Wicked Winters

by Melanie Karsak et al.

  Maggie nodded thoughtfully. “What about...well, even her dad admitted she’d had a problem with booze and pills.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Neal conceded. “Doc Caldwell said Lucy’s liver wasn’t in perfect shape. ‘A little worse for wear,’ that’s how she put it. But it wasn’t enough to explain her keeling over. Doc Caldwell said she’d seen some livers that had killed their owners. Said they look, and I quote, ‘like someone’s been using them for first base.’”

  Maggie chuckled darkly. “Sounds like the good doctor.”

  “Anyway, the doc was holding out on cause of death until this morning.” Neal sighed. “We met with Alec Hennyson from the county attorney’s office this morning, and he says they’re calling it, for now anyway. Hunches won’t do for a cause of death, and we got nothing concrete. Lucy’s cause of death will be unknown.”

  “What about Allie?”

  Neal’s expression darkened. “For today, she stays at the house with Jake. They’ve got a caseworker from the Cabinet of Health and Family Services running the show. Jessica Stansfield. It sounds to me like she’s gonna have Allie with her dad by Christmas.” Neal shook his head in disgust. “You met Joe Desilva? The family law guy?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “Joe was working on Lucy’s case for the divorce. Yesterday, I set up a lunch at the Elm Street Grill with Joe and the CHFS case worker, and we made the pitch for keeping the kid away from that bastard Kindler. According to what Lucy told Joe, Kindler’s got a bit of a temper on him. Once or twice he sorted things out with his hands instead of his words. Son of a bitch.”

  “Dammit,” Maggie replied. “With Lucy, or Allie?”

  “That’s the thing, Maggie,” Neal said. “Even in the worst of Lucy’s claims, she never said anything about Kindler being rough with Allie. Never raised a finger to the child as far as we know. I find myself wondering if Lucy might have reported him if she’d realized he was a danger to someone other than just her. Some people can bear a lot when they think they’re the only ones in danger, but if he’d put a hand on Allie... well, it’s neither here nor there, is it?”

  Neal shrugged. “We got no formal complaints about the S.O.B., and so Jessica Stansfield from the Health and Family Services sees no cause for concern.” Neal slapped the table lightly. “Kindler’s alibi for Saturday night checks out. He was covering a shift for a friend in the ER at Coalton General. Interviewed his supervisor, and she looked at me like I was the village idiot when I asked if she was sure he was there. ‘Nurses don’t walk away from my ER, Sheriff.’” Neal shook his head. “Whatever. Meanwhile, our search today turned up goose eggs, just like yesterday and the day before. I mean, we found a bunch of Kindler’s fingerprints, but considering the fact that Lucy only kicked him out two weeks ago, that’s to be expected. In short, the sum total of what we’ve found amounts to precisely jack and squat.”

  Maggie mulled over what she’d been told. None of it came as any surprise. She knew Neal had been hoping to slow things down with CHFS, but none of the interactions they’d had over the years with social services led her to believe that it would go down that way. Maggie knew as well as Neal that Health and Family Services was overrun by every sad family tale in the state, and in terms of evidence, they damn sure didn’t have much to go on. Maggie sighed. “I’m sorry, Neal. I know you were hoping this would break another way.”

  Neal ground his cigarette out in the tray before him. “If wishes were horses, eh?” Neal shrugged. “What about you? What did you get out of the Garmins?”

  Maggie had known this was coming. She pulled the notepad out of her pocket. “Well, I got from them exactly what I got from the Dunnies this morning, and the Corrigans yesterday.”

  Neal nodded. “Walk me through it.”

  So, she did. She’d been putting the similarities together. She told Neal about how each of the kids had been walking somewhere along the river road last night and the night before. Each had heard crying from the trees along the creek, and upon investigating, each had seen the weeping woman. Their descriptions had been nearly identical. Jason Dunnie had told Maggie that the woman’s eyes were “all black,” but the other two had used the same phrase: Her eyes weren’t there.

  Neal chewed his lip as he took in those details. “Her eyes weren’t there,” he repeated dully.

  “Yeah,” Maggie replied. “Sound like someone you know?”

  Neal shook his head. “She’d stand out in a line-up, wouldn’t she?”

  Maggie finished running through her notes, gave Neal a moment to think it over. “Okay,” he said finally, “what’s your takeaway?”

  A spontaneous sigh escaped Maggie. “Well, I got three kids claiming to have seen the same impossible sight.” Maggie lowered her voice self-consciously. “A boogeyman, basically. Neal, we got us a boogeyman in Briarwood County.”

  Neal nodded, expressionless. “I surely hope you’re taking it more seriously than that.”

  Maggie paused to think it over. “You know I am, Neal. Come on, though. Isn’t this just the assignment that every law enforcement officer dreams of pulling?” Maggie took a sip of coffee. “Think about it. The rest of your colleagues are out looking for physical evidence of a possible homicide.” Maggie leaned a little closer, speaking just above a whisper. “Meanwhile, the boss wants you to go looking for a ghost.”

  Neal considered her coldly, and for a moment, Maggie wondered if she’d put her foot in it. Neal was an even-tempered boss, but his sense of humor sometimes fell a little short when it came to errands of the sort on which he had sent Maggie that day. Finally, Neal sighed. “Look, I know, Maggie,” he said. “This isn’t the kind of thing that anybody thinks they’re signing on for. Hell. I know I didn’t. When I came on under Travis Wright, I figured with after ten years working vice in Chicago, the job here would be a cakewalk.”

  Maggie nodded. “And most of it is.”

  “Yes,” Neal concurred. “Yes, it is. Hell, you followed a spouse here like I did, Maggie. Columbus ain’t as big a city as Chicago, but come on. I know you figured it would be, what, working parades on Main Street every day.”

  Maggie laughed. “Maybe noise complaints from too much laughter in the park.”

  Neal grinned. “Exactly. Not this other stuff.” Neal tapped his cigarette in the ashtray. “Not the graveyard shift.”

  Maggie paused thoughtfully. “Yeah, well, that’s life in the little city, I guess.”

  Neal nodded, “Some of this stuff, Maggie, it just doesn’t fit in the paperwork. It can’t show up in the blotter.”

  “I know that, Neal.”

  “And if I could count on Henry or Ronnie to check on some of this… this off-the-record stuff, then maybe we could spread it around a little. But Henry’s about as by-the-books as you can get and Ronnie… heck, Maggie, you know how that is. Ronnie and I have made busts of every kind. We’ve taken fire together. Hell, he once single-handedly broke up a fight between a bunch of bikers out at Jackson’s Pond. Ronnie’s a bull. But this other business?” Neal whistled softly between his teeth. “I took him out on a few of these calls when he was a rookie, and now the poor son of a bitch sleeps with his Bible and crucifix next to his bed. I’d put Ronnie up against just about any number of thugs, but this… this is the graveyard shift.” Neal smiled humorlessly. “I can’t count on them, Maggie. I count on you.”

  “And I know that, too.”

  “So,” Neal said, “with all the intel you have in hand, deputy, what’s your takeaway on the boogeyman?”

  Maggie stroked her chin thoughtfully. “I think we got an apparition on our hands, boss,” she said. “I think these kids saw a ghost.”

  Neal pondered that for a long moment. “What about an identity, Maggie?”

  The question left Maggie feeling suddenly cold. “Identity?” she asked. “I don’t know, Sheriff. You know many eyeless gray women?”

  Neal sighed. “You know what I mean, Maggie. You’ve talked to those kids. You met Lucinda.” Neal paused
now, seemingly at a loss. “Could it be her, Maggie?”

  Maggie nodded. “Honestly? That makes as much sense as anything else.”

  Neal fell silent, and for a few moments, Maggie just took in the sounds of the restaurant. Across the way, Ike and Benji joked with Estelle, and the bell rang as another couple came in from the cold. In that moment, Maggie could almost bring herself to believe that Burgettsville was just a simple small town the likes of which she had imagined she would find when she followed her husband here a decade ago.

  Then Neal pushed a manila folder across the table to her. It had no exterior markings, but Maggie knew what it was. “Here,” Neal said. “It’s a dossier I’ve put together over the years. It’s broken up into categories.” Neal took a nonchalant sip of coffee. “Poltergeists. Residual phantasms. Elementals. Et cetera.” He tapped the folder with a forefinger. “Some stuff in there about ‘revenants’ that I think you might find useful.”

  Maggie opened her mouth to respond, but she was honestly at a loss for words, so she just took the manila folder, looked it over briefly, then stood to leave. There was still one question nagging at the back of her mind. “Neal,” she said, “why do think it’s this way in Briarwood County?”

  Neal took a wad of bills from his wallet, counted them off and left them on the table. “Why’s it this way?” he asked. “Been wondering that myself a long damned time, Maggie.” He pulled on his coat and hat. “A wise woman I once knew might have gotten closer than anybody else.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Maggie asked.

  “Yup,” Neal replied. “Way she put it, it’s just life in the little city.”

  With that, the two departed.

  The sun had gone down by the time Maggie arrived at her sister-in-law Judy’s house to pick up Andy. Judy was Jerry’s younger sister. She and her husband, Pete, had a ten and a twelve-year-old, Jack and Dougie. Andy had spent so much time with his cousins that they were basically siblings. They had spent that afternoon in the throes of some sort of disagreement or another that seemed to have been mostly smoothed over by the time Maggie arrived. Before Maggie could get Andy out the door, Judy insisted that she’d made more than enough stroganoff for the family, and she insisted Maggie and Andy stay. Maggie knew better than to try to fight her. The Dells were a stubborn clan, and Maggie sometimes sensed that her sister-in-law’s hospitality was her ongoing tribute to her older brother.

  After dinner, Maggie and Andy headed back home. Maggie lived in the same little ranch she and Jerry had bought when they first moved from Ohio. Maggie sometimes thought back on their realtor, a middle-aged woman with a prom queen’s perm and flashy gold bracelets who had enthused about the two baths, three bedrooms, and a fireplace, saying it was “just a darling little starter home.” Twelve years later, Maggie was pretty sure it would be her finisher home as well, but the neighborhood was nice, and it was enough for her and Andy.

  That evening, Maggie made popcorn and let Andy stay up until 10:00 for a Christmas movie. Andy was an independent kid. He’d decided when he was five that he was too old to cuddle anymore, but with popcorn in play, he’d still share a couch with his mom for a movie. After the film wrapped up, Andy kissed Maggie and went to bed. As she watched her son disappear down the hall toward his room, Maggie’s mind went back to the work ahead of her, to the thought of Lucinda Kindler out in the trees beside Little Horn River, and to only two words she had left to say.

  My baby.

  Maggie fetched her dossier.

  She worked at the kitchen table, as she often did when Neal sent her home with files of this sort. There was something comforting about the bright light that bounced off the chrome of the oven and the well-waxed linoleum, a reassuring domesticity. When she spread dossiers with labels such as “Possible Possessions” and “Spiritual Manifestations (Corporeal)” across her kitchen table, she could balance the unbelievable with the routine. A malicious apparition haunting the Red Rock Quarry in the summer of ‘75? Of course. Let’s pair it with those leftover lemon bars from the office Christmas party. If the graveyard shift had taught Maggie anything, it was that the unthinkable always went down a little easier with a chaser of mundanity.

  The dossier was packed. Here were the notes on the Red Rock Quarry haunting. Here were Polaroids of an accident scene with strange orbs floating in the background. Here were photos showing inexplicable lights glowing over that church camp out in Bracken’s Hollow. Maggie thought of images she’d seen in books about the paranormal. Ghosts. UFOs. As a kid, she’d eaten that stuff up, but there was always a sort of unreality to those illustrations. Here she held a Polaroid taken by an actual police officer of what might be a ghost. The thought made her turn away for a moment to meditate on Andy’s last spelling test hanging from the refrigerator with notes from his teacher made in a bright purple marker. “A+! Much improved!”

  As midnight approached, Maggie felt her focus slipping and her eyelids drooping, and she was no closer to understanding the weeping woman than she had been when Andy went to bed. She was in the midst of slogging through an academic article Neal had found in some kind of magazine about parapsychology and was all but ready to hang it up for the night when she came across a passage that had been marked with a highlighter. “Though Rexler’s findings vis-à-vis persistent ghostly visitations suggest a randomness to most of such activities, multiple reports of object-orientation among such apparitions suggests that the entities might view the objects of their fancy with an overpowering fascination. Indeed, some entities have been known to express a drive toward certain objects so strong that even Rexler himself has referred to them as ‘talismans.’”

  Maggie was tired, and the jargony prose threw her enough that she had to read it twice, but she was fairly certain she hadn’t been the only one who had to think it over, as Neal had left a note in the margins. “Talismans,” Neal had written. “Objects believed to possess magical properties.” Under that line was a blank space that gave Neal’s note a sort of pause as though his thought process needed to present itself on the page. Under that pause, his script continued in the same flawless handwriting as ever: “If they have returned, what are they looking for?”

  The thought clicked clearly in her mind, rising out of the academic prose as plain as a picture taken on a clear and sunny day. “What are they looking for?” Maggie asked herself aloud. The thought gripped her strongly enough that she rose from the table and walked over to the kitchen door. She peered out at the snowy midnight street and into the darkness beyond. The river road was only a few miles off, and the tree line out beyond her street could easily be the trees where Holly and the other kids had seen the weeping woman. “My baby,” Maggie whispered. The refrigerator hummed consolingly, but still Maggie shivered at the thought of Lucinda out in that cold. “My baby,” she said again.

  What could be clearer? She wanted her baby. Maggie stared into the dark and thought that over. Lucinda couldn’t have Allie. That went without saying. But might she have a talisman?

  Maggie stared into the dark just a little longer. Then she gathered up the papers scattered across the kitchen table, loaded them back into the manila folder and headed off to bed.

  She had her work cut out for her.

  In the morning, Maggie dropped Andy off at Judy’s. Maggie was planning for a late night, so Andy was staying overnight with his cousins. All three boys were excited that they’d be going to a matinee showing of some hot new movie that was apparently about a young boy abandoned by his family at Christmas who has to defend their home from burglars with makeshift traps and weapons. “It’s a lot cuter than it sounds,” Judy assured her.

  Then Maggie headed into work. Ronald was off for the holiday, so with only Maggie and Henry to brief, Neal kept the morning meeting in his office short. He seemed to notice that Maggie had come in with his dossier under one arm, so as he divvied up the assignments for the day, Neal shoveled more of them toward Henry than her. If Henry noticed, he didn’t show it, just took his assignments and left.
When he was gone, Maggie put the dossier on Neal’s desk, flipped it open and pointed out the article that she had found the night before.

  “Talismans,” she said.

  “Talis-whats?”

  Maggie smiled. “It’s your highlight, boss. You tell me.”

  Neal looked the passage over. “Oh, yeah. I remember this. This goes back to when I was working under Travis Wright. We had a case in the public library. An apparition.”

  Maggie furrowed her brow. She didn’t like the sound of that at all. “The library’s haunted?”

  “Not anymore.” Neal replied with a shrug. “Was, though. Some kind of poltergeist that had a habit of pilfering all sorts of objects. Little items from the employees’ desks. A few customers lost some stuff, too.”

  “Oh, great,” Maggie said, “it’s the ghost of the lost and found.”

  Neal shook his head. “So glad to have such professional help.”

  “Hey,” Maggie replied, “I read the dossier. Give me some credit.”

  “So, what do you think?”

  Maggie paused for a moment, searching for the right words. “Well, from what I read, it sounds like some of these… we’ll call them entities—”

  “I call them ghosts,” Neal said, “but you use whatever double-speak suits you.”

  “Some of these ghosts,” Maggie said, “are looking for something. Something they left behind.”

  Neal thought it over. “Okay. I think I see what you mean.” Neal took a deep breath, then sighed. “Allie.”

  “Yeah,” Maggie said.

  Neal stared blankly at his desk for a long moment. “Dammit, Maggie,” he said finally. “She can’t have Allie.”

  “No,” Maggie agreed. “She sure can’t. But maybe we can give her a talisman.”

  “Okay,” Neal replied. “You have something in mind?”

  Maggie nodded thoughtfully. “I think I do.”

  It was just past noon when Maggie stopped by the little ranch house on Dressler Court that until three days ago had been Lucinda Kindler’s home. Neal had called ahead to let Jack know she was coming. A little blue Honda Civic sat in the driveway. This was Lucinda’s car. All the snow that had fallen in the last three days remained piled high on its roof and hood. Jake Harriman’s battered old blue Chevy pick-up was parallel parked out front. Gray slush and ice coated the rim of the wheel-wells. Jake had been running errands over the last few days. Though Jake hadn’t been responsible for a four-year-old since his only daughter had been that age, Neal claimed that he was taking to his responsibility as Allie’s caretaker with as much aplomb as one could imagine a man who had just lost his only child could possibly muster. Maggie spotted him peering out from behind the living room blinds the moment she pulled her cruiser in behind his truck. Jake was clearly on high alert.