“Reese is my family.”
He nods. “Of course. Listen,” he says, as I let my eyes go to the people behind him, wearing orange vests, a small group of civilian volunteers who stand around doing nothing, with no sense of urgency, and I wonder if it’s because they’ve already found Reese, if it’s because they’ve found her body or something else to suggest she’s dead.
“What is it?” I ask, starting to panic. “Has something happened? Have you found her?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “It’s not that. I just wanted to say, you shouldn’t get your hopes up,” he says, and it’s hard not to notice how he gazes over my head then, surveying the area around us.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask, feeling my hands start to tremble. I wouldn’t say that my hopes are up, but my emotions are charged and run the gamut of hope, grief and fear to an overwhelming, paralyzing sense of dread.
Maybe Reese is here. Maybe she’s not here.
Or maybe we will find her dead.
I think of what that would look like. I prepare myself for it, to come across Reese’s dead body in the damp and overgrown grass or deep in the dark woods, shaded beneath the mantle of trees where the sun can’t reach.
He lowers his eyes to mine, though it’s fleeting before hiseyes leave mine again to graze the area, his hand moving slowly, intuitively to his hip, where his gun sits, and this time, I’m unnerved by his attentiveness.
He thinks someone is out there in the woods.
He thinks someone is watching us from the depth of the trees.
When he looks back at me, he says, “Reese might be here. We might find her phone. Or we might find nothing.” He waits a beat to let his words sink in, and then says, “It’s best if you keep your expectations to a minimum. Hope for the best but prepare for the worst.”
Detective Evans walks with me to the rest of the volunteers, where we’re given directions before splitting into small groups to search. We work under the guidance of the police and trained search and rescue volunteers, moving outward from what the police call Reese’s last known position, which is where Snap Map picked up her phone signal the other night. We move slowly, methodically in the area to which we’re assigned, though it’s not known if Reese is on foot or if she’s in a vehicle—that image of her bound and gagged in the bed of a pickup truck comes rushing back—and so there is no way to know just how fast she’s traveling or how far away she is from the trail by now, if at all. It’s not only Reese we’re looking for. It’s things too, like her phone, footprints, drag marks, blood, a shoe.
Around me, as we search, people call out her name, so that I’m surrounded by a chorus ofReese.
Reese.
Reese.
Reese.
I worry about what we’ll find or if we’ll find anything. There aren’t as many volunteers here as I’d have liked. There are five people in my group and the area is so large that, at this pace, we won’t cover much distance. We stay quiet, intensely focused, concentrating on the rocks, the soil, the blades of grass, so thatour eyes almost never leave the ground until thirty or forty minutes into our search, when one of the women in the group says to me in passing, “Yours isn’t the only pretty girl who’s gone missing, you know?”
Her words, and the way she says them, make the small hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“What do you mean?” I ask, looking sharply up, my heart rate accelerating.
“Joanna over there,” she says, and I follow her gaze to another woman who searches nearby, picking her way through the tall trees. “Her and her husband’s little girl went missing a couple years back.”
“What happened to her?” I ask, keeping my eyes on the woman in the distance, Joanna, whose head is bent, taking in the earth beneath her feet, long dark hair falling down to veil her face.
“Hell if I know. Your guess is as good as mine.”
“What do you mean? They didn’t find her?”
“No. They looked everywhere for her, but she was just gone.”
“Gone,” I echo, wondering how it’s even possible that a person—a child, anyone—could completely vanish like that, into thin air. “What was the little girl’s name?”
“Kylie Matthews.”
There is a poster in the resort lodge for a missing girl. It’s her, Kylie Matthews. The poster asksHave you seen me?in big, bold red letters along the top of the sheet. My eyes have grazed over it more than once, never really processing the words or seeing the face of the missing girl. Instead, I breezed casually past it. I never gave it pause, which I feel guilty for now. I shouldn’t have been so blasé. She’s a child, someone’s daughter. At the time, I chalked it up to just another missing child, thinking that this girl and I had nothing in common, believing this missing child had nothing to do with me.
“Excuse me,” I say, turning and making my way deeper into the woods, where the terrain varies from dirt trails to bog bridges when the ground becomes too soft and spongy to cross. Wildflowers and mushrooms grow beneath the trees where the sun doesn’t reach. There are houses in the area, though they’re intermittent and small, mobile or ranch homes, five hundred to a thousand square feet at best, so spread out and hidden away that my mind fills with horrible possibilities that make me afraid.
What if Reese is in one of the houses?
