“You all right, Gabe?” Vic asked. “You got a lot at stake here for the community, your father’s memory, yourself—for Tess too, right?”

“Yes, I’m fine, just obsessed with solving these cases.”

“Good, ’cause once we get this prelim work done, I got some other info for you, but first go talk to vic number one, okay?”

* * *

Tess sat on the top of the old picnic table in the backyard and glared at the waving shocks of heavily laden corn. Trying to dispel the bogeyman of memories—or lack of them—was something she’d wanted to do for a while. Besides, the cornfield had always haunted her. Those dark green, deep and long, straight alleys between the blowing stalks... The way you could get lost in there, especially if you were small as she’d been back then. Any cornfield could be a maze to a child.

She nearly jumped off the table when a man’s voice spoke nearby.

“Tess?”

“Gabe! I didn’t hear you. Did you find her? Any news?”

“We’ve got help from the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation here—a forensics expert and an agent. The bureau’s a lot more sophisticated now than it was then. As a matter of fact,” he said as he came closer, “Victor Reingold, the same man who worked your case, is here.”

“Really? But he seemed old then!”

“Only to a young girl. Listen, I need to drive up to the falls to check on some graffiti there. It will only take an hour. I hear there’s something written there that may relate to this case. I wondered if you’d like to go along—to the falls. You could leave a for-sale poster for your house at the lodge there. I’ve got missing-child ones in the car that I’ll leave.”

“Oh, sure,” she said, scooting off the tabletop. “I always thought it was so pretty there. So, Agent Reingold’s here. I do remember him and things that came after—well, a while after I came back home. I should thank him for his help back then, even though it turned out I just came back on my own. If, that is, he understands I can’t recall things to help with this case, but wish I could.”

“Sure. I already told him that.”

“I’ll get my purse. Just a sec.”

She darted inside. The old, dried-out willow wand lay on the kitchen counter, almost as if it was a gift from Dad to her on this day. He’d often done that—left their birthday gifts somewhere and made them search for them, not just handed them over. But if she could recall things like that, why were other things so far out of reach? If only she could do what Kate had mentioned, which she figured was pretty impossible—use that old dowsing stick to find the missing girl.

7

After they walked out of the rustic Falls Park Lodge, where they left posters on the community bulletin board, Tess noticed the distant roar of the waterfall again. It was a constant, breathless hum, partly blocked by the colorful autumn trees, yet it seemed to her a looming, unseen presence. It was kind of like her memories, muted, hovering, steady. It made her remember the howl of the local train on the edge of town, farm machinery in the fields. Was there something special about those sounds she should recall?

“You okay?” Gabe asked as they approached the cruiser.

“As ever, yes and no,” she told him with a little shrug. “It’s so strange to have places evoke so many memories. We had family picnics here. Yet other things I’m desperate to recall just won’t come.”

He opened the passenger door for her to get in, closed it and walked around to the driver’s side. He closed that too but just sat there a moment, staring out through the windshield. “In the service, I commanded a squad that disrupted bombs—mostly erratic, homemade IEDs, at first in Afghanistan, mostly in Iraq. One went off when I was too close. The sound and shock waves stunned me, threw me twenty feet, whacked me out for a while. Most of my memories came back, but not when I was being hauled away by medics, then treated. And then in the hospital when I learned some of my guys had died—men I’d assigned to go defuse another bomb that same day in the Kirkuk marketplace—I kind of wished all the memories of sending them to their deaths were gone. They haunt me—their faces, that I called the shots that day.”

They both sat silent a moment. She was stunned by what he had just shared. So he understood her memory loss, some of it anyway. But since he’d gotten his memories back, he probably expected her to do the same.

“I’m sorry, Gabe. But you were doing your job. You couldn’t know what would happen, but others telling you about it could fill in the blanks, even if that brought more pain. And here it’s not knowing that haunts me, especially now that Sandy Kenton’s missing and Jill Stillwell and Amanda Bell haven’t been found yet.”

He only nodded and started the cruiser, and they drove along the curving blacktopped road toward the falls, past picnic areas, a kiddie playground and open-sided shelters for cookouts. She heard him clear his throat. Was he going to confide more terrible war memories? And could she manage to comfort him when her own past tormented her?

“Since you feel that way, and we’re desperate,” he said, “could you be brave enough to reenact the day you were taken? I mean, with me there, right beside you instead of across the backyard, beside you when we go into the corn. I got the feeling you were staring down that cornfield today. We could walk through it together the way you must have been taken. You just never know what that might trigger, and like I said, I’m desperate for leads. Tess?”

He pulled over on the deserted road but kept the motor running. As he turned to her, their gazes held.

Talk about bombs going off, she thought. Though his plan was enough to shock her, something huge leaped between them that had nothing to do with anything they were talking about. Once she’d stuck a fork into a toaster to try to get a piece of bread out and took such a jolt that her hair stood on end. It was crazy, but she felt that way now, like nothing she’d ever known.

“So, what do you think?” he prompted.

“I’ll try. I trust you, and I want to help. Not only to save Sandy and Jill—maybe Amanda—but my own sanity, as well. Talk about your being haunted by regret about your fellow soldiers. I regret the fate of any abducted child who did not come back like I did.”

“Kind of like survivor’s guilt—like me.” He reached over and put his hand on her knee, then withdrew it as if she’d burned him. He put the car in gear and drove around the next turn. The thirty-foot waterfall appeared with its frame of surrounding gray rock and trees hanging on to tiered ledges for dear life.

“See how people ruin beautiful things?” he said, and pointed through the windshield.

The Falls falls, as locals jokingly called them, were still spectacular, but she saw what he meant. With orange spray paint someone had scrawled a message in very fat, outlined letters on the face of the stone next to the white-green water spewing over the cliff above. Tess sucked in a deep breath. GIVE BACK THOSE TOWNIE KIDS YOU PERV OR ELSE!!! Then off to the side, though in different paint and writing, was AZURE ROCKS!

“Well, Azure rocks is a good pun,” Gabe said. “Azure, referring to the new consolidated high school, not far from here. As for the threat about the ‘perv,’ a good thought, but delivered the wrong way.”

“And in a different, more arty script.”

They got out of the car and walked around the deep pool that was the source of Cold Creek and headed toward the cliffside path. The noise was so much louder outside the car that they had to raise their voices.

“I’d like to believe,” he went on, “that message was also done by some kid from the school, where the Lake Azure students don’t get along very well with the locals. I want to walk closer, see if I can find any discarded paint cans or something else to nail anyone. It’s going to take expensive, dangerous sandblasting to clear that off, so it will be a felony, not just a misdemeanor for defacing state property.”