Page 3 of A Future To Remember

So, instead, I’d been pumping up Eggy with painkillers, steroids, and some Chinese herbs the veterinary oncologist had prescribed. They’d all helped him feel better and he’d gotten his appetite back, but he was still very, very sick, and sometimes, in the hour between his previous pain med dose and the next one, he suffered, and it killed me.

All of it killed me. The empty feeling of the house. The loss of my routine. The job that’d been my purpose in life. The good I felt I was doing in the world. Abby’s warmth, love, and presence. All of it was like the last echo of some sound you don’t realize is sustaining you until it’s gone, and all that’s left is the thunder of silence and the soul-crushing merry-go-round of memories, loss, and a hollow emptiness.

I glanced at the living room wall, which was covered with scraps of paper, photos, phone numbers, and leads that’d led nowhere.

“Montana,” I growled. “Middle of fucking nowhere.”

The vacation had been my idea. Abby loved the mountains as much as I did, and it occurred to me back then that we’d never taken a vacation together to the mountains. Abs had wanted to hike the trails and I’d wanted to teach her to fly-fish, so this past October, we’d headed west.

I’d found us a log cabin to rent on a twenty-thousand-acre bison ranch next to the Blackfoot River.

It’d been a bitch to get to the cabin: plane ride to Seattle, followed by a puddle-jumper to Missoula, then an hour and a half drive to Lincoln, Montana, where we’d stopped for lunch before another forty-minute drive to the cabin on a dirt road that was tough to navigate even in good weather.

Why I’d let Abby go alone to the store that Saturday, I couldn’t answer. She’d been bubbly with energy and craving that grilled cheese and tomato soup. I’d been feeling lazy and wanted to get a fire going to heat up the cabin. The fire could’ve waited. The fire should’ve waited. And I should’ve gone with my wife to the goddamn campground store. It was only thirty-five minutes away—a quick trip by Montana standards.

I’d had this false sense of security because we’d been able to connect via satellite on our phones with each other. No internet or Wi-Fi, but we could still call each other.

When she wasn’t back after an hour and a half, I’d called. Straight to voicemail. I’d tried to track her; her phone was either off or untraceable. And I’d known. Right then, only an hour and a half after she’d kissed me goodbye, while the sweet, seductive scent of her still lingered on my skin, I’d just known she was gone.

Maybe living with a professional psychic for all these years had rubbed off on me, but that sinking, gutted feeling hit me like a brick. She’d taken the SUV, so I had to rely on the kindness of the ranch owner to search for her until the local sheriff had graced me with his fucking presence three hours later.

The fact that I was a special agent with the FBI had carried no weight out there. They didn’t give a shit about us “federal city-folk LEOs.”

And it wasn’t until the entire Austin-based FBI Bureau showed up that the sheriff and his three deputies even took Abby’s disappearance seriously.

In my gut, I knew her going missing had nothing to do with our work at the FBI, but she’d been targeted before, and we couldn’t rule out that she’d been targeted again.

Abby and that amazing radar of hers had made her a little famous. She’d solved some high-profile crimes and put away a bunch of the evilest predators among us, and maybe some of their fans, friends, or family wanted to get their revenge while our guard was down.

But there were no leads. Nothing. Just dead ends.

There’d been a massive ground, water, and air search. I’d rented a helicopter, and Brice and I had gone up and spent hours and hours in the air, each with a set of binoculars, looking for any hint of the rental SUV.

The terrain had been thick with fallen leaves and dead grasses; a lot of the trees were bare, but there were enough evergreens to make the air search difficult, if not ultimately impossible, to think we’d covered it all.

And then there was the river.

It’d been raining. The Blackfoot River had been swollen and powerful. There was a bridge between the cabin and the campground store.

I’d hired professional kayakers, and they and the wildlife rangers had searched the river downstream for dozens of miles, and nothing. No trace. No tire marks near the bridge to indicate a car had gone off the road and into the river. No signs of a crash. No CCTV footage. No eyewitnesses to anything unusual. No trace.

She’d simply vanished.

Now, six months later, here I sat all but lost, cuddling a terminally ill pup while Abby’s other dog, Tuttle, cuddled next to me.

A soft knock at the door pulled me out of my hopeless thoughts. That’d be Oscar.

The man didn’t give up.

The only two things keeping me going were hope that Abby was still alive and somehow would find her way back to me, and Agent Oscar Hernandez.

He’d been one of Abby’s closest friends, and their separate intuitions went hand and hand.

Oscar wasn’t a professional intuitive like Abby, however. My wife made a living at it, but he was eerily good at predicting things and discerning the “ether,” as the two called it.

I owed him for his staunch, unwavering conviction that Abby was still alive, even all these months later. And because of that, he was the only one I’d answer the door for.

Getting up with Eggy still cradled in the crook of my arm, I headed to the door. Tuttle was already there, sniffing and wagging her tail. She loved Oscar. He took her for walks when I just wasn’t up for it.