Jamie eased out the door and with one more look back at the sleeping girl, pulled the door shut until it clicked. She glanced at the clock hanging on the wall at the end of the short hallway. It was past one in the morning. She had seen Clem adjusting to her new life, her new world, her new home, her new family. She had hoped the nightmares had disappeared with the changes and the girl's confident resiliency. Apparently, they hadn't. At least not all of them. Poor Clem had woken a half hour ago screaming for her mother and father.
Jamie knew she was a sad substitute for them. It had been Henry instead - the only one who had been through it all with her and was still here - that helped her relax enough to go back to sleep. Henry who had bridged the gap between them. No matter how hard Jamie tried, she wasn't the girl's family. Not really. Maybe one day… but that dream had been snatched heartlessly from her by the Shepherds.
Leaning against the wall opposite the bedroom, she dropped her forehead to her knees and let the tears that had been threatening all night finally fall. Every day she looked at Clem, she saw him. In the way she smiled, laughed, her snarky smirk, her quirky sense of humor, her stubbornness. It was Mitch. Despite having spent the better part of their lives apart, the girl took after her father. Collapsing onto her butt, Jamie chuckled among the tears. They even swirled their straws the same. Ate food in the same order. It was creepy how similar they were.
She allowed herself another five minutes of crying before she wiped the cuff of her sleeve across her eyes and cheeks and shook herself back to the present. Perhaps she and Clem just needed more time. Another few months… Then again, Allison hadn't really moved past Mitch either and that had been years.
"Crap," she cursed, shoving to her feet. They were both screwed.
Jamie crossed to her own room. But instead of crawling under the sheets and trying to get some shut-eye - exhaustion her only ally in the fight to fall unconscious - she grabbed her laptop and flopped cross-legged onto the quilt and propped her pillow on her lap, setting her computer on top. She opened the screen and pressed the power button. It woke up, the network loading, a blank white screen flaring to color, that irritating little cursor blinking under the most recent iteration of Google's logo.
"So…" she droned, tapping her ring finger on the letter 'o' and humming. Where to start this time?
She typed in the last thing she'd found the afternoon before. The Society for the Historical Preservation of Animal Research and Development. SHPARD. The search engine pulled up a half dozen sites, all linked to the main page of the society. That was it. No more. It was same as last time. Still, it was more than she'd known before. She clicked on the main page link. The verdant green, vibrant blue, and sunshiney yellow hued page was simple and refined. It was elegant, but down to earth. Images of free-roaming, healthy, happy, wildlife - mainly jungle life - scrolled across the welcome. A handful of links greeted her roaming cursor. None even remotely suggested the society was anything more than an animal interest group. In fact, she got the feeling the page was supposed to suggest something more like an anti-PETA agency.
Basically, they were selling the idea that animal research was good for the world - including the animals. Jamie snorted. Wasn't too far off the truth, now that she thought about it.
Clicking through the few links, she looked for something else. Anything else. Something for her to latch onto and investigate. Nothing. The page was bland, pretty looking and pretty words, but bland. Jamie pressed back to the original search engine page. She needed to try a new search.
Typing in 'Pangaea' and 'secret island', she scrolled through three pages of search results. Most dealt with the ancient land mass or supercontinent. A few dealt with conspiracy theories about Atlantis, a master race of aliens, or the spread of human intelligence. Although interesting in their own rights, she had been hoping for a theory more in line with prehistoric animals and dinosaurs popping up in and around South America. She rolled her eyes. If it was that easy to find the secret Shepherds, surely the government would have acted.
She groaned. Dead end after dead end. Returning to Google's search site, she tried another series of words: 'Saber-tooth cat' and 'sightings.' A ton more sites popped up. She scanned the list. Nothing jumped out at her, so she clicked on the 'Images' tab. Instantly, thousands of images appeared. Most were obvious fakes, a few paintings, some digital drawings. But what caught her attention was the fourth image across the page. It wasn't a saber-tooth cat at all. It was one of the hybrids. Grainy and blurred, a tiny blip in a much larger image, but she recognized the creature immediately. It was standing on the edge of a beach, shaded in the overgrowth of jungle foliage. Beyond it lay a gray cliff. The picture was taken from the air.
Jamie chose the image and waited as her network connected her to the original website. It was the personal page of a helicopter pilot. Huh? She began scrolling and clicking her way through his posted information. Nothing had been posted new for at least six months. Not one to believe in coincidences, she moved on to his business.
Three partners - he was one - rented both helicopters and single-prop planes, and piloted private charters up and down the west coast of South America and the Galapagos islands. Two of the partners seemed to still be active, posting selfies of themselves regularly. The third partner seemingly had gone missing. There were updates posted on the search. But, in the last month, everyone had given up. His wife's touching eulogy was linked to the homepage. Jamie read the first paragraph before she began crying again, then closed the page.
She needed to think. A thought was clinging to the back of her skull and she couldn't quite grasp it, yet she had a gut feeling it was incredibly important. Closing her laptop, she shoved it to the other side of her bed and curled up, hugging her pillow between her chest and knees. Sleep came quickly. Exhaustion finally won out.
