Chapter 4 - The Search at the Old Pier
The wind off the Detroit River was bitter and unforgiving, carrying the icy spray of grey water against the rusted iron fences of the abandoned industrial district.
Clara and Lily got off the city bus at the end of the line. The street was deserted, bordered by decaying brick warehouses with broken windows and overgrown weeds pushing up through cracked asphalt.
"Mom, it's so cold," Lily said, her teeth chattering as she held onto Clara’s coat sleeve.
"Hold on to me, bug," Clara said, wrapping her arm around Lily to block the biting wind. "Look for the pointed roof. Look for the crane."
They walked past three blocked-off alleys until Lily suddenly pointed her small, mittens-wrapped hand toward a gap between two giant corrugated steel storage sheds.
"There!" Lily shouted. "The pointed roof! Look, Mom, the wooden pier!"
They ducked under a rusted chain-link fence that had been pulled open at the bottom. The ground was treacherous—slippery with wet mud, rotting timber, and jagged pieces of metal.
At the far end of the decaying wooden pier, extending thirty feet out over the dark, churning waters of the river, sat a solitary figure.
He was sitting on a rusted metal bollard. He wore no coat—only his brown cardigan, soaking wet and heavy with rain from the night before. His bare ankles were exposed above his muddy slippers. He was shivering violently, his shoulders hunched, his pale blue eyes staring blankly out at the grey, endless water.
"Mr. Walter!" Lily cried out, her small voice cutting through the roar of the wind.
The old man didn't move at first. He looked like an ancient stone statue left behind by time.
Lily broke away from Clara, running down the slick wooden planks of the pier, ignoring her mother’s frantic warning to go slow.
"Mr. Walter!" Lily skidded to a halt beside him.
Walter turned his head very slowly. His lips were blue, his skin a deathly, translucent pale. But as his eyes focused on the small girl in the faded red jacket, a tiny, faint spark returned to his frozen expression.
"Lily..." he rasped, his voice barely a whisper above the whistling wind. "You... you came. The lantern... the lantern was dark last night."
"I know, Mr. Walter, I'm so sorry!" Lily cried, wrapping her small arms around his wet, freezing shoulders, trying with all her tiny strength to offer him her warmth. "The mean lady made me leave! But I found your drawing! I remembered the tugboat!"
Clara reached them a second later. She immediately pulled off her own thick wool coat and wrapped it firmly around Walter’s trembling body.
"Sir, can you hear me?" Clara asked, kneeling before him, chafing his freezing hands with her own. "We need to get you warm. You’ve been out here all night."
Walter looked at Clara, then down at Lily, who was holding his right hand in both of hers, tears flowing down her face.
"June..." Walter murmured, his mind floating between past and present. "June... the little girl brought me... she knows where the bird lives..."
Clara pulled out her cheap prepaid phone with trembling fingers. The battery was at four percent. She dialed emergency services.
"Dispatch, I need an ambulance at the old Miller Pier on East River Road immediately!" Clara shouted into the receiver. "We have an elderly man suffering from severe hypothermia! It's Walter Vance!"
The line crackled. "Did you say Walter Vance? The missing person from Willow Creek Estates?!"
"Yes! Send help now! He's freezing to death!"
Before the phone battery died completely, Clara gave their exact location. She sat down on the cold pier, wrapping her arms around both Walter and Lily, pressing them close together, using her own body as a human shield against the freezing river wind.
Twenty minutes later, the air was filled with the deafening roar of helicopter blades.
A sleek black search-and-rescue helicopter hovered directly over the abandoned pier, its powerful spotlight cutting through the grey mist, illuminating the three figures huddled together on the rotting wood.
Below on the street, sirens screamed as a convoy of six police cruisers, an advanced life support ambulance, and a massive black SUV tore through the fence, their tires kicking up gravel.
The door of the black SUV flew open before the vehicle had even come to a complete stop.
Julian Vance leaped out. He sprinted down the rotting pier, his tailored suit jacket flying open, his face pale with unimaginable terror and hope.
"Father!" Julian screamed.
He reached the end of the pier and dropped to his knees in the mud beside them. Paramedics rushed past him with heavy thermal blankets and oxygen tanks.
"Father! Oh God, Father!" Julian wrapped his arms around the old man as the paramedics draped heated blankets over Walter's shoulders.
Walter opened his eyes weakly. He looked at his son, then raised a frail, trembling hand and pointed a finger toward Lily, who was standing beside her mother, shivering in her thin denim jacket.
May you like
"Julian..." Walter whispered, his voice weak but extraordinarily clear. "Look after... look after Lily. She... she turned the light on for me..."
Julian turned his head. For the first time, his sharp, powerful eyes locked onto the small, ragged little girl and her mother standing in the biting cold.
