While I sat in an old leather recliner in the barn, he acted out his story of the Ursulina. It was full of horrible deaths and blood dripping from people’s faces, and I knew it would scare the snot out of the kids, which is the whole point of Halloween. I told him he should get it published, and he flipped his brown hair and looked at me as if I were crazy. But I knew he was secretly pleased.
After we met, I wrote a song I could play between sections of the story, with a chorus that would have kids singing with me after they heard it for the first time. It went like this:
Okay, I was never going to give Sara Bareilles any competition when it came to songwriting, but I figured the kids would love it. I wrote it in a week, and then Keith and I met in the writer’s cottage again so I could play it for him. He loved the song, too. We rehearsed the whole performance many times, him doing the story, me doing the song, over the course of the next several weeks. We rehearsed way more than we needed to for a half-hour children’s program. And we talked. We had long talks about things that mattered. He talked about teaching, and reading, and living without a leg, and being married to a high school sweetheart who sent one man off to war and got a very different man back.
I talked, too. I talked about my father, about Trina, about Anna. I talked about my belief in signs and omens and about the challenges of growing up as a mystery girl with no past. I talked about my crush on him in high school. We laughed about that, but I was no fool. Telling him the truth about my feelings carried us across a dangerous line.
The Halloween show was a big hit. Monica was thrilled. We had nearly two hundred kids and parents gathered in the town park outside the courthouse, and they oohed and aahed and screamed at all the right scary parts. Afterward, everybody was singing my Ursulina song. It was as close as I was ever likely to get to being a celebrity, and I was flying high. So was Keith. We hung around together as afternoon became evening and the festival wound down. We were tired but exhilarated. Everyone was coming up to us and telling us what a great show it was. We drank it all in.
As night fell, we went back to his place to continue the celebration. Colleen had already gone home and was asleep in the house. Keith said she slept a lot, because that’s what depressed people do. He and I went to the old barn, and we put on music, and we uncorked a bottle of Macallan that he saved for special occasions. The more we drank, the more he opened up. He grabbed novels from his bookshelves and read some of his favorite passages to me. He caressed his St. Benedict medal and talked in a hushed voice about losing his leg. He told me about his troubles with his wife.
You know where this is going.
I knew where it was going, too, but that didn’t stop me. I’m sorry. You may not be able to forgive me for what I did, and that’s okay, because all these years later, I haven’t forgiven myself. I was drunk, it was my birthday, and I let myself indulge a high school fantasy with a married man. God, I was stupid.
A mistake like that was bound to have consequences.
But never in my life did I imagine the consequences would include Colleen Whalen dead outside their house with a bullet in her brain.
Chapter Eight
After we left the cemetery, Adam and I dropped Anna back at her house, and then we headed to the Nowhere Café. We found my father drinking weak coffee and reassuring the worried neighbors crowded around him that we were doing everything we could to find Jeremiah.
The Nowhere is where people in Everywhere gather. It’s more than a local diner dishing up pancakes and venison stew. It’s our meeting hall, our water cooler, our ground zero for news and gossip. Black-and-white photos of earlier generations of Everywhere residents watch us from the walls, and someday, photos of us will take their places. We meet in the red-cushioned booths and along the lunch counter to talk about weather, sports, politics, religion, cooking, vacations, holidays, and the latest rumors about who was zooming who.
Half the town was there that evening. I knew all of the faces, but I could see something in them that I hadn’t seen very often before. Fear. They were afraid, because Jeremiah was still missing. The innocent explanations for what might have happened to him were fading away, and if it could happen to the Sloan boy, then it could happen to any of their children, too.
I hung in the back of the diner near the glass door. Adam went off to flirt with the counter waitress, Belinda Brees, as he usually did. Belinda was another Striker girl from my high school volleyball team. Her nickname in school was Easy Breezy, and I don’t suppose I need to explain why.
While Adam put the moves on Breezy, I watched my father take questions from the crowd. I didn’t like what I saw.
His brown sheriff’s uniform was crisply starched and neat as a pin. He’d changed clothes after searching through the dirt and brambles of the national forest. His mustache was trimmed, and he’d tamed his thicket of snow-white hair with a brush. One thing Dad never did was to allow the people of the county to see him at anything less than his best. He stood ramrod straight, emphasizing his height, and as the townspeople grilled him, he remained almost supernaturally calm.
And yet he wasn’t. I knew him. I could see the way his fingers were clutched around his thermos so tightly that his knuckles turned pink with exertion. He didn’t look at people as he talked to them. His soft blue eyes were unfocused, a sign that his mind was spinning to the point of overheating. The muscles in his tanned face were tight. Like everyone else, my father was beginning to realize that he’d misjudged this situation. This was not just about a boy who wandered away. In the time we’d spent digging through the woods and searching the town, precious hours had been lost.
Nobody paid attention to me. This was the kind of situation that reminded me that I was still just a young deputy. And a woman, too. The people who wanted answers talked to Dad or Adam, as if my opinion didn’t count for anything. Even my father was guilty of that sometimes. I’d called to let him know that I thought Jeremiah’s brother might be hiding things from us, but Dad wasn’t ready to bother the family with more questions, not simply based on my hunch. I felt as if he were patting his little girl on the head.
“Coffee, Shel?”
Belinda Brees appeared at my side with a Nowhere Café mug and a white plastic pitcher of coffee. The coffee was terrible, but I drank it anyway, the way I always did. Dad and I came to the Nowhere for breakfast six days a week at six in the morning, and we had dinner there on most days, too. Without the Nowhere and the occasional kindness of strangers, I’m pretty sure my father and I would have starved, because neither one of us could fry an egg without setting off the smoke alarms.
I sipped the coffee, which was scalding hot. The voices around us were loud, and Breezy and I spoke to each other under our breath.
“Terrible thing, huh,” she murmured.
That was the word we all used. Terrible. It was a numb word, the kind of thing you say when reality is too hard to stare in the face.