Page 9 of Mountain Struggle

“I’m sure you have other—”

“I really don’t, Damien,” Drake replied in a dry, no-nonsense tone. “Pick me up in ten minutes.”

#

Four hours later, the heaviness in Damien’s chest had settled into an agonizing weight.

They’d found Tess’s car in the Les Tines station, as expected. The train conductor remembered seeing Tess and Jamie take the train up to the small hamlet of Le Lavancher. Tess had a return ticket as well, which hadn’t been used.

They’d made it to the bakery—Damien knew that would have been one of their first stops if Jamie had anything to say about it—where the owner remembered the pair. According to her, they’d been talking of heading up one of the hiking paths to have their snack. She didn’t remember which way they’d gone—it’d been a glorious summer afternoon, and there’d been lots of other families and children looking to buy cakes.

From that moment on, nobody had seen them again—it was as if the earth had swallowed them.

Damien’s heart clenched at the thought that he might never find them. This was his son—and Tess was … this wasn’t the time to examine what Tess was to him. He just knew he needed to find them. Tess would never have stayed out voluntarily. Something bad had happened to them.

Nobody needed to tell him, at eleven p.m., that it was time to call a stop to the search for the night.

They’d searched all around the village and found no sign of either Tess or Jamie. They needed to head up into the mountains now, but Damien knew better than anyone else that searching at night would be foolish—dangerous for the rescuers and not likely to meet with any success.

“We’ll be back at first light, Damien,” Drake said softly. His hand was poised on a map of the area. He’d already identified the three more likely paths they could have taken. Damien was glad for his friend’s leadership—he himself had led hundreds of rescues in these mountains, but right now he didn’t feel he could find his way out of a shoe box.

Beau Fontaine, commander of their sibling Annecy unit, called him on the phone.

“How are you holding up, Damien?” he said. The man’s usually gruff voice was tempered with caution.

“How do you think?” Damien replied, then immediately wished he could take the words back. Neither Beau nor anyone from his team deserved his anger. “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. I’m just—”

“I understand,” Beau replied. “I just wanted to let you know my team will be ready at first light. We’ll coordinate with Drake.”

“Thank you. I appreciate it.”

Damien hung up the phone and looked at his battery—18% left. If nothing else, he’d need to find himself a charger. He thought of the torch in the trunk of his car.

If Drake drives back with somebody else, I can search on my own, just for a few minutes.

“Thank you all. I’ll see you tomorrow,” he told his team. They’d all driven up as soon as they’d heard Jamie was missing. Gael and Kat had driven up from the office right behind him and Drake.

Jens Melkopf, the team’s doctor, had come up shortly after. Nobody wanted to say this out loud, but in a case like this they all knew Jens was the most important person there. The rest of them all had emergency medical training, but Jens had spent ten years as a doctor in the military before joining search and rescue, and he’d seen things the others could only imagine.

Only Hiro was missing. He and Bailey, a black Dutch shepherd, had been at a dog and handler event in Switzerland and were driving back that evening.

“That’s not going to happen,” Drake said, reading his mind.

“You’re not staying here, Damien.” He ran a hand through his short brown hair. “We know better than to tell you to sleep—hell, none of us will be getting any sleep tonight—but we’re not going to let you stay here and endanger your life. We’ll drop you off at home. You’ll rest as best you can—then we’ll pick you up at first light to start the search.”

It was a long speech by Drake’s standards. Damien knew his friend was right, but still, the thought that his son might be lost in the mountains, was tearing him apart. As unreasonable as it might seem, he wanted to stay close to where his son had disappeared.

Damien hadn’t been there when his son was born. He hadn’t known of his son’s existence, in fact, until his mother, a woman he’d dated briefly two-and-a-half years earlier, had shown up on his doorstep with the child in tow.

One look at the toddler was all it had taken for Damien to fall completely, irrevocably in love. During the visit, when Jamie’s mother had expressed concern about her ability to provide a stable home for the boy during her travels, Damien had found himself offering to keep the child. The moment she’d said yes, he’d known it was the right thing, and he’d never stopped feeling grateful that she’d come to him.

“He was wearing a light jacket,” Damien said, his throat tight. “Not nearly warm enough to spend the night out here.”

“What color?”

“Red and blue.”

“Good. That’s good. We’re going to find them, Damien,” Drake said tersely. “Tess will take care of him in the meantime. You trust her, don’t you?”