The Deep, Deep Snow

by Brian Freeman

  “Wow, will you look at that?” Adam suddenly said.

  He squinted into the sunshine in the library parking lot and shook his head with a kind of awe. I asked him what was up, but Adam looked transfixed by whatever he saw and didn’t say a word. We all converged on the doorway, and I got there first. The sight took my breath away.

  Outside, not even twenty feet away, Adam’s motorcycle was parked in the lot. Perched atop the bike’s side mirror was a snowy owl. Motionless. Serious. Regal.

  Staring at it, I felt the strangest, coldest sensation down my entire body.

  “It’s just an owl,” I found myself murmuring out loud, because we lived near the national forest among predators and prey. There wasn’t anything especially unusual about a snowy owl taking a rest before flying back to the trees.

  Except at that very moment, the phone rang on Monica’s desk. We all jumped at the noise, and the owl took flight with a cry. Right then and there, I knew.

  Something had happened.

  Monica skittered across the floor with her short little steps and grabbed the phone. She wasn’t much bigger than a bird herself. She listened to the voice on the line and was barely able to get in a word, because I could hear a panicked woman shouting at her through the receiver.

  When Monica hung up, I looked at her, waiting. So did Dad and Adam.

  “That was Ellen Sloan,” she told us. “Jeremiah is missing. She thinks someone took him.”

  Chapter Two

  Dad led our parade of vehicles down miles of dirt road into the heart of the national forest. Adam and I followed, with me at the wheel. Dennis and Ellen Sloan brought up the rear, and they had Adrian, Jeremiah’s sixteen-year-old brother, in the car with them.

  This was a lonely place for a ten-year-old boy to vanish.

  The town where we live is named Avery Weir, but long ago, people simply started calling it Everywhere. This being Mittel County, we say we live in the Middle of Everywhere, but the truth is that we’re closer to the middle of nowhere. The deer outnumber the people around here by a significant multiple. We’re still ahead of the wolves, but they’re gaining on us. We’re surrounded by hundreds of square miles of woods, creeks, and lakes. The nearest interstate highway is two hours south. Towns are spread out by dozens of miles, and they have great names. Witch Tree. Eagle Ridge. Martin’s Point. Blue Diamond Lake.

  We were thirty miles north of Everywhere when I saw the cloud of dust settling as Dad’s squad car slowed and stopped. I saw a child’s bicycle tipped forlornly on the shoulder of the road in a nest of thistles. The blue frame was caked with dirt. In the forest on either side of us, dense stands of paper birches and white pines fought for the sunlight. The July air was sticky and warm. Insects whined from inside the tangled brush, and songbirds danced back and forth across the road in flashes of color.

  My father got out of the cruiser and assessed the bike with his hands on his hips and his mouth crushed into a dour frown. His brown, flat-brimmed sheriff’s hat was securely placed on his head. The midafternoon summer sun was high and bright, but the denseness of the woods meant you couldn’t see far through the shadows. It had been dry that week, so the ruts in the dirt road showed no tire tracks or footprints. The bicycle was the only evidence that a boy had been here.

  Adam and I joined Dad on the road. So did the Sloans and their oldest son.

  I knew the Sloans well in those days. Everyone did. Despite how spread out we are, there are zero degrees of separation in an area like ours. We know each other’s stories and secrets, probably more than we should. When you all grow up together, it’s also hard to get past who you were in high school. No matter what you go on to do in life, you’re still the baseball star, the homecoming queen, the party girl, the volleyball champ. The Sloans had that problem. People talked about Dennis and Ellen like they were still Jack and Diane from John Mellencamp’s little ditty, but that wasn’t fair. Dennis had a master’s degree in forestry management. Ellen had bought the failing market on Everywhere’s main street and turned it into a moneymaker.

  Ellen was thirty-six that year, two years younger than her husband. She was smart, cool, blond, blue-eyed, tough enough to make a shoplifter confess with nothing but one of those icy stares of hers. She was the strong one in that household. That was what made it so hard to see her struggling to keep it together. I saw the tremble in her fingers. I heard her breathing, which was quick and loud through her nose. She kept touching her hair and pushing it back in place, as if that were the only thing she could control at that moment.

  Her life was her two boys, and one of them was gone.

  My father put a hand on the shoulder of Jeremiah’s older brother and gave the teenager a reassuring smile. Adrian was a meaty kid on the high school football team, but at that moment, he looked as if the slightest breeze would knock him down.

  “So is this where you found your brother’s bike?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you move it at all?”

  “No, I didn’t touch it.”

  “Did you search the woods around here?”

  “Yeah, sure I did. Jer wasn’t anywhere.”

  Dennis Sloan muttered an expletive under his breath and marched to the side of the road, his boots crunching on rock. He didn’t have the patience to stand around answering questions. He cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed into the woods with big pipes that would fill a room. “Jeremiah! Jeremiah!”

  His booming voice scared a few birds, but that was all. There was no answer. That didn’t stop him from hollering again. He was a handsome park ranger with the strong physique of a lumberjack, and strong men always labored under the illusion that they could solve any problem if they swung a little harder, talked a little louder, or ran a little faster. Life didn’t work that way.

  My father let Dennis shout himself hoarse. Then he went on in the same level voice he always used. Panic was boiling over on that road, but my father was an oasis of calm, like the eye of a storm.

  “Adrian, why don’t you tell us what happened?”

  The teenager kicked at the dirt with his sneaker. “Jer and I went to work with Dad at the ranger station. We hung out there most of the morning, and then I figured I’d ride my bike for a while. I was going to go by myself, but Jer threw a fit about coming with me. So I let him go along just to shut him up.”

  “Why didn’t you want him to come with you?”

  “I like to ride fast. He slows me down.”

  “What did the two of you do?”

  “Nothing. We rode, that’s all. I thought we could make it to Talking Lake, but we didn’t get that far before we got hungry. There’s a campground about a mile north of here, so we stopped to have lunch. Mom made sandwiches for our backpacks. Jer wolfed his down, and then he started bugging me.”

  “How so?”

  “Oh, he was batting a shuttlecock around with his badminton racket. He’d whack it and chase it, and he nearly hit me with it a couple of times. It pissed me off. He was collecting rocks, too, and he had to show me every one he found. He wouldn’t leave me alone.”

  “So how did the two of you get separated?”

  “Jer wanted to go back, but I wasn’t ready to leave. I mean, he made such a stink about coming with me, and then he wanted to head out before we did anything. I said fine, go, I don’t care. And he got on his bike and went back the way we came.”

  “You let him go,” Ellen murmured to her son.

  Her tone was gentle, but the lack of anger in his mother’s voice actually made the accusation cut deeper. I could see the kid folding up like a flower.

  “You let your brother go. Alone. Out here.”

  Adrian bit his lower lip and looked miserable. “All I did was give him a head start, Mom. I was going to catch up to him.”

  “Are you sure he headed south?” my father asked, before Adrian disintegrat
ed completely. “Is it possible he went the other way toward the lake?”

  “No, I saw him go. He was heading toward the ranger station.”

  “Was there anyone else in the campground while you were there?”

  The boy squatted to pry a few prickly burs from the cuff of his jeans and flick them into the brush. “No.”

  “What did you do next?”

  “I hung out for a while.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Shooting at the crows. Just to scare them. I didn’t hit them or anything.”

  “You carry a gun?”

  “Sometimes.” Adrian flipped back his windbreaker to reveal the butt of a revolver jutting out of the pocket of his jeans.

  “Boys need to know about guns, Tom,” Dennis interrupted, as if my father had been casting aspersions on his parenting. “The safest thing is to teach them when they’re young. You know that.”

  “I do know that, Dennis. I’m just trying to figure out what happened. Did you ever let Jeremiah handle your gun, Adrian?”

  “A couple of times, but only if Dad was around.”

  My father was silent for a while. That was one of the things he’d taught me about police work. Silence is your friend. People can’t stand silence, and they feel like they have to fill it up with something. Usually, they end up telling you things they never meant to say.

  But Adrian kept his mouth shut.

  “Okay, Jeremiah took his bike and left,” my father went on eventually. “You were alone in the campground. Did you see or hear any cars on the road?”

  “No.”

  “What about voices?”

  “No. I said I was alone.”

  “How long did you stay there after Jeremiah left?”

  “I don’t know. A while.”

  “Five minutes? Fifteen? An hour?”

  “I told you, I don’t know. I wasn’t looking at what time it was.”

  “But eventually, you got on your bike and headed back the same way?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, tell me the rest.”

  The teenager heaved a sigh. “I found Jer’s bike. He was gone. I don’t know anything else.”

  “Did you move the bike at all? Is this exactly where you found it?”

  My head snapped up, as if someone had jabbed me with a live wire. I’d been on edge for months, watching for little things like that. I wondered if anyone else had noticed that Dad was repeating himself.

  Adrian did. He looked puzzled and annoyed. “You already asked me about that.”

  Dad’s composure broke for a moment, but he recovered with an easy smile. “Just making sure.”

  “Well, I didn’t move it,” Adrian said again.

  “What did you do next?”

  “I looked for Jer, what else? I looked everywhere. I shouted and shouted. I rode back to the campground to see if I’d missed him somehow. Then I started back toward the ranger station. I figured maybe he was walking, like the bike crapped out or something, and I’d pass him on the way. But I didn’t. I rode all the way back and told my dad.”

  “You have a phone, right? Why not call?”

  “Signal sucks out here. Anyway, I was too freaked. I just wanted to get back and tell my dad.”

  “Did Jeremiah have a phone with him?”

  “Yeah, but it was dead.”

  “He’s always forgetting to charge it,” Dennis interjected. “I called it over and over. It keeps going to voicemail.”

  “Well, we’ll check with the phone company and see if they can tell us anything,” Dad said. “Adrian, what was Jeremiah wearing?”

  “His Sunday suit.”

  My father’s brow furrowed in surprise. “Really? Why?”

  Ellen was crouched by her son’s bicycle on the shoulder of the road. Her fingers reached out and touched the front tire and spun it slowly. She spoke without looking up. “We lost my father a couple of weeks ago. Jeremiah was very close to his grandfather, and he took it hard. He wore the suit to the service at the cemetery, and he’s been putting it on ever since. I tried to make him stop, but after a while, I just let him do it.”

  “He wore Nikes, too,” Adrian added. “Purple ones.”

  “Okay. Adrian, is there anything else you can tell us?”

  “No, nothing. Really. I don’t know what happened to him.” He shot a pained look at his mother. “I’m so sorry, Mom.”

  Ellen didn’t look back at her older son. She stood up again, brushed the dust from her clothes, and fixed her stare on my father. Her voice was barely a whisper, but she hammered out every word. “Someone abducted my boy, Tom. You need to do something right now. I want roadblocks. Helicopters. Alerts in every police department throughout the state. I want my son’s picture on TV. I want him on highway signs. I want the whole world looking for Jeremiah.”

  She was barely holding back the hysteria that I knew was inside her. It was like lake water thumping against the surface ice, trying to get out.

  “Ellen, none of us will sleep until we find your boy,” Dad assured her. He drew himself up to his full height, and when he was like that, you just had to believe everything he said. “I know you’re scared, but there hasn’t been a stranger abduction in this county ever. Ever. It’s easy to think the worst, but let’s focus on the likelier explanations first. We need to search the woods around here. If Jeremiah left the road for any reason, he can’t have gone far. We’ll put out the word and have fifty townspeople here in a few minutes and we’ll blanket the whole area. We’ve got hours of daylight left to find him. It’s also possible—likely even—that Jeremiah simply hitched a ride back to town with somebody he knew. He could be at a friend’s house right now. Kids don’t think about the panic they cause when they forget to tell their parents where they’ve gone. Shelby and Adam will check the whole town while we’re out here searching the woods. Okay? Trust me. We’ll find him.”

  I knew my father believed that.

  If I’d been in his shoes at that moment, I probably would have said the same thing. You try not to make promises you can’t keep, but Dad still believed that most stories had happy endings. Someone in town would find Jeremiah. Some hero would take him home, and Ellen would cry, and Dennis would hug his boy, and the rest of us would exhale with quiet relief.

  That was how we all thought it would go. The boy would be back in his mother’s arms by nightfall.

  But we were all wrong.

  Chapter Three

  Ten years old. That was Jeremiah’s age.

  I still remember what it was like to be a kid in the summertime in Mittel County. When I was that age, I used to do exactly what Jeremiah did—take my bike down the dirt roads with my hair blowing in the wind, ride to one of the dozens of lakes around here, and swim in the cool water with fish brushing up against my bare legs. Those days felt like they lasted forever. The sun came up early and went down late. When I finally got back home, I’d be wet, dirty, tired, and ready to do it all over again.

  Rose Carter was my best friend back then. Rose was the girl who got booted off the Everywhere Strikers when Violet went out for the high school volleyball team. It wasn’t my fault, but Rose and I were never as close after that. I think she held it against me that I stayed on the team.

  But when we were ten? We did everything together.

  I would make up puzzles and mysteries for us. She and I would hike into the woods to hunt for signs of the mythical Ursulina. We’d find what looked like footprints in the mud, and we’d measure them and take pictures and bring them all back to my father to show him what we’d found. He would swear that our evidence was very, very persuasive, and we believed him when he said he would consult with people in the government about what we’d discovered.

  Rose and I explored the whole county in those days. We went everywhere, just the two of us, and the Ursulin
a was the only monster that ever crossed our minds. We didn’t worry about being alone miles from home.

  We never imagined a bicycle lying on the side of the road.

  Ten years old.

  Dad used to keep a picture of me on the mantle from when I was that age. Hands on my hips, hair in my face, annoyed and impatient that I had to take a break for even a moment from the whirlwind of being a child. I suppose every parent has a picture like that.

  If I look in a mirror even now, I can still see hints of the girl in that old photograph. I haven’t lost that faraway look in my brown eyes or the stubborn crinkle in my forehead. I was a medium girl then, and I still am, not short, not tall, not heavy, not thin. My hair looks dark enough to be black, but you’d have to see me in the sunlight to know it’s more like chocolate. It’s straight as an arrow even on the most humid July day. I keep it parted in the middle and just long enough to frame my face. I have a few freckles, too, sprinkled like pepper across the bridge of my nose.

  When I look at that picture now, I think: that girl wasn’t afraid of anything. It’s hard to find things you like about yourself, but I’ll go with that one. I don’t scare easily.

  Ten years old.

  It can be a dangerous age, too. You’re not just a little kid anymore. You’re starting to become a person, but you haven’t lost the wonder of being a child. You have no sense of your own limitations. That’s a good thing and a bad thing.

  I thought about Jeremiah at that age, trying to figure out the world.

  I knew him better than most kids in the area, because his best friend and next-door neighbor was Anna Helvik. Anna was the daughter of my friend and former volleyball coach, Trina, and I was over at Trina’s house all the time. Anna and Jeremiah were often with us. He was a shy kid, not saying much when you talked to him. Anna was the brave one, like me, the girl who would go anywhere and do everything. Jeremiah looked happy to trail behind her and play Spock to her Kirk. He was sweet, always with a big smile, the polite kid who called me “Miss Lake.” I liked him.