The Snowman's Children : Sample

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[This excerpt from The Snowman's Children comes from the middle of the novel, as the effects of the Snowman's murders ripple through the lives of the children of Detroit.]

1977

Even before the woman realized what she'd seen, thrown up her dinner, and called the police, the Cory twins' abduction was different. All of us had felt it coming, first of all. There was something about this particular snow-a gray vapor that lingered for days and stank like floodwater-that seemed unusually filthy even for Detroit.

That night, the nine o'clock Special Update returned to all three networks. It stayed on for hours, tracking the progress of house-to-house searches on a map, as though they were part of a storm front closing over the region. The woman who'd seen it happen told her story to the police, then to the networks, then to some private detectives who never revealed who had hired them but otherwise talked freely to the press, and then to a shadowy group of men who showed up at her door in the middle of the night in black turtlenecks and demanded that she tell them everything she knew for the good of us all.

What she knew was that the Cory twins, age eleven, had been standing in a parking lot outside a comic book shop in downtown Birmingham, talking to a long-haired man. The shop was less than a hundred yards from their house, and they walked there every day. She had seen the two boys climb-willingly, as far as she could tell-into the long-haired man's car. One kid had held up the seat so that his twin brother could climb in the back, while the long-haired man stood on the other side of the car and grinned. The car itself was rusted almost all the way through along the molding. The police gave her photos of various models, and she identified one instantly: a blue Gremlin.

On the second night of the Cory twins' disappearance, I had my first Snowman nightmare.

I slip on the ice, land next to a basement window. Peering through it is like looking in the lake. I don't want to, and do. Through the snowlight glare, I see a long-haired man in a red down ski jacket and a baby propped in a high chair, gagged and stuffed like a doll. Only it isn't a doll. The long-haired man keeps leaning over the baby and whispering, and every time he stands, the baby looks shinier, less human. Right at the end, the long-haired man turns to me. His face is red and flat, like a stop sign.

The next day, I saw the Snowman's real face for the first time. It appeared on telephone poles, at the post office, in the newspapers, in people's windows. The woman who'd seen him hadn't been able to provide much description aside from the long hair, but the police artist had already come up with a face based on psychological profiles that bore a striking resemblance to her description: blurred charcoal eyes and a smeared indeterminate mouth. The face looked almost fetal, as if it were only now taking shape.

Mrs. Cory made a single public appearance, on the Saturday after the kidnapping. She had weird gouge marks in both cheeks, as though she'd been fitted for a bit. Her hair fell in a dark sweeping wave off one side of her face and was tucked in tight against the other. I don't know whether it was sympathy or admiration that caused it, but within a week, dozens of women were wearing their hair that way.

Mrs. Cory did not cry. She stared at the camera from her own living room, ignoring Larry Loreno. Larry was on his first hard-news assignment, dressed in a dark blue suit instead of the jeans and Tigers cap he usually wore for his Eyeing Detroit feature. He kept shifting in his chair, as if he wasn't sure where to place his hands. For what seemed like forever, Mrs. Cory said nothing at all.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said Larry nervously, but the camera never left Mrs. Cory's face. "We'd like to bring you this exclusive plea. Mrs. Cory?"

"What the hell's an exclusive plea?" my father barked.

Mrs. Cory opened her mouth, closed her mouth. Finally-still without tears, her voice breaking-she cleared her throat, blinked, and said softly, "Goodbye, boys." Then she stood up and wandered out of the room.

"Mattie, get to bed," my father said, and my mother began to cry.

Until then the adults had seemed mostly scared, crouched in their houses or behind their work desks, clutching us to them at every opportunity. But now they were angry.

I remember one night, the Special Update crew suddenly cut away from their map of the suburbs to a live shot at the corner of Telegraph and Long Lake, where a circle of coatless women had erupted from their houses and ambushed a blue Gremlin at a stoplight. They'd yanked a college kid out of the driver's seat, grabbed chunks of ice and gravel off the shoulder of the road, and begun stoning the car. This went on for forty-five minutes-with a few passersby pulling off the road and hopping out to join them-until someone stopped at Kroger and called the cops, who came blazing onto the scene and dispersed the women by waving nightsticks. Then they grabbed the college kid, who was protesting wildly, bent him over his blasted hood, threw on handcuffs, and broke into the trunk of his ruined car with a crowbar.

"You know what?" one of the women told a reporter. She was wearing no makeup, no shoes, just a bathrobe, and looked as if she had sleep-walked onto her driveway. "I didn't even notice the kid. I wanted to kill the car."

On the way home from school the next day, we all sat in silence on the bus and listened to a guy tell a talk-show host on WJR how he'd been stopped twelve times in sixteen hours the day before and ordered out of his Gremlin, which wasn't even blue. And this morning the police hadn't even waited for him to leave the house; they just showed up at 5 a.m. with a warrant to search his garage.

"Get new wheels, asshole," the talk-show host said and cut him off.

The twilight forays into our front yards got shorter. Brent and I slipped out once, when we were supposed to be setting the table, and pelted each other with ice balls while the sun sank behind the pines and split them with white-red light. Cold air crawled along the mouths of our gloves and clutched our wrists. My brother generally demolished me in snowball fights, but that night I scraped up two fistfuls of snow and sprinted at him. By the time he recovered from the shock, I was in his face, driving ice into his neck. He crumpled to the lawn and gave. Then we snuck out of the yard and down the block, past the Foxes' house, which was empty and lightless, and wound up hunched in the drainage ditch at the new bus stop on Cider Lake Road. We hadn't seen much of either Fox for a while. I thought of Barbara in the Daughrety house and missed her.

"What would you do if it came?" Brent whispered.

A van churned past, followed by an old Camaro, deep blue and rusted, with a shadow driver behind the tinted windshield. From far behind us, startlingly clear, came our mother's call. "Boys?" The call got clearer still, and louder. "Boys?"

Both of us heard the tone in her voice, the way the end of the question tailed upward in panic. Brent stood immediately. When I didn't, he kicked me in the ribs.

I didn't really want the Snowman to come. But I could imagine myself gone, could almost hear everyone at school, everyone I knew, talking. I wanted to hear what the Snowman said to get you to come with him. More, I wanted to hear his voice. I could almost hear it already, summoning me through the blowing snow: the Pied Piper, with charcoal for eyes.

Brent kicked me again, and I got up and kicked him back. Then we raced down the middle of the street, yelling and waving to our mother where she stood at the end of our driveway, ankle-deep in the drifts in her stocking feet.

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