“I need food and coffee if I’m going to keep this up.” She paused, seeming to consider her next words. “Want to take these printouts back to my cabin?”

At least that would give him the break he needed before he lost all ability to read and process visually.

“That sounds good. You don’t mind the company?”

“No, I’d rather you be there than be by myself anyway.” She hesitated. “Being alone isn’t quite the same as it was before, you know?” It was the closest she’d come to admitting that the incidents of the last week had impacted her at all.

Wyatt was determined more than ever not to leave her to face this on her own. If only he could convince her to let him go with her to the island. He didn’t want her to have to be alone anymore.

TWELVE

Elsie had intended to get straight back to work after they returned to her cabin, but after the time they’d spent in the police department conference room reading through case after case, her eyes and heart needed a break. Too many people did not get found. Her job reminded her every day that she’d been lucky to not be lost on that island until hunger or exposure had overtaken her.

So instead of diving back in immediately, she found herself stalling. It wasn’t like being on the ground in an active search. She hoped that the time spent poring over these cases would be time well spent, whether they saw something that helped her approach a search differently or, even better, found a connection somehow between an old case and her current one. Anything that helped focus their energies so that when she and Willow did get back to the island they had a more targeted area to search would be helpful.

“Do you, uh...? Do you want anything to eat? I mean, I don’t have anything super interesting, but I’ve got sandwich stuff.”

“A sandwich would be great.” He smiled appreciatively, and then Elsie watched as he sank to the floor beside Willow and started to rub the dog all over. Willow, usually a bit standoffish around people who weren’t Elsie, rolled entirely onto her back, seeming to soak in the attention.

If she hadn’t already liked him, seeing him sitting on the floor with her dog certainly would have been enough to catch her eye. That was the problem with Wyatt. He was so much more than she expected, and she never seemed to be able to anticipate the ways he would be attractive to her. He just was.

“Here you go.” She handed him the sandwich and sank down onto the couch, grabbing a handful of chips from an open bag. She ate in silence, then looked over at Wyatt. “Those files depress me.”

“Seeing all the people you couldn’t help?”

She sighed and nodded.

“Which ones stuck out to you so far? Anything give you new ideas for how to search like you were hoping for?”

“This one...” She tugged a couple of pieces of paper out of a manila folder.

“A man wandered off hiking in the Caribou Hills and never came back?”

“Yes. I picked it just because it’s close to here. And because searchers found him by examining his life and patterns and analyzing how he was most likely to move and then following that path. That’s something I didn’t do enough of in the previous days of searching. I need to get to know our missing person better, guess how she thinks, get inside her head.” She reached for another example, handed it over to Wyatt, who skimmed it as he ate his sandwich. “Here’s another.”

“Boater who disappeared not far from here... Ever found?”

She shook her head. “Just the boat. I helped with that case, but we were never able to find him. Not alive or dead. It just catches my eye because it’s one of my failures.”

“Do you think of them that way, really? Like, do you carry them around like that?”

She scooted to the floor so she was sitting beside him on the other side of Willow, who was still stretched out, enjoying the attention he was giving her.

“I don’t know. I don’t mean to. But probably. It makes the wins sweeter, though...”

Elsie frowned, then stood up.

“Elsie? Where are you going?”

“Give me a second...” Her mind was spinning, something in what she had thought or said turning the wheels of her mind in a way that was confusing and clarifying all at the same time. Wins...

“Why did someone start coming after me now?” she muttered as she dug through the piles that had accumulated on her small table in the last couple of days.

There it was, the newspaper article from the successful rescue that had taken place only days earlier...two days before the threat against her had surfaced? No, only one. The rescue itself had taken place one day, the article had come out the next, and that night someone had broken into her cabin.

“What if someone...?” It was too strange to voice aloud the thoughts formulating in her mind, so Elsie paused and went back to the file. Pulled out another case.

“Here.” She handed it to Wyatt, who looked it over. She sat back down beside him.

“Three-year-old found...island... Wait—this is...”

“Yes. It’s me.”

She waited for his reaction, anxiety and excitement building within her, and she started to wonder more and more if she was right. “I know I said this earlier, but I can’t get it out of my head. What if someone wanted me dead? Like, what if it wasn’t just child neglect or abandonment? My whole life I assumed no one wanted me. Like I was forgotten there and not worth going back for or something.”

He recoiled like she had hit him.

Elsie held up a hand to stop him before he even started. “I know it bothers you that I would think that way, but you need to let it be. You can’t do anything to change all of that. What I’m wondering is... What if I was wrong? What if someone actively wanted to get rid of me?”

“Like murder instead of neglect? Like you really did witness a crime?”

He put into words what she could not, but she still flinched a little at the word murder. It seemed so harsh, but in reality, leaving a three-year-old on an island, even without such stated intentions, was just as cruel.

“Yes,” Elsie said even as she hoped it wasn’t true. Who would want that in their past?

She pulled her phone out and started googling. If different memories kept appearing when she was on the island, triggered by smells or sounds, would it be possible to trigger memories herself?

Every angle she could try to search, she did so. Murdered women and then the year. Alaskan women murdered. Domestic violence Alaska.

Nothing.

“One more idea...” she mumbled. Elsie typed in the phone number for the Office of Children’s Services and asked around until she found someone who could pull up her old file.

“Is there anything in my file,” she asked, hoping desperately that her one last attempt to trigger some kind of flashback wouldn’t be a failure, “that points to domestic violence or violence of any kind?”

If the woman on the other end of the phone thought it was a strange question, she didn’t say so. She just told Elsie she was looking.

“No... There’s really just not enough detail...” The woman stopped. “Maybe one thing.”

Elsie definitely believed in leaps at this point. “I’d love to hear anyway. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your help.”

Across from her, Wyatt had looked up from the files and was watching her, though she knew he could only hear her end of the conversation.

“There’s a note that you kept repeating ‘Mommy crying.’ No mentions of violence specifically, but...”

“Thank you for the help,” Elsie said even as a chill ran down her arms. She hung up the phone.

Crying.