Free A Gift of Time (Tassamara) by Sarah Wynde Page A

been embarrassing? The thought of having to call a ranger for help made him cringe. Fortunately, they’d found their way out. But it had been a gigantic waste of time.
    Or it would have been if not for the pure pleasure of being out in the forest. The air felt crisper today, colors brighter, smells more intense. Colin had thought it was a weather change, maybe a cold front moving in. But even here, sitting in his barren office, the sensation remained.
    As he bit into the chocolate, he found himself admiring the green of the truly ugly office chair on the other side of his desk. How had he never noticed before how closely it matched the olive shades of swamp water? And the coffee that had been sitting on the burner since he’d gotten back here at 4AM smelled nutty and rich and deep, if a little burned.
    Life was good. No, life was amazing.
    Finishing his candy in two quick bites, he tossed the wrapper into the wastepaper basket and clicked open his pen to start making notes.
    Missing person reports? Check. They’d looked at local records, the FBI’s database, and the national NamUS Missing Persons system without finding any cases matching the child’s description. Still, maybe he should have someone start checking neighboring states, just in case. A recent report might not have made it into the national systems yet.
    Rangers? Check. He’d had an early morning phone call from Shelby, the deputy district ranger stationed at the nearby springs. She hadn’t found any sign of an accident after a slow drive down the closest back roads, but she would be checking with the campgrounds to see if any campers hadn’t returned to their sites. He hadn’t heard back from her yet, but he was sure she’d call as soon as she knew anything.
    Media? No check. But it was an obvious next step. Tassamara was much too small to have any local news outlets, but maybe they could get the word out in nearby towns. If one of the television stations in Orlando or Gainesville put her picture out, surely someone, somewhere, would recognize her. Maybe it would even get picked up nationally.
    DNA? Maybe. Would there be any point in testing the girl’s DNA? The lab they used for testing would be backed up over the holiday, because of vacations. If he wanted to get a sample in, he should do so as soon as possible. Did he need to, though?
    State police? He hadn’t contacted the highway patrol yet. Should he?
    With a sigh, he set down his pen, carefully lining it up on top of his notepad. He was taking the wrong approach, he realized. He needed to look at the facts and see what they added up to, what the possibilities were, before he determined on his own course of action.
    Fact number one: a seven-year-old child was found alone, at night, on a road near a national park. The obvious answer was that she’d wandered away from her parents and gotten lost. Simple enough.
    But fact number two was that no one had reported her gone. That detail made the situation darker. He hadn't wanted to think about it last night. But as he watched her limping toward Nat's car and saw her clearly in the headlights—the tangled hair, the dirt, the bruises, the bloody feet, the disheveled clothes—he'd known she'd been in the forest for longer than an hour or two. She’d been lost for a while. And if anyone in the vicinity had reported a child missing, he would have heard about it. Hell, he would have been out searching.
    Yes, her condition was fact number three. The surface damage was bad enough but not the whole of it. Maybe she was naturally thin, but maybe the pinched look around her face meant she’d gone hungry for more than a missed meal or two. Maybe her quiet was exhaustion and fear, but maybe it told a deeper story.
    He sighed, rubbing a hand across his chin. So… a missing child not reported missing. What did that give him?
    Picking up his pen, he wrote:
    Parents failed to report
    Parents unable to report
    Parents don’t know? (Not with her parents?)
    As he