Part 2
Dean lowered the rifle before Walt could pull the pry bar free.
“If I meant to return her, Pike’s men would already be inside.” He tore the radio from his shoulder, dropped it on the concrete landing, and brought his boot down until the casing split. “That bought us maybe ninety seconds. Don’t waste them deciding whether to trust me.”
“Who are you?”
“Dean Carver. Her mother’s brother. I used to be a conservation officer. I took your snare report the night Rook disappeared before I reached Black Spruce Creek. Last winter I heard you call him Rook near your woodpile, and I told June his name when he began coming to the vent.”
Rook moved past Walt instead of attacking. He sniffed Dean’s glove, then returned immediately to June, and Dean’s face tightened. “I brought the food and blankets when I could. I let him near her because he was the only living thing she wasn’t afraid of. Pike cut the generator tonight. They’re moving her before dawn and cleaning this room afterward.”
An engine rose beyond the trees. Dean pointed toward a narrow service door behind the privacy screen. “Carry her, or stay here and ask the rest of your questions with Nolan Pike standing over you.”
Walt hated the choice because it was not a choice at all. June’s pulse was too fast, her skin too cold, and every breath dragged faintly through the damaged place in her throat. Dean pulled a pair of small insulated boots from beneath the cot and put them in the trauma pack. Walt tightened the blankets around her and followed him into a maintenance corridor barely wider than his shoulders.
Rook went first. The passage ended at a rusted hatch hidden behind shelving, and beyond it an old utility trench descended toward the abandoned waterline. Dean had loosened the bolts earlier, though he would not say when. He took Walt’s trauma pack and crawled ahead while Walt kept June against his chest and moved sideways through the dark.
Behind them, metal struck metal in the infirmary. A man shouted Dean’s name.
June flinched so hard Walt nearly lost his footing. He stopped long enough to draw the blanket over her ear. “You don’t have to listen to him,” he whispered. “Just listen to me breathe.”
He made each breath slow and audible until hers began to follow. Then Dean hissed for them to move, and the four of them emerged behind the equipment shed as white beams swept the infirmary windows.
The waterline cut downhill beneath snow-laden spruce, away from the fire road. Dean had left his truck idling at the front of the camp, and its headlights now shone through the trees like a decoy beacon. He carried the pack and broke trail. Walt carried June. Rook kept circling between them, once stopping so suddenly that Dean caught Walt’s arm before he stepped across a buried drainage ditch.
“Pike knows who you are,” Dean said as they climbed the far bank. “A trail camera caught your headlamp on the fire road, and he was a county deputy when you ran rescue calls.”
“Then he knows I don’t leave sick children in locked rooms.”
“He knows what Graham pays him to know.”
It was the first time Dean had used Graham Vale’s name. Walt asked what a county chairman and celebrated children’s advocate had to do with an abandoned infirmary, but Dean looked at June and shook his head.
“Not while she can hear us.”
A sharp crack carried from Camp Bracken. Dean glanced back, and a glow spread briefly across the low clouds. His truck’s windshield had shattered under a rifle round or a metal bar; Walt could not tell which. Either way, the men at the camp had stopped pretending they were conducting a search.
Halfway to Lost Lake Road, June began to shiver in violent waves. Walt welcomed the shivering more than the stillness that had preceded it, but his arms were failing. Dean offered to take her. June opened her eyes, saw him, and clung to Walt’s coat with surprising force.
Dean stepped back without argument. “Keep her.”
They reached the cabin as gray morning gathered behind the trees. Walt carried June inside, shut the curtains, and laid her on the couch near the woodstove. He removed the wet outer layers but left the dry blankets around her, then warmed the room gradually and checked her breathing again. There was no harsh stridor and no blue at her lips, only that thin resistance beneath each inhale and the exhausted flutter of her pulse. Once her feet were dry, he added wool socks from Anne’s dresser and the insulated boots Dean had carried from the infirmary.
“No hot bath,” he told Dean when the younger man reached for a washbasin. “No rubbing her hands or feet. We warm the center of her first.”
Dean obeyed. For all his secrets, he handled June’s things with care. From the folded parka, a tiny gold barrette fell into his palm—a ladybug with one chipped red wing. He turned it over, and Walt saw the engraving beneath: JUNE BUG — DAD.
June recoiled when Dean offered it. Her hand flew to the scar below her ear, and she pressed herself against the couch until Rook climbed onto the rug beside her.
Walt took the barrette in a handkerchief and sealed it in an evidence envelope from his rescue bag. “We keep everything that came out of that room.”
He offered June warm water a teaspoon at a time. She watched him without drinking. Only when Rook lowered his muzzle to the rim, sniffed, and looked at her did she let Walt touch the spoon to her lips. She swallowed once, waited, then accepted another.
“That’s enough for now,” Walt said. “Nobody here is going to make you hurry.”
Dean stood by the dark window. “You don’t know what you brought to your door.”
“A six-year-old with cold injury and an airway alert.” Walt folded the red mitten beside the evidence envelope. “That’s enough to know what I do next.”
He reached for the radio, hoping the storm’s retreat had restored the Bear Ridge repeater. Static broke, cleared, and became an urgent announcer’s voice. A statewide child alert had been issued for June Elizabeth Vale, reported missing from a private recovery lodge near Lake Arlen—forty-five miles east of Red Pine.
The description of her moon-print pajamas was accurate. Everything else was built to point away from Camp Bracken.
Then the announcer named Walt.
Authorities were seeking seventy-one-year-old Walter Mercer, a retired Pinewater County paramedic described as armed and possibly disoriented. His dark green Ford pickup had been entered into the alert system, along with its plate number. Anyone who saw him was warned not to approach.
The announcer said Graham Vale’s recorded appeal would follow. Dean crossed the room and shut off the radio before Graham’s voice entered the cabin.
Walt looked through the curtain at his truck beside the woodshed, then at June curled against Rook. Less than an hour after he had carried her out of a chained room, Pinewater County had turned the rescue into an abduction—and him into the armed old man everyone was being asked to hunt…
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