Visions (Forest Secrets Book 1)

Chapter 13

I was out of the shower, dressed, and toweling my hair dry when we really started getting into the discussion. We kept trying to figure out how the kidnappers hadn’t left a single footprint, but also hadn’t smoothed the ground.They really didn’t have enough time, as they ran. We came to that conclusion because of three reasons.

            Reason one was that Carter had been yelling for help and they had to run so no one could follow them too far. That brought up reason number two.

            Carter Hill was a football player. You couldn’t really keep him subdued absolutely for long if you were multitasking, we assume, since they used the woods quietly, it’s most probable that they went on foot. Walking and trying to keep him quiet would be way too hard, so they had to have run. So running while holding and restraining a football player wouldn’t leave time for anything, and even having enough people to make it easy would be too hazardous.

            That’s pretty much where we were at: a conclusion full of possibilities and guesses, with way too many holes. But it’s all we had. Instead of dwelling on it—longer than we already had—we decided to focus on other, more important things: actual, solid clues.

            The search party was a dead end, so we decided to back track a little farther. If we couldn’t find anything at the crime scene, we’d just investigate everything leading up to it. The route Carter took home could hold just as much information. I mean Carter had walked home alone, so why wait until he got home and risk getting caught? It didn’t make any sense. I searched for a poster board and on it we drew a map of the town, identifying all the routes he could’ve taken home. Now, a person might’ve zig-zagged all over the place, but Carter was a straight-forward kind of guy. If he wanted to walk for a while, he would’ve taken a long route home, and likewise if he didn’t. Something that Carter never would’ve done, was wonder. It was either this way or that, because he didn’t like when people ambled around.

            We ended up with four. Two ways were short, one about medium, and the last one pretty long. Emily volunteered for the two short ways, Christine had medium, and I had the long route. We figured it was equal because the two short ways had a lot of detail to them, the medium was more high-profile—and it’d seem more suspicious if I’d done it—and mine, the long one, was mainly along the highway that passed through our town.

            Our cell phones were all charged and programmed. We got into my car and drove.

            Christine dropped me off first, near Annie’s house. I was going to check out the area before it split off, and then the highway. They’d park the car where it split and separate there, which was a good six minutes away. I looked over everything, but nothing looked out of the ordinary. When I reached my car, the other two were long gone, and the eleven ‘o clock sun beat down on my silver paint, making it almost too bright to look at from my angle. I took a deep breath and continued onto the highway

It was bright on the highway, and quiet. The news of Carter’s disappearance had kept a lot of families from coming into town. A few idiots started rolling in though, wanting to prove they were all high and mighty, not scared of the woods Carter had been dragged into and ended up messing with the investigation. Less came when news got around about the reception they’d be getting. For now, though, it was quiet. Not many people wanted to drive that far to then get thrown out of every business. Besides, even from the town next to us, we were pretty far out; they were at least thirty minutes away.

            The dry gravel crunched loudly under my shoes, the only sound I could hear besides a few bird cries. I tucked my hands in my pockets feeling a little uncomfortable as I searched the road. Everything was as uniformly bland as it had always been, but I forced myself to look harder.