He saw the group on the lawn start to move toward him and put up his hand to stop them.
Grace strained hard now. She was pulling in air at a rapid rate. But she was keeping close to the side of the house. He kept his eyes on her paws, watching for glass or pieces of metal. She was following a narrow gully that the overflowing gutters had created between the foundation of the house and the beginning of the lawn.
At the corner of the house Grace took another hard right. She picked up her pace, skittering in the mud. There was more debris in the backyard than the front and Creed tried to slow her down.
The woods began about fifty feet from the back of the house. Fragrant bushes lined the yard, creating a natural barrier. In the fog it was difficult to see anything beyond them. The thick bushes had also acted as a stopgap for the floodwater that had come through earlier, gathering pieces of debris left behind. He worried that the grass held equal amounts of foreign objects that could pierce Grace’s pads. His boots crunched glass and a knot tightened in his stomach.
Grace stopped suddenly, interested in something stuck in the bushes. She looked back at him and sat down.
Another alert.
He took a closer look and saw a couple more wadded tissues pierced on the prickly bush. To anyone else they’d simply look like garbage, but Grace insisted they were “Hamlet.”
Creed glanced back toward the front of the house. Vance hadn’t allowed anyone to follow. He remembered the daughter had found the front door open. The search party had spent hours going up and down the neighborhood and, from what Vance had told him, they had ventured into the forest that started across the street and at the end of the cul-de-sac. They had tried to track the footsteps of an elderly woman who had come out her front door on a dark and stormy night, thinking that she had gone looking for her daughter who hadn’t come home.
They had done their best to guess the mind of someone old and confused with dementia. Had they looked in the backyard, they would have seen what Creed saw now—nothing.
“Good girl, Grace,” he told her in an even tone and not the excited, high-pitched one he used when she found what they were looking for. Still, her eyes left his to glance at the backpack where she knew her pink elephant was waiting.
“Grace,” he said, and her eyes came back to his. “Find Hamlet.”
She stood up and sniffed at the tissues. Glanced up at him.
They could have blown there from anywhere, even if they had belonged to Mrs. Hamlet. Just when Creed thought they were at a dead end, Grace’s nose started twitching. And once again she tugged and strained, pulling him toward the thick barrier of bushes. She turned right and led him along the row. At the end she took another right and headed back toward the house. Before she got there she stopped in her tracks.
Her tail stood straight out. No motion. Ears perched forward. Nose up, twitching and sniffing rapidly. She turned right again but didn’t go far. She circled and stopped. But she wasn’t finished.
This time she took off and raced for the back line of bushes. She pulled Creed through a narrow gap where the branches didn’t touch her but scraped and scratched at his jeans and snagged his shirt, ripping it before he could set himself free. On this side the grass ended and mud greeted his boots, sending him sliding. He kept his balance even as the forest floor sloped down. Grace didn’t slow a bit.
In seconds the canopy above cut their light. The fog seemed to come alive, moving between the trees like smoke in the wind. Dampness settled around them. Branches dripped. The smell of earth and pine was overwhelming. Yet Grace’s nose continued to work the air.
Creed glanced back up to get a sense of how far they had come, and he could no longer see the bushes that separated the Hamlet backyard from the forest. He knew that Grace was still leading him toward the right but it was subtle now. None of the sharp turns like in the backyard. He was starting to get concerned about how deep they were going. His head hurt. The cut above his eye throbbed a new rhythm of pain. Already he felt that his sense of direction was slipping away.
He wanted to reel Grace in. Take a break. Get both of them some water. Before he had a chance to do any of that, Grace skittered to a halt. She sat down and looked up at him, her eyes finding his.
Creed’s pulse was racing, his breath uneven. His eyes darted around the area. The fog was thick along the floor of the forest. He squinted but all he could see were trees, downed branches, a pile of rubbish, leaves and pine needles, thigh-high shrubs, and vines growing from trunk to trunk. He scanned higher, looking for more tissues stuck in branches, pieces of fabric, anything that could have once been Mrs. Hamlet’s.