The Deep, Deep Snow

by Brian Freeman

  Who was with her? Dennis Sloan.

  A cheating husband with a missing son. But Dennis wasn’t the man I wanted. I simply didn’t believe it.

  No, the man I wanted was Will Gruder. I had this insane notion that the medal of St. Benedict around Will’s neck really did belong to Keith Whalen. That Will and Vince had been the ones to murder Colleen. That Keith was innocent, just like he said, and that somehow the Gruders had discovered that Jeremiah had seen it all happen. Which gave them a reason to make sure he disappeared. They’d heard the Rolling Stones booming from the pickup truck’s radio that night. They’d gone out to the resort and found Jeremiah, and they’d seized the opportunity to make the one witness to their crime go away for good.

  That’s what I wanted the last word in the crossword puzzle to be. Four letters.

  Will.

  But the letters simply didn’t fit the clue. Breezy didn’t know anything about Will or Keith or Colleen or even Jeremiah back then. And Will didn’t kill Breezy. I knew that, too. He’d been in the hospital in Stanton on Monday night. So if Will didn’t kill Breezy, then I simply wasn’t looking at the clue the right way.

  So I did the only thing you can do when you can’t solve a puzzle.

  I switched puzzles.

  “I enjoyed talking to you last night, Dad.”

  His face grew quizzical. “Last night?”

  “At the lake.”

  “Oh. Well. I enjoyed it, too.” He smiled, but I knew he didn’t remember. Our time at the shore of Shelby Lake was already filed away in a part of his brain that he couldn’t locate.

  “You told me about the day your mother died,” I prompted him. “You took a trip. You met a woman who rescued you in a campground.”

  He looked lost at what I was saying. He blinked rapidly, and his smile faltered. His expression told me that all I was doing was upsetting him. I wasn’t sure he even remembered his mother at that moment. And certainly not a policewoman he’d encountered somewhere in a long-ago winter. They may as well have been ghosts who’d never existed.

  “It’s okay, Dad. It doesn’t matter.”

  He looked grateful that I dropped it. That’s what always hurt more than anything, that momentary look of panic in his eyes. I could see his mind saying: These are things I should know. Why don’t I know them? Fortunately, it never lasted long, and then the curtain came down again to protect him.

  Dad shouldered his way to the side of the booth and got out, looking tall and fit. The disease could be a terrible mirage. “Nature calls,” he said.

  I watched him make his way to the restroom, and I kept a close watch on the hallway, because the rear door of the diner was back there. I didn’t want him wandering out into the snow.

  Monica inched closer to me and spoke in a low voice. “What was that about Tom’s mother?”

  “He told me that he took a long drive after she died, and he got lost somewhere. Did he ever tell you about that?”

  If anyone would know, it was Monica, but she shook her head. “I vaguely remember him taking a couple of days off, but he never spoke about what he did. Why?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  For now, this was my secret. My mystery.

  I saw the restroom door open again, and my father came back to the booth. Patty came over with the final dregs of the coffee. “One last warmer-upper before you go, Tom?”

  “Oh, no, thank you, Breezy. I’m likely to float away.”

  Patty looked uncomfortable at being called by the name of a dead woman. She looked at me with a silent question as to whether she should correct him or not. I gently shook my head.

  “So you’ve got Dudley running again, do you?” Dad went on. “Yesterday you said he was on life support. You weren’t sure you were going to get him started again. Good thing you made it to work with all of these out-of-towners around. Big tips, am I right?”

  I didn’t know exactly where he was at that moment, but what he was saying made me hold my breath. Maybe somewhere in Dad’s head, he knew what I needed, and he was trying to find it for me. Maybe, for him, it was that Sunday morning ten years ago after Jeremiah disappeared.

  Maybe he knew something that I’d forgotten long ago.

  “Dudley?” Patty asked him. “Who’s Dudley?”

  I cringed, because I was afraid that she would jar him out of his memories when I needed him to be back in the past. But Dad simply gave one of his Santa laughs.

  “Your car, Breezy, your car! Yesterday you had to rely on Monica’s taxi service to make it to the diner, don’t you remember? But here you are today, bright and early. So I assume Dudley is back in the land of the living.”

  I mouthed to her: Yes.

  “Uh, yeah, yeah, sure he is, Tom,” Patty murmured.

  “Good, very good. How did you get home last night anyway? You were working pretty late. Did you find a knight in shining armor to take you out to Witch Tree?”

  Patty looked completely at sea, but I felt a chill running up and down the length of my body.

  “Last night?” Patty said, not understanding the game. “My husband picked me up, like he always does. We only have the one car. I’m sorry, Tom, did you want more coffee?”

  “Oh, well, sure, just a little more for the road. Thank you, young lady.”

  I knew that Dad was gone again. Patty was “young lady,” not Breezy. He was back in the shadows, among strangers he didn’t know. The visits never lasted long.

  But this time, he’d given me the clue I needed to solve the puzzle.

  “You picked up Breezy in Witch Tree on that Saturday morning,” I said to Monica. “You brought her to the diner that day, right?”

  Monica knitted her eyebrows in confusion and stroked Moody’s urn. “I’m sorry, dear, what?”

  “Saturday. The day after Jeremiah went missing. You picked up Breezy.”

  “Did I? Oh yes, you’re right, I did. She couldn’t get Dudley started, and she called to see if I would stop at her place on my way into town. I’d forgotten all about it. But why is that important?”

  I shook my head. “It’s not. It doesn’t matter how she got to the diner. What’s important is how she got from the diner to her place in Witch Tree that night. She didn’t have her car with her. She was stranded here. So who took her home?”

  Monica looked at me for the answer. “Do you know?”

  In that first moment, I didn’t.

  And in the next moment, in a rush, I did. Yes, I did. The snow melted around me, and I knew everything. I knew who took Breezy home. I knew who killed her. I knew how Jeremiah died, I knew how Paul Nadler’s body made its way to the river in Stanton, I knew how that white F-150 had been abandoned at Shelby Lake without anyone coming to pick up the driver.

  There was just one man behind all of it.

  One man with a motorcycle.

  “Shelby?” Monica asked me. “Who took Breezy home that night?”

  “A well-meaning traveler,” I replied.

  *

  I woke up Agent Reed at the motel.

  It had been the Avery Weir Inn since Rose sold it, but we all still called it the Rest in Peace. I saw a laptop open on the bed in Reed’s room, but his eyes were heavy, as if he’d fallen asleep while working.

  “Shelby,” he said in surprise, with a glance at his watch. “Is everything okay?”

  “No. No, I don’t think so. I have a question for you. Do you remember that voicemail that Adam left for you when you came to town the first time? The one that almost got him fired?”

  “Of course,” Reed replied with a roll of his eyes.

  “This will sound strange, but do you still have it?”

  He gave me a puzzled look. “Well, I’m sure we have it archived somewhere. Trust me, the FBI saves everything. It would take me a few minutes to find on our server, though. Why? What
is this about?”

  “I need to listen to it again.”

  Reed read the expression on my face. He was wide awake now. “Okay. Let me see what I can do.”

  He retrieved his laptop from the bed and relocated it to a circular table near the window. He sat down and began tapping the keys. I closed the motel-room door behind me, shutting out the winter air. Reed gave me a sideways glance as he typed. “So are you going to tell me what this is about?”

  “Drunk driving. I’m pretty sure that’s what this is about.”

  His fingers stopped over the keys. “What?”

  “No kidnapping. No abuse. Just drunk driving.”

  Reed didn’t push me to explain. He turned his eyes down to the keyboard and focused on his laptop again. It took him only a few minutes to find the archived recording of Adam’s voicemail. The time stamp was just before one a.m. on that early Sunday morning ten years ago. He called me over to listen, and then he played it for me. I’d heard the message once before, but I barely remembered what Adam had said. I only knew it had been bad, and it was.

  “Special Agent Reed, this is Deputy Adam Twilley. Just thought I’d check in with you after a really productive day checking the toilets of campgrounds around here. Yeah, thanks a lot for the vote of confidence. I bet you thought that was funny. I bet you guys had a good laugh about that. Man, you feebs really think you’re rock stars, huh? You think you’re so much better than a bunch of rubes like us in the sticks. Well, you know what? You’re all just a—”

  I held up my hand to make Reed stop the playback. There was no need to go on. I confess, I cleaned up what Adam had said. It was much, much worse, filled with insults and F-bombs. The fact is, I wasn’t really listening to Adam’s slurred, drunken voice.

  I was listening to the background.

  “Did you hear it?”

  Reed looked at me. “Hear what?”

  “The music.”

  He played it again, and this time he heard it, too. It was music from a car radio. Close by, so close that Adam had to be practically on top of it, Mick Jagger was croaking out “Under My Thumb.”

  “The music is coming from the F-150,” I said. “Adam was there. He was at the resort.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  At daybreak, I asked Adam to meet me.

  The morning was cold and clear at the old Mittel Pines Resort. With barely a murmur of wind, every branch in the trees was still. The winter gray had vanished and left the clearing under blue skies, making the bed of snow sparkle like a field of diamonds. I hiked through calf-deep powder into the middle of the meadow and found a fallen tree trunk. I brushed off the snow and sat down. I waited.

  Adam arrived ten minutes later.

  I watched him come. He wore his uniform and his hat like shields that he could hide behind. He was the sheriff, but to me, he looked like a boy again, impulsive and reckless. I could see now what the years and the guilt had done to him. I tried to imagine what it was like to keep a terrible secret for so long and to see it reflected in your own eyes whenever you looked in a mirror.

  As he came close to me, I watched him try to decode my own face. Did I know?

  He stood over me and squinted into the sun. His shadow stretched behind him. “Shelby.”

  “Hello, Adam.”

  “What’s up? Why the early meeting?”

  “I have a question.”

  “Yeah? What is it?”

  “I want to know if it was an accident.”

  He tried to keep his cool, but his whole body stiffened. “What are you talking about?”

  “Not Jeremiah. I know he was an accident. I’m talking about Breezy. Did you mean to do it? Was it deliberate? Or did you simply get angry and push her and she fell?”

  “Is this a joke?”

  “Oh, no. No joke. What was the problem, did she want you to pay her to keep quiet? Violet says Breezy wasn’t above a little blackmail. She needed money, and you’ve got a lot of it.”

  Adam shook his head, but he was a terrible actor. He was trembling down to his boots. “I think you’ve had a stroke, Shelby. We should get you some help.”

  I stood up from the fallen tree, and we were eye to eye.

  “When I asked Breezy who went home with her on that Saturday night ten years ago, she was about to say it was you. Right? You took her home on your motorcycle. But she stopped and didn’t say anything when she saw you flinch. Did she realize that you didn’t want her to tell me? She must have wondered why. When you came back later, had she already figured it out? Did she threaten to expose you? So the two of you argued. You grabbed her by the shoulders, you shoved her, and she fell and hit her head. I really hope it was an accident. Breezy was my friend. I don’t want to think you went over there to kill her.”

  “We’re done here, Shelby. I’m leaving.”

  “No, you’re not going anywhere, Sheriff. I need to tell you a story.”

  “What kind of story?”

  “I’m going to tell you what happened to Jeremiah. Agent Reed and I spent most of the night working out the details. Yes, he knows all about it, too. We must be pretty close to the truth, but you can stop me if I get anything wrong. Okay?”

  Adam stared at me with hollow, empty eyes and said nothing.

  “We know about Paul Nadler taking the F-150 and meeting up with Jeremiah. I bet they liked each other immediately. The old man, the young boy. Nadler probably asked him if he knew where this old resort was, and Jeremiah said, sure, I know that place. And off they went. They drove here. Right here. It must have been an adventure for Jeremiah. Hunting for rocks. Playing with his badminton racket. Putting Legos together. Playing the radio on the pickup truck. I’m sure he was thinking he’d have a great story to tell when he got home.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at the cabin where the two of them had stayed. It was winter now. It was summer then. But Anna was right. Suddenly, I could feel Jeremiah all over this place.

  “Friday was fun, but I bet Saturday was when the fun started to wear off. Jeremiah started getting lonely. Hungry, too. I don’t imagine he had much to eat in his backpack. His phone was dead. He was missing his family and wondering what to do. I don’t know exactly when Paul Nadler had his heart attack, but at some point, Jeremiah must have realized that this sweet old man was gone. Just like his own grandfather. All of a sudden, the adventure began to get scary. And when it got dark on Saturday? And a thunderstorm came roaring in? That poor kid. He must have been terrified. Probably the only thing that helped was listening to the radio on the truck, but he’d had the engine running for hours. It must have been getting pretty low on gas. I feel bad, thinking about him all alone, hiding in the cabin, wondering if anyone would ever find him.”

  I stared into Adam’s eyes.

  “But someone did. You found him.”

  Out of the stillness, a single gust of wind whipped across the meadow and took Adam’s hat off his head. It rolled away on top of the snow like an old tire. Adam made no attempt to retrieve it.

  “Saturday was a rotten day for you,” I went on. “I get that. You were doing grunt work for the FBI. You were tired. You were pissed off. You smelled like campground toilets. So you spent the evening drinking at the Nowhere Café and pouring out your problems to Breezy. And when the diner finally closed, you took her home. She rode on the back of your bike in the pouring rain. Not smart, Adam. You were already pretty drunk. You could have both been killed. But you made it to her trailer. What did you do when you got there? Did you drink more? Or did Breezy share any of her other stash with you? Meth? Cocaine? Heroin? Did you sleep with her, or were you too drunk and riled to make it to bed? That probably made you feel worse. Now you were really angry. So when the rain stopped, you told Breezy you were heading home. She came outside with you, and she heard the music. Rock and roll radio blaring over the trees for hours. Just like the previous nigh
t. She was sure it was the Gruders. She asked you to go over there and tell them to knock it off, and that’s what you did. You drove your motorcycle down the dirt road, but pretty soon you realized it couldn’t be the Gruders. The music was coming from the other direction. And that’s when you headed to the old resort.”

  It was all so vivid. I knew Adam. I could see him parking at the end of that road and following the music toward the cabins like a siren. He must have suspected what he would find there. He must have realized that he was going to be a hero. What a combination of alcohol and adrenaline would have been pumping through his bloodstream.

  “You came up here, and you saw it. There it was. The white F-150. Did you call out Jeremiah’s name? No, probably not. You still thought he’d been kidnapped. You figured whoever did it was still around. So you searched through the cabins, and you found him. Safe. Alive. Alone except for that poor old man, dead on the moldy mattress. Did Jeremiah run to you? Did he hug you? Wow, what a moment that must have been, Adam. Really. I know how exhilarated you must have felt. All these people searching, all these out-of-towners, all the national media, all the Feds treating you like dirt—and you found Jeremiah. You. All by yourself. You were going to be on television. I mean, real television, New York talk shows. Magazine covers, too. Probably a movie. You were going to be famous.”

  I felt my words catching in my throat. I didn’t like doing this to him. I really didn’t.

  “That’s when you left the voicemail for Agent Reed, right? I can hear it in your voice when I listen to it. That smug triumph. You were going to show all of them, all of those arrogant Feds. Except you were drunk, and you were impatient. You should have called for backup, Adam. One phone call to my father, and then you wait there with Jeremiah until the cavalry arrives. But that wasn’t good enough for you, was it? You weren’t going to let anybody else take that boy home. You were going to do it yourself. You were going to drive him right up to his house and put him in his mother’s arms. Nobody else. Not my father. Not me. Certainly not Agent Reed. Deputy Adam Twilley was going to save the day. But there was hardly any gas left in the pickup, was there? It was pretty much empty by then. So you said to Jeremiah: How about the two of us take a ride? You ever ridden on a motorcycle?”