“You have one minute,” the nurse warned. “Then I have to check her over.”
Josie nodded. When the nurse was gone, Lisette tugged her closer. Josie leaned in so she could better hear her words. Lisette said, “You have to learn to live with them both, dear.”
“Both?” Josie said, wondering if Lisette was becoming delirious.
“The grief and the happiness.” She paused, taking in a few shallow breaths. “If you can’t live with them both, you’ll never make it.”
“Okay,” Josie said.
“No, not okay.” Another pause for breath. “Josie, you’ve never learned that some things you have to sit with and really feel before you can move past them.”
She was getting tired, her breath more labored now. Josie thought of Emily and how her older sister had told her that sometimes you have to feel all the feelings until they’re gone. Josie had spent her entire life pushing all the bad and terrifying feelings down as deep as she could. She didn’t handle it well when they escaped from the dark place. Lisette had watched her self-destruct many times.
Josie kissed Lisette’s cheek. “I understand, Gram. You rest now. I’ll be back as soon as they let me.”
The celebration—if it could be called that—in the waiting room was subdued. Josie could tell that both Misty and Shannon were trying not to cry. Trinity handed Drake her camera and made him take more photos. Josie wondered how they would look months from now, or on their first anniversary. Would their faces appear strained and hollow? Would they look as exhausted as Josie knew every single one of them felt? Perhaps they should have waited and married after Lisette passed; after her funeral; after an appropriate mourning period. But Josie knew the instant the thought entered her mind that there would never be an appropriate mourning period. It would have been torture planning another wedding knowing that Lisette wouldn’t be there, knowing that if Josie had only stayed at Griffin Hall and walked down the aisle as planned, Lisette could have seen it. She wouldn’t have been able to marry Noah after this and eventually, he would have grown tired of the grief between them forcing them apart and keeping them that way.
Lisette knew Josie better than any living person, and this wedding—bittersweet though it was—was her gift to her granddaughter.
When enough photos had been taken, Shannon and Trinity accompanied Josie back to Dr. Feist’s office to change back into her regular clothes. Back upstairs they waited. Josie and Sawyer waited to be able to see Lisette again. Josie, Noah, and Chitwood waited for news on the case. A few hours after the wedding, Mettner showed up, looking haggard, his face dark with stubble. A glance at the clock in the waiting room told Josie it was just after eleven p.m.
“We’ve got nothing,” he told Josie, Noah, and Chitwood in the hall outside the waiting room. “Gretchen’s been working on finding Rory Mitchell. I’ve been working the Emily angle. They’re on opposite sides of the city, and our staff is stretched as thin as it can get. Even with the state police helping, we haven’t found any signs of them. I can’t get the dogs back till sometime tomorrow.”
Josie said, “Have you found any buttons? In the search for Emily?”
“Two,” he said. He took out his phone and pulled up Google Maps. After a few swipes, he turned the map toward her and used one finger to point at the screen. “Here. This is the Bryan farm, right? Here, about a mile this way…” He swiped some more, moving the map so that more of South Denton was visible. “There’s a small creek. It’s not even a creek. It’s just a place where the water runs off at the edge of the farmland. One of the searchers found two gray buttons.”
“She’s walked a mile already,” Chitwood said. “She can’t be far, Mett. Take people off Rory Mitchell and send them over to South Denton. We already know this teenager can live out in the woods for days. Emily is an eight-year-old kid. How long is she going to last out there? She’s gotta be starving, dehydrated.”
Noah said, “Rory Mitchell is dangerous, Chief. He killed at least one person that we know about.”
“Who’s the Chief of Police, here, Fraley?” Chitwood snapped, sounding more like himself than he had all weekend. “I tell everyone else what to do, and I’m telling Mett to take three-quarters of whoever you’ve got on the Harper’s Peak mountain and send them to South Denton. They’ll start where the last buttons were found and fan out.”
Josie was still staring at the screen. “May I?” she asked Mettner.
He handed it to her. To the Chief, he said, “Maybe we should get the press involved? Ask for civilians to help with the search? Amber could get something going real fast.”
Josie zoomed out on the phone and turned the view to terrain, watching as the lines and asymmetrical shapes on the map turned to fields and trees.
Chitwood said, “That’s a good idea, Mett. Have her talk to WYEP and see what they can whip up in a hurry, would you? It’s too late for the eleven o’clock news but they can still put out a call on social media, and maybe something when they come back on air in the morning. I think they go on at four a.m. The more people we’ve got on this, the better.”
As Josie suspected, not far from where the buttons had been found, there was a break in the forest. A small, indistinct square breaking up the unending green. “This is the old Rowland place,” she said, pointing to it.
Chitwood put on his reading glasses and peered at the screen. “What’s the old Rowland place?”
“Before your time,” Noah said. “We used to have a billionaire living in Denton. Local celebrity, sort of. Went on to make big bucks creating security systems, but always kept
