e, fog was beginning to roll in, wispy tendrils winding through the trees and hovering over the ground. What if…?
Something moved at the corner of her field of vision to her left, and she turned quickly in that direction. Dan turned, too, so he must have seen it, as well. They both aimed their flashlights in that direction, sweeping the hillside with the narrow beams. Dan’s beam stopped abruptly, then rapidly backtracked. Kinley followed the direction of the light, then gasped. She would have sworn she saw a feminine form almost hidden by the trees, beckoning to them. For just a moment, she saw a face in that ring of light. A woman’s face. Smiling at them.
The light jerked in Dan’s hand. By the time he steadied it, the…whatever it had been was gone. A thin line of fog snaked around the undergrowth in that area, but beyond that was nothing but darkness.
Kinley looked up at Dan with widened eyes, telling herself that pain and panic must be causing her to see things that weren’t there. He couldn’t possibly have seen what she did, right?
His face looked a little pale in the periphery of the flashlight beam, his expression quite grim. Because of his worry about Grayson…or because he, too, had seen something he couldn’t quite explain?
By unspoken agreement, they moved in unison toward the area where she thought she’d seen someone.
“Call them again, Dan,” she gasped, stumbling over a stick but righting herself without his assistance. “My voice is giving out.”
He cupped his hands around his mouth and gave another shrill whistle, followed by the boy’s name and the dog’s.
Kinley started to move forward again. Dan stopped her. “Wait.”
She opened her mouth to question him, but he shushed her quickly, then whistled again, the sound spearing through the heavy shadows. “Ninja? Grayson!”
She heard it, too, this time. A faint, rusty-sounding bark from somewhere north and downhill from them. “Ninja?” she called eagerly.
Stumbling and sliding, they followed the occasional bark, flashlight beams waving wildly as they moved with as much haste as safely possible. Kinley heard the slap of a branch, heard Dan mutter a pained curse, but she was afraid to slow down and check on him. It didn’t sound as though Ninja was moving, but she was concerned about finding him. She didn’t even want to think that Grayson wouldn’t be with the dog. She and Dan were putting a lot of faith in Ninja’s tracking abilities, considering they really had no idea if he’d run after the missing child or a stray cat. Her phone was being stubbornly silent, indicating that the boy had not yet been found, so she and Dan had to follow this lead, no matter how tenuous.
She skidded to a stop with a choked sob when her light fell on a pale little face and a pair of glittering canine eyes.
Dirty and disheveled, Grayson sat on the ground, his arms around Ninja, who sat beside him now making his usual rumble-sound. Grayson wasn’t crying, perhaps because the dog had given him courage, but his lip quivered when he looked up at Kinley and Dan.
“I saw a deer,” he said. “And then I got lost.”
Every muscle in Kinley’s body seemed to sag suddenly in relief. The pain she’d been trying to ignore flooded through her, but she tamped it down again.
“Call it in,” Dan advised her, then moved past her to kneel in front of the boy. “Hey, sport. Ready to go see your mom and dad?”
“Can the doggie come?”
“Sure, he can come with us. Let’s go, Ninja.”
Straightening, he scooped the boy into his arms, cradling him close in visible relief. The dog wagged its stubby tail and grinned up at them.
Kinley put in a quick call to Bonnie, figuring it would be best to let her sister break the good news to the family in person. Reassured that the child was safe and unharmed, Bonnie let out a gasp of joy, then promised to start calling in all the search teams.
“So,” Dan was saying to Grayson. “A deer, huh?”
His arms looped comfortably around Dan’s neck, the boy nodded. “A big deer. It had horns.”
“Yeah? Well, next time you’d better tell someone before you chase after anything, okay? Your family was really worried about you.” Dan looked at Kinley. “This way, right?” he asked, nodding toward his left.
Roused from the overwhelmed immobility that had briefly gripped her, she swallowed, nodded and limped in the direction of the inn. Though she concentrated fiercely on the light ahead, and on carefully placing her feet so she didn’t stumble, she couldn’t help but look rather nervously out of the corners of her eyes at every curl of mist, every breeze-rustled branch. To her relief, she saw no more faces in the fog, which only proved in her mind that she’d simply let her fear for Grayson play tricks on her imagination.
What else could it have been?
* * *
Kinley hobbled into her house less than an hour after returning Grayson to his frantic family. They seemed to realize how very fortunate they were with the outcome of this particular incident that could all too easily have ended in tragedy. She hoped that in the future the family would be more vigilant with the child.
Bonnie had wanted her to stay and let her tend to the scrapes and scratches Kinley had sustained in the search, but she’d begged off, saying she just wanted to go home and take a hot shower. She had slipped away during the chaos after the boy’s return, not wanting to stay and rehash the search. She was still badly shaken—only by the awareness of what could have happened, she assured herself. Not by anything she’d imagined she saw during the hunt.
She turned on her bedroom light, then winced when she spotted her reflection in the cheval mirror standing in the corner. Her hair was a mess. A smudge of dirt streaked her cheek, probably from where she’d wiped her face after picking herself up from her fall. Her formerly spotless coral dress was dirty and badly wrinkled. Dried blood smeared her right leg from the deep scrape that ran diagonally beneath her knee toward her ankle. Her knees were filthy from her fall, and a dark bruise was forming on her right shin.