She's Got a Way (30 page)

Just as she was about to slide into her sleeping bag, she did her customary scan of the girls' cots, automatically counting bodies and heads. There were four of each, so she smiled and pulled her ponytail loose, suddenly deliciously tired as she laid her head on her pillow.

Even two days later, she wouldn't be sure what it was that made her sit back up. She wouldn't be sure what it was about one cot that pinged her radar. She wouldn't even be sure why she slid back out of her sleeping bag to take a closer look.

But what she
would
be sure of was the sight that greeted her when she flipped back Sam's sleeping bag.

 

Chapter 29

“What do you mean, she's gone?” Luke's eyes went wide when he came to his door five minutes later. Gabi had sprinted to his cabin in full-on panic mode, and she was breathing hard.

“Gone, Luke. She's gone. She was there when I left at ten and went down to the beach. I
know
she was there. I checked the bathroom, I checked the admin cottage, and I checked the van. She's not here.”

“So she snuck out when we were on the lake.” He ran a worried hand through his hair as he slid on his hiking boots. “Did you tell Oliver yet?”

“No.” Gabi felt her voice reach a panicky tone. “I came to you first.”

“Where are the other girls?”

“They're freaking out in the dining hall. I told them not to dare move till we figured out what to do.”

“Okay.” He headed to a closet and pulled out a backpack that looked fully packed. He slung it onto his back and motioned Gabi back out the door. “She left sometime between ten and five, so she's got some lead time on us. Do you have any idea whether she would have headed for the woods or the road?”

“None.
God.
” Gabi stumbled to keep up with him as he strode toward the admin cottage. “What if she did something like last time? What if she hiked out to the road? Hitchhiked? She could be
anywhere
right now.”

He turned to her, gripping her shoulders. “Listen. Freaking out is not going to help us. We need to figure out which direction she went. And to do that, we need to look for clues. Go to the tent and see if she took anything. Grill the girls to see if anybody knows anything. Anything at all.”

In any other situation or on any other day, Gabi would resent him telling her what to do, but in her panicky state of mind, it was actually comforting to have orders to follow. She had a feeling he knew that. Thus, the tone. Stacking a night devoid of sleep on top of the terror of finding Sam's cot empty was seriously compromising her linear thinking.

“What are
you
going to do?”

“I'm going to call the police.”

“Oh, God.” Gabi put a hand to her throat. He must be worried. She'd hoped for him to be stoic and reassuring and promise they'd find her by breakfast. But his first move was to call the police?

“Does that mean—”

“It doesn't mean I don't think we'll find her half a mile from here in the woods. It just means I'm following protocol and doing what you do in this sort of situation. It's a big forest, a big lake.”

“Oh, God. The lake. I—oh God, Luke. She wouldn't have gone in the lake, would she?” Gabi pictured her blond head slipping under the water that horrible day. She could swim now, sort of, but still. In a panic, would she be okay?

“We would have seen her, Gabriela. No, she didn't go in the water.”

“Okay. All right. Okay.” Gabi spun around, heading for the dining hall. “I'll go talk to the girls.”

“Tell them to get their survival packs ready.”

“What?”
Her jaw dropped. “We can't send them out to look. Are you crazy?”

“We're not
sending
them. We're taking them with us. It'll take the search-and-rescue crew an hour or so to mobilize. Between the five of us, we can cover a lot of ground in that time. Chances are good we'll find her before they even get here.”

*   *   *

Fifteen minutes later, Gabi and the girls shouldered their packs, sliding water bottles into the slots on one side and granola bars into stuff sacks on the other. The girls were somber, scared, and their silence was far more frightening than if they'd been squealing or squabbling. They all claimed not to have a clue where Sam had gone, or when she'd left. Nobody had heard a thing.

While they waited for Luke to finish briefing the state trooper who'd pulled into the yard five minutes ago, Gabi looked around the dining hall one more time. Sam had taken her own survival pack, and as far as Gabi could tell, she'd filled it with exactly the items Luke had taught them all to pack if they were heading out into the forest for an unknown amount of time.

“She said nothing? To anybody?” Gabi scanned their faces, desperate for an eye twitch or a nervous gesture that would tell her somebody knew something … anything. But not one of them moved a muscle.

“Can
any
of you think of
anything
that might have set her off yesterday? Did something happen? Did one of
you
say something? Anything?” Gabi put up her hands. “Free pass here, guys. I don't care what it was, or who said what. We need to know. If there's something that'll help us figure out where she went, we have to know.”

All three girls shook their heads, and as much as she was grasping for a glimmer of hope that one of them was holding on to a little nugget of information that would help, none of them spoke.

Dammit.

Just then, Luke hustled down the path, clipping a radio to the strap of his backpack. “All right. Let's do this.”

The girls froze for a moment, not sure what “let's do this” was going to entail. Then Luke pointed to Eve.

“What do we look for first?”

“Clues at the departure spot.” She rattled off the answer automatically, and he smiled.

“Exactly. So what do we know?” He pointed at Madison.

“She packed her survival pack. Food and water. The spare sleeping bag.”

“Good.” He nodded. “Waverly? Any other observations?”

Waverly scanned the clearing, then looked like she'd just realized something. “She took the dogs.” She smiled. “Luke, she took the dogs!”

Gabi looked at Luke, who nodded thoughtfully as he slid his own water bottle into its slot. How had she not noticed the dogs were missing?

“Well,” he finally said, “that's actually good news.”

“Because?”

“Because the dogs will actually slow her down. When they get tired, they'll just sit their little butts down and refuse to keep going. She'll have to wait.”

“So that's good, then.” Gabi took a deep breath. “She won't have gone as far, maybe.”

“Maybe. Unless she's carrying them, which she might totally do. But that'll add almost twenty pounds to her load, so that'll slow her down, too.” Luke looked at each of the girls. “Last call for any information anyone's holding out on us. No repercussions, no blame. But if there's anything at all, we need to know. And we need to know it now.”

He waited. And waited. He pinned his eyes on Eve, then Waverly, then Madison, and back again. None of them offered up anything, and Gabi was ready to push them all up the trail to get moving, but he just stood there, hands on his hips, the picture of I-can-wait-all-day-here.

What was he doing? They were wasting valuable time! Every minute they stood here in this clearing was another minute of Sam moving farther away from them. If they wanted to find her before the search-and-rescue team got involved, they needed to move. Now.

She widened her eyes at him, but he shook his head almost imperceptibly, then kept staring at the girls.

Gabi stared as well. What was he seeing that she wasn't? What energy was he picking up on that made him stand stock-still and try to draw them out? Was he just bluffing?

He totally had to be bluffing.

And then Eve took a quick, catchy breath, and before she could turn around to catch them, two tears streamed down her cheeks. Gabi's eyes widened as she looked at her, but Luke put a hand out toward Gabi, subtle and low—
don't push
—so she stood still, waiting.

Madison and Waverly turned toward Eve, their mouths open. Madison was the one to finally speak. “What the hell, Eve? What's going on?”

Eve swallowed and wiped her eyes, taking a deep breath. She looked at Gabi, then at Luke, biting her lip, then blowing out the breath slowly. Finally, when Gabi was just about at her breaking point, Eve spoke.

“She doesn't want to go back to Briarwood.” She took a shaky breath. “Said she'd rather take her chances with the bears than go back.”

Gabi felt her jaw drop at the same second her knees turned to melted wax.
What?

“What are you talking about? I've never seen her so happy as she's been the past couple of weeks. I don't underst—” Gabi shook her head, her eyes wide. “Why would she do this?”

Eve crossed her arms. “Because
this
is about to end. That's why. In two weeks, we'll be back on campus as the resident scholarship girls.” She put up a hand. “And don't go all wide-eyed like you think you kept that a big secret. Seriously, Gabi. Everybody knew it the minute we arrived.”

“They did not.” Gabi wished her voice sounded stronger as she argued.

Madison blew out a breath. “Yeah, we did.” Waverly nodded in agreement, looking worriedly from Gabi to Luke.

“Okay.” Gabi's mind spun. “Right now, that's neither here nor there. Which way was she heading?”

“We don't know,” Eve replied. “And that's the truth. I caught her packing the other night, but I didn't know if she'd actually do it.”

“And you didn't
tell
anyone?”

“I think the answer to that's kind of obvious right now.” She pulled her arms closer to her body. “I mean, given the situation.”

“Nobody saw her leave?”

All three of them shook their heads.

Luke shifted his backpack. “All right. Then we need to assume she's got at least five hours on us. We need to move. Now.” He headed for the trail they'd always used for their hikes, walking at a fast clip.

“How do you know she went this way?” Gabi struggled to keep pace.

“I don't. But if she was in a hurry to put some distance between herself and camp, she'd take the route she knew.”

“But wouldn't she assume we'd assume that?”

“Depends how desperate she was when she left. And I'm figuring she was pretty desperate, if she took off at that hour into these woods.” He turned to see if the girls were keeping up. “What are we looking for, girls?”

“Tracks,” Madison offered. “Hers and the dogs'.”

“Good. Waverly? What else?”

“Broken bushes, trampled grass, maybe a piece of her hair caught on something?”

“Yup. Eve? Anything else?”

“Dog poo.”

The other girls let out tension giggles, and Luke laughed. “Perfect. Use your eyes, use your ears, and—now that she's suggested it—use your noses.”

When they were twenty minutes away from camp, the trail forked, so Luke stopped short to look for evidence of which way Sam had gone. He leaned down to check for tracks, but didn't immediately indicate one route or the other. Gabi and the girls took sips of their water, waiting for direction. Finally, he pointed to the right, so they started walking that way. Two minutes later, he put a hand out to stop them.

He shook his head, looking down at the hard-packed path. “Little imp. I thought so.”

“What?” Gabi followed his gaze, but couldn't see anything helpful.

“Look right here.” He bent his knees and pointed at a faint imprint in the dirt. “There's her track.” Then he pointed at the edge of the trail. “And there's one of the dogs.”

“Okay?”

“Well, Sam's feet are aiming this way.” He pointed down the trail. “And the dog's feet are heading back toward camp.”

“What does that mean?”

He shook his head. “It means that she came this way to trick us, then backed up on her own tracks and headed down the other fork. But apparently she wasn't thinking about the dog tracks giving her away.” He made a spinning motion with his index finger. “Turn around. Back to the fork, and we'll take the other trail this time.”

They all turned around and walk-jogged back to the spot where the trail split. This time they headed down the left fork, but it was five minutes before Eve spotted any evidence of Sam traveling that way.

Gabi shivered. “I can't believe she was out here in the dark. She must have been terrified.”

Her chest hurt as she thought about Sam trucking along this trail in the pitch-black night, with only the pups for company. What had she been thinking? What was she planning on
doing,
for God's sake? Gabi prayed that she was safe, and as the sun rose higher in the sky, baking the dew from the leaves and grass, she felt physically ill that this had happened on her watch.

On her watch.
Right.
All
she'd
been paying attention to last night was Luke.

His radio clicked, and he pulled it from his chest as Oliver checked in.

“Any luck out there?”

“Negative,” Luke replied. “but we're on her trail. Tracks are a couple of hours old, so she's got a good jump on us.”

“Okay. Team's gathering here in the parking lot. You think we should send somebody in from Webster Road? See if we can intercept?”

Gabi watched as Luke checked a map and nodded, giving Oliver GPS coordinates and a bunch of other numbers and directions Gabi didn't understand. Then he clicked off and started walking again. The girls were still oddly silent behind them.

“You've done this before, haven't you?” Gabi asked.