With that discovery, we finally had everything we needed to solve Colleen’s murder. Dad arrested Keith Whalen and took him away. Soon enough he would be headed to trial and then headed to prison. I was pretty sure that he would never be coming home.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Looking back, I think of the search for Jeremiah in two phases. The beginning and the end.
I say that with the perspective of time, because like I told you, all of this happened more than ten years ago. I’m no longer the young twenty-five-year old I was then. I didn’t know it at the time, but with the arrest of Keith Whalen, the beginning was about to be over. There was never really a middle in this case, just years of nothingness. And the end — well, the end was still a long way into the future.
Six weeks after Jeremiah disappeared, school began again without him. Summer was over. Life was moving on for everyone in town. The FBI had left town three weeks earlier with the case still formally unsolved. There were no more volunteers filling up the motels. The media had long since let the mystery fall out of the headlines. News feeds the beast, and when there’s no news to report, the beast moves on to new territory.
It’s not like we were going to forget Jeremiah, but there comes a point in every investigation where there are simply no more clues, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t create them. You can keep the file open. You can pull it out every few months and read it again and try to think of things you’ve missed. And then you realize that all you can do is put the file back and wait. Wait for something to happen. Wait for a break in the case that might never come.
I could see all that ahead of us as I sat in the Nowhere Café that September night with Dad, Monica, and Adam. We were finally getting back to our old routines. I was texting Jeannie Samper about my next volunteer shift at the raptor center. Monica was reading spicy excerpts of a romance novel to Moody in his urn. Adam was flipping through the pages of a motorcycle magazine. Dad had his newspaper open to the crossword puzzle.
“A destination for the well-meaning traveler,” he announced to the three of us as he twirled a sharpened pencil in his hand. “Four letters. Anyone? Any ideas?”
I was the only one paying attention. “Do you have any of the letters, Dad?”
“I don’t.”
I thought hard about the clue, but that’s the worst way to solve a puzzle. You can’t force it, you have to let it come to you. Sooner or later, at the strangest times, the answers would pop into my head, long after they didn’t matter anymore.
A destination for the well-meaning traveler. I had nothing.
Dad waited until it was obvious that I couldn’t help him, and then he buried himself in the other clues of the crossword again. He looked oddly free. Ever since he’d decided not to run for reelection, a burden had been lifted from him. He no longer had anything to prove. It had been good for his mind, too, without the stress. He was a little sharper. He’d had fewer incidents. All that was good. But I was under no illusions about where this was going, and neither was he.
I saw Breezy behind the counter wielding a knife on a cherry pie. She wandered over to our booth with a slice of pie à la mode for Adam. He hadn’t ordered it, but she knew what he liked. She wore a big red button on her jean shirt that read Sheriff Twilley. Adam had been passing them out for weeks.
“On the house,” she told him with a wink. “Or is that too much like a bribe now that you’re going to be a big shot and all?”
A satisfied grin crept across Adam’s face as he cut into the pie with his spoon. “We’ll just call it a campaign contribution.”
Yes, Adam was going to be my new boss. I’d made my peace with that. Only days after my father announced he was stepping down, Adam had let me know that he was running to replace him. His mother was happy to see him doing something important with his life. Most of us thought he was still too young, but he had the advantage of being the only candidate interested in the position. He’d also courted Violet Roka, and Violet had persuaded the county board to endorse him. So we all knew the job was his. Being young wasn’t necessarily a problem. Dad had been young when he got the job, too.
I had a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of Sheriff Twilley, but I hoped he’d grow into it. I had to admit he’d changed over the course of the summer. I hadn’t seen him with a drink since he launched his campaign. He’d dialed back the sexual innuendo and flirting with every girl he met, including me. He’d even asked my opinion on a case a couple of times. All in all, this was a new Adam. I guess sometimes the position makes the man.
Was I disappointed that Adam’s decision meant I wouldn’t be sheriff of Mittel County myself? Not really. I’d never been ambitious in that way. Dad had been hoping to hand the keys to me, but I didn’t care. Anyway, I had his health to think about. I had Trina and Anna to think about, too, because Trina wasn’t doing well. My life was going to be busy enough.
So you see, we were all moving on.
I listened to the murmur of talk in the diner that night, and I realized I hadn’t heard Jeremiah’s name once. Not once. That was a first. The talk was about the new school year, the end of the state fair, the end of summer, the grouse hunting season, the announcement that Rose was putting the Rest in Peace up for sale, and the lineup of country concerts at the Indian casino near Stanton.
But not Jeremiah.
Most locals thought they already knew what had happened to Jeremiah. To the police and FBI, the case was still open, but not to the people here. They blamed Keith Whalen. He was guilty. If you murdered your wife, it wasn’t a big leap to imagine killing a child to cover it up. You could have surveyed anyone in the diner that night, and they would have told you that Keith had discovered that Jeremiah saw him shoot Colleen. Maybe the boy had confessed it one of the times he’d wandered up to Keith’s house. Or maybe Keith had seen the boy and his cairns near Black Lake and asked him why he was building those little towers of stone on his land.
However it happened, Keith found out. So he kidnapped Jeremiah and killed him and hid his body in one of those remote places in the north woods that no one would ever find. Maybe Anna’s dream was right and he’d carved a cross on a birch tree near the grave, too.
Jeremiah wasn’t coming back. The man who’d killed him was already in jail. The people of Everywhere were ready to put this tragedy behind them and start living their lives again.
But first, Jeremiah had to be avenged.
First, the past had to be erased.
As the four of us sat in the booth at the Nowhere, Monica’s phone rang. Her emergency phone. She answered it, her face fell, and she looked at us with an expression that said we should all have been expecting this.
“Fire,” she said.
The flames had already consumed most of Keith’s house by the time we got there. Even from a hundred yards away, I felt the ferocious heat on my face. Gray smoke billowed against the black sky, and we had to cover our mouths and noses to keep the poison out of our lungs. Ash fell around us and floated like snow in the air. Night turned to day. The crackle of burning wood sounded like the growl of the Ursulina.
As I watched, the roof of the house caved inward and the walls bent and collapsed in mountainous showers of sparks. On the other side of the shallow hill, I saw a second plume of smoke, where the barn burned, devouring my memories. There was nothing to be done. None of it could be saved. The firefighters used their water on the surrounding grass and trees to keep the flames from spreading to the forest. Fortunately, the wind barely moved that night, and after a while, a light drizzle began to fall, sizzling into steam as it tamped down the flames.