The Deep, Deep Snow

by Brian Freeman

  “Did Rose tell you what this was about?” I asked.

  “No. She probably wants to sell me one of those new lakeside condos in Martin’s Point.”

  “Yeah, could be.”

  “Have you seen her recently?”

  “A couple of weeks ago. I had her out to see how much our house is worth.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at me. “You’re thinking of selling?”

  “I might have to, depending on what happens with Dad.”

  “Too bad. It’s a great place.”

  That was Adam. He had a hard time seeing past the surface of things. Yes, the house was a great place, but it was so much more than that to me. And the idea of selling it made me sick.

  The café door jingled again. This time, Rose Carter stood in the doorway. My childhood best friend. She was prosperous now, like Adam. Ten years in real estate had been much kinder to her than running the Rest in Peace motel. She was thinner thanks to a Nutrisystem diet, she’d grown out her red hair, and she’d traded in her camouflage wardrobe for wool business suits. Sometimes I didn’t even recognize her as the same person, but people change.

  Rose stood at the entrance of the Nowhere, halfway between in and out. The door was still partially open, and people grumbled at her because of the cold air blowing inside. She had a shoebox cradled in front of her with both hands, held with the kind of tenderness you’d use for a pet who had died. Her face looked like she’d come from a funeral. The others in the diner began to notice her demeanor, and the complaints about the winter breeze died away into an uncomfortable silence.

  We all knew there was something in that box.

  She walked toward me and Adam with the shoebox outstretched at the end of her arms. She put it on the counter and took two steps backward away from it, as if it had a kind of dangerous radiation that would seep into her bones. She didn’t take off the lid. Adam and I traded glances, and then, with the slightest nervousness, he popped open the top of the shoebox with one hand.

  I stood up and leaned over to get a better look at what was inside.

  When I did, I couldn’t help myself. I gasped.

  There are ordinary, unimportant objects in life that wind up filled with enormous meaning because of what they represent. You can feel it. You can feel the sacredness of those things. And that was true of what was in the box. It was old, dirty, and frayed, nothing more than trash, but it was something that all of us in Everywhere had waited ten years to find.

  It was a yellow Wilson shuttlecock.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Adam stared at the shoebox in complete disbelief. He reached inside as if he were going to pick up the shuttlecock, but then he pulled his hand back.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked Rose.

  She stood silently in the diner, and so Adam asked her again. “Rose? Where did you find this? Where did it come from?”

  Others from the diner got up from their tables and began to press around us to look inside, but Adam waved them back. The only one close enough to see inside the box was Breezy, and when she did, she screamed. “Is that from Jeremiah?”

  The buzz around us immediately intensified, and Adam slapped the cover back on the shoebox. He stood up from the chair and called to the people in the diner. “Everybody quiet, come on, pipe down. Let’s get to the bottom of this. Rose? I need you to tell me where this came from.”

  Rose had to catch her breath, and her voice was low enough that I had to strain to hear her. “I have a listing on the old Mittel Pines Resort, and I was showing the property to a potential buyer.”

  “The one out near me in Witch Tree?” Breezy asked. “That old wreck?”

  Rose nodded. “It’s been abandoned for more than twenty years. The county took it over when the owners walked away. I got a call this morning from a Chicago developer. He was in town and asked if I could show him the place. So we went up there.”

  Adam was anxious for her to get to the point.

  “The shuttlecock, Rose.”

  “Yes, sorry. Well, there are about thirty old cabins at the resort. Most have collapsed, but one of the larger cabins at the back is still mostly intact. Its chimney came down in the past couple of days. When my buyer and I were passing by, I saw something in the rubble, and I went to check it out. That’s where I found this. The shuttlecock must have been stuck up in the chimney, and when it collapsed, well, there it was.”

  “You should have left it there,” Adam said. “You should have called me.”

  “I guess so. Sorry, I didn’t really know what to do. All I could think about was Jeremiah.”

  That’s all I could think about, too.

  I could imagine the boy whacking the shuttlecock with his racket and chasing it, because that’s what boys do. And the birdies were always getting lost. Sometimes they’d get stuck in trees. Or they’d go over a fence. Or maybe, maybe, they would get stuck on the roof of an abandoned cabin. Up in the chimney where no one would see it or rescue it for years.

  The diner erupted with whispers. Everyone else was thinking the same thing.

  “Hang on, hang on, it might not mean anything at all,” Adam insisted, throwing cold water on our dreams. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We need to check it out before anyone gets excited. Shelby and I will go up to the resort with Rose and see what we can find.”

  He was right.

  There was nothing yet to tie this shuttlecock to Jeremiah. It might have been stuck up in the cabin chimney for decades, back to a time when the resort was open and families used to come up there on summer holidays to swim, camp, fish, grill steaks, and toast marshmallows over the fire. There were a thousand different children who might have lost it there.

  And yet despite those doubts, we knew. We all knew.

  Our missing boy had finally sent us a clue.

  *

  Now that Adam was the sheriff, I had a new partner to patrol the roads of Mittel County with me.

  My partner was Adrian Sloan.

  Adrian was twenty-six years old, still as bulky and strong as when he played football in high school. He came from two attractive parents, but he wasn’t a particularly handsome kid himself. He wore his sandy hair in a flat crew cut. His nose, which he’d broken more than once on the playing field, was like a misshapen meatball. The points on his jutting ears suggested a little Vulcan blood. He didn’t smile much, especially when I made jokes like that.

  I was a little surprised when he wanted to become a cop, but I guess losing his brother gave him a purpose in life. Adam was reluctant to hire him, but I pushed hard that we should say yes. Adrian had put his teenage mistakes in the past, and if we rejected every cop because they’d done stupid things in high school, we wouldn’t have many applicants left. He was solid and serious now. He’d married a sweet girl, and they had a one-year-old. I liked him.

  Adrian drove with his hands rigidly in the ten-and-two position, and he didn’t take his eyes off the bumper of Adam’s car ahead of us. Even for a quiet kid, he was unusually quiet today, which wasn’t surprising at all.

  “I know this is really hard for you,” I said.

  He shrugged, although it was hard to tell, because he had no neck.

  “You don’t have to come along. I can call you if we find anything or if we have questions for you.”

  “I want to be here.”

  “I know, but if you’re going to stay, you have to be a cop and put your emotions aside. Can you really do that?”

  Adrian chewed on that thought for a while without answering my question. The snow-covered evergreens flashed by on both sides of the highway. The cruiser was warm from the heat turned on high. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said finally, as if to prove he was thinking like a cop. “I don’t understand how Jer could have gotten to that resort. It’s thirty miles from where we lost him.”

  “W
ell, remember, this might not be related to him at all. We don’t know yet.”

  “Yeah, but if it is? I don’t get it.”

  “Obviously, someone took him there.”

  “To some old falling-down resort? Why? Why would they go there?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied, but I could think of several reasons, and none of them was good.

  Half an hour after we left the diner, we reached the town of Witch Tree, population 165. It was one of dozens of don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it towns in Mittel County. The dense forest loomed around the main street, as if waiting impatiently to creep back in and take over the land when the humans went away. We passed the Witch’s Brew, a bar and diner with a rough reputation. Then a Lutheran church that doubled as a senior center. A gas station. A car repair garage and parts store. A gun shop. And not much more than that. The few people who called Witch Tree home lived on dirt roads that crept through the woods like vole tracks on a spring lawn.

  We followed Adam in the car ahead of us. Rose was in the passenger seat beside him. They turned on one of the dirt roads half a mile past the bar, and I saw a small clearing where tall trees leaned dangerously over the roof of a mobile home. This was Breezy’s place. Her mailbox on the road didn’t have a number; it simply said, “Breezy.” Weeds poked out of the snow around the trailer, and I saw Dudley rusting under the pines near an old shed. The Ford Escort had finally died for good a few years back and never moved again.

  The slick, rutted dirt road continued into the trees. Unless you lived along here, you were probably going the wrong way. We drove slowly past the driveways of a few recluses living deep in the forest. A mile later, the road ended at a T-intersection. The left half of the T was really just a long driveway. A warped wooden arrow pointed the way, and the name Gruder was painted on the arrow in black. Will Gruder lived down there. The other direction was marked with a Dead End sign, and there was still a decades-old, barely legible poster for the Mittel Pines Resort sagging next to the road. We were two miles from the abandoned cabins.

  “This is pretty close to Will and Vince’s place,” I murmured.

  Adrian frowned. “Yeah.”

  “Think that means anything?”

  “No. No way.”

  But I wondered if that was just wishful thinking.

  “Did you used to come up here?” I asked him.

  “Me? No. Why?”

  “It was a hangout when I was in school. I came out here with the Striker girls a few times. It was a popular spot for parties. Booze. Drugs. Sex. Whatever.”

  “Not me,” Adrian said.

  “Okay. Just curious.”

  We punched through the snow, following the icy tire tracks of a handful of cars that had come and gone here recently. The dead-end road wound through a series of sharp S-curves, following the ribbon of a frozen creek six feet down the bank below us. The trees on both sides were packed together like soldiers at attention. It was gloomy here even on a sunny day, but the winter gray made it seem like night.

  Where the road ended at a turnaround, an old rusted chain was draped across a driveway that was barely wider than our cruiser. Adam parked there. The snow behind the chain was deep, but I could see boot prints, probably from Rose and her prospective buyer. It was hard to imagine anyone coming here and thinking this was the place to invest money. The Mittel Pines Resort had once been a popular summer getaway, but that was when families still enjoyed rustic vacations and there wasn’t any competition from the B&Bs in Martin’s Point. My father and I had spent a weekend here once when I was about twelve years old, not long before the resort closed for good. I could remember practicing my guitar by the campfire, which must have driven everyone else crazy, because the sound around here carries for miles.

  We all got out of our cars. Adam climbed over the chain and led the way, and Rose, Adrian, and I followed behind him. The snow came up to my calves. The four of us walked between the trees and then across a bridge over the frozen creek, until the forest opened up and the ruins of the resort dotted a huge clearing. Most of the old cabins were rotting mounds where moss, weeds, and young trees grew among bowed walls and caved-in roofs. I saw broken doors, shattered windows, frost-covered spiderwebs, and moldy sofas abandoned in the middle of the dead, overgrown brush. Raccoons had made dens here and riddled the snow with paw prints. At least three cabins had been burned by vandals over the years and the wood bore streaks of blackened charcoal and spray-painted graffiti. It was unrecognizable from the place Dad and I had visited so long ago.

  Rose pointed. “I found the shuttlecock back there.”

  I followed the direction of her finger to one of the larger cabins that had fended off some of the ravages of time and nature. The walls were still standing. There were holes in the roof, but it hadn’t fallen. The glass of the windows was all gone, and the door hung open, and I could see where the bricks of the chimney had pitched into the weeds. Rose’s footprints made a path into the middle of the bricks.

  We all went over there, and Adam knelt among the rubble. He squinted and then got up and rubbed his chin and studied the clearing with a frown. This place had the terrible stillness of a battlefield after the guns had gone quiet.

  Ten years.

  I tried to imagine Jeremiah here. I looked around at the encroaching forest and thought of all the places you could hide a body in these woods. When the ground thawed, we’d bring the dogs, and we’d search.

  The open cabin door clung stubbornly to one of its hinges. Rose stayed outside, and the three of us explored the interior. Even in the daylight, under the holes in the roof, we needed flashlights to see. The floor was a mess of glass shards and animal droppings. I saw an old mattress and bed frame that was nothing but stuffing and rusted springs. A toilet and sink had broken off from corroded pipes and toppled over. I examined every square inch of the cabin floor with my flashlight. When I pulled up the mattress, I found the corpses of two dead rats.

  Nothing here suggested that Jeremiah had been inside the cabin. Not until Adrian called, “Look at this.”

  He was at the back wall near a brick fireplace. The floor was wet where snow had blown in through the hole caused by the collapse of the chimney. He squatted near the remnants of a walnut dresser that had collapsed, spilling out its four drawers. Nests had been built inside the drawers by animals over the years. I saw an old laminated resort brochure, with photos of what the place had looked like in its heyday. But there was something else in one of the drawers, too. Adrian highlighted them with his light.

  I saw stones.

  Gray and black stones. Dozens of them.

  Like you’d use in a cairn.

  Chapter Thirty

  Ellen Sloan arrived at the abandoned resort two hours later. She brought an entourage with her.

  I waited to meet her outside the chain at the driveway, and cars rolled up along the dirt road one after another. Ellen and Violet came together in the first sedan. Several aides followed in two other cars. Then half a dozen print and television reporters and photographers brought up the rear in trucks that were equipped for live shots.

  The media army looked ready to assault me with questions, but Violet held them back like a publicity veteran, which she was. Ellen approached me alone, wearing a white winter coat that made her look like a snow angel. She had calf-high boots and leather gloves. Her blond hair was tied in a ponytail, and she wore sunglasses. When she took them off, I saw that her eyes were rimmed in red.

  “Hello, Shelby.”

  “Congresswoman.”

  That had been Ellen’s title for the last three years. After Jeremiah’s disappearance, she launched a nonprofit organization focused on missing children, and built a statewide reputation lobbying for improvements in child safety laws. When the eighty-year-old Congressman representing our district had finally retired, local leaders—especially Violet—had encouraged Ellen to run f
or the seat. She had, and she’d won. She’d spent the last three years shuttling back and forth between Everywhere and Washington, DC. Violet was her chief of staff and legislative director.

  “Your husband is already up at the resort with Sheriff Twilley,” I informed her.

  Ellen’s face barely moved. “Ex-husband.”

  “Yes, of course. Sorry. Adrian’s there, too.”

  “How is he doing?”

  “Adrian’s a fine officer. You should be proud.”

  She looked over her shoulder at the press to make sure they were a safe distance away. It had to be a strange life, always making sure that no one was listening to what you said. “Good. I’m glad to hear it. Adrian took Jeremiah’s disappearance very hard, and I was worried about how he would grow up. I was horrified when he was involved in setting the fire at Keith Whalen’s house, but it proved to be a turning point for him. He did the wrong thing, he got it out of his system, and he was punished for it. It helped him move on and get his life together.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  “He says good things about you, too, by the way. He says he’s learned a lot from you, Shelby.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “How is your father?” I didn’t know if Ellen was asking out of genuine concern, or whether that was simply what politicians did with constituents.

  “He’s declining.”

  “I’m very sorry. It’s a terrible disease.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  She put her hands on her hips and looked up the road toward the resort. I could see journalists taking photographs behind us. The news was already online and would be the lead story throughout the state and probably across the country by morning.

  “I’m glad I was in the county when this happened. I was able to drop everything to get over here.”

  “Of course.”

  “So you really think Jeremiah was taken here?”

  “It looks that way, although we can’t be totally certain yet.”