Ellen shook her head. “Why this place? It’s so remote.”
“I don’t know.”
“What about Keith Whalen? Does he have any ties to the resort?”
“Not that we’re aware of. But we’ll talk to him and see what he says.”
Ellen nodded. Her lips were pursed together.
“What about you, Congresswoman?” I asked.
“Me?”
“Do you have any family connections to the resort? Would this place have had any special meaning for Jeremiah?”
Ellen shook her head. “He wasn’t even born when it closed. Dennis and I took Adrian up here a couple of times when he was a boy. That’s all.”
Violet joined us, leaving the gaggle of media behind her. Nothing had changed between us in a decade. Violet was always moving forward, and I was standing still. I probably didn’t look much different, wearing the same deputy’s uniform, with nothing but a few lines around my eyes and mouth to mark the passage of time. Violet now looked more like Washington than Mittel County, with a cell phone glued to her ear, a Congressional ID on a chain around her neck, and a few streaks of premature silver running through her bobbed hair. She was a Very Important Woman doing Very Important Things. I didn’t doubt that she’d run for office herself someday.
“The press want to go up and take pictures,” Violet said without even a hello.
“Adam doesn’t want anyone there. We’ve taped off the whole resort as a potential crime scene.”
“Well, I know these media people. If you don’t give them something, they’ll sneak in. Let one person go up there and shoot some footage and share it with the pool.”
“I’ll run that by Adam and let you know.”
“Congresswoman, they’re going to want some kind of statement from you,” Violet added. “A short press conference with the sheriff would be best.”
“We’ll discuss that after I’ve talked to him,” Ellen replied.
“Yes, ma’am. Oh, and I talked to the FBI. Special Agent Reed is in Nebraska working on another matter, but he agreed to be pulled away so that he could supervise this investigation again. He was pleased that there might finally be a break in Jeremiah’s case. He’ll be here tomorrow.”
Ellen nodded. “Excellent.”
I was certain that Violet hadn’t talked to Adam before calling in the Feds. I was equally certain that Adam wasn’t going to be happy about having this case snatched out from under his nose again. The bad blood between Adam and Agent Reed hadn’t gone away.
Violet looked at me with the assurance of someone who was used to giving orders. “Agent Reed asked that the local authorities keep the scene secure and not disrupt anything on-site until he arrives with his forensics team. Please convey that message to Sheriff Twilley.”
“I will.”
“Thank you, Deputy,” Violet said, as if we’d just met.
“Of course, Ms. Roka.”
I admit there was a little sarcasm in my voice, but Violet let it roll off her back without any change in expression. She headed back to the reporters.
“I’ll take you up there now if you’d like, Congresswoman.”
“Yes, thank you.” Then she added with a smile, “You can call me Ellen, you know. I’m not here because I’m in Congress. I’m here because I’m a mother trying to find my son.”
I unhooked the chain from the driveway and let her walk through into the snow. “I appreciate that, Congresswoman.”
The two of us walked side by side up the road and across the bridge toward the abandoned resort. Ellen looked at everything around us with a kind of wonder, as if she could feel Jeremiah’s presence if she tried hard enough. I understood. This was as close to her son as she’d been in ten years. If we were right, he’d been here after he disappeared and after the fruitless search began. We’d finally found the next link in the chain that we’d missed so long ago.
When we arrived at the ruins, Adrian hurried over and wrapped up Ellen in a tight hug. He was a tough, strong cop, but at that moment, he was just a boy with his mother. I gave them space. Not far away, I saw Dennis Sloan talking to Adam, and I joined them. I passed along Violet’s message about the FBI, and I saw the flash of anger in Adam’s face that I expected. Just for a moment, he was a twenty-eight-year-old hothead again, leaving a drunken message on Agent Reed’s phone. Then, with a resigned sigh, he became the sheriff and began barking orders to shut everything down.
Meanwhile, Dennis stared across the overgrown field at his son and his ex-wife. It had been five, maybe six years since he and Ellen finally acknowledged that the split between them was irrevocable and filed for divorce.
I could see regret in his eyes. It was obvious that he still loved her. I guess most cheating husbands don’t realize that until it’s too late. He was almost fifty now, with his handsome, athletic days behind him. The rumor mill said that he still hung out in the local bars and made passes at the young girls, but his come-ons were mostly pathetic now. He’d quit his job in the national forest years earlier, because he couldn’t keep passing the spot where Jeremiah had vanished day after day. Now he ran a landscaping business in the warm season, and he did snow removal during the winters.
Ellen saw him, too, but there wasn’t a drop of emotion in her stare. She made no move to come closer or to acknowledge him. He didn’t belong to her world anymore.
Dennis zipped up the down vest he was wearing, as if he’d felt a chill. “So what do you think, Shelby? Who brought my son out here?”
“We haven’t found any evidence about that yet. Hopefully, the FBI will turn up something when they search.”
“Do you think it was Keith Whalen?”
He caught me off guard, and I answered before I could stop myself. “No. I don’t.”
Dennis didn’t look surprised by my honesty. “Me neither. Keith had problems, sure. He had a lot of anger bottled up inside. I could picture him losing it and killing Colleen. But kidnapping my son and murdering him in cold blood? I never believed that Keith was capable of that.”
“Neither did I.”
“Well, I guess we could both be wrong. People surprise you, right?”
“Yes, they do.”
He watched his ex-wife again, who ignored him as if he didn’t exist at all. “Ellen always thought Jeremiah was still alive. She never gave up hope.”
“But not you?”
“No, not me. I knew he was dead. That was really what split us up. I’m sure everyone thought it was because of the affairs, but the fact is, Ellen could tell that I didn’t have any hope left. She hated that. She needed to believe.”
“Why were you so sure?”
“I guess I could feel it. I just knew he wasn’t in the world anymore. I even had a dream where Jer came and told me he was dead. I cried, but I was sort of at peace after that. He said he was okay.”
I thought about Anna’s very similar dream. It was as if Jeremiah had been leaving messages with the people who loved him.
“I suppose you’ll be searching the woods,” Dennis added.
“Yes. When the snow melts.”
“I hope you find him. For Ellen’s sake. For closure. She never found any peace the way I did. She still tortures herself about it. I see her on television sometimes at Congressional hearings, and there will be this moment where she’s questioning someone and she stops and gets this faraway look. And I know. She’s thinking about Jer. She’s wondering where he is. So it would be nice if she could stop wondering, you know?”
“Yes, I know. That’s what we all want.”
“He doesn’t have much of a family to come back to,” Dennis went on, “but I’d like to bring him home anyway. Jeremiah deserves that.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Adrian wanted to stay at the scene with his mother, so I took the cruiser myself to drive back to Everywhere. The winter night was already
falling fast. I headed off along the slippery curves with my headlights sweeping past the forest above the frozen creek. When I got to the intersection that led toward Witch Tree, I started to turn left, but then I spotted the wooden arrow pointing me toward Will Gruder’s house.
I reversed my turn and continued straight.
I’d been to Will’s house on police calls several times, but not since the explosion at the meth lab two years earlier. Their lab had been located deep in the forest on hunting land plastered over with No Trespassing signs. It was no wonder that we’d never found it. But the explosion and fire gave it away and torched several acres of wilderness. We’d found Vince dead at the scene and Will burned over 60 percent of his body. He barely survived.
When I parked in the snowy yard, a Doberman tied up on a chain welcomed me with a murderous frenzy of barking. The house wasn’t much larger than one of the old resort cabins, but it had a satellite dish pointed at the sky and security cameras mounted near the roof. Heavy-duty electrical cables ran outside, powering a refrigerator and freezer. I saw an enormous wooden cross hung on the front door.
I knocked hard, which only made the dog madder. The door opened a crack, and to my dismay, I saw Anna staring at me from inside.
“What are you doing here, Shelby?” she asked in annoyance. “Are you following me?”
“I’m looking for Will.”
“Well, he’s not here.”
“Where is he?”
“In the hospital in Stanton. He’s had joint problems since the fire, you know. Yesterday his knee locked up, and he had to have some kind of injection.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“No, you’re not.”
I leaned closer and smelled alcohol on her breath. Hard stuff, not beer. “Am I interrupting a party?”
“There’s no one else here.”
“So are you going to invite me in?”
“Will wouldn’t like it. He doesn’t want strangers coming inside.”
“Then how about you come outside?”
Anna sighed as if I were making a huge imposition on her life, but she grabbed a coat and joined me in the yard. The Doberman on the chain barked like a madman, but Anna snapped her fingers, and the dog shut up immediately and stiffened to attention. Anna told him to sit, and he did. His eyes followed her closely, waiting for her next command.
“He obviously knows you.”
“Sure he does. Plague’s a good boy.”
“Plague? The dog’s name is Plague?”
Anna rolled her eyes. “Vince thought it was funny.”
“Well, you’re good with animals.”
“Better than people.”
Anna hadn’t zipped up her bubble coat. Underneath, she wore a short-sleeved red T-shirt that left part of her stomach exposed. Her jeans had holes in the knees. I was more concerned with what I saw tucked into her belt. An automatic pistol.
“What the hell are you doing with a gun, Anna?”
She shrugged away my concern. “Some sketchy guys come around here sometimes. People don’t always know that Will is out of the business.”
“You’ve been drinking. Alcohol and guns don’t mix.”
“I had one drink. It’s not a big deal.”
“Is the gun Will’s?”
“No, it’s mine.”
“You own a gun? Since when?”
“Since last summer. I was having a smoke behind the Witch’s Brew, and some guy tried to assault me. That’s when I met Will. He taught the guy a lesson. I didn’t want to get caught out again, so I got a gun.”
“You were assaulted?” I asked, trying to keep my voice down. “And you didn’t tell me?”
“Nothing happened. The guy barely touched me before Will took him down. I’m fine.”
I took a deep breath and tried not to lose my cool. Anna was always pushing me, as if she wanted me to blow up at her, yell at her, ask her what the hell she was doing with her life. But I didn’t. Not this time. I tried to channel Trina, who’d always seemed to levitate above the world, never getting upset, always staying in control. Honestly, I don’t know how she did it.
“Anna, you keep shutting me out. I want to help you.”
“I don’t need your help,” she snapped back at me. “What, did you have a nice talk with my mom today and she told you to crack the whip? Look, I don’t care what you think you are to me, Shelby. Mom, sister, girlfriend, priest, whatever. Right now, you’re my landlord and that’s all.”
The raw pain blew out of this girl like a tornado and nearly swept me away.
“Okay. You’re right, we don’t have to be close. We don’t have to be anything. But as your landlord, I need you to be home tonight. Not here. Got it?”
“I have to take care of Plague.”
“Find someone else to do it. Call one of Will’s friends at the bar. I need your help with Dad tomorrow. I’m going out early to see Keith Whalen, and then the FBI is coming into town. You need to look after my father. That’s part of our deal.”
Anna didn’t answer. It seemed like everything I said got under her skin.
“Did you hear me, Anna? I need you to do this for me.”
“Yes, I heard you. Fine. I’ll get someone else to look after the dog. What else do you want, Shelby? Why are you here? I’m cold. I want to go back inside.”
“You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?”
I told her about the shuttlecock and the Mittel Pines Resort and Jeremiah. She tried to pretend that the news meant nothing to her, but this time, I was the tornado, and Anna could hardly stay standing. When I was done, she shoved her hands in her pockets and ground her boot into the snow. She covered her hurt badly.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked her.
“What is there to say?”
“Jeremiah was your friend.”
“Yeah, well, finding an old badminton birdie doesn’t bring him back, does it?”
“That’s true, but we have another chance to figure out what really happened to him. He didn’t fly to that resort, Anna. It’s thirty miles from where he disappeared. Somebody grabbed him off that road and took him here.” I added after a pause, “And it wasn’t the Ursulina.”
“Yeah. I get that. I’m not a kid anymore, Shelby.”
“I never said you were.”
“Okay, so somebody took him. It sucks, but there are a lot of crappy people in the world.”
“I know.”
“What do you want with Will, anyway? He didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Have you and he talked about it?”
“No, but I know him. He’s not what you think.”
“You know him now. Or you think you do. Will and Vince were both hard cases, Anna. They were drug dealers. The only thing that put them out of business was the explosion. Ten years ago, they were out on that road selling meth to Adrian. They passed right by where we found Jeremiah’s bike. It’s not a big leap to think they grabbed him.”
“Will wouldn’t do that.”
“The resort is only a couple of miles from this house. That’s a big coincidence.”
“So what? Everybody knows about the resort. I’ve known about it since I was a kid.”
“What about Jeremiah? Did he know about it?”
Anna shrugged. “Sure.”
“How?”
“I took him there.”
“You did? Did his parents know?”
“I don’t know. Probably not. It was just one time.”
“When was this?”
“It was the year before he disappeared. Summer. Mom came out to Witch Tree to meet Breezy for lunch at the bar. I had to go along, because Dad was on the road. That sounded boring, so I ask
ed if Jeremiah could come with and we brought our bikes. When we got here, he and I went off to explore the resort. I’d heard it was a spooky place. I figured it would scare him. And it did.”
She smiled at the memory, but then she wiped the smile from her face and looked upset.
“Did he have his badminton racket with him? Could he have lost the shuttlecock back then?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Did anything unusual happen while you were there?”
“No. I told Jeremiah it looked like the kind of place where the Ursulina would hide. I said if he was really brave, he ought to spend the night and see if it showed up.”
“You said that?”
“It was a joke, Shelby. It’s not like he was going to do it.”
“Did he talk about the resort after that? Did he ever tell you that he went back there with anyone?”
“No.”
“What about you? Did you go back there?”
“Sure. Lots of times. Will and I went out there last summer. We pitched a tent.”
“Why?”
“Will said it was haunted. He said maybe we would see some ghosts. He believes in crap like that, same as you. But we didn’t see anything. Now are we done, Shelby? It’s freezing out here.”
“Yes, we’re done, but remember what I told you. Be home tonight.”
“I heard you the first time.”
Anna headed for Will’s front door. The Doberman stirred as she did and began to growl at me again. I turned away, but when I reached the cruiser, I stopped and called to Anna before she went inside.
“Tell me something.”
“What?”
“Why Will?”
“What do you mean?”
“Anna, look at yourself. You’re a beautiful girl. Why hang out with Will Gruder? Do you love him?”
“No. I don’t.”
“Then why?”
“Everybody hates him,” Anna replied. “I like that.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
I was at my wit’s end about Anna, and I needed to talk to somebody. Or I needed a drink. Or both. As I neared Witch Tree, I saw the lights on inside Breezy’s trailer. On impulse, I turned into the matted-down snow of her yard and parked behind her beat-up Dodge Durango, which had replaced Dudley. The yard was otherwise empty, so I hoped that meant Breezy was alone and not entertaining. She’d gotten older like the rest of us, but her reputation as Easy Breezy hadn’t changed.
The Deep, Deep Snow Page 19
