A Virgin River Christmas

by Robyn Carr

  “Best coffee you’ll ever taste,” he said, filling a cup for her. When a thick slice of cake sat before her, he asked, “When you find him, what are your plans?”

  “He was awful good to Bobby—I’d just like to thank him. Talk to him. Get to know him again, like I started to before. I have something of Bobby’s to give him. I plan to ask him what happened, see if there’s anything I can do for him now. Maybe once we get through all that, we’ll both be happier. Obviously he hasn’t moved on, and I need a little more closure. Wouldn’t it be great if we could both get that? Aw, I don’t know, Jack. Freedom? The freedom to put the past in the past?”

  Jack’s eyebrows rose. “And if he’s not inclined to talk?”

  She put a big forkful of velvety, rich chocolate cake into her mouth, scraping the icing off the fork with her teeth and lips. She let her eyes drop closed for a brief luxurious moment. Then she smiled at Jack Sheridan and said, “Then I’ll be his worst nightmare until he comes around. I’m not giving up.”

  Before Marcie had finished her coffee, a good-looking Hispanic man came into the bar by way of the side door. He had a disgruntled look on his face and was carrying a catalog. “Your wife has me in search of the perfect tree topper,” he said to Jack. “Whose idea was this again?”

  “I think it was yours,” Jack said. “And don’t complain to me—there’s no way to decorate that tree without a cherry picker. I’m going to have to rent one before I see Mel using ropes and pulleys to get to the top. Mike, meet Marcie—Marcie, say hello to Mike Valenzuela.”

  “How do you do,” she said, sticking out a hand.

  He took it, smiled and said, “Pleasure. This was his idea—the big tree. Trying to impress his wife. She requested a large tree—he had us out in the hills a full day till he found the biggest tree we could take down in one piece.”

  Just a little embarrassed, Jack interrupted Mike, “Marcie here is looking for a marine who dropped out after Iraq. Show him the picture, Marcie.”

  She pulled it out again and once again explained the possible changes in his appearance since the photo was taken.

  “Don’t know him,” Mike said.

  “But he might be so different…”

  “Don’t know the eyes,” Mike said.

  She let out a heavy sigh. “Any ideas where I might look?”

  “Well,” Mike began, scratching his chin. “I haven’t seen him, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been seen. There are a lot of people out in the mountains who have been there for years and they aren’t real sociable—maybe one of them has seen him.”

  “Can you tell me where to go?” she asked.

  “I can give you a couple of markers,” he said. “More important, I’d like to tell you a few places to steer clear of—there are some illegal growers out there who get real territorial. Real unfriendly. Sometimes their property is booby-trapped.” He pulled a large napkin out from under the bar, brought his pen out of his shirt pocket and drew a line on the napkin. “Here’s highway 36…” In ten minutes, he had drawn a rough map of a half-dozen cabins in the mountains where people lived—people who just might have seen Ian Buchanan. As well, he listed three locations she should avoid.

  The cabins Mike X’d on the map were located down abandoned logging roads, sometimes gated, snuggled behind trees and shrubs, impossible to see from the highway. A lot of that mountain property had been homesteaded and logged. Once a property was logged, the owner had to wait another thirty to fifty years to log it again. It became an acreage full of oak, madrone, young fir and pine fifty to sixty feet tall—real pretty, but not mature enough for logging.

  “I’ve been roaming around back in there, just checking it out, just to know who’s out there. There are a couple of old men living alone out in the sticks and a couple of old widows. There’s a man and woman combo or two, even a family of five. But so far, no single thirty-five-year-old male.”

  “Maybe he’s not single anymore.”

  Mike shook his head. “Pretty sure there’s no one in that age group; not with those eyes. Even with a beard.”

  “Believe him,” Jack said. “He used to be a real cop, LAPD, before he was Andy of Mayberry where we have almost no crime.”

  “Nice,” Marcie said. “No crime and a big tree. I take it you’ve never done a big tree like that before?”

  They both laughed. “Twenty-seven feet,” Jack said. “We thought we were so manly, finding us a big one like that, till we had it down and almost had to rent a flatbed truck to bring it back to town. We tied the limbs tight and dragged it behind a truck. And that wasn’t the hard part. Standing it up took a day.”

  “Two days,” Mike corrected. “We got up the next morning and it was lying in the street. Frickin’ miracle it didn’t fall on the bar and crush the roof.”

  She laughed at them. “Why now? You’re trying to show off for your wife?”

  “Nah. Now was the time. We just lost a comrade in Iraq and one of the local boys—a real special one—went into the Corps. We thought it would be good to erect a symbol, a monument to the men and women who serve. Next year, I think we look for a slightly smaller symbol. Cheaper and easier on the nerves. But I’ll go over to Eureka and find a cherry picker for rent and get it done. Melinda and the other women have put a lot into making it a perfect tree.”

  “It’s a pretty awesome tree,” Marcie said, growing a little melancholy. She really wanted to find Ian before Christmas. For some reason, that seem crucial.

  As she was leaving, the sun was lowering and the bar was starting to fill with locals. It was already getting too dark to venture into the back woods to check out the few cabins Mike had told her about. It was time for her to find a place to park for the night, somewhere safe and not too far from a service station for her morning rituals of peeing, face washing, teeth brushing. She’d start again in the morning, though she wasn’t feeling optimistic she’d find her guy. She’d been disappointed so many times. At this point in her search, crossing all the places off her list meant as much as striking pay dirt.

  But before going to her car, she approached the tree, partially decorated to about twelve feet. She got up close and looked at some of the ornaments. Between red, white and blue balls and gold stars were patches—the kind you’d wear on a uniform—from various Marine and other military commands. She touched one reverently; 1st Battalion, 8th Marines; 2nd Battalion, 10th Marine Regiment; 1st Marine Special Operations Battalion, all laminated to protect them against the outdoor elements. Airborne Division, Sniper Squad, 41st Infantry Battalion. Her throat got tight; her eyes blurred.

  This was exactly why she was determined to find Ian Buchanan—because these men never forgot, never walked away. There had to be powerful reasons for him to leave his military brothers, his Corps, his family, his town. You don’t save a comrade’s life and then ignore him. Ian Buchanan was given both the Bronze Star and Purple Heart for carrying Bobby through sniper fire to medical transport. He took two bullets and kept going. He was not a man who gave up. So why? Why give up now?

  Two

  M arcie’s thirty bucks—$28.87, to be exact—lasted another thirty-six hours. Twenty-five of them went in the gas tank; she could hardly afford the gas even with the great mileage she got in her little green bug. Three dollars for a loaf of bread and two apples and she finished off the peanut butter. Then she went back to that little Virgin River bar and asked if she could use the phone to make a call to her sister—she’d almost exhausted the phone cards because she wasn’t supposed to be gone this long, but there was a little time left on one. Erin, seven years older than Marcie, had taken charge of the family long ago, and she was growing extremely irritable by Marcie’s time away.

  The cook, a guy they all called Preacher, let her into the kitchen.

  Marcie called Erin and, though it made her stomach clench, she asked for money. “Call it a loan,” she said. She lied and said she was getting so close, that Ian had been seen.

  “We had a deal, Marcie,�
� Erin said. “You promised you’d only be gone a couple of weeks and it’s been a month. You didn’t even come home for Thanksgiving.”

  “I couldn’t. I explained about that. I had a tip—”

  “It’s time for you to come home now and think about another way to find him.”

  “No. I’m not stopping. I’m not giving up,” Marcie said resolutely.

  “Okay, but come back to Chico and we’ll try it my way—we’ll get a professional to find him for you—then you can go from there. Really, the only way I know to get you home and through with this madness is to say no. No money, Marcie, for your own good. The only money I’ll wire you is enough to get home. Come home now. Right now. This is scaring me to death.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not done!”

  Marcie then called her younger brother, Drew, who might not agree with what she was doing any more than Erin did, but he was a softer touch. He said, “Marcie, I can’t. Erin’s right, this has gone on too long. You have to give this up now. Come on, I can’t stand to think about what you’re doing. You’re going after a friggin’ lunatic, by yourself!”

  “Please,” she whimpered. “We don’t know he’s a lunatic—he could be perfectly normal. Or maybe just sad. Please, just a few more days. Please. I’m so close.”

  Drew let out a breath, defeated. “I’ll wire you a hundred bucks, then you come back, you hear me? And don’t you dare tell Erin what I did.”

  “I won’t tell,” she said, wiping at her cheeks, smiling into the phone. “Thank you, Drew. I love you so much.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m afraid I’m not showing you how much I care by doing this. I worry about you.”

  “Don’t worry, Drew,” she said with a sniff. “Can you just put some cash in my checking account? I’ll go to Fortuna and withdraw it from the branch there. I’ll be there in less than an hour—and I’m running on fumes. Fortunately, I can coast downhill most of the way.”

  “Where was he seen?” Drew asked.

  “Um…He was seen…um…out in a cabin off the highway a ways. I’ll check out there later to see if it’s really him,” she said, and then her cheeks actually flushed. She said goodbye, disconnected and fanned her face, saying, “Whew.” She looked up and found herself staring into the fierce eyes of the giant in the kitchen. She actually started.

  “He hasn’t been seen,” Preacher said, his thick dark brows furrowing. “Has he?”

  “Well, maybe he has. And I’m just about to find out.”

  “Sometimes a man just wants to be left alone for a while. You account for that?” Preacher asked. While he was talking, he pulled a plastic grocery sack out of a drawer, then turned to get something that looked like a wrapped sandwich out of the refrigerator and put it in the sack. Then a second one went in.

  “It’s been longer than a while,” she said. “But I’ll certainly give him a chance to tell me, if that’s the case. If that’s it, I’ll have the opportunity to thank him for his friendship to my husband, then I’ll go back to Chico and tell his father and anyone else who cares that he’s just a man who wants to be left alone. But isn’t there something ‘off’ about that? That he’s been out of touch for years now?”

  Preacher took a big bowl out of the refrigerator, flipped the lid and spooned potato salad into a smaller plastic container, then sealed it. “You’re real insistent on this, then?”

  She didn’t want to admit that, for no accountable reason, she’d been obsessed about Ian Buchanan’s disappearance. She’d written him a couple dozen letters—at first for him, updating him on Bobby and whatever else was going on in her family, her life, giving information and reassurance. Then, it was more for herself—like keeping a journal. She didn’t know exactly why, but he had been with her a long time. So she shrugged. “There are a few of us who want to know. Well, there’s me. I want to know.” Quietly she added, “Have to know.”

  Preacher added the container and a spoon to the bag. Then he got out a huge jar of pickles and picked out three big ones, putting them in a handy ziplock bag. “Well then, I guess you’re not going to quit early.”

  “I guess not,” she said.

  He pushed the whole business toward her. “Don’t let that potato salad sit and get warm. It’s cold enough outside to keep it all day if you leave it in the trunk and not in a warm car. Just remember, old warm potato salad has a nasty reputation.”

  “What’s this?”

  “The car can coast,” he said, lifting one of those menacing black brows. “You, on the other hand, can only run on fumes so long.”

  Her mouth dropped open a bit and she stared at him. She wondered if he’d done that because he’d seen the way her once-tight jeans hung off her fanny. “That’s nice,” she finally said. “I’ll…ah…bring back the spoon.”

  “If you drop by, fine. If you don’t, we have plenty of spoons.”

  “Thanks,” she said, accepting the bag.

  “Good luck,” Preacher said. “I hope it goes the way you want.”

  “Me, too,” she said with a sheepish smile.

  Several hours later, as the day drew into afternoon, she was driving up her fifth or sixth unmarked dirt road, but she was a hundred bucks richer. Well, eighty bucks richer, the Volkswagen belching on a good, healthy half tank. She’d had half a ham and cheese sandwich, a pickle and some of the best potato salad she’d ever eaten, thinking The guy’s a genius with a boiled potato.

  The roads all backed into the trees and most were in god-awful condition. Her little bug was bouncing and struggling, but hanging in there like the little champ she was. Marcie wished she could have found a way to get a Jeep or some other all-wheel-drive vehicle. If she could have waited longer to embark on this search, it might’ve been possible to have saved enough for a down payment, but she couldn’t wait that long. She took what little she’d put aside for this exact purpose and planned her route. Despite what she’d told Erin and Drew about being away for a couple of weeks, she’d taken an unpaid leave of absence from her job until the first of the year. She had worked at the insurance company since Bobby went to Iraq—five years ago—and her boss had been understanding.

  Erin had been completely against this wild notion that she had to find Ian from the very start. It took months of arguing to convince her there was some purpose for Marcie in this search. Then Erin had come up with a hundred better ideas that she’d offered to take care of herself—a people search, a private detective, anything but Marcie going after him alone. But there was a driving force in Marcie to see him, know him, talk to him, connect again, like she thought she had before.

  Bobby’s family wasn’t much in favor of the idea either, but it didn’t involve any ill will toward Ian—they barely knew about him. Bobby had written Marcie about Ian all the time, but in his short letters to his family he’d only mentioned him a few times. The Sullivans suggested that, if Ian hadn’t been around while Bobby was in the nursing home, the bond was not as solid as Bobby thought. Then there was Ian’s father—one of the nastiest and most negative old men Marcie had ever met. He told her she was wasting her time; he had no interest in finding his only son. “He left without a word and never got in touch. That’s enough message for me.”

  Through perseverance, Marcie learned that the elder Buchanan had not experienced good health in the past few years. He’d had a mild stroke, was being treated for high blood pressure, prostate cancer, Parkinson’s and, she suspected, a tish of dementia.

  “Don’t you miss him?” she asked. “Wonder what’s become of him?”

  “Not on your life,” he said. “He’s the one burned his bridges and run off.”

  But when he said that, there was wet in the folds under his old eyes and she thought: He can’t give much more than this, but he would love to see his son once more, or at least know he was all right. Wouldn’t he?

  Ian’s former fiancée, Shelly, was still angry about the way she’d been abandoned, even though she’d married someone else three years ago and was pregnant
now with her first baby. She had not a kind or sympathetic word for the man who’d run through sniper fire, taken injuries to save a comrade, won both a Bronze Star and Purple Heart. She pretty much hated Ian for the way he’d dumped her and bolted. A thought came to Marcie—if Shelly was happy with her life now, why would Ian’s obvious troubles cause her such prolonged hate? Couldn’t she see how war would shift his thinking, cause his emotional confusion? After having a life-limited husband for so long—a hopeless invalid who couldn’t even smile at her—giving a little patience and understanding to a man who’d been through a lot of trauma seemed a small thing.

  But, Marcie had reminded herself, I don’t know the weight of anyone else’s burdens—only my own. She didn’t judge. She didn’t feel smart or strong enough to judge.

  It was beyond important to Marcie to look at Ian’s face and ask him how he could save her beautiful young husband’s life and then never respond to her letters.

  Maybe Ian couldn’t give her answers that would make everything feel settled for her, and to that end, she thought it made sense for them to talk about it. Talk it through. They called it “closure” in the shrink club.

  As she pulled up to a small, roughly hewn house, she caught sight of a man coming around the corner, his arms laden with firewood. He was clean shaven but stooped, his legs bowed with age, his head bald. He stopped walking when he saw her. She got out of her car, then went toward him. “Afternoon, sir,” she said.

  He put down the logs and the scowl on his face said he was suspicious of her.

  “I wonder if you might be able to help me. I’m looking for someone.” She pulled the photo out again. “This was taken about seven years ago, so he’s obviously aged and I hear he’s got a beard now, but the rumor is, he’s living somewhere out in these hills. I’m trying to find him. Thirty-five years old, big man—I think he’s over six feet.”

  The man took the photo in his bent, arthritic fingers. “You family?” he asked.