The Child Finder

by Rene Denfeld

  Was there a gleam of amusement in her eyes? “Just wait for the mosquitoes.”

  After that she and Jerome were free—not that they weren’t free before, only now the horizon had widened, setting them free to hike along the long ridges looking for gemstones, to camp in the woods. Exploring until their school conversations were filled with little but plans for the afternoon, excitement for the next weekend.

  Mrs. Cottle had only a few rules, but Naomi remembered them now, because they were like templates for her life. Jerome and Naomi were to never trust anyone they didn’t know. And even then, she cautioned, there are only some you really know. They were to never believe the first thing someone told them, or to assume a badge was a badge. Trust the ones you know and love, Mrs. Cottle said, over and over again.

  Other than that? She said: Go. Go explore life, revel in it, roll in it and come up happy. They could see from the light in her eyes that, at one time, their foster mother had done exactly that.

  In the winter they taught each other how to snowshoe. In the spring they swam and fished the nearby rivers for trout, bluegill, and bass. In the summer they picked huckleberries and salmonberries and went camping in the woods. Eventually Jerome learned archery and took them both hunting. Naomi didn’t like the hunting, but she relished the sound of birds at dawn, and the taste of pancakes cooked over a campfire.

  And always—she had to admit—she liked waking up next to Jerome.

  Naomi called Jerome that night outside the motel, watching the sun fall over the mountains. The white-capped summits turned purple, then lavender, and finally a deep mesmerizing gold.

  “How is she?”

  “It won’t be long now,” he said.

  Their foster mother wouldn’t know Naomi again. Not until the other side.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She wished she could go back in time, to when she still had a chance, and tell Mrs. Cottle everything she had ever felt. More than anything she wanted to say thank you, for being the only mother she knew.

  “It’s okay,” he said, and she believed him.

  Naomi could imagine Jerome standing in the farmhouse with his one hand holding the old phone, alone for miles around, eagerly seeking her voice.

  “I’ll call you when it is time,” he said.

  8

  Mr. B liked it warm at night. He put lots of wood in the black stove so the sides glowed with heat. He sat in the chair next to the stove.

  When he let snow girl out of the cellar, she would lie on the bed and watch him. He got shy when she watched him, but she could tell he liked it.

  One night he had been sitting in the chair, oiling the snowshoes. From the small crock he rubbed grease on the rawhide bindings. They made the grease themselves, from animal fat cooked down to a rich yellow, and Mr. B poured in a heated stream of tree sap. The resulting elixir was the color of deep mahogany and smelled like the best of the forest: the needle and the claw, the wild skies.

  The open door of the stove made shadows race across the walls. Mr. B’s hair was like an exotic forest, with rich grasses, and the sides of his cheeks a savannah.

  He looked over at her.

  There were times like these when the world was warm and snow girl was not afraid—though she should have been. She should have seen the heat from the stove and that look in his eyes and been very afraid.

  But she was not. Because in his eyes was a look she could not mistake.

  It was a look of love.

  Being born of the snow meant knowing things that ordinary people did not. Like how the world was like a house built of ice, and while you could see through the walls, you didn’t have to hear what happened in them, or feel them. You could observe a person in another room doing something else. You could sit on the top floor of the home and look down and see yourself curled in a bed with Mr. B.

  What happened in that bed? That was something children in other worlds would never understand. Their teachers taught them foul things. Like checklists in school that said, Have you ever been touched in a private place? Have you ever seen naked people? Those checklists made no sense in the snow world. They were like ugly paper full of lies to be shredded to pieces.

  In between the sheets, Mr. B had a smell. It was a smell that went from his chest to his armpits, which were clouded with hair. The hair was soft and crinkly, and damp when he cried at night, in pleasure. He had two russet nipples and a soft belly that had never seen the sun.

  And below that? That was where they had all lied. All of them, and snow girl would have been angry with the people of other worlds if they had existed.

  Mr. B didn’t want to hurt her—this she could tell. He wanted the warmth and mystery of her body. He wanted to feel good. He didn’t know how.

  She could see Mr. B had the shadow of a memory on him; he didn’t understand it could be different. It was her job to show him. After all, she was light and perfection and a body built out of air and frost. Nothing she could do, watched from the highest chamber at the top of the ice castle, could ever be wrong.

  Once upon a time there was a girl named Madison, who loved fairy tales so much she thought they might be real.

  One of her favorite fables was an African folktale called “The Cow-Tail Switch.” It went like this:

  On the edge of the Liberian forest was the village of Kundi. And in this village lived a man named Ogaloussa.

  One morning Ogaloussa left the village with his weapons to go hunting and he did not return. After a while, the people no longer spoke of him.

  But his son did not forget. Every day his son went into the fields, calling for his father. Finally, the villagers went into the woods and found Ogaloussa’s bones. They covered his bones with his clothes and weapons.

  Ogaloussa rose from the dead and came back to life.

  Back in the village he wove a beautiful cow-tail switch. Everyone wanted it and argued they deserved it because they had found his bones.

  But Ogaloussa gave the cow-tail switch to his son. “I will give it to the one who called for me,” said Ogaloussa.

  This is why the people have said ever since: A man is not dead until he is forgotten.

  Snow girl hoped this was true.

  “Child finder.” Oregon State Police detective Lucius Winfield smiled.

  Naomi closed the door behind her, took the chair across from his desk at the wave of his large brown hand.

  Outside his office window the town was covered in a heavy mist. From here Naomi could see the part of town where the Culvers lived, and across the river, her friend Diane’s quaint neighborhood. In the very far distance were the white-capped mountains where Madison was lost. She could even see the freeway the Culver family had taken from their modest home, winding like a snake out of town. How often had they regretted that day?

  “Got one of my cases again?” he asked, unperturbed.

  Naomi liked Detective Winfield—he had a neat way about him, from the silver in his soft natural hair to the large class ring on his hand. They had worked together often over the years.

  “The Culver kid,” she said.

  “Oh. Poor baby.”

  The walls of his office were covered not with awards but with plaques honoring his favorite charities. It was hard to tell that he was considered one of the best suicide-response officers in the country. In law enforcement they called them ledge talkers. When he wasn’t talking suicidal teenagers off bridges, or distraught men with guns out of their homes, fifty-six-year-old Detective Winfield did missing-child cases. In a case like Madison Culver’s, where another agency had done the physical searching, this meant investigating the parents and any other suspects.

  “That Culver couple was good folk,” he said. His low voice was soothing. “Didn’t find a thing on them.”

  “Tell me about them,” Naomi said, leaning back in her chair.

  “Well, all right, bossy. The dad—who was he again? James Culver. Math professor: adjunct, if I am right. I can pull the reports. Nothing stinky. Handful of s
peeding tickets, that’s it. Clean as a whistle. They got married young, but it seemed solid. Kristina Culver—straitlaced, but I liked her.”

  Naomi smiled a little to herself. For Winfield to say someone was straitlaced was ironic. He was a devout Baptist who took his mother to church every Sunday—twice. “How?”

  “Oh, you know. Cutting the little girl’s grapes in half, all organic—the sort of thing having a few more kids would have killed. Seems like they were trying, too. But this put an end to that.”

  “You ruled them out?” she asked, pointedly.

  “Sure did. Really couldn’t find a motive for them abandoning their child in the woods like that. No reason for it. They seemed pretty broken up about it. Plus they’re the kind of people who would have pointed fingers at each other if they had the faintest suspicion. Good folk, like I said, and not a single peep of doubt from their families or friends. You know how it shouts, eventually. Or sometimes it whispers, but we can hear it.”

  Naomi nodded. “Thanks.”

  Detective Winfield studied the young woman across his desk. The child finder wandered in and out of his life like a cipher. Even after knowing her for close to ten years, he didn’t really know anything about her. As friendly as she was, with that big smile, she gave nothing of herself away.

  His mild efforts at curiosity had been rebuffed—not with coldness but with her single-minded focus on her cases. And yet he could sense something deeply vulnerable about her. It was that part of her that spoke to his soul.

  He wasn’t a ledge talker for nothing.

  “I can’t imagine what it would be like,” he said softly, watching for her reaction.

  Sure enough, Naomi blinked. Just for a moment he thought he could see—a shadow crossing her face—how she knew it in ways that went far beyond work.

  That was okay. In Winfield’s world everything was deeply personal.

  He got up to open the door for her. “Be safe out there. No hot dogs.”

  That smile split her face.

  It was an old joke between them, how Naomi wandered into danger. One time, furious with fear, he had reamed her out for walking blithely into a Gypsy Joker Motorcycle gang clubhouse in search of a missing child. He called her a hot dog, the worst insult he could imagine. Naomi had stood patiently on a midnight sidewalk, rain dripping, the child tucked safely in the back of his car, wrapped in a poncho. The next day he had shown up to work and found a package of hot dogs on his desk.

  And just like that, she had disappeared again.

  Outside the state police office, a sunny, cold day with the smell of cherry blossoms lightening the air, Naomi hesitated. She should follow up on the Danita Danforth case. She didn’t know when she would return to Oregon, and the woman was in jail right here in town. The case was brand-new—the child had gone missing only a month before. It was the sort of case in which a day could make a difference.

  Naomi didn’t have any requirements for the cases she took: there was no border she would not cross, no economic factor or family history or other reason that would make her turn down a missing-child case.

  It wasn’t the child’s fault, she figured, if the parents were too poor to pay, or if they had criminal histories, or if they were the suspects themselves. Like Danita Danforth.

  She had been avoiding the case not because the missing girl’s mother, Danita, was accused; not because she appeared guilty; not because the case was still open and active and she suspected Detective Winfield would not appreciate her interference; not because there was no money, only pleas from the mother’s persistent, if rattled, public defender.

  She was avoiding the case because she was afraid her intuition was correct.

  “I try to only work one case at a time,” she told Danita, sitting at a table in a jail visiting room with her attorney, an earnest young woman with a swipe of bright early silver in her hair and a smattering of freckles.

  Danita looked like the fight had gone out of her. Her skin was ashen, her eyes dull. Her black hair was askew; she had that jail smell of bleach and body odor. No makeup, no razors, no tweezers. The young mother now looked swollen, unhappy, demoralized.

  The press had convicted Danita before the district attorney brought charges. Naomi knew it didn’t look good. Danita was poor, young, and black. She lived with her grandmother in a run-down home in the bad part of town, where she worked graveyards as a custodian. The media trumpeted the fact that she had a criminal record.

  Baby Danforth—that was her name—had vanished a little over a month before, on a cold February day. Danita said she had come home from working graveyard in a misty dawn. The crib next to her bed was empty. Her grandmother was sleeping peacefully on the sofa. There were no signs of forced entry. The police had taken fingerprints, turned the house upside down.

  The only thing missing was the baby.

  The grandmother said she had returned from Bible study the evening before to an empty house. She had figured Danita had taken the child to work—she did that sometimes, though she wasn’t supposed to. The police focused on Danita. Her stories were all over the place. She had kissed the baby good-bye before she left. No, the baby was asleep. No, she took the baby to the doctor. No, a strange man followed her. No, it was three strange men—and one had a mustache.

  Things took a turn for the worse when Danita failed a polygraph—and then another. She became belligerent with the police, and threw a disturbing tantrum in the courthouse. If there was a look of guilt, it was the mad, stony affect of Danita Danforth in the camera’s eye.

  “I’m convinced she is innocent,” the public defender said as Naomi studied Danita.

  “I’d prefer to hear it from her,” Naomi said, softly.

  “There’s a reason she failed—”

  “Shhh.” Naomi leaned forward. “Danita.”

  Danita met her with a flat gaze. I lost my infant, her look told Naomi. What else are you going to do?

  Naomi didn’t ask if she was guilty. She didn’t ask what she had done with her baby. She asked the only question that mattered.

  “Danita, do you want your baby to come home?”

  Danita came alive. Tears jumped in her large brown eyes, her hands, gloved in chains, smacked the table. Her legs began running in place. She was running to her baby—Naomi could see the image in her mind—swooping her up, bellowing with joy, smothering her with kisses.

  Naomi turned to the attorney. “I’ll take the case.”

  Outside the jail, with the now smiling attorney, Naomi asked, “How did you hear about me?”

  Sometimes there was a lot to be found in the answer. For the Culver family, it had been research: the father had found her name in articles about missing children who had been successfully found. Other times police officers recommended her, and more than one network of grieving, terrified parents passed around her name. Naomi did not advertise. More than enough work came to her through word of mouth.

  The public defender stopped smiling. “Come back to my office and I will tell you.”

  The indigent defense firm was what Naomi expected—a rat’s maze of cubicles with the smell of take-out food and eager young faces. She felt a lift just for walking through.

  The attorney had a small windowless office crowded with court clothes thrown over chairs, heaps of binders and case files. There was a quote above her desk: Be careful what you wish for. You just may receive it.

  “I never liked that story,” Naomi said.

  “What story?” the attorney asked, sighing as she unloaded her heavy bag of files and rolled her shoulders.

  “‘The Monkey’s Paw.’ That quote is from some versions of the story. The wife wishes their dead son back again, but when her husband hears the son knock at their door he makes the third and final wish and the son is lost forever. Whoever would do that?”

  The attorney fell into a chair and directed Naomi to the other. “Maybe someone afraid of ghosts.”

  “Ghosts are just dead people we haven’t found,” Nao
mi said.

  “I like you.” The other woman smiled, and Naomi felt the tug of friendship. “You asked how I knew about you. Your name is known around here.”

  “Oh.” It hadn’t occurred to Naomi—that the lawyers here had represented people who had taken children. After she found a child she considered the case closed unless she was called back to testify. What happened to kidnappers and pedophiles was not something she thought about after she was done. She always moved on to the next case. It had to be that way. Otherwise her soul would fill with poison. She didn’t want to know about the times they were acquitted, or sentenced, or anything else.

  “But we’re not baddies.” The attorney sighed, removing her pumps. She flexed her toes, clad in panty hose. “Consider us equal opportunity defenders.”

  “I’m an equal opportunity finder,” Naomi said.

  “In that case we’ll get along fine.”

  “But I might find something that says she is guilty, and if I do, I am certainly not keeping it a secret,” Naomi said.

  The attorney met her eyes. The hank of frank silver fell over her forehead. “I don’t think you will. But if you do—I’ll take that risk.”

  Naomi was just getting back to the motel that evening after the long drive from the city when she saw a familiar-looking, battered green truck outside: skookum national forest ranger.

  Ranger Dave was leaning against the side of his truck—waiting for her, apparently. He looked oddly shy as he approached.

  “How did you know where I am staying?” She didn’t sound friendly.

  “Where else would you stay?”

  She looked around. He had a point.

  “Can I buy you dinner?”

  She looked pointedly down at the ring on his finger.

  “I’m a widower,” he said, rotating the ring ruefully. “I lost my wife in the forest.”

  They had dinner in a restaurant that Naomi had no idea existed, at the base of the mountains in a secret home covered in ivy. The muddy lot was crowded with cars.