“Do you think Kali might have been in the trunk of one of those cars that left right away?” Faye scanned the parking lot and the people standing in it. “I’d say we lost half of them in the first few minutes after she ran.”
“Yeah, half. At least,” McDaniel said, and he didn’t look happy about it. “They left before I had any clue that it was going to take more than five minutes for a hundred people to find a ten-year-old girl on the lam. Especially when every last one of us saw her leave under her own power, and hardly five seconds passed before people went after her. I want to say that there’s no way anybody had time to put her in their trunk before the rest of us came outside. Only I can’t say that, because nothing else here makes sense. Where could she have gone?”
“I can tell you that Kali is pretty self-sufficient, especially when she’s outdoors. She spends hours in an environment like this every day. I’ve seen it.” She paused to look at the flowing creek and its overhanging trees. Some of them were even sweetgums, just like the ones on Kali’s creek. “Should she have been able to evade a dozen or more adults who were looking for her? No. But the fact that I know she can handle herself in a place like this,” she gestured vaguely at the trees, creek, and sky, “is helping me hold onto the hope that she’s okay. She’s just hiding because she’s upset and I can’t argue with that. She has every right to be upset.”
“Everything changes when the sun goes down.”
As if in response, the undersides of the clouds hanging west of them began to turn pink. Faye consciously shifted her mind away from her fear of the coming darkness and focused on practical things.
“Do you have a handle on where everybody is? Jeremiah and Davion have come back,” she said. “Reverend Atkinson is in the church praying over Frida. Who’s still out there?”
“Not them,” McDaniel said, gesturing to Linton and Mayfield, who were squatting side-by-side in the shade of a big oak tree, talking on their cell phones and smoking. “Nor him.” He pointed at Walt Wilson, pacing the parking lot and looking at the other two like a man who wished he still smoked. Or him,” he said, pointing at Armand, who was pacing aimlessly.
Stephanie and Ayesha had positioned themselves on the church’s wooden porch, as far from Linton and Mayfield as it was possible for them to be, while remaining safely in sight of Faye and McDaniel.
“Laneer and Sylvia aren’t back,” he said, “and if they don’t show up again, I’m going to go look for them myself.”
“They won’t come back without Kali. Not unless you send your people out there to drag them.”
“Not doing that. But if I tell them they need to let my people and their dogs do their work, maybe they’ll listen to reason.”
McDaniel’s professional opinion was that Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth looked miserable, like a woman born for action who wasn’t getting any action. He decided to give her a chance to act. “Did your husband teach you some of his tracking tricks?”
“He did,” she said. “I don’t have his skills, but I’m better than a lot of people. Even if I do say so myself.”
“Maybe I was wasting your talents by assigning you to parking lot duty. Show me those skills.”
She led him to the church door, where she stood and mused out loud, “If I were a little girl coming out this door and I wanted to get away from a crowd, where would I go?”
McDaniel saw several directions that he might run, if he were in the little girl’s shoes. He probably would have gone to the road, where he could make the best time, and that’s why he’d called in some officers to check the road in both directions. Traffic was light, this far out of town. The pavement wasn’t too rough. Yes, that would be his first choice if he were trying to run away, but not if he were looking for a place to hide. It was obvious that the little girl was trying to get away from all those sympathetic eyes, but how was she trying to do it? Was she running or was she hiding?
Faye was looking away from the road, toward the creek and the woods beyond. The trees and underbrush were thick there. It was a place for hiding. Faye knew the child. She must think Kali had found a place to hide.
Just on the other side of the parking lot, a narrow stone-paved path took a winding route to the church cemetery. That’s where McDaniel would go if he were looking to hide, and that’s why he’d gone there immediately. The graveyard was appropriately spooky, rows and rows of leaning headstones and crumbling crypts and silence. He’d looked behind all the headstones and in all the crypts. He’d even peered down into Frida’s open grave. There had been no little girl there, and there were no tracks to say that there ever had been.
He’d continued down the only other path serving the graveyard, but that walk had been just as fruitless. An opening in the trees at its other end had lured him on, but it had turned out to be nothing but the same road that passed by the church, so he’d turned back to find more promising places to search.
So Faye thought the child was hiding, and he knew that she hadn’t run to the graveyard to hide. That left the acres and acres of woods backing up to the church. Everybody but him had seized on those woodlands immediately and had begun to search them. Even Faye was sure that this was the answer, and maybe she knew what she was taking about. After all, she was the one who said she’d seen the girl’s love for the great outdoors.
She
