by Bill Bernico
Time Will Tell
A Cooper Story
by Bill Bernico
“Can you afford to close the office for a week?” Chris Cooper said to her husband. The words were no sooner out of her mouth when she realized what a ridiculous question that was. Matt Cooper could have easily retired a wealthy man with the royalties he received from the State of California for the rights to his hat cam invention that all of law enforcement was now using. Instead, Matt wanted to keep his private investigations business going in order to have something besides money to leave his two children, Nick and Veronica. “Never mind,” Chris said. “I keep forgetting.”
“I made sure the schedule was clear for the whole week,” Matt said. “You know, this will be the first family vacation that all four of us have been on together since the kids were young. It should be fun. Even I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon. I’d kind of like to take a look before I check out.”
“Check out?” Chris said. “You’re not going anywhere for quite a while, Matthew Cooper. You talk like you’re eighty-nine. You’re only forty-seven.”
“I guess it just feels like eighty-nine some days,” Matt said. “Kids’ll do that to you.”
“Kids?” Chris said. “They’re twenty-four already. Hardly kids anymore.”
“I know,” Matt said, “but they’ll always be kids to me—our kids, and I think they’d enjoy this trip just as much as I would.”
“Okay,” Chris agreed. “Just as long as you spend more time at the canyon than Chevy Chase did in that Vacation movie, remember? He takes a two second look, nods his head and takes off again.”
“Love that movie,” Matt said. “Sure, I plan on taking in the whole package including the donkey rides down to the canyon floor.”
Chris held up both palms toward her husband. “Count me out of that part,” she said. “I don’t want to put my life in the hands, or should I say the slippery hooves of some dumb pack animal. It wouldn’t take much for them to slip right off the ledge with me on their back. No thanks.”
“You go ahead and do it if you want to,” Chris said. “I’ll wait for you on solid ground and take in the other sights.”
“All right then,” Matt said. “Can you pack us a picnic lunch for the ride there? I don’t want to have to drive straight through for seven hours and I don’t want to rely on roadside café food.”
“Sure,” Chris said. “That’ll be fun. And I’m glad the kids are into this trip as well. Young people these days would rather spend a week on Facebook or Twitter or some other shallow superficial social media site. What a waste of time.”
“Well, no one is taking any tablets or laptops along on this trip,” Matt assured her. “Cell phones, yeah, but that’s it. I want us to get back to the basics this week, like a real family.”
Nick and Veronica both pulled up in front of their parents’ house at almost the same time. Matt’s car was already parked out at the curb, leaving room for Nick and Veronica’s cars to stay safely in the driveway for the duration of the trip.
“Can you believe we’re really going to do this?” Nick said to his sister as they walked toward the house.
“I think it’ll be fun,” Veronica said. “We haven’t done anything like this since we were six or seven, remember? We all went to Disneyland in Anaheim that year. It was the last time the four of us took a vacation together. I’m looking forward to it.”
Nick help up one palm toward his sister. “You’re right, it should be fun, but I hope this isn’t just them trying to recapture what we did all those years ago. We’re adults now and it probably won’t be nearly the same. I’m just saying.” They let themselves in and found their parents in the kitchen, packing the picnic basket.
“There they are,” Matt said when he saw his children. “You guys ready to have a good time?”
Nick exchanged a quick glance with his sister and then looked at his dad. “You bet, Dad,” he said. “When are we leaving?”
“Right now,” Chris said, closing the picnic basket. She carried it while Matt carried an insulated cooler loaded with several brands of soda. Nick held the door open as they walked their containers out to the car. Matt returned to lock up the house and then raised his hand like a kid at school. “I call shotgun.” He tossed the keys to Nick. “You wanna drive?”
Nick looked at the keys in his hand. “Uh, yeah, I guess.”
Matt loaded the cooler and picnic basket in the trunk and slid in next to Nick. Veronica and her mother slid into the back seat. They weren’t even a block from home when they began talking non-stop about everything and nothing. Nick looked over at his father and shrugged. He and Matt could sometimes ride together for an hour without saying a word. It was probably a guy thing.
Several hours later Nick pulled into the wayside and killed his engine. “Anyone else hungry?” he said.
“We’re almost halfway there,” Veronica said. “Can’t we just keep going and eat when we get there?”
“I’m hungry,” Matt said.
He turned back to Chris with a question on his face. “I could go for a sandwich,” she said. “Besides, I’d like to stretch my legs a little.”
Matt turned toward Veronica and said, “Looks like you’ve been out-voted. We won’t stay too long. Don’t worry, we’ve got all week once we get there. You won’t miss out on anything.”
“Oh, all right,” Veronica said. “I guess I could use a sandwich myself. What did you bring?”
Matt deferred to Chris, who said, “We’ve got peanut butter and jelly, ham and cheese, bologna, braunschweiger or peanut butter and Cheese Whiz. I also have tuna and Cheese Whiz with mustard. And I brought some cake.”
Nick made a face and winced. “I’ll take the peanut butter and jelly.”
Everyone got out of the car and stretched their arms over their heads before walking around a little to work out their leg cramps. Matt and Chris retrieved the picnic basket from the trunk and carried it and the soda cooler over to a picnic table in the middle of the turnaround.
Nick made sure he got the right sandwich before someone else claimed it, grabbed a can of soda from the cooler and began walking toward the guard rail on the edge of the cliff that this wayside bordered. Veronica joined him with her lunch. Nick gestured with his chin off into the distance. “How far do you suppose that is out there? I mean how far do you think we can see from here?”
Veronica gazed off into the distance and said, “That short mountain over there is probably twenty or twenty-five miles from this spot.” She sat on the edge of the guard rail and continued eating.
Nick finished the last bite of his peanut butter and jelly sandwich, washing it down with his last swallow of cream soda. He threw the can in the trash receptacle and on the way back to join his sister, picked up a handful of gravel. As Veronica continued to eat, Nick took one pebble at a time and began throwing them over the cliff edge, going for distance. It didn’t take long for Veronica’s competitive spirit to rear its ugly head. Veronica quickly finished her lunch, disposed of the can and found her own handful of pebbles to throw. She couldn’t let her twin brother—her younger twin brother outdo her.
They had both thrown all the pebbles in their hands and it appeared that Veronica’s throws were falling a bit short of Nick’s. “Forget distance,” Veronica said. “Let’s see who can toss the biggest stone.”
“You’re on,” Nick said and immediately began scouring the immediate vicinity for larger projectiles. He found one the size of his fist and returned to the guard rail. “Check this,” he said and waited for Veronica to watch before he threw it over the edge. The rock slipped out of Nick’s hand and fell short of clearing the edge of the cliff.
It rolled to the bottom with a noisy crash through the thick underbrush.
“I can beat that,” Veronica said and found a rock similar in size to the one Nick had just dropped.
“Mine was bigger than that,” Nick said. “You need to find a bigger one.”
Veronica conceded and casually tossed her rock over her shoulder and down into the deep valley. It sailed out twenty feet or so and then dropped straight down. She and Nick began looking for more rocks but stopped dead in their tracks when Veronica’s casually thrown rock struck something that made a metallic clanking noise. The two looked at each other. “What do you suppose that was?” Veronica said. They both looked over the side but could only see more of the thick underbrush.
“I’m going down and take a look,” Nick said. “Wait here.”
“You be careful,” Veronica said. “That’s pretty steep.”
Nick eased himself over the guard rail, hanging on to the branches of the bushes and small trees as he descended into the valley below. Thirty feet down he stepped onto a ledge of sorts and paused to catch his breath. He was about to continue descending when something caught his eye. He pulled some of the heavy underbrush aside and then quickly jumped back, letting out an involuntary scream.
“Nick,” Veronica almost screamed. “Are you all right? What did you find?”
Veronica’s shouting attracted the attention of her parents, who quickly joined her at the guard rail. “What are you yelling about?” Matt said, looking around. “And where is Nick?”
Veronica pointed down the steep incline. “He went down there,” she explained.
“What on earth is he doing down there?” Chris said.
Veronica explained how the rock she’d tossed over her shoulder hit something that made a metallic clanking sound and how Nick went down to see what her rock had hit.
Nick could actually see his sister from where he stood, but just yelled up to her. “Get Dad,” he said. “Hurry.”
“Nick,” Matt yelled down to his son. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” Nick yelled back up. “But you’d better get down here and take a look at this. There’s a car down here.”
Matt eased himself over the guard rail and clung to some of the same branches Nick had used to make it to the ledge below. A couple of minutes later he found himself standing next to Nick. Nick pointed to the massive object that was all but hidden by the thick underbrush. “Dad,” Nick said. “There are people inside. Three of them.”
Matt stepped up for a closer look and verified what Nick had said. The car looked to be nearly fifty years old. Inside he could see the three skeletons Nick had mentioned. He pulled a few branches aside to look at the rear license plate. It was a California plate with renewal stickers that went back thirty-seven years. “Don’t touch anything,” Matt told his son. “I have to call this in to the police.”
Matt pulled his cell phone out and dialed 9-1-1. The operator asked what his emergency was.
“My name is Matt Cooper and I was on my way from Los Angeles to the Grand Canyon this morning,” he explained. “We stopped at a wayside for lunch and we stumbled upon a car down the side of the cliff and it has three bodies inside. Better get the police and the medical examiner over here right away.” He gave the operator approximate directions to the wayside. She said she knew which wayside he was referring to and told Matt to stay on the line while she dialed the authorities.
It took the first car nearly thirty minutes to find Matt and his family at the roadside rest area. The cop who was driving was a man named Bentley, according to his name tag and he was a sergeant. He had another officer with him whose name tag identified him as someone named Ferguson. They walked over to where Matt stood with his family. “You the person who called in a car with some bodies in it?” Bentley said.
Matt nodded and then pointed over the guard rail down into the canyon. “Down there, about thirty feet or so. The car’s so buried under the bushes that you’d never even know it was there.”
“Then how’d you find it?” Bentley asked.
Nick stepped forward. “We found it,” he said. “My sister and I were just throwing rocks over the side and one of them hit something metallic so I went down to see what it was and found the car. There are three skeletons inside.”
Bentley motioned to his partner. “Go on down and take a look, Art,” he said to Officer Ferguson. The officer eased himself over the rail and down the embankment until he came to the ledge. He moved a few branches out of the way and took a quick look into the windows of the old car before he called back up to his partner. “The kid’s right,” he said. “Looks like a ‘65 Pontiac Catalina sedan.”
Nick turned to Veronica and silently mouthed one word—kids?—with a question on his face.
“Anyone inside?” Bentley yelled down.
“Three as far as I can make out,” Ferguson said. “Won’t know if there’s any more until we can get this wreck back up there. I don’t know if a tow truck will be able to pull this back up there. Better get something with a crane hoist on it.”
Bentley excused himself and returned to his cruiser, grabbing the dash mic and calling in to the sheriff’s sub-station twenty miles to the east. By the time he returned to Matt and his family, Officer Ferguson had climbed back up to the parking lot. “What does it look like?” he asked Ferguson.
“Been down there quite a while,” Ferguson said. “There’s nothing left but skeletal remains. That would take years for them to get like that.”
“Anything else?”
Ferguson hesitated and then said, “Yeah, I saw at least one skeleton with a bullet hole in the skull. There could be more, but that’s all I could see from where I stood.”
Bentley turned to Matt. “You told the 9-1-1 operator that your name was Cooper?”
“That’s right,” Matt said. “Matt Cooper.” He opened his wallet and handed the sergeant one of his business cards.
“A private eye?” Bentley said.
“Yes,” Matt told him, “but I’m not here on any business. My family and I are just on vacation.” He motioned for Chris to join him. “This is my wife, Chris and those are my children, Veronica and Nick.”
Nick and Veronica both gave a short, half-hearted wave to the sergeant.
“Any idea who that is down there?” Matt asked.
“Four men went missing thirty some years ago,” Bentley said. “No one ever heard whatever became of them. I guess now we know. This was way before I joined the police force here. Hell, I was only a kid when that happened.”
“But how’d they manage to get their car past this guard rail without someone seeing the damage?” Matt asked.
“Back then, this wasn’t a wayside,” Bentley explained. “And there wouldn’t have been a guard rail here until a dozen years later. They might have remained down there for another forty years if you hadn’t thrown those rocks and found them.”
“Are you going to need to keep us here much longer?” Chris said. “We’re supposed to be on vacation and we’d like to get going, if it’s all the same to you.”
Sergeant Bentley nodded. “Just a few more questions and then I’ll take down your names and addresses and you can be on your way.”
Nick and Veronica both produced business cards of their own and handed them to the sergeant. Chris looked at Bentley and shrugged, spreading her hands. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t have a business card. You’ll just have to write my name down.”
Sergeant Bentley finished with Matt and his family and thanked them for the call. “You probably helped put some closure on a decades-old open case.”
“Glad to help,” Matt said and began walking back toward the picnic table to pack up the food and beverages so they could be on their way. He slid behind the wheel this time with Chris sitting next to him and the kids in the back seat.
He was just about to pull out of the rest area when Nick said, “Wait, Dad. Look over there. It’s a flatbed truck with a crane on it. The Grand Canyon will
still be there but we’ll never get another chance like this. Let’s stick around and watch them bring that car up from the canyon.”
Nick looked at Chris and then back at Nick. “I don’t know if your mother would…”
“Sure,” Chris said. “I’m just as curious as Nick to see what they bring up. Come on, Matt, another hour won’t matter one way or the other.”
Matt pulled his car ahead twenty yards, out of the way and everyone got out. They all sat at the picnic table and just waited as the flatbed truck positioned itself near the guard rail. “The show’s about to start,” he said to no one in particular. “Anyone want another sandwich or something to drink?”
Nick waved him off. “Stay where you are,” he said. “I’ll get it.” He carried the drink cooler over to the picnic table and then returned to the car for the picnic basket. Everyone helped themselves to another soda and sandwich and just watched with fascination.
The truck driver and his partner positioned the crane arm and lowered the heavy cable over the side of the cliff. The driver’s partner rode down to the ledge with his foot in one loop of the cable. He had a two way radio in one hand and had apparently signaled to his partner when he got to the car. Twenty minutes later, he had enough underbrush cut away and had the four cables attached to each side of the car. He climbed up the side of the hill and made sure he was out of the way before the driver started the winch.
Matt and his family got up from the picnic table and stood to one side, trying to jockey for a better position to see the car when it came up. The winch slowly cranked away and a minute later they could see the roof of the old Pontiac sedan. The driver lifted it up and over the guard rail, swung the crane sideways and set the car down on the gravel driveway. His partner disconnected the four cables and waited while the driver swung the crane arm out of the way.
By now three more squad cars had arrived, each with a pair of policemen in them. The medical examiner’s van had pulled into the rest area more than half an hour earlier. Sergeant Bentley and his partner were the first ones to get a closer look at the wreck. They both donned their rubber gloves as they approached the vehicle with the medical examiner right behind them. Bentley grabbed hold of the driver’s side front door handle and tried to press the button. It was rusted shut. He turned to Ferguson. “Better get me that crow bar out of the trunk.” Ferguson retrieved the pry bar and handed it to the sergeant. Bentley inserted the straight end of the bar between the door and the jam and pressed, putting his body behind the push.