The Deep, Deep Snow

by Brian Freeman

  After we met, I wrote a song I could play between sections of the story, with a chorus that would have kids singing with me after they heard it for the first time. It went like this:

  Ursulina! Ursulina!

  Look at those teeth and claws!

  Ursulina! Ursulina!

  Look at those big brown paws!

  Ursulina! Ursulina!

  Is he a scary beast? Ayup!

  Ursulina! Ursulina!

  He’s gonna eat you up!

  Okay, I was never going to give Sara Bareilles any competition when it came to songwriting, but I figured the kids would love it. I wrote it in a week, and then Keith and I met in the writer’s cottage again so I could play it for him. He loved the song, too. We rehearsed the whole performance many times, him doing the story, me doing the song, over the course of the next several weeks. We rehearsed way more than we needed to for a half-hour children’s program. And we talked. We had long talks about things that mattered. He talked about teaching, and reading, and living without a leg, and being married to a high school sweetheart who sent one man off to war and got a very different man back.

  I talked, too. I talked about my father, about Trina, about Anna. I talked about my belief in signs and omens and about the challenges of growing up as a mystery girl with no past. I talked about my crush on him in high school. We laughed about that, but I was no fool. Telling him the truth about my feelings carried us across a dangerous line.

  The Halloween show was a big hit. Monica was thrilled. We had nearly two hundred kids and parents gathered in the town park outside the courthouse, and they oohed and aahed and screamed at all the right scary parts. Afterward, everybody was singing my Ursulina song. It was as close as I was ever likely to get to being a celebrity, and I was flying high. So was Keith. We hung around together as afternoon became evening and the festival wound down. We were tired but exhilarated. Everyone was coming up to us and telling us what a great show it was. We drank it all in.

  As night fell, we went back to his place to continue the celebration. Colleen had already gone home and was asleep in the house. Keith said she slept a lot, because that’s what depressed people do. He and I went to the old barn, and we put on music, and we uncorked a bottle of Macallan that he saved for special occasions. The more we drank, the more he opened up. He grabbed novels from his bookshelves and read some of his favorite passages to me. He caressed his St. Benedict medal and talked in a hushed voice about losing his leg. He told me about his troubles with his wife.

  You know where this is going.

  I knew where it was going, too, but that didn’t stop me. I’m sorry. You may not be able to forgive me for what I did, and that’s okay, because all these years later, I haven’t forgiven myself. I was drunk, it was my birthday, and I let myself indulge a high school fantasy with a married man. God, I was stupid.

  A mistake like that was bound to have consequences.

  But never in my life did I imagine the consequences would include Colleen Whalen dead outside their house with a bullet in her brain.

  Chapter Eight

  After we left the cemetery, Adam and I dropped Anna back at her house, and then we headed to the Nowhere Café. We found my father drinking weak coffee and reassuring the worried neighbors crowded around him that we were doing everything we could to find Jeremiah.

  The Nowhere is where people in Everywhere gather. It’s more than a local diner dishing up pancakes and venison stew. It’s our meeting hall, our water cooler, our ground zero for news and gossip. Black-and-white photos of earlier generations of Everywhere residents watch us from the walls, and someday, photos of us will take their places. We meet in the red-cushioned booths and along the lunch counter to talk about weather, sports, politics, religion, cooking, vacations, holidays, and the latest rumors about who was zooming who.

  Half the town was there that evening. I knew all of the faces, but I could see something in them that I hadn’t seen very often before. Fear. They were afraid, because Jeremiah was still missing. The innocent explanations for what might have happened to him were fading away, and if it could happen to the Sloan boy, then it could happen to any of their children, too.

  I hung in the back of the diner near the glass door. Adam went off to flirt with the counter waitress, Belinda Brees, as he usually did. Belinda was another Striker girl from my high school volleyball team. Her nickname in school was Easy Breezy, and I don’t suppose I need to explain why.

  While Adam put the moves on Breezy, I watched my father take questions from the crowd. I didn’t like what I saw.

  His brown sheriff’s uniform was crisply starched and neat as a pin. He’d changed clothes after searching through the dirt and brambles of the national forest. His mustache was trimmed, and he’d tamed his thicket of snow-white hair with a brush. One thing Dad never did was to allow the people of the county to see him at anything less than his best. He stood ramrod straight, emphasizing his height, and as the townspeople grilled him, he remained almost supernaturally calm.

  And yet he wasn’t. I knew him. I could see the way his fingers were clutched around his thermos so tightly that his knuckles turned pink with exertion. He didn’t look at people as he talked to them. His soft blue eyes were unfocused, a sign that his mind was spinning to the point of overheating. The muscles in his tanned face were tight. Like everyone else, my father was beginning to realize that he’d misjudged this situation. This was not just about a boy who wandered away. In the time we’d spent digging through the woods and searching the town, precious hours had been lost.

  Nobody paid attention to me. This was the kind of situation that reminded me that I was still just a young deputy. And a woman, too. The people who wanted answers talked to Dad or Adam, as if my opinion didn’t count for anything. Even my father was guilty of that sometimes. I’d called to let him know that I thought Jeremiah’s brother might be hiding things from us, but Dad wasn’t ready to bother the family with more questions, not simply based on my hunch. I felt as if he were patting his little girl on the head.

  “Coffee, Shel?”

  Belinda Brees appeared at my side with a Nowhere Café mug and a white plastic pitcher of coffee. The coffee was terrible, but I drank it anyway, the way I always did. Dad and I came to the Nowhere for breakfast six days a week at six in the morning, and we had dinner there on most days, too. Without the Nowhere and the occasional kindness of strangers, I’m pretty sure my father and I would have starved, because neither one of us could fry an egg without setting off the smoke alarms.

  I sipped the coffee, which was scalding hot. The voices around us were loud, and Breezy and I spoke to each other under our breath.

  “Terrible thing, huh,” she murmured.

  That was the word we all used. Terrible. It was a numb word, the kind of thing you say when reality is too hard to stare in the face.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hard to believe someone took him. Not around here. But it’s looking like that, isn’t it? Wow.”

  I didn’t say anything or make any guesses. I just listened to Tom handing out hope to the people in the diner. I wanted to be an optimist like him, but we were running out of optimists in Everywhere.

  “Hey, have you talked to Trina lately?” I asked Breezy.

  “Yeah, she was in for the fish fry on Friday with Karl and Anna.”

  “Did she look okay to you?”

  “As far as I could tell. Why?”

  “Oh, it’s something Anna said. It made me wonder if anything was wrong.”

  “Well, you’d know better than me.”

  That was true. The others on the team hadn’t stayed close to Trina after high school the way I had. We’d all drifted apart. Three of the girls left town to go to college and never came back. Rose still resented being booted from the squad in favor of Violet Roka, and Violet had never been close to any of us. And then there was me
and Breezy.

  She was the wildest of the Striker girls. We were good friends, but we were as different as a head-banger and a country star. She was much taller than me, which helped in our school days because she could unleash a vicious spike from the attack zone. (My own specialty was a booming overhand serve.) She was skinny and always wore long-sleeved shirts, even on the hottest summer days. Breezy had dabbled with drugs since I’d known her, and I suspected she had track marks on her arms that she didn’t want anyone to see. Her hair was long, straight, and black, with shiny purple streaks, and when she was working she usually had it pulled back into a ponytail. She had a plain face, and her teenage acne had trailed her into adulthood.

  She was the only one of our group who’d gotten married after high school, but she’d divorced a couple of years later when her husband skipped town for the North Dakota fracking fields after cleaning out their bank accounts. I knew he was bad news, because he’d been my boyfriend before he was hers. And yes, I warned her, but girls don’t always listen to other girls about that sort of thing. Since the divorce, she’d lived alone in a mobile home in Witch Tree, but the word among the local men was that Easy Breezy didn’t often sleep alone.

  “The Gruders live over in your area, don’t they?” I asked her. “Near Witch Tree?”

  Breezy rolled her eyes at the mention of their name. “Oh, yeah. They sure do.”

  “They’re back in town. Did you know that?”

  “I didn’t. It must be a recent thing, because they’ve been gone for a few weeks. They can get pretty loud over there, and the noise blows my way.”

  “Do you see them a lot when they’re in town?”

  Breezy gave me a strange look. “What’s that supposed to mean, Shel?”

  “It’s just a question.”

  “Well, they’re at the Witch’s Brew a lot, and so am I. No law against that, right?”

  I knew this was one of those times when people saw the uniform and not me. Even close friends never forget that you’re a cop. Breezy had a history with drugs, and there I was asking about two of the region’s suspected drug dealers. That was bound to make her nervous.

  I leaned close to her ear and whispered. “Off the record, Breezy. I just want to know who the Gruders hang out with.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Jeremiah disappeared right after they came back to town. Maybe that’s a coincidence, maybe not.”

  She rejected the idea with a firm shake of her head. “You’re way off base, Shel. Vince and Will wouldn’t touch a kid. They may be dirt bags, but I don’t see them doing that.”

  “They sell drugs. It’s a violent business.”

  “Yeah, but you mess with a kid, and the whole town gets involved. You think they want that kind of attention? No way.”

  “Have you ever seen them with Adrian Sloan?”

  “Jeremiah’s brother? No. He’s too young to be in the bar. What is he, sixteen?”

  “Yeah, but the Gruders sell their crap at the high school, right? Could Adrian be involved?”

  Breezy glanced at the Nowhere’s long lunch counter, as if she needed an escape from our conversation. “I don’t know, Shel. You’re talking to the wrong person.”

  “Would you tell me if you did?”

  “Probably not. But in this case, I really don’t know. I haven’t heard Adrian’s name from Will or Vince, but that doesn’t mean anything. Okay? Now I have to go.”

  Breezy refilled my mug of coffee and waded back into the crowd. Her tease-me smile returned to her face. She put a hand on the shoulder of every man she passed and gave it a squeeze. They looked back at her like she was strawberry shortcake swimming in whipped cream.

  I was alone again. Adam wolfed down a burger at the counter. I hadn’t eaten anything myself, but I wasn’t hungry. I pushed through the diner door and brought my coffee out to the main street and climbed into the cruiser. I opened the window. The evening had cooled down fast, and the smoke of someone’s firepit was in the air. It was dusk and would be dark soon, and wherever Jeremiah was, I didn’t like to think of him spending the night away from his family.

  Not long after, the door of the café opened, letting out a burble of noise. My father had broken free from the inquisition. He stood in the doorway, straight as an arrow, not letting on that anything was bothering him. He saw me in the cruiser and crooked a finger at me, and I scrambled out of the car to join him. The two of us headed across the street to the library. Dad used his key to let us inside, and we took the stairway down to the basement.

  The lights were on. Monica Constant was still on the phones, calling seemingly everyone in town one by one. Her eyes looked up at us hopefully, but it only took a glance for her to realize there was no news. Dad beckoned me into his office, and I followed him. He sat behind his desk, laying both hands flat on the impeccably neat surface. Always keep a clean desk, he’d say. Your desk should be as perfectly organized as your mind. I think that staying organized was his way of keeping the wolf in his brain at bay. And we both knew the wolf was in there, stalking him. Dementia had claimed both of his parents.

  I stayed standing. We were silent for at least two minutes, and finally I had to say something.

  “Dad, there was a ninety-nine percent chance that Jeremiah would be home safely by now. You made the right call.”

  My father nodded. I wasn’t telling him something he didn’t already know. “Unfortunately, Shelby, it’s looking more and more like we’re dealing with the one percent this time.”

  “So what do we do next?”

  He inhaled long and slow. “I’m heading back to the forest. We’re still searching the area where the bicycle was found. These people will search all night if they have to. I’m proud of them. A terrible thing like this brings out the best in everyone.”

  I thought that was a generous sentiment, but also a little naive. People who are scared and upset usually take it out on someone, and that someone was likely to be my father. If we didn’t find Jeremiah, he’d be the one they blamed.

  “What do you want me and Adam to do?” I asked.

  Dad reached into his in-box and drew out a single sheet of paper. He put on reading glasses and examined it as he tapped a finger on his desk. “Mrs. Norris called earlier to complain that she had a Peeping Tom outside her window last night. She thought it was someone staying at Rose’s motel. Normally I’d be laughing about another complaint from Mrs. N, but I’m not laughing anymore. The motel is just down the highway from where the Sloans live. You better go check it out, Shelby.”

  Chapter Nine

  I stood on the county highway at the base of the steep driveway leading to the Rest in Peace Motel. From where I was, I could see the timber frame of Ellen and Dennis Sloan’s house not far down the road. The sky was almost dark, and lights burned in every window. Cars and trucks were parked up and down the shoulder, and I knew friends were providing support to the family. I was happy that the Sloans weren’t dealing with this alone.

  Adam returned to our cruiser from a modest yellow cottage on the opposite side of the highway, where Mrs. Norris had lived since FDR was elected. We’d flipped a coin to decide who got to talk to her this time.

  “Mrs. N can’t give us many details about her mystery stalker,” he reported. “She calls him Snuffle Man. Said his heavy breathing sounded like some kind of obscene phone call.”

  “And this was last night?”

  “Early this morning. Around five o’clock or so, before daylight. She was sleeping, but Snuffle Man woke her up he was so loud. He was right outside the open window.”

  “And is she sure it was a person? Sounds like it could be a deer snorting to me.”

  “Yeah, Mrs. N says she screamed and grabbed her shotgun and went running to the window. You don’t mess with a double-barreled ninety-five-year-old who sleeps in the raw. She made sure to tell me that, by the way
, like I’ll ever get that image out of my head. Anyway, she spooked whoever it was, and he took off. She thinks he headed across the highway to the motel.”

  “But she couldn’t give a description of him?”

  “No. Too dark to see.”

  I peered up the asphalt driveway at the Rest in Peace Motel, or the Peaceful Rest, if you want to be fussy about its real name. Rose had inherited the place two years earlier when her parents died in a car accident. This was where she’d grown up, but I knew Rose had never wanted to be in the motel business like her parents. She liked to be on the go, and running the Rest in Peace kept her inside the office nearly every single day, which she hated. She was fixing it up and already had plans to sell it as soon as she could find a willing buyer.

  Rose wasn’t married, and she was an only child. It’s funny, when we were kids, I was a little jealous of her because she knew who her parents were. And then, just like that, her mom and dad were gone. You’d think that kind of tragedy might have brought two old friends closer together again, but it really didn’t. I offered to stay with her for a while after the accident, but she was pretty firm in saying no. I knew that Rose and I were never going to hunt for the Ursulina together the way we did as kids, but I still missed the closeness we had in those days.

  The motel was an L-shaped one-story building with twelve rooms. The doors were all freshly painted red, and blooming flower boxes decorated the windows. A dense stand of pines towered behind the motel walls. It was the high season, and every door had a car parked in front of it. The highway advertisement featured two painted signs dangling from hooks below the motel’s name. One said No Pets and the other said No Vacancy.

  “Full house,” Adam commented.

  “Yeah, let’s go see if Rose remembers any snuffly breathers.”

  We climbed the driveway to the bungalow in the woods that doubled as the motel office and Rose’s residence. We opened the swinging screen door and went inside. The television behind the motel counter was blaring a home fix-up show, but no one was in the office. I saw real estate books on the desk—Rose was going after her realtor’s license—and another laminated sign reminding guests about the no-pet policy. Around here, pets were prone to wandering into the woods and getting eaten.