by Susan Dunlap
The interior of the shop was divided into three sections. The far side held the plastic bags of potting soil, vermiculite, and peat moss, and the boxes of plant food and snail pellets that only made the race to gobble down tender sprouts more of a challenge for the hearty California snail. The middle section sported a display of indoor plants—false aralias, wandering Jews, coleus, various fig trees, decorative cacti, and an array of succulents. And nearer the door was the counter where Craig stood dealing with the first of a line of six customers—a man in dirt-streaked Levi’s, a workshirt that should have been washed months ago (if not thrown out), and work boots. His long tangled beard melded with his unkempt hair. Clearly he belonged in the hills, shooting squirrels, growing marijuana, or living off a veteran’s pension, not standing in line in a plant shop clutching the least appealing African violet from the display next to the counter. He looked wary and uncomfortable.
It was a look shared by the other customers, who had backed away from him.
He pushed the African violet toward Craig.
It was then that the stench of new perspiration on his sweat-stained shirt hit me. No wonder the other customers had backed off. I edged away. Even Craig appeared uneasy as he muttered something to the man and hurriedly made change.
Next in line was a painfully thin woman with limp blond hair and the unmistakable rash of poison oak on both arms. Poison oak was ever-lurking in the Henderson underbrush, growing around the foundations of houses, or carried in liquid form on the fur of dogs who had rolled in that brush. I had taken the ImunOak PG&E gave us, but I still kept a safe distance.
When the man picked up his drooping African violet and headed for the door, I pushed in front of the woman.
“Hey, what are you—”
“Craig,” I said, before the woman could continue, “I’m Vejay Haskell, the woman Vida told you would be calling this morning.”
He looked momentarily confused, then said, “Yes, of course,” in almost a whisper.
“Can I talk to you a minute?”
He stared at the line of customers. “My assistant, Alison, isn’t here now. She’s out in the truck. People are waiting. I can’t just—”
“I need to check something in your house.”
“Oh?” His voice was so low that it sounded as if it were caught in his beard. His tanned face, which had been scrunched with foreboding, relaxed. He caught my eye and smiled, a little-boy smile that transformed him from the staid man of the wedding picture into an appealing sprite. “The house keys are in the truck, I’m afraid.”
“Don’t you have a set here?”
“No, sorry. The only keys are in the truck. I don’t need them till the end of the day, and by then the truck is back, you see.”
“Where is the truck?”
“Let me check for you?” He turned to the woman with the poison oak, favoring her with the same smile. “Will you excuse me just a moment Mrs. Frederick? I’ll be right with you. Those fuchsias should do well on your deck.” He waited till she smiled in acknowledgment and then disappeared into the office behind the counter.
I didn’t look at the woman with the poison oak or the customers behind her, but I could feel their hostility. Not only was I making them wait, but I was creating a problem for their Craig.
“It’s number seven forty-three out on Route One-Sixteen. Alison was planning to be there an hour. You should be able to catch her if you hurry,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“Sure.” He turned back to Mrs. Frederick. As he took the plants from her, I noticed that Craig showed none of the wariness of coming near her rash that I had felt.
I walked back to my pickup, trying to settle on a clear opinion of Craig. Obviously he was busy. And he had an undeniable charm and pleasant manner with his customers and even with me, whom he didn’t want to see. But his wife had been missing for nearly twenty-four hours, and for whatever reason—fear of what I might tell him, inability to make his customers wait, or just disinterest—he hadn’t even asked what I had discovered. I wondered if Michelle’s absence was not as uncommon an event as Vida believed it to be. After all, Michelle had taken her children to Santa Rosa. Perhaps she knew that Ross was coming to town. Perhaps this was not the first time. Perhaps Ross was not the only man. Of course, it was also possible that the man behind Ward McElvey’s house was not Ross.
I climbed into the pickup, backed out, and headed across town once more.
Route 116 was on the far side of the river, through Guerneville. It ran from the woodsy river area south through small cattle and sheep farms to family orchards and the villages amongst them, and finally to Sebastopol and the freeway that led to San Francisco. There was a move afoot to have it declared a scenic route.
But the house outside which the Davidson’s Plants truck was parked was not going to help in that effort. It was a small, white-shingled rectangle with no distinguishing marks set on a surprisingly flat parcel of land. In the yard a seedling stood unprotected, and around the walkway was turned earth. Alison Barluska, Craig’s assistant, bent over the soil, scooping out a handful. A box of nitrogen additive sat to one side of her, a flat of impatiens to the other.
I had met Alison Barluska only once, at Vida’s house. She was a slim but sturdy woman of about my own age. Now, through her shirt, I could see the ridges of her back muscles. As she turned toward me, I noted again the exotic quality of her face. Everything about it seemed just a bit extra. Her eyes were dark blue, large and set a smidgeon too far apart. Her eyebrows were thick. Her long dark blond hair was neither curly nor bushy, but full and undisciplined enough that it refused to stay behind her ears, and even as she bent back over the plants she kept pushing it out of her face with a soil-smudged hand.
“Alison, I’m here about Michelle,” I said. “You do know she’s missing, don’t you? Vida asked me to check into it.”
She nodded, sending a clump of hair into her face. Then she jerked her head and flung, the hair back over her shoulder.
“I just talked to Craig.” I recounted the conversation.
“How is he holding up?”
“He seemed disinterested.”
She rested her hand on her trowel. “He was very upset this morning. He’s been busy. The store is a zoo from Friday through Sunday. He needs someone to man the cash register. I should rearrange my days so I can be there on weekends. But some people want their work done on certain days. You know how it is.”
“Not really.”
Alison stood up. Even in dirt-streaked overalls she looked stylish. She was not pretty—none of her features was small enough to give her that little-girl look embodied in prettiness—but she had an air of confidence, like someone born to wealth. Had she wandered into a wedding reception dressed in her overalls, it would have been the bride who felt overdressed.
“We have a gardening service,” she said. “That’s why Craig hired me, to start it up. I canvass for it one day a week, and now spend three days doing the actual work. I’m only in the shop one day. Not much help to Craig.”
I thought of my own steep yard, with its mixture of ivy, oxalis, general underbrush, and, of course, poison oak. It was standard for the Russian River area. “I shouldn’t think there would be much call for landscaping here.”
“You and everyone else. That’s been my biggest problem—convincing people their yards could look better, or they could enjoy plants on their decks. We do a lot of work for absentee landlords who don’t want to worry about whether their tenants will keep their places up. Even the most responsible tenant may not have the same taste as the owner. With us, the landlords tell us what they want and we do it. And then, also, they don’t have to worry about the tenants deducting ‘expenses’ from their rent. And they don’t have enthusiastic amateurs making mistakes.”
“Should I assume that is your sales pitch? I used to work in public relations; I know one when I hear it.”
“It’s the openers—what I say in our letter to the owners. This serv
ice is my baby. Craig thought it was a good idea, but the operation is mine.”
“You mean you proposed the whole idea?”
“Right. I wanted a job and Craig hadn’t considered the need for a gardening service any more than you have. It’s been good for both Craig and me. He gets money and publicity; I have a job where I can be outside, work my own hours, and deal as I wish with people. I sell people a good service for a reasonable cost.”
“But you mostly work on rental properties?”
“Right. First I got a list of the absentee landlords and sent them the letter. Then I called. After I’d exhausted that list I canvassed door-to-door. That’s where I am now.”
“Hard work.”
“I don’t mind it. I’m good at meeting lots of people. I’ve traveled around and I’m used to that kind of thing.” She bent down and began patting the earth around a small plant. “I have to get this place done in half an hour if I’m going to keep on schedule. You don’t mind.” It was a statement rather than a question.
I watched as Alison stood and hoisted a bag of manure. She scooped out a bit, added it to the soil and mixed it in, then created a tiny crater for the plant.
“You must have given Michelle’s disappearance some thought,” I began. “Do you have any theories?”
Still looking at the soil, she said, “I don’t know Michelle to speak of. I’ve met her only a couple times, and those were at the shop.”
“Do you know if she’s ever done anything like this before?”
“No.”
“No she didn’t, or no, you don’t know?”
“I don’t know.”
“Craig never mentioned anything?”
“No.”
I couldn’t tell whether Alison was merely concentrating on her work, whether she was tired of talking, or whether she was intentionally not telling me something I needed to know. I decided on the more direct approach. “Did Craig ever mention an old boyfriend of Michelle’s?”
Alison laughed.
It was not the response I had expected.
“Ross?”
“Yes. So Craig did talk about him?”
Alison turned, still squatting, and sat back on her heels. “Ross got me my job, in a sense.”
“I didn’t realize Ross had kept in touch with Craig.”
“He hasn’t. I’d better backtrack. I met Ross when I lived in San Francisco. He lived with me for about six months. And he talked about Henderson.”
“Did he mention Michelle?”
“He said there was a high school girl who had the hots for him. That’s all.”
“And Craig?”
“Ross knew Craig. I had the impression then that everyone knew Craig.”
“Was Ross surprised when Craig married Michelle?”
“That never came up.”
“How did he get you the job? Did he call Craig?”
She laughed again. “No, no. I haven’t seen Ross in years. What I mean by him getting me the job was that he brought me up to Henderson once years ago. As a matter of fact, that’s how our relationship ended. He brought me up here for a weekend. We stayed in one of those lopsided motels by the river, you know, the ones with the plaid bedspreads that always have cigarette burns and the indoor-outdoor carpet that looks like it’s been left outdoors until you checked in.”
“Right, the Cozy Cabins.”
“We stayed there Saturday night, and Sunday we went to the town beach. And then in the afternoon Ross said he had to deal with some family business. So he left me at the beach. It was about two o’clock. He never came back to the beach or the motel. And the next morning I left.”
“Weren’t you worried? Didn’t you try to find him?”
She shrugged. “No. I figured something came up. It wasn’t entirely out of character for Ross. And I didn’t know where his family was or if there was some kind of family hassle I didn’t want to get involved in. I figured then that he would come back to San Francisco and explain.”
It fitted Alison to assume Ross could take care of himself. “Did he come back?” I asked.
“No. It was sort of odd. We were living together at the time. Or that’s how I viewed it. But when Ross didn’t come back, I realized that we were not so much living together as Ross had been staying with me. When I went to get rid of his stuff there was less than a cardboard box of it. And none of that was of any value.”
“So what do you think happened to him?”
She shrugged. “For a while I figured something more attractive came up. But the more I thought about Ross, the more I realized he had been increasingly jumpy before we came up here. The guys he saw in San Francisco were none too reputable. We’d had a couple of fights because I didn’t like them coming to my apartment. So, at first I thought he just wanted to be rid of me. Then it occurred to me that it was them he wanted to get distance from.”
“Do you think he decided to move back here?”
“No. If they were after him he would have had to move farther. He probably planned on laying low on one of the marijuana farms north of here, or somewhere like that. Ross had a lot of connections here, some shadier than others. You know what this area is. There’s a lot of illegal stuff going on. And then there’s all the stuff connected with Bohemian Week. Ross called himself ‘the Bohemian Connection.’ ”
“What does that mean?”
A sports car sped by, blaring music made undiscernible by its speed. Billows of dust flew up from the roadside. Alison rubbed the dust from her eyes, then pushed her hair back behind her ears. I repeated my question.
“I think Ross was mostly a gofer for the guys who needed quasi-legal arrangements for their employers, like places to meet prostitutes.”
“Those places are called bars and motels.”
“Not everyone can take the chance of being seen in a motel, even a discreet motel, particularly if the prostitute is of the same sex.”
“Ah.”
“Anyway, Ross made it sound like a big deal. And he probably did have connections here. And probably one of those guys he met through his gofering was willing to take him to his dope farm, or maybe he met someone who knew of someone who was running drugs from Mexico. That would be Ross’s style.”
“Did you meet any of his connections that weekend?”
“I might have. I remember a couple of rather shady types, but I don’t know if they were involved in anything truly illegal or were just garden variety ne’er-do-wells. We seem to have a lot of those.”
Like the people who cheat on their electricity usage, but not carefully enough to avoid being caught, I thought. “Would you say it was not out of the question for Ross to have come back and seen Michelle and invited her to leave with him now?”
“Not at all. That’s exactly Ross. Enough time has passed so he’d feel safe surfacing again. But if that’s what happened, Michelle will be back in a day or a week, or maybe a month or two, depending on how long it takes Ross to find something more interesting.”
“You know,” I said, “from what I hear of Ross and not just your description, the odd thing is that he would have friends at all.”
She pushed herself up and started for the truck.
“I guess it does sound like that,” she said, leaning against the driver’s door. “I’ve told you Ross’s failings. I thought that’s what you wanted to know. But Ross was charming in his way. He was totally caught up in what was happening now. If he was with you, you were his entire focus. If he was involved in a project, that’s what he talked about. And while he was doing it he was totally committed, completely reliable. And then, suddenly, it was over. It wasn’t that he lost interest; it was like he never knew it existed.”
“Still, that would make one a bit wary.”
“It sounds like it when you’re not involved, but it took a while to see that pattern. The first couple of times it happened, particularly if the subject was not yourself, it didn’t register, or the change was so abrupt, so unusual in the normal day-to-
day life, that you assumed you must have missed something. And while you were the subject of Ross’s attention the intensity was so great, so flattering, that’ it was worth any effort to get it back.”
“Then how come you just went back to the city when Ross didn’t come back?”
“Well, Vejay, I was never a consuming passion for Ross. I always knew he was living with me temporarily.”
“Really?” It was hard to imagine confident Alison on the short end of any relationship. Alison, who had come here knowing no one, who had talked her way into a job that seemed as unpromising as selling sand to a sheik and was making a go of it. I couldn’t picture her letting Ross move in when he found her second-class. But women do a lot of less-than-well-adjusted things for lovers. My friends had done them. I had. I hoped I had outgrown doing them. I waited to see where Alison placed herself on this continuum.
But she added nothing. Instead, she reached into the truck and handed me Craig’s house key.
“You never did tell me how Ross got you your job,” I said.
She took a step back toward her plants. “Partly it was that Ross told me about the area, so I had an idea what kind of gardening service would be needed; partly that I told Craig that Ross had left me stranded here, and that appealed to Craig—hearing about Ross doing something rotten. It probably made a nice change.” She gave me a quick dismissive nod of the head, a regal pronouncement that the audience was over, and returned to her plants.
CHAPTER 5
I DROVE BACK ACROSS the Guerneville bridge and on toward Henderson. The windows of my pickup were all open, but that only served to channel the hot air. Outside I could hear the yelps and screams from the Guerneville beach. Had I looked down while crossing the bridge I could have seen the canoes passing under in either direction. Canoes were rented out at the beach. Upstream were islands, piles of sand raised a foot or two above the water line, where you could pull the canoe up and lie in the sun. Or you might eat salmon salad and watch the canoeists—parents paddling a child perched on the middle seat, divorced fathers with weekend children, couples, pairs of bare-bottomed guys who assumed their canoe seats were lower than they really were. At one spot above Guerneville the river was deep enough to allow a rope to fling any taker Tarzan-like into the water. But mostly the water was so shallow that the danger in canoeing was scraping the bottom of the boat.