was Elvis Babbs, the manager’s husband, but he’d come down sick that year so they hired themselves a replacement for that last week before Christmas. Anyway, Merrie, being the sweetheart she was, volunteered to take her sister next door so that her mother could finish the shopping in peace.”
“And Colson was that Santa Claus,” Constance offered, nodding. “That was in the report.”
“Yeah…” Carmichael grunted. “He was going by John Carter, which we found out later was apparently a known alias of his. How that sonofabitch got hired I don’t know. Of course, back then there wasn’t a sex offender registry, so I guess he just flew under the radar… Anyhow, about twenty minutes or so after Merrie took her sister next door, a clerk came rushing over to Norris’s looking for Elizabeth. Rebecca was standing in the middle of the dime store in hysterics, and all they could get out of her was that Merrie had taken Santa away, or some such. Of course, as we know, it was the other way around, but sometimes five-year-olds see the world differently than the rest of us.
“At any rate, Merrie was nowhere to be found, and no one except Rebecca had seen a thing. Colson had supposedly gone on a break, but he never returned and couldn’t be found in the vicinity, so he instantly went to the top of the list of people we wanted to interview.”
“‘We?’” Constance asked.
“Yeah… ‘We.’ Thirty-five years ago I was a commissioned deputy in this very sheriff’s department,” he explained.
“So, you didn’t just retire here,” Constance said. “You’re originally from Hulis.”
He nodded.
“That wasn’t in our files,” she puzzled aloud.
“I told you we needed to talk.”
“Obviously. Go on.”
“Well, back then I was green. I’d been on the department for less than a year, and we’d never had anything like this happen in Hulis. If you had a kid go missing, you found ‘em at a friend’s house, or they were skipping school and just forgot to make sure they came home in time to not get caught. But I knew this was different almost right from the minute I arrived.
“I was the first one on the scene. Both Sheriff Morton and I figured it was a nuisance call when it came in, but I rushed on over anyway. The minute Missus Babbs started filling me in I had a gut feeling that there was more to it. Then, I found the shoe.”
“The shoe?”
He nodded. “Colson apparently took Merrie out the back, through the stockroom. Since he parked his car behind the store in the employee area, that made it even easier for him to slip away unnoticed. When I was searching for her, I noticed some things that led me in that direction, and when I went out onto the back lot, I found one of her shoes. That’s when I knew for sure she’d been taken.
“We set up road blocks and organized a search, of course. I think just about everyone living here at the time helped look for her. There were even some State Highway Patrol officers sent in. Tom-that was her dad-and Elizabeth were basket cases, understandably, what with their little girl being stolen like that.” He shook his head and stared out the window for a moment before continuing. “I still remember my mom going over and staying at their place to help out with Rebecca, and just to make sure they had someone there.
“Anyway, we searched the rest of that night, even through the snowstorm that was hitting us. We didn’t stop. The searching went on all day the next and into that night too. By then we’d found out about the alias and pulled a complete background check on Colson, so we knew about his record, including the sexual assault on a minor charge. I’m here to tell you that information didn’t do much for our spirits.”
“I understand.”
Sheriff Carmichael drew in a deep breath and then puffed his cheeks in a drawn out sigh. “There was no such thing as an Amber Alert, but we got the word out to all the agencies, including yours. And then there was the media. They jumped all over it too. Next day was Christmas Eve,” he said. “We figured by that point Colson had probably gone across the state line into Iowa, or maybe even east into Illinois, so APB’s went out in every direction. But we kept lookin’ around here anyway. We weren’t about to give up. Of course, we still couldn’t find a thing. Not a trace of either of them. So…later that afternoon I went home and caught a nap. I had a regular shift coming up and I’d been running on next to no sleep. That evening I headed in for my regular overnight duty shift. Next mornin’ is when I found her.”
“How?”
“Luck, I guess,” he replied. “I’d just been sittin’ there in the office and twiddlin’ my thumbs the whole damn night. Soon as my shift ended, I figured I’d go out and cruise. You know, have another look even if I was just covering old ground. I was out for an hour…maybe a bit more…and everything just started to catch up with me. It was pushin’ five A.M., so I decided to go on home and hit the sack. I was out on the west side of town. Turned a corner to loop around the block and there she was. Standin’ in the middle of the road.”
He paused and Constance could see the fresh pain of an old memory creasing his face. He started to speak again, but his voice cracked, so he cleared his throat and took a sip of his coffee before finishing the story.
“At first I just thought I was seeing things,” he offered. “You know…that the lack of sleep was causing me to hallucinate or something… But… I wasn’t. It was her. She was covered in blood. Didn’t find out till later that wasn’t all of it hers. She was wearing her school uniform, or what was left of it. It was torn…just ripped up by that sick bastard. But I guess she’d put it back on after…well…you know.
“There was a good eight inches of snow on the ground, with even bigger drifts, what with that blizzard having blown through. Temp was in the twenties… But there she was, torn clothes, one shoe, and just standing there in the middle of the road, starin’ off into space. She wasn’t even shivering.” He hesitated momentarily as the vivid recollection welled inside him, gathering pressure before escaping via his tortured voice. “The ungodly things that bastard had done to that sweet little girl…cigarette burns…cuts…bruises…and… I… I… I just can’t even… I…”
“It’s okay,” Constance soothed. “I understand.”
“No,” he whispered, shaking his head. “It’s not okay. And unless you’ve seen it…I mean really seen it…then you don’t understand.”
“You’re correct,” she replied. “I don’t, really.” There was no reason to argue.
“Long as I live… I just…” Sheriff Carmichael stopped and blew out a heavy sigh. “Anyway…I wrapped her up in a blanket and called it in. She never said a word the whole time. Just sat there in my cruiser and stared out the window. They hustled her off to the hospital over in Mais while we started searching the neighborhood looking for Colson. About two hours later we found what was left of ‘im in the basement of a vacant house. It was a few blocks from where I found Merrie. It had been checked the day before. Or it was supposed to have been-nobody was sure-but if it was, where they were prior to that is still a mystery.
“At any rate, he was dead, of course. He’d been hacked up good with an axe. It was layin’ right there next to him, along with an empty bourbon bottle. Axe handle had small, bloody handprints all over it, and the fingerprints we pulled matched Merrie. Then, like I said, we found out that a good bit of the blood on her was his. She never told us what happened… I don’t honestly believe she even remembers. But the coroner’s report showed his blood alcohol was through the roof, so with the evidence at hand, the assumption was that he got liquored up, passed out, then Merrie found the axe and did what she thought she needed to do in order to escape.”
“Quite the feat for a ten-year-old girl,” Constance mused aloud.
“You know what they say about fear,” he replied. “It’s the great motivator.”
“True. And it does sound like a logical conclusion under the circumstances,” she offered. “So, what happened after that? The file had notes to the effect that Merrie is currently institutionalized?”
The sheriff shook his head and answered. “She never really recovered. For the longest time she was almost catatonic. She was well into her teens before she showed any improvement at all, but even then it was like she was mentally frozen in time. Stuck at ten years old forever. A little girl in a grown up body. Tom and Elizabeth took care of her even as they got older, but about ten years ago they were both killed in a head on collision out on the two lane. Merrie couldn’t take care of herself, so she pretty much lives at the retirement home. Between her inheritance and the good hearts of folks here in town, it’s covered.”
Constance cocked an eyebrow. “What about her sister?”
“Nobody’s seen or heard from Rebecca for a long time. Coming up on a decade I guess.” He gave his head a shake that exuded sadness in the very motion. “Merrie had become Tom and Elizabeth’s world, and I think Rebecca
