The Deep, Deep Snow

by Brian Freeman

  “Maybe it’s a good thing,” I said, trying to put the best spin on what was ahead. “We need more manpower. We need technology. This is bigger than us, Dad. It’s all about Jeremiah.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Plus, it’s not like they don’t need us. We know the area. We know the people. They don’t.”

  “You’re right.”

  But being right didn’t change the fact that this was our town, our people, our boy, and our mystery, and the whole investigation was about to be taken out of our hands. We didn’t have to like it.

  I heard the jingle of the diner’s front door. Breezy flew in, ninety minutes late, looking stressed and breathless. In unison, everyone in the booths silently pointed their fingers at the empty coffee pot behind the counter. She stopped at the door long enough to hang up her windbreaker and tie up her ponytail, triggering disgruntled rumbling from those of us who needed more caffeine.

  “Yeah, yeah, keep your pants on,” she announced loudly. “Dudley wouldn’t start again.”

  Dudley was her 1998 Ford Escort, which she’d nursed through twenty years of Mittel County winters. The patient had been on life support for a while. When it ran, its engine sounded like a bicycle with a baseball card taped in the spokes. Breezy had been working extra shifts morning and night to save money, but as fast as she earned it, she spent it on other things.

  She went behind the counter, and the aroma of the brewer soon took the edge off everyone’s nerves. While we waited, Breezy leaned her elbows on the counter in front of me and Dad.

  “Any news?”

  I shook my head.

  “Hell’s bells,” Breezy said. “I hear the FBI’s coming. Is that right?”

  “They are,” my father replied.

  “Soon?”

  “Any minute.”

  Breezy looked around the café with a hungry expression that was different from what the rest of us felt. I could read her mind. For her, the arrival of strangers meant tables crowded with out-of-towners who left large tips. That may sound heartless, but I couldn’t really blame her. Newcomers meant money in the cash registers of the local economy. It didn’t matter why they were here.

  “How’s Dudley?” I asked.

  Breezy swore. “The starter just grinds. We may be near the end of the road.”

  “How’d you get here?”

  “I called Monica, and she gave me a lift on her way in. Hell if I know how I’m getting home tonight.”

  I knew Breezy, and I wasn’t worried. With men pouring into town, she’d have plenty of offers for a ride.

  “Hey, you’re right, by the way,” she told me.

  “About what?”

  “The Gruders are back. I couldn’t sleep. They were playing their radio in the woods half the night. You know what that means.”

  Yes, I knew what that meant. More meth around the county. More emergency calls to the hospital in Stanton. More lives ruined. On any other morning, that would have been our first priority.

  Breezy went off to pour coffee for the rest of the diner. Dad studied the clues of the crossword, but I noticed that he hadn’t filled in a single word. His pencil sat unused on the counter, and the point of the pencil was perfectly sharp. Dad liked to say that chaos began with the littlest of things, like a dull pencil. He picked up the paper and squinted at the puzzle.

  This wasn’t just entertainment for him. He did crossword puzzles because he’d read that doing them was like calisthenics for the brain. He knew he was struggling. I knew it, too. Apparently, everyone in town knew.

  “Sixteen across,” I said, peering at the paper. “That’s an easy one. Ten letters. ‘The beacon in the storm.’”

  Dad blinked as he reflected on the clue, but the answer didn’t come. He stroked his snow-white mustache and grimaced. I think that moment was the first time I ever saw him as old.

  “I guess I’m more tired than I thought, Shelby.”

  “Lighthouse,” I prompted him.

  He stared at the empty little squares on the page. “Yes, of course. What was I thinking?”

  He picked up the pencil, wrote “L” in the first box, and then put it down again without finishing. He turned over the newspaper and instead focused on the mug of coffee that Breezy had placed in front of him.

  “I really didn’t think it was possible,” he said to me in a quiet voice. “I didn’t want to believe it. A child abduction. Here.”

  “We’re not cut off from the world, Dad.”

  “No, I suppose not.” My father took a sip of coffee and glanced over his shoulder at the others in the diner. “Everyone’s saying it must have been a stranger who took him. They don’t want to consider the other possibility.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It might not be a stranger at all. It might be one of us.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I realized that Keith Whalen had been right. Soon we would all be turning on each other. We’d be looking for someone to blame. We’d be hunting for an Ursulina hiding among us.

  The bell on the diner front door jingled again.

  Monica Constant pushed into the café like a little tornado. She had an enormous satchel purse draped over one shoulder that looked as if it weighed as much as she did. Her brown eyes were huge behind round glasses. She wore a flouncy pink dress that was decades out of style. She patted her kinky strawberry hair to make sure it was just so, and then she took a seat on the counter chair next to me, where her feet dangled well above the floor. The first thing she did was remove a velvet case from inside the purse and put the urn for Moody, her dead dog, on the paper place mat. The urn was six inches high, made of turquoise ceramic, and hand painted with lilies of the valley.

  “Hello, you two,” Monica squeaked.

  Dad turned his head and gave her his usual charming smile and then picked up his newspaper again.

  I said, “Good morning, Monica.”

  She tapped a fingernail on the place mat and gave me a pointed look.

  “And good morning to you, too, Moody,” I added.

  “Thank you, dear,” she said with a playful dance of her eyebrows. Then she dug a sheaf of papers out of the deep bowels of her purse. “I checked at the office before coming over here. I have the summary of overnight calls.”

  “Did the Stanton police track down old Mr. Nadler?” I asked, hoping for a little good news.

  “Well, if they did, they didn’t send out a follow-up report. Not that this would be the first time things fell through the cracks over there. I’ll call later and find out.”

  “Thanks.”

  Breezy showed up in front of us again with a cup of hot Twinings tea and a blackberry scone. “Here you go, Monica, my treat. Thanks for the lift this morning. You saved me.”

  “Oh, please, Witch Tree is right on my way, dear. I was happy to do it.”

  Monica lived an hour’s drive from Everywhere in a small town called Sugarfall on the western edge of the county. On some winter mornings, her commute took two hours or more. Even so, she was typically at the office ahead of all of us, and I couldn’t remember a day she’d missed for weather or sickness. She was a rock.

  I watched her dip the tea bag in her cup and nibble at the scone by picking off pieces with her red-nailed fingers. To me, she’d always been ageless, the kind of woman who looked the same year after year. She was precise and organized, with a great memory for details, which made her a perfect partner for Dad at work. I was pretty sure she’d thought about being a partner for Dad in other ways, too, but he’d always been too busy as a sheriff and father to think about getting married.

  Dad gave up on the crossword puzzle. He slapped down the paper with obvious frustration and stood up from the counter. “I’m heading to the office.”

  “Okay, I’ll be there in a minute,” I told him.

  He
left, tipping his hat to the others in the diner. They smiled back at him uncomfortably. Monica’s eyes followed him discreetly as he headed out the door and across the street toward the Carnegie Library.

  “He’s not very good today, is he?”

  “Not very good,” I agreed.

  “Stress makes it worse. He’ll bounce back.”

  “I hope so.”

  “He’s going to need you, dear. Are you ready for that?”

  “Of course, I am.”

  She patted my back. “Well, count on me to help you, Shelby. Believe me, this situation will grow you up fast.”

  She meant nothing by her comment, but I felt a little annoyed. It made me realize that the people around here still saw me as young. Twenty-five years old, but not grown-up, not ready for life. Monica, Dad, Adam, Trina, Ellen. To them, I was just a kid, and maybe they were right. I was still the girl who didn’t know who she was or why she was alive.

  I still didn’t know why God had bothered to save me, and I didn’t feel any closer to figuring it out.

  But I had no time to think about myself. Somewhere outside, distantly, I heard the guttural throb of an engine getting closer. Monica and I both looked at each other in confusion. The others in the café heard it, too, and people gravitated from their booths to the diner window and then outside to the street, where a crowd was gathering.

  I hurried outside with Monica next to me.

  The throb got louder, almost deafening, making all of us cover our ears. I looked up in the sky and saw a black helicopter slowly descending toward the open grass yard in front of the courthouse. Down it came, like some giant insect, and when it was nearly on the ground, I could see white letters painted on the side.

  FBI.

  Monica leaned toward me as the helicopter engine cut out and the rotor blades slowed. “An unwanted visitor in a tableware emporium,” she murmured in my ear.

  I shook my head, not sure what she meant.

  “Remember Tom’s crossword clue yesterday? We were talking about a bull in a china shop. Well, dear, now we’ve got one.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Special Agent Bentley Reed of the FBI didn’t look impressed with the basement office of the Mittel County Sheriff’s Department. He was a city man, and this was the country. He was as tall as my father, with mocha-colored black skin, thinning hair that gave him a very high forehead, and a trimmed goatee flecked with gray. He was dressed in a pinstriped blue suit with leather shoes shined to such a bright finish that I was scared to look at them directly for fear of blindness. He was smart. I could see that in his eyes, which moved fast and didn’t miss a thing. I guessed that he was in his forties, and he had the bearing of an ex-military man. He didn’t walk, he strutted. He didn’t talk, he commanded.

  Violet introduced him to us, and we all got the message loud and clear. Bentley Reed was in charge.

  Our entire county team was gathered in the basement, about a dozen of us. Dad had called in all the shifts for the early morning meeting. I stood next to Adam, who was quietly seething at the prospect of taking a back seat to the Feds. Adam never took orders well, even from my father.

  Agent Reed took off his suit coat and folded it carefully over the back of a chair. He stood in the center of the room with eight other federal agents behind him, eyeing the surroundings with the same disdain their boss did. I could feel their impatience, the pros staring at the small-town cops who’d wasted so much time before calling them in.

  Reed had a throaty voice like a drumbeat that filled the room.

  “Sheriff Ginn, I want to thank you for making your whole team available to us and for your partnership in this investigation. My colleagues and I are members of the FBI’s Child Abduction Rapid Deployment team, and we have one goal. That’s to find Jeremiah Sloan and bring him home safely to his family. Unfortunately, he’s already been missing approximately nineteen hours. That’s not good. In a potential abduction situation, every second counts, so we’re already playing catch-up, and we need to move swiftly.”

  I glanced at Dad, whose face was as blank as marble before it was carved. He knew he was being chastised.

  “Jeremiah could still be lost in the woods,” he pointed out.

  Reed nodded. “Yes, we’re aware of that possibility. We have heat-sensing technology in the helicopter, and we’ll be launching a grid search over the forest in less than an hour. Of course, again, time has hurt us here. If Jeremiah spent a night outside, the boy’s body temperature has likely dropped. That will make him harder to detect. As far as a ground search goes, one of my team is a veteran of wilderness search-and-rescue operations, and he’ll be leading the search process and coordinating volunteers from the general public. As news gets out about this case, we’re going to have a lot of people showing up to help, which is both good and bad. I know you’ve had locals out searching already, but we’ll be going over the entire area again from the beginning.”

  Translation: Who knows what you people missed?

  “Next, let’s talk about the sex offender registry,” Agent Reed went on. “Where do we stand on interviews with people on the list?”

  “We haven’t talked to anyone yet,” Dad began, but Reed cut him off.

  “So we’re nowhere on that. Got it. Okay, we’ve identified nearly a hundred level-two and level-three sex offenders in Mittel and Stanton counties. I want in-person interviews and alibis from every single one of them. Talk to their neighbors, too, and show them Jeremiah’s photo. I also want the state patrol showing that photo at every gas station at every exit on the interstate. Ditto for every gas station within a two-hundred-mile radius of the national forest. If Jeremiah was taken out of the area, this guy had to fill up somewhere. And let’s get copies of the guest registers from every motel and resort in both counties, so we can run them against criminal records.”

  Behind Agent Reed, his team keyed notes furiously into their phones. Several of them were already coordinating their next moves with each other in whispered tones. These people had worked together before, and I couldn’t help but be impressed. Reed may have been arrogant and condescending when you met him, but he was a pro. As painful as it was to admit, Violet had been smart to bring him in.

  “We need a command post,” Reed went on. “Large, somewhere we can process physical evidence as we gather it and set up our computers. Ms. Roka, what do you suggest? What’s available in town?”

  “There’s a gym at the school,” Violet proposed. “Will that work? It’s wide open, and no one’s using it during the summer. We’ve got power in the space, and we can bring in dozens of tables as needed.”

  “Perfect,” Reed went on. He jabbed a finger at a special agent on his right who didn’t look much older than me. “Next, media. Tiffany Ball is our media relations specialist. We’re already getting plenty of queries, but we want to control the message, so Tiffany will be working with all of you and the boy’s parents to craft a press release, profile, and media kit regarding the disappearance. Same for social media. I expect to hold a press conference early this afternoon, once our infrastructure is in place. Questions on any of that?”

  My father and the rest of us stood in shell-shocked silence. Life moved at a slow pace in Mittel County. Not so at the FBI.

  “Excuse me, Special Agent Reed?”

  It was Adam. He stepped ahead of the other members of our team and squared his shoulders.

  “Yes?” Reed said. “You have a question?”

  “Yes, sir, I’m Adam Twilley. I’m Sheriff Ginn’s senior deputy.”

  There was no such thing as a senior deputy, but that didn’t stop Adam from staking his claim to the job. Agent Reed looked Adam up and down from his boots to his curly brown hair and analyzed him like a computer. I could tell what the print-out in his head said, and I’m pretty sure Adam could, too.

  Lightweight.

  It wasn’
t fair, but Adam didn’t always give the best first impression. He looked like what he was, a kid with a motorcycle.

  “Okay, Senior Deputy Twilley, what’s your question?”

  “I want to know what our role is going to be.”

  Reed’s face bent into the tiniest smile. “Well, right now, I sure as hell could use a cup of coffee if you wouldn’t mind.”

  The agents broke into laughter that went on longer than was comfortable for any of us. Adam’s face turned several shades of crimson.

  “I’m kidding, Deputy,” Reed went on. “All of you have an extremely important role to play. You know this area backwards and forwards. You know the people. You know the roads, businesses, all the things that we don’t. So we’re counting on you to give us your expertise on everything local. Make sense? Sheriff, you on board with that?”

  My father nodded his agreement. “We’ll give you anything you need. We know every inch of this county, that’s for sure. I’m sure you can count on our colleagues in Stanton to help on their end.”

  “Excellent.”

  “I have a suggestion,” Adam broke in, pushing his luck with Agent Reed. “You should probably designate a liaison between you and your team and the police here and in Stanton. Someone who can coordinate the flow of information between us. Make sure nothing gets missed.”

  “A liaison. Are you volunteering, Senior Deputy Twilley?”

  “If you want me to, sure. I’d be happy to do that.”

  Reed stroked his chin with his thumb and gave Adam another careful look. “Well, the idea of a local liaison working directly with me is a good one. I like your suggestion, Twilley. However, the last thing I want to do is come in here and deprive Sheriff Ginn of his senior deputy. That doesn’t seem right.”

  Adam’s face fell as he realized he was being passed over for the assignment that he’d suggested. Instead, Reed’s gaze floated around the room from person to person among the sheriff’s team.

  It landed on me.