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Print book interior design by Taylor Navis

ISBN 9780316608985 (hc) / 9780316615679 (int’l ed) / 9780316609005 (ebook)

LCCN 2026931153

E3-20260910-JV-NF-ORI

For Robby

you and I will always be back then

2004

That year, in an Arkansas bottomland hardwood forest, someone saw a ghost. A kayaker was gliding through a swamp filled with ancient bald cypress trees, his paddles slipping under surface scum, when an ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird thought to be extinct since the 1940s, darted between the tupelos.

People want to believe that somewhere in that liminal space between seen and unseen, our lost things wait to be found again. Birders heard whispers of the Grail Bird’s rediscovery and flocked to the Cache River. The search radiated out across the state, reaching all the way to the Ozark National Forest, and that’s how the Figg family ended up in Devil’s Den State Park.

Audrey walked heavy-footed along the marked hiking trail with Benny close behind. Their parents were back at the campsite preparing for a day huddled under camouflage gear in the riparian forest along Lee Creek. Joanne and Paul Figg would sit there like that for hours, binoculars at the ready, listening for the ivorybill’s bleating nasal cry.

Audrey was sixteen and overconfident. Tiny rocks skittered on the path ahead as she sped forward. She kept her hair tied back, a deep sable color that caught light, wisps of baby hair flat against the sweat at her temples, her thick eyebrows knitted together in a scowl. She had planned to take a solo hike up to an overlook, but her parents insisted she bring her thirteen-year-old brother, Benny, along so they could spend the day birding in peace.

Behind her, Benny stuffed handfuls of Chex Mix into his mouth, gap-toothed and crunching loudly. Audrey swore he was doing it on purpose to annoy her. They shared the same round hazel eyes, a ring of golden orange in the center. His fawn-colored skin had freckled in the Southern summer. Between large bites he would stick out his tongue full of chewed-up snack food and exhale with a wet “nyah” sound.

“Oh my god, Benny, shut up.”

He laughed. Small stones and dried brush crunched underfoot. The trail wasn’t paved, just worn down and scattered with rocks to keep the forest from encroaching. Benny filled his cheeks with air and squeezed a thin stream through his tight lips, making high-pitched squealing sounds. A loose rock went out from under Audrey and her ankle slid to the left. She stumbled forward and caught herself while Benny laughed harder.

“You look like a dumb giraffe!”

Audrey stopped and clenched her fists. She would teach him a lesson. She kicked out at the tangled mess of mayapple creeping over the path and started bushwhacking her way into the dense overgrowth.

Benny hesitated, eyes wide.

“Audrey! We’re supposed to stay on the trail!”

“Yeah? I’m bored with the trail. I’m going this way. You can come with me or not, I don’t care anymore.”

He whined, “Mom said!”

She ignored the thorns scraping against her thighs as she pushed deeper into the thick woods. She was almost out of Benny’s sight. He whipped his head back and forth, bouncing on his feet like he was waiting for an adult to reprimand her and restore order, but no one came.

“Audrey, wait!”

She could hear him crashing through dead leaves to catch up. They navigated through the trees, beads of sweat striping their dirty calves, buzzing insects drawn to their hot blood. Every sidestep around an obstacle took them in a new direction until they could no longer see the trail.

Benny continued to protest. “This isn’t funny! Let’s go back, please!”

Audrey knew that Benny was terrified of getting lost. They were city kids, visiting from Chicago, a world of high-rises instead of trees, where even the maze of steel architecture had a sense of order. They walked themselves to school in the morning in a place where everything followed predictable grid lines.

Twisted limbs branched out like veins in the stifling humid air. The extent of their experience with natural spaces was limited to city parks and the bird-watching excursions their parents dragged them on every summer.

She spoke low, her voice as fearsome as a flashlight held under the chin in the dark: “Have you heard of the Ozark Howler?”

Benny didn’t answer. He kept his eyes on his feet to avoid tripping on roots.

“They say it lives out here in the mountains. Nobody knows what it looks like for sure, but those who’ve seen it say it’s like a giant black cat with glowing eyes and horns. It’s always hungry. They call it the Howler because of the horrible sounds it makes. Like a knife blade scraping across stone.”

Audrey paused here for effect. Then she started to howl, first quietly, then increasing in volume, until Benny started swatting at her.

“Stop!”

Sensing his panic, she continued, elaborating out of feverish imagination and sibling spite. “It especially loves children. The meat is softer, you see, like veal. It digs its claws into the belly, ripping into the guts and sucking them out like spaghetti—”

“I mean it, stop!”

Audrey flung her arm out in front of him and crouched. She whispered, “Did you hear that?”

Before Benny could reply, she spun on her heel with a shriek and took off running ahead, farther into the dark. Benny’s panic took hold, his chest heaving like a rabbit being chased.

He squealed, “Wait! Wait for me, please!”

Audrey ran harder, excitement welling up and bubbling out in choppy fits of glee. Her heart pounded as she flew over rocky obstacles and brambles, darting through low-hanging branches and laughing as the reckless hysteria took hold. Benny fell farther behind.

Sandstone bluffs began closing in as she bounded up the hillside. Treacherous pits leading into deep winding tunnels opened up every few feet. She noticed a rock wall up ahead with a dark chasm splitting it open. She looked over her shoulder to check whether Benny would see her slip inside.

He cried out of sight in the distance, “Audrey, please!”

Audrey paused to catch her breath, then turned sideways and squeezed into the crevice. The rough walls tugged at the fabric of her shirt as she wriggled farther into the crack. She had to measure her breathing to keep her chest from pressing against the unyielding rock, wedging her in. She rested her cheek against the coarse stone. The grit she’d kicked up from scrabbling into the depths coated her tongue as she peered through the opening.

Moments later, Benny stumbled through the thick foliage, panting. He looked around desperately, craning his neck in all directions, trying to catch a glimpse of her.

“Audrey!” Tears left trails through the dirt on his cheeks now. “Audrey, please, it’s not funny! Where are you? Audrey!”

She could jump out right then, and the joke would be over. Benny’s tears would turn to anger. She’d lead them back to camp and have a good laugh. But something was stopping her—she liked this power she had over him. She didn’t make a sound, watching him strain to find any sign of her, fear dictating his every movement.

He sniffled, breathing heavy, wiped his face on the bottom of his T-shirt, then picked a direction. She watched, unmoving, as he trudged farther and farther until he disappeared forever.

2019

Audrey Figg’s trainee looked like he was about to faint. Hands on his knees, squatting next to an injured hiker, the kid took heaving breaths and his freckled flesh grew paler by the second. Audrey gripped his shoulder and whispered between her teeth, “Get it together, Porter.” They needed to act like they had everything under control in front of the park visitors.

They were about a thousand feet above Lee Creek in the cave-pocked mountainside of Devil’s Den Trail. The injured man lay with his back against the sandstone, sweat beading on his forehead while he took quick, gasping breaths. He kept his eyes squeezed shut to avoid looking at his wound. Audrey knelt next to him and got to work on emergency first response. They might have to call a rescue team to carry him out. Luckily, they were only half a mile in.

“Breathe, you’re going to be OK.” She gently turned his leg to get a better look. He whimpered and leaned his sweaty head back against the rock.

His calf had swelled to twice its size. Veined, purple skin stretched taut over the bloated muscle. There were two red puncture wounds oozing a thick, clear fluid. Leaning closer, Audrey could tell the man had pissed himself at some point during the ordeal. She hissed at the severity of the bite and heard Porter gag behind her.

Silas Porter was new to the interpreter job, which had gone unfilled for months. Audrey had been working double duty in the meantime, giving guided hikes and educational presentations. As her boss, Scott, liked to put it, she didn’t have a great bedside manner. She was more than happy for this kid to take over, though he was fresh out of college and so green he could give you grass stains.

Audrey set down her pack. “Looks like a diamondback. We’re going to get you some help.” Audrey turned to Porter. “Radio Scott and tell him we’re not going to be able to get him out with just the two of us. He’s going to have to take the easy way down.”

With wide eyes, Porter nodded and turned his back, eager to be useful in a way that didn’t involve touching the injured hiker. Audrey shook her head and pulled out her emergency splint kit. Despite the intensity of the situation, she found herself calmest in these moments. Here, in the midst of pain and chaos, she knew exactly what to do.

An hour earlier, a woman had come into the Visitor Center to tell them she had seen an injured man on Devil’s Den Trail. She seemed unsure about whether she was supposed to report this to the rangers, like she thought she was tattling. Audrey could never understand why people hesitated to take responsibility for strangers.

Audrey focused on keeping the hiker calm by distracting him from his injury—an increased heart rate would only quicken the spread of venom.

“What brings you to Devil’s Den?”

The man strained to look at her, taking rapid grunting breaths. “What?” He was on the verge of hyperventilating.

She smiled. “Don’t worry, I’ve done this before. Are you here with your family?” She wrapped the elastic compression band around his leg. Snug, but not entirely restrictive.

“Just me.”

Porter finished contacting Scott and bent down, watching Audrey as she prepared the splint. He was still pale, but it looked like he had regained his composure. He pushed the sweaty strands of his shaggy blond hair back under his Stetson. “Where was the snake?”

The man pointed into a nearby crevice. “I saw a baby one. Wanted a closer look.”

Of course, he provoked it. Audrey tightened the band a little more aggressively than necessary.

Porter’s disgust turned into childlike excitement. “Did you know rattlesnakes actually take care of their young? You probably found her den!”

The man clearly didn’t share Porter’s enthusiasm. “It came out of nowhere.” Audrey fastened the splint rod to the side of his calf and the man doubled over, groaning through his teeth. “What are you doing?”

“Splinting your leg to slow your circulation.”

“Don’t I need a tourniquet?”

“Not if you want to keep your leg.”

Porter went on. “They only stay in the den for about a week after they’re born so she can keep them warm. And did you know rattlesnakes don’t lay eggs? A lot of people think they do but—”

“Are you going to suck the poison out?” the man interrupted.

“Oh, it’s called venom, you see, and actually—”

“We’re just buying time,” Audrey interjected, “until we can get you to a hospital.”

“Are you at least going to find that thing and kill it? I can’t believe you’d let people on the trails knowing they’re snake-infested.”

She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “No. This is the snake’s home. You’re the houseguest.”

Porter chimed in with some stupid catchphrase the park kept posted at the trailhead. “Remember, always be snake aware!”

Audrey handed the man a bottle of water before he could get belligerent. “Hang tight.” The man grimaced and held the cool bottle up against his head while Porter continued to regale him with snake facts.

She folded her arms and walked to the edge of the trail. A steep rocky incline led to the mouth of Devil’s Den. Like most of the caves in the park, thick, padlocked iron bars prevented park visitors from entering. The park’s superintendent, Scott Rollins, had put them up to protect the bats from white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease brought into their habitats by humans carrying it on their clothes.

It wasn’t the most difficult trail in the park, but the medical team would have a hard time getting in with a stretcher. A summer storm had whipped through and there were too many branches down for Audrey’s liking. In fact, one of the trail-marked trees had fallen across the path just a few feet ahead. Its roots clung desperately to a tangled ball of dirt and the red diamond signaling the way forward lay sideways, affixed to the bark. She was going to have to clean that up later.

It had been Scott’s idea for Audrey to use this as a training opportunity. Audrey knew these trails intimately: the way wisps of steam wafted from the underbrush on a swampy July day; the way the rocks seemed to shift of their own accord, arranging themselves into devious new patterns designed to break ankles; the caves that hid behind rocky outcroppings until you walked by and felt a puff of cool cavern air. Bringing Porter along only slowed her down.

The injured man had come to rest at the mouth of the park’s namesake. Devil’s Den. She couldn’t count the number of visitors who asked her why it was called that. Legends about spirits from the Osage tribes that used to live here? Pioneers who believed Satan lived beneath the mountains? The truth was much less interesting. “Devil” was just folksy slang at the time when nonnative people settled in the Ozarks. A walking stick was “the devil’s darning needle,” a fiddle was “the devil’s box.”

Early settlers feared witches and devils and spirits in the dark hollows of the woods, but there was nothing malicious about the black bears that raided campgrounds, or the maze of trees that swallowed children and lost hikers. Maybe everything happens for a “reason,” but those reasons are often mundane.

She heard voices echoing off the sandstone, then the rescue team bobbed into view with a bright-orange stretcher.

Audrey’s daily reports for Scott were straight to the point. She wrote her observations in clipped sentence fragments. It wasn’t that she couldn’t write something more polished and detailed, she just felt like she had more important ways to use her time. That was half of the job’s appeal: work in the park was life or death. That is, when she wasn’t giving her millionth lecture on parking regulations to another camper.

She was surprised they had many visitors at all, considering how miserably hot this summer had been. Luckily, there had only been a few drunks to deal with. With the trails thick with undergrowth, the bugs swarming, and everyone wearing their sweat like a second skin, Audrey understood the desire to do nothing but suck down a few beers.

It did strike her as insane that anyone wanted to light a campfire at all, so her patience wore thin when visitors argued about the burn ban. Her jaw felt sore from repeating the same spiel over and over: “No wood burning, the risk of forest fire is too high. You’re welcome to use charcoal for grilling, the park is happy to provide some for you. Yes, I understand you’re here with your kids. I’ve tried it myself, I promise the s’mores will taste just as good heated over the charcoal. Yes, I know you paid to rent this campsite. Just trying to keep everyone safe. Have you been to the pool by the Visitor Center? The kids will love that.”

She headed to the back of the Visitor Center to add her incident report to the stack on Scott’s desk. Reams of loose paper spilled from every corner of his too-small office. Once a ranger himself, Scott had been relegated to the tedium of management and paperwork. She dropped the documentation and attempted to spin out of the room before he could stop her to talk.

“Audrey.” Too late. “Sit for a minute.” Scott watched her across his desk, fingers laced beneath his goatee. His gravelly voice sounded as though he had blown out his vocal cords years earlier. “How’s Porter doing?”

“Fine. A little hesitant. He gets queasy.”

“That goes away with time.”

“You might want to talk to him about choosing more appropriate times to start ‘interpreting.’ A rescue isn’t the time for educational programming.”

“He’s eager. Don’t you remember being eager?” Scott rasped.

Audrey’s stomach tightened and she folded her arms across her chest. Being a park ranger was not something she had ever fantasized about. In another lifetime, she’d had other plans. Probably. She couldn’t remember anymore. “No, not really.”

He picked up the incident report and grunted as he scanned the brief contents. Lines creased his leathery frown. He always seemed so tired. “I want you to take him under your wing. We’re short-staffed this summer and you can use the help anyway.”

“Doesn’t he have his own work to do?”

“Yes, but you don’t need to be going off alone every time you do a trail survey. Show him the ropes.”

“I prefer going out alone. It’s easier to notice things when it’s quiet.”

Scott didn’t speak for a moment. He always stressed the importance of bringing someone with you on the trails, especially if you were going bushwhacking.

“Show him how it’s done. Tell him to shut up if you need to. But he needs to ask questions, and I trust you. It’s been a while since we’ve had a dedicated interpreter, and I need this one to stick around.”

Audrey didn’t argue. She could handle Porter during working hours. She didn’t dislike Porter, really, his enthusiasm just seemed foreign to her.

“Well, he can start by helping me with some clearing. I noticed a tree down when we were up there and we need to clean up the markers.”

“That’s fine. You can take care of that first thing in the morning, before the hikers start moving. Just be sure that Porter stays alert. It’s easy to get comfortable thinking you know this place, but he needs to remember that nature’s not interested in our safety.”

Audrey pushed herself up with a dark glare. “You don’t have to tell me.”

By the time Audrey made it home, the sinking sun had started to light up the tops of the trees. She lived in the park’s provided housing, a modest refurbished cabin that was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. It retained the original look, dark wooden slats with a rock foundation, designed to blend in with the landscape.

The interior was updated with modern amenities like central air. Everything from the walls to the furniture was made of the same hardwood. The only decor she allowed herself was a muted Persian rug, pilfered from the remnants of her family’s home. The walls she kept bare, with the exception of the framed park photos that came with the cabin to make it feel more lived-in. Instead of books, she kept meticulously labeled, folded-up topography maps.

For Audrey, the cabin was the biggest perk of working at the park. It allowed her a modicum of distance from her mother’s hoarded-out mobile home in West Fork. The job didn’t pay well, but that wasn’t her primary concern; she just wanted to stay close by.

After Benny’s trail went cold, Audrey couldn’t see any other path forward. Her parents fell apart while her singular focus became her overwhelming need to bookend the nightmare she’d started that day in the woods. Some part of her felt that if she could find some evidence of Benny’s final whereabouts, if she could prove something, she could rewind the spool of years and start over from the point that she’d ruined everything. Ranger work was the only way she could survive off of her obsession with these woods.

Audrey walked to the freezer and pulled out a package of chicken necks. She filled up a mixing bowl with hot water and dropped them directly into the bath to defrost. The young Cooper’s hawk she was rehabilitating needed warm meat. Audrey went outside to check on the bird while the necks soaked.

She was keeping it in an old kennel that had once housed a former ranger’s trained search and rescue dogs. The rickety ten-foot structure wouldn’t last for any long-term raptor rehab, but it was good enough as a temporary solution. The injured bird just needed warmth, quiet, and most of all a safe place to heal. As Audrey walked around the side of the house where the kennel leaned against her bedroom window, the hawk scuttled as far away from her as it could get in the confined space, wings beating against the sides.

Back when she started as a park ranger, Audrey volunteered for the long, arduous training necessary to obtain the federally required migratory bird rehab permit. Caring for a hawk or an owl was really another full-time job, and she rarely found occasion to put the permit to use.

Audrey tried to calm it with a “Shh-shh-shh.” The creature held its wings away from the sides of its body, feathers slicked down in fear, beak open and panting. It was a foot and a half tall and only weighed about a pound. The crisp speckling of dark-brown teardrops on its chest indicated that it was still a juvenile. That, and its lamp-like yellow eyes that wouldn’t deepen to red until it reached adulthood. It would be easy to look at the hawk and ascribe human qualities to it. Was it eyeing her with contempt? Did it feel anger for the situation it found itself in? Audrey knew better. The hawk’s emotions were simple and uncomplicated: it was terrified and confused. It was not supposed to be here.

Audrey checked its left leg to see if the swelling had gone down. It was hard to tell with the padded splint the vet had wrapped around the scaly flesh. The hawk had snapped its ankle. She found it in the parking lot of Campground B just a few days earlier, surrounded by an excited group of park visitors tossing it pieces of bread as if it were a duck. The bird screamed a nasal “cack-cack-cack-cack,” a pitiful attempt to frighten them off.

Hawks hunt with their talons, and this one no longer could. Its left foot sat splayed out at a miserable angle, and its talons curled inward toward its toes. It was unable to perch and would certainly die quickly if left on its own. Most likely this one had attempted to snatch a small bird, misjudged the landing, and slammed feet first into the concrete parking lot, snapping the bone.

In most cases, Audrey would have left it to its fate. She firmly believed in the National Park Service’s “Leave No Trace” principles. But while most bird injuries are fatal, a broken ankle would be able to heal. Luckily the bone hadn’t pierced through the skin.

Audrey had a soft spot for birds of prey. She saw them as beautiful groundskeepers, keeping the small animal population in check. Any large feathers she found on her surveys were added to the park’s educational collection: the tapered, marbled-brown plume of a goshawk, or the creamy white, black-tipped tail feather of a golden eagle.

“You’re OK,” she murmured to the trembling Cooper’s hawk. Of course, it didn’t understand, but Audrey hoped her slow movements and the soft timbre of her voice would reassure the animal that she didn’t pose a threat. She went back to check on the chicken necks. The hawk would need a suitable aviary soon. It needed room to fly to regain muscle and strength before it could return to the wild.

When the chicken necks had thawed, Audrey sliced them open lengthwise, exposing the marrow. With thick work gloves, Audrey slid her grisly offering through the bars of the kennel and left the bird to eat in peace.

Back inside, Audrey stripped off her gloves and fixed herself a plate of hummus and smoked turkey. As she did with everything else in her cabin, Audrey stuck to the bare minimum in the kitchen. In a way, she felt that personalizing the space would be an acknowledgment that this was home, and despite the long years that had passed since her family had left their home in Chicago, it was like her childhood was abandoned, frozen there in space-time, and some part of her clung to the hope that one day she could return.

Her mother held on to every scrap. While most people begged time to stop after losing someone, Joanne Figg actually managed to do it. How could the world possibly keep moving while she was reliving the same day over and over? Every time Joanne found a piece of clothing with one of Benny’s hairs still clinging to it, she would break down like she was hearing the news for the first time. She stored his baby teeth, she collected pieces of his hair, as if scientists could reconstruct him from DNA samples.

Audrey walked over to the antiquated landline hanging in the cabin’s kitchen. Devil’s Den sat at the bottom of Lee Creek Valley, and cell-phone service was nearly impossible to come by. Unless you hiked to the high point of one of the surrounding peaks, you were out of luck. She dialed one of the few numbers she knew by heart.

After a few rings, her best friend, Corbin, picked up, skipping the formalities. “Hey, how’s the bird?”

“Energetic. Looks like the swelling has gone down. I think it’s going to need more space soon. Are you almost finished building that aviary? I can cover the material costs.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Thank you,” she said. “What are you up to tonight?”

“What do you think?”

“I need to get out of here and tell you about the new guy.”

“Sure. Meet me at the bridge.”

2004

When the giddy breathlessness subsided and she was satisfied that Benny had learned his lesson, Audrey pulled herself out of the crevice. She brushed grit from her shirt and called to him.

“OK, twerp, let’s go back.”

Only the sounds of the woods answered her, a distant crow and the whine of mosquitoes.

She yelled louder to drown out the insects. “Benny! I’m over here!”

From her hiding spot between the rocks, she hadn’t been able to see more than a few feet in front of the entrance. Now that she’d emerged, Benny wasn’t here. How long had she been hiding? Five minutes? Ten? She wasn’t supposed to let him out of her sight. The underbrush had settled back into place, and without a worn path to follow, she had no clear picture of which direction he’d gone.

She continued up the hill the way they’d been going before her prank. Maybe he thought she’d just gotten too far ahead and was trying to catch up. “Benny! Come back!” She crested the hill and looked out ahead. If he had gone this way, she would be able to see him from the top.

Tangled greenery and crisscrossing honey locust thorns obscured much of the view, but she could see far enough ahead to know she was in trouble.

A bright flash of panic swept over her. “Benny, this isn’t funny, get over here!”

She didn’t know what to do. For a brief moment she grasped at the last flickers of denial. He was doing this on purpose to get back at her for leaving him there. He just wanted to watch her freak out, then he’d jump out from behind a tree, laughing. She let anger replace the dread pooling in her blood like mercury. “Stop being a brat!”

A shuffling in the leaf litter ahead drew her attention. It was difficult to gauge the size of anything moving in the woods—a squirrel could make as much noise as a deer—but a different sound chilled her sweat. In the distance, she heard her brother’s voice cry, “Audrey, wait!” It was a strangled, desperate cry, and everything melted away.

“Benny!”

She heard him again. “Audrey, wait!” There was fear behind his voice, which only heightened the pitch of her own. It sounded like the voice was moving away from the trail.

“I’m over here!”

She had to find him, but she didn’t want to get lost either. She tugged off the bandanna she’d been using to keep her hair back and slipped it onto the branch of a tree at the top of the incline. As long as she could see the red cloth, she’d know how to find her way back to the crevice, and from there to the trail.

“This way!” she yelled. His voice had sounded so distant, but she had a vague impression of which direction it came from. She moved as fast as she could without tripping. Her feet slipped through the loose rocks and dead plant matter as she skidded down the hill. “Benny!”

She pushed through the trees, thorny branches scraping bloody tracks through her arms and exposed calves. Her breath came in hot, panting gasps and her throat began to feel as though the tree thorns had been shoved in there as well.

No matter how many times she screamed his name, she didn’t hear him again. Had she actually heard him in the first place? The dizziness from dehydration caused her to question it. Her mouth was dry and she regretted leaving her water bottle back at camp.

She looked back over her shoulder. The red bandanna was just a dot in the distance, and if she continued much farther she might lose it entirely. Her tongue felt like sandpaper across her chapped lips as she whipped her head back and forth, trying to decide her next move. If she didn’t head back up the hill now, she wasn’t sure she would make it back to the trail at all. What if she was wrong about the direction of his voice, anyway? Her last ragged nerve hung on by a thread of possibility that maybe Benny had made it back to camp before her.

She took a shuddering breath and trudged back the way she’d come.

Audrey returned to the empty campsite alone, sweat-streaked and terrified. From the cave, she’d just had to stick to a straight line until she met up with the trail again. Hours had passed. She ripped open the cooler and grabbed a water bottle, gulping it down until the icy liquid chilled her insides. Her shaky legs found their way to her family’s tent and she sank to her knees in front of it, no longer able to hold herself upright. She reached a trembling hand to the tent flap and whispered, “Benny?”

The zipper hissed through the nylon, the fabric peeled away, and only emptiness greeted her.

She turned her back to the tent, gravel pressing into her shins. Pink shadows stretched across the RV hookups and campground neighbors lit up the charcoal in their grills for dinner. The ice in her belly reached up to clutch at her throat. Her parents would be back soon, tired from a long day of searching for an extinct bird. The last of the sun backlit the treetops while the gravity of the situation pulled Audrey to the ground.

She couldn’t leave—her parents would be back any minute. Her throat was fire and ice and she couldn’t call for help. Indecision paralyzed her into inaction until she heard the popping of gravel underneath tires. She struggled to catch a breath as her parents pulled the car into the camping spot, everything moving in half time: the car doors opened, they rose from their seats, they smiled about something until they turned toward their daughter and saw her face. She watched their expressions morph into concern, that unforgettable look of parental terror, and heard them ask the question that would haunt her for the rest of her life:

“Where’s Benny?”

The worst part wasn’t just that she was worried about Benny, it was mixed with another more selfish fear: she didn’t want to get in trouble. Guilt for that thought, terror for her brother, and teenage aversion to authority and punishment swirled together to create utter turmoil. Her brain felt swollen and congealed in her skull and despite her mother gripping her by the shoulders, despite her father’s voice thick with panic and demanding answers, she couldn’t respond.

When she broke through the surface of her paralysis, the lie came easily. “I don’t know what happened. We were following the trail, and somehow we got off track. We made it pretty far up the hillside but then I turned my back just for a second and when I looked over, he was gone.”

The readiness with which they accepted this version of events twisted her innards like someone wringing out a washcloth.

Audrey led her parents and several park rangers up the Butterfield hiking trail. Blue blazes marked trees every twenty feet or so. She could feel the park superintendent’s gaze on the back of her neck.

He was a hardened man, shocks of gray in his dark circle of beard, though he didn’t seem older than his early forties. The Stetson he wore seemed so organic to his person, his khaki uniform almost blending with his skin, that he would have looked alien if he took it off. He had watched her intently, a slight frown at the corners of his mouth, eyes locked onto her face while she repeated her vague recollection of the day’s events. She couldn’t make eye contact, certain he could see the truth like a point of light behind her tears.

The sun dipped lower until nothing but ghostly shadows filtered through the tree limbs as flashlights flickered across the leaf litter. At some point Audrey noticed a few pieces of Chex Mix on the ground like a sick mockery of Hansel and Gretel and had to take heaving breaths to fight the dizzy blackness at the edges of her vision. The spot where she and Benny had veered off the trail was difficult to see until a ranger pointed out the trampled underbrush leaving a makeshift trail of human destruction up the hill.

The park superintendent told the family to head back to camp. It was too dark and he couldn’t risk them getting lost or injured. He and another experienced ranger would follow Audrey and Benny’s tracks and see what they could find. The piercing chirp of his handheld radio made them jump and a voice crackled through the speaker. The police were there.

He turned to Audrey and dropped a heavy hand on her shoulder, both comforting and threatening. “You tell them everything you can remember, hear?”

She hesitated for a moment and considered confessing about hiding in the cave. Could Benny have slipped into a cave of his own? Should they check hers in case he went back that way? The superintendent’s gaze bore into hers. Just a few minutes earlier, he’d been reprimanding her for stepping onto the Butterfield at all. Hikers were required to obtain a permit from the Visitor Center before attempting the strenuous fifteen-mile route, which of course she wasn’t old enough to request on her own. But she hadn’t intended to go far, and she didn’t think anyone would notice, and she didn’t mean to do it, and—

She nodded and left the rangers to do their job.

Blue beams strobe-lit their campsite and a crowd of onlookers circled like scavengers. Curls of smoke wafted all around as people continued to grill hot dogs and roast s’mores, oblivious or indifferent to the fact that someone’s world had just stopped turning.

Audrey stood wrapped in a blanket of Benny’s she had pulled from the tent. Nearby the officers interviewed her parents about Benny’s personality, his wilderness preparedness, whether he had any reason to run away. Her mother just kept shaking her head, her hand clamped over her mouth in disbelief.

Another officer spoke with Audrey. She wasn’t anything like Audrey imagined, just another kid, really, probably only a few years older than her. Her uniform looked like a costume—a tight, black collared shirt with oversized badges—and Audrey had the sudden flash of clarity that, in a way, it was. It occurred to her that everything is just held together with string and chewed gum and run by people, flawed people, and the days where everything happens to work correctly are nothing short of a miracle.

The officer rattled off standard questions while jotting in her notepad.

“What was Benny wearing?”

“Basketball shorts. A Pokémon shirt. Navy Skechers with a neon-green stripe.”

“Where did you last see him?”

She hesitated. “Near a cave, not far off the trail.”

“When did you get separated?”

“I’m not sure exactly. I just looked away for a second to check out the cave and then he was gone.”

“Why would he have wandered off? Had anything happened to upset him?”

Her stomach cramped and soured, sharp knives twisting further in. Upsetting him had been her singular intention. What good would it do to admit it? No matter how it happened, he was lost in the woods, and whether or not it was her fault shouldn’t affect the search efforts, should it?

The officer peered at her. Audrey realized she had been quiet for too long and in a desperate urge to fill the silence blurted: “Nothing.”

The night passed like water through an hourglass. When the darkness retreated from the golden glow of sunrise over the park, her hope started to fade with it. The park rangers and police canine unit walked in from the trail, nothing to show from their long night.

Up to this moment, it had been easy for Audrey to feel immune to the world’s horrors. Terrible things happen to strangers on the news, but nothing would ever happen to her, because it never had. Until it did.

2019

Woolsey Bridge connected Highway 71 and an old country road about twenty miles outside of the park, on a desolate stretch of empty land somewhere between one of West Fork’s overabundant churches and a butcher shop where local farmers brought their cattle to slaughter. It baffled Audrey how there could be so few residents yet so many churches. Where did they find the preachers? Was there some backcountry divinity school that just kept churning them out?

The bridge was a camelback structure of crisscrossing steel beams that stood out in stark juxtaposition to the rural landscape surrounding it. It had been years since the bridge actually functioned as a passage for vehicles looking to cross the White River. Somehow the city convinced the federal government to list the bridge on the National Register of Historic Places. As far as Audrey could tell, there was no “artistic significance” to the slats of rusted metal that looked like those of any other truss bridge, but the residents of West Fork were proud—they had built it themselves many years earlier.

She and Corbin often met here after work. Corbin lived a few miles away on a farm he had inherited from his grandparents. In a town with a population of less than three thousand, he was everyone’s handyman.

They were each other’s lifeline in this small town that seemed to be made for a different breed. Any belief in a higher power had slowly leaked out of Audrey’s pores as the days after Benny’s disappearance continued to slip away. Corbin’s faith had faded much earlier, when as a kid he moved in with his grandparents after his own parents abandoned him. His father still harassed Corbin about his inheritance, the property he felt was his birthright to sell and profit from. Corbin stayed to maintain the farm mostly out of spite.

He wasn’t great with produce—his grandmother’s vegetables had died not long after she did. But he took great care with her chickens. She had solid relationships with the local co-ops and farmers markets, and he still made some decent money selling the eggs. Not enough that he didn’t have to find odd jobs around town, but still a nice “nest egg,” as he sarcastically referred to it.

It was a relatively short drive to the bridge for Audrey, once she weaved her way up and out of the valley and the trees thinned and gave way to flat farmland. She pulled her car into the thick grass on the side of the road and waded through, weeds tickling her kneecaps as grasshoppers flitted from blade to blade. Corbin was already there with a six-pack.

He saw her walk up and lifted his long-necked glass bottle. “Cheers!”

No matter the weather, Corbin almost always wore jeans and flannel shirts rolled up past his forearms. It was hard to see him smile beneath his bushy black beard, but his kind eyes put people at ease.

They sat with their legs dangling over the water, arms slung over the railing. She wedged her bottle cap under one of the metal beams, popped it off, and took a long swig.

They drank in silence for a minute, clouds of fat mosquitoes buzzing around them in the twilight, growing intoxicated on their blood. The water beneath them had slowed to a trickle in the unbearably hot July.

Audrey sighed. “I can’t believe it’s so hot. I’m spending half of my days just fighting with campers about the burn ban.”

Corbin nodded. “The fields are completely brown. Hell, I’m afraid to mow in case it catches fire.”

“I’m sure that’s not doing you any favors with the bugs.”

Corbin shrugged. “At least the horses take care of some of it. They’re getting fat grazing.”

“Who knows what you’ll find hidden underneath when you finally cut it down.” Her words hung thick in the air. Audrey’s mind tended to linger on anything that might be hiding in the wild. She took a swig, then cleared her throat and changed the subject. “So what did you get up to today?”

“Nothing exciting. Sold some eggs, had to repair the run, the farrier came out, that sort of crap.”

“Oh, how’s Tom doing?”

“Fine. His leg’s getting bad, so I’m going to help him with his fence in exchange for some shoeing. Man, you should have seen the shit that came out of Gambler’s hoof this morning—”

“Stop. God, I can smell it just thinking about it.”

“Oh, I saved you some.” Corbin reached into his pocket and held his fist out to her face.

“No!”

He opened his empty palm and laughed.

“I will push you off this bridge.”

His playful smile lingered. “What about you?”

“I splinted a hiker’s leg, so that was something.”

“What happened?”

“Rattlesnake bite. Idiot disturbed a nest and tried to act like it was an accident.”

“Maybe it was?”

“Come on,” she groaned. “Anyway, I told you we hired a new park interpreter? Silas Porter.”

“His name is seriously Silas?”

“Well, he prefers for us to just call him Porter.”

“I would too.”

“Anyway, he’s fresh out of college. Fayetteville.”

“Frat boy?”

“Doesn’t seem like it. He’s pretty smart, too. I think he’s the first interpreter we’ve hired in a while who really knows his stuff. He actually studied biology.” Audrey felt Corbin twitch next to her—though he was the smartest person she knew, he’d always been self-conscious about his lack of a degree. “Book smart. Not that it really matters.”

Corbin shrugged. “What’s he like?”

“I think he’s the reason they invented the phrase ‘bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.’”

He laughed. “That’ll probably be good for you.”

“No, this kid is so naive. He was shadowing me yesterday when I caught a couple of visitors setting off fireworks in one of the campgrounds. Adults, OK? Not kids. I’m telling them off, about to search their things to confiscate the rest of them, and Porter straight-up tells me to give them a break. In front of them! They keep whining about how they’re not going to do it again and Porter’s over here defending them. So we leave, but I shit you not, the fireworks start up again not fifteen minutes later.”

Corbin rolled his eyes. “At least the kid’ll learn.”

“Get this: his specialty is entomology. Insects. Fucking bugs.”

“Your favorite!”

“You should have seen him fawning over this stick bug the other day. It had these huge pincers on its ass, so of course my instinct was to chuck it as far away as possible, but he was practically cradling it like a baby. ‘Oh, those aren’t going to hurt you, that’s actually part of its reproductive organs, it’s how the male hangs onto its mate,’ blah blah.”

He shook his head, chuckling.

Audrey continued, “Scott wants me to sort of mentor him. Teach him basic trail maintenance, how to interact with park visitors, that sort of thing. He won’t have anything to do with law enforcement since he’ll be planning the educational programming. God, he already came up with this stupid guided hike that he’s calling ‘Amazing Spiders, Man!’”

Corbin laughed. He always seemed afraid to smile too widely. “I might have to take him up on that one.”

“He won’t like that I hike with a stick held in front of me to swat their webs down. I’ll just let him walk in front, then when they’re all over him we’ll see how amazing he thinks they are.”

“Lord help him.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Corbin gave her a sidelong glance and polished off his beer. “Don’t make me say it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I just mean that you can be pretty sharp with new people.” She opened her mouth to defend herself but he talked over her. “Look, I get it, it’s one of the things I love about you, but you have to know that it can take some getting used to. Just give the kid a chance and maybe take it easy, that’s all I’m saying.”

Audrey looked down at her beer. Corbin didn’t usually call her out, and she hated to admit that he was probably right. She resolved to be more patient with Porter, if only to prove that she could. “He’s not so bad, I guess. He’s just not jaded yet.”

“All the best people are.”

She smiled. “Don’t worry, a few years in the park ought to do it. He’ll get pretty sick of being ‘paid in sunsets.’”

Corbin grabbed another beer. “What are we going to do about the bird? What kind is it, again?”

“Cooper’s hawk.”

“Which one is that?”

“Medium size, red eyes, reddish breast, gray-capped head.”

“Oh, you mean a chicken hawk.”

“Just trying to use the proper name, not your country slang.”

“Well, excuse me. ‘Cooper’s’ isn’t the most descriptive. Aren’t they usually something stupidly obvious, like ‘red-tailed’ or ‘black-winged’ or whatever?”

“It’s named after the guy who discovered it. Plenty of birds are.”

“Somebody should fix that.”

She didn’t disagree. How do you discover an animal? The animal had existed long before anyone named it.

She smirked. “Chicken hawk it is, then.”

“Speaking of chickens, I’ve had to make this enclosure pretty sturdy to keep it away from mine. Can’t half-ass it. This might take another couple of days—think it can wait that long?”

Audrey nodded. “It’ll be OK. I’m trying not to bother it too much at this point. It’s not going to take up too much room?”

“I’ve got more space on that property than I need. Plus, I’m sure I can put it to good use once the hawk’s done with it.”

“Thank you, really. It means a lot.”

The pair looked straight ahead, working on their third beers, each lost in their own thoughts. The low water levels had exposed the riverbed, flecked with stranded minnows dried and stinking from baking all day in the sun. With dusk setting in, the cicadas screamed from the thin trees along the banks. It sounded like thousands.

The summer insect cacophony always made Audrey tense, the memory of endless nights in dark woods, searching, dread sitting heavy on her chest. Audrey made a mental note to ask Porter in the morning how the cicadas could possibly be so loud. The grating noise was probably music to his ears. The thought made her smile.

“I’m going to head back. Have to take care of that downed tree pretty early.”

“You know where to find me.”

They sat close together in the gathering dark, the sun lengthening its fingers and creating shadows across the churchyards and graves that surrounded them.

Before sunrise, Audrey was already knocking on Porter’s cabin door. He answered, disheveled and still in pajamas, blinking at her. “Morning. Need something?”

Audrey sighed through her nose. “I need you to hurry up and get your uniform on because we’ve got to move that tree before hikers get on the trail.”

“Oh, right, hang on.” Porter’s door snapped shut and she thought she heard him trip over something as he scrambled to get ready.

Audrey tried to remember what Scott always told her: “Pack your patience.” The moments before dawn and just after dusk put her on edge. Another day farther away from Benny. She had stopped marking those days in physical calendars after they took over her bedroom walls, but the count remained permanently tucked in her brain’s folds, ticking slowly day by day.

Fifteen years, six days. The number came unbidden while she waited. She’d lived without Benny now for longer than she’d been with him. Would he recognize her if he saw her now? Would he be disappointed in how she turned out? She stomped her feet to get her blood flowing and clear the thought. The dead don’t feel guilt. That’s just what you get for being the survivor.

Porter flung his door open and hopped down the front steps. “Ready!”

“We’ve got to go get the horses first.”

“What do we need the horses for?”

She concentrated every effort on being helpful without being condescending. “Unless you want to cut this tree up by hand, we need a way to carry the chainsaws up.”

The park owned two ornery quarter horses that had been there longer than Audrey. Quite a few ranger duties necessitated horseback riding; it was faster to reach people on difficult terrain than it would be on foot, and there were places the horses could reach that the UTVs couldn’t. Especially on search and rescue missions, a horse allowed for a higher vantage point to scour the underbrush.

Unfortunately, the park could only afford two: Cisco, a piebald gelding, and Whiskey, a chestnut mare. There was so much upkeep that they often relied on volunteers to help take care of the horses. Cisco and Whiskey were close to retirement, but they were gentle and didn’t spook easily.

Audrey and Porter saddled up and loaded the pack bags with tools, then plodded their way from the barn to the trailhead in the predawn gloom. Crickets and katydids hummed incessantly like buzzing television static. Audrey suddenly remembered what she had wanted to ask Porter the night before.

“So, tell me, why are cicadas so loud?”

Porter was leaning against the saddle horn for support, but this perked him right up. “It’s just the males that make the noise, that’s their mating call. They have this thing called a tymbal inside their exoskeleton. Basically they vibrate it and it rattles around like a drum.”

Porter rambled on while Audrey relaxed into her saddle, smiling. She had to admit it was sort of refreshing to listen to someone who could be so excited about anything. It was as if Porter had never grown out of his childlike curiosity and the world still held wonder for him.

At the trailhead, Audrey swung down from Cisco and taped a note to the map sign: TEMPORARILY CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE. She hoped that would keep any early morning hikers from interrupting their work, but she knew someone might ignore it and be up there soon anyway.

The horses trudged up the trail, occasionally slipping on the rocks but always finding their footing. Porter wasn’t much of a horseman, it seemed—he gripped the sorrel-colored hair on Whiskey’s withers like he could hang on to it if he lost his balance. Whiskey kept her ears pointed back, putting up with this indignity.

When Cisco wanted to sidestep a portion of the trail, Audrey let him. Keeping the reins loose made for a smoother path as the horse knew where to step. She trusted a horse’s instincts—they could sense things that she couldn’t.

The horses grunted as they climbed the steep portion of the path that led to Devil’s Den. They passed the mouth of the cave where they had found the hiker the day before. The fallen tree waited for them. Audrey hopped down and tied Cisco’s reins to a nearby tree. No matter how docile the horse, it could be spooked by a chainsaw. Porter followed suit.

Audrey squatted next to the tree. It was only about a foot and a half in diameter, so it wouldn’t be too difficult to cut through and roll the pieces out of the way. She pointed to the diamond-shaped red blaze nailed to the wood and turned back to Porter.

“This is the most important thing. We have to keep the trail well marked.” She pried the metal blaze from the bark and stood up with it. “Each marker should be within eyesight of the one before. If you’re ever on a trail and realize you haven’t seen a marker in a while, turn back and find the last one you saw. The worst thing a hiker can do is go off trail.”

She stepped to the closest standing tree and set the marker at eye level. “Hand me a hammer out of the pack bag, please.” Porter grabbed the tool for her and she tapped the nails into the tree trunk. While she worked, she noticed tiny pockmarks speckling the blaze. A woodpecker must have attempted to drill into the tree but been confused by the metal.

Audrey finished and pointed to the next marker up ahead. “One of the main things I do on my trail surveys is make sure these are always visible. You’ll notice ‘desire paths,’ or ‘social trails,’ if we go farther in, where enough hikers have gone through to create a new offshoot of the trail. Usually it’s because there’s an overlook or something they want to get closer to, but we have to try to stop this as much as we can. It makes it confusing for other hikers. People can get so turned around in here. Whenever I see a desire path I try to kick some scree over it, and when I’m cutting brush I let the social trails get overgrown. Stuff like that.”

Porter nodded, listening attentively, but behind him Cisco and Whiskey were shifting, tossing their heads and tugging at the reins that tethered them, ears pressed flat against their skulls. Cisco snorted, tapping his foot. Audrey trailed off and Porter turned to see what she was looking at.

In the distance, a bleating cry pierced the thickening heat. It rose in pitch, insistent and urgent. They stood as alert as the horses.

Porter whispered, “What is that?”

The crying sounded like a human baby wailing for its mother.

“I think it’s a fawn,” Audrey clarified, “but they’re usually silent when they’re left on their own—”

The fawn’s distressed wailing had escalated to a screech when it suddenly choked off. The rustle of trees indicated the presence of larger animals, maybe does answering the call.

Then, a deep, wet clicking wavered behind the thrumming insects, like someone running a finger across the teeth of a comb. Something about it made their muscles seize up, frozen in that moment before the brain decides on fight or flight.

Every nerve ending across Audrey’s body snapped with the electricity of a Tesla coil. The sound was moving. It bounced off the trees, echoing around them.

For a full minute they hardly dared to breathe. Even the horses had stopped shuffling, as though they realized the importance of being undetectable. Audrey stared into the trees, fixated on the sound. The pitch undulated, then it faded away into the noise of the forest.

Then quiet.

Audrey broke their paralysis and stepped over to Cisco, patting his neck to calm him. A little bit to calm herself as well. “Fawn probably just got stuck.”

Porter relaxed and walked back over to Whiskey to do the same. The sound of the cicadas resumed and lengthened the silence between them. He let out a shaky, nervous giggle. “That really freaked me out.” He paused. “What was that clicking?”

The horses huffed out nervous breaths and slowly settled back into calm complacence. Audrey clenched the leather of Cisco’s reins, trying to focus on the physical sensation rather than her own confusion. What animal made a sound like that? Rarely had she been gripped by such innate panic. She did her best to find a rational explanation for Porter’s sake.

“There are so many caves and rock formations around here, sound echoes in strange ways. Could have just been deer on the rocks.”

He seemed satisfied with this answer and nervously rambled to fill the silence. “Have you heard of the Whistling Caves in Colorado?” She shook her head no, and he continued. “It’s just wind blowing over the cave entrances, but it sounds like someone blowing across a huge bottle.”

They didn’t talk for a few minutes; their ragged nerves were settling. The humidity pressed against them and the silence finally became too much for Porter. “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen out here?”

“Not much, really. This job really isn’t as interesting as people think. Most calls I get are about someone who didn’t wear the right footwear and twisted something. Lots of dehydrated hikers. I have heard weird things, though. Mostly forest sounds amplified by the caves. But like I said, it’s usually an animal. You know mountain lions sound exactly like a woman screaming?” Something occurred to her and she smiled. “Have you heard about the Ozark Howler? Supposed to be like Arkansas’s version of Bigfoot.”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“I had a camper once who swore he saw something big and black jump out of the Devil’s Icebox and run off.”

“Did you check it out?”

“I mean, we have to check out everything that gets reported. Not much to see.” Her limbs still twitched with adrenaline. Porter was so jumpy. She couldn’t resist the urge to mess with him a little. “The worst thing I ever dealt with was that escaped convict. It was a couple of years ago. You probably heard about it on the news?”

Porter shook his head.

“Well, we started to get reports from the campers about something being outside their tents at night. Food would turn up missing. We were making sure people kept things secure because, obviously, bears. But then we found some deer that had been butchered. With precision. Like someone knew where to cut in and find the tenderloin, you know?”

“A hunter?”

“No, they know better than that. Hunting in the park would get their license revoked. Plus, they wouldn’t leave so much behind. This was somebody hungry and stupid. Local law enforcement let us know that this guy had escaped up in Washington County, and he wasn’t small-time either. He’d broken into someone’s house and peeled the skin off their body and strung it up, like he was tanning a hide. According to the coroner, they’d probably still have been alive while he did it. They were calling him the Tanner…”

“Please, stop.” Porter stared at her, trusting and gullible, and ice slipped through Audrey’s veins, stopping her cold. The familiarity of that plea. Why did watching someone else’s discomfort somehow make hers feel more bearable? What was it about Porter that made him such an easy target? She needed to knock it off before she had something new to regret.

“I’m kidding. Really, nothing that interesting happens here. Wish I could say that it did!” She cringed. Of course she didn’t wish that. “It gets boring fast. Honestly, I spend more time enforcing speed limits than anything else.”

“You do search and rescue too, right?”

Audrey nodded.

“How often does that happen?”

“Maybe once a month? About seventy percent of searches get called off before they even begin, and the rest of them we usually find the person within twenty-four hours. Our volunteers are mostly made up of highly trained professionals. We know where to look.”

“So you always find them?”

Audrey’s skin flushed. She felt the prickling in her heart, as though it were being lanced through with needles, and the familiar ache rushed through her. “Almost always.”

Porter didn’t ask any more questions. They pulled the chainsaws, wedges, and lifting slings from the pack and got to the task at hand. Slicing the branches away from the trunk stem, carving into the root ball to break it away, cutting the log into pieces small enough to roll off the path. The methodical nature of the work quieted the noise in her mind.

When they finally started the horses back down the trail, Audrey noticed she had never stopped clenching her muscles. That sound they’d heard. Why had it crept into her skin?

Her radio chirped and she jumped in the saddle. Cisco reared and whinnied, just as startled by the noise, and Audrey gripped her legs tight and hung on.

“Whoa, whoa.” Fumbling as she pulled the radio off her belt, Audrey heard Scott Rollins’s raspy voice: “I need you to come back. We’ve got a little girl missing.”

2019

Ivy Missing 5 Hours

Audrey sat in the Visitor Center’s media room with Scott, Porter, and a frightened young couple. It was the only place with enough seating to accommodate the group and a door they could shut so curious park visitors couldn’t poke their heads in. Audrey thought Scott’s office might have had more gravitas, despite the overflowing paperwork. There was something darkly comical about the taxidermy beavers and the framed collection of butterfly specimens that adorned the walls here, looking down on this human drama.

The crying woman was Tracy Summers. Her wet, round eyes were as wide and dilated as those of a cat about to pounce, like she refused to close them ever again in case she missed something. Tracy took ragged, mucus-filled breaths as she tried to recount her story to the rangers. She kept repeating herself and choking on the words: “I told her to stay where I could see her. I said to stay close.”

Scott cleared his throat in an attempt to interrupt the repetitive stream of Mrs. Summers’s mantra. “I’m sure you had your eye on her, ma’am. Kids have a tendency to wander off. I assure y’all this happens fairly often.”

Tracy’s husband, Dan, sat with his arm tight around her slumped shoulders, refusing to meet the rangers’ eyes and murmuring to Tracy, “It’s OK, it’s OK,” on a loop. Audrey recognized it as the comforting nonsense you repeat to an animal to calm it. Whether or not this man believed it was another story.

Scott had a map of the Fossil Flats hiking trail spread in front of him. Tracy and her six-year-old daughter, Ivy Summers, had started from Campground A, heading north. Dan stayed behind in the tent. They hiked for an hour before stopping to rest somewhere near Outlaw Loop. Tracy closed her eyes for only a moment, she swore, and when she opened them again, Ivy was gone.

Next to Audrey, Porter shifted in his seat. His interpretive park duties usually involved smiling, happy families. This had to be a new experience.

Audrey fought the urge to escape this claustrophobic scene. She was normally the first on the trail of a missing person, and this interaction with the little girl’s family was skirting dangerously close to her worst memories.

It suddenly occurred to her that Tracy was about her age. She wondered, not for the first time, what path her life could have taken if she had made a different choice that day in the woods fifteen years earlier. Would she have a daughter of her own? She thought about reaching across to touch Tracy’s hand, but her skin crawled at memories of strangers trying to comfort her. “Mrs. Summers, please describe exactly what you remember, from the moment the two of you hit the trail. Every detail is important.”

Dan rubbed his thumb up and down his wife’s shoulder. “Shouldn’t you be out there looking?” he asked.

“We’ve already got rangers covering the area,” Scott assured him. “Most likely they’ll find her quickly. But I need as much detail as y’all can possibly give me as we set up for more search volunteers to arrive. So, what I’ve got so far, she was wearing blue shorts, white Velcro shoes, and a green shirt with dinosaurs on it?”

“Yes. Well, dinosaur bones.” Tracy whimpered. “She likes fossils, that’s why we picked that trail…” She had to stop as more tears leaked out.

Audrey picked up, “Why didn’t your husband go with you?”

Dan flinched and looked up for the first time. “I wasn’t up for a hike this morning and they were having mother-daughter time. It wasn’t Tracy’s fault.”

Audrey glared at him. “I didn’t say it was her fault.”

Scott nudged her underneath the table with his boot, a reminder to be professional. They had already lost several hours while Tracy searched the area frantically on her own before she alerted anyone. Like most bereft mothers, she fought against the cruel reality of her daughter’s sudden absence and willed the universe to undo itself, to rewind just enough so she could do things differently. She thought she knew her daughter well enough to track her steps into the forest, to pull her back. Audrey knew better than anyone: children were unpredictable.

Audrey continued, “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to understand the full picture here. Tracy? Could you tell us from the beginning? Every detail.”

Tracy blinked away tears and nodded. “So, we wanted to hike Fossil Flats. The water’s down so we walked along the rocks on the creek bed, keeping an eye out for fossils.” She looked up as though afraid she might be in trouble. “We know not to take anything—”

Audrey waved this away. “I’m not worried about that right now.” Porter glanced at her sideways. Audrey’s desire to get to the point bordered on insensitivity. She just didn’t have time to waste.

Tracy nodded. “OK. We followed the creek bed up. Ivy was hopping along the boulders. She found this big piece of rock she wanted to keep, but I told her we had to put it back. We did see a few cairns hikers had left along the creek, so I taught her how to make one.”

Audrey clenched her teeth at this mention of a cairn. Stacked rocks, at once natural and not, a way to let everyone know “I was here!” The staff warned campers constantly not to build these—any rock out of place interrupted the natural ecosystem. But people had this need to announce their presence. It didn’t matter how many she knocked over or how many informational sessions she led, Lee Creek always seemed to sprout new ones.

Tracy continued, “It’s so hot out there, so then I led Ivy over to the trees for a rest and a drink of water. I wanted to sit for a minute but Ivy kept getting distracted by the bugs. God, the bugs just scream out here. I sat on the rock and told her to catch some for me. I told her to stay where I could see her. So she was playing, and I closed my eyes for a minute…” She trailed off and Audrey noticed her shaking. “It was only for a minute.” Dan’s muscles tensed next to her.

“When I looked up, I couldn’t see her. I jumped up and started calling her name. After a bit I got frantic and started screaming for her. I ran up and down the creek bed and that’s when I saw a new cairn at the tree line. It wasn’t there when I nodded off—” She tripped over this brief admission, like she hadn’t meant to reveal that “a minute” her eyes had been closed could mean anything. “I think she—” A hiccuping sob bubbled out and cut her off. She swallowed it down and continued. “I think she put it there so I’d know where she went. I know it wasn’t there before. I found her footprints and could see they went into the woods. So I followed them. I didn’t even think, I just went in after her. But once I got far enough into the woods, her footprints just… ended.”

That was it. Audrey felt a sucking whirlpool of pity in her stomach. Of course it was easy to lose someone in these woods. Of course it wasn’t Tracy’s fault; she simply wasn’t paying enough attention. Identical trees radiate outward in all directions like a repeating wallpaper pattern. Looking at the ground, looking up into the canopy, you can hardly tell which way you came and which way you need to go.

Scott nodded and turned the map toward the couple. “The first search team called with GPS coordinates. They found the cairn you mentioned right here.” He pointed to a red circle he had drawn.

“From what we know of the terrain, there’s plenty of cliffs around here, so she probably stayed on this path,” he said, and drew a line through the undulating veins of the topography, “and since she started walking this morning, she probably hasn’t got much farther than”—he marked an X—“right here.”

Tracy seemed a little more composed now that she felt that Scott had this under control. He had a way of making things sound clear-cut and definite. A parlor trick. Assigning order to chaos.

Audrey spoke up. “Is Ivy an athletic kid?”

Dan Summers nodded. “She takes gymnastics. But she’s only six so I don’t know…”

Audrey attempted a smile. “That’s good. She won’t get too worn out, then.” She found herself wanting to comfort this couple. Something twinged in her chest at the thought that she hadn’t visited her own mother in a while.

Scott interjected, “Audrey is the best SAR ranger we have at Devil’s Den. Ivy’s in good hands with her.”

Audrey fidgeted in her seat in response to the unexpected praise. It didn’t matter how many people she saved from exposure in the wilderness, as long as Benny’s disappearance remained unsolved, she would always feel like a failure.

Porter chimed in, “Don’t worry. I promise we’ll find her, Mrs. Summers.”

Audrey shot him a look. She knew better than to make promises she couldn’t guarantee. She spoke directly to Tracy: “I’ll try my hardest to have her home before tomorrow.”

The dried river rocks and boulders in Lee Creek were too uneven and rough for Audrey and Porter to take the horses or the UTVs over, so they had to hike up to the point where Ivy went missing. The other rangers had been searching for hours, and it was about time for them to swap shifts while Scott organized the staging area. Audrey checked in with them on her radio so they could meet back at Scott’s coordinates and debrief.

To his credit, Porter marched along the creek without complaining or slowing down. It was now three in the afternoon and shimmering heat waves hissed up from the steaming rocks. It hadn’t rained for weeks, and only a few dribbles of water trickled through the stones.

Goose bumps flecked Audrey’s arms despite the warmth. It had been five hours since they got the call from Scott. For the others to search the area surrounding Outlaw Loop for that long with nothing to show for it? It didn’t feel right. Especially for a girl only six years old.

Porter echoed her thoughts: “Why haven’t they found her yet?” Despite wondering the same thing, Audrey felt her temper flash at Porter’s insistence on giving that thought a voice.

“You’d be surprised how far a little kid can wander.”

“Are we going to find her?”

Audrey looked him in the eye. “Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.”

He looked deflated and she felt guilty. She wished she could shake off the hard edge that so often infected her voice. She had a tendency to hurt people before they could hurt her. No one could get to the heart of her if she lashed out first. The few hikers they’d lost during Audrey’s tenure had all been adults. The truth was that there’d never been a kid she hadn’t found quickly. With one exception.

Audrey cleared her throat to change the mood. “Did you hear about Katherine Van Alst back in the forties?”

Porter shook his head. He would have had to undergo search and rescue training as part of the hiring process, so she was surprised it hadn’t come up. Scott Rollins loved to tell this story.

“She was eight years old, and she was playing in the creek with her brothers. They were fishing, and—this is usually the case—they turned their back for just a second and she was gone. They searched for about a week, big groups, and with a kid that young, after enough time has passed, you kind of switch gears and assume you’re working on a recovery instead of a rescue. But on the sixth day, some volunteers were walking by the mouth of a cave and Katherine just walked out calmly, waving at them, like, ‘You looking for me?’”

Audrey stopped for a moment to catch her breath. This was the part of the story that felt particularly unfair, like Katherine Van Alst’s ghost was waving to her from that cave, asking why she thought it was so hard to find just one little boy.

The marble clack of a river rock bouncing off another brought her back to the moment. Porter was panting now. “So what had happened to her?”

Audrey kept looking forward. “It was seven miles from the creek where they lost her. And you know what the terrain is like here. They did the math and she would have had to zigzag around for about thirty miles through the Ozark National Forest, barefoot, wearing only a bathing suit.

“She wasn’t even in rough shape when they found her—a couple of bug bites and scratches, her feet were a little swollen, but she seemed fine. Relaxed, even. Maybe in a daze. She said she didn’t remember the previous six days. All she knew was that she ate berries and slept in the cave and drank some water from a spring nearby.”

Audrey shuddered as a breeze cooled the sweat coating her body. For the first year after Benny’s disappearance, she clung to the belief that he was hiding somewhere in a cave off the trail, eating berries and waiting for her. Deposited there by UFOs or Bigfoot or the Ozark Howler. Nothing scared her more than the thought that he just wasn’t.

Porter shook his sweat-dampened bangs out of his eyes. “Is that normal? For a little kid, I mean?”

It struck Audrey that this was Porter’s first official SAR mission. She hoped for his sake it would have a positive outcome. “No, not normal. But crazy things can happen. Kids are capable of more than we give them credit for.”

“What’s the longest it’s ever taken you to find a kid?”

Her heart fluttered. Scott hadn’t told Porter about Benny. She supposed it wasn’t his responsibility. Still, she wasn’t ready to open that part of herself. “Longest was about thirty-two hours, and it scared the shit out of me. This little boy, about five, got lost near the Yellow Rock Overlook. It wasn’t the kind of hike his parents should have been taking a child on anyway, so, you know, I was upset.

“We searched all around, but never thought to look down the bluffs. I mean, we searched at the bottom in case he had fallen. But anyway, he’d swung his way into a little alcove just below the edge. He was right under everyone’s noses the whole time. The acoustics of the thing were just bizarre—I told you sound bounces off the sandstone in weird ways. But he had been responding to everyone calling his name but the sound was just, I don’t know, blowing away into the air.”

“But that was the longest?”

“Most kids are found pretty quickly.”

“So we shouldn’t be too worried about Ivy Summers, then?”

Audrey breathed heavily through her nostrils. “Like I said, hope for the best. It’s not time yet to start thinking that way. Ask me again once it gets dark.”

She checked the coordinates—they were pretty close. Cicadas began their rasping tune, the unrelenting murmur of the woods in summer.

“That’s strange,” Porter noted. “They usually don’t start up until dusk.”

They came to the cairn that Scott had mentioned. A small pile, threatening to topple over, a childlike structure. She stopped and stared at it for a moment, then pulled out her phone and took a photo. A small set of footprints led away from it into the woods.

Porter stood with his hands in his pockets. “Nice of her to mark her location for us.”

Audrey cocked an eyebrow. This was the first hint of sarcasm she’d heard from him and she didn’t know if she liked it. “You think that’s funny?”

His eyes darted away from hers and his already red face flushed a deeper shade. “Sorry. Just nervous.”

Corbin’s admonishment from the day before echoed in her mind and she sighed. “It’s OK. I get it. Want a refresher on the basics while we wait for the others?”

Porter nodded and Audrey felt a twinge of protectiveness toward him.

“OK, the main thing sounds pretty obvious, but look for anything that shouldn’t be there. Trash, fabric, footprints.” Or cairns, she thought. “Pay close attention to any areas that look like they’ve been disturbed or trampled. Don’t only watch the ground, look all around, even in the trees. Always keep an eye on your compass so you don’t get turned around. I’ve got it covered today, but you should follow along to make sure you’ve got it when you’re on your own.”

Crunching underbrush up ahead alerted them to the others returning. Jimmy and Caleb were seasonal rangers. They would only stay for the summer, then they would move on to different parks. Most rangers started as seasonal employees, building experience or just learning whether they could handle the lifestyle. Audrey never got too attached.

The two stepped out from under the shroud of tree cover into the glaring sunlight broiling the creek bed. Caleb took off his Stetson and ran his hand over his close-cropped ringlets and down across his face to mop off his sweat, giving the appearance of someone trying to wipe the memory of the past several hours from his consciousness.

He looked straight at Audrey. “Nothing.”

The word stuck in her throat and she couldn’t swallow it down. Caleb was blunt and honest to a fault; she trusted him. Jimmy rambled to Porter about suspicious-looking bent grasses and his gut feelings about which direction she might have gone, but Audrey kept searching Caleb’s face. He clearly regretted not having better news to report as he unfolded his topo map and showed Audrey which areas they had covered.

“We did follow those footprints leading in and made sure not to disturb them, but at some point they just stopped,” Caleb said. “It’s the weirdest thing. You should check it out.” Caleb paused, then added, “Good luck.”

He and Jimmy headed down the creek back to the Visitor Center while Audrey and Porter studied the terrain on their map before going off trail. If Audrey were a praying person, she would pray that they found Ivy before dark. Once the shadows blanketed the wilderness of Devil’s Den, the little girl would have to contend with the elements all night on her own.

Audrey knelt down beside the cairn. The shoe prints were no bigger than the size of her hand from palm to fingertip, and since Ivy was so light, they barely left a ghost of an impression in the heat-packed dirt. Still, she could make them out leading into the trees, and even where brush covered the ground she could detect where it had been trampled by the little girl. She looked back at Porter.

“You ready?”

“I think so.”

A silence settled between them, punctuated only by one or the other calling Ivy’s name as they focused on following the footprints. The sound echoed back at them, wavering in the air like the summer bugs. Audrey kept her compass close, marking the map as they went.

This was the reason for the phrase “into thin air.” Small indentations from Ivy’s sneakers had led them in a straight line for about half a mile, ending near a rocky escarpment. There wasn’t even the imprint of two feet beside each other, like there would be if the girl had stopped and stood for a moment. Rather, the steps lay one in front of the other with forward momentum until it seemed Ivy had lifted one foot and flown up into the air.

Some irrational part of Audrey’s brain automatically looked up into the treetops, as if Ivy would be sitting there among the branches waving down at her. Of course there was nothing.

Porter squatted next to the final footstep, staring at the ground intently like it was a magic picture and he could make another footprint appear if he focused his eyes just right. He jerked upright. “What’s that?”

Audrey flinched at the sudden movement. She looked to where he was pointing and saw a series of jagged gashes in the dirt, arranged in a semicircular pattern stretching out from the print. They were deep scars in the earth, almost like a backhoe had stabbed into the ground without pulling it up.

Sweat pooled in Audrey’s collarbone. Could something violent have happened to this little girl? Audrey could feel her heartbeat in her ears as she stared at the marks, willing them to make sense. They didn’t seem to be left by an animal—nothing led to them and they didn’t trail off, plus they jutted out in a six-foot radius—but it was like something had grabbed Ivy from out of nowhere.

Something drew her eye just past these puncture marks—another cairn, hiding among the overgrowth. She turned slowly and clocked several more, arranged against the escarpment like stalagmites. Porter followed her gaze and a small grunt of surprise escaped his lips. “Why would she…?”

Audrey stepped to the nearest cairn and knelt beside it, pushing aside some overhanging foliage. It looked the same as any other, large flat stones with progressively smaller ones stacked onto a narrowing heap. She reached out to topple it, but jerked her hand back out of instinct when she encountered something wet and viscous.

Porter jumped at her sudden movement. “What?”

Audrey looked at the substance that had stuck to her fingers. It had the texture of fresh superglue—she was still able to pull her fingers apart, but it tugged at the skin with enough force to be distressing.

“Shit.”

She wiped her hand against the nylon mesh of her ranger vest, rubbing at the stuff until most of it flaked off in chunks. “I don’t know, there’s something sticky on them.”

She kicked the pile and toppled it. The gunk on the rocks stretched from cairn to cairn in stringy connective threads, nearly invisible except where sunlight hit them just right. She ran her hand along the escarpment as she kicked them over one by one, feeling for some kind of break in the rock where the little girl might have been snatched by an animal hiding in a den. It was solid, no openings in sight.

She measured her breathing and sought another explanation. Maybe Ivy had fallen, and that’s what made the marks. Or maybe she did build the cairns, and this was just her digging in the dirt for bigger rocks. Maybe her footprints ended because she’d taken her shoes off. Audrey’s nostrils flared like a bloodhound that’s picked up a scent and pulls at the leash, an almost panicked need to get on the trail.

“Take a photo. We’ve got to keep moving before darkness falls.”

Porter nodded, shaken and jittery, and fell behind Audrey as she unfolded the map to mark the spot. She reoriented to lead them in the other direction. This, however, meant climbing up some rugged terrain.

The best way to cover the most ground would be to pick a cardinal direction and stick to it without deviating. It looked like Caleb and Jimmy had taken the more straightforward path to the east. Most people assume that kids pick the path of least resistance, but Audrey had seen some work their way into precarious nooks and crannies.

She and Porter kept having to stop to give each other a boost over craggy areas. Dirt stuck to all the sweat on their bodies, making them look like comically oversized children after a hard day’s play. Gymnastics or not, Ivy would have had to be pretty rough-and-tumble to navigate these spaces.

Over and over they called Ivy’s name, pausing to listen over the near-deafening buzz of cicadas.

There was a reason the hiking paths didn’t cut through this section of the backcountry: sharp sandstone cliff faces jutting up from the hill, unexpected elevation changes, the network of caves snaking beneath it all. It was impossible to predict which way Ivy might have gone, since each option looked more exhausting and treacherous than the last.

The trees hemmed them in on all sides, the buzzing sounds surging louder the farther they went. It seemed like the swarming insects were attracted to them, coating the bark of the trees with millions of spindly legs and twitching antennae. Their chirps ebbed and flowed with the pace of Audrey’s and Porter’s steps. Audrey started thinking that if she opened her own mouth again her throat would burst forth with the same clicking noises.

The mottled patches of sky that broke through the treetops blushed pink. It was time to turn around if they wanted to at least make it back to the main trail by dark.

She stopped and hesitated. “All right, Porter, now it’s time to worry.”

A hot wind blew through the tops of the trees, the rustling greenery mimicking the sound of rushing water. Over the whispering foliage a rasping wail pierced the air. Both Audrey and Porter jumped at the sharp noise. It sounded pained. It repeated and Porter whipped his head in the direction it seemed to have come from.

“Ivy!” he shouted, then tore off to find the source.

“Wait!” Audrey scrambled to keep up, soon abandoning any attempt to follow the terrain on the map.

The crying continued, growing louder as they followed it. Porter stepped on a loose boulder and his feet almost went out from under him. He managed to twist upright before hitting the ground and kept running, undeterred.

“Porter, be careful!” Audrey yelled, gasping for breath. “If we get stuck—we’re supposed to be the ones doing the rescuing!”

He ran farther ahead, propelled by desperation. The wailing rose in pitch. Suddenly, Porter stopped with a yelp. Audrey heard snarling and throaty growls amid the scuffle of leaf litter.

She caught up, panting, and found Porter with his back against a tree. An angry bobcat crouched near the ground, its front paw caught in a steel trap. The cat spit at them, its pupils reduced to terrified pinpoints as it thrashed against the steel jaws biting into its leg.

Audrey fought to catch her breath. “Goddammit.”

The animal screamed, an eerily human sound, and hissed between attempts to back away from the pair. Audrey pulled out her radio. “Scott.”

His raspy voice clicked onto the handheld. “You’ve got something?”

“Not Ivy. Some asshole set a trap out here and there’s a pissed-off, injured bobcat in front of me. Can you send backup with some equipment? We’re—” She shut off the radio to check the map. “Shit.” She clicked the radio back on. “Let me locate our coordinates and I’ll get right back to you. We got a little sidetracked.”

She sat down and tore open the map, barely containing her anger as she pulled out the compass to triangulate. “I swear, Porter, if you ever bolt off like that again—”

She heard a sniffle next to her and looked up at his face for the first time since they’d stopped. Dirt streaked his cheeks and a wetness beaded at the corners of his eyes. She looked away, embarrassed.

“You’ve got to familiarize yourself with the animal calls out here. Bobcats and mountain lions sound like women screaming. You’re a park interpreter.”

Porter nodded and apologized in a gruff whisper. Audrey’s anger deflated. What had ever made Scott think she’d be good at training? She didn’t know if she’d ever master the restraint necessary to be gentle with this kid.

She picked up the radio and gave Scott their location. “Latitude three five point seven nine zero four three seven, longitude negative nine four point two four eight nine zero nine. Over.”

The bobcat continued a low throaty growl as Scott spoke. “OK, got it. I’ll go and take care of it myself. Y’all just head back.”

“You want us to leave it? It’s not in good shape.”

Scott responded, “I’ve got it handled.”

Audrey frowned. This wasn’t protocol. “You don’t want us to wait for wildlife rehab, or—?”

“Just get back here,” Scott interjected sharply. “One problem at a time.”

This wasn’t like him. She shook it off, rationalizing that he must be dealing with the stress of this fruitless search. Audrey folded up the map and turned to Porter. “Hey. You did good today. We didn’t find her yet, but we will.”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s get back to the trail before the sun fully sets.” She hesitated, then dropped a hand on Porter’s shoulder to steer him toward Lee Creek. She looked back at the bobcat one last time. It whined, eyes pleading, as the cicada sounds swelled in the dusky woods.

There were few things Audrey believed in, and the certainty of finding a missing person in Devil’s Den was not one of them.

2004

Benny Missing 3 Days

Audrey felt disembodied, a ghost hovering around the staging area as hundreds of people organized to find her little brother. The campground where they had been grilling hot dogs just days before was now transformed into a bustling command center. Adults looked right through her to check on her parents—what did they need, how were they feeling, what information did they have. She might as well have been bobbing in the ocean with her hands in the air, only surfacing to take occasional gasping breaths, but no one recognized she was drowning.

By that third day, search groups were pushing outward to the farthest limits of the three-mile search radius. She sensed a rippling of panic even among the veteran search volunteers. How could there be nothing? The Figg family had been asked to stay in the area rather than join the search parties that went out at regular intervals.

Audrey kept a copy of the search grid that had been distributed to all of the volunteers. They had repeatedly searched the high-probability areas and were moving on to areas that Scott Rollins considered wild cards. Her eyes fixated on the bright-red dot that indicated the spot where she and Benny had left the trail. It seemed to glow, a bloody scar on the wavy topography. You did this.

She licked her lips and looked up at the tents where uniformed rangers and officers handed out instructions. Would it help them to know that Benny was terrified as he ran through the woods? She could feel her pulse beating against her temples as she stood on shaky legs to walk toward them.

Her limbs grew heavier as she approached the tents. She was walking through quicksand, sinking into herself. Scott looked up at her and frowned. Her heart skipped a beat as she opened her mouth, intending to admit she had scared Benny into running off. Her mouth was dry.

“I—” She stopped, her voice raspy and stuttering.

Scott pointed to the cooler behind him. “Need some water?”

She nodded and swallowed her confession as Scott handed her a bottle. Of course Benny was afraid. Any lost kid would be afraid, it couldn’t possibly make a difference. They had to know he was afraid as he wandered.

Audrey muttered her thanks and stepped away. Volunteers and search officials dotted the campground, playing cards, waiting for their shifts. The Butterfield trailhead sat behind her. Log posts held up moss-covered shingles on the small pointed roof like the Ozark version of a Shinto shrine. She looked over her shoulder at the aging structure. It beckoned her to return to the scene of her crime, almost welcoming her home.

She glanced back at the staging area and, certain that no one was paying attention to her, slipped onto the trail and headed toward that angry red dot.

She hadn’t eaten much in the past few days, so the water sloshed in her otherwise empty stomach. Plumes of dust kicked up along the baked dirt in the well-worn portions of the trail. She noticed small flags along the way, marking places where a searcher had noticed something—an unidentified footprint, a crushed piece of Chex Mix. Her gut roiled at the sight of them.

She came to the portion of the trail where she and Benny had left the marked path. It was trampled by searchers and a distinct line now led into the forest. Audrey followed it. The sandstone loomed ahead until she found herself standing in front of the crevice where she had hidden from Benny.

She reached for the water bottle and drained a few final drops. She felt stuck in the moment that comes right before bursting into tears—head aching, throat burning—but never experienced the flood of relief that comes with the deluge. It had been this way from the moment she first led the rangers to this spot.

Audrey knelt in front of the crevice and rested her forehead against the stone. A dry sob shuddered through her. She looked around, unsure what she was trying to find, until her gaze landed on a large flat rock. Grasping for any kind of control over the situation, Audrey recalled that morning hike with her family.

Only a few days had passed since they’d arrived in Devil’s Den, though it felt so distant now it could have been thousands. On the first morning of their camping trip, they all went out together for an early hike, before the heat transformed the fossil-filled limestone into a maze of charcoal briquettes.

Benny went first, hopping one-footed from boulder to boulder, with his arms held out from his sides for balance. At some point he stopped and held up a stone he thought was a fossil.

Their mom insisted he put it back, and an argument arose between her and their dad about the legality of taking things from the park. It didn’t take much anymore, just an offhand comment or a sidelong glance, and their parents would be at each other’s throats. Audrey could almost see Benny’s body shrinking from the barbs flying through the air over his head.

Benny bent down to replace his find in the creek bed, but their parents were already walking ahead, oblivious to their children, spitting insults across the shimmering heat waves.

Audrey noticed Benny was still squatting in the creek bed, his eyes cast down, tears beading on his long eyelashes. She considered hugging him, but teenage pride dictated that she remain aloof and disinterested.

Instead, she distracted him by helping him build a cairn with stones from the creek bed, like the ones they’d seen around the trail. Benny’s focus shifted to this thing they were making, something to mark their place, to show the world they’d been here.

What she wouldn’t give right now to go back to that moment.

The memory clutched at Audrey’s throat. Audrey lifted her head from the sandstone at the opening of this shameful chasm. If Benny was still alive (and he had to be, of course he was), surely he would be trying to find his way back here? She began piling rocks into a cairn in front of the crevice. If Benny ever came this way, he would see the cairn and know she had been here waiting for him. Audrey leaned the rocks against the side of the bluff to ensure they wouldn’t fall over.

For a while, she stayed on her knees in front of the cairn, almost praying, as though it were some kind of effigy. The search teams were far enough away from Benny’s last known position that Audrey felt completely isolated here. No voices crying his name carried to her on the wind.

A rustling in the distance brought her out of her thoughts.

“Hello?” she called.

The summer bugs swelled in chorus. Her skin itched in psychosomatic response to the sound, imagining tiny legs crawling across it.

A new sound electrified every hair on her body.

“Audrey, wait!”

The voice called out to her from deeper in the woods. She didn’t move, frozen like a deer trying to avoid detection.

It came again, echoing with an almost mechanical buzz running beneath it. “Audrey, wait!”

She shot to her feet and bolted in the direction of the voice. Benny’s voice, she was sure.

“Benny! Where are you?”

“Audrey, wait!” She recognized the husky prepubescent timbre. Adrenaline propelled her weak legs forward. It definitely sounded like Benny. But there was a strange gurgling quality to it, like he was choking out the words from deep within the ground.

“I’m coming!”

The sound changed from clear words to indistinct crying. Benny whining in pain and fear. It seemed to be moving away from her. She crashed through the tangled undergrowth, desperate to reach it. Tears streamed down her face now, leaving pale tracks through the grime on her cheeks.

“Benny, wait!”

“Wait!” The voice called in response. Terror flooded through her, liquefying her muscles. The sound echoed all around her in the rocky valley.

She tripped on an exposed root and scraped her knee, but jumped up and kept going. The voice petered off. She heard other voices swimming up from just beyond her. Many voices, chattering, a low hum of conversation, muddling the only sound she wanted to hear.

Light broke through the tree line up ahead. She burst through into the noon sun only to find herself on the bank of Lee Creek. Across the rocky bed, the crowd of searchers milled about the campground staging area. Audrey doubled over, panting, hands on her bloody knees.

She called out across the dry creek, “Help!”

She had just enough time to see a few people turn their heads in her direction before exhaustion led to a blackening flood at the edges of her vision.

2019

Ivy Missing 12 Hours

When Audrey made it back to the cabin, she was ready to collapse. Usually, her days consisted of paperwork and campground patrol. That kind of tedium seemed almost welcome after the day she’d had. Now, shifts of SAR volunteers and professionals would continue the search overnight while she was obligated to get some rest before continuing in the morning. Scott had been working on a more formal and organized plan.

She was alone in her cabin, heating up dinner for herself and the hawk, restless and twitchy. She dwelled on thoughts of Benny, stirred up in the wake of Ivy’s disappearance. It had been many years since she’d had to try to sleep while a child remained lost in the wilderness.

Her little brother. Her annoying, hilarious, pain-in-the-ass, good-hearted little brother. The more time passed, the more she feared she would forget the sound of his laugh. She felt guilty for every insult she ever threw at him, every time she told him no, every time she blew him off to be with her friends. She felt guilty for losing him. Now she felt guilty because she had been so busy with her routines that she didn’t even realize it had been weeks since she had properly searched for him.

Audrey busied herself feeding the hawk. She went around the side of the cabin to the kennel and slipped a pile of livers, hearts, and other poultry organs through the cage bars. The butcher had looked at her like she was Hannibal Lecter and she didn’t bother explaining.

She wanted to watch the hawk eat. For some reason she felt like she needed to see its beak dip into the slick viscera, ripping bite-sized pieces and holding the meat in place with a deft claw. Wild things didn’t care about propriety.

The hawk stayed pressed against the back wall of the enclosure. Its breast feathers heaved and its jeweled yellow eyes darted from Audrey to the fresh entrails. Audrey knew the creature saw her as a predator, its captor.

Audrey wanted so badly to be able to communicate to the bird that she was trying to help. She continued squatting near the kennel for a few minutes before resigning herself to the fact that the hawk wouldn’t eat while she watched. Strange how thin that line between predator and prey could be.

Audrey went back inside and moved to the shelf where she kept the scrapbook she had been compiling since the moment she allowed herself to consider they might not ever find Benny. While her mother hoarded objects, Audrey hoarded memories. She wasn’t afraid of losing physical pieces of Benny, but she was terrified at the thought of forgetting him.

She worried that her Benny stories got repeated so often that only a blurry impression of those memories still existed, like a photocopy of a photocopy. She thought she could remember Benny’s gap-toothed grin, the sound of that irritating elephant noise he liked to make, but who’s to say those weren’t just the details that she had invented and committed to memory?

In the first years after his disappearance, she scoured her childhood journals and spent hours writing down everything he had ever told her. The scrapbook contained exhaustive lists of Benny’s favorite movies, TV shows, comic books, songs. She listed every quote she could recall and tried to hear him—it would kill her when the day came that she couldn’t recall his voice. Not yet changed, a little husky, a lisp when he was younger that he finally grew out of.

The voice that she swore she heard echoing throughout the valley in the months after his disappearance.

Ranger work was a welcome distraction. She learned early on how easy it would be to succumb to her feelings and never emerge from the depths of that longing. She kept herself busy, because a deafening noise filled her mind when there was nothing left to occupy it.

Having something to focus on every day, something that required physical work, allowed her to put her feelings about Benny on the shelf until it was time to open them again. She pulled the scrapbook into her lap to call those memories to the surface. It had a utilitarian look to it, just a plastic three-ring binder she had saved from high school, but she’d stuffed it full. The photos she managed to scavenge from her mother’s albums were only those that featured herself and Benny together. She flipped it open.

Audrey at age three, meeting Benny for the very first time, holding her swaddled baby brother in her lap. The two of them sitting under a blanket, watching a movie, sharing a soft pretzel. Sitting on the porch swing, sticking their tongues out at the camera. Posing in their Halloween costumes one year (a Power Ranger and Super Mario). Smiling over the freshly blown-out candles of a birthday cake—her tenth birthday, though Benny smiled wider. He was always just happy to be included.

The Wisconsin dairy farm they visited in 1999. They ate cheese curds freshly skimmed from the vat. Benny milked his first cow—she remembered him grasping the teat like the farmer had instructed, his face pinched in a grimace: “It’s like a hairy warm water balloon.” She’d written the quote from Benny alongside the photo.

As she turned the pages and watched herself grow into a teenager, her gut frothed with remorse. She could see herself pulling further from him, testing the boundaries of her independence. She would give anything to find a rip in the fabric of the world that allowed her to step into one of those moments as if the last fifteen years had never happened.

She lingered over the last photo. The one she usually avoided. It was a family picture at their Devil’s Den campsite, the morning that Benny went into the woods. The last picture of Benny ever taken. He wore a pair of basketball shorts, a Pokémon T-shirt, and a pair of navy Skechers with neon-green stripes. This was the photo distributed to all of the search and rescue volunteers who were instructed to look for the bright yellow on his shirt or the neon-colored shoes hiding in the undergrowth.

The Ozark National Forest was 1.2 million acres of mountainous terrain, almost two thousand square miles of deep woods. Audrey kept volumes of topographic maps of the area organized by year. Each map contained red-lined grid patterns crossing the squiggled lines representing Devil’s Den’s hills and valleys. Once she had searched an area, she shaded in that box of the grid. It was her New Year’s tradition with Scott to sit down at the beginning of every January and outline a new map. He helped her identify probable routes Benny might have taken and calculated how long a thirteen-year-old could reasonably survive alone in the forest, how far he could walk in a day, how far he possibly could have wandered. Scott was the incident commander at the time of the disappearance, and Audrey knew that the team’s failure to find Benny haunted him too.

She unfolded this year’s topo map of the Madison County section. The distance from West Fork to this area was enormous, and it was highly unlikely that Benny had wandered that far south.

But not impossible. Never so impossible that she gave up hope.

2004

Benny Missing 7 Days

Search and rescue officials and volunteers crawled the forest, swarming the valley and the surrounding mountains along the probable paths. Ground teams scoured low-lying areas. Mounted teams ranged farther out. Canine teams followed the creeks. Cavers explored accessible entry points. No one found Benny.

One thoughtless volunteer mentioned to the Figgs that July was the “worst time of the year to get lost.” He talked about leaves covering tracks and plant growth hiding things from view until someone had the sense to cut him off. The boiling summer days cocooned them all in a sweat-dampened numbness.

Audrey trailed along the edges of everyone’s periphery. Her mother cried about how thirsty Benny must be, where would he find water, how scared he must be. Every hour that passed was another tick closer to the creeping inevitability of his permanent loss. Her father’s face stiffened into a mask, his stoicism a direct reaction to his wife’s unrelenting misery.

Audrey kept to herself. She didn’t feel like she deserved to ask for anything. The quieter she kept, the more her parents ignored her, which allowed her to adapt to the guilt that seeped in and was winding itself into the strands of her DNA. Mostly, she found herself exhausted. Every moment that wasn’t connected to the search, she just wanted to sleep. Even in the thick of daily reports from Scott she would close her eyes and shut it all out. Sleep was the only place she felt peace. Wakefulness meant nausea and fear.

The valley ran dry that summer. Everyone in West Fork prayed for rain, but on the day that it came, Scott Rollins sat the family down in his office. Even before he spoke, Joanne whimpered about how Benny would fare in this weather. A dappled gray sky hung heavy with fast-moving rain clouds. A single lamp on Scott’s desk lit half of his face in the darkness of the rumbling storm outside. He kept his hands folded on the desk, his eyes locked on Paul’s and Joanne’s faces. Audrey sat behind them in the corner of the small office.

“Folks, there’s not gonna be an easy way to tell y’all this, so I’m gonna tell y’all straight.”

Audrey felt her stomach bottom out like it would with a sudden drop in elevation. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and she stared at her mother’s shaking back.

An oppressive hush fell over the room before Scott continued, “We’re scaling back the park’s official search operations.”

Almost before he could finish his sentence, her father shouted, “What the hell are you talking about? My son is out there right now! You haven’t found anything—I don’t know what your people are up to all day—but how could there possibly be nothing, no trace at all?”

Scott never broke eye contact in the face of this eruption. He looked tired, but compassionate. “Lost people do strange things. We can do our best to calculate probability, but at the end of the day, a search is the ultimate mystery. There’s so much that’s unknown.”

Paul continued shouting, “He’s a kid! He didn’t just vanish into thin air. He’s out there right now and it’s because of your total incompetence. This whole thing has been completely mismanaged. I’m taking this to the news, and I’m not talking your Podunk small-town UHF stations either. I’m calling my people in Chicago, I’m calling the FBI—for fuck’s sake this is crazy!”

Joanne’s crying morphed into wet, gasping breaths and moans.

Scott shook his head. “I understand,” he said. “I really do. Hell, I’ve never been more stymied by a search. The fact is, we’ve got to let law enforcement get back. We can’t stretch the resources anymore. Mind, this doesn’t mean we’re giving up. Officially, we’re just changing the status from active to ‘pending further developments.’ Now, I know that doesn’t give y’all much comfort—”

Joanne cut him off with a loud sob.

Paul slammed his palms against the desk. “What kind of further developments? What’s it going to take to get my son back?”

Scott let out a long sigh through his nostrils, his lips pressed tight together, then continued, “We won’t close the case until we find a body.”

At this, Paul shot up. “God damn you.” He said it with such venom, all Scott could do was nod. Paul grabbed Joanne by the hand and pulled her up from her chair, half dragging her out, and slammed the door behind them.

Audrey stayed rooted to her seat. Her muscles quivered and she felt sure that if she stood now, she would pass out. Scott watched her. Under his gaze she felt like her skin had been peeled off and she sat before him vulnerable, her secrets written on her exposed veins like a map to her heart.

“I’m sorry, Audrey.”

Her heart beat against her throat. No one had spoken directly to her in days. She either hovered around the volunteer staging area or crept back to sleep in the cabin the park had assigned to her family. Scott opened a desk drawer and pulled out a stick of jerky. “You eaten anything?” She shook her head. He grabbed a bottle of water from a mini-fridge, walked around his desk, and handed them to her. He pulled up one of the chairs her parents had vacated.

They sat in silence for a moment as she tried to stomach the first protein she’d had in days. Scott reached back and took a folder off his desk. “I’m gonna show you something.” He pulled a Polaroid photo from the folder and held it out to her.

A flood of saliva rushed into her mouth as the nausea hit her. The photograph showed a crevice in the sandstone, the one that she had crawled into when she hid to scare Benny. In front of it rested a stack of rocks, carefully towered in a triangular shape.

“I showed this to your parents as soon as we found it. It’s a cairn. Something hikers leave to mark their spot. This is near where you left the trail. Your parents weren’t sure, but I didn’t get to ask you. Does this mean anything to you?”

She panicked. He’d found the cave. “No.”

“Think, Audrey.” His voice had a note of urgency. “Was this here when Benny got lost? Did the two of you follow any of these into the woods? Did you see any more than this one?”

Audrey swallowed down the sickness. He was worried about the cairn, not the cave. “No, I put it there.” Scott looked visibly relaxed as she continued, “I thought if he saw it he could find his way back—” Her tears cut her off and she folded into herself, crying for the first time since it happened.

Scott put his hand on her shoulder as she howled, deep from her core, all the innocence leaving her body like a vapor floating up to the ceiling. He waited as the last of it left her. “We’ll keep looking. We’ll keep looking as long as it takes.”

2019

Ivy Missing 1 Day

Audrey woke before sunrise to saddle Cisco and head up the Butterfield. Dense thickets of oak and hickory rose into the rock-ribbed hills, the only sounds the swish of hooves through dew-damp river oats and the horse’s deep huffing sighs.

With Ivy’s disappearance, Audrey realized how little Benny had been occupying her mind recently. She used to search the park on every day off. Now her efforts were fewer and farther between. She wanted to spend this morning remembering Benny, in the place where she lost him, before she had to face Ivy’s press conference.

Long after the volunteers stopped searching for Benny, Audrey returned to the woods again and again, mostly retreading old territory, occasionally starting from somewhere much farther into the Ozark National Forest, but always following a methodically planned route, keeping an unhurried pace and a sharp eye out for anything out of place. As months and years passed, her target shifted; no longer seeking the shape of a young boy curled against the base of a tree, now she looked for a scrap of yellow fabric, a neon shoe, a piece of bone.

Her throat clenched. When had she started to give up? She hadn’t, really, but she was finding more and more excuses to busy herself with park work and close off that part of her. As Cisco plodded uphill, Audrey felt the trees around her bend closer, forming a tunnel, pulling her into a time warp of her worst memory. She didn’t need a map in this place. She had memorized every rock on the portion of the trail where she had veered off and taken Benny into the dark.

She tried to avoid treading over the same path—she didn’t want to invite others to go this way. She led Cisco off the trail and he flicked his ears back, grunting at her insistence that he leave the safety of the road and walk a more difficult route. The horse bobbed and picked through the tangled brush while Audrey looked for signs that were visible only to her. Her heart beat in the back of her skull as they drew closer to the sandstone bluffs.

They turned a corner and the sharp crack in the rock appeared like a mirage. The crevice split the stone like a crooked, thin-lipped smile. All these years and it was still laughing at her bad joke.

Benny’s cairn rested against the side of the crag. When she built it, years ago during the initial search, she didn’t know anything about cairns or that they could be harmful. Some part of her had thought that if she placed one in the spot she last saw him, then maybe he would find it and know to wait here for her. It had been here long enough now that it had become almost a natural part of the landscape. Moss crawled up the stones and adhered to the rock face, holding the cairn in place.

It served as his only memorial. Her mother had never actually acknowledged Benny’s death and, without a body, they’d never had a funeral or a proper grave. Audrey felt that in a cosmic sense, some part of Benny was here.

Audrey slid off Cisco’s back. She sat down in front of the cairn, breathing the heavy air as if she could inhale some tiny particle of him.

“Hi, Benny.” She rested her hand against the stones. “I’m sorry it’s been so long. I don’t have a good reason.” She paused and listened to rustling in the trees, squirrels skittering across leaf litter.

“There’s a little girl missing. Almost twenty-four hours now. She’s only six.” A sick part of her noted that Benny at least got to live twice that long. But it still wasn’t long enough. And Ivy might still be alive.

Getting lost had always been Benny’s worst nightmare. Once when they were riding the El with their parents, Benny got distracted by his video game and found himself trapped behind the closing doors. Audrey would never forget his panic-stricken face as he slammed his palms against the windows while the train car pulled away from the platform.

They found him at the next stop, on the Blue Line, waiting for them on a dirty bench, snot pouring out of his face while concerned strangers looked on. He’d been obsessed with maps ever since. He memorized the CTA system and wallpapered his room with the crisscrossing rainbow lines.

“I’m going to find her.” She could make these kinds of promises to a ghost. She’d been letting herself down for as long as she could remember—what did one more time matter?

She felt the muscles knot in her throat like she would cry if she let herself. “If I could go back and do things differently, I would. You know I would. I’m sorry.” The apology soured her gut. It didn’t matter how many times she said it, because Benny would never hear it and it meant nothing. She almost felt sorry for herself, but stuffed that thought down. What he went through was so much worse, how could she possibly deserve any sympathy?

She breathed through her nose until the feeling like she might cry evaporated. She pressed her palm against the cairn, allowing a moment’s sting of guilt that Benny didn’t have a grave marker. But what did it really matter? It’s just another rock, and all of us turn into dust. Eventually so will the rocks, worn down into granules of sand, blowing through the world as they would through an hourglass. All she could hope was that maybe one day her dust would tumble through the wind and meet up somewhere with his.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Family and Police Seeking Public Assistance to Locate Ivy Summers, 6 Years Old, Who Vanished from the Fossil Flats Trail at Devil’s Den State Park

West Fork, Ark., Saturday, July 13, 2019—

Officials from Devil’s Den State Park and the West Fork Police Department are searching for Ivy Summers, 6, who wandered off a trail while hiking with her family on Friday morning. At an upcoming press conference, park rangers and law enforcement, along with family members of Ivy Summers, will be sharing information with the public to help locate the missing child.

Yesterday morning, Friday, July 12, 2019, at around 8 a.m., Ivy Summers was hiking with her mother, Tracy Summers, along the Lee Creek area of the Fossil Flats Trail, near Outlaw Loop. Approximately 2 miles from Campground A, the girl and her mother stopped to rest. Ivy strayed from the trail, out of her mother’s sight, and disappeared in the woods.

Ivy is a white female, 3 feet 8 inches tall, 40 pounds, light-brown hair, and green eyes. She was last seen wearing a green shirt, blue shorts, and white Velcro sneakers.

A press conference is scheduled for 9 a.m. today at the Devil’s Den State Park Visitor Center. Accompanied by law enforcement officials, the parents will speak to reporters.

To join the search efforts as a volunteer, contact park rangers Scott Rollins and Audrey Figg and arrive at the Visitor Center staging area to receive instructions. Please wear appropriate hiking clothing and make sure you are in adequate physical condition. This is rugged terrain that requires a good level of physical fitness.

For more information, call Scott Rollins at 479-555-3355.

The parking lot at Campground A crawled with police vans, EMT crews, news trucks, and visitors popping in to find out what all the commotion was about. Scott had spent the previous day typing up the multitude of missing persons reports that the situation necessitated and sent out the cold, standard press release. A miniature town comprising tents and tables had been erected to organize the search efforts. Despite the instructions in the release, volunteers still showed up wearing flip-flops and were turned away to prevent them from becoming part of the problem.

While the crowd gathered, Audrey rode up on Cisco, much to Scott’s chagrin.

As she swung off the cranky old gelding, Scott grumbled, “What are you doing on horseback?”

“I had something to do this morning.”

“Quit taking the horses out without permission. You’re making a spectacle.”

Audrey shrugged and tied Cisco to a post in front of the trailhead. “I’ll just use Corbin’s, then.”

He sighed. “Take a look at this map with me before the first searches start.”

They went into the shade of a large tent and Audrey pored over the proposed search pattern with Scott.

He pointed to the distance between Campground A and the spot where Ivy was last seen. “The difficulty is going to be getting people up to the starting point in the first place. That’s about an hour’s hike before they even start the grid.”

“There’s plenty to look for on the way up. Who’s to say she hasn’t started heading back in this direction? I’d make sure the volunteers are looking and calling from the moment they head out.”

“I’m just talking for the purposes of covering our radius. I’ve mapped it in a sector search.” He traced the outline, like spokes on a bike wheel. “We’ll go ahead and cover the areas you searched yesterday, just to get more eyes on them.”

“All right. How many trained officials do we have going out this shift?”

“Including rangers, SAR, LE, and firefighters, we can send out about eight groups. Already have a good number of volunteers to start, then once this press conference airs locally, they’ll show up in droves like they usually do.”

Audrey nodded. People showed up for kids. Organized search parties that involved a missing adult always had a good handful of responders, but hundreds had turned out for Benny’s search.

The moment when Scott had sat Audrey and her family down to deliver the news that the official search was being called off swam up every time she looked at his lined face.

“We’ll need to appoint another incident commander to take night shifts. I was hoping you…”

Audrey was already shaking her head. “I’m boots on the ground.”

“All right. I had Washington County SAR out here last night, so we’ll just work it out with their logistics group. They’re already here helping set up.”

They stood rooted to the spot, staring at the map, as if moving would set the chain of events into motion and by standing still they could prevent them. Audrey searched for a way to stall a little longer.

“What happened with the bobcat?”

Scott didn’t take his eyes off the map. “What bobcat?”

“In the trap yesterday?”

“The—oh, right.” His face reddened. “I told you I would handle it, now let it go.”

Audrey crossed her arms. “No need to get snippy. I just wanted to see if I needed to fill out any paperwork to document the poaching activity.”

Scott waved his hand, still refusing eye contact. “No, I covered it.”

She stared at him. When had Scott ever handled her paperwork for her?

“Did Porter show you the photos we took on the scene yesterday? Where the girl’s footprints ended?”

This got his attention. He looked up at her. “No. He made his report to the police. Why? What was it?”

Audrey held her phone up and showed a photo to Scott. “There was a ring of gouges in the dirt, and the footprints just stopped there. What could have done that?”

He gripped the phone behind her hand to hold it steady as he looked closer. “Could have been the girl, if she tripped, or—”

The sentence caught in his throat and Audrey felt his body stiffen. He pulled the phone from her and held it up to his face, pinching to zoom in on the background. “Are those…?”

“Yeah, there were more cairns there too. They weren’t off a desire path, so I don’t know why, but I knocked them over.”

Scott licked his lips and whispered, “How many?”

Audrey realized with a jolt that he was trying to cover a tremble in his voice. “Maybe ten? Why does that matter?”

He grunted to clear his throat. “And you removed them?”

“Of course, but—”

He looked at his watch and cut her off before she could question him further. “Time to deal with this circus. You ready?”

“I guess we have to be.”

They headed to the small gathering of camera crews from news outlets as far as Fort Smith, who shoved microphones in their faces. Curious park visitors milled about. Scott stepped up, his face a stiff grimace, and started to read the press release Audrey had helped him edit. The words sounded hollow, just a list of facts, and she watched the strangers who had turned out to attend this one-act play.

The reporters watched, eyes half-lidded, wholly unenthused, not even taking notes. They’d already collected these details from the brief. The campers stared at Scott with hunger in their eyes, like vultures circling the Summers family trauma, ready to feast on this misery that was not theirs.

Tracy and Dan Summers hovered behind. Their eyes looked bloodshot and unfocused, arms cradling each other as if from a chill in this steaming maw of summer. A morbid thought almost cracked a smile across Audrey’s face—this is what she would tell people when they asked why the park was called Devil’s Den.

Scott finished his reading and stepped back, allowing the parents to take center stage. Tracy Summers was a ghost, almost transparent in the camera light. Dan Summers wrapped one arm around her, gripping her close. At first glance it looked like he was holding her upright, but Audrey felt there was more to it than that, like if he let go, she would bolt into the forest herself.

As Dan made his plea to the public, the reporters finally looked interested. “Our curious, beautiful little girl is out there right now. I don’t want to waste any more time. We believe that she’s strong and can hold out until we find her. Please, help us bring Ivy home.”

The photographers leaned forward and snapped close-up shots of Tracy’s haunted face to memorialize in print. Audrey thought of the news clippings that papered her mother’s walls, permanent images of her face wrenched with grief, watching her every move. How long had it been since she had visited her mother?

The Summerses stepped down, ignoring the intrusive questions from the reporters—“Why weren’t you paying attention? How did you let her get out of your sight?”—while Scott let them know abruptly that this was all for now and he would share any updates as soon as they were available.

Before the group could swarm, Audrey stepped between the would-be volunteers and Tracy Summers. With her back to the crowd, away from the microphones, Audrey addressed Tracy in a low voice. “Did you get any sleep last night?”

Tracy looked as if she were deep underwater and could only see Audrey’s face by looking up through the rippling mirror of the surface. She whispered, “Please let me go with a search group.”

Audrey’s stomach cramped with nausea, nothing to digest but this morning’s coffee. “We need you here in case any questions come up or if we find anything we need you to identify.” She realized how that sounded and tried to course-correct. “Like footprints or some other indicator of where Ivy might have gone. You know her best. We need you here.”

Tracy’s eyes glittered with tears that wouldn’t spill out. She had wrung out her tear ducts. “But I have to find her. I have to fix it.”

“It’s not your fault. I promise.”

Tracy sank back into herself, unable or unwilling to acknowledge Audrey’s trite, meaningless remark, and went to sit with her husband.

Audrey returned to Scott’s side and started handing out assignments and instructions. Joanne was going to see this on the news and would slip further into her twisted grief spiral. Audrey asked Scott if she could take a later shift tomorrow, so she could go visit her mother and try to minimize the damage. There’s only so much a parent can take.

2004

Benny Missing 3 Weeks

Despite the end of the park’s official search operations, hundreds of people continued to scour the woods. The Figgs had hired SAR teams of their own, and Scott Rollins was as accommodating as possible given the circumstances. Park rangers still joined the searches when they could.

Everything changed when one of the volunteers, Roland Bates, ended up missing. They were going out to different sections in small groups, walking an arm’s length apart, carrying flags to mark anything suspicious. It would have been easy for Roland to slip away with everyone’s eyes fixed to the ground. When one of his group mates realized he wasn’t with them, they weren’t even sure when he’d veered off.

It didn’t take Scott and the rangers long to find what was left of Roland’s body.

His remains were already skeletal. Strips of tattered skin clung to bones scattered across a half-mile range. The largest piece, a cracked section of rib cage connected to a length of spine, dangled from the sharp thorns of a honey locust tree. Due to the condition of the remains, the medical examiner could only list the cause of death as “animal attack,” but Scott told local news that Roland’s death was likely caused by a bear.

This dealt a devastating blow to the Figg family’s search efforts, as the volunteers thinned in the wake of this fresh horror. Audrey tried to fight off the feverish questions that buzzed in her skull. How did they find Roland so quickly, but no trace of Benny? If they found Benny now, would he look like that too?

She couldn’t stand to be around her parents. Instead, she lingered in corners of the Visitor Center, collecting bits of information from the park staff. She was beginning to master the art of going unnoticed. Audrey had never been shy or quiet, but the girl she’d been before that hike in the woods was abandoned in the sandstone crevice.

She sat alone in the media room, feeling a kind of kinship with the taxidermy while rangers drifted in and out of the back office. She scratched pieces of overheard conversations in her notebook:

Never seen a bear attack so vicious.

How did he get separated?

No kid would survive this long out there alone.

This last statement she underlined over and over like a nervous tic, scratching puncture wounds into the paper. Benny had to be alive. If he wasn’t, how could she live with herself? She continued digging the point of her pen into the sheets, as if she could black out the thoughts.

Audrey heard the shuffling of hiking boots and packs of equipment as Scott Rollins and two rangers gathered in the front room after what must have been some kind of debrief. She heard Scott’s growling voice finishing a thought.

“… since we’re going on foot. Let’s head up to the trailhead.”

She peered through the crack in the door and saw Scott addressing the staff member at the front desk. “We’re going to see if there’s any cleanup needed now that the police are finished. Channel 3 if you need to reach me by radio. Shouldn’t take more than a few hours.”

Audrey watched the three men leave and climb into the park’s Tahoe. She slipped through the door to follow them outside. The truck made a right at the top of the hill and headed toward the campground area, where she’d left her parents among the dwindling crowds. She shoved the notebook into the back pocket of her jeans and broke off in a run to Lee Creek to catch up. Whatever they found, she wanted to be there to see it.

It wasn’t far to the bridge above the dam that led into the campground. Audrey had the park’s map memorized now after weeks of canvassing the main roads and trails. After about ten minutes of slamming feet against pavement, her breath sharp and stinging from the exertion, Audrey found the truck parked near the creek bed. It looked like Scott had stopped short of going all the way to the campground’s entrance—probably to avoid her parents too.

She stood behind the truck, with her hands on her bony knees, catching her breath. She wasn’t in the best shape after subsisting on snack food from the concessions and the generosity of strangers for weeks straight. The rangers had just made their way over the creek and Audrey could see them heading into the woods on the trail across the bank. As soon as they were out of sight, she followed.

She managed to dart through the rocks of Lee Creek without too much clattering. At least she was light on her feet. Once she made it to the worn gravel path, she stuck to the side, her footsteps masked by the soft overgrowth. She could hear Scott and the rangers up ahead.

“Where are we turning off trail?”

“Heading south once we reach the marked longitude.”

Trying to keep her breathing quiet, Audrey listened to the men gripe about the heat and joke about park-goers they’d encountered. Only Scott seemed appropriately unsettled by the situation. Her face was flushed from more than just the heat. How could anyone be so blasé when people were dead and missing?

For almost an hour she padded in the grass twenty feet behind them. She felt slimy with sweat. Burrs stuck to her damp socks and gnats drowned against her wet skin. Tiny pieces of their legs and wings glued themselves to her arms when she tried to brush them off. Audrey swore at herself for being impulsive and unprepared—she desperately needed a drink of water.

The farther they went, the more Audrey’s thoughts fixated on finding body parts hidden among the weeds. Strips of tree bark started to look like shriveled skin. Every pebble of milky quartz could be a tooth. She struggled to swallow as her saliva dried up. No one had shown her pictures of Roland’s desiccated corpse, but as a bit of living wallpaper in the Visitor Center, she’d heard more than enough description.

She heard Scott addressing the rangers: “Police have their photographs now, so knock down the cairns as soon as you see them. Should be some along the tree line any time now.”

“You think he was leaving them to mark his way?”

Audrey had taken her eyes off the ground. She felt a snap against her sneaker and looked down to see the jagged edge of a cracked bone under her shoe. With a shriek she jumped back and stumbled into a small tower of rocks, losing her footing and hitting the ground with a thud.

“Hey!”

The rangers turned and ran toward her. She rolled away from a sharp rock that was jutting into her lower back to see the “bone” she had crushed: just a rotting piece of a tree branch.

Scott gripped her forearm and pulled her to her feet. “Have you been back there this whole time? Tom,” he barked, “get the kid some water.”

The ranger named Tom handed her a water bottle from his pack and she gulped down the contents. He looked to the rocks where she’d landed. “Looks like she found one of the cairns, though.”

Scott glared at her, a mix of parental concern and annoyance. “Did you hurt anything?”

Audrey shook her head. Scott turned to Tom. “Walk her back down to the campground and—”

“No!” Audrey shouted, surprising even herself.

Scott narrowed his eyes. “What are you doing up here?”

“I wanted to see where you found him.”

“That’s all well and good, but we’re going off trail. I’m not taking an inexperienced teenager into a dangerous situation.”

A flame of her old defiance found its way back into her voice. “If you don’t take me with you now, I’m just going to come back here later by myself.”

Scott’s eyes drilled into hers. A moment of quiet passed as Tom and the other ranger shifted awkwardly while their boss dealt with this new development. It was clear this wasn’t an empty threat.

He relented. “All right, but you’re going to do exactly what I say, and you’re not going to get out of our sight, understood?”

Audrey agreed and Scott instructed her to stay sandwiched between them as they followed the path of crushed vegetation deeper into the woods. Enough police had covered this stretch of woods for the past few days, collecting evidence and gathering Roland’s remains, that the trail to his final resting place was pretty clear already.

Every few feet they found another cairn, and Scott seemed to grow more anxious with each one. They toppled them, but even that wasn’t enough. Scott wanted them to toss the rocks farther apart.

Tom whined, “Isn’t kicking them over good enough? What’s the point?”

“People see these things and think they’re an invitation. I don’t want any other hikers coming back this way,” Scott insisted.

The methodical process of scattering the cairns made the walk seem interminable. Audrey joined in and helped the rangers move rocks just to try and make it go faster. The muscles in her arms screamed but she refused to let Scott see that she was struggling.

After a while, the trees opened up into a clearing and a hush fell over the group. Stack after haphazard stack of rocks circled the area like a tiny primitive city. The cairns were piled in arrangements at once beautiful and eerie. Audrey noticed that there was no birdsong here. No one moved for almost a full minute, as if doing so would break some kind of spell.

Scott broke it. “Well, let’s get started.”

Tom looked up, dumbfounded. “How did he make so many? When?”

“I know I don’t have to explain the bizarre behavior of a lost and injured hiker to you.”

“Yeah, but do you really think he built these to mark a spot? Doesn’t it make more sense that he was following them or something?”

Scott glowered. “That’s for the police to decide.”

The other ranger spoke up. “We knocked over all the ones leading here. Is anyone really going to come find this spot?”

“I’m not here to argue about it.” Scott raised his voice. “It’s bad practice to leave them standing. We’re not leaving until we get rid of every single one of them.”

The rangers got to work and Audrey followed suit. They kicked at the towers, scattering the stones, until the whole area looked just like the dried bed of Lee Creek. Audrey watched Scott throwing the rocks with all his strength, his eyes wild. His questioning her about the cairn she left to mark Benny’s absence made more sense.

But she did wonder why he didn’t insist on knocking that one down.

2019

Ivy Missing 2 Days

The first day of official search operations had been frustrating, to say the least. Audrey had gone out with the first eight-hour shift, certain that the meticulous planning she and Scott had done would take care of the swirling miasma of hot fear that permeated the air. But Ivy had vanished in every sense of the word. The urgency of this search had increased tenfold and panic seeped its way into Audrey’s veins.

Behind the wheel of her car, Audrey tried to settle the churning that soured her gut whenever she came to her mother’s house. It started as a fluttering, whipping into a frenzy as she pulled closer to the rusting mailbox. She tugged a neglected pile of flyers and junk mail into her lap and her stomach bottomed out like she was plunging down a steep hill. As she turned her car onto the gravel driveway, her insides cramped and she felt the lightness of breath and rush of saliva that indicated she was on the verge of painting the dashboard with her stomach contents.

She sat with her arms straight out in front of her, gripping the wheel as she counted her breaths to calm down. She hadn’t visited for several weeks, and the mailbox had been crammed near to bursting. Her mother didn’t have the energy to walk from her front steps to the end of the driveway. She hadn’t for a while. Audrey normally came by twice a month to help sort the mail, pay bills, and attempt to clean up the worst of her mother’s trash.

Audrey had been avoiding the visit. At work, she usually felt grounded, capable, in control of her life. Here, she felt like a corn-husk doll being ripped apart in the fierce winds of a perpetual storm.

She gathered herself and the heap of mail and stepped out of the car. The house still sat on concrete blocks rather than a permanent foundation. Her parents had planned to move and sell the home eventually. Now the blocks were cracked and chipping, and at least one of the pillars leaned precariously. The house itself sagged in the middle under the weight of the accumulated garbage inside. What had once been white wooden siding now dripped with brown stains, a green moldy fuzz crawling across the surface like a decaying body.

Audrey hesitated at the door. It was relatively rare that official search parties had to be called out for a missing child, and she had to approach the subject with her mother delicately.

The smell from inside trickled out of the cracks. She knocked and, from within, her mother croaked, “Come in.” Audrey pulled open the unlocked door.

Rot and stale mildew stench hovered thick as fog. She turned herself sideways to squeeze through the goat path her mother had carved out of the junk. There was no other word to describe it: boxes, dirty clothing, old newspapers, empty food containers, bottles, and every manner of discarded household item. The piles spread outward from the walls as though they had been applied in layers, like coats of paint, until only a thin walkway remained, leading to the one usable room in the house. The bedrooms were all filled.

Her mother sat in a soiled recliner, one of the few pieces of furniture remaining from their Chicago home. It had once been a bright blue; Audrey remembered how it used to look in their game room, where she played Super Smash Bros. with Benny. Now the fabric was faded to a dull gray, and this was where her mother ate, slept, watched TV. Lived, if you could call it that.

Joanne Figg looked up from the bowl of cereal in her lap. Audrey could still see the resemblance between herself and her mother, the chestnut-colored hair, hazel eyes flecked with orange, the same slight bump of the nose. Her mother had been a natural beauty, but now her pale features sagged under the gravity of the past fifteen years like wax dripping from a candle. Joanne had insulated herself behind a hundred pounds of extra fat that shielded her from the world. Food was one of the few comforts she had left.

“Where have you been?” Joanne asked.

Audrey winced at the accusatory edge in her mother’s voice. The familiar thought came unbidden—she hoped she would never turn out that way—and immediately she wished she could take it back.

“I’m sorry, the summer crowd has been keeping us busy. We had a few rescue missions crop up too.” She hated using SAR as an excuse, but she knew it was one of the only things her mother could forgive.

Joanne’s listless eyes lit up from within, the spark of hope the only thing that could rouse her old self from the depths of her grief cocoon.

“Did you find anything?”

Audrey knew she meant anything of Benny’s, but she pretended to misunderstand the question and filled her mother in about the snakebite victim, an old Alzheimer’s patient who had wandered off and been recovered the next day, a few dehydrated hikers, and a lady who had hit the trails in heels and suffered a broken ankle. The light slowly went out of Joanne’s eyes. Audrey choked down her resentment. She so badly wanted her mother to be proud of the things she had accomplished, the people she had saved, not only thinking about the person she had failed.

Audrey’s stomach filled with lead as she watched what remained of her mother chewing on something invisible. She was far away. Audrey worked up the courage to broach the subject at hand. “Something’s happened. That’s what I wanted to tell you…”

She trailed off. Crusted flakes of what looked like dried soup stained the frown lines etched into Joanne’s cheeks; her doughy body seemed to be fusing with the chair, her too-small eyes pressed into the fleshy mask that had once been a kind and open face. Audrey’s guilt and disgust felt indistinguishable, each emotion feeding the other in an endless gut-wrenching loop, until she had to blurt out her news just to breathe.

“A little girl is missing. She’s only six years old. Her mother was with her on the Fossil Flats Trail, but she got out of eyesight and disappeared. We’ve been searching since Friday. It’s a full-scale effort now. The volunteers have been called in. I just wanted to tell you before you saw it in the news.”

“I haven’t seen the news. You haven’t been bringing me my papers.”

“I’m sorry, this has been keeping me busy.”

“More important than your family?”

Audrey wasn’t sure what Joanne meant by family. With Benny lost and Paul gone, Joanne was the only one left, and she seemed to believe that the family could still be made whole again, if only Audrey could be a better daughter, if only they could have closure.

Audrey had been the last one to see Benny. That’s why her father left. That’s why she had to be the one to find him. That’s why she had to take care of her mother now.

“I’m helping to organize the search with Scott.”

Her mother snorted at Scott’s name. A man who, in her eyes, had done nothing but fail her. Audrey couldn’t even be indignant.

For years her confession had perched on the tip of her tongue, ready to fly, but Audrey kept it clenched behind her teeth. Would it help her mother to know the reason Benny got lost, or would it only deepen her pain? And now, after so many years, the confession died before it reached her lips, and she kept it, fetid and decaying, in her mouth. She couldn’t tell if releasing it would cleanse anyone other than herself, so she kept it. Absolution was a gift she didn’t deserve.

Her mother turned her attention back to her cereal bowl.

“Can I help you clean anything up, Mom?”

Joanne shrugged and crunched over the silence. Audrey set the newspaper and the stack of mail on a small side table and navigated her way through the narrow pathway to the kitchen.

It couldn’t really be called a kitchen anymore. No one had cooked anything in it for years. Her mother lived off of processed packaged foods. The evidence of it covered every surface: scraped-out cans, greasy pizza boxes, hundreds of silvery wrappers from toaster pastries.

Audrey pulled out the trash bags she had brought in her back pocket and tried to scoop up what she could. She lifted a soup can and a cockroach scuttled out across her hand. She jerked back to drop the can into the trash bag and shook her hand off vigorously as if she could still feel its tiny legs crawling over her skin. She cursed herself for not coming sooner. She couldn’t stop the hoard from accumulating, but if she came more often, she could at least minimize the damage.

She filled two bags, then shuffled back to where Joanne sat and found her with the newspaper unfolded across her lap; her cereal bowl lay discarded on the floor, having sloshed out milk and crumbs for the bugs.

A picture of Ivy Summers’s smiling kindergarten photo covered most of the page beneath the headline “Search for Missing Girl at Devil’s Den.” Joanne traced her finger along the little girl’s face and wept. “My poor baby.”

Audrey didn’t know if her mother meant Ivy, Benny, or both. She knelt next to her and placed a hand on her shoulder. “We’ll find her, Mom.”

Joanne didn’t seem to hear. She gripped the sides of the paper so hard it began to crumple and tear. Behind the piles of trash, similar newspaper clippings acted as a macabre sort of wallpaper.

It was hard to see them anymore, buried as they were, but Audrey knew they were there. Photographs of Benny, their family, smiling photos and grief-stricken photos mixed together as the headlines grew progressively more hopeless. This room had once served as a command center where she and her family hung maps and potential leads connected with strings and pushpins and desperation. She sometimes wondered if her mother drowned the home with things to hide it. She couldn’t take it down, but she couldn’t look at it either.

She waited quietly while her mother shook, keening, “Poor baby, poor baby,” over and over. There wasn’t anything Audrey could say that would stop the refrain, so she stood up and squeezed into the back bedroom that had once been hers.

It had become a repository for every item Benny had ever touched. She sometimes came to look for new scrapbook pieces or to sneak out something for herself. There was always the fear that she would eventually live in a pile of clutter that rivaled her mother’s, but with the events of the past few days, she felt like she needed something else of his to hold.

She picked through Benny’s shirts, not sure what she was looking for, but trying to reach farther into the depths to find something she hadn’t seen in a while. She dug a tunnel extending almost all the way to the floor before she reached a small black Game Boy case with the familiar emblem of Benny’s favorite game and snatched it from the mess.

Audrey tucked the game in the back of her pants and hoped her mother wouldn’t notice the shape of it under her clothes. She sidled back into the living room, where her mother was still whimpering in the chair like a child: “Poor baby, poor baby.”

“All right, Mom, I need to head back and take over the next shift. More volunteers showing up today.”

Crying had worn Joanne out. The light had drained from her eyes like water sucked down a drain as she stared at the blank television screen. Audrey clicked the TV on for her. Vanna White smiled her toothy smile, waving her thin arms like an illusionist performing a magic trick as she revealed the locations of the latest vowel.

“Don’t watch the news, OK, Mom? Wheel of Fortune is fine. I’ll be back in a week or so.” Audrey picked up the two trash bags she had filled in the kitchen.

Her mother snapped her head to the sound of rustling garbage and plastic. “What’s that? What are you taking?”

“Nothing, it’s just food trash.”

“I need to see it. Bring it over here.”

“I swear, Mom, I just cleaned out some of the empty food containers in the kitchen.”

“Don’t be disrespectful! Let me look at it!”

Audrey sighed and set the bags down at her mother’s feet. Joanne peeled back the plastic and rooted around in the bags, feeling every corner for something she might need to keep.

“I have to get back to work, Mom.”

“Just a minute, don’t rush me.”

Audrey winced as her mother picked up an empty can and ran her finger around the inside, feeling for something, a loose coin, a piece of paper, who knows. The jagged tin nicked her finger, but her mother barely noticed, popping it into her mouth to suck at the blood and old remnants of soup. “OK, you can take those.”

Audrey picked up the bags. She thought about reprimanding or scolding her mother, but the idea shriveled and died under the constant voice in her head reminding her that she couldn’t imagine her mother’s pain. How could she possibly tell her how to live her life?

“I love you, Mom.” She gave Joanne a quick kiss on the top of her head, trying not to recoil from the unwashed oily scalp, and made her way to the front door.

As Audrey left, she didn’t feel the relief that she’d hoped for. Somehow, she felt worse than when she had arrived.

2004

Benny Missing 3 Months

When it became clear that they wouldn’t be returning to Chicago any time soon, Audrey felt like she’d been stranded in someone else’s life.

After Benny’s search was called off, the Figgs became the human equivalent of the empty shells cicadas leave clinging to tree bark. Their selves were somewhere else, stuck in the moment before Benny’s disappearance divided their lives into before and after. Their home in Chicago sat untouched, exactly as it had looked the day they left. Friends and family mailed them their clothes and other essentials, but other than that, Audrey imagined the living room like the contents of a snow globe swirling with dust instead of snow.

It’s easier to think that death is like the dark side of the moon: only gone because we can’t see it anymore. If she didn’t think about it too hard, she could imagine that they just hadn’t seen each other for a while. Benny wasn’t gone, he was at home waiting. He was in the game room, making stupid fart noises and playing Mario Kart, and she had been kidnapped by these impostor parents.

If she did think about it too hard, all she could see was Benny’s skin stippled with mold, his lips receding from his teeth while his corpse withered in some dark hole, animals in the forest scattering his bones. She obsessed over bodies and states of decomposition. What would his corpse look like after four weeks of exposure? Eight weeks?

Something became real the day her parents told her they’d enrolled her in West Fork High School. This wasn’t temporary anymore—she was supposed to cobble together some kind of life here in the middle of nowhere, away from anyone she knew.

She protested at first, like she had fought against the mobile home they bought so they could live near the search radius, but her defiance was met with nothing but affectless resignation. Life in Chicago didn’t exist as long as Benny waited to be found. For the first few months, Joanne walked from room to room, weeping over the tiny pieces of Benny she would find clinging to their things: a strand of hair, an eyelash that might be his, the smell of the clothes he had brought on the camping trip, which she would never wash.

Every time her mother broke down, Audrey’s heart ripped open again, and would knit itself back together, over and over, until there was nothing left but a hardened keloid scar. What right did she have to complain about anything? It was all her fault.

Her father drove her to school the first time. Paul Figg had always been composed, his persona a carefully curated exterior manufactured for his real estate business. Audrey grew up seeing pictures of his face on bus benches. He often used his wife and children as a marketing strategy. They stood together waving at the camera at the end of all of his commercials—the smiling, perfect family.

In the wake of Benny’s loss, Paul was prone to emotional outbursts. These were usually directed at Joanne, owing to his meticulous nature and his aversion to the clutter she had started to amass. Audrey did her best to treat every interaction as if she were handling a live grenade.

The properties scattered across the hilly Arkansas countryside grew closer together the farther they drove into town. West Fork’s city center only spanned a few blocks. Old-fashioned suburbs clustered around the one-room post office; the elementary, middle, and high schools were within walking distance of one other.

Some older houses sagged with weather-beaten, colorful siding, with creeping vines overtaking their chain-link fences. Other, more manicured homes stood against the onslaught of time, remnants of an era when folks sat in rocking chairs on their front porches, gossiping over iced tea with their neighbors.

Audrey lifted her head from resting against the window and turned to her father. “Are you going to pick me up at the end of the day?”

“Yes.”

“Can I have lunch money?”

A muscle tensed in his jaw. “Your mother didn’t pack you anything?”

Audrey didn’t respond. He leaned back in the driver’s seat and rummaged in his pockets for loose change, eventually coming away with three quarters. “That should at least get you something. We’ll figure out a meal plan.”

“Are you going to drive me every day?”

“Bus route doesn’t come our way.”

“Should I start taking driving lessons?”

It was one question too many. His face reddened and he snapped, “Goddammit, Audrey, can’t you just go with the flow for once?”

She retreated back into herself. As the car pulled up to the front of the one-story red-brick building, Audrey balked at the flatness of it all.

As soon as she walked into her first-period geometry class, she realized that there was no such thing as anonymity in a place like this. The whole room gawked at her. Her family had been all over the news, but it didn’t occur to her that she would be a spectacle. She was suddenly self-conscious about her choice of boots and a T-shirt from some bygone birding festival her parents had dragged her to.

Unsure how to handle the infamous newcomer, her new teacher floundered before pointing to an empty seat between two boys.

One of the boys fiddled with a Swiss Army knife and Audrey looked around. Wasn’t someone going to stop him or something? The other boy answered her thought: “Sorry, it’s just his hunting knife. He doesn’t mean anything by it.” He kicked the leg of the boy’s chair. “Put it away, Beau, you’re freaking her out.” He turned to Audrey with a conspiratorial smile. “You should see what some of them keep in the backs of their trucks.”

He was tall, thick black hair curling at the nape of his neck, the cuffs of his jeans frayed and mud-splattered. Something about his wry tone put her at ease and she settled into the chair between the two.

It was too early for math. Audrey hadn’t been to school in months, so falling back into the rhythm of variables and irrational numbers took more focus than she was ready to commit. She’d spent hours watching the park rangers use similar equations to try and predict where Benny had gone: solve for X, an unknown location; he could be anywhere within the square root of five days divided by a prayer.

As the teacher scrawled geometry formulas across the whiteboard, Audrey started getting lightheaded—something about the room full of eyes still locked on her back and the chemical smell of the dry-erase marker and the swirling calculus of the search and rescue team’s “probability of area” maps—and she almost didn’t make it out of the classroom in time to fling open the back doors at the end of the school’s hallway and vomit against the back of the building.

Her skin felt white hot and she shivered, propping herself up with one arm. She heard footsteps behind her and then the voice of the boy from class: “Are you OK?”

Panting, she peered up at him from under her arm. “I guess. Sorry.”

He shook his head. “For what? Gave me an excuse to get out of there too. Thank you.”

She pulled herself upright. “Sorry, I don’t even know you and you’re already standing in my puke.”

“I’m Corbin Hale. Stop apologizing for everything.”

“Audrey Figg.”

He nodded, like it was the first time he’d ever heard of her, and she had never been more grateful to someone for pretending.

2019

Ivy Missing 2 Days

During the morning shift, a canine crew identified Ivy’s scent from the bottom of a steep bluff on the Butterfield, about three miles away from the point she went missing. Not anywhere on the ground, but barking up to where thorny treetops brushed against the escarpment. It was impossible to see. The SAR team called for Ivy but never heard a sound.

By the time Audrey joined the efforts in the afternoon, Scott was furious with the lack of progress on this new lead. Looking for footprints was a lost cause. So many hikers had trampled the dirt before they were able to close off the area. They’d blocked off a wide section for the search grid, but this was outside the original scope. They couldn’t shut down the whole park. He debriefed Audrey before he planned to send her off.

They stood at the Visitor Center’s incident command station and pored over the map. Bright-red marks indicated points of interest—the original cairn, now the bluff—and Audrey marveled at the distance. How could Ivy get that far on foot in just two days?

“We’ve spent the past few hours at the top of the drop-off since that’s where the dogs seem to think they’re smelling something.” He said this with a spit of bitterness—he’d always had a distaste for local law enforcement. They tended to take over operations and treat the park rangers with condescension.

“You checked the bottom first, I assume?”

He nodded, his tongue pressed against the inside of his cheek in concentration. “There’s nothing. I’m going to want you to check the bluff itself. There are some nooks and crannies up there we can’t see from the ground. Grab some rappelling equipment and take Jimmy to spot you. Think you can handle that?”

“It’s been a while, but I’m up for it.” The next question swelled up in her throat, but she choked it out. “So, you think this is a recovery now? Should I be looking for…” She trailed off, unable to articulate the gruesome discovery she imagined.

A look of terror rippled across Scott’s face, which shocked Audrey. Scott was stoic, composed, gruff—she’d not seen that look on him before. It passed and he attempted to gather himself, but stumbled over his words. “I’m not saying—don’t want to think—just try not to come back empty-handed.”

Footholds installed by the CCC jutted out from the incline, designed to look like a natural staircase made out of stones. Audrey climbed carefully, avoiding the treacherous steps, which had been worn smooth and slick from years of foot traffic. Desire paths snaked around them anyway, widening the trails.

Jimmy, one of the seasonal rangers, hiked alongside her. He was a big guy, someone who looked like he had played football in high school, but now, without the constant weight conditioning, his muscles had softened and left him stocky.

Audrey hadn’t done much trail work with Jimmy. He tended to patrol the campgrounds in the truck, barking orders at park visitors. Hiking was clearly not his strong suit. He breathed heavily as they climbed.

“Goddamn, every time I think we’re close there’s another incline.”

Audrey shot him a sideways glance. “Don’t you know the trails?”

“I mean, yeah, I got the full tour when I started.”

Audrey exhaled sharply. What was the point of being a ranger if you didn’t know your park? She bit her tongue and tried to focus on the task at hand.

The path curved to the right and the trees parted, opening out onto the flat rock of the top of the cliff.

It was hard to ignore the undeniable beauty of this panoramic view of the Ozark National Forest’s tree-covered hills. The dusty stone bluff stretched out until a sharp drop-off. There were no railings.

They walked to the edge and then got to their knees and peered over, scanning the cliffside and surrounding area for any sign of Ivy for good measure. Nothing. They called her name a few times, but no answer.

Audrey sucked in a breath. “I’m going to start climbing down to see what I can see.”

She dropped her pack and started hooking up the rappelling equipment.

Jimmy tried to take the harness from her hands. “Whoa, don’t you think I should be going down?”

“Why?”

“I mean, because you’re…” He trailed off like he hoped she would intuit the sexist assumption without him having to say it. His face was mottled with patches of red and he still struggled to get enough breath from the exertion of the climb.

“Seriously? Just keep an eye on the anchors and help me out when I’m ready. I’ll need your big strong man hands to make sure I don’t fall.”

Jimmy snorted. Audrey’s attitude wasn’t anything new.

Audrey snapped on her helmet and took a deep breath. “Double-check my setup, then head down to the bottom. Yell when you get there so I know I can get started.”

“After all that, I didn’t even need to be up here?”

“We had to get eyes on it together.”

“All right, hang tight.” He giggled at his own joke and jogged back to the trail.

Audrey faced the forest with her back to the cliff and tested the rope. This was the longest a kid had been missing on her watch. Not since Benny had she come up so woefully empty-handed. A countdown ticked in her brain measuring the moments until the search would be called off. Could she live with another unexplained disappearance in the park? Wasn’t this exactly why she had stayed all these years?

She took deep breaths through her nose while she waited for Jimmy’s signal, tuning her senses to the present. She leaned back and pushed her feet against the rock, spread shoulder-width apart as she got her balance. She tried not to think about the distance between her and the ground.

A hawk cried somewhere in the treetops below her. She strained her ears for any tiny sound that might carry up to her on the wind. It felt like an eternity before Jimmy finally called up to her: “Ready!”

Audrey grabbed her belay device and started lowering herself, kicking against the rock when necessary. Going down, she understood Jimmy’s complaints earlier. It was a certain kind of torture not knowing exactly how far she had left to go.

Every few feet she stopped to scan her surroundings. A solitary tree clung to the edge of the cliff, its exposed roots gripping whatever it could hold on to. She peered into the twisted stems, trying to find a scrap of fabric from Ivy’s clothing. Nothing.

Her blood pounded in her ears as she went farther. What was she hoping to find? Ivy impaled on a tree limb?

This thought took her mind off her footing for just a moment, and on her next step her foot slipped into a blank space where she expected to find solid rock. She gasped as her other foot skidded down the side and her rope slackened for a terrifying moment before she grabbed her stop descender. Her body jerked to a halt and her backside slammed against the wall.

Jimmy called up, “Are you OK?”

“Yeah, I just slipped. There’s some kind of hole here.” She straightened her harness and twisted herself around to face the bluff again and her heart skipped.

There was a deep cavity in the side of the cliff. The sandstone looked like it had been carved and scooped out with a giant spoon, creating a hollow in the rock. With the jagged ridge and surrounding trees, it couldn’t be seen from the ground. Something was wedged inside the cavity and was glittering at her.

Audrey took a sharp inhale, letting out a small yelp.

Jimmy yelled, “What, what do you see?”

Audrey clambered into the large opening. The walls were coated with a slimy substance that stuck to her skin when she brushed against it. In a daze, she tugged the sparkling thing free, a few ghostly strands hanging from it in wisps. A pink, jeweled, child-sized barrette.

She called down to Jimmy. “I found something! Take the other end of this belay, I’m coming down.”

She descended, hugging the hair clip to her chest, looking for any other sign of Ivy along the way. The long crawl down the cliff wall sapped her strength as her heart throbbed in her ears.

By the time she reached the bottom, Audrey’s legs were shaky and threatening to collapse. Still, she refused Jimmy’s help and made her own way down the rest of the trail.

Audrey fidgeted in her chair at the long table in the Visitor Center’s media room. She gripped the jewel barrette so tightly against her palm that it left angry red marks where it bit into her skin, a welcome distraction as they waited for the Summerses to come in and identify the item. She couldn’t decide whether she wanted it to be Ivy’s or not.

Scott ushered Tracy and Dan Summers into the room and then closed the door behind them. Audrey’s throat constricted as she saw the desperate hope in Tracy’s eyes.

“You found something?”

“Maybe. We don’t know if it’s hers, so we wanted you to take a look at it.” Audrey uncupped her palm and placed the hair clip on the table. It wobbled back and forth in the momentary quiet, fluorescent lighting reflected in the plastic gems.

Tracy lunged at it, panicked tears springing to her eyes, and cradled it against her chest. Audrey’s heart clenched. It was hers.

“Where was it?” Tracy cried.

“In a crevice down the side of a bluff.”

“What does it mean?” Dan asked.

Audrey exhaled through her nostrils. “It means she made it three miles up some pretty steep terrain. She probably dropped it.”

“So she’s alive?” Tracy grasped at the possibility.

Scott and Audrey exchanged a glance, and he took over. “It gives us a better sense of what direction she took.”

“How did no one see her? Isn’t that a popular trail? Why weren’t you searching there already?”

Scott nodded. “I understand y’all’s frustration. I’m frustrated too. She must have been up there at night. But believe me, our original search radius accounted for her most probable locations.”

Audrey couldn’t stand Scott trying to appease them like this. How could he understand anything? He sounded exactly like he did the day he called off Benny’s search—busy covering his own ass.

“We’ll adjust our grid based on this new information,” Scott continued.

“It’s been days.” Tracy looked gaunt, like she refused to eat anything until she was sure her baby could too.

Audrey reached out to place an awkward hand on Tracy’s arm. “Finding this is a good thing. We have a definite sense of direction now. We’re getting closer to her.”

Tracy nodded, clinging to the barrette. Audrey felt a pang of jealousy. This tiny barrette was more than they had ever found of Benny.

2004

Benny Missing 4 Months

The Figgs hired a local chapter of the National Speleological Society to search the caves in Devil’s Den. For two weeks, those ten men and women from the Ozark Mountain Grotto group would manage the most wide-scale cave search in the park’s history.

There were more than sixty known cave entrances in the park, with tunnels that burrowed hundreds of feet underground. Benny could have crawled into any one of them for shelter and wedged himself too far in. The original SAR teams had explored the well-known caves within Benny’s search radius under Scott’s constant supervision, but the Figgs felt that these excursions didn’t delve deep enough.

Going to school every day knowing these searches were happening made Audrey twitchy and unfocused. She sat in the back of her geometry class with her journal cracked open behind the textbook cover. Instead of working on the problems they’d been assigned, Audrey marked off cave locations on a hand-drawn map. Corbin reached a hand over and slipped her a piece of notebook paper.

Need a ride after school?

Park not home.

They find anything yet?

She passed him her journal under the desk and he scanned the scribbled X-marks representing the eight days of explorations that had failed so far. He picked up his pencil and mouthed the words “Can I?” at her, miming writing in the journal. She shrugged and he grabbed his protractor and began doodling lines across the page.

The first eight days had been just as fruitless as every other search: endless waiting, bated breath, with the growing frustration of coming up with nothing, nothing, nothing. What made her think today would be any different? The journal landed back in front of her with a thump as Corbin tossed it back over.

He’d drawn a line from the spot where Benny was last seen and extrapolated a square perimeter using an estimate of time and distance—a practical application of the geometry formulas they both insisted they would never use in the real world.

A question floated outside the box: “Any caves in here?” Audrey frowned at it. The Grotto group had started their search from farther out, based on their calculations, and were in the process of working their way into the original search radius, so Audrey wasn’t sure how close they would come to that area. But she knew of at least one crevice near where he went missing.

When Corbin dropped Audrey off at Devil’s Den after school, the Ozark Mountain Grotto group was already back at the campground area unloading their gear. The chatter that usually filled the lot after a day’s exploration seemed more subdued than usual.

Audrey looked around at their drawn faces and noticed Scott Rollins deep in conversation with the group’s leader. She wasn’t close enough to catch any of it, but it looked tense. There had been some tough negotiations at the start to convince Scott to unlock the bars in some of the deeper caverns, but she thought they’d worked that out already.

“Thought I might catch you here.”

The voice belonged to Michelle Cooke, one of the two women in the Grotto group. Audrey had grown attached to her over the past week. The sides of her head were buzzed and she had an extraordinary number of holes in her face. Rings and studs, she’d explained when she caught Audrey staring, but she didn’t wear them on caving expeditions so they wouldn’t get caught on anything. In her early twenties, Michelle was the only person around lately who didn’t treat Audrey like a child.

“What’s going on?” Audrey asked.

Michelle let out a long exhale. “It was a weird one today, that’s for sure. We found bones.”

Audrey felt the pulse in her jugular beating a sharp staccato rhythm against her throat. “Did you—”

“No, God, sorry. Should have phrased that better, didn’t mean to freak you out. Not human. Nothing about your brother.”

Audrey felt both relieved and disappointed. “What, then?”

“Deer bones. I mean, we are out in the woods, but they were so deep underground. I’ve never seen anything like that at that depth. I doubt a deer could even climb in there like that.”

“Maybe it just got lost and stuck?”

“No, that I could at least make sense of, but I’m not talking about just one deer. I’m talking about a whole pile of carcasses. I couldn’t count them all, but definitely more than ten.”

Audrey stared for a moment, trying to understand the implications of this discovery. “What do you think they were doing there?”

“Our best guess is that it’s the boneyard of some mountain predator. Black bears, coyotes, something like that. But again, it was so much deeper than what you’d see for an animal den.”

The sweat slicking Audrey’s skin chilled as she imagined the deep throaty rumble of a mountain lion, its jaws dripping with blood as it watched her from the shadows. She’d tried not to think about animal attacks since the discovery of Roland Bates’s body. She wouldn’t let herself put Benny in that position, even in her mind.

Michelle interrupted her thoughts. “The park superintendent here says it’s most likely hunters illegally dumping in the park to hide their tracks. I don’t buy it.”

Audrey grasped at this less sinister scenario. “Why not?”

“Some of them had antlers. Full racks. A hunter would have taken those as trophies.” She nodded at Scott in his heated discussion with the head of the crew. “That’s what they’re arguing about. Gus wants to do some more investigating but the super won’t let us go back in.”

“What do you think?”

Michelle crossed her arms. “I think nature can be pretty freaky.”

Michelle left with some of the cavers to get drinks in Fayetteville, and Audrey found herself alone again. Her parents hadn’t acknowledged her arrival and were busy making plans with Scott and the head of the Grotto group for the rest of the cave searches. The sun wouldn’t set for another couple of hours, and Audrey couldn’t sit still any longer.

Corbin’s point earlier about where to look needled at her, and the sandstone crevice on the Butterfield where she’d last seen Benny tugged at her heartstrings with magnetic force. The fissure in the rock was like a gaping wound, and though it had existed before she ever climbed in, it felt like a gash in the world that she had ripped open herself.

She sat at the picnic table near Michelle’s tent, her leg bouncing with nervous energy, and contemplated her next move. Someone had to search it. She couldn’t tell anyone that she’d ducked into that opening, because then she would have to admit what she had done, but she couldn’t leave it unexplored either. Of all the caves in Devil’s Den, wouldn’t that be the most likely place Benny could have ended up?

Audrey looked over her shoulder to where her parents sat scanning search maps. Her mother held her head in her hands, her fingers tangled in her hair. Her father jabbed his finger into faces, speaking through gritted teeth. She had done this to them. To all of them.

Without another thought, Audrey ducked into Michelle’s tent and grabbed her equipment pack, then took off toward the Butterfield. She’d been learning as much as she could about caving—how hard could it be?

Small branches snapped against her arms as she barreled up the trail to where she’d left the cairn. She could find her way here blindfolded by now. Her throat constricted as she got closer. A turn off the trail here, a hundred paces northwest, duck when the thorny branches of honey locust trees cut sharp crosshatch patterns in the sky, clamber over the boulder field, and there it was.

She dropped to her knees, still breathing heavily, and unzipped the stolen pack. She pulled out Michelle’s helmet with headlamp and a harness. The tangle of reflective straps and buckles looked so much more confusing without context. Michelle had shown her how to loop it around her thighs, and it had looked simple, but now Audrey realized how little she actually knew.

Still determined, she managed to tie the belt around her waist and work the straps into some kind of position. She clipped a carabiner on and retrieved a length of cord. She was stumped again. Where did the rope go? She tied it to a nearby tree and knotted it as best she could. Good enough. Finally, she pulled on Michelle’s gloves and stood at the dark opening.

She found herself shaking and placed a palm on either side of the crack to brace herself. On the one hand, she needed to see what she could find in this chasm, but on the other, her whole body screamed in protest at the thought of entering hell. As tears stung at her eyes, she let out a strangled scream to take back control. She refused to succumb. She snapped on the headlamp, turned to face the dark, and began to slide her way inside.

An icy breath of cool air from the depths struck her face. The gritty stone walls snagged her clothing like sandpaper as she inched her way farther and farther in. It was snug, but not enough to deter her. The ground sloped downward and she sat down to scoot farther in on her behind. The light from her headlamp showed nothing ahead but the narrow space, but as long as she could continue forward, she would. The light from the crack above dimmed as she descended, until only the light from her helmet remained.

The air around her rushed and pulsed like the inside of a conch shell. A new fear gripped her. What if the light on her helmet went out? She’d made a hasty decision and didn’t bring extra batteries. Her heart thudded in her ears and added to the ambient noise of the constricting passageway.

A slow, guttural clicking echoed against the sandstone. Before she could react, the rope clipped to her waist suddenly went taut.

Audrey froze, a scream dead in the back of her throat. “Hello?” she called up to the surface. Maybe someone had found out where she went and was trying to pull her back up?

There was no answer. Then, the rope vibrated like a plucked guitar string. Audrey grabbed it and it went slack. She tried to catch her breath. Maybe it just got stuck on a rock. She turned to face back the way she came, lighting the path with her headlamp. A shadow slipped out of sight above. Icy hot fear shot through her veins.

“Hello?” she called again. A visceral panic had taken hold now and she couldn’t quite name why—just animal instinct, the feeling of being watched. She grabbed the rope with both hands and began hoisting herself back up and out. Her legs were shaky and she struggled to get a grip on the ground beneath her as she pushed and slipped.

The long crawl seemed never-ending, and Audrey fought the small voice in her head calling her a coward. But her terror won. If she couldn’t go farther into that hole, there’s no way Benny would have. Benny was afraid of everything. Finally, she heaved herself out of the confining space and lay on the ground, panting and staring straight up at the sky.

For a moment, she thought she heard her name called from the depths. A weak, husky voice crying, “Audrey, wait!” with a fear that mirrored her own. She’d officially lost it. She sat up and kicked a rock into the hole. Benny wasn’t in that crevice.

2019

Ivy Missing 3 Days

Audrey didn’t sleep well. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw a gasping six-year-old girl, scraping her palms and dirty knees as she scrambled over jagged piles of rocks, whimpering but too dehydrated to produce tears. Sometimes the girl was moving, other times she lay splayed out limp on the ground, ants crawling over her curled fingers.

All night, between these snippets of fitful dreaming, Audrey pored over the search grid, analyzing the topography and trying to make sense of Ivy’s route. The footsteps they’d followed from the cairn went in the opposite direction from the bluff where she’d found the hair clip.

Three days in, the chances of this search resulting in a rescue instead of a recovery dwindled by the second. She couldn’t approach this search the same way she always did. She needed to get an outside opinion.

She decided to go into West Fork to see Lottie Cline before her shift started. The long morning drive would be worth it if she could get some new ideas on how to approach this.

Lottie had been best friends with Corbin’s grandmother, but she had been volunteering for search and rescue long before that. Now past the age where she could hike long distances, she still taught courses and led meetings with Washington County SAR. She ran a flea market in town, a small storefront where country kitsch went to die. Audrey often sought her counsel after Mamaw died.

Audrey drove past the high school to a small open area near the train tracks and swung her car onto the gravel lot that the residents of West Fork used as a makeshift parking lot. Above her a marquee announced a $5 chili supper at the fire station.

West Fork was an insular community. Settled in its ways. Her classmates had all known one another since birth, so when she appeared out of nowhere their junior year, they didn’t know what to do with her. The people that lived in West Fork were all from West Fork. No one moved here—they lived and died here, or they got out.

The muffled snap of her car door shutting echoed in the open space. It sounded almost deafening to Audrey without tree cover to dampen it. She felt exposed as she walked up Main Street past the police department and the rusted iron benches in front of another antique store. She tried to figure out what it was about being in West Fork that made her so nervous.

No doubt her family was different from the rural Southerners she found herself entangled with. In Chicago, or at least what little she remembered of it, you could walk through the crowded city unnoticed, only acknowledged when you wanted to be. She had taken this privacy for granted growing up. You could stay comfortably anonymous in a city of three million. In a town of fewer than three thousand, everyone knew each other’s business.

That’s what set her teeth on edge. There was no way she could hang around here for too long before someone recognized her and started asking questions she didn’t feel like answering.

She passed the Oprey house. Strange how a two-story building could look so tall after growing up in a city of skyscrapers, but it loomed on the corner above the others.

The first floor was windowless, a vestige of its days as a Masonic lodge, though now instead of secrets it was filled with bluegrass. Cheery signage for the Little O’ Oprey now covered the sides of the water-stained stone where windows should be. It seemed like a place that had been there since the town’s inception, but in the grand scheme of things it was relatively new.

At the end of the street, Hometown Flea waited for her beneath its metal awning. Various mismatched furniture and old appliances, including an ancient Coke machine, lined the front. A bell jangled to announce her presence as she pushed through the door.

A winding maze of shelving piled with glassware, frames, and other ephemera filled the space floor to ceiling. It would have reminded her of her mother’s trailer if it weren’t so organized. Each numbered partition contained a different seller’s items, row upon row like small cross sections of people’s houses. She heard Lottie’s voice call from somewhere in the back, “Be right there!”

Someone stepped out from behind a nearby stall. “Audrey Figg, is that you?”

Audrey turned around. She vaguely recognized this woman as one of her former classmates, but couldn’t immediately recall her name. Her straight brown hair was curled in at the bottom, making her look much older than someone in her early thirties. She held a crocheted pillow and a handful of costume jewelry.

The woman smiled and filled the awkward moment of silence: “Ann Sims, class of ’06.” And then, with a laugh, “Well, I guess I was Ann Thornton then. How’ve you been?”

Audrey was about to answer but Ann just kept going. “I heard about that little girl. Andy’s been out volunteering on those searches, have you seen him? You remember Andy, he was in our class. How funny we ended up married, right? People call us Raggedy Ann and Andy. Not that we look raggedy, I hope, just like the dolls, you know? Did you end up marrying Corbin Hale? I didn’t see a wedding announcement. Y’all got any kids? I’ve been staying home to watch mine so I haven’t volunteered, but I just feel wretched for that poor girl’s mother. How’s your mother, by the way?”

Ann didn’t leave enough space between each thought and Audrey didn’t know which question to answer first. She didn’t mind answering questions for park visitors, but personal questions made her clammy. She realized she’d been quiet for too long and pulled her face into what she hoped was a friendly smile. “Just been busy at the park.”

“Of course you are, hon! Any news about the little girl?”

Audrey’s mouth suddenly felt dry. She didn’t feel like mentioning yesterday’s find. “No news, but we’re hopeful.”

“She’s been missing three days, hasn’t she? Isn’t that unusual? I’ve taken the kids up there on school vacation but now I’m not sure how safe it is. I hear y’all had over two hundred volunteers goin’ out? You’d think with that many people out there looking you’d find something—”

Lottie appeared behind the cash register and smiled over at Ann’s armful of items, interrupting her monologue. “Ready to check out?”

“Yes, ma’am!” Ann handed Lottie her finds and Audrey was relieved for the distraction.

Ann finished checking out, then turned back to Audrey. “Great to see y’all. Come out to the Oprey this weekend. We’ve got a great lineup, probably some familiar faces. And Becca makes the most glorious parfaits for the concession. If you can get away from the park, of course. Hope the search isn’t still on by then.”

The bell chimed as she left the store, and Audrey’s shoulders relaxed. Lottie sighed. “That woman’s got more nerve than a toothache.”

Audrey snorted. Lottie raised an eyebrow at her. “Now to what do I owe the pleasure of your company this morning? I know you’re not here to shop.”

“You got me. I wanted to pick your brain about the search for Ivy Summers.”

“Come on back and let’s get you a cup of coffee.”

The office at the back of the shop was almost as scattered as Scott’s. Handwritten receipts littered the room—Lottie insisted on doing her own calculations. An ancient bloodhound lay sprawled on the floor against the cabinets. He might have looked dead if he didn’t make a wet snuffle every time he licked his flappy jowls. Audrey sat down at a small round table as Lottie fiddled with a drip coffeepot.

Almost everyone in the area who went through SAR training had taken courses from Lottie at some point. Audrey relaxed as the smell of strong coffee mixed with the musty aroma of antiques and old dog.

Lottie sat across from her and set down the mugs she’d just filled. “Now, I’ve been keeping up with things. Talked to some of my buddies in the Back Country Horsemen. You’re three days in?”

Audrey nodded as she swallowed the bold coffee. Lottie didn’t ask whether she needed cream or sugar, she just assumed that people ought to take it black.

“So, you’ve combed the original sector and now you’re pushing outward. I know y’all’ve got mounted and canine teams goin’ out. And the dogs come up short?”

“They’ve had trouble keeping the scent. It’s strange—even if she was abducted, they should still be able to pick it up. There’s no deep water nearby for them to lose her with everything so dry. They did alert on a cliff pretty far outside of our scope, which I checked out yesterday.” Audrey paused. “We only found her hair clip.”

Lottie looked thoughtful. “A personal item but no scent trail to follow. What do you make of that.” Her dog snorted on the floor as if in response. “You found it on the ground at the base of it?”

“Well, no. It was wedged into a kind of nook in the side of the bluff.”

Lottie drummed her fingers on the side of her mug, thinking.

Audrey continued, “Scott’s revised the search grid and we’re following that direction now, but I can’t help feeling like she’s on the move and we’re just too far behind. I don’t know if the usual approach is going to cut it. I hoped you might have some ideas.”

“I’ve been on some long searches in my years. After this many days, especially with a child—” She interrupted herself to take another gulp of coffee. “Well, I know you know.”

Audrey looked away.

“Of course, it’s not hopeless either,” Lottie said. “Kids wind up in some strange places, sometimes miles and miles away from where they disappeared. A lot of them end up at high elevations…” She trailed off like something had just occurred to her.

“What?”

Lottie frowned. “Have y’all been looking in the caves?”

“They’re barred.”

“The ones immediately around the trails are, but farther out there are plenty. Many of ’em are connected, some for miles. We haven’t come close to exploring them all, mostly because they’re so narrow and nobody can fit. I always assumed that was why Scott Rollins barred ’em up.”

“It’s to protect the bats.”

“I know, I know,” Lottie said, waving her hand. “But let me tell you, if you haven’t done it before, a cave rescue is hell. Not too long before your family came down, we had this one woman goin’ out hiking with her church group. They thought they’d take a peek into Satan’s Maze when she missed a step and skidded down in farther than she meant to, got stuck. Now luckily we could see where she was, but it took us more than seventeen hours to get her out. That’s with winches and pulleys and all sorts of things.”

Audrey considered this. “That could explain why the dogs aren’t picking her up, right?”

“Maybe. I’m not saying anything for sure, but I bet a little girl could slip through those bars. Or find an unsealed cavern. Might’ve found herself a good hiding place. Might not be able to hear her crying out, with the way sound travels through those places.”

Audrey didn’t relish the thought of squeezing into those dark places, but at this point she was ready to try anything.

“There’s no way she could have fit between those bars.”

“She’s only six, Scott. I know for a fact there’s, like, a foot clearance at the bottom of the gate for the Devil’s Icebox.”

Audrey had been arguing with Scott at incident command for half an hour about whether or not she could organize a group for some cave exploration. He started shaking his head the second he heard the word “cave,” and she couldn’t get him to budge.

“No. I’m not risking the contamination—”

“Are you seriously about to tell me you care more about bats than a missing child? We’ve had multiple local caving groups offer to come help out and you’ve just turned them away.”

His face reddened. “Of course I’m not saying the bats are more important. It’s just a risky search and I don’t want to take any chances when we’ve got limited resources and haven’t even covered the search grid yet.”

Audrey kept pushing. “We have tons of groups going out to cover the grid today. I’ve trained for cave rescue. I can call the Ozark Mountain Grotto group and have them here in an hour.” She struck her hand with a karate chop motion between each word to emphasize her point. “What is the problem?”

“The problem is—do you know how often something goes wrong on a cave search? I don’t want to waste time rescuing the rescuers.”

“I’m talking about professionals!”

Scott threw up his hands. “Get them out here, then. You’ve got today. Cover the caves within the grid, and then fall back in line.”

She saluted sarcastically and turned on her heel to get her equipment and prepare.

“I could fire you,” he said to her back.

“Yeah, but you won’t.”

Between her disagreement with Scott and finally getting the keys to unlock the bars, two hours of the search day had been wasted and Audrey didn’t have any more time to spare. She organized her own IC post for the cavers and made a plan. They’d go out in groups of four to the more obvious caves on the trails within the park’s boundaries: Farmers Cave, Devil’s Icebox, Devil’s Maze, and the longest, Devil’s Den Cave.

One of the four in each group would stand at the entrance as a spotter in case anything went wrong. Scott would have told her to take this role, but he wasn’t around, and Audrey wasn’t the kind of person to stand on the outside and wait.

Strapped into her gear, Audrey braced herself to descend into the bowels of the park again. She took a deep breath in through her nose, the cool 54 degrees from the inside of the cave a stark contrast to the heat on the surface.

One of her group mates, Nat, put a gloved hand on her shoulder. “You good?”

Audrey nodded and turned back to the group for a last inventory check: headlamps, backup flashlights and batteries, harnesses strapped, surface-to-ground radios. They wouldn’t carry in a stretcher, just some basic first aid and then regroup if they needed to extract Ivy. Or a body.

She shuddered at the thought. As badly as she wanted to be the one to find the little girl, she didn’t know if she could handle carrying out a child’s corpse. A sharp pang of nausea rose in her belly and she fought it back.

“All right, let’s get started.”

She unlatched the huge padlock and had to yank the rusted metal bars to dislodge them from where they’d started to become embedded in the rock. A more experienced caver, Gus, helped her drag the gate open.

Gus led the way in. He had spent many hours in Devil’s Den Cave before the bars had blocked public access ten years earlier. When search and rescue operations in the caves were more common, the Grotto group had surveyed and mapped all 550 feet to be better prepared.

Audrey and Nat followed close behind. They entered the wide chamber. The light from outside made the glistening back walls sparkle. A permanent layer of moisture coated everything inside despite the heat from outside, and a low rushing sound pulsed around them, either the wind blowing through or a water source deeper within the cave.

“It’s pretty open here up front, but once we get about fifty yards in, there’s a good squeeze. We’ll have to crawl,” Gus said.

They spoke in low voices, even the quietest tones amplified in the enclosed space. It didn’t take long before the light from the surface disappeared and they had to rely on the ghostly beams from their headlamps casting shadows on the rocks ahead. Gus pointed out a few drop-offs that they would have to belay down as they went deeper.

Every few minutes they’d tentatively call Ivy’s name. It echoed around the sandstone as if mocking them for trying. The walls inched closer and closer until Audrey wasn’t sure how much of it was actually the space narrowing and how much was just her anxiety.

Until they reached the squeeze. The rock ceiling dropped and a hole just a few feet wide led deeper into the cavern. Gus squatted beside it.

“OK, it’s been a while, but I think for the first bit we’ll be on hands and knees, and at some point, we’ll have to drop to an army crawl to make it through. It opens back up on the other side.”

Audrey felt a flash of heat despite the chill of the underground air as a wave of fear rippled over her skin. She’d trained for cave SAR, and had gone caving with the Grotto group when she was learning, but she’d never had to make it through an honest-to-God squeeze. She’d heard stories of cavers attempting an unexplored route and getting stuck, even to the point of dying between the rocks and being entombed in the hole forever.

She willed herself to relax. Nothing could be worse than panicking here. They would go in one at a time, ropes tied to their harnesses in case the others had to pull them through.

Gus went first. The length of the tube felt excruciating as he narrated his progress through to let them know what to expect. His body blocked most of the passage, so his voice was muffled and difficult to understand. It took him at least fifteen minutes.

“One of you should stay on that side in case you need to pull us back. This is tighter than I remembered,” Gus called from the other side.

Audrey stopped Nat as he started attaching the next length of rope to his harness. “Please,” she said, “I need to see what’s back there for myself.”

Her headlamp illuminated his face in the dark and he looked ready to protest. “Have you done this before?”

She ignored the question. “I know what I’m looking for.”

Nat unbuckled and passed her the rope. She was the lead on this rescue, after all. She snapped it on without another word and adjusted her kneepads for the crawl. She dropped to all fours and peered inside the tunnel. It was wider than it was tall, an oblong shape that seemed to expand and contract with rocks jutting out from all sides. Her heart thudded in her ears. Would Ivy really crawl through here? Maybe. And that was enough reason to try.

She got in, her kneepads barely protecting her from loose rocks that pressed into her shins. After a few feet, her shoulder blades scraped against the ceiling and she had to drop lower. It wasn’t long before she had no choice but to lie prone on her belly, sandwiched between unyielding rock above and below.

“Gus?” she called. “I can’t crawl anymore.”

“OK! You’re about halfway, then. Can you angle your feet forward, heels up, and get a bit of a grip with your toes?”

She pulled her feet in. “Kind of.”

“All right, so you’ll use your elbows to pull and your toes to push.”

She tried to calm her breathing. If she inhaled too deeply and inflated her lungs, she could feel the rock pressing against her back and chest. She exhaled and inched forward, took a breath, and then repeated the movement. There was only about an inch gap between the rock and her body at any point. Her muscles ached, and fighting down the panic took all of her focus.

The passage seemed never-ending. Audrey turned her head sideways to fit, and couldn’t see her way forward. She had to trust that if she just kept scraping her body against the gritty stone, she’d eventually make it to the other side.

Suddenly, her right arm hit open air and Gus grabbed her hand and pulled, helping her through the rest of the squeeze. Able to stand again, Audrey couldn’t stop trembling. She’d been clenching all of her muscles for the length of the passage.

She looked around this new chamber. It wasn’t as wide as the first opening, but there was room to explore. They still had plenty of slack on the rope connecting them to Nat. After all that, the squeeze couldn’t have been more than thirty feet.

She called through the hole, “Nat, we’re just going to look around this area a bit. Keep your radio on.”

Audrey and Gus walked around the chamber, looking for any scrap of clothing or evidence that Ivy may have been here. Veins of quartz glittered in the lamplight as they swiveled their heads around.

Audrey’s light landed on another passage leading farther back into the cave. It was more like a large crack in the wall. Something about the darkness of the fissure drew her gaze, like she could feel something waiting in the depths. Gus followed the beam of her headlamp and started walking toward it.

The hair follicles pricked all over her body as she realized she could no longer hear the wind that had been blowing through the cavern. She continued to stare at the crevice and found herself wondering if there was something there, something blocking the airflow through the passage. A sibilant hum seemed to vibrate in her bones.

She tilted her head and her breath caught in her throat as something gleamed in the flash of her light across the darkness—wet and round, like a huge eye staring back at her.

There was a sudden clang of metal and the thunk of steel punching through muscle and cracking bone. Gus screamed and Audrey whipped around to find him on the ground, a bear trap clamped around his bleeding ankle. She barely registered the scuffling in the passage as Gus howled in pain and she rushed to his side.

“Get it off!” he shrieked in anguish as Audrey worked to trigger the release mechanism. She could hear Nat calling from the other side as her fingers fumbled for the levers on either side of the steel jaws embedded in his flesh.

“What’s going on?” Nat’s voice issued from the squeeze like through a tin can on the other end of a wire.

Audrey pressed down on the levers with all of the force she could muster, and Gus lifted his ragged foot from the trap. He moaned. Deep puncture wounds circled his ankle and she had to work quickly to bind it tightly enough to be able to drag Gus back through the squeeze and out of the cave.

“How…” Gus trailed off as a low croaking sound rattled from behind them.

Audrey turned to face the crack in the rocks, then looked back to Gus. “Can you make it back through?”

He tried to swivel his foot and sucked air in through his teeth. “I can’t move it.”

Audrey wiped a bead of sweat from her temple, her anxiety levels spiking a hot flash. She helped Gus up onto his good leg and he limped back to the tunnel.

“Nat!” she yelled through the hole. “Take the ropes and start pulling. Gus is coming through first, but he’s injured.”

“What happened?”

“Bear trap.”

“How—?”

“Not now, Nat!”

Gus kneeled down and rolled onto his stomach. He groaned as he wormed his way into the squeeze on his elbows. Audrey dug her feet in, trying to ignore the certainty that something else was in this cave with them. She grabbed his good foot. “I’m going to push, OK?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. Nat tugged on the rope, dragging Gus’s body deeper in. Audrey held tight to his boot and waited for the chance to follow him into the squeeze. She strained to hear any sound above the scuffing of Gus’s equipment against the grit.

Finally, she wriggled in. The rock felt tighter than before, as now she had to anchor her toes and try to exert enough force to push two people through. She sucked in her breath as she pulled her legs out of reach of anything that may have been waiting in the open chamber.

With a jolt, they stopped moving. Audrey barely heard Nat’s muffled voice from behind Gus. “He’s caught on something.”

She grunted as she tried to push her weight into his boot and make it past the resistance. There was no relief. Panic swelled as she realized she was now stuck too.

A shiver ran through her as a sound like a knife scraping stone echoed behind her, a scratching at the entrance to the coffin-like tube she was now wedged into.

“I’m sorry, Gus!” She grabbed his wounded ankle with her other arm and pushed with all her strength. He screamed in pain. She heard a pop and they were moving again, out to the other side.

The day ended up being a rescue operation after all.

2005

Benny Missing 6 Months

There was renewed hope once the leaves fell. The copper treetops beckoned like a promise of closure. When frost coated the naked branches and Devil’s Den laid bare its secrets, a new wave of search parties went out. The Figgs dug into the last of their savings to charter a helicopter and scan the area for any sign of Benny’s bright clothing. When all efforts returned fruitless once again, Audrey’s parents reached an impasse.

Joanne wanted to sell the Chicago house and relocate to West Fork permanently. Paul felt it was time to head back up north and pick up the pieces of their life. He had mourned his son, made peace with the “not knowing” of it all, but as far as Joanne was concerned, there was no life to return to without Benny. Audrey stayed lashed to the rack, pulled in both directions.

Audrey stood in the kitchen one late-January afternoon, fighting the growing mess while Joanne spread newspaper clippings across the living room floor on her hands and knees. The small space hummed with the sound of dishwater and Joanne’s fevered mumbling.

The door creaked as Paul came through. Joanne didn’t lift her head from her task. He announced, “I ordered the stone. It’ll be here in a few weeks.”

“For what?”

Audrey peeked around the corner. Her father’s jaw clenched as he tried to remain calm. “You know for what. It’s time to put him to rest.”

Joanne whipped her head around. “There’s nothing to rest. We talked about this. I told you I’m not memorializing anything until I know where he is.”

“We know where he is! He’s in the Ozark National Forest. We need to have a memorial. Goddammit, I need it. I can’t go on pretending.”

Joanne became a feral animal, still hunched on her hands and knees, teeth clenched and bared at her husband. “You think this is pretending? Where would we put it?”

“Anywhere! That isn’t the point.”

“Of course it is!”

“He was my son too, Joanne.”

“Was?”

Paul let out a frustrated yelp. “Was! What world are you living in? Was!”

“The world where my son is still missing.”

Paul cried, “I have a life to live. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“This is your life!”

Paul stormed to the back bedroom. Audrey returned to the sink full of dishes and rubbed at the plate in her hand hard enough to polish coal. Paper rustling. Heavy footfalls. Running water. Angry muttering. Scrub brush on plastic.

When Paul came back into view, he carried a suitcase. He stopped at the doorway between the living room and kitchen. He looked over at Audrey, new lines etched into his face. For a long time, they stared at each other, the unspoken question pulled tight between them. He teetered on the threshold, leaning almost imperceptibly toward her. “Audrey?” His voice wavered.

She shook her head no.

As Paul Figg walked to the door, he spoke his last words to his family: “You have my forwarding address.”

Joanne didn’t look up. The sink water kept running. The door slammed, the tether snapped, and Audrey turned back to her chore.

Joanne picked up a drinking habit. At first, she tried to hide it, but she collected the empty bottles and measured her grief in ounces. It became a different problem when Audrey found the plastic half-gallon jugs tumbling out from bathroom cabinets. Neither acknowledged it. What right did Audrey have to tell her mother what to do? How could anyone imagine the pain of losing a child?

One night Audrey found Joanne passed out on the toilet, pants around her ankles, head thrown back in an open-mouthed snore, vomit crusting the tips of her split ends. Audrey held her up to the sink, washed the sick from her mother’s stringy hair, and dressed her for bed.

When the divorce papers eventually showed up, Audrey intercepted them from the mailbox. She didn’t think her mother could handle it yet. She shoved them into her backpack on her way out the door for school.

In Paul’s absence, Corbin was picking her up every morning, the truck’s cab the only place she felt safe to express anything. As far as he knew, Audrey bore no responsibility for Benny’s disappearance. She could seethe about the unfairness of it all. Corbin never tried to invalidate her outbursts; sometimes all she needed was someone to hear her without offering thoughts and prayers.

He drove an orange 1984 Datsun that he babied, a gift from his grandfather. Their classmates liked to rib him about its size compared to their four-door pickups, but he knew better. Get him started on the subject and Corbin could wax poetic about the merits of older-model lightweight trucks for hours. “These idiots don’t even use those things for hauling! Plus, they’re too clunky for real farmwork.” Audrey loved to let him.

She hoisted herself into the front seat and could barely muster a greeting.

“What’s up?”

“Dad’s definitely not coming back.”

“You already knew that.” Corbin didn’t mince words. She didn’t take offense.

“It’s different when there’s a paper trail.”

“Ah, shit. How’s your mom taking it?”

“She doesn’t know yet.”

He shot her a bemused look. “How’d you manage that?”

“I just got the mail. I’ll give it to her when she’s ready. This would just push her over the edge.”

“OK, but how much farther over the edge can she go?”

“I’d rather not test it.”

They drove in comfortable silence for a bit, the Datsun’s bouncy shocks glancing off potholes. He asked, “Have you looked at the terms yet?”

“Terms?”

“You know, the settlement agreement. What he’s offering.”

“I didn’t even think about it.”

They were halfway up County Road 228. “Should we ditch and find out?”

“Yep.”

Just past the RV park, Corbin pulled off to the side of Woolsey Bridge. They scrambled down the embankment and sat at the edge of the water, beneath the girders, where no one could see them from the road. Audrey unzipped her bag.

Corbin pulled out a cigar. Audrey stopped. “Are you kidding me?”

“Paps won’t miss it.”

She rolled her eyes and unfastened the metal hooks sealing the manila envelope. A Chicago law firm’s embossed logo was emblazoned on the thick cardstock. She stared at the legal jargon. “Yeah, I have no idea what I’m looking at.”

Corbin tugged the papers from her grasp. “Give it. I’ve seen these suckers when Mamaw and Paps got custody.”

The mention of the word felt like a punch to the gut. She hadn’t even considered it. She was still a minor, after all. Did her father still want anything to do with her?

Corbin held the unlit cigar between his teeth as he scanned the papers. “Oh, this is good, he’s already agreed to pay alimony. He’s going to send your mom monthly checks to take care of—”

He stopped and wouldn’t meet her eye.

She took the papers back and read to the bottom. There it was, short, succinct: Paul Figg would be relinquishing all parental rights to Joanne Figg. Her eyes stung and she heard the click of a Zippo lighter to her left. Corbin took a drag, handed her the lit cigar, then slung a protective arm around her shoulders without saying a word.

She opened her mouth to speak, but only got out the words “My family—” before she choked on them.

Corbin tightened his grip on her shaking shoulders. “I’m your family.”

2019

Ivy Missing 4 Days

When Audrey arrived at the staging area, most of the groups on the morning shift had already gone out. There was a thick humidity coating the air—perhaps the only moisture the forest would get this summer. Audrey could almost see it hanging there like fog. The dull rumble of helicopter blades cut through it above.

Sweat steamed from Audrey’s body as her agitation rose with the temperature. Scott had her on table duty with Porter. They were supposed to spend the day handing out information packets to newcomers and directing them to different tents around the campground. Bored volunteers waited for their next assignments in the somber encampment. Tarps hung throughout the parking lot, plastic shelters from the sun, dismal people playing cards while they awaited further instruction. A group of drone operators hovered around their monitors, scanning the area from above.

Audrey kicked her heel against the metal leg of her folding chair. This waiting was interminable. Didn’t Scott know better than to ask her to sit still at a time like this?

He’d been furious after the accident in the cave the day before. The entire SAR team had been diverted to Devil’s Den Cave to assist in rescuing Gus from the depths. Audrey and Nat had worked together to push and pull him through the squeeze without damaging his ankle any further, and then they’d been able to extricate him on a stretcher the rest of the way.

It wasn’t her fault. Audrey was usually the first to blame herself, but only if it was warranted. How did a bear trap end up that deep inside the cave? Not only that, but it was set and ready to snare. Scott spent more time berating her for wasting a day of the search than trying to answer that question.

He had the keys to the cave. Between that and the way he’d acted about the trap that caught the bobcat, she was certain now that he knew something he wasn’t telling her.

Then he’d stuck her at this table. It felt like a punishment. The past three hours had oozed by like a viscous syrup through a pinhole.

Porter was holding a dead cicada up between two fingers, turning it back and forth so its lacy, iridescent orange wings caught the light. Audrey chewed a fingernail as she watched him sketch the bug in a small unlined journal he carried with him. She frowned. Even with its legs curled inward, it was bigger than his thumb.

“Why are you doing that?”

“Recording it in my field journal before they die off in a couple weeks. These guys have been buried underground for years.” He held it out to her. “Look at the color on this one.”

Audrey leaned away. “Yeah, I’m good.” She looked around at the makeshift tent city. At this point, new volunteers were few and far between. Police officers manned other stations around the parking lot, and Audrey found herself seething at Scott again. Why was she sitting here? She turned back to Porter.

“How about you and I go check out one of the more out-of-the-way sectors?”

“Scott told us to work the table.”

Audrey waved her hand like swatting at a gnat. “He didn’t know how dead it was going to be. We’re not doing any good here.” She unfolded the topo map from one of the info packets and drew a line from the campground to an outlying sector over a ridge. It was far enough from the maintained trails that the few caves speckled throughout the terrain wouldn’t be barred. “No one’s been here yet.”

Porter looked wary. “We should go ask.”

Audrey looked over her shoulder at Scott, who was deep in paperwork with other law enforcement staff at the incident command post. “Hang on.”

She pushed away from the table before Porter could hop up and join her. She knew how to work Scott. Despite her years of experience, he still saw her as a sixteen-year-old girl in need of a parental figure. And despite her desire to be seen as his equal, a part of her couldn’t help acting like that sixteen-year-old girl when she was around him.

Scott eyed her as she strode up to the table. “Audrey?”

“You’ve got more than enough people posted here. Let me and Porter go out.”

He shook his head. “I don’t have the resources for another task force right now.”

“Just the two of us. We’ll cover more ground that way anyway.” She showed him the area she’d marked on the map. “I’ve got a gut feeling about this.”

Scott drew his mouth into a tight line. It was hard to argue with a gut feeling. The deputy next to him interjected, “She’s right, we don’t need them here right now. No reason we shouldn’t have a few more rangers go out.”

Scott reluctantly handed her one of the Garmin trackers they were sending out with each team to keep track of their coordinates. She reached out to take it, but he didn’t let go. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Never.” She clipped the handheld GPS to her belt and headed back to Porter, waving to let him know they were good to go.

They didn’t make small talk at first as they hiked into the woods. Porter struggled to keep up as Audrey marched forward with a singular focus—get to this new area and find an unbarred cave. The humidity felt indistinguishable from the steaming breath that issued from their panting mouths.

The eerie sound of Ivy’s name floated like birdsong in the air. Far-off search parties yelled for the little girl, and by the time the tinny voices reached Audrey and Porter, they blended with the chirping insects to become just another part of the forest’s soundscape.

It seemed that Porter couldn’t stand silence as he rushed to fill it. “What made you want to become a ranger anyway?”

The familiar ache gripped her chest. He wanted to talk? Now was as good a time as any to tell him. “You asked me if we always find the ones who get lost. We don’t. I lost my little brother.”

She didn’t continue, so he prompted her to go on, his voice tentative, a grating mixture of sympathy and fear. “And you never found him?”

“No. It was fifteen years ago. I was a teenager. We were hiking and we went off trail—you know how stupid kids are—and I just…” She wrestled with the same creeping dread that cinched her veins shut every time she considered telling someone the whole truth. “He wandered off and disappeared. My family moved here to keep searching and, I guess, I couldn’t leave because then I’d be giving up on him. And I can’t leave him out there.”

He gaped for a moment. People usually didn’t know how to respond to this story. She’d heard all the platitudes, but she wasn’t expecting Porter’s: “That is God’s plan for you. You’re meant to be here, rescuing people.”

She swallowed her visceral reaction to this response. She had sworn to herself she would never lash out at Porter—it would be like kicking a puppy—but she could barely hold back her vitriol. “If there is a God, they couldn’t find a better way to find someone for the job? You’re saying Benny’s sole purpose in life was just to die and be the catalyst that keeps me here?”

Porter fumbled to recover the positivity he’d meant to inspire. “I just have faith that things are the way they’re meant to be.”

“Even if that version of God exists, that isn’t the kind of god I would want to follow.”

Porter looked hurt. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

She chastised herself. She’d resolved to go easier on him and here she was offending him. She tried to change the mood as they trudged on through the woods. “I didn’t know you were religious. But you studied biology?”

“Yeah?”

“I mean, I just assumed learning about evolution would bother you.”

“Oh, no way, I think evolution is evidence of intelligent design. Science doesn’t answer questions about the metaphysical. Biology is about the natural world, and God is supernatural.” After a quiet beat, Porter continued, “To believe that there’s nothing after this, it just makes everything we’re doing meaningless. I couldn’t live like that.”

“Don’t you think that gives us all the more reason to fight for what we have here on earth instead of spending all our time worrying about what comes after?”

“I think you can do a bit of both.”

“Maybe,” she conceded.

His earnestness chafed her. She didn’t begrudge him his beliefs, especially if they brought him peace. What an amazing gift, to have peace. But she couldn’t decide which scenario was more terrifying: nature that killed people indiscriminately, or a god that killed people intentionally.

After a fraught hour of off-trail exploration with the GPS, Porter and Audrey scrabbled across another rock formation and found themselves at the base of a new cliff face. A narrow passageway opened in the rock, but it looked almost geometric. It cut through the stone leaving a zigzagging hole of long rectangles and straight lines. Right angles don’t usually occur in nature. The rock must have been crystallized somehow, like a grain of salt viewed under a microscope. It was just wide enough for an adult to turn sideways and sidle through.

Audrey’s heart thumped against her rib cage at the familiarity of this crevice. “OK, I’m going in there.”

Porter whipped around to face her. “What? No! Why?”

“If I were a little kid, that’s exactly where I’d go.”

“No kid would crawl in there.”

Audrey’s face flushed. “Maybe you wouldn’t. Here, hold my pack, I’m taking the flashlight.”

Porter continued to protest as Audrey searched the pack. “What about the bats? Shouldn’t we be concerned about white-nose syndrome? The fungus is killing bat populations all over the country, ours are no exception, and studies show that cavers are bringing in the spores on their clothing and—”

“Porter! A little girl is missing!”

Porter shut his mouth and his eyes widened like one of his bug specimens.

She softened her tone. He was just as edgy as she was. “You don’t have to go in with me. I’m smaller anyway. Just stay out here. And I won’t go further than the length of this rope.” She pulled a cord from the pack and started knotting it to a carabiner, snapping it onto her belt. “You hang on to it, and when I feel it go taut, I’ll come back.” He looked worried. “I doubt I’ll get that far in. It looks pretty narrow.” She handed him the rope and strode to the crack before her nerves could win out.

Audrey clicked the flashlight on and peered into the cave. The beam of light didn’t find an end point—rather it continued until it faded into darkness. No excuse now not to enter. A cold gust of air rushed out at her from deep within, chilling her sweat-dampened skin.

As she turned and started to wriggle her way inside, her arms scraped against the clammy walls surrounding her. There was just enough room around her limbs for her to slide her way farther into the tunnel. A wet, mossy substance coated the rock and licked at her arms. It felt like the moist, pebbled flesh of a dog’s nose. She shuffled sideways, her head turned forward and following the light’s path along the ground. She realized that in this position it would be impossible to turn her head and she would have to walk out backward.

“Ivy!” she cried out. Her voice bounced along the glistening corridor.

Porter called from outside, “Did you see something?”

“No.”

Porter called again, his voice shaky. “Well, I found something out here. This tree is covered in claw marks.”

Audrey rolled her eyes at nothing in the dark. “Porter, you know there are black bears out here.”

Porter shot back, “I know what black bear scratches look like! These are something else!” He sounded terrified but indignant, which made her hair stand on end.

“All right, I’ll take a look when I’m back out.”

The ground sloped downward ahead of her, and she had to tread carefully to maintain her footing. The walls narrowed and she found it difficult to take a deep breath without being squeezed against the rock. There was nothing—she would have to go back.

As she shifted to go back in the other direction, her feet slid out from under her. She felt her weight crush her ankle and she yelped.

“What happened?” Porter cried out. “You OK?” His voice wavered, more high-pitched than usual.

“I rolled my ankle.” She tried to move, only to discover that she had slipped too far into the crack and her body was wedged tightly between the rocks. “Shit. Porter?” She tried to keep her breath even as she tugged against the crushing walls. “I’m stuck.”

Porter sounded almost hysterical. “What can I do?”

“Well, stop panicking or you’re going to make me panic.” Audrey tried to control her breathing and ignore the fact that she couldn’t fill her lungs all the way while compressed like this. She counted a few shallow breaths to calm down: in, out, in, out. “OK, just brace yourself against something, and start pulling me up from your end of the rope. If you can get it around a tree for leverage, even better. I’ll try to push my way out.”

She heard rustling and felt the rope tighten at her waist. She wished she had clipped onto a harness or something more substantial than her belt. She hadn’t bothered to raid the supplies for caving gear after Scott scolded her that morning. Using her good leg, Audrey started pushing toward the light of the entrance. She had dropped the flashlight and now it only illuminated a small patch near her injured ankle. Her head was still turned to the side, forcing her to look behind into the blackness.

It was hard to gain traction with her arms on the slime-coated walls. She could feel Porter tugging on the rope and she channeled her self-loathing into the task. She hoped Scott would lay into her again when she got back—she deserved it.

Something touched her foot and jerked back. It reacted to her; it was alive.

Audrey stopped, her eyes fixated on the patch of flashlight beam on the ground. Her breathing quickened. As her chest tried to expand and met resistance, the animal part of her brain activated her fight-or-flight response. She trembled and took gasping sips of air.

“Porter, get me out of here right now!”

She pushed against the ground, adrenaline pulsing through her limbs, and tried to inch upward. She knew her rapid breathing wasn’t helping, and if she could just exhale enough air to empty her lungs and shrink her chest, she could loosen the cave’s grip and scramble out.

Audrey froze as something grabbed her injured foot. It felt like some kind of prehensile paw, impossibly long and wrapping around her ankle, chitinous skin with coarse bristled hair like an elephant’s. The thing was just out of view of the flashlight’s gleam. Something sharp and talon-like scraped against her calf.

She let out something between a moan and an exasperated scream, as she realized it was trying to pull her farther in. Her ankle throbbing, Audrey kicked hard with her good leg, caught in a gruesome tug-of-war between Porter and whatever lurked in the cave’s depths. She felt a pop in her foot and snarled, fear, anger, and pain all frothing in her veins and forcing their way out of her mouth in a screech. From deep within the cave, angry clicking sounds echoed louder and louder.

Her breathlessness gave her enough room to start sliding out. Her hands found purchase on the rock walls, and with Porter pulling from the other end, her ankle wrenched away from the grasping thing. Audrey slithered to the entrance, tearing out fistfuls of slimy moss along the way.

She emerged into the dusky light of the woods and fell to her knees. Porter dropped down beside her, sweaty tangles of blond hair framing his pale face. “Oh my God, are you OK?”

Audrey gasped a few ragged breaths, then beat her palms against the ground, screaming. Porter recoiled in shock. The insects that had been whining all around them seemed to hush in the wake of her outcry.

She looked up at him, and she would have been touched by his obvious concern, were she not choking on panic and bile. “There’s something in there.”

“What? Was it Ivy?”

“No.” She panted through tears. “Help me splint my ankle. We have to go back, now.”

Porter yanked the medical kit from the pack and fumbled around for the splint rod while Audrey tried to focus on anything other than the scratch marks above her swelling foot. She was going to have to limp back to the Visitor Center, and every instinct told her to make a run for it.

Porter looped the compression bandages around her foot while Audrey stared at a tree near the opening in the rock. There were Porter’s black bear scratches. But the bark hadn’t been whittled and peeled back, like it would have been from a young bear scraping its claws along the trunk. These were deep gouges, like two kitchen knives had been plunged an inch deep into the wood and dragged down the length of the tree.

A sonorous purring issued from the opening in the rock, deep and far away in the depths of the mountain.

It took them almost two hours to get from the cave to the Fossil Flats Trail, then all the way to the Visitor Center, on her injured leg. When she told Porter about what she’d felt down there, he didn’t question her, and for that she was grateful. She knew she probably would have responded with skepticism if it had been him in the cave rather than her.

She slung her arm around his shoulder, he held her up by the waist, and they hurried through the darkening backcountry like participants in a life-and-death three-legged race. By the time they made it back, the sky had long since blackened.

It occurred to her as they hobbled along the rocks that the sounds coming from inside the cave were the same as those she and Porter had heard the day they cleared the tree. She hadn’t dared look over her shoulder for fear of what clawed thing might be following her home, but it seemed to have stayed put inside the cave.

At the Visitor Center, she was able to assess her ankle, and luckily it was nothing more than a light sprain. The scratches burned, but they were clean. Whatever it was had been sharp. After raiding the first aid supply for a compression bandage, Audrey readied herself to face Scott.

Now she sat with Porter amid the chaos of Scott Rollins’s office. The day, spent consoling Ivy’s parents, working with local law enforcement, and calculating a new search radius, had taken its toll on Scott. The lines in his face were more pronounced, his eyes sagging as he stared across his desk, trying to compose himself.

“After what happened yesterday, I can’t believe you’d attempt another cave, especially without the right gear. What were you thinking?”

Audrey set her jaw. “We were losing the light; it was a last-ditch effort. I was trying to think like a six-year-old.”

“You got that part right. Because no adult in their right mind would’ve done what you just did,” he growled, “and now you’re injured. Do you know how long it’s gonna take that sprain to heal?”

Audrey flinched. “I’ll still be able to go search on horseback.”

“No, you damn well won’t. I’m not going to get an OSHA violation because of your stupidity.”

Porter stepped in. “I don’t think that’s fair, sir, she was just trying whatever she could…”

He trailed off under Scott’s burning gaze. “I think you can step out, Silas. You’re going to need some rest before tomorrow.”

Blood flushing his cheeks, Porter stood up and shot a worried glance at Audrey.

Scott added, “Shut the door behind you.”

Defeated, Porter stumbled out of the room.

Audrey didn’t retreat from Scott’s glare. They looked each other in the eyes wordlessly for a moment. Scott continued, his voice more composed: “I need you to take a few days off. Clear your head and come back fresh.”

“I can’t just sit around—”

“I don’t care what you do, but you’re not doing it on the trails. Take the next few days off, then you’ll post up at the Visitor Center on Friday. Between SAR teams and volunteers, we’ve got hundreds of people out there. I can spare you.”

Audrey exhaled a sharp puff of breath through her nose before resigning herself to Scott’s stubbornness. She’d already pushed it today. So she couldn’t join the official search—but he couldn’t control what she did in her free time. She changed the subject. “How are Ivy’s parents doing?” She hadn’t seen them since she had shown them the barrette.

Scott’s shoulders twitched, the weight of everything settling. “Hysterical, but worn out. We set them up in Cabin 15 so they’re farther from the other park visitors.”

He looked so tired. Audrey was saddened to notice the worry lines carved deep into his face. She was reminded of her mother—she resisted looking closely at anyone after Benny disappeared, as though she could keep them the same age if only she could ignore the passage of time.

Audrey felt guilty for worrying him. Once the Summers family stopped blaming themselves, they had probably deflected that fear and anger onto Scott. It’s always easy to blame the park: the trails aren’t well marked, your map is confusing, the paths are treacherous, I’m going to sue, there are feral animals out there, etc. People forget that Devil’s Den is wild. As if there were such a thing as “tamed” wilderness.

Audrey had no real love for Devil’s Den. She knew it as well as anyone could, as a deep rocky valley filled with tangled thickets and subterranean chambers. The park spanned thousands of acres—the maintained trails were only a tiny sliver of the whole. To believe that anyone could keep it truly safe was absurd. Beautiful, yes, but always dangerous.

As strange as her story sounded, she had to tell him. “Scott, there was something in the cave.”

His eyebrows furrowed. “What do you mean, something?”

Resisting the urge to speculate, Audrey laid out the facts: “We found claw marks in the trees, longer and deeper than a black bear’s. In the cave, something grabbed my foot. Not a bear. Not a fox. I didn’t get a good look at it.”

Scott seemed to stop breathing for a moment, his pupils dilating like a startled cat’s. A long silence settled between them. Audrey’s skin felt tight and warm—this wasn’t news to him.

Finally, he croaked, “You know as well as I do that there are inexplicable things in the woods.” He wasn’t meeting her eyes anymore.

“What does that mean? You’ve seen something?”

“I’ve seen lots of things, many of which I don’t care to remember.”

“But you know what I’m talking about?”

His eyes flicked back to hers and her heart jumped. “I’ve seen animals eviscerated. I’ve found skulls miles from anywhere they should be, hidden in impossible places. I’ve seen bloated bodies that have floated up from the bottom of the river. We don’t treat this differently than any other search. The park has always been dangerous, it will continue to be dangerous,” he said, punctuating this sentence with a fist against the desk, “and we will search for Ivy Summers with the same urgency we always have.”

Audrey couldn’t tear her eyes from his. The flicker of panic in them reflected the same terror she’d felt in that cave.

2019

Ivy Missing 4 Days

The Milky Way was visible through the breaks in the leaf cover when Audrey finally made it back to her cabin. Each one of her trillions of nerves felt like a piano wire that had been sawed at with a dull knife. Even in the stifling humidity that lingered after dark, she found herself shivering as she limped through the door.

It’s not that she was naive enough to think she knew all of Devil’s Den’s secrets, but whatever had touched her in that cave challenged her notions of what she considered rational. The thin tether that kept her tied to this place threatened to snap under the weight of the unknowable. It was why she’d spent fifteen years learning everything she could about survival, wildlife, ecology, resource management—these were familiar, accepted truths. She could catalog the animals that lived in the Ozarks. This thing defied categorization, and nothing sent her spinning like a lack of control.

Most nerve-wracking of all, it had been four full days now and still no one had found Ivy. Audrey tried to convince herself that Scott wouldn’t keep secrets about hidden dangers in the park, but that nagging whisper kept sparking up her neurons: What if?

The police took over incident command at night, sending out canine teams. Searching the wilderness in the dark was dangerous, but marginally less so with the help of a dog’s nose and instincts.

Audrey clicked on one of her lamps. She preferred the soft glow of halogen bulbs to any overhead lighting. The semidarkness of her lamplit cabin brought some sense of calm—this was her space, things were at least in order here.

She heard the hawk squeaking plaintively outside. It hadn’t eaten since the previous evening. Hawks often went several days without food, and this one wasn’t expending much energy, but Audrey still heard the running stream of self-deprecation in her head for not finding a way to take care of this earlier.

She pulled out a pack of duck breasts Scott had gifted her after the last hunting season and heated water to thaw them, then steeled herself for a phone call with Corbin. He picked up on the first ring, like he was waiting for her.

“Did you find her?”

“No.”

Audrey heard his breathing over the otherwise quiet static of the landline. She wanted to tell him about her experience in the cave, but she didn’t know where to begin. “Listen, something happened today…” She trailed off.

Corbin picked it up. “Well, what happened?”

She cleared her throat. She knew Corbin would be skeptical, and it would be easier to just talk to him about it in person. “I’d like to take the horses out on a search tomorrow. Just me and you, like we used to.”

“Can you take the day off like that right now?”

“Have to. I twisted my ankle and Scott’s insisting on it.”

“How—”

“I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.” She cut him off with a little more force than she’d meant to. She could almost hear his facial expression.

He changed the subject. “I finished the aviary. It’s ready for the hawk whenever you are.”

Audrey’s shoulders relaxed, at least some of her tension dispersing with this news. One less life to worry about. “That’s good, it needs the space. That was quick.”

Corbin continued, “I needed to do something with my hands between volunteer search shifts.”

“Can I bring the hawk over in the morning? Before we search?” He hadn’t technically agreed, but she knew he would.

“All right. I’ll see you then.”

Audrey hobbled to the kennel with the slimy lump of duck breast for the hawk. After a few minutes listening to the sound of a sharp beak ripping through shredded pieces of raw meat, Audrey limped back inside and sat on the couch. Taking the hawk to Corbin’s house tomorrow would be hard. She hadn’t realized how much she had come to crave the responsibility of caring for something.

She pulled out Benny’s Game Boy, which she had retrieved from her mother’s hoard, hoping it might distract her. She ran her hand over the embossed Legend of Zelda symbol on the game case. She unzipped the case and lifted the console to her nose, anticipating that it hadn’t been opened since the last time Benny played. She hoped to catch a trace of his scent lingering inside.

Whether it was only her desperation or a true time capsule of trapped air, she swore she smelled that boyish perfume of electronics and grass clippings and dusty comic books. With a shuddering sigh, Audrey lifted the Game Boy to check if the batteries had corroded. A folded piece of paper was tucked in the pocket with Benny’s assorted game cartridges. His messy handwriting peeked out from the elastic.

Her breath caught in her throat. She had found something valuable, a primary document from the archives of their family history. After his loss, anything Benny created became his only progeny. This is why her mother couldn’t let anything go. He existed only in the things he’d left behind. Audrey’s hands shook as she lifted the note, unfolded it, and read:

Level 3—kill the blobs for tons of rupees.

Infinite health—01185ADB

Infinite bombs—01304DDB

It continued in the same way for several lines. Her first reaction was disappointment; it was only cheat codes, not some secret message from the past or a personal letter addressed to her. But then it occurred to her that for Benny, this note was priceless.

The tears that she had been holding in for days erupted from her. Not the kind of composed crying you try to maintain in public, single tears rolling down an unmoving face. This was the full-throated, wailing cry of someone who can never be whole. Her eyes wrenched in pain, and she clutched the Game Boy to her chest. This was why she kept her cabin free of Benny’s things.

Her howls joined the forest sounds, animal and unrestrained. She briefly wondered if the clamoring bugs outside thought she was singing with them.

Audrey, finally spent of emotion, lay on her side alone in the soft lamplight.

After staring at the wall for a few minutes recovering, she clicked open the Game Boy’s battery compartment. Four AAs, only a bit of bluish corrosion crusted around the edges. She pushed herself up and went over to the kitchen cabinets for a glass of whiskey and some baking soda and vinegar to wipe down the electrical contacts.

Luckily, she kept plenty of batteries for flashlights. She reloaded the AAs and started up The Legend of Zelda. By some miracle, the cartridge’s internal components weren’t fried: Benny’s save file was still there. She clicked on his name and there was his character, waiting for someone to pick up where he had left off.

Her heart somersaulted. Whiskey burned in her belly. She had the bizarre feeling that this tiny warrior made of pixels was, somehow, her brother. And by playing the game, she would be inhabiting his body.

The thought of all the gaming upgrades he’d missed in the past fifteen years suddenly agonized her. All he knew were 8-bit squares arranging themselves into vague shapes, his imagination having to fill in the blanks of the spaces in between. He didn’t get to see the end of his favorite show, or see his favorite band in concert, or experience virtual reality, or lose his virginity.

She knew how unproductive it was to go down that rabbit hole, thinking about how things were “unfair.” She’d spent the last of her teenage years lamenting unfairness. Life was unfair—but “tough titties,” as Benny would have told her. And yet, he would be thirteen years old, locked in 2004, forever. That was unfair.

The whiskey was loosening the tension in her muscles, as well as the veil that kept her rational mind from entertaining these kinds of delusions. She pressed her thumb against the cross-shaped pad on the controller and the avatar shuffled around the screen, holding a shield and sword aloft. Through the haze she vaguely remembered Benny trying to explain the mechanics of this game to her, and she had brushed him off. She wished he were here right now explaining it to her.

A boxy shape that looked like an owl flapped down and a text box appeared:

Hoot! The monster’s power is real!

The character entered a dungeon. She swung the tiny sword at something that looked like a blinking skull. Her neck struggled to support her liquor-heavy head. Navigating the dungeon blindly, trying to stay alive, she slipped into sleep.

A chorus of screaming cicadas roused Audrey from sleep. Still slightly drunk, she tried to make sense of her surroundings. Her head throbbed before anything else registered. Nausea bubbled hot against her esophagus and she pushed herself onto her knees.

The digital clock read 3:15 a.m.

Deep breaths. The sound of chirping insects pounded in time with Audrey’s throbbing skull, the noise of them scraping their rubbery wings together pressing against the walls on all sides. She’d never heard them so loud before. Then she registered the guttural croak running underneath it all. That wet clicking sound, like raindrops snapping against tarp.

Audrey rose to her feet and hobbled into the living room to grab her park-issued handgun from its locked case. She double-checked to make sure it was loaded before she wrenched the door open and faced the night air.

She stood silhouetted in the lamplight emanating from the cabin’s front door, a woman in nothing but an oversized T-shirt with a gun pointed into the sky, and waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness of the surrounding woods. The roar of cicadas seemed to ebb and flow like a heartbeat.

She limped around the side of the cabin to check on the hawk. It was trying to press itself flat against the back of the kennel, mouth open with panting breaths, its eyes dilated and enormous. It stared at the tree line, and a low growl emanated from its heaving chest.

A wavering voice bubbled to the surface of the night’s noise.

“Mommy!”

A little girl’s voice, followed by a stifled sob.

Adrenaline flooded Audrey’s system. She yelled into the woods, “Ivy?”

“Mommy!” Then the crying. “Mommy!”

Audrey stumbled toward the sound, calling Ivy’s name, almost hysterical. The voice had to be Ivy, but something about its cadence sent fear rippling through her.

“Mommy!” The choking sob followed.

An icy realization crystallized in her fogged mind. The voice and the cry sounded identical each time, like someone was playing the same recording of Ivy over and over. Her mind was half asleep but her body trembled with anxiety. She tripped over her ankle at the edge of the trees and fell to the ground, accidentally firing the gun into the dark.

A distant, shadowy shape seemed to shoot out of the ground. Fear writhed like tentacles in Audrey’s already roiling stomach. This was no child. Whatever lurked in the distance was huge. The gunshot must have startled it. She heard the crack of branches as it disappeared, the sound leaving with it.

She pushed herself up from the ground, her breathing ragged. There was no way she was going to chase after it in the dark. For a while she stood still, trying to calm the nausea from whiskey and panic.

She waited for a long time as the chirping insect sounds receded and the night resumed its usual rhythms. She didn’t want to move, as if doing so would confirm that her feet were planted in reality rather than some alcohol-induced nightmare. Something was out there. Something that could mimic the sounds of a lost child.

2005

Benny Missing 7 Months

Audrey dug through the straw for any overlooked eggs while Corbin raked out the clumped mess from the bottom of the chicken run. Every morning before school she would help Corbin with his farm chores. Most nights his Mamaw just let her sleep over on the chesterfield in the living room, under a knit blanket. Anything to escape the torture of Joanne’s emotional miasma. If she went home at all, it was to change clothes or collapse in the bit of space in her “room” that wasn’t slowly being taken over by her mother’s things. She’d have been surprised if Joanne even noticed.

It amused Corbin how eager Audrey was for him to pick her up in the Datsun to do farmwork. He joked that the truck’s bad shocks had jostled the city out of her. She didn’t know how to explain that the methodical, physical work of cleaning chicken shit was the only thing stopping the what-ifs from eating her guts out.

They walked to the front of the house with the basket full of eggs and a voice rose from the herb garden beneath the kitchen window. “Don’t run those under the water this time, they’ll get spoilt. Just wipe ’em down and get ’em in the storage shed.”

Mamaw knelt in the dirt, pulling up handfuls of white flowers. Audrey set her load down and crouched beside her. “Do you need some help?”

Mamaw handed the little bouquet to her. “Pull me up, honey, my knees aren’t cooperating.” Corbin and Audrey each took an arm and lifted her to her feet as she winced.

“You OK?”

“Finer than frog’s hair. Let me fix you something to eat before you head out.”

Audrey peered at the tiny flowers she was holding. She had noticed dried bunches of these flowers hanging upside down around the doorframes to the house. As they went inside, Audrey asked Mamaw what they were for.

“Keep out the haints,” Mamaw replied.

Corbin rolled his eyes and walked past the two of them and into the house.

“What’s a haint?” Audrey asked.

“A bad spirit.”

Corbin called from inside, “Don’t want any ghosts now, do we?”

Mamaw ignored his sarcasm. “If I’ve learned anything by gettin’ old, it’s that there’s more that I don’t know than I do, and I’m not going to fool with what I don’t.”

Audrey followed Mamaw into the kitchen, where porcelain angels from the Precious Moments collection stared from every corner, their doleful teardrop-shaped eyes fixed on you wherever you went. It seemed strange that a Southern Christian woman would be so superstitious.

Mamaw lit a burner under a pan on the stove and pulled meat wrapped in butcher paper from the fridge. Audrey sat at the table with the basket of eggs and started wiping them clean. She ventured, “Do you believe in ghosts?”

Corbin came back into the room and sat next to her. “Don’t start.”

Mamaw took a few fresh eggs from the basket. “I believe in being open to things,” she said. “Paps and I used to hear voices calling from the trees around the house.”

The thought of Benny’s voice calling for help in the woods made Audrey’s heart stutter. “Voices?”

“Sounded like crying, mostly. Sometimes voices calling for help. But it never sounded right—muffled almost, like it was coming out of an old speaker. Paps tried to check it out at first, but the way our animals would react… well, the horses were so spooked they wouldn’t set foot over the tree line when the haints were calling.” She cracked an egg into the pan and it sizzled in bacon fat. “Paps would radio in to see if there were folks missing, but there never were. Something just wanted him walking in those woods. Didn’t stop until we strung up the bottle tree.”

Audrey thought of the redbud tree in the side yard, blue glass bottles of varying shapes and sizes stuck to the ends of the thin branches and plinking together like wind chimes whenever a light breeze blew. “That’s what that’s for?”

Corbin rolled his eyes. “An animal made some noises.”

Mamaw set down their plates with fresh fried eggs and bacon. She tweaked Corbin’s ear before taking the basket of eggs from Audrey. “What’ve I told you about that sass?”

He rubbed his ear. “Yes, ma’am.”

Audrey slurped most of an egg into her mouth to keep the creamy yolk from running out. What was her mother going to eat for breakfast without her there? The thought soured her stomach and she promised herself she’d take some eggs home to her after school. She put her fork down. “I think I’ve heard something like that. In the woods.”

Mamaw glanced over at Audrey, who stared at her plate, her heart thudding in her chest as she felt Corbin’s stare too. She was embarrassed to be vulnerable like this in front of him. She had brought up Benny’s voice to the officers and paramedics the morning she’d fainted during the initial search, but they’d all dismissed it as a hallucination caused by exhaustion and dehydration. Corbin had shared their opinion when she confided it to him later.

Mamaw never made her feel stupid. “What did you hear?”

Audrey didn’t look up. It was hard to even say Benny’s name without her face burning. The food on her plate started to look less appetizing and more clinical as she thought about death, just animal fat and ovum. “Benny. He was crying and calling my name—”

Corbin interrupted to add his own commentary. “She was running around the search area alone and hadn’t eaten or slept in days.”

This provoked Audrey’s ire. “You weren’t there. You don’t think I know my brother’s voice?”

“I think when you’re that tired your mind plays tricks. Foxes can sound like people crying.”

Mamaw put her hand on his forearm and squeezed. “Don’t be rude, Corbin. I know I taught you better than that.”

His face grew red. “Do you think talking about ghosts is healthy? She’s going through enough—”

“Don’t talk about me like I’m not right here,” Audrey scoffed.

“She’s right.”

Feeling ganged up on, Corbin shot up from the table and went out front, slamming the screen door behind him.

“Don’t take it personally, honey,” Mamaw said to Audrey. “He’s had his own fears in those woods, whether he wants to admit it or not.”

Audrey considered this for a moment. “Do you think he’s right, though? That it’s probably just an animal?”

“I think it’s always best to rely on your instincts, and if your gut tells you something’s wrong, then it’s best to trust it.”

The screen door whined open and Lottie Cline came in without knocking. Mamaw’s best friend came over just about every day since Paps died. Lottie was a stout woman—not fleshy, but fit from a lifetime spent outdoors. Her short gray hair circled her face with wild curls. “That boy’s out there moping in his truck.” She winked at Audrey. “Think it’s time you’d better head on to school now.”

The truck growled across the narrow highway toward West Fork High School. Neither Audrey nor Corbin had spoken a word since she’d climbed into the passenger seat ten minutes earlier. His jaw worked like he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the way in.

Audrey offered, “So do you want to tell me about your spooky encounter in the woods?”

“What?”

“Mamaw said you’d had your own experience. Let’s hear it.”

“Oh, come on.”

“I think you owe me after that scene.”

She had him there. It was clear he felt bad about his outburst. After a brief internal struggle, he relented.

“You know I moved in with Mamaw and Paps when I was just a little kid? Paps built me a tree house not too far from the edge of the woods. I don’t know, maybe it’s still rotting in there. I haven’t looked.

“I loved that tree house. It was really well built, not the mass-produced kind you can go buy at one of those home-improvement stores. Paps really made sure it would last, you know? He used red cedar—I remember that because it smelled like smoky mothballs or something, and it was a big expense for him at the time.

“Anyway, I practically lived in that thing for a while. One night I begged him to let me sleep in there. I think I was, like, seven? He went up with me to tuck me in, read me some stories, and at some point I guess I fell asleep and he went back up to the house, didn’t leave me a lantern or anything.

“I woke up in the middle of the night, pitch-black. It had a solid roof so I couldn’t see the stars or anything. But I woke up because there was a tapping sound against the wall. At first, I thought maybe a tree branch was rubbing against the side. It wasn’t that much of a stretch. I was about fifteen feet up in the branches, after all.

“So I started falling asleep again, but then all of a sudden it sounded like there were more, I don’t know, things? Scratching. I started hyperventilating, just breathing really heavy. I was sure someone was out there. I didn’t know how they could be reaching up that high, but they were jabbing things like knives against the top and then sliding them down—the sound was like nails on a chalkboard. I couldn’t see anything and there was no way I was going to stick my head out the front. Then it suddenly stopped. I can’t explain it but I think whatever was out there heard me panting.

“Then I heard this loud, huge clicking, almost like purring. Suddenly it sounded like all of the cicadas in the forest just started screeching at once. It was so loud I slammed my hands against my ears and started crying but I couldn’t get away from it. And the knives weren’t just in one place anymore, they were all around, on every surface of the tree house, scratching like a crazed animal trying desperately to get in. I thought they were going to rip through the cedar. Paps found me the next morning huddled in the corner, barely able to move.”

Audrey sat in the silence. Corbin had been gripping the wheel, and she noticed his hands shaking as he recalled this long-buried memory of being a child sitting alone like a juicy snack inside of a clamshell while something tried to pry it open.

“Anyway. They swore I just had a nightmare. I never went into that section of the woods again. Paps was upset, of course—he had worked so hard on the tree house—but after that, if he would even suggest I go out there again, I’d start crying and he would eventually give up. At one point he went out there himself, to take a look at it, see if maybe he could salvage the cedar. There were these deep gouges, scratch marks all over.” He paused. “I mean, who knows what’s really out there?”

2019

Ivy Missing 5 Days

Audrey struggled to pull the fifty-pound dog crate out of the back seat of her beater. The hawk screeched and flapped its wings, sliding back and forth, distributing the weight of the crate unevenly as Audrey tried to carry it around the side of Corbin’s house. Her wrapped ankle throbbed.

Corbin’s screen door slammed and he hurried over to help. “You should have called and told me you were here.”

“I’m ready to get it out of this thing.” She gulped down another wave of nausea, still hungover from the night before.

Corbin’s property sat on ten acres off Highway 71. Four of the acres were cleared for grazing, while the six surrounding it remained shrouded in the familiar hardwood maze of oak and hickory. The structures consisted of a small horse barn, a long chicken coop that housed around fifty laying hens, give or take, and the small two-bedroom farmhouse that had once belonged to Mamaw and Paps.

The chickens were beautiful Rhode Island Reds, prolific egg-layers with soft, rust-colored plumage. Corbin called them “the girls” and Audrey figured they must have been the most pampered poultry in the Mid-South. Four remained of Mamaw’s original dozen, including one obnoxious rooster named Chanticleer. He and the three hens—Ruby, Princess, and Ladybird—were the only birds with names, which Mamaw had insisted on. Her other hens had died, one by one, whether of age or as victims of a raccoon in the coop, and each loss was a fresh hell for Corbin. When the new ones eventually went, there would be less of an attachment.

Audrey knew he was happy to build this new aviary for the hawk. He got along better with animals than people. His horses could pick up his scent on the wind and would come running to him from the other side of the paddock.

A large enclosure made from fresh lumber hugged the perimeter of the house in an L shape. It stood thirty feet long to accommodate the hawk’s two-foot wingspan. Audrey set down the crate and stood next to Corbin, admiring his handiwork.

“You said wire wouldn’t be good enough to hold it, so I worked with wood and wood only,” Corbin said.

Audrey slapped a check into his open palm. “And I said I would help.”

He tried to push it back. “Don’t worry about it. Knowing you, I figure this won’t be the last time we need it.”

She folded her arms and refused to take back the check. “What else do I have to spend my paycheck on?”

“A car that’s not so shitty?”

“Let’s just say we’re going into the raptor rehab business together.”

Corbin pocketed the check without looking at it and they pulled open the first safety door to the enclosure, shut it, then went through the second, into the open space of the aviary. Audrey looked around in awe. The chain-link ceiling twelve feet above them allowed plenty of light through and offered a honeycombed view of the blue sky, while the slatted wood siding kept the bird secure and provided glimpses of the property. PVC pipes wrapped in Astroturf were arranged as perches throughout for the hawk to practice flying.

Audrey turned to Corbin. “Thank you.”

Corbin smiled despite himself. “Should we let it out of the crate?”

Audrey pulled on her elbow-length leather gloves to protect herself in case the hawk lashed out in fear. The hawk spread its wings as much as it could in the confined space, in an effort to appear larger and threatening. With its leg splinted and its beak yawning open, squeaking sounds of distress, it probably didn’t have the intended effect.

Audrey knelt down in front of the crate and reached in to rewrap the bird’s foot before she let it out. As quickly as she could, Audrey unwound the bandages while the bird shrieked and pecked at the thick gloves and scrabbled against the plastic floor of the crate, trying to get away. Audrey muttered, “You’re OK, you’re OK, shh, shh, it’s OK.” She removed the padding, leaving only the splint and a fresh wrap to make it easier for the hawk to perch while it healed.

Audrey shut the crate and looked over her shoulder at Corbin. “You’re going to want to back up, just in case.” She repositioned the crate so the door faced the length of the aviary. While she and Corbin stood behind it, out of view, she leaned over and unlatched the door.

The hawk waddled out of the crate, one foot in front of the other, favoring its injured leg, looking like a disoriented toddler. Recognizing the relative freedom of the aviary, the hawk took its first flight in a week, barely reaching one of the lowest perches.

It stood as tall as it could, head swiveling with serpentine movements to take in the new surroundings. Its speckled, chocolate-colored feathers lifted, then fluttered as the hawk shook them out, tufts of down wafting to the ground.

Corbin and Audrey backed away slowly, carrying the crate with them, then shut both doors as they left the hawk to get comfortable in peace.

Audrey allowed herself a brief moment of relief before Corbin interrupted her thoughts. “Now, tell me about what happened to that ankle.”

“I’m going to need coffee first.”

“Well, you know I don’t own a coffeepot, so you’re going to have to drink it my way.”

Audrey rolled her eyes and followed him inside. Despite his scruffy exterior, Corbin’s house had all the charm of a country antique store. He had never redecorated after Mamaw went, out of respect or grief, Audrey wasn’t sure. Kitschy porcelain knickknacks littered every surface. Dried bunches of yarrow and dill still hung from the doorframes.

Corbin drank his coffee cowboy style, the way Paps had taught him on the trail. He heated a kettle while Audrey sat at the kitchen table and thought about how to explain the events of the day before without hyperbole or emotion. Not that she was prone to exaggeration, but she knew that, like Scott, Corbin appreciated practicality.

He poured boiling water over the coffee grounds, stirred, then passed her a mug. Flakes of black coffee grounds swirled in the lightly milky brew. She drank without complaining. There were more important things to address than Corbin’s culinary sins.

“I met with Lottie the other day. She suggested we should be looking in the caves—”

“I didn’t think anyone could get inside anymore?”

“Someone Ivy’s size might be able to. And you know how the caves farther from the trails aren’t even barred. Anyway, Porter and I investigated one within the search radius. Scott didn’t want me to, so I didn’t have the right equipment and I got stuck.”

Corbin sighed into his coffee mug with a wet sputtering.

She continued. “I know. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you. When I was wedged in that cave, something grabbed my ankle. It felt like it was trying to pull me farther in. I don’t know what it could have been…”

“An animal?”

“Well, obviously, but you think I don’t know the wildlife around here? Nothing that big lives in the caves. It was covered with coarse hair and had long claws that just about curled around—”

“Did you see it?”

“No, but—”

“Then how do you know it wasn’t a cougar or something?”

“Way bigger.”

He shook his head. “You were tired, you were injured, you were scared. There’s a dozen reasons you might have tricked yourself into thinking it was something that it wasn’t. You have to eliminate all of the possibilities before you jump to conclusions.”

“Have you known me to be someone that jumps to conclusions?”

“No. But emotions were running high.”

She clamped her jaw tight, the grit from wayward coffee grounds crunching between her teeth. Porter had believed her without question. But she didn’t want to argue; she wanted nothing more than to crawl back into bed for several days to sleep off this nightmare. “I know what I felt, Corbin.”

A light flush colored the skin beneath his beard. Audrey could predict his exact reaction to what she had to tell him next, and she dreaded it.

“And then last night”—she cleared her throat—“there was something in the woods.”

“What do you mean?”

“The hawk heard something and it woke me up. I went outside to check it out and… and I heard—”

She choked on the last word and took another sip of her coffee while Corbin stared at her with concern. “Heard what?”

“I heard a voice. Like a little girl’s voice.”

“Like Ivy Summers?”

“But not Ivy.”

Corbin’s jaw worked as he searched for the words. “Like when you heard Benny?”

Audrey’s heart flipped. “Yes.”

“Audrey, you know you couldn’t have really heard—”

“You weren’t there. I heard him then, and I hear her now.”

“Don’t start letting your imagination run away with you again.”

“What do you mean, again? What about that time we heard my voice coming out of the ground?”

“Oh, come on, you and I both know that was an echo. Besides, we were drunk.”

“I wasn’t drunk. Don’t try to rewrite history just because the facts don’t suit your narrative.”

“Audrey.” He reached a hand out toward hers.

As soon as their skin made contact, she flinched and jerked hers away. “Don’t patronize me.”

He frowned. “I didn’t even say anything.”

“Yeah, but I know what you’re thinking.”

They finished the coffee without another word. Corbin pushed up from the table, the old wooden chair’s legs groaning against the linoleum. “We should get the horses loaded if we’re going to get in that search before the worst of the heat.”

They hooked up the trailer to Corbin’s truck and started loading. Neither said much during the methodical process of tacking the horses. Audrey cinched the creaking, worn leather on Flicka’s saddle—the Appaloosa mare might as well have been her horse, considering how often she rode her with Corbin. On her days off, she couldn’t take Cisco or Whiskey since they were technically park property. Corbin finished saddling his buckskin, Gambler, and led him into the trailer.

It was only a twenty-minute drive over to the area she had mapped for that day’s search. They had mastered a similar routine over the years: Audrey planning the route and packing provisions, Corbin providing the horses and transportation. Brown fields streaked by in her peripheral vision while she unfolded the topographic map in the passenger seat. The rippling threads unspooling out from smaller points told her where to expect changes in elevation. A creek ran through the middle of the grid.

“The most likely path would be to follow this stream here. It’s an offshoot of the White River, so Ivy could have followed the water down and made it this far. It’s farther out than Scott mapped, but we might as well look outside the grid boxes at this point.”

Corbin nodded behind the wheel.

She continued. “There are a few caves marked nearby—we should try to see how far we can get ourselves in. I’ve got the flashlights and plenty of batteries.”

“Could a kid really walk that far?”

The unspoken truth hovered between them. It was unlikely Ivy would be found now, let alone found alive. From the point where she went missing, she could have wandered in any direction, spiraling outward in a dizzying abundance of possibilities. Certainly, she wouldn’t have walked in a straight line.

The incident commander on any SAR mission chooses a search radius based on a variety of factors that make up the calculus of probability. An inexact science. Scott Rollins had his team search in the most logical places, but with the discovery of the barrette, it seemed Ivy’s path defied logic altogether.

They stopped at the GPS coordinates Audrey had calculated, not a place that often saw visitors. There were no campgrounds, no marked trails, only a vast swath of untouched woodland. Corbin pulled the truck onto the shoulder, just at the edge of the tree line. They were far enough off the road to avoid any traffic, but theft wasn’t much of a concern—it was the middle of nowhere.

The horses didn’t need much coaxing to back out of the trailer. They shook their heads, free from the confined space for a moment, before Audrey and Corbin slipped their bridles on.

Corbin pulled himself up on Gambler. “You ready?”

Audrey collected herself: food, map, compass, GPS, phone. The moment before starting a search opened her heart to a feeling that rarely crept in anymore: hope. It chewed its way up her spinal column, bone by bone. She shook her head, like Flicka had done, to clear the thought. Hope was a dangerous thing.

“Ready.”

They plodded along the tree line, looking for a good entry point. Audrey checked the GPS to ensure they didn’t stray too far from the water source, until they found an area the horses could navigate. The trees weren’t as thick here and the ground cover wouldn’t trip them.

The sun was high now, but the farther they moved from the edge of the woods, the less light broke through the canopy. Everything grew leafy and dense in the humid Arkansas summer. The horses didn’t mind the backcountry, and as they walked side by side into the untamed wilderness, Audrey and Corbin scanned the ground for anything that might be out of place. A piece of trash, a sharp right angle, a bright color that wouldn’t naturally occur.

Corbin broke the silence. “How far to the creek?”

“Just a little ways ahead, then we should be in a more open area.”

Corbin suddenly spit, peeling the sticky strands of a spiderweb out of his beard. “Dammit, I’m never gonna learn to watch out for those things. When’s that kid’s next guided hike? Forget wilderness preparedness, I need to learn spider preparedness.”

Audrey smiled despite the morning’s tension.

They settled back into the relative quiet. Warblers chittered in the branches, squirrels and other small animals rustled in the leaves. A red-tailed hawk cried overhead, giving Audrey the distinct impression that they were entering a ghost town in an old Western.

Audrey relaxed into the saddle, hyperfocused on the landscape surrounding them. Every sound amplified. She kept her eyes to the ground, peering into the tangled weeds on the forest floor. Flicka’s and Gambler’s hooves occasionally sent small rocks skittering, and her eyes darted to them. Her muscles were spring-loaded, like those of a predator stalking prey.

She had been mastering this skill since Benny first disappeared. Amid that chaos, when everything felt beyond her control, this was a practical skill she could concentrate on learning. It was a solution to a problem—something was lost, this is how you found it. Of course, those first searches looked different: hundreds of volunteers carrying flag markers and flashlights, spread across a wide grid, going out in shifts.

When everyone else stopped looking, only Corbin remained by her side.

The trees thinned and they found themselves in a wildflower meadow, the creek just beyond. Rocky hills stretched up on either side. They led the horses to the water and started to follow the creek down through the valley. Flicka stopped to chew some flowers and Audrey tugged the reins to pull her back. Flicka puffed out her sides and exhaled with a deep, rumbling sigh. The gravity of the task at hand was lost on her.

Corbin interrupted Audrey’s focus. “So, what do we know about Ivy Summers?”

“Well, we know we started the search in the wrong direction. We also know that she’s a rough-and-tumble kind of kid, so, I mean, I’m not giving up yet.”

“And you heard her outside of your cabin last night.”

Audrey’s face flushed. “I heard a voice outside of my cabin last night, yes.”

He frowned. “Something that sounded like a little girl’s voice.”

Her knuckles whitened as she gripped Flicka’s reins tighter to keep from snapping at him. “Something that wanted me to think it was Ivy. Something imitating her. Or playing back a recording of her, I don’t know.”

“Audrey, I know that this little girl’s disappearance has been hard on you, but animals just don’t—”

She couldn’t help herself from spitting back. “Just keep your eye out for bodies and let me know if you see anything.”

“Goddammit, Audrey, don’t be so morbid.”

She burned in the saddle. The heat from the sun on her skin inflamed the shame running in the blood underneath. She let Flicka graze and pulled out the map and her GPS to make sure Corbin knew that this line of questioning had ended. They were about three miles into the grid, and the contour lines told her that there was a path leading to a cave up ahead to the right. “Let’s turn up here. She could have gone in this way to take shelter.”

Corbin didn’t respond but followed her into the woods. The trees curled above them in a domed arch. She might have admired the beauty of the scene if her thoughts weren’t lingering on the sound of faraway voices calling her name or calling for help. She didn’t notice until they came upon a small clearing that the birds had stopped chirping.

Flicka and Gambler stopped short of the grove. She squeezed Flicka’s flanks impatiently but the horse simply grunted and pawed nervously at the ground.

Corbin whispered next to her, muffled, “What the fuck.” It was as if the clearing itself was a sponge, absorbing all sound.

A stream of light shone on the clearing like the clouds had opened just to illuminate this place, and if you walked into it, you would be sucked into the sky like into a tractor beam in some sci-fi movie. Towers of rocks filled the space, carefully arranged into neat piles, each their own artistic formation. Cairns.

Who had built them out here? It seemed unlikely that people would hike this far into the forest, especially with no trails to follow. She wouldn’t have even known to look here if it weren’t for the topographic map, which most people don’t know how to read. The cave they sought would be just beyond the clearing.

Her eyes scanned the cairns, probably around twenty of them, some as tall as four feet, meticulously balanced, seeming to defy gravity. The absolute silence pressed against them, somehow louder than any insects ever would be in the unnatural stillness. An animal fear seized her. She found herself hunching down in the saddle, her breathing in sync with Flicka’s, and felt the horse’s desperate need to turn back.

Both horses began backing away slowly. She could only hear her own breathing and the sound of blood rushing in her ears. It pulsated in a deep, resonant rhythm against her skull, echoing endlessly like the roar of the ocean.

The ground beneath the cairns looked almost as white as snowfall. Ropy strings hung around the clearing as thick as fabric. She remembered Scott’s tendency toward paranoia whenever cairns were grouped together, and though she knew she should probably destroy them, she felt a stronger impulse to run.

They had backed far enough out that the forest noises seemed to return all of a sudden, like someone had shut off a vacuum cleaner. Flicka reared, whinnying, then turned and broke into a gallop, heading back the way they had come. Audrey didn’t bother trying to slow her down. Corbin was close behind on Gambler, the blood drained from his face and his teeth clenched together.

When they made it back to the truck, they loaded the horses into the trailer in silence.

Most cairns mark trails or graves or landmarks. These felt like something else.

2005

Benny Missing 9 Months

The foliage sprang back to life and thickened the tree canopy again. At West Fork High, black butcher paper, cut with tiny holes to let the fluorescent light shine through, darkened the ceilings in the school’s hallways. Cheery posters announced some vague theme: “A Starry Night to Remember.” Glittering paper stars were stuck to the walls.

Audrey felt like everyone had been assigned a role in a play but no one gave her the script. Boys asked girls to be their prom dates with all the pomp and circumstance of a wedding proposal, cheers erupting from all sides with each “Yes.” She remembered having crushes back in Chicago, but now the whole thing seemed pointless.

She saw her classmates’ lives unfolding before them, planned out at seventeen: graduate, marry your high school sweetheart, have his babies while he works at his dad’s hardware business. The world kept turning. Life for them was all birthday parties and Easter egg hunts. It wasn’t that Audrey judged them—if anything she felt like a shopper on the other side of the window display looking in, longing to buy something she couldn’t afford.

Maybe she’d fantasized about prom once. Like snapshots from someone else’s life, she remembered playing dress-up, going to the mall with friends, caring about how she looked. She hadn’t received new clothes in almost a year now—it hadn’t occurred to her to ask. She scavenged around the house, sometimes wearing one of her dad’s old jackets, sometimes sneaking one of Benny’s T-shirts past her mother.

She had no friends she could talk about these things with. Corbin felt like her right arm. They didn’t have to say anything, they just understood each other. They didn’t talk about relationships. Corbin sometimes had dates on the weekends, and every now and again he’d have a girlfriend for a few weeks—she accidentally stumbled upon him getting hot and heavy in the Datsun on more than one occasion—but at some point, those girls would complain about the time he spent with Audrey and he’d drop them.

The days leading up to the prom, Audrey felt more ostracized than ever. Where she hadn’t been self-conscious before, now she added the pressure of worrying about whether anyone could find her attractive. She knew her clothes were out of date, she probably smelled from living in her mother’s increasing hoard, she cut her hair herself. These things hadn’t bothered her before, because they weren’t important, but she couldn’t escape the constant reminders of the teen world she was supposed to be part of.

That Saturday morning, she awoke to the sound of tapping on her bedroom window. She rolled off the bed and unlatched it to find Corbin smiling outside: dirty jeans, work boots, and a bundle of black-eyed Susans he’d pulled from the roadside. “Would you like to not go to prom with me?”

She couldn’t help but smile back. “Where are we going?”

“Wherever you want.” He held out a hand to help her out of the window. He caught her as she jumped down, his palm pressing into her side through the oversized T-shirt, and she found herself suddenly aware of her body.

There was no need to be sneaky. Joanne wouldn’t notice Audrey’s absence. But there was a teenage giddiness she hadn’t felt in ages as they ran through the dewy grass in the insect-buzzing haze of sunrise. The Datsun was parked on the edge of the property, where the weeds gave way to thickets and dense woodland.

Before she went around to open her door, Corbin turned to her. “I’m serious, though, whatever you want. If you want to go into town and buy a dress and go to a dance, I’m down.”

Audrey scoffed. “I’d rather gouge my eyes out.” She fished a stick from the tall grass and snapped it in half to emphasize her point. “In fact, I want to do whatever the opposite of prom is. I want to go as far out into the woods as we can go.”

“Thought you might say that! I packed for a hike.”

“You packed?”

“A little picnic. Just thought anti-prom could at least be something special.”

She assumed “special” just meant “different.” Scott was teaching Audrey to read topography maps. She and Corbin explored the backwoods almost every weekend, seeing what they could find off the beaten path. She didn’t mention that part to Scott—he would have insisted she remain on marked trails.

“What, like a baguette and cheese? Some wine?”

“Try beer and bologna sandwiches.”

She smiled. “OK, well, the maps are still in the glove compartment. Let’s go to that place we tried to get to last weekend.”

“Near Blackburn Creek?”

“Yeah. We’ve got the whole day this time.”

“I was going to say something like ‘That hike’s no picnic,’ but, you know.”

She gave him a playful shove.

“No need to get violent, I already told you I was down for whatever.”

It was a half-hour drive to the pull-off where they’d parked the last time they made this attempt. Corbin shouldered the pack he’d brought, and Audrey heard a few bottles clink.

“You sure you’re good to carry that the whole way?”

“I’ve got it.”

“I hope you at least brought some water too.”

He smirked. “Scott’s rubbing off on you.”

“Shut up.”

Shade from spring greenery made hiking a completely different experience than in the heat of summer. The eastern redbuds were in bloom, dotting the landscape with pink confetti.

Audrey felt lighter than she had in weeks. She and Corbin had been on hikes like this a hundred times, but somehow this one felt different. There was a breathlessness between them that Audrey couldn’t explain. She interrupted the chittering of the spring warblers.

“I figured you’d actually go to the prom.”

He shrugged. “Shows what you know. I hate dancing.”

The warmth from his body radiated next to her in the cool spring breeze, static snapping against the skin between them. She chanced, “I don’t know what’s supposed to be so memorable about prom.”

“Don’t you? Half of them are losing their virginity tonight. What a cliché.”

Her skin burned. They made crass jokes all the time, but in this loaded situation it felt risky. “Are you a virgin?”

He turned toward her, raising an eyebrow. “Are you really asking?”

“Don’t make it weird!”

He snorted but then his expression changed. He looked at her like he hadn’t considered her before. “Have you ever been kissed?”

Her breath caught and she had to look away, turning her gaze back to the map in front of her. She shook her head.

With an assuredness, Corbin grabbed her wrist to stop her. He put his hand against her cheek and kissed her. She pressed into the soft warmth of him, mouth only slightly parted. She felt a surge of desire she’d never felt before. The boyish smell of him, the symphony of buzzing insects, the tang of sweat on their lips.

Everything made sense, the moment lingering and sweet, until suddenly it didn’t. The intrusive thoughts flicked across her gray matter. Benny would never get to have his first kiss. Benny would never ask a girl on a date. Benny would never get to go to prom. Benny would never get married.

The guilt squeezed her insides, the desire leaking out of her like a glass had been knocked over. How dare she, when he never would. Who was she to deserve any of it? She pressed her palm against Corbin’s chest and pushed back. “Hey.”

He looked at her, brows knitted, peering into her eyes until he understood. He smiled and started walking again ahead of her. “Just thought I’d give it a try.”

She jogged a little to catch up and stared at the map with determination. She thought about broaching the subject, about what this might mean for their friendship, but decided it would be better to keep her mouth shut.

Corbin suddenly stopped and she nearly crashed into the backpack of beer bottles. “Check it out,” he said, and pointed to a large stack of rocks a little deeper in the woods on their left.

The little breath she had left after that kiss left her lungs. “A cairn.”

“Guess we’re not the first ones out this way. Should we follow it?”

“Why?”

“Hikers leave these to mark good spots, right? Look—” He nodded past the cairn. “There’s another a ways past it up there.”

Audrey followed his gaze and felt her stomach drop. She hadn’t seen any cairns since that day she followed the rangers, but just the memory of Scott’s reaction was enough to give her pause. “Scott says those are dangerous.”

Corbin snorted. “What does that mean?”

“They lead people away from marked trails and—”

“We’re not on a marked trail, are we?”

She couldn’t argue with that. She hadn’t recovered from her embarrassment, and looking like a coward now wouldn’t help. “All right, fine, let’s go. We can follow them back to this spot and go the way we came to the truck.”

“That’s more like it!”

They set off on this new path. Another cairn led the way every hundred steps or so. The trees grew closer together the farther they went and the woods darkened as the sky disappeared behind the thick network of branches. The rushing of leaves in the breeze quieted as the air thickened behind the curtain of the dense tree canopy.

“Spooky,” Corbin joked, but Audrey could hear the note of uncertainty in his voice. She couldn’t tell if she was walking faster or if the cairns were now closer together.

A rock wall rose up ahead of them, with a low bluff overhanging a dark hollow. Stacks of cairns surrounded the cavity and Audrey’s heart leapt to her throat. This looked exactly like the place where Roland Bates had been found. What was left of him. But hadn’t Scott said that Roland had placed the cairns, like a call for help? Who put these here, then?

Corbin walked straight into the middle of them, ducking beneath the outcropping. He dropped his backpack and started to unzip it.

“What are you doing?” she hissed.

“Perfect spot for our picnic, right?”

“No way.”

“You’re being so weird. It’s just a bunch of rocks. Like an art installation or something. Don’t say I never take you anywhere.”

He unfurled a blanket and sat down, then popped the cap off a bottle and held it out to her. She refused to let him get an upper hand on her again today. She grabbed it and tilted her head back, chugged it down with a few gasps of air between swallows, then sat next to him and handed back the empty bottle.

“Nice.” He followed suit, then handed her another and took one for himself. “You have to admit the stacks look pretty cool. Feels like we’re on Mars.”

Audrey took another swig of beer. “That man who died. When we were first looking for Benny. Animal attack? They found his body in a spot just like this.”

“What’s your point?”

“It doesn’t feel right.”

“So, what, you think we’re going to die today?”

“I think maybe we’re somewhere we shouldn’t be.”

Corbin pushed himself up from the picnic blanket and walked around the grotto, pausing in front of one of the cairns. He nudged the bottom stone with his foot and swiped, toppling the stack. “Better?”

Audrey couldn’t help cracking a smile. The beer was starting to loosen her up. She got up and the two of them started pushing over the cairns one by one, giggling and breathless as they tore down the structures.

Stumbling to the back of the hollow, Audrey felt a whoosh of cold air and noticed an opening leading down into darkness. She dropped to her knees and peered down into the hole.

Corbin got down next to her. “Paps always told me never to look down a well.”

“This isn’t a well, you dork, it’s a cave.”

“Close enough.”

“OK, I’ll bite. Why not?”

Corbin finished the rest of his beer, then began. “Because of the tantrabobus.”

“You just made that word up.”

He shook his head seriously. “Nope. They say the Arkansas tantrabobus lives in the bottom of wells and other deep, dark places. It’s a slimy thing, like a giant salamander or mud cat, with stinging whiskers and rows and rows of sharp teeth. It has tentacles like a giant squid, and these great, glowing eyes. But it can’t see you unless you look directly at it. Once you make eye contact, its grasping tentacles whip out and drag you under.”

He got quieter and quieter as he came to the end of his tall tale, almost a whisper, then when he mentioned the grabbing tentacles he lunged at her. She let out a high-pitched shriek and they started laughing.

Until they heard something shriek back.

Audrey’s voice had issued out of the ground. They both bolted to their feet.

“What the fuck was that?” Audrey panted.

They stayed silent, trying to see if they’d hear it again. Corbin shook his head. “Just an echo.”

“No way that was an echo.”

Her scream came from the hole again, louder this time, but exactly the same pitch. Without another word, Corbin grabbed their pack and Audrey grabbed the blanket and they scrambled back into the woods the way they’d come.

2019

Ivy Missing 7 Days

After the search with Corbin, Audrey spent the rest of her mandatory time off holed up in her cabin playing The Legend of Zelda on Benny’s Game Boy, trying to make some otherworldly connection with him. If nothing else, she felt obligated to see the game through to the end. Benny had wanted to finish it, and he would have finished it, so she was determined to finish it for him.

The eerie discordant chiptune bounced against the walls of her cabin as she solved the puzzles and navigated the final dungeon.

The more she tried to decipher the game, as if it were a message from the grave, the more cryptic it sounded. At last, the pixelated avatar defeated the final shadow boss and ascended a staircase into outer space where a creature appeared with the game’s final dialogue:

It is the nature of dreams to end! Only the memory of this dreamland will exist in the waking world… That memory must be the real dreamworld… Come, let us awaken… together!

The credits rolled. The game returned to the title screen. Audrey felt her loss all over again. Benny never got to see this final scene, and that thought alone brought a new wave of grief. There was never a point where grief faded and disappeared, it just resurfaced in new patterns: a holiday spent alone, a joke he would have liked, the end of his favorite game, which he never got to complete.

What happens when you die? She felt stupid for wondering something so childlike. How is anyone supposed to cope with the realization that some things are unknowable? Audrey liked to imagine Benny as particles of stardust surrounding the places and things he had been close to.

It was the reason she hated not having a memorial to visit. Graveyards felt like places where the energy of the dead hovered thick, and she wanted to be surrounded by him. But without a final resting place, she didn’t even have that. She had a scrapbook, a cairn, a few T-shirts, and a video game.

The cheery theme music prompted her to create a new character and restart the game. She snapped off the power switch and the pixels faded into the green background of the unlit display. Maybe that’s what death felt like. You finish the adventure, someone switches off your power, and everything just goes black.

She’d known it was coming, but her stomach sank when Scott pulled her into his office to prepare her for the inevitability of this horrible conversation they were about to have with Tracy and Dan Summers. Statistically speaking, it was time to dial back the operations and proceed with business as usual. Statistics don’t care about your feelings.

The expressions on the glass-eyed faces of the taxidermy wildlife along the walls of the media room had shifted from judgment to outright contempt. A long-dead coyote sneered at her, frozen in time at the moment of its death, posed to look threatening.

Audrey’s mind ran through its usual list of self-flagellations in anticipation of the torture she was being forced to face. She would prefer to have someone walk up behind her and smash her skull with a hammer than to sit in this room. The Summerses sat across the table from her and Scott. Tracy looked right through her, dark shadows under her eyes. Dan’s pointed glare mirrored the coyote’s.

Audrey’s freshly pressed park uniform felt like fingers constricting around her neck. Scott sifted through his paperwork one last time, preparing to go through the details of the search and try to prove how exhaustive it had been. Audrey wasn’t sure what her role was supposed to be in all this. Would it give Tracy Summers comfort to know that Audrey had lost someone in the woods too, or would it just serve as further proof of the park’s inability to protect its visitors?

Fifteen years earlier, Audrey sat in a similar room with her parents. That memory persisted as patterns of color and emotion. Hot, damp skin, nerves shot through with liquid fire starter. She remembered Mom’s choking sobs punctuating the conversation. Dad standing and shouting at Scott. Her shrunken lungs, her inability to draw a full deep breath and get relief. The now permanent mantra running constantly underneath her thoughts at a low frequency synced in time with her heartbeat: Your fault, your fault, your fault, your fault.

Scott cleared his throat like a somber judge gearing up to pronounce a damning verdict. “I know the past week has been difficult for you folks.” Audrey shot a glance at him. Poor choice of words—he couldn’t possibly “know” anything about what this felt like.

He unfolded a map. “This is the original search radius we calculated based on Ivy’s last known whereabouts. As you can see, we’ve covered every sector. This doesn’t mean that Ivy can’t be outside of it. Audrey can tell you, children are hard to predict. We’ll expand the grid and provide as much information and assistance to the volunteers as we’re able to spare.”

Tracy whispered, “Able to spare.”

“Yes, ma’am. There is a difficult reality we have to acknowledge here today. I’m so sorry to have to tell y’all this. Based on Ivy’s age, weather conditions, the terrain, availability of food and water… I’m sorry.” Audrey guessed he couldn’t bring himself to speak the actual hard truth—Ivy was most likely dead. “We can’t continue to tap the limited resources of law enforcement officers. This remains an open case with the detectives, but as far as our immediate response is concerned, it’s time for us to end the official search operations.”

Tracy Summers withered like a plant unable to draw water from soil. Every part of her was dry. She mouthed words but no sound came out, a fish on dry land. Audrey crouched in her seat, muscles ready to spring, a wild animal trapped in a cage too small.

Dan Summers looked small. His clothes seemed to swallow him. “You’re quitting?” His voice was barely a whisper.

Scott shook his head. “No, sir. If it were up to us, we would never stop looking. And we won’t—as far as I’m concerned, this is an open investigation until we find her. But the park rangers and police force have been devoting most of their time and effort to this and we need to get back to our regular duties and serving the public. I’m asking you to understand this.”

Dan Summers shrank further into himself. The temperature of the room seemed to rise. No one wanted to be the next to speak, but the tension bubbled in Audrey’s chest like steam in a kettle left on the stove too long, until it threatened to scream from her throat.

Audrey leaned forward. “All Scott means is that we’re taking down incident command. But I promise you, with all my heart, I will keep searching. I’m not giving up.” She looked directly into Tracy’s haunted eyes. “I would never.”

A connection formed between Audrey and Tracy. A mother, a daughter, a sibling, the bereaved. Tracy looked at Audrey like she was seeing her clearly for the first time. The thread between them gave her something to hold on to, and she gasped out, “OK.”

Scott went over the paperwork with Dan, giving him the details of the search so far and helping him with a plan to continue organizing volunteers. Tracy never broke eye contact with Audrey, who could almost hear the yip-howls of the stuffed coyote: Your fault, your fault, your fault, your fault.

2005

Benny Missing 1 Year

Audrey volunteered at Devil’s Den during the summer. Most days she’d hitch a ride with Corbin, but when he was too busy on the farm, Scott would make the drive to come get her. He’d use it as an excuse to make supply runs in town, but Audrey knew he did it for her. It was hard for him to see her mother.

It was a rough morning. A little boy had gone missing off the Yellow Rock trail a few days earlier, and the fresh search and rescue operation had sent Joanne reeling. Not only had the wounds from Benny’s loss not healed, but the similarities with Marcus Lathrop’s case were causing those wounds to bleed.

Audrey lay cocooned beneath her sheets in the back bedroom, the only space in the trailer that her mother hadn’t fully taken over yet. She looked around the bare walls and thought of her room in Chicago: lavender paint, Green Day posters, stuffed animals, the stash of weed she kept in an old lunch box—she wondered if her dad had found that yet. Then she wondered how much of their old lives he had stripped out of the place altogether.

This new room had nothing but a mattress with a flannel blanket, schoolbooks, and an old Audubon Society clock of her parents’ that chirped with the call of a different songbird on each hour. Just before the chickadee announced eight o’clock, Audrey heard Scott’s truck growl up the drive. She sprang from the bed and rushed to drag a brush through her thick hair and tug it into a ponytail.

Audrey pushed through the piles of trash in the hall, trying not to draw any attention to herself, but her foot slipped on some loose newspaper and she pulled down one of the unpacked boxes her father had mailed them. Her throat tightened at the sight of Benny’s Shōnen Jump magazines spilling out.

“Audrey!” her mother’s hoarse voice barked from the bathroom.

Audrey winced as she stepped over the box and poked her head around the corner. “I’m going to work.”

The bathroom door flew open and Joanne stood wrapped in an old robe, her scalp showing through the strings of greasy hair. She held up an empty handle of vodka. “I know you’ve been sneaking drinks, young lady.”

The use of the phrase “young lady” stung, the echoes of a kind of mothering that didn’t exist for her anymore. “I haven’t touched it, Mom.”

Joanne waved her finger in Audrey’s face. “I was a teenager once too, you know. Don’t think you can get away with taking it behind my back.”

“Mom, that was you, you drank that last night.” Audrey didn’t bother asking whether her mother had slept in the bathroom.

“Stop talking back. You’re so high and mighty now that you’re spending time with that park ranger.” Joanne couldn’t bring herself to say Scott’s name, but she spit out the word “ranger” with such vitriol Audrey winced.

Audrey mostly took lifeguard shifts at the pool and worked the gift shop, but Scott took her on trail maintenance whenever he could. The school counselors had spent most of her junior year talking about career paths and college choice, but at this point working in the park was all she cared about. With Benny’s body out there somewhere, Audrey couldn’t bring herself to leave. She would have dropped out of school entirely had Scott not promised to help with her tuition if she graduated and went into a program to prepare for ranger work.

“I’m going to be late.” She backed down the hallway and rushed out the front door before her mother had time to start cursing Scott’s name.

Audrey slid into the passenger seat of Scott’s truck and crossed her arms, her eyes squinting against the coppery sunrise. The yellowed stains at her collar gave away that she hadn’t changed out of the shirt she’d slept in. Her nostrils flared and her eyelashes fluttered against the tears pooling in the corners of her eyes.

Scott pulled out of the long gravel drive without a word and started down the country highway. He’d never married or had children, and it didn’t seem he knew how to deal with a crying teenage girl.

Dust plumed behind their rear wheels as they drove in silence for miles. A wooden sign painted with an artist’s rendering of one of the cabins marked the border of Devil’s Den State Park. Audrey leaned her head against the window, her breathing gradually returning to normal as they got farther from the house.

Scott cleared his throat and Audrey turned to look at him. His face reddened under his beard and he didn’t take his eyes off the road. “I need to tell you something.”

“OK?” She licked her dry lips. His nervous energy flooded her with adrenaline.

He continued, “We found that little boy last evening. Marcus Lathrop.”

She felt her heart miss a beat. “Where?” she managed to choke out.

“Made his way up to Moonshiner’s Cave. Seems he was sheltering inside.”

Audrey knew the place—Scott had taken her on one of his tours of the trails. A brick wall with a door and window stood in stark juxtaposition to the natural landscape surrounding it, the remnants of a root cellar built by homesteaders who had once lived above the bluff. A little kid would absolutely want to explore inside.

The unexpected news flushed her skin like she’d walked through a hot flame. “Was he OK?”

“Fine. Exhausted, but fine.”

Audrey sat on her hands so Scott wouldn’t see her shaking. She thought about this for a minute and a realization hit her. “But that’s so far away from Yellow Rock, right?”

The leather on the steering wheel creaked as Scott gripped it tighter. “It is.”

“How did he get there?”

“He wandered.” Audrey sat with this nonanswer for a moment before Scott went on, “I wanted to be the one to tell you. Before you heard the news from somewhere else.”

He seemed expectant, but Audrey couldn’t imagine what he wanted her to say. Neither spoke again for the remainder of the drive.

From her vantage point behind the gift shop’s counter, Audrey watched as the occasional news crew pulled into the park. They wanted to get the wild landscape in the background of their shots as they announced Marcus Lathrop’s miraculous rescue.

It was all anyone could talk about. How amazing that they’d found him alive after three days in the wilderness, that he could have made it that far by himself, at only eight years old, what a blessing! At some point Audrey couldn’t fake enthusiasm about it anymore, and just nodded at each visitor who brought it up as they purchased their bags of Fritos and personalized keychains.

Audrey’s coworker that day, Stephanie, was a seasonal ranger who was just staying for the summer. She didn’t know anything about Benny, and Audrey wasn’t about to tell her. Audrey dreaded being on shift with her. When the shop was dead, Audrey wanted to read or otherwise enjoy the quiet, but all Stephanie wanted to do was talk.

They had customers in and out all morning, but when an opportunity presented itself, Stephanie brought up Marcus immediately. “It’s crazy, isn’t it?”

“So crazy,” Audrey said. The fastest way to shut Stephanie up was to just repeat her own words back to her.

“I can’t imagine what his parents were going through.”

“Mm.”

“Did you hear that a kid went missing here last summer and they never found him? God, what a nightmare, you know?”

Audrey did know. “Total nightmare,” she replied, doing her best not to overreact.

“The guys that found Marcus yesterday were in here this morning. They say he barely had a scratch on him—after walking through the woods for three days! And he wasn’t acting like you’d think a lost kid would act.”

Audrey looked up from her book to face Stephanie. “What do you mean?”

Stephanie’s face lit up now that she had an attentive audience. “He was calm and relaxed, even dreamy about it. They said it was like he was high.”

This was new information. Audrey repeated what Scott had said to her: “Probably just exhausted, right?”

Stephanie shook her head. “The weirdest thing is, he wasn’t even dehydrated. Disoriented, sure, but he was in surprisingly good condition, all things considered. They think he was finding food and water somewhere. But here’s what really gets me—he was talking about being taken care of by some big animal.”

“What?”

Stephanie spoke faster, excited to have a good story. “I don’t know, he said it was, like, a mountain lion or something, but some big animal that took him to its den and gave him food and water the whole time. He said it didn’t want him to leave but he got away when it wasn’t around and that’s when they found him.”

“Do you think that’s true?”

Stephanie laughed. “Bet you believe in Bigfoot too. No way. Kid’s been lost for days and just has some delirium. Still, cool to think about.”

2019

Ivy Missing 8 Days

Audrey needed to visit her mother again, not only to take care of the few chores she could, but to tell her that the search for Ivy Summers would soon become a cold case, a mystery left up to volunteers to try and solve. Of course, some people wouldn’t give up, herself included, but the stream of searchers would eventually thin to a trickle. This hadn’t happened since Benny’s loss, and Audrey worried what new grief this might drag out of her mother.

She assumed there would be some bizarre sort of jealousy, like no one would search for Benny anymore now that there was a more recent missing child. Her mother either didn’t know or willfully ignored the fact that no one besides Audrey had really looked for Benny in years.

Audrey collected a pile of mail from the box and found her father’s monthly alimony check. It was just enough to make sure the mobile home had working plumbing and Joanne had something to eat. Joanne had never worked a day in her life. Audrey supplemented these checks with her own earnings. She doubted her father even knew.

She pushed the front door open as far as the hoard would let her and shimmied her way into the house, a stale-aired coffin lined with rat’s nest materials. The stink of old urine and rotting leftovers settled on her skin and she tried not to grimace as she edged into the center where her mother sat wedged in her chair watching the news.

Back when she was still living at home, Audrey would attempt to clean as much as she could, but as soon as she left, the stuff took over. At some point, any attempt just made things seem even more insurmountable. Still, every time she entered the trailer it somehow felt like her responsibility.

“Hi, Mom. Your check was in the mailbox. I’ll deposit it when I head out.”

Joanne nodded without looking away from the TV.

“Can we talk for a bit?” Audrey ventured.

Joanne clicked the remote, muting the TV, and turned toward Audrey. “What is it?”

Audrey noted without surprise that Joanne hadn’t properly washed herself at all since the last visit. The wrinkles around her mouth were more pronounced. “Mom, when was the last time you took a shower?”

Joanne folded her arms in defiance. “Is that why you came here? To lecture me?”

“I don’t mean it that way. I can help if you need me to—”

“I haven’t left the house,” Joanne interjected, and picked up a container of wet wipes that had been sitting next to her chair. “These do just fine.”

Audrey swallowed and nodded. It wasn’t worth acknowledging that, at this point, outside would be cleaner. She didn’t want to press the matter and upset her, not with the unhappy update she needed to deliver.

“Well, that’s not why I came by. I need to tell you something.”

Joanne watched her cautiously, arms still crossed. “You don’t ever come here except to tell me bad news.”

Audrey took a deep breath. It did seem that way. She never had major life updates to report, and to her mother everything short of finding Benny was a nonstarter. Even Audrey’s minor successes at the park were dismissed as insignificant in the grand scheme of their shared tragedy—at least Audrey wished it were shared. Sometimes she wondered if her mother even knew how much she grieved. In the wake of Benny’s loss, no one had really checked on Audrey. When people did, it was to ask, “How are your parents?”

Joanne only saw Benny’s disappearance as something that happened to her. Not to them. Perhaps that’s why her father left.

“I’m sorry, Mom. I just wanted to tell you in person that we’ve called off the official search for Ivy Summers.”

Joanne balked. “Already?”

“It’s been a full week.”

“Why are you people so quick to give up?”

The words stung. Her mother had started lumping her in together with every other ranger that had ever failed to find Benny.

“I’m not. I’ll keep looking, you know I will.”

Joanne breathed heavily. Audrey sat on the arm of the chair. They didn’t always understand each other, but no one else knew what it really meant to lose Benny.

Audrey said, “Can I ask you something?” Her mother stayed quiet. “Did you ever hear his voice? After he went missing?”

“I hear his voice all the time. I hear it every time I close my eyes.”

This wasn’t what Audrey meant, but it answered her question all the same.

“I hear him laughing,” Joanne said, her voice cracking.

A pang squeezed Audrey’s chest. She hadn’t thought of Benny’s raspy laugh in so long. She often worried that the more she called her memories to the surface, the more warped they would become, because each time she imagined the sound it was just an imitation of the last time she’d remembered it.

But she couldn’t stop her subconscious from calling up those memories whenever she went to sleep. Audrey added, “I see him in my dreams.”

“I don’t dream. I don’t go to sleep. I sit in this chair and I keep the television on until I fall unconscious, but I don’t go to sleep.”

Audrey had never heard this before. “What do you mean? Why not?”

“I have nightmares.”

Audrey held her breath, hoping that if she didn’t interrupt, her mother would continue. A long silence followed before Joanne spoke again:

“When he got lost, I would close my eyes and see him screaming for help, dirty and crying and covered in scratches. He was hungry, he was tired, he was starving, and I could feel it all. I felt his fear, his pain, his exhaustion. I felt the stabbing in his belly when he needed food and the aching in his lungs when he’d walked too far and couldn’t go any farther.” Her voice broke, and she continued in a whimper.

“I saw him in dark places. Terrified, confused. Tight, close, claustrophobic spaces. And I kept hearing him, over and over, calling for us, just screaming. Always screaming. And I knew that if I could just see where he was, I could go get him. I couldn’t close my eyes… I just couldn’t bear to close them. I stopped sleeping in the bedroom. I stayed awake as long as I could, drinking coffee and pinching myself to stay awake because the darkness only meant more of the nightmare.

“And then I learned that if I never went to bed and I stayed awake, I didn’t have to feel those things. I stay up until I pass out and I’m so exhausted I couldn’t dream if I wanted to.”

Audrey’s throat tightened, her eyes swimming, the confession fluttering against the back of her teeth again. “I’m so sorry, Mom.” She couldn’t help wondering what her culpability was in all of it. Had she enabled her mother? How could she do anything else? How can you tell someone they have to change when their grief is unfathomable? It was her fault that Benny disappeared, therefore it was her fault her mother lived the way she did.

“Do you think he suffered for long?” Joanne asked, and Audrey was suddenly struck by her mother’s frailty—when had she become such an old woman?

Audrey felt the force of Joanne’s question like a bolt through her chest. Her mother had never acknowledged Benny’s death, let alone asked Audrey for her professional opinion. Her mind went through all of her survival training, the lost hikers she had rescued, even the bodies she had recovered. Her mouth went dry, and she said the only thing she could: “I don’t know.”

Audrey leaned over the vintage ice-cream freezer by the front of the supermarket and grabbed a strawberry shortcake bar. She was on her weekly grocery run—having put it off during the initial search for Ivy—and now she and her mother were running low on supplies. She scraped the gummy little pieces of cake off the ice-cream bar with her teeth as the doors slid open and she grabbed a cart.

She pushed past aisles of baked goods and into the produce section. Her mother didn’t have the capacity to cook anything, so fresh foods would just be for the cabin. Audrey eyed the platters of precut veggies. As she was considering whether her mother would even bother touching them, a voice behind her made her jump.

“Ms. Figg?”

Tracy Summers was hovering amid the shimmering droplets of the produce misters, like a mirage.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“It’s OK. You can just call me Audrey.”

Tracy nodded. She looked as immaterial as a ghost, her pale arms folded behind a sheer summer kimono. She had grown a few new wisps of gray hair.

Audrey didn’t know what to say. “How are you?” She cringed at the stupid question. She knew how Tracy was.

Tracy seemed to be looking past her. “We’ve rented a place to stay while we keep looking…”

She trailed off. Audrey put her hand on one of the smaller veggie trays, eager to escape this situation.

Tracy continued, “I actually just found out that your own brother went missing here.”

Fingers of ice crystallized across Audrey’s heart. What did Tracy think of her now? Here she had been presented as some conquering hero, practically the patron saint of rescuing children, and now it comes out that she couldn’t even save her own family.

Tracy’s sunken eyes darted back and forth across Audrey’s face. “How have you done it?”

Audrey’s mouth was dry. “Done what?”

“Survived.”

“It’s all you can do.”

A few tears dampened Tracy’s eyelashes. “I wanted to ask… how did you know when to stop? When to give up?”

Audrey’s hackles rose. “I never gave up.”

“Please. I need someone to tell me that it just isn’t possible that she could have survived this long. I need someone with experience, someone official, to tell me she’s gone and”—her voice broke—“that I’m really never going to get her back.”

Audrey tried to recall a day she’d felt certain Benny was dead, but there had been no lightning bolt of epiphany in those weeks and months and years of searching. The knowledge was tattooed on her skin, by the rangers, by everyone around her giving up, one by one, until the ink seeped through her pores and into her bloodstream and just became another part of her anatomy.

Of course, what Tracy wanted was certainty—something definite. Audrey imagined her flesh growing plump as she surrounded herself with garbage and objects to fill the unfillable hole left behind when you lose a child. She couldn’t leave Tracy to that fate, always wondering why and never getting any real answers.

She hadn’t been back into the forest since she and Corbin found the clearing. She thought about Katherine Van Alst, and Marcus Lathrop, and Benny.

“Give me a little more time. Whatever it is, good or bad, I swear I will have a real answer for you.”

Audrey resolved to stop by the Visitor Center before heading back to the cabin for the night. She dreaded facing Scott after that conversation with the Summers family, but she knew she had to tell him about what she’d found with Corbin as soon as possible. She nodded at Porter as she passed the front desk. He was so engrossed in something he was reading that he barely acknowledged her.

As she drew closer to the door of Scott’s office, she heard the sound of drawers slamming and papers rustling. She hesitated before knocking.

“Scott?”

She heard something fall to the ground and the indistinct muttering as Scott cursed under his breath. It wasn’t like Scott to be this agitated. She pushed the door open. “Scott, what are you—”

“Don’t!” he shouted, startling her. “I’m in the middle of something. We can talk tomorrow.”

“I need to talk to you now, actually. I’ve barely seen you.”

He huffed and tossed a handful of paper behind his desk. “About what?”

She froze for a moment. She had never seen Scott so on edge. It unnerved her more than she cared to admit. “Roland Bates.”

Scott’s eyes snapped up to hers, frantic. “Why on earth—”

“The cairns. That day I followed you and the rangers and we knocked down all those cairns. Why was that?”

He chose his words carefully. “I told you, we don’t want hikers following them off the path and getting lost.”

“You said Roland probably set them up to lead people to find him.”

He looked wary. “I did.”

“I went out on a search with Corbin a couple of days ago, on our own. When I was off with my twisted ankle.”

“Of course you did,” Scott growled as he collapsed into the chair behind his desk.

“We were on horseback, in the backcountry, and we found a clearing filled with cairns. A lot of cairns. It was dead silent, and I had this overwhelming urge to get the fuck out of there—” Her voice trembled as she talked, which frustrated her. She didn’t want to seem weak or childish.

A look of terror spread across Scott’s face, shocking her into silence again. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he croaked out, “Where were they?”

She shrank away from his bizarre reaction. “Why?”

“Just tell me.”

“Madison County, the sector you and I mapped for Benny this year.”

He dropped his head into his hands and groaned. He leaned down over the papers he’d flung behind the desk, retrieved a map, and thrust it toward her. “Show me where, exactly.”

When she didn’t answer, he barked, “NOW.”

He handed her a pen and she realized she was shaking as she traced the path she and Corbin had followed. He looked on with feverish attention.

“That’s not the first time Corbin and I have found these in the woods. I don’t think it was Ivy who left that cairn by the trail,” she whispered.

He set his mouth in a hard line. “I know.”

Black heat surged across her vision. She had always sensed that Scott was keeping things from her, but for him to flat-out admit it? “What do you mean, you know?”

“That little girl didn’t leave that cairn.”

Audrey’s heart beat faster. “Well, then who did?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she yelled, unlocked from her paralysis.

“I mean, I don’t know! Something left it there!”

She caught the strange turn of phrase. “Some thing? Not someone?”

He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. “You’re smart, Audrey. I know you’ve seen things, you’ve felt things. There’s something living in these woods that makes cairns, and when folks follow them, they don’t come back.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You still let people camp here. How can you call yourself the superintendent when you knowingly put people in danger?”

This raised his ire. “I don’t put people anywhere. The State of Arkansas would let people camp in the park with or without my approval. I’m here for the exact same reason you are: I’m trying my best to keep people safe.”

“Why haven’t you told anyone about it?”

“I’ve tried!” His voice broke. “I tried and they wouldn’t believe me. We searched and didn’t find anything, and then I thought it was gone. Until…”

“Why keep this secret from me, then? What if it killed Benny?”

“Audrey, I don’t even know what it is. Do you know how hard I’ve tried to find it?”

“You didn’t even mention it as a possibility!” she shouted.

“How can I tell you anything killed Benny if I don’t have proof? When someone goes missing, we can’t make assumptions about a cause of death until we recover a body, or at least a part of it, and you know that as well as I do.”

She tried to calm down. “What do you know about it, then?”

He wiped at the top of his balding head. “There’s something intelligent out there, setting traps. Best I can tell is that it lives in the cave system.”

Audrey sucked in a breath. “The bars…?”

“Our bat populations are fine. I just had to keep people out somehow.”

She thought about how reluctant he’d always been to allow cave searches. Everything started to click into place. “You set those bear traps.”

“Catching it would be a start. At least give us a better idea of what we’re dealing with.”

“What are we supposed to do?”

“What we always do. Maintain the trails, educate the park visitors, rescue who we can.” He retrieved the other maps he’d tossed to the ground and spread them across his desk. Pen marks crisscrossed the park like spokes on a bike wheel, connecting areas circled in red. Scott cross-referenced the Madison County sector she’d identified a moment ago and added a new red ring to the map’s constellation.

With a sinking dread, Audrey understood why.

2019

Ivy Missing 9 Days

There was an inordinate amount of paperwork to catch up on in the wake of the search. The skeleton crew of rangers had been taking SAR shifts between their regular patrol duties, which left little time for the daily mundanity: lists of maintenance issues, water level measurements, incident reports for folks ignoring the burn ban. Audrey sat in the back office deciphering the scattered scraps of notes that lay in messy stacks around her. She was trying to type up her response to a fire that had started spreading in Campground B without using colorful words like “moron” to describe the guest who thought the burn ban didn’t apply to him.

She was bent over the computer, transferring reports from notebooks to digital files for hours. Her neck had stiffened from hunching over her work, and when she turned slightly to the left a stabbing pain radiated down her spine. She let out a frustrated groan.

Scott popped his head in. “Take a break.”

It was the first time they’d spoken since he’d admitted to knowing about the cairns. She was still trying to process the fact that an unidentified creature had been building them, not to mention Scott’s betrayal for keeping it from her for so long.

“Do I need to fill out five pages of paperwork to get approval for that too?”

He leaned against the doorframe, arms folded, a sadness behind his eyes. He looked so tired. A prickling of sympathy interrupted the surging anger in her rapidly firing synapses.

He opened his mouth and paused. For a moment, she thought he might apologize, but he shook his head and changed tactics. “Porter’s in the media room by himself. I think he could use some encouragement.”

“I could use some encouragement.”

Scott continued. “We’ll keep looking for Ivy, and I’m sure the volunteers will be around for a while, but you know how it gets once the search scales back. Just talk to him, remind him that it doesn’t mean this is over.”

Audrey folded up the report she was working on and brushed past him on her way out the door. She headed down the hall to find Porter. She couldn’t trust Scott the way she always had, and she needed someone to confide in. Scott had been the most stable presence in her life for the past fifteen years, and now she felt like she didn’t know him at all.

She found Porter in the media room with a massive encyclopedia cracked open, taking notes. His mouth was drawn tight, eyebrows gathered in intense concentration. He jumped when she spoke: “Some light reading?”

She sat next to Porter as he stuck a finger in the pages to mark his place and lifted the heavy cover: Geomorphic History of the Ozarks of Arkansas and Missouri. “I was trying to learn more about the cave system.”

“What for?”

“There are plenty of known cave entrances in the park, and it seems like some or even all of them may connect underground somehow. There’s still so much we don’t know about them. They’re too deep and too narrow to explore.” He paused, lost in thought, then continued, “What do you think was in the cave that day?” The question made her sit upright. “I know Scott told us not to worry about it,” he continued, “but you just seemed so scared. And I’m not used to”—his face flushed—“you know, you don’t seem like you scare easily. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

Audrey leaned forward, her chin coming to rest against her fist.

“Honestly? I have no idea.” What was she trying to protect Porter from? Someone deserved honesty around here. “I think I may have run into it again.”

“What?”

“Well, I don’t know if it was the same thing. A few nights ago, I heard a voice outside. A little girl’s voice.”

“Ivy?”

Audrey shook her head. “I don’t think so. When I went outside to check it out, I realized it sounded… off. I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t human. I fired my gun and startled it. I couldn’t see much in the dark, but one moment nothing was there, and then this huge thing just bursts into the trees. Nothing like a black bear, or a cougar, or anything that I know of.”

“Did you tell Scott?”

Audrey bristled. “Scott already knows about it.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s the one who’s been setting traps. He’s known about this thing for a while, that it’s out there—that’s why he put the bars on the caves.” She filled Porter in on what Scott had told her about the cairns. “Let’s just do a little investigating on our own, OK?”

The color was draining from Porter’s face as he listened, but this suggestion lit him up. He wanted so badly to be useful. “I’ll do some more research on the wildlife in the area.”

She stood up to leave. “I’ll keep you updated if anything else comes up.”

2019

Ivy Missing 10 Days

Audrey called Corbin as soon as she got back to the cabin and asked him if she could borrow Flicka in the morning before work. He was still asleep when she came by. She hooked up the horse trailer to his truck by herself and headed up to an eight-mile loop in the south part of Devil’s Den.

Audrey rode Flicka past a crooked wooden signpost. It barely clung to its nail, lichen obscuring the faded lettering: VISTA POINT TRAIL. It was far enough away from the search radius that she wouldn’t have to interact with any of the volunteers, but the trail still crossed the Butterfield and put her in a good position to see something if Ivy had gone that way. She wanted to get to Holt Ridge Overlook and see if she could spot anything from that vantage point over Lee Creek Valley.

Helicopters had droned overhead for the first couple of days after Ivy went missing, but they were too high up to see anything, and if they descended any closer the rotor wash would just whip the tree cover into an impenetrable frenzy. Audrey found these police choppers annoying more than anything. Searches required silence and a sharp eye.

She took the fork to the east. She pulled the reins and Flicka let out a dramatic sigh. As they plodded silently up the ridge, splintering sandstone rock formations towered over them on their right, and trees bowed under the weight of their summer foliage on their left. Audrey sighed too.

They were coming up on an old rock quarry that the Civilian Conservation Corps had used to mine stone for the park buildings. The ground lay split open, just as the CCC boys had left it, boulders spilling out of the earth as if from a wound. Audrey wondered what the excavations might have released from the bowels of the mountains, and whether Devil’s Den ought to have never been disturbed.

She crested the ridge and looked out over Quaill Valley and Blackburn Creek. This bluff wasn’t as high as the overlooks and didn’t offer much in the way of a new perspective. Still, she couldn’t help but admire the view. The park’s beauty could still surprise her now and then. Leafy trees crowded together, loblolly pines and eastern red cedar and sugarberry and sweet gum, their bushy canopy obscuring anything that might be hiding beneath. A patchwork quilt of leaves spread across hill after hill, stretching into the horizon.

If only Ivy had wandered off in the winter months, when some of the trees would have been bare. The summer greenery hid secrets. Audrey couldn’t see anything but the treetops as she looked down into the valley. She backed Flicka away from the edge and followed the trail to where it linked up with the Butterfield.

She had walked these trails so many times they felt alive, worn paths snaking through the park like veins. Alone in the woods, she was no one, and the only responsibilities on her shoulders were the ones she placed there herself.

She took comfort in the presence of animals like Flicka who couldn’t understand concepts like fault and blame. On the horse’s back, legs pressed against the soft, warm sides, Audrey could almost pretend she and Flicka were one animal, breathing together, thinking only about their immediate surroundings: sweat, stones, shrubs. The rhythmic clop of horseshoe against rock. She inhaled the rich, earthy, sweet aroma of horseflesh, leather tack, and hay.

These meditations lulled her into a comfortable complacency. She wasn’t scanning the area with her usual focus. When Flicka came to a sudden halt, it jolted her out of her relaxed detachment. The horse had her ears pressed flat, and Audrey could feel her trembling.

Audrey felt a prickling on her own scalp, like thin fingers skimming through her hair, and had the sudden certainty that she was being watched. Her muscles were taut as she swiveled in the saddle, looking for another hiker on the trail. Nothing but silence. Her breath hitched in her throat. She gripped the reins and tried to urge Flicka forward, but the horse refused to move, rooted to the spot.

Audrey heard a low croaking in the distance, the same vibrating echo of the teeth of a comb that she’d heard before with Porter. It resonated in her spine.

A cold flushed her body and chilled her sweat. The sound seemed to be coming from deep within the earth. Neither woman nor horse could will herself to move.

Something shifted in the forest. Audrey made out the silhouette of a deer about twenty feet away. She locked eyes with the doe. Its stare bored into her, inky unblinking pools.

The deer turned and lunged deeper into the forest. This sudden movement set off an explosion: impossibly long, thin legs shot up from the ground and grabbed the doe from behind; the doe screamed briefly before the creature silenced it. Pearlescent flesh glistened in the speckles of sunlight through the trees as the creature’s bulbous center mass heaved up and down, feeding.

Flicka shivered beneath the saddle and snorted. The thing stopped. If Audrey hadn’t just seen it moving, it would have been camouflaged in the shady thicket.

Audrey stared at it, caught in the grip of anxiety. Her breaths were tiny and gasping. She couldn’t tell if the thing was staring back.

With a sudden snap, it jerked upright onto its rear legs and raised its chitinous upper appendages out to its sides. It wasn’t just tall. Its thin legs spanned at least twelve feet across.

From this distance she could see bristled fangs fanning out, tasting the air. The sounds of the forest hushed, and Audrey heard only Flicka’s labored breathing.

It leaned its head back and a throaty clicking sound emanated from its gullet, rising in pitch until it sounded indistinguishable from the cicadas that deluged the park every summer: the sound of leathery wings rubbing against each other, hairy legs scraping, louder than any insect she had ever heard.

Flicka let out a bleating scream and bolted. Audrey barely kept her balance and gripped the reins just tight enough to hang on as the horse pounded down the trail and away from the awful noise.

The chorus of cicadas waxed and waned around them. Audrey turned and tried to see if the thing was following them. Every few seconds she glimpsed, through the blur of trees, a figure running alongside them, keeping pace.

At some point she stopped seeing the creature and any rustling in the leaves was drowned out by the cicada sounds. She couldn’t tell if it was still following them or if she was just hearing the usual scream-song of the summer bugs. It wouldn’t have mattered—she couldn’t slow Flicka down. The panicked horse flew over the trail, kicking up rocks as she went.

They ran for so long that the passing landscape became nothing but swirling colors and shapes. Audrey clung to Flicka, her face buried against the horse’s neck, at her mercy.

They reached the entrance to Quaill Valley and Flicka whinnied as she slid to an abrupt stop before a crumbling slope covered in loose boulders. A chunk of Mount Olive had sloughed away from the rocky bluffs and settled into a series of treacherous chambers.

Audrey hugged Flicka’s neck, the reins still wrapped around her wrists. The horse trembled, exhausted and frightened, her coat slick with frothy sweat. Audrey didn’t dare dismount, worried Flicka might bolt, and so the two remained still, listening for any sound of the creature.

Long minutes passed. The normal sounds of the forest returned and pulsed in sync with her heartbeat. Audrey’s muscles were growing stiff from anxious clenching and she knew she had to move. She drew back on the reins and Flicka backed away from the precipice. They walked to the Vista Point Trail to finish the loop and get out of the woods.

Audrey pulled Corbin’s trailer-hitched truck up his gravel driveway. It was midmorning, and she expected to see him outside tending the chicken coop. The property was quiet. As she drove around back to the horse barn, copper-colored feathers wafted up in her wake and floated back down to the dirt like snow.

Flicka was eager to get out of the trailer and into the barn. Audrey noticed that Gambler was stalled and Flicka nickered at him.

Audrey peeled off the sweat-soaked saddle pad and tied the horse to a post. She hosed her down, the familiar, repetitive motions helping to distract her from thinking about what she’d just experienced. She flung away her fearful thoughts like the droplets of water that she scraped from Flicka’s coat.

She refilled the empty hay racks and headed back outside, barely registering how unusual it was for Corbin not to turn the horses out to pasture for the day. Finished with her mindless tasks, she had no alternative but to reckon with what had just happened.

No matter how long she spent in the park, or how well she knew the plant life or learned the geology, there would always be something unknowable about it. Even the marked trails had to be meticulously controlled or the forest would creep in and reclaim the paths. The futility of this exercise wasn’t lost on her, and the park would still be here long after anyone was left to maintain it.

The details of the creature’s strange anatomy floated around her skull, along with the sensations she’d felt: dread, chilled damp flesh, earsplitting noise. She wished Corbin had been with her so she could have someone to corroborate. How would she explain this to him? The thought of Corbin anchored her back in the present. Where was he? She peered into the chicken run as she walked past.

The hens squatted in corners and under cover, most of them inside the coop. They let out soft, warbling noises. They weren’t flapping and pecking for feed, or chattering at her and crowding the wire like they normally would. Feathers lay thick on the ground, piles of bronze plumage and fluffy down. Too many feathers. She noticed a few spots of blood and what looked like bits of viscera that hadn’t quite gotten scooped up when someone attempted to scrape them off the dirt.

Her muscles still felt weak from hanging on to Flicka as they had run through the woods, so she couldn’t stop shaking as she hurried away from the chickens to check on the hawk. She peered through the slats of the enclosure’s siding and couldn’t see anything, so she ran around to the front and pushed inside through the safety doors.

The hawk was gone.

Audrey scanned the aviary frantically, like the hawk might just be hiding in a dark corner. In the back, she saw that the chain-link cover had been peeled away like the top of a tin can. Scratch marks against the wood told her that the hawk had clawed its way to freedom.

A door shut behind her and Corbin said, “It got three of them. Chanticleer’s dead.”

Audrey turned around. Corbin’s face looked swollen and puffy, and thin red veins laced his eyes. He kept his arms folded and she couldn’t see his mouth behind his unkempt beard.

“Oh, Corbin, I’m so sorry.”

He shook his head. “I didn’t seal it up tightly enough. I was in too much of a hurry.”

“It’s not your fault.” Her first impulse was to absolve people of blame, whether or not they deserved it.

His eyes flashed. “I know it’s not.”

They stood there awkwardly in the empty aviary. The hawk hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary. The only thing out of place had been a wild animal trapped in a wooden cage. Audrey repeated in a small voice, “Chanticleer?”

He nodded. His only rooster, one of the last remaining of his grandmother’s flock. She tried to fill the empty space with words.

“I should never have brought it here,” said Audrey. “I should have just left it alone in that parking lot. Or taken it to another rehabber, maybe someone with more experience who already had an aviary. I don’t know why I thought I could take it on, I’ve got too much on my plate as it is. And so do you. God, I can’t believe I asked you to keep it here. I’m so sorry, I just felt responsible for it or something, I—”

Corbin cut off her rambling. “Come inside for a drink.”

Audrey noticed he hadn’t corrected her. She followed him into the living room and settled on his Mamaw’s chesterfield. She thought about how often she used to sneak out of her mother’s trailer and escape here. Somewhere clean, where someone would notice her and pay attention. Audrey hugged her knees and pulled the knit blanket off the back of the couch to feel safe and swaddled.

She heard the hiss and clink in the kitchen as Corbin popped open two beer bottles. He came in and handed her one, without acknowledging her cocoon, and sat across from her in the matching upholstered chair.

Audrey took a deep swig of the cheap lager. Might as well get good and buzzed for this conversation. She’d been on high alert for too long today.

“Did you already bury him?”

Corbin took a drink. “Found him when I came back from the bridge. Buried what was left of him next to the others.” Mamaw kept a chicken cemetery in the back of the house, a small plot with a short, ornate wrought-iron fence surrounded by climbing roses. It was silly, but it had brought her comfort. The ghost-repelling wind chimes of the bottle tree clinked nearby.

“What was left of him?”

“A beak, feet, a plucked skeleton.”

Audrey cringed. “I’m so sorry.”

“Stop saying that.” There was an edge to his voice now.

They drank until Audrey broke the silence again. “I put Flicka in the barn with the others. I noticed they weren’t turned out today. She was pretty worn out from our search anyway. I hosed her down.”

Corbin stared at her. “Why are you shaking?”

“The search got a little out of control, Flicka bolted. It was… I saw something off the trail.”

Corbin took another drink without breaking eye contact. “Saw what?” His voice was flat.

Audrey polished off her beer. At this point she didn’t want to talk to Corbin about the woods at all. “This is going to sound so stupid.”

Corbin exhaled sharply through his nose. “Could you stop being so goddamn squirrelly?”

“I just don’t know how to explain it in a way that makes sense. There was that clicking noise again, whining like cicadas, and then I saw it coming through the trees. Huge and pale. And then it reared up at me and it was like… a giant spider.”

Corbin’s nostrils flared. “I’m done playing pretend. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but be serious.”

“Flicka saw it too, that’s why she bolted.”

“Horses can pick up on fear, Audrey. The horse being scared doesn’t mean anything other than that your paranoia is contagious.”

Audrey couldn’t keep the defensiveness out of her voice. “She was scared first.”

Corbin jumped up from his seat and strode into the kitchen. He slammed his beer bottle into the trash, glass clanging against more glass, then pulled another from the fridge. He came back to the chair and sucked on the bottle.

Audrey continued, “I know what I saw!”

“Something about that missing little girl knocked something loose in your brain. You need serious help and I’m not the one to give it to you.”

Audrey raised her voice. “Who are you to tell me I need help?”

“Who am I? All I’ve ever done is love you.” His voice broke, the weight of this admission slamming into both of them.

They had never used that word. Startled, all she could say was “I know that!”

There was a plaintiveness in his tone now. “This isn’t like you.”

She didn’t know how to react but in anger. “I know this isn’t like me. Doesn’t that tell you I’m not fucking around?” she yelled.

His eyes darkened and he matched her volume. “All it tells me is that you’ve been alone in that cabin for too long, you’ve been going out in the woods too often, and it’s about time you got some fucking therapy.”

Tears burned the corners of her eyes, which only made her temper flare hotter. “Well, it’s about time you stopped acting so superior.” She stood up and headed to the front door. “Just keep crying about your dead chickens.”

“They wouldn’t be dead if you hadn’t brought that hawk here.”

“Fuck you.”

She slammed the door behind her.

2006

Benny Missing 2 Years

The summer after their senior year, Mamaw took a hard fall. She was getting out of the shower. The steam had made her dizzy and she slammed her head into the tile floor. By the time the paramedics were able to get her to the hospital, she was already brain-dead.

Corbin’s father called sniffing around after he heard Mamaw was close to the end, but when he learned she had willed everything to Corbin, he wanted nothing else to do with either of them. So it was Corbin, newly eighteen, who found himself having to make end-of-life decisions.

Audrey sat in the stale air of the ICU, holding Mamaw’s hand, the yellowing skin as soft and delicate as rose petals. A mask connected to plastic tubing pumped air into her lungs, but something essential had gone out of her. A complicated system of needles and tubes kept the last bit of electricity pulsing through her body’s shell.

Audrey kept thinking of a game she used to play when she was little: dead man’s hand. Two kids would press their palms together and then stroke each other’s middle fingers. Something about the brain recognizing its own hand but not feeling the touch would thrill them with fear, make them think, This is what a dead person feels like.

Audrey ran her thumb across Mamaw’s bulging veins while Corbin spoke with one of the hospital’s social workers. She knew he didn’t expect a miracle, but he clearly wished someone or something could make that final decision for him. No one came to his rescue.

She heard the woman trying to talk Corbin out of his grief. “You know, your grandma didn’t even know it was the end, she just closed her eyes and that was it. Quick. It’s a good death.”

“How long does it take?”

“Since the machine’s breathing for her, once we turn it off, just a few minutes.”

Corbin didn’t respond.

“When you’re ready.” The social worker slipped through the hanging curtains separating them from all the other kinds of death.

They’d been here for around thirty-eight hours, taking turns sleeping in chairs, keeping time by the rhythmic blips of the machines. It was strange to look at Mamaw and know that she would never wake up again. Was this a good death? Is it loving to watch someone die?

Corbin interrupted her thoughts. “Thank you for staying with me.”

“You don’t have to thank me.”

“But I am. Thank you.”

The noise of the ICU filled the space between them. The funk of their unshowered bodies was an almost comforting distraction from the antiseptic medical air. They stank, and they were alive.

“You always stay.”

Audrey nodded, but her cheeks burned. She’d been accepted to the University of Arkansas, in Fayetteville. Corbin was going to stay and work the farm, but she hadn’t told him she’d decided to go yet.

“So,” he ventured, “are you going to leave for school?”

“There are some interesting courses in environmental science.”

“You just want to work at Devil’s Den, right? That ranger you hang around, can’t he teach you?”

“I don’t just want to work at the park, I want to be a ranger, and Scott says I need at least a bachelor’s degree.”

“Why? Here’s what you do. Whenever someone asks you to identify a plant and you don’t know what it’s called, you just string together an adjective, a place, another adjective, and a noun. ‘Oh, that there’s a wild mountain yellow flower.’ That’s pretty much how they’re all named anyway. No one will question it.”

Audrey smiled. It was the first joke he’d made in days. It quickly faltered and her mouth went dry. She had to tell him. “I’m going to go.”

“Oh.”

The steady beeping went on, and Audrey counted 50, 100, 300.

Corbin said, “I just thought you’d be staying here with me.”

“It’s not forever—I’m coming back. And it’s not like Fayetteville’s even far—I’m only, like, twenty minutes away. I can come back whenever you want.”

Corbin shook his overgrown hair out of his eyes. “Sure.”

Her chest tightened as she thought to herself how badly he needed a haircut, and she realized how long they’d had to parent themselves. They didn’t speak again until the doctor came to see whether Corbin was ready.

The machines stopped beeping, and without their beat to keep time, the minutes lost all sense of meaning.

There were arrangements that had to be made. Though Audrey had never had to make them herself, she promised to stay by Corbin’s side as he did.

The nearest funeral home ended up being in Fayetteville, a building that seemed incongruously ornate after the horrific last days in the hospital. The sprawling lawn was luscious and green, and wide steps led to the colonial-style columns on the veranda. A fountain in the lobby welcomed visitors to the maze of framed paintings and statues decorating a number of viewing rooms. The only indication that this was anything other than an old Southern woman’s front parlor were the boxes of tissues strategically placed on side tables throughout the halls for mourners.

Audrey sat next to Corbin at a long, polished mahogany table in a wide room that smelled like a school dance: nervous, uncomfortable people and wilting flowers. Despite how much death colored Audrey’s experiences, she had never actually dealt with the logistics of it. So many forms to fill out and certificates to file and records and documents to obtain.

They sat in silence, still absorbing the shock of it all. Her eyes wandered to the leather-bound menu of funeral options before her on the table. The business of death looked lucrative.

A young man in a tailored suit entered the room. He sat across from them and reached out to shake their hands, a practiced smile carved deep into his face. “Nice to meet you. First, let me say how sorry I am for your loss.”

Corbin and Audrey stared at him.

The funeral director seemed to feel he had waited an appropriate amount of time for his condolences to sink in and began his rehearsed speech. “Now, we have a lot of decisions to make, and we don’t have to make them all today, but I want you to know that this is a family business. We’ll treat your loved one with the utmost care and respect—”

Corbin interrupted, “I don’t want a funeral.”

The man’s face reddened, and he stumbled to respond. He didn’t have a stock response for that kind of bluntness, so he just continued from somewhere else in the middle of his usual presentation. “We will do everything in our power to make sure she looks as natural as possible—”

“No funeral. She didn’t want it.”

“I understand this is a difficult day, but don’t you want to be able to look back, years from now, and be thankful that you did the best you could to honor your grandmother’s life? This is your chance to gather with your family and friends, your community, and share those memories and support each other.”

Audrey stared at him, in disbelief that he could lean on someone’s grief to guilt them into an expense.

The funeral director leaned over the table, opened one of the leather volumes, and pointed to pictures of draped caskets and elaborate bouquets. “We can design any kind of service you want, customized to celebrate your grandmother’s unique life. Plus, our team will create a personal tribute video. They’re wonderfully cinematic and moving.”

The silence of the two shell-shocked teens led him to close the portfolio. “We can talk about the service later. I’d like to show you some of our options. We have a wide selection of beautiful caskets that may make you feel more at peace.” He stood up and opened a door at the back of the room. “Please come this way.”

Audrey and Corbin followed him into the fluorescent glow of a showroom filled with open caskets. Ruffled linings, velvet or satin, were draped over the tops like folded blankets, pillows propped against the tops of the boxes.

It occurred to Audrey that you begin life in a bassinet and then end up inside of one. She thought of all the bodies, drained of blood and pumped full of embalming fluid and painted to look alive, seeping chemicals into the earth as they decayed. She was suddenly glad they hadn’t found Benny and done that to him.

The funeral director rambled about color choices and decorative pendant options in shapes like crosses and doves and American bald eagles. Thousands of dollars for a box. Audrey shivered in the refrigerated air. The cold, the smell of flowers, this man’s cologne, the new plastic from the caskets—everything designed to shield people from the ugliness of death.

“So, do you have any questions?”

Audrey crossed her arms and rubbed them for warmth. Corbin finally spoke up. “I just want whatever the bare minimum required by the state is. Cardboard, a pine box, it doesn’t matter. That’s what she asked for and I intend to honor it.”

“Of course.” The funeral director put a hand on Corbin’s shoulder. “I hope you take comfort in knowing that your grandmother is in a better place. She’s at peace now, at home with the Lord. You’ll see her again someday.”

Audrey supposed it was reasonable for him to assume they were religious, considering they were in Arkansas, and of course he meant well. But these were the kinds of platitudes that made things so much worse in the wake of a loss. How invalidating to be told your grief is unnecessary. How dismissive to ignore death just because you don’t think it’s permanent.

2019

Ivy Missing 11 Days

The bulk of the SAR volunteers had emptied the park, so there was little for Audrey to do as she patrolled the campgrounds. The whole valley felt haunted—visitors would thin out for a while until Ivy’s headlines had faded into memory and they felt safe again.

Her fight with Corbin played on a loop as she drove through the empty lots. He had every right to be pissed. She hadn’t murdered the chickens herself, but by bringing the hawk to the farm, she might as well have. An image of Mamaw rocking on the porch, with Ladybird sitting in her lap while she stroked her feathers, brought tears to Audrey’s eyes.

But still, Corbin couldn’t even entertain the idea that what she’d seen on the trail might be real? After all they’d been through together, that he could call her sanity into question? It came from a place of hurt, but that didn’t make it easier for Audrey to swallow. After replaying the scene for hours, obsessing over it, trying to push the image of the creature in the woods from her mind, it was finally time to end her shift.

Scott was holed up in his office with his paperwork at the Visitor Center. The door was locked. Audrey tried knocking but there was no answer. She found Porter sitting behind the front desk with another huge book cracked open, cradling his chin in his hands with a look of intense concentration.

“Hey. It’s after five.” Her voice made him jump. “What’s got you in a twist?”

Breathless, he didn’t waste any time. “I’ve been thinking about the claw marks we saw on that tree. What you felt in the cave.”

Every hair follicle on her body shot to attention, like her skin had snapped tighter. “And?”

“I don’t know of many animals with two distinct talons like that. Except for things like crabs or scorpions. Or spiders. Spiders have these tarsal claws in their paws that they use for grabbing, or cutting silk.”

Audrey’s heart fluttered in her chest. “But how could something like that possibly be walking around the park without anyone knowing about it all this time? Wouldn’t we have encountered it before?”

Porter shook his head. “Not necessarily. Not if it lives in the cave system. Not if it doesn’t normally come aboveground. Spiders can flatten their bodies and slip into tiny crevices. The caves around here? There are about sixty that we know of, and we’ve reached a depth of around five hundred feet, but who knows how much deeper they go, or where they all connect. We can only explore as far as we can fit.”

Audrey tried to measure her breathing to slow the dangerous spike in her heart rate. “So, what, you’re talking about some previously unknown species of spider?”

“It’s not crazy. They just found another cave-dwelling spider a few years ago. Named it the Trogloraptor because it has these huge claws it uses to snag prey. It’s about the size of a half-dollar—”

Audrey interrupted, frustrated with his contradictions. “You’re using ‘huge’ to describe something that’s probably a fiftieth the size of the thing I saw.”

“What do you mean, saw?”

She told him about her search at Vista Point the day before. He gaped at her, but didn’t question it, which meant more to her than he could know.

“OK, so I found something else too,” he said. “When we went on our first search for Ivy, you told me about that little girl who vanished and then turned up out of nowhere. Katherine Van Alst? I was looking into newspaper archives about her story, and I read some old interviews from the time it happened. One of the men who found her described her saying strange things. She said something had been feeding her and keeping her alive. Something like a bug. They thought she was just deranged, dehydrated, saying crazy things, but…”

He trailed off when he noticed how the blood had drained from Audrey’s face.

“Are you OK?”

She blinked and came out of her stupor. “Not really. What you just said. She said something had been feeding her?”

“Yeah?”

“Marcus Lathrop, this kid who got rescued here about fourteen years ago. He said something similar.”

Porter’s face went as white as hers. They stared at each other for a moment, then Porter started grabbing his things and shoving them into his tote bag.

“What are you doing?”

“We need to talk to an expert.”

“You know any?”

“My entomology professor.”

Dr. Chaudhary agreed to meet Audrey and Porter after work at her office at the university in Fayetteville. On campus, Audrey couldn’t help noticing how easily Porter blended in with the students. He kept his round face clean-shaven, and the freckles smattering his cheeks gave him a boyish look. His blond curls hung just a little too long. She had to stop thinking of him as a kid. He was a full-grown man. Technically.

Porter was the kind of park worker that visitors would try to invite back to their campfires at night to hang out with. He looked like he’d never met a stranger. He occasionally drove back to his parents’ house on weekends to play with his dog and let his mom wash his clothes. Audrey couldn’t imagine.

Dr. Chaudhary greeted them with a wide, toothy smile. She was a short woman, animated and lively despite her age. She kept the natural grays that had begun to streak through her black hair.

“Silas! I’m dying to know what kind of emergency necessitates a meeting with an entomologist.” Porter introduced Audrey, and Dr. Chaudhary sat back down behind her desk and watched them, her eyes sparkling with genuine interest.

Dr. Chaudhary kept several tanks filled with living insects on her desk. Audrey watched a red velvet ant with bright fur crawling up a dried leaf and probing the glass with its antennae. She didn’t dislike bugs, but she certainly didn’t have Porter’s enthusiasm for them. Even less so now.

Porter pushed his hair from his eyes. “I appreciate your making the time for us on such short notice. I hope we’re not keeping you late or anything.”

Dr. Chaudhary lifted a stack of folders and dropped them onto the floor with a sarcastic flourish. “It’s summer. I only have grants to write and field research to compile and lectures to prepare.”

Porter continued, “It’s great to be back in this building.”

“Oh, please, this place has all the charm of a hospital. How can I help?”

“We want to know more about cave-dwelling spiders.”

“That’s pretty broad. What about them?”

Audrey interjected, “How often are we discovering new ones?”

Dr. Chaudhary cocked her head to the side. “All the time. It’s hard to keep count. You know, there are over fifty thousand identified spider species in the world so far? Fascinating examples of biodiversity.”

“What I don’t get,” Audrey said, “is how a species could go so long without being discovered. Besides being deep underground, wouldn’t we have some kind of fossil record?”

“Unfortunately for arachnids and insects, their exoskeletons break down and don’t stay preserved the way bones do. They decompose. Spider fossils are rare, and only occur when they died under extremely specific circumstances.”

Porter chimed in, “Like the ones preserved in amber in Jurassic Park.”

Audrey tried to imagine a tree with enough sap to encase what she’d seen on the trail. “So, it wouldn’t be that unheard-of to discover a new one?”

Dr. Chaudhary’s eyes lit up. “Why—have you?”

Porter piped in. “Maybe. We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. That’s why we’re here. We want to know a bit more about their biology and hunting habits.”

“Well, most species of cave spider live close to the surface to catch their prey. The deepest caverns aren’t well-suited to life, so true cave dwellers have adapted specialized characteristics to survive in those extreme environments: lack of pigmentation, elongated legs, blindness, you know.”

Audrey asked, “I thought spiders usually have lots of eyes?”

Dr. Chaudhary smiled. “Eight, usually, to match their legs. But even so, they have terrible vision. Most spiders don’t rely on sight, anyway. They primarily hunt by sensing vibrations—”

Porter interjected, seeming to forget the reason for their visit in his excitement to be back in school, “It’s the sensitive hair all over their bodies that can detect movement! When something gets caught in their web, depending on the range and frequency, they know right where to strike. There’s a species called an assassin bug that hunts spiders by plucking the web silk to draw the spider’s attention.”

Something heavy settled in Audrey’s stomach as a thought occurred to her. “Do spiders ever use bait like that to lure their prey?”

Dr. Chaudhary nodded. “Absolutely. A certain species of bolas spider can mimic a moth’s sex pheromones to attract them to its web. They’re even able to adjust the scent to the appropriate sex depending on who they’re luring. Some have evolved particular color patterns to camouflage themselves as certain flowers to attract pollinators, and there’s even a type of spider that dangles its legs in the water like bait to catch and eat fish. They’re incredibly adaptable creatures.”

“Is there any reason it would keep its prey alive?”

Dr. Chaudhary considered this for a moment. “Well, spiders don’t always eat their prey immediately. Sometimes they’ll inject just enough venom to paralyze it and save it for later.”

“But would they actively keep it alive? Like, feed it?”

“That’s not a documented behavior that I’m aware of. Of course, as I mentioned, spiders have all manner of tricks they’ve evolved to capture prey. Theoretically, I suppose if the spider were using something smaller to lure a larger target, it might want to keep it alive. There is a species that creates a kind of rod with a baited substance on the end to essentially go fishing.”

As Porter and Dr. Chaudhary discussed the finer points of spider anatomy and cave habitats, Audrey’s mind raced. There was a ringing in her ears, drowning out their conversation, while blood throbbed against her temples. How could an enormous spider be living in Devil’s Den without anyone noticing? How long had it been there? Why was it coming out of the caves at all? If it wasn’t eating the children, what was it trying to catch?

The stress of the past few weeks had sapped her strength. She felt shaky and weak as the clicking of translucent claws against cave walls echoed around in her skull. She wanted to lean on her cynicism, but she had seen it.

The wave of panic subsided enough for her to tune back into what Porter and Dr. Chaudhary were saying.

“… could potentially use the natural cave formations to augment the structures they build. Trapdoor spiders, for instance—”

Audrey interrupted. “Sorry, what do spiders usually eat?”

Dr. Chaudhary answered, “It depends on the size of the species, but they’re all carnivorous. Some of the largest species have been known to eat birds.”

“And what is the largest species?”

“The goliath birdeater can grow up to a foot long, if you can believe it.”

Porter couldn’t hold it in any longer. “We think we’ve found something even bigger than that, at the park. Huge, even.”

Dr. Chaudhary paused. Her eyes narrowed as she looked between Audrey and Porter, connecting the dots. “Does Scott Rollins still work at Devil’s Den?”

Audrey’s heart jumped. “You know him?”

Dr. Chaudhary’s lips pulled into a tight line and she breathed heavily through her nose. “So, he’s dragged you into this now?”

“What do you mean?”

Dr. Chaudhary sighed. “Around thirty years ago, when I was new to the university, I was called upon to do some research in the Ozark National Forest. Scott Rollins was working as a ranger and had this ridiculous story about a man-eating spider. He’d witnessed a tragic death and, well, whatever the reason, he believed that some enormous species of cave spider was crawling around the Ozarks.

“I took a team of graduate students. Though I was certain he was exaggerating the size of what he saw, I thought there might be something to his story. This part of the country is notoriously underrepresented when it comes to field studies. I was a young scientist. Discovering a new species would have been life-changing for me.

“We spent a year in the area and wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding. We found absolutely nothing to support Scott Rollins’s theories. I don’t know if he was trying to cover something up or what, but it took me years to rebuild my reputation. So, I don’t care what he’s told you. Trust me, there is nothing there.”

Porter seemed desperate. “But, Dr. Chaudhary, Audrey’s seen it!”

Dr. Chaudhary looked into Audrey’s eyes. “I assure you, you did not.”

It was almost eight by the time they got back to the Visitor Center, but Audrey was sure that Scott would still be in his office. He was married to Devil’s Den. She never got the impression that he loved the work, but it had consumed his life to the point that she thought of Scott and the park as symbiotic organisms. One couldn’t exist without the other.

The long drive home from Fayetteville gave Audrey the opportunity to seethe. According to Dr. Chaudhary, Scott had known about this spider for over thirty years. Before Benny went missing. And he’d never thought to bring it up.

By the time they pulled into the VC parking lot, Audrey had worked herself into a rage. It was all Porter could do to park the Jeep safely as she ripped off her seat belt and jumped out before he’d pulled to a full stop.

She stabbed her keys into the front door of the building, twisted it open, and stormed down the hall to Scott’s office. Porter followed in her wake, looking like an anxious rabbit ready to dart at any sign of danger.

She banged her fist on the door. “Scott, I have to talk to you.”

No answer. She pounded harder. “Now, Scott. I’ve seen it. I know what’s out there.”

Still nothing. Porter bounced nervously on his heels. “He must have left for the day? It’s getting late…”

“Bullshit.” Audrey pulled out her heavy key ring and flipped through it until she found her backup key to his office. She unlocked the door to find a flurry of papers scattered around the room. Complex maps of the cave systems were now tacked to the wall, while others lay spread across his desk and the floor, scattered with Post-it notes.

It was worse than she’d ever seen it. Scott wasn’t there.

She stepped inside and started picking through the papers.

“Hey,” Porter said, “we probably shouldn’t be going through his stuff—”

“He knew.”

That shut Porter up. Audrey dropped to her knees and lifted page after page, trying to discern what it was that Scott had been looking for. All that kept running through her head was a repeated How could he?

“What are you doing in here?” Scott’s voice interrupted her thoughts and she turned to find him standing in the doorway.

She narrowed her eyes. “You knew about it the whole time.”

Scott’s eyes bounced from hers to Porter’s. The terror evident on Porter’s face told Scott what he needed to know. “The spider?”

“Yes, the spider. The enormous, cave-dwelling, man-eating spider that’s roaming the park. The goddamn spider.”

Scott shook his head.

“How could you keep this secret? When were you going to tell me?”

“When I had some kind of definitive evidence that it wasn’t just my imagination.”

“What about a week ago, when I told you that something grabbed my ankle in the cave? What about the other day, when we talked about something building the cairns?”

“I wasn’t sure.”

Porter found his voice. “What else could it have been, though?”

Scott was taken aback. This was the boldest thing Porter had ever said to him. “Do you both want to sit down? Tell me exactly what you know.”

Audrey settled into her usual seat across from him, feeling very much like the child she had been when they first met. Porter pulled up a chair next to her.

Scott nervously twisted a pen in his fingers. “Well?”

Audrey’s nostrils flared as she tried to settle down. “The other night, I heard something in my backyard. I tried to chase it down, but it ran into the woods. All I could see was how huge it was. Then a few days ago I was out on horseback and I saw it in the daylight. With all the legs, it’s about the size of a small car. A hairy, fanged, venomous car.”

“What did it sound like?”

“Cicadas.”

Scott’s eyes brightened. “Yes, that’s right. For a long time, I thought maybe it learned to copy their sound to blend into the forest, to keep its prey from being on alert.”

She felt dizzy. The whining rattle of the insects she heard every summer suddenly seemed much more threatening.

“How could this possibly be exciting to you?” she said.

“I just never thought anyone would believe me,” Scott said. His excitement faded as he searched for the words to continue. “In 1989, I saw it kill my friend. I spent years looking for it and turned up nothing. I started to think I’d hallucinated the whole thing.”

Audrey and Porter kept quiet, waiting for Scott to tell them the whole story. He swallowed and dug into his memory. “I was new to the park. I’d worked seasonally at Yosemite, but I wanted to find a permanent placement. This was the eighties, so those spots were more competitive. I found Devil’s Den. I was drawn to the history of the place with the Civilian Conservation Corps—my grandfather had been a CCC boy—and the country life appealed to me.

“A few months after I started, a hiker went missing off the Butterfield. Ron Davis—I’ll never forget. He wasn’t much older than me. I went out on search and rescue with my friend Danny. Neither of us was green—he’d cut his teeth in Grand Teton and seen plenty worse than this. The stories he could tell about mountain lions…

“Anyway, we’d been out way past the end of our shift but we weren’t tired and we felt like we were covering good ground so we kept going farther into the grid. Then past it. Eventually we came to a clearing filled with cairns. We had enough supplies to last a while, so it just made sense to camp for the night and keep going in deeper the next morning at daybreak. The cairns made us think this was a spot people had marked for whatever reason. Of course, at that time, our radios didn’t have strong enough signals to tell our incident commander what we were up to, but we were young, invincible, you know. The cicadas got louder as the sun went down. That all still seemed normal. We pitched our tents and went to sleep pretty quickly.

“I don’t know exactly when I woke up. I was hearing these sounds echoing all around the tent. I stuck my head outside and saw Danny standing there looking terrified. This set me on edge—nothing scared him.

“He was staring into the trees. It was hard to see anything by the moonlight, but he took off running. Suddenly, it looked like he tripped on something, and out of nowhere I saw its legs, like it had burst out of the ground. It pounced on him. It was so fast I didn’t have time to react. The screaming…”

Scott wiped sweat from his face.

“It was long-limbed, claws like kitchen knives or scythes. It pinned Danny to the ground, just stabbed its talons right through his flesh and into the dirt to hold him still. Then it opened its jaws and struck him in the chest with its fangs. Danny was howling and God help me I couldn’t move.

“It bent down and covered Danny’s whole face with its mouth, heaving up this foul-smelling secretion. He was still screaming but it was muffled as it injected him full of the stuff. I watched Danny’s body jerking and convulsing until all the sound stopped and it began slurping from him like a juice box. I just zipped up the tent and hid there until dawn.

“When I came out, there was some shriveled remnant of Danny. It had liquefied his insides and then sucked them out. Hollowed out, dried up, I don’t know, it was the worst thing I ever saw. I had to drag the husk of him back to the park like that.”

“Why didn’t you tell anyone about this?”

“I told everyone about this! Of course I did! Danny was my best friend, my partner, I—”

He grunted as he choked back this unexpected wave of emotion.

“I told law enforcement everything I saw. No one believed me. They thought I had some kind of shock-induced psychosis, like whatever had really happened to him had traumatized me to the point of inventing a giant spider. They sent me to the hospital for a while and treated me for exposure. His family banned me from his funeral.

“I called in teams of scientists and experts to explore the region to find some trace of it. Nothing. At some point I learned not to talk about it so as not to risk losing everything. The park is all I have. And besides, I didn’t see a grouping of cairns like that again for years and years. Not until—”

“Roland Bates?” Audrey finished his thoughts.

He opened a locked drawer in his desk and pulled out a map. “I’m sure it lives in the cave system. This is where I saw it with Danny. We were pretty far outside of the park perimeter.” He pointed to a section farther south in the Ozark National Forest. “I’ve spent years searching for every cave entrance I could. They’re all connected somehow, but there’s only so far we can get before the passageways become too narrow.”

Audrey stared at the twisted network of caves Scott had drawn, looping over and under one another. She’d spent the past fifteen years searching aboveground and still hadn’t covered the map. Now it was like the search area had just doubled.

The sheer enormity of the situation knocked the breath out of her. Through Scott’s entire story, she could feel the anger leaking out of her like air from a pinprick in a balloon. Porter trembled next to her.

She looked up at Scott, her eyes pleading. “We have to kill it.”

Scott blinked, as though this were incomprehensible. “You can’t kill it.”

Her balloon began to fill back up. “The hell we can’t. It eats people.”

He shook his head. “Crocodiles eat people. Lions eat people. We don’t go out and kill every one of them.”

She looked at him incredulously. “Obviously this is different!”

“Is it? You know as well as I do how delicate the ecosystem is. One small change can throw it out of balance. Who knows how long this spider species has been here? For all we know, it keeps certain wildlife populations in check. As far as I can tell, it primarily eats deer.”

Audrey’s heart skipped a beat as she remembered the bones the Ozark Mountain Grotto group had found in the caves during their search for Benny.

Porter whimpered, “So what are we going to do?”

Scott let out a deep breath. “What can we do? Three sightings over the past thirty years? That’s fewer than Bigfoot.”

“Scott.” Audrey’s voice was stern, not yelling but loud enough to bring him back to reality. “It’s attacking people. Roland Bates. It takes children and uses them as bait, to draw in the adults who come to search for them. Katherine Van Alst. Marcus Lathrop. They’ve been telling us for years and we didn’t listen.”

The color drained from Scott’s face. “God, I didn’t even think…” He opened up another map. “At least we know how to find it.”

“How?”

“The cairns.” He laid out the map she’d seen the other day. He pointed to three red circles in permanent marker about ten miles south of the park perimeter. “After you told me what you saw with Corbin, I mapped out some of the caves in that area. I’m heading out tomorrow morning to set some new traps.”

“Because bear traps have been working so well,” Audrey scoffed.

“You’re right, they haven’t. I’ve rigged something else up.”

“OK, so we’ll go with you.”

“No, you’ll stay here and do your job. I’ll be back before the VC closes.”

“But—”

“I’m not putting you or anyone else in danger. I’ll have my radio on me.”

Audrey could see a deep aching sadness in his eyes that mirrored her own. How long had he been suffering with this alone? She wanted to be angry with him, but she knew how it felt to not be believed.

2019

Ivy Missing 12 Days

Audrey spent the day on campground patrol. The Visitor Center closed at five. She finished her rounds and headed that way right on the dot, wanting to get a full report from Scott.

Porter was manning the phones at the front desk. As soon as she walked in, he dropped his call and jumped up, half-finished paperwork fluttering around him and snowing onto the floor. He looked like he had slept there, his curls frizzed out at odd angles. “Where have you been?”

She stared at him. “Doing my job? What’s wrong with you?”

Porter shook his hair out of his face. “Scott hasn’t come back, and I can’t reach him. I’ve been trying for hours.”

A fizzing heat spread from Audrey’s gut to her fingertips. She grabbed her radio and dialed in to the correct frequency. “Scott, come in.” The radio chirped as she lifted her finger, waiting for a response. “Scott, can you hear me? Please copy.” Nothing. He wouldn’t turn his radio off, and he wouldn’t fail to respond. Unless he couldn’t.

She tried not to panic. “OK, I’m going to take Cisco. We know where Scott was going. You hold down the fort here and—”

Porter interrupted, “I’m going with you.”

Audrey blinked, stunned. “Absolutely not. You have no idea how dangerous this is going to be.”

“I’ve been part of this since the beginning. I’m not giving up on Ivy, and I’m helping bring Scott back. You don’t think it would be helpful to bring along an entomologist?”

“Chill out, you have a bachelor’s degree.”

“Stop being so dismissive of me. I’m not an idiot.”

“I know you aren’t. I don’t mean to be.” Audrey felt heat rising in her cheeks. “This is just beyond your skill level—”

“I know you think I’m inexperienced, but how the hell am I supposed to get any experience if you’re always shielding me from everything?”

Audrey flinched. He was right. Most of Porter’s “training” had involved her doing things for him. It was easier to step in and take over than to give him the space necessary to learn from his mistakes. Especially when you’re someone with no tolerance for mistakes, even your own.

She swallowed the protests that crowded the back of her throat. “I’m sorry. I just don’t want you to get hurt. I couldn’t take it.”

Porter gave her a strange look. She’d never been vulnerable with him before. She shook it off and continued, determined to treat him like a professional instead of a child. “OK. I need you to get Caleb and Jimmy and any other seasonals we have up here to start covering our shifts. You’ll have to coordinate their schedules. I’m not dealing with the bureaucratic bullshit of getting law enforcement involved, so don’t let on that anything’s out of the ordinary. He’s way up in the backcountry, so we may be out for a while. Better to be prepared in case it turns into an overnight.”

“Are we leaving right now?”

Audrey shook her head. “It’s going to be dark soon. We’ll go first thing in the morning with the horses. I’m going to raid the equipment closet for supplies. Once you’ve got everything handled here, go and get your gear and meet me at my place to pack.”

Back at the cabin, Audrey rolled her lightweight tent as tightly as she could and stuffed it into her backpack with the clothing she had packed. Enough for several days. That, plus flashlights and batteries, her compass, a first aid kit, fire starter, Scott’s map, and more granola and jerky than most people eat in a lifetime.

Beyond the physical necessities, she tried to collect her thoughts on what they were dealing with. A previously undiscovered, potentially prehistoric, cave-dwelling spider of gigantic proportions. Carnivorous, venomous, maybe blind, but sensitive to movement and vibrations. Fast. Claws as long as steak knives.

Armed with this knowledge, along with her park-issued handgun, Audrey felt about as prepared as she could be—i.e., not at all. She had no real desire to go back into the woods.

While she waited for Porter, she went over to her landline and called Corbin.

He answered after a few rings. “What?”

“Scott went to set traps for the thing I saw in the woods, but he never came back.”

She heard him exhale sharply on the line. They hadn’t spoken since the fight. “And?”

“Porter and I are packing out to find him. I’m preparing in case we have to stay out overnight and camp. And I want you to come.”

“I don’t know how much help I’ll be. I have work, you know…”

“I know it’s asking a lot, but I need you. I trust you more than anyone.”

He was quiet.

“I’m sorry,” she pressed. “I’m really, really sorry—”

He stopped her. “Don’t. It’s fine. I’m sorry too.”

She continued, “I’m stocked up on supplies. I’m bringing my gun. I just need your level head. Please, I’m…” She hesitated to admit she was scared, but it floated there, unspoken, over the static of the landline. “Do you believe me?”

There was a long silence on the other end, but she could hear him breathing and knew he was still there. “Audrey, I’ll always believe you.”

Her heart beat against her eardrums. Ever since the fight, the word “love” seemed to be hanging over them. How could he love her? He didn’t even know what she was capable of. What she had done. And even if he did? What if his feelings changed—what would happen then? She couldn’t live without him, so she would rather have him this way. She took too long to respond.

He cleared his throat and spoke louder. “All right. Leave in the morning?”

She regained her footing. “At first light. We’re taking the horses. Can you meet us at the horse camp with Gambler, Flicka, and some extra feed? We’ll start from the Butterfield.”

“Six thirty, then.”

Audrey hung up, relieved. She looked over at a bowl she’d left in the sink with the shredded remnants of duck necks and felt a pang of longing for the hawk. She had accomplished what she set out to do: she rescued the bird and nursed it back to health. But no good deed goes unpunished. How had she ever convinced herself that they could understand each other? That the hawk felt anything other than pain and fear?

A sudden knock at the door made her jump.

She skidded across the hardwood to answer the door, full of nervous energy. Porter stood outside, breathless, like he had run all the way there. He probably had.

“Everything’s good to go.”

“We need to be smart about this. Let’s get familiar with the topography and make sure we’re prepared for anything.”

Porter stepped inside and went over to the couch. He looked around at the blank walls. “Wow. How long have you lived in here?”

“I know. I just don’t like clutter.” She sat next to him, pulled the coffee table closer, and unfurled the map across its surface. “First of all, I’ve packed the essentials. Including my gun, just in case.”

She clicked open the case to check that she had packed enough ammo for the Glock.

Since Porter wasn’t law enforcement, he hadn’t been issued a gun. He let out a nervous laugh. “What are you supposed to bring to a fight against a giant spider?”

She smiled. “That wasn’t part of my training.”

“I took one of the machetes,” he said.

Audrey appraised him. “Damn. Well, one of those ought to do it.” She turned her attention to Scott’s map. “We’ll start on the Butterfield. That will take us south for a couple of miles and then we’ll need to break off into the backcountry, around here.” She pointed to a section of the forest. “Lots of elevation changes we may have to sidestep. We’ll need to watch the compass and head to this first spot.” Scott’s three circles were clustered around a half-mile area.

They stared at the topo map until the spiraling lines seemed to undulate and pulse like waves. Audrey felt dizzy. Scott may have been getting closer to retirement, but no one knew this wilderness better. For him to go out and not return could only mean a few things, none of which she wanted to think about.

Porter said what was on both of their minds. “I feel sick about him being out there all night.”

“I know. But we were already losing light by the time I got to the VC. He can take care of himself for a little longer. If he’s injured, he knows what to do.” She stood up and Porter took that as his cue to make his way out the door. “Now let’s get some good sleep, and I’ll meet you at six to pick up the horses.”

“Aye, aye, captain.” He hesitated on the threshold, then turned back to her, stifling nervous laughter. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

Just like a little brother to make a stupid joke right now.

2006

Benny Missing 2 Years

Audrey and Scott sat with their backs against a tree trunk, high up on a raised wooden platform. The morning fog shrouded the new growth of mountain wildflowers in a gray, dewy chill, giving the place the blurred impression of a half-remembered dream. They were on public land near Cove Creek, just south of Hogeye. The names of these Arkansas towns became less of a novelty the longer Audrey stayed. She didn’t quite feel Arkansan, but she’d come to understand the place better.

Scott had told her that a portion of the park’s funding for conservation programs came from taxes on the hunting industry, which intrigued her. Scott had offered to take her out hunting as soon as the season started.

In the years since Benny went missing, between the regular searches he promised, Scott took Audrey on excursions like this. The winding maze of skyscrapers from her childhood felt more foreign to her now than the wilderness. Scott was teaching her to read topographic maps. The rigid placement of the routes on the CTA maps that wallpapered Benny’s room seemed bizarre now compared to the natural chaos of rocky terrain. The winding ramble of a creek bed made more sense than the grid lines and ninety-degree angles imposed on a cityscape.

Scott was the only adult she knew who seemed in control, which was just about the only quality she aspired to. He had knowledge about practical things, like dressing a wound or pinpointing a location in the wilderness. Or hunting deer.

Crouched up in the deer blind, swimming in borrowed baggy camouflage, Audrey couldn’t help comparing the wait to the constant failed searches for her brother: long stretches of silence, hypervigilance as she peered into the coiled lacework of branches, weak muscles after keeping everything tensed and ready to spring only to come up empty once again.

She blurted, “Is this how it always goes?”

“Keep your voice down. Whisper.” She couldn’t help noticing his slight smile even as he admonished her. “The waiting is part of the experience. The quiet stillness of the woods, just you and your senses, becoming a part of something bigger than yourself. This is how you connect to the land. Besides, I firmly believe that if you’re going to eat meat, then you should be willing to do the work and understand what it means to take a life.”

“We’ve been out here for hours already.”

He considered this. “Well, the deer population has fallen in the past few years. I did tell you to pack your patience.”

“OK, but I’m starving now,” she whispered.

Scott handed her a bag labeled GORP.

“Um,” she said, puzzling over the unfamiliar acronym.

“Good ol’ raisins and peanuts. You’ll take what I’ve got and like it, girlie.”

As she munched on the gorp, Scott considered her for a moment. “I thought I reminded you not to use shampoo.”

“That’s gross.”

“It’s not. The deer have a strong sense of smell. It’s why we got here before sunup. Once we get sweaty the deer won’t come near.”

This made sense. She liked when Scott had a definite answer for things. A breeze came down through the valley and she imagined a doe standing alert, eyes wide and wet, nostrils flaring at the scent of shampoo on the wind. Her stomach flipped at the thought that the day might end with them taking a life.

“Tell me again how this is a good thing?”

Scott shifted his weight to the other leg, his rifle jostling in his lap. “Hunting’s a big industry. A lot of the state’s tax revenue comes from that, and we see that directly in the park. But hunters help control overpopulation. If the deer get out of control it can lead to food shortages that affect the whole ecosystem. Plus, it can lead to problems for the farmers around here.”

“Well, what did nature do before the hunters came around? I mean, there’s no hunting allowed in Devil’s Den, and it seems fine.”

“Once people settled the area we changed the landscape. There may not be any hunting in the park, but our presence keeps some of the wildlife at bay.”

“We changed things.”

Scott nodded. “We did. Land clearing, farming, settlements—it’s our responsibility now to keep things in balance.”

“Because we threw it out of balance.”

Scott didn’t respond and Audrey hugged her knees close.

The woods didn’t want them here. But she didn’t want to leave. She couldn’t. As long as Benny stayed at the park, she would too. The thought of leaving for college after this summer felt like swallowing knives. Whenever she drove away from Devil’s Den, even just to a nearby town, she felt an invisible tether tying her to Benny’s ghost, stretching farther and thinning until she felt like she might snap.

She’d only be less than a half hour away in Fayetteville. She could still come back to search every weekend. But now that she was eighteen, she had to figure out how to support herself and help her mother. If she wanted to work at the park, she needed that bachelor’s degree. Scott had hooked her up with summer jobs at the gift shop, but she wanted to have more impact now that she knew that one small, stupid decision could destroy everything.

A rustling in the underbrush to the left made Scott sit straight up. He held up a finger to indicate quiet as she snapped her head to the source of the sound.

A buck stepped softly through the patches of moss along the creek, occasionally stopping to pull tender buds up by the root. Audrey counted the branches on his antlers like Scott had told her to. Four points, still covered in spring velvet. Just wide enough to be legal.

Scott lifted the rifle stock to his shoulder with the tenderness of a mother cradling her newborn. The deer didn’t react to the soft click of metal as Scott pulled back on the bolt handle. Audrey didn’t dare breathe while he aimed.

The crack of the gunshot rang in Audrey’s ears, but not as loud as the shrieking squeal coming from the buck. Scott’s shot landed true, straight through the neck, so why didn’t it die instantly? He’d made such a big deal about taking an ethical shot. Scott’s face knotted with concern and he scrambled down the side of the blind. Audrey followed.

They hurried up to the buck. Frothy blood bubbled from its nostrils as it took snorting breaths, its eyes rolled back white in panic. It couldn’t move.

“Shit.” Scott bent down. “I hit the spine.”

He cocked the rifle again and took a few steps back, aiming for the heart. “Back up.”

The gunshot echoed through the forest again and a spray of fresh blood speckled Audrey and Scott. The deer’s eyes clouded over and its panicked breathing ceased. She yelped and wiped frantically at her face. Scott ran a sleeve across his, shaking his head.

Audrey suddenly didn’t care about how hunting helped the ecosystem.

2019

Ivy Missing 13 Days

Audrey and Porter sat astride the horses, their packs cinched to the saddles, waiting for Corbin to arrive. Cisco and Whiskey shifted their weight from hoof to hoof, agitated by their riders’ nervous energy. Their tails swished back and forth to fight the cloud of insects they’d kicked up out of the morning dew. Audrey stroked the coarse hair along Cisco’s neck for comfort. Hers and the horse’s.

The horse camp was relatively empty this time of year. Too hot for trail rides. A few scattered trailers occupied spaces, but no one was out and about yet. Everything seemed coated in a dusty sepia haze in the early morning sunrise.

Corbin’s truck crested the hill at the entrance. They watched him pull into the gravel lot and back the horse trailer into one of the first spaces. Audrey dismounted Cisco and tied him to a post so she could help Corbin unload. Porter did the same.

Corbin stuck his head out of the window. “Do I need to reserve this space?”

Audrey made the sign of the cross. “You have my blessing. Spot’s yours. Besides, the superintendent’s not on call today.”

Porter muttered behind her, “Inappropriate.”

Corbin cocked an eyebrow. “Who’s this?”

“Sorry, this is our park interpreter, Silas Porter.”

Porter held out his hand. “Just Porter.”

Corbin gripped Porter’s outstretched hand a little tighter than necessary. “Corbin Hale.”

Corbin got out of the truck and moved around back to tack up Gambler and Flicka. They would need an extra horse to carry Scott back, and it wouldn’t hurt to use her as a pack horse in the meantime. They redistributed some of their supplies to Flicka’s saddle to lighten their loads.

Corbin checked the straps one last time, then turned to Audrey. “Let’s see the map.”

She unfolded the topo map and reviewed the landmarks with Corbin like she had with Porter the night before. The chaotic lines imposed a sense of order on the landscape that let Audrey feel in control of the situation. The more she repeated the plan, the more straightforward it seemed. Ride the horses to the designated point, find Scott stuck and waiting for them, and bring him back to get medical attention or whatever else he needed.

Corbin leaned against the truck as he listened. “So, just so I’m on the same page here, not only are you both certain there’s a giant spider in the park, but Scott Rollins thinks so too and he went out and tried to catch it?”

“Please don’t be sarcastic right now, I really can’t deal with it.”

He threw up his hands. “I’m just trying to get on the same page. Are we ready?”

No one moved. The air felt thicker, fixing them in place, like as soon as someone took a step toward the trailhead a clock would start ticking down.

Porter broke the awkward silence: “Anyone need any bug spray?”

They stared at him, unamused. He looked dumbfounded. “I’m serious. It’s July, we’ll get eaten alive!” His face turned bright red as he realized what he had just said.

The horses’ hooves clicked along the rocks in the dry bed of Lee Creek. Audrey navigated in the lead, Porter was sandwiched in the middle, and Corbin brought up the rear, hanging on to Flicka’s lead and keeping her close to Gambler’s flank. On either side of the creek bed, dense forest covered the craggy hills that enclosed them.

Audrey thought about Ivy walking this same stretch of Lee Creek with her mother just two weeks earlier. It’s strange to imagine the calm moments just before disaster, when people move about their lives, oblivious.

She had spent years trying to remember the days before Benny’s disappearance. What did they talk about? What was the last thing they had for lunch? Did they make each other laugh one last time? But no matter how hard she tried, the memory of camping in Devil’s Den began and ended with the cataclysmic hike into the woods that split her life into two distinct halves.

A sound like a woman screaming stopped them in their tracks. It repeated twice, a shrieking howl like a dying last breath. Audrey listened, muscles coiled and ready to spring like a deer caught in a hunter’s sights, but relaxed as soon as she placed the sound.

Corbin spoke her thoughts: “Just a red fox.”

Porter shook it off. “Seriously?”

“Yes. Get used to it, they usually do that in the middle of the night.”

They nudged the horses forward, quiet again, listening for other sounds of the forest as they walked on. If the spider made sounds like other insects, Audrey wondered to herself, not for the first time, how could she differentiate them from the rest of the endless droning?

Corbin must have been musing on a similar track. He asked Porter, “What made you so interested in studying bugs?”

Porter answered his question with a question. “Did you know that if you combined the weight of all the humans on the planet and all the ants on the planet and compared them, the ants would be heavier?”

Audrey smiled. This was a good distraction.

Corbin responded, “I did not.”

“And that’s just ants. There are more varieties of insect than anything else on earth. You’d need several lifetimes just to scratch the surface when it comes to learning about them. Without them, the whole ecosystem would fall apart: they pollinate flowers and vegetables, they give us honey and silk, they act as decomposers, they’re an important food source—I mean, seriously, we couldn’t live without them. Plus, there are so many species we haven’t discovered yet.”

“I see. You’re after the glory. Probably want to name this spider after you.”

“No! But I have been thinking about a Latin name. Binomial nomenclature. Trogloraptor megalarachne.”

Corbin snorted. “That’s a mouthful.”

Porter continued, “Trogloraptor is the genus, Troglo meaning ‘cave’ and raptor meaning ‘seize and drag away,’ like the ones they found in Oregon. The megalarachne part is pretty obvious, I think.”

“Big-ass spider,” Audrey clarified.

Corbin responded, “I’m not calling it that.”

Audrey found scientific naming practices ridiculous, like humans could fully understand things once they’d slotted them into neat categories. She rolled her eyes. “I’d rather call it by its field markings, like double-clawed cave recluse, or blind vampire spider.”

Porter paused, like he needed a moment to find the words for what came next. “You both keep referring to ‘the spider’ or ‘it’ like there’s only one out here. But biologically speaking…”

He trailed off as the weight of this comment settled. Of course there couldn’t be just one. Audrey knew this. The common sense of it waited somewhere beneath her awareness, but she hadn’t been ready to acknowledge it until now.

She imagined the caverns beneath Devil’s Den like the winding cross section of tunnels behind the glass of an ant farm. Hundreds of ghostly legs skittering beneath the earth, crawling over one another, laying eggs and coating the depths with viscous, gluey threads.

After an hour, they came to the portion of the trail Audrey had marked for them to pull off and head into the brush.

With a deep breath, like they were preparing to dive underwater, the trio left the trail and passed through the veil that separated the valley from the forest.

Though it was still morning, the darkness of the forest enveloped them. The mood shifted to one of hushed anticipation and they stopped talking to one another. Cisco snorted every few feet, which Audrey attributed to his distaste for having to lead the way through the undergrowth and clear a path for the rest.

They balanced in their saddles while the horses moved with slow, deliberate steps to keep from stumbling, though they did lose their footing now and again on the rugged terrain. Audrey kept the map and compass close, so as to consult which way to redirect Cisco whenever the horses needed to move around any rock formations or steep inclines.

What was Scott planning to do with the spider if he caught it? Was he going to kill it, or try to keep it alive? She imagined him exhibiting the thing like King Kong. He wasn’t the type to bask in glory, but after being told he was crazy for so long, she figured it might feel good to be vindicated.

Audrey couldn’t believe she was having to save him like this. Because of course this had to be a rescue rather than a recovery. He must have gotten stuck in one of the jerry-rigged traps he was setting. She let herself be annoyed. The alternative—that he was seriously hurt or worse—was unthinkable.

Hours passed and they were close to Blackburn Creek. As they neared the stream, something gleamed white in the grass up ahead. Audrey gasped, her heart leaping up to choke her. It was rounded and bone-colored, the size and shape of a child’s skullcap.

Cisco grunted in protest as she jerked back on his reins and jumped off.

“What is it?” Porter asked.

Audrey crept up to it, shaking. Ivy hadn’t been gone long enough for her remains to be skeletal. So who was this?

She reached the spot and the adrenaline that had flooded her system emptied. It was just a turtle shell, bleached by the sun. She roared in frustration and kicked it across the bank.

Corbin slid off Gambler and came over to her, dropping a hand on her shoulder. He must have known what she thought she saw. “Let’s take a break, yeah?”

Audrey nodded. The creek was flowing with enough water to allow the horses to drink. She sat on a boulder by the stream. The trees crowded all the way up to the edge, but this strip of water was the first break in tree cover they’d seen since they left the horse camp.

Corbin sat down next to her while Porter trotted a little ways into the trees to relieve himself.

“You’re really wound up,” Corbin said.

“The past two weeks have been hell.”

They listened to the horses lap at the water. Audrey ran her fingers along the moss on the rock next to her.

“I ran into Tracy Summers,” she said.

“When?”

Audrey peeled off a clump of the moss and stared at a wriggling mass of white grubs underneath, a tiny complete ecosystem in her hands. “A couple of days ago. She wanted to know, based on my experience, when it’s time to give up.” She threw a handful of moss into the creek and it landed with a plop.

Corbin reassured her, “You never gave up, though.”

“Didn’t I? At some point our searches felt more like trail rides. I just kept going out on searches to avoid sitting still. I don’t think I really believed that we would find Benny. It was more like penance.”

Corbin looked thoughtful. “What would you do if you found him now?”

Audrey breathed deeply. “Put him to rest. Make a place where Mom and I could visit him. A real memorial.” She paused. “The not knowing has always been the hardest part. Where did he go? How did he get there? Did he suffer? I just want to know something. At least one answer. And I’ll never have that if I stop looking.”

“We’ve looked, Audrey. Methodically, systematically, repeatedly. And I’m sure we’ll keep looking. What did you tell Mrs. Summers?”

“That I was going to find Ivy no matter what.”

Corbin sighed. “You know better than to make a promise like that.”

“I can’t let her end up like my mother, Corbin. I can’t let her go her whole life wondering and not knowing. You have no idea what kind of torture that is. You can’t even grieve because there’s always that tiny spark in the back of your mind asking what if, and so you keep waiting and daring it not to be true. I’m not going to do that to anyone else.”

Corbin looked into her eyes. “Some things are just unknowable.”

She returned his gaze, startled by the intensity. The two had a tendency toward cynicism when together, but she could always count on him for total sincerity when she needed it most. He was right, of course, but how could she possibly find peace when she was the cause of her own misery?

Before Audrey could respond, Porter appeared and leaned down between them. “What are we talking about?”

Corbin’s annoyance flitted across his face as Porter sat down next to Audrey.

“So where are we?” Porter asked.

Audrey unfolded the map and handed it to Porter. “Blackburn Creek. Probably about an hour’s ride from the first cave.”

Corbin stood up and went to feed the horses some trail mix.

Porter squinted at the topo lines, concentrating on the marked locations. “They’re all connected, right?”

“It depends on what you consider connected. Can a human fit through? Maybe not. That’s why the complexities of cave systems can be so hard to prove.”

Corbin called over from the horses, “Everybody’s fed. We ready to keep going?” He scratched behind Gambler’s forelock.

Audrey’s blood quickened. As long as they hadn’t reached the traps, Scott’s fate was undecided. Schrödinger’s park ranger. She stood and wiped the grit from the seat of her pants and headed back to the horses. She was so unfamiliar with certainty that she didn’t trust it.

There was no sign of Scott at the first cave. They hopped off the horses to get a closer look at the snare he’d fashioned, a steel-jaw bear trap, glinting in the rays of the noon sun.

Audrey moved carefully toward the metal teeth in case anything else hid in the leaf litter. She squatted next to the spring-loaded mechanism.

“Aren’t those illegal?” Porter asked.

“I don’t think we’re playing by the rules here anymore, buddy,” Corbin said. “They didn’t make them to apply to what we’re dealing with anyway. Though it does seem weird to me that you’d only set up one of these for a thing with eight legs…”

Audrey followed the chain to where Scott had anchored it to a tree, then noticed a thick rope fastened to the end. She looked up to where a complicated net waited to drop once the jaws snapped shut and tugged the cord.

She pointed into the oak branches. “He just needs one of those eight legs to trigger it. Looks like his idea is for it to get tangled in that net.”

They stared for a moment at the latticed rope before Porter added, “Well, at least that proves he was here, so we know we’re on the right track.”

Corbin let out a humorless chuckle. “Catching a spider in a web.”

They climbed back onto the horses, giving the trap a wide berth to avoid any accidents, and continued southeast to the next marker.

Every once in a while, they called Scott’s name, then listened for any kind of response or even a subtle movement that might alert them to his presence. The cackle of a pileated woodpecker bounced through the trees. It reminded her of the woodpecker that had brought her family here in the first place. Then it just sounded like mocking laughter.

Dense swarms of insects blossomed all around them like smoke, and they had no choice but to swallow clouds of gnats. They stopped calling Scott’s name, to avoid choking on them. A staleness hung in the air. The horses were sweating now, and Audrey’s legs dampened against Cisco’s warm sides. His ears lay flat and his grunting grew more desperate.

The woods seemed to thicken around them as they went. Hours passed like this, sweat streaming down their thighs and tiny bugs sticking to their wet bodies. Audrey checked the map. They were closing in on the next cave entrance.

There was a steep incline as they approached. The horses strained up the hill, the riders leaning forward to shift their weight. As they crested the hill, Audrey saw something long and solid rising from the ground. A dizzying sense of vertigo made her swoon in the saddle.

The object had the milky opacity of a jellyfish, bristles of wiry cilia protruding from all six feet of it. It bent halfway at a joint, and Audrey recognized it as one of the spider’s legs, which had apparently broken off—the spider must have triggered a trap.

Cisco whinnied. The other horses shuffled behind him, fighting Porter’s and Corbin’s grip on the reins as they tried to keep them steady.

Cisco ignored Audrey’s attempts to move closer to the spider’s detached leg. He sidestepped as she wrestled with his bridle. She dug in her heels to urge him forward, but he kicked out, striking a tree and a rope tied to the trap.

Audrey shrieked as Scott’s body swung down from the branches, tangled in the ropes.

His skin hung in grisly folds, clinging to his skeleton, where muscle and viscera had been sucked dry. Gaping holes oozed a gelatinous, steaming fluid wherever the spider’s venom had eaten through his flesh, leaving nothing but drapes of rotting, tattered tissue held together by bone and sinew.

The upside-down mask that was his face had sloughed off his skull, mouth agape. Dark slits of what used to be eyelids slid down past where his forehead should be. Only his beard and the remnants of his park uniform confirmed his identity.

The horses reared and jostled to get away from the corpse, and they stumbled into one another in panic. Flicka, the only horse without a rider, drifted from the pack. A loud snap cracked like a gunshot and Flicka screamed. She’d stepped into a loaded trap hidden in the leaves.

Flicka collapsed to the ground and rolled in an attempt to get the biting thing off her leg. Her high-pitched screeching drowned out the clicking noises echoing out of the cave.

Corbin shouted, “No!” But before he could get to her, a knot of slender legs unfurled and burst out from the cave mouth. It moved with the fluidity of rippling water. The spider reared, revealing a gap in its abdomen where the missing leg had broken off. In the sunlight, Audrey could see its organs pulsing inside its semitransparent carapace. Claws flexed, fangs open, it pounced on Flicka with the blinding speed of a rattlesnake.

The other horses bolted and Corbin let go of Flicka’s lead.

Audrey yelled, “Stay together!”

It was all they could do to keep the horses clustered while they galloped away, pounding through the forest, leaping over rocks, weaving through trees, winding through overhanging sandstone, and barreling up inclines. The trio kept their hands wrapped around the reins, fighting against thousands of pounds of horse muscle and instinct just to stay in a group.

Flicka’s screaming faded into the distance as they raced away through the underbrush.

The blood throbbed in Audrey’s ears and all of the noises around her swam together in a muddled roar—hoofbeats, birdsong, yelling, insects, neighing, screaming. The horses tore through the backcountry in blind panic. Tears and sweat streaked across Audrey’s face and all she could do was hang on.

Corbin’s voice rose above the din: “Pull back! Pull back!” A hand reached across and grabbed her wrist. She gasped as Corbin and Gambler ran alongside her. He was instructing Audrey to pull on the reins and slow Cisco down.

She pulled with the last of her strength, and the exhausted horse slowed to a trot, gasping for breath. The trees thinned and they finally came to a stop. Cisco chewed at his bit, a pinkish tint to the froth at his lips where he’d cut them as he strained against the metal.

Audrey sagged against the saddle horn and sobbed. For Scott. For Flicka. For Ivy. For Benny. For every injustice in her life that had converged into this waking nightmare.

Corbin dismounted and approached her. “Hey, come on down. We need to give the horses a breather. I’ll help you—come on.”

She lifted her head, like breaking through the surface of water, and saw Porter and Corbin standing nearby, looking at her with concern. Shaking, she pushed into the stirrup and swung one leg over Cisco’s back. Corbin kept his hand on her back and she leaned on his shoulder to clamber down. Her legs were sore from gripping.

Standing on her own two feet felt disorienting, like the ground was still moving beneath her. Corbin led Cisco over with Whiskey and Gambler and tied them loosely to a tree. Their skin twitched under coats of lathered sweat.

Audrey found a fallen tree and sat down. Porter sat next to her, at a loss for words. She took long, calming breaths through her nose and then asked, “How long were we running?”

Corbin finished with the horses and walked over. He looked at his watch. “About half an hour.”

Audrey’s chest tightened. The panicked horses had run in whichever direction the terrain allowed, for who knows how many miles. She reached into her pocket and felt around for the map, but it was gone. “Shit. I must have dropped the map. Shit. We need to radio for help.”

Porter’s face blanched. “The radios are in Flicka’s pack.”

The enormity of the situation settled over them like a dusting of snow. Corbin turned his back. The horses’ labored breathing reverberated in the silence. Everything felt hot and sticky, and no one wanted to be the first to speak and make this real.

“We can’t ride the horses like this,” Corbin said.

Porter looked over at Audrey. His eyes pleaded with her. For forgiveness, for a solution, she wasn’t sure, but she had seen that look before.

They had set out on a search and rescue mission, and now they were the ones who needed rescuing. In her desperation to save Scott, she’d been sloppy. One of the most basic principles of wilderness preparedness? Always tell someone where you’re going. And because she thought she knew Devil’s Den, because she didn’t want to start a panic in the park, because she trusted her own instincts rather than protocol, no one knew they were out here.

Audrey stood up. She refused to be responsible for another missing person report. Issuing orders was the only thing that could come close to calming her. “OK. First, we need to get the heavy tack off the horses. Let them rest and cool down. Then we’ll sort through the supplies we’ve got left.”

With a clear way forward, or at least the beginning of a plan, they removed the pack bags and saddles. There was a squelching noise as Audrey peeled the wet saddle blanket from Cisco’s back. He shook out his mane and tossed his head against the halter and she reached up to scratch his jaw. “I know, I’m sorry—I have to leave it on for now.”

The bulk of the supplies were with Flicka. They took stock of what they had kept on the remaining saddles: three liters of water, jerky, Audrey’s compass, two headlamps, matches, one lightweight tent, a multipurpose tool, Porter’s machete, alfalfa cubes, and a rain poncho. Audrey’s gun was still strapped to her belt, but she no longer had the extra ammo.

Corbin looked at the water bottles and combed his fingers through the back of his sweaty hair. “Fuck.”

Porter’s eyes widened. “What?”

“Without the map, we have no idea where the nearest water source might be. And the horses need water. Now.”

“The good news is, we still have a compass,” Audrey said. “We know we went south for most of the day, so the park is north of us. We can just follow the compass north until we hit Lee Creek.”

Corbin clenched his jaw. “We don’t know how far that is, and we have to give the horses a break for a couple hours or they’ll collapse. By the time they’re ready to go, we’ll be racing the daylight.”

Porter looked between the two. “OK, so someone stays with the horses and the others start walking back to send help?”

“We can’t risk splitting up. It’s too dangerous,” Audrey said. “Besides, it would take way longer on foot than on horseback.”

Corbin’s voice wavered. “I’m not losing another horse.”

Audrey’s heart clenched and a shudder of regret for Flicka passed through her. “We’ll have to camp for the night. It’s just one night. We’re armed, and we can take turns on watch.”

Porter looked at her through his curls. “Just one night with the big-ass spider.”

The afternoon passed just slowly enough that Audrey began to question whether they might have been able to walk back after all. The elevation shifted in sloping arcs like storm-whipped ocean waves that had hardened into statues. If they wanted to camp for the night, they needed to find a flat area. Audrey wanted more than anything to look at a map and triangulate their position based on time traveled and the particulars of the terrain.

No familiar landmarks rose up from the hills to reassure her. It was all the same pattern of loblolly and sweet gum trees fighting for room to take root in the massive blocks of sandstone that had crumbled together tens of thousands of years ago.

The inclines finally leveled out enough for them to start making camp. They spoke only in fragments in the thick, syrupy aftermath of all they’d seen.

“Here?”

“OK.”

“You OK?”

“Yeah.”

Audrey cleared brush and started setting up their only tent. It could just fit two adults, so they would have to take turns sharing it, two at a time, while the third stood watch with the pistol. Corbin fiddled with the horses to make them as comfortable as he could, while Porter ran his hands along every rock formation and paced around them, muttering to himself.

“What are you doing?”

“Checking for openings.”

Audrey shivered despite the stifling heat. The shock of finding Scott’s body had stunned her into a quivering shell. Before they settled in for the night, they would need to make sure there weren’t any cave entrances nearby that could invite unwanted company.

She began collecting kindling. Not because they needed more warmth, but because it gave her something to do. If she sat still for too long, the anxious thoughts would have time to crawl in through her ear canal and wriggle through her brain folds. She could shift her focus from spiders’ legs to dry, fibrous sticks and twigs. The task shut off the desperate noise in her head and let the mechanical logic of her wilderness survival training take over.

Corbin waited as long as he could to water the horses to try and make it last. They had calmed down and were grazing on oats around the base of the trees.

Audrey gathered a few of the larger fallen branches. “Porter, let me borrow that machete.”

He frowned at the pile. “What about the burn ban?”

“Emergencies call for exceptions.” Audrey hesitated, then continued, “I’m not ready for total darkness yet, are you?”

Porter pulled the broad knife from its sheath on his belt and handed it over. She looped the safety cord around her wrist, gripped the handle, and, with a practiced stance, swung it at an angle with enough force to split the branch. The rhythmic chopping, the resistance as the metal hit wood with a thunk, gave her something else to focus on. Scott once told her she had Teddy Roosevelt syndrome: she was always keeping herself busy and running around so that her demons couldn’t catch up to her. The memory squeezed at her heart and she tried to shut it out.

Corbin saw what they were doing and placed rocks in a wide circle to keep the fire contained. The three piled kindling and built a cone out of the chopped branches, working together to create a beacon against the encroaching darkness. The twigs were so dry from the oppressive summer that it only took one match to light the blaze.

As dusk settled, needles of icy fear pricked Audrey’s skin. The fire hissed and snapped. Audrey tried to focus on the tendrils of smoke wafting up into the stars, looking for shapes and patterns like she would in the clouds.

Every sound echoed off the trees, amplified by the particular acoustics of the Ozarks. The shadows of the branches in the moon- and firelight elongated and crossed until it looked like they were sitting amid a vast expanse of thorns.

Their faces flickered in and out of focus in the glow. To an outsider, it might have looked like a family camping trip. For one perverse moment, Audrey thought about what a great campfire story this would make.

“Should we worry about the fire signaling our location?” Corbin asked.

Porter shook his head. “Spiders don’t have great eyesight, and this one seems to be blind. I wouldn’t worry about the smell either. If anything, they would avoid smoke.”

“As long as the horses are calm, I feel pretty safe,” Audrey said. “As safe as I’m going to feel in this situation, anyway.”

The fire sucked at the charred branches, which began to look like charred bones, and Audrey had to look away.

Corbin seemed to know what she was thinking about. “You should get some rest. I’ll take the first watch.”

“Not yet.”

Sparks floated up like fireflies. Audrey thought about all her childhood camping trips, being dragged into the great outdoors so her parents could find species of rare bird. But it was Scott who had taught her how to build a fire. Scott who taught her the geography of Devil’s Den, the proper way to mark a trail, and how to make sure you always found your way back to where you started.

She realized that she couldn’t really remember her father’s face. She hoped that when she thought of Scott’s, it would be the memory of his wry smile and not the skin slipping off his skull.

A plaintive trill shimmered in the air above their heads. Porter whipped around and looked into the treetops. The sound warbled around them, keening and eerie.

“It’s an owl, Porter.” Corbin sounded exhausted.

Porter stood on shaky legs. “Yeah, I think I will try to go rest.”

Corbin scooped up a handful of dirt to throw on the fire and Audrey put her hand on his forearm before he could. “I want to stay up just a little while longer.”

Porter moved into the small tent and left them alone. Audrey stared into the fire and watched the last tongues of flame lick at the crisped and curling branches. Her flesh prickled all over and she couldn’t stop shivering despite the heat. She leaned against Corbin and he rested his head on hers.

She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry.”

“About what now?”

“About everything.” Her eyes stung, from smoke or tears, she couldn’t be sure. “It’s all my fault. It’s always been my fault. It’s—”

He grabbed her hand. “I’ve told you before, stop apologizing. You always think everything is your fault.”

She rubbed her thumb over his calluses. “But what if I told you it really was?”

He lifted his head and looked at her. His eyes were red-rimmed and his features seemed more pronounced in the firelight. There were crow’s-feet and bags beneath his eyes that Audrey had never noticed. How had so much time passed? She had tried so hard to hold it back, to think the past fifteen years had just been some kind of purgatory, but here they were. Corbin’s constant presence made it easier to pretend.

He had always been honest with her. But she hadn’t been honest with him. The guilt was choking her now. It had to come out. “I lost Benny and it was all my fault.” The salty tears pooled in her throat, gagging her, and she gasped, “All of it, it’s all my fault.”

Corbin didn’t understand. “Audrey, I can’t imagine what you’re going through right now, with Scott gone, but you have to know none of it is your fault. Just terrible accidents, you know that. You and Benny were just kids, you got lost—”

Audrey cut him off, shaking her head: “No, you’re not listening. He disappeared because of me. I could have stopped it, it was absolutely my fault.”

The salt water flooded her belly with nausea. She covered her face with one hand and gulped down what she could, breathing hard. She couldn’t hold it in anymore. Her secret wasn’t just threatening to come out, it was pressing against her throat and leaking out of every orifice. She turned to him.

“The day Benny went missing, I wanted to go hiking by myself. I was sick of my family and wanted to get away from the campground for a little while. My parents made me bring him. He had been annoying me all morning, talking about comic books and making weird noises, when all I wanted to do was listen to my CDs. I fought them, I actually flat-out refused, and they forced me to take him along.” She took a few heaving breaths.

“So, I was out in the woods with my annoying kid brother, and all I could think about was how unfair it was. I wanted alone time, and Benny was thirteen and a smart aleck and he was making fun of me about something… I can’t remember what it was anymore. God, I can’t even remember, that’s how stupid it was—but it pissed me off, so I decided I needed to pay him back and show him that I was mature and that he was just a little kid. So I did exactly what my parents warned me not to do, and I went off the trail. Just stomping into the forest, blind. We weren’t lost, I did it on purpose. And of course, Benny followed me.”

Corbin watched Audrey cry, no secrets left between them. He didn’t dare move as she continued.

“He was whining, so I thought it would be even better to tell him scary stories to freak him out. He hated that kind of thing, he used to have terrible nightmares. We got so far away from the trail we couldn’t see it anymore, and I told him the worst things I could think of. Something about a monster in the woods that eats kids, that kind of thing. He was so scared, Corbin. Just a scared kid. And then I ran. I ran ahead because I wanted to lose him. I wanted him to be terrified, because I thought I was teaching him a lesson.

“I got far enough ahead and found a place to hide, just a hole in the rocks, and I ducked in. I watched him get close. He was crying then, and he was calling my name and looking around, trying to find me. I could have jumped out right then, just jumped out and laughed and that would have been the end of it. But I didn’t.”

She paused here, letting the weight of that decision settle in. “Why? I’ve thought about that choice over and over and I still can’t understand why. He ran ahead looking for me and got even more lost. I sat in that cave just laughing about it until I felt satisfied and I walked back to camp, and he hadn’t found his way back. I was actually kind of mad then—didn’t he know to just walk back in the direction we came from? He was ruining the joke.

“My parents looked. The rangers came and started searching. I got scared. So, when the police asked me to tell them what happened, I lied.”

Corbin broke in, “But you were just a kid too.”

She looked up at him, her face pained. “I was old enough to know better.”

Corbin was still holding her hand, squeezing it like he was thinking about how he could possibly absolve her. He couldn’t.

“Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

“At some point, so much time had passed and I didn’t think it would make anything better. No matter how it happened, he was lost in the woods. I was scared. I told myself I didn’t want to burden anyone else with it, but it was more selfish than that. I didn’t want to get in trouble. I didn’t want my parents to hate me. And then I got so used to holding it in, telling the truth felt impossible. What really happened, the story I told about what happened, what the police think happened, does it even matter? It’s all the same.”

Corbin was quiet. She had always thought that finally telling someone would be freeing, like a surgeon cutting swollen flesh open to relieve pressure. The guilt had been putrefying inside of her for so long that maybe it was just part of her—not something that could be released.

In that moment, she realized that she didn’t want absolution. She just didn’t want to be the only one who knew what had really happened to her brother. Benny was kind, and funny, and resourceful, and he didn’t get himself lost. He was more than just a lost child, more than a newspaper headline. He had a story. She needed his absence to mean something more than it did.

Corbin was at a loss for words. Audrey filled the silence for him. “And don’t say he would have gotten lost no matter what. For a while I told myself that what happened was fate. But I did have a choice that day, and I chose poorly.”

Corbin frowned, still gripping her hand. “Audrey, people make bad choices every day. Not all of them have such serious consequences, sure, but it wasn’t your choice to lose him forever. That’s not what you chose. You were a teenager. And I’m not a statistician, but think about what the numbers would look like if every teenager throughout existence faced that same exact decision, and how many of them would have done what you did. It’s not zero.”

They let this sink in, the smoke wafting up into the air.

Corbin placed her hand back into her lap. “Get some sleep. I’ll stay out for the first four hours, then I’ll wake one of you up to take over.”

In the tent she could see Porter huddled under a blanket, clearly still awake and shivering. She crawled in with him. He must have heard her too. They lay there back to back, feeding each other’s fear like a pair of spooked animals.

Through the open tent flap, Audrey could see a dot of orange light flare up in the darkness every few minutes as Corbin smoked a cigar. He hadn’t counted those in the supply check. The heady scent of tobacco smoke crept into the tent. The night sounds swelled around them, rising and blurring into one indistinct hum until Audrey’s exhaustion overcame her fear and she slipped into unconsciousness.

She was jolted out of her sleep sometime later—seconds, hours, she wasn’t sure. At first, she couldn’t tell what had woken her, but then she heard the familiar purring in the distance. The thrum of cicadas began to swell. The horses snorted and tugged at their halters.

She turned to look at Porter and found him already staring back at her, eyes wide. She wasn’t even sure he could see her. His pupils were dilated to the point that his irises had almost disappeared. He gave the distinct impression of a cow facing the knife moments before slaughter.

The sounds bounced off the hardwood, echoing all around them. Audrey couldn’t pinpoint a direction anymore, disoriented by the reverberating noise that seemed to come from all sides. Or from beneath the ground.

Corbin started moving in the direction of the sound, stumbled, then grunted as something slammed into him. Audrey barely had time to see the knife-like talons glint in the starlight before it thrust them into the flesh of Corbin’s shoulders and fastened him to the dirt like a pushpin through a corkboard. He howled in pain, blood pooling as he struggled in vain against the claws.

The horses screamed and kicked until they yanked themselves free from their tethers and took off into the woods.

Audrey felt Porter clap his hand over her mouth and pull her back, holding her tightly so she couldn’t move and alert the thing to their presence. Its impossibly long legs arched up to the sky, snapped at an angle, and bent back down to earth. It emitted a guttural clicking sound with the resonance of a growling crocodile, then jabbed its fangs into Corbin’s neck. There was a gurgling sound and he stopped moving.

For the first time she got a look at its head. It was round and flat, with bulbous, milky blank shells for eyes. Coarse hairs sprouted from it like a fly viewed under a microscope. Two fat fangs hung from the front, glistening with venom, while a pair of curious pedipalps waved to the sides, sensing vibrations in the air. Its jaw yawned open and the cicada noises returned. Audrey watched it rear back, bobbing like a skeletal bird regurgitating food for its young, then lean over and cover Corbin’s mouth and nose.

Audrey could hear Corbin’s muffled screams from within the cavern of its mouth. Corbin gripped the pistol in his right hand, but whenever he tried to lift his arm, the talon piercing his shoulder prevented it. The spider heaved and Corbin’s screams were drowned in a gush of fluid.

Porter held Audrey tighter as she writhed in an attempt to slip his grasp. Beneath the spider’s weight, Corbin’s arm jerked and he pulled the trigger, firing shot after shot into the trees. He managed to lift his arm just enough to point the barrel toward the spider. He fired and the bullet grazed its carapace, tearing open a scar that leaked bluish fluid, but it was enough to make the spider release Corbin, and it fled, screeching, into the darkness of the forest.

Audrey managed to get an elbow in Porter’s gut and break free. She ran over to Corbin’s side. He lay on his back, staring into the sky, his eyes pooling with red. She sobbed helplessly while his body spasmed and twitched.

“Porter, help, he’s dying,” Audrey cried out.

The veins in Corbin’s neck throbbed purple through his pale skin. A sizzling liquid leaked from the corners of his lips, frothing and singeing his beard. Corbin’s eyes rolled back to meet hers.

She knelt beside him and pulled his head into her lap. “No, no, please, look at me, I’m here—”

Time stopped now, just as she’d always wanted. It only seemed to happen in these impossible moments. She watched his pupils constrict and pressed her hands against the puncture wounds in his neck, trying to keep some essential essence inside, but the venom lingering there burned her fingers. More steaming blood pumped from the gashes in his shoulders, throbbing with each weakening heartbeat.

He managed to gurgle something that sounded like her name before expelling a torrent of his own entrails from his mouth. His eyes glazed over. She gaped at the chunks of organ meat that pooled in the dirt, crackling like crisped rice in a bowl of milk. Pieces of stomach lining bubbled and melted on the ground before her.

Without thinking, she reached for the gore, like she could put it back inside him, but Porter grabbed her by the wrist to stop her.

“No!” she sobbed. “We just have to get him back to the park, he’ll be OK. He’s still here. He’s right here. Where are the horses? Help me get him up!”

Porter fought against his own tears, crying out, “I’m sorry, they’re gone. He’s gone. We have to run, Audrey, come on, now.”

“I can’t leave him here!”

“You have to. We have to get out of here before it comes back.” He tried to pull her up from the ground but she wrenched her arm from his grasp.

She cradled Corbin’s head and pressed her cheek against his, his beard painting her face with brushstrokes of toxic blood. She didn’t care if the spider came back. If she didn’t move, she could stay here in this moment, and it would never end, and it wouldn’t be real.

Porter dropped to his knees beside her. “I know, I’m sorry, but we have to go. We have to take the gun and go.”

Audrey could barely breathe. She reached down to where Corbin’s hand still held the pistol. She choked out, “I’m sorry,” as she peeled back his fingers one by one to release it from his grip, then stood and followed Porter into the night.

2019

Ivy Missing 14 Days

Audrey and Porter ran as far as they could before collapsing against a rock formation to catch their breath. Audrey sank to the ground, too exhausted and dehydrated to cry anymore.

When they fled the campsite, they left behind most of their supplies. She had her compass in her pocket, the gun, and that was it. The rest of their gear, the food—everything was gone. Porter’s breath came in ragged gasps.

Audrey put her head between her knees, her shoulders heaving with shuddering spasms of something between sobbing and gagging. She would have been sick if there had been anything in her stomach to empty.

What was left for her now? Corbin was part of her. She’d never fully allowed him in, but he was there all the same. She was more like Scott than she’d ever cared to admit: never letting in the love she felt she didn’t deserve.

Porter put a shaky hand on her back and they tried to calm each other down, breathing in slow, deliberate inhalations to quell the hysteria. They were alive, they were together, and they were alone.

Her nervous system lit up as she considered the possibility that this could all be a panic-induced fever dream. She shot Porter a look; he seemed to understand.

He closed his eyes and said, “It was real. I saw it too.”

Porter kept his arm around her while Audrey rocked back and forth.

He rocked with her, not telling her to stop. Her teeth chattered. “Where was it? Where did it come from? There weren’t any caves, we made sure there weren’t any caves…” He shook his head.

A late-night breeze rustled through the trees, the waxy undersides of the leaves catching the moonlight and glittering with the stars. Audrey felt the hairs on her arms rise and felt a sudden sickening jolt of compassion for the spider that felt prey moving through the woods through the vibrations in its cilia. It needed to eat. This was its home.

She dropped her arms to her sides and leaned her head back against the rock, to let it cradle her. What was she still fighting for?

“I’m done,” she said.

He turned his head to her. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’m done. I’m tired.”

“Audrey, we have to go north. We can’t stay out here. We have to get back.”

She could feel the rattling pain in her chest as she struggled to regain her breath. “I can’t keep trying and failing. I’m too tired. I just want to stay here.”

Porter sounded exasperated. “Failing? You’ve saved so many. We’ve come this far.”

“I didn’t save the ones that mattered most to me.”

“But the ones you saved mattered most to someone else.”

“Then I’ve done enough.”

“It’s not your responsibility to save everyone. I know you think it is, but it’s not.”

“I made it my responsibility.”

“No one’s holding you to that but you!”

Audrey shook her head. “And now I dragged Corbin into the woods with me, and I got him killed. You heard me back there? I killed Benny too.”

That was enough for Porter. He stood up. “You’re right, you’ve done enough. So now this is a search and rescue mission, and I’m rescuing you.” He grabbed her hand. “Now get your ass up.”

The urgency in his voice startled her and she let him pull her up from the ground. She took a few more deep breaths and looked over at him. Surely he could feel her shaking.

His mouth was drawn tight. “Now, let’s see the compass.”

She pulled it out and Porter flipped it open in his palm. If she still had the map, she could have used the measuring tools on the baseplate to calculate exactly where they were. She always knew exactly where she was, exactly how long it would take to reach her next destination, exactly how many days had passed since she last saw Benny. She never stopped moving long enough to acknowledge that truth, but now, without Corbin, without Scott, what was she doing? If Benny suddenly appeared out of thin air, would he even know her? Did it matter? She bit down hard on her lip to stop the swelling despair.

Porter interrupted her thoughts, an authority in his voice she hadn’t heard before. “We know what direction we went. I don’t know exactly how far in we are, but if we keep our heads and stick north, we should make it back to the park.”

Her shivering legs felt as weak as if she were battling a terrible flu as Porter led them onward. The only way out was through.

They staggered through the woods like marionettes held up with strings, their knowledge of what lurked underground the only thing keeping them from collapsing from exhaustion. Pieces of bark and grime clung to their damp clothing.

The first rays of the sun peered through the tree canopy. Audrey kept her eyes on her feet to watch for treacherous stones hiding beneath the snarled growth of the forest floor, each protruding plantlet a potential tree fighting for space to grow up and break through and reach the light.

Who had been the first person to enter the wilderness and think it could bend to human will? People had been carving spaces for parks out of sheer stubbornness, everything held together with hubris and spit. How could she ever have thought that she understood it? How could she have let anyone enter the woods on her watch?

Porter came to an abrupt stop and Audrey looked up from the ground. The sandstone beneath their feet gave way to a sloping escarpment and tumbled out into an expanse of brushy hilltops unfolding for miles into the distance. Trees stretched their fingers to the sky, inching ever upward. Yellow rock cliff faces jutted up on either side, blushing crimson in the sunrise.

As she stared out at the horizon, the line where the trees met the open air blended into one indistinct color, nothing to mark the distinction between heaven and earth.

Despite everything, it was beautiful.

They kept walking in silence. The fatigue was sucking at the last dregs of Audrey’s awareness and it was all she could do to remain upright.

It was hard to tell if the sun had started sinking or if darkness had just crept into the corners of her vision. She felt like a shadow and might have floated forever if she hadn’t run into Porter, who had just stopped moving.

She peered around, bleary-eyed, then snapped to attention as she took in their surroundings. The silence wrapped her in a tight embrace. Not even the sound of birds broke the dead air. It was as though her ears were stuffed with cotton balls.

There was a cairn here. It filled her with a sick dread. Just beyond, she saw more, leading deeper into the woods, marking a trail. It seemed clear that they had been placed intentionally. Porter backed away, but Audrey felt sure that they had to follow them.

She motioned for him to come but he shook his head. “No way.”

“We have to,” she said.

“What? No, we need to keep going north.” He pointed at the compass needle.

“Porter, we’re following the cairns.”

Porter’s chest heaved. “We don’t have any food or water. We can’t waste time getting off track. Every minute counts.”

“Please, not having closure will kill me.”

He stared at her for a moment, then replied, “There are other things that will kill you first.”

“We won’t get lost. The cairns will lead us back to this exact point and we can keep going.” She held up the gun. “I’m never going to be satisfied until I kill this fucking spider.”

She started to follow the cairns and Porter had no choice but to fall in behind her or risk losing her too. The cairns were just a few feet apart, one after another. The forest sounds slowly returned, humming mosquitoes and thick, hissing clouds of gnats. Porter spit something out of his mouth and Audrey pulled strands of thick spider silk from her hair in a daze.

They made it to another clearing filled with cairns. Stones stacked precariously into impressions of steeples and spires and turrets. Strands of webbing stretched from tree limb to tree limb, the occasional bird caught in the sticky threads. She came too close to one of the doomed sparrows and it started flapping frantically, tangling itself further in the netting.

Audrey jumped back and bumped into Porter. He stepped back with a grunt, then tripped and fell backward.

“Sorry, are you OK?”

Porter was staring at his ankle. His shoe had disappeared into a hole. He whispered, “Oh, God—”

“What is it?”

He lifted his panicked eyes to meet hers, then traced his finger around a huge semicircle in the leaf litter. Whatever he was pointing at was invisible to her.

Her heart skipped a beat, then raced to catch up. His fear was contagious. “Porter, what is it?”

He licked his lips and whispered, “Trapdoor spider.”

“What?”

He pulled his foot out of the hole, lifting a flap of earth, like a lid with a hinge. He knelt down and tentatively pulled up on the flap, peeling it away from the ground and cracking it open, revealing a yawning mouth leading to a bigger hole like a tunnel in the side of the hill. It had blended seamlessly with the forest—no one would have ever seen it if they just walked by.

As sunlight flushed into the hole, they heard a rustling from within the depths. A bleating sound, then the terrified squeaking of a little girl, hoarse from crying.

Audrey entered the tunnel and slid down the hole feet first. The sides were reinforced with a slick coating. She fell about twenty feet from the trapdoor to the floor of a large cavern. Porter followed seconds later.

Audrey’s eyes were gradually adjusting to her surroundings, with only a dim light entering from above. Thick wads of ropy string hung from nearly every surface. The bundle nearest to her shook and a fawn’s head poked through, its eyes bulging, tongue lolling, as it bleated its futile refrain and struggled weakly against its wrapping. Audrey’s heart clenched. Why was it still alive?

A whimper farther back echoed softly against the stone walls. Porter took off running and cried, “Ivy!”

Audrey hissed at him as she hurried behind, “Quiet!”

They skidded to a halt in front of an even larger clump of webbing, which was plastered to a slimy wall, suspended like a grotesque hammock, and the pale outline of a child’s face peeked out from the threads. A girl—her light-brown hair was crusted over with dried fluids and pressed to her scalp, but it was unmistakably her—they had found Ivy. And she was still alive, somehow.

Porter reached out a shaking hand to touch the side of her face. “Ivy?”

Her eyes fluttered open. She blinked up at them with an eerie calmness.

“Oh, hi,” she said. “You know my name.”

Without hesitation, Porter pulled out his machete and hacked away at the deceptively strong mesh to cut her down. He was almost manic with ecstasy at their discovery. “I’m Porter, and this is Audrey. We’ve been looking for you for weeks!”

Ivy smiled. She had the affect of a hospital patient receiving a steady morphine drip. “Oh, good. Can I go home now? I don’t like it here anymore.”

Audrey was paralyzed, her insides roiling as though she had been filled with spider venom herself. “How? I mean, how did you survive? What did you eat?” She noticed a small puncture wound on Ivy’s clavicle.

Ivy looked toward the darkness at the back of the cave. “It feeds me things.”

Porter continued to saw at the threads. “Just help me,” he called over his shoulder. “We need to hurry before it comes back.”

Audrey whispered, “What’s a trapdoor spider?”

He answered automatically, the facts bubbling out of him like a fountain, even while his primary focus was freeing Ivy from her sinuous trappings. “Just what it sounds like. They’re basically a family of burrowing spiders that create these tunnels, like”—he waved the knife vaguely about—“well, much smaller than this, typically. To catch their prey, they create a kind of plug, out of soil and silk and saliva, essentially a door with a hinge, that covers the entrance to an underground nest. They spread silk outside the nest, like trip wire, and hide until they feel the vibrations of approaching prey, and then they pop out and snatch it.” A tinge of excitement crept into his voice as he momentarily forgot the desperate urgency of their situation.

Corbin had tripped over something before he was attacked, Audrey recalled. Now it made sense, she thought as she took in the gloomy surroundings. She recoiled in disgust at the gluey webbing, mixed with objects collected from the surface: crumpled beer cans, pieces of old plastic.

Audrey backed away from Porter and something crunched underfoot—a deer’s aging femur, some dried tissue still crusting it with dark stains. She sprang away and a piece of bone clattered across the floor of the cavern.

“Don’t trip on the bones,” Ivy called out, dreamily.

Strewn about were the yellowed remains of what appeared to be deer carcasses. Fragments of antlers poked out of a pile of bones, some with bits of hide still attached. And what could only be the jaw of a human skull.

She looked around in horror. She was surrounded by a meshwork of silk-wrapped carcasses in various states of decay, clinging to the cavern walls. Most appeared to be fawns, like the one still bleating near the entrance.

Then something else amid the detritus, a bright flash of neon green, called out to her like a beacon. She stretched her arm toward it, then stopped short, as though afraid of sparking a static shock if her fingers connected with the faded fabric: the sneaker she’d been looking for all this time.

An aching void opened inside Audrey. All those years she had walked through the woods, over and over, keeping her eyes peeled for something unnatural, and all along it was right underneath her. Obscured, perhaps, hidden beneath the undergrowth, just a thin seam punctuating the crust of the earth, but an entirely organic part of the forest.

A shuddering sigh escaped her lips. Whatever she had hoped to find, whatever physical evidence of Benny’s final whereabouts, she certainly never imagined herself here, in the den of an unknown creature, surrounded by rot and decay.

Porter severed the last of the thick, gluey strands holding Ivy to the wall, cast aside the machete, and grunted as she fell into his arms.

“I’ve got her, Audrey, I—”

He choked off the end of his sentence. A low-pitched tap-tap was coming from deep within the cave, a now-familiar sound, like a finger running across the teeth of a comb.

Audrey’s damp skin broke into cold gooseflesh. The sound reverberated in her chest.

Ivy, still in her dreamlike state of semiconsciousness, lay in Porter’s arms. She whined as she stared into the blackness.

The clicking sounds grew louder as the spider crept down the burrow, scraping its tarsal claws against the moist cave walls, exhaling through its pores with a low humming sound, like a purring tiger.

If Audrey and Porter could just hold absolutely still, the spider might not notice them.

The spider’s ghostly exoskeleton came into view as it skittered toward the entrance. Its hulking mass of translucent, segmented legs tapped along the rock, reacting to the sensations like a bat using echolocation to position itself in the cave.

The fawn thrashed as the spider lowered its head, its vacant, milky eyes inches from the fawn’s face, tilting side to side like a curious puppy. It reached its pedipalps out to the sides, fanning them up and down, tasting the air. It wiped something from its head, like a cat licking its paws, then rubbed its face and pushed the pedipalps against the fawn’s mouth.

Audrey winced.

Porter whispered to no one, “What’s it doing?”

Ivy whispered back, “Feeding.”

Audrey’s stomach clenched. Porter was caught in an impossible situation. He couldn’t move without risking Ivy’s life. The creature made its way to where they sat, scuttling above them across the stony ceiling. It stopped a few feet from Ivy, seemingly confused to find her on the ground instead of on the wall. It crouched low, the clicking sounds growing louder with agitation while it tilted its head, trying to see her through the cloudy lens of its weak eyes.

Ivy stretched her open palms toward it. Satisfied, the spider reached up to its head again with those same feline stroking motions. It had gathered berries and stored them in its wiry cilia, where they were held like droplets of water clinging to the tiny hairs of a plant. It plopped the berries into Ivy’s hands and she swallowed them hungrily.

The spider turned its attention back to Ivy’s tattered webbing. It leaned against the torn remnants and got to work restoring the bundle. Audrey’s jaw dropped as it tilted its head back and bent backward all the way down to the end of its abdomen to pull more silk strands from its spinnerets, piecing the structure back together.

It turned to lift Ivy and found her heavier than she should be. Porter had his arms wrapped around her now—he would die before he let go.

Audrey stood up and took a wide stance, aiming the gun. “Die, you—”

Click. The gun was out of ammo. She’d never checked the chamber after taking the gun from Corbin’s corpse.

Audrey had only a split second to decide what to do before the creature realized they were there. What else could she do? She wasn’t going to sit there and watch Porter and Ivy die right in front of her.

She reached deep into her gut to let out a piercing howl that she’d been trying to stifle for the last fifteen years. Her primal anguish echoed off the walls of the cave. The spider let go of Ivy, disoriented and searching for the source of the vibrations.

It fixed on Audrey. She dropped the gun. “Porter. Run. Get her out.”

Porter swung Ivy up into a piggyback position. “Take it!” he screamed, and slid the sheathed machete across the floor to Audrey.

She lunged for the machete and the spider jumped toward her. She dodged and the spider collided with a pile of bones.

Audrey scrambled to her feet and unsheathed the machete. The spider hissed and flailed as it righted itself. One of its legs was stuck in a rib cage.

Porter, reaching the entrance of the tunnel, cried out in frustration: “It’s too steep, I’ll never be able to climb up!”

A child’s voice came from the bone pile. “Mommy!” It was the same voice Audrey had heard outside her cabin. “Mommy!” it cried out again.

Audrey walked toward the spider, machete aloft, angry tears filling her vision. With a wet pop, the creature wrenched away from the bones, cracking one of its own legs off, and reared up to full height on its remaining legs in an attack stance.

Audrey heard another voice: “Audrey, wait!”

It was Benny. She hadn’t heard that voice in years, but there it was, like it was being played on an old VHS tape, crackling and somewhat distorted, but it was unmistakably Benny’s voice that emanated from the spider. The same phrase it had stolen from him all those years ago.

“Audrey, wait!”

She was right next to it now and it loomed above her. She gripped the machete’s handle in both hands and roared as she stabbed upward into the segmented point where the spider’s head connected with its abdomen. With the last of her strength, she dug the blade in and yanked it downward, slicing the carapace open. Blue blood and jelly-like globs of what was probably Scott’s and Corbin’s partially digested flesh rained down on her.

The spider collapsed onto its back, hissing through the holes in its body with the last of its dying breath. Its chitinous legs curled in on themselves, folding against its husk.

Audrey dropped the machete to the floor with a clang and tried to wipe away the film of slime covering her. She sank to her knees, all of her energy and emotion spent, and leaned forward onto her palms as strings of her wet hair hung around her.

Porter was frantically searching for another way out, with Ivy’s arms wrapped around his neck and her head on his shoulder. Only their heavy breathing and the fawn’s bleating punctuated the silence. Its mother would be looking for it.

Audrey looked back up at the spot on the wall she’d been avoiding, where Benny’s shoe held fast to a knotted ball of spiderweb.

Her last earthly connection to her brother. She almost wished she had never seen it. It was final, absolute confirmation that yes, Benny had died, and yes, it had been horrible, and yes, he was almost certainly afraid and in pain until the end.

She reached toward the sneaker and her fingers brushed the laces, which had crumbled with age. It was stuck tight, half submerged in the net of ropy silk that held this bulging mass to the wall. She set her mouth in a tight line. She wasn’t leaving this cave without that sneaker. Audrey leaned her shoulder against the wall for leverage and gripped the shoe with both hands and pulled. With a muffled rip, the sneaker came loose, tearing a seam in the circular lump.

She barely had time to react to the rustling sound coming from within the ball of webbing as thousands of baseball-sized, chalk-colored baby spiders issued forth from the hole. They spilled across the rocks, crawling over Audrey, who could barely hear Porter yelling for her above the sound of the skittering spiderlings.

She clutched the shoe to her breast, cradling it, wishing that somewhere, Benny could feel the force of her love and her sorrow and her regret. As she made her way toward Porter and Ivy, the scurrying clicks of the miniature claws began to recede and the spiderlings disappeared into barely perceptible cracks and crevices, slipping into darkness and memory.

“Are you OK?” Porter asked. “I see a light at the other end of the cave.”

Ivy leaned around Porter’s neck and said, “She was a mommy spider.”

Audrey followed Porter. The light was just a pinpoint streaming through a crack. The clammy walls licked at their skin as the passageway continued to narrow until it seemed impossible to squeeze through. Audrey was done panicking. She’d just lived through a nightmare—what was left to be afraid of?

“Put Ivy between us. We’ll pull her through.”

She turned sideways and slipped into a crack between the rocks, holding Ivy’s hand. The little girl’s cries spurred Audrey with a burst of adrenaline. She scraped along the tight cavern walls, ripping at anything she could grab to gain purchase. The slime coating the sides helped push them forward.

Audrey could see the opening now, a jagged splintering of sharp right angles zigzagging across the rock like a zipper. Audrey cried, “I know where we are!”

She slid through the last few feet of the squeeze and burst into the daylight on the other side, pulling Ivy and Porter out after her. It was just a short hike to Lee Creek Valley.

MISSING SIX-YEAR-OLD GIRL FOUND ALIVE AT DEVIL’S DEN

Devil’s Den State Park, West Fork, Ark.—

Six-year-old Ivy Summers went missing on July 12 in the rugged wilderness of the Ozark National Forest. Last Friday, off-duty park rangers Audrey Figg and Silas Porter found Ivy in a cave located ten miles from the Fossil Flats Trail, where she disappeared. She was reunited with her parents after the harrowing two-week ordeal.

Ivy was found shell-shocked and malnourished, but otherwise unharmed. Early reports state that Ivy survived in the cave with a large predatory animal, though officials have yet to disclose further details.

The disappearance of Ivy Summers sent shock waves throughout Arkansas. People from all corners of the state came together, including police with canine and mounted units, and an army of dedicated volunteers determined to bring the little girl home. Official search operations were recently suspended, but the Summers family and the community never gave up hope.

Ivy’s father, Dan Summers, expressed his heartfelt gratitude, saying, “Thank you to all of the volunteers who worked tirelessly to bring Ivy back. Your efforts were a light in the darkest time of our lives. We ask for privacy as we return home as a family and navigate the aftermath of this horrific experience.”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

In the interest of public safety, Devil’s Den State Park will be closed to visitors until further notice due to an ecological threat. Information will be updated as it becomes available.

ACTIVE ALERT IN WASHINGTON COUNTY

WARNING: Stacked rocks may indicate the presence of Trogloraptor megalarachne, or giant cave spiders. Do not approach these structures. Alert law enforcement if you encounter them.

GIANT CAVE SPIDER DISCOVERED IN ARKANSAS

If you’re arachnophobic, stop reading. During a search and rescue operation, park rangers discovered a new species of cave-dwelling spider in the depths of Devil’s Den State Park in Arkansas.

Much about the spider remains a mystery, but one thing is certain. It’s the largest species ever found, boasting an impressive legspan of twelve feet across. The discovery has rocked the scientific community.

How did such an enormous arachnid survive undetected for so long? Dr. Asha Chaudhary, an entomologist at the University of Arkansas and one of the researchers who described and classified the new spider, says there’s a simple explanation.

“The Trogloraptor megalarachne lives underground at a depth of around 300 meters. This is uncharted territory, and we’ve only just begun to map the areas beyond human exploration.”

“This changes everything we thought we knew about spider evolution,” says Milo Wolfe, head of arachnology at the Georgia Academy of Sciences. “I wouldn’t have believed it, if Dr. Chaudhary and her team hadn’t produced a specimen.”

While this discovery may seem exciting, it came at a cost. Longtime Devil’s Den superintendent Scott Rollins lost his life tracking down the Trogloraptor megalarachne while trying to protect park visitors. The nest where researchers recovered the specimen contained the remains of a human victim, solving a fifteen-year-old cold case.

Dr. Chaudhary insists that this is unusual behavior. “From what we’ve learned so far, the megalarachne’s preferred food source is white-tailed deer and other large game animals. They use a trapdoor system familiar in other species to catch their prey. Unfortunately, as hunting in the area has increased over the past century, the megalarachne has become a more opportunistic feeder and spends more time closer to the surface. These creatures have an astounding level of intelligence and mimicking capabilities, and have adapted to imitate human structures like cairns to lure prey to their den.”

Researchers are mapping Trogloraptor megalarachne activity through the Ozarks. Most of the “trapdoors” have been found in remote locations, with the exception of those in or near Devil’s Den State Park.

Newly appointed superintendent Audrey Figg has been working with the Nature Conservancy and the State of Arkansas to designate the area a protected wildlife reserve. She declined to be interviewed for this article, releasing only the following statement: “Whether or not this particular specimen’s behavior was abnormal, Devil’s Den will remain closed until we can guarantee the safety of the public. Until that time, we want to emphasize that unauthorized access to the park will not be tolerated. Hunters attempting to operate within the newly outlined limits will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

So how worried should you be? “We don’t know how abundant nor how widespread they may be,” Chaudhary continued, “but they’ve most likely lived in this area for much longer than humans have.”

2019

4 Months After

When Audrey received a notice that Corbin had left the farm to her in his will, she’d felt sick. She didn’t intend to keep it. Why would someone that young have a will anyway?

When she arrived at the executor’s law office, it all made sense.

Corbin’s father was waiting in the conference room when she entered. She had never met him before, but the resemblance was clear. He had the same wiry, wild black hair. Years of hard living gave him the appearance of a wrung-out human washcloth.

She felt nauseated that he showed up at all. He had never visited on Corbin’s birthday or for the holidays. He hadn’t attended Corbin’s high school graduation. He wasn’t even at his funeral. She wondered what Corbin possibly could have left him.

She was greeted by the executor, who invited her to take a seat.

Corbin’s father ignored Audrey completely, just fixed his hungry eyes on the executor, who was shuffling through paperwork, preparing to announce the distribution of Corbin’s assets. One by one, Audrey signed papers transferring the land, the house, the chickens, the horses, his truck, and everything to her. This went on and on while Corbin’s father seethed and screamed at the executor about parental rights. To Audrey’s amazement, the lawyer kept his composure throughout the ordeal and didn’t address him at all until the last of the documents were signed.

Corbin’s father growled, “If you don’t talk to me right now, I swear to God—”

The executor cut him off. “Yes, Mr. Hale, I’m getting to you now. This is one of the stranger testamentary wishes I’ve seen, but,” he said, and threw up his hands, “it’s not any sort of legal violation, so here we are.” He picked up a sheet of paper and handed it over to Corbin’s father, who snatched it from his hands. “Your son wanted you to read this letter,” the executor told him, “but only after sitting through this distribution of assets.”

It took only a moment to read the letter. He thrust it down onto the table and stormed out of the room, threatening to sue.

Audrey picked up the discarded sheet and read: “You left me with nothing. Now we’re even.” She knew she had to keep it all.

Audrey woke to Spartacus crowing. She didn’t bother with an alarm anymore, now that the farm sounds roused her. She had new chores to do.

She sat at the edge of her bed and rolled her head back and forth to loosen her shoulders. Porter would be here soon to help her with the day’s errand. She dreaded it, but it was the last thing she needed to do to put the woods behind her.

She pulled on some wool socks and went to the kitchen to put beans in the coffee grinder. The noise drowned out the warbling chatter of the chickens for a moment. Their clucking seemed more insistent once the mechanical hum of the machine stopped.

“I’m coming, girls,” Audrey called out the kitchen window. “Hold your horses.”

She sprinkled the coarse grounds into the pot of water and clicked on the gas stove to let it heat. While it boiled, she looked out across the pasture and wondered how Corbin ever did it all by himself.

She poured black coffee into her thermos, doing her best to prevent too many grounds from spilling in, then pulled on her work boots and headed out to the chicken coop. Spartacus, the new rooster, strutted up to the wire, furiously pecking at the ground, as if to chastise her for taking too long. She chuckled as she stepped into the run and poured feed into the hanging tubes. “Yes, you’re a terrifying little dinosaur.”

One of the park’s trucks rattled up the gravel drive and pulled in front of the remnants of the raptor aviary. Audrey planned to shore up the roof at some point. She sipped at the cowboy coffee as Porter hopped down from the cab.

“Who said you could take that out today?”

Porter smiled at her. “Har har. You ready for this?”

“Need to get the horses ready.”

Gambler and Whiskey had eventually found their way back to the park after their ordeal—no sign of Cisco. Audrey decided it was time to retire Whiskey from park duties and moved her here to the farm.

Porter followed Audrey through the cold morning dew on their way to the barn.

Gambler nickered softly at her as she stepped inside the stall. More than anything else, she felt Corbin’s presence here with Gambler. She pressed her forehead to the bridge of the buckskin’s nose and stroked his neck. “Morning. Up for a hike?” His velvety nostrils flared and snorted hot breath against her neck.

Audrey turned the pony loose into the pasture and worked with Porter to saddle the horses and get the trailer ready.

Porter cinched Whiskey’s saddle. “I got another report from Dr. Chaudhary yesterday. They found some more of the trapdoors. It’s getting easier now that we know the signs. No human remains at any of the other nests so far. It’s looking more and more like our megalarachne was an anomaly.”

“Anomaly or not, the park stays closed until we can guarantee public safety.”

Porter nodded. “I know.”

Audrey finished with Gambler’s halter and led the horse to the trailer.

“So why are you still keeping up with trail maintenance?” he asked.

Audrey led Gambler up the ramp, then ran her fingers down his side as she climbed back out. “I’m still a state employee,” she said. “Superintendent or not, I’ve got people to answer to, and keeping the trails maintained is part of my job. If they force us to reopen at some point, I’d rather not have to start from scratch.”

“Do you think we will? Reopen?” He spoke with a hopefulness that took her by surprise.

“Not how it used to be, anyway. I think at some point they’ll probably model it after the other wildlife refuges, like the Cache River. The campsites and everything will have to go.”

“You love that.”

She smirked. “I don’t hate it.”

Finished loading, the pair climbed into the truck. Audrey drummed her fingers against the steering wheel for a moment before taking a deep breath and starting the engine.

Porter put a hand on her shoulder. “It doesn’t have to be today, you know. No one’s walking the trails. We can always take it down later if you want to.”

She shook her head. “No, today’s the day.”

The horses trekked up the Butterfield. Autumn’s breath rattled the trees’ dried leaves and Audrey buried herself deeper into her fleece jacket and leaned into Gambler’s warmth beneath her. She pulled to a stop in front of the rocks whose pattern she’d etched into her heart. She looked back at Porter, who responded with a tentative smile.

Audrey pulled Gambler’s reins to the right and led them off the trail, into the section of woods she knew better than any other. It was the constant backdrop in her dreams. The tunnel of trees beckoned them in. The horses picked their way through the brush and Audrey felt the warmth spread up through the rest of her body.

Sandstone bluffs loomed ahead. Around a corner, the rocks parted to reveal the crevice, but in this light, everything seemed smaller than she remembered. Audrey and Porter dismounted and tied the horses to a tree near the cairn.

The mossy cairn rested against the bluff. Audrey appraised it for the first time. Four feet tall, piled with the biggest, flattest rocks she could find to keep it secure. She’d become more of a cairn expert since the day she’d piled this offering to lead Benny back.

Audrey sat down in the leaves in front of it and rested her hand against the base stone. Porter joined her.

“I used to come here when I wanted to talk to him. It felt sort of like I left his ghost here. Or there was some cookie-cutter shape of him sliced out of the air and I just needed to call him back through it.” The breeze whispered through the falling leaves. “It’s hard to explain.”

“You can still talk to him,” Porter said.

“Not here. I guess I kept coming back because some part of me thought that if I ever found him, it would be right where I lost him. After all that time, I wanted it to be a bad dream, and I’d have to be in this spot to wake up from it.”

“There’s really no harm in leaving this here.”

She shook her head, then turned to look at Porter. “OK, let’s do it.”

They stood up. Audrey pressed her leg against the middle of the cairn and leaned into it. The cairn didn’t shift at first, stuck in place from years of settling. Porter joined her and they put their weight against the rocks until it toppled over. Moss peeled away from the crag and the individual stones thudded to the earth. The topmost stone rolled a few feet away. Audrey lifted one of the stones from the middle and a tiny wolf spider skittered out from underneath. She tossed the stone away, ensuring that all the stones were scattered.

Audrey waited for the familiar weight to settle into her chest, but nothing did. Porter stood next to her in silence for a bit as they stared at the empty space where the cairn had been.

He asked, “How are you feeling?”

“For a long time, I felt this guilt, not just for losing him, but for not making every single moment of his life perfect. But they weren’t all bad days. Before that last day, there were video games, and dumb jokes, and fake lyrics we made up to songs. There were times I could have paid more attention. But there were times that I did.”

“He knew that you loved him.”

“I did. I always will.”

Audrey wondered if she would ever come back to this spot. It might as well exist only as a memory for her now. She hesitated to leave, as though moving would close her to Benny forever. But, she thought, when the last living person who knew her faded into memory themselves, the time she and Benny spent together still will have happened.

They got back on Whiskey and Gambler and made their way back down the hillside. As they reconnected with the trail and turned back toward the VC, Porter asked, “So, you’re going to stay here? At Devil’s Den?”

“There has to be someone here who understands it.”

“I’m not going anywhere either.”

She smiled. “Good.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book wouldn’t exist without the countless teachers, librarians, writers, artists, and others who have inspired me throughout my life, but I would like to mention some specific people and places:

To my little brother, Robby. No amount of time with you would have ever felt like enough.

To my wonderful agent, Via Romano, for your faith and unwavering enthusiasm for this novel. Thank you for taking me on and for championing my work.

To my talented editor, Liv Ryan, for seeing right into the heart of this story and connecting with it on such an emotional level. I’m so lucky to have someone with your passion and vision in my corner.

To Uncle Lonnie, for talking with me for hours about your incredible experiences with search and rescue, the Arkansas Forestry Commission, and the Back Country Horsemen of America. So much of this story exists thanks to your knowledge of SAR and Devil’s Den.

To Devil’s Den State Park, and in particular to Monte Fuller and Tim Scott, for giving me insight into the realities of life as a park ranger and superintendent. I took many research trips to hike the trails, and I wrote my earliest drafts of the novel while staying in the CCC cabins.

To my creative writing professors at the University of Central Arkansas—this novel started as a rough draft in John Vanderslice’s class. Your guidance and mentorship gave me the confidence to see this through to the end. I also couldn’t have done it without my MFA cohort and writing community, specifically Kathy Bates and Sydney Austin.

To designer David Litman and art director Keith Hayes for the lush and striking cover design.

Special thanks to Community Bakery and the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts for letting me loiter in your beautiful café spaces to write for hours at a time.

To my big sister, Amy, for loving this book from the beginning and for officially reading more drafts than anyone else except my publisher. You’ve always inspired me creatively, and I love that we get to share our art with each other.

To my little sister, Lori, for being the first person I ever made up stories with. No one will ever know the epic dramas that our toys endured. Thank you for fueling my imagination.

To my parents, for encouraging me. Thank you for buying me so many books, thank you for reading to me every night, and thank you for letting me be myself.

And, of course, my husband, Michael South. Thank you for all the late nights brainstorming. Thank you for the freshly ground pour-over coffee every morning. Thank you for always believing in me. I love you more than anything.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carrie Lee South earned her MFA at the Arkansas Writers Workshop, where she served as the fiction editor for the literary magazine Arkana. She’s currently the fiction editor at StoryBottle Co. Her work has appeared in Waxwing, F(r)iction, Iron Horse Literary Review, Tales to Terrify, and elsewhere. When she’s not reading and writing, she’s spending time with birds—the ones outside and the four parrots that live in her house.