Constance reached up and absently pushed a damp shock of hair from her face while she stared out the windshield of the police cruiser. Her eyes were burning as the warm air from the vent caused them to dry, but she couldn’t stop staring. The faint reflection of a disheveled woman gazed back at her from the inside of the glass. It looked horrifyingly old.
She forced herself to blink then looked beyond the slanted glass. The snowy landscape ahead loomed in the headlights as they rolled along the street. However, as with each time before when she would try to stay focused on a distant point, whatever she locked onto would grow to fill the window, then slip past and disappear into their wake. Her eyes would always come back to the unpleasant reflection.
She closed her eyes and allowed her head to drift forward, dropping her chin against her chest. Reaching up with both hands, she massaged her scalp through tangles of damp hair.
She was somewhere in the early stages of an annoying headache. At first she assumed it was a product of the head butt she’d delivered, especially since there was a fresh knot on the back of her scalp, courtesy of Skip’s chin. While that had probably been partially responsible, the epicenter seemed to be a dull ache radiating through her ears and into her temples. It took some time for her to realize that her jaw was tightly clenched, and she was grinding her teeth-a side effect of too many caffeine pills mixed with the jitters that always followed an adrenalin dump from hell.
She forced herself to open her mouth, then took in a deep breath and tried to relax, but it was an exercise in futility. There was no way she could relax while her mind was still racing. Unfortunately, since it had no idea where it was racing to, it was doing little more than following itself around in a confusing circle, looking for an off ramp that didn’t seem to exist.
She needed a drink. Maybe two. Followed by twenty-four hours of uninterrupted sleep. Better yet, she needed someone to tell her that this was all just an exceptionally vivid nightmare and that she would be waking up very soon.
Constance puffed out her cheeks with a heavy sigh and dropped her arms back to her sides. Then she pushed herself up in the seat and started turning around to check on the little girl in the back. She’d lost count of how many times she had turned to look at her. She wondered silently how much of it was to check on the girl’s well being and how much was simply to see if she was really there.
Skip threw an understanding glance at her, just as he’d done each time before when she’d twisted around to look upon the girl. She gazed back at him for a moment, but said nothing. Right now, there didn’t seem to be any words that would make sense.
She shifted some more and completed her turn in the seat. Although it was dark in the back of the vehicle, there was enough ambient light for her to see. What met her eyes was pitiful and heartbreaking. It would have been so even if she didn’t know the circumstances behind it.
Better than fifteen minutes had passed since they had picked up the little girl, but almost nothing about her had changed.
She was still mute, and unmoving.
Although she absolutely had to be chilled all the way to the bone, she didn’t shiver. She didn’t tremble. She didn’t huddle into the blanket. She didn’t even cry. She simply sat there, her only visible movement being that which was forced upon her slight form by the jostling of the vehicle as it bumped along the road.
Her expression had remained constant as well, in that she really bore no expression at all. Her face was slack, relaxed in a way that reminded Constance of death. That morbid thought was bolstered by the fact that the child’s pallor was ashen, almost devoid of any color behind the smears of blood and dirt.
And that was the one thing that had changed. In fact, she seemed to be graying more with each passing minute.
Her eyes were unblinking as she gazed straight ahead from behind matted clumps of chestnut hair that had fallen across her sallow face. The glassy stare was the same one she’d worn inside the house. What Merrie saw with those eyes was something that only she knew, but Constance doubted it was anything good. She was also convinced that whatever it was, it lay somewhere beyond the confines of this world. She found herself wishing Rowan were here. This sort of thing was his forte. The seemingly fantastic and the paranormal were where his expertise dwelled. Even if it didn’t make sense to everyone else, he always seemed to accept it for what it was and find a way to deal with it.
She desperately needed a way to deal with this.
Mandalay felt the vehicle starting to slow and then yaw a bit as it started into a turn. She braced herself and tossed a quick glance at Sheriff Carmichael, then twisted back around in her own seat and looked out through the windshield once again. For a brief instant, the sign for the Holly-Oak Assisted Living facility was framed in the headlights, then it quickly slipped sideways into the darkness as they turned into the entrance.
“Shouldn’t we be taking her to a hospital?” she asked.
“No,” Skip replied.
“But…”
“Trust me. I’ve been down this road before.”
Skip drove around to the back of the building, made a tight circle through the empty lot in order to turn around, and then pulled up close to the back door. As the vehicle rolled to a stop, flood lamps above the rear entrance sprang to life, spilling their brilliance outward and casting the passenger side of the cruiser in a stark light. After cranking the shift lever into park, Carmichael switched off the engine and dragged himself out from behind the wheel.
Before swinging the driver’s side door shut, he peered back in through the opening at Constance and said, “Get Merrie’s door for me, will you…”
Constance glanced quickly back over her shoulder at Merrie, then shouldered her own door open and climbed out into the cold wind. By the time she had levered it back closed, Skip had come around to her side, so she pulled the cruiser’s rear door open for him.
“We’re home,” he said to the girl as he pushed his frame in through the opening.
After unbuckling the seatbelt, he wrapped the loose folds of the blanket tighter, taking care to make sure 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 the house with us and saw everything first hand, including Merrie coming out the front door. He didn’t handle that so well. In fact, he left town before we ever started processing the scene, and that’s the last time we ever saw him around here. After that, I stopped calling you Feds. Sorta figured I was on my own with this. Kind of like my own private hell, I guess.”
“So you haven’t contacted the bureau for help on this case since two-thousand six?”
“Nope. Hasn’t stopped any of you from showing up though, regular as clockwork. It’s just been a new face every year. Either way, ever since the first unsolicited visit in oh-seven I’ve kept my mouth shut and just let you all see it first hand for yourselves.” He shook his head. “Of course, don’t know that it’s worked any better that way either.”
Constance mulled over what he had just said. Her tired brain was having enough trouble processing everything she had seen tonight, and these latest revelations definitely were not helping her to make sense of the situation. As if there weren’t enough curiosities about this case already, the fact that the SAC had implied that the assignment came out of DC was even more intriguing now.
After a moment she offered, “I’m not really sure what to say about all that, Skip…”
“I suppose there’s not much you can,” he grunted. “Just so you realize that the lack of up-front information on my part wasn’t anything personal against you. Seeing is believing, I guess… Don’t know what to tell you about the lack of support at your end, other than join the club… I haven’t been getting any either.”
“Yeah… I’m not exactly clear on that myself,” she admitted.
Skip suppressed a snort, then nodded. “I hear you… Well… I’ll say this much, Special Agent Mandalay, you’re different.”
“What do you mean?”
“After what you’ve seen and learned in the past hour, you’re still here. I can’t say the same was ever true for most of your colleagues.”
Constance paused, still digesting the influx of bizarre data. Eventually she blew out a heavy sigh and looked at Sheriff Carmichael. “So, what now?”
“We grab some coffee and go process a crime scene,” he replied, then bobbed his head toward the door next to them. “In about two hours Merrie will wake up just like usual, and for her, it’ll be Christmas Day nineteen seventy-four all over again.”
“Which one of them, Sheriff?” she asked.
“There’s only one Merrie, Constance.”
“But you just-”
He cut her off. “I know.”
She cocked her head and blinked. “And all of the other Merries?”
“Trust me, Special Agent Mandalay. There’s only one Merrie Frances Callahan.”