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there in the woods. Aunt Gwen fixed their feet."

The law enforcement officer in Anna was annoyed that any part of the girls that might contain trace evidence had been tampered with. The halfway decent human part of her was glad the children had been pro-vided with some relief.

During this staccato exchange the girls grew, not calmer precisely, but less demonstrative. Anna decided to see if they could be induced to trust themselves to her, the EMTs, the ambulance: the System. She stood, her knees cracking in protest. "Girls, Dr. Littleton, Ms. Jarrod: What do you say we take a look at you, then get you a warm safe place and call your folks?"

The children shared a look, something hard and sharp. The tears con-tinued. Anna turned from the light to one of the EMTs, Emily some-thing, a seasonal who Anna had reason to know was twentv-six because, wondering what an apparent fifteen-year-old was doing hanging around the backcountry office's computers, she'd asked. To Emily, she said, "It's them, isn't it?"

"It's them." Emily looked to Ryan, who nodded.

"It is," he confirmed. "We saw pictures. God, did we see pictures."

"Get me their names. Notify dispatch and Chief Knight. She'll want to call their folks. Tell dispatch we're going to need a child psychologist to meet us at the hospital. Tell them we'll roll as soon as we can get the kids into the ambulance."

Anna started to turn back to the sad little party around the picnic table but was stopped by Ryan's voice:

"There were three of them."

Three. Normally, even working in a park a thousand miles away, she would have known this. But there'd been the wedding. And the decision. And the move-slings and arrows she'd thought so earth-shaking. Now they seemed petty beyond belief.

"Three."

In their earnestness the rangers nodded like bobble-heads.

"I need to know who we've got and who is still missing. Now," she added when neither of them moved.

"The little red-haired girl with the disabled woman is Beth Dwayne. She's twelve. Her folks-all the girls-live near Loveland, an hour or so east of here," Emily said.

Anna knew where Loveland, Colorado, was. She'd driven through it on her move to the park rather than take the more traveled route from Denver through Boulder and into Estes Park.

"The other one is older, thirteen. Her name is Alexis Sheppard. The one not here is Candace Watson. She's thirteen too."

"You're sure?" Anna asked. Calling the girls by the wrong names could only further any sense they had of being forgotten or unsafe.

Again the nods. Anna took them at their word. She knew from experi-ence that the intensity of a prolonged search for missing children burned the victims' particulars into the brains of the would-be rescuers. Emily and Ryan would probably be able to rattle off this information with accu-racy and in detail long after they'd forgotten their own names or the addresses of their nursing homes.

"Ryan, go on back to the ambulance-or out of earshot-and make the calls. Tell dispatch we're going to need search dogs come morning, see if we can backtrack to where the third girl is. Emily, come with me."

Anna left her hat on the ground. It went against the grain. Her dog, Taco, a three-legged but brave-hearted lab, would have made short work of the Stetson-as-chew-toy.

"Don't even think about it," she muttered to the helper dog and walked back into the light. The blonde, Alexis Sheppard, looked the stur-dier of the two-if one hummingbird in a hurricane can look stronger than another. Besides, she was in the sphere of Dr. Littleton and, like the dog, the doctor seemed less likely to bite than the chair-bound Ms. Jarrod.

Anna crossed slowly to the picnic table and eased herself onto the far end of the bench opposite the girl and the doctor. All the while she talked softly, a lesson learned not from victim assistance training but from working with horses in Guadalupe Mountains National Park early in her career. If she made noise or touched them when she