Author's Note: This is a sequel to my Non-TG Novel, Missing Without A Trace: A Kelly Mitchell Mystery by Charles Schiman.
This is also a non-tg novel. However, I am a male writing the novel first-person as a female. And I created Kelly as the female person I thought I could have become--my alter ego, if you will--had I been born a girl.

The first novel, Missing Without A Trace: A Kelly Mitchell Mystery, is available for purchase online as a Nook Book at the Barnes and Noble Nook Store.

I got the handheld GPS out of my rucksack as I reached the edge of the forest on the east side of the camp. I turned it on and waited as it booted up and acquired the signal of three overhead satellites. Then I locked in the location of the camp as my starting point. Then I put the device back in the rucksack and took a moment to examine the forest before me.

It didn’t look so bad. The undergrowth immediately surrounding the edge of the tree line went from being four-to-ten inches of grass and weeds, to a little over knee deep. I figured that it would thin out considerably after I got inside the forest where the drop in the sunlight reaching the ground would have limited the growth rate of the various plants and small trees which struggled to grow in the shadows of their huge brothers.

Before stepping into the forest, I also took a moment to spray myself with insect repellant. And, sure enough, as soon as I entered the confines of the forest, clouds of mosquitoes and gnats and things rose from their resting places on the ground and formed a dancing cloud around me, inches from my body, face, and hair. I kept my mouth shut and used my free hand to wave away anything which tried to fly up my nose as I inhaled as I walked deeper into the forest.

There had been several deer paths which opened onto the east side of the camp. I chose one of them at random and, luckily, I think I guessed right, because the path headed uphill, directly toward the east. It jogged left and right, following the easiest path up the hill. This part of the National Forest was dotted with rocks and boulders left from when the glaciers of the Ice Age had melted. As the pioneers had discovered—and then later farmers and more recent landowners—the boulders were mostly hidden below ground. They were like icebergs. Sometimes, only a small portion of the rock poked above the ground. What might look like a small, two-foot long half-buried rock, becomes a massive underground boulder after you dig a ten-foot-wide hole around it and only uncovered eight inches of the stone’s depth.

I reached the top of the first hill and had to decide whether or not I wanted to continue following the deer path. I was tempted to used the GPS to cut in a straight line across the forest to the start of the next hill. But I had the niggling suspicion that Annie and Dean might have come across something that I might notice but they might not have grasped its significance. What if the marker Dean had written about wasn’t the only one. Maybe there were others which he had missed and had only come upon the last one, the one which marked the cairn, by accident?

So I stayed on the deer path and, even, I also almost missed the next clue. It was kind of well hidden, slightly off the path in a little cleared space. I would have missed it, too, because I had chosen that moment to refresh my insect repellant which I was walking and wasn’t really paying attention to where I was going. I had just closed my eyes, to spray around my face and head, when the toe of my shoe caught against something sticking out of the ground and tripped me. I fell forward, sprawling flat on my face, losing my grip on my rifle and knocking the wind out of me.

As soon as I could breathe again, I rolled into a sitting position and scrambled to get hold of my rifle again. Dam!Dam!Dam! I frantically wiped the dirt and crud off the rifle, fearful that I had damaged it somehow. Why did I always have to be so clumsy! It looked okay. I was lucky I had been smart enough not to added a bullet to the firing chamber when I was loading it. Otherwise it might have gone off when it hit the ground—had the safety jarred loose when it had hit the ground. I scowled at my pant legs as I realized that, because they were still pretty wet from wading in the lake, all the dirt and wet mulchy stuff from the forest floor that had gotten on the was going to work its way into the wet fabric. Crap.

I turned my attention to what had precipitated my fall. On the edge of the path was a half-circle of rectangular stones. Bricks? I leaned forward and brushed the dirt away. No. Not bricks. They were made of clay which had been hardened with fire or something. The ground inside the circle seemed empty, so I grabbed a stick and started scraping. A corroded piece of angle iron appeared about a half an inch below the surface. It formed a kind of pointer, I decided. The bottom of the rod touched the bricks which connected with the edge of the deer trail. The top of the rod ended several inches from the opposite edge of the circle, pointing slightly to the north. Both ends of the pointer were staked into place with what looked like rods which had been bent into a ‘u’ shaped and hammered into the ground. I took out the GPS and bookmarked the site of the ‘pointer.’ Then, taking a heading on the pointer, I began walking a straight line toward the next hill.

Every once in a while, I would stop and try to brush some of the dirt and stuff from my jeans and pantlegs. I was not very successful. I was able to get most of the mulchy stuff off me, but there was no way I was going to my pants back to their pristine, pre-tumble in the muck, look. Near the summit of the hill, I began to see granite poking through the ground cover, in the form of angled shelves of rock. This was probably near the spot where Annie got her quartz crystals. I reached the summit and looked around. At first, nothing leapt out at me. Then I noticed something odd over on the side of the hill farthest away from me. I moved a little and something glinted in the sunlight.

Getting a better grip on my rifle, I hurried toward it. Whoa! It was more impressive than anything I was expecting. Most guides and hikers think of cairns as stacked piles of flat rocks, maybe two or three feet high at the most. Like a little sign post or something. A playful attention-getter. This was obviously built for more than just getting your attention.

For one thing, the base of the cairn was built upon a perfect circle of carefully placed flat stones. I glanced back over my shoulder. Whomever had constructed this had, quite probably, pried away flat sections from some of the granite shelves which were protruding out of the hill. Then they had dragged them to where they wanted to build the cairn. Each flat section had been placed into the ground and levelled carefully. The cairn itself was built like a little tower, but it looked solid and not hollow. No windows, nor was there any sign that they’d constructed stairs or things to aid the workers doing the construction.

It was, maybe, six or seven feet high. Four feet in diameter. Kind of thick and squat. The sides angled in at a shallow angle and it the top was not ‘a piece of metal’ maybe from some aircraft or machine. It was a ten-inch thick wing spar. In spite of having its thickest end anchored into the top of the cairn, the spar had the aerodynamic curve necessary to generate the lift needed for an aircraft. Each long edge of the spar had an ‘I’ beam shape and a series of lightening holes had been milled into the spar in decreasing sizes up the spar’s length as it tapered to a narrow point.

Dean’s comment that it was ‘odd’ didn’t say the half of it. It was a memorial to a crash. Some time in the past, an airplane or a floatplane, or some sort of an airfoil flying vehicle, had crashed somewhere near this memorial. Perhaps there had been fatalities and the survivors—or their surviving relatives—had built this in memory of the event. Or maybe they had built it hoping someone would see it from the air and come looking for them. I really didn’t know.

I looked up at the sun and was surprise at how low it was in the sky. More time had passed than I’d thought. I got out the GPS and bookmarked the location of the cairn. Hank was going to want to see this.

Then I clicked to the menu and set the GPS to guide me back to the camp.

It took me less than a half hour to make it back to the camp. I spotted Jack Piper’s Cessna floatplane sitting on the shore next to my boat-hull amphibian and I could see Hank and three of his men photographing and checking things out. They hadn’t spotted me yet, so I walked into the camp to where Hank was standing next to Dean’s open tent.

“So-help-me-God,” Hank was saying to one of the troopers, “I’m going to shake some sense into her if it’s the last thing I—"

“Hey, Hank, I’m back,” I said, interrupting him. “Wait ‘til I tell you what I found!”

He whirled to face me. “Don’t you ever do something so stupid as that again! Didn’t you even think to take a radio along with you so we would know that you were all right?”

“I didn’t have a radio I could take with me,” I protested indignantly. “I only have the one that the amphibian’s equipped with.”

“What about the handhelds that Dean equipped the campers with?” he growled, unappeased. I wasn’t going to get off easily on this one.

“There wasn’t one,” I said. Then I added, “I looked,” actually I hadn’t, but you understand, “but Dean obviously only had the base transceiver and four headsets. When he left with the Olsens—either with them or to find them—he must have taken the fourth headset for himself and left the one for the base transceiver behind. That one’s just a headset mike, it can’t work away from the transceiver.”

I blinked my eyes and gave him my innocent look. “Did you read Dean’s journal?” I asked hopefully. “I left it open on the table next to the transceiver.”

“I did,” Hank replied. “A lot of good it did me. He doesn’t even give any directions.”

“East of the camp,” I said. “I found it. You’ve got to come see it.”

“What about the missing campers?” Jack suddenly demanded from beside me. I jumped a little, startled. Where had he come from? “I swear, you’re like some dumb squirrel who’s spotted a new shiny object sometimes!”

“I am not!” I snapped. I looked back at Hank. “Annie might have taken her parents out to the cairn. We should look for them out there.”

“What about Dean?” Jack snapped back at me, not giving Hank a chance to respond to my suggestion. “He took the remaining headset with him. That means he thought something bad happened. Otherwise, he would have called you on the transceiver and given you a head’s up before going out to check on ‘em.”

“Whatever!” I said, scowling at Jack. I looked back at Hank. “What did you guys find? Any blood? Any sign of foul play or that they were forcibly abducted?”

“No,” Hank replied. He eyed me for a moment. Then he decided to let everything slide. “Dean’s rifle is missing. He probably took it with him when he left the camp.”

“So,” I said, “if they’re not here hiding from us in the camp, then they’re out there in the forest somewhere. Therefore—”

“Oh god, here comes the logic bomb again,” Jack said.

“Therefore,” I repeated. “It is the only logical thing for us to do. Go up to the cairn and search the area around it for clues. Annie and Dean were there the day before. It’s only logical that Annie would take her parents back there to show them what she and Dean had discovered.”

Hank looked at Jack. Then he looked around at the three other troopers.

“Okay,” he said. “Listen up. We’ve got, maybe, two hours of daylight left.” He looked at Jack. “Jack, we need some high power portable lights. Both for photographs at the cairn thing and for when we get caught in the dark coming back to the camp.”

“I have a bunch of ‘em, Hank. How about one for each of us?”

“Sounds good,” Hank said. “Go get them.” He looked at one of the older troopers who was standing nearby, holding a digital camera. A macro lense for the camera dangled from a strap halfway down the front of his uniform shirt. “Bill, you can wrap up photographing the inside of the Olsens’ tent. It pretty much looks as though whatever happened to them and Drew took place someplace other than at the camp.” Bill nodded his head. Then Hank looked at me. “Kelly, I’m letting you come along with us, seeing as how you are the one who found where the cairn is.”

I smiled. “Thank you, Hank.”

“Leave the rifle in your plane. It’s not coming with us.”

“But—”

“Go put it in your plane. Right now. We don’t want to have you shooting somebody by accident.”

“I’ve never shot anybody by accident!” I protested.

“What about yourself,” Jack asked, his voice quick.

I whirled and frowned at him. “That was an…”

He laughed as my voice dropped off and my face got red.

“Yeah, an accident,” Hank said sourly. “I remember it well. Get moving and lock that gun up. We’re wasting daylight.”

Keeping my irritation at Hank and Jack in check, I nodded my head and headed toward the amphibian. Once inside the aircraft, I found a rag and carefully wiped down my rifle. Then I unloaded the gun, replacing the bullets in their box. I locked both into their compartment and sighed to myself. Jack was right when he’d said I’d let myself get distracted by the sight of the cairn. Confronted by a mystery—who had built it, where had the aircraft spar come from, had there be some sort of crash, what was the incident the cairn was supposed to remind people about, why didn’t any of us in North Liberty know about it—those thoughts had led me, once again, to fail and screw up.

I refastened the top of my rucksack and left the plane. Jack, Hank, and the rest of the troopers were waiting for me. The three troopers were all wearing bulky backpacks; full, I assumed, of evidence bags, sealed empty vials for collecting liquid samples, and stuff like that. I handed Hank the GPS, which I had turned on before I left the plane so that it was all up-and-running when I reached the group.

I pointed to the first bookmarked location. “That’s where I found a small marker of brick-like stones. There was a metal bar anchored into the ground, pointing northward, off the deer trail.” I paused, glancing toward the trees. “I think Annie and Drew missed seeing it. Or they didn’t know what it meant. Anyway, I think they continued following the deer trail. It probably led them eventually to the cairn. By following the pointer’s direction, I cut straight to the hill, taking a shorter route. I think the deer trail that Annie and Drew followed brought them to the cairn on the opposite side of the hill than the way that I went.”

Hank nodded. “Then that’s what we’ll do. We’ll check out this first spot—the stone circle. There might be something else to find there. Let’s go.”

Examination of the brick circle was quick. Hank was right, in that there wasn’t much more to learn from the marker. It was pretty simple. There were no tracks around it to be found—except my own, which I had left there when I’d found it. Jack made an interesting observation about the marker. If it was indeed put there to tell people the direction of the cairn, that meant that whoever put it there knew the cairn was, if not secret, then at least the marker maker knew that the cairn monument was unknown to the general public.

Bill, the older trooper commented quietly, “Yes, it could be either one of the two reasons. But what bothers me is what timeframe we’re talking about here. When did the cairn thing come about? Ten, twenty, thirty, forty years ago? It couldn’t be earlier than the nineteen-thirties, because most of the aircraft flying back then were of wood and fabric construction. Metal-bodied aircraft with aluminum spars and metal support structures were unknown until just before the Second World War.”

Jack cocked his head to one side, thinking. I was, too. This area was pretty uninhabited back then. Not pioneer times, but a lot of the forests were unmapped and unknown. Could a plane back then have crashed around here and the survivors had become like castaways from a south seas shipwreck—but instead of being castaways on a deserted sea island, they’d been stuck inside a vast and unmapped forest primeval? Maybe the monument had started out as a signal tower. Maybe, instead of an aircraft spar, there had been a signal fire, trying to alert the outside world of their plight?

Hank picked two of the troopers and told them to follow the deer around until they reached the cairn. They were to keep watch along the way for any signs that the Olsens had been waylaid somewhere along the trail and abducted. That done, the rest of us set off, up the hill, taking the shortcut to the cairn.

At we reached the summit, Hank stopped walking and halted the group.

“We unpack our gear, here,” he said. “Then we examine everything, step-by-step. We are looking for evidence. Footprints. Damaged vegetation. Evidence that anybody’s been here. Blood evidence. If the Olsens and their guide were attacked up here, somebody might’ve dropped something in the struggle. We’re looking for evidence that they might’ve been injured or killed. If they were killed,” and here, I swallowed a little convulsively, thinking about Annie, “then there will be fairly large places where we’ll find blood. If they were just slightly injured and taken away from here, then, not so much.” He looked at each member of our group individually. “But they have to have left something behind.” He turned to Bill. “Bill, I just want you to use the camera to document the resting point of each piece of evidence. We don’t need photos of the whole crime scene—if that’s with this is. Understand?”

Bill nodded. “Yes, Hank.”

“Then let’s get to it. Remember: Don’t get too far out ahead of everybody else. I don’t want anybody accidentally contaminating the area with their own footprints. Sing out if any of you see a foot or boot print in the dirt. That boot or foot print will give us clues as to who we’re looking for. If we’re lucky, those footprints will also give us a rough idea of how many perpetrators we’re looking to deal with.”
In less that five minutes, one of the guys yelled, “Over here! I’ve got boot prints!”

“They could be mine,” I said in a low voice to Hank.

“I don’t think so,” he replied. “You ain’t wearing boots.” He raised his voice. “I need two men over there to help him make some plaster casts of the prints! Move carefully! There are probably more foot prints close-by!”

“Sneaker prints over here!” Jack yelled. “Not Kelly’s! These are kid-size!”

My hand went to my mouth. Annie!

“Is there any blood?” I called out to him.

Jack’s head came around and he looked at me for a moment. Then he said, “Nope. It’s looks like she was running away from the cairn, toward the woods.” He paused and then straightened up. “I’ve got some big boot prints following the sneaker prints into the forest.” He pointed to a point where the tree line started back up, part way down the hill. “That way!”

“Stay where you are!” Hank yelled. “Everybody! Keep searching the ground! I want to know where the parents were standing—where Dean was standing—where the perpetrators came out, onto the scene! We need to know the complete situation that unfolded up here before we go running off on a hasty pursuit.”

End of Chapter Three