the swing.
'Look at the last one,' Moorehead said.
Preston's stomach dropped with those somber words. He shuffled past a series of pictures that showed him walking back to where he had parked at the curb after the hour-long interview with the Downeys.
'Jesus.'
His heart rate accelerated and the room started to spin.
In one motion, he removed his Beretta from the recess in his desk drawer and jerked open the curtains again. Little girls still slid and jumped rope, but only one swing was occupied. The one upon which his daughter had been sitting only moments earlier swung lazily to a halt. As did the branches of the juniper shrubs behind the swing set.
'No, no, no!' he shouted.
The phone fell from his hand and clattered to the floor beside the faxed pages, the top image of which featured a snapshot of his house from across the street, centered upon Savannah as she removed a bundle of letters from the mailbox.
He ran down the hall and through the kitchen.
'Phil!' Jessie called after him. 'What's going on?'
He burst through the back door and hit the lawn at a sprint, nearly barreling into one of the girls twirling the rope.
'Savannah!'
The activity around him slowed. Two of the girls stared down at him from the top of the slide, faces etched with fear. He ran to the girl on the swing, a dark-haired, pigtailed slip of a child, and took her by the shoulders.
'Where's Savannah?'
Startled, the girl could only shake her head.
Preston shoved away.
'Savannah!'
He shouldered through the hedge and hurdled the split-rail fence into the small field of wild grasses and clusters of scrub oak that separated the houses in this area of the subdivision.
'Savannah!'
A crunching sound behind him.
He whirled to see Jessie emerge from the junipers down the sightline of his pistol.
'What's wrong?' she screamed. 'Where's Savannah?'
She must have read his expression, the panic, the sheer terror, and clapped her hands over her mouth.
Preston turned back to the field, tears streaming down his cheeks, trembling so badly he could barely force his legs to propel him deeper into the empty field toward the rows of fences and the gaps between them where paths led to the neighboring streets.
'Savannah!'
His voice echoed back at him.
He fell to his knees, rocked back, and bellowed up into the sky.
'Savannah!'
ONE
June 20th
Present Day
I
'How much farther?' Lane Thomas asked. He swiped the sweat from his red face with the back of his hand.
Dr. Lester Grant had grown weary of the question miles ago. These graduate students were supposed to be the future of anthropology, and here they were braying like downtrodden mules.
'We're nearly there,' Les said, comparing the printout of the digital photograph to the surrounding wilderness.
It was the summer session, so rounding up volunteers had been a chore, even though the opportunity to be published in one of the academic journals should have had them chomping at the bit. Granted, they had left the University of Wyoming in Laramie several hours before the sun had even thought about rising and driven for nearly three hours before they reached the end of the pavement and the rutted dirt road that wended up into the Wind River Range of the Rocky Mountains. Another hour of navigating switchbacks and crossing meadows where the road nearly disappeared entirely, and they reached the foot of the game trail that the hiker who had emailed him the photographs had said would be there. That was nearly two hours ago now. They'd taken half a dozen breaks already, and would be lucky if they'd managed to reach the three mile mark.
'Can we switch off again?' Jeremy Howard asked in a nasal, whiny tone. 'Breck's making it so that I'm bearing all of the weight.'
'Give me a break,' the blonde, Breck Shaw, said. She hefted the handles of the crate they carried between them for emphasis, causing Jeremy to stumble.
'That's enough,' Les snapped. They were adults, for God's sake. Sure, the crate containing the university's magnetometer was quite heavy, but they all had to pay their dues, as he once had himself.
They proceeded in silence marred by the crackle of detritus underfoot.
The path had faded to the point that it was nearly non-existent. At first, it had been choppy with the hoof prints of deer and elk, but after they had crossed over the first ridge and forded a creek, it had grown smooth. Knee-high grasses reclaimed it in the meadows. Only beneath the shelter of the ponderosa pines and the aspens, where the edges of the trail were lined with yellowed needles and dead leaves, was it clearly evident. How had that hiker found this path anyway? They were hundreds of miles from the nearest town with a population large enough to support a WalMart Supercenter, and at an elevation where there was snow on the ground eight months out of the year. And this was so far out of the commonly accepted range of the Plains Indian Tribes, a generic title that encompassed the Arapahoe, Cheyenne, Crow, and Lakota, among others, that it made precious little sense for the site in the photographs to exist in the first place.
Which was what made the discovery so thrilling.
Les didn't realize how accustomed he'd grown to the constant chatter of starlings and finches until the sounds were gone. Only the wind whistled through the dense forestation, the pine needles swishing as the branches rubbed together. The ground was no longer spotted with big game and rodent scat. Patches of snow clung to the shadows at the bases of the towering pines and beneath the scrub oak, evidence of what he had begun to suspect. The air was indeed growing colder.
An unusual tree to the left of the path caught his attention. The trunk of the pine had grown in a strange corkscrew fashion, almost as though it had been planted by some omnipotent hand in a twisting motion. He fingered the pale green needles, which hung limply from branches that stood at obscene angles from the bizarre trunk.
'Can we take a quick break so I can get my coat out of my backpack?' Breck asked.
Les didn't reply. He was focused on an aspen tree several paces ahead. It too had an unusual spiral trunk. What could have caused them to grow in such a manner? He was just about to run his palm across its bark, which looked like it would crumble with the slightest touch, when he noticed the large mound of stones at the edge of the clearing ahead.
'We're here,' he said.
He slipped out of his backpack and removed his digital camera.
'It's about time,' Lane said. 'I was starting to think we might have walked right past...'
Les's student's words were blown away by the wind as he walked past the first cairn and began snapping pictures. The clearing was roughly thirty yards in diameter. More corkscrewed trees grew at random intervals. They
