He cut me off. “If Deputy Twilley has anything to say, he can say it to me himself. Don’t fight his battles for him.”
“Sure. Of course.”
“We don’t have any time for distractions. There’s been a break in the case.”
I felt my heart rise into my mouth, giving me a bitter taste. I was afraid of what he would say next. “Did you find Jeremiah?”
Agent Reed shook his head. “No, but we found the missing F-150.”
*
The white truck was in a parking lot near the beach at Shelby Lake.
Obviously, this was an area I knew well. I’d spent many hours here throughout my life, looking out at the cove where my father had moored his boat between the trees and thinking about the strange circumstances that had brought him home to rescue me. This was my sacred place, the small lake that had been touched by God.
To everyone else in Mittel County, of course, it was just a quiet destination for avid fishermen like Dad or Adam and teenagers looking for a make-out spot where the cops wouldn’t find you. Its location wasn’t really all that far from Martin’s Point, where the truck had been stolen, but it felt remote compared to that busy tourist town. If you’d swiped a truck and wanted to party in a place where no one would find you, this was a good spot.
The same was true if you’d kidnapped a child.
In the early morning hours, the F-150 was the only vehicle in the parking lot. It was wet with leaves and pine needles that had been swept from the trees. The area was paved, so there were no tire tracks. An FBI forensics team surrounded the truck, examining it inside and out. Another team patrolled the beach, hunting for evidence of anyone who had been here, and still another team hunted through the park’s garbage cans.
At least twenty cops and volunteers were spread out through the surrounding forest, on a search for Jeremiah.
“Who found the truck?” I asked Agent Reed.
“A fisherman got here at dawn. He remembered the media reports about the F-150 and called it in.”
“Is there any way to tell how long it’s been here?”
Reed surveyed the parking lot with a frown. “No, our search grid hadn’t covered this area yet, so we don’t know when the truck was abandoned. Hopefully, someone will come forward and let us know whether they saw it in the parking lot in the last couple of days.”
One of the FBI forensic analysts, who was robed completely in white, called Agent Reed over for a conversation.
I stared at the F-150 and tried to connect the dots in my head.
On Friday morning, this truck had been parked half a block from Bonnie Butterfield’s ice cream parlor in Martin’s Point. It had been stolen sometime after eleven o’clock, and barely two hours later, the Gruders had spotted someone in a white F-150 near the spot where Jeremiah disappeared. Maybe it was this truck. Maybe not. Now it was Sunday morning, and the truck from Martin’s Point had been found abandoned in an area that was nowhere near the national forest.
Reed returned and peeled off his sunglasses. “There’s nothing in the truck.”
“No evidence that Jeremiah was inside?”
“No evidence that anyone was inside. The truck has been wiped down. No fingerprints anywhere, not even inside the flat bed. In your experience, are teenage joyriders that good at covering their tracks?”
“No.”
“Yeah, that’s what’s I think, too. Kids didn’t do this. It was a thorough job. Someone didn’t want us finding anything.”
“You think this is the truck, don’t you?”
“Without more evidence, we can’t be one hundred percent sure. But if you want to know what my gut tells me, then yes, this is the truck, and yes, it’s connected to Jeremiah’s disappearance.”
“What does that mean?”
Reed studied the searchers in the forest, pushing shoulder to shoulder through the underbrush. “If Jeremiah was inside that truck, then either someone brought him here to the lake after kidnapping him, or someone abandoned the truck here to throw us off the scent and make us search in the wrong place. Either way, I don’t like the fact that he’s done with it.”
I understood the implications.
If the kidnapper was done with the truck, then it was possible he was done with Jeremiah, too. Neither of us wanted to say it out loud, but I began to fear that we would never find the boy alive.
Sunday was already off to a bad start, and as Agent Reed and I stood near the waters of Shelby Lake, it only got worse. I heard the ping of a text arriving on my phone. It was Monica Constant sending me a message. I checked it and then gave Reed the news.
“The police in Stanton have found a body.”
Chapter Twenty-One
No, it wasn’t Jeremiah.
The body was Paul Nadler, the ninety-four-year-old Alzheimer’s patient who had wandered away from his nursing home on Friday morning. We’d feared for months that something bad would happen to Mr. Nadler when he made one of his escapes, and something finally did.
A river runs through the heart of Stanton. It’s not a big river like the Mississippi; it’s more of a creek that ebbs and flows with the rainfall. On Friday, when Mr. Nadler disappeared, it would have been a trickle under the Oak Street bridge, but on Saturday night, the heavy storm would have swelled it into a torrent racing through the land south of town.
The Oak Street bridge was only four blocks from Mr. Nadler’s nursing home. Anyone sitting under the bridge deck would have been invisible from the street, so it wasn’t a surprise that no one had found him. The Stanton police suspected that he’d died down there, and the next day, when the rains came, his body had been picked up by the swollen currents and tumbled downstream. An organic farmer driving into town for the Sunday open-air market had spotted Mr. Nadler’s body two miles south of town on the grassy riverbank beside the highway.
Nadler was dressed the way he’d been when he wandered away on Friday, in a blue button-down dress shirt, a plaid blazer with patches on the elbows, pleated tan slacks, and natty wing tips he’d probably owned for thirty years. His leather wallet was found still buttoned into his back pocket, and it contained twenty-six soggy dollars, a frequent-buyer punch card from a long-closed Stanton restaurant, and a laminated photograph of his late wife. His face in death was utterly peaceful.
The discovery of a dead body so soon after Jeremiah’s disappearance triggered Agent Reed’s rule that when two unusual things happen in close proximity, it was important to look for connections. As a result, the FBI forensics team took control of the death investigation and was planning to oversee the autopsy. However, there was no sign of foul play and no violence to the body other than the postmortem injuries of the river currents. To me, it looked as if Mr. Nadler had gone to sleep under the bridge and never awakened. All in all, in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t seem like a bad way to leave this world.
Even so, it made me sad. I was sad for Mr. Nadler dying alone. I wondered what he remembered of his life when he left and whether he had any thoughts about his family or friends. Most of all, I was sad because when I looked at the body on the riverbank, I didn’t see Mr. Nadler’s face. I saw my father’s face. I saw my proud, strong father stripped of who he was, unable to pick up a fork and tell you what it was used for. I had a vision of the future, and it filled me with dread.
“Do you need me here?” I asked Agent Reed.
“No, not for a while. Do you have somewhere you need to be?”
“I thought I would walk the route from the nursing home to the river bridge and see if Mr. Nadler left anything behind.”
“Okay. That’s a good idea. Come back here when you’re done.”
But I could tell he knew that this man’s death meant more to me on a personal level than I was sharing. I was sure Violet had told him about my father, and it wasn’t a big leap from there.
I drove alone in
to the heart of Stanton, past the chain restaurants, past the Walmart. I found the three-story senior apartment building where Mr. Nadler had lived. It didn’t look much different from the outside than a building where twenty- and thirtysomethings would live. Two cars from the Stanton Sheriff’s office were in the parking lot, and no doubt they were breaking the bad news to the residents and staff.
I parked in front of the building and crossed the street. There was a mailbox, a bus stop, and a McDonald’s on the opposite side. One of the times Mr. Nadler had disappeared, he’d been found in the children’s playland inside McDonald’s, jumping with the kids in the bouncy castle.
Oak Street ran next to the McDonald’s through a leafy suburban neighborhood. As I walked on the sidewalk, the sun came and went through the trees. Death shouldn’t have been stalking such a perfect Sunday morning. Ahead of me, I could see the river bridge. It took me only a few minutes to get there on foot. I walked halfway out onto the bridge, then looked down over the railing at the swift waters below me. In the hours since the rain, the level had already dropped, but it was still a miniature version of whitewater rapids rushing around gentle curves toward the southern end of town. When I looked behind me, I could still see Mr. Nadler’s apartment building a few blocks away.
I retraced my steps to the riverbank and made my way down the grassy slope, which was wet and slick. A concrete walkway bordered the river, but the water level had risen above it. I peered under the bridge itself, trying to see between the support posts. Staying above the waterline, I side-stepped along the sharp slope of a retaining wall under the bridge deck. I was surprised to find someone sitting there, only inches away from the rushing water.
It was Dr. Lucas from the raptor center. He hadn’t noticed me yet. He was staring at the current as if he were hypnotized.
“Well, hello,” I said.
He looked at me when he heard my voice. I’d startled him, and he had to place me in his memory. “Oh. Hello. It’s Shelby, isn’t it? This is a surprise.”
“Yes, I didn’t expect to see you again so soon. How’s my owl?”
“I expect it to make a full recovery. The injury to the wing wasn’t serious.”
“That’s good. I’m glad to hear it.”
He took note of my uniform. “I’m sorry, Jeannie didn’t mention that you were with the police.”
“Mittel County, not Stanton. There was a body found downriver this morning. I’m here with the FBI to make sure there’s no connection to the missing boy from Everywhere.”
“Yes, I know about the body,” Lucas replied.
“Oh?”
“He was my grandfather. Paul Nadler. That’s my name, too. Lucas Nadler.”
I carefully slid down onto the concrete slope next to him. The river slapped loudly against the stone. It was darker and cooler here in the shadows of the bridge. “I’m so sorry. You mentioned your grandfather last night, but I didn’t make the connection. I don’t think Jeannie ever mentioned your last name.”
“Yes, that’s the vet world. I’m always Dr. Lucas, never Dr. Nadler. I prefer it that way, to be honest. It’s more personal.”
“Well, I apologize for pulling you away in the middle of a family crisis. I mean, to take care of the owl.”
“No, I was glad to do it. I needed to think about my work for a while and not about Grampa Paul. I’ve been a wreck since Friday, not knowing where he was. At least something like this reminds you how people pitch in to help. The police and the people at the facility have been great. Jeannie, too. The two of us drove all over town looking for him.”
“I know this didn’t end the way you were hoping. All I can say is, I saw his body. There were no signs of distress or pain.”
“Yes, I was there earlier when the Stanton police called me, and I thought the same thing. He looked as if he’d just slipped away. Still, I wish I’d been with him. The police think he probably came down here to the river from the nursing home, so I figured I’d come here, too. I figured maybe his spirit would be hanging around for a while. I suppose that sounds foolish.”
“No. It doesn’t.”
Lucas smiled at me. I thought the same thing I’d thought last night. He had a nice smile that went from his mouth all the way up into his blue eyes. His long blond hair was messy across his shoulders.
“I came back to Stanton because Grampa Paul needed help. I was hoping to take care of him myself, but by the time I moved here, it was obvious he needed more care than I could give. That’s why I moved him to the facility. It’s not a bad place, even though it can be awfully depressing.”
“We got the reports over in Everywhere every time Mr. Nadler wandered away. It seemed like they couldn’t keep track of him.”
Lucas laughed sadly. “Well, don’t blame them too much. Grampa Paul was like Houdini. An escape artist. We tried GPS trackers; he found a way to take them off. The elevators were locked out, but somehow he always managed to slip away from the dining room. The police would call when they found him, and I’d go talk to him wherever he was and take him back there. He hated it. He’d cry when I left. It broke my heart.”
It broke my heart, too.
“If you don’t mind a personal question, did he know who you were?”
Lucas’s face got a faraway look. “Occasionally. Just for a moment or two. Most of the time, no. I was in there somewhere, though. He’d talk about things we did together when I was a kid, but he didn’t realize that it was me sitting there with him. Still, I liked hearing the old stories. It was a comfort knowing there were bits and pieces of him that the disease hadn’t taken, even if he couldn’t connect them to reality anymore. He’d talk about this resort we used to visit during the summers, and for him it was like we’d just been there the previous weekend. Or he’d laugh about the ant farm he built for me and how all the ants got loose and sent my grandmother screaming out of the house. I remember when that happened. I was probably seven at the time. But he thought the two of them still lived in the old house. He’d ask me over and over where my grandmother was. To him, she was still alive. Still the most beautiful woman he’d ever met.”
“That’s sad, but it’s sweet, too.”
“Well, as I say, it was nice knowing the disease hadn’t wiped out everything.”
The two of us were quiet for a while. I was comfortable sitting with him. It occurred to me that he was one of the few people I’d met who had been through what was ahead for me. I didn’t like talking about it, but Lucas made me feel safe.
“My father,” I murmured.
He looked at me. “What about him?”
“It’s starting.”
Lucas understood immediately. “I’m so sorry, Shelby.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“How old is he?”
“Only fifty-five. It’s early onset. His parents went the same way.”
“There are things that can be done now to slow it down.”
“I know. We’ll explore everything.”
“Well, if I can help at all—”
“I appreciate it.” I checked my watch and saw that a lot of time had passed while I was sitting there. “I really need to go.”
“Of course.”
I pushed myself to my feet and brushed dirt off the slacks of my uniform. “What’s next for you? You came home because of your grandfather. Will you leave now that he’s gone?”
“No, I don’t think so. I like it here. I always have.”
“Well, good. And thank you again for taking care of the owl last night.”
“It was my pleasure.”
“Goodbye, Dr. Lucas.”
“Please, let’s drop the ‘doctor,’ okay?”
I smiled. “Okay. Lucas.”
“I really am sorry to hear about your father, Shelby. Believe me, I understand what you’re going through. If you’d like to talk more, I’m
always happy to do that. Maybe we could meet for dinner sometime.”
It was a kind, generous offer that also sounded suspiciously like a date.
“Maybe we could,” I replied. “I’d like that.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Agent Reed and I had an hour alone as we drove back to Everywhere from Stanton, and I used the time to try to save Adam’s job. Yes, I knew he wouldn’t lift a finger to help me if the tables were turned, but I didn’t want to see him get fired for one stupid mistake. So I talked up Adam as much as I could, and Reed heard me out. Then, without a word, he took his phone from his pocket and played me the voicemail message. It was even worse than Adam had described it. He was obviously so drunk he could hardly talk, and I could hear the beat of the rain and rock music in the background as he tried to form his words. Most of what came out were four-letter obscenities. At some point, the reality of what he was doing must have dawned on him because he cut it off in midsentence. But the damage was already done.
“Well, that was bad,” I admitted, because there wasn’t anything else I could say.
Agent Reed didn’t react, other than a grim little smile. He simply put his phone back in his pocket. I was silent for the rest of the drive.
When we reached Everywhere, we went directly to the Sloan house. There was still a crowd of neighbors inside, helping the family. Trina was back, and she answered the door. She led us into the living room where Ellen and Dennis were waiting. Reed wanted to give them an update about the F-150 before news broke in the media. I knew the discovery didn’t bode well for finding Jeremiah, so when Reed asked to be alone with the Sloans, I was happy to bow out of the conversation. The three of them went downstairs. Trina and I left the other neighbors in the living room and went upstairs to see Anna, who was hanging out in Jeremiah’s bedroom.
The door to the boy’s room was at the end of the hallway. I headed that way, but Trina stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. We hadn’t turned on the light, so her face was in shadow. I didn’t see any emotion there, which wasn’t unusual. Even so, I knew she had something to say to me.
The Deep, Deep Snow Page 13
