In The Bleak Midwinter: A Special Agent Constance Mandalay Novel (8 page)

“Bad thoughts? What kind of thoughts? About
who?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “I don’t know. She
wouldn’t tell me.”

“Do you think she was bothered by it enough
to run away?”

A fresh round of tears began welling in her
eyes, overflowing to embark on a trek downward across her cheeks.
She blinked hard, and then answered in a choked whine, “I don’t… I
don’t know… I… just… Please find her…”

He locked eyes with her and found himself
searching for something to say. Unfortunately, he wasn’t having
much luck where words were concerned.

The simple fact was, it hadn’t been all that
long ago that Deputy Carmichael had been just plain “Skip”
Carmichael, a former high school football star who had somehow been
lucky enough to avoid being drafted into the service, thereby
missing the horrors of Vietnam, unlike some of his friends. He’d
had little ambition where furthering his education was concerned,
but he’d always wanted to be a cop. Unfortunately, he didn’t have
much luck when applying to accredited police academies in the
bigger cities.

Eventually, he gave up and contented himself
with working on the family farm. After that, he had no greater
plans in mind other than convincing Kathy Higgins to marry him.

Then, the position for a deputy sheriff
opened up. Sheriff Morton had taken a chance on him and soon
afterward was making calls. No matter what the old man said, Skip
knew he had called in some markers on his behalf.

And now here he was, on the verge of what
could be his perfect career. The only problem was that the career
was still on the horizon. Right now, he was just a deputy sheriff
in a small town where the worst thing that ever happened was a
drunk and disorderly call that didn’t even end up on the books
because it was someone you knew and you just drove them home, or
let them sleep it off in the holding cell for a few hours.

He had been trained, yes; Sheriff Morton had
seen to that. But he hadn’t been prepared for something like this.
Besides, training wasn’t everything; experience was often the real
teacher, and that was something he sorely lacked. Even he would
admit that he was green enough to sprout roots if he stood still
long enough.

And it was for that very reason, as well as
the fact that in Hulis everyone seemed to be family whether related
by blood or not, that he did the only thing he could think of to
do. He opened his mouth, and what came out was something that would
have caused any seasoned law enforcement veteran to cringe.

“Don’t worry Missus Callahan,” he said. “It’s
going to be fine. I promise I’ll find Merrie. I’m sure she’s just
fine. I promise…”

PLASTIC
slammed hard against plastic.
The initial noise made by the sudden clash of handset versus cradle
was short-lived, but the echo and resulting forlorn ping of the
telephone’s metal ringer hung on a bit longer. Not only did they
linger in the air, they joined together and carried through the
open transom above the closed door of Sheriff Morton’s office. The
blended sound continued, unhindered by obstacles from that point on
as it zipped across the span of the room and entered Clovis’s
ears.

She swiveled around, startled by the sudden
noise and the resulting commotion. Through the large windows on the
back wall she could see that the sheriff was up from his desk and
moving about his office in a purposeful fashion. It had only been a
couple of minutes since Missus Babbs had called and asked to speak
to him, apparently at Skip’s insistence. She didn’t yet have the
details, but she got the impression they would be coming soon. The
urgency in the woman’s voice had already given her a very bad
feeling.

And now there was this.

A few seconds later the office door swung
open and Sheriff Morton stormed out. He was heading straight for
her desk, one arm stuffed into a sleeve of his coat while he fought
to fill the other as well. An index card was tucked between his
lips.

Given his expression, he didn’t seem like he
was angry. Actually, he appeared more than just a little concerned
and without a doubt, completely driven. Now Clovis was definitely
worried.

“What’s wro…” she started to ask.

He cut her off as he yanked the index card
out of his mouth, tossed it onto the desk in front of her, and
began to bark instructions. “I need you to get these descriptions
out to Carl and tell him to keep his eyes open. Tell him if he sees
this car, pull it over and radio for backup. Then call Joe and
Edgar and give the info to them too. Tell them they’re on the clock
as of ten minutes ago. You’ll want to plan on working late too.
Might wanna call Carol too. Get her in here to help.”

Clovis glanced quickly at the card. The lined
stock was covered with a scribble of notes, legible, but obviously
jotted in a hurry. Before she could utter any sort of response to
what had already been said, the sheriff continued. “I want you to
send Joe to the west end of town; tell him the same as Carl, keep
his eyes open. If he sees the car, pull it over, call for backup.
Have Edgar head over to Bremerton’s to help Carmichael. And then I
want you to get the Highway Patrol on the line…”

When he paused long enough to suck in a quick
breath, Clovis jumped on the chance and interjected a question,
“What’s going on?”

“A goddamned false alarm, I hope,” he
replied, then grunted hard as he finally managed to force his free
arm through the other sleeve and shrug completely into his coat.
“But right now it sure looks a lot like we’ve got an abduction on
our hands.”

At his words, Clovis felt her heart slide up
into her throat. The sharp pain of sympathetic fear washed over her
immediately behind the first sensation, causing a strange
hollowness to form deep inside her chest. She imagined it was
probably the empty space where her heart used to be.

“Are… Are you sure?”

“Not yet, but it sure looks bad. And, I trust
Carmichael. Something had to set him off for him to have Ruth call
me.”

“What do you want me to tell the Highway
Patrol?” Clovis asked, croaking out the words past the sudden
tightness in her voice. Still looking at the sheriff, she reached
sideways for the base microphone and fumbled after it with a shaky
hand until she managed to grasp the neck and pull it toward
her.

“Everything I just told you,” he replied,
turning and starting toward the front door. “And have them run this
John Carter for priors, just to be sure.”

She shouted after him. “Where are you
going?”

A swirl of snow streamed inward on the sudden
draft that was created when he tugged the door open with a quick
jerk. He started forward into the storm while calling back to her,
“I’m heading over to the Greenleaf to check on something. I’ll
radio in just a few…”

CHAPTER 6

HARSH
light spewed from a pair of
un-shrouded flood lamps and pooled on the parking lot just beyond
Bremerton’s back door. The bulbs themselves angled slightly
downward and were screwed into a fixture that was mounted a few
feet above the top of the opening on the outside wall. The glare
spread outward, throwing itself with singular purpose at the
encroaching darkness.

Undaunted, the artificial illumination put up
an admirable fight against insurmountable odds, but in the end it
lacked the strength to fully overwhelm the night. Somewhere near
the center of the back parking lot the opposing forces grappled,
blending together in a murky gray skirmish, flanked on either side
by the two sworn enemies, light and dark.

Deputy Carmichael paused at the threshold and
gazed out into the wide arc of diminishing light created by the
ongoing clash. Fat, crystalline flakes were filling the air before
him, streaming down, diagonally, sideways, and even twisting in
violent, short-lived swirls on sudden gusts of wind. As the frozen
precipitation plummeted toward the ground, it was simultaneously
reflecting the brilliance of the high-wattage bulbs, and casting
oblique, animated shadows upon the already snow-covered surface of
the asphalt.

Skip had hurriedly walked the interior of the
store, from front to back, calling Merrie’s name as he went, and
identifying himself aloud as well. If the little girl was simply
hiding, he wanted her to know that the police were involved now and
that the game had moved from simply annoying to downright serious.
However, he received no answer from her, and though he had said
exactly the opposite to her mother, he hadn’t really been expecting
one. In his mind, that lack of expectation was supported by what he
found at the back of the store.

The first thing to catch his eye when he
reached the “North Pole” fantasyland was the angle of the cardboard
fireplace. In the grand scheme of things it wasn’t off by much. No
more than a few inches, really. In fact, the average onlooker might
not have even noticed anything wrong about it at all, but the
disruption to its positioning was more than enough to grab Skip’s
attention. The fake logs with their orange cellophane embers were
still pretending to burn, most likely exactly where they’d been
placed originally. The fireplace façade itself, however, was askew
by more than enough to fully expose the motorized workings of the
flickering light behind the glowing hearth. Moreover, it was
resting at an angle that suggested it had been struck by someone or
something that was headed for the nearby storeroom door, and in a
bit of a hurry. Under everyday circumstances, while the disruption
to the scenery was certainly something he would notice, it wasn’t
something that he would consider all that important, because there
could easily be any number of mundane explanations for the
issue.

In truth, those innocuous reasons could still
apply, and he knew better than to discount them. However, the way
things had been shaping up, the mundane didn’t seem very
likely.

On that instinct, he followed what he
perceived to be a trail, entering the storeroom and continuing to
call out for the young girl as he searched. Eventually, he came to
the back door of the building and opened it. And that is where he
now stood, gazing out into the night.

“Merrie?” he called. “Merrie, it’s Deputy
Skip from the sheriff’s office…”

Again, no answer came other than the rising
and falling sigh of the frigid wind. His call had ridden out on a
cloud of steam caused by his moist breath. A cloud that immediately
leapt onto the back of the swirling air and was dragged away,
taking each dying syllable of the words along as well.

Carmichael stepped through the opening and
was instantly pelted with the blowing snow. He squinted his eyes
and pivoted his gaze from left to right as he quickly scanned the
lot, looking for both the missing girl and for Carter’s four-door
sedan. Stark puddles of light similar to the one in which he now
stood fell from fixtures mounted above the rear entrances of the
flower shop and pharmacy. Two more sets of flood lamps were also
positioned at the corners of the building. Still, the darkness of
night, aided by blizzard conditions, was winning the battle for
dominance over the lot. Were it not for the near whiteout, with the
exception of the trash dumpster to his right he would have had a
fairly unobstructed view of the parking area. Of course, as the old
saying goes, “woulda, shoulda, coulda.”

Skip held his hands up with his fingers
parallel to the brim of his hat and palms hooked at a ninety-degree
angle, trying to shield his eyes from the blowing flakes as he
concentrated on each individual car before moving his gaze to the
next. Unfortunately, of the few vehicles present, the sedan Missus
Babbs had described was nowhere to be seen, at least not that he
could tell. On top of that, they were all currently excelling at
the task of collecting their own blankets of white, which made them
even harder to make out. However, that also meant that it was
unlikely that any of them had been running recently enough to be
warm.

He repeated the scan just to be sure. Not
only was Carter’s vehicle not on the lot, there were no tire tracks
or footprints readily visible in the freshly fallen snow either.
This could simply mean that nobody had gone out this door since it
had started snowing. When you combined that observation with the
lack of a warm vehicle, it might also indicate that Carter wasn’t
as conscientious about his job as Missus Babbs wanted to believe
and that he was late returning from his dinner break.

Or, it could mean that Carter had indeed
taken Merrie and had done so before the snow had really begun to
fall, which fit the timeline. In Skip’s mind, as horrifying a
thought as that was, thus far everything seemed to be adding up to
foul play.

Finally satisfied that the car wasn’t there,
Skip panned his gaze lower across the flat expanse of snow. Even
though no tracks were immediately evident, that didn’t necessarily
mean they weren’t there, or even that something else important
might not be hiding in plain sight. Sometimes you just had to look
a little closer. As he swept toward the right, he noticed a dark
spot in the snow just a few feet away from where he was standing
and very near the dumpster—right at the corner of it, in fact. The
stain was roughly the size of a small dinner plate, though much
more oblong in shape, and appeared as if something was melting
through the thin layer of snow cover from beneath.