Chapter Twenty-Seven
Seth wasn’t anywhere to be found.
“Seth!” Tyler hollered into the floodlights mounted atop his dually illuminating the pump-jacks.
Frodo bounded through the grass. His men shouted Seth’s name. Heart combed through the meadow with a flashlight in the darkness. Seth wasn’t here and it had been two hours. A breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding gushed from his tight lungs as horrid visions of Seth climbing the pump-jacks, of his hands or feet slipping, of his body falling and crumpling beneath them receded. But more fear encroached in its place.
If Seth wasn’t here, then he was still out there.
It was dark. Bobcats and coyotes haunted this backcountry at night, hungry for an easy meal. The night was starless and rain tainted the air with pregnant humidity. Rain showers were moving in. No good. It would only make conditions worse.
“Seth McClintock Dixon!”
No answer. Heart was on the phone. Had she found something? She tapped off the device and looked at him in the stark floodlight, shaking her head. “Just called the house again. Stevie says he hasn’t come back.”
“Where else do you think he might go?” T.R. said, huffing as he jogged up to them.
“Someplace that would piss me off,” he replied.
It was the likeliest case. Seth was angry, at him, at everything he’d overheard on the phone. Perhaps he was angry at his illusions about his mother being shattered. He’d heard her say, no matter how remorsefully, that she’d never wanted him. He’d heard the truth, that Tyler had tried so hard to shield them from. When Seth was angry, he always did something defiant.
Tyler’s mind ran wild with every scenario of what could go wrong, of every way in which his son might lash out.
“Seth!” Once more, he bellowed his son’s name, shaking his head, pounding his chest to knock loose the knot. Would this anguish ever ease?
Heart bit her lip, a dark emotion on her face. She rubbed her exhausted, worried eyes and stared hard at him.
“Talk,” Tyler said.
She took a deep breath. “He’s asked me nonstop to see the fossils. Do you think, maybe…” she bit her lip nervously, “he went up the escarpment?”
Tyler’s jaw pumped as rain began to smatter down across their faces. Jeezus. The slump would turn into a quagmire in the rain. He and Heart jumped in the cab of his truck as he ripped it around the field and roared back toward the gravel access road.
Windshield wipers swished. Heart was looking thoughtfully out the window, arms crossed over her chest in a withdrawn posture. She didn’t look at him.
Throwing the transmission in park, they both jumped out. The rain had strengthened to a steady shower, plastering their clothes to their bodies. With his flashlight, he jogged along the trail past his old hideout, water falling in heavier drops as the tree canopy distorted their descent, Heart followed quickly behind him, and they spilled out at the base of the slump.
He pounded the knot in his chest again. The horrible pang wouldn’t relent, only intensified at the sight of the massive slope of rubble. In the darkness, the escarpment looked like a tall, ominous silhouette against a gray-dark sky. The rain was forming channels, racing downhill, creating grooves in the loose soil. Heart hurried downstream along the dried creek bed that in no time, if the rain kept up, would fill with water.
“Where are you going?” he shouted at her receding shadow, her flashlight bouncing away.
“Downhill where the ground’s stable, to climb up!” she called back.
Tyler followed her lead, watching the dirt of the slump turning to mud, the uneven rockiness slick and dangerous. In what felt like hours but was probably only minutes, he caught up to Heart and began climbing on the undisturbed hillside, when his flashlight glinted off metal. Red metal. Quad tires.
Seth’s quad bike, parked on the uphill, abandoned, the key still in it.
“Seth!” Tyler bellowed, eyes blazing every direction as panic swept through him.
Nothing but darkness.
He scoured his hand over his mouth, swiping rainwater from his face, when no reply came. His worst nightmares paraded through his mind. The accident. Seth and Stevie screaming in their car seats. Tipping that car up by sheer willpower as EMTs flurried in, to drag his babies out of the wreckage while police put up shields, blocking the fucking paparazzi trying to snap photos of the famous model. He shook off the touch Heart tried to place on his arm. Anger at Isabella still coursed through his blood, even if the call had ended as amicably as could be hoped for. His eyes flashed to Heart.
“We’re going to find him, okay?” she tried to soothe, though her face looked haunted.
He shook his head as he rattled off a group text to T.R., his brothers who were on the way from West Texas, and his men, that he’d found Seth’s bike and where it was at. Anger that this landslide had happened in the first place, that the farm and all its problems were his to cope with, that he never should have left this area unsecured, rippled through him.
“This ground’s unstable. If he’s still out here…” His eyes flashed to Heart, whose gaze watered with the same pale distress he’d seen on her face when she’d confided in him about the accident that had killed her sister.