Part 2
What Rachel knew fit into one sentence, and she gave it to Matt while he waited for Dana to answer.
“My mother had a baby before me, and she never told anyone.”
Matt stared at her. Then Dana came on the line, and the question in his face had to wait.
He read the note aloud and described the cabin. Dana ordered them to remain there until rescuers reached them, but Rachel unfolded the topographic map.
A line had been drawn from the cabin to a steep drainage marked NORTH CUT. Beside it, someone had written BOY—LOWER LEDGE.
“We know where he is,” Rachel said.
“You know where somebody thinks he is,” Dana replied. “That slope was part of an old logging grade. We had a washout there last winter. Do not approach the edge.”
“How long until your team gets here?”
“Twenty minutes if they cross where you did. Less if they can use the west access.”
Rachel looked through the doorway at the rain. “He’s been out there since Saturday.”
“And I intend to bring him home. Give me twenty minutes without creating two more people I have to rescue.”
Matt ended the call and took the map from Rachel. His thumb rested beside the handwritten word BOY.
“You found letters?”
“In Mom’s recipe box.”
“When?”
“After the funeral.”
“You said there was nothing personal in the house.”
“I didn’t know what to do with them.”
“So you locked them away and decided they didn’t exist?”
“We can fight about my mother when Eli isn’t lying under a hillside.”
Matt folded the map into quarters. “That’s how you do it.”
“Do what?”
“Decide when the rest of us are allowed to know.”
He walked outside before she could answer.
They did not wait twenty minutes. They left the cabin after sending Dana a photograph of the map and followed the marked route, moving carefully enough that she could not accuse them of running and too quickly for either to call it safe.
The North Cut was less than half a mile away. Benjamin Avery had tied blue cord around two trees along the route, and his boot prints were deep in the soft ground.
Rachel found a photograph under the clear cover of the field notebook she had grabbed from the table. She almost passed it to Matt, then stopped.
A girl stood in front of the same cabin when its boards were still new. She wore a sleeveless yellow blouse and held a bundled infant against her chest. Although she could not have been older than seventeen, Rachel recognized her mother’s straight brows and the small hollow beside her mouth.
On the back, someone had written Helen and Ben, June 1975.
Rachel slipped the photograph into the notebook. The movement was so automatic that she hated herself for it.
A whistle sounded ahead.
Three short notes.
Matt broke into a run.
The ground ended at a raw gash in the hillside. Rainwater threaded down exposed roots and dropped into a channel strewn with broken timbers from an old drainage structure.
Twenty-five feet below, Eli sat on a narrow shelf of packed earth. Someone had wrapped him in an orange jacket several sizes too large.
Beside him crouched a gray-haired man with one arm held close to his body.
“Dad!” Eli shouted.
His voice was thin, but it was his.
Matt dropped to his knees. Rachel caught the back of his jacket before he leaned too far over the edge.
“I’m here, buddy,” he called. “Mom’s here too.”
Eli’s face crumpled. He pressed one fist against his mouth, a habit he had when he was trying not to cry in front of other children.
Rachel lay flat on her stomach several feet from the rim.
“Let me see your hands, Eli.”
He pulled them from beneath the jacket.
“Wiggle your fingers.”
He did.
“Good. Now put them back where they’re warm.”
The man beside him shifted, and Rachel saw a rope tied around his waist. Its upper end disappeared beneath loose soil where a young fir had torn out by the roots.
“Don’t come closer,” he called. “The lip is undercut.”
“Are you Benjamin?” Rachel asked.
He looked up.
Rain had flattened his gray hair against a face narrower than hers, but the hollow beside his mouth was the same one in the photograph. It was the same one Rachel saw in her own mirror when she was tired.
“Ben Avery,” he said. “You must be Rachel.”
“How badly is Eli hurt?”
“His left ankle’s swollen. No obvious deformity. He’s cold and dry enough under the jacket, but he needs to come up soon.”
“What about you?”
“My shoulder’s out. I’ve had better mornings.”
Eli leaned against him. “Ben found me this morning.”
“Near dawn,” Ben corrected.
“I was in the pipe before that,” Eli said. “I blew my whistle, but nobody was close enough.”
Rachel lowered her forehead to her arm for a moment.
Matt kept his voice steady. “How did you get down?”
“Old maintenance path on the east side. He’d sheltered in a dry section of the culvert, but water was starting to back up. I got him out of the pipe. Then the path gave way.”
Ben nodded toward the broken timbers below.
“There’s debris blocking the lower opening. I wouldn’t send anyone through it.”
A branch snapped in the woods. Dana appeared with three members of the county rescue team carrying rope bags, helmets, and a rigid litter.
She gave Rachel and Matt one hard look but saved her anger for later.
The rescuers anchored lines well back from the edge. One member moved east to examine the failed path while another lowered a helmet and harness to Ben.
Eli began breathing too quickly when the harness touched his knees.
“I can’t,” he said. “I’ll fall.”
“You won’t,” Matt called.
“I already did!”
Rachel knew that tone. Reassurance would slide off him now because his body had stopped distinguishing possibility from memory.
“Eli, look at Ben’s jacket,” she said.
He looked down.
“How many black snaps?”
“Three.”
“Touch each one. Say the numbers.”
He counted them.
“Again.”
By the third count, his shoulders had lowered.
Below them, Ben used his good arm and his teeth to pull the harness around Eli. The motion was awkward and slow. He paused twice, face tightened against pain, but kept his body between the boy and the water.
A rescuer tested the line.
The ledge shed a thin curtain of dirt.
Dana leaned over from the safe side of the anchor. “We take the child first. Then we reset for you.”
Ben looked toward the dark opening of the culvert. Muddy water had begun spilling over the debris and spreading across the ledge near his boots. “You won’t have time to reset,” he said…
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