Page 99 of The Girls in the Snow

“Do you remember the night you found those pictures?”

His eyes popped wide. “I’m not supposed to talk about that.”

“I understand, but I’m trying to help you and your mommy, remember? I can’t do that if you don’t tell me everything.”

“They were in a big box.” He looked up at her solemnly. “Like the kind printer paper comes in.”

“Why did you open the box?”

“I didn’t mean to,” he said. “But I knocked the lid off when I was playing. I shouldn’t have told Mommy about them. That’s when everything went bad.” His lip quivered.

She held his shoulders. “You didn’t cause any of this, I promise. After you found the pictures, did you tell your mom?”

He nodded. “She looked at them and then got really mad.”

“Do you know if she looked through all of them?”

Bailey chewed his lower lip. “She told me to go play in my room.”

“Did you?”

“For a little bit, but then I snuck back to Mommy and Daddy’s bedroom. The door was mostly closed, but I peeked.”

“What did you see?” Nikki struggled to keep the nerves out of her voice. Bailey had been through enough without thinking he’d said something to upset her.

“Bunches of pictures all over the bed. Mommy was looking at them and crying.”

“Were the pictures printed out like the ones that go in frames? Like does Mommy ever take a picture with her phone and then have it printed out and framed?”

Bailey nodded. “I think there were lots of those. But there were square ones. Like thick and kind of old-looking.”

How did she describe a Polaroid picture to a kid his age? The technology would seem ancient to him. “Did they look like the picture had been printed on a thick, plastic-like white material? Like the actual picture was framed in white?”

He nodded. “Those were weird. Mommy was really upset about those.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“No,” he said. “But she kept picking them up and staring, like she was trying to figure something out. Mommy saw me in the door and made me go back to my room. Then I heard Maddie come home. Mommy told her to come here.”

Nikki worked to keep her face and tone neutral. Amy had shown Madison the pictures. “Did you hear what they talked about?”

“I heard Mommy crying and Maddie yell. Not at Mommy, though. Just like really surprised. And Mommy kept asking about her.”

“Who’s her?” Nikki kept waiting for him to tell her he might have seen a picture of her in John’s box. Maybe she was giving herself too much credit, since twenty years had gone by. She definitely didn’t look anywhere near sixteen now.

“I don’t know,” Bailey said. “She just kept asking Maddie if she was sure that was her. She kept saying yes,” he said, playing with the end of his mittens, concentrating hard in an attempt to remember. He reminded her of Lacey when she’d had a bad day at school and was making sure not to miss a single detail. “And then Maddie came back and told me everything was going to be okay. But it wasn’t. She was angry every time she saw Daddy. And then she and Kaylee were gone.” His eyes welled up.

Nikki’s heart broke for the little boy. “I know it’s hard to understand, but sometimes really bad things happen, and it’s no one’s fault.” She took his hand and led him to the jeep.

Forty-Four

Bailey finally agreed to watching a movie on the DVD player in the jeep as long as Nikki drove it up to the cabin. She needed to examine the cabin and Bailey wanted to be able to see her. He was still scared, and with the visits that Nikki had made to Bailey’s house in the last few days, she was the person he felt the most comfortable around. After updating the APB on John, she enlisted one of the Mille Lacs County deputies to keep an eye on him and joined Liam and Courtney inside the cabin.

“I can’t imagine multiple families staying here.” Courtney’s equipment took up half the floor space. “Even if there are three bedrooms. Where do the kids sleep?”

“Didn’t you ever go camping as a kid?” Liam asked. “Who cared about sleep?”

“I prefer indoor activities, thank you very much.”

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