Merrie was protected from the cold. Slipping his arms around her, he lifted up and carefully maneuvered her small form out of the seat.
Constance heard a sudden creak of hinges behind them and turned to see Martha pushing open the back door of the building. The woman shot her a curious look and then raised an eyebrow as if seeing her was a surprise, but other than that she seemed as if she had been waiting for them. A second later she turned and directed herself to the sheriff.
Pushing her voice up a notch to be heard above the sigh of the rising wind, Martha asked, “Is everything okay, Skip?”
“Okay as it ever is,” he called out as he turned. Hugging the bundled child close, he looked at Constance and dipped his head toward the open doorway. “Follow me.”
“Good God, Skip!” Martha exclaimed when the light fell across his swollen lip and blood-smeared chin. “What happened to you?”
As he hastened past her into the building he replied, “Nothing to worry about. Just got my ass handed to me is all.”
“You’re getting too old for this, Addison Carmichael,” she chastised.
“We all are, Martha,” he called back over his shoulder. “We all are.”
Constance followed him through the opening, with Martha bringing up the rear for the moment. Once she had latched the back door, she quickly skirted around them, running ahead and opening the other doors in their path, leading them along short, dimly lit hallways until they finally arrived at “Merrie’s Room.”
“I was starting to worry,” Martha expressed in a hushed voice, carefully opening the door a crack. “You’re running late.”
“I know,” Skip replied, whispering. “Couldn’t be helped. But there should still be time.”
Martha pushed the door inward to reveal the same room they had visited three days ago. It was dark now, except for a dim puddle being cast outward by a small lamp resting atop the nightstand. The adult Merrie Callahan was tucked into the bed, her slackened face bathed in the soft glow.
“You two must be frozen solid,” Martha whispered. “I’ll go start some coffee…” Then she turned and disappeared up the corridor.
Skip looked at Constance and said, “Wait right here.” Then he shifted the blanket-wrapped girl farther up onto his shoulder to adjust his grip on her as he walked through the opening and into the room.
Just over twenty minutes had elapsed since they had picked up the little girl from the middle of the road, and still nothing made sense. Constance watched on in a shocked stupor from the doorway as the sheriff stooped over and carefully laid the ten-year-old Merrie Frances Callahan on the bed next to her catatonic adult self. He gently unwrapped the cocoon, revealing the girl. Her skin was now the ghostly gray-white of a corpse. Working with both tenderness and haste, Carmichael lifted the child’s hand and placed it against the woman’s. Slowly, both of their hands moved, intertwining with one another, though there was no other sign of consciousness from either of them.
Skip stood beside the pair for a moment, watching quietly. Finally, he kissed his fingertips and gently touched them to the little girl’s forehead, then to the older Merrie’s cheek.
When he walked out, he ushered Constance ahead then pulled the door shut behind him.
With a sigh he said, “All right, Special Agent Mandalay. Much as it pains me, I believe we still have a crime scene to process.”
“What…” she started, stammered, and then started again. “What just happened here, Sheriff Carmichael?”
He reached up and brushed his thumb and forefinger through his mustache while gazing in the general direction of the floor. His shoulders drooped as he allowed a long, low breath to escape. He swallowed hard, then looked up at Constance and shook his head.
“I don’t honestly know,” he said. “I don’t have any answers and that’s the truth. All I can tell you is that as of tonight it’s been happening for eight years now.”
“That little girl is actually Merrie Callahan?” she pressed.
He nodded. “Yes…or maybe her soul… I just know she’s part of Merrie.”
Constance rubbed her eyes and then pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger as she leaned back against the wall. “This is surreal…” she breathed.
“Yeah…it’s a bit much to take in.”
“Uh-huh…even for me and I’ve seen some things.”
“Anything like this?”
“Not exactly, but pretty close on the bizarre meter.”
“I have to admit, you’re the first Fed to tell me that one.”
“Why all the deception?” she asked. “Why didn’t you just tell me about all of this right from the outset?”
Skip raised an eyebrow. “You wouldn’t have believed me if I had.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Maybe not, but I’d say it’s a pretty good guess,” he replied. “Hell, sometimes I’m not sure I believe it myself.”
“So…” she said. “It’s some kind of test?”
“I guess that really depends on how you look at it. Believe me, I tried the truth with the first Fed. It ended up being more trouble than it was worth.”
“How so?”
“Well, on the first murder in oh-three I didn’t even call. We hadn’t put the pieces together yet, and besides, when I found Merrie standing in the street just like she had been in seventy-five, I wasn’t all that sure that I hadn’t lost my damn mind.”
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
