Lost Lake Read online

  The three of them split up, tending to different tasks around the campsite. Ally and Mac worked on dismantling the tents while twenty feet away Jake lowered plastic bags of trash and food from the high bough of a thick pine tree. Bears were hungry, curious, and agile climbers; tying food and trash up high might not prevent a determined bear from getting to it but at least it would keep the bear away from the tents.

  While they worked, I checked the perimeter of the site, attempting to recreate in my mind the events of the previous night: the roaring fire, the bottles of wine passed from hand to cold hand, the tip of a joint glowing in the dark, a hovering red-hot firefly setting a tiny patch of the black night alight.

  Maybe it was the warm spring day, or the lake, once more laid out by the sun like a turquoise egg nestled in a basket of blue spruces, guarded by jagged, ancient stone peaks.

  Maybe it was my own fatigue, settling in after the tricky hike and a night without much sleep. I’d had too many evenings recently where a glass of red wine with dinner had turned into a second or third in the hours between meal and sleep.

  Whatever the reason, I couldn’t see what had happened here at Lost Lake.

  All I was able to take in were the slushy, muddy ground and the colorful tents, the four backpacks and the unlit, ashy campfire. The three friends, moving around the site with grim determination.

  Later, I would think about the ice cracking that morning, and the eagle, fishing for its breakfast, and the three friends who were once four: quiet and subdued, packing up after a night of indulgence. The three of them silent, like ghosts of their former selves, living in a new world where it was possible for a woman, a friend, to vanish overnight.

  Later, much later, I would regret every decision I made that morning.

  Chapter Two

  In 1837, Harris Theroux, an intrepid scout for the Continental Fur Company, took a respite from surveying the land to follow a twelve-point buck up the side of a mountain through a dense maze of brush and forest. He lost the buck somewhere in the thicket, but as he crested the top of the mountain and gazed at the beauty before him, his disappointment quickly turned to awe.

  He marveled that such a place existed outside his dreams.

  The lake was half a square mile of deep blue water, as richly hued as a gemstone, nestled in a narrow valley below rocky peaks that pierced the clouds. A thick forest surrounded the lake, sheltering it. Protecting it.

  Hiding it.

  The scout camped that night next to the water. He practically tripped over the trout, there were so many of them. They were fearless, unaccustomed to being hunted, and he soon feasted on a fat beauty beside a roaring fire. As the sun sank down below the mountains and the moon rose to take its place, star after star appeared in the night sky and the lake in turn deepened from cobalt to indigo to a velvet black.

  Harris Theroux’s journal stops there.

  I like to imagine he wrote those words and then laid back, his belly full, his mind content, at peace with the world.

  When Theroux didn’t return to the Continental’s base camp within the week, three men set out after him. They tracked him to the same spot where he’d seen the twelve-point buck, then they followed his trail up the mountain and back down the other side. It was at the water’s edge where they finally found him, mauled and partially eaten by what must have been a very large grizzly bear. The men said a prayer, collected the body, and penciled in the lake on Theroux’s map of the area.

  They christened it Lost Lake.

  * * *

  Mac took the lead, followed by Ally and then Jake. I brought up the rear, having offered to carry Sari’s camping pack. The melting snow and shoe-sucking mud made hiking slow, and it was as frustrating heading down from the lake as it had been heading up to it.

  Could Sari Chesney have made it down this trail, in the dark, alone?

  Maybe.

  Maybe she hadn’t been alone.

  We hiked in silence. Mac and Ally were the most at ease, nimbly picking their way among the slick rocks and patches of loose gravel. They wore lightweight hiking clothes, easy to breathe in and made for traversing land like this.

  Jake struggled. He moved slowly, not exactly afraid, but not confident, either. His leather sneakers were flat on the bottom, without tread, and his shirt was a thin cotton jersey. As he sweated, the shirt stayed damp and he shivered occasionally.

  I knew what my partner, Detective Finn Nowlin, would make of Jake. Finn calls them “mountain guppies”: inexperienced, underprepared people who (in his mind) inevitably have to be rescued from the mountain they’ve been foolish enough to try to scale.

  Under normal circumstances, Finn might have been here with me, responding to this call. But he was out of town for the weekend. If the call had come in during the week, I might have asked another officer to accompany me to the lake. But as it was, we were short-staffed, and I was confident in both my hiking skills and my ability to take care of myself.

  “Hey, Jake? How’d you end up being the one to hike down this morning?” I asked, carefully wedging myself around a fallen tree.

  “I volunteered. It just made sense. Mac knows the terrain; he was the best person to stay and search the woods. And Ally’s a chick. I wasn’t about to let her run all over the mountain. I’m all for equal rights, feminism, yada yada yada, but at the end of the day, women appreciate a man with some chivalry, am I right?” he said. He stopped and turned around, watching me through his eyeglasses. “Speaking of … do you need a hand?”

  “I’ve got it, thanks,” I said. “I imagine Ally and Mac were going crazy this morning?”

  “Of course they were. We all were. Wouldn’t you be, if you woke up and one of your friends had disappeared into thin air?” Jake said over his shoulder.

  “Yes, I would be worried.”

  Fifty-five minutes after we’d left Lost Lake, we reached the parking lot. It was midafternoon; hours since Mac had discovered Sari missing.

  I slipped the pack from my shoulders and rested for a moment, one hand on the warm hood of my department vehicle, a battered old Jeep. My Jeep and Mac’s van were the only two cars there, but the ground was a mess of tire tracks, slushy snow piles, and mud pits.

  If someone had picked up Sari Chesney here, their tracks were long since blended with everything else.

  I checked my phone again and saw the signal was strong. Mac pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed Sari’s number. After a moment, he hung up, his face grim. “Voice mail.”

  The rest of the group removed their packs and took a few minutes to stretch weary muscles and sore limbs. They were dusty and dirty, and smelled of fatigue, worry, and sweat.

  I gave them a moment, then checked my watch and said, “Ally, have you been to the police station before? Do you know where it is?”

  Ally nodded, sweat trickling down her face. Her long dark hair was a mess, and she struggled to wrestle it up into a ponytail. “I’ve never been, but I know how to get there. What do I do when I arrive?”

  “I’ll radio ahead and let them know to expect you. They’ll give you some paperwork to fill out. Mac and I will be along shortly. We’ll take a peek in Sari’s apartment and see if she’s there. We’ll be, oh, ten or fifteen minutes behind you.”

  “Okay. I hope she’s there.”

  “Me, too,” I replied.

  Mac handed his car key to Ally as they walked to his van. He helped load the camping gear, then he hugged Ally and said a few words to Jake. I couldn’t hear what he said, but whatever it was caused Jake to flush and Ally to grimace. Then they were climbing in the van and Mac was jogging back to my Jeep.

  I was in the car with the engine running by the time he joined me. As we pulled out of the parking lot, I called the department and asked them to get the initial paperwork ready for Ally. Then I got Sari’s number from Mac and called her, too. After four rings, voice mail picked up and I left a message with my identification and a request for her to call me immediately.

 
Mac listened, uneasy, his hands in his lap.

  When I was finished with the call, he said, “What do we do if Sari’s not home?”

  “We’ll put a trace on her cell phone and credit cards. We’ll also reach out to her family, her other friends, her employer. But I promise you, Mac, the chances are extremely good that she’ll turn up quickly.”

  He nodded and looked out the window as we reached the outskirts of town. He was quiet a moment, then spoke. “Up here, if you cut across Seventh Avenue, you’ll miss all the traffic lights on Main Street. Sari doesn’t have much family. It’s just her mom, Charla. She’s sick. With Alzheimer’s. She lives in one of those special care facilities. Carver Estates, I think it’s called.”

  “I know the place. And I’m sorry to hear that; my grandmother, Julia, is living with dementia. It’s an insidious condition.”

  “It’s been hard on Sari. Thankfully, her mom has some money and good insurance. There’s no way Sari could pay for the care Charla needs,” Mac said. “Sari can barely afford her own life. She’s got expensive taste. Here, turn right. Park up there, by that stop sign. Her apartment is the second door on the left, with the green welcome mat.”

  I’d barely turned off the Jeep before he was out of the car and barreling toward the front door. Catching up to him, I put a hand on his shoulder. He was a big guy, solid through the shoulders and upper body, and tall.

  I struggled to hold him back. “Mac, wait a minute. I need to go in first. If something has happened to Sari … there might be evidence in the apartment. This could be a crime scene.”

  Reluctantly, Mac stopped. “Yeah, okay. Be careful. She’s got a cat, Barnaby. He’s been known to claw strangers.”

  He held up his keys and separated a bronze one from the rest of the silver keys. “This is the key. There’s a bolt and a knob lock, but the one key works on both.”

  I nodded and used the key to open the door slowly. From somewhere deep inside the apartment we heard a pitiful meow. Mac pushed past me and then quickly shut the door behind us. He started to move further into the foyer, calling, “Babe? Are you here?”

  Once more, I put a hand on his shoulder and held him back. I used more force this time, really gripping him. “What did I say? I need you to wait here a minute. Right here, in this exact spot. Let me do a quick walk-through of the apartment.”

  Mac stopped moving and nodded. “Sure, sorry.” The flush in his face was a few shades lighter than his red hair, and I got the sense that he didn’t appreciate being restrained.

  I walked into a living room with a kitchen off to the right and a narrow hallway to the left. Moving quickly but thoroughly, I checked the rest of the apartment: a darkly painted bedroom with many posters and prints on the walls; a clean, bright bathroom; and a couple of closets.

  I found the cat in the bathroom, sitting outside his litter box, looking up at me with big untrusting eyes. Keeping my distance, I peeked around the cat and into the box; aside from a single dropping, it was clean. I backed away and headed to the front of the apartment.

  Mac was where I’d left him, anxiously chewing on a fingernail.

  “Did Sari have a house sitter, someone to come by and feed the cat?”

  “Yes. A neighbor, a teen that lives next door with her mom. This is not good. Sari loves that damn cat; he’s her baby. She would never willingly abandon him.”

  First the gala, now the cat. Mac was right; this was not good.

  I took another, longer look around the apartment. It was tidy; there was a single mug, orange and chipped, resting in a drying rack next to the sink. The counters were spotless. The floors were swept and the carpets recently cleaned; I could still see the indentations from the vacuum in the fibers. Even the pillows on the sofa looked recently plumped.

  On the far wall of the living room, next to a locked sliding glass door that led to a small patio, I saw a collage of pictures. I studied them. The photos were taken at different times of day and night, in different locations, but they all had one thing in common: the two young women who took center stage and beamed at the camera like they hadn’t a care in the world.

  I recognized one of the women, and it threw me for a loop.

  Mac noticed. He joined me and tapped the other girl. “That’s Sari. Uncanny, isn’t it?”

  I stared at the photographs. Sari and Ally had identical builds—petite and thin—and the same long, thick, dark hair. Up close, of course, it was easy to see the differences: Sari Chesney was Caucasian, with bright green eyes, while Ally Chang was Asian, with dark brown eyes.

  “They could be twins, couldn’t they?”

  Mac replied, “Yeah. It’s weird sometimes.”

  Another series of photographs showed Sari surrounded by a group of young girls.

  “And these girls? Who are they?”

  Mac pointed at one of the pictures. “Sari mentors them. She’s got about six or seven of them at any given time.”

  “She sounds like a wonderful person.”

  “She is. Man, I thought she’d be here,” Mac continued. He spun around in a slow circle, looking at the floor as though there might be footprints or a clue. “She hasn’t been home. This place … it smells sterile. Too clean. If Sari had been here, she would have cooked something or at least showered. She likes that smelly stuff, from the beauty shops. This whole apartment smells like vanilla after she showers.”

  From somewhere down the hall, the cat let out another pitiful cry. Mac called, “Barnaby! Hey, Barney!”

  At the sound of his name, the cat crept toward us. He was beautiful, gray with huge golden eyes. As he twisted around my ankle, his cry became a purr. I reached down and patted him on his head. The cat continued to curl around my ankle, and my unease grew.

  “You said Sari’s mom lives in town, in a nursing home? Any other family?”

  Mac shook his head. “She’s an only child. Cancer took her dad a few years ago. Sari was bent out of shape for a while. She said she felt ‘untethered.’ She and her mom are very close, though.”

  I understood what she meant by untethered. A car accident in the dead of winter had taken my parents when I was a child and left me orphaned, scarred. Scared. It had taken years for the sense that I was suddenly spinning adrift in a world without gravity to abate.

  “Are you okay?” Mac stared at me with concern. “You went pale all of a sudden.”

  I smiled. “I’m fine. Let’s feed the cat, and then we’ll head to the police station.”

  “I’m going to take Barnaby with me. Let me grab his things.”

  I watched as Mac grabbed a grocery sack from underneath Sari’s sink and filled it with cat food, a couple of bowls, and a few toys that were tucked in the corner of the living room. Then he retrieved a cat carrier from the hall closet and scooped Barnaby into it. The last thing he did was leave a note on the counter for Sari, letting her know he had the cat.

  “All set?”

  “Yes.”

  I followed him out of the apartment and watched as he locked up. Then we went down to the parking garage, where Mac pointed out Sari’s blue Honda sedan and a small storage closet. A thin layer of grime covered the car.

  “Sari takes the bus or bikes whenever possible,” Mac explained. “I can’t tell you the last time she drove her car.”

  We left the parking garage and were halfway to my car when Mac stopped and set the cat carrier down. He bent over, his hands on his knees. I heard him exhale loudly before he brought himself back up to an upright position.

  Anguish darkened his eyes. “Damn it. I really thought Sari would be here. Where is she?” He looked west, toward Lost Lake, and asked again, “Where the hell is she?”

  Though I wished I had a response for Mac, I didn’t, and his question hung in the air unanswered.

  Chapter Three

  By the time Mac and I arrived at the police station, Jake and Ally had given statements to the front desk officer. While Ally finished up the necessary paperwork, Mac emailed me a recent phot
ograph of Sari from his phone.

  I printed the picture and then stared at it, committing Sari’s image to my memory. She wore a red-and-black checkered flannel tunic, faded jeans, and brown leather knee-high boots. Her hair was down, and she smiled widely at the photographer. Beside her were Mac and Ally, dressed in similar flannels and jeans.

  Sari looked young, healthy, and vibrant.

  She looked like someone with her whole life ahead of her.

  Mac pointed at the picture. “We took this last fall, just before Halloween. Sari was wearing this same shirt at the lake, with black jeans.”

  “What kind of shoes?”

  “Boots. Heavy hiking boots.”

  I skimmed through the report that Ally had completed, then asked, “Does she have any tattoos or birthmarks?”

  Jake spoke for the first time since I’d arrived. “What does that matter?”

  He’d found the vending machine and was eating from a bag of chips, pulling them out one by one, inspecting them, then popping them in his mouth in a steady rhythm.

  “It’s helpful information to have,” I replied, deliberately vague. There was no sense in worrying them further by mentioning the possibility, however remote, of needing to identify a body that was otherwise unrecognizable.

  “She’s got a couple of tattoos. There’s a star on the back of her neck and a four-leaf clover on her right ankle,” Mac said. I jotted the information down on the back of the photograph.

  “What now?” Ally asked.

  “Now, we wait. Or rather, you wait and I work. I’ll check out a few things, make a few calls. As I told you before, most people show up within a few hours of being reported missing. Try to remember, it’s not a crime to be missing. Maybe Sari just needed to check out for a while.”

  “Check out of what?” Jake asked. He ate the last chip and crumpled the empty bag, looking genuinely curious.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know, life, I guess. Haven’t you ever wanted to disappear for a few hours?”