“So?”
“So? So, I didn’t go.” Rafe checked his watch. “Next question. You’re running out of time.”
“Why do you care? It’s my time.”
“Because I know you want something. I want you to tell me what it is so I can tell you no.”
“Why would you tell me no? Spite?”
“Can you blame me? Fifteen years ago, I begged you to tell me what happened in the woods, and you refused.”
He waited, expecting excuses, explanations. Instead, Jeremy shrugged. “No, I can’t blame you,” he said. “I would be as pissed as you are if the roles were reversed.”
“Ten minutes. What do you want? Tell me now, or I’m going to set my watch five minutes fast.”
Jeremy leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and looked up at Rafe, still standing.
“I need your help.”
“My help?”
“With a case. A missing girl in the woods.”
“You don’t need my help. You’ve never needed my help.”
“I need it now. She went missing in the Crow five years before we did. Thirteen years old. Shannon Yates. Do you remember hearing about her? Happened before Mum and I moved here.”
“Maybe?” Five years before they went missing? He would have been nine or ten years old. He probably had overheard something, but he’d been too young to process it. “What about her?”
“Her sister wants me to find her.”
“She still alive?”
“I think so. Still in the Crow.”
“How is that possible?”
“She is very, very well hidden. More than off the grid. There is no grid where she is.”
Possible? Maybe. There were hills and hollers in West Virginia so remote you couldn’t even find them with a map. And Red Crow State Forest was huge—fourteen thousand acres. And it butted up against Monongahela National Forest, nearly a million acres…If there was anywhere in the United States someone could hide out for twenty years, it was in the deep, dark woods of West Virginia.
“You’ve been to remote places before. So why me? Why now?”
“To find this girl…this particular girl? I need someone I trust to go with me.”
“So why me?”
“You’re the only person in this entire world I trust.”
Rafe was stunned into silence. All these years, not a word, and now Jeremy was here declaring Rafe was the only person in the world he trusted? If his high school girlfriend had called him out of nowhere and proposed marriage, he would have been less shocked.
“Me?”
“Nobody else here. What do you say?”
Rafe took a deep breath. “I say…I’ll go.”
“You will?” Jeremy’s eyes widened in surprise.
“Yeah, if you tell me right now what happened when we were lost in the woods. Do it fast. You have seven minutes left.”
Rafe held up his watch.
Jeremy sighed and sat back on the couch.
“Nothing’s changed. I couldn’t tell you fifteen years ago. I still can’t tell you now.”
“Can you at least tell me why you can’t tell me?”
“The truth is too dangerous to tell.”
“Even to the person you trust most in the world?”
“Especially to the person I trust most in the world.”
“Makes no sense.”
“It does to me. But…I can promise you this much—by the time we find this girl, you’ll know everything.”
