On the other side of the river, the land leveled out to the right, while to the left it climbed back up to the Devils’ Cascade. Straight ahead lay a hill that rose up as high as any they had crossed on their trek. “We’ll need to find their trail,” Lyle said, dropping his pack. “If we don’t, we may pass ’em and not even know it.”

Max followed suit. They aimed their lights at the ground and walked in small circles, looking for a track. After half an hour, they had found none.

“We should wait for daylight,” Max said.

“We can’t wait. They can’t be far.”

“Yeah, but which way? Up the hill? Down the river? If we choose wrong, we may never find them.”

“I can’t stand the thought of Pip, out here in the cold. I’m his Poppy. I have to find him.”

“I don’t like it any more than you do, but we have to keep our heads.”

Lyle put his hands on his knees, his body bent down in defeat. Still, he didn’t turn back.

“They have to stop for the night at some point. We’ll hit it at first light, find their trail, and double time it until we catch up. We have the upper hand. We aren’t traveling with a small child.”

Max could see that Lyle was struggling to give up for the night, so he added, “We’ll find Pip. I promise.”

Lyle nodded reluctantly.

As Max pulled his gear from his pack, a curious thought came to him. They had been in the woods for five hours or better. That was more than enough time for Bolger to confirm what they had found at the shack, more than enough time for him to follow up on the Tahoe, more than enough time even to call the State Patrol to launch a plane with night-searching technology. Max looked up at the sky. Where was the plane?

CHAPTER 57

By the time they set up camp, Spud was so cold he thought his bones would break.

It had been a hard slog once they crossed the Devil’s Cascade. With no trail to follow, the forest clawed at them as they ducked and twisted through the scrub. Spud walked behind Pip, sweeping branches aside so that the boy wouldn’t get scraped up. Sometimes the brittle pine shoots would snap off in Spud’s hands and Reed would bark at him for making noise, but Spud no longer cared. The man was a psychopath. He had wanted Pip to walk across a log in the middle of a raging river. Had Pip fallen in, that rope would have done nothing more than pull a dead body out of the water.

And it hadn’t escaped Spud’s notice that Reed had called him Peter—not Spud. It had been Reed’s idea to call him by a nickname. Peter chose the name Spud because that’s what his father had called him. He didn’t like hearing that name on the lips of someone like Reed, but when Pip said it, it warmed Peter’s heart.