Cast in Stone

by G. M. Ford

  His shoulders sank even further. He looked like the Bridge Troll.

  "What time is it?" I asked.

  Tony cheeked his watch. "Ten-twenty."

  "Can you have it ready by one?"

  "I suppose," he grumbled.

  "See you at one."

  Something about the ringing of a telephone drives reason from my mind. Anything to stop the ringing. I sprinted across the apartment. "Hello."

  "Ah, Leo." Cousin Paul's strangled tenor. "I was just going to call you," I lied. "Oh, I'm sure you were. Most assuredly." "I was," I insisted.

  "Hmmm. Be that as it may, cousin. There remains the matter of the liberation of your trust fund and our luncheon date."

  "There does indeed," I agreed. "Did you have a date in mind?"

  "I had this afternoon in mind."

  "No can do. I'm leaving town."

  "When then?"

  "What's today?" I asked.

  "Wednesday."

  "Let's see. I'm going to be gone for a couple of days. What about next Wednesday?" "One o'clock." "One o'clock." "The Seattle Club," "Yup."

  "Tie and jacket. At least tie and jacket. Suits are preferred, but you know, if you don't have—" "I don't."

  "One o'clock, Wednesday." "I'm looking forward to it." "I'm sure."

  On my way home from Eastlake Chevrolet, I'd double-parked in front of the Bovs' house, poked my head in, and told them to be packed and ready at one. It was just short of eleven. Plenty of time for me to pack a few things and make a trip to the liquor store.

  I left a message on Rebecca's home phone telling her I was going to be out of town for a couple of days.

  The phone again.

  "Yo," I answered.

  "Not very businesslike." It was Marge.

  "Sorry," I said. "How you doin'?"

  She took a deep breath. "I'm doin'. That's about all I can say." A pause. "Heck's family all went back home this morning. This is the first chance I've had to sit down."

  "Try to take it easy," I advised lamely.

  "Has Howard McColl contacted you?"

  "He's tried. I was away from my desk."

  "So, he hasn't fired you then."

  "Nope."

  "Good."

  "Good?"

  "I've been out of it for a few days." Another pause.

  "Quite understandable," I threw into the void.

  "What's not understandable to me is that the estimable Mr. McColl should take it upon himself to reorganize my affairs."

  "Oh, I assumed he was lending a hand."

  "What? I'm just some poor dearie who can't manage without the strong, guiding hand of a man. Is that it?"

  She was rolling now. I didn't want to interrupt with an answer.

  "I don't want to disillusion all you strong silent types but Sea Sundstrom was—is—my creation. Whatever wonderful other virtues Heck may have possessed, and God knows—" She paused to collect herself. When she started again, it was with measured control. "And God knows I miss him. But corporate

  life was just not his cup of tea. Way too many i's to dot and t's to cross for him. Too many people saying one thing and meaning another. Heck, God love him, couldn't even be hard enough on the guys in the warehouse. He just didn't have it in him. This is mine. I did this." She stopped.

  A beep. One of us had another call coming in.

  "I never doubted it," I said with conviction.

  "I want you to keep at the investigation," she said.

  "Okay," I said. "This is it, anyway."

  "What is?" she asked.

  "If this little trip I'm gonna take doesn't pan out, we'll have to discuss what to do next. It may be time to try the cops or maybe just hang it up."

  Another beep.

  "Is that yours or mine?" she said. "No idea." "Hang on." I hung.

  "It's Howard. D6 you want to listen in while I fire him?" "I'll pass," I said.

  "I've got to be sure about all of this."

  "I understand," I said. "You want a full report?"

  "Stay at it, Leo."

  Hmmmmm.

  20

  We'd covered nearly thirty miles before Harold cracked the silence. As we crested the small rise before the Marysville exit, he leaned forward and read my mind.

  "This is Marysville, huh? Isn't this where all that stuff was being dumped, you know—back when Buddy got killed?"

  "Yeah," I said. "This is it. About eight miles west of here. Out on the Tulalip reservation."

  I thought that was going to be it, but I was wrong.

  "You shoulda known, Leo," Ralph said suddenly.

  I knew what he meant. I'd had this same conversation with myself more often than I liked. "Yeah, I know," I said.

  "We talk about it a lot," said Harold. "You done all the right things, Leo. I mean you told him all the right stuff, no denying that. But you still shoulda known how he was."

  "Ain't like he was gonna do what you told him," George said from my right.

  "He never did what nobody told him," Ralph added.

  "You shoulda known," Harold repeated. "I know," I said again.

  This time, they let it ride. George and I briefly locked eyes as we searched the air between us for silent signs of Buddy.

  They'd been waiting at the curb like refugees when I'd pulled up in the borrowed van. Norman, a huge khaki sack thrown over his shoulder, towered above the others in a gray tweed overcoat. Ralph had covered several turtlenecks with an aged madras sport coat. He looked like the Michelin Man gone plaid. In spite of the bright blue sky, George and Harold wore matching yellow rain slickers like the Bobbsey twins. The Speaker stood lone sentry on the porch, his lank hair hanging straight down, wearing his sandwich board—still "Ozone Schmozone"—as mute and impassive as the post he was leaning on. "All aboard," I shouted.

  The sheer volume of luggage should have alerted me, but I was hassled and hurried and not paying much attention. They would have pulled it off if Ralph hadn't missed the seat with his Hefty bag, which slipped to the floor with a crack of broken glass. The sickly sweet smell of peach schnapps spread like airborne honey through the interior air.

  "Hold it. Hold it," I hollered. "Everybody out. Get the bags out too. Obviously we need a reality check here."

  "What's the problem?" demanded George. "What," I demanded. "You don't smell it?" "Smell what?" asked Harold. "I don't smell nothin'," said Ralph. "Harold, you smell anything?"

  "I think maybe you busted your aftershave," tried Harold. "Ralph doesn't shave," I said. "I meant mouthwash," said Harold weakly as they dragged themselves and their luggage out onto the narrow grass strip. "Open all the bags."

  "Who the hell are you, U.S. Customs?" George snapped "That's right, and the custom is that I'm holding all the booze."

  "Cram it, Leo. Nobody appointed you God or nothin'."

  I ignored him. "Open up. Come on, open up." No movement. I undid the safety pin securing the nearest bag.

  They stood forlornly in the street as I went through the assortment of sacks, baskets and Hefty bags they used for luggage, picking carefully through the sodden clothes and broken glass of Ralph's green Hefty cinch sack. In the end, the tally was: four fifths of assorted whiskey, the shattered half-gallon of peach schnapps, two pints of hundred-proof vodka, and one large can of Sterno.

  "Sterno?" I couldn't believe it. "Sterno?" "We might need to impress the natives with fire," said Norman. I confiscated all of it.

  "Maybe you better go inside and get some dry stuff," I suggested to Ralph. "This stuff is pretty wet."

  He shrugged. The minimalist approach. Simplify. Simplify.

  "Well, leave the bag open. It'll dry."

  George sat up front with me. Ralph and Harold commandeered the second seat. Nearly Normal Norman sat in back, facing the rear, clutching the seat-back on either side, his huge maned head thoroughly obscuring the rear window. Within a couple of miles, the rancid mist rising from Ralph's bag had so permeated the interior air as to make it possible, by simply closing th
e eyes and conjuring the sounds of wheeling desert birds, to visualize oneself immediately downwind of the Cairo dump. The rest, as they say, was silence.

  I dropped off the interstate at Burlington and took the Cascade Highway east, winding through Sedro Woolley in silence, past the sign for the Northern

  State Multi Service Center—what, until some time back in the early seventies, used to be Northern State Hospital. For nearly seventy years the state of Washington had used Northern State Hospital as its repository for the seriously addled. Among Seattle's informal community of screaming drunks, brain-fried druggies, and muttering droolers, Northern State's medieval methods were the stuff of street legend. Each of us knew somebody who'd taken the one-way trip to Northern State. The walls seemed to be reaching out to us. I broke the spell.

  "Okay. We're almost there. Here's the deal. You guys listening?"

  I checked the mirror. No eye contact. A couple of grunts.

  "All we want to know is, does anybody recognize the girl in the picture? Nothing more than that. If you get anybody to hit on the picture, come get me. I'll take it from there."

  I paused to let it sink in.

  "What did I just say?" I pushed. Nothing. I tried again.

  "Hey, I'm not kiddin' here. Somebody tell me what I just said."

  "You said we was too goddamn stupid to do anything except to show some picture to the hicks, and if anything needin' a brain came up we was to call you right away," George said from my right.

  "I just—" I started. Shit. He had a point. That had indeed been more or less the message. "Okay, George is right." I sighed. "I'm sorry. If you're going to work, you might as well do the job. If anybody even seems to recognize the picture, find out everything you can and then find me and report. We'll all figure out what to do from there."

  The Timber Country Saw Shop came right before the turn to lyman. As I turned right I spotted a sign a quarter-mile down the highway: EAT. We wound down into the town. Main Street was five blocks long. The first short block contained the only two public buildings. On the left was the post office. On the right was the Lyman Tavern. Both were painted a uniform white. The post office was entered at ground level. A dark-haired young woman, big-time pregnant, wheeled a baby in a stroller out the door. Her striated belly had rolled the top of her blue stretch pants and now bobbed at large beneath an orange-and-white maternity blouse. On the right, the Lyman Tavern was three steps up to a narrow front porch supported by elaborately turned posts. Half a dozen pickups nosed into the north side of the building.

  I drove another three blocks and pulled over to the side of the road. "Everybody out," I announced as I opened my door and got out. I walked around to the double doors on the passenger side and yanked them open. Another round of mumbling, bumbling, and stumbling and I had them standing in the fine gravel that separated Main Street from the lawn of the modest blue house behind me.

  They blinked disbelievingly at their surroundings as I passed out pictures. I wanted to get them going before the bitching started.

  "Okay. We need to ask as many people as we can in the time we've got. The longer they've lived here the better. You're gonna find that most of these people have been here a long time. Be polite. Ask them for help. Say something like, 'Excuse me. I was wondering if you could help me.' For the most part, people will help if you approach them in that manner."

  George waggled his hand like a schoolboy who needed to take a piss. I knew better, but acknowledged him anyway.

  "What?"

  "Excuse me, sir, but I was wondering if maybe you couldn't help us get the fuck out of here." The other three almost smiled.

  "As a matter of fact, my good man, you've come to the right fellow. You do just what I tell you and I'll have you out of this lovely little hamlet inside of an hour."

  He wanted to respond, but I kept talking.

  "Harold. You go down there to the end of town." I pointed south. "This is Third, so you do all up and down First and Second." I stepped out from behind the front of the van and peered up and down the street. It looked to go no more than three blocks on either side of Main. "George, you and Norman do Third and Fourth. Ralph can do Fifth by himself."

  "Ralph can always manage a fifth by himself," said Harold.

  They yukked it up. I went on.

  "If there's a No Trespassing or No Peddlers sign, skip the place. Sometimes out in the country like this, people really, I repeat really don't want to bothered. Sometimes out here in the sticks you're gonna find types that have been waiting thirty years for something that looks like you guys to show up on the front porch so they can blow them away. Don't take any chances. Be safe. You guys hear me?"

  They all let me know they understood.

  "Don't mess with any dogs. Thank everybody when you're done. If they want to know how come you want to know, tell them the missing heir story like we did when we found the Abrams girl."

  Again they agreed. I handed each man a folder of photos and a roll of half-inch masking tape,

  "Okay, let's go then," I began. "We'll all meet back here in this spot in an hour, and"—I waved a finger— "stay out of the tavern."

  "What are you gonna do?" asked Ralph.

  "I'm gonna drive back out to the highway and talk to the people in the saw shop and the people in the restaurant. Then, depending on what I find out from them, I'm gonna come back here and see how you guys are doing and then maybe take a lap around town. I want to see if there isn't some place in town where folks hang business cards or maybe put up announcements about stuff they want to sell. I'll put one of the small pictures with a phone number up. If any of you guys comes upon a place where you can hang one without pissing anybody off, then put one up. That's what the tape is for. Each of you has a bunch of pictures that have my number on the bottom."

  They pawed through their respective folders.

  "Save those for hanging up. Show the big ones without the number. Somebody wants to keep a picture, let 'em. I've got plenty. An hour." I checked my watch. "It's two-twenty. So three-twenty, right here. Got it?"

  They must have. Each man trudged off in his appointed direction clutching a folder.

  Nothing doing at either the Timberland Saw Shop or the Riggin' Room Cafe. Friendly? Yes. Concerned? Maybe. Helpful? No. Both places let me tack up a picture. I continued past the cafe, just in case there was another business of some sort just up the road. Not a thing. I retraced my steps back into Lyman, this time taking an immediate left off Main, riding the perimeter. Lyman was a typical Northwest mill town, twenty years after the mill closed down. Anybody with any place to go had long since gone. What was left was just marking time.

  Postwar single-family houses originally financed by the company, never better than adequate, now moss-encrusted, sagged in varying degrees toward equilibrium with the natural contours of their untended yards. Like the clear-cut scars on the sides of the surrounding mountains, they stood in testament to simpler times. I turned right. The closer I got to the river, the better the upkeep of the homes. The copper-colored Skagit River blew by First Avenue, garnished with fresh leaves and limbs, torn loose by some upriver storm. Freshly mowed grass, well-tended shrubs along the river. Recent retirees, I guessed, moved out to the country to fish away their golden years.

  I took a full lap and then cruised the streets looking for any trace of the Lyman school, passing Allison Stark's picture taped to a pole on Fourth and catching a glimpse of Harold as he backed out the front door of a small yellow house on Second and Main. Apparently, the school had vanished from the earth.

  I left the van at the pickup spot and showed the picture around the post office. Nada. Norman was slouching on the front of the van as I crossed the street to the Tavern. He'd shed his tweed overcoat and attracted a crowd. A white-haired boy on a blue bike rode wobbly semicircles at Norman's feet while his little sister stood agape, looking straight up at the strange, massive apparition.

  Same thing at the Tavern. The place was so dark, the bartender had
to click on the light over the register to look at the picture. He held it there for the patrons. No go.

  "Was the old Lyman school in that big empty area between Second and Third?" I asked the bartender.

  "Used to be," he said.

  A little fellow on the nearest stool, green John Deere cap worn at an angle on the very top of his head, piped in. "Till eighty-two. Said we had to consolidate. Then they made all the kids go to Sedro Woolley."

  "Took what damn little heart the town had left," said somebody down the bar.

  John Deere agreed. "Even when we didn't have nothin'. We could always beat Hamilton."

  "Concrete too sometimes," somebody added from the gloom. "We turned out some damn good athletes.

  Got some major college scholarships. Don't usually get them for B-8 neither."

  "Then they closed us down."

  The bartender dried a glass. "Had a couple of kids get hurt in the old building. The thing got to be an eyesore. We bulldozed it down back in—"

  "Eighty-six," said another voice.

  "Eighty-five," came from the far end of the room.

  "Eighty-six."

  "You're both wrong, as usual," said a rough female voice.

  I slipped out the door while they worked it out. The Boys had gathered around the van. The kids were gone. Their expressions told me all I needed to know.

  "Nothin'," said George as I approached.

  "Anybody else get anything useful?"

  "I got some blueberry pie," said Ralph with a grin. "A real nice widow name of Williamson down the end of Fifth Street."

  "Lyman was founded in eighteen seventy-two by a guy named Williamson," said Norman. "Grew hops. Had big plans for—"

  I cut the travelogue off. "Everybody in," I hollered.

  We duplicated the process at Hamilton, where the gutted remains of the old school building stood like a peeling Greek temple a scant block off Pettit, the main drag. No hits. We followed the Skagit east to Birds-view and Grassmere, both barely wide spots in the road, talking to anyone who would talk, taping up pictures, ending up, just before full dark, at the North Cascades Motel on the outskirts of Concrete.