Wake Up Missing (24 page)

Ben's mouth tightened. “That doesn't matter. Not after what he did. He deserves to die here; he doesn't deserve to live. He wasn't going to let us.”

No one argued with him. It was true.

Instead, Sarah moved quietly to Ben's side. She put her hand on his arm. He flinched, and his eyes were like stone. He didn't look at her, but he didn't pull away.

“You're better than that,” she said quietly. “We all are.”

“But I'm not,” he said, and his eyes filled. “I almost got you killed. I believed
him.
” He looked into the red-brown water. Wind rippled the surface. “He was the first person who actually
cared about me . . . who thought I was anything at all . . .” His voice trailed off to a whisper. “. . . since my dad.”

“What about your aunt and uncle?” Sarah said quietly.

Ben shook his head. “My aunt's okay. But my uncle . . .” He shrugged. “He never wanted kids.” He closed his eyes, squeezed them tight, but a tear spilled out. He shrugged and looked back at the water. There was nothing left where Dr. Ames had been. “I wanted to believe him so much.”

Sarah let her hand drop to Ben's and squeezed. “It's okay,” she said. “It's okay.”

“No, it's not.” Ben glared at Dr. Gunther, leaning back weakly in the water. Then he looked at us, eyes shining, wet. “I knew. And I lied to you.”

I didn't know what to say.

Sarah shifted her weight. “If it makes you feel any better, I lied, too.”

“About what?” I asked.

“I didn't get checked into the boards at hockey. I tripped over my skate lace while I was going to get nachos and knocked my head on the concrete steps of the bleachers.”

Quentin paused, then bit his lip. “Yeah . . . well . . . my football injury . . . didn't actually happen while playing school football. I kind of fell over my dog.”

“Your
dog
took you out?” Ben almost smiled.

“I
was
playing football,” Quentin said quickly, “in the park with my little brother. But yeah. I tripped over Baxter.”

Sarah laughed. “Well, I feel better now.” She reached out for Ben's hand. Ben hesitated, then took it and held on, tears in his
eyes. “What about you, Cat? Going to come clean on the real story of your concussion?”

“Seriously,” I said, “if I were going to lie about what happened to me, don't you think I'd come up with something less dorky than falling out of a tree stand watching birds?”

This time, Ben laughed.

“Shall I start this up?” Trent asked from the front of the working airboat. “When we get back to town, I'd like to stop somewhere and purchase dry batteries.”

“You got it, man. Give me one minute.” Quentin turned back to Ben. “We need to take Dr. Gunther with us.”

Ben didn't answer.

It was easy to understand why Ben would want to leave him, after everything we'd been through. But it felt wrong. And I was through letting Dr. Ames—or anybody—decide what kind of person I was going to be.

I looked at Ben. Then at Dr. Gunther. “If we leave him,” I said quietly, “he's going to die. I can't do that.”

Finally, Ben nodded. He didn't help us as we lifted Dr. Gunther from the water and eased him onto the boat. But he didn't try to stop us either.

I climbed onto the boat and nodded at Trent. “Ready.”

A lone osprey soared overhead. It followed us all the way past the island with the poachers' hut, past Molly's camp. “Thank you,” I whispered. She had kept her promise to us, after all. We were going home.

The osprey didn't leave us. It followed us out of the mangrove tunnels. It dipped and rose again as we pulled up to the dock at
Camilla's Grille, then hovered for a moment, as if it were making sure we'd be okay.

And we are
, I thought, climbing off the boat.
We made it. We're going to be okay.

I looked up, wiped away a tear, and watched the osprey, finally, fly away.

When we pulled up to the dock at Camilla's Grille—six wet, muddy kids and an old man, lying half-conscious on the airboat's deck—the waitress almost dropped her tray of ketchup. It was Kelly, the one who had waited on Mom and me, and she came rushing right out.

It had been hard to explain to the others why I figured we could trust somebody I only met once, when she brought me a quesadilla. “She's a mom,” I'd told them. “She'll help us. If that investigative reporter's not around, she'll help us find him.”

But she didn't need to.

Brady Kenyon was there at the bar, in that same seat, drinking coffee with his notebook beside him.

“What in the devil happened to you kids?” he asked, already reaching for a pen.

“We have a news story for you,” I told him.

Kelly called for an ambulance, then brought us water and ibuprofen. Quentin and Ben took Kaylee to rest at a picnic table while
they waited, and Sarah walked with Trent to check out the basketball court behind the restaurant. I watched Sarah make a few layups, then toss the ball to Trent, who studied it for a minute and then, with perfect form, sank a basket from the far end of the court. Sarah cheered, but Trent looked genuinely surprised when it went in. Maybe our muscles hold on to memories better than our minds.

“You ready?” Brady Kenyon said, flipping to a clean page in his reporter's notebook.

And I told him our story.

I started at the beginning, my lunch with Mom that felt like it happened in some other lifetime.

I told him everything . . . right up to when we pulled up at the dock.

Kelly put a hand on my shoulder as she set another glass of water in front of me. “I tried calling your parents, but your aunt said they were already on the plane, sweetie, halfway here. They're on their way. All the families are.”

I remembered what Dr. Gunther told them, and my heart twisted. “Do they know I'm okay?”

“They will very soon,” she promised.

My eyes welled up. I hadn't really let myself cry this week, but now, knowing Mom and Dad were coming, I felt like I could almost let go. But not quite.

I blinked fast, took a drink of water, and startled when I heard an ambulance pull into the gravel driveway. It sounded too much like the smugglers' truck at the dock. I took a deep breath. This whole awful mess was beginning to feel real, like it hadn't been some bad dream.

A second ambulance came. A door slammed, and my heart leaped into my throat again. Would the rest of my life be like this? Full of plain old regular noises that were terrifying because they brought me back to the swamp?

“Don't worry.” Brady Kenyon watched with me as EMTs gently eased Kaylee onto a stretcher and lifted her into the first ambulance. “They're going to take great care of her. Pete and Jim'll be with her the whole time, too.”

Pete and Jim were two of the four U.S. Fish and Wildlife agents Brady Kenyon had called. He promised they were all friends of his who had already been investigating Dr. Gunther for importing illegal butterflies. Pete and Jim stood by the ambulance, along with Sarah and Quentin, then climbed in next to Kaylee before it pulled away.

Quentin and Sarah waved and wiped away tears, then walked over to join Trent at a nearby picnic table. Kelly had given him the restaurant's broken toaster to take apart.

The second ambulance pulled forward, and medics loaded Dr. Gunther into the back.

“What's going to happen to him?” I asked.

“They'll set his broken leg. Then he'll have a lot of questions to answer.”

Dr. Gunther's eyes fell on me before the ambulance door slammed shut. They were sad and full of sorry. But it wasn't enough. It could never be enough.

“I don't understand how he could . . . how anybody . . .” I stopped. There weren't words for what they'd done.

Brady Kenyon leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms.
I thought he was watching the ambulance, but his eyes stared at the same spot even after it pulled away. Finally, he shook his head. “I don't know,” he said, and tapped the laptop computer that rested on our table, between my water and my untouched turkey sandwich, “but from the few videos you've already shown me, it sounds like Dr. Ames and Senator Wiley had something on Gunther.”

“Like he was in trouble?” I remembered the way Dr. Gunther cowered in the video and understood he'd been afraid of Dr. Ames long before I was. “He was sick, too,” I suddenly remembered. “Dr. Ames said Dr. Gunther was going to die if he couldn't continue his research.”

“That would explain why Gunther cooperated.” Kenyon's eyes scanned the long list of video files—hours of clinic activity Dr. Ames had never expected anyone outside of the project to see.

“Did you have any idea?” I asked. “That time you visited the clinic? Did you have any idea what was going on?”

He shook his head. “No. I was working on an investigative piece about wildlife poaching. Got a tip about Gunther's endangered bird-wing,” he said.

I remembered the butterflies—brilliant and delicate, frozen forever in time on Dr. Gunther's wall. If he hadn't been obsessed with collecting them, would Dr. Ames have gotten away with everything? I shivered, even though the sun had crept around the umbrella that stuck up from our table.

“So, let me ask you one more question. I had talked with Sawgrass Molly last week, looking for leads on the poaching story. How did you know to find me here? Had she mentioned that to you?”

“No. But I found this in her bag.” I pulled the waterlogged business card from my pocket and handed it to him. “You gave it to her?”

He nodded. “She was a great source out there. Told her to call me anytime she thought somebody was up to no good out in the islands.”

“But she didn't tell you about us?”

He shook his head.

Maybe she meant to. Maybe Brady Kenyon was the person she was going to call to help us, but she never had the chance. “She's . . . we had to leave her body there, at the shack. Will you . . .”

He nodded. “I'll make sure she's taken care of. She loved that swamp.”

My eyes watered, remembering Molly at the helm of her boat, pointing out the crab traps and alligators.

“So, you found my card with her things?” His voice brought me back from the swamp.

I nodded. “And I remembered your name.”

He tipped his head. “Remembered my name from where? I've never met you before.”

“You were here the day I had lunch with my mom, before . . .” Before everything. I pointed to the bar. “You were sitting there, and Kelly said, ‘Hey, Brady,' and she asked if you wanted your usual, so I knew you came here a lot.”

“What if I hadn't been here?”

“I knew you might not be, but I figured she would.” I pointed to Kelly, taking orders a couple tables over. “And I knew . . .” I
hesitated. It sounded dumb. I didn't know Kelly, hadn't said a word to her except to order the quesadilla I never ate. But it was true. “I knew she'd help us. She's a mom.”

Tires crunched on the driveway. I jumped in my seat, then sighed. It was another U.S. Fish and Wildlife van, and when it pulled to a stop next to the picnic table, my parents flew out the door.

They didn't see me right away. Mom looked at Quentin and Ben, at Trent with his toaster pieces, at Sarah, then turned. When she saw me, her face melted into a million different emotions—joy and relief and remorse and pain. But mostly love.

“Mom!” I jumped up and ran into the biggest, longest, strangler-fig hug of my life. I buried my face in her damp T-shirt and breathed her in. Dad wrapped his arms around both of us, and Mom started shaking.

She was crying. Everything was okay.

Finally, I let all the pieces I'd been holding together come apart, and I cried with her, with Dad, all wrapped up in their arms.

Tires crunching on gravel startled me again, and I pulled back from Mom and Dad to look. A third Fish and Wildlife van had arrived with the other parents. They must have all booked flights when Dr. Gunther called with his awful lies. Back home, Mom freaked out if I even came back from a bike ride late; I couldn't imagine what those hours had been like for her and Dad, believing I was gone.

But now we were here . . . together.

Sarah sat on the picnic table bench, leaning against her mom, a
woman with Sarah's same dark-brown hair and green eyes. She was clinging to Sarah every bit as tightly as Mom was hugging me.

Quentin was invisible, buried in a double hug with his mom and dad.

Ben sat between his aunt and uncle. His aunt gushed over him, wiping away tears. His uncle held his face in his hands, sobbing.

Kelly was talking quietly to Trent, who was half listening while he tightened a screw on the toaster. His foster parents had gotten the news that he was alive, but that he'd been part of an unsanctioned experiment, and that he was . . . different from the boy they'd said good-bye to six weeks ago.

I wondered if it was true that the genetic engineering could be reversed. I wanted to meet the real Trent someday—the old Trent who made Sarah laugh. I hoped he was still alive in there, somewhere.

And Kaylee—were her parents at the hospital already? A lump grew in my throat, and I prayed as hard as I could that it wasn't too late for her parents to get their daughter back, too.

Mom pulled me closer. “Cat. Cat. Thank God. I can't wait to get you home.”

I wanted to go home more than anything. But not quite yet.

“Hey, Mom . . . Dad . . . you need to meet some people.” I introduced them to Quentin and Sarah and Ben and Trent, and we had a whole new round of hugging and tears, until finally, the Fish and Wildlife guys waiting in the van climbed out.

“Let's get you to the hospital so doctors can check you over; it was quite an ordeal you went through. And I know you must
be exhausted, but after that, we need you all to come by headquarters. We have some federal agents waiting there to take your statements. And we'll keep a record of everything, too.”