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snow was fresh, no frozen hazard lurking underneath.
    Holding fast to her key ring, Beth made the few steps from the car to the covered porch. She found the cabin key by feel. It was a skeleton key. She had taken it from her father’s key ring and placed it on hers shortly after the funeral. It was like a talisman. It made her feel better.
    Her dad had possessed quite a dramatic sense of humor. He had found the ancient lock interesting, so he’d had an expert repair it when they had first bought the ramshackle cabin back when she was just a little girl.
    The porch was inhabited by shadows, some shallow, near the steps, some much deeper, where the porch met the wall. In places some were so black they seemed to be poured on, as though a bucket of ink had been splashed across the front of the cabin. She wondered about the boy again.
    Once she had driven out of the closed-in valley, up a bit higher on the mountain, she had finally gotten through to the DPS via 911. A trooper by the name of Tad Donaldson had met her at the mile marker nearest where the incident had occurred. He’d been very interested in her story. Apparently, a boy had been kidnapped in Albuquerque a couple of weeks earlier.
    Beth felt terrible. Together, she and Trooper Donaldson had driven back along her route, stopping to check every stand of trees on the east side of the highway. They found nothing out of the ordinary. Unfortunately, a fresh, heavy, snow had begun to fall before Beth had even got out of the valley.
    After a couple of hours of searching, the trooper had taken her report and her cell number. He’d also noted the location of the Stutter Creek cabin.
    She’d listened as the trooper contacted dispatch and told them to relay the description of the boy to all local law enforcement offices in the city, county, and state.
    But Beth could tell he was beginning to doubt her story. After searching for a while, Beth noticed the trooper wasn’t making eye contact with her anymore. She didn’t really blame him. It was just too farfetched. How could a child be there one moment and not the next?
    She was beginning to doubt it, herself. When Trooper Donaldson asked her if she’d been under any stress recently, she broke down and told him she was going to the cabin specifically to get away from the sorrow of losing her father and her husband.
    He’d nodded sagely. Then he had regaled her with stories of the many highway accidents he had worked that occurred simply because an exhausted driver swerved to avoid something in the road—like a dancing stove, or a peacock in a top hat. And these folks were not under the influence of anything, he’d said. They were just guilty of operating a motor vehicle on too little sleep, or under too much stress, or both.
     
    Now, taking a deep breath, Beth slid the key into the lock and turned. It creaked loudly, just as it was supposed to. Her dad had adored that sound. A love of spooky books and movies had been one of the many things they had shared. Campfire stories had been another.
    Toward the end of their marriage, Sam had confessed that he’d often felt jealous of her dad. “I could never compete with him,” he’d told her, after she had caught him in another one of his lies.
    Her friend, Cindy, had chalked it up to Sam trying to shift some of his own guilt onto Beth. But thinking back . . . hadn’t she seen signs that he sometimes felt left out on occasions when they were all together? Their daughter, Abby, certainly hadn’t felt excluded. When she was growing up, she was the light in her Grampa’s eyes. Every weekend, the two of them were together. Just like when Beth, herself, was a girl.
    Sam had never complained about that. If he was jealous of Tom’s relationship with his granddaughter, it never showed. Usually, he would even join them on the camping and fishing trips. Especially when Beth couldn’t go. She had thought it was evidence that he had melded to her dad the same way she had. The way Big