Six teenagers sat in handcuffs in the back of two of our cruisers. They were all boys from the high school. Adrian Sloan was among them. We’d caught the kids as they were scrambling to escape the scene. They’d stayed too long to watch their handiwork. I knew they’d be punished, but I didn’t think a judge would be too harsh with minors, not when one of them had lost a brother. They’d probably get community service. After a while, their records would be cleared, and we’d all get on with the business of forgetting that Keith Whalen had ever lived in Everywhere.
I stood there for hours that night, hypnotized by the fire. Even after it was out, I stayed. We had to make sure it didn’t catch again, and I was one of the volunteers who spent the entire night watching over the hot, soggy funeral pyre. When it was safe enough to get close, I walked the perimeter with my flashlight to see if anything had escaped. Any little piece of Keith and Colleen. I did the same at the barn. But the fire had been thorough and consumed everything except a few scorched beams and shards of melted glass.
Was this justice?
All I can tell you is what I believed that night. I believed that Keith lied to me. I believed he murdered his wife and covered it up, and I believed that twelve good men and women would pronounce him guilty. Was it an accident? Was it a crime of passion that got out of control? Was it a burst of rage that bubbled up out of the horrors of his past? Possibly. That was up to the judge and jury, and they could decide how long he would spend behind bars. Either way, he would pay for his crime.
But Jeremiah?
Call me naive if you want, but I wasn’t convinced that Keith Whalen had really taken that boy. If he had, we would have found Jeremiah’s body hidden under the water of Black Lake, like the evidence of Colleen’s murder. But we didn’t find him there.
No.
We hadn’t solved the mystery yet. We didn’t know the truth about Jeremiah. Back then, I wasn’t sure we would ever know what really happened.
I remember wandering alone beside the remnants of the fire that night. You could say it’s burned into my memory. As I picked my way beside the ruins, I said one word aloud to myself. Just one word. Otherwise, I was quiet, feeling awed by the devastation.
“Hell,” I murmured, staring at the scene.
There was plenty in that twisted panorama of destruction to remind me of hell, but actually, I was thinking about Dad’s crossword puzzle. Like I told you, the answers usually come at the strangest moments, long after you’ve given up.
Hell.
The destination for a well-meaning traveler was hell. That was the where the road of good intentions usually led us.
Part Two:
The Well-Meaning Traveler
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.”