1
The home was a small yellow cottage on an empty street. There was something dispirited about it, but Naomi was used to that. The young mother who answered the door was petite and looked much older than her age. Her face seemed strained and tired.
“The child finder,” she said.
They sat on a couch in an empty living room. Naomi noticed a stack of children’s books on the table next to a rocking chair. She could guarantee the child’s room would be exactly as before.
“I’m sorry we didn’t hear of you sooner,” the father said, rubbing his hands together from his position in an armchair near the window. “We’ve tried everything. All this time—”
“Even a psychic,” the young mother added, with a pained smile.
“They say you are the best at finding missing children,” the man added. “I didn’t even know there were investigators who did that.”
“Call me Naomi,” she said.
The parents took her in: sturdy build, tanned hands that looked like they knew work, long brown hair, a disarming smile. She was younger than they had expected—not out of her late twenties.
“How do you know how to find them?” the mother asked.
She gave that luminous smile. “Because I know freedom.”
The father blinked. He had read of her history.
“I’d like to see her room,” Naomi said after a bit, putting her coffee down.
The mother led her through the house while the father stayed in the living room. The kitchen looked sterile. An old-fashioned cookie jar sat collecting dust on its rim: the fat belly said, grandma’s cookies. Naomi wondered the last time the grandma had visited.
“My husband thinks I should go back to work,” the mother said.
“Work is good,” Naomi said gently.
“I can’t,” the mother said, and Naomi understood. You can’t leave your house if at any moment your child might come home.
The door opened to a room of perfect sadness. There was a twin bed, covered with a Disney quilt. A series of pictures on the wall: ducks flying. madison’s room, read the appliqué letters above the bed. There was a small bookshelf and a larger desk covered with a mess of pens and markers.
Above the desk was a reading chart from her kindergarten teacher. super reader, it said. There was a gold star for every book Madison had read that fall before she went missing.
The smell was of dust and staleness—the smell of a room that had not been occupied for years.
Naomi stepped next to the desk. Madison had been drawing. Naomi could imagine her getting up from the drawing, bolting out to the car while her dad called impatiently.
It was a picture of a Christmas tree covered with heavy red globes. A group stood next to it: a mom and a dad with a little girl and a dog. my family, the caption announced. It was the typical little-kid drawing, with large heads and stick figures. Naomi had seen dozens of these in similar bedrooms. Each time it felt like a stab wound to her heart.
She picked a wide-ruled writing journal off the desk, thumbing through the clumsy but exuberant entries decorated with crayon illustrations.
“She was a good writer for her age,” Naomi remarked. Most five-year-olds could barely scribble.
“She’s bright,” the mother responded.
Naomi went to the open closet. Inside was an array of colorful sweaters and well-washed cotton dresses. Madison liked bright colors, she could see. Naomi fingered the cuff of one of the sweaters, and then another. She frowned.
“These are all frayed,” she noted.
“She would pick at them—all of them. Unravel the threads,” the mom said. “I was always trying to get her to stop.”
“Why?”
The mother stopped.
“I don’t know anymore. I would do anything—”
“You know she is most likely dead,” Naomi said, softly. She had found it was better just to say it. Especially when so much time had passed.
The mom froze.
“I don’t believe she is.”
The two women faced each other. They were close to the same age, but Naomi had the bloom of health on her cheeks, while the mom looked drawn with fear.
“Someone took her,” the mother said, firmly.
“If they did take her and we find her, she won’t come back the same. You have to know that now,” Naomi said.
The woman’s lips trembled. “How will she come back?”
Naomi stepped forward. She came close enough that they almost touched. There was something magnificent in her gaze.
“She will come back needing you.”
At first Naomi didn’t think she would find it, even though she had the directions and coordinates given to her by the parents. The black road was wet with plowing, the sides pulpy with snow. On either side of her car rolled an endless vista: mountains of dark green firs capped with snow, black crags, and white frosted summits. She had been driving for hours, high into the Skookum National Forest, far away from the town. The terrain was tough, brutal. It was a wild land, full of crevasses and glacier faces.
There was a flash of yellow: tattered remains of yellow tape dangling from a tree.
Why did they stop here? It was nowhere.
Naomi stepped carefully out of her car. The air was bright and cold. She took a deep, comforting breath. She stepped inside the trees and was plunged into darkness. Her boots crunched on the snow.
She imagined the family deciding to spend an entire day driving to cut down their Christmas tree. They would stop for fresh doughnuts in the hamlet of Stubbed Toe Creek. Make their way up one of the many old roads winding the snowy mountains. Find their very own special Douglas fir.
Snow and ice would have been everywhere. She could picture the mom warming her hands on the car heater, the little girl in the backseat bundled in a pink parka. The father deciding—perhaps tired of trying to decide—this was the place. Pulling over. Opening the trunk to get the handsaw, his back turned, his wife diffidently picking her way into the woods, their daughter dashing quickly ahead—
It had happened in moments, they had told her. One minute Madison Culver was there, the next she was gone. They had followed her tracks as best they could, but it had begun to snow—hard—and even as they clung to each other in terror, the tracks vanished.
By the time the search parties were called, the snow had turned into a blizzard that closed the roads. The search resumed when the roads were cleared a few weeks later. None of the locals had heard or seen anything. The next spring a cadaver dog was sent in, but came back with nothing. Madison Culver had disappeared, her body presumed buried in the snow or scavenged by animals. No one could survive for long in the woods. Especially not a five-year-old girl dressed in a pink parka.
Hope was a beautiful thing, Naomi thought, looking up through the silent trees, the clean, cold air filling her lungs. It was the most beautiful part of her work when it was rewarded with life. The worst when it brought only sorrow.
Back at her car, she pulled out some new snowshoes and her pack. She was already dressed in a warm parka, hat, and thick boots. The trunk of her car was filled with clothes and gear for searching every possible terrain, from the desert to the mountains to the cities. She kept everything she needed right there at the ready.
In town she had a room in a house owned by a dear friend. It was there she kept her files, her records, more clothes, and keepsakes. But for Naomi real life was on the road working her cases. Especially, she had found, in places like this. She had taken classes on wilderness survival, as well as search and rescue, but it was intuition that informed her. The most dangerous wilderness felt safer to Naomi than a room with a door that locked from the inside.