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“I really don’t need your help, Mr. Shooks. Bennie—thank you for bringing Mr. Shooks around. I appreciate what you’re trying to do. But I think it’s best if we leave this investigation to the proper authorities.”

  Shooks smiled at her. Although he was so dark and thin and saturnine, there was something strangely kind about his smile, as if he really understood what she was suffering. “Okay,” he said, “the decision is entirely yours. Bennie’s quite right, though. Sometimes, if you look at a problem from a different angle, it can unravel itself right in front of your eyes. As if by magic.”

  “Would either of you gentlemen like a drink?” asked Ned. “I still have about two gallons of my famous Christmas punch left over. Bennie? How about you, Mr. Shooks? Care for a drink?”

  “Thanks, but no,” said Shooks, still smiling at Lily.

  “I’d better take a raincheck, too,” said Bennie. “It’s solid ice out there, and I think I’m going to need my wits about me.”

  “I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted journey,” said Lily.

  Bennie put his arm around her and gave her a hug. “Not at all. You know that I’d do anything for you, Lil. I just thought it might be worth giving John a crack at finding Tasha and Sammy for you. Like I said, he really helped out my brother Myron with his two daughters. Every time his ex-wife Velma tried to take them away, John found her in a couple of hours flat. In the end I guess she got tired of trying. He never heard from her again.”

  Shooks picked up his hat and turned to go. As he reached the door, however, Agnes said, “Do you really think you could find Lily’s children, Mr. Shooks?”

  Shooks smiled at the floor. “Believe me, ma’am, I wouldn’t have come here otherwise. Not on Christmas Day.”

  Agnes looked at Lily. “Lily—maybe you should let him try. As Bennie says, what do you have to lose?”

  Lily said, “I don’t want to mess up anything the FBI might be doing, that’s all. You see these stories on TV when ordinary cops arrest undercover cops by mistake, thinking they’re criminals, and blow the cover on a drug bust or something.”

  “I understand your concern, Mrs. Blake,” said Shooks, “but we’re not dealing with a sting operation here, and I don’t have any more power of arrest than anybody else in this kitchen. All I intend to do is find your children and bring them back to you, unharmed, and as quickly as possible.”

  “But how can you do that, if the FBI can’t do it?”

  “Because I’m not the FBI, Mrs. Blake, and I can call on resources which the FBI are unable or unwilling to employ.”

  “Like what, for instance?” asked Ned. “You mean, like”—and he silently mouthed the next two words—“the Mafia?”

  “No, nothing like that. There are forces in this world that are a great deal more powerful than the Mafia. More trustworthy, too.”

  Lily could feel her heart beating, quick and hard—adrenaline, released by the possibility that Shooks could actually do what he claimed he could do.

  “How long do you think it would take you to find my children? I mean, supposing I did ask you to look for them?”

  Shooks turned his head slightly and fixed her with his glittery eyes. “Hard to tell exactly. Depends how far away they’ve been taken. But no more than three or four days, I shouldn’t imagine.”

  “If you’re such a genius at finding people, how come you’re not more famous? How come the FBI doesn’t use you?”

  “Because what I do, Mrs. Blake—it comes at a very high price. Not always financially. Sometimes, in terms of money, it comes extremely cheap. But all the same, some people can’t afford it; some people can afford it but don’t want to pay it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You would, if you were to retain me.”

  “Give us a ballpark figure,” said Ned.

  Shooks said, “I’m sorry. I’d have to consult my resources first, find out what they were looking for.”

  “A thousand? Two thousand? Ten thousand? What?”

  “You can name your price,” put in Bennie. “Concord Realty will pay. We just want to see Lily get her kids back.”

  “How much did your brother pay?” asked Shooks.

  Bennie thought about it, and then frowned. “I don’t know, to tell you the truth. He never told me.”

  “Exactly,” said Shooks. He turned again to leave, but Lily knew that she couldn’t let him go. If he could really find Tasha and Sammy for her in three or four days, she didn’t mind what it cost. She didn’t even mind if she had to sell the house and live in some low-rent apartment in Cedar-Riverside.

  “Mr. Shooks . . .” she said, and he stopped where he was, patiently waiting for what she was going to say next.

  He met her the next morning at eleven A.M. at Sibley’s Barn. It had stopped snowing and an orange sun was suspended in a pale-gray sky. She wore a shaggy fox-fur coat and a shaggy fox-fur hat and thick shaggy boots. When she crossed the Brer Rabbit field Shooks was already waiting for her, in his long black coat and his wide-brimmed hat, and a very long black scarf, his breath smoking.

  “How did you sleep?” he asked her as she approached. She was taken aback. It seemed an incongruous question from a man who barely knew her. Yet somehow it made sense. He wanted to know how excited she was.

  “Not very much, as a matter of fact,” she told him. “But then you must have known that.”

  “I’ve looked inside the barn already,” he said. “No physical, evidence, just as the FBI told you. No footprints, no fingerprints, no fibers.”

  “So now what?”

  “We find out what happened here first.”

  “How can we do that, if there’s no evidence?”

  Shooks smiled. “I said no physical evidence. But people leave more than physical evidence. They leave a resonance, an echo. A smell of themselves.”

  “The FBI tried manhunting dogs. They couldn’t pick up any scent at all.”

  “I’m not talking about that kind of a smell. Here—come into the barn and I’ll show you what I mean.”

  Lily hesitated for a moment, but then she stepped through the access door into the barn and Shooks followed her. She stood among the straw while he circled around and around her, trailing his fingers against the walls.

  “What are you looking for?” she asked him.

  He stopped circling. “They were here all right. I can hear them.”

  “You can hear them? What do you mean?”

  He approached her with his hands held up to the sides of his face. He stopped only two or three feet away from her, and it was then that she saw that his eyes had rolled up into his head, so that only the whites were exposed. She took a step away from him, and then another. He looked grotesque, like a death mask.

  “Where are we going?” he suddenly said. But he didn’t speak in his own voice at all. He sounded high and childish. In fact, he sounded exactly like Sammy.

  Lily felt her scalp crawl with fright. This wasn’t ventriloquism, or mimicry. Somehow, this was Sammy talking through Shooks’s lips.

  “How are you doing that?” she demanded. “That’s Sammy! How are you doing that?”

  “Mommy’s going to be worried,” said Shooks, and this time he spoke in Tasha’s voice. “I think you should take us back home.”

  “Don’t you want to come on vacation?” he replied, and now he was talking like Jeff. In fact he sounded so much like Jeff that Lily couldn’t stop herself from turning around, to see if Jeff was standing behind her. “Mommy won’t mind if we take a few days’ vacation. We can swim on the beach, we can go horseback riding. We can do anything you want.”

  “But does Mommy know?” asked Tasha.

  “I’ll call her. I promise. The trouble was, she didn’t want me to see you so the only way was to have those friends of mine sneak you out of the house.”

  “I’m cold,” said Sammy. “I don’t want to go on vacation. I want to go back to bed.”

  “Don’t you worry. My friends are bringing a car for us. There are b
lankets in the back, and it’ll be warm. You can sleep on the way.”

  Lily slowly approached Shooks and said, “Jeff? Jeff, listen to me, Jeff. Where are you taking them?”

  But it was Sammy who answered. “I don’t want to go on vacation. I want to go home.”

  “Jeff!” shouted Lily, taking hold of Shooks’s upraised wrists, and shaking him. “Jeff! Where are you taking them, Jeff?”

  There was a long pause. Somewhere up in the eaves of the barn an owl flapped, and gave a hollow moan that was unnervingly human. Shooks slowly closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, his black glittery pupils had reappeared. He looked at Lily’s hands, gripping his wrists, and he gently but firmly pried himself free.

  “You heard them, then?” he asked her.

  “Of course I heard them. You spoke like Sammy and Tasha and you spoke like Jeff, too. How did you do that?”

  “It’s a well-known phenomenon, Mrs. Blake. Scientists call it ‘auditory persistence.’ ”

  “What?”

  “It’s very simple. After we say anything, our words continue to resonate for a very long time—days, or even weeks, depending on where they were spoken, and with how much vehemence.” He tapped his forehead with his fingertip. “Anybody who has the sensitivity can pick them up. It’s a talent. I inherited it from my great-great-grandfather, on my mother’s side, who was a Mdewakanton Sioux. The Sioux call it ‘ghost talking.’ ”

  “So that was actually them—their actual voices—Tasha and Sammy and Jeff?”

  Shooks nodded. “Absolutely. You heard them for yourself. And so far as I’m concerned, those voices prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that your ex-husband kidnapped your children and tried to have you killed.”

  “So where is he now?”

  “It sounds like he was planning on going someplace warm. Who knows—Mexico maybe?”

  “I thought you could find out.”

  “Oh, yes. But not me personally. I don’t have the man-trailing skills for that. But I have an acquaintance who does.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?”

  “You remember what I was saying at your sister’s house—about the price that has to be paid?”

  “Yes. So what? I’ll pay anything.”

  “I know. But I have to warn you that my acquaintance may not be tempted.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I think you’d better meet him. Then we can see if he’s willing to help.”

  “All right, then. When?”

  Lily went back home, feeling jumpy and impatient and unnerved. The house was chilly and silent. The long-case clock in the hallway had stopped, and the log fire in the living room had burned out. She went into the utility room and Sergeant was dozing in his basket. He looked up at her sadly. She could have believed that Sergeant was pining for Tasha and Sammy more than she was.

  She hunkered down beside him and ruffled his ears. “Don’t you worry, boy. Mommy’s found a man who can bring them back to us. I hope so, anyhow.”

  Sergeant made a whining noise in the back of his throat and licked her hand.

  The phone rang. It was Special Agent Kellogg. “We had a sighting at Estherville, Mrs. Blake, a few miles over the border in Iowa. Two kids, very similar to Tasha and Sammy in appearance, but the Iowa State Police have just e-mailed us pictures and I’m afraid it isn’t them. Sorry—I was hoping to give you a belated Christmas present.”

  Lily was tempted to tell him what Shooks had managed to find out in Sibley’s Barn—that Jeff had taken the children and had probably headed south. But she decided against it. She guessed that Special Agents Rylance and Kellogg would be pretty irked if they found out that an amateur was interfering in their investigation, especially a part–Native American amateur who could talk in other people’s voices.

  She took Sergeant for a walk. The streets were snowy and the world was utterly hushed. The oaks were bare of leaves, but they were clustered with hundreds of black crows, as if the souls of all the children who had ever died in Minneapolis had gathered together, to hold a vigil. She still believed that Tasha and Sammy were alive, but she wondered how mothers could bear it when their children were killed. The emptiness and the sense of loss must be almost maddening.

  She was walking across the empty park when her cell phone rang. “Mrs. Blake? This is John Shooks. My acquaintance says that he can see us tomorrow, at noon.”

  “Did you tell him that I can pay him anything he asks?”

  “That didn’t really arise.”

  “What do you mean? I have to get my children back. Whatever he wants, he can have it.”

  “I’ll call for you tomorrow, Mrs. Blake.”

  He hung up. Lily checked her screen but he hadn’t left a number. She stood in the middle of the park, surrounded by snow and silence, and for the first time in her life she felt as if she were the only person left alive on the entire planet.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The next morning, while she was sitting in the dining room drinking a cup of coffee and working on a brochure for the Shingle Creek development, the doorbell chimed. She opened the door and it was Bennie, with a boiled bell hat that was two sizes too small for his head.

  “Bennie, come on in!”

  “I was on my way to Tangletown—thought I’d call by.”

  “Like some coffee?”

  He stamped his snowy galoshes on the mat. “No, no. I can’t stay long. I’ve got a viewing at the Starling property.”

  “Well, if you can sell that old ruin for the asking price, you’re a better realtor than I am.”

  He took off his padded coat and his hat, and perched his hat on top of the banister post. “Did you meet John Shooks yesterday?” he asked her.

  “Yes, I did. And I really think we’re making some progress. He’s coming around later this morning and bringing a friend of his.”

  “That’s good,” said Bennie. “That’s good.” But then he said, “I hope it’s good, anyhow.”

  “You hope it’s good? The way you talked about him before, he’s the best detective since Sherlock Holmes.”

  “I don’t know, Lil. Maybe it’s nothing. But I met my brother Myron yesterday and told him that Shooks was going to be working on your case. He said fine, good, he’ll definitely get your kids back for you. But for some reason he didn’t seem too easy about it. I asked him if there was anything wrong, and he said no. Then I asked him what Shooks had charged him, because I wanted you to have some idea of what you were letting yourself in for, costwise. And he said, it wasn’t the money.”

  “It wasn’t the money?”

  “That’s what he said. I didn’t know what he was talking about, either. So I asked him: if it wasn’t the money, what was it? And he said, it was his conscience.”

  Lily sat down at the dining-room table. “His conscience? He didn’t explain himself any more than that?”

  Bennie dragged out a large green handkerchief and blew his nose. “I told him that I still didn’t understand what he meant. And I told him that if he knew of any risk in doing business with Shooks, he needed to warn me about it, because I certainly don’t want you to come to any harm. But all he said was, when you do business with John Shooks, the price he asks you for is the price you’re going to have to pay, come hell or high water, so think long and hard before you agree to it.”

  Lily didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t imagine what Shooks could ask her for that she wouldn’t be prepared to give him. She wanted Tasha and Sammy back, at any price, and even if Shooks asked her for a million dollars, she was sure that she could find some way of raising it.

  Not only that, she was a seasoned negotiator and she knew exactly how to cut a deal and draw up a contract. Before she entered into any kind of arrangement with Shooks, she would make sure that all of the angles were covered, legal and financial, and that he wasn’t able to spring any unpleasant surprises—like finding Tasha and Sammy but refusing to hand them over unless she trebled his fee. Not that she beli
eved he would.

  Bennie said, “Maybe I’m making something out of nothing at all. Myron can have his funny moods, you know—laughing his socks off one minute, all doom and gloom the next. I thought he was real happy with what Shooks did for him, which is why I introduced him to you. I just thought I’d better give you the heads-up, in case.”

  “Well, I appreciate it,” said Lily. “But it sounds to me as if Myron could be feeling guilty about taking the children away from Velma and getting the court to cut down her alimony. I mean, once the dust has settled, some husbands and wives do regret how crappy they’ve been to each other, while they were going through their divorce. I know I did. Well—now I don’t, after what Jeff’s done. But I did before.”

  “Maybe you’re right. I hope so. And I hope you get those kids back, real quick.” Bennie peered at his wristwatch. “I’d better be heading off. I arranged to meet those people at eleven thirty.”

  But he didn’t immediately reach for his hat or his coat and Lily sensed that he had something more to say.

  “What is it?” she asked him.

  He pulled a tight, embarrassed smile. “I’ll tell you something, Lil: you must be psychic. I don’t really know how to tell you this, especially since I feel so fond of you. But I’ve been going through your sales figures for the past two months, and I guess you know that you’re way, way below target. And not showing a whole lot of improvement.”

  “It’s been a tough couple of months, Bennie—you know that. The market’s been really sluggish.”

  “Well, yes, sure, but I’ve had some negative feedback about you from some of our clients. Most of the local people we deal with—they’re aware of what happened to you—the kidnap, the way you were nearly burned alive. Quite understandably they’re not one hundred percent comfortable buying and selling their homes with you.”

  “What?”

  “They’re not unfeeling people, Lil. Far from it. But they know how traumatized you must be feeling. All they want to discuss with their realtor is customized kitchens and walk-in dressing rooms and escrow. They don’t want to be treading on eggshells in case they accidentally mention fire hazards or child security.”