The Child Finder

by Rene Denfeld

  With most other cops, she would demur. But they had had lunch plenty of times over the years, and Winfield treated her exactly as she expected, so she said yes.

  Winfield studied the menu at length, smiling a bit behind it as Naomi fidgeted, clearly impatient. Finally, after a lot of musing, he gave his order: a roast beef sandwich, hold the fries. Naomi ordered a hamburger.

  “You should learn to relax,” he told her. “Now.” He pulled out his yellow pad. “Desmond Strikes, nothing. Dead. Earl Strikes must be his grandson, right? This is funny. Earl had a charge of unlawful commerce in furs some years ago. That’s it. Earl had a wife, Lucinda Strikes. She sounds like a hell-raiser before she found Jesus. And probably after she found Jesus, too, because there is a charge in here of clobbering some thief in the head with her Bible.”

  The waitress came by with coffee. Winfield put three sugars in his coffee and stirred. He saw Naomi watching. “Life ain’t sweet enough.”

  She sipped hers black, waiting.

  “Moving on,” he said. “Robert Claymore. You know some of these guys died decades ago. They couldn’t have taken your girl.”

  “I’m getting a read on the land.”

  “Okay. He went nutters. Committed to the Oregon State Hospital.”

  “I can imagine why.”

  The waitress brought their food, interrupting his natural question about why—not that she would have answered. He always enjoyed watching Naomi tuck into her food. He’d like to see what she would do with steak and potatoes.

  “Next up is Walter Hallsetter. You’re going to like this one. He was a pedophile. Several arrests, but he never spent a week behind bars. Back then no one took it seriously, and the parents would never press charges. His last arrest he made bail and disappeared. Smoke on the wind. Let’s see—this was fifty years ago.”

  Naomi sat up, rigid. A fry was in one hand.

  “But there’s the catch. He can’t still be alive now. Not unless he found the proverbial fountain of youth.”

  “Maybe he did,” Naomi said softly. “No death record?”

  “No.” He looked surprised she had guessed. He dug into his sandwich, looked at her fondly.

  He caught the downward, confused glance at her food. “You know, child finder,” he said with a rueful smile, “I’m awfully fond of you.”

  Naomi’s smile was pleased, but there was a wall there.

  “The report numbers?” she asked.

  He gave them to her.

  Naomi drove to the far outskirts of town, where an industrial area lay over buckled land. Railway tracks crossed the roads, sooty old buildings advertised woolen mills, and a long-abandoned rendering plant still managed to look greasy.

  At a scratched wooden sign she turned. There, past a bramble of blackberry bushes and a pack of suspiciously feral-looking dogs, lay the police archive building. It was old and made of pale pink brick—the storage unit for over a century of moldering files. The sole employee had parked his car tight to the building, as if protecting his flank.

  Naomi watched the dogs as she went inside through a glass door spiderwebbed from a gunshot hole. The lead dog, a malamute mix of some kind, watched her. The other dogs lined up behind their leader, panting expectantly.

  The officer sat up and patted his holster, an ugly expression on his face. Naomi had dealt with him before. He was assigned on permanent desk duty here because he was unfit for anything else.

  “Wild dog pack,” he said. “I take potshots at them.”

  Naomi looked at the gunshot hole in the door. “Are they shooting back?”

  “Ha-ha. No, but they will bite you if they get a chance.” He lifted his trouser leg to show a neatly incised bite wound. A few stitches crossed the worst parts.

  “Holy moly.” That was about as much as Naomi swore. She liked to joke that being raised by Mrs. Cottle had cleaned her of cuss. Mrs. Cottle often said God gave us a vocabulary and cussing showed us for fools.

  “They’ll get it,” he said darkly.

  Acting put-upon that he had to leave his desk, the man led her down a long corridor of metal shelves filled with file boxes, rusted evidence cans, sheaves of papers tied to string, the sunlight streaming in through the dusty windows above. Naomi knew where the reports would be stowed deep inside the cavernous building—the storage was by year, and this was going back decades.

  “You’re lucky water damage didn’t get to them,” he groused, pulling out the labeled file boxes and blowing off dust.

  Naomi counted luck as a bonus, not a default. But she didn’t tell him that.

  He found the reports, handing her the old papers with a shrug.

  “Good luck with the dogs,” he said, turning away the opposite direction, deeper into the building.

  “I thought you might help me,” she called.

  “Going to the restroom,” he called derisively, limping away.

  Naomi watched him walk away, cursing lightly under her breath—she was sure God didn’t mind silent cursing. She returned to the front with the reports, made copies on the machine, and put the originals on his desk.

  Outside the cracked glass door the dogs still waited, smiling at her with wet teeth. The lead dog looked like he had been someone’s pet. Feral dogs in the town limits—she had heard of this in larger cities, and had been bitten herself in Detroit. But this was new here.

  The man had left his lunch box sitting on his desk.

  Naomi smiled a little to herself. On her way out she opened it: bologna-and-ham submarine, with slices of American cheese, a brownie wrapped in plastic wrap. She flung the pieces one by one over the heads of the dogs, sending them scurrying, and by the time they turned she was back in her car.

  Naomi knew what Detective Winfield had said was true—fifty years ago molestation cases were seldom prosecuted. Parents didn’t want to face the shame of having their children known as victims. Each time Walter Hallsetter had been arrested for molesting, the case had been dropped.

  But his last arrest was different. Walter had been caught red-handed, trying to drag a boy from a park into his car, and this time prosecution seemed certain. The boy’s mother was adamant that the district attorney press charges.

  But Walter had made bail and disappeared.

  Naomi knew exactly where the pedophile had run to: the Skookum National Forest, where he had gotten the claim high above where Madison had gone missing. There was scant effort at the time to find absconders, and police agencies seldom communicated across county or state lines. There was no Internet, no computer systems to run checks. No one would have known where Walter had gone without finding the same homestead claim in the same obscure building Naomi did—and they had no reason to look there.

  Detective Winfield was right. After so many years Walter Hallsetter was likely dead. But Naomi knew that some things never die.

  They just get passed on.

  Mrs. Cottle would have said it was a sin. Naomi had felt that at age seventeen, in the months before she left, and it went to her core. The last thing she wanted, after all the uncertainty she had been through, was to be a sinner.

  She had noticed Jerome growing into a man, his very legs mysterious, like the legs of an animal, his back curving, growing scant hair. Indian hair, he joked, at the felt on his arms, the soft velvet that rode down the back of his neck. On summer nights he had Mrs. Cottle cut his hair, and he was vain about it, Naomi could tell. He grinned at her, between snips of the scissors.

  Watching him walk across the hilly kitchen floor. Dropping a pan because he was a klutz. Cooking soup for her when she was sick—and bringing it in her room when the fever plastered her hair to her cheek.

  Jerome walking in accidentally as she was stepping out of the tub, a creamy trail of bubbles running down her lower back.

  She had stood in front of her bedroom mirror after that, looking at herself naked. The adults of her childhood were ciphers, but dark ones. What did it mean to be a woman? She had no idea.

  The body in t
he mirror had been muscular, firm. The stomach was curved, flowing out to wide, taut hips. The breasts were soft and raised. Turning, she saw round haunches, a set of embedded dimples at the very base of her lower back. Remembering a song she had heard somewhere, She has dimples on her butt, but I love her just the same. It was a silly song, a voice out of a nursery. But where?

  She had stood and stared. This was what she had become. The past that had run down the truck’s sides had landed, fertile, and sprung into hot white flowers. Touching her flat belly, she saw herself as Jerome might see her, and the thought was intoxicating.

  What she had left in the blank past had stayed there. What would happen if it came back? It might roar in on an avalanche, explode in a shout. To find part of herself and make it new would mean making herself vulnerable in a way beyond comprehension. To have that vulnerability betrayed would be catastrophic. Especially by the one person she could imagine trusting completely.

  Jerome.

  In the big dream that evening she was standing naked at the edge of a strawberry field at night. Her legs were trembling—she was getting ready to run. Behind her, an ancient trapdoor covered an exit to a concrete bunker hidden underground. The brush that had covered the hatch had been pushed aside.

  A little girl was standing next to her. She had brown hair like Naomi, a face that turned up in adoration. She had Naomi’s eyes, her wide mouth, but a different set of cheekbones. The little girl was smiling at her, reaching for her hand like a talisman.

  Big, she was whispering. Naomi’s heart shattered and she awoke.

  Naomi had long thought there is no safe place, even in our minds. Even there could be traps. We could round a corner and find a secret moldering like a toadstool in the dark. The dream was like a dark demon, bringing with it scraps of the past. It was hard to tell what was a skeleton to be buried—or a treasure to be revealed.

  In his farmhouse bed, the shadows of packing boxes in the hall, Jerome also lay awake, thinking about Naomi. As a boy he had been fascinated with her—her mysterious past, the way she had dropped into his life like an unlikely miracle. He had never wished for a sister, but he had wished for someone like Naomi—a girl more beautiful than the stones. Mrs. Cottle had warned him, back then, not to pry. “She’ll discover her truth when it comes,” she had warned. “You can’t make someone remember any more than you can make them believe.”

  But Jerome was a boy bursting with curiosity, from wanting to know about how gems were created to learning about his birth tribe. Everything had a creation story, he figured. Naomi did, too, and it disturbed him how Mrs. Cottle and others in town seemed so sanguine in accepting her blank past. Something had happened to Naomi, and he was sure in his bones it was a bad thing and that meant something needed to be done to fix it. He wanted to bring justice for the harm. The man in him, even as a child, spoke.

  He had often wondered if part of the reason he went to war was to claim that man in him that Naomi couldn’t see—the warrior who wanted to save her.

  One day his curiosity, like a dark fruit, bore questionable returns.

  It had been after the war when he started working for the sheriff’s office. There was usually little to do—no one to really police, he joked—and the old sheriff, now retired, would often come by to reminisce.

  The sheriff liked to talk. A lot.

  “I never did tell Mary Cottle,” the retired sheriff said as he poured a cup of the syrupy coffee that stewed all day in the brick office. “There was some odd stuff about that case.”

  “Like what?” Jerome had asked.

  Jerome was uncomfortable, in part because he sensed the sheriff revealed things to him because he was a man when he should have been honest with Naomi and Mrs. Cottle instead. And in part because he believed too much talk is often a cover for too little action.

  “Oh, dead ends everywhere. Mum’s the word. Except those migrants.”

  “What about them?”

  “I’ll never forget. They pulled up in that rusty old truck. I wasn’t expecting nobody, you know how it goes. Sleepy day. And all of a sudden I have all of these misfits in my office, all dirty, camp clothes smelling like dirt and firewood, and they have a little girl between them, wrapped in a serape. Precious little thing, and what I remember is her hair—so glossy, like a horse. I don’t know why I thought that. Those migrants pushed the girl towards me, but I could tell they cared, and they were all talking, and shushing each other as they went, but one of them said something to me before they pretty much ran out the door.”

  “What was that?”

  “‘The law ain’t always kind.’”

  Jerome had puzzled over that in the months since. He wanted to know where Naomi had been found. He wanted to know why the migrants had driven Naomi all the way from wherever they found her to Opal, knowing she would be safe there. He wanted to know if the law wasn’t kind where she came from—and what that meant. He wanted justice for whoever had hurt her.

  In Kalapuya belief, Jerome knew, the world was created out of stone. At the top of the highest mountain the first woman came: Le-Lu, the mother of us all. Down the mountain Le-Lu walked, and with every step the grass sprang forth, green as life itself. Where she sat rivers rushed, and streams and lakes grew.

  At her breast Le-Lu carried her two precious children. At the bottom of the stone valley she met Wolf, and Wolf asked her where her children came from. “I dreamed them,” said Le-Lu.

  Wolf offered to watch the babies while Le-Lu traveled. Le-Lu trusted Wolf, who was also a mother, and so she wove baskets for her children to sleep in and left them with Wolf. When she returned much later, after traveling the world, her children were fine.

  After that the Kalapuya always honored the wolves as protectors of children.

  Naomi, Jerome thought, was both wolf and mother, child and protector. To him she was Le-Lu, bringing the valley of his heart to life.

  13

  Snow girl liked to read. It was an important gift, one she was pretty sure the snow had brought, or maybe the moon. Wherever it came from, she liked to see the words, how the shapes lined up and made sense. There wasn’t much to read in Mr. B’s cabin, and nothing at all in the dark cellar. But snow girl made do.

  In the kitchen there was Maple Syrup man, with his funny white shape. On the bottle it said things like 100% pure and made from all natural maple sap. Sometimes there was Can of Chili, he was round and hard, and on the can she sounded out to herself wolf brand—that made sense—and lots of other words that were tiny, and hard to understand. Over time snow girl learned about nutrition facts and heating instructions from Can of Chili.

  There were lots of other things to read, she found over time: the oil bottle, the sack of flour like a soft, huggable old man.

  Mr. B saw her reading, and she looked to him to see if he was upset, but he was not—he was mystified. He picked up the objects and held them close to his own face, as if mimicking her. They smiled at each other.

  An idea occurred to him. Mr. B led her to the warped and molding old cabinets under the sink. Looking pleased, he showed the snow girl how a very long time ago someone had lined them with newspapers. He pointed at the shapes on the paper, proud of himself.

  The newspapers were faded and brittle and had stuck to the wood, but with Mr. B nodding approval, the snow girl carefully peeled up little pieces. Words came with them, like treasures. Bond measure. What was that? A record year. Weather. First snowfall. Trappers. Avalanche. These were little inky words, snow girl realized, of a time gone past, hurtling them right now to the present.

  Only one of the words puzzled her, and she thought about it later when she woke in the middle of the night, lying in Mr. B’s bed. Why was the word Skookum on the paper?

  Mr. B seemed surprised at how much a snow girl needed to eat. As she grew bigger she ate one plate of stew and then another. One dish of pancakes and then another—chewy, delicious browned pancakes made of the flour and oil and water, with Maple Syrup man poured over—at t
he rough wood table, her fork scraping the plate.

  Whatever he gave her she ate, and then she started getting up and making herself more food, and this seemed to anger and confuse him, so he came in the kitchen area and knocked her hands away from bag of flour, from oil, and, especially, Can of Chili.

  It was the snow, she wanted to tell him. Her hunger distressed him, as if she might eat her way out of his cabin to the outside. As if she was going to get too big for him, and stretch her arms out the windows, punching through the nailed blankets.

  Maybe that was why he kept locking her up, to keep her small.

  When Mr. B left for more food, the snow girl played games in the cave. She played jacks with small stones, and then animal charades—playing the fox was the best. She made shadow creatures against the wall, from the light filtering from above. She made a pyramid with her hands, then the steeple, wondering what either meant.

  When he finally opened the trapdoor and lowered the ladder, she scrambled up.

  He showed her the food he had gotten, including more flour, another jug of Maple Syrup man. Only this time, he shyly offered, his very hands proud, two Hungry-Man dinners.

  Her heart beat steadily.

  For me? her gesture asked.

  He nodded, eyes shining.

  He lit the stove, and when the dry wood had burned to red coals he put the two dinners on to heat. When they were done he pulled the foil back so she could see the food. He handed her a fork. She crouched on the floor next to him as he sat in the chair, but suddenly he stood, and dragged the bench near the stove, so she could sit next to him. Together they dug into their treat. Is it good? his face asked.

  Yes, she nodded. Yes.

  Naomi returned the Russian fairy tale book, and Madison’s mother accepted it with thankful hands. She put it on the pile like a talisman.