Forever by Jacquelyn Frank Page A

for Sargent’s benefit as opposed to his. The other dog teams from Albanywere tied up and still hadn’t arrived. Apparently there was no shortage of missing people that night. Since the Saugerties dog handlers covered a great deal of the townships in the area, the next closest town with a team had been notified. It was spring so the ski teams had come off the mountains and were being called back to join the search. They were just now starting to arrive.
    “Damn him, I’m going to nail his ass to the wall,” barked Avery Landon, the precinct captain. “He’s ignoring me on purpose!”
    “Tommy was such a good boy,” the mother was saying. “He always, always listened to me. Never did a single thing wrong.”
    “I’m going to go out there and get him myself.”
    Uh-oh. Trouble. And she knew there was only one person “out there” who would pretend he didn’t hear his captain recalling him if he didn’t want to hear it. He would work himself until he dropped, the noble idiot. He’d let that dog rest, but he’d probably work himself into a—
    Was.
    Cold seized Marissa by the heart, freezing her breath in her lungs.
    Was. Tommy
was
a good boy. Not is, but
was
.
    And that was when she knew Tommy was most likely dead already. It could have been days ago … who really knew? The only other person to see him had been his teacher on Friday. Two whole days ago. And here he was, missing quite conveniently before he was due to show up in school the next day.
    “Excuse me,” she said numbly, standing up and walking over to Landon. “Captain, I know where Jackson is.” She didn’t actually, but she suspected what she had to say would flush him out far quicker than his railing captain would. But she did have his cell number and assoon as she got into the woods and far enough out of earshot, she was going to tell him to come in.
    Because as far as she knew, Sargent hadn’t been trained as a cadaver dog. It took a very special type of training for that.
    “Where?” Landon demanded on a growl.
    “Firstly, Captain, I can appreciate that it’s late and we are all very tired, but snorting like a bull isn’t going to help. Secondly, if you think I’m going to tell you so you can extract your pound of flesh you clearly don’t know me very well. Let me go. There’s as much chance of me talking sense into him than anyone else, I guess.”
    “You get him and you bring him back A once againag.SAP, Doc,” Landon ordered. “I swear I’m writing him up this time. He’s gotten more and more insubordinate this last month …”
    Marissa tuned out the rest of the tirade, hunching into her sweater, and moving toward the trees quickly before Landon changed his mind and sent someone with her. Actually, it was pretty thoughtless of him not to do so. She probably should have told Landon her suspicions, but a few minutes either way wasn’t going to make much difference. It had been hours, actually, since anyone had made anything resembling headway. Anyone but her.
    Was.
    It was a horrendous word to use when referring to a child, she thought as she picked her way carefully through the trees and brush, keeping her back to the house and the command station as she moved out of sight. Usually a mother would deny the idea of her child’s death for as long as was logically possible … and even then some. She knew mothers of missing children who never stopped looking, not even decades later. Never stopped hoping that one day their doorbell would ring and there their child would be, all grown up, childrenin their arms, some miraculous circumstance bringing them home at last. Denial was a painful coping skill. But it was almost always there. Sometimes until the bitter end.
    Once she was deep enough into the woods, the terrain suddenly steep and indicative of her having begun to travel up the mountain, she pulled out her cell. Belatedly she realized she might not get a very good signal there. That could be why Jackson wasn’t