The Distant Echo of a Bright Sunny Day

by Patrick O'Brien

She set both mugs on the counter. “Hot on somebody’s trail?” she asked.

  “Yeah, we’re lookin’ for your ol’ man,” Bill said. “We understand he doesn’t appreciate you enough.”

  The waitress laughed. “He better—or he won’t get any peace from me.”

  The two agents chuckled. “We’ll convey the message.”

  When she was gone, Bill laid out a sheet of paper on the counter. It was a computer printout that showed, in alphabetical order, a list of motels within a two-mile radius of The Flats. A dozen of the cheaper ones had already been crossed off. Bill scanned down the list of those that remained, then tapped his finger near the bottom.

  “Here’s a couple right up the street,” he said. “Let’s do them next.”

  “Sounds good,” Tom said. “Incidentally, what about car rentals? I know they didn’t rent the VW camper, but what about the other two? They might have rented them.”

  Sipping his coffee, Bill pondered the question. “I don’t know,” he said. “They may have overlooked a few things, like the gloves, but they were probably meticulous otherwise. They knew how to plant the explosives, and they made sure they picked a time when nobody was around. They just didn’t count on the security guard showing up when he did. That’s one of those variables you can’t control. But I don’t think they’d want to leave a paper trail with credit cards. My guess is, unless they were especially fucking dumb, they had their own vehicles.”

  “Yeah, that wouldn’t be the way I’d do it, either,” Tom agreed, reconsidering. “But, speaking of gloves, I can’t help but think about that poor bastard and how he’s feeling right about now. I’ll bet he’s kicking himself in the ass this very moment, as we speak. I know I would be.”

  Bill smiled at the thought.

  “If he knew enough to wire something that big, he’s either professional or he was at one time. But you’re right—either way, he’s probably smart enough to know he made a mistake—a dumb fucking mistake. And he’s probably gonna spend the next week or two lying awake, wondering if we got his prints.”

  “He’ll soak in sweat for a while, that’s for sure.”

  The two agent cracked up at the thought.

  Their orders in hand, the waitress came over. “You boys having a good time?” she said, setting the two plates on the counter.

  “Contemplating the folly of the criminal class is always a source of amusement to us,” Tom said.

  “Never-ending, huh?”

  “Gonna write a book about it one of these days.”

  “Oughta be pretty good. More coffee?”

  “Yeah.”

  A short while later the two agents pulled into the same motel where the group had stayed. They parked and went into the office. A bell sat on the counter, next to a rack of colorful brochures depicting various tourist sights around the city. Tom gave it a couple of whacks; a woman came through the beaded doorway from the family quarters behind the office.

  A middle-aged Pakistani woman, erect in posture, with prematurely graying hair, she wore an electric-blue sari over an orange blouse. Three gold chains hung around her neck and fell onto her bosom. A ring of gold bracelets encircled each wrist above fingernails painted a deep red.

  “How may I help you?” she asked. She looked from one man to the other, then saw the FBI logo on Bill’s cap.

  Bill took out his identification and showed it to her.

  “We need information. We’re wondering if a group of people, possibly young, stayed here recently? They would have been driving a Volkswagen camper, with one or two other cars…we think maybe a Toyota and a Subaru?”

  The woman felt herself swallow involuntarily. She had no idea why the police would want to question her.

  “I do not think I can be of any help to you,” she said, looking from Bill to his partner and then back at Bill.

  Tom immediately picked up on the hesitation in her voice. “This doesn’t involve you at all,” he assured her. “But we need to locate these people. And it’s important to know if they stayed here. You can help us if you will. Do you mind if we look at your registrations for the last few days? We can get a warrant if we need to.”

  The woman took a deep breath, looked at both men again, and then, reaching under the counter, brought a broad-leaf registration book into view. Setting it on the counter, she opened it to a list of entries covering the previous three days. “Examine it as you like,” she said, stepping back. “It is all there.”

  Starting from the top of the page, Bill ran his finger down the list of entries, checking each one for vehicle type and state of origin. When he got to the bottom of the first page, he moved on to the second page, starting at the top, and continued to note each entry. Halfway down the page, he gave the vehicle entry column a resounding tap with his finger.

  “Bingo! Right there”

  Tom leaned over and looked. “Nineteen sixty-nine VW with Oregon plates. Signed by Heidi Tipper,” he read aloud. “And she rented two adjoining rooms. Might be them, huh?”

  “Why do you need two rooms if you’re by yourself?”

  “Overnight guests.”

  “But probably not for dinner.”

  Bill looked up at the woman. “Anybody else with her? More than one car?”

  “I did not see her again after she checked in. But the maid, she could perhaps tell you.”

  “She around now?”

  “I will call her.”

  She disappeared through the beaded doorway and returned a few minutes later with a woman in tow whose facial resemblance indicated a relation. The second woman had on jeans and a blue maid’s smock.

  “This is Rani,” the proprietress introduced her. “She cleaned the two rooms every day.”

  The woman smiled shyly.

  Bill asked her about the number of occupants and whether there was more than one vehicle.

  “Three, I think. And maybe seven people. They always left the rooms in a mess. They were not dirty, just messy.”

  “How many men were there? And how many women?”

  “Three women, maybe four men. I did not always observe them.”

  Tom took out his notepad and wrote down the woman’s information. He entered the information from off the registration page. Then he flipped the notepad shut and dropped it in his coat pocket.

  Addressing both women, he said, “We appreciate your cooperation on this. And we want you to know that neither one of you has anything to worry about. What this is all about doesn’t concern you in any way, and you have no reason to worry. Okay?”

  Smiling, the women nodded gratefully.

  The two agents left the office and went out to the parking lot.

  “What about the rooms?” Tom asked as an afterthought.

  Bill had his hand on the car door handle.

  “They’ve been cleaned, wiped down,” he said over the roof of the car. “It’d be pointless to dust for prints. There’s probably been another set of guests, anyway.”

  “Pretty good day’s work, though, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Damn right! We’re good! We’ll nail the dumb fucks!”

  “You bet!”

  5

  Leaving the creek and the bridge behind, Mitchell Anderson continued up a switchback portion of trail until he came to a parking lot. He had left his car near a log bench that overlooked the steeply wooded ravine he had just come up. The creek rushed along the bottom of the ravine, and from the vantage point of the parking lot he could look down and see a pickup-stick jumble of evergreen trees off to his right that had slipped into a section of the ravine after a prolonged, heavy rain had saturated the hillside. The afternoon sun had already passed well overhead, and now the ravine lay in deepening shadows.

  Now in his late thirties, Mitchell still had the same wiry, athletic build he had in high school and college, when he had been a track-and-field runner. And his hundred and sixty-five pounds suited his five-foot, nine-inch frame well. With thick brown hair, a ruddy complexion, deep-set blue e
yes that often revealed an ironic if not critical appreciation of others, his handsome Scotch-Irish face had something of the Appalachian, no-nonsense cragginess of the hard-rock miner. Black-and-white photographs from his father’s side of the family showed a set of ancestors whose lot had been mainly one of hardship and toil. His parents being fairly prosperous, he himself had avoided the onus of such an existence; but the firm line of his jaw and the oftentimes frank gaze he leveled at the world hinted at the ancestral similarity.

  Using a bandana, he wiped the sweat from his forehead and the back of his neck and sat down on the bench. He shouldered his way out of the small daypack he wore and set it down beside him. He had eaten half of an energy bar earlier, and now, digging it out of a side pocket in the daypack, he peeled back the yellow wrapper and sat there eating the rest of it.

  Mitch had arrived the day before on a Continental Airlines flight from London, England. He had checked into a downtown Portland hotel but had been unable to sleep much. The hike had been meant to counter the effects of jet lag, and, while he felt energized for the moment, he knew that later on he would probably crash into a deep sleep.

  He finished the energy bar and, out of habit, folded the wrapper neatly and stuck it in the breast pocket of his fleece jacket. He looked at his watch, then slung the daypack over one shoulder and got up and went over to the rental car.

  Leaving the parking area, he drove up the two-lane highway that for the better part of two miles meandered between stands of maple and alder mixed in with Douglas fir and western hemlock. Here and there, a private driveway shadowed up through the trees, or a house sat at the top of a grassy slope that dropped down to the culvert alongside the roadway. One or two of the driveways he passed had signs offering logging services, and another showed a picture of a bulldozer with a telephone number written underneath.

  A quarter-mile short of a crossroads, he came to a mailbox at the end of a gravel driveway. Turning into the driveway, he drove another fifty yards, until coming to a clearing. In the clearing he parked next to a late model Mercedes station wagon sitting next to an aging green Volvo sedan. He didn’t know who owned the Mercedes, but he knew who the sedan belonged to. It was Heidi’s proud possession. She had owned it since her student days at Reed College, and she continued to drive it around town as a diehard exhibition of the egalitarian attitude she had maintained since then. Unlike a newer car, it signified solidarity with those of lesser fortune, and it identified her as someone whose values were not primarily materialistic. Despite whatever change of circumstance had occurred in her life since what she had often referred to as “my Top Ramen days,” she still held on to a passionate belief in social activism. Outwardly, her lifestyle had taken on many of the trappings of affluence—thanks, in part, to her civil engineer husband, a trust fund from her mother’s side of the family, and the inheritance of a house that, while itself modest, sat on prime real estate in an increasingly desirable though as yet unincorporated area of the city. By most standards of social progression, she occupied a solid niche in a pantheon of those whose lives count for the most; yet she herself had stayed conscientiously democratic.

  After parking his car, Mitch got out and walked to a flagstone pathway that cut diagonally up a grassy slope and curved around to the front of the house her great-grandfather had built at the end of the nineteenth century. Her great-grandfather had been a lumber baron who had logged whole sections of nearby hillsides, and as an act of conscience had bequeathed to the city of Portland several tracts of forest that, over the years, had seen development in what had once been decidedly rural parts of the city.

  Like an ancient but well-crafted, well-cared-for wooden sailing vessel, the house had withstood the vicissitudes of weather and climate. Set atop a prominent rise on one side of the clearing, its two stories faced out over the top of a heavily wooded area. In broad outline, it resembled a two-layered, square, but compact cake with white frosting. Its gray Mansard roof angled off gradually in four directions, and two dormer windows looked out from the front. One story below, slender white columns supported a porch overhang on the front of the house and along one of its sides. Forest green, ornamental shutters bordered each one of the elongated, Italianate windows, and out in front, to the right of the porch steps, a Sitka spruce towered skyward. Rosebushes occupied an area immediately under the porch balustrade along the front and the side. Farther out, away from the house, a green park bench sat in the center of the lawn in lone view of the treed expanse.

  Mitch reached the top of the pathway and went up the porch steps. He rang the doorbell, and waited.

  Heidi opened the door.

  “My God, Mitch!” she said. “Is that really you, in the flesh? Where did you come from?”

  “Got back just yesterday. How have you been, Tip?”

  “How have I been? How you been, stranger? But don’t stand there—come in!”

  Mitch stepped inside, and she gave him a big hug.

  “It‘s nice to see you, too, Tip.” He laughed again.

  “But this is such a surprise, Mitch,” she said, giving his hand a squeeze. “Why didn’t you call me…let me know you were coming?”

  “I wanted to surprise you. Why else?”

  “You surprised me all right. How long has it been, anyway? And why didn’t you write more often?”

  “I wanted to,” he said. “But I got caught up in events…”

  “Events? You mean, like, you fell in love or something?”

  “Not exactly.” He laughed. “But pretty close.”

  “Are you here to stay awhile or are you going to run off again?”

  “I’m going to play it by ear. See what life here has to offer.”

  “Well, let’s go down to the war room and you can tell me all about your adventures. And, in exchange, I’ll tell you all the latest gossip—and then some!”

  The “war room” was in the basement. In any other household, it might have been the family recreation area, complete with pool table, wet bar, perhaps a foosball table, and an array of comfortable couches and chairs. But in Heidi’s house the same area had been given over entirely to what she considered her calling. Here, amid a perennial clutter of magazines, books, newspapers, fliers, computers, a seldom-used Underwood, a printer, two desks, a filing cabinet, and several folding chairs, she conducted what often amounted to a one-woman enterprise in the interest of various causes. From here she had launched a campaign to prevent developers from acquiring a portion of Forest Park (ironically, some of the same land her great-grandfather had given to the city). She had also helped to organize food drives for the homeless and the hungry. Using the typewriter, she had put out articles exhorting the socially conscious to get involved in alleviating the plight of the homeless. More than once, she had taken a group of university students on a tour of several campsites the homeless had established for themselves under bridges and out-of-the-way tracts of undeveloped land. Not being content with the more conventional undertakings, she had even grappled with the notion of establishing her own radio station, operating out of this very room, as a way to broadcast her activist views. Though now, with the advent of the Internet and the rise of blogging, she had found a better alternative.

  She rinsed out a coffeepot at the sink and put a new filter in the coffeemaker, and Mitch sat down in one of the folding chairs. Looking around the room, he noted the same posters that had been there previously, from times past: those of Che Guevara and Malcolm X, even one of Chairman Mao. But the revolutionary theme, though still very much in evidence, appeared to have been supplanted by another having a more contemporary relevance. One of the newer posters depicted a polar bear with a bewildered expression, perched on the edge of an ice floe. Another featured a South Sea Islander in a rowboat, holding a national flag aloft; a line of palm trees in the background had sunk beneath the ocean’s surface. Yet a third showed how much the glaciers in Glacier National Park had melted since the early twentieth century. Finally, a fourth portrayed a cityscap
e dominated by towering smokestacks discharging hawser-like contrails of black smoke. They all bespoke the foremost concern of today’s activist community, and they pointed to yet another area of activity ripe for someone of Heidi’s predilections.

  When the beeper went off she filled two earthenware mugs with hot coffee and brought one over to Mitch.

  “I didn’t remember whether you liked it black or with sugar and milk,” she said. “But I have cream in the refrigerator.”

  “Black’s fine,” Mitch said, sipping the hot liquid.

  With her own mug in hand, she sat down across from him. “Well, what do you think?” she asked. “But let me guess—you’ve already figured it out, haven’t you?”

  Mitch smiled. “It’s pretty obvious, Tip. You’re into the global warming thing now.”

  Her self-deprecatory smile acknowledged that, yes, he had guessed right and that, yes, as implied, her activism was characterized by a certain capriciousness.

  “There’s so much that has to be done,” she said. “So many pressing issues. How is one to keep up with it all? I try to divide my time between all of them, but it can be so overwhelming.”

  “Pick one and stay with it. I mean, you can’t do it all, Tip. And, if you try, you’re not using your time efficiently.”

  “You’re absolutely right, Mitch. And, to tell you the truth, I think I’ve come to the same conclusion. I have to prioritize. And I have to do it on the basis of which issue is the most important…”

  “And which issue would that be? Have you figured that out yet?”

  “I think I have, Mitch. And you’ve just seen it for yourself.”

  “Global warming—yeah, that’s pretty important. And, as an issue, it’s not gonna go away.”

  “I’m afraid not. But what are you doing about it, Mitch?”

  “I’m not doing much of anything about it, Tip.” He had to laugh. “I mean, yeah, it concerns me. I read the papers. I know about the loss of habitat, which endangers many animals. I know about the rising sea levels and so on. I’m not oblivious to its effect, believing that it’s all a hoax or a conspiracy involving ninety-five percent of all the scientists in the world. Worldwide, the climate is definitely changing, and you’d have to be living in a bubble to think otherwise. But—what am I doing about it? Listening to you, I guess.”