The phone rang, and Wes silenced the chatter before answering it. “Yes, Jeremy, listen. Before you tell me anything, I have something to tell you. We called the airline, and Paul wasn’t on the flight. He had a reservation, but he never received a seat assignment, and according to their computer, he never boarded the plane.”
Sierra’s heart was pounding. She wanted to grab the phone from Wes and tell Jeremy herself.
“Yes. I know. You did? And did you reach them? Oh, really. Okay. Well, are you coming back, then? Sure.” Wes held the phone out to his dad. “Tawni wants to talk to you.”
“What did you find out?” Sierra asked the minute Wes let go of the phone. “He wasn’t at the hospital, right?”
Wes nodded. “He wasn’t at the hospital, and he’s not on the list of the confirmed fatalities. Jeremy still can’t reach his parents. He called some of their friends, who said his parents had gone to their mountain cabin for the weekend. They don’t have a phone there and their cell phones aren’t working, so Jeremy asked the friends to drive up and tell them.”
“What are they going to tell them?”
“I guess that Paul’s okay.”
“Is he?” Sierra asked. “I mean, he wasn’t on the plane; he isn’t here.” Sierra looked around and wondered why she was the only one asking this question. “So where is he?”
thirteen
WES GRABBED THE PHONE from his dad before he hung up with Jeremy and said, “Jeremy, Sierra just made a good point. Where is Paul?”
It was quiet for a moment. Sierra bit her lower lip and tried to imagine what had happened to Paul. For all they knew, he could have taken a different flight, and he could be at the Portland airport right now, waiting for Uncle Mac to pick him up.
“Okay, call us if you hear anything,” Wes said before hanging up. He then gave everyone in the room a rundown on the plan. “Jeremy is going to call his grandmother in Scotland to find out when Paul left her house. They’re going to drive back here and halfway back they’ll call for an update. The friends who are going to the Mackenzies’ cabin have our number, and they’ll call here, too.”
“He’s probably stuck at the airport in London,” Vicki said. “I’ll bet he missed his flight and is still trying to get another one. Or maybe he’s already in the air and will call when he arrives in Portland—or Seattle or wherever his plane is going to land.”
Just the words “Seattle,” “plane,” and “land” sent shivers up Sierra’s spine.
“Sierra, you don’t look very relieved,” Vicki said. “Are you still in shock? Paul wasn’t on the plane.”
“I know,” Sierra said.
“It’s a lot to process so fast,” Amy said, coming to Sierra’s defense. “I’m like Sierra. I’ll feel better when we know exactly where Paul is and why he missed the plane.”
“It is a lot to process,” Sierra said, pulling Amy to the side. The others had begun to help Wesley and Sierra’s mom clean up the kitchen mess. “And your decision is a pretty huge event, too,” Sierra said to Amy. “I don’t want you to think I don’t know how big a step that was for you. I’m so happy, Amy.” Sierra tried but couldn’t pull up a smile for her friend. “I’m deep down happy that you said what you did and that you let Vicki and me be there when you prayed. I’ve been praying for this for a long time.”
“I know,” Amy said quietly. “Thank you.”
“So,” Warner said, breaking into their twosome, “is it time to let the party begin? What happened to Vicki’s hats and blowers?”
Sierra pulled herself out from under Warner’s lumbering interference and went over to her dad. “Do you think we should go to the airport in case Paul comes in and doesn’t have money to call Uncle Mac to pick him up?” A tiny smile came to her as she remembered how Paul hadn’t been prepared with enough British coins for the phone when they had met at the London airport. He probably didn’t have any American coins with him on this trip.
“I think he would find a way to call,” Mr. Jensen said. “We could be wandering around the airport for hours when he could still be stuck at Heathrow. It’s better to wait here and keep in contact with people calling in.”
Sierra nodded and meandered into the study. She shut the door behind her and took refuge in her favorite thinking chair. The study was dark, but she didn’t turn on the light. Someone might realize she was there and come in. She needed to be alone, just for a few minutes.
Reviewing the available information, Sierra tried to put together the pieces. Paul could be anywhere. Then, silently moving her lips, with her eyes shut tight, Sierra prayed. For months she had prayed for Amy, and now, just like that, her prayers appeared to have been answered and Amy had come back to the Lord. For more than a year, she had prayed for Paul to turn wholeheartedly to God, and in just the last few weeks, he had. Sierra was so experienced at praying for her friends to come to Christ that she didn’t know what to pray after they did.
Party sounds floated in from the kitchen. Everyone was relieved, and after all, this was supposed to be a celebration. But Sierra couldn’t find a festive bone in her body at this moment. She knew she wouldn’t feel like blowing any party horns until she knew where Paul was and that he was safe. Paul’s image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd entered her thoughts. For the first time in her life, Sierra believed she had a tiny understanding of what it must be like for God to have lost sheep and to long for them all to come back to Him. She remembered the story of how the Good Shepherd left his flock of ninety-nine safe sheep to search for the one lost sheep. He didn’t end his search until that one was found and brought back safely.
“You brought Amy back,” Sierra whispered to the Good Shepherd. “And You brought Paul back. Now please bring Paul back to me. Or, well, bring him back to his family and friends and bring him back safely. I know I can’t pretend that I have any right to him. He’s Your sheep. And so am I. I know You will lead us and guide us in the future, whether it’s separately or together.”
Sierra felt a calmness that had been missing during the last few hours of panic. She thought of her frustrated prayer earlier when Randy had gathered the group together. She had said then that God’s ways weren’t her ways and she was having a hard time understanding those ways. Right now, it seemed she didn’t need to understand. All she needed to do was trust.
Before she left the study, Sierra drew in a deep breath. She noticed her lower lip was swollen and wondered how many times she had chewed on it during the last few hours without realizing it. A smile came to her as she thought of how terrible she was going to look when she finally did see Paul. Her lip would be swollen, and her eyes would probably still be red and puffy. Her chin was likely to break out within the next twelve hours. It usually did that when she was under stress and eating a lot of sugar.
The thought of sugar piqued Sierra’s interest in eating. She had skipped lunch in all the graduation excitement and then had felt no interest in food when the lobster was served in front of the TV. Right now she could eat about anything.
Sierra’s mom and Amy were the only two still in the kitchen when Sierra left the study and joined them. Mrs. Jensen’s hands were submerged in soapy dishwater. She turned to Sierra and with a concerned look asked, “How are you doing?”
“I’m okay,” Sierra said. “I’m actually kind of hungry.”
“That’s a good sign. What are you hungry for?”
“I don’t know. I’ll find something.”
Sierra’s “something,” under Amy’s creative direction, turned out to be a lobster sandwich. She cut open one of the dinner rolls and loaded it with lobster and sliced cherry tomatoes. It was even tastier than she imagined it would be.
Sierra found out that while she was in the study, Drake and Cassie had come by, and most of Sierra’s guests had left with them to go to another party. She couldn’t blame them. This hadn’t exactly turned into the evening of enchantment she had planned. The only people left were Amy, Vicki, Randy, and Wes. Sierra’s younger brothers had go
ne to bed. Her parents went upstairs but said they would stay up and wait for news.
Vicki went to her car and brought back a bag filled with yearbooks. They reminisced about Royal Academy and talked about it as if all the things that had happened to them there had taken place a decade ago. Sierra certainly felt she had lived a decade in the last five hours.
The phone rang, and Wes grabbed it. “She’s right here,” he said and handed the phone to Sierra.
“Hi, Sierra?” It was a deep, male voice. For one second her heart rose, thinking it might be Paul. “It’s Drake.”
“Oh,” she said. Then she quickly added, “Hi.”
“Margo just told me about Paul, and I wanted to call and see how you were doing.”
“Thanks,” Sierra said, pulling away from the group on the living room floor.
Vicki grabbed her leg and mouthed the word, “Paul?”
Sierra shook her head. “It’s Drake,” she said, covering the mouthpiece.
“Are you okay?” Drake asked. “Margo said you took it pretty hard. I saw the crash on the news. I can see how it would have rocked your world.”
“It did,” Sierra agreed. “We still haven’t heard from Paul, so we don’t know where he is. Tawni and Jeremy went to Seattle. They should be back in a couple of hours. I don’t know if they’ll have any more news or not.”
“Well, I just wanted to call you and say happy graduation, and I hope everything turns out with Paul and you.”
“Thanks, Drake. I really appreciate that.”
“I also wanted to say I appreciated what you wrote in my yearbook. I think you’ll always hold a memorable spot in my life, too. I don’t have any backpack trips planned this summer, but if I did, I’d want you along for the hike.”
“That was an interesting trip, wasn’t it?”
“Interesting,” Drake repeated.
There was a pause before Drake said, “Well, I, um, I don’t know if I’ll see you much this summer, so have a good one and maybe we’ll run into each other.”
“I imagine we will,” Sierra said, not sure why Drake would suddenly be so nice to her. He certainly appeared sincere.
“Take care, then. And I hope everything is okay with Paul.”
“Thanks, Drake.”
He hung up, and she returned to her circle of friends.
“What was that all about?” Amy asked.
Sierra shrugged. “Drake wanted to tell me he hoped everything turned out okay with Paul.”
The phone rang again while it was still in Sierra’s hand. She jumped before pushing the “On” button. “Hello?”
“Sierra, it’s me,” Tawni said. “Have you heard anything from Jeremy’s parents?”
“Not yet.”
“We finally reached his grandmother in Scotland. That was no easy task. She said Paul left last Tuesday because he was going to travel on a rail pass for a few days before he left the country.”
Sierra relayed the message to Wesley and the others, who were waiting eagerly, before she answered Tawni. “That means he could be anywhere.”
“Exactly. Jeremy is more concerned now, I think, than he was before. Paul would check in; this isn’t like him.”
“Maybe he tried to call his parents, but they were already in the mountains,” Sierra suggested.
“You’re right.” Sierra could hear Tawni relaying the information to Jeremy and Uncle Mac. Then she said, “Jeremy, does anyone have a key to your parents’ house who could listen to their answering machine?”
Jeremy’s response was muffled. Sierra heard a loud page in the background.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“We’re at the airport. When you guys discovered that Paul wasn’t on the flight, Jeremy thought we should come here to see if Paul took another plane out of Heathrow. We’ve been checking with all the airlines for the past hour, but none of them has Paul listed on any of the flights.”
“So he’s probably still in London,” Sierra surmised.
“That’s what Uncle Mac thinks. He’s making a few calls right now to see if he can have Paul paged at Heathrow, just in case Paul is stuck there, trying to get a flight out. Oh wait,” Tawni said. The sound of muffled voices was drowned by another loud airport page, causing Sierra to hold the phone away from her ear as she explained to the others what Tawni had said.
“Sierra?”
“Yes, I’m still here.”
“Uncle Mac didn’t get a response to his page at Heathrow.”
“What do you think that means?”
“Jeremy thinks Paul never arrived at the airport. He thinks he disappeared somewhere between his grandmother’s house and the airport. He could be anywhere.”
Like a storm cloud, Tawni’s words blew in and settled over Sierra’s heart. With the swiftness of a lightning bolt, the intense pain Sierra had experienced earlier suddenly returned, striking her this time in the throat. She handed the phone to Wes and lowered herself into a chair.
For the first time ever, a jagged thought pierced her. I might never see Paul Mackenzie on this earth again.
fourteen
SIERRA DIDN’T LIKE the thoughts that hovered over her throughout the long night. She tried to make them go away. She tried to reason them through. Nothing seemed to help. All she knew was that Paul Mackenzie probably wasn’t dead. He was missing. For some reason, that was much more terrifying to wrestle with.
Randy went home around two in the morning. Amy and Vicki stayed. The three girls put out sleeping bags on the living room floor and changed into shorts and T-shirts. They waited all night for the phone to ring.
At a little past four in the morning, the phone finally rang. Sierra jumped to answer it, but the cordless wouldn’t respond to her push of the button. The battery had gone out again.
“Somebody get the phone!” she yelled, scrambling for the phone in the kitchen. She grabbed it on the fifth ring. All she heard was a click and some static. The answering machine was set to pick up calls on the fifth ring, so Sierra ran into the study to grab the phone connected to the answering machine.
“Hello?” She could hear her father’s recorded message playing over the line. “Wait just a second,” she said.
The voice on the other line sounded like a recording also. Sierra listened hard to decipher what it was saying.
“Hello?” Wesley’s voice came over the upstairs extension.
“Hang up, Wesley. The phones are all messed up.”
“What?”
More static.
“Hang up!” Unfortunately, whoever was on the other end must have thought the command was for him, and he hung up.
“Sierra?” Wesley said.
Frustrated, she hung up the phone and went back into the kitchen to hang up that extension. Wes came bounding down the stairs, along with Sierra’s dad.
“Who was it?”
“Our phones are messed up!” Sierra stated, pushing her hair out of her face. “If it rings again, only one person should answer it. I really think it could have been Paul.”
Vicki and Amy appeared from the living room; Amy was holding the dead cordless phone.
“Are you sure?” Mr. Jensen asked Sierra.
Sierra felt like crying. “I’m not sure of anything. I tried to get it before the answering machine picked it up and then …” Before Sierra could finish, a clear thought broke through her deep blue funk. “The answering machine!”
She turned and headed back to the study. The confused troop followed her.
“Did anyone ever listen to the messages?” Sierra bent over the machine and pushed the rewind button.
They heard a beep, and then an electronic-sounding voice said, “This is the overseas operator. Will you accept a collect call from …” There was a click and then in his own voice they heard Paul say, “Paul Mackenzie.” A pause followed as the electronic overseas operator tried to discern if the answer to its question was “yes” or “no.” Of course all the answering machine gave was silence as the tape
rolled, so the mechanical operator hung up.
“No,” Sierra cried. “Why did it do that? Where is he? When did he call?”
The next message beeped, and the group fell silent again to listen. It was the same mechanical operator, only this time, instead of Paul’s saying his name, he listed some numbers. Again, when there was no answer, the “operator” hung up.
“He’s trying to leave you a message,” Amy said. “Those numbers! Play it back, and write down the numbers. You can call them and see if he’s there.”
It seemed a little strange to Sierra’s dad, but Sierra agreed with Amy. If Paul realized he couldn’t get the phone to take a message, he had to use whatever means he could to communicate with them. Sierra wondered if Paul had tried to reach his parents as well but only got their machine. Uncle Mac had been at the airport waiting for Paul, so it was possible Paul hadn’t been able to reach him yesterday afternoon, either.
Sierra replayed the message while Wes wrote down the numbers. They tried phoning them only to hear a recording that said their call couldn’t go through as dialed.
“It’s probably a London number,” Sierra said. “Don’t we have to dial another number first to get international access? I know there’s a code for each country in Europe.”
“I’ll call the operator,” Wes said.
“It’ll be a machine,” Vicki predicted.
But it was an actual person, and Wes set to work, trying to solve the mystery. The operator tried seven different possibilities, but none of those seven codes with the numbers Paul left was the right combination. They tried one more, and Wesley looked up excitedly.
“I have a connection. It’s ringing.” He held up his hand, motioning for silence. “Yes, hello,” he said into the receiver. “What did you say this was? Danbury House? Yes, well, I’m not sure I have the correct number. Pardon me? Yes, I am calling from the U.S. I’m trying to contact Paul Mackenzie. By any chance is he there?”