way they went?”
The sheriff grimaces. “The rain started coming down shortly after the fire, which is part of what helped put it out. Any tracks were washed out.”
“But he has a compass.” I slap my palms to the table and lean in. “If he has his backpack, it’ll be in it and he knows how to use it. He’ll be able to navigate his way to safety.”
For the longest time, no one speaks. No one quite looks at me, either.
The sheriff shifts on the bench, restless and uncomfortable. “Ms. Jenkins, I know it’s not what you want to hear, but in all likelihood, the compass is not going to help your son. Now, it’s still possible that Ethan wandered off in the confusion of the fire, but it’s not looking that way. Every indication points to his having some help.”
The sheriff’s words fall into the room like a bomb, and the ugly fear that’s been creeping through my veins grows and pulses with heat, clawing at my consciousness. I think about the helicopters swooping over the trees, searching between the branches for one, maybe two glowing bodies, and I feel unsettled, panicky.
“Has somebody called Andrew?”
This gets everybody’s attention. The sheriff cocks a brow, and he grows an inch or two on the bench. “I assume you’re referring to your husband.”
“Ex-husband. Has somebody talked to him?”
The sheriff shakes his head. “So far, we’ve been unable to reach him.”
“Well, send somebody by,” I yell. “Tell them to pound on his door until he opens it.”
“We’ve done that, just like we did with you. So far, nobody’s answered.”
I flip through the logical explanations in my mind. It’s still early. Andrew is not a morning person. He’ll have his phone ringers off and his noise machine on. There’s no waking him once he’s out.
But still. The suspicions sneak in like smoke, silent and deadly.
“But why?” The question is as much for me as for anyone here. “Andrew loves Ethan.”
The sheriff hikes a shoulder. “When people are desperate enough, they’ll do all sorts of things they wouldn’t do otherwise.”
“How is Andrew desperate? He’s paying me bare-bones alimony and stretching out the divorce just long enough to hide all his assets.” I turn to the detective. “You saw where I live. If anybody is desperate here, it’s me. And before you start accusing me of having something to do with Ethan’s disappearance again, I was at home asleep.”
“I wasn’t accusing you. I was questioning you, and I’m not going to apologize for it. Like I told you in the car, we’re looking at every possible scenario. That includes close family, starting with the parents.”
Of course, they are looking at Andrew. If I’m a scenario, then so is a soon-to-be ex-husband with an arrest record.
I shake my head, speechless. No matter what Andrew thinks of me, he adores his son. He’d never do anything to hurt him... Would he?
The sheriff reads my expression. “Parental kidnappings aren’t all that uncommon, unfortunately, especially when the parents are estranged, which I understand you and Andrew are.”
“We’re estranged, but he and Ethan aren’t. Andrew can see Ethan anytime he wants.”
“According to a court order filed with the DeKalb County clerk, Andrew’s visitation is every other weekend.”
“Yes, but that was what the judge decided. Not me. When I told him I wanted a divorce, I promised Andrew we would share custody fifty-fifty. This arrangement is only temporary. And why go to all the trouble to kidnap him here? Why wouldn’t he just... I don’t know, not bring Ethan home one Sunday night? I mean, it’s not like he doesn’t have plenty of other opportunity.”
“I don’t know, but like the detective said, we’re looking at every scenario. Including the possibility your son might be lost out there in the woods, or that he’s with someone unrelated. We also have to consider that it might have been a stranger.”
“What kind of stranger kidnaps an eight-year-old little boy?”
The sheriff doesn’t respond, but I hear the answer in his silence.
A predator.
A psychopath.
A monster.
I dig my phone from my pocket with shaking hands, pull up Andrew’s number on the screen. Screw the restraining order. No, screw him if he’s done what I think he has. The phone rings once, twice, three times. It flips me to a recording, Andrew’s slightly nasal voice asking me to leave a message. I call him four more times, each time with no response. The same happens with his home line.
The sheriff reads the answer on my face. “Keep trying. We will, too. In the meantime—”
The walkie-talkie on the sheriff’s hip crackles to life, a deep voice spouting something in fits and starts. I squeeze my eyes and strain to make out the words, but I don’t catch them all. The dogs caught a trail. They tracked it a mile and a half to the northwest. Something about a mountain.
“Goddammit.” The sheriff slams a fist to the table, rattling my frayed nerves and toppling one of the cups. A brown liquid, the remnants of someone’s forgotten coffee, creeps across the papers like sludge.
He heaves himself to his full height and hustles off.
“What?” I call out, but he doesn’t slow. Two seconds later, he’s out the door.
“The dogs are confused,” the detective says. “They’re all over the place. Running around the woods then back to the camp, basically heading in opposite directions. One of them caught a scent, but it dried up at a place called Black Mountain.” He shuffles through the papers until he finds a map, then spreads it across the table. His fingertips fly over a sea of green to the north of Dahlonega, decorated with swaths of black squiggles—the Chattahoochee National Forest.
I clamp on to the edge of the bench, my knuckles going white with fear, with hope. If the dogs caught his trail once, if they tracked him up a hill, then surely they can track him down the other side.
Dawn rushes back in the room, and her expression punches a bright red panic button in my chest. She heard the update, too. “Black Mountain’s not a place,” she says, and she looks sick. Physically ill, and now, so am I. “It’s a road.”
Detective Macintosh’s hands freeze on the paper, and he looks at me with a compassion that clamps around my heart like a vise.
The realization, one I’ve been battling since the detective showed up at my door, dawns in brilliant, horrifying color.
Ethan is not out there, wandering the woods or huddled from the rain under a tree. He’s in somebody’s car.
But with whom? Going where? I think about all those movies and TV shows featuring children shoved into a trunk or the back of a van, then push the images away. Those stories never end well, the real-life statistics too grim. What is it all those advocacy groups say in their warnings? Scream, kick, fight, but whatever you do, do not get in that car. Because the minute that door is slammed with you on the inside, it’s too late. Statistics say you’re already dead.
A vibration starts up somewhere in the very core of me, somewhere deep and primitive. It rattles my bones and throbs in my veins, pushing outward in quakes as violent as a seizure. My mouth fills with bile and a scream, but my frozen lungs can’t push it out. It echoes, loud and horror-movie wild, through my head.
Dawn sinks onto the bench beside me, wrapping a hand around mine. “I know it’s scary, but this development changes things.”
I look at her. Shake my head.
She nods hers. “We will be doubling down now, expanding the roadblocks and the