“I know, but if you’re going to stay, you have to be a cop and put your emotions aside. Can you really do that?”
Adrian chewed on that thought for a while without answering my question. The snow-covered evergreens flashed by on both sides of the highway. The cruiser was warm from the heat turned on high. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said finally, as if to prove he was thinking like a cop. “I don’t understand how Jer could have gotten to that resort. It’s thirty miles from where we lost him.”
“Well, remember, this might not be related to him at all. We don’t know yet.”
“Yeah, but if it is? I don’t get it.”
“Obviously, someone took him there.”
“To some old falling-down resort? Why? Why would they go there?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, but I could think of several reasons, and none of them was good.
Half an hour after we left the diner, we reached the town of Witch Tree, population 165. It was one of dozens of don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it towns in Mittel County. The dense forest loomed around the main street, as if waiting impatiently to creep back in and take over the land when the humans went away. We passed the Witch’s Brew, a bar and diner with a rough reputation. Then a Lutheran church that doubled as a senior center. A gas station. A car repair garage and parts store. A gun shop. And not much more than that. The few people who called Witch Tree home lived on dirt roads that crept through the woods like vole tracks on a spring lawn.
We followed Adam in the car ahead of us. Rose was in the passenger seat beside him. They turned on one of the dirt roads half a mile past the bar, and I saw a small clearing where tall trees leaned dangerously over the roof of a mobile home. This was Breezy’s place. Her mailbox on the road didn’t have a number; it simply said, “Breezy.” Weeds poked out of the snow around the trailer, and I saw Dudley rusting under the pines near an old shed. The Ford Escort had finally died for good a few years back and never moved again.
The slick, rutted dirt road continued into the trees. Unless you lived along here, you were probably going the wrong way. We drove slowly past the driveways of a few recluses living deep in the forest. A mile later, the road ended at a T-intersection. The left half of the T was really just a long driveway. A warped wooden arrow pointed the way, and the name Gruder was painted on the arrow in black. Will Gruder lived down there. The other direction was marked with a Dead End sign, and there was still a decades-old, barely legible poster for the Mittel Pines Resort sagging next to the road. We were two miles from the abandoned cabins.
“This is pretty close to Will and Vince’s place,” I murmured.
Adrian frowned. “Yeah.”
“Think that means anything?”
“No. No way.”
But I wondered if that was just wishful thinking.
“Did you used to come up here?” I asked him.
“Me? No. Why?”
“It was a hangout when I was in school. I came out here with the Striker girls a few times. It was a popular spot for parties. Booze. Drugs. Sex. Whatever.”
“Not me,” Adrian said.
“Okay. Just curious.”
We punched through the snow, following the icy tire tracks of a handful of cars that had come and gone here recently. The dead-end road wound through a series of sharp S-curves, following the ribbon of a frozen creek six feet down the bank below us. The trees on both sides were packed together like soldiers at attention. It was gloomy here even on a sunny day, but the winter gray made it seem like night.
Where the road ended at a turnaround, an old rusted chain was draped across a driveway that was barely wider than our cruiser. Adam parked there. The snow behind the chain was deep, but I could see boot prints, probably from Rose and her prospective buyer. It was hard to imagine anyone coming here and thinking this was the place to invest money. The Mittel Pines Resort had once been a popular summer getaway, but that was when families still enjoyed rustic vacations and there wasn’t any competition from the B&Bs in Martin’s Point. My father and I had spent a weekend here once when I was about twelve years old, not long before the resort closed for good. I could remember practicing my guitar by the campfire, which must have driven everyone else crazy, because the sound around here carries for miles.
We all got out of our cars. Adam climbed over the chain and led the way, and Rose, Adrian, and I followed behind him. The snow came up to my calves. The four of us walked between the trees and then across a bridge over the frozen creek, until the forest opened up and the ruins of the resort dotted a huge clearing. Most of the old cabins were rotting mounds where moss, weeds, and young trees grew among bowed walls and caved-in roofs. I saw broken doors, shattered windows, frost-covered spiderwebs, and moldy sofas abandoned in the middle of the dead, overgrown brush. Raccoons had made dens here and riddled the snow with paw prints. At least three cabins had been burned by vandals over the years and the wood bore streaks of blackened charcoal and spray-painted graffiti. It was unrecognizable from the place Dad and I had visited so long ago.
Rose pointed. “I found the shuttlecock back there.”
I followed the direction of her finger to one of the larger cabins that had fended off some of the ravages of time and nature. The walls were still standing. There were holes in the roof, but it hadn’t fallen. The glass of the windows was all gone, and the door hung open, and I could see where the bricks of the chimney had pitched into the weeds. Rose’s footprints made a path into the middle of the bricks.
We all went over there, and Adam knelt among the rubble. He squinted and then got up and rubbed his chin and studied the clearing with a frown. This place had the terrible stillness of a battlefield after the guns had gone quiet.
Ten years.
I tried to imagine Jeremiah here. I looked around at the encroaching forest and thought of all the places you could hide a body in these woods. When the ground thawed, we’d bring the dogs, and we’d search.
The open cabin door clung stubbornly to one of its hinges. Rose stayed outside, and the three of us explored the interior. Even in the daylight, under the holes in the roof, we needed flashlights to see. The floor was a mess of glass shards and animal droppings. I saw an old mattress and bed frame that was nothing but stuffing and rusted springs. A toilet and sink had broken off from corroded pipes and toppled over. I examined every square inch of the cabin floor with my flashlight. When I pulled up the mattress, I found the corpses of two dead rats.
Nothing here suggested that Jeremiah had been inside the cabin. Not until Adrian called, “Look at this.”
He was at the back wall near a brick fireplace. The floor was wet where snow had blown in through the hole caused by the collapse of the chimney. He squatted near the remnants of a walnut dresser that had collapsed, spilling out its four drawers. Nests had been built inside the drawers by animals over the years. I saw an old laminated resort brochure, with photos of what the place had looked like in its heyday. But there was something else in one of the drawers, too. Adrian highlighted them with his light.
I saw stones.
Gray and black stones. Dozens of them.
Like you’d use in a cairn.
Chapter Thirty
Ellen Sloan arrived at the abandoned resort two hours later. She brought an entourage with her.
I waited to meet her outside the chain at the driveway, and cars rolled up along the dirt road one after another. Ellen and Violet came together in the first sedan. Several aides followed in two other cars. Then half a dozen print and television reporters and photographers brought up the rear in trucks that were equipped for live shots.
The media army looked ready to assault me with questions, but Violet held them back like a publicity veteran, which she was. Ellen approached me alone, wearing a white winter coat that made her look like a snow angel. She had calf-high boots and leather gloves. Her blond hair was tied in a ponytail, and she wore sunglasses. When she took them off, I saw that her eyes were rimmed in red.