M. Sellars: In the bleak midwinter

She shook her head. “Actually, Elvis isn’t here. He came down with that bad flu that’s been going around, and we had to hire someone to take over for him this past week.”

“Who?”

“His name is John Carter.”

“That doesn’t sound familiar. Is he local?”

“No. With it being so last minute we had trouble finding anyone. Mister Bremerton actually had to hire him through an agency all the way down in Saint Louis. I understand that it wasn’t cheap, but he didn’t want the children to be disappointed.”

“Sounds about like Mister B.”

She nodded agreement. “Anyway, Mister Carter seems like a very nice man. He even gave his time to go over to Immaculate Conception in Mais this morning to fill in for Elvis at the school party there. That wasn’t part of the contract, so he didn’t even get paid for it. He just volunteered.”

“That was nice of him to do that,” Skip said.

Voices were becoming more distinct within the overall murmur as they closed the gap between themselves and the clutch of people in front of the main window. Some of them were attempting to be soothing, most were concerned, but there was a standout that was unmistakably panicked. Skip figured that one in particular had to belong to Elizabeth Callahan. The bawling youngster hadn’t fully stopped either, but she seemed to be in a lull for the moment, with the warbling cries replaced by quieter gasping sobs, punctuated by short wails.

“So, what about this Mister Carter?” Skip asked. “Did he see the girl at all before she went missing?”

Missus Babbs slowed then completely stopped in her tracks, still several yards away from Bremerton’s storefront. Scrunching her forehead in thought and resting the tips of her fingers against her lips for a moment before shaking her head slowly, she answered, “You know… Come to think of it, I haven’t actually seen him since all of this started. He was on his dinner break when the girls first came in, but he was due back soon so I sent them back to wait. Then, in what seemed like it was just a couple of minutes later, Becca, the youngest, came wandering up to the front of the store, all alone and in a complete fit. All we could get from her was that her sister wouldn’t let her see Santa and that she couldn’t find her now.”

“Wouldn’t let her see Santa?” he asked.

“I know,” she replied. “It seemed strange to us too, but you know how kids are. I went back and looked for her, but she was nowhere to be seen.” The woman shrugged. “I just assumed Mister Carter hadn’t come back from his dinner break just yet and that the Santa thing was just a matter of a big sister picking at her little sister… And since then we’ve been so worried about finding Merrie I didn’t even think about him.”

The earlier notch of added concern was now joined by several more, and Deputy Carmichael felt every single one as each ratcheted into place. It wasn’t that a missing child hadn’t been important from the outset, but this was a small town. Kids around here were never really missing; they were just off being kids, daydreaming and hiding in plain sight while parental hearts skipped a beat or two.

However, something suddenly felt very different about this situation, and he didn’t like it at all.

“So that’s the missing girl’s name?” he asked, a thin but noticeably real edge of urgency had crept into his voice. “Merrie?”

She nodded. “Yes. Merrie Frances Callahan.”

“Would you happen to know where this Mister Carter goes on his dinner break?”

“No…” She shook her head.

“How about what type of car he drives?”

“It’s older. Kind of an orangish-brown,” she replied hesitantly, then paused to think. A heartbeat later she added, “It’s a four door, and it has a vinyl roof. Black, I think… Definitely dark… He’s only been here a few days, and I never really paid much attention to the make or anything. I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay,” Skip told her as he glanced quickly up the row of vehicles ahead of him as well as the traffic on the street. “That’s a good description. Did he normally park out here, or in the back?”

“In the back,” the manager replied.

“When you were looking for Merrie did you happen to notice if his car was out there?”

“No. I’m sorry. I didn’t even think to look for it.”

“Do you know where he’s staying?”

“I believe Mister Bremerton said he put him up at the Greenleaf,” she replied. Obvious fear was now welling in her voice. “You don’t think that…”

Skip filled in behind her failing words. “I’m just covering all the bases, Missus Babbs, that’s all. But I need you to do me a favor. I want you to go in and call back to the office, and give Sheriff Morton all of that information you just gave me, as well as a description of Carter and the girl. Tell Clovis that I told you to talk directly to him, okay? Can you do that for me?”

He could see that Missus Babbs was now wearing a far more concerned expression than when he had first arrived on the scene. She nodded in the affirmative, but didn’t say a word.

“Okay, let’s get moving,” he told her.

There was far more urgency in their pace now. It didn’t take uncanny powers of observation for Skip to put these pieces together and see that the picture they might well be forming wasn’t very pretty.

The gap between them and the crowd shrank quickly now, and as he expected, once he could start making out faces Skip recognized that he knew several people in the clutch. Those he didn’t actually know, he registered as having seen before. After all, Hulis wasn’t really as big as it looked on a map. Truth is, the majority of it was farmland spread out around a spot on the road that just happened to have its own post office. The population was relatively small, so it was easy to become familiar with faces, especially when you’d lived here your entire life and had a good memory.

“You have to find her,” a voice cried at him as they moved through the parting bodies. At almost the same instant, a hand clamped tightly onto his arm.

“Go on ahead in,” Skip told the manager as he came to an unscheduled halt. “And, make that call right now.”

Missus Babbs continued on, and Skip turned to see Elizabeth Callahan staring at him, a tight mask of worry clawing at her features as she clung to his arm. “Something’s wrong,” she said.

“I’m going in to look for her, Missus Callahan,” he said.

She shook her head, moaning, “This isn’t like Merrie at all.”

“Has anything been bothering her lately?” Skip asked. “Anything that might give her a reason to run off? Trouble at school or at home, maybe?”

“No, noth…” she said, then backpedaled almost immediately. “Wait… She said she wasn’t feeling well when I picked her up. I finally got her to tell me that she was worried about going to Hell because she was having bad thoughts about someone…”

“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.