Chapter One

“Look right down there in that gully. Just to the left of that tree branch that’s sticking up out of the gravel. See that flash of white? I’m sure that’s bones.”

Eagle Mountain Search and Rescue volunteer Vince Shepherd moved in closer beside the couple who had summoned the team to this remote mountain trail above Galloway Basin. He squinted toward the spot the man had indicated. Yes, that definitely looked like a long bone. A femur, maybe? And was that a rib cage? His heart pounded with a mixture of hope and fear.

“They sure look human to me,” the female half of the pair, a sturdy brunette who wore her hair in a long braid, said.

Search and rescue captain Danny Irwin lowered the binoculars he had focused on whatever was down there in the gully. “It’s worth checking out,” he said. “Thanks for calling it in.”

“Looks like a pretty gnarly climb down there.” The male hiker, red-haired and red-bearded, frowned into the gully. “Lots of downed trees and loose rock.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Danny said. Tall and lanky, with shaggy brown hair and a laconic manner, in another context he might have been mistaken for a surfer instead of a registered nurse and search and rescue veteran. He looked past them to the gathered volunteers—only six responders, since this had been deemed a nonemergency call and not everyone was free on a Friday morning. “Three of us will make the hike down,” he said. “The other three need to monitor the situation up top, in case any of us get into trouble.”

“I’ll go down with you.” Vince stepped forward. He was one of the newer members of the group, but he had done a lot of hiking and climbing before he joined up, and he wanted to get a closer look at those bones. Part of him dreaded seeing them, but better to know the truth sooner rather than later. It was a long shot that those bones had anything to do with his sister, but what if they really did belong to her?

“I’ll go too,” Hannah Gwynn said. A paramedic, Hannah served as the team’s current medical officer.

“If you hike down from the top end of the gulley, it’s not that steep.” Sheri Stevens, on summer vacation from her teaching position, looked up the mountainside. “You won’t need to rope up or anything.”

“Yeah, we just have to pick our way around the dead trees, boulders and loose gravel swept down by spring runoff,” Danny said. He looked to Vince. “You ready to go?”

“Yeah.”

They left Sheri, along with Grace Wilcox and Caleb Garrison, to monitor the situation up top. The hikers who had called in the find elected to head back down the mountain. Danny led the way, picking a path through the debris-choked gully. The July sun beat down, but at this high elevation the warmth was welcome. Wildflowers carpeted the meadows alongside the gully, and if it weren’t for the reason for their presence here, it would have been an enjoyable outing. The climb wasn’t physically challenging, but it was tedious and frustrating, requiring frequent backtracking and constant readjustments to the unsteady footing. “How did those bones ever end up down here?” Vince wondered out loud as he clambered over a fallen tree trunk, then skirted a large boulder.

“They might have washed down from farther up the mountain,” Hannah said. She hopped over a mudhole, then pulled aside a fallen branch to clear a better path.

Danny stopped to gauge their progress, then pulled out his handheld radio. “How much farther do we have to go?” he asked.

“You’ve got about five hundred feet,” Sheri replied. “You’ll know you’re close when you see that big branch sticking up. It’s got most of the bark peeled off of it. The bones are just beyond that.”

“I may need you to direct us when we get there,” Danny said. “There’s so much debris down here it’s hard to distinguish details.”

They squeezed through a tangle of tree limbs, then trudged across a section of mud, boots sinking with each step, before scaling a jumble of granite slabs. “Guess I’m getting my workout in for the day,” Vince said, as he hauled himself to the top of what he hoped was the final slab. From here, he had a view down the gully. “I think that’s the tree Sheri was talking about.” He pointed toward a jagged branch, the bare wood shining white in the sun.

“I see a path through to there,” Danny said. He hopped down from the slab and set out again, shoving aside knots of brush as he went. Hannah followed, with Vince bringing up the rear.

“You’re almost there,” Sheri radioed. “Look uphill.”

A few minutes later, Danny stopped. “We’re here,” he said, and crouched down to examine something on the ground.

Vince hung back. “Is it human bones?” he called.

Hannah moved in closer and leaned over Danny’s shoulder. “It’s a skeleton, all right,” she said. “Kind of small. Maybe a child?”

For a moment, Vince stopped breathing. Valerie had been ten when she disappeared from the family’s campsite above Galloway Basin. A four-foot dynamo with sandy-brown curls cut short, she had a dimple in her left cheek that matched Vince’s own. He forced himself to move forward until he was standing beside Hannah, looking down on a small rib cage, and a heap of arm and leg bones.

Danny moved up the gully a few steps and began shifting a pile of rocks. After a few seconds, he stood once more. “It’s not a human,” he said. “It’s a bear.”

“What?” Hannah looked up from her scrutiny of the bones.

“The skull is right here.” Danny pulled out something from among the rocks and held it up. The skull was oblong, with a prominent jaw, one oversize canine tooth jutting from one corner of the mouth.

“A bear?” Vince staggered a little. Not Valerie.

“Kind of a small one.” Danny leaned over the skeleton once more. “See, if you look closer, you can tell the femur is too short to be human, and the shoulder blades are a lot wider.”

“You’re right,” Hannah said. “I guess I was thinking ‘human’ because that’s what the hikers called in, and at first glance it’s similar.”

“Maybe a cub that didn’t make it through a hard winter,” Danny said.

Vince was dimly aware of their conversation. A bear. Not a little girl. Not Valerie.

“It really did look like a human from a distance.” Hannah hugged her elbows. “I can’t say I’m sorry we don’t have to try to transport a skeleton out of here.”

Danny dropped the skull. “That’s it, then. Let’s get away from here.” He pulled out his radio. “We’re headed back up,” he said. “The bones weren’t human, but a bear’s.”

Hannah started to move past Vince but stopped. “Are you okay?” she asked. “You look like you don’t feel so hot.”

“I’ll be okay.” He ran his hand over his face. “I guess I was trying to prepare myself for the worst, and now...”

Hannah’s eyes widened. She gripped his shoulder. “Oh my gosh, Vince. I didn’t even think! You thought this was Valerie, didn’t you?”

No sense lying about it. “I knew it probably wasn’t,” he said. “But our camp wasn’t that far from here, and after all these years, we’re still waiting for her to be found.”

Danny had ended his radio transmission and joined them. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

Hannah squeezed Vince’s arm. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have remembered.”

“No reason you should have,” he said. “It was a long time ago.” Fifteen years. Most of his life.

Danny was watching him, a puzzled look on his face. “Something I need to know about?” he asked.

“My sister.” Vince cleared his throat and focused on pulling himself together. After this long, he hadn’t expected to feel so emotional. “My twin sister. She disappeared on a family camping trip in the mountains the summer we were ten.” He looked past Danny, toward the mountains rising around them. “Not that far from here. She was never found, so when I heard bones had been spotted up here, I couldn’t help wondering...” His voice trailed away.

“That’s rough,” Danny said. “Do you have any idea what happened to her?”

“None. Maybe she fell or had some other kind of accident, but lots of people looked, for days, and we never found any sign of her.”

“I was a little older than you, but I still remember the posters around town and people volunteering to help search,” Hannah said. “It really is scary how someone can just vanish up here.”

“Sometimes they get found years later,” Danny said. “There was that woman about ten years ago. She had disappeared skiing three years before, and her remains were found in a bunch of avalanche debris.”

“You must think about Valerie every time you’re up here,” Hannah said.

“I do,” Vince said. “And pretty much every time I’m up here, I look for her.” Though that wasn’t the sole reason he had joined search and rescue, it had been one consideration.

“I hope someone finds your sister one day,” Hannah said. “I’m sorry it wasn’t today.”

“Really, I’m okay now. It was just kind of a shock.” He shrugged, trying to appear steadier than he felt. “Like you said, now we don’t have to haul a body bag up out of this gully.” He didn’t wait for them to answer, but turned and began retracing his steps. For a brief moment, when he had first looked down on those bones, a wave of dizziness washed over him, a mixture of profound relief that they would finally know Valerie’s fate and gut-wrenching grief at proof that she really was gone. No matter how improbable it would be for her to still be alive after all this time, as long as they didn’t have a body, they were able to cling to a sliver of hope that she was still walking around somewhere and maybe one day they would be reunited.

Finding out the bones weren’t even human resulted in the kind of nausea-inducing whiplash experienced on roller coasters and bungee jumps. A few deep breaths and a little physical exertion, and he’d be all right again. Valerie was still gone. Probably dead. They would likely never know what happened to her. It was a reality he had grown used to, even if he had never fully accepted it.

“I HAVE AN idea for a series of articles I want to do.” Tammy Patterson, the Eagle Mountain Examiner ’s only full-time reporter, stood in front of editor Russ Saunders’s desk, notepad in hand. Russ cast a jaundiced eye on anything he considered “too fluffy,” so she would have to pitch this right.

Russ removed the cigar from the corner of his mouth—he never smoked the things, just chewed them. Tammy suspected he had adopted the habit when he first took helm of the paper when he was fresh out of college, thinking it made him appear more mature and even jaded. Now he actually was mature—north of fifty—and definitely jaded. “What’s your idea?” he asked.

“This year is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of Eagle Mountain Search and Rescue,” she said. “I want to run a series of articles that looks back on some of their most dramatic callouts and daring rescues.”

“Why would our readers care?” This was the question he always asked.

“People love reading about local heroism, not to mention danger, the outdoors and even unsolved mysteries.”

“How is this going to contribute to our bottom line?” This was Russ’s other favorite question, and one she had also anticipated.

“We’ll ask local businesses to buy space for messages or special ads that celebrate Eagle Mountain Search and Rescue’s anniversary. They get to advertise their business and support a favorite local organization.”

He leaned forward, elbows on the desk. “How many articles are you talking about?” he asked.

“Six. One every other week for three months.”

She could practically see him running through the calculations in his head. “When can you have the first article ready?” he asked.

“Two weeks. I want to start with the search for Valerie Shepherd.” Before he could ask, she rushed on. “She was a ten-year-old girl who disappeared on a family camping trip in the mountains fifteen years ago. Never a trace of her seen again. Search and rescue was part of the largest wilderness search in local history. That search really ushered in a new era for the group, with a turn toward more professional training and organization.”

“I remember,” Russ said. “Local family. Wasn’t she a twin?”

“Yes. Her brother, Vince, works for the county Road and Bridge Department. Her parents are in Junction.”

“You’ll talk to them for your article.”

“Of course. And search and rescue has agreed to give me access to their archives. And there are lots of photos in our files we can use.”

“Sounds good,” Russ said. “But don’t let this take precedence over your regular news coverage.”

“When have I ever done that, Russ?”

He chomped down on the cigar once more and spoke around it. “You’re not a slacker, I’ll give you that.”

Smiling to herself, Tammy moved back to her desk. Working for the only paper in town, which came out once a week, was a great way to feel like she always knew everything going on. But the sameness of reporting on the school board and county commissioner’s meetings, as well as perennial wrangles over building codes or the budget amount to devote to promoting tourism, could get old. It was good to have something exciting and interesting to write about. The fifteen-year-old mystery of a missing girl definitely wasn’t going to be boring.