Into the River Lands (Darkness After Series Book 2) (20 page)

Lisa and Jason were back at the spot where David had last been seen shortly after sunrise, and this time Lisa planned to methodically search both banks in the upstream and downstream direction. She didn’t think David had gone far, and she knew he wasn’t deliberately trying to elude them, but she had heard her father talking about manhunts for fugitives in the woods and some of what he said stuck with her. One of the oldest tricks around to throw off trackers and dogs was to wade into a stream at one point and then travel a considerable way either up or downstream before exiting. It would at least slow pursuers down, while they looked for the exit point, and if it was done well might throw them off the trail entirely.
 

The hours went by as they scoured the banks this way, first on the same side of the creek they knew David had started from, then on the opposite. Around a bend downstream, they found a place where a canoe had landed and saw more confusing footprints, but none they could positively identify as David’s. After giving up there, Lisa just wanted to continue downstream at least a mile or two, reasoning that if he had floated or swam a greater distance than expected once he entered the water, then downstream was the only logical direction he could have traveled. They were about to give up and go back to the house when both of them heard the sound of voices from somewhere even farther down the creek.
 

“We’d better check that out,” Jason said.

Keeping several yards within the forest but still close enough to see anything that moved on the water, the two of them slipped quietly along, carrying their weapons at ready. The voices had stopped momentarily, but then they heard them again. The tones were low and could not be at all far away.

“I think whoever it is, they’re coming closer,” Lisa whispered.

“I think you’re right. Listen! Did you hear that?”

“Yes.” The sound was unmistakable for anyone who had spent much time around a creek like this in the summertime. It was a the clank of a paddle or some other object agains the hull of an aluminum canoe. Lisa knew for certain that’s what it was, but it was unusual for anyone to be coming upstream against the current.

“Maybe it’s Mitch bringing them back in the canoe the men took,” Jason said.

“Maybe, but we’d best not take a chance. Let’s just wait right here and keep down until we see.”

They did not have long to wait until sure enough, a canoe suddenly appeared from downstream. It was not Mitch and April though. Two men occupied it, both with long hair hanging over their shoulders and thick beards that obscured most of their faces. The man in the bow was sitting, doing nothing, while the one in the stern, who looked much older, judging by his nearly white hair, was wielding a long pole. The man clearly knew what he was doing, and the canoe shot upstream with each push as easily as most people could paddle one downstream. But something else surprised Lisa and Jason even more than the ease with which the man was making headway against the current. Tied to the other end of a taut rope that stretched from the stern of the canoe, was a second canoe in tow. And in it was a woman Lisa and Jason both immediately recognized as April, sitting there holding a small child in her arms.

* * *

April was becoming more despondent with every day that passed. It had been nearly two weeks since that day that Lisa and Jason led her and Benny and Tommy back to the Henley farm, and still Mitch had not returned. Nor did they have any idea what became of David.
 

When Lisa and Jason had hailed her from the bank after figuring out she was not a prisoner of the two rough-looking men towing her canoe, she had been shocked to learn that Mitch was looking for her. It seemed incredible that she had been so close to him that day that Wayne and the others took her and Kimberly, and yet she never knew it. She never knew that even as she was so terrified of the uncertain future that lay ahead of her in the hands of those men, Mitch was hot on their trail and doing everything he could to rescue her and her child. But if he was that close, so close that he had seen the whole thing as it unfolded, then where was he now? What had happened to him?

After sitting on the bank discussing the whole scenario with Jason, Lisa, Benny and Tommy, they concluded that all the gunfire they’d heard the day before in the vicinity of the place Benny had killed Wayne must have been connected to Mitch. He must have caught up with the other three and there must have been a gunfight. April wanted desperately to find out, but there was no way she could put Kimberly at further risk. Crossing paths with Lisa and Jason meant she had found her way, and Lisa said the farm was not all that far. April couldn’t walk anyway without assistance, and even after nearly two weeks her ankle still hurt when she spent too much time on her feet.
 

The very next day after they were all safe at the Henley farm, Jason and Benny set out for the two-day round trip by canoe to the campsite where Benny and Tommy had encountered Wayne. They were hoping to find Mitch or at least determine what had happened during all the shooting they’d heard, but they found no one alive in the vicinity.
 

Wayne’s body was lying where he had fallen when Benny shot him, and scavengers had already found him.
 

“Dogs or coyotes, most likely,” Benny said. They found another dead man just a short distance downstream, lying in the mud, his eyes picked away by vultures. If he had been carrying weapons, someone had taken them.

“I’d bet anything he was one of the four,” Jason said.
 

I’m betting you’re right,” Benny said. “Look, that wound in his throat wasn’t made by a bullet. It’s cut too clean. It looks to me like he was killed by an arrow, and it either got lost or whoever shot it picked it up. I’ll tell you something else too; that was one clean kill—a perfect shot if I ever saw one.”

“It had to be Mitch,” Jason said. “He’s incredible with a bow and arrow. But if it was, where did he go?”

They searched and searched but didn’t find the answer to that question or any clue to the whereabouts of the other two. Benny offered his best guess though.

“You know, when I first found April and her little girl, she said we ought to go upstream because she knew those fellows had a camp somewhere downstream they were taking her to. It was good thinking on her part, and for sure wouldn’t have been what they expected. I’m thinking your friend, Mitch wouldn’t have expected that either. I’m thinking that he came along and saw the dead one I killed and saw the canoe was missing too. He probably thought somebody else took the two of them downriver. Most people would think like that.”

“And if Mitch didn’t kill the other two, they would be looking down that way too, right?”

“Yep.”

“How are we ever gonna know then?”

“I reckon we ain’t, really. If them fellows did get the best of Mitch in all that shooting we heard, his body could be almost anywhere within a half a mile of here, the way gunshots carry so. It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack out here in these woods. And going downriver would be just as useless. Those river bottom swamps down there just get wilder and wilder the closer you get to the Pascagoula. I’m thinking all we can do is is just go back to the house and wait. If he
is
alive, he’ll show up eventually when he doesn't find any sign of April down that way.”
 

When Benny and Jason returned to the farmhouse with news of what they found, April knew Benny was right. Mitch wouldn’t give up until he exhausted every possibility in his search, if he was still alive. When they described the other dead man, April knew it was one of the other two, whose names she did not remember or care to recall. It was somewhat encouraging to know that the man had definitely been killed by an arrow, and she had no doubt it was Mitch who did it. But with the other two unaccounted for and all that shooting noise, she knew something could have happened to him after that. What if the other two men managed to get the better of him? After all he was one against three, and at least one of them, that Gary guy, was a real tough customer, and armed with a machine gun. April had to face the possibility that Mitch was dead, and that he died trying to save her.

The thought tore at her soul as she waited, and waited and waited, each day and night passing interminably slow on the Henley farm. She had her Kimberly, and for that she was grateful. But Kimberly didn’t have her father and April didn’t have the one she’d thought about almost constantly for the entire seven months since she’d last seen him. She spent hours rocking her child on the porch of Mitch’s family home, sitting with her in the antique caneback rocker that he’d told her had belonged to his late grandfather. After all she’d gone through and all the risks she’d taken to finally get back to this place, the one she’d come here to find was no longer here and might never return. Tears rolled down April’s face as she sat and rocked, despite how much she tried to keep her focus on the fact that for now at least, she and Kimberly were safe.

Twenty-nine

M
ITCH
H
ENLEY
WAS
NOT
a quitter and had never been one to give up before achieving the goals he set for himself. But he was at a complete loss and continuing to search where there were no clues to be found was getting him nowhere. It had been almost two weeks since he’d set out downstream from the place he was certain April had last been. Mitch had examined the body of the leader of the four men—the one who had been killed by a shotgun blast from some mysterious stranger. His weapons had been taken and Mitch had found the keel marks in the creek bank mud where two canoes were launched. He had been certain at the time that April and Kimberly were in one of those canoes. He had also been quite certain that whoever left with them had headed downstream. It was the logical conclusion at the time, but now he questioned every decision he’d made that day.

First of all, in his haste to try and find a sign of April before dark, he’d left the man he’d exchanged gunfire with and circled around to the campsite. He had been sure that he’d wounded him badly, judging by the way he fell before taking cover behind a tree, but with no way of knowing whether or not he was truly incapacitated, Mitch couldn’t risk getting closer. Nor did he have time to spend hours playing a waiting game with darkness fast approaching. Once he determined April was indeed nowhere nearby and saw the canoe marks, he left immediately to follow the creek downstream. His hope was to catch up to whoever took April and Kimberly wherever they stopped for the night.
 

But he never found that place, if indeed there was one. Though he followed Black Creek all the way to the edge of the Pascagoula swamp lands where it joined Red Creek before emptying into the big river, he never saw the two canoes. He checked every sandbar and other probable landing sites on both sides of the creek on the way down, but found no marks left by a canoe hull. Mitch knew it was possible to paddle long distances without stopping and that someone bent on doing so could have gone that far in one marathon stretch, but he doubted they would. Burdened with a captive who had a small child, they would have almost certainly stopped somewhere along the way, and likely many places. The farther he traveled downstream, the less likely it was beginning to seem that they had come this way at all. If Mitch had found the slightest bit of evidence that they had, he would have continued on in his quest, even if it took him all the way to the coast. But as it was, he had to admit that he might have made a bad decision. He had utterly failed in his attempt to rescue the woman who believed in him enough to leave the city and come back to Black Creek to find him. Things must have gotten really bad in Hattiesburg for her and David to take that risk, traveling all that way with Kimberly. It was heartbreaking knowing they had come so close, and that he had actually seen her and yet still could do nothing to save her.
 

Mitch knew that he would return to search again, as many times as it took to try and find out what happened. But he still had his sister and the others back at home to think about, and he knew that after all these days they would be really worried considering what Jason told them he’d set out to do. With a heavy heart, he made his way slowly back upstream, still looking for anything he might have missed. When he reached the campsite again and what remained of the two bodies left lying there, he spent even more time trying to decipher what might have happened. But there had been at least two good rains since the day those two men died there, and any sign he might have missed before would be much more obscure now.
 

While there, he also found the tree where the man he’d exchanged gunfire with had been hiding. The man was not dead there as he had dared to hope, and if he had indeed been wounded, Mitch could find no evidence of it. He considered trying to track him down, but decided there was little point. Following that man would not lead him to April, and since he wasn’t there when the one who had taken her in the canoe was killed, he wouldn’t know what happened to her either. The man was long gone anyway by now and the trail was cold. It would take him days to catch up, if he ever did, and he felt that he needed to get back to the farm sooner than that.

He continued on upstream in the direction of home, still stopping to check sandbars and mud banks along the way for anything unusual. He didn’t rule out the possibility that the canoes had gone upstream, but he really doubted it. That doubt disappeared, however, when he came to sandbar where someone had clearly camped recently. It was about five miles upstream from the place where the shootings happened, and as Mitch scoured the sand looking at the washed-out, poorly defined tracks, he saw faint keel marks above the high water line that indicated two canoes had landed here.
Did they go upstream after all?
It sure looked like there was a good possibility of it, though he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t someone else who’d landed here. It was certainly enough to give him hope though, and for the rest of the journey back to the farm he was on high alert for anything unusual. He crossed the creek when necessary to check a sandbar on the opposite side, and he stopped often to look and listen. It was during one of those stops that he heard someone approaching through the dense forest.