Rescue At Cedar Lake. Maggie Black K.

was pretty funny.

      A huge diamond dazzled on her finger. He’d proposed to her that day, on the edge of the rock in front of her cottage, while they’d been out together scavenging for whatever treasures had been hidden in the woods. The ring was even bigger than he remembered. It’d been so far beyond what he was able to afford that Theresa’s father had pulled him aside later that night to ask how he was going to pay for it.

      He could still remember the moment that picture was taken. He’d never been happier than he’d been the moment she’d said yes. He’d never wanted anything in life as much as he’d wanted to marry her. His eyes slid from the cell phone camera up to Theresa’s face, as years’ worth of words he never got to say suddenly smacked inside him like a tidal wave.

      Lord, what happened to us? How did something so amazing get so destroyed?

      He swallowed hard. “Look, Theresa, I—”

      “Break, break.” A child’s voice buzzed from the CB radio on his belt, and it was only then he realized the channel was open. “Bee to Hive. Come in Hive.”

      Was there another family up at Cedar Lake? He yanked the radio from his belt and raised it to his mouth. “Hey, kid. I don’t what you’re doing on this line. But a radio isn’t a toy, especially not with a storm coming. Where are your parents? Because if you’re in a cottage right now they should really pack up and head for town.”

      There was a pause. Then the child said, “Copy. Negative. I’m in a house. I’m not at a cottage and you’re rude. Over and out.”

      The line went dead.

      “In my experience, little kids hate being spoken to like little kids,” Theresa said mildly.

      “I was worried his family might be up at a cottage around here and not know about the weather situation,” he said. “But it seems your radio’s getting a decent range. There are any number of houses on the highway that boy might be in. But I don’t know what his parents were thinking, letting him play with a CB radio.”

      “It was a girl. I’m guessing somewhere between the ages of eight and ten.” A slight smile turned up the corners of her lips. “And we used to play on CB radios when we kids all the time. Remember? Paul Wright’s father was a trucker and got us all hooked. We used them during the scavenger hunt. Or whenever you wanted to talk to me late at night without risking my parents answering the cottage phone.”

      True. He hadn’t gotten a cell phone until he was eighteen and cell service at the lake had always been nonexistent. Life had been one big adventure back then: slipping through the woods, hiding together from the other scavenger hunt teams and whispering coded messages to her over a walkie-talkie, as if how they felt about each other was a secret they needed to protect from the world.

      The ironic thing was that now he was living the kind of life he’d only played at back then. Stopping evil and protecting people from danger was no longer just some unattainable dream. It was his job and his calling. But did Theresa even see who he’d become? Or did she still think he was some reckless boy running through the trees playing at being a hero?

      He set the radio down on the table, fished his useless cell phone out of his pocket and took a picture of the group photo.

      “Kenneth Brick was obviously using his last name as a nickname,” Theresa said. “But that doesn’t mean Howler and Castor are. One or both of them could be someone we know using a nickname to hide their identity.”

      He nodded. “Agreed.”

      “If Kenneth Brick is twenty-three, then he’d have been about fourteen around the time this picture was taken, right?” Theresa asked. “If we assume that Howler and Castor are in their twenties, too, and that one of them is in this picture, then we’re looking at anybody in the picture between the age of, say, eleven and twenty.”

      He scanned the picture. He spotted Mandy quickly. She was eleven back then and sitting cross-legged in the sun between her older brothers. There were ten people in the picture who’d be in their twenties now. Six he dismissed immediately. Theresa, Zoe, Josh and Alex himself could be struck off the list. So could Mandy’s twin brothers, Emmett and Kyle, not just because they were slightly too old, but because it was hard to imagine the owner of a successful car dealership or a local politician hiring somebody to ransack their parents’ cottage. But, still, he couldn’t discount the possibility one of them was Castor’s target.

      That left just four people.

      “Natalie Patterson, Corey Patterson, Tanner Mullock and Paul Wright,” he said.

      “Paul would be about twenty-seven now,” Theresa said. “I don’t know where he is, but I know he was always big into hunting and won the scavenger hunt with the Rhodes twins every year, until we finally took the trophy. All I know about Tanner Mullock is that he came up to the lake to stay with his grandparents a couple of summers because his parents were going through marriage problems. He’s probably in his midtwenties now. There wasn’t a woman on the crew, so Natalie’s out. Although we can’t dismiss the possibility she could be romantically linked to Castor or someone on his crew.”