You were born of the snow, her mind told her. Born of the beauty.
Outside a spring snow whipped and purred. The trees raised their very arms to feel it. The sun was very, very far away: a lemon drop that could not warm a thing.
In his bed, the girl and the man were entwined. She felt loved. There was no need for darkness. She could be awake. At night she slept against him and it was bliss, it was remembrance, it was touch.
The next morning, when she was returned to the cellar, she lay down in the shape that was MOM and cried.
It was after that snow girl told herself the first fairy tale. It went like this:
Once upon a time, in a world free of snow, there lived a little girl, and her name was Madison.
Madison was like all children: half make-believe.
One day her mother said: “We are going to the mountains, to cut a tree for Christmas.”
The mountains were much bigger than Madison had ever imagined. Their car was like an ant crawling up the side of a sugar jar.
Finally they stopped. Madison was so excited to see the snow. She ran inside the trees, surprised at how dark it was in the woods.
Madison turned around. She couldn’t see her mother or father. Her heart started beating faster. She was lost! Madison ran and ran, calling, “Mommy, Daddy!” But the more she ran, the more lost she got.
Suddenly she went tumbling down a long white cliff. The earth rose and fell, and she could see nothing but snow.
Madison landed in a place where the snow rose over her waist. It took a long time, but she fought her way out into another forest. She was shivering. Night fell.
All night Madison walked, touching the dark trees with her bare hands. By the time the sun came up, the shivering stopped. Madison began to feel very warm.
The snow looked soft, and comforting. Madison wanted to lie down and sleep. She stumbled, her head hitting a tree as she fell.
Then everything was white.
The store door clanged behind Naomi.
Earl Strikes looked up from his counter, where he was selling shells and beer to a group of hunters. They looked like they had stepped out of another time, with long tangled beards and stiff, stained coats. An old woman was with them. She clutched a gallon of cheap wine. She was wearing a jacket over a nightgown over boots.
Naomi stood at the door and watched the locals leave. The group piled into a deflated pickup with mold in the tires. The old woman’s nightgown stuck out of the truck door as they rode back down the mountain.
“Who was that?” she asked, returning to the counter.
“Oh, them? That’s the Murphy brothers. Buncha fools. And their mom, poor pisser she is.”
“Where do they live?” she asked.
“Down past Stubbed Toe Creek. They only come up here because I still sell them beer. That’s the kind of fool I am. Why? You think they got that girl?”
“Excuse me?”
“Ranger says you’re looking for that little girl,” Earl commented laconically.
Naomi felt a flash of anger. Of all the challenges in her work, having some law enforcement talk out of school was one of the hardest. If this old coot knew, probably everyone in the area would find out—and if Madison were still alive, it was a good way to get her killed. Most captors would kill a child rather than get caught.
“Heard you got a claim,” she said, deciding to make the best of it, pulling out her copy and smoothing it over the counter. Earl Strikes’s eyes widened. “Must have inherited it.”
“That I did,” he said, his back straightening.
“You live here in the store?”
“Right in the back. You can see. Don’t have no girl there either.”
Naomi didn’t hesitate. She knew that if she made her request a statement, many people didn’t know they could decline. So over the years she had learned to not ask permission, but to presume command.
“It’s not your back room I’m interested in—though I’ll definitely see that later. What I need to see is the family cabin.”
“You don’t scare easy, do you?” Earl asked, leading the way into the forest behind the store.
The land looked ready to jump at them: tangles of brush much denser than the area she had been searching, probably due to the lower elevation and logging. They passed massive snow-covered circular stumps of logs so large Naomi could have lain across them. The second-growth trees wove together a thick canopy. Giant ferns poked out of the snow.
“I don’t believe in fear,” Naomi said.
“Why not?” He worked his mouth.
“What’s the point?”
“Keeps you safe.”
The frost of his skin showed underneath the back of his cap, mottled with age spots. She saw the swinging hands, the capable knuckles.
“Fear never keeps anyone safe,” she said.
“You gonna go in the cellar like one of those TV shows?”
“No. I’m going to ask you to do it.”
“Got nothing to hide.”
In the end Earl’s family homestead was exactly as he had said: a falling-down old cabin with a collapsed mud chimney, home now to a dozen birds. A fat chipmunk sat on a decayed wall mantled with snow. The cabin was tucked into the trees. Naomi saw with dismay she could have hiked right past it without noticing it, the mossy old logs blended in so well. Searching for these cabins was going to be much harder than she had thought.
She peeked over the wall into a broken interior. Parts of the floor had collapsed. “That’s your cellar,” Earl said, pointing at the dim shadow under the floor. Naomi peered down. The cellar was small, deep, and empty. A broken ladder leaned against one wall.
She looked around at the cold woods. “It doesn’t seem like you’d need a root cellar in these parts.”
He cackled. “Not roots. It was for keeping furs.”
After thoroughly inspecting the cabin, Naomi followed Earl back to the store. She insisted on examining the place, from his room in the back—a surprisingly neat little room decorated with a collection of doilies hand-made by his dead wife—to the bales of rank-smelling furs on the covered back porch that he seemed reluctant to let her see. Earl explained that every year he took the furs to Prineville, where the Oregon Territorial Council on Furs ran a raw-fur auction. After the council took their commission they sent him a check, which he deposited at the bank in town. All perfectly legit, he said, a little too pointedly.
In the front she examined his decrepit old truck, which was filled with trash and wrappers, and sent her flashlight under the buckled porch, which rode only inches above the wet ground.
“You still think I got that girl?” Earl asked, watching her work. He had gone from sour to amused.
Naomi stopped, swinging her flashlight. She looked up at him, her knees in the dirty snow. Her face was controlled: there was a real girl missing.
“Who did?” she asked flatly.
“Snow got that girl, sure as rights. Sad as hell.” He signaled at a muddy sky. “Sure as heaven above.”
Naomi was scraping the mud off her boots, sitting in the seat of her car, when Earl came back out of the store. From the chimney ran a spiral of smoke. Naomi watched with interest as the smoke dispersed into the cold air as if it never had existed.