THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: LOST AND FOUND

Michael Mark Declan. Missing. Caucasian, red hair, blue eyes, freckles, repaired cleft palate. 36". 31 pounds. The 3-year old went missing from Yosemite village at the Sunnyside Campsite on the evening of 7/12/04. Last seen by his parents at 6:41 PM near the fire pit at the campsite.   

His jumper and shoes were found 14 hours later at 7,000 feet on Eagle Tower by a climber on the morning of the 13th, but although word had spread, no one was looking 6,000 feet UP for a toddler last seen on foot. The climber (Evan Puglise, Caucasian male, 33 YOA, no record) was all off in his own world and dropped the kid's clothes in his pack and turned them in at lost and found on the 16th in Yosemite village. That unfortunate fucker almost spent the night in jail because of it. He had no clue that 200 people had spent four days crawling through the brush of the valley below, looking for the kid those clothes once contained. Puglise turned out to be well-connected and well-to-do. He was questioned and then let go.

The search then switched to the heights near Eagle Tower. Twelve days. 200+ volunteers. Nothing was found. That case went silent fifteen years ago. The file is open on my desk now as I sit and drink and think, looking at the push pin map in the office. Eagle Tower, 7,100 feet up from Yosemite Village.

A boy vanishes, walks 6,000 feet straight up and takes off his clothes. Scratch that. Someone takes the boy and climbs 6,000 feet straight up. No. A boy is kidnapped and driven 12 miles around, then hiked up along the utility road. That's not it. Someone kidnaps and kills and strips the boy, and then climbs the heights to dispose of the clothing...  

Goddamnit, no.

Even before this morning, I still thought about the case a lot. I'm sure every one of the thankfully few personnel that have read the field report on it does. It's not something that leaves your mind willingly. Sometimes, I just can't let it go. Other times, I realize I've been thinking about it, quietly, for hours. Doing the math. Moving the people and clues around in my head, trying to make them come to rest. They won't rest.

And they're not alone.   

It's my job here, to look into these disappearances. Murders. Assaults. The rest are pretty average, but the disappearances. The disappearances stick. They stick in your head because, after a while, they make patterns that you can't help but see. Children disappear in the park. A lot. More than should disappear in a place this size. They vanish in broad daylight near family members. They usually vanish near dawn or dusk. Mostly in the spring and early summer. They tend to go missing in some of boulder fields and low meadows more than in other places. Their clothing is often found, or their bodies (usually naked) at higher points than the place they were last seen. Those that are dead are simply...dead. A medical examination usually says something like asphyxia, though there's no ligature marks. Sometimes they have odd incisions on their bodies. Small cuts like stars or circles in their skin.  

There is no official line, but the official line is we don't talk about the details. So far, that's worked wonders. But now, we see, you can only pack that stuff up and sink it into the dark for so long before it starts oozing out again. Before things start to surface again. We try our best to point out of the park. To get the local authorities looking for suspects in the child's life, or to pin it on known fugitives or criminals thought to be haunting the park.

But some things can't be buttoned up like that. Some things just defy any attempt at clean up.

Like the thing in my flatbed under the tarp out front.
I got the call early this morning and drove out to Glacier Point road because Glenn rang me up saying he had shot something and could I come out? Glenn was weird but did his job alright. Trustworthy wasn't the right word for him, but it was close; whatever's between stuck in a rut and reliable, that's what Glenn is. So the call was strange.

"You shoot a coyote?"

He didn't say anything.

"Fuck, Glenn, did you shoot a wolf?"

A hollow laugh, and then a dial tone. I drove out in the dark and pulled up on the station just as the sky was filling with light and found Glenn there with his shotgun and a bottle and his backhoe parked out front.

"What the fuck, Glenn?"

"I killed him," was all Glenn said, and something behind my eyes dropped into my stomach. I took the gun from Glenn, and I could smell that he had been drinking for some time. I pictured an inquest and Glenn in that old-timey lockup waiting on the DA, and the local news batting the story around for two weeks between bear reports and the firetruck festival.  

"He came out of the ground," Glenn said, and stood up, and backed up to sit on my truck.

I walked around the deck of the station and clicked on the big mag, illuminating something that wouldn't resolve for several seconds. A body. But a body too large and too...wrong...to be human, though all the basics were there. I walked the height, noting the hole through the chest. A naked man at least 9 feet long, maybe more when laid out properly. Gunpowder burns on his chest saying Glenn had been right up on him when his ticket was punched. No, not naked, wearing a deerskin hide loincloth and strange, huge, leather slippers.

Then I settled the beam on the face turned up towards the thin, pink, sky.

Red hair cut carefully in a bowl, with the sides of its strange, elongated skull shaved meticulously. Freckles and vacant, bulging, blood-shot blue eyes. And below the nose, a long healed, meandering scar of a palate repair.

In the office, the phone rings startling me, and it's him. They'll have a team here by midnight and could I stay and secure the remains? Sure, I said. But that's not what I was thinking.

I was thinking about the children. Long-lost children, down in the earth in the dark.