The Deep, Deep Snow

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Anna and I glided on cross-country skis through the fresh bed of snow filling the cemetery trails. She took the lead up and down the hills, and I followed. With each breath, we exhaled clouds of steam. The skeletal branches of the trees cradled the snow and shook wet, cold blasts into our faces as the wind blew. My cheeks felt numb. It was January 22, a bitter and blustery Monday morning, during one of those days-long stretches of winter gray where you wonder if the sun still exists.

Ahead of me, Anna brought herself to a stop halfway down the shallow slope. She leaned on one of her ski poles and stared into the thick of the forest. I pulled up beside her. Among the shaggy pines and flaky white trunks of the young birches stood the massive gnarled body of the famous Mittel County beech tree we called Bartholomew. The tree had survived storms and fires for more than two hundred years. Its roots dug into the ground like fingers, and its many fat arms made it look like a troll that had been turned to stone. If you grew up in Everywhere, you almost certainly paid a visit to Bartholomew on a sixth grade science outing.

Two of Bartholomew’s finger-roots had grown apart over the decades to create a deep hollow like a cave. I’d written a song once about Barty’s Hollow, one of the songs I played for kids on my guitar during Sunday story time at the library. The chorus went like this:

“Think there’s a sleeping bear inside?” Anna asked me. She remembered the song, too.

“Could be,” I replied. In fact, the hollow made a perfect den, so I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find a black bear sleeping through the winter there.

“Maybe we should check it out,” she said. “There could be cubs by now.”

“Or we could just let sleeping bears lie.”

Anna shrugged. She unhooked a plastic bottle from her belt and squirted cold water into her mouth. We’d been outside for twenty minutes, and the bottle was already partially frozen. I watched her eyes go from Bartholomew to the other trees around him, searching one by one among the birches. She did that wherever we were in the woods. I don’t think she realized that I noticed it, but I knew what she was looking for.

A cross.

After all this time, she was still hoping to find Jeremiah.

Anna peeled a red balaclava from her head, letting her blond hair cascade below her shoulders. Her creamy skin had a pink flush from the cold. At twenty years old, she was now a beautiful young woman. She’d grown up tall and lean, with curves to make the rest of us jealous. She had dark eyebrows above pale-blue eyes and a face that looked stolen from a painting. When she smiled, she was the spitting image of her mother, and I felt like Trina was still with me.

But Anna hardly ever smiled.

We weren’t even a quarter mile from our destination, but Anna made no effort to push off on her skis. It was like this whenever we came here. When we could see the cemetery grove ahead of us at the base of the hill, she would stop and procrastinate, hoping I would change my mind.

“It’s not much farther,” I said, although we both knew that.

Anna refused even to look down the hill. She unzipped one of the pockets on her ski jacket and extracted a pack of cigarettes. She lit one and inhaled, and then she held it between two fingers and extended it in my direction, offering me a puff. I shook my head, saying nothing. She knew I didn’t smoke. She knew I hated the fact that she did. We played this same game all the time.

“Barty’s sick,” Anna said, nodding at the tree.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I met a guy at a bar in Stanton last week. He’s a forestry major at the college. He says it’s some kind of bark fungus. He showed me photos at his place. Barty might not make it more than two or three more years. Sucks, huh?”

I didn’t like to think of Bartholomew toppling over and taking a couple of centuries of Mittel County history with him. Of course, I knew the point of the story wasn’t to tell me about Barty’s fungus. It was to let me know that she’d been in a bar the previous weekend, met a stranger, and slept with him.

“We should go,” I said, not taking the bait.

Anna fluffed her blond hair with both hands. “I don’t know why we have to do this all the time.”

“We don’t do it all the time. We do it on Mother’s Day and on January 22.”

“Well, Mother’s Day is only four months away. Let’s wait.”

“Come on, Anna.”

“I’m cold. It’s freezing out here. It’s stupid to go at this time of year. I told you I didn’t want to come out here.”

“This won’t take long. Then we can head home.”

Anna shook her head, and her jaw hardened with stubborn resistance. “I’m not doing it this time, Shelby. I’m sick of this. You can go by yourself if it means so much to you. Tell her I said hi.”

I pulled off my own balaclava, and the wind slapped my face, as if it were mad at me. “Look, go home if you want, but it’s been ten years, Anna. Ten years.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?”

“I know you do. I think that’s why you don’t want to go. I’m just saying, you’ll regret it if you miss this one.”

Anna tilted her head and blew smoke toward the trees. “Blah blah blah. God, Shelby, give it a rest, will you? I know you’re into the spiritual New Age stuff, but I’m just not, okay? Coming out here doesn’t change a thing. If it makes you feel better, great, go for it. But I hate it.”

“Okay. If that’s how you feel, then go.”

Anna threw her cigarette into the snow. Awkwardly, she lifted up her skis and turned around on the trail, forcing me to glide a few steps forward to make room for her. I twisted around to watch her over my shoulder. She settled into the tracks we’d made and with a giant shove on both ski poles, she launched herself toward the crest of the hill, heading back the way we’d come. Her arms and legs pumped. Her loose hair flew behind her. A few seconds later, she slid across the top and vanished.

It was just me and Bartholomew now. I wondered if he really was sick.

I tapped my poles on the slope and let gravity whisk me downhill past the dense trees. A couple of minutes later, I reached the clearing, where I slowed to a stop. It had been a mild winter until recently, melting most of the early season snow, but January had taken us back to the deep freeze. Six inches of fresh snow had covered up some of the flat headstones that we usually saw here. It was like missing old friends. Even so, I relished the peace and silence here. The grove, like the bears, was in hibernation until spring, although a few deer tracks tiptoed through the fresh powder to let me know I wasn’t alone.

Trina was buried on the far side of the clearing.

Her headstone was built of pink marble and topped with the sculpture of an angel. With her rosy face and wings, she looked like a fairy caught in the middle of a dance. I skied that way, until the angel was in front of me and Trina was below me in the frozen ground. Her carved name rose over the snow.

“So I’m back.”

I never felt strange talking to her as if she could hear me. Anna didn’t feel the same way. In all the years we’d been making these visits, Anna had never said a single word to her mother. She’d always stood beside me in frozen silence, her face showing the anger she felt that Trina had left her so young. But until this time, she’d always come with me. This was the first year she’d made good on her threat to turn back and leave me to visit the grave alone.

“My father says hi,” I went on.

Then I figured, why lie to the dead?

“Actually, that’s not true. I told him I was coming here, but he didn’t remember you. Don’t feel bad. Most days he still knows me and Monica, but not too many others. He doesn’t even recognize Adam anymore. He’s still physically healthy, which is a good thing, I guess. I don’t know, maybe he’s happy, too. I’m the one who can’t handle it. It’s getting to a point where I don’t know how much longer I can do it myself, you know? I still have to work. Friends help out, but there’s only so much they can do. I’m putting off the decision, because I don’t want to deal with it. I can’t even think about it.”

I wiped a couple of tears from my face. I thought about what else to tell her. I always gave her an update about her husband.

“Karl changed jobs. He can work remotely now, so he doesn’t have to travel as much. That’s good. And he’s seeing somebody. A woman he met at an IT class he was giving in Stanton. It’s been a year now. It seems serious. I didn’t tell you last time, because I wasn’t sure it was going anywhere, but now, I don’t know. He might be ready to move on. He didn’t know what you’d think about that, but I told him you’d say it was crazy he waited so long.”

The wind blew and swirled a little cloud of snow around the angel’s face. I thought that was Trina agreeing with me.

“And Anna,” I began.

But I didn’t know what to say.

“I’m sorry she’s not here. It’s still hard for her. She’s so lost, Trina. It breaks my heart.”

I crouched down in the snow, so I was eye to eye with the angel.

“She hates the woman Karl is seeing, but it’s not about her. I’ve met this woman. She’s nice. Anna just can’t accept it. She had a huge fight with Karl over the summer, and she left. Took all her stuff and moved out. We didn’t know where she was. We were all in a panic. Breezy finally told me she saw her in the bar in Witch Tree with Will Gruder. That girl knows how to pick them, doesn’t she? I mean, Will hasn’t been much trouble since his brother died, but I wasn’t going to let her stay there. I told her she had two choices, move back home or move in with me. So she picked me. She’s been living with me and Dad for about three months. At least she has a mission in life now. She wants to find every way humanly possible to push my buttons and make me lose it with her. So far, I haven’t, but the ice is getting pretty thin.”

I didn’t tell her the rest.

I didn’t tell her about Anna barely graduating from high school and saying no to college. I didn’t tell her about the girl getting fired from four jobs in eighteen months since then. Or about the boys and the bars, one after another. Or about the shoplifting charge in Stanton that I was able to get dropped when I paid the owner back.

Then again, I suppose she knows.

“Anyway, I miss you. I can’t believe it’s been ten years. Every time I pass your photograph on my dresser, I stop and think it’s just not possible that you’re gone. I don’t know. Life just feels pretty empty at the moment. The thing is, I’m letting you down. That’s what really hurts. I promised you I’d be there for Anna, and I can’t reach her. I don’t know how to get through to her. She’s such a great kid, but she’s in so much pain, and she shuts me out. She’s going off the rails just like you feared, and I can’t do anything about it. I could use your help, Trina. That sounds silly, but wow, I could really use your help right now.”

She didn’t answer, of course.

I laughed a little at myself.

There was nothing more to say, so I told Trina goodbye and said I’d be back on Mother’s Day. Then I worked myself around on my skis to head home.

That’s when I saw the owl.

He was perched on top of a stone cross on one of the headstones jutting out of the snow. A perfect, serious, white-and-gray snowy owl. We stared at each other like old friends. I hadn’t seen one in a long, long time. In fact, it took me a while to remember the last time I’d seen a snowy owl, and I realized it was atop Adam’s motorcycle on the day Jeremiah disappeared.

Was it another sign?

Did Trina send it to me?

You don’t have to believe that if you don’t want to. All I know is, later that same day Jeremiah’s ghost came back into my life. And just like it had ten years ago, everything changed.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Winter is traditionally the slow time at the Nowhere Café. Not too many tourists come to Mittel County in January. A few ice fishermen, a few lonely artists, a few naturalists doing research. Otherwise, we have no one to talk to except each other, and we always look up when the bell rings on the diner door to see who’s coming in next.

It’s slow for the Sheriff’s Department, too. We get busy during ice storms when cars and trucks slide off the highway, but sub-zero cold tends to keep people inside and out of trouble. The nights bring out the domestic disturbance calls, but the days can pass without the phone ringing at all.

On that Monday afternoon, Monica and I sat in a booth with my father. He was working intently on one of his puzzles, although he no longer tried to solve the actual clues. About a year ago, he’d started filling the boxes with random words. At least he was still using real words when he did. One of the next warning signs, according to the doctors, would be when he began using nonsense letters.

“Looks like you’re almost done with that one, Tom,” Breezy said brightly as she topped up our coffee.

She was right. Dad had filled in most of the boxes, and he beamed when she noticed it. “Why, thank you, young lady. If I am good at one thing in this world, it’s crossword puzzles.”

Breezy squeezed his shoulder affectionately. She’d been “young lady” to Dad for about nine months. That was what he called all of the women he didn’t recognize now. Age didn’t matter in his calculations. I was still Shelby. Monica was still Monica. Everyone else in the world was “young lady” or “sir.” He didn’t know who any of them were.

The doctors in Stanton had told me that my father was in what they called stage five of the disease. We’d been at that plateau for about two years. If you asked him what he’d had for breakfast, he wouldn’t have a clue, but he could talk about the details of police cases from decades earlier as if they’d happened the previous day. Maybe, in his mind, they had. He could still bathe and dress himself, and he made it a point to look good, the way he always had. But I wasn’t comfortable with him being alone anymore, and the doctors said it was only a matter of time before he moved on to stage six, at which point I would either have to quit my job to take care of him 24/7 or find a facility we could afford. I hated the idea of either option.

Dad put down his pencil. He focused on Monica, who was crocheting a navy-blue scarf that I knew she intended as a present for him. “How’s that puppy of yours?” he asked her. “Is he house broken yet? You have to stick with training once you start and be consistent, you know. Firm and consistent. Dogs appreciate that.”

Sometimes we couldn’t always keep up with the shifting sands of my father’s mind.

“Puppy?” Monica asked, looking puzzled.

“Moody! Isn’t that what you call him? Malamutes are such beautiful dogs.”

Moody, of course, was sitting where he always did, in the flowered urn on the table in front of Monica.

“Oh, he’s just fine, Tom, thank you for asking. Of course, puppies have limitless energy. I swear that dog will wear me out.”

“I’ve thought about getting a dog myself,” Dad went on. “Shelby loves the idea. It’s good for kids to grow up with a dog. But right now, that little girl is so much work that I don’t think I could handle a puppy, too.”

I wondered how old I was at that moment in his mind. Two? Three?

Dad had a proud, happy look on his face, but then he glanced across the table and focused on me, and there I was, thirty-five years old. He knew me. He recognized me. But his eyes went glassy with confusion as his mind tried to reconcile the impossible contradictions. I couldn’t be a toddler who wanted a dog and an adult in my deputy’s uniform at the same time.

The confusion made him afraid, and I hated seeing fear on my father’s face. Then, as if giving up on things that made no sense to him, he went back to finishing his puzzle.

I got out of the booth, because I couldn’t stay there at that moment. Monica patted my arm in sympathy. I followed Breezy back to the lunch counter and sat down in one of the chairs. I’d left my coffee on the table, so Breezy filled another cup for me.

“Sorry, Shel. That’s hard.”

“Thanks.”

“Where’s Anna? I mean, it’s the anniversary, right? I figured the two of you would be hanging out together.”

“I truly have no idea where she is.”

“Things aren’t so good with you two?”

“Not good at all.”

Breezy lowered her voice. “Listen, just so you know, I saw Anna back at the bar in Witch Tree last weekend. She was with Will Gruder again.”

“Great. That’s just great. Was she drinking?”

“Beer.”

I shook my head. “She’s underage. I could bust the place.”

“I know, but don’t do that. I’ll talk to the owner and try to get her cut off if she comes in again.”

“Is she doing drugs, too?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Come on, Breezy, be straight with me.”

“I am, Shel. I haven’t seen her with drugs. As far as I know, she’s clean.”

“Thanks.” I eyed Breezy, who was as thin as a sapling but had clear, bright eyes. “How about you? Are you still clean?”

She offered a cynical laugh and pulled up her sleeves to show off her bare arms.

“Cleanest I’ve ever been. Being on food stamps will do that to you. No drugs. No cigarettes. And hey, I’ve lost ten pounds. This no-money diet really does the trick.”

“You need any help?”

“I need plenty of help, but you’re not rolling in dough either. I’ll be fine. Something will turn up.”

Everyone around here knew Breezy had it rough this year. She’d never been flush, but she’d had an emergency appendectomy the previous summer, and the medical bills had cleaned her out. The diner didn’t need her for extra shifts during the slow season, and there weren’t a lot of ways to make money on the side in January.

Breezy leaned across the counter. She tried to put the best spin she could on my situation with Anna.

“I know you don’t want to hear this, but it’s actually sweet that she hangs out with Will. Most girls won’t do that. I mean, the burns and all.”

“It’s Will Gruder, Breezy.”

“I get it. He’s not your favorite person. But you know, he’s not dealing anymore. He paid the price in all sorts of ways. Right now he’s just kind of pathetic. He blames himself for Vince’s death, and he wallows in it. Mostly he drinks in the bar and reads the Bible.”

“The Bible? Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Well, if Anna wants religion, she doesn’t need to get it from Will. She can come to church with me and Dad.”

I knew I sounded bitter. I was feeling bitter. It was a bad day.

The bell on the diner door jangled, and all of our heads turned like trained dogs. Adam strolled inside, bringing a cold burst of winter air with him. He took off his sheriff’s hat and tucked it under his arm, and he used one hand to primp the few remaining brown curls on his head. His hair had thinned over the years, but his waist had gone the other way, bulging as he added twenty more pounds. He greeted people at every table the way a politician does. He said hello to Dad, too, which I appreciated, but Dad simply called him “sir.”

Adam joined me at the counter but didn’t take a seat immediately. “Is Rose here?”

“Rose? No, I haven’t seen her. Why?”

“She called and said she had something she needed to show me.”

He slid onto the chair and eyed the morning glory muffins under a glass dome. He checked his phone, found no new messages, and put it faceup on the counter in front of him. I could smell cigar smoke clinging to his uniform the way it usually did. Now that he was the sheriff, no one was going to tell him to stop. He had money, too. His mother had died three years earlier and left him her fortune. I thought he might retire at that point, but he didn’t. He was in the second year of his third term as sheriff. People kept voting for him because he was a known quantity, although he wasn’t really beloved the way my father had been. And I think Adam knew it.

You can check off all your goals in life, but it doesn’t necessarily make you happy. Adam had the job he’d always wanted and the money he’d always anticipated, but something was still missing. The old restless Adam was back. Physically, he’d let himself go since he lost his mother. In addition to putting on weight, he was drinking again. He was back on his motorcycle and driving recklessly when he wasn’t on duty. He’d gone through a string of girlfriends. None of them had stayed.

“Did Rose tell you what this was about?” I asked.

“No. She probably wants to sell me one of those new lakeside condos in Martin’s Point.”

“Yeah, could be.”

“Have you seen her recently?”

“A couple of weeks ago. I had her out to see how much our house is worth.”

He cocked an eyebrow at me. “You’re thinking of selling?”

“I might have to, depending on what happens with Dad.”

“Too bad. It’s a great place.”

That was Adam. He had a hard time seeing past the surface of things. Yes, the house was a great place, but it was so much more than that to me. And the idea of selling it made me sick.

The café door jingled again. This time, Rose Carter stood in the doorway. My childhood best friend. She was prosperous now, like Adam. Ten years in real estate had been much kinder to her than running the Rest in Peace motel. She was thinner thanks to a Nutrisystem diet, she’d grown out her red hair, and she’d traded in her camouflage wardrobe for wool business suits. Sometimes I didn’t even recognize her as the same person, but people change.

Rose stood at the entrance of the Nowhere, halfway between in and out. The door was still partially open, and people grumbled at her because of the cold air blowing inside. She had a shoebox cradled in front of her with both hands, held with the kind of tenderness you’d use for a pet who had died. Her face looked like she’d come from a funeral. The others in the diner began to notice her demeanor, and the complaints about the winter breeze died away into an uncomfortable silence.

We all knew there was something in that box.

She walked toward me and Adam with the shoebox outstretched at the end of her arms. She put it on the counter and took two steps backward away from it, as if it had a kind of dangerous radiation that would seep into her bones. She didn’t take off the lid. Adam and I traded glances, and then, with the slightest nervousness, he popped open the top of the shoebox with one hand.

I stood up and leaned over to get a better look at what was inside.

When I did, I couldn’t help myself. I gasped.

There are ordinary, unimportant objects in life that wind up filled with enormous meaning because of what they represent. You can feel it. You can feel the sacredness of those things. And that was true of what was in the box. It was old, dirty, and frayed, nothing more than trash, but it was something that all of us in Everywhere had waited ten years to find.

It was a yellow Wilson shuttlecock.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Adam stared at the shoebox in complete disbelief. He reached inside as if he were going to pick up the shuttlecock, but then he pulled his hand back.

“Where did you get this?” he asked Rose.

She stood silently in the diner, and so Adam asked her again. “Rose? Where did you find this? Where did it come from?”

Others from the diner got up from their tables and began to press around us to look inside, but Adam waved them back. The only one close enough to see inside the box was Breezy, and when she did, she screamed. “Is that from Jeremiah?”

The buzz around us immediately intensified, and Adam slapped the cover back on the shoebox. He stood up from the chair and called to the people in the diner. “Everybody quiet, come on, pipe down. Let’s get to the bottom of this. Rose? I need you to tell me where this came from.”

Rose had to catch her breath, and her voice was low enough that I had to strain to hear her. “I have a listing on the old Mittel Pines Resort, and I was showing the property to a potential buyer.”

“The one out near me in Witch Tree?” Breezy asked. “That old wreck?”

Rose nodded. “It’s been abandoned for more than twenty years. The county took it over when the owners walked away. I got a call this morning from a Chicago developer. He was in town and asked if I could show him the place. So we went up there.”

Adam was anxious for her to get to the point.

“The shuttlecock, Rose.”

“Yes, sorry. Well, there are about thirty old cabins at the resort. Most have collapsed, but one of the larger cabins at the back is still mostly intact. Its chimney came down in the past couple of days. When my buyer and I were passing by, I saw something in the rubble, and I went to check it out. That’s where I found this. The shuttlecock must have been stuck up in the chimney, and when it collapsed, well, there it was.”

“You should have left it there,” Adam said. “You should have called me.”

“I guess so. Sorry, I didn’t really know what to do. All I could think about was Jeremiah.”

That’s all I could think about, too.

I could imagine the boy whacking the shuttlecock with his racket and chasing it, because that’s what boys do. And the birdies were always getting lost. Sometimes they’d get stuck in trees. Or they’d go over a fence. Or maybe, maybe, they would get stuck on the roof of an abandoned cabin. Up in the chimney where no one would see it or rescue it for years.

The diner erupted with whispers. Everyone else was thinking the same thing.

“Hang on, hang on, it might not mean anything at all,” Adam insisted, throwing cold water on our dreams. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We need to check it out before anyone gets excited. Shelby and I will go up to the resort with Rose and see what we can find.”

He was right.

There was nothing yet to tie this shuttlecock to Jeremiah. It might have been stuck up in the cabin chimney for decades, back to a time when the resort was open and families used to come up there on summer holidays to swim, camp, fish, grill steaks, and toast marshmallows over the fire. There were a thousand different children who might have lost it there.

And yet despite those doubts, we knew. We all knew.

Our missing boy had finally sent us a clue.

Now that Adam was the sheriff, I had a new partner to patrol the roads of Mittel County with me.

My partner was Adrian Sloan.

Adrian was twenty-six years old, still as bulky and strong as when he played football in high school. He came from two attractive parents, but he wasn’t a particularly handsome kid himself. He wore his sandy hair in a flat crew cut. His nose, which he’d broken more than once on the playing field, was like a misshapen meatball. The points on his jutting ears suggested a little Vulcan blood. He didn’t smile much, especially when I made jokes like that.

I was a little surprised when he wanted to become a cop, but I guess losing his brother gave him a purpose in life. Adam was reluctant to hire him, but I pushed hard that we should say yes. Adrian had put his teenage mistakes in the past, and if we rejected every cop because they’d done stupid things in high school, we wouldn’t have many applicants left. He was solid and serious now. He’d married a sweet girl, and they had a one-year-old. I liked him.

Adrian drove with his hands rigidly in the ten-and-two position, and he didn’t take his eyes off the bumper of Adam’s car ahead of us. Even for a quiet kid, he was unusually quiet today, which wasn’t surprising at all.

“I know this is really hard for you,” I said.

He shrugged, although it was hard to tell, because he had no neck.

“You don’t have to come along. I can call you if we find anything or if we have questions for you.”

“I want to be here.”

“I know, but if you’re going to stay, you have to be a cop and put your emotions aside. Can you really do that?”

Adrian chewed on that thought for a while without answering my question. The snow-covered evergreens flashed by on both sides of the highway. The cruiser was warm from the heat turned on high. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said finally, as if to prove he was thinking like a cop. “I don’t understand how Jer could have gotten to that resort. It’s thirty miles from where we lost him.”

“Well, remember, this might not be related to him at all. We don’t know yet.”

“Yeah, but if it is? I don’t get it.”

“Obviously, someone took him there.”

“To some old falling-down resort? Why? Why would they go there?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, but I could think of several reasons, and none of them was good.

Half an hour after we left the diner, we reached the town of Witch Tree, population 165. It was one of dozens of don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it towns in Mittel County. The dense forest loomed around the main street, as if waiting impatiently to creep back in and take over the land when the humans went away. We passed the Witch’s Brew, a bar and diner with a rough reputation. Then a Lutheran church that doubled as a senior center. A gas station. A car repair garage and parts store. A gun shop. And not much more than that. The few people who called Witch Tree home lived on dirt roads that crept through the woods like vole tracks on a spring lawn.

We followed Adam in the car ahead of us. Rose was in the passenger seat beside him. They turned on one of the dirt roads half a mile past the bar, and I saw a small clearing where tall trees leaned dangerously over the roof of a mobile home. This was Breezy’s place. Her mailbox on the road didn’t have a number; it simply said, “Breezy.” Weeds poked out of the snow around the trailer, and I saw Dudley rusting under the pines near an old shed. The Ford Escort had finally died for good a few years back and never moved again.

The slick, rutted dirt road continued into the trees. Unless you lived along here, you were probably going the wrong way. We drove slowly past the driveways of a few recluses living deep in the forest. A mile later, the road ended at a T-intersection. The left half of the T was really just a long driveway. A warped wooden arrow pointed the way, and the name Gruder was painted on the arrow in black. Will Gruder lived down there. The other direction was marked with a Dead End sign, and there was still a decades-old, barely legible poster for the Mittel Pines Resort sagging next to the road. We were two miles from the abandoned cabins.

“This is pretty close to Will and Vince’s place,” I murmured.

Adrian frowned. “Yeah.”

“Think that means anything?”

“No. No way.”

But I wondered if that was just wishful thinking.

“Did you used to come up here?” I asked him.

“Me? No. Why?”

“It was a hangout when I was in school. I came out here with the Striker girls a few times. It was a popular spot for parties. Booze. Drugs. Sex. Whatever.”

“Not me,” Adrian said.

“Okay. Just curious.”

We punched through the snow, following the icy tire tracks of a handful of cars that had come and gone here recently. The dead-end road wound through a series of sharp S-curves, following the ribbon of a frozen creek six feet down the bank below us. The trees on both sides were packed together like soldiers at attention. It was gloomy here even on a sunny day, but the winter gray made it seem like night.

Where the road ended at a turnaround, an old rusted chain was draped across a driveway that was barely wider than our cruiser. Adam parked there. The snow behind the chain was deep, but I could see boot prints, probably from Rose and her prospective buyer. It was hard to imagine anyone coming here and thinking this was the place to invest money. The Mittel Pines Resort had once been a popular summer getaway, but that was when families still enjoyed rustic vacations and there wasn’t any competition from the B&Bs in Martin’s Point. My father and I had spent a weekend here once when I was about twelve years old, not long before the resort closed for good. I could remember practicing my guitar by the campfire, which must have driven everyone else crazy, because the sound around here carries for miles.

We all got out of our cars. Adam climbed over the chain and led the way, and Rose, Adrian, and I followed behind him. The snow came up to my calves. The four of us walked between the trees and then across a bridge over the frozen creek, until the forest opened up and the ruins of the resort dotted a huge clearing. Most of the old cabins were rotting mounds where moss, weeds, and young trees grew among bowed walls and caved-in roofs. I saw broken doors, shattered windows, frost-covered spiderwebs, and moldy sofas abandoned in the middle of the dead, overgrown brush. Raccoons had made dens here and riddled the snow with paw prints. At least three cabins had been burned by vandals over the years and the wood bore streaks of blackened charcoal and spray-painted graffiti. It was unrecognizable from the place Dad and I had visited so long ago.

Rose pointed. “I found the shuttlecock back there.”

I followed the direction of her finger to one of the larger cabins that had fended off some of the ravages of time and nature. The walls were still standing. There were holes in the roof, but it hadn’t fallen. The glass of the windows was all gone, and the door hung open, and I could see where the bricks of the chimney had pitched into the weeds. Rose’s footprints made a path into the middle of the bricks.

We all went over there, and Adam knelt among the rubble. He squinted and then got up and rubbed his chin and studied the clearing with a frown. This place had the terrible stillness of a battlefield after the guns had gone quiet.

Ten years.

I tried to imagine Jeremiah here. I looked around at the encroaching forest and thought of all the places you could hide a body in these woods. When the ground thawed, we’d bring the dogs, and we’d search.

The open cabin door clung stubbornly to one of its hinges. Rose stayed outside, and the three of us explored the interior. Even in the daylight, under the holes in the roof, we needed flashlights to see. The floor was a mess of glass shards and animal droppings. I saw an old mattress and bed frame that was nothing but stuffing and rusted springs. A toilet and sink had broken off from corroded pipes and toppled over. I examined every square inch of the cabin floor with my flashlight. When I pulled up the mattress, I found the corpses of two dead rats.

Nothing here suggested that Jeremiah had been inside the cabin. Not until Adrian called, “Look at this.”

He was at the back wall near a brick fireplace. The floor was wet where snow had blown in through the hole caused by the collapse of the chimney. He squatted near the remnants of a walnut dresser that had collapsed, spilling out its four drawers. Nests had been built inside the drawers by animals over the years. I saw an old laminated resort brochure, with photos of what the place had looked like in its heyday. But there was something else in one of the drawers, too. Adrian highlighted them with his light.

I saw stones.

Gray and black stones. Dozens of them.

Like you’d use in a cairn.

Chapter Thirty

Ellen Sloan arrived at the abandoned resort two hours later. She brought an entourage with her.

I waited to meet her outside the chain at the driveway, and cars rolled up along the dirt road one after another. Ellen and Violet came together in the first sedan. Several aides followed in two other cars. Then half a dozen print and television reporters and photographers brought up the rear in trucks that were equipped for live shots.

The media army looked ready to assault me with questions, but Violet held them back like a publicity veteran, which she was. Ellen approached me alone, wearing a white winter coat that made her look like a snow angel. She had calf-high boots and leather gloves. Her blond hair was tied in a ponytail, and she wore sunglasses. When she took them off, I saw that her eyes were rimmed in red.

“Hello, Shelby.”

“Congresswoman.”

That had been Ellen’s title for the last three years. After Jeremiah’s disappearance, she launched a nonprofit organization focused on missing children, and built a statewide reputation lobbying for improvements in child safety laws. When the eighty-year-old Congressman representing our district had finally retired, local leaders — especially Violet — had encouraged Ellen to run for the seat. She had, and she’d won. She’d spent the last three years shuttling back and forth between Everywhere and Washington, DC. Violet was her chief of staff and legislative director.

“Your husband is already up at the resort with Sheriff Twilley,” I informed her.

Ellen’s face barely moved. “Ex-husband.”

“Yes, of course. Sorry. Adrian’s there, too.”

“How is he doing?”

“Adrian’s a fine officer. You should be proud.”

She looked over her shoulder at the press to make sure they were a safe distance away. It had to be a strange life, always making sure that no one was listening to what you said. “Good. I’m glad to hear it. Adrian took Jeremiah’s disappearance very hard, and I was worried about how he would grow up. I was horrified when he was involved in setting the fire at Keith Whalen’s house, but it proved to be a turning point for him. He did the wrong thing, he got it out of his system, and he was punished for it. It helped him move on and get his life together.”

“I think you’re right.”

“He says good things about you, too, by the way. He says he’s learned a lot from you, Shelby.”

“I’m glad.”

“How is your father?” I didn’t know if Ellen was asking out of genuine concern, or whether that was simply what politicians did with constituents.

“He’s declining.”

“I’m very sorry. It’s a terrible disease.”

“Yes, it is.”

She put her hands on her hips and looked up the road toward the resort. I could see journalists taking photographs behind us. The news was already online and would be the lead story throughout the state and probably across the country by morning.

“I’m glad I was in the county when this happened. I was able to drop everything to get over here.”

“Of course.”

“So you really think Jeremiah was taken here?”

“It looks that way, although we can’t be totally certain yet.”

Ellen shook her head. “Why this place? It’s so remote.”

“I don’t know.”

“What about Keith Whalen? Does he have any ties to the resort?”

“Not that we’re aware of. But we’ll talk to him and see what he says.”

Ellen nodded. Her lips were pursed together.

“What about you, Congresswoman?” I asked.

“Me?”

“Do you have any family connections to the resort? Would this place have had any special meaning for Jeremiah?”

Ellen shook her head. “He wasn’t even born when it closed. Dennis and I took Adrian up here a couple of times when he was a boy. That’s all.”

Violet joined us, leaving the gaggle of media behind her. Nothing had changed between us in a decade. Violet was always moving forward, and I was standing still. I probably didn’t look much different, wearing the same deputy’s uniform, with nothing but a few lines around my eyes and mouth to mark the passage of time. Violet now looked more like Washington than Mittel County, with a cell phone glued to her ear, a Congressional ID on a chain around her neck, and a few streaks of premature silver running through her bobbed hair. She was a Very Important Woman doing Very Important Things. I didn’t doubt that she’d run for office herself someday.

“The press want to go up and take pictures,” Violet said without even a hello.

“Adam doesn’t want anyone there. We’ve taped off the whole resort as a potential crime scene.”

“Well, I know these media people. If you don’t give them something, they’ll sneak in. Let one person go up there and shoot some footage and share it with the pool.”

“I’ll run that by Adam and let you know.”

“Congresswoman, they’re going to want some kind of statement from you,” Violet added. “A short press conference with the sheriff would be best.”

“We’ll discuss that after I’ve talked to him,” Ellen replied.

“Yes, ma’am. Oh, and I talked to the FBI. Special Agent Reed is in Nebraska working on another matter, but he agreed to be pulled away so that he could supervise this investigation again. He was pleased that there might finally be a break in Jeremiah’s case. He’ll be here tomorrow.”

Ellen nodded. “Excellent.”

I was certain that Violet hadn’t talked to Adam before calling in the Feds. I was equally certain that Adam wasn’t going to be happy about having this case snatched out from under his nose again. The bad blood between Adam and Agent Reed hadn’t gone away.

Violet looked at me with the assurance of someone who was used to giving orders. “Agent Reed asked that the local authorities keep the scene secure and not disrupt anything on-site until he arrives with his forensics team. Please convey that message to Sheriff Twilley.”

“I will.”

“Thank you, Deputy,” Violet said, as if we’d just met.

“Of course, Ms. Roka.”

I admit there was a little sarcasm in my voice, but Violet let it roll off her back without any change in expression. She headed back to the reporters.

“I’ll take you up there now if you’d like, Congresswoman.”

“Yes, thank you.” Then she added with a smile, “You can call me Ellen, you know. I’m not here because I’m in Congress. I’m here because I’m a mother trying to find my son.”

I unhooked the chain from the driveway and let her walk through into the snow. “I appreciate that, Congresswoman.”

The two of us walked side by side up the road and across the bridge toward the abandoned resort. Ellen looked at everything around us with a kind of wonder, as if she could feel Jeremiah’s presence if she tried hard enough. I understood. This was as close to her son as she’d been in ten years. If we were right, he’d been here after he disappeared and after the fruitless search began. We’d finally found the next link in the chain that we’d missed so long ago.

When we arrived at the ruins, Adrian hurried over and wrapped up Ellen in a tight hug. He was a tough, strong cop, but at that moment, he was just a boy with his mother. I gave them space. Not far away, I saw Dennis Sloan talking to Adam, and I joined them. I passed along Violet’s message about the FBI, and I saw the flash of anger in Adam’s face that I expected. Just for a moment, he was a twenty-eight-year-old hothead again, leaving a drunken message on Agent Reed’s phone. Then, with a resigned sigh, he became the sheriff and began barking orders to shut everything down.

Meanwhile, Dennis stared across the overgrown field at his son and his ex-wife. It had been five, maybe six years since he and Ellen finally acknowledged that the split between them was irrevocable and filed for divorce.

I could see regret in his eyes. It was obvious that he still loved her. I guess most cheating husbands don’t realize that until it’s too late. He was almost fifty now, with his handsome, athletic days behind him. The rumor mill said that he still hung out in the local bars and made passes at the young girls, but his come-ons were mostly pathetic now. He’d quit his job in the national forest years earlier, because he couldn’t keep passing the spot where Jeremiah had vanished day after day. Now he ran a landscaping business in the warm season, and he did snow removal during the winters.

Ellen saw him, too, but there wasn’t a drop of emotion in her stare. She made no move to come closer or to acknowledge him. He didn’t belong to her world anymore.

Dennis zipped up the down vest he was wearing, as if he’d felt a chill. “So what do you think, Shelby? Who brought my son out here?”

“We haven’t found any evidence about that yet. Hopefully, the FBI will turn up something when they search.”

“Do you think it was Keith Whalen?”

He caught me off guard, and I answered before I could stop myself. “No. I don’t.”

Dennis didn’t look surprised by my honesty. “Me neither. Keith had problems, sure. He had a lot of anger bottled up inside. I could picture him losing it and killing Colleen. But kidnapping my son and murdering him in cold blood? I never believed that Keith was capable of that.”

“Neither did I.”

“Well, I guess we could both be wrong. People surprise you, right?”

“Yes, they do.”

He watched his ex-wife again, who ignored him as if he didn’t exist at all. “Ellen always thought Jeremiah was still alive. She never gave up hope.”

“But not you?”

“No, not me. I knew he was dead. That was really what split us up. I’m sure everyone thought it was because of the affairs, but the fact is, Ellen could tell that I didn’t have any hope left. She hated that. She needed to believe.”

“Why were you so sure?”

“I guess I could feel it. I just knew he wasn’t in the world anymore. I even had a dream where Jer came and told me he was dead. I cried, but I was sort of at peace after that. He said he was okay.”

I thought about Anna’s very similar dream. It was as if Jeremiah had been leaving messages with the people who loved him.

“I suppose you’ll be searching the woods,” Dennis added.

“Yes. When the snow melts.”

“I hope you find him. For Ellen’s sake. For closure. She never found any peace the way I did. She still tortures herself about it. I see her on television sometimes at Congressional hearings, and there will be this moment where she’s questioning someone and she stops and gets this faraway look. And I know. She’s thinking about Jer. She’s wondering where he is. So it would be nice if she could stop wondering, you know?”

“Yes, I know. That’s what we all want.”

“He doesn’t have much of a family to come back to,” Dennis went on, “but I’d like to bring him home anyway. Jeremiah deserves that.”

Chapter Thirty-One

Adrian wanted to stay at the scene with his mother, so I took the cruiser myself to drive back to Everywhere. The winter night was already falling fast. I headed off along the slippery curves with my headlights sweeping past the forest above the frozen creek. When I got to the intersection that led toward Witch Tree, I started to turn left, but then I spotted the wooden arrow pointing me toward Will Gruder’s house.

I reversed my turn and continued straight.

I’d been to Will’s house on police calls several times, but not since the explosion at the meth lab two years earlier. Their lab had been located deep in the forest on hunting land plastered over with No Trespassing signs. It was no wonder that we’d never found it. But the explosion and fire gave it away and torched several acres of wilderness. We’d found Vince dead at the scene and Will burned over 60 percent of his body. He barely survived.

When I parked in the snowy yard, a Doberman tied up on a chain welcomed me with a murderous frenzy of barking. The house wasn’t much larger than one of the old resort cabins, but it had a satellite dish pointed at the sky and security cameras mounted near the roof. Heavy-duty electrical cables ran outside, powering a refrigerator and freezer. I saw an enormous wooden cross hung on the front door.

I knocked hard, which only made the dog madder. The door opened a crack, and to my dismay, I saw Anna staring at me from inside.

“What are you doing here, Shelby?” she asked in annoyance. “Are you following me?”

“I’m looking for Will.”

“Well, he’s not here.”

“Where is he?”

“In the hospital in Stanton. He’s had joint problems since the fire, you know. Yesterday his knee locked up, and he had to have some kind of injection.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“No, you’re not.”

I leaned closer and smelled alcohol on her breath. Hard stuff, not beer. “Am I interrupting a party?”

“There’s no one else here.”

“So are you going to invite me in?”

“Will wouldn’t like it. He doesn’t want strangers coming inside.”

“Then how about you come outside?”

Anna sighed as if I were making a huge imposition on her life, but she grabbed a coat and joined me in the yard. The Doberman on the chain barked like a madman, but Anna snapped her fingers, and the dog shut up immediately and stiffened to attention. Anna told him to sit, and he did. His eyes followed her closely, waiting for her next command.

“He obviously knows you.”

“Sure he does. Plague’s a good boy.”

“Plague? The dog’s name is Plague?”

Anna rolled her eyes. “Vince thought it was funny.”

“Well, you’re good with animals.”

“Better than people.”

Anna hadn’t zipped up her bubble coat. Underneath, she wore a short-sleeved red T-shirt that left part of her stomach exposed. Her jeans had holes in the knees. I was more concerned with what I saw tucked into her belt. An automatic pistol.

“What the hell are you doing with a gun, Anna?”

She shrugged away my concern. “Some sketchy guys come around here sometimes. People don’t always know that Will is out of the business.”

“You’ve been drinking. Alcohol and guns don’t mix.”

“I had one drink. It’s not a big deal.”

“Is the gun Will’s?”

“No, it’s mine.”

“You own a gun? Since when?”

“Since last summer. I was having a smoke behind the Witch’s Brew, and some guy tried to assault me. That’s when I met Will. He taught the guy a lesson. I didn’t want to get caught out again, so I got a gun.”

“You were assaulted?” I asked, trying to keep my voice down. “And you didn’t tell me?”

“Nothing happened. The guy barely touched me before Will took him down. I’m fine.”

I took a deep breath and tried not to lose my cool. Anna was always pushing me, as if she wanted me to blow up at her, yell at her, ask her what the hell she was doing with her life. But I didn’t. Not this time. I tried to channel Trina, who’d always seemed to levitate above the world, never getting upset, always staying in control. Honestly, I don’t know how she did it.

“Anna, you keep shutting me out. I want to help you.”

“I don’t need your help,” she snapped back at me. “What, did you have a nice talk with my mom today and she told you to crack the whip? Look, I don’t care what you think you are to me, Shelby. Mom, sister, girlfriend, priest, whatever. Right now, you’re my landlord and that’s all.”

The raw pain blew out of this girl like a tornado and nearly swept me away.

“Okay. You’re right, we don’t have to be close. We don’t have to be anything. But as your landlord, I need you to be home tonight. Not here. Got it?”

“I have to take care of Plague.”

“Find someone else to do it. Call one of Will’s friends at the bar. I need your help with Dad tomorrow. I’m going out early to see Keith Whalen, and then the FBI is coming into town. You need to look after my father. That’s part of our deal.”

Anna didn’t answer. It seemed like everything I said got under her skin.

“Did you hear me, Anna? I need you to do this for me.”

“Yes, I heard you. Fine. I’ll get someone else to look after the dog. What else do you want, Shelby? Why are you here? I’m cold. I want to go back inside.”

“You haven’t heard?”

“Heard what?”

I told her about the shuttlecock and the Mittel Pines Resort and Jeremiah. She tried to pretend that the news meant nothing to her, but this time, I was the tornado, and Anna could hardly stay standing. When I was done, she shoved her hands in her pockets and ground her boot into the snow. She covered her hurt badly.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked her.

“What is there to say?”

“Jeremiah was your friend.”

“Yeah, well, finding an old badminton birdie doesn’t bring him back, does it?”

“That’s true, but we have another chance to figure out what really happened to him. He didn’t fly to that resort, Anna. It’s thirty miles from where he disappeared. Somebody grabbed him off that road and took him here.” I added after a pause, “And it wasn’t the Ursulina.”

“Yeah. I get that. I’m not a kid anymore, Shelby.”

“I never said you were.”

“Okay, so somebody took him. It sucks, but there are a lot of crappy people in the world.”

“I know.”

“What do you want with Will, anyway? He didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“Have you and he talked about it?”

“No, but I know him. He’s not what you think.”

“You know him now. Or you think you do. Will and Vince were both hard cases, Anna. They were drug dealers. The only thing that put them out of business was the explosion. Ten years ago, they were out on that road selling meth to Adrian. They passed right by where we found Jeremiah’s bike. It’s not a big leap to think they grabbed him.”

“Will wouldn’t do that.”

“The resort is only a couple of miles from this house. That’s a big coincidence.”

“So what? Everybody knows about the resort. I’ve known about it since I was a kid.”

“What about Jeremiah? Did he know about it?”

Anna shrugged. “Sure.”

“How?”

“I took him there.”

“You did? Did his parents know?”

“I don’t know. Probably not. It was just one time.”

“When was this?”

“It was the year before he disappeared. Summer. Mom came out to Witch Tree to meet Breezy for lunch at the bar. I had to go along, because Dad was on the road. That sounded boring, so I asked if Jeremiah could come with and we brought our bikes. When we got here, he and I went off to explore the resort. I’d heard it was a spooky place. I figured it would scare him. And it did.”

She smiled at the memory, but then she wiped the smile from her face and looked upset.

“Did he have his badminton racket with him? Could he have lost the shuttlecock back then?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Did anything unusual happen while you were there?”

“No. I told Jeremiah it looked like the kind of place where the Ursulina would hide. I said if he was really brave, he ought to spend the night and see if it showed up.”

“You said that?”

“It was a joke, Shelby. It’s not like he was going to do it.”

“Did he talk about the resort after that? Did he ever tell you that he went back there with anyone?”

“No.”

“What about you? Did you go back there?”

“Sure. Lots of times. Will and I went out there last summer. We pitched a tent.”

“Why?”

“Will said it was haunted. He said maybe we would see some ghosts. He believes in crap like that, same as you. But we didn’t see anything. Now are we done, Shelby? It’s freezing out here.”

“Yes, we’re done, but remember what I told you. Be home tonight.”

“I heard you the first time.”

Anna headed for Will’s front door. The Doberman stirred as she did and began to growl at me again. I turned away, but when I reached the cruiser, I stopped and called to Anna before she went inside.

“Tell me something.”

“What?”

“Why Will?”

“What do you mean?”

“Anna, look at yourself. You’re a beautiful girl. Why hang out with Will Gruder? Do you love him?”

“No. I don’t.”

“Then why?”

“Everybody hates him,” Anna replied. “I like that.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

I was at my wit’s end about Anna, and I needed to talk to somebody. Or I needed a drink. Or both. As I neared Witch Tree, I saw the lights on inside Breezy’s trailer. On impulse, I turned into the matted-down snow of her yard and parked behind her beat-up Dodge Durango, which had replaced Dudley. The yard was otherwise empty, so I hoped that meant Breezy was alone and not entertaining. She’d gotten older like the rest of us, but her reputation as Easy Breezy hadn’t changed.

She answered immediately when I knocked. Her face showed surprise that it was me on the steps. “Shel.”

“Hey, Breezy.”

“Everything okay? You don’t usually stop in here.”

“I was passing by and saw the light. I thought I’d say hi. I don’t want to get in your way if you’re busy.”

“No, it’s fine, come in. The only thing you’re interrupting is laundry.”

She waved me inside. Pop music played on a cheap old boom box. The interior of the mobile home was compact and cluttered. I saw dishes stacked in the kitchenette sink and clean clothes folded in piles on the dinette table and reclining chair. She cleared a spot for me to sit down in the built-in booth. I spotted a couple of old photographs hung on the wall over the sink, including one of the Striker girls after our volleyball victory. We had our arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders. We looked very young.

“I’ve got a couple beers in the fridge. You want one?”

“No thanks, but you go ahead.”

“I can afford beer, Shel. Really.”

“Well, okay. Sure. Why not?”

Breezy grabbed two cans of Miller Lite from her small refrigerator. She popped both cans and put one in front of me. Then she grabbed a folding chair and sat down, propping her bare feet on the table and leaning back until the chair balanced against the door of the stove. Everything inside the trailer was a tight squeeze.

She wore shorts and a pink spaghetti-strap top. A toe ring with fake jewels shined on her left foot, and a tattoo snaked up her ankle. She wore her hair long and straight the way she always had, but she’d stopped using highlights a while back and let it stay her natural brown. It was loose around her shoulders. Her pockmarked face was winter-pale. She took a swig of beer and then grabbed a remote control and turned down the volume on the boom box so that the music was soft in the background.

We drank together for a few minutes, and Breezy did most of the talking. The air in the trailer was warm, and so was the beer. I hummed along in my head to the song that was playing, “Iris,” which had always been one of my favorites. When a T-shirt slipped off Breezy’s pile of clean clothes, I folded it and put it back.

“Anything going on with you, Shel?” she asked after a while, because I hadn’t said more than two words while we were sitting there.

“I’m just tired.”

“Well, you must have had a hell of a day. This whole thing with Jeremiah is something else, huh? After all this time?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know anything more yet?”

“No, it’s too early to tell.”

Breezy looked at me the way a friend does who’s known you for a lot of years. “You sure nothing else is wrong? You don’t look so good.”

I shrugged. “Anna.”

“Ah.”

“She was over at Will Gruder’s place. We had another argument. Whatever I do, I seem to make things worse between us.”

“That’s not you, Shel. It’s her. You can’t fix what that girl’s been through. Believe me, it’s easy to get screwed up even when you’ve got two parents. I can’t imagine losing your mom as a kid. But hell, why am I telling you that? You never even knew who your mom was. Or your real dad, for that matter.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t suppose you ever get over that.”

“No. You don’t. That’s why I know what she’s going through, feeling angry, feeling abandoned. I thought maybe it would give us some common ground, but it hasn’t worked out that way. We were so close when she was a girl, but not now. I can’t reach her.”

“Well, kids are tough nuts to crack.”

“I know.”

“You’re the best thing in her world. Don’t give up. She’ll come around.”

“I wonder.” My eyes drifted to the volleyball team photograph over her shoulder. I was ready to change the subject. “So I saw Violet today. She was up at the resort with Ellen Sloan.”

“Yeah, I saw the media parade. I figured she was in town.”

“She acted like we hardly knew each other. She kept calling me ‘Deputy.’”

“Still the same stuck-up Queen Vi.”

“That’s her.”

Breezy winked. “You know, I can tell you a juicy story if you want. If you can take off your cop’s hat for a minute.”

“What is it?”

“Vi and I did coke together once in high school.”

My mouth fell open. “Are you kidding? Violet?”

“Yeah. In the locker room.”

“That’s hard to believe. She’s such a straight arrow.”

“Not always. It wasn’t even my idea. It was her stash, not mine.”

“And you never told me?”

“We kept you out of it because of your Dad. Nobody else knew. We didn’t want to get kicked off the team.”

“Where did she get it?”

“I don’t know. If you wanted anything back then, it wasn’t hard to find. Some things never change. Actually, you want to know the real dirt?”

“What?”

“I hear Ellen had a pretty serious drug problem, too. Pills.”

“Who told you that?”

“Dennis.”

“You still see him?”

“Oh, I throw him some pity sex now and then. He’s not a bad guy. Nothing’s really been the same in his world. Losing Jeremiah. Losing Ellen. Leaving his job. I feel sorry for him. Anyway, he swears Ellen was a pill-popper for years. Who knows, maybe she still is.”

“Or it could be a man talking crap about his ex.”

“Yeah, well, it’s hard to say. Vi and Ellen are both pretty tight-assed. I suppose they’ve got to unwind somehow.” Breezy tilted the can to her lips again and then wiped her mouth. “I miss this, you know. You and me dishing.”

“Me too.”

“We should do it more.”

“Yes, we should.”

Breezy slapped her chair down on the floor. “Hey, can I tell you something funny? Since we’re sharing dirty secrets. I’m not exactly proud of it.”

“What?”

“I hooked up with a guy at the Witch’s Brew last week. Out-of-towner. He came over here, and we did it, and he snuck out in the middle of the night. Guy left fifty bucks on the table. Can you believe that? He thought I was a hooker.”

“Oh, crap.”

“Yeah, at first I felt like a slut, but then it made me laugh. It’s not like I didn’t keep the cash, too. I’ll tell you what, it made me think. People always say you should find a way to get paid for doing what you love.”

“Breezy. No.”

She laughed at me. “Kidding. I’m kidding. I love shocking you, Shel.”

I laughed, too. It felt good to laugh. I hadn’t done enough of that lately.

We spent the next half hour making jokes the way we had back in high school. I didn’t think about Anna or Dad for a while, which was a relief. I only had the one drink, but I was relaxed enough to feel a little bit drunk. We were both grinning like teenagers when we saw headlights spray across the front window of the trailer. I heard the growl of a car engine and tires pushing through the slush outside. Breezy got up and peered through the blinds.

“Well, look at me, all popular tonight.”

“Who is it?”

“Adam.” She swung open the door, letting in frozen air that brought goosebumps to my skin. She put up her hands in surrender. “Is this a raid, Sheriff? Two cops showing up at my door in one night?”

Adam climbed the steps, making the trailer shake. He had his hat off, and his face was red with cold. He slid off his brown leather gloves and shoved them in his pocket. “I saw Shelby’s cruiser. I figured I’d better see what the two of you were up to.”

“Girl time,” I explained.

“I’m out of beer,” Breezy told Adam, “but I’ve some got whiskey in a cabinet if you want some.”

“No. Thanks.”

The strain of the day showed in Adam’s tired eyes. He rubbed his hands through his messy brown curls. His boots tracked melting snow on the floor. I squeezed over in the built-in booth to give him room to sit down, but he stood awkwardly where he was.

“Do you need anyone up at the resort tonight?” I asked.

“No, I’ve got it covered.”

“Did you say anything to the press?”

“Yeah, Ellen and I made a statement. She said the usual things, hoping this is the break we’ve waited for, praying for answers, you know the drill.”

“Sorry about the FBI.”

“I saw it coming.”

Breezy put up her feet again and rocked back and forth. “So Jeremiah was over at the Mittel Pines Resort after he disappeared. Wow. You know that means whoever took him had to drive right by my trailer. That’s creepy. If I’d looked out the window, I would have seen him go by.”

“Did you see anyone?” I asked curiously.

“Oh, no.”

“No strange cars coming or going?”

“I doubt I’d remember if I did, Shel. I was barely home for days after Jeremiah disappeared. I was putting in double shifts at the diner. Those first few nights, I didn’t get back here until midnight. Still, it’s weird that the kid was so close to me, and I never knew it. It makes me sad. Like I should have done something to save him.”

“Do you remember anything else?”

“Hey, come on, are you kidding? It was ten years ago.”

“I know, but what about the Gruders? Do you remember anything about them? It’s an interesting coincidence that they live so close to the resort where Jeremiah was taken.”

“Well, yeah, but snatching a kid wasn’t their thing. Look, Shel, I know you’re not happy about Will and Anna, but I can’t see those boys doing anything to Jeremiah. Adam, you talked to them, didn’t you? Did you see anything weird going on?”

Adam shot me an impatient look. “Shelby and I both talked to them at the school that afternoon. They were playing basketball. I can’t see them kidnapping Jeremiah, taking him thirty miles to an abandoned resort near their house, and then coming all the way back to Everywhere to shoot some hoops. It doesn’t make sense.”

He was right. It didn’t make sense. And maybe Breezy was right, too. I was just looking for a reason to pry Anna away from Will Gruder.

I stood up from the booth. “Well, I better get home. Monica’s hanging out with Dad, and I need to rescue her. Thanks for the girl talk, Breezy.”

“Any time.”

“I should go, too,” Adam said. “Breezy, don’t beat yourself up about Jeremiah. There’s nothing you could have done.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

We opened the trailer door. Old Man Winter waited for us like a ghost with frigid breath. I took one step down into the cold, but then I stopped and turned around as I thought of something else. I was reluctant to ask the question with Adam standing between us, because this was something better shared friend to friend. But I needed to find out anyway.

“Hey, Breezy? Listen, I don’t mean to put you on the spot.”

“What is it?”

“Well, there were a lot of strangers in town those first few days after Jeremiah disappeared. Media people. Out-of-town cops. Volunteers. They were big tippers over at the diner.”

“Yeah. So?”

“So I was wondering if anyone came out to Witch Tree with you after your late shifts.”

Breezy didn’t react well to what I was implying. She opened her mouth as if to fire something back at me, but then she stopped. Her face pinched into a strange, unhappy expression as she looked back and forth between us. I knew I’d crossed a line by not waiting to talk to her in private. It’s one thing to joke about easy sex, it’s another to have your friend ask you about it in front of a man. I saw Adam flinch, as if he’d wandered into the middle of a shooting match and figured he’d better duck.

“Why do you care who came home with me? Jeremiah was already gone by then.”

“I know, but if someone was out here with you, we should probably talk to them. Just in case they saw anything. Like you said, this is the only road out to the resort.”

“Well, there are so many men, Shel,” Breezy said sourly. “What makes you think I’d even remember?”

“I’m sorry. Look, I’m not judging you. I would never do that. This is just routine follow-up.”

Adam played the good cop, which, of course, made me the bad cop. “We’re not trying to pry, but Shelby’s right. If you came back here with someone, you should really tell us who it was.”

“Really, Adam? You think that’s what I should do?”

“He could be a witness and not even know it.”

Breezy shook her head. “Well, sorry, the answer is no. I was working late every night, I was tired. Nobody came out here with me. Got it? Now you can both go.”

I wanted to say something else to make it right, but for now, there was nothing more to say. I’d made a mistake and offended a friend. Adam put a hand on Breezy’s shoulder and thanked her and murmured an apology. Then the two of us tramped down the trailer steps into the snow, and she slammed the door behind us. We stood by our cars as the freezing cold stung our faces.

“That was awkward,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Yeah.”

“I had to ask.”

“I know. You were smart to check.”

I didn’t say anything more. We both got into our cars. I waited while Adam started his engine and drove into the night. I looked at the trailer and thought about going back to the door to confront Breezy again, but all that would do was make things worse.

Even so, I knew the truth. Girlfriends always do.

Breezy was lying.

Chapter Thirty-Three

I found my father staring into the flames of a roaring fire when I got home. The fireplace took up most of the north wall of the great space in our house, and he’d built it himself brick by brick. There were no lights on in the room, just the fire’s orange glow. He sat in a Shaker chair, his back straight, his feet flat on the floor, his hands on his knees. I didn’t let him know I was there. I watched from the wide arched doorway and wondered where he was and what he was thinking about.

Monica came up behind me. She was drying her hands on a kitchen towel. She took off her big glasses and wiped away water spots and then repositioned them carefully on her face. The glasses made her eyes look twice their size. She wore the yellow polka-dot apron that I’d given to my father when I was nine years old. It looked ridiculous on him, but on Monica it seemed to fit, even though it was so big that she looked like she was wearing a bed sheet.

“We had spaghetti,” she squeaked. At almost sixty years old, she still looked and sounded the way she had my whole life. She was as sweet and perfectly preserved as strawberry jam.

“Did Dad eat?”

“Yes, he needed a little help with it. He wasn’t too happy about that.”

“His pride hasn’t gone away, that’s for sure.”

“I think I’d feel worse if it had. I did laundry, by the way. I figured you wouldn’t be up for it when you got home.”

“I don’t know what I’d do without you, Monica.”

“Oh, please. There’s nowhere I’d rather be.”

“Is Anna back?”

“No. I haven’t seen her.”

I tried not to let my frustration show. I had no idea whether Anna would come home at all. She knew I needed her help, but that didn’t mean anything to the girl. I thought she might stay out just to spite me.

“Are you hungry?” Monica asked. “There’s still some pasta.”

“I can heat it up myself. You should go home. You’ve got a long drive.”

“Only if you’re sure you don’t need anything else.”

“I’m sure.”

Monica untangled herself from the extra-large apron and handed it to me along with the kitchen towel. She grabbed her winter coat from the hall closet, then retrieved her satchel purse and Moody’s flowered urn from the table near our front door. I waved at both of them, and Monica giggled and left. I felt bad that she still had to drive an hour to get home. With me and Dad depending on her, she didn’t have much of a life for herself.

I went into the kitchen and heated up a small bowl of pasta and sauce in the microwave and ate it quickly at the table. Then I joined Dad in the great space that had once been the church sanctuary. Sometimes he played music in the evenings, and sometimes he preferred silence. This was a silent night. The crackle of burning wood was enough to occupy him. Even on a January evening under a high ceiling, the fire made the room so hot that I began to sweat. My father didn’t seem affected by it at all. His face had the same suntanned glow it always did.

“Hi, Dad,” I said as I pulled over a chair and sat down next to him.

“Hello, Shelby. How was your day?”

“Oh, fine.” Then I stopped biting my tongue and decided to be honest with him. “Actually, no, that’s not true. It was a pretty tough day for all of us. Do you remember Jeremiah Sloan? The boy who disappeared?”

“It was last summer, Shelby. I’m not likely to forget it.”

In fact, it had been ten long years, not six months, but I was glad that Dad knew who Jeremiah was. His mind operated like a time machine with a bug in its programming. You couldn’t tell where it would carry him next. Whenever my father went traveling, he came out at a different moment of his life. Sometimes the moments were enveloped in fog, and sometimes they were crisp and clear. And you never knew how long any given moment would last.

“Well, it looks like someone took Jeremiah to that old abandoned resort out near Witch Tree. Mittel Pines. We still don’t know what happened to him. The FBI is coming back into town to run the search.”

“Then I should go out there.”

I chose my words carefully. “Adam and I have it under control, Dad. We’ll take care of it.”

“Even so, they’ll want to talk to me.”

“Okay, don’t worry. I’ll arrange it.”

But I wouldn’t. In the morning, he’d have forgotten our conversation entirely.

“What about the F-150?” he went on with a precision that surprised me. Sometimes details flooded out with perfect recall like that. The past wasn’t gone. It was still in his head somewhere, just hidden away in places he couldn’t always find. If only we could help him look.

“What do you mean, Dad?”

“Well, the F-150 was abandoned near your namesake lake. That’s on the other side of the county from Witch Tree. And yet you still think the truck was connected to the boy’s disappearance, don’t you?”

“Agent Reed thinks so.”

“So why take the truck so far away?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve always wondered how he got away from the lake,” Dad went on, as if he were still Sheriff Tom Ginn. “It’s remote out there. How did he get away from that area once he left the truck behind? Did someone pick him up? Did he have another car waiting for him?”

“That’s a good question,” I said. And it was.

We didn’t have many conversations like that anymore, and they never lasted long. I treasured them when we did. For those brief moments, I had my father back, and I remembered the man he was. I wished it could last all night, but the heat began to make me tired. As we sat next to each other, I found myself drifting off, giving in to the exhaustion of the day. I blinked my heavy eyes and tried to stay awake, but it was no use. Eventually, I surrendered to the hypnosis of the fire.

I awoke sometime later with a start. When I checked my watch, I saw that nearly two hours had passed. Dad was exactly where he’d been, still sitting straight up in his Shaker chair, his blue eyes wide awake. The fire was waning, burning down to the last embers.

A footfall landed on the hardwood floor under the archway behind me. I realized that the noise of the front door opening and closing had awakened me. When I turned around, I saw a vanishing swish of blond hair. A girl disappeared into the shadows, and I heard the squeal of the old wooden steps as she climbed to her bedroom.

Anna was home.

Suddenly, it felt like a good night.

The next morning, early, I drove to Stanton. I left Dad in Anna’s care for the day. I only had time to stop briefly at the Nowhere Café to fill up my travel mug with coffee and take out a blueberry muffin for the road. I wanted to talk to Breezy, but she wasn’t there for her morning shift. I still felt bad about the previous night, and I wanted to make sure we got past it.

The winter gray hung over my drive east, like an old blanket thrown across the sky. The roads were empty except for the occasional deer hunting for fallen twigs under the snow. I made my way to the state prison north of Stanton, spent an hour checking in through the bureaucracy, and then another half hour waiting in a small conference room with concrete walls.

Eventually, they brought in Keith Whalen.

I hadn’t seen him since the trial where I’d testified about our affair. I wasn’t sure how I expected him to look or what I would feel when I saw him again. His thick brown hair had been cut short, leaving him without a cowlick to toss back. The lines on his face were deeper, but he still had the same sad brown eyes. He was even leaner than he’d been in the past, to the point of being skinny. Despite our history, not much had changed for me. I still looked at him like he was my high school English teacher and I was still eighteen years old.

“Shelby Lake,” he said with surprise.

“Hello, Keith.”

He took a moment to assess me the way I’d assessed him. “You look good, Shelby. Not very happy, but you look good.”

I resented that he could still read me so well. “How are you?”

“You mean, how has prison life suited me for ten years? The days are all the same in here. After a while, you look forward to it being that way. You don’t like having the routine disrupted.”

“Like by me?”

“No, not you. You’re a welcome distraction.”

I found myself struggling for words, like this was a cocktail party and I was making small talk. “You’ve served half your sentence. That’s good.”

“I don’t count the time. It’s a waste.”

“Do you read a lot? Do you need books? I could send you some.”

“It’s sweet of you to be concerned for my welfare after all this time,” he replied, in a tone that made sure I knew it wasn’t sweet at all. “Yes, I read. I write, too. You’ll be amused to know that I turned my Ursulina story into a children’s book. Isn’t that what you told me to do? A publisher actually accepted it, at least until they found out about my circumstances. Then it quickly became ‘thanks but no thanks.’ Oh, well.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What do you want, Shelby?” he asked impatiently. “Why are you here? Welcome distraction or not, seeing you is hard for me on all sorts of levels. Partly because you’re the reason I’m in here. Partly because I know I’m going to spend the next several months seeing your face again whenever I close my eyes. And it took me years to get you out of my head the first time.”

I thought of all the things I could say to that.

Then I said, “I’m not the reason you’re in here, Keith.”

“No? Well, it doesn’t matter. Just tell me what’s going on.”

“The Mittel Pines Resort,” I said, studying his face for a reaction. His expression was blank.

“What about it?”

“Do you know it?”

“It’s that old ruin near Witch Tree, right? So what?”

“Have you ever been there?”

“Didn’t it close like five hundred years ago? No. I’ve never been there. What is this about?”

“We think that’s where Jeremiah was taken after he was kidnapped.”

Keith leaned across the table. I could smell his closeness. “Ah. I see. Is this the part where I break into a nervous sweat because you’re so close to finding the body I managed to hide?”

“I don’t know. Is it?”

He fired his words at me. “My story hasn’t changed, Shelby. I had nothing to do with Jeremiah’s disappearance. I don’t know what happened to the boy. I was nowhere near the national forest that day. And since you saw me in the cemetery in Everywhere that same afternoon, I don’t know how you think I managed to take the boy out to this old resort, kill him, bury him, and then get back to town in time for you to see me visiting my wife’s grave.”

That was what I’d expected him to say. Honestly, I’d come to this place just to hear those words from his mouth.

“You’re right.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re right. I don’t see how you could have done it. The timing doesn’t work.”

“Well, doesn’t that make me feel better.”

“The fact is, I never really thought you were involved in his disappearance.”

“That’s big of you, Shelby.”

“But I have to ask. Is there anything at all you can tell me about Jeremiah? Or about the Mittel Pines Resort? I’m not trying to trick you, Keith. Back then, I know you couldn’t say a word, even if you knew more than you were telling us. But now, well, it doesn’t really matter, does it? You’re already in here. If you can help me, I wish you would.”

“I don’t owe you anything, Shelby.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Regardless, I can’t help you. I don’t know a thing.”

“Okay.”

He waited, and I didn’t say anything more.

“Are we done?” he asked. “Is that all?”

“That’s all.”

Keith stood up. He took a long look at my face, as if he were trying to memorize it. I was about to signal to the guard to take him away, but Keith stopped me by sitting down again. His jaw softened. His hard eyes were suddenly full of emotion.

“I made a mistake back then, Shelby.”

“You sure did.”

“No. You don’t understand. My mistake was to hide the evidence.”

“What do you mean?”

“Yes, I took the jewelry. And the gun, too. I threw it all in Black Lake. I admit that. It was a stupid thing to do. But the only reason I did it was to protect myself. I was desperate that night. I panicked. I knew how it would look when the police came and saw Colleen’s body and my gun lying next to her. I knew that you’d tell everyone about our affair sooner or later, and then I’d have a motive to go along with a dead wife. I could see all that coming. That’s why I tried to make it look like a thief did it. But I didn’t kill Colleen.”

I got out of the chair and waved to the guard. I wanted Keith out of there right now. I didn’t want to hear this. I didn’t want to listen to him lie to me again. The guard unlocked the door and came into the room and took Keith by the arm, but Keith resisted long enough to bend over the table.

“You asked if I could help you, Shelby. You asked if I knew anything about Jeremiah. Well, here’s what I know. I’m innocent. I didn’t murder anyone. Maybe there’s no connection between Colleen’s death and what happened to that boy. Or maybe you were right all along, and Jeremiah knew who really killed my wife.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

A cold case like Jeremiah’s disappearance never goes completely cold. It was always in my thoughts. We kept a file cabinet in our basement office that contained everything related to the case. Search results. Photographs of evidence. Transcripts of interviews. Plus my personal notes of what had happened in those early days. Every few months, on a slow day or a Sunday afternoon, I would pull it all out and go over everything page by page to see if there was something we’d missed. After Adrian joined the force, we’d often do it together. I think it made him feel closer to his brother.

Sometimes the review left us with new questions, new people to talk to, or new places to search. None of it led to any breakthroughs, but it meant I was often on the phone with Special Agent Bentley Reed to talk about the case. He came back to town several times over the years, including on the one-year and five-year anniversaries of the disappearance, when the national media was revisiting the mystery. A strange thing happened along the way. He and I became friends. We’d have meals together. I told him about my struggles with Dad and Anna. He told me about his wife, his four kids, and his drug-addicted brother. I was pretty sure he didn’t tell many other people about him.

When I got back to the sheriff’s office later that morning, Reed was there to lead the investigation again, and he kissed me on the cheek. Physically, he hadn’t changed much. He was an imposing man, in good shape, and I was willing to bet he could still give younger agents a run for their money at the gym. He’d shaved away his thinning hair and his goatee, probably because it had gone completely gray a while back. He wore a suit and tie, but he’d come prepared for the January weather with a hooded winter coat and North Face boots.

He was still as sharp and focused as ever. We reviewed topographical maps of the area and studied ground and aerial photographs of the ruins at the Mittel Pines Resort. The team laid out a search strategy and grid. Then, while a dozen FBI forensic specialists headed for the resort itself, Reed asked me to drive him back to the original place on the national forest road where Jeremiah had disappeared. He wanted to follow the route the kidnapper would have taken on the way to Witch Tree and see the world through his eyes.

Being Reed’s chauffeur again after ten years gave me a feeling of déjà vu. As we drove, I told him about my conversations with Ellen and Dennis Sloan and about Anna taking Jeremiah to the ruins of the resort a few months before the disappearance. I also told him about my visit with Keith Whalen, even though I didn’t believe that Keith was telling me the truth about Colleen’s murder.

I told him my father’s thoughts about the white F-150, too.

“Interesting,” Reed replied as we rattled along the dirt road. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that very same question. I don’t see how the driver of the truck could have gotten away from the lake without help. Either someone met him or someone left a car for him. If that’s true, there’s a witness around here who knows something.”

“Or we could be wrong about the truck.”

“True. Do you believe that?”

I shrugged my shoulders. It would make the case easier if I believed that, but I didn’t. “No, you’re right. The truck was wiped down for a reason. It’s connected to Jeremiah somehow.”

Reed was quiet, looking out the car window at the trees. We were close to the spot. When we got there, I parked, and the two of us climbed out into the bitter cold. The forest was more open in January because the trees were bare, and you could see into the deep stretches of wilderness on both sides. Snow clogged the brush and spilled across the road in windswept ridges. Where there had once been nothing but a bicycle left behind, there was now an unofficial memorial that attracted locals, strangers, and mystery hunters at all times of the year. People came here to look for clues and pray for answers. They always left something behind. There were dozens of white crosses. Stone cairns. Stuffed animals. Flowers that had died with the coming of winter. Hand-written notes with messages of inspiration.

During the warmer months, volunteers tried to keep the site clean and well maintained, but the memorial grew forlorn over the winter as weather took its toll. Reed looked up and down the road and into the trees. We’d been here together countless times. Nothing was ever going to change, but you never knew when the ghosts would decide to talk.

Reed shoved his gloved hands into his coat pockets. “If we’re right about the F-150 being connected to the crime, that means someone stole the truck in Martin’s Point and grabbed Jeremiah right here about two hours later. And now it looks like whoever it was took the boy to the abandoned resort, which is another hour away.”

“That’s right.”

“This resort sounds like a place that most locals know about but most outsiders probably wouldn’t know about.”

“Yes, unless they stayed there when it was open.”

Reed nodded. “Okay, that’s true. A visitor would remember it, too. On the other hand, the resort was shuttered for more than a decade before Jeremiah disappeared, right? So if our perp stayed there, it was a long time ago. The question is: Why take the boy there? Was there anything personally significant about that location for the kidnapper? It’s a long way to go with a victim in the car, and there are plenty of other deserted hiding places closer to where we are. But he chose the resort.”

“You think that was his destination all along,” I said.

“I think so. It’s not a place you come upon by accident. He knew where he was going.”

My face was cold. I shivered. I couldn’t take my eyes off the collection of crosses pushing out of the snow. We were alone out here, and the wind moaned and rattled the empty branches. Ten years ago, we’d been here in the summer, when the forest was overflowing with life, full of insects and birds and plants all reaching for the warmth of the sunlight. Now that world was dead until spring.

“The kidnapping had to be a crime of opportunity,” I pointed out. “No one could have known that Jeremiah would be out here. Adrian didn’t even want him to come along. So the boy couldn’t have been a specific target for anyone. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Reed frowned. “In other words, we’re right back where we were when this all started.”

“A predator.”

“I’m afraid so.”

I thought for the millionth time about Jeremiah riding his bike that day. I could almost hear the squeak of the wheels if I listened hard enough. I’d tried for years to think of an explanation for his disappearance that didn’t go back to the horrible reality of a monster abducting him, but I always ended up in the same place.

Right here on this dirt road, in a collision of good and evil.

Right here with the Ursulina.

The media was waiting for us outside the resort. They surrounded Agent Reed, but he deflected their questions as we passed through the police barrier that was guarded by one of my fellow deputies. We hiked along the resort driveway and across the creek bridge, following the trail of numerous sets of footprints. In the clearing where the ruins of the old cabins were located, the FBI team was hard at work.

They’d already made one discovery. In the toilet located inside the cabin where the shuttlecock had been found, they’d identified remnants of human feces, which had to have been left long after the resort had been shut down and the water turned off. Of course, there was no way to know who had left that evidence behind. The resort had been a magnet for trespassers for twenty years, and no doubt many of them had answered the call of nature while they were here. Like everything else, the samples would go back to the FBI lab for DNA analysis in the weeks ahead.

As the search continued, the afternoon passed slowly in the cold. Darkness began to sink across the clearing. We were all hoping for fast answers, but the FBI never rushed, and that made everyone impatient. I saw Adrian patrolling the fringe of the forest, wearing a wet path into the snow. Seeing his lips move made me think he was talking to himself. Blaming himself.

I went over to make sure he was okay.

“You don’t need to hang out here,” I told him. “Why don’t you go spend time with your parents? I’ll call you if we find anything.”

“No, I’m staying.”

“There’s a lot of ground to cover, Adrian. They’ll be at this for days.”

“I know, but I want to be here. I owe it to Jer.”

Adrian reminded me of his father, a big, physical kid who didn’t know how to deal with loss. “I’ve told you this before, but what happened to Jeremiah isn’t your fault. You shouldn’t feel guilty about it.”

“Not feel guilty? Shelby, I told him to go. I was buying drugs, and I sent my little brother off by himself.”

“Yeah, but you’re not the one who took him away.”

Adrian simply shook his head and didn’t listen to me. I could tell that he didn’t want to feel better about himself. I remembered the very first day, the very first moments after the crime, when Ellen Sloan had quietly eviscerated her older son by laying the blame at his feet. I wondered if Ellen had ever taken those words back and forgiven him, but I doubted it. Here we were ten years later, and Adrian was still echoing what his mother had said.

You let him go.

I heard a shout.

“Special Agent Reed, we need you over here,” one of the members of the FBI search team called. Through the gray twilight, I saw him signaling to Reed from the opposite side of the clearing. “We’ve got something.”

My heart sank. I had visions of what they’d found, and none of them was good. I ran through the snow, and so did Adrian. We all converged on the site from different directions. Adrian, me, Reed, Adam. The FBI analyst stood outside one of the other cabins, at least fifty yards away from where we’d found the shuttlecock. He held a large plastic bag in his gloved hand. The bag was filled with odd, multicolored objects, but I couldn’t identify them at first. Then I realized that the objects were Legos. There were hundreds of them in red, yellow, green, orange, purple, and blue. Some were loose; some had been chained together; others had been built into an army of tiny robots.

“We found these scattered among the debris on the cabin floor,” the analyst said. “We may be able to get fingerprints or DNA off the pieces.”

I looked at Adrian. “Did Jeremiah have Legos with him that day?”

Adrian reached out to graze the plastic bag with his fingers, but the analyst pulled it out of his reach. “Yeah. He had a tub of Legos in his backpack.”

“And the robots?”

“He used to build those all the time.”

Agent Reed didn’t look happy about the discovery. “Was Jeremiah playing with the Legos before he disappeared? When the two of you were at the ranger station that morning?”

Adrian rubbed his forehead with his thick fingers and tried to remember. “No, Mom got the box to cheer him up because he was so upset about losing our grandfather. He hadn’t opened it yet.”

Reed frowned, as if this wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear. “Did you find anything else?” he asked the analyst on his team.

“Yes, sir. We’ve got a collection of rocks similar to the ones the sheriff’s department found in the other cabin. We’re bagging them now.”

“How many?”

“There are a lot, sir. Dozens. It looks like they were gathered from the forest and creek bed around here.”

I saw another scowl of confusion cross Reed’s face. He buried his hands in his coat pockets and wandered away from the group. The wind blew snow across his face. I followed and quickly caught up with him. “Is something wrong?”

“This doesn’t add up. How long does it take a kid to build Lego robots like that? How long does it take to gather that many rocks from the forest around here?”

“I don’t know. Hours, probably.” As I said that, I realized what he was driving at. “Jeremiah was out here for a while.”

“Yes. If you ask me, he was here at least a day. Maybe more. But that’s not what’s bothering me.”

“Then what is?”

“Think about it, Shelby.”

I did. I tried to imagine Jeremiah here with his toys. Attaching Legos together one after another. Batting his shuttlecock around the resort. Hunting through the trees and ravines and finding rocks he could use in his cairns.

That’s when it hit me.

“He was free.”

“Exactly. He was free. It doesn’t make sense. Abductors don’t let kids go off by themselves. What was really going on in this place?”

I studied the ruins in the growing darkness.

We had to be getting closer to the truth, and yet I felt as if we were farther away than we’d ever been from finding the answers. “We just said we were dealing with a predator. A sex crime. But I don’t know, is that what this feels like to you? I mean, it looks like Jeremiah was out here playing.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

I got home after dark with a takeout veggie burger and sweet potato fries in a cardboard box from the Nowhere Café. Thumping rap music from Anna’s room drowned out every other sound in the house. I was hungry, and I had a headache, and the music made it worse. I called out to my father that I was back, but there’s no way he could have heard me, so I sat in the kitchen by myself. We had an open liter of cheap white wine in the refrigerator, and I poured myself a glass.

I don’t know how long I sat there. I finished my burger. I dipped my fries in ketchup one at a time as I ate them. I drank the wine, and when I was done, I drank another glass.

Anna still hadn’t turned down the music. When I went upstairs, I saw that her door was closed, with a sign hung on the knob that said, Stay Out. Dad’s door was closed, too. I went to my bedroom and grabbed my guitar and went back downstairs. I let myself out into the yard and hiked through the path we’d shoveled to our gazebo. I sat inside on one of the wicker chairs, and I turned on a space heater to take the edge off.

I played for a while, picking out tunes and singing. That’s the way I unwind. I did a Simon and Garfunkel song, “Keep the Customer Satisfied,” and then I played “Hotel California” until I had this vision of Don Henley with a sorry look on his face, shaking his head at me. So I quit. I worked on the chords of a song I’d been writing, but it wasn’t coming together yet. By the time I’d played for half an hour, the space heater wasn’t enough to keep me warm. I was freezing and my fingers were numb, so I went back inside.

The music shook the house. I couldn’t take any more of it. I went upstairs and pounded on Anna’s door, and when she didn’t answer, I opened it anyway, despite the warning to keep out. The volume inside made me cover my ears. Anna lay on her bed, wearing a purple T-shirt and shorts and white athletic socks. I was relieved that she was alone in the bedroom. She was reading the Bible, and I couldn’t remember when I’d ever seen her doing that. I went over to the speakers on her dresser and yanked out the plug. The sudden silence was blissful, but the music left a ringing in my ears.

“I think we’ve had enough of that for tonight.”

“Tom didn’t mind,” she replied in an irritated voice.

“He’s a kinder soul than me. Where is he?”

“In his room.”

“Did the two of you eat?”

“Yeah, we had eggs. I can cook, remember? You’re the one who can’t.”

I couldn’t argue with that. “I’m going to crash early. It was a long day. Keep the music off, okay?”

“Whatever.”

I nodded at the Bible in her hands. “Light reading?”

“Will said I should see what’s in it.”

“And what have you found?”

“It’s pretty grim. ‘Everything is purified with blood. Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness.’”

“Try some other passages,” I suggested.

Anna shrugged. “So did you find him?”

“Who?”

“Jeremiah.”

“We found evidence at the resort, but we don’t know what happened.”

“Oh.”

She began reading the Bible again, ignoring me. I felt dismissed. I left and closed the door behind me. I went to my father’s room and tapped my knuckles gently on his door. It was still early, but if he’d fallen asleep, I didn’t want to wake him. Although I didn’t know how anyone could have slept through the music Anna was playing.

There was no answer. I opened the door a crack and peered into the room. The bed was neatly made. The recliner near the window where he usually sat was empty. “Dad? Are you still up? It’s Shelby.”

I checked the bathroom, but that was empty, too. When I glanced at the dresser, I saw his cell phone. Wherever he was, he didn’t have it with him.

I went back downstairs. There was no sign of him in the great space. I knew he wasn’t in the backyard, because I’d just been there. I checked the basement, because he still liked to putter in his work room, even though I’d had to take away the power tools for fear he would injure himself. But the basement was dark. No one was there.

My heart began to accelerate. Anxiety tightened around my chest.

“Dad? Dad? Where are you?”

He didn’t answer. He wasn’t in the house.

I ran upstairs again and threw open Anna’s door without knocking. She had headphones on, but I could still hear the blast of music between her ears. She didn’t notice me until I went and grabbed the headphones off her head and threw them on the floor.

“Hey!” she shouted at me. “What the hell?”

“Where’s my father?”

“I told you, he’s in his room.”

“No, he’s not. He’s not in his room. He’s not downstairs. He’s not anywhere.”

“Well, the last time I saw him, he was in his room.”

“And I just told you, he’s not there. Now march your ass downstairs and help me find him.”

Anna groaned loudly and followed me back to the ground floor. I rechecked all of the rooms, but I was wasting my time, because I knew he wasn’t there. I could feel a huge, sick weight taking shape in my stomach. I went out onto the front porch and shouted into the darkness.

“Dad? Are you out there? It’s Shelby. Are you there?”

The winter night was perfectly still. All of the animals and the dead in the cemetery must have heard me, but not my father.

I was shaking from head to toe as I went back inside. Anna stood in the foyer, watching me with her thumbs hooked in the belt loops of her shorts. Her blond hair was messy.

“Where is he?” I demanded.

“I don’t know.”

“Anna, I told you to watch him. I was counting on you.”

“I did watch him. I spent the whole day with him. I made him dinner. He went to his room. I figured he was in for the night.”

I clenched my fists and unclenched them. I swallowed down my rage, but it rose back up like a boat on a turbulent sea.

“Did he say anything?” I asked, struggling to keep my voice calm. “Did he talk about going somewhere?”

“No.”

“Did anyone come by? Did anyone call?”

“No.”

I glanced at the hallway leading past the laundry room to the garage. I had a terrible premonition of what I would find. I ran down there and pushed through the heavy door. The garage was empty, and the door to the outside was open, letting in the cold wind. The Ford Explorer we kept in there was gone. Dad’s truck.

“Oh, my God.”

He hadn’t driven in two years. We’d taken away his license and keys. But I’d been letting Anna drive the truck since she’d been staying with us.

“Where are your keys?”

“What?”

“Your keys, your car keys, where are they?”

I was losing it. Sweat made a film on my skin, and I felt acid in my throat.

“On the kitchen counter,” Anna replied. “Chill. I needed to run out and get eggs, remember? You don’t keep anything in the fridge.”

“Chill? Did you just tell me to chill? Don’t you understand what’s going on here? The truck is gone. My father is gone. Your keys aren’t in the kitchen, because he took them. How many times have I told you that you can’t leave your keys lying around?”

“I forgot. I was busy making dinner. What the hell do you want from me, Shelby?”

“What do I want from you?”

I could feel blood pulsing into my face. I stared at the empty garage, and I thought about Dad out on the roads, with no idea where he was or where he was going, driving off in the middle of a January night. He could be alive or dead by now. He could be hurt. He could be bleeding. He could have pulled off the road and walked into the woods alone and be freezing to death on a trail somewhere. My father. I’d failed him. I’d lost him.

What did I want from Anna?

What did I want from this girl?

I thought about what Trina would do and what Trina would say, but Trina was gone. I wasn’t her. I could never be her. I didn’t have the patience of Job. I wasn’t a mother. I had no idea what to do with Anna. All I knew is that I had never been so furious at anyone in my entire life. All the emotion I’d bottled up and forced down for months exploded from me like a bomb.

I screamed.

“What do I want, Anna? What do I want? I want you for one single second of your life to think about someone else. I want you to stop being a little bitch and realize that what you do affects other people in this world. I want you to be a human being and find something in that empty heart of yours. Got it? I want you to grow up, Anna! Grow the hell up! And I want you out of my house. I want you to pack your bags and go. Go now. Get away from me. Do you hear me? Do you understand me? I don’t want you anywhere near me or my father or this house. Call Will Gruder and have him pick you up, and live with him for all I care, because I am done with you, Anna Helvik. Done. Finished. We are over. Get out of my sight!”

It took me all of one second to regret my outburst.

Oh, damn.

Oh, hell.

What did I just do?

I watched this beautiful twenty-year-old girl, whom I treasured, whom I loved more than life itself, disintegrate before my eyes. I wanted emotion from her, and I got it. She crumbled into pieces. She sobbed.

I tried to apologize. I said it over and over. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Anna, I’m sorry, please forgive me, I didn’t mean that, I’m upset.

But you can’t take the words back once you’ve said them. They’re out there forever. I reached out to take hold of her arm, to hug her, to comfort her, but she twisted violently away from me. Her tears turned to fury. She was speechless with sorrow, humiliation, and rage. She turned and ran away from me up the stairs, and I knew, I knew, she was gone.

She was going to leave just like I’d told her to do, and she wasn’t coming back.

And meanwhile, my father was missing.

There haven’t been many times in my life when I’ve been a wreck, but that night, I was a wreck. I wasn’t able to function. I couldn’t drive. I called Adam, who told me he’d come to the house. I called Monica, who was an hour away, but as soon as I told her about Dad, she started getting dressed and getting ready to head back through the winter night to Everywhere. I probably sounded hysterical to them, and I was.

Adam arrived first. I half expected him to use his motorcycle, which he drove on off-hours throughout the winter, but he came in his sheriff’s truck. He was out of uniform, and the first thing he did was ask for coffee, because I could smell that he’d been drinking. He didn’t look thrilled to be here, but he hugged me and sat me down in the kitchen and tried to keep me calm.

“I’ve called out every deputy,” he assured me, putting his cell phone faceup on the table. “They’re all out on the roads, every one of them. I called the boys in Stanton, too, and asked them to give us a hand. Wherever Tom is, we’ll find him.”

“Did someone look in the sheriff’s office? Maybe he’ll go there.”

“That was the first place I checked.”

“I just don’t know how his mind works, Adam. He could think it’s years ago. He could think he’s still working a case somewhere.”

“Like I said, we’re covering the whole county.”

“It’s cold. It’s practically zero. If he’s outside...”

“I know, Shelby. We’re doing everything we can.”

I stood up again, because sitting down and doing nothing was driving me crazy. “I’m so sorry about this.”

“Don’t be.”

“He wandered off and didn’t take his phone. I don’t even know if he remembers how to drive. I’m going to have to do something. This is the beginning of the end. I can’t let this go on.”

“Worry about that tomorrow. For now, let’s just focus on finding him and getting him home.”

I nodded, because Adam was right. I opened the refrigerator door and closed it. Don’t ask me why. I poured myself a cup of coffee and poured it out. I pulled a half-empty garbage bag from under the sink, tied it up, and replaced it with a new one. I had to keep moving and doing something, no matter how useless it was.

Finally, I ran out of power like a wind-up toy. I sat down again.

“Thank you, Adam.”

“You don’t have to thank me. It’s my job. Besides, you and I go back a long way. So do me and Tom.”

“Well, this is above and beyond, and I really appreciate it. You’re a good sheriff. You know that, right?”

“I’m competent, Shelby. That’s about all. Let’s not pretend I’m the sheriff Tom was.”

“Hey, come on. That’s not fair.”

Adam took a pack of nicotine gum from his shirt and unwrapped a stick. “It’s okay. I’m used to living in other people’s shadows. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid.”

“What do you mean?”

He reached into his pocket and found his wallet. He opened it and took out a small photograph of his mother. It was from decades earlier, when she was a young athlete. He had a glossy magazine article folded inside his wallet, too, and he spread it out on my kitchen table. It was from a sports magazine that had done a retrospective on his mother’s Olympic career after she’d died. I felt a little bit of kinship with him at that moment, despite all the differences between us. Sooner or later, we all become orphans.

“Just look at everything my mother did,” Adam said.

“She was an amazing woman.”

“Yes, she was.”

“But?” Because I could hear the “but” coming.

“But she also went out of her way to make me feel like a failure my whole life. Nothing was ever good enough for her. I know she didn’t mean to be that way. I don’t blame her for it. It’s just who she was.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that. I’d known his relationship with his mother was troubled, but I’d never heard him go that far. Adam wasn’t the kind of man who typically shared personal things. He picked up the photo of his mother and stared at it, and then he put everything back in his wallet. I noticed that he folded the magazine article with care and made sure the corners of the picture stayed unbent.

“I’m just saying that you’re lucky to have a father like Tom, and Tom’s lucky to have you.”

I nodded. He was right about that, too.

On the table in front of us, Adam’s cell phone lit up with a call. I tensed, because the ringing of the phone meant there was news, and all my fears ran through my head in a single instant.

He answered the call and listened. I couldn’t read his face. When he hung up, my throat was so dry I couldn’t even swallow. “Well?”

“We found him,” Adam said, his face breaking into a smile. “He’s alive, he’s fine.”

“Oh, thank God!” Tears of relief began to run down my cheeks. I felt as if my whole body would melt. “Thank God, thank God! Where is he?”

“I’ll drive you over there. He’s at Shelby Lake.”

Chapter Thirty-Six

Dad sat in his truck at one of the campgrounds near the lake. With clouds hiding the moon, I had trouble seeing the frozen cove in front of us. He was dressed for the cold in his winter coat, winter hat, and boots, and he’d even made coffee and brought his thermos with him. According to the deputy who’d found him, he was sharp and perfectly focused tonight. And yet he had no recollection of coming out here and no memory of how to get home. It was strange, the randomness of the disease. It was as if the wires in his head were loose, sometimes working, sometimes failing.

“Hi, Dad,” I said, climbing into the truck next to him.

He reacted as if this situation weren’t strange at all. Me showing up at the lake with him in the middle of a January evening. He looked over with a big smile, then reached out and squeezed my shoulder. “Oh, hello, Shelby. I’m so glad to see you.”

“What are you doing out here?”

He blinked, as if that were an odd question. “I come here all the time.”

I knew that wasn’t true. He didn’t drive anymore, which meant he hadn’t been here in at least two years. But it made me wonder if he’d been doing this for much of his life, and I never knew about it.

“Why?”

“Well, it’s a beautiful spot. My favorite spot in the whole world. Shelby Lake. This is the place that gave me you.”

“I know.”

“I was thinking, all these years have gone by, and I don’t believe I ever asked. Do you like the name I gave you?”

“I do. I love it.” Then I realized I was quickly running out of time to ask the things I’d always wanted to ask. “But why not Ginn, Dad?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why Shelby Lake? Why not Shelby Ginn? You were the one who was going to raise me.”

“Raising a child doesn’t mean you own them. I thought you deserved to be your own person, separate from me. I had visions of you going off and living your life far away and seeing the whole world. I never wanted you to feel as if you were stuck here with me.”

“I’m not stuck anywhere. I’m exactly where I want to be.”

Dad didn’t react or say anything. His eyes were lost in the darkness of the lake.

On most days, I don’t think he was aware of what was happening to him. That was probably better. Time played hopscotch in his head, and he simply jumped along with it. Old friends became strangers he called “young lady” or “sir,” and he had no knowledge of losing anything. But every now and then, I saw a glimmer of regret as he recognized the horror that was unfolding. He knew that his moments of clarity were growing rare, and he was too proud to say anything about it. He’d watched his parents die of the disease, and he’d always wanted to shelter me from the same thing happening to him. He wanted me to be far away when it took him over. But here I was.

“We should go, Dad. It’s late.”

“Let’s just take five minutes at the lake, okay?”

“Sure. If you like.”

We got out of the truck and hiked through the snow of the campground to a bench near the flat sheet of ice, where the lake water was trapped until spring. The wind howled at us, as if angry that anyone was here. I was cold, but my father didn’t seem to notice the frigid temperature. He pointed at the narrow gap between the trees where the cove broke out onto the larger area of the lake.

“That’s where I had the boat anchored. The owl just came down from the forest. And you told me where you were.”

“I guess I did.”

He inhaled loudly, swelling his lungs with the winter air. His white mustache looked crusty with frost. “Snow’s coming soon. A lot.”

“You think so?” I trusted his judgment about that. He’d lived enough seasons here to know what nature was planning.

“Definitely. A big storm. We’ll be buried in it soon.” He turned his head to look at me. I could barely make out his blue eyes. “Do you know what they say about the deep, deep snow?”

“What?”

“It hides every secret. It covers every sin.”

“But only until spring,” I pointed out. “The snow always melts.”

“Yes, but sometimes that takes a very long time.”

I took his hand. “Let’s go home, Dad.”

But he didn’t move. He didn’t want to go, and to be honest, neither did I. He was himself again, and neither one of us knew how long the moment would last or how many more moments like that we would have. I think he wanted to make the most of it while he could.

“It was thirty-five years ago, Shelby. On this very day.”

“What was?”

“My mother died.”

“I’m so sorry, Dad. I didn’t know.” I felt bad. I knew it had happened in January, but as far as I could recall, he’d never told me the date. I didn’t even realize that he remembered it himself.

“It was the worst day of my life. Nothing else comes close. Even losing my father a few months later wasn’t the same.”

“I understand.”

“I had a breakdown after it happened. I had to get away from here. I simply got in my car and drove. I didn’t know where I was going. The snow was coming down. It was practically a blizzard and the roads weren’t safe, but I didn’t care. I can’t say I was even aware of the time or the miles passing. Sort of like tonight.”

I was still holding his hand, and I squeezed it tight.

“I drove all day,” he went on.

“Where did you go?”

“Honestly? I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention to signs. I stopped at a campground much like this one and just watched the snow fall. I stayed so long that I got snowed in. I couldn’t go anywhere. It was pretty remote, and I hadn’t taken anything with me. No coat. No food. I grew a little concerned as night fell. However, as I always say, things happen for a reason. A young policewoman came by on her way home, and she rescued me.”

“That was fortunate.”

“Yes, it was.”

He didn’t say anything for a while, as if he were caught between present and past. The cold got inside my bones and sent a shiver up my spine. Or at least, I blamed it on the cold at that moment, rather than on anything else.

“Dad?” I said when he stayed quiet. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Maybe we should go.”

“Yes, we should.”

I led him back to the truck through the snow and helped him inside. I got behind the wheel and started the engine, but the warmth did nothing to shake away the trembling I felt. Dad was next to me, but I could feel him slipping away. He was tired, and he was about to time travel again to a new square in some other part of his life.

“This policewoman. Do you remember her name?”

“Policewoman?” he asked. He was already gone.

“Never mind, Dad.”

I drove us home through the dark, empty roads. I was relieved that he was safe but anxious about when he would wander away again. Next time we might not find him. Things couldn’t go on like this, and the choices I had to make for our future felt painful and close.

I thought about that and so much more on the forty-mile drive home. The same forty miles my father had driven to rescue me when I was a baby.

I thought about the white F-150 that had been abandoned near this same lake.

I thought about Breezy lying to me about being alone after Jeremiah disappeared.

I thought about Anna and the damage I’d done to our relationship.

I thought about Adam and his mother.

I thought about mothers and fathers and orphans.

Most of all, I thought about the strange coincidence that thirty-five years ago, in the middle of the deep, deep snow, Sheriff Tom Ginn met a young policewoman, and nine months later, I was born.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

The FBI search continued the next morning at the old resort, but there wasn’t anything for me to do there, so I drove to the raptor center in Stanton instead. One of our neighbors agreed to stay with Dad, but that was a temporary solution, and I knew I needed to find a permanent answer soon.

Jeannie Samper had expanded the center with two new buildings over the years. A couple of her larger donors had passed away and left the organization sizable donations in their estates. She wasn’t involved in the daily operations as much as in the past. She’d had two hip replacements that limited her mobility, but her oldest son, Matthew, had come back from Northwestern to take over the management of the center. Her husband and three younger kids were involved, as well.

Fewer birds arrived for help during the winter, but I still came over whenever I could to work with the owls and eagles that had permanent homes there and to drink Jeannie’s farmers market tea. And, yes, to see Dr. Lucas Nadler, too. He was now the center’s primary vet. Our visits hadn’t overlapped in several months, but I knew Lucas was on the schedule today.

I arrived while he was giving a presentation to a middle-school class in the newly opened visitor’s center. He had Winston, a great horned owl, perched on a leather glove, and he was explaining to thirty rapt twelve-year-olds about the hunting and breeding habits of owls. When he saw me, he gave me a warm smile from the front of the room. Winston’s head swiveled on his neck to observe me, too. The owl had white feathers on either side of his beak that looked like Santa Claus whiskers.

I found Jeannie in the gift shop, awaiting the swarm of kids and teachers after the presentation. She wore cheaters pushed down to the end of her nose. She didn’t get up from her chair, but I bent down and gave her a hug. I was surrounded by shelves crowded with T-shirts, magnets, DVDs, hats, and stuffed eagles and owls. Visitors to the center typically didn’t go home empty-handed.

“Is today your shift, hon? I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“No, I came by to talk to Lucas about something.”

“Ah. Of course. Lucas.”

“Yes, Lucas, and don’t give me that look.”

Jeannie took off her reading glasses and eyed the vet on the other side of the gift-shop windows. I knew what she was going to say. “I still don’t understand why the two of you didn’t make a go of it.”

“We tried,” I told her for about the millionth time.

“You tried? You had, what, one dinner?”

“One very nice dinner where we realized that we both had busy lives and no time for romance. So now I have a really good friend instead of an ex-boyfriend.”

“Or you could be friends with benefits,” Jeannie pointed out. “So what do you need to talk to Lucas about?”

“My father.”

“Is there a problem?”

“He wandered off last night. We found him forty miles away.”

“Oh, that’s not good.”

“No, it’s not. I have some decisions to make.”

“I’m sorry to hear it, hon. I guess you knew this day was coming.”

“I did.”

Jeannie’s youngest, a ten-year-old named Hildy, wandered into the gift shop and interrupted us. She was heavily built like her mother and wore a long-sleeved T-shirt with a close-up photograph of Winston’s sober owl face and the slogan, “Hoooo Are You?” Hildy gave her mother a rundown of ticket revenue with all the poise of a corporate vice president. Like the rest of Jeannie’s kids, she was basically a genius.

I waited until Hildy was gone, and then I said to Jeannie, “Can I ask you a personal question?”

“Of course. What is it?”

“Do you ever lie to your kids?”

Jeannie laughed. “What, little white lies? Sure. If there’s only one Snickers bar left, you better believe I’m telling them we’re out.”

“Not little lies. Big stuff.”

Jeannie’s round face turned serious, because she could see I was serious, too. “What did you have in mind?”

“I don’t know. Say you’d done something wrong in your past. Would you be honest about it with your kids? Would you tell them?”

“I suppose it depends on what it is, but I’d like to think so. We all make mistakes. I don’t want my kids thinking I’m perfect. Not that they’d ever believe that.”

“What if it was something that affected them?”

“Like what?”

“I have no idea. Sorry. It’s not important.”

Jeannie wasn’t convinced by my denial. “Is everything okay with you, Shelby? What’s on your mind?”

“Nothing. I’m fine.”

I was rescued from saying anything more by the arrival of a crowd of chattering seventh graders in the gift shop. Jeannie was immediately busy at the register. I glanced out the windows of the learning center and saw Lucas and Winston disappearing toward the outdoor shelters for the raptors-in-residence. I waved goodbye to Jeannie and followed them.

By the time I caught up with Lucas, he had the horned owl safely back on his perch inside the screened enclosure. He returned outside and gave me a friendly embrace on the trail. The morning was cold and as gray as ever, but the snow my father had predicted hadn’t arrived yet. We were surrounded by the watchful eyes of bald eagles, red-tailed hawks, barn owls, and turkey vultures.

Lucas had hardly changed at all since I first met him. His blond hair was still long and loose, and he still had the most gentle eyes that I’d ever seen. He’d taken over the vet practice in Stanton when Dr. Tim passed away four years earlier, which meant he was on-call pretty much every day of the week. Not that he ever complained. He loved what he did and had the gift of looking at ease wherever he was. That was what came of knowing who you were and being comfortable inside your own skin. The only time I’d ever seen him look out of place was when we met for dinner on our first and only date. Formal surroundings didn’t suit either of us. Honestly, neither did dating.

It had been several months since I’d seen him, but we always reconnected as if no time had passed in between. I felt relaxed with Lucas in a way that I hadn’t felt with anyone else since Trina died. Maybe it was because neither one of us had any expectations of the other. I didn’t see him as a man, and he didn’t see me as a woman. Or at least, that’s what we pretended.

“How are you, Shelby? It’s been ages. It’s wonderful to see you.”

That was all it took. That was how close to the edge I was. He didn’t have to say anything more than that to get me crying. I’d been able to hold it together with Jeannie, but not with Lucas. I broke down. Everything that had happened the previous night overwhelmed me. I stood there with tears running down my face, and Lucas pulled me to his chest and held me until I’d regained some semblance of control.

When I could speak, I told him about my father’s disappearance. I knew he’d been through it with his grandfather and could understand. He waited until I was done before he even said a word. He was a good listener.

Eventually, when I’d talked myself out, he said, “But Tom’s safe?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Well, that’s the main thing.”

“I know. I just feel like I’m at a crossroad.”

“It sounds like you are.”

I slipped my arm through his elbow. We walked on the plowed trails through Jeannie’s acreage, ignoring the chill of the winter morning. It was peaceful here under the tall trees.

“What was it like with your grandfather?” I asked him. “How did you deal with it?”

“Well, Grampa Paul was much older when I came back here, and the disease was already further along. He had some lucid stretches, but he spent a lot of time jumping through his past the way Tom’s doing now. I’d been hoping to figure out a way to take care of him at home — you know, a combination of myself and in-home nurses — but I realized pretty early on that was going to be impossible. I’d have emergencies where I needed to be out the door immediately and couldn’t wait for a caregiver to arrive. I’m sure you’re in the same situation.”

“Exactly.”

“Even live-in care wasn’t enough. You can’t watch someone 24/7, and Paul was a wanderer. If I went to take a shower or cook a meal or read a book outside, he’d be gone. I’d literally have to lock him in his room at night, and I’d wake up and hear him rattling the doorknob to get out. It was awful. Sometimes I still hear that noise at night. It haunts me.”

He looked behind us at the cages where the raptors lived. The cages kept them safe, but a cage was still a cage.

“So finally, I made the decision to put him in that facility in Stanton,” Lucas went on. “Believe me, it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. The fact that I didn’t have a choice didn’t make it easier on either of us.”

“Yeah.”

“I won’t tell you not to feel guilty, Shelby. If it comes down to that for you and Tom, you will feel guilty. All you can do is find a way to live with it. And any time you need to talk to someone who knows what you’re going through, I’m right here.”

“Thanks, Lucas.”

“Are you at that point?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, and I didn’t. I had no idea. “Most days, he’s functional. I mean, he can do basic life stuff. He has periods where he seems entirely normal, but then he can be gone just like that. If he’s going to start disappearing, I need to do something. I don’t want him ending up on the side of the river like your grandfather.”

Lucas gave a sad little laugh. “You know, Grampa Paul probably preferred it that way. He went peacefully, and he wasn’t locked away in some room when he did. That’s not so bad. But I hear you. It could have been much worse, and no one wants a loved one to pass away alone.”

I checked my watch. “Well, I should go. I appreciate the talk.”

“Of course.”

“I made an appointment this morning to visit the facility in Stanton where your grandfather was. Just to see what it’s like and get some of my questions answered. I’m not looking forward to it.”

“Do you want company?”

“Really? Could you do that?”

“There’s nothing on my schedule that I can’t cancel.”

“Well, that would be so helpful. Thank you. It won’t take much time, I promise. I have to get back to Everywhere soon. I need to check on the FBI search at the resort.”

Lucas gave me a puzzled look. “The FBI are back in town? Did something happen?”

“Haven’t you seen the news?”

“No, I hardly ever read the paper or watch television. I usually don’t know what’s going on in the world. You’d be amazed how little difference it makes to your life on most days.”

“Well, it’s about Jeremiah Sloan,” I told him.

“That boy who vanished years ago? Is there new information in the case?”

“Yes, we found evidence that he was taken to an abandoned resort outside Witch Tree after he disappeared. The FBI is searching the area to see if there’s anything that would help us figure out what happened to him.”

“You mean, like a body?”

“That’s what we’re afraid of.”

“I’m so sorry.” Lucas stared into the trees, and I watched his brow furrow with memories. “Witch Tree. Wow. That takes me back. I don’t suppose it’s the Mittel Pines Resort, is it?”

“Yes, it is. Why? Do you know it?”

“Sure. I was there for a couple of weeks every summer before we moved away. Grampa Paul used to take me there. That was one of the things I really missed about being in Kansas City. I couldn’t visit the resort with him anymore.”

“Hang on, your grandfather used to stay at the Mittel Pines Resort?” I repeated, just to make sure I had it right.

“It was his favorite place in the world,” Lucas told me. “He loved it out there. He was so upset when it closed. I bet he stayed there practically every summer of his life. I remember sometimes when I was in the facility with him in Stanton, he’d talk about the days we spent there. He’d tell me that when summer came, we really had to go back and stay in the cabins. That was so sad. In his mind, the resort was still open, and I was still a ten-year-old boy.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Lucas and I stood outside the nursing home in Stanton where Paul Nadler had spent the last months of his life. I had an appointment to talk to the administrator about my father, but instead of going inside, I stood on the sidewalk and found myself unable to move. Yes, I was hesitating because I was scared to even think about my dad in a place like that. But I also couldn’t get Lucas’s story about his grandfather out of my mind.

“Shelby?” Lucas said, when I stayed frozen where I was. “Are you okay?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Should we go in?”

“Not yet.”

I looked up and down the street that ran past the three-story apartment building. I drove past this location every month when I had errands to run in Stanton, but I’d only stopped here once, after Paul Nadler’s body was found by the river. From where we stood, I could see the Oak Street bridge a few blocks away. I thought about Mr. Nadler wandering out of this facility when no one was looking and taking a stroll past the neatly mowed lawns until he reached the bridge. He climbed down the slope and sat underneath the bridge deck, and at some point on that summer Friday, his heart stopped. When the rains came the following night, the river rose up and carried his body away and left him on the grassy bank outside town.

That was what had happened to him.

And yet.

I walked across the street, and Lucas followed me with a puzzled expression on his face. The parking lot of the McDonald’s on the corner was crowded. I sat down on a cold bench beside the bus stop and tried to make sense of it.

“Shelby?” Lucas said, trying again. “Do you want to tell me what you’re thinking?”

What I was thinking was crazy, but I said it anyway.

“I think your grandfather was the one who took Jeremiah to that resort.”

Lucas shook his head. His expression made it clear that he definitely thought I was crazy. “Grampa Paul? Come on, that’s impossible.”

“Maybe, but hear me out. Over in the national forest, we’ve got a ten-year-old boy on his bicycle. He misses his grandfather so much that he won’t even take off his Sunday suit. And now over here in Stanton, we’ve got a nice old man with dementia who loved taking his ten-year-old grandson to the Mittel Pines Resort. An old man who wandered away from his nursing home on the same morning that Jeremiah disappeared.”

I watched Lucas struggle with what I was saying.

“Yeah, it’s a weird coincidence, but that’s all it is.”

“Are you sure?”

“Well, it doesn’t make sense, Shelby. Grampa Paul’s body was found by the river here in Stanton. Not in Everywhere. Not in Witch Tree. Here in Stanton.”

“You’re right.”

“The national forest where that boy disappeared is more than an hour away from here. And Witch Tree is, what, another hour past that? How on earth did Grampa Paul get there?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, even if he took somebody’s car, it doesn’t add up. You’re saying he drove to Everywhere, picked up Jeremiah, went out to this resort, came back to Stanton, dropped off the car that apparently nobody realized was gone, and then went walking by the river, had a heart attack, and was carried away by the current? Doesn’t that sound absurd?”

“Yes, it does.”

“Plus, if Grampa Paul really was the one who picked him up, what happened to Jeremiah? I hope you’re not suggesting that my grandfather harmed that boy. Because he didn’t, Shelby. He would never, ever hurt a child. He was the nicest man I’ve ever known.”

“I’m sure he was, Lucas.”

“Then how do you explain Jeremiah never turning up?”

“I can’t.”

“Well, see? There’s no way it happened like that. No way.”

I was ready to agree with him, because everything he said was true. My theory didn’t make sense. It left me with too many questions that seemingly had no answers. And yet I couldn’t give it up for one simple reason.

I was right.

I knew I was right. I knew it had happened exactly that way. Paul Nadler took Jeremiah Sloan to the Mittel Pines Resort. I didn’t know what happened next, but I was sure that somehow their two lives had intersected that day in the national forest.

As if to prove I wasn’t really crazy, the universe took that moment to send me a sign. A real sign that helped explain everything.

We sat on the bench across from the nursing home, and a regional bus rumbled toward us from the center of town, the way it did every hour of every day, serving Stanton and Mittel Counties. I saw it coming, and I looked at the destination on the electronic sign on the front of the bus.

It said Martin’s Point.

I got up immediately and flagged the driver to stop. “Want to take a ride?” I said to Lucas.

“Why?”

“Because that’s what your grandfather did.”

Lucas didn’t argue with me. The two of us got on the bus. Ten years ago, I was sure Paul Nadler had done the same thing. He’d walked out of the retirement home and crossed the street just as the Martin’s Point bus was pulling up to the stop. He’d climbed the steps, probably said a polite hello as he paid the driver, and taken a seat. He was dressed impeccably in his blazer, checked shirt, tan slacks, and wing tips. No one looking at him would have given him a second thought or wondered if this old man wasn’t where he was supposed to be.

Lucas and I had no trouble finding a seat. In summer, the bus would have been crowded, but not in January. We made a handful of stops in other towns as we made a zigzag route south, leaving Stanton County behind and crossing into the lower half of Mittel County. I saw the city limits sign as we neared Martin’s Point. The road descends as you drive into town, and below us, I could see the huge swath of white marking the lake that was frozen from shore to shore. Lake homes dotted the breaks in the bare trees. We rumbled along the main street past shops and inns that were mostly shuttered for the winter. When the bus pulled to the curb, I said to Lucas, “This is our stop.”

“Is it?”

“Oh, yeah.”

We got out of the bus and let it pull away in front of us. When it did, we were immediately across the street from Bonnie Butterfield’s ice cream parlor. Unlike many of the other Martin’s Point shops, Bonnie kept her store open year-round, because people here eat ice cream no matter how cold it gets outside.

“I know this was a long time ago,” I said to Lucas, “but do you remember what kind of car your grandfather used to drive? Back when he would take you out to the resort on summer vacations?”

Lucas thought about it. “A white pickup, I think.”

I pointed down the block. “Like that one?”

He followed the direction of my finger, and his eyes widened in surprise, as if I were a magician performing a trick. I realized he was beginning to think I might not be crazy after all. “Yes, just like that one.”

Ten years later, Bonnie Butterfield still owned a white F-150, parked in the same place where she’d always kept it, half a block away from her shop. I wondered if she still left her keys inside. I imagined Paul Nadler getting off the bus from Stanton and seeing that truck. It was his truck, or at least that was what his mind told him. Mr. Nadler got in that white F-150 and headed off for the Mittel Pines Resort, where he’d spent some of his happiest days with his grandson.

But you know, every dirt road looks like every other one around here, and it’s easy for an old man to get confused. I was pretty sure Mr. Nadler had made a wrong turn on his way to Witch Tree and wound up on the dead-end road that leads into the national forest.

That was where he met Jeremiah.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Dad was right about the snow coming. As I made the long drive back to Everywhere late that afternoon, it began to fall, like sand tapping across my windshield. Soon a thin white layer covered the highway, and my tires kicked up a cloud that I could see behind me in the mirror. I drove carefully to avoid slipping off the road.

Darkness was already setting in as I arrived in town. Everywhere looked like a fairy land, covered in swirling snow and lit up with the Christmas lights that we kept on through most of the winter. I parked outside the Carnegie Library. Across the street, I could see the early bird crowd at the Nowhere Café. The evening special was Swedish meatballs, and the lingonberry sauce was famous. I could see several members of the FBI team filling the booths, but not Agent Reed. He was waiting for me in the sheriff’s office.

I climbed the concrete steps that fronted the century-old library building and let myself inside through the massive oak doors between two Corinthian columns. The stairs to the basement were on my left. I was about to head down to the sheriff’s office when I heard a voice call to me from the darkness of the library.

“Shelby, over here.”

It was Agent Reed. The library was closed, but he was wandering among the shelves and lighting up the spines of the books with his phone. I do that sometimes at night, too, if I’m working late. There’s something about being alone with all those books that makes you think the characters will come to life.

Reed had a book in his hand, which he returned to the shelf. “You know, I’ve never asked you, Shelby. Why is the sheriff’s office in the basement? It seems like a strange location even for Mittel County.”

I smiled. “Oh, it was a temporary fix that became permanent. We used to have our own building, but it burned down about fifteen years ago. We moved in underneath the library while the county board debated what to do about a different space. Eventually, my father told them we’d just stay where we were. He always thought we should be out on the roads anyway, not stuck in an office.”

“Smart man. What started the fire?”

“An overnight deputy was smoking.”

“Ah. Not Sheriff Twilley, I hope. I can tell he likes his cigars.”

“Fortunately not.”

The two of us made our way to the front of the library where chambered windows overlooked the street. We sat down in overstuffed chairs that had been here my whole life. The air inside had grown cold. You could hear a pin drop in the quiet, and when we talked, our voices had a faint echo on the stone floors.

I explained to him my theory of what had happened between Paul Nadler and Jeremiah. I expected him to dismiss it out of hand as impossible. He didn’t.

“I remember the old man,” he replied when I was done. “I couldn’t have told you his name was Paul Nadler, but I remember the body by the river. He had a peaceful look about him.”

“Yes, he did.”

“And you’re convinced that Jeremiah went off with this man?”

“I am. I can’t make all the details fit yet, but I believe that’s what happened.”

Reed knitted his hands on top of his bald head. “Yesterday, I said the boy seemed to be having fun out at the resort, not that he was some kind of prisoner. That’s consistent with your theory.”

“It is.”

“Did you check with the police in Stanton about Nadler’s background?”

“I did. He had no criminal record. Nadler’s grandson, Lucas, says his grandfather was never abusive. There’s no reason to think he planned to harm Jeremiah. Frankly, I don’t think this was a kidnapping at all. I think it was completely innocent.”

“Did you get a DNA sample from the grandson?”

“I did. I told him we’d need to run familial comparison on any DNA samples found at the resort.”

“And what do you know about the grandson?”

“He’s a local veterinarian. Solid guy.”

“Are you sure?”

I felt an urge to defend Lucas. “Yes, I’m sure.”

“His grandfather was missing, and the two of them had history at that resort. It’s at least possible that he went out there looking for him, Shelby. I can tell you like him, but we have to cover all the bases.”

“I know we do. And I already checked. Lucas was with a friend of mine, Jeannie Samper, most of that Friday and Saturday. They were searching for his grandfather. Plus, I saw him myself late Saturday night at the raptor center in Stanton. He wasn’t involved.”

“Well, that leaves us with several mysteries,” Reed said.

“I know. If this was an innocent accident, I can’t understand why we never found Jeremiah. This case should have had a happy ending.”

“Unfortunately, the fact that it started out as innocent doesn’t mean it ended up that way. It’s possible that the wrong kind of person found them and took advantage of the situation. After all, we know that a third party got involved at some point. This wasn’t just Paul Nadler and Jeremiah Sloan. Someone else wound up in the middle of it.”

“Because of the F-150.”

“Yes, exactly. The truck was wiped down and abandoned on the other side of the county. There’s no way Paul Nadler did that. Somebody else did.”

“I feel like we’re back at square one.”

“Oh, no, we’re not. Thanks to you, we may well be a lot further along than we were before. However, our suspect pool just got bigger. Any alibis people had for Friday don’t hold up anymore. We’ve looked at this whole case through the lens of Jeremiah’s disappearance on Friday afternoon. But that may no longer be the relevant timeline. If Paul Nadler was the one who took Jeremiah to the resort, then the real question is, what happened between Friday afternoon and the discovery of Nadler’s body by the river in Stanton on Sunday morning?”

I thought about the people we’d considered suspects.

Will and Vince Gruder.

Keith Whalen.

I’d seen all three of them on Friday afternoon when there wasn’t enough time for them to have taken the boy to the resort and made their way back to Everywhere. But Reed was right. Things had changed. We didn’t know where they’d been for the next two days.

“Here’s what I don’t understand,” I said. “If somebody else got involved, how did they even find Jeremiah? Nobody knew he was at the resort, and I can’t believe they stumbled onto him by accident. It’s too much of a coincidence.”

“Well, everybody in Mittel County was looking for the boy,” Reed pointed out. “Maybe somebody saw or heard something that led them to search the resort. And there he was. We’ll need to talk to everyone who lives nearby to see what they remember.”

As he said that, I felt a ripple go through me.

“Somebody in Witch Tree did hear something.”

I leaped out of my chair and headed for the stairs that led down to the sheriff’s office. Reed followed on my heels. Downstairs, the lights were on, but there was only one deputy staffing the phones. I gave him a distracted greeting as I headed for the file cabinet. The Jeremiah file cabinet. I knew what I was looking for. My notes. My own personal diary of everything I’d seen and heard during the early days of the investigation.

I yanked the folder out of the drawer the way I’d done over and over at different points in the past ten years when I revisited the investigation. I flipped through the pages until I found my notes for Saturday morning.

“Breezy,” I said. “She heard something.”

“The waitress?”

“Yes. Belinda Brees. I went into the diner on Saturday morning the day after Jeremiah disappeared. Breezy made an off-handed comment that didn’t seem important, but I wrote it down anyway, because I was still suspicious about the Gruders.”

“What did she say?”

“She said I was right about Will and Vince being back in town. They’d been playing their music half the night, and it was keeping her awake. But the Mittel Pines Resort isn’t much farther from Breezy’s house than the Gruders’. What if the music she heard wasn’t coming from Will and Vince? What if it was really coming from the F-150 at the resort?”

Just as it had the previous night, light blazed from the darkness at Breezy’s trailer in Witch Tree. An inch of snow had already gathered over her dirt driveway, and more was falling like a slow, quiet avalanche. The virgin bed was undisturbed by tire tracks when we arrived.

I got out of the cruiser. So did Agent Reed. We made footprints in the snow and climbed the rusted metal steps of the trailer. I thumped on the door. “Breezy? It’s Shelby. Breezy, are you there?”

I put an ear to the door and heard nothing but the wind around me. The trees in the dark forest surrounding the lot stared at us.

“Not home?” Reed asked.

“Her car’s here.”

We descended into the snow and circled the trailer. The only footsteps I saw were a few rabbit tracks crisscrossing the yard between Dudley’s rusted carcass and the tree line. Breezy hadn’t been outside since the snow began. I got on tiptoes to peer through the windows, but the curtains were pulled shut on all sides. I banged on the wall and called again. “Breezy? You around? Open up!”

I went to her Dodge Durango and brushed away the snow and peered inside. It was empty. I checked the wooden shed where her yard equipment was stored and shined a flashlight on the interior. There was nothing inside but old spiderwebs and pools of ice on the concrete floor.

The two of us went back to the trailer. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and dialed her number. When I listened, I could hear the muffled sound of Breezy’s ringtone inside. Her phone was there.

I climbed the trailer steps again and checked the door, but it was locked.

“Does she have a boyfriend?” Reed asked.

“Lots. But I don’t think this is about a boyfriend.”

“Well, what do you want to do, Deputy? This is your town.”

“I say we go in.”

Reed nodded his agreement. He climbed the steps and threw his shoulder heavily against the trailer door. He was a big man, and the lock only held through two more mighty shoves before it gave way. The door banged open. Reed went in first, and I followed him.

Immediately, I slapped my hand over my face. The smell erupting out of the warm, shut-up space was like a hothouse of rotting lilies. I had to swallow down the urge to vomit. My eyes shot to the floor, and I wanted to scream at what I saw. Blood was spattered across the kitchenette and had settled into a sticky lake on the linoleum floor. In the middle was Breezy. She lay sprawled on her side, eyes fixed and open as she stared at me, her skin gray. Her long hair spilled across her face and was stained red by her own blood.

My friend, my fellow Striker girl, was dead.

Chapter Forty

I called Adam, and it took him forty-five minutes to drive to Witch Tree through the snow. I met him outside. When he and I went back into the trailer together, I kept my arms wrapped so tightly around my chest that it felt like a boa constrictor was squeezing me to death. I held back my emotions as I stared at Breezy’s body. It’s not like violent death was a stranger around here. I’d seen grisly suicides by shotgun. I’d seen car accidents where people flew headfirst through the windshield. But this was different. I’d known Belinda Brees since I was a girl and talked to her at the diner practically every day of my adult life. I’d sat right here with her in this trailer two nights ago. And now she lay dead at my feet.

“What the hell happened here?” Adam asked. “Was this an accident? Did she slip?”

He examined a plastic bottle of canola oil tipped sideways on the counter. The lid was loose, and oil had oozed down the front of the cabinets and made a slippery puddle on the trailer floor. Some of the oil had comingled with the blood, and I could see a sheen of oil on the bottoms of Breezy’s bare feet. On the other side of the kitchenette was the sharp counter edge where her skull had struck as she fell backward. It was stained to a deep burgundy, and remnants of bone and tissue clung to the corner. Below, on the linoleum, tiny florets of brain matter were scattered around her head like spilled cereal.

Agent Reed knelt next to the body. “If she slipped, she had help. See these little sliver cuts on her shoulders? Those are from fingernails. There’s bruising, too.”

I bent over, reluctantly, and saw what he meant. There were four tiny crescent scratches on both of Breezy’s bare shoulders beside the spaghetti straps of her top. Little discolorations marked her skin. She’d had a violent confrontation with whoever killed her, and I didn’t think the timing of her murder was a coincidence.

“She must have known something about Jeremiah. That’s what got her killed.”

“And she kept quiet about it for ten years?” Adam retorted, shaking his head. “That doesn’t sound like Breezy.”

“I know, but she was hiding something when we talked to her on Monday night.”

Reed’s head turned sharply as I said this. “Hiding what?”

“Breezy talked about how creepy it was that whoever took Jeremiah drove right past her trailer. She said she didn’t see anything, so I asked if anyone had spent the night with her in those first couple of days after Jeremiah disappeared. I wanted to know if there were other witnesses we should talk to. She said no, but I don’t think she was giving us the real story. She was protecting someone.”

“Any idea who?”

“No.”

Reed studied the body at his feet again. “Well, it looks to me like she’s already been dead for a couple of days.”

“It was probably that same night we were here,” I said. “She didn’t show up for her shift at the diner the next morning.”

He frowned. “Where’s her phone?”

I looked around the cramped confines of the trailer, but I didn’t see it. “It’s here somewhere. I heard it ringing when I called from outside.”

“Call it again,” Reed told me.

I pulled out my phone and dialed Breezy’s number. We heard it ringing, still muffled but louder than before. Her ringtone was Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies,” which fit for Breezy. The noise came from near my feet, and I realized the phone was under her body. Reed bent down with a gloved hand, nudged the body slightly at the hip, and slid out her phone with two fingers. I recognized the cheap silver pay-as-you-go phone that Breezy had used for years.

Reed tapped on the screen. He navigated to the call log and pulled up a list of dialed numbers. “What time did the two of you leave the trailer on Monday night?”

“About seven thirty.”

“She didn’t make any calls after you left. And there are no incoming calls either.”

“If she didn’t reach out to anybody, then why was she killed? No one knew we’d talked to her.”

“Maybe not, but the whole town knew we’d found evidence at the resort,” Adam pointed out. “This is Everywhere. News travels fast.”

“So she was a time bomb.”

Adam stared at me. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, as long as we hadn’t connected Jeremiah to that resort, whatever Breezy knew didn’t matter. As soon as we did, she became a threat. The question is why.”

Not long after that, I said goodbye to Breezy for the last time. I still had trouble accepting the reality that I would never see her again.

Adam offered to drive Agent Reed back to Everywhere, so I was on my own. I exited the trailer into the winter night, where the snow was still falling through the swirl of lights on the police cruisers. Beyond the perimeter of the scene, I saw that a black SUV was now parked on the dirt road. Violet Roka stood outside the driver’s door, looking elegant and powerful in her long wool coat. It was dark, but she wore sunglasses, as if she were in disguise. Her hands were in her pockets. I got the feeling that she’d been waiting for me.

I headed her way. The snow made my hair wet and got in my eyes, making me squint to see. My brown uniform was bulky and unflattering. As always, I felt outclassed whenever I was around Violet.

“So it’s true?” she asked me.

“Yes. Breezy’s dead.”

Violet’s face didn’t react to the news. “That’s what I heard. The FBI media rep called the congresswoman to give her a heads-up. I wanted to get out here ahead of the reporters, but they’ll be all over this soon enough. I need to brief her before she gets any questions. What can you tell me?”

“Don’t get too sentimental, Violet. Try to hold it together.”

Yes, that was a cheap shot, but Violet took the hit without flinching.

“Look, I know we’ve never been close, Shelby. I know you think I’m an ice queen. Unfortunately, doing what I do, I can’t afford the luxury of getting emotional about things. It doesn’t mean that I don’t feel anything. Breezy was my friend, too.”

“Well, someone murdered our friend tonight.”

“You’re sure it was murder?”

“Agent Reed thinks so. Do you want to see her before they take her away?”

“No. I just want information.”

“You should talk to Adam about that. Or the FBI. Not me.”

“I want this to be unofficial for now. I’m a lawyer, Shelby. Lawyers like to know the answers before they start asking questions.”

“So what do you want to know?”

“Obviously, whether Breezy’s death is connected in any way to Jeremiah’s disappearance.”

“It’s too early to say for sure.”

Violet sighed. “I told you, this is off the record, Shelby. Not for the press, not for public consumption. Let’s not play games.”

“Okay. Is there a connection? Probably. But we don’t know what it is yet.”

“We’re very close to the old resort. That must mean something.”

“Could be.”

“Is there any reason to think Breezy herself was involved in Jeremiah’s disappearance?”

“Breezy? No, not at this point. Why would you think that?”

Violet took off her sunglasses. She looked uncomfortable, and I’d hardly ever seen Violet looking that way. “Let’s talk in my truck.”

“If you like.”

We climbed inside. The interior was still warm. She had three separate cell phones mounted on her dashboard, and I had to relocate a laptop and a dozen thick manila folders to sit in the leather passenger seat. In the thirty seconds it took me to get situated, two of the phones rang and went to voicemail, and one rang again immediately after that. That was the life of a congressional aide. I was sure Violet loved it.

“What’s going on?” I asked her. “What did you want to tell me?”

“This is private and sensitive information, Shelby. That’s why I’m telling you, not Adam, not Agent Reed. I hope I can count on your keeping it confidential.”

“Not if it affects a murder investigation, Violet.”

“I don’t know if it does. It’s probably irrelevant. But since it involves Breezy, I thought you should be aware of it.”

“Okay.”

“Three years ago, Breezy tried to blackmail me. It was during the first campaign. She wanted money, or she was going to go to the press with a story about me using cocaine.”

“Did you pay her?”

“No. I told her to go to hell.”

“And did she talk to the press?”

“If she did, they saw it for what it was. Malicious gossip. The story never saw the light of day. I’m only telling you this because I know Breezy has been struggling with money. If she stooped to blackmail once, she might do so again.”

“All right. I appreciate the information. But I do have to ask: Was the story true? Do you have a drug problem?”

“No.”

“Did you have one in the past?”

“No.”

“Breezy told me that you and she did coke together in high school.”

“That was a very long time ago. We were teenagers. Sometimes teenagers do stupid things. How is that relevant now?”

“Breezy’s dead. Someone murdered her. Everything’s relevant.”

“Well, I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re suggesting. Believe me, if I didn’t think it was worth paying blackmail over, then it wasn’t worth committing murder, either.”

“What about the congresswoman?”

“What about her?”

“Breezy also said that Ellen had a problem with pills. That sounds like something a politician would want to keep secret.”

Violet sat in silence for a while without answering me. “Breezy said that? Breezy wasn’t anywhere near Ellen in the past ten years. So let me guess where this came from. Dennis, right?”

“Are you saying he lied? It wasn’t true?”

“I’m saying Dennis is still upset and angry about the divorce. He’s not a credible source.”

“That’s not exactly a denial, Violet.”

“So what? It’s none of your business.”

“If Ellen was abusing pills when Jeremiah disappeared, then yes, it is my business.”

“She wasn’t.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am.” She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel and stared through the windshield with a frown. “Look, all I’m going to tell you is this: Ellen struggled with the disappearance of her son. I’m sure that’s no surprise. She was in therapy after it happened, and she was treated with medication. Hypothetically, if that resulted in any kind of problem, she dealt with it, and she’s clean now.”

“Okay.”

“Does that answer your concerns?”

“For the moment, yes.”

Violet shook her head in disgust, showing emotion for the first time. “This is low, even for Dennis. Gossiping about his wife’s depression over her missing son. But I guess it shouldn’t surprise me.”

“You don’t like him.”

“No. I don’t. I never have. Ellen has been my friend since I moved to Mittel County. I put up with Dennis for her sake. But she deserved better. She didn’t need him. He was holding her back. She finally realized that, too.”

“I guess she did.”

“You know when I lost all respect for Dennis?”

“When?”

“The day after Jeremiah disappeared. I went over to their house that Saturday night to be with Ellen, and Dennis wasn’t there. Can you believe that? He walked out on his wife while their son was missing. He bailed on her. I never forgave him for that.”

“Why did he leave?”

“Because he was a coward. He couldn’t deal with it.”

“And you’re sure it was that Saturday night?”

“That’s right. I was there with Ellen all night, and she was alone. Dennis didn’t get back until early morning.”

“Where did he go?”

Violet shot a glance at Breezy’s trailer. Mixed emotions spilled across her face. “I don’t know for sure, but I can guess. When he came in, he reeked of booze. And he reeked of sex, too.”

Chapter Forty-One

I got out of the truck, and Violet drove away.

I surveyed the police activity that was still going on outside Breezy’s trailer, and then I walked down the dirt road through the snow until the crime scene was blocked from view by the trees. It was the middle of a winter night, and I was cold, wet, and mostly blind.

The road vanished into the forest ahead of me. In the sticky heat of summer ten years ago, Paul Nadler would have driven this same road in the white F-150, with Jeremiah on the seat next to him. A sweet old man, a sweet young boy. They were in no real danger at that moment, as far as I knew. There was no reason we shouldn’t have found both of them eventually. There was no reason why this story hadn’t ended with Jeremiah safely back home.

All I could think was: Someone intervened. Something happened.

I was about to go back to the trailer when I heard a noise not far away. The closer I listened to it, the louder it became. I had no idea where it was coming from. It seemed to be disembodied, floating over the trees, landing on me like the sheets of snow.

Music.

Someone was playing music deep in the forest. I could even recognize what it was. “Stairway to Heaven.”

Breezy had heard music ten years ago, too. She’d stood at the diner counter and talked about music playing half the night and keeping her awake. We’d both assumed it was coming from the Gruders, but listening to the music now, I realized how sound can play tricks on your ears. What Breezy heard could easily have come from somewhere else, like a pickup truck with its radio on, in the overgrown field of an abandoned resort.

I listened to the mysterious music and felt a crushing sense of guilt. Breezy had told me about the music she’d heard back then, and I’d completely missed the clue. I’d never given a thought to the idea that the music might have been connected to Jeremiah. I could have gotten in my cruiser and gone out there and saved him. The boy would still be alive. Instead, here we were.

The song in the forest called to me like a Pied Piper. I had to know where it was coming from and who was playing it. I headed back to the trailer and got in my cruiser. I took off down the dirt road, plowing and swerving through the drifts of fallen snow. When I reached the T-intersection, I stopped and got out of the car and listened. Where Will Gruder lived, down the driveway to the left, the forest was silent. The music was coming from the other direction.

From Mittel Pines.

I kept driving. My headlights lit up the old road sign that was a like a headstone for the resort. My windshield wipers dragged aside snow and ice. I could see ruts chewed through the powder, already being filled in by fresh snow.

Someone had driven here before me.

I went slowly, but I got stuck twice and had to use a shovel from the trunk to dig a path for my tires. It took me almost half an hour to drive two miles.

When I got there, I found a car parked at the dead-end turnaround for the resort. I didn’t recognize it, but it was an Escalade about the size of Canada, with a bumper sticker that said Repent in red letters. I got out of my cruiser and shined a flashlight on the Escalade’s interior, but it was empty. I could still hear the music, loud and close now, coming from the field where we’d searched the old cabins. There was supposed to be a deputy here guarding the scene, but I wondered if Adam had pulled him because of the blizzard.

I ducked under the police tape. One set of footprints showed me the way. I followed them through the trees until the trail opened up at the resort meadow. Snow poured from the night sky. In the field, the footprints had already been erased, but I could see the glow of a light inside one of the cabins that was still standing. Music boomed around me like a rock concert, covering my approach. I hiked toward the cabin through deep drifts.

A whiff of cigarette smoke soured the air as I got closer. The cabin windows were shattered and empty. There was no door. I inched toward the rotting wall and peered inside and saw a girl in a Lotus position on a moldy, moss-covered mattress. She had a lantern next to her. Her eyes were closed. Her boots were on the wet floor. A cigarette hung from her mouth, and as I watched, she pinched it between her fingers and exhaled smoke without opening her eyes. She wore jeans, heavy wool socks, and a blue bubble coat that had once belonged to me.

It was Anna.

When I went inside the cabin, the crunch of my shoes on broken glass alerted her. Her eyes shot open, first with fear, then with irritation as she recognized me. I shouted at her to turn off the music, but she didn’t, so I grabbed her phone myself and switched off the sound that fed her speakers.

The resort went silent. My heart beat more slowly. I heard the hiss of wind and snow.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I told her quietly. “This is a crime scene. We’re still searching for evidence.”

“I didn’t touch anything.”

“No? What about that cigarette? The FBI will find it, bag it, and waste time running DNA on it.”

“Fine. I’ll pick up my butts. Okay? Will that make you happy?”

I didn’t want to get in another argument with her. This girl meant more to me than anyone in the world other than my father, and I had basically thrown her out of my house and told her she was worthless. Me. The woman who was supposed to be her guardian angel.

“What are you doing out here, Anna?”

“Nothing. I’m not doing anything.”

“No Bible reading tonight?”

“Why bother? God’s not here. He left Jeremiah to die in this place.”

“We don’t know what happened to him yet.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Who owns the Escalade outside?”

“It’s Will’s. So what?”

“I still need to talk to him.”

“I dropped him at the Witch’s Brew. You can find him there. I told him I’d pick him up later. I wanted to come out here and be by myself for a while.”

“Why? Why come here?”

She didn’t answer. She closed her eyes and focused on her yoga position, as if ignoring me would make me go away. I thought about leaving, but I couldn’t do that. Instead, I took a seat next to her on the old mattress. The smoke of her cigarette burned my throat. The cabin around us was filled with shadows and snow. I saw a dead, frozen robin in the corner.

“Anna, I want to apologize. I said harsh things that I didn’t mean. I was upset about my father. It was wrong of me to take it out on you.”

She was in a pose made for relaxation, but she wasn’t relaxed at all. She was coiled like a spring. When her eyes opened, they were bloodshot and hurt. “Will says people apologize when they accidentally tell you what they really think.”

“That’s not true.”

“You don’t have to lie to me, Shelby. I heard what you said. I got your message loud and clear. You think I’m a worthless little bitch. At least you had the guts to finally admit it. I’m sorry my mom foisted me on you and told you to look after me. The good news is, you’re done. You told me to get lost, and I did. I’m not your problem anymore, so don’t worry about me.”

I had no idea what to say. None. If anyone in that cabin felt like a worthless bitch, it was me.

“Anna, tell me why you came out here. Please.”

“Go away, Shelby. Don’t pretend you care.”

“I’m not pretending. I do care. Talk to me. You can hate me if you want, but I need you to talk to me.”

“Why? What difference does it make?”

“Because I love you. And you’re hurting. I want to help.”

“You can’t help. I wish you’d just go.”

“Well, sorry, I’m not going to do that. Look, Anna, we both know why you’re here. Why can’t you just admit that you’re upset about what happened to Jeremiah? Why is that so hard for you?”

The girl scrambled off the mattress as if I’d set it on fire. She shoved her feet back into her boots and paced back and forth in the cabin. She kicked at the snow with each step.

“Can’t you feel him?”

“Jeremiah?”

“Yes, of course, Jeremiah! He was here. He’s all over this place.”

I tried to feel what she felt, but I didn’t. To me, there were no ghosts here, just the sleeping chill of winter. But I had never been connected to Jeremiah the way Anna was.

“Did you come out here to talk to him?”

“I came out here to tell him to leave me alone.”

“Leave you alone? What do you mean?” And then I realized what she was saying. “You still dream about him, don’t you?”

Anna pushed her blond hair out of her face. She was close to tears. “I have the same dream over and over. It’s driving me crazy. I can’t make it stop.”

“Tell me about it.”

“He keeps telling me he’s okay. He says that he doesn’t blame me, that it’s not my fault.”

“It’s not your fault.”

The girl picked up an empty, dirty beer bottle from the debris on the floor and heaved it at the wall, where it exploded into a shower of glass. “Of course, it is! Jeremiah! My mom! It’s all my fault!”

I got up from the mattress and took her by the shoulders. “Anna, you didn’t make those things happen. Your mom had cancer. And Jeremiah’s disappearance had absolutely nothing to do with you. If he keeps coming back in your dreams, maybe it’s because you’re not listening to him.”

I hoped that the wall between us might crumble. I hoped that she’d put her arms around me. I was praying that I’d finally be able to reach her. I was looking for anything, any kind of glimmer, even the smallest crack in the shell. But she was as lost as Jeremiah. She shrugged off my hands and backed away from me.

“You don’t know anything. You don’t know who I am. Will does. He knows I’m a bad person.”

“Will is wrong.”

“Yeah? Tell me one good thing I’ve done in my whole life, Shelby. Just one.”

“Are you kidding? Your best friend disappeared ten years ago, and you still miss him. Would a bad person feel that way?”

Anna reached into her pocket and found another cigarette to light. Her fingers trembled. “Shelby, please just go now.”

“I’m not going to leave you here. Let me take you home. My home. That’s where you belong.”

“No. I get it, you feel sorry for me, but I want to be alone right now. Okay? Let me be alone with him.”

Maybe I should have forced her to go with me, but it felt like the wrong thing to do. I couldn’t help her until she wanted my help.

“Okay. If that’s what you want, I’ll go.”

“Thank you.”

I headed for the cabin doorway. I was outside, under the falling snow, when Anna called to me. There was something different in her voice that reminded me of the little girl she once was. “Hey, Shelby?”

I turned around. “Yes?”

“Just so you know, you’re in the dream, too.”

“Your dream about Jeremiah?”

“Yeah. It used to be that I was alone, but lately you’ve been there, too. You’re standing on this dirt road, and when I pass you, you tell me you’re looking for someone, but you can’t find him. And you ask me if I’ve seen him.”

“Who am I looking for? Jeremiah?”

“No. Not him.”

I was puzzled. “Then who?”

“You always say the same thing,” Anna replied. “‘A well-meaning traveler.’ That’s who you’re trying to find.”

Chapter Forty-Two

Even late on a snow-filled Wednesday night, the Witch’s Brew was packed shoulder to shoulder with people. When I came inside out of the cold, I immediately felt warm with so many bodies pressed together around cocktail tables. The entire bar was paneled in walnut, making the place dark. Sconce lights flickered like fake candles. The heads of deer, elk, bears, and moose scowled at me from the walls. I looked around at the faces, but I didn’t see Will Gruder.

People tend to notice the uniform in places like this. They figure it’s never good when a cop arrives, so they gave me space. I heard fragments of conversation as I pushed through the crowd, and everybody was talking about Breezy being dead. I made my way to the bar. I was about to ask the bartender about Will when I noticed a familiar face near the back door.

It was Dennis Sloan, standing off by himself and staring into his beer as if he were alone on the planet.

“Hello, Mr. Sloan.”

Dennis looked up from his drink and eyed me with an anxious stare. That’s the thing about being a parent with a missing child. Whenever a police officer shows up, you think, this is it. This is the moment I find out.

“Mr. Sloan? That’s pretty formal, Shelby. Is this an official visit? Do you have news?”

“No news, but actually, I do have a couple of questions for you. Could we go outside where it’s a little more private?”

“Sure. If you want.”

We went through the rear door into the gravel lot behind the bar. A few cars were parked back there, wearing caps of snow. The large trash bins near us smelled of old vegetables and empty wine bottles. Dennis’s face was flushed red. Ten years had gone by since he lost his son, but he’d aged twenty.

“I heard about Breezy. I’m just devastated. I can’t believe it. What happened?”

“We’re still looking into that.”

He glanced at the woods on the other side of the parking lot. Somewhere beyond those woods was Breezy’s trailer. What I saw on his face looked like genuine longing and regret.

“I really liked her, you know. It was more than sex. It’s not like we were in love or anything, but we were good for each other.”

“When did you last see her?”

“Thanksgiving. Adrian was in DC with Ellen, so I was alone. So was Breezy. I came out here to the Witch’s Brew, and we ended up having drinks and going back to her place. That’s the way it was with us. We wouldn’t see each other for months, and then we’d screw around and stay up all night talking. It’s nice to be with someone you’ve got history with, even if it’s just an on-again, off-again thing.”

“And you haven’t seen her since then?”

“No.”

“What about Monday night? Where did you go after you left the resort?”

Dennis’s tired eyes slowly focused. He realized what I was asking. “Are you kidding, Shelby? Tell me you don’t think I killed her.”

“We have to talk to everyone who knew her and rule them out.”

“Well, I didn’t go to Breezy’s on Monday. I’d like to give you an alibi for where I was, but I can’t. After I left the resort, I went home. Nobody went with me. I wanted to be alone. All I can tell you is, I would never hurt Breezy. No way.”

“Okay.”

“Is there anything else? I have to go soon. Once the snow stops, I have to start plowing driveways.”

“I have a few more questions. Do you remember knowing a man named Paul Nadler? He was from Stanton.”

“The name’s not familiar. Who is he?”

“He was an old man with dementia, and he spent a lot of time throughout his life at the Mittel Pines Resort. He wandered away from his nursing home on the same day that Jeremiah disappeared. We think it’s possible that he’s the one who took your son there.”

“And killed him? A senile old man?”

“We don’t know exactly what happened, but it’s more complicated than that. Given what happened to Breezy and that she lived on the only road that leads out to the resort, it’s possible she knew something, even if she didn’t realize it.”

“If Breezy knew anything at all, she would have told me.”

I held his eyes with mine. “Here’s the thing, Dennis. I asked Breezy if anyone was with her on Friday or Saturday night after Jeremiah disappeared. She said no. But I don’t think that’s the truth. I don’t think she was alone. And I think whoever was with her either knows what happened to your son, or has been hiding something important for a long time. I think that’s why she’s dead.”

I watched him get angry, but the anger didn’t last long. He shook his head with disbelief. “And you think it was me? That I know what happened to Jer?”

“Violet says you didn’t spend that Saturday night at home. You went out, and you didn’t come back until very late. I know you’d been having an affair with Breezy. It makes me wonder if you went to see her.”

Dennis sighed and shook snow out of his hair. “Okay. I don’t know what difference it makes, but yes, I did see her that night. Honestly, I haven’t been thinking about anything else since I found out that Jer was at that damn resort. Can you imagine what it feels like to know I was so close to my boy back then? Hell, I could have shouted his name, and he probably would have heard me. I could have driven over there and saved him. But I didn’t know, Shelby. I didn’t know a thing about it.”

“Tell me what happened that night.”

He exhaled long and slow, as if talking about it was the last thing he wanted to do. “Ellen was freezing me out all day. She was in her own world. I mean, I don’t blame her for that, but after a while, I just couldn’t be there anymore. I couldn’t take the silent treatment. So I went out. I didn’t even know where I was going. I drove up and down the roads, like maybe if I drove around long enough, I’d find Jer. It was pouring rain. Hammering down. I kept thinking of him being out in the middle of that. Anyway, sooner or later, I wound up in Witch Tree. Right here at the bar. It wasn’t deliberate or anything, it just happened. I stayed here until the place closed at two in the morning, but I still didn’t want to go home. I couldn’t face Ellen. And I was feeling wrecked about Jer. So I went over to see Breezy at the trailer.”

“Did you see anyone else on the road as you were driving to her place?”

“I don’t remember. It was late, and I was pretty buzzed.”

“Did you hear anything when you got there?”

“Hear anything? Like what?”

“Music. Someone playing music in the forest.”

“I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure the rain had stopped, but I don’t remember hearing anything.”

“Was Breezy awake?”

“No. She was sleeping. I knocked on the door and woke her up.”

“Was she alone?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. It’s not like there’s any place to hide in the trailer, Shelby. Other than the bedroom, and that’s where we went. I mean, I’m not proud of it. My son was missing, and what did I do? I had sex.”

“And after?”

“Breezy went back to sleep. I stared at the ceiling and thought about what a piece of crap I am. I stayed there for a while, and eventually, I got up and went home.”

“What time did you leave the trailer?”

“I don’t know. Sometime between two and three, I guess. I didn’t check my watch.”

“And you drove straight home?”

“Yeah.”

“Did Breezy wake up when you left?”

“No, she was dead to the world.” He frowned. “Sorry, bad choice of words. But she was tired. She was barely awake even while we were having sex. She’d pulled double shifts at the diner two days in a row. I knew she had to get up early again, so I let her sleep. I just slipped out.”

“What about when you left? Did you hear music then?”

“I’m not sure, but I don’t think so.”

“Did you see anyone else?”

“What? I forgot about the raccoon.”

“The raccoon?”

“Well, I assumed it was a raccoon. I remember going out the door at Breezy’s place. I was parked right behind Dudley in her driveway. As I opened my car door, I heard a loud bang from the shed in her yard. Like somebody bumping into a wall or something.”

“Did you check it out?”

“Yeah, I went over there. The shed door was open. It was pitch-black, so I used the light on my phone to take a look around. A shelf had fallen. I figured that’s what I’d heard, and I assumed an animal had done it. But I’ll tell you, when I went back outside, I had the weirdest feeling. It made my skin crawl.”

“What was it?”

Dennis shook his head. “I wasn’t alone out there. I was sure someone was watching me. I could feel their eyes.”

Chapter Forty-Three

When I asked about Will Gruder, one of the other drinkers at the bar ratted him out by pointing a finger upstairs. I knew what that meant. The owner of the Witch’s Brew kept a few rooms for drunk patrons who needed to sleep it off instead of driving home. The word around town was that the rooms also got rented by the hour.

The stairs were located behind a varnished door across from the restrooms. When I climbed to the second floor, I found myself in a cold, narrow hallway, decorated with posters of black cats. There were four doors on each side, looking in on empty rooms that didn’t offer much more than a twin bed and a closet-sized bathroom. The smell told me that people threw up here regularly. I passed seven open doors, but the last door on the right was closed.

The noises I heard inside told me what was going on.

I knocked hard. “Will Gruder! It’s Deputy Lake. We need to talk.”

The grunting from the bodies behind the door stopped abruptly, and I heard a string of profanities. Footsteps creaked on the wooden floor, and the door inched open in front of me behind a chain. I saw a redheaded girl who couldn’t be more than a teenager. Behind her, the room was pitch-black.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

“Is Will Gruder in there?”

“What if he is?”

“I need to talk to him.”

She looked ready to give me attitude, but I heard a male voice behind her. “Just do what she says.”

The door closed again. I heard angry whispers on the other side, along with the rustle of clothes. When the door opened again, the redhead passed me with a slur about cops underneath her breath. The light was still off in the bedroom, and the shutters were closed. When I opened the door, I could barely make out the body of a man on the twin bed. The long stretch of pale skin told me he was naked.

“Get dressed, Will.”

“Turn on the light so I can see.”

I didn’t bother with games. I knew he wanted to shock me. I turned on the light, and I kept my reaction off my face. Yes, he was naked, and his skin was mottled all over with the shiny, grotesque burns that he’d suffered in the explosion of his meth lab. Vince had died, but seeing Will made me wonder if his brother had gotten off easy. I didn’t like Will, and I didn’t like what he and Vince had inflicted on the people around Mittel County with the drugs they sold. But he’d definitely been punished.

He saw through the impassive look I was faking. He smirked at my discomfort. His own face was like a shiny plastic mask, with a nose that resembled the opening of a skull. His mouth was like a round cave. His eyes were unaffected, still sharp and blue, as if part of his sentence was to be able to see himself in a mirror every day of his life.

Will limped to a pile of clothes near the bed. I remembered Anna talking about his bad knee, which was wrapped in an elastic bandage. He grimaced as he stepped into a white pair of underwear, and then he sat on the bed without putting on anything else.

“Vengeance is mine,” Will murmured. “That’s what you’re thinking, right? I got what was coming to me?”

“I’m sorry about your situation,” I told him. And I was.

He had the look of a man who was accustomed to pity from everyone he met and had no patience for it. “You can turn off the lights again if you don’t want to look at me. I keep the lights off for sex. Girls won’t do it if they see me. I don’t blame them. I’m a monster.”

I felt like I should disagree with him, but I couldn’t.

“Does Anna know you’re cheating on her? Does she know you bring other girls up here?”

“Anna and I don’t sleep together, so I can’t cheat on her.”

“Oh.” I couldn’t hide my surprise. Or my relief. “Okay.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you’re happy about that. It’s not like Anna hasn’t offered, by the way. She’s told me lots of times that she wanted to do it. I said no.”

“Really.”

“Yes, really. There are only three reasons a girl will sleep with somebody who looks like me. One is because I pay them. Two is because they think they’re at the circus, and they want to see the freaks. Three is because they want to punish themselves. Anna’s number three. That’s the worst kind.”

“Then why do you hang out with her?”

“I don’t. She hangs out with me.”

“Well, do us both a favor and knock it off. I don’t want her with you. I don’t want her anywhere near you. You make her feel bad about herself, and I hate that. That girl can do amazing things with her life, but she’ll never get there with you dragging her down.”

“You’re wrong. I don’t do that. She does it to herself. But hey, I get it, it’s easier to blame me.”

“You told her she was a bad person.”

“No, I said we’re all bad people. I’m a bad person. You’re a bad person. We sin. That’s what people do.”

I had to remind myself that you can go through a lot of physical suffering and still be a jerk. Underneath it all, Will Gruder was still Will Gruder.

“Look, you got a crappy deal,” I told him. “It doesn’t matter that you brought it on yourself. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. If you’re not dealing drugs anymore, great, good for you. If you want to spend your life reading the Bible and doling out pop psychology, that’s fine, too. But leave Anna alone.”

Will shrugged. “Is that all?”

“No. That’s not all. I assume you heard about Jeremiah Sloan and the Mittel Pines Resort.”

“Yeah. Everybody’s talking about it.”

“And about the death of Belinda Brees.”

“Sure. That’s too bad. Breezy was cool.”

“How well did you know her?”

“In the old days, she was our favorite customer. Sometimes she didn’t have any money, so Vince would make her sleep with us instead.”

“Real nice.”

Will rocked back and forth on the bed. His blue eyes were cold. “So what? Like I said, everybody sins. You weren’t exactly an angel back then, were you, Deputy? Cheating. Lying. Wasn’t that you?”

I ignored him, but I felt the sting. He was good at pinpointing people’s weaknesses. His grotesque appearance also gave him a strangely hypnotic presence. He was like a cult leader gathering up disciples to spread his gospel, and Anna was under his spell.

“Where were you Monday night?”

“Lying in a hospital bed. My knee went out, and I had injections. I couldn’t walk. I was there Monday. I was there Tuesday. I only got out this morning. Sorry if that bums you out, Deputy, but I didn’t kill anybody.”

“I never said you did.” But he was right. I wasn’t expecting an unshakable alibi from Will in Breezy’s death. To me, he was my prime suspect. “I want to talk about the weekend that Jeremiah disappeared.”

“What about it?”

“The Mittel Pines Resort is close to your house.”

“So?”

“So did you and Vince ever go out there?”

“Sometimes.”

“Doing what?”

“Hanging out. Screwing around.”

“What about that weekend? Did you go there?”

“No. We’d just got home from our supply trip to Mexico, and we were back in business. We were busy.”

“The road to the resort goes right near your place. Did you see anything that weekend? People? Vehicles?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Did you hear anything?”

Will tilted his chin in thought. He leaned back, putting both palms flat on the mattress. “Music.”

“You heard music? Where was it coming from?”

“I don’t know. Could have been anywhere. We heard it both nights. Friday and Saturday. Someone was playing it pretty loud. Vince was getting pissed.”

“Breezy thought the music was coming from the two of you.”

“That’s why Vince was pissed. He didn’t want the cops getting nosy.”

“Did you check it out?”

“No.”

“Why not? If Vince was angry, seems to me he’d go bang some heads.”

“We didn’t want to attract any attention.”

“What about Breezy? Did she come over to complain?”

“No. We didn’t see her.”

“But you had to pass her trailer when you were coming and going, right?”

“Yeah, so what?”

“Did you see anyone there?”

“Ten years ago? Who knows? Breezy always had a lot of company. All I remember is, yeah, there was music, and it was loud, and then somewhere in the middle of Saturday night, it stopped.”

“It stopped? When?”

“Come on, Deputy. Late. I don’t know.”

“What kind of music was it?”

“A radio station, I think. Seems to me we heard commercials. I remember we could make out some Aerosmith and some Stones, too. Vince was a big Stones fan.”

“Do you remember anything else?”

“It was a long time ago. So no, I don’t remember a damn thing. Are we done?”

“We’re done.”

Will got off the bed and went back to the jumble of clothes on the floor. I could see that his knee was mostly frozen. He bent down with difficulty and grabbed a white T-shirt that he slipped over his torso, and he grimaced in pain as he did so. Then he slipped on a blue flannel shirt and left it unbuttoned.

“Remember what I said about Anna,” I told him.

“Talk to her about that. Not me.”

“Oh, I will.”

Will gestured at his jeans on the floor. “You going to help me put my pants on, or what?”

“Are you kidding?”

“You scared off the girl, Deputy. I can’t do it myself, not with my knee locked. It’s not like you need to be afraid of me. I don’t bite.”

I rolled my eyes. “Lie on the bed. If you try anything, believe me, you’ll regret it.”

Will’s mouth stretched into something close to a grin. He limped to the bed and lay on his back. I picked up his jeans, but as I did, something metal slid out of his pocket. I retrieved it from the floor and studied it in my palm. It was a silver chain, and on the end of it was a blue-and-silver enameled religious medal. On one side was an image of a robed, bearded figure, and on the other was a cross with capital letters circling the outside of the coin.

“This is a medal of St. Benedict, right?”

“That’s right. You know it?”

“I’ve seen one before. What do the letters mean?”

“It’s a Latin curse against Satan. It keeps him away.”

“Do you need help with that?”

“We all do.”

He extended his arm and cupped his fingers together. I let the coiled chain and medal fall back into his hand. He slipped the medal around his neck.

“Where did you get it?”

Will rubbed the medal between his fingers. He took a long time to answer. “I think it was a gift.”

“Really? From whom?”

“I don’t remember. Maybe I found it. Does it matter? It’s not expensive, if you think I stole it. You can probably get one online for ten bucks. You should think about it, Deputy. Seems to me Satan must be hanging around you wherever you go.”

I headed for the door. “Goodbye, Will.”

“Hey, what about my pants?”

“I’ll send your girlfriend up.”

I went back into the cold hallway, then downstairs into the warm, crowded bar. I felt lost in a daze. I watched the seas part for me — cop in uniform again — and I headed out of the Witch’s Brew into the night. The snow had finally stopped, but it left behind a silent white shroud over the world.

I got into my cruiser, but I didn’t turn on the engine.

Instead, I sat there and thought about the medal of St. Benedict. Will was right that it wasn’t valuable. You could walk into a flea market or a church basement and find one for a few dollars.

But I knew where I’d seen St. Benedict before. It was a long, long time ago.

Keith Whalen had kept the very same medal on a hook in his barn.

Chapter Forty-Four

Sometimes you get to the end of a crossword puzzle, and you’ve filled in every answer except one. You’ve got most of the letters, but you can’t figure out that last word, even though it’s right there in front of you. Usually, that means you’re thinking about it all wrong.

That’s how I felt as I drove back to Everywhere. I had all the clues I needed to solve this puzzle, but I still couldn’t fill in the blanks.

I drove fast and made good time. The plows had been out through the storm and had already cleared the highway and the main street through town. Even so, it was late by the time I parked in front of the Nowhere Café. I checked my watch and saw that the diner had closed five minutes earlier. The neon sign in the front window was off, but the lights were still on, and sometimes I can sweet-talk them into a last cup of coffee or piece of pie before I head home.

I got out and peered through the window. In a booth at the far back of the restaurant, I saw Monica and Dad. I felt bad that Monica had stayed late again to look after my father and that she’d have a long drive ahead of her on the snowy roads to get home. The night waitress, whose name was Patty, waved at me when I drummed my fingers on the door. She let me inside, and she still had a hot pot of coffee in her hands. I was saved.

“Take your time, Shelby,” she told me. “I still have to clean up before I head out of here.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s horrible about Breezy.”

“Yeah. It is.”

The diner was like a family, so I knew Patty well. I knew all of the waitresses so well that I probably had their shifts memorized better than they did. They were all friendly, all lifers in our little town. But I couldn’t help thinking that none of them would ever call me “Shel” and that I would never see Breezy behind the counter again, joking and flirting with the men.

“Hello, you two,” I said as I slid into the booth next to Monica. Then I noticed Moody’s urn and corrected myself. “Sorry. You three.”

“Much better,” Monica replied with a squeaky giggle.

I leaned over and apologized in her ear for being late, but she shrugged it off the way she always did. Patty came and poured coffee for me. I closed my eyes and listened to the quiet hum of the diner. It always sounded the same and smelled the same, and at that moment, I was glad for anything in my life that didn’t change. When I opened my eyes, I saw Dad sitting across from me. His white hair was combed, his white mustache trimmed. He whistled tunelessly under his breath, and I could read the signs. He was lost in time tonight, somewhere that only he could see.

For years, I had thought of my father as one of those things in my life that never changed, but that wasn’t true anymore. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I could believe in the stories that he’d told me long ago.

“How are you, Dad?”

He turned his warm eyes on me. “Fine, Shelby. How was your day?”

“My day?” I thought about what to say. “My day was all about Breezy, Dad. Do you remember her? Belinda Brees?”

“Do I remember her? After that diving save she made in the game last night? I love how that long hair of hers flies when she jumps. That girl is so intense on the court. Well, you all are. Trust me, you girls are on your way to the championship this year. It’s going to happen.”

I worked up a smile. “I hope so, Dad.”

To him, Breezy and I were still two high school seniors playing volleyball. I almost envied him, because he had this strange superpower to drop himself down into another part of his life. The man with almost no memory could remember everything from some parts of the past, if only for a few seconds. I wanted that power for myself. I wanted to go back to that Sunday morning ten years ago after that rainy, rainy night. I wanted to sit right over there at the counter again and talk to Breezy.

I wanted to ask her: What happened last night?

What did you see?

What did you hear?

Who was with you?

But I couldn’t.

And the fact is, I knew the answers to all of those questions, and they didn’t help me. What happened? Nothing. What did she see? Nothing. What did she hear? Music, just music, blowing in with the wind.

Who was with her? Dennis Sloan.

A cheating husband with a missing son. But Dennis wasn’t the man I wanted. I simply didn’t believe it.

No, the man I wanted was Will Gruder. I had this insane notion that the medal of St. Benedict around Will’s neck really did belong to Keith Whalen. That Will and Vince had been the ones to murder Colleen. That Keith was innocent, just like he said, and that somehow the Gruders had discovered that Jeremiah had seen it all happen. Which gave them a reason to make sure he disappeared. They’d heard the Rolling Stones booming from the pickup truck’s radio that night. They’d gone out to the resort and found Jeremiah, and they’d seized the opportunity to make the one witness to their crime go away for good.

That’s what I wanted the last word in the crossword puzzle to be. Four letters.

Will.

But the letters simply didn’t fit the clue. Breezy didn’t know anything about Will or Keith or Colleen or even Jeremiah back then. And Will didn’t kill Breezy. I knew that, too. He’d been in the hospital in Stanton on Monday night. So if Will didn’t kill Breezy, then I simply wasn’t looking at the clue the right way.

So I did the only thing you can do when you can’t solve a puzzle.

I switched puzzles.

“I enjoyed talking to you last night, Dad.”

His face grew quizzical. “Last night?”

“At the lake.”

“Oh. Well. I enjoyed it, too.” He smiled, but I knew he didn’t remember. Our time at the shore of Shelby Lake was already filed away in a part of his brain that he couldn’t locate.

“You told me about the day your mother died,” I prompted him. “You took a trip. You met a woman who rescued you in a campground.”

He looked lost at what I was saying. He blinked rapidly, and his smile faltered. His expression told me that all I was doing was upsetting him. I wasn’t sure he even remembered his mother at that moment. And certainly not a policewoman he’d encountered somewhere in a long-ago winter. They may as well have been ghosts who’d never existed.

“It’s okay, Dad. It doesn’t matter.”

He looked grateful that I dropped it. That’s what always hurt more than anything, that momentary look of panic in his eyes. I could see his mind saying: These are things I should know. Why don’t I know them? Fortunately, it never lasted long, and then the curtain came down again to protect him.

Dad shouldered his way to the side of the booth and got out, looking tall and fit. The disease could be a terrible mirage. “Nature calls,” he said.

I watched him make his way to the restroom, and I kept a close watch on the hallway, because the rear door of the diner was back there. I didn’t want him wandering out into the snow.

Monica inched closer to me and spoke in a low voice. “What was that about Tom’s mother?”

“He told me that he took a long drive after she died, and he got lost somewhere. Did he ever tell you about that?”

If anyone would know, it was Monica, but she shook her head. “I vaguely remember him taking a couple of days off, but he never spoke about what he did. Why?”

“It’s nothing.”

For now, this was my secret. My mystery.

I saw the restroom door open again, and my father came back to the booth. Patty came over with the final dregs of the coffee. “One last warmer-upper before you go, Tom?”

“Oh, no, thank you, Breezy. I’m likely to float away.”

Patty looked uncomfortable at being called by the name of a dead woman. She looked at me with a silent question as to whether she should correct him or not. I gently shook my head.

“So you’ve got Dudley running again, do you?” Dad went on. “Yesterday you said he was on life support. You weren’t sure you were going to get him started again. Good thing you made it to work with all of these out-of-towners around. Big tips, am I right?”

I didn’t know exactly where he was at that moment, but what he was saying made me hold my breath. Maybe somewhere in Dad’s head, he knew what I needed, and he was trying to find it for me. Maybe, for him, it was that Sunday morning ten years ago after Jeremiah disappeared.

Maybe he knew something that I’d forgotten long ago.

“Dudley?” Patty asked him. “Who’s Dudley?”

I cringed, because I was afraid that she would jar him out of his memories when I needed him to be back in the past. But Dad simply gave one of his Santa laughs.

“Your car, Breezy, your car! Yesterday you had to rely on Monica’s taxi service to make it to the diner, don’t you remember? But here you are today, bright and early. So I assume Dudley is back in the land of the living.”

I mouthed to her: Yes.

“Uh, yeah, yeah, sure he is, Tom,” Patty murmured.

“Good, very good. How did you get home last night anyway? You were working pretty late. Did you find a knight in shining armor to take you out to Witch Tree?”

Patty looked completely at sea, but I felt a chill running up and down the length of my body.

“Last night?” Patty said, not understanding the game. “My husband picked me up, like he always does. We only have the one car. I’m sorry, Tom, did you want more coffee?”

“Oh, well, sure, just a little more for the road. Thank you, young lady.”

I knew that Dad was gone again. Patty was “young lady,” not Breezy. He was back in the shadows, among strangers he didn’t know. The visits never lasted long.

But this time, he’d given me the clue I needed to solve the puzzle.

“You picked up Breezy in Witch Tree on that Saturday morning,” I said to Monica. “You brought her to the diner that day, right?”

Monica knitted her eyebrows in confusion and stroked Moody’s urn. “I’m sorry, dear, what?”

“Saturday. The day after Jeremiah went missing. You picked up Breezy.”

“Did I? Oh yes, you’re right, I did. She couldn’t get Dudley started, and she called to see if I would stop at her place on my way into town. I’d forgotten all about it. But why is that important?”

I shook my head. “It’s not. It doesn’t matter how she got to the diner. What’s important is how she got from the diner to her place in Witch Tree that night. She didn’t have her car with her. She was stranded here. So who took her home?”

Monica looked at me for the answer. “Do you know?”

In that first moment, I didn’t.

And in the next moment, in a rush, I did. Yes, I did. The snow melted around me, and I knew everything. I knew who took Breezy home. I knew who killed her. I knew how Jeremiah died, I knew how Paul Nadler’s body made its way to the river in Stanton, I knew how that white F-150 had been abandoned at Shelby Lake without anyone coming to pick up the driver.

There was just one man behind all of it.

One man with a motorcycle.

“Shelby?” Monica asked me. “Who took Breezy home that night?”

“A well-meaning traveler,” I replied.

I woke up Agent Reed at the motel.

It had been the Avery Weir Inn since Rose sold it, but we all still called it the Rest in Peace. I saw a laptop open on the bed in Reed’s room, but his eyes were heavy, as if he’d fallen asleep while working.

“Shelby,” he said in surprise, with a glance at his watch. “Is everything okay?”

“No. No, I don’t think so. I have a question for you. Do you remember that voicemail that Adam left for you when you came to town the first time? The one that almost got him fired?”

“Of course,” Reed replied with a roll of his eyes.

“This will sound strange, but do you still have it?”

He gave me a puzzled look. “Well, I’m sure we have it archived somewhere. Trust me, the FBI saves everything. It would take me a few minutes to find on our server, though. Why? What is this about?”

“I need to listen to it again.”

Reed read the expression on my face. He was wide awake now. “Okay. Let me see what I can do.”

He retrieved his laptop from the bed and relocated it to a circular table near the window. He sat down and began tapping the keys. I closed the motel-room door behind me, shutting out the winter air. Reed gave me a sideways glance as he typed. “So are you going to tell me what this is about?”

“Drunk driving. I’m pretty sure that’s what this is about.”

His fingers stopped over the keys. “What?”

“No kidnapping. No abuse. Just drunk driving.”

Reed didn’t push me to explain. He turned his eyes down to the keyboard and focused on his laptop again. It took him only a few minutes to find the archived recording of Adam’s voicemail. The time stamp was just before one a.m. on that early Sunday morning ten years ago. He called me over to listen, and then he played it for me. I’d heard the message once before, but I barely remembered what Adam had said. I only knew it had been bad, and it was.

“Special Agent Reed, this is Deputy Adam Twilley. Just thought I’d check in with you after a really productive day checking the toilets of campgrounds around here. Yeah, thanks a lot for the vote of confidence. I bet you thought that was funny. I bet you guys had a good laugh about that. Man, you feebs really think you’re rock stars, huh? You think you’re so much better than a bunch of rubes like us in the sticks. Well, you know what? You’re all just a—”

I held up my hand to make Reed stop the playback. There was no need to go on. I confess, I cleaned up what Adam had said. It was much, much worse, filled with insults and F-bombs. The fact is, I wasn’t really listening to Adam’s slurred, drunken voice.

I was listening to the background.

“Did you hear it?”

Reed looked at me. “Hear what?”

“The music.”

He played it again, and this time he heard it, too. It was music from a car radio. Close by, so close that Adam had to be practically on top of it, Mick Jagger was croaking out “Under My Thumb.”

“The music is coming from the F-150,” I said. “Adam was there. He was at the resort.”

Chapter Forty-Five

At daybreak, I asked Adam to meet me.

The morning was cold and clear at the old Mittel Pines Resort. With barely a murmur of wind, every branch in the trees was still. The winter gray had vanished and left the clearing under blue skies, making the bed of snow sparkle like a field of diamonds. I hiked through calf-deep powder into the middle of the meadow and found a fallen tree trunk. I brushed off the snow and sat down. I waited.

Adam arrived ten minutes later.

I watched him come. He wore his uniform and his hat like shields that he could hide behind. He was the sheriff, but to me, he looked like a boy again, impulsive and reckless. I could see now what the years and the guilt had done to him. I tried to imagine what it was like to keep a terrible secret for so long and to see it reflected in your own eyes whenever you looked in a mirror.

As he came close to me, I watched him try to decode my own face. Did I know?

He stood over me and squinted into the sun. His shadow stretched behind him. “Shelby.”

“Hello, Adam.”

“What’s up? Why the early meeting?”

“I have a question.”

“Yeah? What is it?”

“I want to know if it was an accident.”

He tried to keep his cool, but his whole body stiffened. “What are you talking about?”

“Not Jeremiah. I know he was an accident. I’m talking about Breezy. Did you mean to do it? Was it deliberate? Or did you simply get angry and push her and she fell?”

“Is this a joke?”

“Oh, no. No joke. What was the problem, did she want you to pay her to keep quiet? Violet says Breezy wasn’t above a little blackmail. She needed money, and you’ve got a lot of it.”

Adam shook his head, but he was a terrible actor. He was trembling down to his boots. “I think you’ve had a stroke, Shelby. We should get you some help.”

I stood up from the fallen tree, and we were eye to eye.

“When I asked Breezy who went home with her on that Saturday night ten years ago, she was about to say it was you. Right? You took her home on your motorcycle. But she stopped and didn’t say anything when she saw you flinch. Did she realize that you didn’t want her to tell me? She must have wondered why. When you came back later, had she already figured it out? Did she threaten to expose you? So the two of you argued. You grabbed her by the shoulders, you shoved her, and she fell and hit her head. I really hope it was an accident. Breezy was my friend. I don’t want to think you went over there to kill her.”

“We’re done here, Shelby. I’m leaving.”

“No, you’re not going anywhere, Sheriff. I need to tell you a story.”

“What kind of story?”

“I’m going to tell you what happened to Jeremiah. Agent Reed and I spent most of the night working out the details. Yes, he knows all about it, too. We must be pretty close to the truth, but you can stop me if I get anything wrong. Okay?”

Adam stared at me with hollow, empty eyes and said nothing.

“We know about Paul Nadler taking the F-150 and meeting up with Jeremiah. I bet they liked each other immediately. The old man, the young boy. Nadler probably asked him if he knew where this old resort was, and Jeremiah said, sure, I know that place. And off they went. They drove here. Right here. It must have been an adventure for Jeremiah. Hunting for rocks. Playing with his badminton racket. Putting Legos together. Playing the radio on the pickup truck. I’m sure he was thinking he’d have a great story to tell when he got home.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the cabin where the two of them had stayed. It was winter now. It was summer then. But Anna was right. Suddenly, I could feel Jeremiah all over this place.

“Friday was fun, but I bet Saturday was when the fun started to wear off. Jeremiah started getting lonely. Hungry, too. I don’t imagine he had much to eat in his backpack. His phone was dead. He was missing his family and wondering what to do. I don’t know exactly when Paul Nadler had his heart attack, but at some point, Jeremiah must have realized that this sweet old man was gone. Just like his own grandfather. All of a sudden, the adventure began to get scary. And when it got dark on Saturday? And a thunderstorm came roaring in? That poor kid. He must have been terrified. Probably the only thing that helped was listening to the radio on the truck, but he’d had the engine running for hours. It must have been getting pretty low on gas. I feel bad, thinking about him all alone, hiding in the cabin, wondering if anyone would ever find him.”

I stared into Adam’s eyes.

“But someone did. You found him.”

Out of the stillness, a single gust of wind whipped across the meadow and took Adam’s hat off his head. It rolled away on top of the snow like an old tire. Adam made no attempt to retrieve it.

“Saturday was a rotten day for you,” I went on. “I get that. You were doing grunt work for the FBI. You were tired. You were pissed off. You smelled like campground toilets. So you spent the evening drinking at the Nowhere Café and pouring out your problems to Breezy. And when the diner finally closed, you took her home. She rode on the back of your bike in the pouring rain. Not smart, Adam. You were already pretty drunk. You could have both been killed. But you made it to her trailer. What did you do when you got there? Did you drink more? Or did Breezy share any of her other stash with you? Meth? Cocaine? Heroin? Did you sleep with her, or were you too drunk and riled to make it to bed? That probably made you feel worse. Now you were really angry. So when the rain stopped, you told Breezy you were heading home. She came outside with you, and she heard the music. Rock and roll radio blaring over the trees for hours. Just like the previous night. She was sure it was the Gruders. She asked you to go over there and tell them to knock it off, and that’s what you did. You drove your motorcycle down the dirt road, but pretty soon you realized it couldn’t be the Gruders. The music was coming from the other direction. And that’s when you headed to the old resort.”

It was all so vivid. I knew Adam. I could see him parking at the end of that road and following the music toward the cabins like a siren. He must have suspected what he would find there. He must have realized that he was going to be a hero. What a combination of alcohol and adrenaline would have been pumping through his bloodstream.

“You came up here, and you saw it. There it was. The white F-150. Did you call out Jeremiah’s name? No, probably not. You still thought he’d been kidnapped. You figured whoever did it was still around. So you searched through the cabins, and you found him. Safe. Alive. Alone except for that poor old man, dead on the moldy mattress. Did Jeremiah run to you? Did he hug you? Wow, what a moment that must have been, Adam. Really. I know how exhilarated you must have felt. All these people searching, all these out-of-towners, all the national media, all the Feds treating you like dirt — and you found Jeremiah. You. All by yourself. You were going to be on television. I mean, real television, New York talk shows. Magazine covers, too. Probably a movie. You were going to be famous.”

I felt my words catching in my throat. I didn’t like doing this to him. I really didn’t.

“That’s when you left the voicemail for Agent Reed, right? I can hear it in your voice when I listen to it. That smug triumph. You were going to show all of them, all of those arrogant Feds. Except you were drunk, and you were impatient. You should have called for backup, Adam. One phone call to my father, and then you wait there with Jeremiah until the cavalry arrives. But that wasn’t good enough for you, was it? You weren’t going to let anybody else take that boy home. You were going to do it yourself. You were going to drive him right up to his house and put him in his mother’s arms. Nobody else. Not my father. Not me. Certainly not Agent Reed. Deputy Adam Twilley was going to save the day. But there was hardly any gas left in the pickup, was there? It was pretty much empty by then. So you said to Jeremiah: How about the two of us take a ride? You ever ridden on a motorcycle?”

I looked at the stricken pain on Adam’s face.

I knew I’d gotten it exactly right.

“You could feel that boy’s arms clenched around your waist as you rode. You must have been flying. You were thinking about your future and how this was going to change your life. You were thinking what it was going to be like when Ellen Sloan saw her son again. You were thinking about all those media people interviewing you and taking your picture. You were thinking about everything except what you should have been thinking about. The road. The wet pavement. The bike. You took one of the curves too fast, is that how it went down? The bike spun out? You fell. Jeremiah fell. You got up, but he didn’t.”

I shook my head.

“I’m trying to imagine the horror you felt, Adam, and I can’t. I just can’t. One split second, and all those dreams turned to nightmares. You’d found our boy, and now, instead of rescuing him, you’d killed him. You weren’t going to be the hero anymore. You were going to be hated. Everyone in town, in the state, in the country, would know your name. Adam Twilley. The drunken deputy who let a missing boy die on his motorcycle. You were going to lose your job. You were going to jail. Your life was over. You were in a panic. What do you do? You can’t let anyone know what happened. Nobody can know Jeremiah or Paul Nadler were anywhere near that resort. You had to cover it all up.”

I pictured him standing over the boy’s dead body on the road. Dragging him down the shoulder into the woods. Coming up with a desperate plan.

“You needed gasoline for the truck. So you rode back to Breezy’s, right? You figured she’d have a tank in her shed. Except in the middle of doing that, you heard somebody outside the trailer. Dennis Sloan. He felt you watching him; he was sure someone was there. But you were lucky. He didn’t find you. He left, and then you took the gas tank and went back to the resort to get the truck. You had to move fast. You needed to get everything done while it was still dark. You tried to hide any evidence that Jeremiah had been there, but you were in a hurry. There were things you missed, things you didn’t know about. The rocks. The Legos. The lost shuttlecock in the chimney. You filled up the gas tank of the truck, and you put Mr. Nadler’s body in the back, and you put your motorcycle in the flatbed. Then you went back to where Jeremiah was waiting for you. Was there a shovel in the pickup, or did you take one from Breezy’s shed? Either way, you buried him. You dug through the wet ground and buried him. Do you still remember the place where you did it? I don’t think you forget something like that. I hope you remember, because you’re going to take us there, Adam.”

His breaths were coming faster and faster. His eyes darted back and forth, as if he could find a way to escape if he looked hard enough.

“Then all that was left was to get rid of Paul Nadler. And the truck. So you drove all the way across the county to Stanton. It was a long way to go, but that was the safest bet, right? Put Mr. Nadler in the river not far from his nursing home. Everyone would assume he’d wandered away on foot and died. But the truck? The truck couldn’t be anywhere nearby. You didn’t want anyone to connect Nadler to the F-150. So after that, you went over to Shelby Lake and wiped down the truck and left it behind. Then you took your motorcycle and you drove home.”

Adam didn’t look at me. His gaze wandered across the field, following his hat as it blew away toward the trees. When he finally said something, he was the old Adam. The arrogant James Dean Adam. The hero with the inferiority complex.

“That’s a hell of a story, Shelby.”

“It’s a true story. Right?”

“I’m a cop. I know the difference between evidence and speculation. I know when somebody has proof and when somebody has nothing.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t count on that, Adam. We’ll be able to prove you were at the resort, because we’ve got the voicemail to Agent Reed. And when we search along the road between here and Witch Tree, sooner or later we’re going to find Jeremiah. Even after all this time, the FBI forensics team will find something to connect him to you and your bike. Count on it. But you can save us the trouble. You can admit what you did right now.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you’ve been living with the guilt for ten years, and it’s killing you. The only thing that will make it go away is to admit the truth. The only way to save yourself is to give up the secret. Tell me the truth, Adam. Tell us the truth.”

“Us?”

I gestured over his shoulder. Adam turned around. They were all there in the snow behind him, their faces grim.

Ellen.

Dennis.

Adrian.

Agent Reed.

They stood there watching him like a silent jury.

“We’re here so you can take us to Jeremiah,” I said. “Don’t you think it’s about time, Adam? It’s time for him to come home. Tell us where he is.”

Adam tried to say something, but nothing came out of his mouth. He swallowed hard. He sucked his upper lip between his teeth and bit down. He blinked over and over, until he blinked out a single tear that ran down his red cheeks. His fingers clenched into fists.

“Please, Adam. Take us there.”

He staggered away from me through the drifts. He didn’t run; he knew there was nowhere to go. No one said a word. The Sloans were quiet. So was Agent Reed. No one made any attempt to stop him. I followed in his footsteps. We hiked through the clearing and back into the trees and down to the turnaround at the end of the dirt road. Adam went to his car. I saw him freeze outside the driver’s door. He squeezed his head with both hands, as if he could shut out the memories flooding through his mind. Then he looked back at me, and our eyes met, and he gave me an expression that must be like a drowning man when his lungs run out of air.

Adam got in his car. I got in mine. I knew where we were going.

The two of us headed down the dirt road in tandem back toward Witch Tree. Adam drove slowly, letting me trail behind him in the ruts his car made. We went around a sharp curve. Then another. And another. And then, ahead of us, the road straightened for half a mile. At the end of the straightaway was a swooping S curve with a sign warning drivers to slow down.

I heard the roar of the engine in front of me. Adam accelerated his cruiser like a jet unleashing its engines on the runway. His tires squealed, and the car fishtailed as he built up speed. Snow shot up in clouds behind him. I thought for a moment he was trying to escape, but he wasn’t. The reality of what he was doing dawned on me, and I lowered my window and shouted.

“No, no, no, don’t do it!”

He was too far away to hear me. I sped up, too, but I couldn’t catch him. Adam rocketed down the straightaway. His brake lights never flashed, not once. The bend of the S-curve loomed ahead of him, but he didn’t slow down or turn the wheel. The cruiser burst through the snow and took flight, shooting off the road, lifting off the ground and jolting to a lethal stop an instant later as it slammed into the trees beyond the curve. I heard the tortured squeal of metal and the shatter of glass.

I brought my own car to a stop, and I got out and ran. The shoulder of the road dipped down to the frozen creek ten feet below me. I half slid, half fell into the valley. Adam’s car was upside down among the trees, its tires still spinning. Steam hissed into the air. I pushed toward the wreck and squatted to look inside, but the front seat was empty. I peered through the skeletal branches and saw Adam crumpled on the ground not far away. He’d gone through the windshield like a bullet. When I reached him, I knew that he was already dead. His face was ribboned with blood. His head was snapped sideways like a broken doll. He was warm, but he was gone.

I listened to the loud, fast, in-and-out of my own breathing. My sweat was wet and cold, and my feet inside my boots were soaked. Around me, the forest continued its winter sleep, undisturbed. There was nothing but me and the trees and the snow and the creek, but I wasn’t alone. I had the strangest feeling of someone being with me, of someone who’d been waiting for me to arrive. I turned around in a slow circle. No one was there. But squeezed among the oaks and pines was a stand of birch trees, their bark flaking away like old paint, their black-and-white trunks rooted in the ground like the legs of elephants. One of the thick birches called to me, and I fought through the snow to get to it.

That was when I saw the sign.

A cross had been carved into the trunk.

Ten years ago, it must have been invisible among the summer foliage, just two slim gashes cut out of the bark. But it had grown along with the tree. As the trunk bulged and thickened, so did the cross, begging for someone to notice it and understand what it was.

My body felt enveloped by a warm glow even among the frigid cold. The earth at my feet felt sacred.

Someone was buried below me, and I knew who it was.

Chapter Forty-Six

Ten years after Jeremiah Sloan disappeared, we finally brought him home.

With the help of propane fires and insulated blankets, we melted the frost in the ground and dug carefully through the soft soil at the base of the birch tree. Three feet down, we found the skeleton of a child. Adam had buried Jeremiah with his arms folded across his chest. If it was possible for bones to look peaceful, then his body looked as if it had been at peace all this time.

His Sunday suit had long ago disintegrated, leaving behind only the leather and rusted buckle of his belt and the rubber remnants of the sneakers on his feet. He still wore his backpack. Parts of it — the zippers, the thick vinyl, the plastic-encased pockets — had survived the freezing, thawing, moisture, and bugs. His badminton racket was caked with dirt but otherwise intact. His dead cell phone was safely locked inside a zippered pocket and a boy-proof indestructible case. Agent Reed took it for analysis by the FBI team. If any photos could be retrieved from Jeremiah’s phone, I wanted his parents to have them.

We were at the scene for most of three days. The time was reverent for all of us. The Sloans were there, all three of them, when we brought their boy into the light again. We kept the media away, so that they could have a private moment with him. From where I was, I saw Adrian whisper something to his brother, and I was pretty sure he said Welcome back. Ellen and Dennis held hands and hugged each other fiercely. The love of that moment wouldn’t last, but for a little while anyway they cried the tears of a family that had been reunited.

On the last day, as Jeremiah was brought back to Everywhere, I thought about the first day when he disappeared. Strange as it sounds, my father had been right all along. He hadn’t believed in a stranger abduction. He’d had faith that the people here were basically good and that we would find an innocent explanation at the heart of the mystery. And we did.

Sadly, it came without a happy ending.

Three weeks later, Jeremiah finally had his funeral, and we all got to say goodbye. It seemed as if the whole state came. Thousands of people braved the cold for hours to pay their respects. The bend in the road where he’d waited for us to find him became a shrine, covered over with flowers freezing into brittle china. His face and smile no longer haunted us from missing-person photos the way they had for years. He had a permanent home.

Before the public service, the Sloans held a small memorial of their own at their church. They wanted to say thank you to the town and to the police for never giving up hope. The minister spoke. Ellen, Dennis, and Adrian spoke. And then they went from person to person to shake every hand. We all cried, but the tears were cathartic, letting go of ten years of pain.

When Ellen came to me, she slipped something into my hand. I looked at my palm and saw a smooth, flat stone, the kind of stone you’d place among the rocks of a cairn to honor the dead.

“I kept this stone in my pocket every day for the past ten years,” Ellen whispered to me. “It came from Jeremiah’s room. I swore I would never let go of it until we found him. And now we have, thanks to you. I want you to keep it.”

I tried to say something, but I had no words.

Ellen kissed my cheek, and she moved on.

It was a day of closure for all of us. Lucas was there, apologizing to the Sloans for what his grandfather had done. Dennis Sloan wrapped him up in a bear hug and told him that God hadn’t wanted Paul Nadler to be alone when he died, and that was why he’d brought Jeremiah to him.

I’d like to believe that’s true.

Agent Reed was there. So was Monica, carrying Moody in his urn. And Rose. And Violet. And Jeannie Samper and all of her kids. And Dad, looking handsome in his suit. I wished he could understand that the long mystery had come to an end, but he was already deep into his own mystery.

Everyone was there except the one person I wanted to see. Every time the door opened, I kept hoping, but the service began and ended without her.

Anna didn’t come.

Later that same day, my own life took a turn I wasn’t expecting.

I was back at the Nowhere Café with Monica and Dad, and Violet came through the door and made her way straight to the booth where we were sitting. She sat down next to my father, and he smiled and called her “young lady,” because he didn’t remember who she was. Violet nodded at Monica, who didn’t look at all surprised to see her there.

“Deputy Lake,” she said to me.

I tried not to roll my eyes at the formal greeting. “Hello, Violet.”

“I know the congresswoman has already thanked you, but I wanted to say thank you myself for everything you did on her behalf.”

“That’s not necessary, but I appreciate it.”

And I did. Violet and I were never going to be friends, but she was looking at me with something I’d never seen from her before.

Respect.

“Obviously, I’m not on the county board anymore,” she went on, “but my former colleagues thought I’d be the best person to sound you out about something.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

Violet took another quick glance at Monica before focusing on me again.

“The board would like you to consider an appointment as interim sheriff. They also wanted you to know that if you’d consider running for the position in the November election, you’d have their full support.”

“Me? Sheriff?”

“Well, you’ve pretty much been filling the role anyway since Adam’s death,” Violet pointed out. “So I assume you’ve thought about it.”

In fact, I hadn’t thought about it at all. I know I should have, but I really hadn’t had time to think about the future. There were too many details filling up the present. The trouble was, now that the opportunity was staring me in the face, I did think about it, and I knew what my answer had to be.

“Tell the board how much I appreciate their confidence,” I replied, “but no.”

“No?”

“I’m sorry. No. I’d love to do it, but I can’t.”

Violet didn’t ask me why. She seemed to know why. She got out of the booth and then bent down and put a hand on my father’s shoulder. “Tom? Mr. Ginn? I wonder if you’d mind giving me just a moment alone with Shelby and Monica. Would that be okay?”

“Violet,” I said in protest, but Dad simply slid his big body out of the booth.

“Why, certainly, I know how women like to chat.”

I watched him make his way to the counter, where Patty brought him a slice of tollhouse pie.

Violet sat down across from me again. “I assume Tom’s the reason?”

“Yes.”

“You have your own life to live, Shelby.”

“I know that, but my father is everything to me. I’m not going to put him in a facility. I’m going to take care of him myself.”

“At some point, you won’t have a choice.”

“Well, for right now, I do, and my choice is to be with him. I can’t do that and be sheriff at the same time. It’s hard enough the way things are.”

“You could get help,” Violet said. “You could find someone to live with you and look after Tom when you’re gone.”

I had to laugh. “Live-in help? Are you kidding? Do you know how much that costs?”

As I said this, Monica reached over and took my hand. It was as if she’d been waiting for that moment. “In fact, Shelby, it will cost you nothing at all.”

“What do you mean?”

She continued to hold my hand with the calmness of someone who would never let go. “I’m quitting my job, dear. It’s time for me to retire. If you can find a place for me — and Moody, of course — then let me move in with you and Tom. That’s where my heart is. That’s where I can be most useful at this stage of my life. With me around, I think you should be able to balance your career and your devotion to your father, don’t you think?”

The offer took my breath away. I shook my head and tried not to cry. “Monica, I can’t believe you. I don’t know what to say.”

“Say yes,” she replied. “And say yes to Violet.”

“I don’t know if this will work. It’s still too much.”

“Well, we won’t know until we try, will we?”

“I guess that’s true.”

“Tom always wanted you to be the sheriff.”

“I know he did.”

“If you’re honest with yourself, I think you’ll realize that you’ve wanted this, too. And you’ll be good at it. Truth be told, you were made to do this, Shelby. Everyone I talk to in town says the same thing. They all want you.”

“She’s right,” Violet said.

I glanced at my father, who was sitting at the counter with his cup of coffee and his pie. Yes, this was what he’d always wanted for me. And yes, as a girl, I’d imagined the day when Dad would hand me his badge, and I would take over. I just never thought the circumstances would be like this.

I extended my arm to Violet, and we shook hands. “Okay. I can’t promise to run in November. Let’s see how the year goes. But for now, you can tell the board I’ll take the interim post.”

Violet looked pleased with herself. She had a way of getting what she wanted, and I was pretty sure she’d worked this all out with Monica in advance.

“Congratulations, Shelby. You’re the new sheriff of Mittel County.”

Chapter Forty-Seven

Slowly, the town of Everywhere exhaled.

The media and the strangers went away and left us alone. February became March, and the snow began to melt. March became April, and buds appeared on the trees. Life returned to normal day by day. My own life was a constant juggling act, but Monica and I became master jugglers. Somehow, I found time to wear my many hats. I was a daughter. I was a sheriff. I was a volunteer helping Lucas and Jeannie with the owls. I was a girl with a guitar.

I had everything I needed, but I couldn’t get past my biggest disappointment.

You see, I’d lost Anna. I’d failed.

Yes, I’d wrested her away from Will Gruder. She was back home with me, but the fire had gone out of her eyes. I actually missed her defiance. Ever since we’d found Jeremiah’s body, she’d become an empty shell, drained of passion. Her father, Karl, reached out to her, but she pushed him out of her life the way she did everyone who tried to help her. She wouldn’t go to therapy. Her drinking got worse, and the physical signs told me she was using drugs, too, as if the chemicals would deaden her.

She was a beautiful girl, only twenty years old, but she acted as if her life was over. I tried to talk to her, but she simply dug a hole for herself that got deeper each day. Now that Jeremiah was safe, it seemed as if Anna was the one buried in the woods.

Sometimes the dead are easier to find than the living.

This went on for weeks. I was losing hope that it would ever change.

Then, on May 1, I brought home a package from Agent Reed, and I thought what was inside might be what I needed to open up a little door into Anna’s heart. It was like a message from her childhood.

Midnight had come and gone by the time I got home that day. I often got back late in my new job. Thank God for Monica, who put up with my hours without a single complaint and was always there for Dad. I checked on both of them. Monica was asleep in her room, with Moody on the nightstand beside her, and my father was asleep in his. But I knew that Anna hardly ever slept. She’d be awake for hours. In the middle of the night, I would hear her moving around downstairs like a fitful ghost.

I found her in her room. She lay on her back, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. The older she got, the more she reminded me of Trina. It wasn’t just how she looked. With the benefit of time, I could see some of my old friend’s flaws in her, too. Trina had always been emotionally distant, someone who was willing to cut off the highs in order to never face the lows. Karl had confided in me a while back that Trina suffered from severe depression her whole life. I never knew about it. I didn’t know if that could be passed down from mother to daughter, but Anna had clearly followed Trina’s path. If you don’t want to feel bad, then the safe thing is to feel nothing. Unlike me, who felt everything way too much.

“Hey,” I said to her.

Anna didn’t look at me. The one lamp in the room was dim and cast shadows. Her face was dark as she stared at the ceiling. “What do you want, Shelby? I’m tired.”

“I have something I thought we could look at together. I think you’ll want to see it.”

“What is it?”

I held up a plastic bag with a thumb drive inside. “The FBI finally sent me what they recovered from Jeremiah’s phone. I thought we could check it out on my computer.”

“No, thanks.”

“Look, I know it’ll be sad, but if there are pictures, don’t you want to see them? It’s the last little bit of Jeremiah we have. I thought it might make you feel close to him again.”

“I don’t want to see any pictures.”

“All right. Maybe later.”

“No. Not later. I don’t want to see them ever.”

I shoved the thumb drive back in my pocket. I sat down next to Anna on the bed and stroked my fingers through her blond hair. She didn’t react at all. All I could feel from her was numbness.

“Is it really so hard to think about him?”

“I don’t think about him at all.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You can believe what you want. When people go, they’re gone. Dwelling on it doesn’t bring them back.”

“No, it doesn’t. But forgetting them isn’t any better.”

Anna closed her eyes. “I’m tired, Shelby.”

“All right. Good night. Try to get some sleep.”

I left her bedroom and closed the door softly behind me. I went to my own room and kept the lights off. I opened the window, letting in crisp spring air. Outside, the forest and the cemetery were lit up in a gray glow by the moon shining through misty clouds. I stood there for a while, watching the world. Spring was my favorite time of year, but my heart was heavy.

I took the thumb drive from my pocket again. I felt as if I were holding Jeremiah’s soul in my hand. I didn’t want to wait until morning to see what he’d left for us. I booted up my computer and pushed the device into the USB slot. According to the note from Agent Reed, the FBI had recovered nearly five hundred photos and a similar number of text messages from the boy’s phone. This was like his last will and testament. His last chance to speak to us.

I checked the texts first, which took me into the past. Jeremiah was alive again, and we were all more than ten years younger. We’d lived the “after” of this case for so long that it was strange to be reminded of the “before.” I smiled as I read the texts. He’d messaged back and forth with his brother during the long summer days. He’d sent Adrian silly jokes, the kind little boys tell.

What did the dog say to the tree?

Bark.

He’d exchanged texts with his mother, too. Ordinary things. What’s for dinner. When do I have to be home. Yes, I took a shower. One of the messages broke my heart. It had been sent to Ellen two days after her father’s funeral.

Where did Grampa go?

Ellen texted back: Heaven. We talked about this, honey. He and Grammy are in Heaven, and they’re happy, but they miss us just like we miss them.

Jeremiah texted back: Okay.

But I remembered that he was still wearing his Sunday suit when he disappeared.

There were messages to his friends in the archive, but I was surprised to find only one message to Anna. The recovered texts went back for over a year prior to his disappearance. The boy hadn’t deleted anything else on his phone, as far as I could tell, but at some point, he’d erased his texts with Anna. They’d been best friends the previous summer, and I was sure they’d sent hundreds of messages back and forth to each other. But the texts were all gone.

The only message that was left was a text that Jeremiah had sent to Anna in the early spring.

It said: Are you still scared of the Ursulina?

There was no reply.

I closed out the messages, and I loaded the photographs.

What I saw was the world through Jeremiah’s ten-year-old eyes. He took photographs of everything. A rabbit in the middle of the yard. A june bug on a soccer ball. Cheerios spilled on the floor. Adrian playing a video game. His father napping in a hammock. A leaf. A doorknob. Most of the pictures were blurry because he never stood still long enough to focus.

The photographs began that summer, but then they went backward in time to when Jeremiah was in school. I recognized dozens of students from different grades. Teachers I knew. Classes, desks, and blackboards inside the school building in Everywhere and the sprawling athletic fields outside. Click click click. I smiled at everything I saw.

What stopped me was seeing a photograph of Keith Whalen.

It was nothing unusual. It was simply a photo of Keith taking a drink of water from a hallway fountain. Jeremiah took plenty of pictures of random things, but I wondered why he’d taken that photograph.

And then, as I scrolled through more pictures, I saw Keith again, getting out of his car in the school parking lot.

And again in the cafeteria.

And again grading papers at his desk in an empty classroom. All in all, I found almost twenty different pictures of Keith Whalen taken around the school grounds.

That wasn’t a coincidence. Jeremiah had been spying on him.

When I located the earliest photograph of Keith in the picture gallery, I checked the date stamp, and it looked familiar to me. Jeremiah had taken the photo on the same day he’d sent his one remaining text message to Anna.

Are you still scared of the Ursulina?

I felt an odd sense of foreboding. A sense that something was very wrong.

Around that same time in the roster of Jeremiah’s photos, I began to see pictures of the cairns, too. Whenever he built a tower of rocks near Black Lake on Keith’s land, he took a picture of the stones. I found eight different photographs, taken over a span of several weeks. As soon as the winter snow had melted, he’d begun sneaking off to visit the lake and assemble his memorials.

I began to scroll through the pictures more quickly.

I knew something was waiting for me.

There were only a handful of photographs taken during the winter. Mostly indoors, mostly in the boy’s bedroom. His Lego creations. His boots. Crosses made with Popsicle sticks. Christmas presents. The family Christmas tree lit up with lights. Picture by picture, I went back through each month.

I found my finger hesitating with each click, as if I knew I would regret what I was about to see.

And then there it was.

One single photograph date-stamped November 14. Just one. There were pictures in the days before and after, but only one photograph was left on his phone from that day. I wondered if he’d deleted the others.

It was a selfie. A night-time selfie, lit up by the flash.

Jeremiah had stretched out his short arm to take the picture. I saw the familiar face of that happy, innocent boy, the face that had haunted us for a decade after he went missing. He had messy hair in need of a cut. One crooked tooth in his huge smile. But I wasn’t focused on Jeremiah, because he wasn’t alone in the selfie.

No, he had his face pressed against the cheek of his best friend, who wore the same big, fearless grin that he did. They were two children off on an adventure. Hunting for the Ursulina.

Jeremiah. And Anna.

She was with him.

I recognized the background in the photograph. The two of them stood in front of the apple-red door of Keith Whalen’s barn. The night of November 14. The night Colleen had been killed.

They both saw it happen.

Chapter Forty-Eight

Anna was gone. Her bedroom door was open. My first thought was: She knew. She knew I was going to find that picture.

I rushed out of the bedroom to search for her, but my sixth sense made me turn around and go back inside. I felt an unspeakable horror in that room. I went directly to her dresser and ripped open the top drawer and threw the clothes inside onto the floor. I pulled out everything until the drawer was empty.

It was gone. I knew she always kept it there, but it was gone.

She’d taken her gun with her.

I flew down the stairs in the grip of a desperate fear. Few things have ever scared me in my life, but I was terrified. The door to the backyard was ajar. She’d left it that way, as if knowing I’d follow her sooner or later. I pushed through the screen door onto the wet grass and screamed her name into the gauzy moonlight.

“Anna!”

The frogs croaked, the insects buzzed, but I heard nothing else.

I saw the tracks of footprints leading through the grass past the gazebo, disappearing onto the cemetery path. I ran. When I reached the trees, I was blind, because the moonlight couldn’t penetrate the crown of the forest. I was crying, and I kept screaming her name.

“Anna! Where are you?”

I stumbled my way down the trail. Roots and rocks tripped me up. Branches and wet leaves slapped my face. The thunder of the frogs made me want to cover my ears. I broke free into one of the cemetery groves, where the sky opened up and the graves were bathed in silver light. It was empty except for the dead. Anna wasn’t there. I made a silent plea to the people under the headstones to help me find her, but the ghosts had nothing to say. I was alone.

I knew I could hunt for hours through the dark woods and never find her. She could be anywhere, and she wasn’t answering when I called. But I kept going, running through the maze of trails, driven on by panic. Every time a branch cracked under my feet, I flinched, because my mind was expecting a gunshot.

“Anna!”

I passed more graves silhouetted by the moon. Among the crosses and angels topping the stones, I saw a snowy owl observing me with silent grace. Somehow, I’d expected it to be there. Every crossroad I faced was marked by an owl. It made me finally grasp the truth of what I’d been trying to understand my whole life. All those years ago, the owl that had called me to rescue a child hadn’t come to me because of Jeremiah.

The child who had needed me all along was Anna.

God had rescued me for this moment.

I’d been saved for tonight. Right now.

This was why I was alive and not dead on the doorstep of my father’s house.

I kept running. I knew the path I was on. It was the path that led up and down the shallow hill where Anna and I had skied in the winter, past the diseased old beech tree we called Bartholomew, down into the hollow where Trina’s grave was waiting for us. But not just Trina. Suddenly, I knew why Anna was so reluctant to visit her mother, so unwilling to make her way into the small meadow with those silent spirits. It wasn’t Trina she was afraid to see.

Colleen Whalen was buried there, too.

The trail took me downhill. I ran with the wind pushing me faster and the moon guiding me toward the gap in the trees. I burst into the solemn meadow, and there she was. Anna was a motionless shadow standing in front of Colleen’s grave. Her back was to me. The wind swirled her hair.

I saw the pistol in her hand.

“Anna.”

She didn’t turn around.

“Anna, put down the gun.”

I made my way carefully through the monuments, not wanting to alarm her. I passed Trina and put my hand on the angel adorning her grave, and I could feel something electric, like a voice that said: Save her, Shelby. I glanced at the thickness of the forest surrounding us, and I could feel the hidden eyes of the owls. They were all watching us.

“Anna.”

We were only a few feet apart. I’d come around in front of her. Colleen’s grave was between us, just a flat stone on the earth, with the wet grass and weeds closing around it.

Tears streamed down Anna’s face along with the mist.

A flood, a deluge of tears.

“Anna, tell me what happened that night with Jeremiah.”

She tried to talk, but her throat choked off the words. She shook her head back and forth, and her whole body shivered.

“Please. Tell me.”

Finally, she got the words out, and her voice begged for mercy. “It was my idea.”

“What was?”

“To find the Ursulina.”

“And why go to Keith Whalen’s place to do that?”

“Because I was sure he was hiding it. He was the one who wrote the Halloween story. He knew so much about it. I told Jeremiah that he had to be keeping the Ursulina at his place.”

“So the two of you went over there that Saturday night.”

“Jeremiah didn’t want to go. He was scared, but I made him go. I told him to sneak out of his room and meet me in the woods. And then we took the trail past Black Lake to Mr. Whalen’s place.”

“What did you see there? Who did you see?”

“Nobody.”

“It’s okay, Anna. None of this was your fault. Tell me what you saw. Was Keith there? Did you see Will and Vince? Who was it?”

“Nobody was there,” she moaned. “Just us.”

“Anna, I don’t understand. What happened?”

She tried to tell the story through the tears. “I said we should search the barn. I said maybe he kept the Ursulina in there. I thought he would have it in a cage or something.”

“You went in the barn?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“The Ursulina wasn’t there. Nobody was there. Except I found—”

“What? What did you find?”

She tried to talk. She tried to say it. But she couldn’t. Her whole body heaved with sobs. Her eyes squeezed shut, and her face twisted with misery. Her head hung down against her neck.

“A gun. I found a gun.”

I nearly felt my legs collapse under me.

I’d been wrong. So wrong.

“Oh, no. Oh, no, no. Oh, Anna.”

“Jeremiah said we should leave it, but I said, what if we saw the Ursulina? So I had it in my hand. And we left the barn, and it was so dark, and we couldn’t see anything. We were near the big house—”

I waited. I waited for the truth.

“And there was this noise! Somebody was there! I couldn’t see who it was, but I saw someone, and I was sure, I was sure, I was sure it was the Ursulina. I just pointed the gun at it, and I wasn’t trying to fire or anything, but it went off. It went off. It was so loud. And Jeremiah was like, ‘You got it! You got it, Anna!’ So we went to look, and there was this woman lying on the ground, and all this blood. I just dropped the gun, and we ran. Oh, God, I’m so sorry, Shelby. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to do it. It just happened.”

“Oh, Anna.”

I thought of this girl nursing her horrible secret day after day as she grew up. I thought of the weight of that one night crushing her for ten years. I took a step toward her, toward Colleen’s grave, but as I did, Anna lifted the pistol in her hand and placed the barrel to her temple. She could barely keep her hand steady.

“Anna, no. Put down the gun. Please. Put it down, honey. Don’t do this. Do not do this.”

“I killed her! It’s all my fault. Everything’s my fault. All of it. Mrs. Whalen. Jeremiah. My mom. They sent Mr. Whalen to prison, and I didn’t say anything. I’m being punished, don’t you see that? I don’t deserve to be alive.”

“That’s not true. That’s not true at all.”

“It is!”

All I could see was the gun pressed against her forehead.

“Anna, listen to me. If Mrs. Whalen were standing here with us, she’d tell you it was an accident. She wouldn’t blame you.”

“It doesn’t matter. I killed her.”

“You have your whole life ahead of you. Don’t throw it away. That’s not what Colleen Whalen would want. That’s not what your mother would want.”

“Her cancer came back right after. It was because of me. I did it!”

It didn’t matter what I said. She was determined to believe the worst of herself, and she wouldn’t hear anything else. I didn’t know what to do. In my head, I called for an owl to swoop down and knock the gun away from her hand. Or for the ghosts to rise up and talk to her. I needed help. But it was just the two of us in the cemetery. This was up to me and no one else.

“Anna, look at me.”

Her red, lost eyes stared into mine. I could still see the child she’d been so long ago.

“Anna, give me the gun.”

“No. I can’t live with this anymore.”

“I understand. I do. It hurts, it hurts so much. But what made it so hard was living with it all by yourself. You never have to do that again. You told me the truth. I’m here for you, I’ll always be here, I’ll always love you.”

Anna shook her head.

I saw her finger slip over the trigger.

“Don’t you get it, Shelby? I murdered her.”

“Oh, Anna, honey, listen to me. You were ten years old.”

She quivered where she was, her knees knocking together. I watched the gun, and I saw her finger twitch. We were at the brink of a cliff from which there was no turning back. She would stop or she would fall. I rushed on, desperate to reach her.

“You said Jeremiah has been coming to your dreams for years. Why do you think he kept coming back? Why couldn’t he rest in peace? It was because he wanted to save you. You need to listen to what he’s been telling you all this time. You need to forgive yourself.”

Anna sobbed and gasped for air. “I miss him. I really miss him.”

“I know you do.”

“I miss Mom. I miss her so much.”

“Oh, honey, I know, I know.”

I took another step forward. Colleen’s grave was under my feet. I reached across the stone and gently put my hand around the gun and pointed it at the ground and separated Anna’s fingers from it. I took it into my own hand, laid it in the grass, and covered it with my foot.

“I’m so sorry, Shelby.”

“Don’t talk. Don’t be sorry. It’s over. It’s all over.”

She wrapped her arms tightly around me and held on. Her head crushed against my cheek. Around us, the gentle mist turned into rain and became a kind of music beating on the trees and the graves. We stood there for a long time. I listened to Anna sobbing as she let go of the past, and I stroked her hair and let her cry.

Chapter Forty-Nine

We all have to let go of the past. Either that, or it eats us alive.

I was there when Keith Whalen was released from prison after the judge voided his conviction for murder. So was Anna. I was proud of her for that. She’d already testified in court about the night of November 14, but she wanted to be there when Keith was set free to ask for his forgiveness. Like I expected, Keith gave it to her with no hesitation at all. He embraced her and let go of the ten years he’d lost.

He said he forgave me, too. I’m not so sure about that. We’ll see what the future holds. He’s moving back to Everywhere to rebuild on his old land. I guess it doesn’t matter if your home treats you badly. It’s still home.

Setting Keith free was the last chapter in Jeremiah’s story. The ripples that had changed so many lives finally faded away into the lake. I found myself thinking about all the “if only” moments that might have changed what happened.

If only Paul Nadler hadn’t escaped from the nursing home.

If only the bus to Martin’s Point had arrived five minutes earlier.

If only Adam had called for help that night at the resort.

If only, if only, if only. On and on. Jeremiah would be alive. Breezy would be alive. Adam would be alive. If only. But we all had to let it go.

Ellen and Violet went back to Washington. I heard rumors that Ellen was planning to run for the Senate and Violet was thinking of pursuing her congressional seat in the next election. I’ll vote for them. Of course, I’ll be pretty busy with my own campaign for sheriff. Yes, I’m going to run.

The county board voted the money to clean up the ruins at the Mittel Pines Resort once and for all and turn the land into the Jeremiah Sloan County Park. There will be a grand opening and ribbon-cutting ceremony next summer. I’m sure there will be more tears.

Dennis Sloan got another DUI. Not everyone lets go in the right way.

Will Gruder sent me his medal of St. Benedict. I was right that it was actually the medal that had belonged to Keith Whalen. Anna had slipped it around her neck that night in the barn to ward off the Ursulina, and years later, she gave it to Will. He asked me to return it to Keith. I did.

Given Anna’s age at the time of the shooting, she won’t face any legal consequences. And I knew she had already punished herself enough in the years since it happened. She’s started therapy. She’s got a long way to go, but at least she’s on her way. Yesterday she slept through the night for the first time in a long time, and Jeremiah didn’t come to her in her dreams.

In all these years of searching, no one has ever found the Ursulina.

And me? I needed to let go of the past, too. My father’s past. I didn’t know what had happened the night after his mother died, and I had to make peace with the fact that I probably never would. After all, the past had already let go of him, and he had no more answers to give me.

I confess that in a locked drawer of my office desk, I have a file where I’ve looked at maps and researched the distances someone might have traveled through a blizzard on a bitter night in January thirty-five years ago. It encompasses a universe of hundreds of town, county, and state police officers who might have rescued Sheriff Tom Ginn in a snowy campground. Maybe one of them was my birth mother. Or maybe I just needed to believe she was out there for me to find.

Last night, I came home late. Monica and Dad were in the great room. Monica was tired and went to bed, but my father and I went outside to the gazebo in our yard, as we often do. I brought my guitar. It was a warm spring night. The moths beat their wings against the screens, and the humid air felt thick. We sat together, and Dad listened to me play. I’d been working on a song off and on for a while now. I finally had it done. I called it “The Deep, Deep Snow,” because it’s about the secrets we keep and the places we hide them.

The chorus goes like this:

I sang it all from start to finish. When I was done, I put down my guitar in my lap and looked at my father with an embarrassed blush. “Well, that’s what it is. I know it’s nothing special, but I like it.”

“It’s beautiful,” Dad told me.

“Oh, I know it’s not, but thank you.”

He shook his head and gave me that same amazing smile that I’d known my whole life. “I mean it. Play the song for me again. I could listen to you sing all night. You have such a pretty voice, young lady.”

I smiled back at him.

I pretended not to hear those words. Young lady.

“Sure, Dad,” I replied, picking up my guitar. “I’ll play it again. You just close your eyes and listen.”