The Deep, Deep Snow

by Brian Freeman

  Stanton is an hour’s drive east from Everywhere. The highway was dark and empty and still slippery from the heavy rain. There was a lot I could have been thinking about as I drove, but I put it all out of my mind and simply stared down the tunnel of my headlights and kept a watch for deer and moose. I could hear the occasional rustle of the owl shifting inside the box.

  I made it to the raptor center just before midnight. The facility was really just Jeannie’s house and a few acres of land, located well outside the busier Walmart section of town. She and her husband and four kids were squeezed onto the upstairs floor, while the downstairs, garage, basement, and outbuildings had been converted into areas to treat and house several dozen birds of prey at any given time. Jeannie was a ruthless fund-raiser, and the equipment and care she provided rivaled anything you’d find at a veterinary hospital.

  The garage was open as I drove up the muddy, twisting driveway through the woods. However, the person who met my car wasn’t Jeannie. A man I’d never seen before came up to my driver’s window with a smile, and I rolled it down.

  “You must be Shelby. Jeannie said you were on your way. I’m Dr. Lucas. I understand you have a little patient for me.”

  “Yes, it’s a barn owl that flew into my window. I’m worried he may have a broken wing.”

  “Well, let’s get him inside and take a look.”

  Dr. Lucas didn’t look more than thirty years old. He wore a white lab coat over a red-checked flannel shirt and stonewashed jeans. He had long sandy hair that hung loose to his shoulders. I’d never been much of a fan of long hair on men, but on him, it worked. He had a thin frame and narrow face, and his eyes were warm and very blue. When he smiled, the skin around his eyes crinkled and made you want to trace the lines with your finger, as if you were exploring a map of an exotic new place.

  When I got out of the car, I saw that he was taller than me but not a giant, only about five-foot-ten. He shook my hand. His grip was firm, and his hands were soft. I took him around to the passenger side, and he reached inside to take the box with the same gentleness you would use with a newborn’s cradle. As the box moved, the owl inside got scared and began moving about, and Dr. Lucas murmured, “It’s okay, buddy, we’re here to help. Don’t worry.”

  I liked this man.

  “I’m sorry to get you out of bed in the middle of the night,” I told him.

  “Oh, I wasn’t sleeping. Wide awake and staring at the ceiling. I was actually pleased to get Jeannie’s call.”

  “And you’re a vet?” I asked, which sounded like a stupid question as soon as it came out of my mouth.

  “Two years now,” he replied with a grin, as he carried the box inside the garage. I followed him past the lineup of glass windows at the back into the treatment room. “Don’t worry, I passed all my tests. I can take a dog’s temperature like nobody’s business.”

  I laughed. In fact, I may have blushed a little.

  “Sorry, what I mean is, I usually see Dr. Tim over here.” Dr. Tim was the sweetest, most capable vet on the planet and about two hundred years old. He’d volunteered his time at the raptor center ever since Jeannie started it.

  “Yes, I recently joined Tim’s practice in Stanton,” Lucas told me. “He’s planning to retire in a couple of years. When he does, I’ll take over the business.”

  “Dr. Tim retire? That’s hard to imagine. I was pretty sure they’d have to take him out of the clinic feetfirst.”

  “Well, that may still be true. It took me a few months to convince him to let me come on board, and so far, all he’s done is cut back his hours a bit. But that’s okay. When you do something you love, why would you want to quit? Anyway, I’m in no hurry. As far as I’m concerned, he can stay on as long as he likes. I’m just happy to learn the ropes.”

  There was something refreshing about meeting someone else like me who wasn’t in a huge hurry. Sometimes I feel like the world is filled with nothing but Violet Roka’s, who rush to finish one day in order to get to the next.

  “Do you live in Stanton?” I asked.

  “I do. I moved here about a year ago. I was actually born around here, but my family moved away when I was ten. I grew up in Kansas City, and then I went to vet school at Kansas State.”

  “But you moved back here? I don’t hear that a lot.”

  “Oh, it’s a complicated family drama. My grandfather needed help, and I was the only one willing to uproot myself to go back home. I guess the fact that I still thought of Stanton as home even years after we moved away made me realize it was something I needed to do.”

  “I know exactly what you mean.”

  I was enjoying my conversation with Dr. Lucas, but I heard a tapping behind me on the row of windows that separated the treatment room from the garage. When I looked over my shoulder, I saw Jeannie Samper waving at me.

  “Don’t worry, I’ve got this,” Dr. Lucas told me. “You don’t have to stay in here. Go talk to Jeannie.”

  “Are you sure? I’m happy to help. I’ve done it before. I’m practically a vet tech.”

  “It’s fine. If I need another pair of hands, I’ll shout.”

  I felt the tiniest twinge of disappointment at being dismissed, but I left him alone with the owl. Outside the treatment room, Jeannie greeted me with a hug. I apologized for coming so late, but she waved it off as if it were nothing. The two of us watched Dr. Lucas through the glass as he tended to the owl. You can always tell someone who loves animals. His movements were quick, firm, and tender as he prepared to sedate the bird in order to X-ray its wing.

  “So Dr. Tim has a partner now,” I said. “Amazing.”

  “Yeah, I never thought I’d see the day,” Jeannie agreed. “I like Lucas. He’s very capable. And very charming.”

  “He sure seems to be.”

  Jeannie winked at me. “Unmarried, too.”

  I shrugged off her comment. Jeannie’s mission in life was to fix me up. “Yeah, well, who has the time?”

  “Uh-huh. You never have time if you don’t make time, Shelby Lake. Come on, let me fix you a cup of tea, and we can chat.”

  I had an hour’s drive home ahead of me, and I was anxious to get back on the road, but I never turned down tea with Jeannie. She grew her own, and her kids sold it at farmers markets during the summer. Once you’d had her tea, you really couldn’t drink store-bought anymore.

  Jeannie led me up an old narrow staircase with boards that creaked and shifted under my feet. In the second-floor family room, I plopped down on her threadbare sofa as she went into the kitchen to boil water. She had a homemade, lemon-scented candle burning; that was the only light. The doors to the other upstairs rooms were closed. Everyone else was sleeping.

  She returned shortly with tea for me in a china mug that looked as if it had been around for decades. The flower design on it was faded. She had her own tea in a ceramic mug with a logo for the Stanton Raptor Center. Nothing matched around here, and that was fine.

  “Here you go, sweetie.”

  Jeannie sank into a glider opposite me and pushed herself relentlessly back and forth with one leg on the floor. She was forty years old, with prematurely silver hair that was tied in a bun behind her head. Having four kids, she always said, was what had turned her gray. She was tall and very heavy, but her weight didn’t slow her down. I’d never seen her when she wasn’t busy doing three things at once. As she drank her tea, she turned on the television and muted it, fanned herself with a magazine, and fiddled with the baby monitor that let us listen to the noise of her six-month-old, Hildy, in the nursery.

  Life for Jeannie was a constant juggling act, but she never showed any stress about it. Despite the pressures of running the raptor center, she and her husband managed to find time to homeschool all of their kids. Their oldest, Matthew, was sixteen, as deeply religious as his parents, and had already been accepted to college at Northwestern in
the fall. The two middle kids were just as bright.

  “What an awful thing about Jeremiah Sloan,” Jeannie said. “Are you any closer to finding him?”

  “Not so far.”

  “If this happened to one of my kids, I think I’d be driving up and down every street in the county shouting their name. Dennis must be a wreck.”

  “He is. They all are.”

  “People are saying that someone grabbed him. Is that true? It’s hard to believe around here.”

  “We’re not sure what happened yet,” I said cautiously.

  “Well, I have two boys. Don’t rule out the possibility that Jeremiah wandered off on his own and got into trouble. That’s what boys do.”

  “We’re not ruling anything out yet.”

  Jeannie opened her mouth as if to say something more, but then she closed it again. She sipped her tea, and her round face in the flickering glow of the candle looked troubled. She played with a loose strand of her gray hair and pushed back and forth in the glider.

  “Jeannie? Is there something else?”

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s nothing. I shouldn’t say anything. I don’t like to be a gossip.”

  “Jeremiah’s missing. This is no time to hold something back.”

  Jeannie put down her mug on the coffee table between us. No one could hear us, but she leaned forward in the glider and whispered anyway. “Well, you know I see Dennis a lot. Either he’s over here, or I’m in the ranger station.”

  “Of course.”

  Dennis’s job in the national forest meant that he was often discovering birds that needed treatment at Jeannie’s center. When healthy birds were ready to be rereleased into the wild, Jeannie worked with Dennis to do so deep in the forest land. That shared bond had made them good friends over the years.

  “There was this odd little thing last fall,” she went on. “It makes me kind of uncomfortable to talk about it. I mean, I know the kind of man Dennis is, and I’ve made peace with that, but I don’t like being recruited as a coconspirator.”

  My eyes narrowed with concern. “Go on.”

  “I was with him at the ranger station, and he asked if my son Matthew would be willing to babysit for Jeremiah that Saturday night. All night. He was wondering if Matthew could sleep over at his house.”

  “Why didn’t he have Adrian do it?”

  “That’s the thing. Ellen and Adrian were both out of town. She was off at some retail conference in New Orleans, and Adrian went with her.”

  “Ah.” I got the picture.

  “Yes, you see why it bothered me, right? Dennis was going to be gone all night, and he wanted a babysitter from Stanton, not Everywhere. He didn’t want the news getting around. I was pretty sure he was having an affair and looking for a way to hide it.”

  “Well, I doubt it’s the first time, if you believe the rumors.”

  “Oh, I’m sure that’s true. Like I say, I know Dennis, warts and all. I wasn’t crazy about it, but I agreed to let Matthew do it. He’s been trying to save money to buy a telescope, and Dennis was offering a hundred dollars to have him stay over. I knew Matthew could use the cash.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Well, it seemed to go fine. Matthew and Jeremiah hung out watching TV and playing video games during the evening, and then he got Jeremiah ready for bed around nine thirty. No problem. Except I got a call from Matthew at one in the morning. He was in a panic.”

  “Why?”

  “He went to check on Jeremiah before he went to bed himself. The boy wasn’t in his room.”

  “He was gone?”

  “Yes. Matthew was about to call 911, but I told him first to search the house and then walk around the yard to see if he could find the boy anywhere. That’s what he did. Matthew found Jeremiah hanging out on the back porch below his bedroom window. He said he’d climbed down to watch the stars.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Well, Matthew was pretty sure that Jeremiah was lying. The boy wasn’t in his pajamas anymore. He’d changed clothes. And his shoes were all muddy, like he’d been off in the woods somewhere. Matthew asked him about it, but the boy swore he hadn’t been anywhere. He said he went out in the middle of the lawn, and that was that.”

  “But?” I asked, because I could tell the story wasn’t over.

  “But Matthew said something else, too. He told me the boy looked really, really scared. I mean, the poor kid was trembling. It was like Jeremiah had seen a monster.”

  Chapter Twenty

  I slept through my alarm on Sunday morning. Instead of waking up at five thirty, I woke up at seven. My father was already gone. His cruiser wasn’t in the driveway. I got ready quickly and then made my usual stop at the Nowhere Café for breakfast. Like last night, the tables were filled with out-of-towners.

  I called out my order to Breezy and took a seat at the counter next to Adam. He was on the same stool he’d been at the previous night, looking as if he’d never left, except for the fact that he was back in his deputy’s uniform. His eyes were bloodshot and rimmed with dark circles, his hair was dirty, and he had a pot of coffee and four aspirin on the counter in front of him, the universal clues of someone nursing a hangover.

  “You get the license plate?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Of the truck that ran you over.”

  “Ha. Funny.”

  I laughed, but Adam didn’t. He popped all of the aspirin onto his tongue and washed it down with coffee.

  “Has my father been in here?”

  “Yeah, he already went over to the office.”

  “I bet he complimented you on your appearance.”

  “The subject came up,” Adam replied.

  I laughed again, because I could imagine how that conversation had gone. “Well, don’t let Agent Reed see you looking like this. He won’t be impressed either. He’ll send you off to investigate more toilets.”

  Adam’s face had the mournful look of a bloodhound. “Too late.”

  “Why? Reed’s already been in here?”

  “No, I did something stupid last night.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “Oh, Adam, what did you do?”

  “I was pissed off about getting shut out of the investigation. And I was hammered. So I called him.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “I left a message. It was an epic rant. I’m pretty sure my career is over. What the hell, it’s probably better that way. I suck. Everything I touch, I screw up.”

  I put a hand on his back, because Adam looked as if he might cry. I’d never seen him so upset. “Hey, come on. It happens. Cut yourself some slack, okay? It’s been a tough couple of days for all of us, and none of us have gotten much sleep. Besides, you don’t report to the FBI. You report to my father.”

  Adam shrugged off my reassurance. He was feeling sorry for himself, and I couldn’t really blame him. “If the FBI wants me gone, I’m gone. Reed talks to Violet, Violet talks to Tom, Tom kicks me to the curb. You know that’s how it goes.”

  “I’ll talk to Agent Reed,” I promised him.

  “It won’t do any good.”

  “You don’t know that. And no matter what the FBI or Violet says, Dad’s not going to fire you for one mistake. He may read you the riot act, but that’s all. He knows you’re good at the job.”

  Breezy showed up in front of me, bringing coffee and a short stack of blueberry pancakes. She looked as bright as the morning sunshine, her long hair was washed, her makeup was neatly done, and she had a spring in her step. I wasn’t sure if it was the prospect of another day of big tips or whether she’d gotten lucky last night. Or both.

  “Adam telling you his tale of woe?” she asked.

  “Yup.”

&nb
sp; “He kept saying he was going to call that FBI guy, and I said, don’t do it! I tried to cheer him up, but he wanted to mope instead.” Breezy leaned over the counter until she was practically in Adam’s face. “And you know, Adam Twilley, most men like the way I cheer them up.”

  “Knock it off, Breezy,” Adam fumed. “I’m not in the mood.”

  I changed the subject before Adam blew up again. “So how’s Dudley? Back in the land of the living?”

  “Yeah, for the moment. Kenny at the Witch Tree garage went over to my place yesterday and tinkered with the engine. I was able to get it started this morning. Of course, then I practically ran out of gas on my way in. I thought I had a spare tank in the shed, but no such luck. I was afraid Dudley was going to sputter out before I made it here.”

  Breezy tended to ramble when she talked, so I tuned her out as I ate my pancakes. I had this strange habit of eating pancakes like the phases of the moon, and my breakfast was waxing gibbous when I heard Adam mutter a curse under his breath. His face looked gray as death. I followed his eyes and saw Agent Reed in the doorway of the diner. The FBI man wore a dark suit and had reflective sunglasses over his eyes. He beckoned me with his finger.

  “Stay put,” I murmured to Adam. “Don’t say anything.”

  I figured we didn’t need a confrontation between Adam and Agent Reed in front of a dozen reporters. As it was, questions about the investigation flew as soon as they spotted Reed, but he stood near the door without responding, as if he were stone deaf. I left my pancakes behind, threw some money on the counter, and hurried over to join him. He held the door open for me, and we stood on the sidewalk together outside.

  “Good morning, Deputy Lake.”

  “Hi. Listen, I hear that Adam left an unfortunate message for you last night, and I just want you to know—”