Cold Trail

by Janet Dawson

  She nodded. “That’s when the subject came up. But he just mentioned it, in passing. Not anything definite. He didn’t like the man who was assigned as the temporary principal, and hoped the guy wouldn’t get the permanent assignment. But last summer, the temporary assignment became permanent.”

  “Did Brian want the principal’s job?”

  “I don’t think so,” Sheila said. She thought about it and shook her head. “No, I can’t picture it. Brian likes teaching kids. He hates all the administrative stuff that gets in the way of teaching. He doesn’t want to be a principal. He’d have to deal with all the politics and the district hierarchy. Teachers get enough of that anyway. Being principal would drive Brian crazy.”

  “Why didn’t he like the new principal?” I asked.

  Sheila shrugged. “Clash of personalities, maybe. I remember Brian saying this guy is a bully, a martinet, a petty tyrant. You know the type, one of those by-the-book disciplinarians who’s difficult to work with. Brian doesn’t like that kind of work environment.”

  “So Brian talked about changing jobs,” I said, “but you didn’t think he was serious.”

  She threw up her hands in a frustrated gesture. “He made a couple of offhand remarks about it, at the start of the school year, and again later in the fall. I didn’t think much about it, just that maybe he was considering a transfer to another school in Sonoma. I don’t remember him saying anything about it after that.”

  Late fall, I thought, followed by the distractions of Thanksgiving and Christmas. I asked the question that had been running through my mind. “Is it possible Brian didn’t mention his plans because of the situation with your father?”

  Sheila looked startled and I figured she hadn’t considered this. In January, after the Christmas decorations had been put away for another year, her father had been diagnosed with cancer. In the months since his diagnosis, Sheila’s father had had surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. I gathered from what Brian had told me that the prognosis wasn’t good. During that time, Sheila had been going to Firebaugh constantly, sometimes for long weekends, ­other times staying a week or more, usually taking the children with her, but not always. That sort of thing could put a strain on a marriage, too.

  “I guess so,” Sheila said. “This business with my father hit me hard. I’m the youngest, and the only girl out of a family of four boys. I’m Daddy’s little girl. And he’s always been so big and healthy and vital. When he got diagnosed with cancer, it was such a blow.”

  Sheila sighed. She rattled the ice cubes in her glass. “I know I’ve spent a lot of time going back and forth to Firebaugh. For all I know Dad may not last till the end of the year. Brian knows how important it is for me to be there for him, and help Mom.”

  “I just wondered,” I said. “Maybe he didn’t want to put anything else on your plate by talking about his problems at work.”

  “Even so, taking a new job and moving, that’s a big deal. Yes, I’ve been gone a lot. But I thought he understood about that. I certainly didn’t think he’d come home from work one day and announce that he had taken a job in Petaluma. It was a fait accompli. We’re moving. I’m supposed to uproot myself and the kids, pack up everything we own, put our house in Sonoma on the market. He’d already rented this house, before he told me he’d taken the job. I hadn’t even seen the damn place before we moved in.”

  That was out of character, I thought, frowning. “Just like that?”

  “Yeah, Jeri, just like that. I didn’t have any say in the whole damn fiasco. I’m pissed. Then he disappears. I feel...” She paused. “I feel like I don’t know him anymore.”

  “What did you fight about, on the phone?”

  Sheila’s mouth tightened and she took a sip of her lemonade. “I left on Thursday, twelve days ago. I was supposed to come back last Tuesday. We were going camping before school started, up in Plumas County. We had a reservation at a state park campground up there, starting last Thursday.”

  “But you got home two days ago, on Sunday. You decided to stay in Firebaugh?”

  She nodded. “When I got there, I found out my aunt, my dad’s oldest sister, was coming to visit. She was due to arrive on Wednesday, the day after I was going to leave. She was bringing her daughter, who’s my age, and her grandkids. I hadn’t seen any of these folks in a long time, Jeri, because they live back in Ohio. So yes, I decided to stay longer. I called Brian last Monday and told him I’d be coming home Sunday instead of Tuesday.”

  “How did he react?”

  “He was upset, angry. He didn’t want to cancel the camping trip. He said he’d come and get the kids and take them camping. I said, no, I wanted the kids there to see my family. I asked him to come down to Firebaugh, but he didn’t want to come. We argued and I hung up. Later that evening I called again and he didn’t answer. In fact, I called several times over the next few days, and he didn’t pick up the calls.”

  So Brian resented Sheila and the kids being gone, and Sheila’s change of plans brought things to a head. Something else was lurking under the surface, though. I steered the conversation away from their argument and back to the move.

  “How did Brian come to rent this particular house, without you even taking a look at it?”

  “It belongs to Lance...and Becca.” Sheila’s mouth twisted, as though she’d bit into a particularly sour dill pickle. The tartness seemed to be reserved for Becca.

  “Lance, Brian’s buddy from college,” I said. “He was best man at the wedding.” I’d met Lance at Brian and Sheila’s wedding ten years earlier. I dredged up a memory of a tall young man with sharp features and dark hair. “And Becca’s his wife?”

  “They dated the last year of college and got married a year after we did,” Sheila said. “Lance was born and raised here in Petaluma. After school he went into business with his father, a real estate agent. Lance is now a big-deal Petaluma real estate tycoon and mover-and-shaker. Which is somewhat ironic, since he and Becca are such big environmentalists.” She shrugged, reaching for her lemonade. “Lance is all right.”

  “But you don’t like Becca,” I said.

  Sheila took her time answering, as though choosing her words. “Becca can be...overwhelming. She takes charge of things and bosses people around. Her way is always the right way. She’s a true believer—always involved in some cause. Lately it’s environmental stuff, everything from climate change to Sonoma County land use issues. Ever since we moved here, Becca’s been recruiting Brian to join this or that organization. Right now Becca’s energized about the Friends of the Petaluma River. She’s a member and she convinced Brian to go to a meeting with her.”

  “Brian’s always been interested in the environment and the natural world,” I said. “He loves to camp and hike.”

  “I know that,” Sheila said. “He takes the kids on nature walks. He enjoys birding with your father. Although I think that’s not so much the birding as a chance to be with your dad, now that he’s retired. But...”

  The Friends of the Petaluma River sounded like a rather benign organization. Going to a meeting and joining the group would be normal activities for someone with my brother’s interests, especially since he’d just moved to Petaluma. He had been active in community life in Sonoma when the family lived there.

  But that didn’t explain the frown on Sheila’s face.

  “Is there something else? Something you’re not telling me?”

  Sheila didn’t answer right away. She set down her glass. Her mouth tightened again, and I saw tears in her eyes.

  “I think Brian’s having an affair.”

  I sat back in my chair. My kid brother, cheating on his wife? I didn’t believe it. But that was Jeri, Brian’s big sis. The private-eye Jeri took a different view.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Something I found,” Sheila said. “Wait here. I’ll get it.”

  She got up and disappeared into the house, returning a moment later with a note card. She handed it to me.
It was about four by five inches, and the front showed a delicate color sketch of a bird, a yellow-rumped warbler, a bird common to the woodlands in Northern California.

  I opened the card. The inside was blank except for a handwritten message that looked as though it had been written in a woman’s hand. In a few lines, she said she’d enjoyed talking with him, and that she hoped they could meet again soon. The signature read “All the best, Willow.”

  “How did you get this card?” I asked.

  “I found it in Amy’s room, right before I left for Firebaugh. She must have liked the picture. She said she took it from the recycling bin. When I read the message, it set off alarm bells.”

  “You might be reading too much into it. It sounds innocent enough.” I set the card on the table between us.

  “Am I? I asked Brian who Willow is. At first he didn’t answer. He just seemed evasive. Then he said she was a casual friend, that he’d had coffee with her. Finally he admitted he’d had coffee with her several times. If that’s all there was to it, why didn’t he say anything about meeting her? He kept saying I was getting upset about nothing. But I was upset. I still am.”

  She seemed to be blowing up something trivial. But Sheila was definitely on edge. With everything tossed into the mix—Brian’s dissatisfaction at work, Sheila’s preoccupation with her father’s illness, and the missive from the mystery woman—it sounded as though the conflict had been ripening into battle stage.

  Had my brother’s meetings with Willow moved into a different kind of relationship? Had Brian gone off somewhere to meet another woman? Sheila was certainly entertaining that thought.

  But it was so out of character for my kid brother. So was the vanishing act. Besides...

  “That still doesn’t explain how Brian’s MedicAlert bracelet wound up on a boat with a body,” I said, thinking out loud.

  Sheila’s face crumpled and tears began to flow. “Oh, Jeri, do you think he’s dead?”

  I hastened to reassure her, although I’d reluctantly considered the possibility, then pushed it back into the darker reaches of my mind. “No, I don’t think he’s dead. I think we just have to keep looking, to figure out where he might have gone.”

  “I do love him,” she said. “In spite of being angry with him, I love him. Oh, hell, I want him home.”

  “We’ll find him,” I said, as much to myself as to Sheila.

  Seven

  “Where do we start?” Sheila wiped tears from her face.

  “Maybe Brian went camping on his own,” I said. “Maybe something happened to his Jeep.”

  Maybe he was injured—or dead, somewhere out in the wilderness. I kept that thought to myself.

  Conventional wisdom says that one shouldn’t go hiking alone, especially in rugged or unfamiliar terrain. But people do it all the time. I’d done it myself, in Yosemite Valley. Yes, there’s always someone around in Yosemite Valley. But I’d been there in March on that particular trip, in the middle of the week. There was snow on the ground, and fallen trees and rocks on the trail I’d chosen. I had felt isolated—until I encountered those hikers from Australia.

  Brian was an experienced camper and hiker. No doubt he figured he was up for any sort of terrain, or conditions. But things happen out in the woods, or on the coast. It was possible he’d gone hiking and had a fall, breaking an arm or a leg and making it difficult for him to return to where he’d left the Jeep. Presumably he had his cell phone with him. But sometimes cell phone signals were few and far between, especially on the Northern California coast. He had been gone several days now. The cell phone could be out of juice. But he must have his charger. It wasn’t in its usual place on the dresser, Sheila informed me, and he had a car charger in his Jeep. Maybe something else had happened.

  Maybe, maybe, maybe.

  None of this offered a plausible explanation for how his Medic­Alert bracelet ended up on a burning boat with a corpse.

  “I thought of that, about his going camping alone,” Sheila said. “The note he left just said he was going away for a few days. It didn’t say specifically that he was going camping. But he must have. I looked through the camping gear. Several things are ­missing.”

  “Let me take a look.”

  “It’s in the garage.” Sheila led the way back through the house and out to the double garage, with unpacked boxes stacked in the middle. Utility shelves held several clear plastic tubs. She pointed at an empty tub. “His sleeping bag is gone. The camp stove and the big cooler are gone. So is the tub with cooking stuff, the pots and plates and utensils. Both the lanterns are gone, but the tent is still here.”

  That told me he was going to be sleeping indoors, or that he’d gone camping with someone else who had a tent.

  “His closet?” I asked.

  “I checked,” Sheila said, “and checked again. His hiking boots are gone. And his trek poles and backpack.”

  “Has his credit card or debit card been used since Friday?”

  “That detective from the Petaluma Police Department asked me the same thing. Colman, her name is. I’ve got her card here. When I was talking to her yesterday, filing the missing persons report, I got the impression she figured Brian took off on his own. To get away from me.” Sheila compressed her lips tightly and brushed away a tear. “Maybe he did.”

  “I don’t think Brian would do that,” I said. “You checked your bank account and credit card. What did you find?”

  “There are no charges on the credit card,” Sheila said. “Not since he used it at the hardware store two weeks ago. The last time he used the debit card was near here, on Wednesday of last week, to buy gas.”

  “Let me look at the desk and the computer. Is the desktop the only computer you have?”

  “Yes,” Sheila said. We went back to the house, to the desk in the corner of the dining room. “It’s a Windows PC. We both have different log-ins to get onto the computer. As for email, we both have our own Gmail accounts. I don’t know what his passwords are.”

  “I might be able to figure it out.”

  I sat down at the desk and turned on the computer and the printer as well. As the computer went through its start-up phase, I examined the desk and the surrounding area. On the right side of the keyboard and mouse, I saw an oversized pottery coffee mug, glazed in an iridescent purplish red. I picked it up. It was heavy and there was a faint brown residue inside. “Brian’s mug?”

  “Yes. He got that at some craft fair in Sonoma. He likes it because it’s big and he drinks lots of coffee.”

  “Family trait.” I, too, drink lots of coffee.

  Sheila took the mug from me and looked inside. “Well, that needs washing.” She turned and went to the kitchen.

  I picked up a weekly calendar, and leafed through the pages. For the previous week, my brother had written in “Plumas,” then he’d crossed out the notation. For this week, he’d written in two appointments, a lunch date with Lance tomorrow, Wednesday. On the calendar section for Thursday, I saw a name and phone number I didn’t recognize, for a meeting at ten o’clock in the morning. For this coming Saturday, he’d written “Apple Fair.” So Brian and Sheila had planned to take the children to the Gravenstein Apple Fair at Ragle Ranch Park up in Sebastopol. It was usually held the second weekend in August.

  I looked at the books stacked on the desk to the left of the computer monitor. One was about mushrooming, finding and identifying wild mushrooms. I knew this was one of Brian’s recent interests, along with birding. The other three books were hiking guides. The first was written by my friend Dan, about hiking at the Point Reyes National Seashore; The Hiker’s Hip Pocket Guide to the Mendocino Coast; and Day Hikes Around Sonoma County.

  Underneath the books I saw some papers. I pulled them out and examined them. They were printouts from the Internet, one containing information about the campground in Plumas County where Brian had intended to take the family camping. He’d written “CANX” and a date in black ink over the first page, showing that he’d cancel
led the campsite reservation, the day after his phone argument with Sheila.

  As for the other printouts, it looked as though Brian had been researching places to go for a short camping trip on his own. He had printed out information on campgrounds on the coast, in Sonoma County and Mendocino County.

  Two brochures were stuck into the pages of the Sonoma County hiking book. Both were for Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve and the Austin Creek State Recreation area. The two parks were adjacent, in an area a few miles north of the small town of Guerneville, on the Russian River. The larger brochure contained a map and descriptions of the parks’ flora, fauna and trails. The smaller brochure was specific to the Bullfrog Pond Campground at Austin Creek.

  I set the brochures aside and opened the lower desk drawer, which was deep enough for file folders. Here were bank records, information on the retirement savings Brian and Sheila were building, and details about their health plan. There was a tax folder as well. They had a will and durable powers of attorney, and they’d made arrangements for who would take care of the children should they die. Here too was a file about the house in Sonoma that Brian and Sheila were selling, and another containing Brian’s résumé and information about his new job in Petaluma. I found folders for their vehicles, Brian’s Wrangler and Sheila’s Honda. I jotted down the license plate number and vehicle identification number for the Jeep.

  I moved on to the shallow drawer and found a checkbook and an assortment of check registers. I also found a small notebook, two by three inches, with a red cover and lined pages. People frequently keep lists of user names and passwords, because these days there are so many of them, and it’s difficult to remember all of them. My brother was no exception. Here was the key that would give me access to Brian’s computer, his email, his financial records.

  I looked at the little book in my hand. The sort of probing I would normally do in a missing persons case felt like an intrusion when the people involved were my brother and his wife.