The Child Finder

by Rene Denfeld

  It was after that snow girl told herself the first fairy tale. It went like this:

  Once upon a time, in a world free of snow, there lived a little girl, and her name was Madison.

  Madison was like all children: half make-believe.

  One day her mother said: “We are going to the mountains, to cut a tree for Christmas.”

  The mountains were much bigger than Madison had ever imagined. Their car was like an ant crawling up the side of a sugar jar.

  Finally they stopped. Madison was so excited to see the snow. She ran inside the trees, surprised at how dark it was in the woods.

  Madison turned around. She couldn’t see her mother or father. Her heart started beating faster. She was lost! Madison ran and ran, calling, “Mommy, Daddy!” But the more she ran, the more lost she got.

  Suddenly she went tumbling down a long white cliff. The earth rose and fell, and she could see nothing but snow.

  Madison landed in a place where the snow rose over her waist. It took a long time, but she fought her way out into another forest. She was shivering. Night fell.

  All night Madison walked, touching the dark trees with her bare hands. By the time the sun came up, the shivering stopped. Madison began to feel very warm.

  The snow looked soft, and comforting. Madison wanted to lie down and sleep. She stumbled, her head hitting a tree as she fell.

  Then everything was white.

  The store door clanged behind Naomi.

  Earl Strikes looked up from his counter, where he was selling shells and beer to a group of hunters. They looked like they had stepped out of another time, with long tangled beards and stiff, stained coats. An old woman was with them. She clutched a gallon of cheap wine. She was wearing a jacket over a nightgown over boots.

  Naomi stood at the door and watched the locals leave. The group piled into a deflated pickup with mold in the tires. The old woman’s nightgown stuck out of the truck door as they rode back down the mountain.

  “Who was that?” she asked, returning to the counter.

  “Oh, them? That’s the Murphy brothers. Buncha fools. And their mom, poor pisser she is.”

  “Where do they live?” she asked.

  “Down past Stubbed Toe Creek. They only come up here because I still sell them beer. That’s the kind of fool I am. Why? You think they got that girl?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Ranger says you’re looking for that little girl,” Earl commented laconically.

  Naomi felt a flash of anger. Of all the challenges in her work, having some law enforcement talk out of school was one of the hardest. If this old coot knew, probably everyone in the area would find out—and if Madison were still alive, it was a good way to get her killed. Most captors would kill a child rather than get caught.

  “Heard you got a claim,” she said, deciding to make the best of it, pulling out her copy and smoothing it over the counter. Earl Strikes’s eyes widened. “Must have inherited it.”

  “That I did,” he said, his back straightening.

  “You live here in the store?”

  “Right in the back. You can see. Don’t have no girl there either.”

  Naomi didn’t hesitate. She knew that if she made her request a statement, many people didn’t know they could decline. So over the years she had learned to not ask permission, but to presume command.

  “It’s not your back room I’m interested in—though I’ll definitely see that later. What I need to see is the family cabin.”

  “You don’t scare easy, do you?” Earl asked, leading the way into the forest behind the store.

  The land looked ready to jump at them: tangles of brush much denser than the area she had been searching, probably due to the lower elevation and logging. They passed massive snow-covered circular stumps of logs so large Naomi could have lain across them. The second-growth trees wove together a thick canopy. Giant ferns poked out of the snow.

  “I don’t believe in fear,” Naomi said.

  “Why not?” He worked his mouth.

  “What’s the point?”

  “Keeps you safe.”

  The frost of his skin showed underneath the back of his cap, mottled with age spots. She saw the swinging hands, the capable knuckles.

  “Fear never keeps anyone safe,” she said.

  “You gonna go in the cellar like one of those TV shows?”

  “No. I’m going to ask you to do it.”

  “Got nothing to hide.”

  In the end Earl’s family homestead was exactly as he had said: a falling-down old cabin with a collapsed mud chimney, home now to a dozen birds. A fat chipmunk sat on a decayed wall mantled with snow. The cabin was tucked into the trees. Naomi saw with dismay she could have hiked right past it without noticing it, the mossy old logs blended in so well. Searching for these cabins was going to be much harder than she had thought.

  She peeked over the wall into a broken interior. Parts of the floor had collapsed. “That’s your cellar,” Earl said, pointing at the dim shadow under the floor. Naomi peered down. The cellar was small, deep, and empty. A broken ladder leaned against one wall.

  She looked around at the cold woods. “It doesn’t seem like you’d need a root cellar in these parts.”

  He cackled. “Not roots. It was for keeping furs.”

  After thoroughly inspecting the cabin, Naomi followed Earl back to the store. She insisted on examining the place, from his room in the back—a surprisingly neat little room decorated with a collection of doilies hand-made by his dead wife—to the bales of rank-smelling furs on the covered back porch that he seemed reluctant to let her see. Earl explained that every year he took the furs to Prineville, where the Oregon Territorial Council on Furs ran a raw-fur auction. After the council took their commission they sent him a check, which he deposited at the bank in town. All perfectly legit, he said, a little too pointedly.

  In the front she examined his decrepit old truck, which was filled with trash and wrappers, and sent her flashlight under the buckled porch, which rode only inches above the wet ground.

  “You still think I got that girl?” Earl asked, watching her work. He had gone from sour to amused.

  Naomi stopped, swinging her flashlight. She looked up at him, her knees in the dirty snow. Her face was controlled: there was a real girl missing.

  “Who did?” she asked flatly.

  “Snow got that girl, sure as rights. Sad as hell.” He signaled at a muddy sky. “Sure as heaven above.”

  Naomi was scraping the mud off her boots, sitting in the seat of her car, when Earl came back out of the store. From the chimney ran a spiral of smoke. Naomi watched with interest as the smoke dispersed into the cold air as if it never had existed.

  “Miss,” he said, holding his cap in his hands. His head was white on top, like a tonsure.

  Her eyes turned up, large in the soft light.

  “I ain’t gonna tell no one about what you’re doin’,” he said.

  “How do you know what I’m doing, Earl?”

  “I don’t,” he said mildly. He pointed at the now glowering sky. “There’s a storm coming, miss,” he said. “Best you get back home. Unless you want to spend the night with me.” He had the audacity to crack a wink.

  She didn’t take him seriously until she was halfway back to the motel and what had started as a few random flakes suddenly became a thick blur. Her windshield wipers, turned on high, beat frantically, and yet the snow fell insistently, softly, deadly.

  Her hand reached for the radio. “Nothing like a spring squall,” the young-sounding man said. “Hold on to your hat and button up down south. Not a time to be watering the woods,” he joked. It took Naomi a moment to get it.

  He sounded so close he could have been talking in her ear.

  By the time she got to the motel she was crawling through whiteout conditions. Her hands were tight on the wheel. Behind her the mountains had disappeared.

  “This is Jerome,” the kind old lady had said in their ki
tchen.

  Naomi had pressed hard against the woman’s skirts, smelling the reassuring—foreign—adult female smell. With one hand she rubbed the fabric. Naomi knew that under the skirts was something that linked the nice old woman to her, and this felt profoundly comforting to her, because the old woman seemed strong. Like she would hit badness with her black iron skillet before she let it in the door.

  But the boy standing in front of her, with the cap of jet-black hair, tight cheekbones, and wonderful dark eyes? Naomi had never seen a boy like that, of that she was certain.

  “I’m Jerome,” the boy said, with a grin. He looked saucy. Even the way he stood, like he had a right to throw his arms all over the kitchen. Which smelled nice, by the way.

  The old woman cut her a thick slice of bread, toasted it, smeared it with butter, and put it in a bowl. She poured a current of warm milk over it, scented with cinnamon and vanilla and sugar. She had held Naomi close to her the entire time. “You look like you need feeding,” she had said warmly.

  They sat at the kitchen table. Papers she later learned were called bills. A clutch of pencils and pens in a holder. Pens! Paper! A bowl of apples. A window. Out the back screen door crickets sang.

  Naomi ate the milk toast, feeling each bite fill her stomach, as the old woman and the boy watched. “My name is Mary Cottle, but you can call me Mrs. Cottle,” the woman had said. “Jerome is my foster son. I’ve taken care of a lot of children. I will keep you safe.”

  The bowl was empty. Her spoon scraped the traces of milk, getting every last bit. She looked up at Mrs. Cottle and the boy called Jerome, his face hanging on her every expression. Her mouth wanted to apologize. Her mouth wanted to say a lot of things, but all of them ran from her like her memories had, leaving her feeling as empty as the bowl. Finally, she spoke.

  “Safe?” she asked in her unused voice.

  “Safe,” Mrs. Cottle answered.

  There was a small bed with a bright quilt on it, and a sink with a toothbrush in a glass. Mrs. Cottle had found her some pajamas, stacked away in closets for times like this, and then tucked her in.

  Naomi waited until they were all asleep and got up and wandered the house, examining it until she knew every door latch and way the windows opened, and she made sure all of them were locked. She found tinfoil and made balls she perched on all the windows, thinking she would check them in the morning, to see if anyone was trying to sneak in.

  She stood by the front door late at night, looking out the window. The black sky extended as far as she could see. “Safe,” she had whispered to herself. “Safe.”

  The sheriff who had brought her to Mrs. Cottle had made some efforts at an investigation—maybe it was more. From Naomi’s perspective they asked questions, dazzled by her blank innocence. Naomi couldn’t remember anything besides running across the fields, a warm fire, and the migrants who had brought her to the sheriff.

  Asked more about the monsters, she shut down and became nearly catatonic, frightening everybody, especially Mrs. Cottle.

  The migrants who had dropped her off had moved on, quickly, before they could be found. Maybe they were afraid of the law, the sheriff surmised. Naomi was like a child fallen from heaven, a young girl with pale skin and brown hair and hazel eyes.

  Where had she come from? The town dentist, who had his big rust-colored chair in the same town building that stored the mail and served homemade ice cream custard, looked at her teeth and said he thought she was about nine. The doctor said someone had taken care of her—maybe a little too much, he had whispered to Mrs. Cottle, and they shook their sad heads.

  She had no birthday, no beginning—and, she figured, no end.

  Every night she stood on the farmhouse porch, the door within safe reach, and counted the stars. Somehow she knew how to count. Somehow she knew how to read—a little. Someone had taught her those things. That meant she could learn again.

  The stars were bright and showed like warm little eyes in the heavens. Her mother was up there, she figured, watching down over her. Letting her know that it was now safe to remember.

  But she could not remember. She stood outside on the porch until the cold drove into her bones that coming fall and winter. She stood out there every night for months, trying to unmake this puzzle in her mind. Who was she? Where had she been?

  5

  It took a very long time—she figured she had been snow girl for almost a year—but one day, with her hand on his chest, she showed Mr. B that she could be trusted.

  It was a heavy wintry day and the snow moved like it was alive, forming and re-forming drifts as if at play. Mr. B pulled out a smaller pair of the funny shoes he had, like baskets for their feet. He wrapped her busted tennis shoes in warm furs and laced the rawhide straps tight around her ankles, his hand pausing as if in memory. And then he opened the door and let her out.

  She had stood there, eyes wide, breathing in the essence of herself. Mr. B smiled. She ran and played in the snow, arms out, while Mr. B watched, his eyes carefully checking the forest, noticing how the snow filled in the drifts of her marks even as they were created. Finally he took her inside. She sat at the table, satiated.

  But for some reason Mr. B got mad. He started to drag her to the cellar. She didn’t try to resist. It was as though she wasn’t even in the cellar anymore but outside in the wild, beautiful wonder of the snow.

  After another long time he took her outside again. The waits became shorter, the times outside longer, and slowly, Mr. B stopped worrying so much. She learned to be patient, like a good snow girl.

  She delighted in everything outside, especially learning to walk in the magic yellow baskets that keep you afloat over the snow. Mr. B demonstrated with his own strong legs: Don’t let your legs bow out. Roll your ankles in a little instead.

  Soon her legs were strong, too. Like the pillars of ice on the mountain bathed by the yellow sun, the one she named the gold church.

  Mr. B knew everything there was to know about animals. He knew how to find tiny tracks under the brush. He could read the flight of the hawks over the places where the animals hid. He knew where the snow was pockmarked with delightful holes under which he would find warm carcasses of meat and blood.

  The girl learned that the trap lines he set followed the lives of the animals, not just from season to season but along with weather. She learned to recognize the sly, cunning fox, the sleek marten, the ever-present skunk, the sharp coyote, and the distant, howling wolf. She learned to identify the yellowing marks of telltale urine, the soft, dimpled snow over a dug burrow. The heat of scat as it buries itself, the clue of a few hairs caught in a branch, the musky smell of an animal in the far distance.

  She was a snow girl and could run in the snow forever, Mr. B clapping his hands, his mouth making those funny shapes of joy. But most importantly, she was a trapper and learned to follow in his tracks like the surest of hunters.

  In the snow it is easy to get lost. The snow girl kept tiny pieces of thread in her pocket, the ones she unraveled from her sweater cuffs, now bleeding up her arms. On the rare times when Mr. B was not looking she reached into her pocket, where she kept the threads, and tied them on the branches. Not up high where Mr. B was, but down at her level, hidden in the trees.

  She told herself she was doing this to find a way back to the cabin if she ever got lost. But she knew that Mr. B would never let her outside alone. He would track and kill her if she did try to escape. She knew that as real as day, and could imagine her intestines blooming red on the snow.

  There was another reason to do it—a secret she could not even tell herself, because if she did Mr. B might sense it. He would see it in her trusting eyes.

  She wondered if Mr. B would catch her, or notice the tiny bits of thread wound in inconspicuous places: on the new bud of a fir tree, wrapped around a tender cedar branch. But he never did. He was too busy looking for animals in the snow.

  When Naomi woke she could see the empty parking lot outside her window, covered w
ith snow, and farther up the road, the Shell station.

  And then the world disappeared.

  Snow between you and me, Madison: snow and a world of hurt that had to happen for three years—even if you are dead, especially if you are alive.

  Naomi spread her fingers on the window, feeling the cold drops of condensation on her palms. She frowned angrily at the whirling bank of snow over the mountains. She didn’t like being held back.

  Behind her the phone rang. She knew, turning, who it would be.

  “I’ve been thinking about you,” she said.

  His voice was a drink of water after a long illness.

  “It’s Mrs. Cottle,” Jerome said.

  “I’ll come,” she said, without a pause.

  She headed down from the mountain ranges, driving slowly as the snow disappeared off the roads and the air warmed, onto the freeway that led her past the town where the Culvers and her good friend Diane lived, and on down to the fertile valley, where the air was still cold but the green grass was budding.

  That was the thing about Oregon: one could travel from snow to desert in just one day. The town of Opal was the happiness between.

  Jerome was waiting for her outside the farmhouse when she pulled in early that afternoon. She took in the tidy gutters, the clean roof, and the mended fence line. A farm without stock, a home without children. The world here was dying. But underneath the earth still beat. Her eyes admired the familiar hills, the valleys and the mountains above where they had so often hiked and camped.

  She got out of her car. As always, her heart twisted upon seeing him.

  Jerome: her foster brother. Jerome, who had lost his arm in the war; Jerome, who now worked part-time as a deputy sheriff in the same office where she first had arrived.

  His empty T-shirt sleeve was pinned up around the shoulder. His black hair moved in the cool breeze. Slim jeans hugged his hips; she could see the muscles of his stomach through the thin cloth of his shirt.