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.

Processing the area around the cairn seemed to take forever. I kept getting more and more wound up as every time it seemed as if we could get moving, someone would find something else to check out and look at. The only sign that Hank was also getting tense was that he had shifted his stance so that his legs were more farther apart and he had folded his arms across his chest and was glowering a bit.

I will have to admit that we did learn a lot more about the situation than if we had just gone charging into the forest, following the boot prints of Annie and her pursuers. We determined that a group of seven had confronted the Olsens. They’d come at them from three sides, with the cairn blocking the out the fourth side as a possible escape route for the family. It appeared that there had been some sort of a struggle and that someone—possibly Jim Olsen, I thought—getting some cuts and leaving some small smears of blood against one of the sides of the cairn. Someone had either hit him with their fists, I thought, or tackled him; throwing his back against the stone side of the squat tower, where he’d scraped his head against the rough surface of the rocks.

One odd thing that we learned was that all of the assailant boot prints had a distinct identifying feature: the lugged soles of their boots each had a deep “V” cut across the bottom of the heels. One of the troopers commented that this would make them easier to track and Jack had replied that it also made the assailant’s job of tracking the family easier because they would know immediately whether or not any tracks they came across were left by one of the family or whether it was an old foot print which had been made long before by someone on their own side. Since Jack was the most experienced tracker, he was the one who examined the ground on either side of where Annie’s tracks went into the forest.

“Well,” he said after a moment. “One thing I can say for that little girl, is that she can think where others would panic.” He gestured at the point she had plowed through the brush. “She didn’t waste time heading for one of the deer paths. And she’s fast. When I met and talked to the family last year, that kid could run like a deer!” He moved a couple of feet to the side of where Annie had entered the brush. “Here’s where her first pursuer went in after her.” He studied the ground. “Two men, by the size of the boots. The other five were probably busy getting Dean and the parents under control.”

Hank agreed with him, saying, “And it looks as though the five took the Dean and Jim and Charlotte Olsen west.” He gestured toward Jack and me. “While your two followed Annie, south.”

“So, what do we do?” I asked. “Pick one group to follow? Or split up?”

“You and Jack, follow Annie’s trail and try to catch up with her. We’ll follow the larger group and see if we can catch up with them.”

“I’m unarmed,” I pointed out. “Those two who are chasing Annie are probably armed to the teeth.”

“Jack’s got his rifle,” Hank replied. “And you each have one of our police radios. You’ll be okay. Just be careful and don’t go charging into something without looking first.”

Trooper Bill grinned at me. ‘I can loan you my combat knife,” he said, “if you promise not to cut yourself.”

“That’s not funny, Bill,” I said. Then, thinking about it, I said, “Okay. I promise.” I stuck my hand out and raised an eyebrow. “Hand it over.”

Bill looked over at Hank for guidance. Hank shrugged his shoulders as if to say, ‘It’s up to you.’ Bill hesitated a moment longer and then unclipped his black double-edged knife and sheath from his service belt and handed it to me.

It looked especially lethal. I took it and clipped it to the waistband of my jeans. “Thanks,” I said quietly. “I’ll be careful with it.”

“It’s double-edged,” Bill replied. “If you have to use it, Kelly, slash—don’t stab with it. Stabbing slows you down.”

“Um—” I swallowed My throat suddenly felt dry. “Thanks for the tip.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Hank rubbed his chin, as though he was thinking about saying something. Then he just nodded at me and then pointed at Jack. “Jack, watch yourself.” He looked around at the other trooper. “That goes for all of you. Move quickly, but as quietly as you can. Right now, these guys don’t know that we’re after ‘em. Let’s keep it that way—at least, until it’s too late for them to do anything to stop us.”

I turned and followed Jack into the waist-high scrub and weedy grass which formed a kind of barrier between open space around the cairn and the edge of the rest of the forest surrounding us. Annie and her two pursuers had punched a sort of opening through the tangle of high weeds. The weeds really thinned out once we were inside the forest itself. The shade created by the foliage overhead created a “dead zone” of relative darkness inside the forest proper. The forest floor was a thick carpet of moist dead leaves. We determined that Annie had run downhill in a fairly straight line, zig-zagging left and right to avoid protruding outcropping of shelf granite. I could also see the two trails of her pursuers. One had entered at almost the same place as she had and I figured this one must have been the person she’d broken away from when she escaped. The other trail stated almost twenty feet away from the point where Annie and the first man had broken through the underbrush and into the relatively clear slope of the forest floor. Annie must have heard him as she ran, because her trail abruptly angled to the left, away from the side from which the second man was coming down the hill.

I swallowed, my throat a little dry. All this had happened hours ago. For all I knew, Annie’s fate had already been decided. I looked over at Jack, whose mouth was set in a grim line. He was thinking the same thing. I looked ahead and there was a small creek running along a little gully which was formed by the bottom of the hill we were descending and the base of the next hill. The small creek was following the downward slope between both of the hills. It was partially choked by deadfalls—old trees and branches which had fallen and then been moved down to the creek by erosion and thawing snow and water during the spring. We reached the creek and Jack paused and studied the banks upstream and downstream from where we were standing.

“Which way do you think she went?” I asked.

“Downstream, probably,” Jack replied. He looked at me. “She’s smart. She knew the second man would cut her off if she turned upstream.” He looked across toward the upward slope of the hill on the other side of the creek. “And running in a straight line would have meant running uphill. That’ll wear you out fast and you can run faster going down a slope than running up one. So—if I was her, I would move along the bank and head downstream as fast as I could.”

“Sounds good,” I replied.

“I’ll take the lead,” Jack said. “That way we won’t move too fast and miss her tracks. She could see a path or an animal trail or something and head down that at any point along here.”

I nodded my head and we set off, along the bank of the creek, downstream. It was pretty easy going, at first. The grass went all the way to the edge of the creek. There wasn’t much of a drop-off to the water. The bed of the creek was composed of stone, mostly broken granite, washed down the hillside by runoff during the spring thaw and from rainstorms during the rest of the year. A half mile downstream, the going became rough as the creek circled round the bottom of the hill and butted up against two more hills. There was a growing pile of fallen trees piled up here, almost as though something had happened up on the hillsides a long time before.

Jack had hopped down onto a moss-covered trunk which was half-submerged in the creek-bed, and was reaching up, extending his hand to help me climb down when I heard a small voice whisper right next to me, “Kelly?!”

I jerked my head around and stared for a moment. Annie’s face was staring back at me from an open space between one old deadfall and the tree trunk I was climbing down to. I almost lost my balance fell. Jack took a half-step closer to me and clapped his hand against my hip to steady me. I looked at him, wide-eyed.

“What is it?” he asked.

I pointed toward the gap next to me. “Annie,” I whispered. “She’s here! Next to me!” I looked back at Annie as Jack scrambled to climb back up to where I was. “Jack Piper’s climbing back up, Annie. We are part of the team that’s out looking for you guys.”

“Oh—that was Mister Piper?” Annie exclaimed. “I thought he was one of them!” Even in her surprise and fear, her voice remained low. Almost a whisper. “They went by here a while ago. They didn’t realize I was hiding in here. I was afraid that they’d come back!”

“How deep is that space you are hiding in?” I asked. It looked pretty small in there. This log was probably forming part of the creek’s bank.

“I’m not sure,” she replied. “It seems kind of deep. And the floor’s funny. It’s got these evenly spaced ridges—they are like ribs that curve up toward the ceiling. It’s so dark in here that I can’t tell how far back the cavern goes.”

Jack stood beside me. “I’ve got a portable flashlight,” he said. “Step out of the way, Annie, and I’ll light up your little cavern.”

Jack switched on the big electric torch flashlight—which really wasn’t all that huge, I reminded myself. It was about twice the size of a regular police light, the increase in size coming from both its battery, which hung, box-like, beneath the long carry handle which doubled as part of the reflector assembly, and the wide lense which covered the reflector. He leaned into the opening and aimed the light upward, so that the beam bounced off the cavern’s interior roof and then defused, filling the dark area behind Annie more evenly than if he had just flashed the beam around the walls to see what was in there.

I gasped in surprise. The inside of the cave was not composed of rocks and the trunks and branches of fallen trees. It was metal. Bare weathered aluminum. I felt the fingers of both my hands touch my lips as I covered my mouth.

“It’s part of an aircraft’s fuselage,” I said softly.

Jack set the portable flashlight inside the cavern and then unclipped his radio from his belt. He pressed the transmit button and said, “Hank? This is Jack.”

There was a pause while, I assumed, Hank got his radio out to reply. Then Hank’s voice came through, saying, “I hear you, Jack. What’s going on?”

“We’ve found her,” Jack said quietly. “She’s okay.”

“Great!” Hank said, relief evident in his voice.

“We found something else, too,” Jack said.

“What, exactly?”

“Part of a wrecked aircraft fuselage. Buried next to a creek.” He paused. “It’s been here a long time, Hank. Maybe decades, from the amount ground that’s accumulated over it and the moss and decay of the deadfalls that have fallen over it.”

“Mark the location on your GPS,” Hank instructed. “We’ll check the wreckage out at some later date.” There was a pause. “We are about a mile northwest of the cairn. We are certain where the attackers are taking the victims. The maps we’ve got show nothing but forest north of here. Terrain’s getting rougher.” There was a pause and then Hank said, “According to Bill, if you head north-northwest, you are only about three miles from us. Head this way and we’ll meet up. I’ll call if our guys change their direction.”

“Roger that,” Jack said and returned the radio to his belt. He smiled at Annie. “You’re a smart and brave little girl,” he said quietly. “I would never have thought to hide in there to get away from those guys. How did you know this was big enough for you to hide in?”

“I didn’t,” Annie replied. She glanced at me. “And I wasn’t very brave—or smart. I was scared to death and I only found this place by accident.”

“Being brave doesn’t mean not being scared,” I said. I reached in and squeezed her shoulder to reassure her. “It’s continuing to move forward instead of letting your fear freeze you in place.” I paused and then gave her a small smile. “Let’s get you out of there. Okay?”

She nodded and Jack and I each grabbed one of her hands and helped her slide out through the narrow opening.

“You know,” Jack commented as he helped Annie get to her feet on the creek bank’s narrow edge, “I don’t think that opening’s big enough for me—or Kelly—to have wiggled through.”

Annie laughed. “I am pretty small for my age.”

“That you are!” Jack replied. He leaned down and looked inside the cavern again. “That section of fuselage is not very big,” he commented. "The inside space only runs back a couple of feet. No windows in the expose metal, that I can see.”

I leaned forward and looked inside, too. “There’s not enough there to tell what kind of an aircraft it was, either.”

Jack straightened up and looked at Annie. “Did you see your two pursuers after you slid inside the cave?”

She nodded, gulping. “Yes, I did. But I ducked down. I was so sure that they had seen me fall, right here, and that they would check inside the opening. But they just kept on going. They never even noticed the opening.”

Jack rubbed his chin. “That’s a good thing.” He studied the slope downstream. “Now…if they keep following the creek, they’ll be heading southeast. Away from us.” He looked at me. “I think we’ve spent enough time standing here. Let’s make tracks and head north.”

We took a few minutes to let Annie wash some of the mud and muck from her hands, arms and pant legs, then we headed uphill and made our way back to the cairn. Jack figured that it would be easier to take a north-northwest bearing from the open area around the cairn, plus it would lower our chances of running into Annie’s two pursuers if we did not retrace our path along the creek.
When we got to the cairn, Jack contacted Hank on the radio. Hank informed us that his group had tracked the abductors another mile but had not made contact with them. Hank was picking a spot for them to make camp for the night and gave me the coordinates of the location of their intended camp. I entered it into my little handheld GPS. Then, using those coordinates as the destination point, set up the GPS to ‘home’ in the that location. Thus, we would be kept constantly on track instead of me trying to keep us on a directional bearing as we moved.

As I was doing this, I had glanced upward into the sky and my gaze rested for a moment on the aluminum wing spar which rose from the top of the cairn. Briefly, I wondered if the five or six-foot section of broken aircraft fuselage which had formed part of the side and ceiling of Annie’s hiding spot was part of the same aircraft. There really wasn’t any way to tell. There hadn’t been any visible marking on the interior piece of fuselage. Any identifying numbers would have probably been painted on the aircraft’s exterior—not inside. If it was part of the same aircraft as the cairn’s wing spar, I wondered what had happened to the rest of the plane.

Had the piece which had ended up buried in the bank of the creek sheared off during the crash? Did that mean that there were countless other little pieces of the aircraft’s body buried around the creek’s banks? If that was so, it meant that the plane had lost its wings first, as it broke apart, making the fuselage and its occupants a wingless missile. The wings, having aerodynamic surfaces, would act like sails and come to earth some distance from the main body of the wreckage. The fuselage must have broken up as it plowed through the trees on the last leg of its final descent.

I sighed. If that had been the case, it would have been a wonder if anyone inside the plane had survived.

End of Chapter FOUR.