In The Bleak Midwinter: A Special Agent Constance Mandalay Novel

by M. R. Sellars

  Pushing her voice up a notch to be heard above the sigh of the rising wind, Martha asked, “Is everything okay, Skip?”

  “Okay as it ever is,” he called out as he turned. Hugging the bundled child close, he looked at Constance and dipped his head toward the open doorway. “Follow me.”

  “Good God, Skip!” Martha exclaimed when the light fell across his swollen lip and blood-smeared chin. “What happened to you?”

  As he hastened past her into the building he replied, “Nothing to worry about. Just got my ass handed to me is all.”

  “You’re getting too old for this, Addison Carmichael,” she chastised.

  “We all are, Martha,” he called back over his shoulder. “We all are.”

  Constance followed him through the opening, with Martha bringing up the rear for the moment. Once she had latched the back door, she quickly skirted around them, running ahead and opening the other doors in their path, leading them along short, dimly lit hallways until they finally arrived at “Merrie’s Room.”

  “I was starting to worry,” Martha expressed in a hushed voice, carefully opening the door a crack. “You’re running late.”

  “I know,” Skip replied, whispering. “Couldn’t be helped. But there should still be time.”

  Martha pushed the door inward to reveal the same room they had visited three days ago. It was dark now, except for a dim puddle being cast outward by a small lamp resting atop the nightstand. The adult Merrie Callahan was tucked into the bed, her slackened face bathed in the soft glow.

  “You two must be frozen solid,” Martha whispered. “I’ll go start some coffee…” Then she turned and disappeared up the corridor.

  Skip looked at Constance and said, “Wait right here.” Then he shifted the blanket-wrapped girl farther up onto his shoulder to adjust his grip on her as he walked through the opening and into the room.

  Just over twenty minutes had elapsed since they had picked up the little girl from the middle of the road, and still nothing made sense. Constance watched on in a shocked stupor from the doorway as the sheriff stooped over and carefully laid the ten-year-old Merrie Frances Callahan on the bed next to her catatonic adult self. He gently unwrapped the cocoon, revealing the girl. Her skin was now the ghostly gray-white of a corpse. Working with both tenderness and haste, Carmichael lifted the child’s hand and placed it against the woman’s. Slowly, both of their hands moved, intertwining with one another, though there was no other sign of consciousness from either of them.

  Skip stood beside the pair for a moment, watching quietly. Finally, he kissed his fingertips and gently touched them to the little girl’s forehead, then to the older Merrie’s cheek.

  When he walked out, he ushered Constance ahead then pulled the door shut behind him.

  With a sigh he said, “All right, Special Agent Mandalay. Much as it pains me, I believe we still have a crime scene to process.”

  “What...” she started, stammered, and then started again. “What just happened here, Sheriff Carmichael?”

  He reached up and brushed his thumb and forefinger through his mustache while gazing in the general direction of the floor. His shoulders drooped as he allowed a long, low breath to escape. He swallowed hard, then looked up at Constance and shook his head.

  “I don’t honestly know,” he said. “I don’t have any answers and that’s the truth. All I can tell you is that as of tonight it’s been happening for eight years now.”

  “That little girl is actually Merrie Callahan?” she pressed.

  He nodded. “Yes…or maybe her soul… I just know she’s part of Merrie.”

  Constance rubbed her eyes and then pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger as she leaned back against the wall. “This is surreal…” she breathed.

  “Yeah…it’s a bit much to take in.”

  “Uh-huh…even for me and I’ve seen some things.”

  “Anything like this?”

  “Not exactly, but pretty close on the bizarre meter.”

  “I have to admit, you’re the first Fed to tell me that one.”

  “Why all the deception?” she asked. “Why didn’t you just tell me about all of this right from the outset?”

  Skip raised an eyebrow. “You wouldn’t have believed me if I had.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Maybe not, but I’d say it’s a pretty good guess,” he replied. “Hell, sometimes I’m not sure I believe it myself.”

  “So…” she said. “It’s some kind of test?”

  “I guess that really depends on how you look at it. Believe me, I tried the truth with the first Fed. It ended up being more trouble than it was worth.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, on the first murder in oh-three I didn’t even call. We hadn’t put the pieces together yet, and besides, when I found Merrie standing in the street just like she had been in seventy-five, I wasn’t all that sure that I hadn’t lost my damn mind.”

  Constance shook her head. “How did you manage to find her in oh-three anyway?”

  Skip shrugged. “Dumb luck, just like seventy-five. Why I even turned down that street I have no idea. Maybe it was some sort of divine intervention, who knows? Either way, I did, and there she was. I honestly thought I was hallucinating. But…as you can see, I wasn’t.”

  “Unless we both are…” Constance offered quietly.

  “Sometimes I wish that was true,” he replied.

  “How did you know to bring her here to Holly-Oak?” Constance asked.

  “I didn’t.” He shook his head, voice tinged with sadness. “That ended up being a very bad year for Merrie. We actually thought we were going to lose her.”

  “What happened to the little girl?”

  “That’s a good part of why I thought I was hallucinating,” he explained. “She disappeared.”

  “Disappeared how?”

  “I mean she vanished. It was like she was never there. No trace. Anyway, then in oh-four when I called after receiving the same Christmas card as before, we had an Agent by the name of Graham show up. During the interview to get him up to speed, I told him about finding Merrie and such. All of it… The bare naked truth, every bit… Right then and there he decided I was either insane or covering something up. To be honest, after what happened in oh-three I was almost inclined to believe him on the insane part.

  “Either way, because of all that I went right to the top of his suspect list. We sat in my office the whole night Christmas Eve, and on into the morning Christmas Day, with him profiling me. Once we got the call he headed straight to the scene, but I made a detour… As crazy as it seemed, I had to go look. And…as I’m sure you can guess, I found Merrie again.”

  Constance offered a matter-of-fact observation. “And that’s when you brought her here for the first time.”

  “Yeah,” he said with a shallow nod. “Still don’t know what made me do it, but obviously it was the right thing.”

  Skip paused for a moment, then shrugged and continued relating the history. “Then, in oh-five when I got another card, I called again. Graham showed up and turns out I was still his prime suspect. He just figured I had an accomplice. He beat that horse to death for a while then finally gave up. At that point he was just convinced that I was a head-case. Insisted I be evaluated by a shrink. That was a mess.

  “Then, oh-six rolled around. Another card, another call, and he was back again, but that time he staked out the house with us and saw everything first hand, including Merrie coming out the front door. He didn’t handle that so well. In fact, he left town before we ever started processing the scene, and that’s the last time we ever saw him around here. After that, I stopped calling you Feds. Sorta figured I was on my own with this. Kind of like my own private hell, I guess.”

  “So you haven’t contacted the bureau for help on this case since two-thousand six?”

  “Nope. Hasn’t stopped any of you from showing up though, regular as clockwork. It’s just been a n
ew face every year. Either way, ever since the first unsolicited visit in oh-seven I’ve kept my mouth shut and just let you all see it first hand for yourselves.” He shook his head. “Of course, don’t know that it’s worked any better that way either.”

  Constance mulled over what he had just said. Her tired brain was having enough trouble processing everything she had seen tonight, and these latest revelations definitely were not helping her to make sense of the situation. As if there weren’t enough curiosities about this case already, the fact that the SAC had implied that the assignment came out of DC was even more intriguing now.

  After a moment she offered, “I’m not really sure what to say about all that, Skip…”

  “I suppose there’s not much you can,” he grunted. “Just so you realize that the lack of up-front information on my part wasn’t anything personal against you. Seeing is believing, I guess… Don’t know what to tell you about the lack of support at your end, other than join the club… I haven’t been getting any either.”

  “Yeah… I’m not exactly clear on that myself,” she admitted.

  Skip suppressed a snort, then nodded. “I hear you… Well… I’ll say this much, Special Agent Mandalay, you’re different.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “After what you’ve seen and learned in the past hour, you’re still here. I can’t say the same was ever true for most of your colleagues.”

  Constance paused, still digesting the influx of bizarre data. Eventually she blew out a heavy sigh and looked at Sheriff Carmichael. “So, what now?”

  “We grab some coffee and go process a crime scene,” he replied, then bobbed his head toward the door next to them. “In about two hours Merrie will wake up just like usual, and for her, it’ll be Christmas Day nineteen seventy-four all over again.”

  “Which one of them, Sheriff?” she asked.

  “There’s only one Merrie, Constance.”

  “But you just–”

  He cut her off. “I know.”

  She cocked her head and blinked. “And all of the other Merries?”

  “Trust me, Special Agent Mandalay. There’s only one Merrie Frances Callahan.”

  CHAPTER 28

  6:17 A.M. – December 25, 2010

  632 Evergreen Lane

  Hulis Township – Northern Missouri

  QUIET is a relative term, especially at 6 A.M. on Christmas morning. Constance was certain, however, that no matter the day, the hour, or the point of reference used to define the concept of relative quiet, the portable generator parked outside the abandoned house on Evergreen Lane didn’t qualify as such—even though the words Super-Quiet were emblazoned on the side right next to the manufacturer’s logo.

  The pulsing thrum of the running engine was spilling into the frosty air in competition with the moan of the wind through the trees. The incessant staccato popping of the exhaust was being carried aloft on the undulating breeze, and together they were most assuredly splitting what little calm remained of the pre-dawn darkness. The mélange of noise wasn’t helping Constance’s headache either, nor were the extra-strength aspirin Martha had given her back at Holly-Oak. At this point, the only thing that would do her any good would be sleep, but that was a prescription she couldn’t fill just yet.

  She followed the ropes of multi-colored, heavy-duty extension cords that snaked away from the generator and across the porch, running in through the front door. Inside, the harsh glow of a halogen work light illuminated the way through the front room. A second of the adjustable lamps was positioned farther inward to light the hallway.

  The bulk of the cords continued along the floor of the main room until they bent sharply into the corridor at the archway and angled across its length. After running diagonally across the floor for several feet, they hooked to the left and disappeared through the open basement doorway—a twisted green, orange, and yellow stripe that marked an obvious path toward the remnants of horror that waited below.

  The tight bundle of electrical cords ran down the stairs—carefully arranged, safely out of the way—against the uprights that supported the handrail. At the bottom they spilled out across the concrete floor in a bright pile of coils before shooting off in a spindly fan, each ending in its own caged, halogen work lamp.

  Constance lowered herself down from the double-height step at the bottom of the staircase and then tiptoed gingerly around the pile of cables. To her back, the basement was still bathed in oblique shadows, illuminated only by residual glow. But in front of her, beyond the semicircle of tripod-mounted lamps, a man-made sun had risen. Even during the day, there hadn’t been anywhere near this amount of light filling the subterranean room, but then again, during the day there had only been rough outlines to see. Now those outlines were grotesquely filled in.

  Deputy Broderick was facing away from the spotlighted carnage, hands buried deep in his coat pockets. His face was harshly shadowed due to the angle at which he was standing. The reflected wash of brilliance from the nearest lamp fell in an oblique swath across him, and what little of his face it revealed was sickeningly pale.

  He looked up at Constance and nodded. After a moment he said, “Sorry about…you know…earlier.”

  She returned the nod. “Yeah. Me too.”

  They stood staring at one another for several heartbeats until the awkward silence became too deafening to endure.

  Broderick gave in first. Lolling his head to the side and angling it toward the dismembered victim, he offered in a quiet voice, “Fourth Christmas for me. Wish it would get easier… You know… Seeing it and all…”

  “No,” Constance replied without hesitation. “Trust me, Deputy; you really don’t.”

  He appeared to frown then gave a shallow nod in response to her statement. A second later a fresh pair of footsteps began to echo from the stairs, and the sullen officer cast his flat expression upward toward the source.

  “Martin called,” Broderick announced as Sheriff Carmichael came into view and continued down the staircase. “He’s having trouble getting the hearse to turn over this morning, so he’s running behind.”

  “Yeah,” Skip replied, stepping off the bottom precipice with a grunt. “I just got off the radio with Johnson. He told me.” Hitching up his belt, he picked his way through the tangle of electrical wires and drew himself up next to Mandalay.

  “Is Martin your County Coroner?” Constance asked.

  “Yeah,” he grunted. “Martin Hornbeak. He owns the funeral home here in town too.”

  She acknowledged with a nod.

  The sheriff sucked in a deep breath then blew it out in a loud huff, as if to state unequivocally for the record just exactly how they all were feeling. After a long measure with nothing more than the muffled drone of the generator outside to fill the space, he grumbled, “Déjà goddamn vu… Every year… Every goddamn year…”

  “Do you have a Crime Scene Unit on the way?” Constance asked.

  “You’re looking at it,” he snorted. “We could process this scene in our sleep.”

  “I’m not doubting you, Skip,” she replied. “But have you considered calling in outside investigators? Maybe from the MHP Crime Lab?”

  “Sure,” he told her. “But not for a few years now.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’ve made it clear that they prefer to leave this one alone,” he explained.

  “Why?

  “Hold that thought,” Carmichael said, then turned his gaze toward the deputy. “You take the pictures yet?”

  “Yeah,” Broderick replied. “Same as last year.”

  “And the year before; yeah, I know,” Skip grunted. “Bag the axe?”

  The deputy nodded. “Yeah. Bagged and tagged. Whiskey bottle too. Just waiting on Martin to show up for the remains. I’ll take prints and do a DNA swab over there. Called Doc Harper too. She said to let her know if Special Agent Mandalay wants an official autopsy, otherwise just have Martin sign off on the death certificate as usual.”

 
After a pause the sheriff asked, “Did you check…?”

  He purposely left the half-asked question dangling in the air. While not fully spoken, it seemed that between the two of them it was implicitly understood.

  “Yeah,” Broderick replied. “Same as always.”

  “Good,” the sheriff replied with an approving nod. “Give Constance a glove.”

  Broderick dug around in his coat pocket, then produced a latex glove and handed it over to Mandalay.

  “You still haven’t answered my question, Skip…” she said.

  “I know, but I’m about to,” Skip told her and indicated for her to follow as he started across the basement. “Go ahead and put the glove on. I need to show you something.”

  She followed along behind him, stretching the sheath over her hand and working it onto her fingers as they stepped out in front of the arc of halogen work lights. Their shadows fell against the far wall in harsh, misshapen silhouettes. After skirting around the congealed pools of rusting blood, which were already showing the first-stage signs of freezing to the floor, they stopped amid the scattered remains of the butchered victim.

  “Have a look,” Skip said, pointing at the severed head a few feet away.

  Constance furrowed her brow at the sheriff. She had worked far too many cases involving violent death to be squeamish as a rule, so she wasn’t exactly a lightweight when it came to crime scenes. However, the egg salad sandwich was still lodged sideways in her gut, and her headache wasn’t helping either. Getting up close and personal with a dismembered corpse wasn’t exactly high on her priority list.

  Still, after a moment’s hesitation, she stepped forward, then gathered her coat and squatted down in front of the disembodied head. She tilted her gaze, inspecting the grotesque tableau.

  “What am I looking for?” she finally asked.

  “You can move it,” the sheriff answered. “Get yourself a better look.”