“Trust me. Tell me where he is.”
Norm rubbed his face with exhaustion and mussed his thinning hair. “Can I talk to the Rebecca Colder I’ve known since she was a little girl? And not to the sheriff’s deputy?”
“Yes. I promise you that.”
Norm stared at his son in the hospital bed. In the low light, Will breathed in and out, but he showed no signs of consciousness. Even so, I felt as if Norm were pleading with his son for advice. And for forgiveness.
“Jay is out of control, Rebecca,” Norm said. “He blames himself for what happened to Will. He’s desperate.”
“That’s even more reason for me to find him. Where is he?”
“He was driving his dad’s car. The Mercedes. I told him to go back to my house and park the car in the garage and make sure the door was closed. I said he should stay in the house with the lights off and not answer if anyone came by.”
“How do I get in?” I asked.
“I keep a spare key inside the brass light fixture on the porch.”
“Thank you, Norm. I’ll find him, and I’ll keep him safe.”
I got out of the chair, but Norm took my arm gently before I could leave. “Rebecca?”
“What is it?”
He hesitated, struggling again, as if the lawyer were doing battle with the father. “There’s something else. You need to be very careful if you go in there.”
“Why?”
Norm swallowed hard as he tried to get the words out. “Jay has a gun.”
Chapter Eighteen
On the highway, the plows had given up their fight against the blizzard, and my tires punched and swerved through wet snow on the way back to Norm’s house. Drifts blew into terraced mountains that I had to navigate around. The storm showed no sign of letting up. My snow-ghosts — my hallucinations — followed me across the county, twisting my gut with the things I saw. I had visions of the three victims of the Ursulina standing on the shoulder, their skin in ribbons. I saw Ricky hiding behind every tree. Most of all, worst of all, I kept hearing the lonely, plaintive cry of a baby in the screech of the wind.
Call it a premonition. An omen or a sign.
Was it you, sweetheart? Were you telling me you were out there? Were you crying about things to come?
By the time I made it to the forest outside Random, the gray late afternoon sky had begun to darken into night. When I reached Norm’s house, I saw that I wasn’t the first to arrive. The vandals had already struck. A gay slur had been spray-painted in huge red letters across Norm’s garage, and several first-floor windows had been smashed. Splintered debris was everywhere, and ash and smoke floated in the air with the snow. I realized they’d broken into the workshop and thrown Will’s woodwork into the yard and burned it like a bonfire. They’d also scattered the contents of Will’s high school locker on the front steps and left a message for him painted on the door.
Don’t come back.
I didn’t bother knocking. I retrieved the key from the light post near the door and let myself inside. The house was cold, with winter air and snow hissing through broken windows. Sharp fragments of glass covered the hardwood floor.
“Jay?” I called. “Jay, it’s Rebecca. Are you here?”
There was no answer. I searched the whole house and couldn’t find him. His moving boxes had been delivered, but they sat on the floor of one of the upstairs bedrooms, unopened. When I went outside and checked the garage, I saw no sign of Gordon Brink’s Mercedes. Either Jay had left when he’d seen the damage, or he’d never come here at all.
The other kids in town were undoubtedly hunting for him. And Jay had a gun. That was a volatile combination. I needed to find him.
I thought about checking the house that Gordon had been renting, but I didn’t think Jay would go back there. And he was still a stranger to the area, so I doubted that he would know many of the hideaways that teenagers learned about growing up here. Plus, most of our secret places were summer escapes, and this was winter, and the snow was falling in waves.
Then I knew.
I knew exactly where Jay would go. He’d return to the place where he and Will had spent the night together.
I got back into my car and headed east. Night fell hard not long after I started out, and so I had to deal with the storm and the darkness at the same time. What would normally take me an hour took me two, as I fought the snow and tried to see. I missed the turnoff to the dirt road that led to Norm’s trailer, and I had to do a U-turn to go back and find it. The depth of the snow made the road almost impassible, but a couple of cars had obviously traveled this stretch before me, and I was able to use the ruts they’d left to make my way through the forest.
After several miles, my headlights reflected on the chassis of a car parked in a turnoff, barely visible among the trees. I could see that it was a Mercedes. I pulled in behind it and got out. The crowns of the trees overhead gave me a little protection from the snow, but the wind in my face was bitter and fierce. I trudged to the car and shined my flashlight inside, but it was empty.
“Jay?” I shouted, barely able to hear my own voice over the howl of the gales. “Jay, are you here?”
No one answered me.
There was no trail to follow, just snow, but I knew where I was going. I headed along a path through the trees, and ahead of me, I saw a faint square of light like a will-o’-the-wisp. It was the glow of windows in Norm’s Airstream. Someone was inside. As I neared the trailer, however, I spotted another car parked at the end of the trail. This one was a yellow Cadillac.
Ben Malloy was spending the night in the woods again.
I thumped on the trailer door. Ben answered with a pipe in his mouth, as he always did. He wore an open bubble coat, red corduroys, and moon boots. He had a camera with a flash attachment hanging around his neck.
“Deputy Rebecca,” he said with surprise. “What on earth are you doing out here in the middle of the storm?”
“I could say the same to you, Ben.”
“Well, I’m Ursulina hunting, of course. I was getting ready to go stalk the beast. Since you’re here, I’d be happy to have company on my quest.”
“Have you seen Jay Brink?” I asked.
“Who?”
“Teenage boy. Tall, reddish hair, dark eyes.”
“I haven’t seen him, but I haven’t seen anyone out here.”
“His car’s parked on the road. I need to find him.”
“Say no more,” Ben replied. He zipped up his coat and trundled down the trailer steps. “I have a compass, a lantern, and peanut shells.”
“Peanut shells?” I asked.
“To mark our trail and make sure we can find our way back. We wouldn’t want to get lost out here, would we?”
“No.”
“Any idea where to look for this boy?”
I shined my flashlight at the snow in the clearing surrounding the Airstream. It didn’t take me long to find Jay’s trail. Close by, fresh footsteps went up to the trailer windows and then led into the forest. “There. Jay must have realized someone was inside, so he went off by himself.”
With my flashlight guiding us, we followed Jay’s tracks. Ben stayed behind me, but he was invisible unless I turned the light directly at him. It was a difficult slog, and I could hear him huffing and puffing, but he didn’t complain. He crunched on peanuts, eating them and then dropping the shells like Hansel and Gretel leaving bread crumbs. The smell of his pipe followed us through the woods.
As the wind gusted and sprayed wet snow, my skin felt raw. I pushed my way forward, stumbling into branches that slapped my face. The drifts got inside my boots and melted, and soon my feet were cold and wet. Several times, I lost Jay’s footprints and had to stop and scan the ground to find them again before we could continue. During one long stretch, when I was afraid I’d lost his trail altogether, we heard movement not far away from us. Ben immediately had his camera up, and the pop of his flashbulb nearly blinded me. As my eyes swam with orange reflections, I spotted a deer bounding away through the trees.