“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.”