Dead Time

by Stephen White

  She began to climb onto the backseat. One foot inside the car, her hand on the top of the doorframe, she turned to me and whispered, “It’s not just that I think she’s dead. I’m afraid someone killed her.”

  I saw fear in her eyes. “The Grand Canyon girl? Or Lisa?” I said.

  “The Grand Canyon girl.”

  “Do you know something, Meri?”

  “It’s just a feeling.” Her eyes welled up. “I miss my baby. Is that silly?”

  A messenger delivered a large sealed envelope from Merideth a few minutes after three. The doorman—during the day it was a hip, young Egyptian man named Haji who had a smile as invigorating as the Nile—signed for the package.

  Haji had never said anything to me, but I suspected he was aware of the details of my arrangement with Ottavia. I thought that more than a few dollars—my dollars, ultimately—had changed hands. Haji was considerate to me. I figured he liked the money, and I was beginning to think that he liked the subterfuge, too.

  I walked down the stairs to get the envelope. After a few days’ practice, I could do the descent to the lobby rapidly—the motion akin to speed jump-roping while the floor fell out from under me. My quads were aching from the multiple climbs I’d undertaken since moving in, though, so I was taking a day off from doing ascents.

  I thanked Haji for the package and waited for the elevator to take me back up to the flat. I’d never had a doorman before. I liked it.

  The file that Merideth sent about the events in the Grand Canyon was sparse. She didn’t know many details about what had happened, which surprised me; I had been assuming she knew much more than she was letting on. I reminded myself it was possible—knowing Merideth, even likely—that she hadn’t sent me everything she had.

  With the assistance of her network research staff she had compiled a series of succinct AP reports about the disappearance. Dateline: Grand Canyon National Park. They were written by an unnamed stringer, I guessed out of Vegas. The AP reports had been picked up by newspapers in Flagstaff, Phoenix, and Las Vegas. In addition, the file had printouts of brief Internet mentions of the events that had appeared on the Web sites of the NBC affiliate in Tucson and the ABC station in Phoenix.

  The Phoenix station linked to some video of search preparations that had taken place up on the rim and of an interview with the U.S. Park Service ranger who was coordinating the search and rescue. The station had apparently aired some coverage of the story at the time of the disappearance. Merideth’s staffers had done synopses of the video clips. An update about the missing girl had consumed the entire single paragraph allotment for Arizona news by USA Today on the third day after her disappearance. Must have been a slow news day in the rest of Arizona.

  Jaana Peet had grown up in a middle-class home just outside of Tallinn, Estonia. Her father was a baker. The local Estonian paper tracked the events in the Grand Canyon for about a week after she vanished. Merideth’s crew had obtained English translations of the articles. They covered no new ground. One piece described the search. Another described the flash flood and the decision to call off the ground search.

  In each piece, the geography where the local girl had vanished was described as “desolate.”

  The known facts were limited.

  Jaana Peet was a twenty-one-year-old cook at the cafeteria in the lodge on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. She had worked there just shy of half a year, since the previous February. She had originally arrived in the United States on a student visa, but hadn’t been enrolled in classes anywhere since the fall semester of the previous year at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she had been a communications major.

  Photographs were of a lovely girl with a triangular face and huge, inquiring eyes.

  Her companion on the hike to the Grand Canyon floor was Nicholas Paulson. In the news accounts, Paulson was initially described as a student at UNLV. Later reports listed him as being employed by a Las Vegas developer. The last report in Merideth’s file identified him as the stepson of a prominent resort developer.

  Jaana’s coworkers at the lodge reported that her decision to go to the canyon floor on her day off was an impulsive one. She was excited that Nick was visiting her. She told her friends that she and Nick would spend only one night in the campground. The next day, they planned to hike back out to the rim in time for her to make her late shift in the cafeteria.

  Jaana’s day off from her cooking job coincided with the tail end of one of the hottest weeks ever recorded at the Grand Canyon. Merideth’s research file included nine articles that focused on the scorching heat that had consumed northern Arizona during the time just before and after Jaana’s disappearance. The number of articles about the weather exceeded the number of articles about Jaana’s disappearance. The heat wave had proven much more newsworthy than the search for the girl from Estonia.

  Jaana had told friends that she wasn’t worried about the heat. She didn’t mind it.

  People who had known Jaana on the rim—coworkers all, some also identified themselves as her friends—unanimously reported that she was an experienced hiker, that she had previously completed around ten round-trips to the canyon floor, and that she wasn’t someone who would be ambushed by the fact that the canyon was hot in August. She was neither an expert in the backcountry nor a risk taker—she was unlikely to leave the well-marked rim-to-floor trails or to venture far off the paths that snaked away from the camping areas and ran along the river and into the nearby slot canyons.

  A review of Grand Canyon National Park guest logs indicated that she had never previously signed up to take any route to or from the canyon floor other than the most common ones that leave the visitors’ centers—either the Bright Angel or the North Kaibab.

  Everyone interviewed maintained that Jaana would not have been unprepared for her hike. She would not have been careless around the river.

  Upon his return to the North Rim, her companion, Nick Paulson, told the rangers that he was not an experienced hiker and would not have attempted the round-trip to the canyon floor had Jaana not assured him that he would have no trouble. He identified her as the leader of their expedition.

  Multiple witnesses reported the couple’s timely arrival at the canyon floor the day of their hike. A small group of people in a nearby campsite said that Nick and Jaana seemed to be pleasant, although Nick was depleted from the heat and the hike. He had developed bad blisters on one foot. Jaana prepared a simple supper at the end of the day. They drank a bottle of wine that she chilled in the river, and they quieted down for the night about the same time as everyone else in camp did.

  The consensus among those who had spent any time with the couple was that Jaana was more gregarious and outgoing than Nick. She chatted with everyone she met.

  Nick initially reported his companion missing to some other campers early the next morning. She wasn’t in their camp when he awoke. He walked to the toilets near the the river looking for her so that they could begin preparations for their ascent back to the North Rim. When he didn’t find her there, he backtracked toward Phantom Ranch where he found some other hikers preparing to climb out and explained that she had gotten up during the night and when he woke up he discovered that she hadn’t returned to camp.

  About an hour later a hastily assembled amateur search party began a search of the nearby campsites and cabins, and of the closest accessible beaches and trails. The group found no sign of Jaana. Over the course of the morning, the searchers gradually extended the perimeter of the target area.

  Midmorning, the Park Service took over. Rangers organized additional volunteer searches that continued throughout the day on the canyon floor.

  Midafternoon, one of the volunteers discovered a cheap woven bracelet that Nick thought may have belonged to Jaana. Friends later confirmed it was hers. The braid was found on a dusty trail about fifty feet from the banks of the Colorado River at the base of a waist-high boulder that had been rounded by a few eons of river flow. The spot was about a f
ifteen-minute walk from her campsite, between the boat beach and a nearby suspension bridge.

  The first Park Service aerial searches began late that afternoon, by helicopter. Fixed-wing craft joined the search before dusk.

  That first day, especially during the first few of hours after dawn, the alarm level about the girl’s absence was low. Most of the people who were helping to look for Jaana expected her to wander back into camp at any moment.

  Everyone was assuming she had gone off by herself to explore and perhaps had gotten injured. Some guessed she’d headed up the North Kaibab toward Ribbon Falls. Others thought she was on the River Trail on the other side of the Colorado. Most of the initial anxiety was that she might not have carried enough water with her on her morning hike.

  The search continued without success for a second day.

  Late the second afternoon, the grueling heat wave that had been smothering northern Arizona finally broke. Shortly after three o’clock the hot, still air was supplanted by gusty winds. Skies darkened to the south and to the west. Campers on the floor of the canyon heard a series of distant thunderclaps.

  Visitors four thousand feet below the rim lacked the vantage to be able to see the approach of storm clouds, but a big, slow-moving thunderstorm had filled the void of the departing high pressure and stalled above the Bright Angel/Phantom Creek drainage. Rain began falling onto the drainage at the rate of more than an inch every twenty minutes. By shortly after six o’clock, rainwater overwhelmed the arroyos and natural channels, torrents of runoff poured from the slot canyons into the tributaries of the Colorado, and at 6:13 in the evening a ferocious wall of water exploded down Bright Angel Creek into the Colorado River.

  The flash flood picked up rocks and debris at the confluence of the creek, near Phantom Ranch. Any hope of finding clues on the nearby trails or beaches vanished as the fast-moving flood jumped the banks of the Colorado and scoured the entire flood plain between the canyon walls.

  The ground searches along the river were halted at the first indications of the approaching thunderstorm. Further efforts to locate Jaana were limited to helicopter and small airplane searches of the miles of the Colorado River that were downstream from where Jaana had disappeared.

  By the morning of the next day, the third after her disappearance, official rescue efforts had ceased. Park personnel had moved into a “recovery” phase.

  Signs were posted and all the registered river-runners on the Colorado were alerted to keep an eye out for Jaana’s remains in the river, especially in eddies far downstream.

  Over the course of those three quick days, the search for Jaana Peet had gone from casual to professional to despairing. The Park Service issued a press release on day four. Rangers considered it likely that Jaana Peet had drowned in the river and that her body had been carried downstream either before or during the flash flood. Although officials planned to remain vigilant, they couldn’t estimate how long it might take to recover her body, or how far downstream her remains might have been carried.

  One of the AP pieces in Merideth’s research file quoted a Park Service ranger with almost twenty years of experience who said her body could be ten to twelve miles farther down the Colorado. A Grand Canyon river guide who had been running the river for a decade said forty or fifty miles wouldn’t surprise him.

  AP did a short follow-up story three weeks later. Jaana Peet remained missing. The article referenced a statement from the Park Service promising that personnel would continue to keep an eye out for her remains.

  Nick Paulson spent only one additional night on the canyon floor. He accepted a ride out on a search helicopter about thirty hours after he had first reported Jaana missing. He had already been evacuated when the flash flood hit. At the request of the Park Service he spent one additional night at the lodge at the North Rim while he was being interviewed about Jaana’s disappearance. He checked out of his room at almost the precise time that the thunderstorm was parked over the Bright Angel Creek Drainage. He drove back to Las Vegas in a Mustang convertible.

  The contemporaneous follow-up accounts contained no additional information about Nick Paulson. Merideth’s files showed no indication he had been interviewed by the press or by Park Service personnel after he returned to Las Vegas. One of Merideth’s researchers tried to track down his current whereabouts. The researcher identified three possibilities, based on Paulson’s age at the time of Jaana’s disappearance. The AP news reports had pegged him as twenty-two at that time.

  One Nicholas Paulson was in Boise, Idaho. He worked as a laborer for an oil company. One was literally a rocket scientist—he was employed by NASA, and was living in Huntsville, Alabama. The third was living in Las Vegas, where he was employed by a well-known resort development firm.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Jonas and I talked daily while we were in New York. He would sit on the swing in his aunt and uncle’s backyard and talk with me on his cell phone. I think the regular contact was reassuring to us both.

  During a morning conversation the day after I received the research file from Merideth, he asked if we could cancel our weekend plans. He’d been invited to go to the shore with his cousins.

  Jonas was a hard-core baseball fan. Though he was slender like his dad had been, he saw himself as a catcher. It was one of many revelations about him that had begun to pelt me within hours after he began to sleep in our house following his mom’s death.

  What else had I learned? Jonas adored astronomy and was able to get lost for hours charting the night sky. He was dying to go to a monster-truck show, was curious about drag racing, and liked early eighties music. He was embarrassed about his affection for SpongeBob.

  His favorite baseball team was the Colorado Rockies, and to counterbalance the chronic despair that tagged along with that affection, he also had a backup thing for the Mets.

  I had gone online and scored some pretty good seats for the Saturday Mets game at Shea.

  I almost told Jonas I had tickets for a Mets game. Against the dreaded Braves. But I didn’t tell him. That would have been selfish.

  “You’re sure?” I asked, as evenly as I could. Prior to beginning the extended visit with his relatives, I had prepared Jonas for the possibility that he might get some pressure from his aunt or uncle to minimize or cancel the time that he was scheduled to spend with me in the city. I had also assured Jonas that if it turned out he preferred to stay with his cousins rather than come into the city, that would be fine. I was in New York in case Jonas wanted contact. In case he needed me. It was up to him to decide if he wanted to take advantage of the safety valve I was providing—it wasn’t a requirement.

  I didn’t expect him to cancel our visits. Adrienne had once told me that her niece and nephew were “dweebs.” She’d allowed at the time—in a moment of familial rationalization—that she didn’t consider it the kids’ fault they were dweebs. Any dweebness was the nature/nurture responsibility of her dweeby brother, their father.

  Jonas and I agreed on a code word he could use if he didn’t feel free to tell me the truth about what was going on in White Plains. The code word he picked was “Callie.” Callie was the name the breeders had given the Havanese puppy that Jonas’s mother had bought for him before she died. All he had to do to alert me that he was under some kind of pressure from his aunt or uncle was to use her original name, Callie, in a conversation.

  He didn’t mention Callie while we talked about his trip to the beach. What he said was, “I really want to go to the shore. They have a boogie board.”

  He sounded excited. “Sounds great, Jonas. Should be fun. What beach?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it close? Within driving distance?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Okay. “Is Kim around? I want to get some details. Wait—Jonas?”

  “What?”

  “Jonas, do you know how to swim?”

  He laughed. It was a deep, belly laugh. Music. I could hear his mother’s wit echoing f
rom within him. “I’ll race you sometime,” he said.

  “You’re on.”

  “Thanks, Alan. Bye, Alan,” Jonas said. “I’ll find her.” He yelled, “Aunt Kim! It’s Alan. I can go!”

  For the first month or so after his mother’s death, he had stopped calling Lauren and me by our names, something he’d been doing since he had learned to talk. I didn’t know what it meant that he had started again. It was one of those perplexing questions that one of my patients might ask me during a session. I was supposed to be the expert.

  My patients always acted surprised when I said I didn’t know.

  Kim gave me all the details about the weekend. One of her girlfriend’s families had a place in the Hamptons. “Not one of those places,” she clarified. I assumed she meant it wasn’t a palace. “That’s where we’ll be staying. Three families, a houseful of kids.”

  I liked Kim. I’d begun to suspect that I would find her kids likable too if I got to know them. But Marty? I thought he would end up being one of those acquired tastes that I never quite acquired. Like oysters. Or tinned anchovies.

  I called the Netherlands. Lauren and I had a quiet talk that left me feeling nurtured and hopeful. She gave the phone to Grace, who was wonderfully chatty. She told me that they were still waiting to see if they were going to get a chance to meet her sister. She told me all about her visit to the Anne Frank house. When her attention began to wane, I asked if she liked Holland. “It’s the best. I want to live someplace with canals, Daddy. Here’s Mommy again.”

  Lauren sounded tired. I inquired about her health, and learned she was “okay.”

  “Are you hopeful about seeing…your daughter?” I asked after it was clear our health-status duet was done.

  “Just a second,” she said. I imagined her taking a few steps away from Grace to get some privacy. “I don’t think her adoptive family is exactly happy we’re here. I’m hopeful about things one day. Other days I think they’re just waiting for us to get tired of all the delays and go home. How’s Jonas?”