At Rio Nido, we wind along the river, past cabins, the hardware store, all the way to Guerneville. From a distance, not much has changed: the post office, the River Inn, Lark Drugs, and, off beyond the old bridge, Johnson’s Beach. I turn onto Armstrong Woods Road and pull in at Coffee Bazaar. I kill the engine. Rory stirs but doesn’t open his eyes.
Inside, Bob Marley’s “Stir It Up” pulses through the speakers, the barista dancing behind the counter. He’s five foot ten and wiry, midthirties, a Sideshow Bob mop of a hairdo, tie-dyed pants.
“Hellllooo,” he croons. “What can I get you?”
“Morning. One latte and one hot chocolate with extra foam, please.”
“Righteous.” As he steams the milk, he stares at me as if trying to place me. His body is still gliding to the music, his lips mouthing the words. “Last night, I was eating at that new Chinese place in Forestville. Been there?”
“Nope.”
He spoons chocolate syrup into a paper cup. “It was excellent, five stars. And, at the end, they gave me a homemade fortune cookie. Do you want to know what it said?”
“What?”
“I kid you not. It said, ‘Tomorrow, you will meet a mysterious lady.’ By chance, are you that mysterious lady?”
“I don’t feel very mysterious this morning.”
“And yet, you are indeed a mystery to me. I love the color of your hair. What do you call that? Strawberry blonde?” He slides the drinks across the counter. In the foam on the hot chocolate, he has created a Volkswagen bus. “My name is Curtis, but my friends call me Sunshine.”
“Nice foam art, Sunshine. How much do I owe you?”
He rings up the drinks, and I stuff a big tip into the jar. I might want to talk to him later. “Goodbye, Mystery Lady,” he calls as I walk out the door.
Rory is standing by the door, stretching, looking around. I hand him the hot chocolate, and he glances down at the VW bus foam art. “Where are we?”
“Guerneville.”
Once we’re back in the Jeep, doors closed, I instruct him: “Sit up, be alert, open the camera on your phone. If we see anything unusual, I want you to get a picture. If we see any unusual cars, you need to capture their plates.”
“What are we looking for?”
“A panel van, maybe a transit van, and a colorfully dressed white man in his forties, tall, overweight, imposing.”
“Okay,” he says, tapping the camera icon on his phone.
“We belong here, right?”
“Right.”
“Say it.”
“We belong here,” Rory echoes.
“And don’t let anyone see you take a picture.”
We slowly drive down Armstrong Woods Road, past the auto repair shop, the church, the library. We pass a boarded-up motel with an ancient for sale sign out front. The other resort is a cute set of five cabins surrounding a retro swimming pool. The cars in the parking lot—TTs, 328s, Mini Coopers—tell me it’s popular with hipsters from the city.
A couple of miles down, we pass the address where the Leonard Blake phone last pinged—an empty lot across the road from a fenced-in field. An old Mustang on cement blocks sits rusting against a backdrop of towering redwoods. Rory raises his phone to the window and quickly snaps pictures. I turn left into a cul-de-sac. No vans here, just tidy houses with neatly kept yards. I complete the circle and continue up Armstrong Woods Road, slowing as we pass a dirt road cutting between two huge redwood trees.
“Trailer park,” Rory observes.
“Yeah, fatal funnel. One way in, one way out, narrow, trees on both sides.”
“Are we going in?”
“Not yet.”
We continue east, where the road dead-ends at the parking lot for Armstrong Woods Park. “I used to come here with my parents,” I tell Rory. “Up for a walk?”
We grab our backpacks and fall in behind two women headed toward the entrance, wearing matching Dykes on Bikes T-shirts from the 1997 parade. Rory is determined, alert, his eyes registering everyone on the trail, in the parking lot, near the restrooms. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, not sure this is how we should be spending our time.
Nearly three hours later, we end up back at the car, no closer to answers. Every road leads to two more roads, every trail leads to more trails.
Rory kicks at the tire. “What now?”
“Let’s do another loop on the main road.”
As we circle in and out of cul-de-sacs, Rory jots down the addresses of the three houses that stand out. We choose the most suspicious, a yellow rancher with a white van in the yard. A tall locked fence encloses the yard, a fifteen-foot shed standing in the corner. We park down the street.
An hour passes. Rory keeps an eye on every house on the cul-de-sac, making notes in his notebook every time we see a new car or person.
“It’s amazing how much you can see when you sit still,” he says.
After two hours, we drive to Safeway to pick up some lunch. Rory suggests we play “spot the shoplifter.” It was Fred’s game every time we went to Sloan’s or Gristede’s in New York. The first one to spot a shoplifter in the act got to buy any frivolous item in the store. I’d usually see three or four before I said anything, just to level the playing field.
Russian River shoplifters are less discreet. We aren’t even past the cashiers when Rory taps me on the shoulder. Halfway down the aisle, a guy is stuffing a jumbo pack of Twizzlers into the pocket of his oversized army surplus coat.
“That was too easy,” I say.
“Deal’s a deal,” Rory insists. “Now for my prize.” At the deli counter, he orders two pounds of fried chicken tenders.
We wander the aisles and select more food than we need: Oreos, bananas, mango kefir, Havarti and crackers, sparkling water. By the time we get to the checkout, we’ve spotted four more shoplifters, including a pregnant woman in bulky parachute pants.
Back at the yellow house, the van is still across the street, but the lights are out. We eat the chicken tenders and Rory inhales a dozen Oreos. We wait and wait. We listen to music. The air gets colder, and I turn on the heater. I think of Gray Stafford shivering in that box. I think of Caroline.
“You do this a lot?” Rory asks.
“I used to. It can be Zen if you just roll with it.” How many hours of my life have I spent on surveillance, sitting in cars, watching and waiting?
At 5:33 p.m., a white Volkswagen Jetta pulls up to the yellow rancher, and a well-dressed woman emerges with a toddler, who chats happily as they go inside and shut the door. “We can cross that one off,” I tell Rory.
“We have to go to the trailer park.”
He’s right. We do have to go to the trailer park. Leonard Blake’s phone pinged from the empty lot down the road, but allowing for the variations in range, the cell phone could have also been in the trailer park, or even in the empty field. If Rory weren’t with me, I would have started in the trailer park—more nooks and crannies, more opportunities for concealment.
“Driving is a bad idea,” I tell him. “We should walk.”
“Because of the fatal funnel?”
“Yep. Never drive into something unless you’re certain you can drive out.”
47
James Joyce once wrote: “Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world, a mother’s love is not.” W. D. Hamilton would disagree. Why?
As we walk up the street, staying close to the tree line, I slide my gun out of the knapsack and tuck it into the small of my back. What was I thinking bringing Rory? Despite his size and strength, he’s still a kid. I chose this career; he did not. I’ve never felt fear going into a dodgy situation, just curiosity and adrenaline. Now, with my son by my side, I feel a sense of dread.
We move along the wet embankment, the earthy smell of the redwoods drifting up around us. I consider all the thi
ngs I should have taught him—the difference between cover and concealment, the fact that when someone says “get down” in a shooting situation, you don’t get all the way down. Bullets don’t bounce, they travel along the surfaces they strike. You never lean against a wall for the same reason.
“Act natural,” I say.
Rory rolls his eyes. “How else would I act?”
The muddy dirt road descends through the two giant redwoods into a deeply wooded area. It looks like there might be about twenty-five trailers. The park is arranged in two concentric circles, surrounded by dense brush. A few of the trailers have curtains in the windows, but most of the windows are covered with sheets and towels. A mess of wires connects each trailer to a haphazard grid.
Rory walks quietly with his hands in his pockets. When I nudge him and glance toward two vans parked side by side, he takes out his phone and pretends to be texting while discreetly snapping pictures of their plates. No one is out, but I can hear televisions and voices through the thin walls. Someone is playing Bon Jovi, someone is watching Friends, a baby is screaming. Passing a trailer with an ancient Dodge Dart in the driveway, I smell a strong whiff of pot. Beyond the trailers, a smaller, even muddier dirt road winds up a hill, dotted with a few more mobile homes. Behind the first one stands a neatly stacked collection of orange Home Depot buckets; the tidiness signals that this meth lab is still in operation.
A well-kept garden patch graces the trailer at the end of the road. Behind the garden is a small greenhouse with the door open to reveal hydroponic gear. The trailer itself is clean, an empty Wheat Thins box poking out of the garbage can and a new orange Wrangler in the clearing. The license plate is from West Virginia with a frame that says ALMOST HEAVEN. Across the muddy path, another trailer is surrounded by junk, the faded seat of a plastic Big Wheel filled with leaves and rainwater. A Ford Transit van sits out front.
A narrow path winds up behind the clean trailer. I motion Rory through the brush. In the clearing above, the stump of a fallen tree is perfectly positioned as a lookout. Rory and I sit on the stump overlooking the trailer and van. I check my phone, no service. The sun is gone now, the moon rising in a cloudy sky.
In my mind, I replay the facts that led us here, checking my logic. In the negative column: Caroline told Rory by text six days ago that she’s fine, and Dave Randall told Rory she’s on a cruise with her parents. We’re a hundred miles from where she was last seen.
In the positive column: Caroline disappeared almost a year to the day after Gray Stafford, who disappeared a year after the Lamey twins, from the same town, immediately before the Wonder Test. At the same time that she went missing, three other kids who had performed poorly on the pretest suddenly left town with their families. Dave Randall isn’t friends with Caroline, so he may not be a reliable source. According to my colleague Malia, Caroline’s parents were last spotted completely off the grid in Algeria, a place where they would be unlikely to take their daughter. Before Sunday, Caroline texted Rory two dozen or more times a day, but since then, it’s been radio silence.
As for the location, Gray Stafford was handed over to the boat owner, John Murphy, by Leonard Blake—probably not his real name—whose phone pinged to an empty lot about two hundred yards from here during the period of Gray’s absence. But why here? Where do the interests of a Daly City gang named the Kenji Boys, Leonard Blake, and Greenfield intersect?
The temperature drops. The clouds shift again, moonlight flooding the camp. Rory remains quiet, vigilant. I keep going over the facts. We need to find Caroline, and we need to find her soon.
48
In some instances, one plus one equals one. Explain using the Socratic method and Goldbach’s conjecture.
At 8:03 p.m., I hear a dog barking, followed by a door opening. It’s the tidy trailer with the Wrangler. Footsteps, a leash jangling, a man’s voice calling, “Pluto!” The voice sounds familiar.
The dog is running up the path toward us. Rory looks at me nervously. I mouth to him “don’t move.” We try to stay hidden, but the dog moves closer and closer, the voice right behind, twigs snapping under footsteps. “Pluto! Slow down. Where are you going, boy?”
The footsteps grow closer.
I stand and position myself in front of Rory. I slide my hand into the small of my back, unbutton my holster. Pluto sounds like a small dog, maybe a beagle. I wish it wasn’t a full moon. Moments ago, it felt as though we were safely hidden, but of course that was only an illusion.
“What’s the hurry, boy?” I’m finally able to place the voice. Pluto is fifty feet away, then forty, thirty. I see him moving toward us, his nose to the ground.
He stops and stands, facing us, not making a sound. The leash is long, and it takes his owner a few seconds to come upon us. “Mystery Lady?” he smiles. “Whoa.”
“Hi, Sunshine.”
Sunshine looks at Rory, back at me. His face registers confusion. “What are you doing here?”
I take my hand off my holster. “I’m looking for someone.”
Rory stands and walks up to Sunshine, hand outstretched. “Martin,” he says, without a hint of hesitation.
“Hi Martin, I’m Sunshine. This is my friend Pluto.”
“Can I pet him?”
“Sure. He used to work at the airport, searching bags for vegetables and fruits. He has a whole little pension and vet insurance.” I hear the tinge of a West Virginia drawl that I didn’t notice this morning in the coffee shop.
Pluto wags his tail and licks Rory’s hand.
“So.” Sunshine winds the end of the leash around his wrist. “If I can ask, who are you looking for?”
“Just a friend.”
He shakes his head. “You don’t strike me as the sort of person who has friends up this way.” Pluto is taking an obvious liking to Rory, and the feeling appears to be mutual. “Want to join Pluto and me for our walk?”
Pluto leads the way, with Sunshine close behind, calling out to him in a singsong voice. Rory and I fall in behind them on the path, eventually emerging into another clearing. Pluto digs under a bush, Sunshine still talking and singing. “You have to make noise when you’re out here,” he explains.
“To scare off the animals?” Rory asks.
“It’s not the animals I worry about. You two shouldn’t be up here alone. But you’re good, so long as you stick close to me. They know me, they know my routine, they trust me.” He frowns, looking at both me and Rory. “Seriously, you two do not want to be out here alone in the dark.”
Pluto is dancing around Rory’s feet, yipping, and Sunshine takes up the call again, singing loudly: “Pluto! Pluto! Time to be heading home.”
He falls in step beside me. “We should get you and Martin back to your car. Where are you parked?”
“Down Armstrong Woods Road.”
“So you’re out for a pleasant walk and you randomly decide to take a detour into a trailer park? Looking for your ex or something?”
“Long story.”
“I’ll drive you back.”
“We can walk.”
“Trust me, Mystery Lady. You’re better off if I drive you out. As soon as the sun goes down, the party starts. And it’s not the kind of party you want to attend.”
A small part of me wants to argue. I have my gun, and besides, this isn’t the slums of Dar es Salaam. I’ve been in worse situations, and I never needed a knight in shining armor to escort me out of a tough spot. Then again, I’ve never been in a place like this with Rory.
“Okay, thanks.”
Sunshine turns to walk back down the path, Pluto plodding along behind.
I put a hand on Rory’s back to get him to walk between us. I don’t want him in the front or back of the pack. When we get to the trailer, mist hovers over the encampment. “I just need to get my keys,” Sunshine says. “Come on in.”
Before I can say anything,
Rory follows him through the door.
The place is clean and organized. Small but cozy, it smells like vanilla and coffee. There’s a tiny kitchen, a fridge, a booth with a simple pine table, a bookshelf filled with story collections, philosophy books, and sea glass. I take in a set of chef knives on the counter, three copper All-Clad pans hanging above the stove, a fancy espresso maker. How does a guy like Sunshine end up in a trailer park like this?
Sunshine nods at Rory. “Take a seat, champ. Thirsty?”
“Yeah.”
I’m not worried about Sunshine. In my mind, I’ve already run the “danger algorithm.” He is amiable, engaging, asks questions out of curiosity, enjoys a close relationship with his dog—one of equality not control—all positives. The fact that he gets up before six each morning to run a coffee shop, something that requires responsibility and social dexterity, is also a good indicator. Of course, serial killers can also be tidy, charming dog owners with a day job, but Sunshine isn’t one of those.
“I’ll make you an Italian soda, my specialty.”
Sunshine pulls ice and a frosted glass out of the freezer and opens a bottle of Italian vanilla syrup. A seltzer machine sits on the counter. He pours syrup over the ice and taps a button, and the machine whirs to life.
“That’s a pretty serious operation.”
“Can’t help it. I was a mixologist in another life. This trailer may not look great from the outside, but on the inside it’s a classy operation.” He hands the glass to Rory, bubbles fizzing. “What can I get for Mystery Lady?”
“Nothing, thanks.” I notice the Virginia Tech emblem on Rory’s glass. “Were you a Hokie?”
The Wonder Test Page 21