Page 73 of Holly and Ivar
“I’m coming too.”
“That’s not a good idea.”
“I don’t care.She’s my sister.”
Within thirty minutes, the whole town had gathered in the square.The carnival lights were still on, but the cheer had been replaced with silent determination and concern.
“Our trained search and rescue volunteers have their assignments.Everyone else, it’s too risky to send you into the forest.If you’re going to search, I want you in groups of three or four.Check the back roads, the main roads in and out of town, anywhere she might’ve pulled off.I don’t want anyone else to go missing.Keep your radios on channel three.Liv and Mim are coordinating at the town hall.So if you can’t get through on your radio, call them there.”
“Ivar,” Holly called, catching him as he headed to his snowmobile.“Listen to me for one minute.”
He stopped walking.
“I’ll go up.Into the air,” she whispered.
“It’s too risky.There’s too much snow, and it’s dark.”
“We go out in the snow all the time.”
“Yeah, but don’t you have routes?Coordinates?”
“Not when we go out for fun.”
“But would you go out for fun in this?I can’t let you do that.It would be flying blind.”
“I can’t stay here and do nothing.I’ll go with you.”
Ivar, about to agree, was interrupted.
“I’m going with him,” Chad said, walking over to them.“She’s my sister.I’m not sitting here waiting for news.”
For a moment, no one spoke.Then Ivar nodded once.“Fine.”He pulled Holly aside.“Stay with Liv in the office.I could use your help in coordinating the volunteers.And Al, stay with Holly.”
She leaned in and hugged him.He was hoping for another kiss on the cheek.Instead, she whispered, “Listen to the forest, Guardian.”
For a heartbeat, everything else fell away except for the echo of her words and the weight of what they meant.
When she stepped back, he could only nod.Then, with his pulse thudding in time with the wind through the trees, he returned to his snowmobile.
“Put this on while I hook up the rescue sled,” he said to Chad, tilting his head toward a snowmobile suit.
“What about you?”
“I’m used to it,” Ivar said.“I’ll be plenty warm.”
With the sled attached, he zipped up his parka and pulled on his mitts.“Is there somewhere she might go?A favorite trail?”
There was a pause while Chad considered this.“Betty used to take us swimming at a pond,” Chad said.“I haven’t been there since I was ten.Rowan would have been three at the time, but Betty took her there each summer.Just the other day she told me how much she loved it.”He gave a short, uneasy laugh.“I used to hate it.The forest made my skin crawl.It still does.”
Ivar glanced at him.“But you’re coming anyway?”
“She’s my sister.”
They set off in the direction of the Hale property.“What did this pond look like?Do you remember anything specific?”
“Nothing really.But Rowan pointed to the road you take to the trail head the other day as we drove past.It's a bit east of the house.”
Ivar knew where he meant.He’d been in that part of the forest before—just not often, and not recently.It wasn’t a popular hiking route, maybe because it ran too close to the Hale house.
