21. SKYE

Kuna, Idaho

Now

It was my useless phone that led them to the foothills off Blacks Creek Road. Three days after I was supposed to be driving to ISU.

Once the officer ordered the phone records, things moved quickly. And once the police started searching in the right area, I wasn't exceptionally hard to find.

My phone had pinged off cell towers in Kuna, South Boise, Robie Creek, and then Prairie, Idaho, where the signal pinged until it disappeared. Together, along with a GPS signal that had briefly connected along Blacks Creek Road, the little dots created something like a Bermuda triangle, where I'd been swallowed up.

My parents didn't see the constellation of cell phone pings or the GPS data. I drove with them to the police station. But then I followed Officer Willis while a different officer took my parents' detailed statement in separate rooms.

I couldn't be with my parents and their hope. Not when it was about to be shattered.

While my parents were being questioned, Officer Willis requested cell phone records from Verizon. Before he called the customer service number and pressed 8 for law enforcement requests, he printed and faxed a signed affidavit on letterhead stating that the Kuna Police required the records as soon as possible as part of an endangered missing persons investigation.

I waited with him until the cell phone records were emailed half an hour later. When the cell data report came, I studied the map of tower pings and the long GPS timestamp along Blacks Creek Road over his shoulder. His brow furrowed as he traced a finger along the list of final pings coming from Prairie, Idaho. There was nothing but foothills and canyons anywhere near the area.

The license plate number on the Kia Sorento wasn't immediately useful. It was a Utah plate with a Utah address, registered to James and April Carson. There was no record of either April or James in Idaho yet.

The fact that he was married surprised me less than the fact that he had a living, breathing wife. I tried to imagine her. What did she look like? Beautiful, probably. Did she have any idea who she had married? I wasn't sure whether I should be terrified of her or for her.

Officer Willis barked at someone to create an ALPR report, which I gathered was some kind of license plate monitoring database. Then he pulled up a map of Blacks Creek canyon and left the station in his patrol car.

* * *

I sat shotgun as we drove up Blacks Creek Road. The radio spit codes and meaningless snippets of information as we turned off the highway exit.

I watched the sagebrush and rocky hills fly past outside the car window. The last time I'd seen them this way, I'd been alive. But not for long.

Officer Willis turned onto an unmarked dirt road, a camping site with two cars and a tent visible along the creek bed. He spent a few minutes questioning the man and woman who emerged from the tent then spent some time studying the area. I followed him. And even though I knew he couldn't hear me, I talked to him. "It's farther. Not here. It's farther up the canyon." I glanced at the sun, hanging heavy in the sky. There were only a few hours of daylight left. If he spent this long searching every dirt road that branched off Blacks Creek, this was going to take a long time.

He pulled off the road several more times, each of them the wrong exit. He was drawn most to the pull-offs with camping sites. I tried to gauge how far we were from the spot he'd left my body. Would I recognize the pull-off? I hadn't realized how many dirt paths snaked off the main road. I focused on the memory and found, with surprising clarity, that I could see the horizon and the pull-off as if it were a photo in my mind.

I wasn't sure exactly how far away we were.

But I'd know it as soon as I saw it.

* * *

The horizon was just turning pink when I saw the pull-off.

The officer had skipped the last two dirt roads, marking each on his paper map to check later. I couldn"t tell if that decision was influenced by the fact that it was getting late or if he was following some kind of hunch I'd contributed to. Either way, I felt like we were getting close.

Then suddenly, there it was. The scrubby weeds and tall grass covering the little rise at the shoulder in the road stood out in relief against the darker treeline beyond the road. The shape of that rise was burned into my mind.

"There it is," I called frantically, willing him to stop.

His eyes flicked to the exit. The area past the rise wasn't easily visible. In fact, it sort of looked like the turnoff dead-ended before it snaked deeper into the hills.

"Stop," I called again desperately, sliding over until I was nearly on his lap, my hands resting uselessly on the steering wheel as if maybe I could turn it myself.

He wasn't slowing down.

"Stop there," I said again, louder.

Nothing.

His ears weren't picking up what I was saying. I needed to tap into his brain somehow.

I thought about how I'd been able to slip through the crack in the FroYo shop earlier. That's when I had the idea to get as close to Officer Willis's brain as possible.

So I leaned into that hairy ear canal and thought about hitting the brakes hard and pulling off that little dirt road while I looked at the inside of his eardrum.

To my amazement, the car slowed down.

His eyes flicked over to the dirt road. Then he hit the brakes harder and exited.

I felt like cheering. I couldn't say for certain whether he'd heard me, but I was confident he hadn't planned to stop. And yet here we were.

My excitement evaporated as he got out of the car and started poking through the brush.

It took him less than two minutes to find my body, unhidden by the dry creek bed.

The animals had found me over the past three days. One of my arms had been separated from my torso, the gray skin torn from muscle and bone in raw strips.

The rest of me wasn't much better. It was the kind of scene that would have kept me awake at night if I'd seen it in a movie. But this time I couldn't look away. Because this wasn't a movie. This was me.

Officer Willis didn't waste any time in calling for backup.

At first, he hurried to secure the area, pulling caution tape from the trunk of the cruiser and putting on gloves.

There were no other headlights on the road. Everything was still and quiet. We were going to be here for a minute before anyone else arrived. And I wasn't going anywhere.

So after a few minutes, he paused and sat down in the driver's seat of the police cruiser, staring toward the spot where the ground sloped toward the creek bed and my body.

I sat next to him while we waited. After a few seconds passed, he cleared his throat and started to sing softly.

I'd only been to church a few times, but I recognized the hymn immediately. They'd sung it at my granddad's funeral two years earlier.

Abide with me; "tis eventide.

The day is past and gone;

The shadows of the evening fall;

The night is coming on.

* * *

I wasn't there when they told my parents.

By the time Officer Willis drove back down Blacks Creek, it was well after midnight.

My body had been photographed. Evidence—including my cell phone, a cigarette butt, some candy wrappers, and a partial tire track—had been cataloged and tucked into plastic bags.

A tech wearing booties, a mask, and a hair net had carefully pulled down my jeans and underwear to insert a long swab between my legs.

That was the part that finally made me look away. It had to be done. But I didn't want to remember seeing any of it.

I felt weirdly grateful when he pulled my purple-striped underwear back up, careful to re-button my jeans, afterward.

My parents weren't at the station anymore when Officer Willis let us inside the still-humming office. A couple of men were being hauled through the reception area in handcuffs, and a woman was standing at the counter, holding her head in her hands while she sobbed incoherently.

Officer Willis, who looked bone-tired, still took the time to write a report of what had happened. A female officer entered the room at one point to tell him that the missing persons report had been canceled and that a press conference had been scheduled for first thing in the morning. A detective from homicide, someone named Kittleson, would take over from here. He needed to be brought up to speed as soon as possible. The license plate was still a dead end.

Officer Willis nodded. A few minutes later he emailed the report for Detective Kittleson, printed off a copy to be filed, and turned off the light to his office.

When he got into his patrol car, I didn't follow him. Instead, I headed down the main road, then the side streets, until I got home. Miles no longer meant anything. And at this point I knew the way.

As I passed through an overgrown lot at the edge of my neighborhood, a large fox appeared from the brush, carrying some small rodent in her mouth.

She froze.

"Hey," I said, crouching.

She flattened her ears against her head and sniffed the air. Still holding onto the rodent, she crept forward with her head turned toward me, giving me a wide berth. When I stood up, she made a little muffled yip then scurried into the cover of a lilac bush.

* * *

My parents were asleep when I finally slipped into the house through the crack in the back door.

My dad was sitting on the couch, his head leaning at an uncomfortable-looking angle against the wall on account of the too-short backrest. My mom slept with her legs curled up against her chest on the cushion beside him, her head against his leg.

Like most kids of divorced parents, I'd secretly fantasized about all kinds of scenarios that would bring them back together. Or at least bring my dad back to Idaho. I'd never been very good at it. It was easier to imagine them apart than together. Both of them were happier. And my dad's girlfriend was actually pretty nice.

Apparently this was what it took.

"I'm sorry," I whispered, feeling the sadness and love expand in my chest.

My mom whimpered in her sleep, then sat upright on the couch in the dark room. "I can find her," she cried, her eyes still shut. "I'll find her."

My dad reached for her hand. "It's okay, Mari," he murmured and readjusted his head against the back of the couch. "Just sleep. Keep sleeping."

She obediently lay back down on the couch, still holding onto his fingers tightly.