Page 22 of Lost Lake
“Looks like he found something,” Jude said.
Not taking his eyes off the dog, Gabe nodded. Scout’s tail wagged in severe alert movements as his body quivered with restrained excitement.
The handler squatted down, and Ulrich crouched beside him. Together they pawed through fallen pine needles with gloved hands.
Ulrich came up holding something sparkly. El carefully made her way across the sand, looking as if she was avoiding stepping in other footprints that would be cast by Sierra.
Ulrich said something to her and then held out the object. She took it in her gloved hand and stared.
Gabe held his breath.
She stilled, then slowly looked up at him, eyes narrow and tortured.
His heart stuttered.
“That could only mean one thing,” he said. “They found something belonging to Lucy. You could be right and someone took her. Maybe she struggled and it fell off as they walked away. This could either confirm that or confirm she wandered away, but at least we won’t find her in the water.”
“Could be,” Jude said, sounding like he didn’t believe the last two options were probable.
Gabe still wasn’t ready to admit that someone had taken Lucy, because if they had, she could be in terrible danger right now, and he had no way of finding her.
His sweet little princess in the hands of some crazed abductor.
Frightened. Terrified. Alone.
And not only couldn’t he find her, here he stood, doing nothing to save her.
5
Daylight barely skimmed the smooth, glassy lake that was still now as if it had never taken any lives at all. But El knew better as she stood at the water’s edge, watching faint ripples spread from Vance Porter’s headlamp as he made his way to the surface.
Somewhere beneath that calm skin of water, answers waited.
Porter surfaced, eyes narrowed beneath his mask, clutching something in his hand.
El’s stomach dropped. What now?
First, the dog had found a child-sized bracelet, which she’d bagged and stored in her cargo pocket. It gnawed at her like a cancerous growth to her body, and every moment since then, she’d been aware of what it could mean.
Now this?
She’d opted not to show Gabe the bracelet until Scout and his handler completed the trail search, but if, in fact, Porter had found something to indicate Lucy had drowned, she couldn’t hold back from getting Gabe’s positive identification that the item belonged to Lucy.
Porter pushed through the water toward the dock and waved for her to join him. Before she even reached the worn woodenplanks, he’d hoisted himself onto the edge, water sluicing off his wetsuit. He removed his fins and stood, the item in his hand.
She tried to hurry, but the slippery dock dipped and bobbed under her feet. To keep from face planting, she slowed her steps and was also careful to skirt around drag marks on the wood that the light of day made more obvious.
Porter held out the item dripping in his hand.
She steeled herself with a deep breath and looked at a pink Converse sneaker with random black and red stars dotting the canvas. Small. Barely the length of his open palm.
A child’s shoe.
She gently took it in her gloved hands, legs going weak.
“I’ve seen girls wearing these in my daughter’s daycare class,” Porter said, voice choked.
“How old is she?” El asked and clutched onto the shoe.
