The Deep, Deep Snow Read online

  ALSO BY BRIAN FREEMAN

  The Frost Easton Series

  The Crooked Street

  The Voice Inside

  The Night Bird

  The Jonathan Stride Series

  Alter Ego*

  Marathon

  Goodbye to the Dead

  The Cold Nowhere

  Turn to Stone (e-novella)

  Spitting Devil (e-short story)

  The Burying Place

  In the Dark

  Stalked

  Stripped

  Immoral

  The Cab Bolton Series

  Season of Fear

  The Bone House

  *Cab Bolton also appears in Alter Ego

  Copyright © 2020 by Brian Freeman

  E-book published in 2020 by Blackstone Publishing

  Cover design by Brobel, Inc.

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental

  and not intended by the author.

  Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-09-407134-3

  Library e-book ISBN 978-1-09-407133-6

  Fiction / Mystery & Detective / Police Procedural

  CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Blackstone Publishing

  31 Mistletoe Rd.

  Ashland, OR 97520

  www.BlackstonePublishing.com

  For Marcia

  The first thing you should know about me is that I believe in signs. Omens. Premonitions. I grew up believing that things happen for a reason.

  That’s the only way to explain why I’m alive.

  You see, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about who I am, because I don’t know where I came from. I’m a mystery to myself.

  I was born in late October or early November, but I don’t know the exact day. When I was five years old, I picked October 31 for my party. Halloween. I thought that would make for a cool birthday.

  Whatever the real day was, I was left on Tom Ginn’s doorstep when I was about a week old. His house used to be a church, with a white steeple and a wall of stained glass windows. At night, in the darkness, my birth mother probably thought it was still a church, and I guess that’s where you take a baby you’re planning to abandon.

  She left me in an old Easter basket, strangely enough, nestled among green paper curly-cues like a white-chocolate bunny. I was dressed in a cotton onesie with faded pink stripes and a bonnet with flaps tied in a bow under my chin. The temperature outside was thirty-nine degrees. Obviously I don’t remember that night, but sometimes I think about what it must have been like to be alone, freezing, crying, with no idea what I had done to be cast away. She left no note to tell me why.

  Tom Ginn wasn’t home at the time. He was forty miles away, night-fishing under a cloudless, moonless sky in his favorite spot on Shelby Lake. You don’t realize how many stars hang in the heavens until you experience one of those nights. Tom had a tent set up on the shore and a portable propane grill for cooking whatever he caught on the lake. It was a Saturday, his first night off in four weeks, and he was planning to camp on the beach until morning.

  If he’d done that, I would have died.

  Either the cold would have killed me, or an animal would have dragged me off. The woods near us are filled with wolves, raccoons, bears, and wolverines. We even have a mythical monster called the Ursulina that many townspeople swear is no myth. Any one of those predators would have torn a little baby limb from limb and consumed me. Thinking about it still makes me shiver.

  Tom had no idea about any of this. He was enjoying the night on the placid water. The air was fresh and sweet, tinged with the scent of pine. His boat was at the mouth of a cove between the trees where it was utterly still. There was just him, the lake, the wilderness, and the stars. It’s a big, big place that makes you feel small. He was sipping hot black coffee from a thermos and jigging for walleye. He’d been out there for an hour without any luck, but he was in no hurry.

  That was when God sent him the sign.

  Like an angel, a snowy owl swooped down from the treetops and landed on the other end of the boat. Tom was so shocked that he couldn’t even take a breath. His mouth hung open with the jug of coffee at his lips. The owl perched there and watched him with its stoic, unblinking eyes. Its head was a perfect white, its body checkered over with white and gray. Breaking the silence of the night, the owl squawked out a loud, raspy call. When Tom didn’t answer, the owl called to him again and again, each time with an urgent impatience.

  To Tom, the owl’s voice sounded like the same word over and over.

  Home.

  Later, he would say that he knew this was no ordinary moment in his life. He would tell everyone that it wasn’t just the owl calling to him.

  It was me.

  “Okay,” he announced finally. “Okay, I’m going.”

  The owl unfurled its wide wings, soared into the sky, and vanished. Right then and there, Tom brought the boat in and packed up his camp. He drove the forty-mile trip along the two-lane highways faster than he’d ever driven in his life. He had no idea what was waiting for him, but when he got home, there I was. Screaming to the world. Blue with cold.

  He never located whoever had left me there. My mother was long gone. When he didn’t find her, Tom Ginn, the thirty-year-old, never-married, youngest-ever sheriff of Mittel County, adopted me himself. He named me not with his own name but after the place he’d been when God brought us together.

  Shelby Lake. That’s me.

  Tom became my father, and he raised me. You won’t be surprised to learn that he has always been my superhero, my whole world, my idol, my life. I worshipped that man from the time I could walk. You also won’t be surprised to learn that I’ve spent many of my free hours at the local raptor center, volunteering with the injured owls who are brought there for rehabilitation.

  Growing up in Mittel County, I knew that I would be a police officer like my father. I was already helping the secretary, Monica Constant, answer the phones in the sheriff’s office by the time I was thirteen years old. It wasn’t the life my father wanted for me. He thought I should go to college, leave this remote wilderness behind, and chase other dreams far from home. But my choice was to stay here and follow in his footsteps. That’s what I did.

  I’ll be honest with you. I’ve always felt a little guilty that I was alive at all. I mean, God went to an awful lot of trouble keeping me here, right? When I was a girl and my father told me about finding me on his doorstep, I asked him: Why me? I’m nothing special. Why was I saved?

  He told me that was something I would have to figure out for myself, even if it took me a long time to do. And he was right. All these years later, I finally have an answer that I can live with.

  But that’s the end of the story. I need to take you back to where it started.

  The mystery began ten years ago, on July 17, a perfect summer afternoon. I was twenty-five years old back then. That was the day another snowy owl appeared in my life like the return of a messenger.

  To me, the arrival of an owl could mean only one thing.

  I was being called to rescue a child.

  Part One:

  The Unwanted Visitor

  Chapter One

  On the day that Jeremiah Sloan disappeared, I was teasing Monica Constant about her dead dog.

  That
sounds cruel, but you have to understand that Monica’s Alaskan malamute had died nine years earlier after a long and very pampered life. She cremated Moody, which isn’t unusual, but she kept his ashes in a flowered urn that she took with her to work in a special purse every single day. Vacations, too. If you asked her why, she would explain that if she left Moody at home and her house burned down, then she would have no way of differentiating between the ashes of her house and the ashes of her dog.

  Monica wasn’t about to take any chances.

  And yes, I would tease her about this whenever I could.

  On that particular July afternoon, my partner, Adam Twilley, was leaning against the open door that led to the parking lot, with a cigar between his lips. My father couldn’t see him, which was the only reason Adam felt bold enough to smoke in the office. The warm wind blew in and sprayed a plume of ash from the end of his cigar onto the yellowed linoleum floor.

  “Monica?” I called, pointing to the little gray sprinkle of ash. “I think Moody needs to go out.”

  To her credit, Monica always giggled at my lame jokes.

  “Shelby, what am I going to do with you?” she said with a little shake of her head, using the same grandmotherly tone she’d used with me since I was a girl.

  Monica and I went way back. It’s a little weird when you work with people who used to change your diapers. She joined the sheriff’s department as a secretary right out of high school and had never worked anywhere else over the past three decades. That’s the thing about a small-town place like Mittel County. Loyalty runs deep in these parts. When you find your place in the world, you stay there.

  She went back to reading us the latest police reports out loud. Adam and I were both in our chocolate-brown uniforms. Normally, we would be out on the roads together, but it had been a slow Friday so far. I was only half paying attention to what Monica was saying, because my father was in his office behind closed doors, and the muffled conversation inside was getting loud.

  “Oh, this is sad,” Monica announced in her high-pitched twitter of a voice as she squinted at the computer screen. “Poor old Paul Nadler wandered away again in Stanton. They want us to be on the lookout for him.”

  Adam snorted from behind his cigar. “On the lookout? Stanton is an hour away. Nadler is what, ninety-four? Do they think he’s running a marathon or something?”

  “Come on, Adam,” I chided him. “The man has Alzheimer’s.”

  “Yeah, I know, but this is like the sixth time he’s walked out of that care center without anybody noticing. Somebody either needs to bell that cat or figure out how to lock the damn door.”

  Adam was right about that. Stanton was in the next county over, so it really wasn’t our problem, but I felt sorry for Mr. Nadler and angry that the senior facility couldn’t keep him safe. They typically found him within a couple of hours, but a lot can happen to an old man in that amount of time. Once he walked into a stranger’s house two blocks away and fell asleep in a closet. Another time he actually climbed the hundred-foot Stanton fire tower. Sooner or later, he was going to get hurt.

  “Let’s move on, Monica. What else is on the list?”

  I was a little too brusque with her, but Monica gave me a sympathetic smile from the other side of the room. She could read my mind. I wasn’t upset about Mr. Nadler’s memory problems. I was worried that someday I would find myself in the same situation with my father.

  “We’ve got a report of a stolen pickup truck in Martin’s Point,” she went on. “A white Ford F-150. That is such a nice vehicle. I’ve always wanted one of those.”

  I grinned at the idea of tiny Monica Constant driving one of the world’s largest trucks. She rattled off the license plate, and Adam and I scribbled it down in our notebooks. This was the fourth stolen vehicle report this month. It was summer. Cars around Mittel County had a way of going on joyrides when kids were off school. Martin’s Point was a lakeside town fifty miles south of us, which meant it attracted tourist families with bored teenagers who quickly discovered that the locals don’t always lock their vehicles.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. Mrs. Norris says she saw a man skulking outside her bedroom window last night. According to her, he was, quote, ‘ogling her lasciviously while in a state of undress.’”

  “A state of undress?” I asked. “Was he undressed or was she?”

  “I think she was.”

  “So we’re looking for a blind man,” Adam joked from the doorway. “That should make it easy.”

  I couldn’t help laughing. Adam was right about that, too. Nobody with good eyes would be ogling Mrs. Norris. “Did she give a description of the man?”

  “No, she didn’t see him. Her bedroom window was open, and she says he was making some kind of snuffling sound, like heavy breathing. She thinks he came from the motel across the highway.”

  “All right, we’ll wander over there later. I’m sure Rose won’t be surprised at another complaint from Mrs. N about one of her guests. Is that all?”

  It didn’t matter if that was all.

  Before Monica could say anything more, the door to my father’s office flew open with a bang, interrupting us. I saw a slim, tall, annoyingly attractive woman in the doorway, and she saw me sitting at my desk.

  “Violet,” I said coolly.

  “Shelby,” she said with equal frost in her voice.

  Violet Roka and I had been frenemies since high school. My one claim to fame in Mittel County—well, other than being the baby in the Easter basket—was being part of the girls volleyball team that won the state championship in my senior year. Believe me, that’s a big deal in a small town. There’s still a billboard about us on the highway. Violet’s family moved to the area when she was a junior, and she promptly went out for the team and squeezed out my best friend, which didn’t help us get along. She and I became the two biggest rivals with the two most stubborn personalities, but Coach Trina had managed to get it through our heads that we could accomplish more together than apart. The truce lasted until we brought the trophy home. Since then, we hadn’t exactly been close.

  At twenty-six years old, she was a newly minted lawyer who’d already gotten herself appointed to the county board after one of the members resigned in the middle of his term. One thing Violet never lacked was ambition. She’d been using her newfound clout to hassle my father about everything he was doing wrong as the county sheriff. I didn’t like it one bit, but Dad let it roll off his back the way he did everything in life.

  Violet didn’t linger in the office. She shrugged a purse over her shoulder, clicked across the floor in her sky-high heels, and pushed through Adam’s cloud of cigar smoke into the parking lot. Adam gave her one of his crooked James Dean smiles, but Violet didn’t swoon.

  When she was gone, my father strolled into the common area to join us. Adam quickly flipped his cigar to the asphalt outside and hummed an innocent tune.

  “What did Violet want?” I asked.

  “Oh, she always has something to complain about,” my father replied with a wrinkle of his bushy mustache. “Apparently, now I’m not doing enough to combat climate change.”

  “What exactly can you do about that?”

  “As you’d expect, Violet had a list prepared.”

  “Was there anything else? It sounded like the two of you were arguing.”

  “It was nothing, Shelby. Don’t worry about it.”

  My father was the most honest man I knew, but that also meant he was a bad liar. I didn’t know what he and Violet had been arguing about, but it was more than climate change. Whatever it was, he chose not to share it with me.

  Dad wandered over and perched on the side of Monica’s desk, where he perused the summary of police calls. “Mr. Nadler again? I can’t believe they keep losing that man.” Then without looking up, he continued: “Oh, and Adam? Was that a cigar
I saw in your hand?”

  “Definitely not, Tom,” Adam replied, although he wasn’t fooling anyone, because the smell had already permeated the basement.

  My father sighed and shot me a sideways glance. “How about we solve a little crossword puzzle for Adam, Shelby? Let’s try this one. ‘An unwanted visitor in a tableware emporium.’ Four letters.”

  Dad loved crossword puzzles. He and I had spent twenty years doing them together over breakfast in the local café. His clue took me just a moment to figure out, and then I said, “Bull.”

  Because a bull in a china shop would definitely be an unwanted visitor.

  “You got that, Adam?” my father told him with a wink. “Bull.”

  Adam stared at his feet and coughed. “Sorry, Tom.”

  “No more cigars in here, got it? Let’s try not to burn down another building.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Monica and I both covered our smiles.

  That was my father. He never needed to yell or shout or throw his weight around to get what he wanted. He had a way of charming you even as he made you feel like dirt for disappointing him. His voice was soft, like piano music, which sounded strange coming from such a big man. He stood six-foot-two, with a shaggy head of snow-white hair and a mustache that kept growing out of control like a weed. Even during the winter, his skin had a deep, leathery tan. His build was bulky and broad-shouldered in a way that sent a quiet message of strength.

  Anyway, now you’ve got the picture.

  That was July 17. A slow day. The four of us were in the Mittel County Sheriff’s Office, located in the basement underneath the town’s Carnegie Library. It was an old space, cold in the winters, humid in the summers. We could hear the thunder of children’s running footsteps overhead. The linoleum peeled at the corners. The ceiling tiles were water-stained.

  For me, that particular moment will always be stuck in time. Me at my desk. Dad and Monica with the police reports in hand. Adam in the open doorway. That’s how it was when the world changed.