Page 15

That night, 2:21 a.m.

A banging jolts Ranger Emmy awake from a dreamless sleep. Before she determines that the knocking is real, she knows something is terribly wrong.

She flips on the lights in her cabin. It takes her eyes a minute to adjust.

“Hello?” someone calls. “We need help.”

Emmy finds her ranger coat on the back of her desk chair and throws it over her shoulders as she heads to the door. Outside, it’s still the darkest slice of night, but the rain has stopped, leaving dewiness in its wake. In the light of her cabin, she discerns two men standing at the base of her steps. They wear the two-toned blue fleece jackets from the Chester School group. She doesn’t know their names. Like so many of the fathers, they are generically handsome, interchangeable even in their stricken expressions. One of them, she thinks, is Cassie Bent’s husband.

“Two boys. They left the camp. We don’t know where they went,” the other father, not Cassie Bent’s husband, explains.

She tells the fathers to give her a moment. Then she shuts the door to collect her thoughts. Springing into action, she throws on her uniform pants, her hiking boots, then gets her radio from the charger, straps it to her belt, hooks on her Taser, and unlocks the gun safe. She wills her body and mind to slow down. It’s been pouring for the last several hours. The children couldn’t have gone far. That is if they’re missing at all. She’s getting ahead of herself by letting the fathers’ fear become her own before she knows what happened.

Another knock on her door quickly grows insistent.

“Ranger Emmy? We need you to come now.”

Emmy turns on her radio to call Sam. It takes longer than usual for him to answer, but it’s the dead of night.

“Hey, Sam. I’ve got two fathers here, say their kids left the camp. I’m going to check it out.”

“I can come with you.” His voice is gravelly with sleep. “Give me a minute.”

“No, I’m sure they’re close by. Just stay on call, okay?”

“Roger that.”

Emmy straightens her ranger hat and opens the door to the fathers, who are tapping their feet and hugging their chests, equal parts impatient and terrified.

“Tell me everything you know,” Emmy says as she leads them toward her UTV.

They have to shout over the engine. A mother woke up and her son wasn’t in the tent. His friend is missing too. The parents are trying to find them.

Emmy slams on the brakes, stares between the fathers. “The parents—they didn’t wait for you to get me?”

The fathers appear dumbfounded, not realizing how dangerous this impetuous decision was, how little they all know about search and rescue. She’s definitely not getting ahead of herself now. Even if the boys are nearby, even if she finds them quickly, she’ll still have several other people to look for.

Emmy doesn’t want to scare them further, to berate them for the other parents’ poor judgment, but they really shouldn’t have left.

“Do you know who went where?”

The father in the back of the UTV says, “It all happened really fast. Some went down to the lower loop, the beach, Potato Harbor, I think? The hills near camp.”

Emmy balls her fists, trying to stay calm. “Did anyone make a list of who went where?”

After a pause, Cassie Bent’s husband says, “We wanted to find them.”

Emmy clenches the wheel. Stay calm, she reminds herself. Most likely, the parents realized that it’s too dark to venture far. Most likely, by the time she drives these fathers back to camp, everyone will have returned, the boys too.

The howl of the wind offers a soundtrack to their otherwise silent drive. At the bottom of the hill, Emmy turns right, stopping a few feet down the road at the kayak center. The boys are probably watching YouTube on the kayak company’s Wi-Fi. She tells the fathers to wait in the UTV and hops out to inspect the equipment huts.

The boys aren’t here.

They make their way down the dirt road, thumping over divots, sloshing through puddles. At the lower loop, flashlights blaze in every direction. Lights illuminate tents with their doors open but no campers inside. Emmy feels a tightness in her chest. The parents have involved the other campers.

Her mind starts racing through SAR-GAR risk determination. The rain has stopped, which lowers the risk, but it’s night and these campers do not know the island. It is difficult for visitors to understand how dark it is here, even as they see it with their own two eyes. Emmy sucks in her breath, already certain that someone is going to get hurt, that this will go down as the worst night in the park’s history.