Before Switch could speak again, Ben Cappadora stepped up and thrust his shoulder back. He said, “What is all this conferencing about? Is my daughter up there or not? Is anyone going up there for her? Is there a hunting cabin or something up there or isn’t there?”
“It’s a lot bigger than a hunting cabin,” said Blaine Whittier, coming up behind him. “Sam, I’m trying to help, so please forgive me for saying anything. It’s a big house, like, not as big as our house back there in Durand, and not on a street. But it’s on a real road and it has all the comforts. If my father is there with Stella, she’s safe.”
“Yeah, right,” said Ben. “I’m certain of it.”
“I mean … I’m sorry,” Blaine said. “The house is safe.”
Sheriff Switch explained to Ben how the weather complicated what might otherwise be a simple decision to have a look-see. She didn’t mention that everyone’s fear of what Bryant Whittier might do was a more vital consideration.
Bill Humbly took over again. “Sheriff. What we figure is that the so-called couple who took her either went back under whatever white-collar rock they crawled out from under, where they probably don’t have big sunglasses and blond hair, or they’re speaking Spanish by now.”
“Why?” the sheriff asked.
“Three people doesn’t make for a secret,” Detective Humbly went on. “They could start blackmailing Whittier right back if they forget they have their own skeletons in their own closets … which means he’s probably on his own by now and he might have the jits … maybe he didn’t mean for it to go this far or he didn’t know what it would be like if it did.”
The sheriff leaned back in what Humbly assumed must be a form of repose taught only to people who grew up in the mountainous West, her thumbs hooked in her belt.
“That makes sense,” she said. “But I still don’t get the fired-up need to go right now. I don’t get why you presume that the person who abducted this child and who owns a virtual mansion down here in town and another one up in the San Juan Diego Mountains and has the means and know-how to get there through this much snow is too clueless to buy formula or change a diaper,” she said. “If he’s even up there. Or ever was.”
“Sheriff, please,” Humbly began. “I’m not saying for sure. There’s a good chance though. What if she’s crying nonstop? What if he flips out?”
Switch pursed her lips and fiddled with the end of her thick braid. Finally, she said, “Well, what we can do is a hasty search of this immediate area, see whether any vehicle has passed through here in the past week. I can get the forest service to help, but they’re shorthanded because of that case with the campers who got stranded in the snowstorm a few days ago,” she began. “You read about that. And we have a group of Eagle Scouts trained in Operation Find.”
Eagle Scouts, Humbly thought. Okay, this was going to be a kid movie. It needed only a Baldwin brother.
“I’m going to have to assert …” Berriman began.
“Stop,” Humbly and Switch said together.
Switch went on, “The weather is unstable, of course. And that’s what worries me. Bryant Whittier has been away from home for what, nearly a week? He may have gone in with her twenty-four hours before the first snowstorm, not the one we’re having now, which, by the way, isn’t even a snowstorm by our standards. The campers were found two days ago. Those people who took the baby, back in Los Angeles, if they were working for Whittier, might also have brought supplies up there. They might have brought the baby up here. But since the snow, maybe they’re not sufficient. He may not be able to get out, even with that big honking truck he bought.” She paused to think as she leaned over the topographical maps that were laminated on the ranger’s desk. “Now from what Blaine here said, presumably he has some kind of water source. It’s not a little shack. There’s plenty of water up there. That’s really all he needs. A day isn’t going to make a difference. Let the weather settle down. And no one said we wouldn’t try to get someone to fly over. I’m just not sending anyone up there on a foot search. Or a snowmobile either.” She turned to the FBI agent. “And sir, I am the sheriff of Cisco County. I assign the case number. I decide if and in what way a search will proceed. I decide what manner of and how much help we request from federal agencies or other jurisdictions. I welcome you here, but let’s be clear on this. We have one tracker, our best pro, who we thought was going to lose two fingers from exposure because of that camping rescue …”
“What does that have to do with us? Why didn’t he wear gloves?” Humbly asked. “This is a helpless baby! If the goddamned sheriff’s deputies up here don’t know how to keep warm, who does?”
The sheriff then made the threat gesture of the primal female. She shoved up her sleeves and crossed her arms. They were considerable arms, with tame, tended oval nails stained a whimsical sparkled burgundy color but muscles that Humbly was sure she could use to knock a door off a small refrigerator. She said, “It wasn’t a matter of the rescue tracker wearing gloves, sir. The team took every necessary safety precaution based on known predictions. No one could have predicted the drop in temperature to ten degrees.”
“I’m not insulting him,” Humbly said. “I know shit … stuff happens.”
“Her,” said Switch. “Our team leader on that rescue was Lorrie Sabo. She spent a full day in the hospital. I put her on mandatory rest for a month.”
“Or her! For the love of Mike. This guy Whittier is a nut! It doesn’t matter what he says he is in a letter! His own wife thinks he’s snapped his cap! We aren’t just talking about a water shortage. Or not having diapers. If you send a helicopter up there, you might as well send a marching band. He’ll hear it and he could kill the baby if he panics.”
Pat held Beth against his chest as she began to sway.
Candy and Vincent gripped each other’s hands—Candy grateful that Eliza, who could not stop crying, had agreed to stay back in Durand at the Lone Star Inn, where they would all sleep later.
“The intelligence we have is shaky. Mrs. Whittier is sure, but we don’t really know if anybody’s up at their house. You have the word of a civilian who has, well, a righteous obsession with this case that this might be a place where Bryant Whittier would go. That it’s his family refuge. His guy cave.”
“And now her daughter says the same thing,” Detective Humbly reminded the sheriff. “Blaine Whittier is manifestly mentally robust and got a wacko call from her father earlier this week.” He gestured at the crowd who stood a few paces away, inside the ranger’s building—all the Cappadoras except Eliza, Candy, and George, as well as Claire and Blaine Whittier.
They all stared at the sheriff.
“You’ve done more with less,” Berriman said. “We all have.”
Switch stubbed at the floor with her boot and admitted, “That’s true.”
Straining to hear the words from inside the huddle, Candy realized she was hungry to the point of nausea. That morning, realizing she hadn’t eaten anything but coffee for more than forty-eight hours, Candy had gone to breakfast with Beth and the others. She had tried to eat. She had made a concentrated effort to break her toast up into bites she could chew and she chewed them as her mother had told her and Belle to do when they were children, twenty times each bite. And yet the sight of her key chain—with a picture of Stella’s first smile, given to her and Beth by Eliza just a few months after Stella was born—closed her throat so that no matter how much juice she chugged, the bread was like a wad of wet paper jammed in her gullet. Finally, Candy had to slip into the bathroom and throw it up. A fifty-one-year-old bulimic. She drank the rest of the juice. People could live for weeks without food.
On the other hand, Beth hadn’t even tried to eat, beyond a cup of tea.
Candy felt lucky that they had let her come along, on her solemn promise not to abruptly act like a police officer. But she couldn’t help asking, “Bill, so who was the woman who mailed the package from Canada? Was it someone else that Whittier found?”
“I’m guessing it was the same woman who actually took Stella, but dressed to look older,” Humbly said. “But with no priors, nothing, I’m guessing we’ll never know who she really is or the connection to Whittier.” He tightened his lips.
Beth sat quietly, watching the men and wishing she could cry. She craved the relief of the scooped-out, limb-heavy exhaustion and deep-nasal-pool feeling that tears would bring. Instead she was hollow, light, and dry as a seedpod. Tears would not come. Losing Stella was outside the fence of sad. There was nothing animated within Beth except a hot, pale column of rage, like a third rail threaded through her torso.
Still, she tried everything to make herself cry. As she lay cradling Eliza earlier that day, while Vincent and Humbly conferred about the trip up, Beth tried to prompt her own tears. She thought of the moment she had first seen Ben, after nine years, when he came to her door to drop off a handmade flyer offering Lawns MoWeD $5! She thought of Ben proudly cradling Stella in the newborn nursery at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Hospital, or talking to Vincent through the Plexiglas when the theft of the coach’s car landed him in juvenile hall.
But Beth’s eyes remained so dry it was as though they were coated with a film of plastic wrap. She saw through them as through a cataract and realized later that this was because she had barely slept and hardly blinked.
Finally, Bill Humbly turned to the rest of the group. “Well, you heard her. We won and we lost. The sheriff is going to organize a hasty search, a perimeter search around the trailhead where the road goes up that leads to the Whittiers’ house. It’s an established road. Hikers and campers and people drive up it all the time in most kinds of weather.” Except this kind. “They’ll see if there’s any sign of anyone having gone in there with a vehicle, which she says there will be, even with the snow. And if there’s no sign, she’s agreed to let Berriman pull strings to get some military guys to take a helicopter up there for a look-see. Which,” Humbly said, “is a risk considering what we know about Bryant Whittier’s mental state. But I don’t think we have a choice.”
“God, I’m so sorry!” Blaine cried. “This is all our fault!”
“No,” Kerry said. “It’s because you were brave enough to tell us the truth, you and your mother, that we have a chance to bring Stella home.”
“I can’t believe you don’t want to kill us,” Blaine said.
“It must be terrible to know something like this about your own father,” said Kerry.
“It makes me wonder why he was so sure that Jackie wanted to kill herself,” Blaine said softly. “And even worse, it makes me wonder why he thought she did.”
“I want someone, somehow, to go look for my daughter. Time is passing fast,” Ben said. “She can’t last … like this. If you won’t go, I will.”
“We will,” Vincent said.
“Give her a chance,” said Humbly. “She seems like a good woman and a good cop.”
“And she’s all we have,” said Candy. “No hospital or church has reported finding a baby.”
Humbly said slowly, “That, too.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
At dawn, Sheriff Switch’s “hasty search” was called off when the snow, which had stopped briefly, began again. She brought the few volunteers back off the road leading to the Whittiers’ summer home.
They came back in, slipping their cell phones back into their pockets, turning off their radios, avoiding Vincent’s eyes, making a wide path around Pat and Beth and Candy. Ben took one of the rental cars and drove back down to Durand to be with Eliza at the Lone Star Inn, all six rooms now entirely filled with the Cappadora family. Vincent sent his parents after Ben. Sheriff Switch had shown them a detour around the reporters blockaded two miles from the original trailhead.
Before he left, Pat got hold of as many of the volunteers’ hands as he could and shook them.
“I want you to know how much this means to my family,” Pat said. “We all know you gave it your all.”
No one could fault such earnest, decent people.
The weather had made for a few near misses with the Eagle Scouts, who fell on slippery places under the snow. The only grace was that they had young, elastic bodies that could bend the wrong way and leave nothing but a bruise in the morning, a bruise that would vanish in days—unlike the memory of having failed, which would last. But those falls were enough for the sheriff. Under the new frosting, older snow had melted and frozen again, slickening the rocks and even the paths. And then, for some reason, in the wishbone between the two nearest peaks, Blind Bear and Parker Rock, a slight fog settled like a perfect wedge. The place was called Clear Canyon; it was now a perfect irony.
Before noon, Berriman had called in the troops, literally.
A helicopter from Moffett Field had used the coordinates Sheriff Switch provided to find the Whittiers’ big mountain house and land in a clearing in front of it. Except for Claire and Blaine, Sarah Switch was the only person to have actually seen the Whittiers’ summer home, and that had been years before. She’d been after someone her former boss believed was an arsonist threatening to start a fire in the area one dry August day—it had turned out to be an eighth grader mad at his father. Sarah Switch remembered accepting a cool drink from the Whittiers and meeting both daughters, then gangly young girls. And she recalled thinking that this was a magnificent post-and-beam house to be seen by only four people—and the occasional friend or family member.
Bryant Whittier had said something about the house being nothing and the view from it being everything. That, and the fund-raising dance she had mentioned to Mrs. Whittier, were the only times Sheriff Switch had ever spoken to Bryant Whittier, though he was a familiar figure in Durand, striding down from Paramount Street in rain or sun to his office above the Peak State Bank.
Within an hour, the helicopters were back emptyhanded.
The officer in charge said that his squad initially drew their guns. As they approached the house, a light went on. But after they circled to the back, they realized it was only a motion sensor. The officer had made the decision to break a front window and then he swore that people in Utah could hear the alarm until one of them figured out how to pull the wires.
“But there was nobody in that house,” said the pilot. “Judging by the dust inside and the snow outside, there hadn’t been anyone there for a long, long time. Not a trace.” He added, “We jogged up the road. Those other places were boarded up. Summer people, I guess. This was clearly the biggest house and there was heat on, enough to keep the pipes free and such.”
Vincent rode back to Durand with the sheriff in her truck. Sarah Switch was so pretty and sad that at any other time he would have made some kind of move on her. The thought might have belonged to another man, in another lifetime.
To his shock, Sheriff Switch stopped in front of the Whittiers’ house.
“You can stay in the car,” she told Vincent.
“Could I come in?” he asked her.
She shrugged. “You can imagine what I’m going to say to them.”
But Vincent could not have imagined what Claire and Blaine would say in return. So he winced when Switch told them that the search was skunked and that there was no one up at their summer home. But Blaine Whittier’s eyes flared to life.
“The bill in Dad’s office for Small Shelters, Mom,” she said. “Did you tell them about that?”
“No, I assumed they would search your father’s office,” Claire said, and Vincent had a strong, transitory urge to clip this slight, vague, older woman on the jaw.
“Well, I looked up Small Shelters to find out what it was,” Blaine said.
“I’ll bite,” said Switch.
“My father spent … come and look,” Blaine said, leading the way to her father’s office—which she had torn apart, over her mother’s protests. “He spent almost ten thousand dollars on one of these mini prefab cabins. My mom didn’t know what it was. She doesn’t use a computer that much and when she does, it’s my father’s laptop. Look at th
e website.”
There were a dozen models—a baby Cape Cod, a tiny ten-by-twelve two-story A-frame ski lodge, a wee Victorian that could have accommodated the three bears without Goldilocks. Inside, these places featured fold-down tables and fold-up beds and were generally a triumphant exemplar of the efficient use of space. Some people, people Vincent assumed were deeply eccentric, actually lived full-time in these houses, which could have had, at most, two hundred square feet of floor space. Others used them as hunting or fishing getaways or even guest cottages.
“If my dad bought one of these, and it is not here in the yard or up at our summer house, it has to be someplace,” Blaine said. “He wouldn’t buy it and not use it. He’s too compulsive for that.” Blaine tore through a mass of papers on the huge, varnished desk. “See? He was going to donate his other land to some nature group if he and my mother took off on me and moved to some island …”
“His other land?” Switch asked. “What other land?”
“It’s a parcel of some acreage Bryant owns,” Claire Whittier said, obviously deeply troubled by Blaine’s assertion that Bryant’s madness would have made her abandon her only living child. “Here is the map of the … and the deed if you need it. It’s farther up than the resort area where our summer house is. His grandfather cleared lumber up there a hundred years ago. Bryant and his two brothers owned it, but Bryant bought the rights from Cooper and Ames a few years ago.”
“Can you take us there?” Switch asked.
“I’ve never been there,” said Claire Whittier.
Blaine added, “Neither have I. He and Jackie went camping up there a few times. They skied in and out. There’s only a fire road that goes up there. You know, what the lumber guys used…. He always said he’d build a place, for Jackie of course, up there. I loved my sister but she was in over her head with my dad’s ideas for her future and what she’d want. He was, like, possessed by Jackie.”
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