Snowblind

by Christopher Golden

  “Did you leave that open?” Ella asked.

  Snow had swirled in and built a thin, ridged layer of white on the sill. It had begun to turn to sleet, a thousand icy little pinpricks on the window glass.

  “No,” TJ said, turning to her. “I don’t think so.”

  Ella didn’t think she had, either.

  “Ssshhh,” she whispered to Grace, holding her daughter tightly. “It’s okay. It was just a bad dream. You’re okay now.”

  One of us must have opened it and not remembered, she thought.

  She held the girl close but her eyes were on TJ. He stood frowning at the open window for several seconds longer and then at last he walked over, swept the snow from the sill to the floor, and shut it tightly.

  The wind and the sleet continued.

  One of us must have.

  EIGHT

  Detective Keenan rolled through the red light at Winter and Main without bothering to turn on the siren. It was after one A.M. and the roads were abandoned except for the plows, whose drivers were trying to scrape the sleet and snow from the street. The coming day promised to be even colder, and if the slush froze solid before they could get it off the pavement, the streets would be even more treacherous.

  The engine purred as he guided his unmarked to the next intersection, then turned left along the river. The blue lights built into the grille of the vehicle threw gliding blue phantoms onto the snowbanks around the car. The tires splattered the slush to either side as he drove but he kept his hands tight on the wheel, ready to act if he hit an ice patch.

  Another winter, another friggin’ snowstorm, he thought.

  But this wasn’t just another storm. The sleet had made sure of that. He remembered worse, of course—both snowstorms and ice storms—but this one had turned out to be pretty bad, and very weird. The department had received more than a dozen calls from folks who claimed to have seen ghosts. Detective Keenan figured they were either cranks or nutjobs and had said as much when the dispatcher had called him several hours before to see if he would drive up nearly to the state line to talk to a woman who had asked for him by name but not given her own. Keenan had declined; he’d been off duty, and there was no reason the woman couldn’t give her statement to a uniformed officer and wait until tomorrow for a detective to investigate her ghost story.

  Insane, he thought now, driving along Riverside Road, the water churning by on his right. A little snow and people go batshit crazy.

  “You’re one of them,” he said aloud, his voice filling the quiet of the car.

  It was true enough. During most snowstorms in the past dozen years, people in Coventry had gotten … twitchy. There were always frantic calls about missing kids who turned out to have gone sledding or—with the older ones—were out drinking with friends. Joe Keenan had been through enough of these that he’d become almost numb to the skittishness that came over so many Coventry folks in the wintertime.

  Tonight felt different.

  Ghost stories were different. As unsettled as the town always grew during a storm, this was a new development. A dozen calls, each with a story. He could still recall with anxious clarity the sound it had made that night twelve years ago when he had hit something in the blizzard with his car. The dent had been there for months before the police department’s mechanics had gotten it fixed. And he remembered the deaths of Charlie Newell and Gavin Wexler, and the way the Wexler kid’s father had been there one second and gone the next. Lost in the storm.

  Detective Keenan thought the people who had been unnerved by snowstorms for the past dozen years needed to move on, but tonight people—too many people—were talking about ghosts, and it freaked him out a little.

  Stupid, he thought.

  Maybe it was, but he kept his hands tight on the wheel and surveyed the road ahead with great care.

  The wipers scraped the icy windshield and freezing rain pelted the roof. Nothing came out of the storm to smash into his car and he sure as hell didn’t see any ghosts. But then he hadn’t come out tonight because of ghost stories. He had made it clear to Trisha, the dispatcher who’d called, that he wasn’t responding to crazy complaints unless the captain on duty ordered him to do it. That call had never come, but twenty minutes ago he had received a different one—a call that had gotten him out of his chair and moving so quickly that he’d left the TV on, only realizing it when he was in the car, headed for the river.

  Now the icy water churned past on his right, visible through the trees that grew along its banks in this part of Coventry. To Joe Keenan, the best thing about the city had always been its eclectic nature. If you wanted a busy downtown or a modern suburb or a remote rural farmhouse, you had to only drive a couple of miles and you could find it, all within the city limits. That also meant that the Coventry PD saw all kinds of crime and had to be equipped to handle everything from meth dealers to petty theft and breaking up high-school parties. None of those things would have persuaded him to put in overtime tonight. But there were things that even the most hardened cynic could not ignore.

  Up ahead, red-and-blue lights swirled in the darkness, reflecting off the newfallen snow and the droplets of sleet that still slashed down from the sky. Detective Keenan slowed his car and pulled in behind a darkened Coventry PD patrol vehicle. He made sure not to box in the ambulance that sat waiting for a passenger. Cursing the wind and the tiny daggers of sleet, he climbed out of the car and opened the battered black umbrella that he kept on the floor in the backseat. Some of its spokes had torn through the fabric but it did the job.

  Detective Keenan walked through the trees, greeted by uniformed officers with a wave or a grim word. A group of police officers had gathered at the river’s edge. Beyond them, a silver Mercedes lay on its roof, halfway into the river. The current dragged at the front end, which was almost entirely submerged, and he wondered idly if the current would be strong enough to pluck the car from the bank and swallow it entirely.

  A loud beeping echoed along the riverbank and he glanced farther south, where a tow truck had pulled over and was now reversing through a narrow gap in the trees often used by local fishermen. The beeping came from the tow truck, that backing-up alarm that he had always found more irritating than helpful.

  The group standing by the river included cops both in and out of uniform, paramedics, and Al Dyson from the county medical examiner’s office. Two men in hip waders were thigh deep in the icy river, checking out the car, neither of them stupid enough to stand downriver from the vehicle, just in case the current dislodged it.

  Callie Weiss saw him first. She tapped her partner on the arm and they both peeled away from the group to greet him.

  “Detective,” Callie said. She was a slim brunette with a Roman nose and full lips who spent her off hours at a dojo and her summer weekends at Warrior Camp. Callie Weiss might be only a few inches over five feet but Keenan knew she could have kicked his ass without breaking a sweat.

  Her partner, a big ginger guy called Ross, seemed to sneer at the sky. “Nice night for it, huh?”

  The freezing rain pelted Keenan’s umbrella but he was glad to have it. Callie and Ross wore waterproof jackets and the hats that would keep the worst of it away, but he knew that the rain must have gone down their necks and soaked through their pants and shoes by now. It would be a shitty night for all of them, and it was just getting started.

  “Paint me a picture,” Detective Keenan said.

  “This picture isn’t clear enough?” Ross asked. Keenan shot him a dark look and turned to his partner.

  “The car is registered to Christopher Stroud,” Callie said. “Home for the Strouds is Falcon Ridge Road. Officers sent to the residence found a family friend house-and-cat sitting for them, said they were on a ski weekend in New Hampshire and were due back tonight.”

  Detective Keenan glanced at the Mercedes. He’d taken note of the ski rack before but hadn’t paid enough attention. The car had gone into the river upside down, tearing the rack right off the roof. At
least two pairs of skis had been torn off, left scattered along the bank, but one pair of skis remained locked to the ruined rack, shorter than the others. Kids’ skis.

  A tight knot formed in his gut and he started for the car, stood behind it and tried to see through the night-black glass of the rear windshield.

  “What’ve we got?”

  Callie and Ross had followed. He felt them just over his shoulder, watching him the way he watched the two guys in waders who were peering in through the shattered driver’s side window.

  “We broke the passenger window,” one of the guys said. “Car was filling up. Water would’ve dragged it off the bank. This way it flows right through.”

  “People,” Detective Keenan said, hearing the sharp, cold edge in his voice and not caring. “I meant people.”

  Now that he’d shifted his position he had a better angle and he saw at least one body inside, hanging upside down by the seat belt.

  “Driver is presumably Christopher Stroud,” Callie Weiss said, coming to stand beside him on the bank. “Safe to assume the passenger is his wife, Melissa.”

  A clanking noise made Detective Keenan look up. The tow-truck driver had backed as close to the water as he dared and now he stood at the back of the truck with the hook and chain in his hand. With the flick of a switch, he set the electric winch moving, unfurling lengths of cable until he had it long enough to secure to the car.

  Keenan barely took note of the tow driver or the winch. He stood waiting. Listening. After a few seconds he turned to look at Callie.

  “What about the kid?”

  “Kid?” Ross asked.

  Detective Keenan stared at him. The umbrella sagged in his grip and he let it slip down to hang loosely beside him, upside down just like the car. He glanced at Callie and then turned to look at the other cops and the paramedics and even Al Dyson from the ME’s office. They were just waiting for the tow truck to haul the Mercedes out of the water so they could bag and tag the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Stroud. Detective Keenan had been called out to survey the scene, make sure it was just an accident, a happy couple who’d foolishly chosen to drive home in this weather, a little too fast around a corner, a date with the Merrimack River.

  “The goddamn kid!” Keenan snapped. He pointed at the ski rack. “The kid who belongs to these skis. Or didn’t the cat-sitter tell you the Strouds had a kid?”

  Callie Weiss had gone pale, staring at the car and the river and then forcing herself to meet Keenan’s gaze.

  “I don’t know if … I mean, I wasn’t the one who…”

  The tow-truck driver had hooked up the car. As he walked back to the winch controls, Detective Keenan felt a strange, dark certainty come over him. He barked at the others to get out of the way, waved the waders back from the car, and then stood to watch while the Mercedes was dragged from the river, sliding on its roof in the snow, hundreds of gallons of water pouring out of the broken windows.

  The two guys in waders sloshed toward the car but Detective Keenan beat them to it. Abandoning his umbrella, he dropped to his knees in the slush. Water soaking through his pants, he bent to shine his flashlight within. The Strouds had drowned. Mr. Stroud hung limply from his seat belt, the deflated air bag a dead white balloon. He’d sustained a massive contusion to the side of his head, likely when the car had rolled. It was probably his head that had broken the driver’s side window; chances were that he had died before the car had even gone under water.

  His wife had managed to get her seat belt undone but it hadn’t saved her. Upside down, she lay in a tumble of limbs on the inverted ceiling of the car. Melissa Stroud’s eyes were wide and staring as if they saw into another world and water had pooled in her gaping mouth. Keenan had seen too many corpses in his life, but there seemed something especially obscene about Mrs. Stroud.

  The backseat of the car was empty. He’d barely noticed before but the rear passenger window was broken, just like the front one.

  “Did you do that?” he asked the two waders, pointing to the window.

  “No,” the talkative one replied. “The back of the car was mostly above water when we got here.”

  It made sense, of course. The windows were likely to shatter when a car rolled. The fact that the rear windshield and the front passenger window hadn’t broken in the crash was more of an anomaly than the rear passenger window breaking.

  He shifted his flashlight around, examining the backseat. The beam halted on the door latch and he frowned. Keenan used his flashlight to brush away loose shards of safety glass and pushed himself through the broken window, taking a closer look.

  “Blood,” he said, flashing the light around for a moment longer before pulling out of the car.

  “The kid, you think?” Ross asked.

  Detective Keenan shot him a hard look, then turned to Callie. “Get me information. Now. I want a description of the Stroud child within five minutes. Name, gender, height, weight, identifying marks. I want a photograph in fifteen minutes or less. And at some point between the two, I want as many people on this site as you can muster. We’re going up and down the river, full-on search party.”

  “You don’t want to wait till morning?” Ross asked, glancing dubiously at the riverbank. “If the body snagged on the shore, it’s not going anywhere till dawn. If it’s still floating we’re not going to find it tonight anyway.”

  Keenan felt his fists clench. He swallowed hard and begged himself not to punch the guy. Bile rose in the back of his throat and he thought of Charlie Newell and Gavin Wexler—other kids he had not been able to save.

  “And what if this kid’s alive?” he asked, staring at Ross. Stepping back, he spread his arms, addressing the rest of the gathered men and women. “The back of the car was not submerged. Rear window was broken. There’s blood on the handle. Someone who was in the backseat and who sustained injuries in the crash tried to get out with that handle before climbing out the window.”

  He shone his light up and down the riverbank.

  “Whoever owns those smaller skis might be in the river, yeah,” he went on. “But the way it looks, we have to assume that the kid wandered away from the crash, probably looking for help. We are going to be that help.”

  People were scrambling. The guy from the ME’s office did his job, supervising the recovery of the bodies of Christopher and Melissa Stroud from their vehicle. Everyone else was refocused on the task of finding the missing child. Maps came out and zones were marked off, but several officers had already spread out to search the immediate vicinity of the crash. Phone calls would be made. If the kid had been picked up by another car or shown up at a hospital, they would know soon enough.

  Keenan stood staring at the river, hoping. He wondered why Jake Schapiro hadn’t shown up with his camera. It might be helpful later to have photos of the site and the inside of the car before the small army of searchers arrived to trample the area.

  “Zachary,” a voice said behind him.

  He turned to see Callie Weiss holding a police radio as if it might ward him away.

  “Zachary Stroud,” she said. “Ten years old. Goes to Whittier Elementary. A picture’s on the way. We should be able to get it to everyone shortly.”

  Detective Keenan could not speak. Could barely breathe. He only nodded and then returned his attention to the river. Cars were approaching. He heard their engines and knew that the search was about to begin. Nobody else would be out in the middle of the night in this weather. The chief wouldn’t be among them yet, but he wouldn’t be that far behind. Chief Romano would take charge. Keenan would be relieved; he wanted to be out there searching in the dark and freezing rain.

  Zachary Stroud, he thought, setting the name firmly in his mind.

  Another boy lost in the storm.

  “No,” he muttered to himself. “Not again.”

  He wouldn’t let it happen again.

  NINE

  Ella came awake on Sunday morning with sunlight streaming through the windows in her bedroom. T
hey had left the curtains open last night and now she had to turn her face away from the brightness, burrowing into her pillow’s cool shadows. The memory of the night before returned to her slowly. Furrowing her brow, she wiped sleep from her eyes and flopped onto her back.

  After Grace’s bad dreams, she and TJ had first insisted that their daughter try to go back to sleep on her own. She was eleven years old, after all, not a baby anymore. But when for the third time an anxious Grace had appeared at their bedside, Ella had gone back to her daughter’s room and they had climbed into bed together. This had been their pattern for years when Grace was troubled or ill. Most of the time it seemed preferable to letting her get into the habit of sleeping with her parents, but there had been nights when Ella cursed TJ for his firm resistance to letting Grace drift off between them. She understood his reluctance to set a precedent, but at three o’clock in the morning, when she’d had only small snatches of broken sleep, Ella didn’t give a crap about precedent.

  During the night she had tried to depart Grace’s bed several times, only to have the girl stir and call for her to come back. Finally, after hours without any decent sleep, she had slipped from beneath Grace’s covers and shuffled back to her room. TJ had sprawled across their bed, claiming most of it for himself, and she’d had to shake and poke him to get him to move over. This morning, her eyes burned and her head felt heavy, as if she’d had too much to drink the night before. Of TJ there was no sign save a tangle of sheets and bedspread that had been twisted up and hung off the bed on his side.

  Groaning, Ella sat up and swung her legs out of bed. She dragged on a pair of yoga pants and rose, going to the window and squinting against the bright sunshine. The storm had been fierce yesterday, but now the sky was nearly cloudless. The yard and driveway were covered with a thick layer of snow capped by a gleaming crust of ice. The plows had been through, evidenced by the white ridges on either side of the road, but given how much frozen mess remained, it had been many hours since the last one went by.