Brian Freeman
The Deep, Deep Snow
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.”