Orson looked at the kayak seat and found a section of hip pad was missing. In its place was a rolled-up section of dry suit. “Here’s the missing dry-suit parts.” He removed it and compared the knife cuts on that portion to the knife cuts on the dry suit where the girl had cut it. “Definitely two different knives.” He found a meal pouch and opened the Ziploc bag, sniffed and quickly closed it. “Looks like she prepared a cold meal and never got a chance to eat it.”
“Cold meal?”
“Yeah. Dehydrated food is intended to be prepared with hot water and eaten fresh, but you can eat it cold—it just tastes like crap. Survivalists will put a little water in a meal packet and let it sit to make it soft enough to eat. This one’s gone sour. It won’t stink a lot but you might want to double bag it.”
Orson pulled the sleeping bags out of the boat. They were packed one inside the other, tightly rolled, stuffed into a waterproof bag and tied with bungee cords. He opened the waterproof bag and spread the sleeping bags out on the floor. “If she was caught in a strainer, injured and shocky, her husband might have put one bag inside the other like this and gotten in with her to keep her warm.”
“Matches her story,” Nolan conceded.
“Or indicates she’s very well organized and planned ahead.”
Nolan grinned. “Junior, the girl I talked to in the hospital? Even beat all to heck, she kept her head together. Emotional, but not to the point of hysteria or even confusion. She was sequential with her story, not jumping from event to event, like most people I interview. She’s organized. Too organized. Knows her rights. If I get a reason to use county money, I’ll send all this to the lab. For now, it’s just conjecture.”
Orson stood, and his father stood with him. “So, you think maybe she’s been planning it, waiting for the right opportunity. The river trip gave it to her.” Orson shrugged. “Bust her ass, Pop.”
Nolan shook his head. “Not yet. Waiting to see what the SAR turns up. But I didn’t call you back just to look at this river crap. I have a job for you, Junior.”
Orson didn’t like the gleam in his father’s eyes. Not one bit.
8
Listening to the searchers’ comments on the radio as they were relayed up and down the river, Nell fought tears and lost when they found Joe’s kayak and removed it from its securing lines. Her head in her arms at the kitchen table, she heard each report. Waiting. Waiting for any good news. Waiting for them to find Joe. What she heard was information she already knew. The kayak was empty. No supplies. And no Joe nearby, on a rock waiting for help, trapped in a strainer.
No Joe. Not anywhere, alive or…or dead.
One kayaker was assigned to bring the boat in to the takeout, and the team started down the last stretch of the river. It would take a few hours to do a cursory search. There wasn’t time to do a full, in-depth search before sunset.
Nell’s tears splattered on the kitchen table with tiny taps of sound to form a pool. Her breath shuddered along her throat as if claws ripped at it. She silently begged God, begged him, to let her husband be alive. She knew, in some miniscule rational part of her mind, that she was out of control. She, who never cried. Never prayed. “Please,” she whispered. “Please.”
Nell felt Claire’s cool palm on the back of her neck, stroking and soothing. “It’s okay, honey. They’ll find him.”
Though she heard the lie in her mother’s voice, Nell swiveled in her seat and wrapped her arms around Claire’s waist. Her face buried in Claire’s stomach, her mother’s jeans rough on her tender skin, she wept.
Claire massaged her back and neck as the dammed-up emotions flooded out and away. Her mother murmured softly, “It’s okay. You just cry it all out. I’m here, honey. I’m here.”
“I can’t do this,” Nell whispered brokenly. “I can’t do it. I need Joe back. I need him. I’m not strong like you. I can’t do this.” She rocked her forehead against her mother. “I can’t do it.”
Claire’s stroking hand slowed and stopped. “I wasn’t strong when your father died. I was a mess.”
Nell looked up into her mother’s face. “You never cried.”
“I cried. I cried and cussed and threw things and cried and cussed some more. And I hated him for the longest time.” Her pink-lipsticked mouth curled in a sad smile and she brushed Nell’s stiff hair back behind an ear. “And even after all that, even after all these years, I still miss the cheatin’ son of a gun. Can you believe it?”
Nell laughed, a hiccup of surprise. “No.”
Claire waved a hand in the air as if to rub away the negative. “I do. Still. But it was pure torture to live through, him running off with that woman, the church elder’s wife, and them getting killed together. All the gossip at church and in town. The whisperin’. The way the newspaper kept on and on with the story and brought it up over and over during that trucker’s trial for drunk driving and resisting arrest. It was all I could do to get through each day.”
“I didn’t know,” Nell said, the words hoarse.
“’Course not. I had to protect you. You were mine, all I had left to love and provide for. So I survived. And now you have me to survive for. ’Cause I don’t know what I’d do without you.” She wiped Nell’s face with the pads of her thumbs. “Come on. Lie down a while. You need to rest.”
“I can’t sleep.” Fresh tears ran down her face, stinging like salt in wounds. “I can’t. Not until they find Joe.”
“I didn’t say anything about sleep. I said you should rest. I’ll sit with you. And I’ll listen to the radio. And if you doze off, I promise to wake you if they find anything. Anything at all. Come on.” Claire pulled Nell up. Docile, she followed her mother to the bed. Like a child, she lay down when her mother folded back the sheets and held them for her. They were fresh and cool and smelled of Joe. Instantly, she was asleep.
Orson watched from the shadows as Nolan reached to knock at the door of the motor home. It flung open and the old man stepped back, jerking his hand from the swinging door. He looked up to see those blue eyes. Nell Stevens’s mother. Claire. His dad’s mouth opened, but no words came out. Orson hid a smile.
The woman stared down from three steps up, sparks flashing. She came down the steps at him, her face flushing red with anger. His dad, who had faced down moonshiners and pot growers and backcountry mountaineers carrying shotguns and a total disregard for the law, stepped back. She walked up to him, shoulders rigid and fire in her eyes, backing him another two steps before he was able to stop his backpedaling progress.
She leaned into him, her chest a fraction of an inch from his, her chin outthrust, her finger pointing. Pale pink nail polish, Orson saw, that matched her lipstick.
“If you think you’re gonna wake my daughter, you have another think coming. My girl is asleep, after crying her eyes out. You can just wait. You hear me?”
“I wouldn’t think about—I just need to ask—”
“You need to ask nothin’. I know how you cops work.” She put her hands on her hips. Orson saw his dad looking at her mouth. “You start out all sweet and nice and asking simple questions and then you lower the boom with some other awful question that says you think somebody’s guilty of something. It’s a sneak attack, is what it is. Jist like that sneaky way you questioned me about it all without telling me you was a cop. And my Nell is too broke up over Joe to be hurt like that.”
“Miz Bartwell, I—”
“I know you got a job to do. I know somebody’s gotta ask the