The Deep, Deep Snow

by Brian Freeman

  I extended my arm to Violet, and we shook hands. “Okay. I can’t promise to run in November. Let’s see how the year goes. But for now, you can tell the board I’ll take the interim post.”

  Violet looked pleased with herself. She had a way of getting what she wanted, and I was pretty sure she’d worked this all out with Monica in advance.

  “Congratulations, Shelby. You’re the new sheriff of Mittel County.”

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Slowly, the town of Everywhere exhaled.

  The media and the strangers went away and left us alone. February became March, and the snow began to melt. March became April, and buds appeared on the trees. Life returned to normal day by day. My own life was a constant juggling act, but Monica and I became master jugglers. Somehow, I found time to wear my many hats. I was a daughter. I was a sheriff. I was a volunteer helping Lucas and Jeannie with the owls. I was a girl with a guitar.

  I had everything I needed, but I couldn’t get past my biggest disappointment.

  You see, I’d lost Anna. I’d failed.

  Yes, I’d wrested her away from Will Gruder. She was back home with me, but the fire had gone out of her eyes. I actually missed her defiance. Ever since we’d found Jeremiah’s body, she’d become an empty shell, drained of passion. Her father, Karl, reached out to her, but she pushed him out of her life the way she did everyone who tried to help her. She wouldn’t go to therapy. Her drinking got worse, and the physical signs told me she was using drugs, too, as if the chemicals would deaden her.

  She was a beautiful girl, only twenty years old, but she acted as if her life was over. I tried to talk to her, but she simply dug a hole for herself that got deeper each day. Now that Jeremiah was safe, it seemed as if Anna was the one buried in the woods.

  Sometimes the dead are easier to find than the living.

  This went on for weeks. I was losing hope that it would ever change.

  Then, on May 1, I brought home a package from Agent Reed, and I thought what was inside might be what I needed to open up a little door into Anna’s heart. It was like a message from her childhood.

  Midnight had come and gone by the time I got home that day. I often got back late in my new job. Thank God for Monica, who put up with my hours without a single complaint and was always there for Dad. I checked on both of them. Monica was asleep in her room, with Moody on the nightstand beside her, and my father was asleep in his. But I knew that Anna hardly ever slept. She’d be awake for hours. In the middle of the night, I would hear her moving around downstairs like a fitful ghost.

  I found her in her room. She lay on her back, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. The older she got, the more she reminded me of Trina. It wasn’t just how she looked. With the benefit of time, I could see some of my old friend’s flaws in her, too. Trina had always been emotionally distant, someone who was willing to cut off the highs in order to never face the lows. Karl had confided in me a while back that Trina suffered from severe depression her whole life. I never knew about it. I didn’t know if that could be passed down from mother to daughter, but Anna had clearly followed Trina’s path. If you don’t want to feel bad, then the safe thing is to feel nothing. Unlike me, who felt everything way too much.

  “Hey,” I said to her.

  Anna didn’t look at me. The one lamp in the room was dim and cast shadows. Her face was dark as she stared at the ceiling. “What do you want, Shelby? I’m tired.”

  “I have something I thought we could look at together. I think you’ll want to see it.”

  “What is it?”

  I held up a plastic bag with a thumb drive inside. “The FBI finally sent me what they recovered from Jeremiah’s phone. I thought we could check it out on my computer.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Look, I know it’ll be sad, but if there are pictures, don’t you want to see them? It’s the last little bit of Jeremiah we have. I thought it might make you feel close to him again.”

  “I don’t want to see any pictures.”

  “All right. Maybe later.”

  “No. Not later. I don’t want to see them ever.”

  I shoved the thumb drive back in my pocket. I sat down next to Anna on the bed and stroked my fingers through her blond hair. She didn’t react at all. All I could feel from her was numbness.

  “Is it really so hard to think about him?”

  “I don’t think about him at all.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You can believe what you want. When people go, they’re gone. Dwelling on it doesn’t bring them back.”

  “No, it doesn’t. But forgetting them isn’t any better.”

  Anna closed her eyes. “I’m tired, Shelby.”

  “All right. Good night. Try to get some sleep.”

  I left her bedroom and closed the door softly behind me. I went to my own room and kept the lights off. I opened the window, letting in crisp spring air. Outside, the forest and the cemetery were lit up in a gray glow by the moon shining through misty clouds. I stood there for a while, watching the world. Spring was my favorite time of year, but my heart was heavy.

  I took the thumb drive from my pocket again. I felt as if I were holding Jeremiah’s soul in my hand. I didn’t want to wait until morning to see what he’d left for us. I booted up my computer and pushed the device into the USB slot. According to the note from Agent Reed, the FBI had recovered nearly five hundred photos and a similar number of text messages from the boy’s phone. This was like his last will and testament. His last chance to speak to us.

  I checked the texts first, which took me into the past. Jeremiah was alive again, and we were all more than ten years younger. We’d lived the “after” of this case for so long that it was strange to be reminded of the “before.” I smiled as I read the texts. He’d messaged back and forth with his brother during the long summer days. He’d sent Adrian silly jokes, the kind little boys tell.

  What did the dog say to the tree?

  Bark.

  He’d exchanged texts with his mother, too. Ordinary things. What’s for dinner. When do I have to be home. Yes, I took a shower. One of the messages broke my heart. It had been sent to Ellen two days after her father’s funeral.

  Where did Grampa go?

  Ellen texted back: Heaven. We talked about this, honey. He and Grammy are in Heaven, and they’re happy, but they miss us just like we miss them.

  Jeremiah texted back: Okay.

  But I remembered that he was still wearing his Sunday suit when he disappeared.

  There were messages to his friends in the archive, but I was surprised to find only one message to Anna. The recovered texts went back for over a year prior to his disappearance. The boy hadn’t deleted anything else on his phone, as far as I could tell, but at some point, he’d erased his texts with Anna. They’d been best friends the previous summer, and I was sure they’d sent hundreds of messages back and forth to each other. But the texts were all gone.

  The only message that was left was a text that Jeremiah had sent to Anna in the early spring.

  It said: Are you still scared of the Ursulina?

  There was no reply.

  I closed out the messages, and I loaded the photographs.

  What I saw was the world through Jeremiah’s ten-year-old eyes. He took photographs of everything. A rabbit in the middle of the yard. A june bug on a soccer ball. Cheerios spilled on the floor. Adrian playing a video game. His father napping in a hammock. A leaf. A doorknob. Most of the pictures were blurry because he never stood still long enough to focus.

  The photographs began that summer, but then they went backward in time to when Jeremiah was in school. I recognized dozens of students from different grades. Teachers I knew. Classes, desks, and blackboards inside the school building in Everywhere and the sprawling athletic fields outside. Click click click. I
smiled at everything I saw.

  What stopped me was seeing a photograph of Keith Whalen.

  It was nothing unusual. It was simply a photo of Keith taking a drink of water from a hallway fountain. Jeremiah took plenty of pictures of random things, but I wondered why he’d taken that photograph.

  And then, as I scrolled through more pictures, I saw Keith again, getting out of his car in the school parking lot.

  And again in the cafeteria.

  And again grading papers at his desk in an empty classroom. All in all, I found almost twenty different pictures of Keith Whalen taken around the school grounds.

  That wasn’t a coincidence. Jeremiah had been spying on him.

  When I located the earliest photograph of Keith in the picture gallery, I checked the date stamp, and it looked familiar to me. Jeremiah had taken the photo on the same day he’d sent his one remaining text message to Anna.

  Are you still scared of the Ursulina?

  I felt an odd sense of foreboding. A sense that something was very wrong.

  Around that same time in the roster of Jeremiah’s photos, I began to see pictures of the cairns, too. Whenever he built a tower of rocks near Black Lake on Keith’s land, he took a picture of the stones. I found eight different photographs, taken over a span of several weeks. As soon as the winter snow had melted, he’d begun sneaking off to visit the lake and assemble his memorials.

  I began to scroll through the pictures more quickly.

  I knew something was waiting for me.

  There were only a handful of photographs taken during the winter. Mostly indoors, mostly in the boy’s bedroom. His Lego creations. His boots. Crosses made with Popsicle sticks. Christmas presents. The family Christmas tree lit up with lights. Picture by picture, I went back through each month.

  I found my finger hesitating with each click, as if I knew I would regret what I was about to see.

  And then there it was.

  One single photograph date-stamped November 14. Just one. There were pictures in the days before and after, but only one photograph was left on his phone from that day. I wondered if he’d deleted the others.

  It was a selfie. A night-time selfie, lit up by the flash.

  Jeremiah had stretched out his short arm to take the picture. I saw the familiar face of that happy, innocent boy, the face that had haunted us for a decade after he went missing. He had messy hair in need of a cut. One crooked tooth in his huge smile. But I wasn’t focused on Jeremiah, because he wasn’t alone in the selfie.

  No, he had his face pressed against the cheek of his best friend, who wore the same big, fearless grin that he did. They were two children off on an adventure. Hunting for the Ursulina.

  Jeremiah. And Anna.

  She was with him.

  I recognized the background in the photograph. The two of them stood in front of the apple-red door of Keith Whalen’s barn. The night of November 14. The night Colleen had been killed.

  They both saw it happen.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Anna was gone. Her bedroom door was open. My first thought was: She knew. She knew I was going to find that picture.

  I rushed out of the bedroom to search for her, but my sixth sense made me turn around and go back inside. I felt an unspeakable horror in that room. I went directly to her dresser and ripped open the top drawer and threw the clothes inside onto the floor. I pulled out everything until the drawer was empty.

  It was gone. I knew she always kept it there, but it was gone.

  She’d taken her gun with her.

  I flew down the stairs in the grip of a desperate fear. Few things have ever scared me in my life, but I was terrified. The door to the backyard was ajar. She’d left it that way, as if knowing I’d follow her sooner or later. I pushed through the screen door onto the wet grass and screamed her name into the gauzy moonlight.

  “Anna!”

  The frogs croaked, the insects buzzed, but I heard nothing else.

  I saw the tracks of footprints leading through the grass past the gazebo, disappearing onto the cemetery path. I ran. When I reached the trees, I was blind, because the moonlight couldn’t penetrate the crown of the forest. I was crying, and I kept screaming her name.

  “Anna! Where are you?”

  I stumbled my way down the trail. Roots and rocks tripped me up. Branches and wet leaves slapped my face. The thunder of the frogs made me want to cover my ears. I broke free into one of the cemetery groves, where the sky opened up and the graves were bathed in silver light. It was empty except for the dead. Anna wasn’t there. I made a silent plea to the people under the headstones to help me find her, but the ghosts had nothing to say. I was alone.

  I knew I could hunt for hours through the dark woods and never find her. She could be anywhere, and she wasn’t answering when I called. But I kept going, running through the maze of trails, driven on by panic. Every time a branch cracked under my feet, I flinched, because my mind was expecting a gunshot.

  “Anna!”

  I passed more graves silhouetted by the moon. Among the crosses and angels topping the stones, I saw a snowy owl observing me with silent grace. Somehow, I’d expected it to be there. Every crossroad I faced was marked by an owl. It made me finally grasp the truth of what I’d been trying to understand my whole life. All those years ago, the owl that had called me to rescue a child hadn’t come to me because of Jeremiah.

  The child who had needed me all along was Anna.

  God had rescued me for this moment.

  I’d been saved for tonight. Right now.

  This was why I was alive and not dead on the doorstep of my father’s house.

  I kept running. I knew the path I was on. It was the path that led up and down the shallow hill where Anna and I had skied in the winter, past the diseased old beech tree we called Bartholomew, down into the hollow where Trina’s grave was waiting for us. But not just Trina. Suddenly, I knew why Anna was so reluctant to visit her mother, so unwilling to make her way into the small meadow with those silent spirits. It wasn’t Trina she was afraid to see.

  Colleen Whalen was buried there, too.

  The trail took me downhill. I ran with the wind pushing me faster and the moon guiding me toward the gap in the trees. I burst into the solemn meadow, and there she was. Anna was a motionless shadow standing in front of Colleen’s grave. Her back was to me. The wind swirled her hair.

  I saw the pistol in her hand.

  “Anna.”

  She didn’t turn around.

  “Anna, put down the gun.”

  I made my way carefully through the monuments, not wanting to alarm her. I passed Trina and put my hand on the angel adorning her grave, and I could feel something electric, like a voice that said: Save her, Shelby. I glanced at the thickness of the forest surrounding us, and I could feel the hidden eyes of the owls. They were all watching us.

  “Anna.”

  We were only a few feet apart. I’d come around in front of her. Colleen’s grave was between us, just a flat stone on the earth, with the wet grass and weeds closing around it.

  Tears streamed down Anna’s face along with the mist.

  A flood, a deluge of tears.

  “Anna, tell me what happened that night with Jeremiah.”

  She tried to talk, but her throat choked off the words. She shook her head back and forth, and her whole body shivered.

  “Please. Tell me.”

  Finally, she got the words out, and her voice begged for mercy. “It was my idea.”

  “What was?”

  “To find the Ursulina.”

  “And why go to Keith Whalen’s place to do that?”

  “Because I was sure he was hiding it. He was the one who wrote the Halloween story. He knew so much about it. I told Jeremiah that he had to be keeping the Ursulina at his place.”
r />   “So the two of you went over there that Saturday night.”

  “Jeremiah didn’t want to go. He was scared, but I made him go. I told him to sneak out of his room and meet me in the woods. And then we took the trail past Black Lake to Mr. Whalen’s place.”

  “What did you see there? Who did you see?”

  “Nobody.”

  “It’s okay, Anna. None of this was your fault. Tell me what you saw. Was Keith there? Did you see Will and Vince? Who was it?”

  “Nobody was there,” she moaned. “Just us.”

  “Anna, I don’t understand. What happened?”

  She tried to tell the story through the tears. “I said we should search the barn. I said maybe he kept the Ursulina in there. I thought he would have it in a cage or something.”

  “You went in the barn?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “The Ursulina wasn’t there. Nobody was there. Except I found—”

  “What? What did you find?”

  She tried to talk. She tried to say it. But she couldn’t. Her whole body heaved with sobs. Her eyes squeezed shut, and her face twisted with misery. Her head hung down against her neck.

  “A gun. I found a gun.”

  I nearly felt my legs collapse under me.

  I’d been wrong. So wrong.

  “Oh, no. Oh, no, no. Oh, Anna.”

  “Jeremiah said we should leave it, but I said, what if we saw the Ursulina? So I had it in my hand. And we left the barn, and it was so dark, and we couldn’t see anything. We were near the big house—”

  I waited. I waited for the truth.

  “And there was this noise! Somebody was there! I couldn’t see who it was, but I saw someone, and I was sure, I was sure, I was sure it was the Ursulina. I just pointed the gun at it, and I wasn’t trying to fire or anything, but it went off. It went off. It was so loud. And Jeremiah was like, ‘You got it! You got it, Anna!’ So we went to look, and there was this woman lying on the ground, and all this blood. I just dropped the gun, and we ran. Oh, God, I’m so sorry, Shelby. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to do it. It just happened.”