“Here at the shop, before five?”
“Before five.”
We said quick, hushed good-byes, like furtive lovers, and I rang off feeling vaguely depressed. In my mind was an image of her—the naked hope in her face, the pain and the too-tight control. I got up and went into the bathroom and washed my face and hands in icy tap water. That did nothing for the low feeling. Neither did a couple of turns around the cold, bare room that Allison had shared with her lover ten nights earlier.
Assume the boyfriend was a college student too, someone of her own approximate age. How would they have felt, spending the night in a place like this? Viewed it as part of a brief adventure, maybe—or the beginning of a long shared one. Backwoods interlude; snuggle up in this monastic cell, make love and their own heat, make the best of a minor hitch in their plans. Or maybe it hadn’t been that innocent or pleasant. Maybe they’d had a fight of some kind, and the next day it had kindled even hotter, and then . . . what? He abandoned her somewhere in the wilderness, and took her car and drove himself back to Eugene? Not likely, but possible—yet another possibility. Hell, at this stage, with the limited number of facts I had to work with, anything was possible. The car broke down again and this time they weren’t lucky enough to be close to a town and they’d managed to get themselves lost on foot. Or they’d had an off-highway accident, in some remote area. Or, as Tamara Corbin had suggested, they’d made the foolish mistake of picking up the kind of hitchhiker who turns out to be deadly. Or—another worst-case scenario, and also as Tamara had suggested—her mystery lover hadn’t been what he’d seemed to Allison, was a psycho in sheep’s clothing.
Circumstances. Allison’s actions plus those of the boyfriend plus those of strangers—piling up, intermingling, creating new circumstances that affected and reshaped their two lives and maybe those of others as well. But what action, what cause and effect? The key was finding just one of the circumstances; then it would be possible to piece together the others, extrapolate, work out the gist of what had happened.
Sure. Except that it had been nine days now, and there hadn’t been a whisper from or about them. Not a whisper. And nine days is more than long enough for any trail to grow cold, for events to lose their detail, become distorted, become lost.
The image of Helen McDowell’s face flickered across my mind again, accompanied by the sound of her voice on the phone just now, the desperation in it, the gathering dread. She knew what I knew, what anyone in a situation like this knows. Some refuse to face it, but she wasn’t one of those; denial was not in her makeup. And because it wasn’t, because she was a woman who met a crisis head-on, each passing, waiting minute would eat at her like drops of acid.
The longer her daughter remained missing without a trace or a whisper, the slimmer the chance of anyone finding any of the right circumstances—of finding her alive, or ever finding her at all.
Chapter Five
Maxe’s Garage was a big, barnlike building made of warped pine boards and covered with a sloping tin roof. A row of three gas pumps, protected from rain and snow by a rickety-looking portico, guarded the narrow apron in front. A couple of pick-ups, a tow truck, and eight or nine junk cars were scattered along the sides and around to the rear. With its run-down appearance and its dark, colorless aspect, it reminded me of a set in a forties film noir—Out of the Past, specifically, except that the kid manning the pumps was blond instead of dark-haired, and judging from the portable radio pumping forth country music from his shirt pocket, not yet deaf.
The kid told me I could find Art Maxe inside the garage. The interior was cluttered, droplit, and had a cement floor so smeared with grease and grit, it appeared to have been painted black. The only occupant had his head and upper body underneath the raised hood of a Brahma four-by-four, working the accelerator linkage to race the engine. I walked up alongside and waited until he quit jazzing the linkage.
“Art Maxe?”
He said, “Yeah?” without shifting position.
I told him who I was and why I was there. That brought him out of the Brahma’s shell. He was big and shaggy and dirty, like a bear that had been rolling around in a pile of oily refuse. There were oil streaks on his unshaven cheeks, a glob of grease caught in his unkempt black hair; his overalls might never have been washed and his hands were black-spotted with the kind of embedded grime even industrial-strength soap never quite gets out. He gave me a long, steady look out of squinty eyes that held both wariness and suspicion.
“I already talked to the county cops,” he said.
“Then you won’t mind talking to me. I’m trying to do the same job—find a couple of missing kids.”
He shrugged. “You ask me, those two took a side road somewheres and that crappy MG of theirs busted down again. Lot of wilderness around here, lot of places to get lost.”
“Her MG really that bad?”
“Piece of junk. Just about ready for the dismantlers.”
“What made it quit running out on the highway?”
“Fuel pump went out. I didn’t have one in stock, not for a foreign job like that; had to call down to Susanville. They couldn’t get it up here until late Saturday. Special trip.”
“You had the car ready for them at ten Sunday morning?”
“That’s right,” Maxe said. “Told the girl it’d cost her extra, my working on Sunday, but she said that was all right, they wanted to get back on the road. I warned ’em, though, both of ’em. Half a dozen other things ready to go wrong on that baby. Don’t push it too hard, I said. She just laughed. Allison, right?”
“Allison McDowell.”
“Kids that age, everything’s a big joke.”
“Did she pay you, or was it the boyfriend?”
“She did. Cash. I give her a little off the bill for cash.”
“Who was driving when they left?”
“She was.”
“They say which direction they were heading?”
“Not to me. Out to the highway and then who knows?”
“How did they seem together that morning?”
“Seem?”
“Toward each other. Were they getting along all right?”
“Better than all right,” Maxe said. “Just like the day before—kidding around, laughing, holding hands. Christ, even kissing on each other.” He shook his head and made a spitting mouth, as if he thought public displays of affection were in poor taste.
“Either of them mention his name?” I asked.
“Not that I remember.”
“First name, even a pet name?”
“I didn’t pay that much attention.”
“How old would you say he was?”
“Her age, about.”
“Describe him.”
“Shit, I’m no good at that. . . .”
“Didn’t the county law ask you for a description?”
Shrug. “I told that sheriffs captain, Fassbinder, what I could remember. Wasn’t much.”
“How tall was he? The boyfriend.”
“Not too tall. Average.”
“Six feet? Shorter?”
“Six feet, I guess.”
“Weight?”
“One-seventy, one-eighty.”
“In good shape?”
“Well, he filled out a sweater pretty good.”
“What about his hair? Long, short?”
“Short. Real short.”
“What color?”
“Well, what color you think?”
“I’m asking you, Mr. Maxe.”
“Black.”
“Any memorable feature? Mouth, eyes, nose?”
“No.”
“Scars, moles?”
“No.”
“Anything at all unusual about him?”
“. . . I dunno what you mean.”
“Did he limp, talk oddly—like that?”
“No. He was just a . . . just a kid, that’s all.”
“How was he dressed?”
“Blue sweater, Levis, them running shoes.”
“Both days?”
“Yeah.”
“And the girl?”
“Same, only her sweater was green.”
“Was anybody else here when they came on Sunday morning? Anybody they might’ve talked to?”
“No.”
“Kid out on the pumps?”
“No, just me. Johnny don’t work on Sundays.” Maxe made a waggly gesture with the wrench he was holding. “I got work to do,” he said. “How about you letting me get back to it, huh?”
“Okay.”
“Questions like you been asking ain’t gonna find ’em anyway. They got lost somewheres, like I said. Walk out under their own steam or the sheriffs pilots’ll find ’em from the air. Other-wise . . .” Another shrug. “Bones,” he said.
There were two people in the Creekside General Store when I walked in: behind the counter, a heavyset woman in a plaid lumberman’s shirt, and in front of it, a bushy-bearded male customer wearing a stocking cap over long, graying hair tied in a ponytail. It was a dark, crowded place, almost as dark as Maxe’s Garage, with a creosote-soaked wood floor, narrow aisles, and tall shelves. In addition to the usual merchandise, it sported a back section stocked with old clothing and miscellany, a sign above it reading THRIFT CORNER.
I loitered near the door, waiting for the counter transaction to be finished. On the wall was a corkboard to which were attached dozens of business cards, flyers, scraps of notepaper with handwriting on them. People wanting goods and services; people selling same. Cordwood, yard work and hauling, and baby-sitting were the dominant subjects.
One of the flyers was something else again—something ugly. It had been printed by an outfit called the Christian National Emancipation League, run by a “grand pastor” named Richard Artemus Chaffee—one of those white supremacist outfits that preach hate instead of love under the guise of religion. It wasn’t local; the address and telephone number were downstate in Modesto. Put here by a traveling league member, probably: recruitment drive that reached even into backwaters like this one. I quit reading it when the stocking-capped customer came away from the counter with his purchases. But I would have quit anyway about then. Credos such as “dedicated to purifying America of race-mixing and mongrelism, and to the emancipation of the white seed and the rise and rebirth of God’s true Chosen People” make me want to puke.
The ponytailed guy was pushing fifty, and the length of his hair and beard, the out-of-date ragbag clothing he wore, marked him as a child of the sixties—an unreconstructed hippie for whom time had stopped somewhere around 1967. He didn’t want anything to do with me, maybe because to him I represented the establishment in my conservative suit and tie. He shook his head when I tried to talk to him, refused to look at Allison McDowell’s photograph, and pushed past me and out through the door. Peace and love to you too, brother, I thought.
The heavyset woman was even less cooperative. She glowered at me as I approached, said before I got to her, “Don’t bother showing it to me neither. I can’t help you.”
“I just want to know—”
“I know what you want to know. I never saw those two kids, neither one.”
“At least take a look at the girl’s photo—”
“Can’t help you, mister. Didn’t you hear me tell you that? This is a store, not an information booth. Buy something or leave.”
I left. On the way out I tore down the Christian National Emancipation League’s flyer and crumpled it and tossed it into a sidewalk trash can. That made me feel a little better.
Trilby’s Hardware & Electric was closed, so I moved on to the Modoc Cafe. Too-hot box, its trapped air thick and miasmic with the odors of frying meat, grease, coffee, cigarettes, and various human effluvium. Booths along the side walls, a few tables in the middle, serving counter and kitchen at the rear. The patrons totaled six, all in the left-hand booths; it was early yet, not much past five-thirty. I sat in one of the right-hand booths and waited for the lone waitress to work her way around to me.
She was fortyish, tired, with a polite outer layer over a hard inner core of cynicism and quiet desperation: it went with the job in places like this, or maybe it was the job that made women like her the way they were. Her name was Lena, according to one of those little oblong name tags on the pocket of her uniform. She set a well-thumbed menu in front of me, asked if I wanted coffee.
I said I did and then held up Allison’s photo. She glanced at it, took a longer look at me. The cynicism was plain in her eyes now, along with a guardedness, but none of the polite veneer seemed to have chipped away. Even her faint professional smile remained intact.
She said, “And who would you be?”
“Private investigator.”
“No kidding.” She wasn’t impressed, or even particularly interested—at least not in me or my origins.
“You recognize the girl?”
“If you mean was she in here, yeah, she was. Only place to eat in town.”
“Week ago Saturday night?”
“As I remember.”
“With a male companion?”
“Him too.”
“You wait on them?”
“I’m the only waitress when I’m here.”
“Did she happen to mention her friend’s name?”
“Once that I heard. It was noisy, so I’m not sure if I heard it right.”
“What name do you think you heard?”
“Rob.”
“Rob, not Bob?”
“Rob.”
“Anything about him strike you as unusual?”
“Not really. Good-looking kid, not too dark.”
“What ethnic background, would you say?”
Her smile dipped wryly. “I wouldn’t.”
“Did he have an accent? I mean regional, not foreign.”
“Not so’s I noticed.”
“How did the two of them act together?”
“Like they were alone in a bedroom.”
“Couldn’t keep their hands off each other?”
“Not for two seconds. In a place like this, in the middle of the Saturday dinner rush . . . stupid. Very stupid.”
“Why stupid?”
“Calling attention to themselves like that.”
“Yes?”
“These’re the mountains, mister, not the big city.” Lena poked a stray lock of brown hair back over one ear. “Coffee, you said. Cream, sugar?”
“Just black.”
She went away and I opened the menu. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and then only juice and a bowl of Grape Nuts with Kerry, and I was pretty hungry. The closest thing to low-fat, low-cholesterol food served here was pot roast, and I was not in the mood for pot roast, particularly not when I saw the listing for chicken-fried steak with country gravy.
I have had a small insatiable lust for chicken-fried steak all my adult life. Back in the days when I was forty pounds overweight and shoveling in all the wrong things, I would order it every time I saw it on a menu—ongoing search for the ultimate chicken-fried steak, blue-collar equivalent of the white-collar pursuit for a perfect martini. I have kept my weight down for well over four years now, after shedding the extra forty pounds under the grimmest circumstances imaginable; retrained myself to eat and drink in healthy moderation, and to maintain a more or less regular exercise program. I hadn’t had chicken-fried steak in all that time and I was overdue. One little indulgence wouldn’t hurt me. One little rationalization, either.
Lena came back with my coffee and I ordered the chicken-fried steak. Then I asked her, “Allison and Rob have much to say to you while they were here?”
“No. Too wrapped up in each other for chitchat.”
“Just placed their orders and that was all?”
“Pretty much.”
“What were they talking to each other about?”
“I didn’t pay much attention.”
“Travel plans? Anything along those lines?”
“I just told you, I didn’t pay much attenti
on.”
“Did they talk to anyone else, one of the other customers?”
“. . . No.”
“Why the hesitation?”
Lena looked down at her pad, moving her lips in an over-and-under fashion as if she were holding a debate with herself. Pretty soon she said, “Not in here. Afterward, out front.”
“Who’d they talk to then?”
“I don’t know. I saw them through the window, just for a few seconds, and it was steamy in here and dark outside.”
“One person or more?”
“Two. Two men, I think.”
“But you don’t have any idea who they were?”
“Think I’m lying about that?”
“No, I don’t think you’re lying. How long did the conversation go on?”
“Couldn’t have been long,” Lena said. “Next time I glanced through the window, they were gone. All of them.”
“What time was that, do you remember?”
“End of the dinner rush . . . about seven-thirty.”
“You see the kids again that night?”
“No.”
“Sunday morning, before they left town?”
“I wasn’t here. I don’t work Sundays.”
“Who does?”
“Breakfast shift? Lorraine. Ask her tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll do that. Thanks.”
“Mashed potatoes or french fries with your steak?”
“Mashed potatoes.”
Her mouth quirked again. “Good choice,” she said.
It wasn’t. Turned out I’d made a lousy choice all around. The mashed potatoes managed to be lumpy and runny at the same time, and more than likely had come out of a box; the country gravy was mostly white sauce with neither Tabasco nor black pepper; and the patty-sized “steak” was a mass of gristle coated with corn meal instead of flour. If the perfect chicken-fried steak was a ten, this one barely made it past zero. No wonder Lena’s smile had been wry.
So the ultimate chicken-fried steak was still out there somewhere. Maybe. Or maybe, like the putative perfect martini—or for that matter, like Diogenes’ genuinely honest man—it didn’t really exist except as an illusionary ideal. Not that it mattered either way. The important thing was the quest itself, the search for perfection in an imperfect world.
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