“Alison McGovern’s vanished. She helped out up at the Lakeside Humane Society. Feed animals, walk dogs. She’d come out for a few hours after school. One of those animal kids. So. Dolly Knopf, who runs the Humane Society, she’d always run her home when they closed up for the night. Yesterday Alison never got there.”
“She’s vanished.”
“Yup. Her parents called us last night. Silly kid used to hitchhike up to the Humane Society. It’s out on County W, pretty isolated. Her parents told her not to, but this isn’t the kind of place where things happen…people here don’t lock their doors, you know? And you can’t tell kids. So, look at the photo again.”
Alison McGovern was smiling. The rubber bands on her teeth in the photograph were red, not blue.
“You can honestly say you didn’t kidnap her, rape her, murder her, anything like that?”
“I was in San Francisco. And I wouldn’t do that shit.”
“That was what I figured, pal. So you want to come help us look for her?”
“Me?”
“You. We’ve had the K-9 guys out this morning—nothing so far.” He sighed. “Heck, Mike. I just hope she turns up in the Twin Cities with some dopey boyfriend.”
“You think it’s likely?”
“I think it’s possible. You want to join the hunting party?”
Shadow remembered seeing the girl in Henning’s Farm and Home Supplies, the flash of a shy blue-braced smile, how beautiful he had known she was going to be one day. “I’ll come,” he said.
There were two dozen men and women waiting in the lobby of the fire station. Shadow recognized Hinzelmann, and several other faces looked familiar. There were several police officers, dressed in blue, and some men and women from the Lumber County sheriff’s department, dressed in brown.
Chad Mulligan told them what Alison was wearing when she vanished (a scarlet snowsuit, green gloves, blue woolen hat under the hood of her snowsuit) and divided the volunteers into groups of three. Shadow, Hinzelmann, and a man named Brogan comprised one of the groups. They were reminded how short the daylight period was, told that if, god forbid, they found Alison’s body they were not repeat not to disturb anything, just to radio back for help, but that if she was alive they were to keep her warm until help came.
They were dropped off out on County W.
Hinzelmann, Brogan and Shadow walked along the edge of a frozen creek. Each group of three had been issued a small hand-held walkie-talkie before they left.
The cloud cover was low, and the world was gray. No snow had fallen in the last thirty-six hours. Footprints stood out in the glittering crust of the crisp snow.
Brogan looked like a retired army colonel, with his slim moustache and white temples. He drove them, told Shadow he was a retired high school principal. “I took early retirement when I saw I wasn’t getting any younger. These days I still teach a little, do the school play—that was always the high point of the year anyhow—and now I hunt a little and have a cabin down on Pike Lake, spend too much time there.” As they set out Brogan said, “On the one hand, I hope we find her. On the other, if she’s going to be found, I’d be very grateful if it was someone else who got to find her, and not us. You know what I mean?”
Shadow knew exactly what he meant.
The three men did not talk much. They walked, looking for a red snowsuit, or green gloves, or a blue hat, or a white body. Now and again Brogan, who had the walkie-talkie, would check in with Chad Mulligan.
At lunchtime they sat with the rest of the search party on a commandeered school bus and ate hot dogs and drank hot soup. Someone pointed out a red-tailed hawk in a bare tree, and someone else said that it looked more like a falcon, but it flew away and the argument was abandoned.
Hinzelmann told them a story about his grandfather’s trumpet, and how he tried playing it during a cold snap, and the weather was so cold outside by the barn, where his grandfather had gone to practice, that no music came out.
“Then after he came inside he put the trumpet down by the wood-stove to thaw. Well, the family’re all in bed that night and suddenly the unfrozen tunes start coming out of that trumpet. Scared my grandmother so much she nearly had kittens.”
The afternoon was endless, unfruitful, and depressing. The daylight faded slowly: distances collapsed