Page 39 of Wilderness Search
She opened the car’s rear door and shoved her pack inside. “All right. What do I have to do?”
“You have to persuade Scott Sprague to take you up on the offer.”
She made a face. “So he doesn’t even know you’re planning this?”
“No one knows. Jake and I came up with the idea on our own. Well, with some help from Bethany. She’s the one who pointed out that the campers wouldn’t want to tell the truth to ‘old’ men like us.”
She almost smiled in spite of herself. “What if Scott says no?”
“Don’t take no for an answer.” He grinned. “Besides, I don’t think he’ll turn you down.”
“Oh? Why is that?”
“He’s a single man. You’re a beautiful woman.”
She ignored the flutter in her stomach at his words. “You’re suggesting I what—seducehim into saying yes?”
“No! Nothing like that. Just, you know, smile and make him think you want to do the class as a favor to him—and the campers.”
She didn’t want to agree to the idea, but she couldn’t think of a better one, and she wanted to help find Olivia. “All right, I’ll try,” she said.
“At least you’ll know you tried.” He held the driver’s door open for her. She gave him what she hoped was a look that told him she didn’t need his help, and slid past him, into the seat.
“How did the call go?” he asked. “I heard it was a hiker with a broken leg.”
“Fine. We had to pull him out of a hole in the ground he’d fallen into.” She was about to start the car, but hesitated, wanting to tell someone about what had happened, and who better than a sheriff’s deputy? “Someone had set a trap out there in the woods—a hole in the ground with a bunch of branches over it. This man—he and his wife were out searching for Olivia—stepped on the branches and fell into the hole.”
“No pointed sticks at the bottom?” he asked.
She frowned. “No. Vince said something about that, too. I never heard of that.”
“It’s called a punji trap. They used them in the Vietnam War.” At her questioning look, he added, “When I was a teenager I went through a phase where I was really interested in stuff like that. Anyway, someone dug a hole and set up a trap like that—without the sticks?”
“It didn’t look like they dug the hole, exactly,” she said. “A tree had died and most of it had rotted away. Whoever did this scraped out the rest of the dead tree, then pulled some branches off a pine that had fallen and scattered them around. There’s a lot of branches and stuff on the ground around there anyway, so it was good camouflage.”
“Was someone trying to trap Olivia?”
“I don’t know. It was just…strange.” She started the car. “I think Danny is going to contact the sheriff about it. Someone needs to make sure there aren’t other traps out there. With so many searchers out in the woods, someone else could get hurt.”
He stepped away from the car. “Thanks for agreeing to talk to the kids,” he said.
She nodded, and put the car in gear. She didn’t like how circumstances kept throwing her and Aaron together.
Most of all, she didn’t like how seeing him made her feel—not like she was facing someone who had betrayed her. When she was with Aaron these days, she was reminded of how much she missed him.
Gage asked Aaronto come with him to check out the trap that had injured Luke Wagner. They said little as they hiked toward the location search and rescue had provided. Aaron was tired of tramping through the woods, or at least these woods, with their tangled deadfall and uneven terrain. He was constantly slipping on the thick carpet of pine needles or being slapped in the face by low-hanging branches.
“This isn’t good,” Gage said when they stopped briefly to rest and drink water. He pointed at something on the ground.
Aaron leaned over to look. “Bear scat,” he said. There were plenty of black bears in Vermont, though most of his dealings with them had involved chasing them out of people’s fruit trees or garbage cans. “Black or grizzly?”
“No grizzlies in Colorado,” Gage said. “And the black bears around here usually shy away from people.”
“Even if one ran away, it would probably terrify a little girl,” Aaron said. The thought made his stomach ache. Forget his own troubles; they needed to find Olivia.
They reached the GPS coordinates they had been given and gathered around the hole in the ground.
“I see what Willa meant when she said this wasn’t dug by hand.” Aaron indicated the remains of a rotted tree nearby. “Someone used what was already here.”
