Rafe couldn’t stand Jeremy’s eyes on him like that. He couldn’t stand the weight of expectation. It was easier when nobody thought he could do anything special. Now he wanted to kill the spider. He wanted to be as good as Jeremy thought he was. But he wasn’t.

“Try to kill the spider. Just try it,” Jeremy said. “Dare you.”

“Dad always said you were a bad influence.”

“Holy crap, that’s a long way,” Emilie said as she jogged back up to them. “What’s going on?”

“I bet Rafe that he could kill the spider in one. I’ve seen him do it before,” Jeremy said.

“Not a chance. I’m out of breath just walking there and back.”

“Try it,” Jeremy said. “Nothing to lose.”

Rafe gave in. “Anything to shut you up.”

He moved into position. He knew there was no way he could do this, but he wanted to try because what if he could? It was his father who’d taught him how to use a bow and arrow and shared with him the secret of archery.

Put your heart where you want your arrow, son, Put your heart there first, then aim for your own heart.

Rafe put his heart into the target right where he wanted it, then he released his arrow.

Emilie gasped softly. “I think you got it. Did you get it?” She ran down the yard to the target. Rafe started after her, Jeremy following. But he already knew the verdict.

“Off-center,” Rafe said. It hit off-center because of course it did. Because it was an impossible shot now and always and forever. “Told you so.”

Rafe pulled the arrow from the target and slid it back into his quiver.

Jeremy said, “You’ll get it next time.”

Chapter Thirteen

Emilie woke from strange dreams that left her head spinning. From the window of the tiny guest room, she saw the gold and silver fingers of dawn climbing over the tops of the mountains and stretching into the sky. If Ohio had mountains, she thought, she would’ve gotten up a lot earlier every morning.

Awed, she watched the sunrise until she heard the soft scuttling sounds of a wide-awake fancy rat who wanted his breakfast. She unzipped the top of Fritz’s large mesh pop-up tent, and he happily scurried into her hands and up her arm.

She kissed the top of his head and carried him to the kitchen to get his breakfast.

Rafe was already awake and dressed in dark hiking pants, a long-sleeved gray T-shirt, and a blue-and-black plaid flannel shirt on top. She hadn’t quite cut his hair short enough, so when he leaned over the map, a lock fell across his forehead. Easy to see why Jeremy was so hung up on him, even after fifteen years apart. She didn’t even have any interest in Rafe, and it was hard to keep her eyes off him.

“You’re staring again,” he said without looking up at her.

“Just admiring my handiwork,” she said. “You look chef’s kiss,” she said, then kissed the tips of her fingers.

“You know, you don’t have to say every thought out loud, right?” he said.

“Yes, I do.”

She smiled, then got Fritz his chopped apples and pellets. As he ate, she studied the map Rafe had spread across the table.

“That’s Red Crow? Bigger than I thought,” she said.

“Looks smaller to me,” Rafe said.

“What do you mean?”

He ran his fingers over a section of the forest. “This is where we went missing. There’s a desire trail to a place called Goblin Falls.”

“What’s a desire trail?”

“That’s when people make their own unofficial trails. But everyone knows about it. We knew about it. Jeremy told the police that’s where we went off-trail. A few hikers say they saw us on that trail too. And that was the last time we were seen. Twenty-four hours later, we’d vanished from the park. Which makes no sense.”

She looked down at the map that read Red Crow State Forest Topographical Map in the corner. Someone had drawn circles all over with pencils. Search areas?

“Why not?” she asked.

“You see this?” He tapped a line on the map and ran his finger down it. “River. Leads right to a main highway. And here? Trails. Trail here and here. You can get lost in a place like that, but you can’t stay lost. You either die from injuries or exposure or dehydration or…you find one of, God, fifty trails and walk out in a day or two.”

“You were injured, right? Head injury?”

“I had an MRI. No signs of head injury. Even a healed one. And Jeremy wasn’t hurt. He could have gone for help.”

“He said you all stayed away because you didn’t want to come home.”

She gave Fritz his applewood stick, which he happily munched on, oblivious to the turmoil around him. She envied the little guy.

“Right, right,” Rafe said. “But say we were hiding in the woods. Not lost but hiding. Where were we all that time? There’s no cave system in Red Crow. The park’s been mapped a thousand times. Dad even had satellite photos. Detailed ones.” He pulled one out from under the map and looked at it. “No houses, shacks, shanties, lean-tos, tree houses…And the first search-and-rescue parties were thorough. See?” He made a circle on the map with his hand. “This is as far as we could have gotten in twenty-four hours, and every inch was searched. They should have found us. They were right on top of us in that park, and we were…what? Invisible? And where were the bones?”

“Bones?”

“I went from five-four to five-nine. I put on twenty-five pounds when we were missing. Jeremy put on thirty and was almost six feet tall by the time we left. That happens to teenagers, but not when you’re starving. If we were hunting out there, where were the bones? Dad never found a single deer carcass, a dead rabbit, not even a snare or a spear or the remnants of a cooking fire.”

“People have hidden out in the woods. That guy in that park in Oregon—”

“Yeah, but no one was looking for him. As soon as they started looking, they found him in a day. God, I would kill to remember…” He ran a hand through his hair, exhaled hard. “ ‘We are saddened to report that all avenues of discovery have been exhausted in the search for Ralph Howell and Jeremy Cox. There will be no further searches of the area. We ask everyone to keep the Cox and the Howell families in your thoughts and prayers. Thank you.’ ”

It sounded like he was reading from a cue card.

“What was that?”

“On June thirtieth, the police announced they were ending the search to find us. Their tactful way of saying they thought we were already dead.”

He pulled a sheet of paper out from under the map, a photocopy of the news story.

“Your dad kept this?”

“He kept it all. He never stopped searching. But where the hell were we?”

She was hesitant to say it, but she thought he could handle it. He was already asking the questions.