The Deep, Deep Snow

by Brian Freeman

  I turned my head and stared at him. “No.”

  “Good to know.”

  After that, we were silent until we reached Martin’s Point.

  *

  Martin’s Point is built on the shore of the region’s largest lake, much bigger than any of the other lakes in Mittel County. It was a quiet little town for a long time, but the city people had discovered it about twenty-five years earlier. They built summer homes all around the lakeshore, and upscale resorts and B&Bs had sprung up to accommodate vacationers. Antique shops and gourmet restaurants followed. The success of Martin’s Point took its toll on the other towns in the county. Some of the rustic cabin resorts that had prospered for decades went under as tourists found more upscale amenities by the lake. You can still find the ruins of several old resorts deep in the woods, slowly being overrun by Mother Nature.

  My most vivid memory of Martin’s Point was taking Anna Helvik there on a Sunday afternoon five years earlier. That was when Karl and Trina were away in Chicago for her cancer surgery. Anna was five years old then but already smart for her age. She knew something was wrong with her mother. I took this beautiful blond child to the lake, where we cruised on my father’s boat under the bright sunshine. We fished, and Anna caught a crappie. She struggled to hold the slippery, squirming fish in her small hands and giggled the whole time, until it stopped struggling as it died. I watched Anna shake the fish, as if to wake it up. When it didn’t, she bawled, and it took me most of an hour to get her to stop. When she was finally calm again, she wiped her face and asked me, “Is that what’s going to happen to my mom?”

  That was when I started crying, too.

  That night, when we were back at her house, I stood outside her bedroom and listened to her pray before she went to sleep. Over and over, she said, “God, I’m sorry for killing the fishy, I’m sorry for killing the fishy, I’m sorry for killing the fishy.”

  I remember thinking: I would take a bullet for that little girl.

  Anyway, Agent Reed and I arrived in Martin’s Point, and I parked the cruiser near an ice cream parlor on the far end of the main street. The shop owner was also the owner of the F-150 that had been stolen the previous day. Unfortunately, we were one block from the town’s sandy beach, where dozens of tourists tanned on any given summer day. The bus stop from the town of Stanton was immediately across the street. The large town parking lot was behind us, and anyone walking from their car toward the water would have passed where the truck had been stolen. So this location had hundreds of suspects and not a security camera anywhere in sight.

  The store owner’s name was Bonnie Butterfield, which I thought was a great name for someone with an ice cream shop. She gave us free ice cream when we introduced ourselves. I’m not too proud to turn down things like that. I picked a flavor called Ursulina Poop, which was chocolate-hazelnut ice cream swirled with fudge and studded with nuts and malted milk balls. It was terrific. Agent Reed got vanilla, and I rolled my eyes at him.

  Bonnie took us outside and showed us where her truck had been parked half a block from the store itself. It was out of view from inside the parlor. She’d discovered it was missing when her husband arrived at one o’clock and mentioned that the truck wasn’t in its usual spot. She’d seen it there about eleven o’clock when she went outside to meet the mailman, so the theft had occurred sometime in the two hours or so in between.

  She also told us with some embarrassment that she’d left her truck unlocked with the keys in the cup holder. She’d been doing that for years without any problems. I wasn’t surprised, because half the families in this area couldn’t even find their house keys if you asked, but this time, it was Agent Reed who did the eye rolling.

  After our conversation with Bonnie, we stopped in at every store along the main street to see if anyone had witnessed the theft, but no one had seen a thing. We located the mailman, too, who was no help. There wasn’t anything else for us to do. Half an hour later, we were in my cruiser on the way back to Everywhere.

  “What did you take away from all that?” Reed asked me, as if I were a trainee at Quantico.

  I thought about it as I drove. Then I said, “The time.”

  “That’s right. What about it?”

  “The truck was stolen sometime between eleven and one. The Gruders passed the truck on the national forest road around one fifteen or so. And we’re at least a ninety-minute drive from where we found Jeremiah’s bicycle. So if this was our guy, he didn’t waste any time. He must have driven straight there.”

  “Exactly,” Reed said. “Whoever took the truck knew where he was going. He had plans.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  That night in Everywhere, the rain came.

  After I took Agent Reed back to the command post, he set me free until morning. I drove to the Nowhere Café and parked on the main street, where rivers ran through the gutters and the downpour drenched me immediately. It was ten o’clock. All the shops were closed, and the only light I could see was from the window of the diner. Even so, the street was still crowded with cars bearing out-of-state plates. The café was open late to accommodate a full house of strangers. Print and TV reporters. Volunteers and curiosity-seekers, all sharing posts on Instagram and Facebook. Our little town was suddenly the epicenter of the daily news.

  Inside, I squeezed to the end of the lunch counter and found an open stool next to Adam. He’d switched out of his uniform into casual clothes. He wore a tight-fitting white T-shirt, ratty blue jeans, and a baseball cap backward on his head. His brown curls poked out from under the rim. He had a bottle of Bud in front of him and two other empty bottles on the counter. He glanced at me with a resentful stare as I sat down.

  “Busy day, Shelby?”

  “Yeah. Pretty much.”

  “Well, it must be nice to be in the middle of all the action.”

  “Come on, Adam. I didn’t ask for this.”

  “Yeah, but you got it, didn’t you? Maybe if I had perky little tits, Agent Reed would have picked me.”

  He was trying to get a rise out of me, but I kept my mouth shut rather than fire back at him. I knew he was drunk and didn’t know what he was saying.

  “So did you find Jeremiah?” Adam asked.

  “You know we didn’t.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “We’re still looking for the missing truck.”

  “You mean all those Feds crawling over town and they still don’t have a damn clue what happened? What a shock. It’s almost like they don’t know this area from the holes in their asses.”

  “Adam,” I murmured sharply. “Keep your voice down. You want these reporters to know you’re a cop and you’re drunk? If Agent Reed hears about it, you’re going to be in big trouble.”

  “Oh, what’s he going to do? Give me a crap assignment? You know what I spent my day doing, Shelby, while you were hanging out with the feebs? I was visiting camp sites on my motorcycle. Talking to Bubba and Dixie in their RV about whether they’d seen anything strange. Sticking my head inside every outhouse to make sure nobody was hiding there. Reed was very insistent about that. Check every toilet, he said. Supposedly they found a kid gagged and bound inside a porta-potty on one case, but if you ask me, he was making that up. You got a body, you bury it.”

  “Adam,” I hissed at him again. “Don’t talk like that.”

  He went back to his beer. “Whatever.”

  Breezy arrived to rescue me with a glazed donut, which she knew was my favorite. She’d already put in a fifteen-hour day but looked none the worse for wear. She was whistling, and I suspected that the pockets of her apron were stuffed with tips. She’d borrowed new clothes, too. Somewhere during the day, she’d traded her red mock turtleneck for a button-down white blouse sheer enough to give the world a look at the skimpy purple bra she was wearing underneath. Enough buttons were undone that the girls practically spill
ed out when she leaned over.

  “Is he still being Mr. Grumples?” Breezy asked, eyeing Adam next to me.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Poor baby,” she said, sticking out her tongue at him. “The FBI won’t let you play with them?”

  “Shut up, Breezy,” Adam retorted.

  She reached out and patted his hand, and she tugged on her blouse to make sure he had a good view. “Sorry, sweets. I don’t mean to poke the bear. Drink up, the next one’s on the house. When I’m in a good mood, I figure the world should be, too.”

  I checked my watch. “It’s late, Breezy. You guys ever going to close?”

  “Maybe at eleven. Look at this place. I’ve made more money today than I’d make in two weeks normally. I mean, I feel a little bad about it, but still. No offense to our local boys, but I wouldn’t get a twenty-five percent tip around here if I served them stark naked. Today? That’s my average.”

  “Lots of reporters on expense accounts, huh?”

  “No kidding. I hope this keeps up for a few days. I’ll have enough to retire Dudley and get a new car.” Then she closed her eyes in disgust with herself. “Oh my God, did I just say that?”

  “Yeah. You did.”

  “Sorry. I got carried away.”

  “Hey, I get it. Just keep it to yourself.”

  Breezy pasted the flirty smile back on her face and went off to serve the strangers in the diner. I looked toward the front window, where rain continued to pour down from the night sky like a deluge. A drumroll of thunder made the building shake.

  “Jeremiah’s out there in this,” I said quietly, underneath the noise of the café.

  Adam heard me. “Yeah, I know. It sucks.”

  “Do you think he’s alive?” I leaned close enough that Adam’s beer breath was in my face.

  “If he is, it might be better if he weren’t,” Adam replied. Being drunk has a way of making you speak the truth even when you’re better off with a lie.

  I swore, because I didn’t want Adam to be right, but he probably was. I’d held onto the hope all day that this was a mistake. An accident. But suddenly, there was a truck. The truck changed everything. Someone had gotten into a stolen truck, and two hours later, Jeremiah vanished without a trace, leaving his bicycle on the road. I couldn’t find an innocent explanation for that.

  “Have you seen my father?” I asked.

  “Yeah. He went home.”

  “What about Monica?”

  “She left an hour ago.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  “Hey, Shelby?”

  “What?”

  “Sorry for being a dick.”

  I winked at him. “What else is new?”

  I finished my donut and waited for the sugar to kick in, but it never did. I watched the rain, which was hypnotic. Every now and then, lightning flashed over the Carnegie Library across the street like a broken branch. I thought the storm might pass if I waited long enough, but the downpour kept on. Eventually, I climbed off the stool and left money on the counter. I gave Breezy a 30 percent tip, which didn’t amount to more than a dollar. I figured she’d laugh about it anyway.

  “I’m heading home,” I told Adam.

  “Yeah, see you in the morning.”

  I listened to the thunder. “You still got your bike outside?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, drive carefully.”

  “Always.”

  *

  The rain did finally quit. The roads were a mess, slick with mud and leaves and fallen branches, but at least I could see where I was going as I drove home. When I got there, the lights were on, giving the house a saintly glow through the stained glass windows. Dad’s truck was in the driveway, but when I called for him inside, I got no answer. I checked his bedroom, which was empty. The bed didn’t have a wrinkle and was made with hospital corners, as always.

  When I looked through the windows at the backyard, I saw him. He’d built a screened-in gazebo out there years ago as a playhouse for me. The light inside made it look like an oasis in the darkness. I went out the back door and trudged through the muddy grass, leaving footprints. A firefly winked at me near the trees. Inside the gazebo, I found Dad in one of the wicker chairs. He was still in his uniform, sitting straight up with perfect posture. The daily crossword puzzle was folded up in his lap, with only a handful of words filled in. He had his phone on the table in front of him, as if waiting for it to ring.

  Something told me it hadn’t rung all day.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  He gave me the kind of smile that lets you know in a glance that you’re loved. “Hello, Shelby.”

  “Mind if I join you?”

  “Please.”

  I sat down next to him. We didn’t talk for a while; we just listened to the buzz of insects hiding in the grass. Eventually, he asked about my day, and I gave him an update. We were silent again after that, until he looked over at me and said, “I owe you an apology, Shelby.”

  “For what?”

  “I should have listened to you about Adrian and the Gruders.”

  “It was a hunch. I got lucky.”

  “No, you were observant, and I didn’t take you seriously.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Dad,” I said, but I liked hearing it.

  Somewhere during the day, he’d slipped off to see the town barber and get his hair cut. When I looked at him in profile, I could still see his face looking like it did in photographs from twenty-five years earlier, when his hair and mustache were dark brown. He’d been leaner then, but just as serious. I remembered the proud expression on his face in the first picture Monica had taken when he held me as a baby. It was a long time before I understood what it meant to him to find me on his doorstep in that year of all years. He’d lost his father to Alzheimer’s four months earlier. His mother to the same damn disease five months before that. Enter Shelby Lake into his life. He used to say that I’d saved him as much as he saved me.

  “I have to ask you something, Shelby.”

  “Sure, Dad. What?”

  “I don’t want you to panic when you hear it.”

  “What is it?”

  His hand trembled a little with nervousness. “What’s the name of the boy who disappeared?”

  I stared at him. “Dad, I—I don’t—”

  “Just his name, Shelby. Please.”

  “It’s Jeremiah, Dad. Jeremiah Sloan.”

  He nodded as if it were one of the answers in his crossword puzzle that had eluded him. “Of course, it is. Thank you. I was able to remember everything else about the past two days, but not that. Weird, isn’t it? It was just gone. Like a chip of paint falling off the wall. This has been a bad day. I know it’ll go up and down, but this was a bad day.”

  Dad was being clinical about it to protect me. I knew he would never show me the depth of his frustration, but it was there. I looked away so he wouldn’t spot the sadness on my face, but I could never fool him.

  “You don’t have to pretend, Shelby. We’ll just take it as it comes.”

  “I know.”

  “It can move fast, or it can move slow. And there are new drugs now. Hopefully, we’ll hardly notice it for a while.”

  “I know,” I said again, choking on the words.

  Funny how I could feel myself getting older at that moment. The teenage girl, the volleyball player, was slipping away from me into the distant past and leaving me alone. It was as if Jeremiah had taken what was left of that side of me with him when he disappeared.

  “Trina’s sick again,” I added, not knowing why I felt the need to tell him that when he had his own troubles. “She told me about it last night.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “I don’t want her to be alone going through this again. I’m just worried she won’t open up and let me in. O
r anyone else. Not Karl. Not Anna.”

  “Some people can’t do that.”

  “I know. That’s not who she is.”

  “All you can do is be there for her. She has to decide for herself what she needs.”

  “I know,” I said again.

  Sitting there, I felt a wave of anger at the world. It’s that helpless frustration we feel when fate deals a blow to someone we love, and there’s no one we can blame and no one we can scream at.

  “Do you want to bring out your guitar?” Dad asked, trying to pull me out of the hole I was in.

  “No, thanks. I’ll take a rain check. I want to be by myself for a while.”

  “I understand, Shelby. Go on. Get some sleep.”

  I stood up and bent down to kiss him on the top of the head. While I was there, I put my arms around him and didn’t let go. He held on to me, too. We didn’t need to say anything. There was nothing we could do about the future.

  I turned and left the gazebo and hurried upstairs to my bedroom. When I stood by one of the windows looking down on the backyard, I saw the light of the gazebo go out, and I could just barely make out my father as he returned to the house. With him gone, there was nothing but wilderness outside. I opened the window and breathed in the humid air through the screen. The night was quiet and still after the wild storm, with barely a leaf moving in the trees.

  Then, out of nowhere, a barn owl swooped down in front of me, its huge auburn wings spread wide. I jumped back with a shout. For an instant, I saw its monk-like face staring at me as it crashed against the second-floor screen, and then after the impact, it spiraled away down to the ground. When I peered out again, I could see the bird on the grass below me, hopping as it tried and failed to fly on a broken wing. I sprinted for the stairs to rescue it.

  You know me. I believe in signs.

  That one felt like a bad omen of what was to come.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I do regular transports of injured birds for the Stanton Raptor Center, so I keep heavy cardboard boxes and falconry gloves in a shed near the house. With Dad’s help, I was able to get a blanket over the owl and secure him inside a box, which I put on the floor of the front seat of my cruiser. I called my friend Jeannie Samper, who runs the center, and she said she’d be there to meet me. Jeannie was used to calls at all hours during the summer season, and I’d never once seen her fail to get up in the middle of the night to receive an owl, hawk, or eagle in need of help.