“A predator.”
“I’m afraid so.”
I thought for the millionth time about Jeremiah riding his bike that day. I could almost hear the squeak of the wheels if I listened hard enough. I’d tried for years to think of an explanation for his disappearance that didn’t go back to the horrible reality of a monster abducting him, but I always ended up in the same place.
Right here on this dirt road, in a collision of good and evil.
Right here with the Ursulina.
The media was waiting for us outside the resort. They surrounded Agent Reed, but he deflected their questions as we passed through the police barrier that was guarded by one of my fellow deputies. We hiked along the resort driveway and across the creek bridge, following the trail of numerous sets of footprints. In the clearing where the ruins of the old cabins were located, the FBI team was hard at work.
They’d already made one discovery. In the toilet located inside the cabin where the shuttlecock had been found, they’d identified remnants of human feces, which had to have been left long after the resort had been shut down and the water turned off. Of course, there was no way to know who had left that evidence behind. The resort had been a magnet for trespassers for twenty years, and no doubt many of them had answered the call of nature while they were here. Like everything else, the samples would go back to the FBI lab for DNA analysis in the weeks ahead.
As the search continued, the afternoon passed slowly in the cold. Darkness began to sink across the clearing. We were all hoping for fast answers, but the FBI never rushed, and that made everyone impatient. I saw Adrian patrolling the fringe of the forest, wearing a wet path into the snow. Seeing his lips move made me think he was talking to himself. Blaming himself.
I went over to make sure he was okay.
“You don’t need to hang out here,” I told him. “Why don’t you go spend time with your parents? I’ll call you if we find anything.”
“No, I’m staying.”
“There’s a lot of ground to cover, Adrian. They’ll be at this for days.”
“I know, but I want to be here. I owe it to Jer.”
Adrian reminded me of his father, a big, physical kid who didn’t know how to deal with loss. “I’ve told you this before, but what happened to Jeremiah isn’t your fault. You shouldn’t feel guilty about it.”
“Not feel guilty? Shelby, I told him to go. I was buying drugs, and I sent my little brother off by himself.”
“Yeah, but you’re not the one who took him away.”
Adrian simply shook his head and didn’t listen to me. I could tell that he didn’t want to feel better about himself. I remembered the very first day, the very first moments after the crime, when Ellen Sloan had quietly eviscerated her older son by laying the blame at his feet. I wondered if Ellen had ever taken those words back and forgiven him, but I doubted it. Here we were ten years later, and Adrian was still echoing what his mother had said.
You let him go.
I heard a shout.
“Special Agent Reed, we need you over here,” one of the members of the FBI search team called. Through the gray twilight, I saw him signaling to Reed from the opposite side of the clearing. “We’ve got something.”
My heart sank. I had visions of what they’d found, and none of them was good. I ran through the snow, and so did Adrian. We all converged on the site from different directions. Adrian, me, Reed, Adam. The FBI analyst stood outside one of the other cabins, at least fifty yards away from where we’d found the shuttlecock. He held a large plastic bag in his gloved hand. The bag was filled with odd, multicolored objects, but I couldn’t identify them at first. Then I realized that the objects were Legos. There were hundreds of them in red, yellow, green, orange, purple, and blue. Some were loose; some had been chained together; others had been built into an army of tiny robots.
“We found these scattered among the debris on the cabin floor,” the analyst said. “We may be able to get fingerprints or DNA off the pieces.”
I looked at Adrian. “Did Jeremiah have Legos with him that day?”
Adrian reached out to graze the plastic bag with his fingers, but the analyst pulled it out of his reach. “Yeah. He had a tub of Legos in his backpack.”
“And the robots?”
“He used to build those all the time.”
Agent Reed didn’t look happy about the discovery. “Was Jeremiah playing with the Legos before he disappeared? When the two of you were at the ranger station that morning?”
Adrian rubbed his forehead with his thick fingers and tried to remember. “No, Mom got the box to cheer him up because he was so upset about losing our grandfather. He hadn’t opened it yet.”
Reed frowned, as if this wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear. “Did you find anything else?” he asked the analyst on his team.
“Yes, sir. We’ve got a collection of rocks similar to the ones the sheriff’s department found in the other cabin. We’re bagging them now.”
“How many?”
“There are a lot, sir. Dozens. It looks like they were gathered from the forest and creek bed around here.”
I saw another scowl of confusion cross Reed’s face. He buried his hands in his coat pockets and wandered away from the group. The wind blew snow across his face. I followed and quickly caught up with him. “Is something wrong?”
“This doesn’t add up. How long does it take a kid to build Lego robots like that? How long does it take to gather that many rocks from the forest around here?”
“I don’t know. Hours, probably.” As I said that, I realized what he was driving at. “Jeremiah was out here for a while.”
“Yes. If you ask me, he was here at least a day. Maybe more. But that’s not what’s bothering me.”
“Then what is?”
“Think about it, Shelby.”
I did. I tried to imagine Jeremiah here with his toys. Attaching Legos together one after another. Batting his shuttlecock around the resort. Hunting through the trees and ravines and finding rocks he could use in his cairns.
That’s when it hit me.
“He was free.”
“Exactly. He was free. It doesn’t make sense. Abductors don’t let kids go off by themselves. What was really going on in this place?”
I studied the ruins in the growing darkness.
We had to be getting closer to the truth, and yet I felt as if we were farther away than we’d ever been from finding the answers. “We just said we were dealing with a predator. A sex crime. But I don’t know, is that what this feels like to you? I mean, it looks like Jeremiah was out here playing.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
I got home after dark with a takeout veggie burger and sweet potato fries in a cardboard box from the Nowhere Café. Thumping rap music from Anna’s room drowned out every other sound in the house. I was hungry, and I had a headache, and the music made it worse. I called out to my father that I was back, but there’s no way he could have heard me, so I sat in the kitchen by myself. We had an open liter of cheap white wine in the refrigerator, and I poured myself a glass.
I don’t know how long I sat there. I finished my burger. I dipped my fries in ketchup one at a time as I ate them. I drank the wine, and when I was done, I drank another glass.
Anna still hadn’t turned down the music. When I went upstairs, I saw that her door was closed, with a sign hung on the knob that said, Stay Out. Dad’s door was closed, too. I went to my bedroom and grabbed my guitar and went back downstairs. I let myself out into the yard and hiked through the path we’d shoveled to our gazebo. I sat inside on one of the wicker chairs, and I turned on a space heater to take the edge off.