“Not yet,” Lily said. “I’m going to check all the close places first before we panic. I’ll be right back-”

“I’m coming with you,” Jack said.

She took one look at his face and didn’t argue. “The rest of you stay here,” Lily said.

Rose and Rock nodded, looking unhappy about the command, but not making trouble.

Lily turned to Jared, who stood slightly away from them all, looking down at the PDA unit in his hand, which was equipped with that amazing heat-seeking GPS system. “Jared?”

“A minute.” He was working the controls with his thumb, his brow furrowed in concentration.

Lily turned to Jack. “You’re sure she said she was going to the bathroom? She didn’t say anything else, like maybe she’d had enough and was going to try to get out of here?”

“We all know she’d had enough, but no.” He shook his head. “She didn’t say anything like that.” Not even good-bye. “But…”

“But?”

“But I was really asleep, you know?” Dread filled his gut. “And I sleep like the living dead. I wasn’t paying her much attention…Oh, God.” He scrubbed his hands over his face, then dropped them as he remembered. “Hang on.” He dove back into his tent and began going through her bag.

“Jack?” he heard Lily say, speaking through the still flapping tent door. “What are you doing?”

Hitting pay dirt, he found Michelle’s makeup bag. Relief flooding him, he stuck his head back out. “If she’d given up and decided to go back on her own, she’d have never left this.” But then the truth sank in and his relief abruptly deserted him, because if Michelle hadn’t left on purpose, then the situation was even worse.

She was lost.

LILY MOVED CLOSE to Jared to look at his small screen. “What do you have?”

“Two possibilities,” he said, and everyone moved closer to huddle around him so that Lily had to get on her tiptoes to see the digital display of a satellite map of their area.

Jared pointed to a heat spot. “Us,” he said, then widened the screen. A small dot of red appeared to the east, right next to a body of water.

A lake, Lily knew. Not the one right here at camp, but the next alpine lake over, nearly three quarters of a mile away.

Then Jared pointed westward, to the only other heat spot, which if Lily was reading the satellite correctly, was behind and above them. High above them on the rocks.

Michelle wasn’t a climber. Hell, she was barely a hiker. “Jack and I’ll check out here,” she said, tapping the first red dot. “I think Michelle is more likely to be this one.”

Jared nodded. “Okay, but I’ll check the other while you’re doing that, just to be sure.”

“That’s pretty much straight up,” Lily said. She looked at Jared. “It could be anything, right? A deer, or raccoon?”

He shrugged. “Or a bear, or a mountain cat-” At the collective shocked gasp from Rose, Rock and Jack, he trailed off. “Just saying.”

“So basically, anything alive and breathing,” Rock said with an exaggerated gulp that under different circumstances, would have been funny on a guy built like he was.

“Anything alive and breathing,” Jared agreed. “And emitting body heat, which is to say, not necessarily something we want to run into.”

Lily met his gaze as her thoughts whirled. “Okay, so we’ve got two possibilities. One on a flat, easy-to-walk-to area, the other high up. It’s an easy decision, really.”

“Oh my God, we have a bear or a mountain cat watching us,” Rose said. “Probably just figuring out which of us to eat first.” She slipped her hand into Rock’s and swallowed hard. “You know he’s going to want me.” She sucked her lower lip into her mouth. “My body fat ratio is the highest.”

Rock slipped an arm around her and pulled her close. “Your body is perfect, and not going to be wild-animal bait, not today.”

“No one’s going to be animal bait,” Lily said firmly. “Because you’re all going to stay here and wait while I run to the lake, to that first heat spot. Jack?”

“Right with you. You know, maybe she headed there to wash her face. She loves to wash her face first thing in the morning.”

“Why not go to the closer lake, the one that’s right here?” Rose asked, and gestured to the lake only several hundred yards away.

“I don’t know. But it was dark, really dark, when she got up.” Looking exhausted, Jack rubbed his jaw. “And she has a lousy sense of direction. Last night, she asked me how to get to the water, if it was to the right or the left, and when I told her left, I could tell she wasn’t listening to me. Maybe she went right on the trail.” He looked at Lily. “It could have happened.”

Lily agreed. “Let’s go right, all the way to the farther lake. If Michelle had kept at it long enough, she’d have indeed ended up there.”

“Thing is,” Rose said. “She’s not one to keep at anything for long.”

“Well, she’s somewhere,” Lily said, determinedly. “And wherever that is, we’ll find her.” She looked at everyone else. “Wait here. That’s the most important part, okay? Wait here. Just yell really loudly if she shows up.”

Their camp was a rather secluded, woodsy site, and from the moment Lily and Jack took the trail, they could no longer see the others. The trail to the right was wide, but because they’d not had rain for weeks, the ground was dry and brittle. No noticeable footprints.

“Michelle!” Jack called out from her side every few yards. “Michelle!”

The trail climbed a bit, and Jack began to pant for breath. “Gotta tell ya, this one feels too hard. She’d have turned back.”

“She’s tougher than you think,” Lily said. “Michelle! Michelle, can you hear us?”

Nothing.

They came to a small creek in a shady aspen grove. The water meandered slowly past them on the left, summer-shallow, and filled with sediment. They both looked at it. “No,” Lily said. “She’d not have stopped here to wash her face.”

“Oh, no,” Jack agreed. “Too dirty. How much farther until the lake?”

“Another quarter of a mile.”

They sped up. Jack was panting pretty good at their near-running pace. It was the altitude and nerves, she knew, but he was holding her back. “I’m going ahead,” she told him. “Stay on the trail.”

Without waiting for a response, she took off, making much better time, and soon enough the trail opened to a clearing, with tawny, undulating wild grass leading directly to a gorgeous beach.

A deserted beach.

The land was vast and rambling, open but not flat, beautiful in its emptiness. The morning light coated the ground with just enough dew to give depth to each individual feature.

Lily scanned the water. Smooth as glass.

And utterly devoid of one spoiled married princess.

But across the lake, there was a single lone deer, sipping from the water, causing the lake to ripple outward in mesmerizing circles.

“A deer,” Jack said, coming up behind her, bending at the knees to gasp for breath.

The deer lifted its head, wriggled its nose, then bounded into the woods without a backwards glance.

“And heat spot gone,” Jack said, sounding despondent.

Lily looked around, not ready to concede defeat. “Michelle?”

No answer, just her own voice echoing back to her. She turned in a slow circle, shoving her sunglasses to the top of her head, scanning every rock, every tree, every inch of the horizon with careful precision.

And it was halfway around, when she was facing dead east, which was the way back to camp, that she saw it. There. High on the craggy rock behind where their camp lay.

A splotch of bright yellow.

What the hell?

Shading her eyes from the morning sun, she squinted and tried to focus in. She recognized the area. Rocky growth, above a dense wooded area.

Above their camp.

Just behind where their camp lay was the makeshift bathroom. They’d set it up against the base of a sharp hill. Which is where she was looking right now. As unbelievable as it seemed, the splash of yellow was halfway up that hill and moving.

As unbelievable as it seemed, Michelle had apparently taken herself on a little climbing expedition. “Uh-oh.”

“What? Where is she?” Jack followed her gaze and his jaw dropped. “Is that-My God.” He let out a long breath and stared at the moving dot of yellow. “What the hell is she doing?” He brought his hands up to his mouth, cupping them around his lips. “Michelle!”

“Don’t,” Lily breathed, grabbing his arm. “Don’t startle her.”

Regardless, they were too far away to see if Michelle had reacted to Jack’s voice. Dropping his hands, he whirled back the way they’d come.

Together they raced through the woods and back into camp, where a startled Rose and Rock, standing by the fire, looked up.

“Did you find her?” Rose asked.

“Is she okay?” Rock rushed to ask.

“We found her, we just haven’t gotten to her yet.” Lily kept moving through camp toward the yellow spot that she could no longer see, not from here. “Where’s Jared?”

“He went after the other heat spot,” Rose said.

The one that had turned out to be Michelle after all. Lily skidded to a halt and stared at her. “I told him to stay.”

“Honey, most men don’t know how to take directions, you know?”

No. No, she didn’t know but she was coming to. It didn’t matter now. She was going to get him, and Michelle, and then she was going to put her hands around their necks and squeeze.

And then…

And then, if Jared was up for it, she was going to hug him to death, just to finish him off. “Come on,” she said to Jack, and headed east. Soon they stood in the low valley, with sharp, jagged, sheer rock on either side, climbing up hundreds of feet. She’d been here earlier, and hadn’t seen Michelle, but then again, she wouldn’t have if Michelle had gone climbing. The shrubbery and lodgepole pines and scrub blocked most of the rock so that seeing any distance upward became all but impossible.