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  The law enforcement officer in Anna was annoyed that any part of the girls that might contain trace evidence had been tampered with. The halfway decent human part of her was glad the children had been provided with some relief.

  During this staccato exchange the girls grew, not calmer precisely, but less demonstrative. Anna decided to see if they could be induced to trust themselves to her, the EMTs, the ambulance: the System. She stood, her knees cracking in protest. “Girls, Dr. Littleton, Ms. Jarrod: What do you say we take a look at you, then get you a warm, safe place and call your folks?”

  The children shared a look, something hard and sharp. The tears continued. Anna turned from the light to one of the EMTs, Emily something, a seasonal who Anna had reason to know was twenty-six because, wondering what an apparent fifteen-year-old was doing hanging around the backcountry office’s computers, she’d asked. To Emily, she said, “It’s them, isn’t it?”

  “It’s them.” Emily looked to Ryan, who nodded.

  “It is,” he confirmed. “We saw pictures. God, did we see pictures.”

  “Get me their names. Notify dispatch and Chief Knight. She’ll want to call their folks. Tell dispatch we’re going to need a child psychologist to meet us at the hospital. Tell them we’ll roll as soon as we can get the kids into the ambulance.”

  Anna started to turn back to the sad little party around the picnic table but was stopped by Ryan’s voice:

  “There were three of them.”

  Three. Normally, even working in a park a thousand miles away, she would have known this. But there’d been the wedding. And the decision. And the move—slings and arrows she’d thought so earth-shaking. Now they seemed petty beyond belief.

  “Three.”

  In their earnestness the rangers nodded like bobble-heads.

  “I need to know who we’ve got and who is still missing. Now,” she added when neither of them moved.

  “The little red-haired girl with the disabled woman is Beth Dwayne. She’s twelve. Her folks—all the girls—live near Loveland, an hour or so east of here,” Emily said.

  Anna knew where Loveland, Colorado, was. She’d driven through it on her move to the park rather than take the more traveled route from Denver through Boulder and into Estes Park.

  “The other one is older, thirteen. Her name is Alexis Sheppard. The one not here is Candace Watson. She’s thirteen too.”

  “You’re sure?” Anna asked. Calling the girls by the wrong names could only further any sense they had of being forgotten or unsafe.

  Again the nods. Anna took them at their word. She knew from experience that the intensity of a prolonged search for missing children burned the victims’ particulars into the brains of the would-be rescuers. Emily and Ryan would probably be able to rattle off this information with accuracy and in detail long after they’d forgotten their own names or the addresses of their nursing homes.

  “Ryan, go on back to the ambulance—or out of earshot—and make the calls. Tell dispatch we’re going to need search dogs come morning, see if we can backtrack to where the third girl is. Emily, come with me.”

  Anna left her hat on the ground. It went against the grain. Her dog, Taco, a three-legged but brave-hearted Lab, would have made short work of the Stetson-as-chew-toy.

  “Don’t even think about it,” she muttered to the helper dog and walked back into the light. The blonde, Alexis Sheppard, looked the sturdier of the two—if one hummingbird in a hurricane can look stronger than another. Besides, she was in the sphere of Dr. Littleton and, like the dog, the doctor seemed less likely to bite than the chair-bound Ms. Jarrod.

  Anna crossed slowly to the picnic table and eased herself onto the far end of the bench opposite the girl and the doctor. All the while she talked softly, a lesson learned not from victim assistance training but from working with horses in Guadalupe Mountains National Park early in her career. If she made noise or touched them when she walked behind them, they were less likely to startle and kick her.

  “Hi, Alexis,” she said. The girl flinched as if Anna had flicked her with a quirt rather than used a familiar form of address. “We’re so glad you and Beth are back. Everybody looked and looked. Hundreds of people. You can’t imagine how much your folks love you.” Anna hoped this was true. Having not participated in the search, she was flying blind, but the details didn’t matter. What mattered was that children hear right away and repeatedly that they might have been lost but they’d never been forgotten, that their parents never quit hoping and looking. Even adults, lost for long periods of time, had trouble with feelings of abandonment. In children of twelve and thirteen—too young for adult rationale, too old for childish faith—these feelings could be cripplingly acute.

  Half turning to include Beth in the conversation, Anna noticed the littler girl had started sucking her thumb. “Ryan—he’s one of the rangers who came to help us take you to your families—has gone to call them so they can meet us at the hospital. This here is Emily. She’s a ranger too. If you’ll let her, she’d like to check real quick and see if you’re hurt, then we’ll get you out of here. How does that sound?”

  Anna thought she’d made the whole thing sound pretty doggone spiffy, but both girls hung their heads. Literally let them hang from the very top vertebrae till their noses pointed at their navels. The tears fell unimpeded onto the fronts of the borrowed running suits. The Jarrod woman held the one girl in her arms like a bundle of laundry. She must be a good deal stronger than she looked, Anna thought. The kid would weigh close to eighty pounds.

  Dark thoughts crowded in. These kids didn’t seem thrilled to be back, just relieved to be gone from where they’d been. They didn’t cry for Momma and Daddy. The promise of home didn’t bring on renewed energy or hope but an increase in anxiety.

  Maybe they hadn’t been lost. This kettle of worms had been thoroughly looked into long before Anna came to Rocky. The possibilities were runaways, stranger abduction, accidental death or abduction by a family member. The lack of enthusiasm Beth and Alexis showed when the words “parents” and “home” were bandied about suggested either runaways or possible abduction by a family member.

  Anna let it go for the moment. The first order of business was to get them to a medical facility. Moving emotionally damaged children was not something she’d done much. Did one drag them shrieking to the ambulance and lock them in? Force them into the cage in the patrol car at gunpoint? They needed psychiatric care. They needed nurses, mommies, the kind of succor she couldn’t even begin to offer.

  They needed to be moved the hell out of her park.

  “Have they spoken at all?” she asked Dr. Littleton.

  “One of them said something to Heath, I think. When she found them. Before I got there.”

  Anna turned to Heath Jarrod.

  “The little limpet—Beth—said ‘It’s a dog.’ She meant Wiley. Not me.”

  “Anything else?”

  The woman’s face lost its angry look as she sent her mind back twenty minutes and two thousand heartbeats. Anna was startled at the difference it made. She’d put her age at about that of her own, but Jarrod was probably ten years younger. Very pretty in an Edith Piaf, Gigi, Apache dancer sort of way: fine and exotic. And volatile. High maintenance, Anna thought.

  “Beth said ‘Humpty Dumpty.’ Me. Not the dog. Because I’d taken a great fall I suppose. Ski—Alexis—said she thought I was a bear. I don’t think they’ve spoken since.” To the child in her lap she said, “You don’t have to talk till you want to.”

  Serious bonding had obviously taken place. Anna wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not, but she was in favor of anything that she could use to get the kids moved.

  “Mind if I ask Beth a question?” Anna asked, ceding authority to Ms. Jarrod. It might get results. Besides, she could always take it back if she had to.

  “Back off if she freaks?”

  “Of course.”

  The woman nodded. Anna came around the table and sat directly
in front of the wheelchair. Knee to knee. She wondered if the woman could feel the touch, sense the warmth or if, when Anna sat, it was as if she too only existed from the chair up.

  She gathered one of the girls’ hands into her own. The thumb was still damp and sticky from being recently sucked.

  “Is your name Beth?”

  A tiny nod.

  “Did I say it right or is it pronounced Beeth?”

  “Beth,” the child said.

  Anna was careful to show neither surprise nor triumph.

  “You look like you’ve been in the woods for a while. Where have you been?”

  Again a look passed between the children. Confusion? Complicity? Reassurance? Shared terror? Accusation? Surprise? Anna couldn’t read it. Emotions were too high, the light too uncertain.

  “I don’t know,” Beth whispered.

  “How about you, Alexis? Do you know what happened to you?”

  The blonde shook her head.

  Anna turned back to Beth. “There were three of you. Candace Watson was with you. Do you know where Candace is?”

  The silence was so long Anna thought the girl had clammed up again. Then Alexis said, “She stayed with Robert.”

  “Shit,” she heard Emily whisper from the far side of the picnic table.

  “Who’s Robert?” Anna demanded.

  “Robert Proffit,” Emily replied. “He was the Christian youth group leader who got himself lost looking for them, then reported the girls missing twenty-four hours after they’d disappeared. You wouldn’t believe how torn up he was about the whole thing. Ran himself into pneumonia going out with search teams. He said God had given them into his care and he loved them like his own sisters.”

  Emily’s voice was even, professional, but her sweet young face had hardened to the point it was neither sweet nor young. Emily hated. Robert? God? Herself? If she didn’t watch it, Anna knew, one day that hatred could become a way of life.

  “Okay,” Anna said. “Dr. Littleton, Ms. Jarrod, help me get the kids out of here. It’s going to rain.”

  five

  When the heavens finally opened up and let loose a biblical downpour, Anna was glad.

  Alexis Sheppard allowed herself to be loaded into the ambulance without a fuss, without anything: she said nothing, her face was emotionless, her body moved sluggishly. The girl acted as Anna had witnessed scores of undead—zombies, wraiths, pod people, even the occasional vampire—behave on screen. Life without life. Movement without soul. Animation without spirit.

  Such was Alexis’ apparent internal wasteland. Anna felt positively guilty when she found herself wishing a like fate on Beth Dwayne. She had returned to a state of selective mutism. She remained on the disabled woman’s lap. She’d returned to her thumb-sucking.

  When Anna and Emily tried to remove her from the sanctuary she’d found between the spoked wheels, she’d closed her fists in front of Jarrod’s jacket, howled like a banshee and kicked out. With the poor little flayed feet, her defense probably inflicted more pain on herself and her hostess than on either ranger. Ms. Jarrod’s face became an unnatural shade of gray, and sweat beaded at her hairline despite the chilly edge of the wind.

  There’d never been cause for Anna to learn much about paraplegia, and she couldn’t begin to guess in what kind of shape it left one’s internal organs, but clearly, having four score pounds of misery flopping and thrashing about on them was not beneficial. She had to give Jarrod credit for fortitude and stamina. She never complained and never lost patience with the little girl. The same courtesy was not shown Anna. She was snapped and snarled at more than once—and not by the silly-looking dog.

  The solution was obvious, but Anna hated asking. Maybe because Heath Jarrod was disabled. There was the feeling of walking on eggs, as if plain old ordinary Americans, once confined to a wheelchair, immediately became foreigners with a separate culture, different rules of etiquette, customs and taboos that, in her ignorance, Anna might break.

  There was that.

  And there was pity. That creeping, mealy-mouthed cousin of goodness that oozed out in a parody of empathy, leaving the perpetrator nauseated and the victim feeling worse than before. Pity was born of fear. Anna wasn’t afraid to die. But to be broken so bad no one could fix it and in such a way that life and comfort became dependent on being helped by others; that thought made her blood run cold. Crippled was scary and it was hard and Anna feared she wouldn’t have the strength or courage to pull it off with any shred of grace or dignity.

  Making a point to speak only to Ms. Jarrod and not to her aunt, Dr. Littleton, she said, “If you could accompany us to the hospital, things might go more easily for Beth.”

  “Not a problem.”

  Anna wished she’d had the metaphorical balls to ask sooner.

  “We can go in the RV. It’s got a lift.”

  “Sure,” Anna agreed easily. To Emily she said, “I’ll ride with Dr. Littleton and Ms. Jarrod. You go with Ryan.”

  Jarrod opened her mouth to argue. Anna could feel the woman’s need for a fight as a physical pressure on her brain. If the Texas clock-tower, equipped with a handicapped-accessible elevator, were instantly available, Anna didn’t doubt Jarrod would be up there with an automatic rifle in the blink of an eye.

  That’s when the rains saved her. A flash and a boom so close as to be two facets of the same sensation rattled eardrums and retinas, then an icy torrent was loosed sufficient to cool whatever dark fires were fueling Heath Jarrod’s fury.

  Dr. Littleton ran ahead to the RV. Anna and Emily followed, pushing the doubly burdened chair through the streaming gravel.

  The RV was new and spacious and outfitted for use by a chair-bound person. Comforts and conveniences had not been spared when the vehicle was retrofitted for a handicapped user. Somebody had money.

  Heath Jarrod’s hands full of Beth, Dr. Littleton locked the brakes on her wheels. Anna belted herself into a captain’s chair on a swivel base. It was covered in velvet-soft butter-colored leather. She chose not to think what her soggy, metal-bristling nether parts were doing to the upholstery.

  Dr. Littleton took to the driver’s seat and followed the ambulance out the rain-dark road. Dispatch radioed that Lorraine Knight would meet them at the children’s wing of the Estes Park hospital. Arrangements were being made for a child psychologist and a detective from the Estes Park police department to join them.

  Estes Park was full of rich old retired environmentalists. The very sort to guarantee the small town had a truly excellent medical facility. That it was in one of the most beautiful places on earth didn’t hurt either. Recruiting top-notch doctors and nurses, even at lower pay, proved fairly easy. Anna relaxed fractionally.

  Explaining what she was doing each step of the way to reassure both Beth and Heath, she gently took the girl’s vitals—blood pressure, pulse, temperature—and relayed them to the hospital via dispatch. Beth was severely dehydrated: when Anna pinched up a bit of skin on the back of her hands it remained tented far too long. Under normal circumstances she’d have been put on an IV. If Emily knew her stuff, Alexis would already be on a normal saline drip.

  The cursory check over, Anna reached for a horribly green afghan on the arm of her chair. When she turned back, Beth was out like a light.

  “She’s asleep,” Anna said, faintly surprised. Sleep had come so fast, for an instant she thought the kid had passed out. Or died.

  “Poor little limpet came to the end of her rope. I’ve seen climbers do that—literally and figuratively—but I meant get caught on a sketchy face, go without sleep. They get to the top and bang. Down for the count.”

  This was the closest thing to a normal exchange Anna had had with this woman. Instinct whispered that she was going to want Heath Jarrod on her side if for no other reason than to help unlock the secrets shut away in Beth’s skull.

  “You climb?” She was cursing herself for a fool as Heath Jarrod treated her to a scathing look.

  “Not hardly.”
r />   Anna just nodded, not ready to risk another blunder. Besides, if her former mother-in-law had taught her anything during the years she was married to Zach, it was that there was no excuse for bad manners. Not that Anna hadn’t exhibited them herself, but she’d never excused herself. She wasn’t in a mood to excuse Jarrod, either.

  After a couple minutes’ silence the other woman either saw the error of her ways or, more likely, just wanted to talk and so chose to reattach the nose to her spited face.

  “I used to climb. Ice mostly. But anything else when that melted.”

  Anna nodded again. She wanted to ask what happened, but by the calculating, almost triumphant look that entered Jarrod’s brown eyes, it was clear she was waiting, daring her to do just that. Anna said nothing.

  Another minute passed.

  “I fell. Rotten ice above Frozen Lake, the Keyhole.”

  “Bummer,” Anna said sympathetically. Frozen Lake, she knew, was in the Rocky Mountains. That was as far as her knowledge went. She’d not yet had time to do much more than study maps and fill out the reams of paperwork deemed necessary when one changed jobs. It crossed her mind to ask Heath about the Keyhole—there was no way quicker into another’s heart than letting them be the expert—but something made Anna leery of exposing any weakness. Perhaps it was that Jarrod was fanatical about showing none herself. Whatever the cause, Anna sensed she would go for the jugular if it were presented.

  And snarl like a wounded wolf if anyone offered help. It was that which kept Anna from pressing her with questions on her own well-being. Rain had washed the sweat away but the pallor remained, and Jarrod was exhibiting shortness of breath.

  A mile or more passed in silence. When Heath Jarrod spoke again, her tone was slightly less pugnacious. “What can you tell me about the girls?” She looked down at Beth, sound asleep on her lap.