“Looks like her friends already did.” Colm inclined his head toward the other end of the building, where a group of men were standing around a wood stove. “Course without their truck they couldn’t get very far. They’ve been up all night. We’re lucky we’re not searching for them as well.”
I gauged fairly quickly which of the men were from the hunting party and which were the volunteers. The two men from Evergreen were camp-dirty, wearing damp coveralls splattered with mud and something darker—most likely blood from one or both of their kills. Their faces were unshaven. Their shoulders slouched beneath their Carhartt coats. One of the men looked like he was in his thirties. Waves of thick red hair bunched up between the edge of his cap and the collar of his coat. The other man might have been a good fifteen years older. He was heavyset, several inches shorter than the first man, and had a black beard, streaked with gray.
“Go easy if you talk to them,” Colm said. “They’ve already beat the shit out of themselves.”
“What about the family?” I asked.
“The husband’s on his way. Should be here in a couple of hours.”
I asked Colm about the compass pouch and the notes I’d found.
“Could be hers. I’ll check with her friends.”
I looked at Jeff. “You ready?”
He blinked slowly and ever so subtly tipped his head.
There was something about a search that was compelling and heady. The urgency, the meticulous use of the senses, and the desperate need to replace what was missing, to smooth out what had become so devastatingly out of sorts. Perhaps Jeff felt all of these things as well. In the quiet of his deliberate movements, I liked to think that he did.
While climbing in the Tahoe to leave, I saw the helicopter approach. It floated toward the rough patch of gravel and snow. Despite the helicopter’s loud percussion, I was able to make out Colm’s voice over the radio as he gave the pilot a summary of the search mission’s operations, the hunter’s point last seen, and GPS coordinates. Dean and one of the volunteers walked out of the headquarters and rounded the building, making their way across the road toward the helicopter, their bodies withdrawing into their parkas and hoods as they braced themselves against the cold air and biting wind.
I backed my Tahoe away from the command station and began my climb up the narrow road toward the ridge. Jeff and I spoke little on the way up. I filled him in on my earlier search, on the broken scent trails and dead ends. The rest of our conversation was small talk.
“How’s your family?’ I asked.
“Family’s good,” Jeff said.
And later, “Everything okay on the ranch?”
“Can’t complain. What about you?” he asked. “How’s that boy of yours?”
“He’s good,” I said. “Home game this weekend. Rio Mesa versus Hayden. Last game of the season.”
“Those are good times,” Jeff said.
“Yes, they are.”
I wanted to hold on to every one of those good times, as if at any moment they might be taken away. I was forty-two with no plans of having another child. I hadn’t planned on Joseph either, and every day I counted my blessings that he was in my life. And sometimes I wondered if Joseph was the child Brody and I would have had, if in some strange way Brody had played a hand in it all.
—
I didn’t always live in Rio Mesa. I’d grown up in a suburb just west of Liberty, Missouri, where until a year after high school, I’d lived my whole life. Brody had lived his whole life there as well. My father owned a feed barn, Mercantile Co-Op. We lived in a farmhouse, owned chickens. My upstairs bedroom overlooked hayfields, several hundred acres that would later be sold and subdivided. But I didn’t realize that at the time. I was young, and I had the fields to explore.
Brody’s family grew corn and sorghum. The Lidells lived a couple of miles from me in a brick ranch they had built before Brody was born. The original homestead was situated about two hundred yards away from their house. The family rented the homestead to groups of out-of-state pheasant hunters from November through January.