Surrender the Dead Read online

  Dedication

  For my sister, Kristin,

  and my father, Dennis

  Epigraph

  Hide and seek until the dawn

  Billy, Sally, Jake, and John

  They looked in places big and small

  But never did they find them all

  —NURSERY RHYME

  Hey! Where do you think you’re going?

  —SCRAWLED ON THE WALL OF THE AMTRAK

  TRAIN STATION, WOLF POINT, MONTANA

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by John Burley

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  IT WAS SOMETHING SMALL THAT BUILT TO A FURY.

  The weather report out of KVCK predicted light snow—an accumulation of two to four inches—that would taper by midafternoon. By Northeast Montana standards, that was practically a summer day. Three years ago, it snowed in early June, two days shy of the end of the school year. Angela Finley was only eight then, but she remembered it, the way the morning sky had gone from light blue to a dense mat of gray while she stood there at the corner bus stop with her mother. She’d worn a yellow dress that day, something that was too small but worth holding on to. “That doesn’t fit you anymore,” her mother said when Angela appeared in the kitchen, but Angela had wanted to wear it anyway, knowing that the dress would soon be hanging in her sister Monica’s closet instead of hers, just one more thing she’d be forced to surrender.

  Combing her hair this morning in front of her bedroom window, Angela looked out at the February haze and thought about that dress, the color of lemonade and daffodils and afternoon sun. It hung in the dark now in the back of her sister’s closet, just as she’d known it would. But on that day in early June, she’d been running late and there had been no time to change. It was a small victory to leave the house in that dress, one dampened only by the dropping temperature. As Angela stood at the corner, her mother had turned back to fetch her daughter’s jacket, but the bus had arrived while she was gone and Angela had climbed aboard. By the time the driver pulled into the school parking lot, the day had gone cold, and Angela’s breath had made tiny plumes of smoke as she walked toward the building. It had not yet begun to snow, but she had felt it coming, like the distant roll of thunder before a summer storm.

  She’d learned that day that winter was a wild thing that could visit whenever it wanted, and she thought about that now as she descended the flight of wooden stairs toward the kitchen.

  “Wear your boots today,” her mother told them as Angela and her sister sat at the table over breakfast. “It’s cold outside. Radio says it might snow.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Angela responded. She glanced at Monica, who was dragging the back of her fork across a thin film of jelly on the surface of her toast.

  Dan Finley stretched his right leg out beneath the table and tapped the seat of his younger daughter’s chair with a steel-toed work boot. “Hey,” he said, “you hear your mother?”

  Monica looked up and nodded her head, her brown curls bouncing like a collection of miniature pogo sticks.

  The room fell silent as their father studied the two of them, his gaze moving from one face to the other and back again. He curled his fingers around the handle of his coffee mug, lifted it to his lips, and took a sip.

  Angela’s mother dried the surface of the counter with a hand towel, folded it once, and draped it over a hook attached to the cabinet below the sink. “You girls get your books together,” she told them. “Bus will be coming soon.”

  Monica slid out of her chair and left the kitchen, humming a song from one of her favorite TV shows.

  Angela lingered at the table, her eyes on the crust-laden plate in front of her. “If we get snow, can I go sledding with my friends?”

  Her father took one last sip of coffee and pushed his chair back from the table. “Shovel the driveway first,” he said. “It gets dark early. Make sure you’re home before then.”

  AT NORTHSIDE ELEMENTARY, the school was fifteen minutes into period two when Angela glanced toward the window and noticed the flurries: big wet flakes that peppered the glass but melted on contact. She sighed. At eleven years old, she figured she’d seen just about every type of snow there was to see. This was the wet and sloppy kind. It could fall all day and never amount to more than a few inches. It wasn’t until much later, in period six, when Emily Soto leaned over and whispered from the chair to Angela’s left.

  “We’re going sledding at Jacob’s Field after school. You in?”

  “Won’t be any good,” Angela whispered back. “Nothing but slop.”

  “Are you kidding? There’s, like, two feet of snow on the ground and it’s still dumping.”

  “Really?”

  Mr. Turner looked up from his desk. “Something you’d like to share with us, Ms. Finley?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then let’s keep it down, shall we? Unless you and Ms. Soto would like to stay after school to catch up on your reading.”

  The class was quiet after that. At the end of the period, Principal Hastings announced over the intercom that afternoon homeroom was canceled and that students were to head straight to their buses.

  Angela filed through the doors with the rest of them and boarded the number three bus that serviced the northeast section of town. She looked out at the streets as the bus made its way through the neighborhood. The school parking lot and primary roads had been plowed, but everywhere else the snow looked waist-deep or higher, the parked vehicles burrowed into the stuff like beetles.

  Erin Reece popped her head above the seat back in front of her. “Jacob’s Field, right? You going?”

  “Yeah,” Angela said. “Who else will be there?”

  “Me, Deirdre, Robbie, Emily, Meghan.” She shrugged. “I don’t know who else.”

  “I have to shovel the driveway before I go. I’ll meet you there.”

  Erin scowled. “That’ll take forever. Can’t you do it tomorrow?”

  Angela shook her head. “No, I have to do it today. Otherwise it turns to ice and my dad gets mad.”

  The inside of the windows were fogging. Angela wiped hers with the palm of her hand and looked through the glass at the falling snow. It was 3:40 P.M. How long would it take to get the job done? she wondered. By the time she cleared the driveway and walked across town to the sledding hill, how much time would she have before sundown?

  “You
could help me,” she suggested. “It would only take half as long if we did it together.”

  A small crease appeared in the center of Erin’s forehead. “I don’t know,” she said. “Robbie and me, we’re supposed to pick up the sleds and go straight from his house. The others will be waiting.”

  Angela nodded. “Yeah, okay.” She wiped at the glass again and looked out at the neighborhood. “It was a stupid idea anyway. I’m not even sure if I have a second shovel.”

  Erin rested her chin on her forearm. “I mean, we could come by, but . . .”

  “No,” she said. “You’d be getting in my way. I’m really fast with the driveway. I’ve been doing it, like, forever.”

  The bus slowed and Angela stood up, grabbed the strap of her backpack, and slung it over her shoulder.

  Erin tapped her friend’s leg with the toe of her boot. “We’ll meet you there, right?”

  “Soon as I’m done,” she said, and walked down the aisle toward the open doors.

  Outside, the road was plowed but icy. Angela waded through the front-yard drifts. She stumbled once over a hidden root, but a minute later she was at her door, using her key and moving through the house to where her father kept two snow shovels—one red and one blue—that leaned against the interior wall of the garage.

  Angela picked the one with the red blade, the one she always used. Outside, it was coming down harder than ever. Two feet of snow was more than she could lift with the shovel. She cleared it in layers, tossing each scoop on top of the growing mounds on either side. It was not a long driveway, but her progress was slow, and the parts she’d already shoveled were filling in with new precipitation. In an hour, she realized, it would be hard to tell that she’d done anything at all.

  Angela wanted to call her father to ask if she could do this later, after the snow had stopped falling. He worked at the Columbia Grain processing plant. The phone number was posted on the refrigerator door, but Dan Finley had emphasized to his family that it was to be used for emergencies only.

  “If you call that number,” he’d told Angela when he first got the job a few years back, “my boss has to come get me. I have to stop working in order to come to the phone.” He lifted her chin with his index finger until she was looking him in the eyes. “My boss doesn’t like it when I have to stop working,” he said. “If it happens too much, maybe he’ll decide to give my job to someone else. We’d have to leave this town and the friends we’ve made here.” He touched the side of her cheek with his thumb. “You understand?”

  She’d nodded and had never used the number to call him. But now she stood in the driveway, wrestling with her indecision. Her friends were probably at Jacob’s Field already, screaming and laughing as they careened down the steep slope that stretched more than a hundred yards—longer than the high school football field—before it flattened out near the bank of the Missouri River. The sun was low in the sky. If she hurried, she could have an hour of sledding, maybe more. She would come home for dinner, turn on the outside light, and shovel the rest of the driveway before she went to bed. Most likely it would have stopped snowing by then, and the driveway would stay cleared as she shoveled, instead of filling in around her.

  It took only a few minutes for Angela to change into something dry, and she left her wet things in a basket in the mudroom. Her snow pants were hanging in the closet, and she put those on as well, then the same boots she’d been wearing throughout the day. She fetched her plastic sled from the garage but left the red shovel sticking out of the snow so that her father would see that she’d at least tried to clear the driveway before she left.

  Trying is good, she thought. Trying could mean the difference between getting a scolding or something worse.

  Jacob’s Field was on the other side of town, about three-quarters of a mile from where she lived. Angela stuck to the roads that had been cleared. She jogged for most of the distance, moving off to the side to make way for the occasional car as it rolled slowly past, kernels of ice crackling beneath the tires. She crossed the open corridor of the railroad tracks that divided the town into its northern and southern sections. The rails themselves were hidden beneath the snow, and Angela stepped on one of them with the sole of her right boot before descending the small embankment to Sixth Avenue South and passing the quiet grounds of the high school on her right.

  She was near Jacob’s Field now, an expanse of land that stretched along the southern section of a parcel of farmland owned by Nathaniel Jacob. Angela had never met Mr. Jacob and knew of him only because of the sledding hill. She had seen him once, standing on his porch and looking south toward the river, although his view of the hill and the water below was obstructed by a line of pine trees that stood along the ridge where the land began to slope downward. It was not a secret thing, the kids sledding there. Mr. Jacob had no children of his own that Angela was aware of, and it was rumored that he lived alone, that his wife had died a long time ago, although no one seemed to know exactly how. Angela had asked her father about him last winter, curious after seeing the man standing on the porch in his olive baseball cap and flannel jacket.

  “I don’t know,” her father said, his hands resting on the copper pipe he was working on in their basement. “Nathaniel Jacob keeps to himself mostly. Did he talk to you?”

  “No, sir. I saw him from across the field.”

  “Well”—Dan Finley stood up and wiped his hands with a rag—“he prefers to be left alone, I imagine. Did he give you and your friends permission to use his field?”

  “Yes, sir. Jeff Stutzman’s brother asked him about it a few years ago. He said it was fine, as long as we stayed away from his crops and none of us got hurt.”

  “Stay away from his crops, then,” her father told her. “Go around the long way if you have to.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and that’s what she always did, taking the long way down the side road instead of cutting across the northern section of the property. Today the road was unplowed, and it took her longer than usual, wading through the waist-high powder toward the tree line that marked the top of the hill. On the other side of those trees were her friends: Emily Soto and Erin Reece; Meghan Decker with her new braces and self-conscious smile; and Deirdre McKinney, whose father had run for town mayor twice but lost both times to a man named Zachary Brody.

  “Hey. Hey, girl.”

  Angela turned to look. There was a man standing in the snow behind her, along the buried section of road she had just traveled. He was wearing a brown winter hat and a heavy dark green jacket. The clothes made him look bulky, but it was hard to tell much about the features beneath. His pants were caked with snow, and his neck and face were wrapped in a scarf a shade darker than the jacket. There was a white van parked along the main road behind him.

  “No sledding today,” he said. “Storm’s getting worse.”

  Angela stood there, her plastic sled tucked under her right arm. She looked around. Her mitten made a soft zipping sound as it brushed against the side of her snow pants.

  “Everyone’s gone,” the man said. “I can give you a ride home if you want.” He took a few steps in her direction. “I’m sorry to make you leave. I’m sorry and that’s the truth.”

  “Are you Mr. Jacob?” Angela asked. She’d been coming here for four years and had seen him just that once.

  “I work for him. Take care of the farm a little and fix things around the house.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and brushed powder off the sleeves of his jacket. “It sure is coming down hard out here.”

  Angela heard it then, the shriek of one of her friends—Deirdre, she thought, the one with the loudest voice—coming from Jacob’s Field on the other side of the tree line behind her. She turned her head at the sound.

  “Come on now,” he said, but his voice sounded funny—the pitch high and a little squeaky.

  Angela took a step backward. It was difficult in the snow. “I thought you said everyone was gone.”

  “That’s
right,” he said, and took a few more steps. He was standing in front of her now, close enough to reach out and touch her if he wanted. “I told them to leave, but maybe they came back. They’ll get in big trouble if they did.” He cupped a gloved hand around Angela’s upper arm, the one that was not holding the sled. “Enough talking. It’s time to go.”

  “I can get home by myself.”

  “No, no,” he said. “Children don’t listen.”

  He clamped down on her arm and pulled her toward the van. Angela tried to yank free, but his grip was strong as they plodded through the snow. She stumbled a bit, but didn’t fall. Up ahead was the van, its side door open, letting in the weather.

  “Let me go. I don’t want to go with you.”

  He shook his head. “Too late for games, too late for fun. Tomorrow’s big adventures are all but said and done.”

  They were moving fast through the snow, and Angela wondered what would happen if she stopped walking, made her legs go slack and fell to the ground. Would he wrap his other hand around her arm and drag her the rest of the way? She remembered the warnings her mother had given her when she was younger. “Don’t take rides from strangers,” she’d said. “If a stranger tells you to get into his car, you don’t do it, do you hear me? You run away or call for help.”

  “Let go of me.”

  He stopped walking and looked back at her. “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m not supposed to take rides from strangers. My father would be very angry if he found out.” She thought of the shovel, jutting out of the snow beside the abandoned driveway. “I’m already going to get in trouble.”

  The man seemed to think about this, his head cocked to one side. He reached up with his left hand and adjusted his hat, although the right hand remained clamped around Angela’s arm. “Don’t tell him,” he said. “I’ll drop you off a block away.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.” She looked up at him, but the snow fell in her eyes and she looked down again, tried to blink it away.

  “Okay,” he said, letting go of her arm. He pulled at the fingers of his left glove. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “Thank you,” Angela told him, and there was a perfect moment of silence between them, when all she could hear was the soft patter of snow falling around them.