Page 9 of Wilderness Search
She laughed, more from frustration than mirth. “I’m not interested in going out with anyone right now.” She had turned down half a dozen men who had shown up at the clinic, asking to see “the new nurse” with their mystery ailments. They had all been polite, ranging from slick and charming to bashful and sweet.
“That’s cool, too.” He pulled a package of ground beef from the refrigerator and shut the door. “But the next time you see Aaron, look right past him. Let him know you don’t care what he thinks.”
“I’ll do that.” She didn’t need Aaron. She didn’t need any man.
But she did need for Gary to be all right. He said he was free now, but was he, really? The two of them had given up so much to escape the cloud that hung over him because of those charges. They had told themselves taking new names and moving was a chance to reinvent themselves. They could do whatever they wanted, and be whoever they wanted to be.
But seeing Aaron had made her feel the past would always be hanging on to their heels, pulling them backward whether she wanted it or not.
Their shifts hadended by the time Jake and Aaron left Mountain Kingdom Kids Camp, but they still needed to return to the station and file reports. Aaron was used to the long hours. It wasn’t as if he had anything else to devote himself to, though he knew Jake was anxious to get home to his wife.
“I wonder why Trevor left the bonfire without speaking to his brother?” Jake asked as he and Aaron drove away from the camp. “And how he ended up smelling of alcohol if he wasn’t a drinker?”
“Maybe he wasn’t drinking at all. Maybe a bottle broke in the car or something.”
“Yeah. We need to wait until we hear from the coroner.” He slowed as a quartet of turkeys crossed the road in front of them, sun angling through the trees glinting off their bronzed feathers. “Did you ever go to summer camp as a kid? Someplace like Mountain Kingdom?”
“I spent a couple of weeks at Boy Scout camp one summer,” Aaron said. “But not places like this, where kids stay for a month at a time, or the whole summer. There were a lot of those in Vermont, where I’m from. When I was on the force in Waterbury, we would occasionally get calls.”
“What kind of calls?”
“Usually petty things—theft or vandalism. But we had a murder case once. A little girl was killed.” Rachel Sherman.
“Did they find the killer?”
“We never did.”
“That’s rough.”
“Yeah.” Aaron and another officer had interviewed the girls in Rachel’s cabin. They had said they had seen Rachel talking to Gareth Delaney. Aaron remembered the shock of hearing Kat’s brother’s name in connection with a crime. He hadn’t known Gareth well, but he had seemed like such an ordinary, likable guy.
But the more Aaron and his fellow officers talked to Gareth, the more nervous and suspicious Gareth acted. At first he denied knowing Rachel. When confronted with her cabin mates’ statements, he admitted talking to her, but said he hadn’t even known her name. Another lie. And though everyone was supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, you didn’t have to be a cop long to learn that guilty people often lied.
Aaron realized Jake had been talking to him. He shook his head. “Sorry. What did you say?”
“I asked how you’re settling in. New town, new job, all that?”
“It’s good. I like it here.”
“Small towns aren’t for everyone, but I guess it helps that you have family here.”
“Yeah. It’s great.” Not that he couldn’t have moved away from his parents and siblings, but when they had decided to follow his sister, Bethany, to Eagle Mountain, it seemed like a goodopportunity for him to make a fresh start. Get away from bad memories.
Except this morning the biggest memory had confronted him on the side of the highway. As beautiful as he remembered.
And just as unforgiving.
Willa sleptlittle that night, her mind too full of worries about Aaron and Gary. Would Aaron spill their secret to others in the community? Would the media—or some true-crime enthusiast online—track them down and make their lives miserable, as had happened back in Waterbury? The murder of Rachel Sherman remained unsolved and the internet was full of amateur sleuths who were sure they could find the real killer. A good number of those people started with the assumption that Gary was guilty. All they had to do was find the right proof to convict him, or persuade him to confess.
She dozed off after 4:00 a.m. and woke at six to crashing thunder and pounding rain. She gave up trying to sleep and rose, showered and made coffee. By seven, she was sipping her second cup, scrolling through her phone, searching for any distraction, when it vibrated in her hand with an alert from the first responders’ app. For a moment she thought she must have dreamed the last hour as she read the message:
Volunteers needed to search for missing girl, Mountain Kingdom Kids Camp. Muster at SAR Headquarters.
She was still staring at the message when Gary shuffled into the kitchen. He must have said something, but she didn’t hear him. Her head buzzed with the dizzying sensation of having been here before.
“Sis? Is something wrong? You look like you’re going to be sick.”
She looked up and focused on her brother’s face: He was blond like her, with a boyish face that had many people still mistaking him for a teenager. Despite everything that had happened to him, he maintained his open, optimistic attitude about life. People liked Gary. They trusted him.
