Avalanche Of Trouble

“Not if they were busy with the parents.”

Gage nodded. The scenario made sense. “We need to find her today,” he said. “She’s got to be cold and hungry and scared.” If she wasn’t lying at the bottom of a ravine or drowned in a creek. He didn’t have to say those things out loud—he knew Travis was thinking them, too.

“Check out Hake’s. Take others with you if you need to.”

“I think Maya and I will have a look by ourselves first,” he said. “As it is, if word gets out we were over there, we’re liable to hear from Hake’s lawyers. They’ve got the place fenced off like a fortress.”

“Let them complain about us searching for a missing child and see what kind of PR that gets them,” Travis said.

Gage found Maya standing by the campfire with Mellie Sanger, half of the couple who had stayed at the site overnight. Maya turned toward Gage as he approached, the hope in her eyes like a stab to his heart. “Mellie was telling me they stayed up most of the night and didn’t hear or see anything,” she said. “I don’t see how Casey could have just vanished.”

“She’s probably afraid and hiding,” Gage said. “As she gets hungrier, she’ll want to come out.” That was all the hope he had to give her right now.

“Good luck.” Mellie took both Maya’s hands in hers. “George and I will come back tonight if we need to, but we really hope we don’t need to.”

“Thank you both, so much.”

“Are you ready to go?” Gage asked.

“Yes.” She hitched her backpack up on her shoulder. “Which way?”

He led the way east, toward the land Henry Hake had wanted to develop. There was no defined trail, and the going was rough, over uneven ground littered with fallen tree branches and small boulders. They crossed a small stream, and then another, then descended into a steep ravine. Gage could hear Maya breathing hard as they climbed back out of the ravine, but she kept up with him and didn’t complain. A few hundred yards on, they stopped to drink some water. “How could a little girl have crossed all that?” Maya asked.

“People lost in the wilderness do incredible things,” he said. “The little boy we found last year—the one who had wandered away from his parents while the family was out for a hike—ended up three miles away from the trail, in a place he would have had to cross three streams and climbed a small mountain to get to.”

“How did they ever find him?” she asked.

“Persistence and luck,” Gage said. “Lorna’s dog, Daisy, found the trail initially, then a group of volunteers spread out to search a hundred yards on either side of the trail. They found him asleep in the hollow made by an uprooted tree trunk. If they hadn’t been looking for him, they might have walked right by and never seen him.”

“I don’t know if that story makes me more hopeful or more horrified,” she said. She stuffed her water bottle back in her pack. “I’ve been staring at the ground all morning, hoping to see a little footprint or some pink thread—Casey loves pink, and almost all her clothes are pink. I want so badly to see some sign of her that I’m half-afraid I’ll start imagining things.”

“I’m watching, too,” Gage said. “Maybe we’ll spot something soon.” Or maybe they wouldn’t. He kept talking about the little boy they had found last summer to encourage her, but he didn’t mention the three or four other people over the years who had become lost and were never found—or whose bodies were found months or years later.

After a half hour of walking, they came to an eight-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire, hedge roses poking through the wire and blocking the view beyond. “Whoa!” Maya stopped and stared up at the barrier. “What is this doing out here? It looks like something the government would build around an airport—or a prison.”

“The landowner, Henry Hake, doesn’t like trespassers.” Gage wrapped his fingers around the chain link and tugged. Still taut and solid as the day it had been built four years ago, and the thorny roses added to the barrier. “He planned to build an exclusive—expensive—resort community up here. I guess this fence was supposed to keep out the riffraff.”

“Casey couldn’t have gotten over this,” Maya said.

“No, but it’s possible she found a break in the fence, or a place where an animal had dug under. Plus, a public trail crosses one corner of the property and it’s not supposed to be fenced off.” He scanned the terrain on either side of the fence. “Come on,” he said, pointing north. “Let’s see if we can find a way in.”

* * *

MAYA TRUDGED ALONG behind Gage, trying hard not to freak out over the idea of Casey being lost out here. Everywhere she looked, she faced another hazard: tree stumps to trip over, holes to fall into, rocks to stumble on. And what about wild animals? Surely there were bears and mountain lions and no telling what else out here that might view a five-year-old girl as a tasty snack. She shuddered and pushed the thought aside. A child couldn’t just vanish this way. She had to be somewhere.

“Look here.”

Her heart jumped in her chest at Gage’s words, and she hurried to catch up to him. He stood alongside the fence, pointing to a depression in the ground. “This looks like a place some animal has been going under the wire,” he said.

Maya frowned at the muddy hole. “You think Casey went under there?”

“She might have. She would fit, wouldn’t she?”

“Yes, but why would she get down in the mud like that?”

“If she saw people or saw a building on the other side, she might risk it,” he said.

She turned to look through the fence. The rose hedge was less dense here, but she didn’t see anything but trees at first. Then she spotted what looked like the corner of a building. “If she did go in there, how are we going to follow?” she asked. “I can’t fit through that hole, and I know you can’t.”

“We should be getting to the public trail soon.”

Another ten minutes of walking took them to the end of the fence—and to a large iron gate blocking a well-worn trail. “That looks new,” Maya said, studying the fresh-looking concrete around the gateposts.

“It is new,” Gage said. “And it’s against the law to block a public trail.” He looked around, as if searching for something.

“What are you looking for?” Maya asked.

“Something to break that padlock.”

The padlock was large and heavy. “I don’t think a rock is going to do it,” she said.

“No.” He drew the gun from the holster at his hip. “Stand back.”

“You’re not going to sho—” But apparently, he was. The blast echoed through the woods and Maya covered her ears and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the lock lay shattered on the ground.

Gage pushed open the gate. “Stay behind me, and if we meet anyone, I’ll do the talking.”

She resisted the urge to roll her eyes at him. She got that he was used to being in charge, but he ought to have figured out by now that she didn’t like being ordered around. She forgot her annoyance as she moved farther away from the gate into what looked like a long-abandoned ghost town. The remains of paved streets showed between patches of grass and even small trees that grew up through the asphalt. A few windowless concrete buildings crouched alongside crumbling concrete foundations or stakes topped with faded plastic ribbons that fluttered in the breeze.

Maya moved up alongside Gage. “What is this place?” she asked, keeping her voice low. “It’s creepy.”

“It was going to be an exclusive resort, with luxury homes, a country club and a golf course.”

“Why wasn’t it built?”

“Paige and a group of like-minded citizens got together and filed a lawsuit to stop the building. They convinced a judge that this was a fragile environmental zone that wouldn’t support that kind of development. The judge agreed.”

“Do you agree?” she asked.

He glanced at her. “I do. But I can’t say leaving it like this is much better. It’s an eyesore.” He led the way across one of the crumbling streets, toward a row of three curved ducts jutting up from the ground.

“What are those?” she asked.

“Probably air vents for underground storage, or possibly machinery—a power plant or something. They could even be venting gasses from an old mine.”