The Seeker A Novel (R. B. Chesterton) Read Online Free Page A

you think it’s really a matter for the police?” I was a bit taken aback. I didn’t want to be involved in even the most benign investigation. I had work to do. Grinding work that required my total concentration.
    “Chief McKinney will want to know. He’ll check it out. No bother to him or you.”
    The color rising along her throat revealed her thoughts. “Those prints don’t belong to your missing child from ten years back. She’d be grown by now.”
    “I know.” She pushed away from the desk. “Help yourself to the books.” She hurried to the office where she could talk privately on the phone.
    Will McKinney was a stout man with a walrus moustache and heavy jowls reddened by the cold. He found me at the inn, arms loaded with books. He’d already been to my cabin.
    “No footprints,” he said without preamble. “Snow’s coming down like a mother. Covered everything by the time I got there. Even your prints.”
    “I saw them.” The instinct to defend myself made my voice more strident than I intended. This wasn’t a case of my overactive imagination.
    “Don’t doubt it, but they’re gone now. Damned snow. Morons who shouldn’t be driving will be wrecking everywhere. This is no weather for grown-ups to be out, much less a kid. Folks today don’t mind their children.”
    “I saw someone in the woods earlier, and I thought it might be a child. It was just a flash of a figure moving through the trees.”
    “You seen any young’uns hanging around your cabin?”
    The question felt loaded. “No, should I have?”
    “Last year, when the cabin was empty, Dorothea discovered a group of middle-school kids hanging out there. They’d busted the lock. Smoking cigarettes, likely dope. They drank the liquor she’d stored there.” He pursed his lips and his moustache jumped like a caterpillar. “Might be they were hoping to use the cabin again.”
    “How old were these kids?” A ten-year-old was a different matter from an eighteen-year-old. I could handle the younger ones. The nearly grown ones could be treacherous.
    “Twelve and thirteen.” He sighed. “Kids today get into stuff that wasn’t around when I was growing up. Both parents work, they’re left to their own devices. Too often that means drugs or alcohol, or both.”
    “Did Dorothea press charges?”
    “No need. The two ringleaders went off to military or boarding school. A hard decision for the parents, but it was the right one. They were headed for trouble, and if Mom or Pop can’t watch over them, paying a school to do it is the next best option.”
    In theory I agreed with him, but I knew first-hand the brutality of boarding schools. Rich kids with money and no moral compass tortured the weaker, more sensitive kids. Some grew out of it, others grew into it.
    “I’ll keep an eye out. Chief, Dorothea mentioned a young girl who went missing years back.”
    The smile faded from his face. “Doesn’t take much to bring back that bad memory.”
    “Dorothea said she disappeared.”
    He rolled his shoulders and stood straighter. “That little girl vanished. We searched high and low for weeks. Dogs, helicopters, volunteer searchers. It didn’t make sense then and it doesn’t now. She was just gone.” His bleak expression told me how much the past troubled him.
    “Do you think a predator picked her up?”
    “I don’t want to think that, but she sure didn’t hitch-hike out of town. Someone had to take her.”
    “That must have been horrible for her parents.”
    “For all of us,” he said. “For every single person in town.” He inhaled. “Give me a call if you see or hear anything that troubles you.” He gave me a card. “Winters here are usually calm. The weather causes problems, but none we haven’t handled for years. Dorothea tells me you’re a writer.”
    I shook my head. “I’m a doctoral student at Brandeis. I’m writing my dissertation.”
    The first genuine grin crossed his face. “And here I was hoping you’d be