I stood off to the side under the canopy of an old oak and watched as Olin tried to smooth things over. I thought of Lisa on her last day. Why would she drive out to the woods alone? It didn’t sound like the Lisa I knew, the one who’d been afraid of her own shadow. I shivered despite the warm air and looked away. I closed my eyes and placed myself in Lisa’s shoes. If I had been the one in danger and I couldn’t get back to my car, I would have run off into the woods in the hope of losing my attacker in the trees. All the officers were concentrating on the area surrounding the car and the land south of the river but I would have run upstream. The ground was harder, it didn’t sink underfoot like the soft sand downstream and there were rocks and boulders as the land swooped up an incline. I would have tried to lose my assailment over the rough terrain and perhaps hidden in one of the craters where the rain washed away the soil by the larger rocks. There were pockets in the scrub large enough for a person to lie in and with enough foliage pulled over, someone could walk by and never even know you were there.
