M. Sellars - In the bleak midwinter

Constance shook her head. “How did you manage to find her in oh-three anyway?”

Skip shrugged. “Dumb luck, just like seventy-five. Why I even turned down that street I have no idea. Maybe it was some sort of divine intervention, who knows? Either way, I did, and there she was. I honestly thought I was hallucinating. But…as you can see, I wasn’t.”

“Unless we both are…” Constance offered quietly.

“Sometimes I wish that was true,” he replied.

“How did you know to bring her here to Holly-Oak?” Constance asked.

“I didn’t.” He shook his head, voice tinged with sadness. “That ended up being a very bad year for Merrie. We actually thought we were going to lose her.”

“What happened to the little girl?”

“That’s a good part of why I thought I was hallucinating,” he explained. “She disappeared.”

“Disappeared how?”

“I mean she vanished. It was like she was never there. No trace. Anyway, then in oh-four when I called after receiving the same Christmas card as before, we had an Agent by the name of Graham show up. During the interview to get him up to speed, I told him about finding Merrie and such. All of it… The bare naked truth, every bit… Right then and there he decided I was either insane or covering something up. To be honest, after what happened in oh-three I was almost inclined to believe him on the insane part.

“Either way, because of all that I went right to the top of his suspect list. We sat in my office the whole night Christmas Eve, and on into the morning Christmas Day, with him profiling me. Once we got the call he headed straight to the scene, but I made a detour… As crazy as it seemed, I had to go look. And…as I’m sure you can guess, I found Merrie again.”

Constance offered a matter-of-fact observation. “And that’s when you brought her here for the first time.”

“Yeah,” he said with a shallow nod. “Still don’t know what made me do it, but obviously it was the right thing.”

Skip paused for a moment, then shrugged and continued relating the history. “Then, in oh-five when I got another card, I called again. Graham showed up and turns out I was still his prime suspect. He just figured I had an accomplice. He beat that horse to death for a while then finally gave up. At that point he was just convinced that I was a head-case. Insisted I be evaluated by a shrink. That was a mess.

“Then, oh-six rolled around. Another card, another call, and he was back again, but that time he staked out the house with us and saw everything first hand, including Merrie coming out the front door. He didn’t handle that so well. In fact, he left town before we ever started processing the scene, and that’s the last time we ever saw him around here. After that, I stopped calling you Feds. Sorta figured I was on my own with this. Kind of like my own private hell, I guess.”

“So you haven’t contacted the bureau for help on this case since two-thousand six?”

“Nope. Hasn’t stopped any of you from showing up though, regular as clockwork. It’s just been a new face every year. Either way, ever since the first unsolicited visit in oh-seven I’ve kept my mouth shut and just let you all see it first hand for yourselves.” He shook his head. “Of course, don’t know that it’s worked any better that way either.”

Constance mulled over what he had just said. Her tired brain was having enough trouble processing everything she had seen tonight, and these latest revelations definitely were not helping her to make sense of the situation. As if there weren’t enough curiosities about this case already, the fact that the SAC had implied that the assignment came out of DC was even more intriguing now.

After a moment she offered, “I’m not really sure what to say about all that, Skip…”

“I suppose there’s not much you can,” he grunted. “Just so you realize that the lack of up-front information on my part wasn’t anything personal against you. Seeing is believing, I guess… Don’t know what to tell you about the lack of support at your end, other than join the club… I haven’t been getting any either.”

“Yeah… I’m not exactly clear on that myself,” she admitted.

Skip suppressed a snort, then nodded. “I hear you… Well… I’ll say this much, Special Agent Mandalay, you’re different.”

“What do you mean?”

“After what you’ve seen and learned in the past hour, you’re still here. I can’t say the same was ever true for most of your colleagues.”

Constance paused, still digesting the influx of bizarre data. Eventually she blew out a heavy sigh and looked at Sheriff Carmichael. “So, what now?”

“We grab some coffee and go process a crime scene,” he replied, then bobbed his head toward the door next to them. “In about two hours Merrie will wake up just like usual, and for her, it’ll be Christmas Day nineteen seventy-four all over again.”

“Which one of them, Sheriff?” she asked.

“There’s only one Merrie, Constance.”

“But you just-”

He cut her off. “I know.”

She cocked her head and blinked. “And all of the other Merries?”

“Trust me, Special Agent Mandalay. There’s only one Merrie Frances Callahan.”

6:17 A.M. – December 25, 2010

632 Evergreen Lane

Hulis Township – Northern Missouri

QUIET is a relative term, especially at 6 A.M. on Christmas morning. Constance was certain, however, that no matter the day, the hour, or the point of reference used to define the concept of relative quiet, the portable generator parked outside the abandoned house on Evergreen Lane didn’t qualify as such-even though the words Super-Quiet were emblazoned on the side right next to the manufacturer’s logo.

The pulsing thrum of the running engine was spilling into the frosty air in competition with the moan of the wind through the trees. The incessant staccato popping of the exhaust was being carried aloft on the undulating breeze, and together they were most assuredly splitting what little calm remained of the pre-dawn darkness. The melange of noise wasn’t helping Constance’s headache either, nor were the extra-strength aspirin Martha had given her back at Holly-Oak. At this point, the only thing that would do her any good would be sleep, but that was a prescription she couldn’t fill just yet.

She followed the ropes of multi-colored, heavy-duty extension cords that snaked away from the generator and across the porch, running in through the front door. Inside, the harsh glow of a halogen work light illuminated the way through the front room. A second of the adjustable lamps was positioned farther inward to light the hallway.

The bulk of the cords continued along the floor of the main room until they bent sharply into the corridor at the archway and angled across its length. After running diagonally across the floor for several feet, they hooked to the left and disappeared through the open basement doorway-a twisted green, orange, and yellow stripe that marked an obvious path toward the remnants of horror that waited below.

The tight bundle of electrical cords ran down the stairs-carefully arranged, safely out of the way-against the uprights that supported the handrail. At the bottom they spilled out across the concrete floor in a bright pile of coils before shooting off in a spindly fan, each ending in its own caged, halogen work lamp.

Constance lowered herself down from the double-height step at the bottom of the staircase and then tiptoed gingerly around the pile of cables. To her back, the basement was still bathed in oblique shadows, illuminated only by residual glow. But in front of her, beyond the semicircle of tripod-mounted lamps, a man-made sun had risen. Even during the day, there hadn’t been anywhere near this amount of light filling the subterranean room, but then again, during the day there had only been rough outlines to see. Now those outlines were grotesquely filled in.