The Pulse

other prints circling around and covering up the first ones she’d made, indicating to Grant that she had probably been moving around while she dripped dry from her bath before putting at least some of her clothes back on. He saw other footprints as well, some of them covered up by hers, and figured someone had been here before the rain. The other footprints looked older, because they did not have a clearly defined shape or tread definition.

Looking beyond the immediate area, he then spotted another line of Casey’s barefoot tracks leading off up the sandbar, even farther upriver, but as soon as he started following them, a chill ran up his spine and he grabbed Jessica’s hand while motioning her to silence with a finger over his lips. Superimposed over some of the prints made by Casey’s bare feet were more of the larger, smooth tracks that he had mistakenly thought were old. The fact that some of them were on top of Casey’s tracks made his previous conclusion impossible, and upon closer examination, he determined that the shapeless, smooth footprints could have been made by a person wearing moccasins or some similar footwear. One thing was for certain: the tracks were made by a man. Grant could judge by their size compared with Casey’s tracks and his own that the person who made the prints had to be a man, as they were slightly bigger than the impressions left by his own size 11 hiking shoes.

His eyes swept back over the trail of larger tracks they had passed, and he could see where the person who made them had stepped out of the dense woods that began at the edge of the sandbar just a few feet uphill from the log where Casey had left her things. Someone had been walking around on this sandbar before she got here, and then must have been watching her from the cover of the trees while she bathed. When she walked farther upstream, he had re-emerged from the woods and followed her. It was the only explanation for the fact that some of his tracks were covered by hers, while these last were made on top of her trail. As this realization dawned on him, he wondered if the man who made them had been on the sandbar when they rode down the bank from the highway, and had hidden in the woods watching as he and Jessica left Casey alone and went to get the canoe.

Grant gave Jessica a serious look that conveyed the importance of keeping silent and then motioned downward with his hand, to tell her to stay put while he tried to figure this out. He crept over to the backpack and felt inside it for the Ruger pistol. It was gone! He could only hope that Casey had it with her. But now that he was looking for them, he saw moccasin tracks near the log as well, and realized the person who made them could have taken the gun if she had left it there when she walked away. Following along beside, but not touching the two sets of tracks, he moved as fast as he could while still remaining silent, which was easy enough in the damp sand. He gripped the machete so tightly his knuckles were white. Surely this person who had followed Casey had heard them calling her name. Surely she would have heard them too, but why didn’t she answer? Fear and worry gripped him as he struggled to find the answer while he followed the tracks, ducking under the river birch trees that leaned out of the forest over the sandbar.

He didn’t have to go far to reach the end of the narrow beach, where he found Casey’s trail obliterated by a large area of disturbed sand where both sets of footprints had been erased by something. Only the man’s tracks led beyond that point, and following them a few more steps, Grant’s heart nearly stopped when he saw the answer to the puzzle. There was a deep grove in the mix of sand and mud that extended from the water’s edge several feet up the bank, and on both sides of it, a flattened mark made by something smooth and heavy sliding into the water. On one side of these impressions were more of the larger tracks, but none of Casey’s. Some of them were deep and distorted from slipping and digging into the mud. Grant had done enough canoeing to know exactly what he was looking at. It was the mark made when someone pushes a heavily laden canoe into the water from the bank.

Almost as soon as it became clear what he was looking at, he whirled back the way he had come, knowing that the canoe they’d seen heading downriver less then twenty minutes ago had to be the one that had made these marks. Casey was in that canoe, he thought, probably hidden from their view under the camo tarp that Grant had assumed was covering the lone paddler’s gear! No wonder the man paddling it had not taken his eyes off them as he passed, much less shown any indication of wanting to stop and talk. With the strong current in his favor and his obvious experience as a paddler, there was no telling how far downriver he’d gotten by now. Grant was horrified by the thought of what his intentions might be. He turned and raced back down the sandbar, yelling: “Jessica! Quick, we’ve got to go!” The he grabbed Casey’s backpack, shoes, and underwear, and shoved them into Jessica’s hands as he hurried her back in the direction of the bridge.

“What happened? Where is she? Why are we going back this way?”

“That canoe we passed. She’s in it! That man we waved at must have stopped here for some reason before we all got here. He must have been in the woods when Casey walked up here to take a bath. He was probably watching her the whole time, and then followed her when she walked upriver to where he’d left his canoe. He grabbed her and put her in it, and she must have been hidden in that pile of gear he had when we saw him.”

“How do you know all that?” Jessica asked as she ran to keep up with Grant on the way back to where they’d left the bikes and the canoe.

“I’m no expert, but in this sand the tracks are easy to read. All the rain over the last two days would have swept away any tracks other than new ones made in the last couple of hours since it stopped. Her footprints leading upstream are covered by his, which makes it clear he was walking behind her. Then hers completely disappear and only his lead to the canoe. I could see where his feet dug in as he was pushing it back in the river. And, besides, there’s no other explanation. She can’t be anywhere near here or she would have heard us calling out to her.”

“But wouldn’t we have heard her scream if someone grabbed her?”

“Maybe not. He must have gagged her somehow. This probably happened when we were still trying to get the canoe and gear together at that camp. So we might not have heard anything even if she screamed as loud as she could, especially over the sound of the running water.”

“What are we going to do? How will we ever find her? We’ve got to help her, Grant!”

“We are going to help her. We’ve got to try to catch that guy, and that’s why we’ve got to go now, no time to waste! Let’s just throw our stuff in the canoe and go! He’s got a big head start, but he has to stop to rest somewhere.”

“Why would he be going downstream anyway? Doesn’t that go back the way we came, towards New Orleans?”

“No, not to New Orleans,” Grant said as he steadied the canoe while Jessica got in and got situated in the bow seat. “It runs to the Gulf eventually, of course, but first it joins the Pearl River, which is the biggest river in this region this side of the Mississippi. The lower reaches of the Pearl split apart into three rivers and lots of branching bayous that spread out to be more than five miles wide. For about 20 miles it becomes a maze of waterways, and runs through a vast river-bottom forest that is the closest thing I’ve seen in the States to a jungle. The general area is called the Honey Island Swamp, but this forest covers some 250 square miles, most of it protected as a national wildlife refuge. If he is headed there and gets there with Casey before we catch him, it will probably be impossible to find them.”

“How far is it from here?” Jessica asked. They were now afloat, with all their belongings, including Casey’s, stowed in the middle of the canoe between them. The bicycles were left where they’d hidden them, in the dense canebrake.

“By canoe? I’ve only done the trip once, and I think it took us about four days to get to the Pearl River from my parent’s cabin. But we weren’t in a hurry and we were stopping a lot to explore and take pictures. Then we paddled another three days through the swamps and took out almost at the coast. From here, somebody paddling like this guy was doing could be in those swamps in two days, not to mention the help he’ll get with the river up like it is after all this rain.”

“The current will help us too, won’t it?” Jessica asked as she frantically dug into the water with awkward, choppy strokes of her paddle, doing everything she could to help them go faster.

“It will, but we’ve also got to be careful. We don’t want this guy to know we’re following him, but since he saw us going upstream in the canoe, he knows we have a boat and that we could try to follow. But he probably doesn’t think we would be able to figure out that he has Casey, unless we were just guessing.”

“Isn’t the gun still in Casey’s backpack? Maybe when we catch up with the creep he’ll give up when he sees that you have it, like those gang-banger punks in New Orleans did.”

“Are you kidding? Any guy like that who has loaded up a canoe to live out here on the river probably has at least a hunting rifle or shotgun, and likely several firearms and plenty of ammo. But it doesn’t matter anyway, because I don’t have the pistol anymore and he’s likely got it too. It wasn’t in Casey’s pack, and even if she was carrying it when she left her stuff on that log, he must have taken it from her.”