In the bleak midwinter asacm-1

by M. R. Sellars

  Skip slowed the cruiser as he reached the dime store, quickly scanning for a space to pull in. Almost immediately he noticed a silhouette framed in the light that was escaping from the storefronts. The dark form waved and gestured toward the corner farther down. Picking up on the cue, he coasted another fifty or so feet, then flicked on the cherries as a visible warning before giving the steering wheel a quick turn to cut across oncoming traffic. Slipping carefully between the front of a pickup truck and the back end of a compact that was waiting to make a turn, he guided the cruiser through a hard arc and into a diagonal space in front of Evanston’s Drug at the opposite end of the strip.

  Out of habit, he checked the time. According to his watch, slightly less than five minutes had elapsed since Clovis had hung up from the initial call. However, given the traffic snarl he had encountered at the Lake Street intersection, despite a quick burp of the siren to clear the way, Deputy Carmichael wondered if he could have been here just as fast traveling on foot.

  He levered the vehicle into park, then shut off the engine and killed the lights. Bremerton’s was back up the street, on the other side of Sissy’s Florist Shop, which was nestled almost dead center between the five-and-dime and the drug store. However, before he even had the key out of the ignition, the silhouette had come down to meet him and was already standing under the awning on the sidewalk directly in front of the patrol car. In the yellowish glow pouring from Evanston’s windows he could see that what had earlier been little more than a dark outline was in fact Ruth Babbs, Bremerton’s store manager. Apparently she hadn’t taken the time to don a coat before coming outside, so she was now hugging her thick sweater tight, with her hands tucked beneath her crossed arms.

  “Evening, Missus Babbs,” he said, nodding in her direction as he climbed out of the vehicle, only to be greeted by a cold gust of wind that presented him with a face full of the oversized snowflakes. He sputtered and blinked, then shoved his hat onto his head. After pushing the car door shut he walked toward her.

  “Skip,” the manager called back to him by way of a greeting. “I sure do appreciate you coming down so fast.” Her voice sounded relieved, but what he could see of her face still appeared to be deeply creased with concern.

  A tangle of voices was coming from the small crowd gathered just outside the dime store’s main window at the opposite end of the short block. Even with the distance and other background noise, it filled his ears with a muddy thrum, interspersed here and there with a random high note or two. Threading through it all was the unmistakable sound of a small child bawling. Given the combination of darkness, backlighting, and heavy curtain of snow, he could actually hear the people better than he could see them. However, that in itself was more than enough to get a general assessment. Even if he hadn’t been aware of the current situation, he would have been able to tell just from their sound that they weren’t there to watch the train, as would usually be the case this time of year. Their audible distress warned him that things weren’t yet resolved, and that raised his own concern by a notch or two.

  “So you still haven’t located the child?” he asked, just to be sure.

  Stepping up onto the sidewalk he came under the shelter of the wide awning that ran the length of the storefronts. Now that the oversized flakes were no longer streaming directly in front of his eyes he could see much better, and Missus Babbs’ expression was definitely pained.

  She gave her head a shake. “No, we haven’t, and we’ve been over the entire store three times now.” She looked in the direction of the crowd for a moment then back to him and added, “Elizabeth is just beside herself. She came out front to get some air, but I’m not sure it’s done much good.”

  “Has anyone called her husband?” he asked.

  She nodded. “He’s on his way.”

  “Good,” Skip grunted. “I’m sure everything is going to be fine, but having him here should help. So, did anyone see the girl leave the store?”

  “Not that I know of.” She shook her head again. “They’ve checked all through Norris’s and Evanston’s too.” She tilted her head toward the entrance of the drug store as she continued. “Sissy’s was already closed for the day. We’ve asked around, but a lot of people were going in and out of the stores, so…”

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” Skip replied as her voice trailed off. “Well, let’s go have another look. She’s probably just hiding somewhere.” He gestured ahead and they started walking toward the store proper. “So, Clovis said you were the last person to see the girl?”

  “Yes.” She nodded.

  “And where was that?”

  “When she and her sister first came into the store. They wanted to see Santa, so I sent them to the back where we have the North Pole all set up.”

  “Okay, so what about Mister Babbs then? Didn’t he see them?”

  Skip made what he considered a logical assumption since everyone over the age of seven knew Missus Babbs’ husband played the part of Santa at Bremerton’s and that he had for what seemed like forever. In fact, there was even a Polaroid in his parent’s family photo album from back when Skip was a small child. It showed him standing next to Mister Babbs while the jolly man in the red suit cradled his younger sister on his lap. In the photo, Skip was clutching a candy cane and looking genuinely befuddled by the entire ruse. Even back then very little escaped his attention, including the fact that Bremerton’s Santa was really the owner of the sandwich shop.

  She shook her head. “Actually, Elvis isn’t here. He came down with that bad flu that’s been going around, and we had to hire someone to take over for him this past week.”

  “Who?”

  “His name is John Carter.”

  “That doesn’t sound familiar. Is he local?”

  “No. With it being so last minute we had trouble finding anyone. Mister Bremerton actually had to hire him through an agency all the way down in Saint Louis. I understand that it wasn’t cheap, but he didn’t want the children to be disappointed.”

  “Sounds about like Mister B.”

  She nodded agreement. “Anyway, Mister Carter seems like a very nice man. He even gave his time to go over to Immaculate Conception in Mais this morning to fill in for Elvis at the school party there. That wasn’t part of the contract, so he didn’t even get paid for it. He just volunteered.”

  “That was nice of him to do that,” Skip said.

  Voices were becoming more distinct within the overall murmur as they closed the gap between themselves and the clutch of people in front of the main window. Some of them were attempting to be soothing, most were concerned, but there was a standout that was unmistakably panicked. Skip figured that one in particular had to belong to Elizabeth Callahan. The bawling youngster hadn’t fully stopped either, but she seemed to be in a lull for the moment, with the warbling cries replaced by quieter gasping sobs, punctuated by short wails.

  “So, what about this Mister Carter?” Skip asked. “Did he see the girl at all before she went missing?”

  Missus Babbs slowed then completely stopped in her tracks, still several yards away from Bremerton’s storefront. Scrunching her forehead in thought and resting the tips of her fingers against her lips for a moment before shaking her head slowly, she answered, “You know… Come to think of it, I haven’t actually seen him since all of this started. He was on his dinner break when the girls first came in, but he was due back soon so I sent them back to wait. Then, in what seemed like it was just a couple of minutes later, Becca, the youngest, came wandering up to the front of the store, all alone and in a complete fit. All we could get from her was that her sister wouldn’t let her see Santa and that she couldn’t find her now.”

  “Wouldn’t let her see Santa?” he asked.

  “I know,” she replied. “It seemed strange to us too, but you know how kids are. I went back and looked for her, but she was nowhere to be seen.” The woman shrugged. “I just assumed Mister Carter hadn’t come back from his dinner break just yet and that the San
ta thing was just a matter of a big sister picking at her little sister… And since then we’ve been so worried about finding Merrie I didn’t even think about him.”

  The earlier notch of added concern was now joined by several more, and Deputy Carmichael felt every single one as each ratcheted into place. It wasn’t that a missing child hadn’t been important from the outset, but this was a small town. Kids around here were never really missing; they were just off being kids, daydreaming and hiding in plain sight while parental hearts skipped a beat or two.

  However, something suddenly felt very different about this situation, and he didn’t like it at all.

  “So that’s the missing girl’s name?” he asked, a thin but noticeably real edge of urgency had crept into his voice. “Merrie?”

  She nodded. “Yes. Merrie Frances Callahan.”

  “Would you happen to know where this Mister Carter goes on his dinner break?”

  “No…” She shook her head.

  “How about what type of car he drives?”

  “It’s older. Kind of an orangish-brown,” she replied hesitantly, then paused to think. A heartbeat later she added, “It’s a four door, and it has a vinyl roof. Black, I think… Definitely dark… He’s only been here a few days, and I never really paid much attention to the make or anything. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” Skip told her as he glanced quickly up the row of vehicles ahead of him as well as the traffic on the street. “That’s a good description. Did he normally park out here, or in the back?”

  “In the back,” the manager replied.

  “When you were looking for Merrie did you happen to notice if his car was out there?”

  “No. I’m sorry. I didn’t even think to look for it.”

  “Do you know where he’s staying?”

  “I believe Mister Bremerton said he put him up at the Greenleaf,” she replied. Obvious fear was now welling in her voice. “You don’t think that…”

  Skip filled in behind her failing words. “I’m just covering all the bases, Missus Babbs, that’s all. But I need you to do me a favor. I want you to go in and call back to the office, and give Sheriff Morton all of that information you just gave me, as well as a description of Carter and the girl. Tell Clovis that I told you to talk directly to him, okay? Can you do that for me?”

  He could see that Missus Babbs was now wearing a far more concerned expression than when he had first arrived on the scene. She nodded in the affirmative, but didn’t say a word.

  “Okay, let’s get moving,” he told her.

  There was far more urgency in their pace now. It didn’t take uncanny powers of observation for Skip to put these pieces together and see that the picture they might well be forming wasn’t very pretty.

  The gap between them and the crowd shrank quickly now, and as he expected, once he could start making out faces Skip recognized that he knew several people in the clutch. Those he didn’t actually know, he registered as having seen before. After all, Hulis wasn’t really as big as it looked on a map. Truth is, the majority of it was farmland spread out around a spot on the road that just happened to have its own post office. The population was relatively small, so it was easy to become familiar with faces, especially when you’d lived here your entire life and had a good memory.

  “You have to find her,” a voice cried at him as they moved through the parting bodies. At almost the same instant, a hand clamped tightly onto his arm.

  “Go on ahead in,” Skip told the manager as he came to an unscheduled halt. “And, make that call right now.”

  Missus Babbs continued on, and Skip turned to see Elizabeth Callahan staring at him, a tight mask of worry clawing at her features as she clung to his arm. “Something’s wrong,” she said.

  “I’m going in to look for her, Missus Callahan,” he said.

  She shook her head, moaning, “This isn’t like Merrie at all.”

  “Has anything been bothering her lately?” Skip asked. “Anything that might give her a reason to run off? Trouble at school or at home, maybe?”

  “No, noth…” she said, then backpedaled almost immediately. “Wait… She said she wasn’t feeling well when I picked her up. I finally got her to tell me that she was worried about going to Hell because she was having bad thoughts about someone…”

  “Bad thoughts? What kind of thoughts? About who?”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me.”

  “Do you think she was bothered by it enough to run away?”

  A fresh round of tears began welling in her eyes, overflowing to embark on a trek downward across her cheeks. She blinked hard, and then answered in a choked whine, “I don’t… I don’t know… I… just… Please find her…”

  He locked eyes with her and found himself searching for something to say. Unfortunately, he wasn’t having much luck where words were concerned.

  The simple fact was, it hadn’t been all that long ago that Deputy Carmichael had been just plain “Skip” Carmichael, a former high school football star who had somehow been lucky enough to avoid being drafted into the service, thereby missing the horrors of Vietnam, unlike some of his friends. He’d had little ambition where furthering his education was concerned, but he’d always wanted to be a cop. Unfortunately, he didn’t have much luck when applying to accredited police academies in the bigger cities.

  Eventually, he gave up and contented himself with working on the family farm. After that, he had no greater plans in mind other than convincing Kathy Higgins to marry him.

  Then, the position for a deputy sheriff opened up. Sheriff Morton had taken a chance on him and soon afterward was making calls. No matter what the old man said, Skip knew he had called in some markers on his behalf.

  And now here he was, on the verge of what could be his perfect career. The only problem was that the career was still on the horizon. Right now, he was just a deputy sheriff in a small town where the worst thing that ever happened was a drunk and disorderly call that didn’t even end up on the books because it was someone you knew and you just drove them home, or let them sleep it off in the holding cell for a few hours.

  He had been trained, yes; Sheriff Morton had seen to that. But he hadn’t been prepared for something like this. Besides, training wasn’t everything; experience was often the real teacher, and that was something he sorely lacked. Even he would admit that he was green enough to sprout roots if he stood still long enough.

  And it was for that very reason, as well as the fact that in Hulis everyone seemed to be family whether related by blood or not, that he did the only thing he could think of to do. He opened his mouth, and what came out was something that would have caused any seasoned law enforcement veteran to cringe.

  “Don’t worry Missus Callahan,” he said. “It’s going to be fine. I promise I’ll find Merrie. I’m sure she’s just fine. I promise…”

  PLASTIC slammed hard against plastic. The initial noise made by the sudden clash of handset versus cradle was short-lived, but the echo and resulting forlorn ping of the telephone’s metal ringer hung on a bit longer. Not only did they linger in the air, they joined together and carried through the open transom above the closed door of Sheriff Morton’s office. The blended sound continued, unhindered by obstacles from that point on as it zipped across the span of the room and entered Clovis’s ears.

  She swiveled around, startled by the sudden noise and the resulting commotion. Through the large windows on the back wall she could see that the sheriff was up from his desk and moving about his office in a purposeful fashion. It had only been a couple of minutes since Missus Babbs had called and asked to speak to him, apparently at Skip’s insistence. She didn’t yet have the details, but she got the impression they would be coming soon. The urgency in the woman’s voice had already given her a very bad feeling.

  And now there was this.

  A few seconds later the office door swung open and Sheriff Morton stormed out. He was heading straight for he
r desk, one arm stuffed into a sleeve of his coat while he fought to fill the other as well. An index card was tucked between his lips.

  Given his expression, he didn’t seem like he was angry. Actually, he appeared more than just a little concerned and without a doubt, completely driven. Now Clovis was definitely worried.

  “What’s wro…” she started to ask.

  He cut her off as he yanked the index card out of his mouth, tossed it onto the desk in front of her, and began to bark instructions. “I need you to get these descriptions out to Carl and tell him to keep his eyes open. Tell him if he sees this car, pull it over and radio for backup. Then call Joe and Edgar and give the info to them too. Tell them they’re on the clock as of ten minutes ago. You’ll want to plan on working late too. Might wanna call Carol too. Get her in here to help.”

  Clovis glanced quickly at the card. The lined stock was covered with a scribble of notes, legible, but obviously jotted in a hurry. Before she could utter any sort of response to what had already been said, the sheriff continued. “I want you to send Joe to the west end of town; tell him the same as Carl, keep his eyes open. If he sees the car, pull it over, call for backup. Have Edgar head over to Bremerton’s to help Carmichael. And then I want you to get the Highway Patrol on the line…”