Afterward, I turned the key in the ignition and drove the truck out of the lot, the tires crunching the gravel and spitting it out, pinging on the wheel wells. Then, on a whim, I yanked the wheel to the right and pulled into the lot at the front of the mart.
On the walkway in front, Rhonda was pouring a bucket of fat, stubby cucumbers into an ice-filled metal tub. I said good morning and walked straight through to the office. A minute later, Rhonda was placing a cup of coffee and a cheese Danish beside the keyboard.
“So,” she said, instead of hello. “What’s with the cop yesterday?”
“Oh, you know.”
“He thinks we got something to do with that kid’s murder?”
“Yeah.” I clicked through the files on the desktop until I got to the security footage. “He thinks we kidnapped him and fed him pastries until he hemorrhaged.”
Rhonda didn’t laugh. “What’d he want with the camera?”
As far as I was concerned, there wasn’t anything to tell, but Rhonda was like a pit bull: once she got something in her jaw, she wouldn’t let go.
“I told him—” I began, and then thought better of it. “I told him I heard the dead guy everyone’s talking about might have been a local kid, and I told him he could check the footage if he wanted. Maybe he could establish the last time anyone saw him.”
“You didn’t look at much of it yesterday.”
“Yeah, well … I had things to do, so I just made him a copy. Alright with you?”
I looked away from the computer screen, craned my neck to look up at Rhonda. She towered over me even when I was standing. Sitting down and looking up, I could barely see past the mountain of her boobs stuffed inside a frilly red shirt.
“I’ll tell you the last time I saw him.” Rhonda crossed her arms under her breasts. “It was a little over a week ago. Week and a half, maybe.”
Surprised, I turned back to the computer and opened the file.
“You won’t see it on there,” Rhonda said.
I clicked on the playback bar to where I figured ten days ago began. “Why not?”
“Because it wasn’t here,” she said, snot dripping from her voice.
I pushed the chair back and crossed my arms too. “Oh yeah?”
Rhonda dropped her arms. “It was in Oroville. At a diner.”
“Did you tell Darren that?”
“No.” She paused, sneered a little. “He didn’t ask.”
“Yeah. That’s awesome, Rhonda.”
“I’m telling you.”
I shook my head and turned back to the desk, rummaged in the drawers for another USB drive.
“He was with some other guy,” Rhonda said. “Someone I didn’t recognize. Tall, tattoos everywhere.”
“What else did you notice?”
“Long hair, dark. Really tan—or maybe he was Latino. Older than the kid. Twenty-five, twenty-six. Something like that.”
At the back of a drawer, I found another drive. It was caked with dust, but the light at the end glowed when I plugged it in. I dragged the files into the window and waited while the light flickered on and off, green then dark, until all the video had been saved.
“You going to eat that?” Rhonda said, pointing at the Danish. “It’s a good batch.”
“Yeah.” But I didn’t touch the pastry.
Rhonda sighed. “Hey, I gotta leave a little early today. Have to go try on my wedding dress.”
“Yeah, okay. When?”
“Four thirty.”
“Okay, I’ll be here.”
Rhonda swept out, then back again, leaning on the doorjamb. “You’re coming to the wedding.”
“Uh, yeah,” I said, but I was watching the video, not paying attention to her.
“I’ll pick up something nice for you to wear, put it on Tim’s account. You can pay him back later.”
“Yeah.” My eyes flicked over the screen, following the black-and-white people and the black-and-white vehicles racing through fourteen days. “Sure.”
* * *
Later, I packed a box of Danishes. Then I got in the truck. At the edge of the parking lot, I turned left toward the hills, drove for a couple of miles before turning left again, and then again a few miles after that. As I came out of a long bend that wound down the side of a hill, I put on the brakes and turned into the driveway of Ed and Christine Beale’s place.
Ed was in the yard; I could just see his blue coveralls bent over the engine of an old truck. He looked up when I turned into the drive, put his tools down when I slammed the door, and wiped the grease off his long fingers on a red rag streaked with black before he took the pastry box from me. But he didn’t look me in the eye, not once.
“I was sorry to hear about your boy,” I said softly.
Ed was still. I followed his gaze out to the field where his stock was grazing. Brown cattle, steers, their necks bent low, their tails flicking lazily.
“It isn’t right,” I said, “what they did to him.”
Ed laughed. “Yeah?” he mumbled.
Surprised, I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. Not that I hadn’t seen someone grieve like that before. Not that I hadn’t seen it a hundred times, just clothed in Army green, not blue coveralls.
So I waited, stood there like a statue and waited for him to say what he needed to say.
“He was a good kid,” Ed said suddenly.
I nodded but kept my mouth shut.
Still gazing out at his fields, Ed said, “You know he played baseball all four years of high school? He was gonna play in college too.”
“College?”
“Yeah. He was gonna go to Western. Coach was scouting him.”
“But he didn’t go.”
Ed sighed. “Naw. Last winter, he comes and says to me, ‘Dad, I’m through. I played enough ball.’ And I said, ‘Okay, son. You gotta do what you think is right.’”
“That why he stuck around here?”
Ed nodded.
“Did he stay here at the house?”
Ed slowly shook his head, the afternoon sun catching in his graying blond hair, shaggy and curling at the ears like he’d waited too long between cuts. Like his son’s hair.
“No,” he finally said. “I told him, ‘If you ain’t going to college, go get a job, put food in your mouth.’”
“Did he? Get a job, I mean.”
“Yeah.”
“A good one?”
“He was makin’ money. Got himself an apartment down in Omak. Got himself a truck.”
Not his truck, I thought.
Ed shook his head again, slapped the grease rag against his thigh. “It’s too bad it wasn’t working out.”
I narrowed my eyes. “How’s that?”
“Don’t know. But he’d been talking about leaving, maybe going down to Texas. Houston, maybe.”
Texas? Texas was big time for narcotics. Didn’t take a genius to figure that out.
“Was he going to work for the same people?” I said.
“No.” Ed clenched his jaw. “He said he wanted a fresh start. Something new.”
“Don’t we all,” I said under my breath.
Angry, his brow compressed into ragged valleys, Ed said, “No. No, we don’t all want that. Me and Christine like it just fine here. And I told him that, told him there was no point leaving the Okanogan. I told him there’s no better place.”
Ed squeezed his eyes shut, then raised his arms and pressed his hands hard into his eyes. His shoulders heaved and I reached out to the one nearest me. But he reacted like my hand was a high-voltage line: dropped his arms just as quickly as he’d brought them up and rounded on me, his black eyes fierce and sparking in his deeply tanned face.
“I should have told him to go,” Ed shouted, his voice soaked with rage and grief. “I should have put him on the road myself.”
“You don’t know that would have helped anything. You can’t know that.”
“They wouldn’t have found him hanging in that barn!” Spittle flecked Ed’s stubb
le. “I know that!”
I locked my hands on his shoulders, held him at arm’s length. “You don’t know that.”
But Ed was bigger and stronger than me; he broke free. “Goddamnit, Camille. I do. I do know it. And I’ll take it to my grave.”
For a moment I watched him, the hair on the side of his head splayed up violently in the high wind that came off the mountain, the collar of his coveralls flattened against his neck, the pain in his eyes. It was the kind of pain that makes you crazy. The kind of pain no one should feel and no one else should see.
Embarrassed, I looked away to his golden field, to the narrow valley and the red hills and the blistering blue sky.
“Do you know who he was working for?” I asked quietly. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ed shrug. “Do you know who did that to your boy?”
But Ed just shook his head, shut his eyes. When he opened them, they were flat and black and depthless, like a mountain lake on a still day. He shook his head again, then picked up the box of Rhonda’s Danishes and mumbled thanks. He turned and walked through the open garage door, disappearing into the house. He wasn’t coming back. Not that day. Not ever.
So I got in the truck and reversed out of the drive. The last thing I saw before I headed back the way I came was Christine Beale peering out the window, a frilly white curtain framing her slack, puffy face.
* * *
There aren’t many places in the Okanogan where you could store a helicopter—just a few small airfields—and it didn’t take much to learn most of them didn’t have any helicopters or a place to keep one. But over near Chelan, there’s this airstrip with a cluster of private hangars off to one side. Every now and then, a tall, wide door will slide open, and a shiny four-seater will roll out of the air-conditioned gloom on skinny wheels and toothpick legs. It wobbles down the apron and then around the corner to the runway and speeds off, lifting up toward the end of the asphalt, its wings buoyed up by the dry winds that sweep down through the valley. When I was a kid, my dad would take me down there to watch them. He’d tell me about how they went up and came down again, why they stayed up there, and how sometimes, they didn’t. He said they were like big, brittle birds, their bones too fragile to survive during the storms we get sometimes.
I thought about that a lot out in the desert, in Iraq. I spent a lot of time flying there, on helicopters mostly, going out to the field with one of the docs, a gurney, and a mobile medical kit. We’d sit around with the pilot in a shack out at the airfield watching satellite TV, waiting on an old plastic couch for the next call to come in. When it did, we’d throw on our gear and sprint out onto a dusty tarmac that shimmered in the heat, leaving the fat civilian guy, who always scoped my boobs, alone in the shed with the telenovelas and black-and-white Westerns and cartoons. I’d hang on for dear life when the bird lifted off, then tilted forward and soared out over the sand. And I’d pray to whatever was listening that I’d live to see my baby girl one more time. I’d pray that the bird’s brittle bones wouldn’t break.
In Chelan, in August of that year when everything started to go to shit, my truck rolled to a stop in front of the office at the airstrip. A golden dog sprawled on a patch of grass, its tongue lolling, dripping slobber on its paws and into its shiny metal dish. It smiled at me like I was a long-lost friend. Behind it, the office was gray and long and low—government issue, just like the shed back in Iraq. Inside, the air conditioning was cranked up so high you’d think you were in Baghdad. Squatting in the middle of the room was a cracked brown Naugahyde sofa, a layer of dust on the arm glowing white in a shaft of sunlight shining through a high window, CNN scrolling soundlessly on the TV in front of it.
“Just be a minute,” a man shouted, his voice muffled. A moment later, a toilet flushed, a sink ran, and then a guy in an orange polo two sizes too small for his gut walked out from the back room, still wiping his hands on his jeans.
“How you doing?” He extended his hand. Instead of taking it, I flashed my clipboard.
“Camille Waresch. I’m from the county.” I didn’t bother to tell him which county. Chelan was outside my jurisdiction, and I wasn’t exactly there on official business even if it had been. I was skating, lying, whatever you want to call it. In any case, betting he wouldn’t look too closely at the paperwork.
His watery blue eyes walked down the front of my body and back up again. Then he took the clipboard. Damn.
“County assessor,” he muttered and looked up, confused.
I smiled. “Property tax inspector.”
His face hardened, his eyes narrowed.
I jerked my thumb over my shoulder. “Just need to take a look at a one of the hangars.”
Then he smiled, his eyeteeth creasing his bottom lip. “You got a warrant?”
“Don’t need one,” I said, then took the clipboard from his hand. A wet thumbprint stained the page of the assessment order I’d drafted that morning. “I’m not law enforcement.”
“Look, lady. You want into a hangar, you got to show me something more official than that.”
“Like my boobs?”
That caught him off guard.
“I need to take a look at the odometer on an aircraft,” I said before he got any ideas. “It’s standard procedure; I’m not going to take anything.”
He squinted at me so hard I could see the wheels turning in his head. Then he jerked his head toward the window that looked out on the airstrip. “Ain’t you supposed to drive a county vehicle?”
“It’s in the shop.”
He jabbed a fat finger at my clipboard. “And if I called that number, someone’d tell me this is all legit?”
I held the clipboard out to him, the heel of my hand over the Okanogan County seal, and bluffed. “Go ahead.” I was confident no one would answer the phone anyway.
He looked down at the clipboard like it was covered in shit. Then he looked at me like I was too. But he turned around and lumbered to the back room. A moment later, I heard squeaky metal hinges opening and he shouted, “Which hangar?”
“The one that has a brown Sikorsky.”
I slipped my sunglasses on when I followed him outside and kept my distance down the gravel path to the seventh hangar. At the far end of the airstrip, a woman with a long gray ponytail under a John Deere green ball cap rode away from us on a mower, skirting the tarmac. When I turned back, the guy from the office was walking into the hangar, leaving the door open for me.
Inside, the Sikorsky S-76 perched like a bird of prey. It was mud-brown and glossy, its rotor drooping like wings at rest, its pointed nose like a raptor’s beak, its belly just large enough to swallow a gurney, a pilot, and a couple of medics. It was just like I had pictured it, just like the photos I had seen online of rescue copters and medivac birds. Just like the birds I had ridden in Iraq.
The guy in orange was leaning against the wall, his hands tucked up into his armpits.
I nodded at the helicopter. “You ever been up in one of these?”
“Nope.”
“Me neither,” I lied. “They scare the piss out of me.”
He laughed. I guess the tension was running higher than I thought.
I put my hand on the side of the passenger compartment, trailed it along as I walked around the airframe, peeking into the windows, the gritty dust and slick paint sliding beneath my fingertips.
“Like flying grenades, my dad used to say. He was in ’Nam, so I guess he knew.”
“Yeah?” the guy said. “My old man went, too.”
“He ever talk about it?” I tilted my head back to get a better look at the blades, four of them cocked at right angles from the rotor.
“Naw. He don’t talk much anyway.”
“My dad didn’t talk about it either.”
“He still around?”
I clenched my jaw, closed my eyes, just glad the idiot couldn’t see me on the pilot’s side of the bird. “No,” I said as lightly as I could. “He passed earlier this year.”
“Sorry t
o hear that.”
I tried the pilot’s door. Damnit. Locked.
“You got the keys for this thing?” I asked.
“Nope.”
I leaned against the window, my hands framing my eyes against the glare of the fluorescents.
“This aircraft’s got a lot of miles on it,” I said, my voice extra loud in the echoing hangar. “I mean, for its age.”
Through the windows of the passenger compartment, I saw the guy shrug his shoulders. “It goes out every few weeks.”
“Taking tourists out over the lake or something?” I said absently and made a show of writing down what I could see of the odometer reading.
“No idea. I see a guy come and pick it up in the afternoon.”
“Does it come right back?”
“I guess. I’m never here for the return.”
“You work days?”
“Yeah.”
“Who’s the lucky bastard who gets the night shift?” I said, then laughed.
“Nobody.” The guy glanced at his watch, a chunky black digital model. “There’s no one here after five.”
* * *
After the airfield, the day was mostly a lost cause. After hitting one property down south, I drifted back to Chelan when I got hungry. A BLT and an iced tea later, I lingered in the booth in the back corner of Dee Dee’s, ignoring the dirty looks from my waitress and staring at the cursor blinking on the blank first line of my blank assessment report.
“Hey!” someone said. I didn’t look up: the restaurant was busy and there was no reason why any of the sticky, sunburned tourists would “hey” me on their way back to the lake or out to the mountains.
“Hey, how’s it going?” the same voice said, louder this time. Then he slid into the plastic booth opposite me. Lyle.
I forced a smile. “Hey.”
“What are you doing down here, Sis?”
I hated it when he called me that, mostly because I wasn’t—I’m not—his sister, not even his sister-in-law, technically. As far as Lyle is concerned, I’d long considered myself a victim of circumstance. I stared back in silence. He laughed in that high-pitched “ha-ha-ha” of the perpetually stoned.
Lyle swiped a wilted French fry from my plate. “On the beat?”
Little Falls Page 5