Page 49 of Undertow

Gabe had watched from the doorway as they pulled out. Arms crossed, jaw set. His face said everything. She’d pushed the image away before they hit the highway.

The guardrail still wore the scar—scraped metal, broken reflectors, a gouge in the gravel shoulder where Pirelli’s car had gone through. Below it, the slope dropped into brush and second-growth timber.

“This is where she climbed out,” Cara said.

Wade was already out of the car, studying the shoulder. He crouched at the guardrail, fingers tracing the gouge in the metal.

“She went over the passenger side,” he said. “Driver’s door would have been crumpled against the slope.”

He rose, scanning the tree line. “We go north. Grid pattern. Stay below the road.”

Cara followed his lead. Her skills were rooms and faces and conversations. His were this.

Twenty minutes in, working through wet brush and second-growth fir, Wade paused.

“Broken branch. See how the break is low? Someone moving fast, not watching their feet. Running.”

“In the dark.”

He shook his head. “Most people would have stayed with the car and waited for help.”

“Most people aren’t running from the people who are supposed to be the help.”

Wade glanced at her. He’d heard more in that sentence than she meant. He didn’t push. Wade never pushed. It was one of the reasons she could work with him—he noticed everything and said nothing.

Forty minutes in, a vehicle slowed on the highway above.

They went flat without a word. Cara’s ribs hit the cold ground and the pain whited out her vision for half a second. Wade’s hand was out, palm down.

Camera shutter. Multiple clicks. A woman’s voice, something appreciative about the view.

The door closed. The car pulled away.

Tourist. Taking photos from the pullout.

Wade exhaled. Cara exhaled. She pressed her forehead into the cold dirt and willed her heart rate down.

“We’re a mess,” she muttered.

“Speak for yourself.” Wade was already up, brushing mud off his jacket. He offered her a hand.

They walked on. A drainage culvert under a logging road—concrete pipe, three feet across, screened by ferns and blackberry. Wade crouched at the opening. Went still.

“Cara.”

She came up beside him. Inside: a torn jacket, dried blood on the concrete beneath it. A wadded pile of newspaper and dry leaves sat against one wall—insulation, makeshift but deliberate, along with an empty water bottleand a candy bar wrapper.

Someone had sheltered here. Curled up in a concrete pipe in January on the Oregon coast with a torn jacket, a candy bar, and a nest of newspaper—whatever she'd carried out of that wreck.

“How long?” Cara’s voice was barely a whisper.

Wade studied the interior. “One night. Maybe two. Blood’s dry but not old. The candy bar wrapper still smells like chocolate.” He paused. “She left the jacket. That means she found something better, or she was moving fast enough that the weight wasn’t worth it.”

Cara stared at the jacket. Something cracked in her chest that had nothing to do with the ribs.

North from the culvert. Wade mapped it as they went—a broken fern, a footprint in soft ground, subtle disturbances that meant nothing to a hiker and everything to a man who’d tracked people through worse.

“She wasn’t stumbling,” he said.