Blue Lady
By
Dean Drabin
Published by Dean Drabin at Smashwords
Copyright © 2010 by Dean Drabin
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Visit the author at: deandrabin.com
Prologue
She turned left from Highway 97 onto Vandevert, crossed the railroad tracks, then pulled over to the right shoulder and stopped. Putting the transmission into park, she let the engine idle as she turned on the overhead lamp, then pulled the Mapquest printout from the passenger seat and studied it closely.
Yeah, that was right; Vandevert. Getting close now; only a few more miles. Before she extinguished the lamp she snuck a peek at the mirror, smiled at her reflection: not bad, really; despite twelve tense, exhausting, almost non-stop hours behind the wheel, she still looked pretty damn good. After a couple of quick flicks at her long, blonde hair with her fingers, she doused the light, and then, keeping the map in her left hand, eased the car back out onto the pavement.
Man, it was dark out here: even with the high-beams on, the headlights suddenly seemed dull, inadequate by half; involuntarily leaning forward, she strained to see far enough down the road to drive even at the moderate speed she was maintaining right now.
Talk about your middle-of-nowhere; he’d told her he was moving to the mountains of Central Oregon, but…Jesus, this was like driving off the end of the fucking planet….
In a way, though, it wasn’t all that unfamiliar; kind of called to mind the bayou roads they’d driven so recklessly as teenagers. She smiled at the memory of those crazy, sweat-stained nights: at the Dixie beer---the taste of which she’d always hated but never refused---; at the rebel yells, the stupid, raunchy jokes producing way too much laughter; at the groans and rattles of their p.o.s. Ford Fairlane convertible, its nearly tread-less tires sorely tested by rutted, country lanes better suited for hooves and shoe leather; at the scolding, wagging red finger of the speedometer, always reading twenty miles an hour past insane---which, of course, they’d ignored, because when you were seventeen and wired to the gills, you knew you were indestructible.
Guess I’m not so indestructible now, am I?
She gritted her teeth as the memories abruptly vanished. What a steaming, stinking pile this whole thing had turned into: absolutely no fault of hers, and yet there she was, bolting out of L.A. like a frightened, scalded cat. Ditching her apartment, her clothes her possessions; hell, everything---except for this car, what she was wearing and the few things she’d managed to throw into a valise before she ran out the door.
Thank God I made it out of there before they showed up.
And if I hadn’t?
She’d compulsively mulled this same question at least a dozen times since she hit the road; now, as always, it produced a shudder, as a whole range of unpleasant possibilities paraded, luridly, across her thoughts---all of them painful, all, obviously, extremely terminal. With an effort she forced them away, took a couple of deep breaths, and again reminded herself that no matter what, she had, in fact, escaped; as things stood now, they would have no idea where she was or what her plans were.
And that was largely because, when it came to plans, even she had no idea.
But, at least for now, she had a place to crash.
She hoped.
He won’t turn me away. He can’t….
In her rear-view mirror, she saw the dim, distant points of a pair of headlights, a half-mile back. She found the sight reassuring: at least there was someone else driving out here in East Bumblefuck---
Christ, why couldn’t he have been home when she’d called earlier? She thought about pulling over and dialing his number again, decided, what the hell, I’m almost there anyway; kept driving. Reaching the end of Vandevert, she glanced briefly at the map for confirmation, and then made a left. One mile and then a right at the next road. From there, two and a half miles to the last road. To Widewater---his road. To rest and safety.
On the right the forest abruptly gave way to a broad, open meadow, dim and indistinct---maybe even a little creepy---under a moonless sky. But at least now she could see that sky: see the blanket of stars---millions of them, in fact; so many, so tightly crowded together against the overhead blackness that they seemed to blend into one continuous band---the Milky Way…that’s what they’d called it when she was a kid. Craning her neck as she gazed, fascinated, through the windshield, she realized with some regret that it had been too many years since she’d been in an area so free of city lights.
Her thoughts shifted back to him. Damn it, he’d better be home when she got there. Considering the late hour, and the fact that she had absolutely no idea of what sort of alternative accommodations were to be found out here, she basically had nowhere else to go. If he wasn’t there, she’d probably end up having to sleep in her car, parked like some homeless loser in his driveway---
I am homeless…now.
Surprised at the tears suddenly clouding her view of the highway, she shook herself and gripped the wheel more tightly. For Chrissakes, girl, knock it off! You’re free, aren’t you? Free and still breathing…all that matters, for now. He’ll be home---this late, where the hell else would he be?
“And if he is home, Lord, please let him be by himself.” She nodded; it’d certainly be a whole lot easier convincing him to put her up for a few days if there wasn’t some girlfriend standing there with arms folded, staring daggers at her as she made her pitch. If there was a girlfriend, she thought with a smug smile, you really couldn’t blame her for feeling threatened, could you? Hell, I’d be shooting stink-eyes, too, if someone looking like me showed up, unannounced, and hit on my man for some lodging---
Absolutely, it would be much better if he was alone---could even be kind of fun; a pleasurable way to make the most of a colossally shitty situation. After all, they’d had one or two good times, hadn’t they? As lovers went, he’d been…well, stimulating---at least for a while, anyway. Not that it mattered, though. If the price of sanctuary turned out to be nookie, well, then, she’d put out with gusto, whether it was fun or not. Sometimes you just do what you have to do. Besides, it’d probably only be for a few days---just long enough for her to catch her breath, get her shit together and figure out what the next move should be. Face it, she thought; tight spot you’re in, you don’t have a whole lotta choices. She sighed. Anyway, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t done a lot more for a lot less in the past.
A sign came up, interrupting her thoughts and directing her, with an arrow, to turn right onto South Century. After completing the turn, she shot one last look at the map: exactly two-point-five more miles. Then one last right onto his street and she was home free; comfortable, warm---secure.
Now heading due west, the highway traversed the meadow she’d been skirting. At the field’s far edge a quarter mile up, the road passed through a brief stretch of wetlands, and then crossed a curving bridge over a small river---very small, actually; looked more like a stream. She wondered about this, recalled that he’d mentioned that his house was on a river. Was this what he’d been talking about? If so, it’d be disappointing; the way he’d described it, it had sounded much bigger, far more impressive and scenic.
Ah well…wouldn’t be the first time a man exaggerated about size….
That brought a harsh, cynical chuckle, and then she looked in her mirror, and noticed that the headlights back there were closer now---maybe only a couple of hundred yards back. Again, reassuring; if you should happen to have a break-down out here, it was nice to know that there was a good chance someone would come along to bail you out.
After the bridge, she drove past a couple of modest, manufactured houses just off the highway on the left, and a large, sprawling R.V. park on the right---which, this early in the spring, did not look to have much business yet. Past that, the road plunged, once again, into thick forest, seemingly leaving even these meager signs of civilization behind. She was ruminating over this---wondering exactly how isolated his house must be---when the street sign for Widewater Road came up so abruptly she almost drove past it. Fortunately, she hadn’t been driving her normal banzai speed, so she was able to brake hard, and then make the right-turn onto the road without actually skidding.
A glance at the odometer puzzled her: according to it, she’d only traveled a mile and a half since the last turn; and yet the directions on the map had clearly read two and a half miles to Widewater. Could they really be that far off? The other puzzling thing was that, according to the map, the address she was seeking should have been just past the corner; on the left side of the street, and backing to the river. But, now that she was on that road, she could see no houses at all; nothing but dense, dark forest on both sides. And she certainly couldn’t see anything like a river.
“Oh, what the fuck,” she heard herself say. Then: “Maybe I should just pull over and call him again.”
While she was debating this, her car creeping along at barely twenty miles per hour, a sudden wash of bright light from behind told her that the car trailing her had just turned onto this road as well.
“Good,” she said. “For sure this guy knows where he’s going; I’ll just let him pass me and then I can follow him.” Lowering her window, she waved the driver by, then raised it and waited.
The car, actually a large, dark SUV, pulled alongside, but didn’t pass; instead staying exactly even with her car as they both rolled down the deserted avenue. “C’mon, dammit…move!” she muttered, wondering if she should slow down even more. She looked to the side, but the truck’s windows were tinted---too dark to penetrate.
“Get your butt in front of me, shit-kicker!”
Maybe I should just stop…force this asshole to get ahead of me. But, as soon as she thought it, the idea of stopping didn’t sound so good. Feeling a bit more nervous than she cared to admit, she reached for her cell phone, suddenly glad that his number was the last one she’d called.
Simple: just hit redial…
But just as she began to fumble with the buttons, she was suddenly thrown, violently, against the door, her ears filling with the grinding, protesting sound of tortured metal as her car was forced sideways from the road onto the shoulder. The phone flying onto the floor, she grabbed the steering wheel with both hands, wrestling with it, and pounding the brake pedal, until her car slid to a stop in a hail of flying gravel. Panting, her heart beating frantically against her ribs, she sat there, frozen, as the dark SUV that had just crashed into her eased to a stop on the shoulder, twenty feet ahead.
As her breathing slowed, fear was quickly replaced by anger, and she glared as she saw both front doors of the SUV swinging open, with two dark shapes emerging. Despite the murk, she could see that the driver was a big man, and that the passenger was much smaller---female, it looked like, though she couldn’t be sure. They both approached; each keeping to his---or her---side of the car, and also staying well outside of the pattern of her still-lit headlights. As the driver neared, she caught the glint of a tool in his hand; probably one of those emergency hammer things they use to help free trapped motorists.
“I’m not trapped, you dumb-shit, backwoods motherfucker,” she hissed. “Better you should be bringing your checkbook; stunt you’ve just pulled, I’m gonna own your sorry, red-neck ass.”
The notion of a sudden, extremely well-timed boost to her bank account danced into her mind, and she quickly decided that her lower back should be killing her, prepared to unleash a torrent of pain-laced expletives.
Then the two figures reached her car; the short one taking up a position outside of her passenger door, while the large figure stopped at the damaged driver’s side and leaned in, his face nearly touching the window---
Suddenly, all ideas of lawsuits and bank accounts, of exhaustion and warm beds and sanctuary, vanished, as she recoiled, spasmodically, from the glass; her only functioning thought as she strained frantically against her still-fastened seatbelt was to get away from that face. As she leaned backwards over the console, with the shift knob jamming, painfully, into her spine, her head turned towards the passenger window, where the image of the other, smaller person now became discernable.
She screamed; a long, agonized, helpless scream of terror and despair, which was only interrupted by the sound of smashing glass.
Chapter One
I awoke to the usual morning image of my dog’s face, hovering close enough to my nose to blur my vision. Even slightly out of focus it’s really quite a fetching face: soft, black white and tan fur; alert, upright ears; gentle, liquid brown eyes and a long, noble snout---a result of the fortuitous blending of breeds, in this case German shepherd and coyote (no idea...I guess somebody got lucky.)
Not satisfied with my reluctant opening of one sleep-stained eye, she sat up on the bed and prodded me with a paw.
“All right Satch,” I grumbled, “you win.”
I squinted myopically at the clock, and made sure that this wasn’t a canine con job. After all, when you’re retired, the term “crack of dawn” has little relevance. But it was a quarter to eight; a perfectly respectable time for a man of leisure to rise. This early in the spring the light was still somewhat insubstantial, creeping in at an oblique angle through the small window high up on the eastern wall of my second-story bedroom, which looked out from the front of the log home to the street. The west side, facing the Deschutes River and featuring several large windows, along with a pair of French doors leading to the balcony, was still very much cloaked in shadow.
Pushing myself from the bed, I stretched lazily, and headed for the bathroom, pausing briefly on my way to admire the view beyond the balcony. The house is set back fifty feet from the river, and at this height on the second floor your gaze is drawn across the water to the wetlands a hundred yards away on the opposite shore; then beyond that, to the thick pine forest, the dark green foothills, and finally, above and twenty-some-odd miles off in the distance, to snow-clad Mount Bachelor, its volcanic symmetry dominating the landscape like an American Fuji.
Eventually, my eyes dropped back down to the river.
“Hey,” I said, “water’s really up this morning.”
Satchmo wagged her tail agreeably.
The Deschutes, a dam-controlled river which flows mainly south to north, is lowered almost into nonexistence midway through October to conserve water during the idle winter months when farmers downstream aren’t irrigating. I’d been told that the river would gradually be restored sometime in April, but as this was my first spring in Central Oregon, I wasn’t sure how the process worked. Four days ago, and each day subsequent, I’d noticed slight, almost imperceptible rises in water level; a matter of a few inches at a time. This morning though, the difference was dramatic; I could see that the river had swelled considerably, at least three feet higher and far broader. It still had three or four feet to go yet, but at least by now there was an actual river flowing past my house; which is nice if you’re inclined to boast to friends about owning riverfront property.
That the sudden swelling of the river had just played a major role in turning my life upside down was something of which I was, as yet, unaware; and so for the moment I could only consider it a pleasant harbinger of spring and a major enhancement of my backyard view.
The sight of running water also carried with it the usual power of suggestion, and I soon turned toward the bathroom.
Behind me, Satch whined, obviously being of a similar disposition.
“All right, Baby,” I said; “let me take care of business, and then we’ll get out of here.”
In the bathroom, I ran through my routine, and tried to ignore the giant mirror over the sink. And as usually happens, I failed; forced to acknowledge that there was way too much of me in that reflection.
I am a large guy. At one time that might have meant large and imposing. Maybe even, as some had suggested, large and intimidating. Unfortunately, these days the evidence mostly argued large and soft. In the glare of this too brightly lit bathroom, the truth was as accusatory and naked as my reflected image.
I sighed.
Forty-eight years old.
Actually it wasn’t really the forty-eight years. It was mostly the last eleven, spent in entirely too many plush bucket seats, office chairs and cushy café booths around Los Angeles brokering commercial real estate deals.
I had hoped that, among other things, relocating to the Oregon woods would help me reclaim the physical focus I’d once owned but lost while trapped in the businessman’s bubble. That was the plan, anyway: hiking, skiing, biking---more hiking; nothing but clean, healthy mountain living. And when I constructed my dream house I’d even made sure to include a well-equipped workout room downstairs, sporting more chrome than a Harley showroom, and seemingly guaranteeing hours of vigorous, sweaty redemption.
Unfortunately, so far the only exercise I’d managed in that room was polishing the chrome. My fear was that, had I the guts to actually step on the scale, I’d find that my move north had so far only resulted in a net increase in poundage.
What an asshole.
It was a small voice, but as insistent as it was profane and always loudest in front of the bathroom mirror. And, as usual, there was a laundry list of explanations:
Creeping middle-age, laziness, inertia, lack of purpose….
I turned away from the mirror and jumped into the shower, attempting to drown that nagging little bastard of a voice. Anyway, I thought, my body wasn’t completely shot to hell; all I needed was to simply get going with my program. Might even start today.
After toweling off, I carelessly and quickly ran a brush through my hair, this time deliberately keeping my focus above the neck. Here, too, the years had been at work. There was now plenty of gray distributed among the brown, though my hair was still mercifully thick. These days I tended to let it grow long, partly out of laziness about getting to the barber, but also to offset what I’d always considered a not particularly handsome face. “Rugged” might be the most charitable description, and unfortunately time had only served to enhance that impression, adding lines and character to further harden a countenance which had always been more than hard enough.
Stepping from the bathroom, I pulled on some faded jeans, an old sweatshirt and my hi-top hiking boots, and followed my now very excited dog from the bedroom out onto the landing, and then down the stairs into the great room, turning left at the bottom towards the rustic entryway, and grabbing the leash from the wrought-iron coat rack mounted on the log wall.
As we stepped through the etched-glass front door and passed under the porte-cochere, I breathed deeply, taking in a huge volume of fresh, pine-scented air. The morning had a snap to it, but as soon as we emerged from the shade I could feel the sun’s caressing warmth. Walking down the right leg of my circular driveway, we reached the road. Had I been less ambitious that morning, or more pressed for time, I’d have turned left, away from the highway and towards the homes of my neighbors. And had I done so, my dog and I would have had little more than a twenty minute, largely uneventful stroll around the gravel roads of our small community. There we might have encountered one or two fellow homeowners, a couple of corralled horses, a few of Satchmo’s unleashed acquaintances, and a fair sampling of the local squirrel population. There might be some early morning chatter; the usual commentary on the vagaries of the weather, maybe a little friendly butt-sniffing.
Instead, with that galling memory of my reflected Pillsbury Dough Boy image still fresh in my mind, I tugged Satch’s leash and pulled her to the right; opting for the longer, more vigorous route, towards the highway, and, beyond it, to the forest path which followed the river southward.
Might things have turned out differently otherwise? I doubt it. Way I see it; trouble always has a nasty habit of finding you no matter which path you choose.
Chapter Two
Satch and I walked two hundred yards to where my street, Widewater Road, meets the highway; turned right, then continued another hundred paces along the shoulder to the US Forest Service sign that marks the trailhead. From there we plunged into the forest, following the footpath back towards the river. A few steps in I unhooked my dog’s leash, and she trotted happily ahead, pausing every few feet to sniff, industriously cataloguing a long list of available scents.
I particularly enjoy morning walks in the woods. There is something in the tight, biting freshness of the air; the way the morning sun’s rays thread through the untidy profusion of pine trees; the racket of the robins and jays, and the amusing antics of the quail as they dart in and out of the bitterbrush and current bushes with a manic energy bordering upon naked panic, that makes the forest seem more vibrant, more promising; more vital, in fact, than at any other time of the day. Strolling in the a.m. on the pulverized red volcanic soil of the path, I am seldom so completely absorbed in my thoughts that I fail to remark the scene as I pass through. Brooding seems to be an activity more appropriately left for the declining hours of the afternoon.
By the time I reached the river, less than two minute’s walk from the highway, my dog had already waded in, apparently oblivious to the near freezing temperature, and was happily traipsing about in the shallows, alternately biting at the water as if it were something solid, and taking giant gulps of the fragrant air about her. I stood there watching, and enjoying the view of three ducks placidly cruising near the willows on the far shore, some fifty yards away. Above the river in a sky the color of a child’s bedroom flew a ragged assemblage of geese, madly honking and struggling in a frantic attempt to form a vee, but mostly looking like Keystone Kops tumbling out of a paddy wagon. No bird seemed able to take the initiative and fly the point, and I smiled as they careened noisily out of sight. Some creatures, it appears, aren’t much sharper in the morning than I am.
Leaving the water, Satch shook herself and then joined me. In many places winter was slow in surrendering to spring; here and there snow drifts had persisted, by now compressed into grayish, dirty ice, which I carefully avoided. To the left of the pathway the forest was crowded, the thick stands of trees rudely elbowed, everywhere, by a leaning riot of dead, twisted, fallen pines struck down by disease and high winds, and bushes still skeletally awaiting their first leaves of the new season. In places on the forest floor the downed tree limbs and branches had piled, haphazardly, into deadfalls, from under which scurried small birds and ground squirrels, which immediately reversed direction at my dog’s approach. She charged some of them briefly; sniffed at the piles into which they’d disappeared, then gave up and returned to my side. My dog is three years old, with hundreds of pursuits to her credit but not one capture; for Satchmo, it’s the chase that matters.
From here, the path wound its way towards the old footbridge, a half mile upstream. At times, the trail crept to within spitting distance of the water; at others, snaked inland, putting fifty yards or so of dense forest between itself and the river. Here I would stick to the path, while Satchmo disappeared into the bushes on the right, evidently preferring those sights and smells available on the river side of the trail. Though I couldn’t see her, I could often hear the jangling of her collar, and, occasionally, a distant splash as the allure of the river became too great. Sometimes, there would be no sign of her for several minutes, but I would continue walking, and eventually there would come the noisy rustling of bushes and clanking of ID tags, and then she would burst out onto the path, sprinting to catch up with me.
It was Satch who found the body. On one of the inland turns of the path, she had disappeared, and there’d been no sign of her for almost ten minutes. This was unusual, and I stopped, listening a while for the expected sound of her approach, and becoming annoyed when I didn’t hear it. I called to her, once, then twice, without receiving any response. Concerned that she might have actually caught some poor critter this time, or, more likely, that she’d stumbled upon something interesting to eat (like elk droppings), I retraced my steps, yelling her name with what I hoped sounded like authority.
A few minutes back up the path, at a place where a stand of trees separated me from the river, I began to hear the sound of her collar, busily rattling as if she were in constant, frantic motion. I turned into the woods there, and, carefully navigating the uncertain footing, soon found myself on a low bluff overlooking the river.
Satch was down there on the shore, anxiously pacing back and forth, and snuffling at a tree which had lost its grip on the bank and fallen at a right angle into the river. It must have happened fairly recently, because many of the branches twisting into the water still looked fresh, laden with green pine needles. A breeze was blowing; not sufficient to generate white noise in the forest, but strong enough to blow ripples on the river, so that you could clearly see the current in the center outpacing the water closer to the banks. Behind the fallen pine, the flow had basically stopped, forming a murky, sullen pool.
“Come on Satch,” I called out, impatiently, “let’s go; it’s just a dead tree….”
I stopped, and squinted: a vague shape was riding low in the water, only a couple of feet out from shore, trapped in the gnarled profusion jutting out from the tree trunk and bobbing gently in the quiet shadow. I could just make out the suggestion of a tangle of longish hair, dark and of undetermined color due to wetness, surrounding the mostly submerged head. There also seemed to be a slight swelling of the hips, which along with the hair length suggested a female, but from where I was standing I couldn’t be sure.
Seeing that the body’s face-down position in the water precluded any possibility of survival, and not wanting to sully what was obviously shortly to become a crime scene, I resisted the impulse to get closer, and instead commanded my dog to join me atop the bluff, which she reluctantly did. I reattached her leash, looped it around a nearby sapling, and then pulled out my cell phone, which I always carry with me when I venture into the forest.
I dialed 911, reported what I had found and my location, and agreed to remain where I was until the authorities could arrive. I then found a large decaying log, lying atop the bluff within sight of the body, and settled onto it, with Satch seated in front of me, to wait.
Chapter Three
I maintained my perch on the log as I watched the forensics crew at work and waited for the cops to get around to me. Things had happened quickly after I’d dialed. In less than twenty minutes a robust-looking ranger from the US Forest Service had shown up. Possible homicides were not really his gig, but he’d been the officer closest to my neighborhood at the time the call had come in. He’d met me on the trail, listened to my brief report, then followed me through the trees to the bluff. After a quick look at the body from there, he’d moved to seal off the area with crime scene tape, and then, further, to close the trail; first at the highway, and then at the other end of the path by the footbridge, where he’d parked his truck, and from where he’d probably reported in to verify that my initial call had been the real deal. I secured his permission to run my dog home, after promising to immediately return for further questioning.
Shortly after I made it back, two deputies in khaki uniforms from the Deschutes County Sheriffs had shown up, done a brief recon, and then made their own calls into headquarters. They mostly avoided me, only speaking in brief, clipped sentences in low tones to each other, although they made it reasonably clear with looks and gestures that I wasn’t to go wandering off. I therefore reseated myself on the log, and watched as the area soon became populated with other uniforms and technicians.
Observing the crew at work, I was suitably impressed. Not that I’m such an expert in such matters, but my longtime friend and onetime government partner, Cyrus Brooks, now a homicide detective in Los Angeles, has described his work often enough for me to be able to at least suspect when things are being conducted carelessly at a crime scene. As far as I could tell, these guys seemed to know what they were doing.
“Mr. Cassidy?”
As two men wearing neoprene waders and heavy gloves stepped gingerly into the cold water, another, apparently the lead detective, approached and shook my hand as I rose from my seat. Tall man, intensely angular; pale skin; deep-set, dark eyes which seemed always to be distracted; a shock of unkempt, jet-black hair; voice like a leaky radiator, with an apparent range of less than half an octave.
Ichabod Crane with a badge---although he claimed his name was Detective Sal Denove.
“The medical examiner’s here,” he said, motioning to a portly civilian standing precariously on a giant rock, looking down at the still-submerged body. “We’re getting ready to move her. Thought you might like to take a look.”
“Isn’t that a little unusual?”
“Oh,” he said, with a thin smile that radiated little warmth, “not really. Might actually speed things up a bit, possibly help with the identification. You don’t mind….”
“No,” I answered, “not at all. But I’d say that’s really a long shot, the chance of my knowing who she is, considering that I only moved here a few months ago.”
“From where?”
“Los Angeles.”
“Ah,” was his flat response, “although I thought I detected in it a trace of oh no; another transplanted Angelino. “Anyway, it’s worth a try.”
They took an exquisitely long time to raise her from the entanglement of the tree branches, taking care not to disturb, if possible, any evidence they might find on her body and in her clothes. As they lifted her, water deserted the body in an obscene cascade. Adding to their difficulties was the uncertain footing which the sub-surface mud and rocks provided them. At one point one of them slipped, and for a moment it seemed as if they were about to drop the corpse back into the water, but like high-wire artists they steadied themselves at the last second, and resumed removing her to shore. I had glanced at the detective while this little drama played out, and watched as what little color in his face drained away and the muscles along his jaw tightened. He said nothing to them though, and once they’d recovered their balance the storm brewing on his face quickly dissipated, and was replaced by the characteristic stoicism he’d displayed all morning.
Once they’d succeeded in bringing the woman’s body to dry land and had laid it on a stretcher, I was able to get a better look at her. The first thing that quickly became apparent was that her hair, which had appeared to be dark in the water, was actually much lighter now that it was exposed to the air; blonde, in fact. Another thing instantly obvious was that her clothing was inappropriate for this area and climate: light-weight slacks, silk blouse, cardigan sweater, and one soggy white Reebok athletic shoe (the left foot was shoeless, clad only in a nylon stocking).
The third thing was that I knew her.
The eyes were closed, extinguishing what I had once known as lustrous light suffused with sexy, playful good humor. The facial features, once golden and classic, now had a stark, bluish cast to them and were slightly bloated from hours in frigid water, but not so much so that I couldn’t recognize them.
Dana Cormier.
I turned, and caught Denove studying my reaction. I wondered how much my face had betrayed my surprise. I weighed my options, considered the hole I’d be digging for myself should I admit that I’d known her, then considered how much deeper it might become if I attempted to conceal the fact.
“I know her.”
“You do,” he said---a statement; and I knew I’d said the right thing.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, gesturing towards the path. “Think you could spare a moment to come back to my house with me?”
“Your house?”
“Yes,” I said; “unless you want me to go downtown….”
“Oh,” he said dryly, with a glance back at the body, “no call for that, just yet.”
“Good,” I said, “besides, there’s something I think you need to listen to.”
“At your house.”
“Yeah.”
“All right,” he responded, “let me finish up here first.” It only took a few minutes for him to issue final instructions, to get a few preliminary comments from the coroner and to turn over supervision of the wrap-up to another detective, before the rangy lawman followed me back down the path to my home.
Chapter Four
Denove stood in the great room, absent-mindedly mussing my dog’s fur as he looked around, while I brewed a pot of coffee. “Nice place,” he said.
“Thanks.”
He walked over to the mantel, and touched the large, flat, rough rock set prominently on a wooden stand. “Fossil?”
“Yeah,” I replied, as I flipped the switch on the coffee maker, “it’s an ammonite in sandstone…found in Morocco. Devonian, 350 million years old.”
“No kidding,” he said, sounding impressed. “Real dinosaur bones.”
“Nope,” I said, “the one you’re looking at preceded the first dinosaurs by about a hundred million years, give or take a month.” I pointed to another display at the opposite end of the mantel. “That one over there’s a trilobite.”
“Interesting.”
“You’re not exactly from Bend, are you?” I said.
“What makes you say that? Can’t be the accent…”
“No,” I said. “It can’t; you don’t have one.”
“What, then?”
“Just a guess.
His laugh sounded more like a cough. “And a good one; although that’s usually a safe bet---hardly anyone’s really from Bend. The city’s quadrupled in population in the last twenty-odd years, and you can scarcely blame that on a robust birth rate.”
“So, where are you from?”
“Bay Area.”
“What part?”
“South---San Jose.” He paused. “Aren’t I supposed to be the one asking the questions?”
I shrugged. “I figured we were just doing the friendly preliminaries thing.”
“Preliminaries are about over…black’s fine,” he said, as I offered him the coffee and fixings.
“Okay,” I said, sitting across from him; “ask away.”
He sipped his coffee. “So you’re single.”
“That’s right.”
“Always been?”
“Yeah,” I replied, as we both occupied wooden chairs at my small dining table, sipping the brew, “A couple of close calls, but fortunately nothing official.”
This produced a thin smile as the detective glanced out of the window, nodded as if endorsing the view, then took another look around at the very male appointments in the great room: giant stone fireplace, big screen, giant speakers, oversized furniture, and flashed that meager smile again. “Yeah this place does lack the woman’s touch,” he remarked, his dry tone accenting the understatement.
There was a prolonged moment of silence as we drank, simultaneously. I broke it.
“I didn’t kill her.”
“That’s good.”
His eyes wandered back to the river. “So who is she?”
“Dana Cormier,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, writing on his pad as I spelled it. “So now we’ve got a name---who is she?”
I stared at the mug I was holding on the table with both hands. “She is…she was…a woman…someone I used to know. We dated briefly, maybe a dozen times. It didn’t amount to anything, and so we ended it, a little over a year ago. Since then it’s been just an occasional phone conversation; always with her doing the calling, and always brief---mostly just touching bases.”
I’d lifted the mug to my lips as I spoke, but instead of drinking, I put it back down on the table, a little too heavily, which raised a clunk echoing into the rough-hewn rafters.
“Pretty simple tale,” he remarked, laconically. “I suspect there might be a bit more to it than that.”
There was, but again I hesitated, uncomfortable with the idea of impugning the dead.
“Well?”
I shrugged. There was no way around it. “You might say she was a user.”
“Drugs?”
“No,” I said; “people. She was your basic opportunist---what the old folks used to call a ‘gold-digger.’ If you’ve got designs on getting anything serious going with her, you’d better come armed with one hell of an impressive Dunn and Bradstreet.”
A nod. “She use you?”
“Only for sex.”
He cocked an eye at me.
“That’s all it was,” I insisted, wishing I sounded more convincing. “Just play, just sex; a little diversion while she was out looking for the big score. And that’s why it didn’t last: I wasn’t serious about her, and she…well, frankly I would never have been big-time enough to make the final cut.”
“That bother you?”
“Yeah,” I admitted; “but not personally; more like philosophically---the kind of greasy feeling you get hanging around someone who’s so openly corrupt.”
“Ah…a moralist.”
“I don’t know about that,” I laughed, self-consciously. “I’d like to think that I do have some scruples. But---”
“But what?”
“Well, like I said, she was never shy about expressing her attitudes. I knew what she was about the first night I met her, but knowing that, it still didn’t prevent me from---”
“Hopping into the sack with her.” He sipped his coffee. “The flesh is weak.”
“Very,” I agreed; “and she is…was…a beautiful woman.”
“So, what happened when you broke up?”
“It was hardly what you would call a breakup,” I said; “more like a fizzle out. We just got tired of each other, agreed it was over, and went our separate ways.”
“That was it?”
“That was it; except for the phone calls.”
“And the last call was---”
I let a breath out slowly. “Yesterday. She left a message on my machine.”
Denove’s pale expression seemed to alter, although only slightly. “And that’s why we’re here.”
“Yeah,” I said, rising and walking over to the wooden stand on which sat the answering machine. “It was such an odd message,” I said; “out of the blue, first time I’d heard from her in almost three months. Anyway I didn’t erase it; figured I’d listen to it again, see if I could make some sense out of it.”
I pressed the playback button, and turned the volume up so that Denove could hear clearly across the room.
As I heard Dana’s voice, a gauze-like sense of the surreal enveloped me. Yesterday, this had merely been a slightly puzzling message from a relatively inconsequential, mostly forgotten girlfriend---not even a girlfriend, really.
Now it was a voice from the grave.
Her message started out in familiar, playful, slightly sexy, if also slightly forced, tones: “Hank? Guess who? ---Nervous giggle---“It’s me…Dana. Um, remember how I always warned you I might drop in on you some time?”---Another giggle, even more nervous---“Well guess what? I’m headed your way…on the Five, I mean, and I just passed Redding. Looks like I’m about to drive into the mountains, so I may lose you in a second…but I thought I better call and warn you, just in case…you know…you’re um, not available.” Then, abruptly, the voice changed; became much smaller, reedier, almost childlike. “I hope you are, though…available, I mean. I could really use a friend right now, and…um, I guess I’ll call you when I get closer, okay? I hope you’re not out of town or anything. Hank? I…well; I’ll talk to you later.” She disconnected, and the machine’s robotic time stamp voice announced that the call had come in yesterday at 5:36 p.m.
At Denove’s request I replayed the message, then played it a third time without his prompting. When I’d finished, I rejoined him at the table. We nursed our coffees for a minute or so, silently. It was the detective who broke the spell.
“That was the only message?” he asked.
“Yep,” I said.
Seeming to hold his mug in both hands for warmth, Denove said, “So she was on her way to see you.”
“But she never made it,” I added.
“So you say,” he responded.
I stared at my coffee. It was pointless to repeat myself. Either the man believed me or he didn’t.
“Five thirty-six,” he said. “Redding is about two hundred and sixty miles from here. If she didn’t stop, and she was in a hurry, that would make it four and a half, maybe five hours. And she wouldn’t have lost her phone signal for more than, say, two hours. So why didn’t she call back?”
“Don’t know,” I said. “Maybe she did, but hung up when she got the machine again.”
He pointed a long, slender finger at the phone box. “I’m going to need to take that with me.”
“Be my guest.”
“Okay.” Denove looked at me, gave the impression of peering at me myopically, as if through an opaque glass. “So you were out. What time did you get home?”
“About eight.” And before he could ask, I added, “I was in town all afternoon shopping---Costco, Safeway, pet store---and then I stopped off on my way home and had dinner at the Sunriver Bar and Grill.”
His face during this recitation was about as expressive as it ever seemed to get, meaning not much. “Anybody see you?” he asked, in a tone matching his expression
“Shopping?” I thought a second. “No one I know, but I think I can fish the receipts out of the trash, and they’re date and time stamped.”
“Good,” he said. “How about the restaurant? Anybody see you there?”
“Just the waitress.”
“Would she remember you?”
I shrugged. “You could ask, though we didn’t really chat much. I was the guy in the motorcycle jacket.”
“I’m sure that’s burned into her memory.”
“Sorry. It’s all I’ve got.”
“How about a receipt there?”
“No,” I replied, “I didn’t bother taking it with me.”
“Credit card?”
“Paid in cash.”
“Too bad,” he said. “Did she know your address?”
I was going to ask if he meant the waitress, but decided that being a smart-ass at this point might not be such a good idea. “No,” I said, “I don’t think she did. But if Dana had been thinking about coming up here without asking, it wouldn’t have been all that difficult for her to get it. I am in the book.” I paused, stared off into nothing. “Although I can’t imagine that it would have been easy for her to find my house out here in the woods after dark, address or no address.”
His face remained impassive. “And yet her body washes up less than a quarter mile from your place.”
I searched his face for an accusation, found none, then said, “I know. I can’t explain it. I can’t explain any of this.”
We sat there, just a couple of guys sparring with understatements. I noticed his coffee was low, and got up to refill it. “You saw her close up,” I said; “any thoughts on how she might have died?”
“Just private ones.”
I regarded him briefly, then gestured vaguely upriver, in the direction of the forested crime scene. “How long will it take him to perform the autopsy?”
Denove looked up. “Who…oh, you mean our medical examiner? He won’t be doing it. He’s just a local doctor contracted by the county to do preliminary work, but he doesn’t have the forensics equipment or expertise to handle a ‘major crimes’ case like this one.”
“Major crimes…what makes it a major crime?”
Denove took a healthy swig of coffee. He seemed to enjoy it. I do make very good coffee. I waited.
“Guy walks into a bar, accuses his best friend of boffing his wife, shoves a five inch blade in just below his buddy’s sternum. Twenty witnesses---even a few sober ones. Open and shut. That’s the kind of case goes to our local contract doctor. More complex situation like this one, we turn the body over to the M.E. in Portland. We’ll ship your friend up there either tonight or early tomorrow morning. Once she’s there, she gets priority status. Forty-eight hours later, hopefully we should have a completed autopsy report.”
“So you think you won’t have anything more until Sunday.”
“Yeah,” he said, “Not much more until then. That is of course unless you have anything significant to add.”
“Well,” I replied, “I can give you some basic stuff about her: address, phone number, place of work---I think her place of work; it has been a while. No relatives that I know of, no friends either. Like I said, we didn’t really spend that much time together. But since I didn’t kill her, and I don’t have any idea who did, I’m afraid I’m not gonna be able to simplify things for you.”
I held up a hand, stopping the detective before the question could form on his lips. “And, of course, you guys are welcome to search my house.”
“No warrant?”
“Innocent.”
“I’ll get the crew.”
Chapter Five
A few hours later I watched with some detachment---and a small sense of irony---as teams of deputies searched my home. A houseful of guests; first time since I’d built the place. My aim in constructing this log home had been to create a world largely composed of luxurious solitude. And, as my friends were so often fond of noting, since I was hardly the entertainer type, odds had seemed perilously long that I would ever welcome more than a couple of people at a crack. Yet here I was, playing host to a small busload of lawmen, swarming over my place like so many khaki locusts.
Some housewarming.
Denove continued to express some surprise at my lack of resistance to their search. “Most people put up a fuss, no matter how innocent they are,” he said.
“I think it’s mostly the prospect of some sort of embarrassing revelation they’re most concerned about,” I said. “Now me, I just haven’t lived here long enough to accumulate anything which might damage my standing in the community.”
“Like what?”
“Strange underwear, inflatable dolls….”
One of the crew, a smiling, fairly young fellow with curly red hair, emerged from the service door which led to the garage. He nodded to the detective. “Clean truck, very clean; silver 4 Runner.”
“Waxed it three days ago,” I volunteered.
Denove turned to me. “Three days. You haven’t driven it since?”
I smiled. “When you live on a gravel road, the only way to keep your car clean is not to drive it.”
“Uh huh,” he said, “so what did you use yesterday?”
“My motorcycle.”
“Yeah, detective,” the redhead said, “he’s got one of them crotch rockets. What is it…Italian?” he asked, pronouncing it “eye-talian.”
I nodded. “It’s a Ducati. ST3.”
“And you can do your shopping with that?”
I nodded. “Most of the time I do, now that winter’s over. My bike’s got a full set of hard bags. As long as I don’t need to buy anything bulky, I can usually carry it on the Duc.”
“Uh-huh,” said Denove. “You got anybody to vouch for your having waxed the car three days ago?”
“I suppose,” I answered. “I did it in my driveway out in front of the house. Any of my neighbors who drove by would’ve seen me.” I watched, as he wrote down the names I gave him. “Do you think that might get me off the hook?”
He shook his head, as he smiled pleasantly. “Not really. It’ll just mean that you didn’t drive that car last night.”
Shortly afterward, the crew finished up and cleared out. Denove was the last to leave, and, as I walked him to the door, I said, “I’d appreciate it if you would keep me posted, Detective”
He paused as he stepped out onto the driveway. “Oh, I think I can do that. But of course that’s going to be reciprocal. You think of anything…give me a call.” He handed me his card and walked away, his long legs gobbling up the distance to his cruiser. Halfway there, he turned. “And, by the way---”
“Yeah, I know,” I said; “don’t leave town.”
“A cliché,” he said, affably, “but a valid one.”
That night I had a dream about Dana. I was standing on that same bank, looking down, as before, at her partially submerged body. Only this time she was face up, and through the crystal-clear water I could see her blonde hair floating about her head like a golden corona, the tan skin of her face glowing and healthy, her blue eyes open and alert. She was alive under that water, and she could see. Suddenly she seemed to recognize me, and her expression turned urgent; her mouth beginning to move violently, forming words, chains of words. Unfortunately, all I could hear was the gentle, lapping movements of the river eddying along the shore and the chirping of the birds floating above me, sounds which otherwise might have been pleasant, calming; but which now seemed maddening to me, because they seemed a conspiracy to mask what Dana was trying so frantically to tell me.
I woke up frustrated and tense, and was unable to sleep the rest of the night.
Chapter Six
It would be two long days before Denove got back to me. I spent the time doing my level best to keep occupied. There were several extra-length walks with my dog: exploring stretches of forest along the river we hadn’t yet visited; wandering aimlessly on and off vaguely-defined trails, plunging recklessly into thick stands of trees where one could almost imagine the region in its primal, undiscovered state. Additional time was consumed sitting idly by the river, watching how the wind animated the trees and rubbed a wrinkled skin onto the surface of the water, while Satch braved the icy shallows to retrieve thrown sticks.
At home, my restless spirit caused me to finally take my body out of mothballs, and I spent several sweaty sessions in my weight room, where I worked out so furiously and deliberately that I became too exhausted to wrestle with my thoughts, as well as too sore to continue---my poor muscles screaming their protest at far too many demands being placed on them after such a long period of neglect. I then ended each routine by showering, and then collapsing gratefully onto the sofa and escaping into the sweet oblivion of a late afternoon nap.
After dinner, I managed to chew up a couple of hours each night, upstairs at my computer playing online poker and craps. Unfortunately, though---either because I was too preoccupied to concentrate properly, or---as I preferred to believe---because the cards and dice happened to be running against me, I was a consistent loser at both; and I was compelled to bail out on those games relatively early in order to prevent the erosion in my casino account balances from taking on serious dimensions.
Unfortunately, however, whatever efforts I made to stay busy still left me with too much free time, and my thoughts during every idle period naturally drifted back to Dana Cormier. Each time, I found myself hashing and rehashing the same meager fare; the result being, naturally, frustration and restlessness. Questions, always questions. What was the meaning of that phone message? What was she doing, driving eight hundred miles in an effort to locate me? And who was it who’d found it necessary to trail her that entire distance, and finally, to kill her, seemingly in order to prevent her from getting here?
And what the hell was my part in all of this?
Alone in my house, beset by this legion of questions, and completely unequipped to confront them, I was---to use an exceedingly bad choice of words---dead in the water.
Chapter Seven
Dana Cormier.
Those few weeks I’d spent with her. Was there some answer to all of this to be found in those physical yet inconsequential days and nights?
I’d met her at a party. It had been at a late-March Friday night party celebrating the end of the Los Angeles winter (Angelinos have such a delicious sense of irony), thrown by, of all people, my ex-fiancé, Holly Thurston.
I hadn’t intended to go. My breakup with Holly almost a year previous had been ugly---ugly enough for me to happily forswear ever having any further contact with her. And yet there I was, steering my car up the narrow, winding streets into the hills, with an all too familiar pit occupying my stomach. Why?
It certainly wasn’t for any stirring of the old romantic embers. Even had I been that ridiculously masochistic or forgetful about how nasty things had been, the extremely comforting fact was that I was no longer attracted to the woman, either physically or emotionally.
I suppose part of the reason I went was that despite myself I couldn’t help but be impressed with the effort that Holly had made to persuade me to attend: an elaborately written invitation complete with heart-felt apologies for past actions; a legion of emails, which I’d immediately shunted off into my spam folder; and numerous phone messages, the last of which I’d finally, reluctantly, returned.
In that call she’d adamantly maintained that if she could extend herself, the very least that I could do was to show up at her soiree, and help her finally “put close to that unhappy chapter and get on with my life.” Employing her best we’re-both-adults-here-aren’t-we voice, she argued that it would be “such a tiny thing for you, and such a big thing for me;” an argument which, though melodramatic, did manage to play into the one emotion strong enough to convince me to make this one, final, and hopefully painless, sacrifice:
Guilt.
Fact is, when you’re the dumper rather than the dumpee---no matter how entirely justified---you tend to come away with the nagging feeling that, at least on some level, you still owe something.
It was a large party---at least a hundred people---at Holly’s ridiculously expensive rented home in one of the trendier sections of the Hollywood Hills. I cringed when I saw how many cars were stacked up along both sides of the street more than two blocks from her house; almost turned around and headed back down the hill. In general I am your basic wallflower; indeed, the conversational demands of even the most modest party generally have the effect of hammering my mute button.
And this thing was hardly going to be modest: in fact, it looked to be a full-on, balls-to-the-wall Hollywood bash. Again, I was sorely tempted to flee before the fact.
As a rule, any homogeneous affair, whether comprised of dentists or lawyers, masons, longshoremen or politicians, is bound to bore a rank outsider into bleary-eyed distraction, since all of the conversations are certain to be ninety percent work-related. But in my humble opinion few things in this world can be as maddeningly stultifying as several rooms full of yakking entertainment-industry types; because, in addition to the monothematic quality of their patter, there also hangs in the air about them like noxious cigar smoke an overwhelming sense of smug privilege, the belief that whatever they are brewing in their conversational cauldrons is bound to be priceless. As a non-industry schmuck, I’d never quite bought into this attitude---something which, incidentally, had always bothered Holly.
From the street the house looked like a typical modest yet meticulously-landscaped sixties-style one-story suburban rancher. Here though, high up in the rarified air of the Hollywood Hills with its ass hanging out over the bright, panoramic lights of the city, I estimated it must be worth at least one-point-three mil. Which also meant that Holly was paying upwards of six thousand a month rent to reside in such modesty.
Having the income to afford such a sum would have made her easily able to purchase her own house in just about any nice area of the San Fernando Valley. But with Holly, appearances mattered above all else, and though her office was actually located out there in Burbank, she could never tolerate living on the “wrong side of the hill.” I’d found that kind of petty snobbery amusing, especially in light of the fact that at the time she was making those ostentatious proclamations, she was also spending four nights a week on the “wrong side,” at my house in Studio City.