Fifty First Times

  Focus on your work, Avery. I withdrew a syringe from the carpenter’s apron I wore, dipped it inside the jar, and filled it halfway. When I was finished, I screwed the lid back on and set the jar aside.

  “What are you going to do with that?” Tanner asked, nodding at the syringe.

  “Giving the dogs something to find.” Earlier in the day I’d unloaded several bags of stuffed animals I’d purchased from Goodwill and left them outside. I reached into the bag and pulled out a ratty brown bear.

  “You teach the dogs to find teddy bears?”

  “Not just teddy bears.” I plunged the syringe into its stuffed belly and inserted the liquid. “Corpse bears. I also have bone fragments and placentas that people have donated to me after their surgeries.”

  He made a face. “Gross.”

  I tossed the bear to the ground and folded my arms across my chest. “Why are you here, Tanner? Obviously you’re not interested in a career switch to the glamorous world of canine search and rescue.”

  “I—no. Of course not.” He straightened, his face becoming serious. “This morning, Olivia O’Dell, a five-year-old girl, disappeared from her yard.”

  My breath caught in my throat. Now he had my attention. “What happened?”

  “We don’t know.” He swept his hand through his hair, something I’d seen him do a thousand times whenever he was frustrated. The familiarity of it made my chest ache. “According to the mother, the girl was outside playing for approximately forty-five minutes while her mother straightened the house. Around ten A.M. when the mother went to check on her, Olivia was nowhere to be found. We have no witnesses. No idea if she was abducted or simply wandered into the woods and got lost. That’s why we need you. We’ve got a search party assembled and the chief requested your help. If she is lost in the woods, we’re hoping one of your dogs can locate her before . . .” His words trailed off.

  But he didn’t have to finish. I was all too aware of the things that could happen to a child lost in the woods. Accidental drowning, injury, and animal attacks, just to name a few.

  “How about it, Cricket? Can you help us out?”

  I flinched. Cricket was a nickname he’d invented for me in high school because of my size and black hair, a name I hadn’t heard in the four years he’d been gone. I’d never expected to hear it again.

  I turned around and swallowed several times as a wave of fresh pain washed over me. A popular saying in dog training was that emotions traveled down the leash. Tanner’s sudden appearance was affecting me more than I cared to admit, which made me wonder how well I’d be able to perform as a dog handler. With a little girl’s life at stake, I couldn’t afford to be distracted.

  He touched my arm and it was all I could do to keep from trembling beneath his fingers. I wondered how many girls those fingers had touched in the years he was gone, and why I wasn’t enough to make him stay. As if he could read my mind, he said, “I know I owe you an explanation.”

  “No.” I whirled around, forcing him to drop his hand. The second it left my shoulder, I could breathe again. “You don’t owe me a thing. Besides, there’s a little girl to find.”

  “But later, maybe we—”

  “There’s no we.” I unbuckled the leash I’d tied around my waist and brushed past him on my way to the training building entryway.

  “Cricket,” he called after me. “Do you trust me?”

  I froze with my hand on the doorknob. Those were the words of a game we’d played. He’d sneak up behind me, whether I was in study hall, cheerleading practice, or walking the hallway to my locker, and he’d whisper in my ear, Do you trust me? And each time without hesitation, I’d close my eyes and fall backward into his waiting arms. He’d never once let me fall. But I wasn’t a teenager anymore. After what he’d done to me, there was no way I could trust him again. I looked over my shoulder. “No, Officer Wade. I don’t.” And just to be sure the point was driven home, I added, “And the name is Avery.” Before he could respond, I entered the building and let the door shut behind me.

  I tried to steady my breathing as I walked across the large training room where I taught obedience classes on the weekends. When I heard Tanner had been hired by the police department, I knew it was only a matter of time until we ran into each other. I just hadn’t expected his appearance to impact me so much. Sure, I’d been devastated when he seemingly dropped off the face of the Earth. But I had four years to get over it. I’d even dated a couple of guys since. True, those relationships fizzled out almost as soon as they started, but that just meant I hadn’t met the right guy yet. It wasn’t like I’d been looking too hard, anyway. Training took up practically all of my time—and that was probably why Tanner looked so good. I was a dieter staring at a piece of chocolate cake. Just because he looked good didn’t mean he was good for me.

  I opened the door at the far end of the training building and entered the kennel’s air-conditioned dog runs. I couldn’t help but smile as I walked past the grinning, hopeful faces of the two German shepherds and Belgian Malinois I had in training. In my opinion, nothing equaled a dog’s devotion. A small part of me wondered if I had Tanner to thank for my career choice.

  A familiar woof broke through my thoughts and I looked up to find my black Labrador, Shawnee, wagging his tail happily at me from his kennel run. “Hey buddy. Ready to get to work?” I unlatched his door and he burst through, bounding a circle around me. I grabbed the leash off his door and he immediately sat. “We have an important mission today. There’s a little girl missing and it’s up to us to find her.”

  Shawnee’s tail thumped softly on the ground in response.

  “And there’s something else, too.” I snapped the leash to his collar and led him to the door. “There’s a police officer right outside. You’re welcome to bite him anytime you want. Okay?”

  Shawnee barked and his tongue rolled out the side of his mouth. Even though I knew he couldn’t understand a word I said, I was going to take that as a yes.

  AFTER A SILENT, uncomfortable twenty-minute drive, Tanner parked his police cruiser at the end of a row of police cars and pickup trucks edged along a line of trees. Several times during the car ride Tanner glanced at me and appeared on the verge of saying something before thinking better of it. I opened the passenger door and retrieved Shawnee from the backseat before he could change his mind.

  I’d finished snapping Shawnee’s harness in place when Harold Schwimmer, the town’s police chief, walked toward me. “Avery, glad you could make it.” A tiger tattoo, a tribute to his former college football days, adorned his left forearm. Given the solid mass of muscles straining beneath his shirt, he obviously cared enough about fitness to keep lifting weights even though he was well into his sixties.

  “Of course,” I answered him. “Anything I can do to help.”

  “You’re a good kid.” He clasped a hand on my shoulder. “We’ve got at least three dozen people searching the woods now, but we can certainly use your dog’s nose.”

  Tanner stepped beside me. “Have there been any new developments?”

  The police chief’s hand slid from my shoulder and he nodded. “Yes. One of the searchers found the Olivia’s stuffed pony in the woods so we can narrow down her possible location. At this time we have no reason to believe there’s been an abduction. Hopefully we can locate the girl and get her reunited with her family.”

  A knot inside my gut loosened. Still, I knew the girl wasn’t out of danger until she was found. “Can I see the stuffed animal?”

  “Sure. Be right back.” The chief turned and marched down the line of cars. As I waited for him to return, I stared into the gaps of the trees where I could spot the occasional flash of orange from a searcher’s vest.

  Shawnee strained against the leash in my hand, prancing eagerly from foot to foot as if to say, Let’s get a move on!

  Tanner, on the other hand, remained silent—a good thing because I needed to focus all of my attention on finding the missing girl.

/>   A minute later the chief came back with a stuffed black horse clutched in his hand. The yarn mane stuck out at odd angles and only a tuft remained where his tail appeared to have been severed crudely with scissors. He held the toy out to me. “Take care of it. I practically had to pry it out of the mother’s hands.”

  I nodded as I accepted the toy. “I promise.” I held it out to Shawnee. He buried his nose in the animal, snorting as he inhaled. “Find her,” I whispered.

  Shawnee leaned back and looked at me. Gone was the good humor almost always present in his eyes, replaced instead with the seriousness of the task at hand. He lifted his black snout in the air, closed his eyes, and inhaled deeply several times before his eyes opened and he dropped his nose to the ground.

  “We’re off,” I told the chief as Shawnee lunged for the trees. I stuffed the horse into my backpack as I trailed after him.

  “Good luck!” He called after me. “We’re short radios, so Officer Wade will go with you so we can keep in contact.”

  “Wait. What?” I turned to look at him and nearly stumbled over a branch in the process.

  Tanner grinned as he jogged over to me. “Orders are orders. Besides, nobody goes out alone.”

  “I know that. But—” Shawnee yanked me forward, killing the words on my tongue. We were lucky Shawnee had a good hit on her scent so early on. With each passing minute, the girl’s scent would fade. As much as I didn’t want to spend any more time with Tanner than I absolutely had to, I wasn’t about to pull Shawnee off a solid scent trail just because I was uncomfortable.

  I sucked in a deep breath, mentally scolding myself for my own selfishness. For Olivia’s sake, I’d get over it. And later, when this was all over, we’d go our separate ways. I’d go back to my life and Tanner would go back to his, and that would be that.

  Until the next missing person case, a voice inside my head whispered. I shrugged the warning away. I would tell the police chief I didn’t want to work with Tanner anymore. But I wouldn’t worry about that now—I needed to focus, for Olivia.

  Shawnee charged ahead and I slowly unraveled my twenty-foot leash, making sure he had enough room to work.

  “Is his running ahead like that a good thing?”

  I jerked back, surprised by Tanner’s nearness. After four years of wondering what had happened to him, I still couldn’t believe he was close enough to touch. I forced my attention back to the Labrador in front of me. “A very good thing. As long as his nose is to the ground, we know he’s got her trail.” I pulled an electronic GPS from my utility vest and pinned our start location.

  Tanner quirked an eyebrow. “You come prepared.”

  I fought the urge to tell him he was the one who taught me to prepare for the worst. Instead, I quickened my step, moving in front of Tanner so I wouldn’t have to catch glimpses of him out of the corner of my eye. Each time I did, memories of how it had been between us before he left crashed into me like waves. “Better safe than sorry.”

  Much to my annoyance, Tanner jogged ahead and lifted a branch for me to duck under. I frowned as I passed. “You don’t have to do that, you know. I’m perfectly capable of navigating through the woods without a chauffeur.”

  To the left of us, three weary men in orange vests emerged from behind a cluster of trees. They met our eyes and shook their heads, indicating their lack of luck before they continued on.

  Tanner nodded at them before answering me. “I never thought you needed help. I was being nice.”

  “Please.” I rolled my eyes and stepped over a fallen log.

  Lines of confusion creased his forehead. “What?”

  I sighed. I knew I was about to open a can of worms, but I couldn’t help it. Four years was a long time to wonder what happened. “Why bother being nice, Officer Wade? When you left without so much as a good-bye, it was pretty apparent you could care less about my feelings.”

  He jerked back as if I’d struck him. “Crick—”

  I glared at him.

  “Avery,” he finished. “You have no idea how much I cared . . . how much I still do.”

  “What?” How stupid did he think I was? I turned to look at him, only to be whacked in the face by a branch. My cheeks flushed hot and I batted the branch over my shoulder. “How can you stand there and lie to my face? You care about me?” My voice wavered and I grabbed the leash so tightly my knuckles turned white. I felt as if the forest floor had been yanked out from under my feet and the only thing holding me in place was the thin piece of nylon and the dog at the other end.

  “I wanted to call you.” He swept his hand through his hair. “I thought about you every day.” His eyes burned into mine. “Every goddamned day.” He turned away from me and followed after Shawnee, who continued to blaze the trail ahead of us.

  I stood, blinking after him until the leash tightened in my hands and I was forced to stumble after it. I hurried forward. Anger flowed inside my veins like gasoline, and Tanner’s words struck the match setting me on fire. “How dare you say something like that, Tanner Wade. You have a lot of nerve.”

  He looked at me over his shoulder and quirked an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

  “This!” I gesture to space between us with my free hand. “You can’t take a girl to prom, promise her forever, disappear for four years, and then tell her how much you thought about her—as if it was so hard for you to dump me.”

  “What?” He stopped walking and I stumbled against him. I placed my hand against his chest to brace myself, only to have the warmth and firmness of the muscles beneath my fingers make my throat go dry. “I never dumped you. And I’m certainly not lying about how I feel.”

  I swallowed several times before I worked up enough saliva to answer him. “You don’t walk away from someone you love.”

  He raised a hand as if to touch my cheek, but stopped short, leaving it to hover in the air. “You would if it meant protecting the person you love.” His hand fell to his side.

  My pulse thrummed inside my head. “Protecting? What are you talking—” A whimper from Shawnee cut me off and it was then I realized the leash had gone slack in my hand. Shawnee spun in frantic circles at the other end.

  “Shit,” I muttered.

  Tanner frowned. “What’s wrong?”

  “He lost Olivia’s trail.”

  Tanner crouched and examined the ground around us. “What does that mean?”

  “It means it’s a good time to take a break and regroup.” I couldn’t tell if the sweat trickling down my spine was from the humidity or Tanner’s revelation. Either way, I needed a minute. I patted my leg, calling Shawnee to me. He trotted over and I pulled a collapsible bowl and water bottle from my backpack. After filling the bowl and setting it in front of Shawnee, I took a long sip from the water bottle. When I finished, I offered the bottle to Tanner. As he tilted his head back to finish the bottle, I couldn’t help but wonder what he’d meant when he said he was protecting me. How on Earth was breaking someone’s heart protecting them?

  Shawnee stopped drinking and looked up at me with water dripping from his muzzle.

  “All finished?”

  His tongue rolled out the side of his mouth and he grinned.

  “Then let’s get back to work.” I picked up his nearly empty water dish, shook it out, and zipped it inside my backpack. Next, I pulled the stuffed horse back out and let Shawnee take several good sniffs. “We’re going to find her now, aren’t we?”

  He tilted his head in the air and closed his eyes, inhaling deeply before moving forward at a slower pace than before. Every couple of feet he would stop and sniff the ground before continuing on.

  Tanner was back at my side, moving with me as I trailed behind Shawnee. The familiarity of his presence felt like a knife to my side. If I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine we were back in high school walking each other to our classes and stealing kisses before the bell rang.

  Shawnee stopped again and lifted his nose in the air, making a chuffing sound with each exhale.
/>
  “What’s he doing?” Tanner jutted his chin at the dog.

  “He’s air scenting. He lost her foot path but he’s trying to scent her in the woods.” Thorns from a bramble pulled at my jeans and I kicked my leg free.

  “He can do that?”

  I nodded. “If the wind’s on our side, he can. But just in case, keep your eyes peeled for any sign a little girl might have passed through—a shoe, a torn snippet of clothing, or even a barrette.”

  He nodded. Together, we spent several minutes combing through the brush. But no matter how hard we looked, there was nothing to be found.

  I gave a frustrated sigh and Shawnee echoed me with a snort.

  “That’s uncanny.” Tanner shook his head. “You guys really are a team.”

  I smiled and shrugged. “What can I say? I have the best job in the world. In my opinion, dogs make much better coworkers than people. They’re always happy to see you and they never complain.”

  “Or put a bullet in your leg,” Tanner added so quietly, I almost didn’t hear.

  I whirled my head in his direction but he kept his eyes carefully averted from mine. “You were shot?”

  When he finally looked at me, the humor was gone from his eyes. “It wasn’t a coincidence I showed up at your place today. When I heard the chief was going to ask for your help, I volunteered to get you. I’ve thought of nothing else but you since I arrived back in town. I wanted to see you earlier, but I didn’t think you’d talk to me. There’s so much I have to explain. I know now’s not the time, and you have every reason to turn me a way. But please, Cricket, hear me out.”

  “Avery,” I muttered. His words swam around my head so fast I became dizzy, so I focused my attention on walking, grabbing on to small trees as I passed in order to stay upright. For the first time in four years, I considered that maybe it hadn’t been the distance or another girl who’d kept us apart, but rather something much worse. “You’re right, though. Now isn’t the time.”