Authors: Rebecca Drake
At the first short blast of the whistle, Jill started across the lawn with David and the others in their group, walking about two feet apart, moving toward the back of the house while other groups fanned across both sides of the cul-de-sac.
“We found a five-year-old child last year over three miles away from his own house, stuck in a shed in someone’s backyard,” Ottilo had told her. “It’s seems improbable, but even little kids can go incredible distances.”
“What month was it?” Jill had been busy collecting Sophia’s pillow and a shirt that she’d worn two days ago because the dogs would need to sniff them to pick up her scent. They weighed nothing—so light, so insubstantial.
“What month?” Ottilo looked confused.
“Did the boy wander off when it was warm? It would be okay if it was warm out, but it’s so cold. How long could she last—” Jill stopped, swallowing hard, her hands tightening on Sophia’s things.
“Let’s not look ahead, Mrs. Lassiter,” the detective said firmly. “You need to stay focused on bringing Sophia home. We can’t worry about what-ifs.”
But what-ifs were all that pounded away in her brain. She veered between wild, magical thinking—that some kind elderly couple had taken in Sophia—to the darkest thought—that Sophia was dead. Dead. Even thinking the word made Jill shake. She focused hard on the ground, murmuring “I’ll find you,” over and over again like a prayer as she walked along, searching for any sign of Sophia’s presence—tiny footprints, a scrap of clothing, the toy dog that she’d loved to a uniform grayness.
Andrew had shown up to search, along with some of David’s other colleagues, and Paige Graham had come, too, with their children in tow, all of them wearing matching hiking outfits that looked like they’d been taken straight from the pages of L.L.Bean or some more exclusive outdoors catalog company. Paige had come by earlier to drop off several loaves of beautifully wrapped, homemade pumpkin bread. “I know it’s not much, but I wanted to do something for you,” she’d said, catching Jill off guard with a big hug. The woman was a more glamorous version of Martha Stewart. As soon as she thought this, Jill felt guilty; her judgment would bring bad karma.
Jill had always thought of herself as mildly superstitious, but Sophia’s disappearance had loosed something inside and she couldn’t stop playing mind games. If she didn’t look up for ten minutes, then Sophia would be all right. If she didn’t watch the clock, they would find her. If she only believed that Sophia was fine, then she would be fine.
She’d always been skeptical about unbridled optimism, dismissive of people who insisted that you could keep bad things at bay if you only entertained positive thoughts, but now she embraced it with a true believer’s zeal, striving with every step to know that it was all okay and that Sophia would be found; any minute now she would wander out of the woods just like she had that day at the park.
* * *
Bea smiled involuntarily before averting her gaze, stepping around the bird-watchers and moving even deeper into the crowd. She listened to the police officer giving instructions, but her eyes were on the couple. Jill looked terrible—pale skin, eyes red-rimmed, hair that looked like it hadn’t been combed. Satisfaction lit like a little coal inside Bea, warming her. David looked just as bad, his face puffy as if he hadn’t slept, and his voice shook as he thanked them for helping to bring back his daughter. Bea made a scathing noise and turned it into a cough as a woman shot her a surprised look.
Police divided up the crowd and Bea moved into a far group that she hoped would lead to the culvert. She caught a glimpse of the Lassiters moving at the front of another group and she wondered at the police allowing them to participate, feeling a momentary panic that what she’d planned all along wasn’t going to happen. But then she remembered how many times this had happened before—family members would make tearful pleas on television and lead the searches for their missing spouses or children, and later would come their inevitable arrest. It was just a matter of time; Bea pressed again to feel what she held in her jacket.
* * *
Jill focused on the grass, trying not to notice how it crunched underfoot, hardened from a frost, which had silvered the trunks of trees and etched the remaining leaves. She looked to her right and saw David searching the same way, his eyes locked to the ground, his face tense.
Please let me find her, she prayed. Please God, whoever, wherever you are, please bring her home. She’d never been a particularly religious person; she hadn’t been raised in any church, though her mother had been fascinated with saints and their followers. She’d dragged Jill to numerous Catholic churches, where they lit candles and stood below the passive, plaster representations of people whose devotion mostly seemed to have caused them to die in horrific ways. Jill had enjoyed the smell of incense, though, and the flicker of votives, and she could remember wondering what it was like to believe as passionately as the silent old women kneeling alone in hard wooden pews clutching their prayer beads.
If Jill had been devout, if she’d been a believer, might God have protected her and her children? Did it only work that way? Did the Almighty really require constant reverence and attention to return even a little of the same?
Jill followed other searchers across the lawn and into the woods. The pace slowed in the thick carpet of leaves. It was so cold. Jill’s breath hung in faint clouds in front of her as she moved slowly down the hill. Could it really only have been the day before yesterday when she and David ran down this hillside on their own frenzied search? The hill sloped sharply, at a steeper pitch, and Jill had to catch the thin trunks of sapling maples and oaks to keep from falling. It got darker and colder the farther down they went and her mood dropped along with it, as if they were descending from earth to the underworld.
She caught a glimpse of blue, but when she frantically brushed aside the leaves, it was just the cracked shell of a robin’s egg caught in the center of a small brown nest that must have fallen from a tree long ago in the spring. She thought of Sophia spotting one like it last year, the way her blue eyes could look startling like that robin’s-egg blue, the color so bright and pure in that same way, and how they seemed to sparkle when her daughter was excited, running across the yard to show her,
“Look, Mommy! It’s a teeny, tiny birdie!”
The cracked egg seemed like a bad omen. As she stood staring down at it, two sharp blasts of a whistle pierced the woods.
DAY THREE
The dogs arrived as Bea’s group started across the yard. She heard excited barking and turned back to see a man wrestling to restrain three large German shepherds pulling against their leashes. A police officer held something up to the dogs’ faces, and the way they sniffed at it frightened Bea.
She had to hurry. Those dogs were coming; it was a matter of minutes. At least she’d planned her position well: her group landed on top of the concrete culvert and she watched the people in front of her split off, some of them moving one way around it and others going over it. She stayed to the left, reaching the little creek at the base of the hill just outside the entrance to the concrete tunnel, where she paused, pretending to adjust her boots. Searchers passed, one woman asking if she needed help, but Bea shook her head. She heard a dog barking, glanced back up the hill and caught a glimpse through the trees of sweating coats and salivating muzzles. They were coming. Quick look left—the man searching the half-frozen creek had turned away. The woman creeping through the tunnel had her back to Bea. It was now or never.
She unzipped her coat and unzipped the plastic bag, slipping its contents into the muddy water at the edge of the concrete. A layer of ice had formed on one corner and she used the tip of a stray branch to shove the garment under it, before shifting some leaves toward it with her foot.
“What is it? Do you see something?” The man to her left had turned around.
“I don’t know, there’s something caught under the concrete, but I can’t see very well down here,” she said and the man—large and ruddy-faced—ran to her side.
The dogs were close now, straining at their leashes, pulling ahead of their handler, who was practically sliding down the hillside. Bea hurried up the opposite hill, glancing back to watch as the searcher squatted for a moment to peer at the ice shelf just before the dogs plunged through the creek to his side. Then the man bolted upright and reached for his whistle.
* * *
The sharp blasts stopped Jill short. The whole row of searchers halted for a moment, before continuing on, but Jill couldn’t move. “What if it’s Sophia?” she called to David. “What if they’ve found her?”
David’s eyes locked with hers, his face ashen. He came to embrace her, moving one hand to the base of her neck and pulling their heads together for a moment. “It’s going to be okay.” But it sounded like he was trying to convince himself.
Ottilo came running down the hill with another officer just behind him. “C’mon,” David said, hurrying after him and Jill stumbled forward, trying to look past the leaves falling silently from the trees, through the shafts of sunlight dappling the cold, hard ground. She could see nothing, nothing at all except more trees and fresh leaves falling on molding ones, hundreds of new leaves covering the old ones. What if Sophia had fallen out there and been buried by them?
When they reached the shallow creek at the bottom Jill saw that it was frozen in sections, a thin layer of ice covering the water running over a bed of brown and gray rocks and pebbles, darker brown silt underneath it all. She looked to her right and saw the search dogs near the culvert and a police officer stringing crime-scene tape around the trees next to it. Ottilo and a couple of officers huddled near the entrance to the concrete pipe. She wanted to go to them, wanted to see what they’d found, but she was afraid. She kept imagining the blood on the patio, the blood that they’d missed. What else had she and David missed when they ran through there? She heard a faint whistling sound and realized it was her own keening.
The detective turned and there was something in his face, a grimness, which scared Jill even more. She reached for David’s hand. He called to Ottilo, “What is it? What have you found?” But the detective turned away, climbing back up the hillside without answering.
* * *
Bea scrambled up the opposite hillside, hearing the dogs clamoring behind her. Could they smell Avery on her? She’d paused along with everybody else at the whistle blasts, peering back through the woods as if she, too, wondered what had been discovered, but then the dogs pulled their handlers on and Bea no longer cared about anything but getting out.
She checked her watch. Only thirty minutes left before Avery would wake up. Bea was tired from climbing, but there were other people older than she was out there, diligently pressing forward into the backyards of the houses at the top of the hill. One of them would probably step in the dried remains of Cosmo’s shit, left behind the half-constructed house that she’d used as her excuse the first time she ventured into these woods.
She kept walking, pretending to search the path in front of her, all the while hearing the dogs behind her and knowing that at any minute they’d be on her, barking. She wanted to run, but people would definitely notice that and it would take even longer to get back to her car.
As she continued up the hill the dogs came running straight at her. Bea froze, holding her breath, waiting for them to leap on her. She could see the whites around their eyes, the foam-coated mouths hanging open, teeth sharp. One of them paused, sniffing her, nuzzling in to her coat and Bea fought down her panic, leaning back and struggling not to run.
“Get off her!” The handler was a short white man with cheeks red and raw like slabs of uncooked meat. He jerked on the leash, glancing at Bea for a split second. “Sorry about that.” The dogs bolted away, springing past her up the hill through the leaves while the man huffed along behind them. Then they were gone and she was standing there, shaking. Her feet hurt and her chest felt odd. Not like a heart attack, at least she didn’t think so, but palpitating all the same, and despite the cold she felt clammy. She scrabbled through her coat pockets, searching for her tablets, but she’d forgotten to carry them with her, she’d left the bottle in the car. Other volunteers spread out, searching this next street and the wooded hillside beyond, but Bea turned back.
Some other searchers were backtracking down the hill they’d just climbed, and she joined them, moving in a line back through the woods and up and out the way they’d come, marching slowly across the frozen grass in the Lassiters’ backyard under a hard sun. Bea needed to be done, needed to sit down somewhere and take some slow, deep breaths. Out from the shelter of the trees, a cold wind whipped at her face; the sun blinded her. She stumbled and someone cried, “Watch out!” Then a man grabbed her arm and before she could shake him loose, her other arm was also taken.
“Okay,” the first man said, “we’ve got you.”
For one terrifying second, Bea thought she’d been discovered, but then the other man said, “You’re going to be okay.”
“I’m fine,” she protested, trying to pull loose, but they held fast, leading her to one of the metal chairs sitting next to a folding table that someone had set up to hold supplies and information for volunteers. The cold press of metal against her backside didn’t help Bea. She struggled to rise, but the men’s hands held her down.
“Here, have some water.” A female voice and then hands pressing a bottle into hers. Bea dutifully gulped it down, afraid they’d try to pour it into her if she didn’t. It helped; her heart rate slowed just a fraction. She looked up to thank the woman and when she saw her the grip on the water bottle gave way. Jill Lassiter caught the bottle before it hit the ground and offered it back to her. “Here you go. You should probably drink some more.”
“Thanks.” Bea ducked to hide her face, pretending she needed to catch her breath.