“You look bad, Vincent.” Always his full name or Vin, never Vinnie; he simply wouldn’t respond to anyone who tried to call him that. “Do you know Miriama well?”

“I love my coffee, you know that.” A ­self-­deprecating smile that didn’t reach the arresting tawny shade of his eyes. “When I’m in Golden Cove and working from home, I see her pretty much every morning and every afternoon. She always has that smile. So bright. So much life to her.”

Anahera thought again of the lovely young creature she’d met and felt a shivering chill within. The world had a way of crushing things that were beautiful and so bright that they glowed. “Is there any chance she might’ve just taken off?”

“Matilda says all her stuff is still in her room. Her wallet, her favorite jeans. She only took her phone and the ­iPod—­just what she normally takes on a run.”

Anahera had been afraid that would be the answer. She looked desperately into the trees, in the hope she might magically spot a flash of cheerful orange or brilliant pink. But there was only verdant green and healthy brown, the curling fern fronds delicately lit by the morning sunlight that speared through the canopy.

She’d missed this so much, this primeval landscape unlike any other place on Earth, but she knew the beauty around her could be deadly. There’d been more than one lost hiker over the years she’d lived in Golden Cove. The tourists came, saw the initially unthreatening lushness of the bush and didn’t listen to warnings to be careful, to stick strictly to the marked paths.

They’d go off the track “just a little” to take a photograph or chase a native bird, and the next thing they knew, they’d be turned around and scared and unable to find their way back out through the dense growth. If the hikers had been smart and filed a plan with the town’s tourism office, then a search would be mounted as soon as they didn’t show up at the appointed time. But too many weren’t smart.

By luck, most had stumbled out or been found by locals who lived wild.

At least three hadn’t. All over the course of a single hot summer. And all young women from distant corners of the world.

Their bodies had also never been ­found—­once this landscape took you, it held you close. In fact, the only evidence the first had even been in Golden Cove was a distinctive water bottle plastered with stickers from around the world. It had been found because of a search for another hiker who’d gone missing and who had filed a plan for her hike.

Only days later, a local hunter helping with the search had found a backpack ­half-­buried in a stream; it was proved to belong to the second missing woman, the one whose failure to return from the bush had initiated the search.

At the time, the theory was the two must’ve become either injured or lost. A tragedy but these things happened in a country with such dense forests. The weather didn’t help. Like ­today—­it seemed so sunny, but according to the weather forecast, a storm was building over the ocean. It would turn dark and wet and cold in a few hours.

Anahera remembered hearing the news about the two missing women, but lost hikers were pretty standard in the region and she’d been a teenager awash in summer.

But the third missing ­hiker… that had ended the sunshine.

The gold identity bracelet found in their teenage hangout, the swarm of police, the beach flapping with crime scene tape, it had brought down the hammer on all their childhoods.

Shaking off the eerie memories she hadn’t thought of in over a decade, Anahera glanced at Vincent. “Tell me about Miriama. I knew her as a ­girl—­what’s she like as a woman?”

“Hugely talented and with an even bigger heart,” Vincent said in that restrained but intense way of his. “I’ve never seen her not smiling. She lives life like it should be ­lived—­without limits, without trying to shove herself into a predefined box like so many other people. She’s real, honest, beautiful in the deepest sense of the word.”

Anahera wondered if Vincent was talking about himself and his perfect life with two ­picture-­perfect children and a pedigreed woman who made the perfect partner on the charity circuit. It also seemed as if he was half in love with ­Miriama—­but was that surprising? Miriama had the kind of glow that drew people.

Most of the men in town probably had crushes on her.

“I think we should head right,” she said when they came to a fork in the path. According to the quick briefing Nik had given them, that track was rarely ­used—­it was a little bit too uneven to allow for a smooth ­run—­but according to Josie, Miriama had run competitively at high school. “The challenge might’ve appealed to her.”

Vincent nodded and they went single file down the track. It was darker here, the canopy thicker, the bush more dense. It absorbed all sound yet made you feel as if the trees were whispering to one another, talking secrets that humans would never understand. Anahera’s calves began to ache after a while, a subtle sign that she wasn’t who she’d once been.

Jogging through the streets of her London neighborhood had in no way prepared her for the West Coast. It’d take her body time to remember that this land was in her blood. Which meant the cop had been right to tell her not to assume she could do everything she’d once ­done—­and somehow, that pissed her off.

Poor cop, she thought. He was taking the brunt of all her anger, all her cold fury.

“She wouldn’t have gone this deep,” Vincent said from behind her, his voice certain. “It’s too far for her to have been able to get back before dark and she’s smart enough not to try to run these trails after sunset. The visibility just ­ends—­you can’t even see your hand in front of your face.”

Bowing to his greater current knowledge, Anahera turned and they began to make their way back to the fork, from where they searched the ­left-­hand track before going over an area others had already searched.

But lunchtime came and went, the helicopter landed, and still there was no sign of what had happened to a luminous, laughing girl named Miriama.

17

Will rubbed his face as he sat inside the hastily built police station; the place was just big enough for his desk and a filing cabinet. He’d told the searchers to stand down that afternoon, when it became obvious they’d covered every possible area that Miriama could’ve reached on foot. He’d gone over that suspicious part of the cliffs above the whirlpool, but like the searcher had said, while someone had walked there, there was no sign of anything untoward.

No drag marks, no blood, no clumps torn out in a desperate attempt to grab hold of safety. Nothing but indications of recent ­passage—­the same in the trees behind it. He’d also walked the bush trail that opened up near that spot, but multiple teams of volunteers had already walked through it and there was nothing to see but ­tamped-­down leaf litter.

Will also kept coming around to the fact that Miriama was too smart to have gone that close to the deadly edge above the whirlpool.

He’d known the searchers wouldn’t follow his order to stand down, but he’d needed to give it so he’d have a better chance of talking his superiors into treating this as a serious incident.