The Girl Who Remembered the Snow by Charles Mathes

had promised to phone Emma if anything broke in either murder case, after extracting her pledge to call him if she should come across some connection between her grandfather and Henri-Pierre. But what connection could there be?
    â€œThis is getting me nowhere,” Emma finally muttered aloud.
    She turned off the television, left her mug in the sink—she could clean up in the morning—and headed upstairs.
    She got back into bed, took off her glasses and closed her eyes. Nothing happened. Nothing like sleep, at any rate.
    After fifteen minutes of struggling unsuccessfully to black out, Emma put her glasses on and went into her grandfather’s room.
Then she took the glasses back off, got into his big bed and pulled the covers up to her neck.
    When she had been frightened in the night as a little girl, she would come in here, and her grandfather would let her into the bed with him. He had patted her hand and told her stories and sung her old French songs. She had not understood most of the words, but somehow they had always made her feel better, had made her feel safe. Or was it just the tone of his voice? She wished more than anything that she could hear that voice again.
    â€œMy poor Pépé,” she said quietly.
    The rain tapped gently on the windowpanes. The furniture cast strange shadows on the wall. The house creaked the way old houses do.
    Emma suddenly sat bolt upright. She reached over and turned on the lamp next to the bed, put on her glasses, and held her hand over her eyes until they got used to the light again. When she finally took her hands away and looked around, she knew she was not mistaken. Something was different about the room.
    Emma tried to figure out what it was. Her grandfather had been entirely set in his ways and had resisted even the slightest change. Emma practically had to hit him over the head just to get him to throw out his frayed and faded old shirts after she had bought him new ones. He certainly wouldn’t have started redecorating after all these years—nothing had changed in this room since Emma was a little girl.
    But something had changed now. What was it?
    Not the little blue-and-white bedside lamp or his old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock. Not the rocking chair by the window where Jacques Passant would sit and listen to a little transistor radio he would hold in his lap.
    Emma’s grandfather’s tastes were simple. Aside from a half dozen or so of the primitive carvings that he liked on top of the dresser, there were few decorations. The only picture on the wall was an old framed photograph of Emma’s mother when she was a
teenager, though there were photos of Emma on the bedside table and albums on the shelf below containing all the pictures he had taken of her growing up.
    Emma looked at the dresser again. That was it.
    She got out of bed and walked over to the dresser, where the heavy, dark wooden carvings stood guard—vague human shapes with deep eye sockets and elongated features. They ranged from eight inches to about two feet in height, and several of the squatting shapes had been carved with thick triangular blocks sticking out of their backs to counterbalance them. Between two of the largest figures there was a space where something else had been.
    â€œThe boat,” said Emma, pleased to have figured it out.
    A carved wooden model of a boat had always sat there on the dresser. When had her grandfather removed it? she wondered. And why?
    It was funny, Emma thought as she got back into bed and turned off the light. She had seen that model boat a million times, but she could barely remember what it looked like.
    The vague image of white sides, mahogany decks and an open back flashed through her mind. It may have been an old-fashioned cabin cruiser or something. A name had been painted on the stern in gold letters. She couldn’t even remember that. What was the boat’s name?
    Emma was still trying to remember when she finally