Where was he?
I kept going over Adrian’s story in my head. I thought about Jeremiah heading out of the campground on his bike. I tried to picture this short, skinny boy flying down the road through the national forest. His little legs pumped up and down on the pedals, and his backside probably lifted off the bicycle seat. His badminton racket jutted out of his backpack. His hair whipped like strands of fine straw, long enough to fall over his eyes, with a cowlick sprouting from the back.
But you know what really struck me?
That Sunday suit he was wearing.
They’d put Jeremiah’s grandfather in the ground two weeks earlier, and this little boy still couldn’t take off his Sunday clothes.
I didn’t know if it would help us find him, but it told me one thing. Jeremiah was lonely. That’s what worried me, because if I could see it, then so could others.
The ones who saw a boy like that as prey.
Chapter Four
“So what do you think?” Adam asked me as we drove back toward Everywhere. “Where’s the kid?”
I didn’t answer immediately. I was watching a caravan of cars pass us in the opposite direction, filled with searchers ready to fan out shoulder to shoulder to hunt for Jeremiah in the woods. They were our friends and neighbors. Around here, when someone’s in trouble, the word goes out, and people drop everything to help.
“I hope he’s in town with a friend,” I said finally, “and we just haven’t found him yet.”
Adam took off his sunglasses and waited until I turned my head and stared back at him. “Shelby, you know he’s not in town.”
“He might be.”
“Without his bike? How did he get there? Somebody had to drive him, and by now, the whole town knows he’s missing. If anybody knew where he was, they’d have called. The fact is, he’s either still in the forest, or else—”
I waited. “Or else?”
Adam shrugged and replaced his shades on his face. “Hey, you’re thinking what I’m thinking. You just don’t want to say it.”
He was right. I didn’t want to say it, so I said nothing.
We drove on in silence. It was ten more miles before we reached the southern border of the national forest. Dennis Sloan worked at the ranger station and welcome center at the park entrance. There was a stop sign ahead of us marking the main highway cutting through Mittel County. Going left would take us east toward Stanton an hour away. Going right led toward block-long towns like Witch Tree and Sugarfall that were situated deep in the kind of woods where Goldilocks got lost.
The checkerboard streets of Everywhere were directly ahead of us. Century-old brick buildings lined the main street, which was dominated by the county courthouse and its acre of green lawn and historical statues. Next to the courthouse was the boxy library that housed the sheriff’s office downstairs. The rest of the street was made up of shops that had been around for years. The small market owned by Ellen Sloan. The bakery with green-frosted sugar cookies that have always been a weakness of mine. The hardware store. The Post Office. The Nowhere Café, where Dad and I ate nearly every day of our lives.
You can imagine the jokes. Where do you eat in Everywhere? Nowhere.
Some of the shops had closed over time, leaving empty buildings with rusted signs and broken windows covered over with plywood. It’s like a funeral for a friend when a main-street shop closes, because you know it’s never coming back. This isn’t a place where new customers come to live and shop. Every census report whittles down Mittel County by another few hundred people. Either they die or they leave for better jobs and bigger towns. People aren’t having enough babies to compensate.
Adam and I parked outside the Nowhere and then went door to door at all of the shops in less than an hour. No one had seen Jeremiah that day. Searching the outskirts of town was going to take longer, because most neighbors lived half a mile or more from each other, in houses carved out of a few acres of forest, with long dirt driveways winding through the trees. I drove toward Jeremiah’s house, but Adam stopped me when we were barely out of the town center. He grabbed my arm and pointed at the parking lot for our one-story K–12 school, home to the Everywhere Strikers. I’d gone there. Adam had gone there. We’d all gone there. It was summer, when kids wanted to forget about school, but there was a beat-up red SUV parked in the far corner of the lot.
“I recognize that Bronco,” Adam said. “The Gruders are back.”
I groaned. Will and Vince Gruder were our local bad boys. The ones who kept the county flush with drugs. “Think they know something?”
“I think we should ask.”
I pulled into the lot and parked our cruiser next to the Ford Bronco. Adam and I both got out. The SUV’s rear windows had been covered with duct tape, so we couldn’t see into the back. Hundreds of bugs were splattered across the windshield, and the front seats were a mess of fast-food wrappers and Walmart bags. A plastic jalapeño, wearing a sombrero, dangled from the rear-view mirror, with “Welcome to El Paso” printed across the green skin of the pepper.
I knew what the jalapeño meant. Will and Vince traveled to Mexico every summer, and they cooked what they brought back into meth in a lab hidden somewhere in the woods. We’d chased them for years, but they were sly like foxes about covering up their business and had never spent so much as a day inside the Mittel County jail.
There was no sign of the Gruders outside the school, but I heard the springy thump of a basketball behind the building. Adam heard it, too, and he headed off across the green grass without a word to me. I jogged to keep up with him.
I was used to Adam taking the lead. Technically, he and I were both deputies, but he was three years older. You can guess where that left me in the pecking order, at least in Adam’s mind. It didn’t help that I was the daughter of the sheriff. It also didn’t help that Adam had asked me out in high school when he was a senior and I was a freshman, and I’d shot him down. Adam didn’t hear the word “no” very often. He was used to girls falling for the jeans, the shades, the smirk, and the tight little curls in his short brown hair. He wasn’t tall, but he had the cool factor going for him back then. Cool kids weren’t my type. Not that I knew what my type was.
Adam was a good cop but a little reckless, because he always felt like he had something to prove. He’d grown up in the shadow of his mother, who was a local hero in Mittel County. She’d competed in the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid and taken home a silver medal in cross-country skiing. She was pretty and TV-friendly, and she’d parlayed her success into a lot of money in sponsorships. Sooner or later, Adam was going to inherit some big bucks. Maybe that’s why he never looked happy living an ordinary life. I think he always felt that his mother wanted him to do something more with her DNA than hand out traffic tickets on the county roads.
The two of us went around to the rear of the school building, where the athletic fields were arranged in a giant rectangle. The basketball courts were closest to us, and we saw the Gruders playing a fierce game of one-on-one with a white-and-purple basketball. As I watched, one of the brothers sunk a hook shot through the rusted hoop, but I didn’t know which brother it was. They were identical twins, twenty-two years old.
“That’s Vince,” Adam said, reading my mind.
“How do you know?”
“Because Vince can shoot, and Will sucks.”
We strolled over to the court. The Gruders saw us coming, and they dribbled the ball to the fence to meet us. Both wore jeans and high-tops, and both were bare-chested, with sweat dripping in streaks down their suntanned skin. They had the same long, greasy blond hair and the same green eyes and even the same nose rings in their right nostrils. They were tall and skinny, and I could smell pot on their breath.
“Deputy Twilley,” Vince announced, as if we were all old friends, “and Deputy Lake. Look at that, our two favorite law enforcement professionals are here to w
elcome us home. You want to shoot some hoops with us?”
“When did you get back into town, Vince?” Adam asked, ignoring the small talk.
“A couple of days ago. We rolled into Witch Tree late on Wednesday.”
“Where did you go on your trip?”
“Oh, here and there. We hit us some beaches, drank us some beer. What’s summer without a road trip, right? Still, there’s no place like home. Nothing beats the scenery around here.” As he said this, Vince gave me an up-and-down look that belonged in a brown paper wrapper.
“We’re looking for Jeremiah Sloan,” Adam said impatiently. “Have you seen him?”
Vince bounced the basketball in his hand. “Who?”
“He’s Adrian Sloan’s little brother,” I told him. I noticed that Will Gruder kept scratching his leg with his foot, and I shot a quick glance at the ragged cuffs of his jeans, which were loaded with sharp little prickly burs. When I saw that, I quickly added, “I mean, you guys know Adrian, don’t you?”
The two brothers exchanged looks, and the look from Vince said Shut up.
“Sure, we know Adrian,” Vince said. “Football player, right? What’s up with his brother?”
“Jeremiah is missing,” Adam replied. “We found his bike on the dirt road that leads to Talking Lake. There’s no sign of the boy. His parents are pretty worried.”
Will shot a concerned glance at his brother. “He’s missing? Really? I mean, we just—”
“Hey, that’s too bad about the kid,” Vince interrupted before Will could say anything more. “Wish we could help you out, but we haven’t seen him. If we spot him hanging around, we’ll give you a call.”
“When did the two of you last see Adrian?” I asked.
Vince didn’t blink. He just stared right through me. “Adrian? Heck if I know.”
“Are you sure you didn’t see him today?”
“Today? No, we haven’t seen Adrian since we got back. Not sure why we would. You guys need anything else? Or can I get back to kicking Will’s ass on the court?”
“Go ahead.”
Vince grabbed his brother’s shoulder and dragged him back to the basketball court. I waited to see what Will would do, and sure enough, he glanced back at me with a shifty, nervous expression that told me the two of them were lying. I turned my back on the brothers and walked away toward the front of the school. This time, Adam had to jog to catch up with me.
“What the hell was that about?” he asked. “Why were you asking about Adrian?”
“Burs.”
“Huh?”
“Will had prickly burs stuck to his jeans and shoelaces. A lot of them.”
“So?”
“Adrian Sloan did, too. He was picking them off while Dad was talking to him.”
Adam looked back at the brothers, who were hanging around on the court and watching us go. “You think the Gruder boys were with Adrian? Because of a few prickly burs? That’s pretty thin, Shelby.”
“Yeah, I know. Maybe I’m wrong about this, and it’s nothing. But if I’m right, then Will and Vince saw Adrian in the national forest today. And that means Adrian’s lying to us.”
Chapter Five
When you’re in the midst of an investigation that involves a child, you always feel as if your heart is in your mouth and you have to remind yourself to breathe. So it was a relief when Monica called us to say she had a report of an unidentified, unaccompanied minor in our old town cemetery. I told her we’d check it out immediately. My first thought was that Jeremiah had gone to visit his grandfather’s grave, and I allowed myself to hope that our fears had been misplaced and we’d have the boy back with his parents soon.
The dead of the Mittel County Cemetery have always been like friends to me, because the graveyard backs up to our house. When I was a girl, I used to wander the cemetery trails at night with a flashlight, hunting for ghosts. Rose thought it was creepy and wouldn’t go along, but the place never bothered me. Remember, I’m the girl who doesn’t scare easily. I still walk in the cemetery whenever I can. Sometimes I’ll take my guitar and sing songs for the dead, because they’re good listeners and don’t heckle me when I’m off-key.
Adam and I parked in the driveway of my father’s house, and we hiked through the backyard toward the cemetery. The burial plots are clustered in small groves, with spruces watching over the dead like silent giants. Moss and mold adorn the older stones, some of which date back two hundred years. Even on the hottest, brightest summer day, it’s cool and dark there, and you can’t see far because of the tree trunks packed closely together.
I called, “Jeremiah! Jeremiah, are you here?”
Adam shouted, too. “Jeremiah! Hey, Jeremiah, can you hear us?”
We didn’t get any reply except the trill of cardinals.
“Let’s split up,” I suggested.
Adam took a path to my right, and the woods quickly swallowed him up. I went in the opposite direction. Every now and then, I called Jeremiah’s name again. Distantly, I could hear Adam doing the same, but after a while, his voice faded away. The cemetery meanders over acres of hilly land, and as I explored the individual groves, I saw winged angels, crypts guarded by carved lions, fallen crosses, and massive trees toppled by storms, with mushrooms growing out of the stumps. The whole area had a peaty smell.
I’d walked these trails countless times and knew many of the names on the graves by heart, but this time, I felt an odd sense of unease being here. That’s because I knew I wasn’t alone. Someone was in the trees, spying on me. Every now and then, I heard a twig snap, betraying a footstep. It could have been an animal digging in the leafy brush, but I didn’t think so. I kept looking over my shoulder, but the trails were empty, and I didn’t see anyone near the graves.
“Hello?” I called. “Who’s there?”
There was no answer, so I tried again. “Jeremiah? Is that you? Come on out, I know you’re there.”
I kept walking, but when I glanced back, I spotted a tiny flash of yellow disappearing behind the trunk of a black oak. It was someone wearing a hoodie. Small, definitely a child. I couldn’t see a face, but whoever it was knew they’d been spotted. I heard my stalker sprinting away, and I took off in pursuit, but I was chasing someone with the grace and speed of a deer. Little stabs of yellow whipped in and out of view through the trees and left me behind.
“Hey! Hey, stop!”
I broke into a field of headstones scattered along a shallow hillside. Shadows stretched across the lawn, and the forest itself was gray. My spy in the hoodie had vanished. If it was Jeremiah, he wasn’t wearing his Sunday suit anymore.
“Shelby?”
Deputies aren’t supposed to scream, but I screamed in surprise. Someone was right behind me. I whirled around, and the man who was there backed away, raising his hands as if to assure me that he came in peace.
I knew him.
Oh, yes, I knew him. He was just about the last person I wanted to see.
“Keith.”
He stood there, looking as awkward as me. His lips moved, but he didn’t say anything, as if his mouth didn’t know what to do. Talk. Smile. Frown. Kiss me.
“Long time,” Keith said finally. You’d be amazed how much meaning you can pack into two little words. We could both tell you the exact date when we’d last spoken. November 14. Last fall.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him.
He nodded his head toward a flat stone on the ground, newer and brighter than the weathered graves around it. “Colleen.”
“Oh. Sure.”
“I suppose that surprises you.”
“Why should it? She was your wife.”
Keith tossed his head, flipping back his messy brown hair. It was a nervous gesture he used a lot. He was lanky and tall, wearing khakis, old brown shoes, and a rust-colored pullover. He limped when he moved, be
cause he had an artificial limb below his right knee. He wasn’t classically handsome, but handsome faces have never been that interesting to me. His face had character, like a book that offers you something new every time you read it. His eyebrows were thick and dark, his nose long and slightly crooked, his chin narrow and protruding. He and I had the same kind of eyes, colored like raw brown sugar and a little sad. Whenever I looked in his eyes, I knew there was a lot going on inside.
Keith Whalen. He was eight years older than me. When I was a senior in high school, he taught my English class. I know, what a cliché, the girl with a crush on her English teacher. He read Thoreau, and I swooned. Yeah, that was me, but it’s not that simple. We’d all heard stories about his injury in the war, his mood swings, his opioid habit, his troubled marriage. I didn’t see any of that in the classroom. I just saw a broken man sitting on the desk, taking us all to Walden Pond with that “Tupelo Honey” voice of his. To me, if he had personal struggles, that only made him more attractive, and I was the teenage girl who could fix it all.
Don’t worry, it was nothing more than a Harlequin Romance fantasy in my head. Nothing happened when I was a student. But dead fires have a way of coming back to life.
“So how are you?”
Keith shook his head the way he had when one of my answers disappointed him in class. “Do you really care how I am, Shelby? If you’re just making small talk, we don’t need to do that.”
“I care.”
“Okay. Sorry, I suppose that sounded harsh. It’s just that the last time we talked, I thought that you—”
“Don’t misunderstand me,” I interrupted with coolness in my voice. “I’m still a police officer. Nothing’s changed. But you asked me if I care, and I do.”
He got a little tic in his cheek. I knew I’d hurt him. I was trying to hurt him.
“You’re honest. I guess I prefer that. Well, since you asked, the fact is, I’m not doing well at all.”
“That’s too bad, Keith.”
The Deep, Deep Snow Page 3
