Even if this was true, I had so much to think about. First, if Fisher had made such a successful disappearance, why would he then return to the same university where he had matriculated? It seemed like he was begging to be found out. Some of the faculty, like Professor Wallace, had been at the school when Fisher was a student. Had he changed enough to ensure that no one would recognize him?
Even if he was able to get away with it, why did he continue the disappearance? He was certainly an adult by any measure today. Thirty years had passed. He was able to make his own decisions and live his own life. He’d even been declared dead, so there was no need to go back to being Ronald Fisher. So why not stop the hubbub over the disappearance at this point?
Finally, why had he disappeared again? Was he aware of the deal with Professor Wallace for me to find him? I wasn’t sure that I was good enough as an investigator to warrant throwing away the identity he had so carefully crafted. In leaving, he had opened the door to another police investigation, which would make the Fisher case a desirable cold case all over again. Had he intended for that to happen? Was I supposed to be the manner in which he was going to reveal his true identity? I didn’t know the answers to these questions, but I had work to do if I was going to prove this theory.
Land looked at me. “I suppose I don’t have to talk to the wrestlers now? You have this all figured out.”
I shook my head. “It’s even more important that we talk to them now. They might be able to confirm my idea, or they might be able to give us an idea of where Fisher is now.”
Land smiled. “If I have to get up early in the morning, perhaps we should go to bed,” he suggested.
Land was out the door before me the next morning. I marveled at how he could function on a lack of sleep. He was planning on going to the university before his shift. I wasn’t sure how he’d managed to meet up with some of the current wrestling team, which had to be in disarray after the abrupt departure of the coach, but he gave me a kiss and a smile as he took his bag and left.
The morning went quickly for me. Sabine was talkative without really saying much to me. She chattered on about family gossip and discussions about the wedding. Now that I had shown that I wasn’t holding a grudge against her, she had gone back to discussing bridesmaids’ dress and bouquets.
Detective Danvers did not put in an appearance that day. I wondered if he was busy with another case, or if he had just decided to keep his distance given the circumstances. In either case, it was a relief not to have to pretend around him.
Closing time came quickly. I finished counting the money twice and prepped the coffee urns for tomorrow’s sales. Sabine took the keys and promised to park the food truck safely in the secured lot.
I took the cash bag and headed to Basque in the Sun, which had pulled up 30 minutes prior. I was impressed that Land could investigate two hours away and still be at the assigned location on time.
I gasped when I saw him. His eye was darkened around the edges, and the flesh had puffed up some. I was immediately protective and wanted to handle whoever had done this to him.
“Before you go seeking vengeance,” he said, as if he could read my mind, “you might want to know that it’s not what it seems.”
“Someone beat you up!” I said in a voice that echoed off the walls of the food truck.
“Not true. I got in to see the wrestling team because of my martial arts and defense skills. That’s why I took my gear this morning.”
I could see where this story was going. Someone had taken a poke at Land and had found his mark. My shoulders and back released their tension.
“So I should see the other guy?” I asked, leaning forward and gently placing my lips on the puffiness around his eye.
“Definitely.” He took a small step back. “So do you want to hear this, or do you want to do something else?” He winked at me with his good eye.
“Does there have to be a choice?” I asked. “Can’t we do both?”
He gave me another kiss and then backed away. “So I went up to the university as a volunteer for the wrestling program.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Since when do you wrestle?”
“I don’t, and I’m not a licensed instructor. I just went up there to show them some martial arts moves. Jujitsu is much like wrestling, so I thought I could give them a few pointers. That seemed to open the door.”
“And?” I asked, wishing that Land would get to the point. Usually when he toyed with me like this, he had something of interest to tell me.
“They had a lot to say about their coach.” He shrugged as he took a knife and started back to work.
“Like the fact that he was Ronald Fisher?” I was getting a bit antsy now that I seemed to be getting close to a solution to this case. I also knew that Danvers had to be close to warning me off the case too.
“Nothing like that. Coach Williams was reclusive. He didn’t socialize at all—or didn’t seem to. He wasn’t on any social media and got mad if anyone posted his photo on any of the sites. He rarely appeared in the newspapers and never had his photo in the papers.” Land talked while he chopped, with the ease of someone who knew exactly what he was doing.
“All negative evidence, suggesting that he did not want to be seen by the general public. It could point to him being Fisher, but then what? How do we show that he was the person we’re looking for?”
“Two things came up that made me think we have a shot,” Land said. “The first is that he has a cabin somewhere to the east of here. No one knew exactly where it was, but it was secluded, and the coach had talked about it several times. So if there’s a bet on where he could be, that was it. The team was pretty unanimous about that.”
I stopped listening for a few seconds while I tried to make sense of what I’d heard. I wasn’t sure to how to find out the location of the cabin without the police. Certainly, Detective Danvers would only warn me off the case and take the address for himself. I wasn’t sure how I could get the information beyond that.
I realized that Land was waiting for me, and I looked up. “What was the second piece of information?” I asked.
“Coach Williams was fascinated by the Ronald Fisher case.” Land looked up from cutting and smiled at me.
“Well, Professor Wallace mentioned that Williams had brought it up on more than one occasion. That was suspicious enough.”
“It’s way worse than asking questions. He and some of the team went to the dorm where Fisher disappeared on the anniversary of that event. They hung around, and he told them ‘ghost’ stories about the disappearance.”
“That doesn’t sound so terrible. It’s a little macabre, but nothing out of the ordinary, and it’s a damned sight better than what they do for hazing,” I said, thinking back to my own college days and the silly rituals that the fraternities imposed on new recruits.
“I’m not done,” Land said ominously. Yet then he paused.
“Okay, I give. What was big piece of news?”
Land grinned again. “When Williams told the wrestlers about the disappearance, he told them about the coded message in the textbook, asking for help.”
My mouth dropped open. . One of two scenarios was possible here. It could be that I wasn’t from the first person who had learned the secret of the textbook, which seemed unlikely. If Mrs. Fisher was to be believed, no one had looked at that book since the time of the disappearance. I mentally cross-referenced it with the fact that others had indicated that Ron’s books and possessions had been boxed up quickly and moved out of the dorm room.
That would mean that either someone saw the message at the time of the disappearance and chose for whatever reason not to reveal the message, or the message was found at a later time. I saw no reason why a concerned person wouldn’t bring the message to the attention of the police. If Fisher disappeared, then this would be a clearer indication that foul play had not played a part in the vanishing.
The other possibility was that Williams knew something that the ot
hers didn’t. Since I’d already covered the chance of someone finding the message and revealing it, the only other option was that Williams was Fisher or had been told by Fisher since the night of the disappearance. So in either case, Williams had information about the disappearance that no one else was privy to.
I still wondered why he’d come back. Not only was I now learning that he’d likely taken a position that was only yards from where he had disappeared, I was hearing that he’d told factoids to the team, pieces of information that no one—not even the police—had uncovered in their investigation. In some ways, it was almost as if he wanted to be caught out and revealed. Had living under an assumed name become too much for him? Was he wanting to be unmasked without the work of doing it himself?
“Were there any other things that Williams told the kids when he was scaring them?”
Land raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, someone saw Fisher leave that night.”
I perked up. No one had admitted to seeing him outside of the dorm that evening. Was this a clue that I’d missed in my interviews? “Who?”
“The guys didn’t say. Either Williams told them, and they forgot, or he didn’t tell them at all. You haven’t run into anyone who says they saw Fisher that evening?”
“No one. There’s two men who didn’t return my calls about meeting to talk about Fisher. Maybe it was one of them?”
Land asked for my phone and found the two numbers in my call log. He hit redial for one and left a message. Then he did the same for the other. Land had worked in the military and with the police, and when he wanted to, he could sound as official as Detective Danvers any day of the week. His message was terse. He had information about the Ronald Fisher disappearance and it was imperative that he talk to them immediately. I gave him the number for Edwin Geier, the one student who had not called me back, despite a few messages.
With that, I gave Land’s eye a few more kisses and then headed to the new food truck for the evening shift. Kamila was already there, and she was busily chopping away. It was nearly déjà vu for the scene in Basque in the Sun except she was not my husband.
I was feeling tired and drained. I had known that I couldn’t keep up this pace forever, but I was still on the low side of 30. My contemporaries still managed to stay out all night partying, and here I was, getting winded from working double shifts. Maybe fun didn’t take as much work as food services.
We finished the shift and I texted Land and told him my plan of cutting down at Let it Slide to just two days a week. Kamila would have the keys to the truck and would report back to me each evening with the day’s totals. In exchange for the added duties, she would get an increase in pay and some additional benefits. This was the same arrangement we had with Carter, and he seemed pleased with the way it worked. Apparently, Kamila was as well, because she let out a small squeal and overwhelmed me with a hug.
Land responded before I left the truck. The man who had just probably scared two of Ronald Fisher’s classmates with his official-sounding voice sent me a winking emoji. So much for scary.
I took the cash to the bank and did an evening deposit. I had barely put the satchel in the slot before my phone rang. It was Vince Joines, one of the men who had known Ronald at school. I finished my transaction quickly and then answered the phone.
“Hi, a detective left a message for me to call him back. What is this in reference to?” His voice sounded tentative. I knew that his statement was less than honest, since I’d heard Land leave a very specific message regarding Ronald Fisher.
I put on my most official business-like voice, which was hard to do when I was this tired. “Yes, that would be Mendoza. He called you in reference to the Ronald Fisher case.”
The man snorted. “Is there a Ronald Fisher case? I haven’t had anyone ask me an official question about that in nearly twenty years. I heard that his family declared him dead a while back.”
I added some frost to my tone. “Indeed. Well, we’ve come across information that one of the witnesses in the dorm on the night of the disappearance lied to the police. Fisher was actually seen outside of the building on the night he vanished. Do you have anything to say about that?” I walked back to my car, got in, and turned on the engine.
The man paused a long time before he spoke again. “I think I need to see a lawyer,” he replied.
“That’s fine, but you do realize that the statute of limitations is long since passed for submitting a false statement to the police? We’re trying to take a look at a cold case and come up with some answers. I can guarantee you that the police will not make any moves based on any additional evidence that you might provide.” I switched the phone over to the car’s Bluetooth, which Land had added to my old Buick, complaining about adding 21st century tech to a 20th century vehicle.
There was another long pause. “Okay. The night Ron disappeared, I saw him go. There was a car waiting for him at the end of the street. He went directly to the car, like he was expecting it to be there. He got in the car and left.”
“Who was driving?” I asked, feeling elated that I’d finally come across some additional information on the case.
“I couldn’t see. It was dark and about 50 yards away.”
“Anything about the car itself?” I asked, wondering who had been in cahoots with Fisher and why they had refused to come forward.
“Nothing. It was a dark sedan. Cars aren’t really my thing, so I don’t normally care about who drives what. Plus, I had no idea that I’d be expected to identify a car. I just assumed he was going out for a beer or something like that. I didn’t know that was the last time anyone would see him.”
I knew he was right, even though the little he had provided me wouldn’t do much good. “So did you tell anyone about this?” I asked, wondering where Williams had got the information from. I wanted to be able to trace everything back to its source.
“I told Professor Wallace, the business prof. He suggested that the information was of limited value to the police. I wouldn’t be able to state with 100% accuracy that I had seen Ronnie leave. I was certain at the time that it was him, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable in swearing to it under oath. So the police would have likely just ignored me. Other than him, I never told a soul.”
I was back to where I’d started with this. Professor Wallace had known about the sighting of Fisher in the minutes before he disappeared. He had suggested to the young man that he should withhold testimony and so the evidence was suppressed. Now someone was telling the wrestlers this piece of evidence.
“Do you know anywhere that Ronnie might have gone to hide out afterwards?” The question was deliberately misleading. He would be thinking of the original disappearance, but I was looking for a place where Williams might be hiding out at currently.
“The Fishers had a lake house about twenty minutes from here. I told the police about that in my statement. I did. From what I understand, they checked the place out, but there were no signs that Ronnie had ever been there. I have no idea whatever happened to that old place, but I guess it’s still there if you want to look again.”
This was another piece in the puzzle. Both Williams and Fisher had access to a cabin not too far from Capital City. While many people had second homes, I had a sneaking feeling that the place Williams went to for solitude belonged to the Fisher family.
I thanked him and hung up. I now had an idea of where Ronnie might be. I was going to try to make a stealth move without notifying the police or the family. There were plenty of websites that gave information on property owned by the owners’ names. I was going to find the Fisher place by myself and see what was there.
Before I could even pull out of the bank parking lot, the phone rang again. This time it was Edwin Geier. Land had missed his calling. He should have done telemarketing, I thought. I answered quickly and pulled into an empty parking spot. I wanted to be focused on the phone call rather than the road.
“Someone called me for about the Ronnie Fisher matter?” he said fla
tly. I couldn’t read any emotions from his voice.
I explained who I was and how I was looking into the case for a possible article. I then told him that he was listed as the only appointment on the night Ronnie had disappeared from school.
“Never happened,” Geier said. “It was over by then.”
“Over?” I asked.
“Ronnie and I had flirted around some. He acted like he was interested in me, but he was so deep in the closet that he would have been years coming out, especially if he’d had to move back home. We talked, but it was never really a dating relationship. Finally, I got tired of the excuses for why he couldn’t come out, and we stopped hanging out. I’m not sure what that appointment would have been. I was out with friends that night. It’s been a lifetime since, but they remember being with me. I was clear at the time that they needed to remember the date and what we were doing.”
I thought that an odd reaction to a friend’s disappearance, but it showed that there was no real love lost if his first thought had been of alibis rather than romance. We said good-bye, and I knew I had another loose end to tie up.
Chapter 8
I texted Sabine in the morning and told her that I was not coming in today. She was fine with that; she’d worked alone for two weeks while we were on our honeymoon. Land had some business dealings to handle in the morning, and I had my own secret errand to run that I didn’t want anyone else to find out about.
When I returned, I grabbed my backpack from the apartment and headed out to make the two-hour trip to the university again. I had deliberately not called Professor Wallace, wanting to use an element of surprise. I had ensured with the department that he had office hours today, which would give me some certainty of catching him.
Before I went to his office, I parked near the stadium and walked the short distance to Coach Williams’ office. I hadn’t expected much, and those low expectations were met. The office already had another coach’s belongings in it. The door read “Coach Cobb,” and the plaques on the wall said the same.
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