The Body Finder

“What if she’s not lost?” Violet asked, hating the question even as it poisoned her lips.

“They can’t rule that out either. They have every cop in the area looking for evidence, while half the city is combing the woods around the Hildebrands’ house looking for that poor girl.” Her mom squeezed Violet’s hand before letting it go. “Since you were there, your uncle Stephen might want to talk to you.”

“I’ll get dressed and go over there,” Violet decided.

Her mom looked up, as if surprised by the declaration. “No, Vi. I think you should stay here today…” She didn’t finish her thought, but Violet could hear the unspoken words that hung in the air… where it’s safe.

She thought about holing up in the house again, watching the clock and waiting, not doing anything productive, and she just couldn’t take it. And then she wondered if she would sense anything when she got there…a new echo maybe. She pushed away the troubling thought.

“No, Mom. I’m gonna go talk to Uncle Stephen. Maybe something I saw, anything, can help them find her.” She was surprised by her own conviction, but she knew she hadn’t yet convinced her mother, who was still wrestling with her own silent fears. “Don’t worry, Dad’s there. I won’t do anything without his permission.”

Violet waited for her mom to say something, holding her breath and willing her mother to agree to let her go.

When she did finally speak, her words were unsteady and filled with defeated fatigue. “I’d feel better if Jay was going with you,” she said.

Me too, Violet thought without giving her words voice. Me too.

Violet wasn’t sure what she’d expected to find when she turned down the road toward the house where she and her friends had partied just the night before. She had assumed there would be small groups moving around the area, calling out to the lost girl in hopes of finding her, misplaced among the thick stands of tall trees that practically overcrowded and dwarfed the few homes in the area.

But it wasn’t just a few Good Samaritans helping a missing neighbor. This was a full-on search-and-rescue operation. It had the feel of organized chaos, with emphasis on the organized part.

Violet had to park her car much farther away than anyone had the night before, when they were just a bunch of teenagers converging on the semi-isolated house. And people were still arriving behind her. While ahead of her, emergency vehicles, both police and fire, hovered around the entrance to the forests that lay beyond.

Men and women, young and old, volunteers and professionals, all dressed in brightly colored vests, many of them carrying walkie-talkies, moved in smaller groups in all directions, efficiently combing the endless landscape with deliberate order. It was like nothing she had ever seen before. They were like a swarming sea of fluorescent vests, bobbing and shifting in steady progression.

Violet made a quick scan of the area as she walked toward the mass of people, to see if she could spot her father or her uncle in the throng of rescue workers. But if they were there, they were lost among the crowd.

She approached what seemed to be the central hub of activity. Groups grew larger as more people arrived, waiting to be told what they could do to help. She recognized some of the people among them, parents of her friends, neighbors, people who worked at stores in the area, and even one of the teachers from her school.

A woman was passing out the neon-colored vests, while another was taking down the names of the volunteers and organizing them into search teams, each with a leader who was assigned a walkie-talkie. A man with a bullhorn was shouting out orders about where to check in and instructions on how to proceed once they got started. Everyone was handed a black-and-white flyer with a picture of the missing girl, and Violet was glad to replace the mental image she had of the stumbling, incoherent girl from the night before with this smiling photo.

She waited with a crowd of people who were hanging around one of the many uniformed police officers; she was hoping he might be able to tell her where she could find her uncle. Other people shouted out questions all around her.

How long has she been missing?

Was this where she was last seen?

Do they think the killer might have taken her?

Do they expect to find her alive?

Violet tried to push her way to the front of the gathering, to get the officer’s attention, but it was like swimming upstream, and she found herself making backward progress instead as she was squeezed toward the rear of the group. She didn’t want to yell out and draw attention to herself, so eventually she just pried herself free from those looking for answers.

She wondered if coming here had been a mistake. Maybe she shouldn’t have been so adamant about trying to help. But she felt guilty, riddled with a sense of at least some degree of responsibility for being among those who had last seen the girl…and one who hadn’t bothered helping her when she’d so obviously been in need.

She drifted around, feeling a little like a wayward snowflake caught in a breeze, finally landing near the cluster of volunteers who were busy checking in.

“Are you already assigned to a team?”

Violet looked up, caught off guard by the woman passing out vests. “No,” she answered, thinking to tell the woman that she wasn’t planning to join the search but never quite finding the words.

The woman handed Violet a vest and another woman assigned her to a team. She was introduced, only briefly, to her team leader, a man who was probably in his late fifties or early sixties. His gray hair was cut high and tight, army style, and he looked like he’d done a tour or two in some branch of the military. He handled his walkie-talkie like a seasoned veteran.

Surprisingly to Violet, however, especially since he gave the air of a man who had seen some action in his day, she sensed nothing at all from the uber-militant team leader. John Richter carried none of the imprints of death she would have expected.

Maybe he wasn’t so tough after all. Or maybe he’d just been lucky.

The no-nonsense team captain took the lead, reading the coordinates on the map he held and piloting them to the area they’d been assigned to search, which was circled in red Sharpie. There were five other members of her team, two women and three men. Violet didn’t know anyone in her grouping, and she didn’t really care. That way she didn’t feel the need to make polite chitchat.

The farther they walked, passing other teams as they scoured the area, and moving deeper and deeper into the damp, darkening woods, the more ominous it all began to feel. Violet wasn’t afraid, but she was definitely troubled by what they were doing out here. She had the foreboding sense that this was an effort in futility, that they were out here simply to rule out the possibility that Mackenzie had wandered away from the party and had gotten turned around among the trees…when it seemed so obvious to Violet, and probably to almost everyone around her too, what had really happened to her schoolmate.

He had gotten her.

Violet could hear the others, in all directions, calling out Mackenzie’s name. They passed a few men who were carrying long wooden poles that looked like unpainted broom handles, and she could only imagine what they were meant to prod or uncover.

She followed her group until they reached their designated coordinates, and they were ordered by John Richter to fan out, keeping one another in their sights but spreading wide enough apart to cover as much ground as possible.

Violet moved with careful steps, losing herself in the process of the search. The familiar, reassuring smells of the woodlands drifted around her. The Christmassy smell of the fir trees surrounded