“You think it’s likely?”
“I think it’s possible. You want to join the hunting party?”
Shadow remembered seeing the girl in Hennings 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 police officers, and some men and women in the brown uniforms of the Lumber County Sheriff’s department.
Chad Mulligan told them what Alison was wearing when she vanished (a scarlet snowsuit, green gloves, blue woollen 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 handheld 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 mustache and white temples. He told Shadow he was a retired high school principal. “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 morejiike 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 bam, where his grandfather had gone to practice, that no music came out.
“Then after he came inside he put the trumpet down by the woodstove 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 and the world turned indigo and the wind blew cold enough to burn the skin on your face. When it was too dark to continue, Mulligan radioed to them to call it off for the evening, and they were picked up and driven back to the fire station.
In the block next to the fire station was the Buck Stops Here Tavern, and that was where most of the searchers wound up. They were exhausted and dispirited, talking to each other of how cold it had become, how more than likely Alison would show up in a day or so, no idea of how much trouble she’d caused everyone.
“You shouldn’t think badly of the town because of this,” said Brogan. “It is a good town.”
“Lakeside,” said a trim woman whose name Shadow had forgotten, if ever they’d been introduced, “is the best town in the North Woods. You know how many people are unemployed in Lakeside?”
“No,” said Shadow.
“Less than twenty,” she said. “There’s over five thousand people live in and around this town. We may not be rich, but everyone’s working. It’s not like the mining towns up in the northeast—most of them are ghost towns now. There were farming towns that were killed by the falling cost of milk, or the low price of hogs. You know what the biggest cause of unnatural death is among farmers in the Midwest?”
“Suicide?” Shadow hazarded.