Monica and I both covered our smiles.
That was my father. He never needed to yell or shout or throw his weight around to get what he wanted. He had a way of charming you even as he made you feel like dirt for disappointing him. His voice was soft, like piano music, which sounded strange coming from such a big man. He stood six-foot-two, with a shaggy head of snow-white hair and a mustache that kept growing out of control like a weed. Even during the winter, his skin had a deep, leathery tan. His build was bulky and broad-shouldered in a way that sent a quiet message of strength.
Anyway, now you’ve got the picture.
That was July 17. A slow day. The four of us were in the Mittel County Sheriff’s Office, located in the basement underneath the town’s Carnegie Library. It was an old space, cold in the winters, humid in the summers. We could hear the thunder of children’s running footsteps overhead. The linoleum peeled at the corners. The ceiling tiles were water-stained.
For me, that particular moment will always be stuck in time. Me at my desk. Dad and Monica with the police reports in hand. Adam in the open doorway. That’s how it was when the world changed.
“Wow, will you look at that?” Adam suddenly said.
He squinted into the sunshine in the library parking lot and shook his head with a kind of awe. I asked him what was up, but Adam looked transfixed by whatever he saw and didn’t say a word. We all converged on the doorway, and I got there first. The sight took my breath away.
Outside, not even twenty feet away, Adam’s motorcycle was parked in the lot. Perched atop the bike’s side mirror was a snowy owl. Motionless. Serious. Regal.
Staring at it, I felt the strangest, coldest sensation down my entire body.
“It’s just an owl,” I found myself murmuring out loud, because we lived near the national forest among predators and prey. There wasn’t anything especially unusual about a snowy owl taking a rest before flying back to the trees.
Except at that very moment, the phone rang on Monica’s desk. We all jumped at the noise, and the owl took flight with a cry. Right then and there, I knew.
Something had happened.
Monica skittered across the floor with her short little steps and grabbed the phone. She wasn’t much bigger than a bird herself. She listened to the voice on the line and was barely able to get in a word, because I could hear a panicked woman shouting at her through the receiver.
When Monica hung up, I looked at her, waiting. So did Dad and Adam.
“That was Ellen Sloan,” she told us. “Jeremiah is missing. She thinks someone took him.”
Chapter Two
Dad led our parade of vehicles down miles of dirt road into the heart of the national forest. Adam and I followed, with me at the wheel. Dennis and Ellen Sloan brought up the rear, and they had Adrian, Jeremiah’s sixteen-year-old brother, in the car with them.
This was a lonely place for a ten-year-old boy to vanish.
The town where we live is named Avery Weir, but long ago, people simply started calling it Everywhere. This being Mittel County, we say we live in the Middle of Everywhere, but the truth is that we’re closer to the middle of nowhere. The deer outnumber the people around here by a significant multiple. We’re still ahead of the wolves, but they’re gaining on us. We’re surrounded by hundreds of square miles of woods, creeks, and lakes. The nearest interstate highway is two hours south. Towns are spread out by dozens of miles, and they have great names. Witch Tree. Eagle Ridge. Martin’s Point. Blue Diamond Lake.
We were thirty miles north of Everywhere when I saw the cloud of dust settling as Dad’s squad car slowed and stopped. I saw a child’s bicycle tipped forlornly on the shoulder of the road in a nest of thistles. The blue frame was caked with dirt. In the forest on either side of us, dense stands of paper birches and white pines fought for the sunlight. The July air was sticky and warm. Insects whined from inside the tangled brush, and songbirds danced back and forth across the road in flashes of color.
My father got out of the cruiser and assessed the bike with his hands on his hips and his mouth crushed into a dour frown. His brown, flat-brimmed sheriff’s hat was securely placed on his head. The midafternoon summer sun was high and bright, but the denseness of the woods meant you couldn’t see far through the shadows. It had been dry that week, so the ruts in the dirt road showed no tire tracks or footprints. The bicycle was the only evidence that a boy had been here.
Adam and I joined Dad on the road. So did the Sloans and their oldest son.
I knew the Sloans well in those days. Everyone did. Despite how spread out we are, there are zero degrees of separation in an area like ours. We know each other’s stories and secrets, probably more than we should. When you all grow up together, it’s also hard to get past who you were in high school. No matter what you go on to do in life, you’re still the baseball star, the homecoming queen, the party girl, the volleyball champ. The Sloans had that problem. People talked about Dennis and Ellen like they were still Jack and Diane from John Mellencamp’s little ditty, but that wasn’t fair. Dennis had a master’s degree in forestry management. Ellen had bought the failing market on Everywhere’s main street and turned it into a moneymaker.
Ellen was thirty-six that year, two years younger than her husband. She was smart, cool, blond, blue-eyed, tough enough to make a shoplifter confess with nothing but one of those icy stares of hers. She was the strong one in that household. That was what made it so hard to see her struggling to keep it together. I saw the tremble in her fingers. I heard her breathing, which was quick and loud through her nose. She kept touching her hair and pushing it back in place, as if that were the only thing she could control at that moment.
Her life was her two boys, and one of them was gone.
My father put a hand on the shoulder of Jeremiah’s older brother and gave the teenager a reassuring smile. Adrian was a meaty kid on the high school football team, but at that moment, he looked as if the slightest breeze would knock him down.
“So is this where you found your brother’s bike?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you move it at all?”
“No, I didn’t touch it.”
“Did you search the woods around here?”
“Yeah, sure I did. Jer wasn’t anywhere.”
Dennis Sloan muttered an expletive under his breath and marched to the side of the road, his boots crunching on rock. He didn’t have the patience to stand around answering questions. He cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed into the woods with big pipes that would fill a room. “Jeremiah! Jeremiah!”
His booming voice scared a few birds, but that was all. There was no answer. That didn’t stop him from hollering again. He was a handsome park ranger with the strong physique of a lumberjack, and strong men always labored under the illusion that they could solve any problem if they swung a little harder, talked a little louder, or ran a little faster. Life didn’t work that way.
My father let Dennis shout himself hoarse. Then he went on in the same level voice he always used. Panic was boiling over on that road, but my father was an oasis of calm, like the eye of a storm.
“Adrian, why don’t you tell us what happened?”
The teenager kicked at the dirt with his sneaker. “Jer and I went to work with Dad at the ranger station. We hung out there most of the morning, and then I figured I’d ride my bike for a while. I was going to go by myself, but Jer threw a fit about coming with me. So I let him go along just to shut him up.”
“Why didn’t you want him to come with you?”
“I like to ride fast. He slows me down.”
“What did the two of you do?”