Page 42
That night, 3:57 a.m.
By the time Emmy parks at the beach, the rain has started again, a light drizzle that promises slippery rocks and an imminent downpour. She will have to move quickly.
Emmy bounds out of the UTV.
“I want you all to wait here. Let me check out the situation first.” She shines her flashlight in each of their faces. “The last thing we need is someone else getting hurt.”
“What if you get hurt?” the plastic surgeon asks, shielding his eyes from the light.
“I won’t,” Emmy says so certainly that she realizes she might. It’s dark and wet, the rocks full of crevices even her floodlight can’t catch. And the rain is now spitting, hard little drops that could erupt into a deluge.
“Please stay in the truck,” Emmy pleads, unable to hide her stress. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Emmy puts away her small flashlight and grabs her floodlight. Its beam is no match for the formidable darkness, but she’s able to see a few feet in front of her, enough to cut a path across the rocks. Pebbles crunch beneath her feet as she traverses Scorpion Beach toward the uneven coastline. She hears no movement around her other than the waves crashing on the shore. The parents have listened. They’ve stayed in the UTV.
The beach narrows to a thin strip beneath the bluffs. Ocean water pummels her ankles, pouring into her boots. It’s shockingly, foolishly cold. Ranger Emmy’s radio crackles at her chest. She stops to answer it.
“I’ve got everyone rounded up at the upper loop,” Ranger Sam tells her, “but there’re quite a few adults missing. Children are all accounted for.” Despite the cold stabbing her feet, her body relaxes. The children are safe. “Can you tell me who’s with you?”
“There’s Sofía, the mom of one of the boys who wandered off. Then two others. I didn’t catch their names. They’re both doctors. A GI and a plastic surgeon, I think?” It’s unlike Emmy not to ask their names. Then again, this situation is not like any she’s found herself in before.
“Okay, I’ll see if I can identify them. That leaves—” Sam whistles. His radio cuts out before he clicks back in and says, “Six missing.”
“I’m on the coast, east of Scorp. Headed toward Little Scorp. I’ll let you know what I find.”
“I’ll go see if anyone is missing from the lower loop. Emmy? Be careful.”
Emmy clips her radio to her chest, wipes the rain off her forehead like sweat. The rain is steadier now. She can see it falling sideways in the beam of her flashlight. She steps and skids like she’s walking across ice. Breathe, she reminds herself. She does the exercises she learned as a teenager, a three-count in and out that after all these years still manages to steady her.
It’s slow work. Emmy has to pause between steps to keep from falling. She makes it to the first boulder. She hauls her body over it into the first dark cove along the coastline. Her heart floods her system with adrenaline. She swoops her flashlight across the cove, back and forth over wide swaths of darkness. It illuminates shapes like faces carved into the rocks by generations of surges. Nothing here looks like a body. She scurries over the small rocks, until she arrives at the next large boulder. She flings her body around this one too.
In the next cove, her light catches on something hunched and smooth. Immediately, nausea hits her. Is this the body?
She inches closer. It’s the wrong shape for a human. Maybe it’s a sleeping sea lion? She circles her light on it. When it doesn’t charge her, she sucks in her breath and steps closer. Then closer. So close she can reach out to touch it. This close, she can see it’s a rock, covered in hairlike kelp.
She keeps walking down the coast, her body relaxing with each empty stretch of rock. The rain has dwindled to a mist, not even a drizzle. Charles must have been so terrified of finding his son out here, harmed or worse, that his mind tricked him into seeing things that weren’t there. It would have been easy along these rocks.
Ranger Emmy skitters across Little Scorpion Beach, where she’s watched so many sunsets, certain that a few hours ago the tide was high enough that Charles could not have walked this far. There will be no body along these rocks. That still leaves six parents to find. More, possibly, if any of the campers at the lower loop were foolish enough to head out into the night in pursuit of the children. But they will not be here along the bluffs.
It’s only a little farther until the coastline disappears into the ocean entirely. She’ll walk to the point where the water takes over so she can definitively say that there’s no body.
