Finding Hannah (8 page)

“Molly never missed a day of searching,” I said, smiling at Mom.

Mom asked for her phone number and Molly wrote it down.

“Tell you what,” Dad said, “it’s starting to get dark. I have the day off tomorrow. If you and Molly stay here tonight, I’ll take you anywhere you want to go in the morning.”

Molly and I looked at each other. Even though we’d both just slept, I was still tired and I guessed Molly was too. Plus the idea of saving ourselves the four-hour walk to get to the search area sounded great. We both nodded in agreement.

Amy was extremely excited to hear that Molly was going to be sleeping on the spare bed in her room. Amy asked Molly to read her a bedtime story. I sat outside in the hallway listening as Molly happily read to her. When she finished, Molly pulled up Amy’s covers and tucked her in. “Good night, Amy. It was so nice to meet you.”

“Good night. See you in the morning.”

Molly pulled Amy’s door shut behind us. I could hear the nine o’clock news from the basement TV. I looked across the hall at Hannah’s door. I’d only seen it a few times in the last month. Ever since she’d been taken it had always been shut.

“Is that …?” Molly whispered, pointing at Hannah’s door.

I nodded and realized the last time I’d seen Hannah’s room was the night she’d been taken.

I motioned for Molly to follow me, carefully opened Hannah’s door, and flipped on the light. Heavy clear plastic covered the furniture in her room. Her bed was made and it too was covered. Hannah’s laptop sat under the plastic covering her white desk. Even her lamp was covered. About fifty or so pictures of friends and cut-outs from magazines hung over the far wall next to a large mirror above her dresser. Two signs hanging above the mirror said “Instant Swimmer, just add Aqua” and “Dancing Queen.”

I stared at her desk chair and pictured the last time I’d seen Hannah sitting there doing homework.

“Are you okay?” Molly whispered.

“Yeah.” I walked over to the wall and spotted a picture of Hannah and Amy smiling at the camera, both with green cream smeared on their faces. I scanned the pictures and saw one, which was several years old, of a smiling Hannah with her arm around me. I pulled it off the board and stared at it.

“Hannah never let me in her room,” I said, still looking at the picture. “I can’t remember the last time I stood here.”

A wave of grief washed over me as I thought about how I’d slept through Hannah’s kidnapping. My hand was shaking as I handed the picture to Molly.

She looked at it and gave it back. “I’m sure Hannah would want you to keep it.”

I put the picture in my pocket and stared at Hannah’s desk, remembering the time Hannah had helped me with my algebra homework at the kitchen table a few weeks before school ended.

Molly’s hand found my shoulder. “You’re going to find her. I just know it.”

Chapter 6

The next morning Dad took Molly and me to a grocery store so we could load up on dried food to go with our MREs. He then drove to our drop-off point, where he pulled his pickup to the side of the highway and helped us get our packs out of the back.

“Call me if you have any trouble,” Dad said. “Good luck.”

“Thanks,” Molly and I said in unison. We waved goodbye and set off into the woods.

Molly and I hiked until noon and found a spot for our camp overlooking a valley stretching for miles. According to our map, a large river wound through the bottom of the valley, which made Molly happy. The weather was calling for more hot sun, so again she made me promise we’d stop for a swim. We had searched to the east of the river from our last campsite. Now we were on the west side of it.

After a quick lunch of sandwiches Mom had made, we marked our campsite with the GPS, then set off for our first loop. I carried the satellite phone in my day pack along with some granola bars.

We headed north to higher ground through a mix of pine and birch trees. Without a cloud in the sky, the sun burned the backs of our necks but, thankfully, it wasn’t humid. We looped back in the afternoon through the lower ground, where we fought through thick growths of poplar, ash, and maple trees.

“What is that?” Molly said, pointing at the ground in the distance.

I looked where she pointed and saw a large bush surrounded by a blanket of dead pine needles. “I don’t see anything.”

Molly walked toward the bush and I followed. She bent down to look under it.

“Right there,” Molly pointed. “There’s something yellow under there. It looks like fabric.”

I instantly pictured Hannah standing at the bottom of the stairs. “Hannah was wearing a yellow T-shirt.”

I grabbed a stick and poked at the yellow spot. I dragged it out from under the bush.

“It’s a T-shirt,” Molly said.

She was right. The faded yellow shirt tore easily as I pulled it off the stick. I held it up and it was big enough that both Molly and I could have fit into it at the same time. “There’s no way this was Hannah’s.”

“Shoot,” Molly said. “I was hoping we’d found a clue.”

“Me, too.”

The sound of a passing car seemed out of place as we walked through the forest, and a gravel road soon came into view. We decided to walk down it for awhile. When we came upon a long driveway, we ducked back into the woods and walked in the cover of the trees along it until we saw a house with a small backyard. So many of the homes in the country were like this, as people moved here to be spread out far from other people. It was very likely Hannah’s kidnapper lived in a house just like this one.

The place was ideal for housing a kidnap victim. The nearest house was at least a half mile away, plus it was set back far enough from the road that only the driveway gave any indication that a house was buried in the trees.

Molly pointed. “Look, it has a basement.”

The house also had a one-stall garage. There was no movement in the house that we could see through several open windows. I looked at the GPS and guessed we were about an hour from our campsite.

“Let’s come back tonight and have a look,” I said.

“I hope they don’t have a dog,” Molly replied.

We returned to our campsite and rested. We both drank water from our packs, as the bottles we carried had run dry a few hours earlier.

“Will you show me how to build a fire?” Molly asked.

“Sure.”

I had her pile small pieces of dry kindling into a tepee shape. I watched her excitement as the flame from her match transferred nicely to the kindling.

“Look at that!” she said, staring at the growing fire while still holding the lit match.

“Molly,” I pointed at her hand, “the match!”

She looked at her hand and saw the flame was right next to her finger. She squealed as she snapped her hand away, dropping the match.

“Are you okay?”

She looked at her finger. “I’m good.”

I smiled at her and we both laughed.

We used Molly’s fire to heat two cans of beef stew.

Molly poked at her stew with her spoon. “How mad were your parents when you got home yesterday?”

“My mom was not happy. We cleared up a few things and she got over it.”

“So you decided to speak to them again?”

“I didn’t have a choice. Now we have an understanding. My price of freedom is lugging the phone around with me.” I set my empty can of stew down. “What about you? Was your mom mad at you for being gone?”

Molly shook her head. “No. My … my mom didn’t even notice I was gone, and Tony was disappointed to see me.” She swallowed hard and looked at the fire. “Drug addicts only care about their next high. They don’t care about anything else.”

The tension in Molly’s face was clear as she fought her emotions. I touched her shoulder. “I care about you.”

Her face brightened. “Thank you.” She gave me a quick hug and said, “You’re the first person who’s hugged me since my father died.”

I opened my mouth, but didn’t know what to say. As her words sunk in, I felt awful. It had been two years since her father died. Two years since she’d had a hug. I felt so bad for Molly. I couldn’t imagine how awful that would be.

* * *

Molly and I wore our face paint as we lay next to each other in our black clothes, looking at the rear of the house we’d walked past hours before. We were on a hill looking down at the house, which had a deck with a sliding-glass door. The backyard was surrounded by tight clumps of trees, allowing us to get quite close without being seen.

The sun had set, and the blue sky was retreating into the distance. I used the spotting scope and Molly used her binoculars to watch a man walking around what appeared to be the kitchen.

“It looks like he just got done eating,” Molly said.

A black-haired girl darted behind him.

“Did you see that?” I asked.

“No. What did you see?”

“In the window behind him. It looked like a girl.”

The man turned to his right and laughed as he appeared to be talking to someone. The man wiped his hands and disappeared.

“It was a girl with black hair,” I said.

“Are you sure?” Molly asked.

“Yes.”

“If it were Hannah, you wouldn’t think he’d let her walk around like that.”

The man reappeared in the window for a moment and then was gone.

A teenage girl appeared at the sliding-glass door with her back to us.

“Is that her?” Molly asked.

I strained to look harder. The girl looked like she was putting on tennis shoes. She stood and opened the door. Both Molly and I got a good look at her face.

“No,” I said. “It’s not her.”

The girl was holding a baseball glove and a softball. She flipped on a light that lit up the backyard. The man followed her out, holding a catcher’s mitt. The two walked to opposite sides of the lit area.

“Are you ready?” the girl asked.

The man crouched and said he was.

She spun her arm around to loosen it up and then, in an underhand motion, she threw the ball to the man.

“Take it easy until you’re warmed up,” he said.

Molly and I looked at each other. We knew we weren’t going to find Hannah here. Even though we were well protected, we were too close to be able to stand up and walk away without being seen or heard. Even crawling away would be risky.

“Let’s wait it out,” Molly whispered. “It’s getting darker. It shouldn’t be long.”

I nodded and quietly loaded our binoculars and spotting scope into our backpack. I put the pack on and heard the snap of the softball hitting the catcher’s mitt.

Molly pointed at the girl. “She’s really good.”

We watched a few more pitches.

“Good pitch,” the man said. “Does your arm still feel okay?”

“Yeah, it’s fine,” the girl said.

Molly looked at me. She held her hand up toward me as if she were miming me to do the same.

I held mine out and our palms touched. She turned my hand over and traced it with her finger. My whole arm tingled.

I watched Molly as she followed each of the lines in my hand with her index finger. I was frozen by her touch, unable to move in fear that if I did, she would stop. I felt the hairs on my arms and neck stand at attention.

“I still see you running from bear cubs,” Molly whispered.

I smiled as the girl increased her pitch speed and another snap echoed through the forest.

A loud ringing noise came from my backpack. It was as if a dozen bells were going off and the sound easily filled the whole area.

Molly looked at me, the whites of her eyes wide within her black-painted face, and we scrambled to our feet. I glanced at the backyard, and both the man and girl were staring into the woods right at us.

“Who’s there?” the man shouted.

Molly grabbed my hand and we took off running.

“Who’s out there?” the man shouted. “Stay off my property. I’m calling the police!”

We ran up the hill and the ringing sound returned. We continued to run as the phone rang a fourth time. We had cleared the other side of the hill and I stopped to take off the backpack.

“Stupid phone,” I said.

I pulled out the satellite phone as it rang for a fifth time. I hit the button to answer it.

“Dylan, can you hear me?” I heard Mom say.

“Yes, Mom.” I stood up and jogged as Molly followed.

“It’s about time you answered,” she said.

“Sorry, this thing is still new to me.”

“Why does it sound like you’re running?”

“I have no idea,” I said as we continued to jog away from the house.

“Are you two okay?”

“Yes, Mom, we’re both fine.”

“What are you doing?”

“We’re hiking back to our camp.”

“At this time of night?”

“We’re almost there.”

She asked about Molly and I told her she was fine. Next she told me to be safe and not to forget about Amy’s birthday party. The only thing I had going for me was that she knew how expensive calls were on the satellite phone, so she said good night.

“After the phone rang,” Molly said, “my heart was racing so fast.”

“You should have seen how big your eyes were.”

Molly and I continued to run for awhile and then slowed to a walk. We shared a laugh and hiked back to our camp.

* * *

Molly and I awoke early the next day. By late morning the heat was so bad we had to take frequent breaks to rest in the shade. We used our water filter to refill our bottles every time we found a stream. Weaving in and out of trees on steep hills and rocky ground made it a massive effort to keep moving forward. By midafternoon the air was so hot and humid, breathing became difficult.

When Molly and I reached the river, we dropped our packs and stripped down to swimsuits without saying a word. The cold water against my skin was beyond refreshing. The shallow water was flowing faster than the last time we’d swam, but it was still deep enough for Molly to show me how to do the dead man’s float.

We waded upstream where the river narrowed and water flowed over rocks, creating a tiny waterfall. We sat down and let the water flow over our shoulders.

“I love this,” Molly said. “I wish I could live in the water.”

“Molly, the River Mermaid.”

She laughed.