The Deep, Deep Snow

by Brian Freeman

  After he left, I couldn’t stay there. I had to go. I turned around and hiked through the long grass until I couldn’t see Keith’s house or barn anymore. His land went on for many more acres, but the woods took over. I saw a rough trail matted down in the underbrush, and I followed it. I knew where I was. I could keep going for less than a mile and arrive where the Sloans lived. This was the route Jeremiah would have taken, flashlight in hand, on November 14. I’d always thought of him as a shy follower, not a brave kid, but there he was, alone at night, out looking for the Ursulina. Just like I’d done at the same age.

  I’d been on this trail many times myself over the years. Sometimes I’d come here alone, sometimes with Rose, sometimes with Trina and the rest of the Striker girls. I recognized old-growth trees that had been here my whole life. I saw glacial rocks where I used to sit and listen to the birds. If you dug down under the moss, you’d find places where I’d scratched my initials.

  Another quarter mile took me to the place we called Black Lake. It was the haunted lake in the valley with the trees sprouting from the water, where we would dare each other to swim after we told scary stories about what was lurking below. The wind scraped low branches across the lake’s surface and caused ripples. By the shore, I saw a high boulder we used to climb to jump into the water. I could still hear the echo of our squeals and screams. I climbed the boulder again, like I used to do when I was a kid. It was high enough for you to think you were queen of the world up there. You could see the whole lake edge to edge, and it was really just a large pond, barely a hundred yards across. Part of me thought about taking off my clothes and jumping in the way I had years ago. But I didn’t.

  Below me, I saw a clearing where we would lay after swimming. You couldn’t really call it a beach, because there was no sand, just a few feet of low weeds where we would spread out our towels.

  When I looked closely, I saw something in the clearing.

  What I saw made me jump down the sheer side of the boulder near the water, almost twisting my ankle in the process. I fought through an overgrown patch of snakeroot and broke into the open, and there they were.

  Stones.

  Towers of stones.

  At least two dozen of them, made of the kind of flat gray rocks I’d seen in a plastic bucket in Jeremiah’s bedroom. Some of the towers were only a few inches high; others had tumbled over and lay in piles; others had somehow survived the wind and rain to stay standing a foot or more above the weeds. I knew what these were. These were cairns.

  Built for the dead.

  I had no doubt that Jeremiah had built them. He’d seen a woman killed on this land, and this was his way of making peace with it. But it wasn’t just the stones themselves that caught my eye. Something sparkled in the brush near one of the cairns, as if it had been placed atop the tower and fallen down. It was shiny even under the dark sky and the thick cover of trees. I knelt and stared at it. It was a ring, made of yellow gold, with a single large square-cut diamond mounted in the center.

  A wedding ring.

  I put on a plastic glove from my pocket and picked up the ring to examine it. There was no inscription. Nothing to identify its former owner. Even so, I knew whose finger it had been taken from. Hurriedly. In the dark. While her dead body was still warm.

  When I looked at the still surface of the lake, I also knew what we would find when we searched under the water. The stories of Black Lake hiding something horrible were true.

  Colleen Whalen’s jewelry had never been stolen by a burglar.

  It had been here the whole time.

  *

  You see, Keith made a mistake.

  Panicked people covering up crimes often do.

  He’d put all of his wife’s jewelry in a plastic bag that night. His expensive dress watch, too. Maybe if he’d disposed of the pieces separately, we wouldn’t have found them, but when the FBI dragged the silty, muddy lake bed, they located the plastic bag, filled with water under its loose knot. Everything Keith had removed from their bedroom was still inside.

  I imagined him frantically gathering up things that night to make us believe that a thief had killed Colleen. But would a thief leave her diamond ring behind? No. So he ripped it off her finger as he was heading for the woods and must have shoved it carelessly in his pocket. Somewhere on his way to the lake in the darkness, he’d lost the ring. And sometime after that, Jeremiah had found it.

  But Colleen’s jewelry wasn’t the only thing that Keith had hidden to get away with murder and hide his guilt.

  He’d put the gun in the bag, too.

  The gun that killed her.

  With that discovery, we finally had everything we needed to solve Colleen’s murder. Dad arrested Keith Whalen and took him away. Soon enough he would be headed to trial and then headed to prison. I was pretty sure that he would never be coming home.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Looking back, I think of the search for Jeremiah in two phases. The beginning and the end.

  I say that with the perspective of time, because like I told you, all of this happened more than ten years ago. I’m no longer the young twenty-five-year old I was then. I didn’t know it at the time, but with the arrest of Keith Whalen, the beginning was about to be over. There was never really a middle in this case, just years of nothingness. And the end—well, the end was still a long way into the future.

  Six weeks after Jeremiah disappeared, school began again without him. Summer was over. Life was moving on for everyone in town. The FBI had left town three weeks earlier with the case still formally unsolved. There were no more volunteers filling up the motels. The media had long since let the mystery fall out of the headlines. News feeds the beast, and when there’s no news to report, the beast moves on to new territory.

  It’s not like we were going to forget Jeremiah, but there comes a point in every investigation where there are simply no more clues, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t create them. You can keep the file open. You can pull it out every few months and read it again and try to think of things you’ve missed. And then you realize that all you can do is put the file back and wait. Wait for something to happen. Wait for a break in the case that might never come.

  I could see all that ahead of us as I sat in the Nowhere Café that September night with Dad, Monica, and Adam. We were finally getting back to our old routines. I was texting Jeannie Samper about my next volunteer shift at the raptor center. Monica was reading spicy excerpts of a romance novel to Moody in his urn. Adam was flipping through the pages of a motorcycle magazine. Dad had his newspaper open to the crossword puzzle.

  “A destination for the well-meaning traveler,” he announced to the three of us as he twirled a sharpened pencil in his hand. “Four letters. Anyone? Any ideas?”

  I was the only one paying attention. “Do you have any of the letters, Dad?”

  “I don’t.”

  I thought hard about the clue, but that’s the worst way to solve a puzzle. You can’t force it, you have to let it come to you. Sooner or later, at the strangest times, the answers would pop into my head, long after they didn’t matter anymore.

  A destination for the well-meaning traveler. I had nothing.

  Dad waited until it was obvious that I couldn’t help him, and then he buried himself in the other clues of the crossword again. He looked oddly free. Ever since he’d decided not to run for reelection, a burden had been lifted from him. He no longer had anything to prove. It had been good for his mind, too, without the stress. He was a little sharper. He’d had fewer incidents. All that was good. But I was under no illusions about where this was going, and neither was he.

  I saw Breezy behind the counter wielding a knife on a cherry pie. She wandered over to our booth with a slice of pie à la mode for Adam. He hadn’t ordered it, but she knew what he liked. She wore a big red button on her jean shirt that read Sheriff Twilley. Ada
m had been passing them out for weeks.

  “On the house,” she told him with a wink. “Or is that too much like a bribe now that you’re going to be a big shot and all?”

  A satisfied grin crept across Adam’s face as he cut into the pie with his spoon. “We’ll just call it a campaign contribution.”

  Yes, Adam was going to be my new boss. I’d made my peace with that. Only days after my father announced he was stepping down, Adam had let me know that he was running to replace him. His mother was happy to see him doing something important with his life. Most of us thought he was still too young, but he had the advantage of being the only candidate interested in the position. He’d also courted Violet Roka, and Violet had persuaded the county board to endorse him. So we all knew the job was his. Being young wasn’t necessarily a problem. Dad had been young when he got the job, too.

  I had a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of Sheriff Twilley, but I hoped he’d grow into it. I had to admit he’d changed over the course of the summer. I hadn’t seen him with a drink since he launched his campaign. He’d dialed back the sexual innuendo and flirting with every girl he met, including me. He’d even asked my opinion on a case a couple of times. All in all, this was a new Adam. I guess sometimes the position makes the man.

  Was I disappointed that Adam’s decision meant I wouldn’t be sheriff of Mittel County myself? Not really. I’d never been ambitious in that way. Dad had been hoping to hand the keys to me, but I didn’t care. Anyway, I had his health to think about. I had Trina and Anna to think about, too, because Trina wasn’t doing well. My life was going to be busy enough.

  So you see, we were all moving on.

  I listened to the murmur of talk in the diner that night, and I realized I hadn’t heard Jeremiah’s name once. Not once. That was a first. The talk was about the new school year, the end of the state fair, the end of summer, the grouse hunting season, the announcement that Rose was putting the Rest in Peace up for sale, and the lineup of country concerts at the Indian casino near Stanton.

  But not Jeremiah.

  Most locals thought they already knew what had happened to Jeremiah. To the police and FBI, the case was still open, but not to the people here. They blamed Keith Whalen. He was guilty. If you murdered your wife, it wasn’t a big leap to imagine killing a child to cover it up. You could have surveyed anyone in the diner that night, and they would have told you that Keith had discovered that Jeremiah saw him shoot Colleen. Maybe the boy had confessed it one of the times he’d wandered up to Keith’s house. Or maybe Keith had seen the boy and his cairns near Black Lake and asked him why he was building those little towers of stone on his land.

  However it happened, Keith found out. So he kidnapped Jeremiah and killed him and hid his body in one of those remote places in the north woods that no one would ever find. Maybe Anna’s dream was right and he’d carved a cross on a birch tree near the grave, too.

  Jeremiah wasn’t coming back. The man who’d killed him was already in jail. The people of Everywhere were ready to put this tragedy behind them and start living their lives again.

  But first, Jeremiah had to be avenged.

  First, the past had to be erased.

  As the four of us sat in the booth at the Nowhere, Monica’s phone rang. Her emergency phone. She answered it, her face fell, and she looked at us with an expression that said we should all have been expecting this.

  “Fire,” she said.

  *

  The flames had already consumed most of Keith’s house by the time we got there. Even from a hundred yards away, I felt the ferocious heat on my face. Gray smoke billowed against the black sky, and we had to cover our mouths and noses to keep the poison out of our lungs. Ash fell around us and floated like snow in the air. Night turned to day. The crackle of burning wood sounded like the growl of the Ursulina.

  As I watched, the roof of the house caved inward and the walls bent and collapsed in mountainous showers of sparks. On the other side of the shallow hill, I saw a second plume of smoke, where the barn burned, devouring my memories. There was nothing to be done. None of it could be saved. The firefighters used their water on the surrounding grass and trees to keep the flames from spreading to the forest. Fortunately, the wind barely moved that night, and after a while, a light drizzle began to fall, sizzling into steam as it tamped down the flames.

  Six teenagers sat in handcuffs in the back of two of our cruisers. They were all boys from the high school. Adrian Sloan was among them. We’d caught the kids as they were scrambling to escape the scene. They’d stayed too long to watch their handiwork. I knew they’d be punished, but I didn’t think a judge would be too harsh with minors, not when one of them had lost a brother. They’d probably get community service. After a while, their records would be cleared, and we’d all get on with the business of forgetting that Keith Whalen had ever lived in Everywhere.

  I stood there for hours that night, hypnotized by the fire. Even after it was out, I stayed. We had to make sure it didn’t catch again, and I was one of the volunteers who spent the entire night watching over the hot, soggy funeral pyre. When it was safe enough to get close, I walked the perimeter with my flashlight to see if anything had escaped. Any little piece of Keith and Colleen. I did the same at the barn. But the fire had been thorough and consumed everything except a few scorched beams and shards of melted glass.

  Was this justice?

  All I can tell you is what I believed that night. I believed that Keith lied to me. I believed he murdered his wife and covered it up, and I believed that twelve good men and women would pronounce him guilty. Was it an accident? Was it a crime of passion that got out of control? Was it a burst of rage that bubbled up out of the horrors of his past? Possibly. That was up to the judge and jury, and they could decide how long he would spend behind bars. Either way, he would pay for his crime.

  But Jeremiah?

  Call me naive if you want, but I wasn’t convinced that Keith Whalen had really taken that boy. If he had, we would have found Jeremiah’s body hidden under the water of Black Lake, like the evidence of Colleen’s murder. But we didn’t find him there.

  No.

  We hadn’t solved the mystery yet. We didn’t know the truth about Jeremiah. Back then, I wasn’t sure we would ever know what really happened.

  I remember wandering alone beside the remnants of the fire that night. You could say it’s burned into my memory. As I picked my way beside the ruins, I said one word aloud to myself. Just one word. Otherwise, I was quiet, feeling awed by the devastation.

  “Hell,” I murmured, staring at the scene.

  There was plenty in that twisted panorama of destruction to remind me of hell, but actually, I was thinking about Dad’s crossword puzzle. Like I told you, the answers usually come at the strangest moments, long after you’ve given up.

  Hell.

  The destination for a well-meaning traveler was hell. That was the where the road of good intentions usually led us.

  Part Two:

  The Well-Meaning Traveler

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Anna and I glided on cross-country skis through the fresh bed of snow filling the cemetery trails. She took the lead up and down the hills, and I followed. With each breath, we exhaled clouds of steam. The skeletal branches of the trees cradled the snow and shook wet, cold blasts into our faces as the wind blew. My cheeks felt numb. It was January 22, a bitter and blustery Monday morning, during one of those days-long stretches of winter gray where you wonder if the sun still exists.

  Ahead of me, Anna brought herself to a stop halfway down the shallow slope. She leaned on one of her ski poles and stared into the thick of the forest. I pulled up beside her. Among the shaggy pines and flaky white trunks of the young birches stood the massive gnarled body of the famous Mittel County beech tree we called Bartholomew. The tree had survived storms and fires for more than two hundred y
ears. Its roots dug into the ground like fingers, and its many fat arms made it look like a troll that had been turned to stone. If you grew up in Everywhere, you almost certainly paid a visit to Bartholomew on a sixth grade science outing.

  Two of Bartholomew’s finger-roots had grown apart over the decades to create a deep hollow like a cave. I’d written a song once about Barty’s Hollow, one of the songs I played for kids on my guitar during Sunday story time at the library. The chorus went like this:

  It’s big enough to build a house

  But don’t you go inside

  ’Cause wolverines and sleeping bears

  Use the cave to hide!

  “Think there’s a sleeping bear inside?” Anna asked me. She remembered the song, too.

  “Could be,” I replied. In fact, the hollow made a perfect den, so I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find a black bear sleeping through the winter there.

  “Maybe we should check it out,” she said. “There could be cubs by now.”

  “Or we could just let sleeping bears lie.”

  Anna shrugged. She unhooked a plastic bottle from her belt and squirted cold water into her mouth. We’d been outside for twenty minutes, and the bottle was already partially frozen. I watched her eyes go from Bartholomew to the other trees around him, searching one by one among the birches. She did that wherever we were in the woods. I don’t think she realized that I noticed it, but I knew what she was looking for.

  A cross.

  After all this time, she was still hoping to find Jeremiah.

  Anna peeled a red balaclava from her head, letting her blond hair cascade below her shoulders. Her creamy skin had a pink flush from the cold. At twenty years old, she was now a beautiful young woman. She’d grown up tall and lean, with curves to make the rest of us jealous. She had dark eyebrows above pale-blue eyes and a face that looked stolen from a painting. When she smiled, she was the spitting image of her mother, and I felt like Trina was still with me.