“Two bodies, sir,” the man’s voice carried to her. She froze, her eyes widening. Two bodies?
She heard Agent Gallagher blow out a slow breath. “Children?” he asked and there was something in his voice that made her think he already knew the answer.
“Appears so, yes. One very young, the other older. The lab will tell us more.”
“Okay. Thank you, David. Did the dogs hit on anything else?”
“Not yet. We’re going to widen the search, come back tomorrow if necessary.”
“Thank you. Let me know right away if you find anything else.”
“Will do.”
Harper heard the man named David walking away, heard Agent Gallagher approach her from behind and turned slowly to meet his eyes. He must have seen by her face that she’d overheard their conversation, because he blew out a breath and said, almost to himself, “I hoped I wasn’t right.”
“Two children?” Harper whispered, the horror of that coursing through her. There were two children buried out there. Whose children?
Agent Gallagher nodded solemnly.
“They found two,” Harper said. “Do you . . . do you think this third marker is another one?” And if he did, why did he have her out there? The dogs seemed to be up to the task.
“I don’t know. I hope not. There are two red ones and one black.” If the red ones are the location of the two bodies, then the black one might be something different. “This wavy line here that looks like a stream or a river, think we can find it now that some of the snow is gone?”
She swallowed, gathering her strength, feeling a . . . responsibility to those children. If there was something out there that would provide a clue how to get them back home to those they belonged to, then she would do anything she could to help.
She was supposed to pick Jak up in a little while, and as far as she knew, he didn’t yet have a phone, nor would she necessarily get service out there anyway, but . . . he would understand. When she told him what she’d been doing, he would understand her delay.
“Can we go back out and see the location of the graves?” she asked. She hated even contemplating the word graves, but what else could she say?
Agent Gallagher nodded and they exited the heavily wooded area, walking to the back of Driscoll’s house. The dog handlers had moved farther away, letting the dogs lead the way apparently, and from where they stood, she could see the locations of the two areas that had been dug up, men and women in white suits and masks bent over both spots. A wash of sadness moved through Harper and she did her best to ignore it. For now. She knew the value—the relief—of finally having answers, and two families were going to get that now. She would focus on that while she was out there. She could cry for those children later.
No wonder Jak had hated Driscoll, gotten a bad feeling from him. The things he’d been doing and why . . . she shivered. It was unthinkable. Monstrous.
And for the first time, she wondered if Jak wasn’t telling the whole truth about his relationship with Driscoll, wondered if he’d left some of the story out. Wondered if he’d not only been lied to, but used in some more heinous way he was too ashamed to talk about.
Oh, Jak.
She held up the map, lining up the two graves. They did seem to be positioned in the same way the two red boxes were drawn on the map. Her gaze moved to the place beyond, the place where the dogs were now searching.
“There’s a river in that direction, and a few small streams as well,” she told Agent Gallagher. If the wavy line in fact indicated water. She thought about it for a minute. “I could take you to each of them, but they’re miles away. Whatever Driscoll marked could be anywhere. Although”—she studied the map again for a second—“the marker is drawn right on the edge of the wavy line.” Not that anything was to scale. Harper blew out a breath. This felt like hunting for a needle in a haystack.
“I know,” he said. “It’s frustrating. But we might have a couple of starting points now, and it’s more than we had. I’ll tell the searchers we’re taking the truck to drive closer to those rivers.”
She nodded. They couldn’t drive straight to any of those bodies of water. But they could get closer and then walk. She’d taken fishermen to one of those streams a few times that had an excellent fishing hole. “I’ll wait here.”
He walked away, stepping carefully over the soggy ground. Harper looked at the map again, wondering why she was even bothering. It was so simply drawn, with four shapes and a word. She already had it memorized.
Agent Gallagher was talking to one of the men now and she looked briefly up at the blue sky, filled with fluffy white clouds, soaking in the peace of the place. Terrible things had happened there, but those terrible things had all been done by humans. She wished it would be left to the animals—and only the animals—once more.
As she turned in the direction of Jak’s old cabin, the one she’d barged into not once, but twice, a small smile curved her lips. She recalled sitting at his table, their heads bent close together, reading with him, kissing him . . . A twinge of melancholy squeezed her chest at the memory of that wonderful simplicity, something that would never be fully recaptured.
As she began turning back in the direction of the graves and Agent Gallagher, her gaze snagged on the mountains, low-lying clouds softening their peaks, making them look more like a wavy line in the sky
than sharp spikes. She turned back. What if . . . She held up the map. The graves—the two markers—were behind her now, but what if the wavy lines indicated the mountains instead of any number of various water sources in the opposite direction?
The same problem remained though. The mountains were far off in the distance—miles—the third marker could be anywhere between the graves and the base.
Unless . . . Her eyes moved from the exact wave of the lines to the mostly cloud-obscured peaks. They matched in a very simplistic way. Because it was the most simplistically drawn map possible. So, with that in mind, what if the square drawn underneath the mountain simply indicated a visual sense of where the mountains touched the earth from exactly where she was standing?