Page 21 of Winter’s Teeth

Ben was driving, having wanted to pick Maple up from his place along the way, and I navigated since we would lose service soon. Riss was backseat driving with her compass apps, begging Ben to play better music or step on the gas.

“You don’t like my oldies?” he asked, simultaneously cranking the volume up on his beloved 80s station. “And I’ll go the speed limit, thank you very much.”

Riss muttered behind him, “Coward.”

Normally, the banter left me with stitches in my side. Normally, I joined in. Normally, none of my loved ones were missing, and we weren’t out on a time-sensitive manhunt.

It had been well over forty-eight hours since the incident, and I’d been alive on this earth long enough to know that didn’t bode well for the victim. It meant she would be dead from exposure or long gone at someone else’s mercy.

My fingers dug into Maple’s wrinkled fur, squeezing tight to keep myself together. Dead or missing. Those were my options.

There were more answers to be found in the woods. My nose was never wrong, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to find out exactly what had been in the woods with us.

Pulling up the familiar gravel drive, I half expected to find all the cars again from the wedding party, but there was only one.

Everly’s.

No one had moved it yet, most likely because it was still part of the open investigation, her keys locked up in an evidence room somewhere with the rest of her belongings.

Maple perked up as soon as we parked, bounding out of the car when I snuck over to Everly’s car for a peek. I cupped my hands around my face to block out the glare and peered through the back window. My breath fogged up the glass, giving me little view of the contents left behind while Maple circled the car with her snout to the ground.

A strangled gasp from Riss drew my gaze back to the Jeep. They all stood around Ben’s trunk as he pulled out a hunting rifle and a box of ammo.

“And why do you just happen to have a huge gun in your car?” Riss exclaimed. She blinked wide eyes furiously, lips white at the edges in a stern purse like a grandmother waiting to be told the only correct answer.

With a barely restrained eye roll, Ben tucked the gun under his arm and put the ammo box in his pocket. “Because I go hunting after school on my uncle’s property. This is central, redneck PA, Riss. What do you expect?”

Maple barked once in complete agreement.

Riss grumbled under her breath, something demeaning about men who had guns in their trunk, but she rerouted to her maps as I approached. Unlike Riss, I had no trepidation around guns. Rather, I felt marginally safer knowing Ben would have it on our hike.

We still didn’t know what lived in the woods.

My gaze roved over the treetops, snagging on what looked like an eagle or overly large hawk surveying its kingdom from the highest perch. With feathers as black as onyx against a silver-blue swath of January sky, I didn’t have a clue what species it was. It certainly didn’t look native, and it appeared to be scrutinizing us just as intently as I stared at him.

A shiver rippled through me, the feeling of becoming prey urging me to stand closer to Ben and his gun.

“Doesn’t look like anyone else is here,” Angie remarked. “Would have been nice to get Fox’s help since he knows the land best.”

“I’m not sure he would have been all that helpful,” I murmured. Fox had been reluctant every step of the way, so could I really trust him?

I couldn’t rely on anyone the way I could with Riss, Angie, and Ben. The four of us would have to make do with our tenacity and aerial maps.

After another bark from Maple that echoed across the field, the bird took flight, disappearing over the hillside into the dense tree cover.

Our quartet plus Maple headed into the woods without ceremony, finding the gravel path littered with ice, leaves, and debris after only a few minutes thanks to my recall and Riss’s compass. Though my ankle demanded a slower, stiffer pace, we made good headway in the first few hours of the day.

Spotting new tracks I had missed in the dark and circumventing roots and other pitfalls this time around, I could only think of one problem: there was no way to tell who the tracks belonged to anymore. None were bare like the earlier prints we followed into the woods. They could have belonged to anyone in the Winter family, someone from the wedding party, or any other volunteer who’d been out scouring the woods for Everly in those first critical hours when she went missing.

The forest’s cold, dead air seeped under my skin again, chilling me from the inside out, warning me I shouldn’t be here. That I wouldn’t find anything good.

I’d never felt this way in a forest before. Family hikes with the Bennetts had never been the most glamorous or even the happiest of occasions, but I used to rely on the woods to bring me solace.

These woods wanted to be left alone.

Hours passed. Miles were traversed. My ankle buckled twelve times, and still I pressed on until the gravel path petered out to nothing but deer trails and more dense forest.

“According to my navigation calculations,” Riss voiced when we paused to rub aching muscles and decide about where to search next, “We’re almost on state park land. If we want to search there, we should park there and use the trails to look around.”