Between Lost and Found

by Shelly Stratton

  “You can have it for your investigation,” she had said to Sam, giving him the once-over. “But you better give it back when you’re done. It’s the last thing I have from Bill.”

  * * *

  Janelle held her breath as she read the insurance letter’s salutation.

  Dear Mr. Marshall,

  Thank you for being a valued customer of MetLife insurance.

  We are writing to inform you of some of our coverage options changes that you will have effective Jan 1, 2017. We regret to inform you that we are discontinuing your current dental care insurance plan as of Dec. 31, 2016.

  We have provided a detailed list of coverage options now available, but recommend a plan on the back of this letter. All options are available for your consideration. You can choose one of these plans at our website. The enrollment process is easy and you won’t have to answer any health-related questions!

  If you have any additional questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

  Janelle slowly lowered the sheet of paper. Her mind stopped spinning. The bread crumbs had led to a dead end.

  She tore the paper into little pieces and tossed the pieces into the air like confetti, letting it flutter around her. She then dropped her head to the steering wheel and broke down into uncontrollable sobs.

  CHAPTER 13

  Sam watched as the double doors opened and a stream of men and women flooded out of the conference room. They were dressed in a rainbow of drab hues—tan, navy, gray, brown, green, and black—representing about a dozen police departments and search-and-rescue teams. On all of their faces was the look of sheer exhaustion, and it had been only two days since they started the search for Little Bill. Mind you, it was two days of ceaseless searching—scouring everything within an eight-mile radius of the crash site, all falling between the town limits and Pasque Lake—but still, a mere forty-eight hours. It was essentially the equivalent of a blink in a lifetime.

  What if this damn thing drags on for three days . . . four days . . . hell, maybe even a week, Sam thought as his eyes scrutinized their furrowed brows, bowed heads, and austere-set mouths. What if we never find Little Bill?

  Would their looks of exhaustion eventually give way to that of the downtrodden and broken?

  Though his father had annoyed the hell out of him while he was alive with his need for perfection and his controlling ways, it was moments like this that made Sam wish he were more like his old man. If General Patton had been reincarnated, his battle-worn, cantankerous old soul surely would have been dropped into the body of Tom Adler. When he was alive, Sam’s dad could inspire (and bully) even the laziest of specimens. He had even gotten Hank to put away the donuts and get a hop in his step while he had worked under him. He also would have kept Mayor Pruitt off his back. Pruitt wouldn’t have dared called Tom Adler three times a day for updates on the search or with reminders of “Every day that black codger stays missing—stealing headlines—is another day he takes attention away from what we really need to focus on in this town, Sammy! I was watching KEVN last night and I swear they spent ten whole minutes on a story about Little Bill. How much time did they spend on the festival? A measly three minutes!”

  Sam could only imagine what his father’s response would have been to that observation.

  And when that hiker had disappeared near Terry Peak two years ago and the Mammoth Falls Police department had taken the lead in the search, Sam’s dad—then police chief—had been the perfect fit for the role of taskmaster and absolute leader. Thanks to Chief Adler they had found the hiker, short one arm but still alive.

  But Sam was no Tom Adler—not by a long shot. His usual brand of leadership was the kind that you now found in the self-help book aisles—the type of hardbacks with titles like Leading from the Back and Good Leaders Ask Questions. The kind of books that would have made his father puke or chuck them onto a log fire.

  “The only thing that sissy crap is good for is kindling,” his dad would say.

  Sam was a cheerleader, not a dictator. He was a consensus builder, not a bully. Even though he was trying his best, he knew he couldn’t inspire that same sense of allegiance and determination as his father. He couldn’t spur on these beleaguered officers and deputies, especially if his heart wasn’t in it. Besides, he still wasn’t sure if they were looking for a missing person or just a misguided man who didn’t want to be found, who thought he could thwart his granddaughter’s engagement by pulling some great disappearing act worthy of Houdini.

  I’ve done my bit in trying to save someone who doesn’t want to be saved, and I don’t know if I’m up to doing it again.

  Of course, Gabby had nothing to do with this, but Sam couldn’t help but see the correlation. His ex-wife had wandered around in her own brand of wilderness for years—for decades—and when he thought they had finally discovered a way to get her out of those dark woods, she had given up. She had walked away from the rescue beacon with a shrug and waded back into the forest, absolutely infuriating him.

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” she had told him after he confronted her about the bottle of Lamictal that sat unopened in her medicine cabinet. “Those things make me . . . a . . . a zumbi! They make me dead. At least this way, I’m alive! I am human, Sam!”

  As the last officer walked out of the room, Sam turned back around to face the conference room wall where an oversize map hung, showing the ground that they had already canvassed in the Black Hills. Multicolored thumbtacks on the map represented each search team.

  Maybe Little Bill doesn’t want to be found, Sam thought again as he absently fingered one of the tacks, and I’m wasting my time all over again.

  “Hey, Chief!” Rita shouted from the doorway, making Sam whip around to face her. “Everyone’s grabbing a quick bite to eat. Maybe stop by the festival to grab some pretzels and corn dogs. You want anything?”

  Sam shook his head. “Nope, I’m good. Thanks, Rita. Hey, how are those tips coming along?”

  In addition to being their office manager and dispatcher, Rita’s new job was now fielding calls and gathering tips about Bill Marshall that came into the police department. They would later be passed onto assisting detectives.

  “Good,” she said. “We’re getting lots of them.”

  “Any of them sound promising to you?”

  She wasn’t a cop, but he trusted her opinion.

  “Well, there was one that said Bill was being held in an RV in Spearfish by a group of commune hippies. There was another one that said all signs point to him probably being abducted by a UFO.”

  “Shit,” Sam muttered.

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “Ah, well, keep at it. I appreciate all your hard work. Enjoy a nice lunch and maybe some cotton candy—on me. You deserve it.”

  “Thanks, Chief.”

  He watched as she nodded but didn’t budge. Her chipper smile stayed in place. She tucked a blond lock of hair behind her ear that had escaped her ponytail.

  Behind her, he could hear the voices of the other officers and deputies filtering their way down the hall. He heard a door open and close and the sound of clanging keys.

  “You coming, Rita?” someone called to her.

  “Yeah,” she said absently over her shoulder, keeping her green eyes focused on Sam, “I’ll be right there.”

  For some reason, she lingered.

  They stared at each other. Sam anxiously cleared his throat.

  It wasn’t often that he and Rita were alone in a room together. He knew he scrupulously avoided it, and he suspected she did, too. Any time they were alone, silences seemed to stretch wider and wider, and the distance between them seemed much shorter. He felt stifled by it.

  All because of one mistake, he thought.

  Though “the mistake” had happened two years ago, enough time still hadn’t passed that he could unflinchingly look Rita in the eyes. That night had been a moment of weakness, the result of his final divorce decree that had arrived in the
mail a week prior, and the downward spiral of disappointment, loneliness, and heartbreak he had experienced soon after. Nevertheless, “the mistake” definitely was not recommended in any of the leadership books he kept on his office desk.

  To foster a sense of camaraderie, good leaders do not screw their assistants.

  He knew he and Rita could never go back to what they had been before “the mistake,” even though they both valiantly pretended that everything was normal. They still joked with each other. She still took his lunch order along with the other officers and made him a cup of coffee when he showed up in the mornings. He occasionally asked after Rita’s new boyfriend—a car salesman based in Rapid City—and bought Rita one of those bouquets of chocolate-dipped strawberries, pineapples, and cantaloupes for her birthday with a card attached saying, “To the best damn dispatcher and office assistant on this side of the Missouri!” But it was all a façade and right now, it felt like a flimsy one.

  “Are you all right, Chief?”

  He nodded. “Sure. I’m fine. Why?”

  She strolled into the room, and even though she was more than ten feet away, he automatically took a step back, almost bumping into a whiteboard.

  “I just hope you aren’t driving yourself too hard. You getting enough sleep? You’ve got to keep your strength up, you know!” She playfully wagged a finger at him. “Can’t expect to keep going on a search like this if you’re—”

  “I’m sleeping fine, Rita,” he said, cutting her off. If pretending to be just friends or police chief and dispatcher was trying, enduring her mothering was even worse. “Don’t you worry about me.”

  She inclined her head and gazed at him from an unnervingly long time, her green eyes a billboard of unspoken emotions. “It’s hard not to worry about you,” she said softly.

  “Rita!” a voice shouted beyond the doorway. “We’re hungry as heck! You still coming?”

  “I better get going,” she murmured before backing toward the door. “Catch you later, Chief. Huh?”

  He nodded and watched as she turned and left.

  * * *

  Sam sat in his silent office with his feet propped up on the desk, staring at his phone, contemplating doing something that he hadn’t done in almost two and half years. He chewed a stale onion bagel as he mulled over whether to make the call. The bagel was one of the few offerings left in the conference room from that morning’s complimentary continental breakfast for the multi-jurisdictional meeting. It was either that or a half-eaten apple danish from Joanna’s Bakery that was already starting to crust over. The danish’s oozing, sugary filling seemed about as appetizing as feasting on a wad of snot.

  Sam’s stomach growled in protest as he chewed his bagel, but he ignored it. The bagel would have to do for now. He reached for the phone, paused, pulled his hand back, then reached for the phone again. He finally picked it up and began to dial the number from memory, wondering if it still worked, wondering if the person he remembered would be on the other end.

  “Hello?” a male voice answered tentatively after three rings, making Sam grin.

  “Hey, Kev,” Sam said.

  “Holy shit! Sam? Is that you! I saw the area code and thought it was a telemarketer! The Fraternal Order of Police or some shit. What’s going on, man?”

  Sam lowered his feet from his desk and leaned back in his chair. “Not much, Kev. Not much. How the heck you’ve been?”

  He regretted not keeping up with Kevin. When he lived back east, he and Kevin used to be drinking and running buddies. They were the guys who would exchange meaningful, exasperated looks over their wives’ heads as the two women prattled on, ignoring their husbands during double date nights. In fact, they had met through their wives.

  Gabby and Kevin’s wife, Ingrid, had connected through the diplomatic circuit, when the Brazilian delegation attended one of the parties thrown by the Norwegian embassy. They had become fast friends and so had Sam and Kevin. When Sam spotted Kevin across the room with his side-part haircut and Dockers, drinking a Bud Light with a bemused expression on his face, he had known immediately that Kevin was a kindred spirit. A man cut from the same cloth. They were two Midwestern boys dropped in the dizzying world of foreign relations, politics, and a bunch of snooty folks who looked at them strangely whenever they revealed their humble backgrounds. Sam was a cop from a mountain town in South Dakota and Kevin was an engineer from a sleepy town in Missouri, both with populations less than any of the small enclaves that surrounded D.C. They might as well have announced that they grew up washing in a tin tub and playing the banjo from the reactions they got from people.

  But his connection with Kevin was severed once he and Gabby separated. As with most divorces, husbands and wives split their assets, and not all are as tangible as the house, car, and furniture. One of the things Gabby got was their mutual friends, and that included Kevin. When the divorce was finalized, the two men stopped talking, like they had magically forgotten each others’ phone numbers and email addresses. It hadn’t hurt Sam’s feelings. He knew how these things went.

  “I’m good! So what’s life like out there?” Kevin continued. He sounded almost giddy as he spoke, like a kid who had the chance to interview his favorite super hero. “I bet it’s awesome! Nothing like the boring shit I have to deal with day to day.”

  Sam shrugged. “It’s all right, I guess.”

  “All right? Just all right? Bullshit, man! That’s cowboy country! I see the guys around here at the gym, playing racquetball and doing that pussy rock climbing and I think, ‘I know guys who do stuff back home that you guys couldn’t even dream of! Yeah, you can run a five-minute mile but I know guys who’ve literally wrestled steer!’ But they don’t get it, Sam. They just don’t get it!”

  Sam didn’t comment. He hadn’t planned for their conversation to veer in this direction. He had forgotten this part about Kevin: his ability to ramble and his weird idolization of the land out west, which in Kevin’s mind was a place that was so rugged, rustic, and earnest that Sam doubted it had even existed a hundred years ago.

  “Your nuts just shrivel up out here, man! It must be something in the air. Or maybe it’s all the sitting around. God, I had to sit on this two-hour conference call yesterday that made me want to pull my teeth! And then that evening, I had to sit through kindergarten orientation with Ingrid at Siri’s Montessori school. I mean it’s kindergarten! How much orientation do you need? They draw with crayons and sing the alphabet. How complicated is that?”

  “How is Ingrid?” Sam managed to wedge into Kevin’s rant.

  “Oh, she’s fine, man. Bossy as ever!” He chuckled. “She wants to redo our garden so she’s had me out there for the past two weeks. I’m up to my ass in potted soil and mulch. She’s the world’s best slave driver. She went to the farmer’s market and got these—”

  “Has she spoken to Gabby?”

  There was a noticeable pause on the other end.

  “I . . . I don’t know, man. I guess,” Kevin finally replied. The excitement had disappeared from his voice. He sounded cagey, like Sam was trying to trick him into revealing something.

  “I just wondered, because I know they were close.”

  “They still are,” Kevin mumbled.

  “So she has spoken to her, then?” Sam could hear voices in the front office now. It looked like everyone was returning from their brief lunch break. He would have to meet with one of the lieutenants to get an update on the latest canvassing, but Sam didn’t want to do it now. Not just yet. He rose from his chair and shut his office door before returning to his desk. “How is Gabby doing?”

  Kevin loudly sighed. “I don’t know, man. I guess she’s . . . okay. She has her good days . . . and her bad days, from what I’ve heard. I’m a bad person to ask, though.” He paused again. “Is that why you called . . . to talk about Gabriela?”

  Sam briefly contemplated lying.

  No, I called because I wanted to catch up, Kev. I haven’t talked to you in two years and I was
wondering if you were still alive. Sue me! he wanted reply. But he couldn’t.

  The truth was he couldn’t stop thinking about Gabby, not since he had seen Janelle standing at the counter talking to Rita.

  Gabby, what the hell are you doing here? he had thought when he saw her. His heart had nearly burst out of his chest. Gabby wants to give it a second chance, his frantic mind thought. She finally wanted, after all this time, to fight for her sanity and their marriage. But then Janelle had turned around, and he had felt a stab of pain when he realized it wasn’t Gabby.

  He had thought he had finally moved on, that he was at peace with what had happened. He had exorcised his ex-wife from his memory—sat her effigy on a boat, pushed it off onto a river, and set it aflame with the hope that eventually it would reach Valhalla. But he hadn’t done anything quite that spectacular. Instead, he had only shuttered both the sad and the happy memories of Gabby in the back closet of his mind, allowing them to gather dust. Little Bill’s disappearance and Janelle’s subsequent appearance in town had flung that closet door open. Now Sam was covered in dust bunnies, a deluge of memories, and unresolved feelings that kept him up at night.

  “You should just call her yourself, Sam,” Kevin said, making Sam shake his head. “She’s . . . kind of hit a rough patch, I gather. She might like to hear from you.”

  “I doubt it.”

  She wouldn’t want to talk to me.

  He had walked out on her, hadn’t he? When she needed him the most, he had thrown in the towel and told her he couldn’t be married to her anymore. But he had had his reasons. He hadn’t ended their marriage on a whim. Gabby’s extreme highs and lows had not only exhausted him but left him questioning his own sanity some days. Then she told him she didn’t want to undergo treatment anymore because she was tired of the unexpected side effects that came with each new drug, and the drugs weren’t working anyway, and the doctors were suggesting electroconvulsive therapy as a last resort. Rather than putting her life in the hands of her doctors, she wanted to just “ride out the wave” and see where it took her.