Lilith stiffened. “And what? You think I need saving?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Isavedyou. I took you in when you had no one. Put a roof over your head. And you up and deserted me the first chance you had.”
“What the?—”
Maggie touched Polly’s hand to silence her. She didn’t need saving anymore. “I appreciate you taking me in, but?—”
“But what? Now you don’t need me, so you can do and say whatever you want?”
“Yes. That’s how it works.”
Lilith stepped closer. “I don’t need people asking if I’m okay. I don’t need anything, least of all fromyou. Go save someone who actually wants you around.”
“Hey!” Ethan shouted.
Lilith turned to him. “And you can go back to your second lapse in judgment.”
Then she walked away, clearly not caring about the chaos she left behind.
11
Ethan pulled his phone from his pocket and checked the screen.
No text. No missed call. Only a blank screen. And it was getting late.
Dammit.
He shoved it back into his pocket. He’d texted Maggie a few times in the last week to check in after the bar incident with her aunt but had barely received anything back. Short texts here and there that told him absolutely nothing.
He was losing his mind. He wanted to hear her voice. Talk to her. Touch her.
He stopped beside a tree, where a tattered piece of fabric poked up from the dirt. It was navy colored. A bit of clothing? A jacket or the strap of a backpack?
He lowered beside it and pulled on a glove before tugging it out. That’s when he realized what it was—a piece from an old tent canvas. Nothing important.
“Anyone find anything?” Ryan’s voice crackled over the radio.
“I’ve covered a lot of ground and found nothing,” Connor said, the first to respond.
Ethan pulled out his radio. “Unless some material from an old tent counts, I’ve got nothing either.”
The other guys piped in. No one had anything.
They’d created a search grid and everyone had a section to cover. They’d been combing through it for days, searching for anything—scraps of clothing, a shoe, a phone. The smallest thing could give them a clue about what had happened, but they needed to find that thing.
Ethan wasn’t so naive to think he’d find the tourists alive. He wouldn’t. Months had passed, and if they were still in this forest, they were more than likely dead. But they needed to figure out what the hell had happened to them so it didn’t happen to anyone else. Had they gotten lost and succumbed to the elements? Died of dehydration? Been attacked by animals? Or was this something more sinister?
He moved down to the river. It was vast and cut all the way through town, this particular section bordered by rocks.
“All right, we’re losing light. Let’s call it and head back,” Ryan said.
Ethan’s jaw clenched as he headed back to base. It was frustrating. And every day they found nothing of the missing women made him that much more suspicious that this was more than lost hikers.
He was halfway back when he spotted something on the underside of a big rock. It was several feet away and barely visible, but he saw it. He closed the small distance and crouched.
Blood. A smear of it on the rock.
