But then a piece of silver metal shone up from the ground as it caught the reflection of the sky. Adam reached down to pick it up and take a look at it.
“This is the ax that Rob brought out with him today,” Adam said.
“Why would it be so far away from the cabin?” I asked. There was plenty of good wood to chop right next to the cabin.
“I don’t know,” Adam said.
“Over here,” Michael said.
He was just a few steps away from us and was looking at something else that was lying on the ground—Rob’s shoe.
“Okay,” Michael said. “I think now there may actually be valid reason to worry.”
I reached into my pocket to grab my phone and tried to dial Rob’s phone number, but there was only a disconnecting sound as soon as the call went through. There was no way to reach him, wherever he was.
“Let’s go back to the cabin,” Adam said. “Maybe he’s back there already.”
We walked back to the cabin, but when we got there, there was no sign of Rob.
“What do we do?” I asked. “Should we call the police?”
“No,” Michael said. “They’ll only get in the way and make matters worse. We’ll handle this ourselves.”
“And what exactly is it that we’re handling?” Adam asked.
Michael looked down at the ground again as we took a different and shorter path home.
“The mysterious and sudden disappearance of our friend,” Michael answered.
Deranged
1
It wasn’t like Rob to just disappear without telling anyone where he was going.
His car was still in the drive, and too much time had passed for it to have been a walk in the woods. Plus, who goes for a walk in the woods with only one shoe? Michael, Adam, and I searched all around the cabin; calling for Rob and spreading out enough to look a sizable distance from the cabin before checking back in with each other.
“He’s not here,” Adam said.
“That’s impossible,” I said. “He has to be here. Where would he have gone?”
Adam and Michael stood there silent, unable to answer me because they didn’t have a clue where Rob might have been.
“Something has happened to him,” I said on the verge of tears.
“We don’t know that,” Michael said. “We can’t assume the worst until we know something for sure.”
“Yeah, because things never end up proving to be the worst case scenario for us, right?” I said sarcastically. “Things always work out great for us and never get weird.”
“Okay, she definitely has a point,” Adam said, backing me up.
“We have to go out into the woods and look for him,” I said.
“Agreed,” Michael nodded his head. “But we can’t go out there without supplies. It’s winter, getting dark out, and if we don’t act smartly about this then we’ll end up being lost or dead in the woods ourselves.”
I gasped at his comment.
“You think that Rob is dead?” I said with my mouth hanging open.
“No, that’s not what I meant,” Michael said as he tried to backpedal his comment.
“Try not to panic,” Adam said, switching sides to back up Michael now. “Worrying isn’t productive. If we’re going to track down Rob, we need to be smart about this. Michael is right; let’s go inside and pack a few backpacks with supplies and head out to look for him.”
I didn’t want to waste a single moment. It would start getting dark in a few hours and who knows how far into the woods we would have to go.
“Hang on,” Michael said.
He was looking out toward the shed where I kept the pots and tools for the garden. We had already looked all around there, so I wasn’t sure what could have caught his eye, or his train of thought. Michael left Adam and I standing there and walked toward the shed. We followed behind him to see what he was doing. When he got to the shed, he stopped and looked down at the ground where the late afternoon sun was reflecting off a small puddle. The light must have caught his eye from where we had been standing.
“Look at that,” he said as he pointed at the irregularly shaped ditch in the snow. “What does that look like to you?”
I glanced down at the puddle and looked. Michael took a few steps forward to where there was another small puddle in the melting snow, while Adam and I both stared at the one in front of us. Then it dawned on me what I was looking at. The edges of the melting shape in the snow were beginning to blur into the mush of the wet ground around it, but I could still make out the shape—a shoe.
“This is a footprint,” Adam said when he came to the realization at the same time that I did.
