Vanished in the Dunes

by Allan Retzky

  He positions himself that first day before seven and waits until the rain comes. It starts slowly, but after a few hours the wind gusts and sheets of water convince him that only a madman would attempt to move around and so he goes back to his motel.

  He sits there in the small tidy room for nearly a full day while the storm hurls its engorged fury at the hamlet, which at that time is anything but a resort. At one point the lights go out, but the motel has its own generator and power is restored without incident. There is nothing Stern can do but wait and he falls asleep fully clothed. The night does not bring the expected dream, and he wakes not only refreshed, but convinced that he now closer to the truth and to the point where he can both rescue Heidi and exact justice.

  When the weather returns to normal, daylight greets him with a cloudless blue sky. Even here, a mile from the beach, the storm’s effects are obvious. Broken branches are strewn across the parking lot together with a miscellaneous assortment of rubbish, including broken lawn furniture, plastic garbage bags, and one red-soled flip-flop that lies perched atop a scattered pile of leaves. He walks to his car, brushes a small ragged branch off his windshield, and then walks to the office to see about the local roads. The news is not good. Trees and power lines are down everywhere. He is advised to stay close to the motel. In this regard he is lucky. A restaurant is open less than a hundred yards away so he won’t be forced to drive anywhere.

  He is reluctant to accept the fact that he will need to wait but refines his plans to catch up with Posner the next morning. Later that day he calls Posner’s number to confirm his prey has not evacuated. It is a possibility. He knows Posner and his wife have an apartment in the city but he guesses that Posner spends much of his time out here. To be closer to Heidi, he thinks.

  Posner answers on the fourth ring, just as Stern is about to give up. So he’s home. Good.

  He hangs up without speaking.

  He wakes early on Thursday and is so anxious to get to Posner’s house that he forgets breakfast. He doesn’t care, and is there just before eight. He parks down the block in the spot he’d chosen earlier in the week. It’s another clear day. The streets here have already been emptied of debris and almost all of the houses are vacant. He rolls the window down and hears a still angry surf behind him as it says a final goodbye to the storm. Otherwise there is a stillness that unnerves him.

  It is so calm that the sound of the engine starting on the blue Lexus in Posner’s driveway shatters the air as if it were a thick and brittle object. He hasn’t even noticed that Posner is already in the car when he arrives. He’s lucky and knows it. Another few minutes and Posner might be off somewhere, and he would waste a full day’s surveillance.

  Posner backs slowly down the driveway onto an empty street. “He’s a careful man. I’ll have to remember that,” Stern says to the empty passenger seat. He has begun to talk to himself aloud with some regularity in the past few months. Sometimes it’s to Heidi, but more often to an unknown audience, a shapeless companion who agrees never to disagree.

  Stern watches as Posner turns onto the main street and moments later accelerates onto the highway going east. He’s easy to follow. There are few other cars in sight. But he must lay back more than a casual distance to avoid drawing even accidental attention. Posner stays at the limit of fifty-five although the road ahead is empty. A town police car comes from the other direction and Stern sees Posner’s brake lights flicker as the cars near each other.

  “What’s he afraid of?” Stern asks aloud. “You’re going slowly enough. Feel guilty about something, do ya?”

  He follows Posner into the village of Montauk past the mostly empty motels and food shops. Posner drives through the village without stopping and picks up speed as he reenters the highway still going east.

  “How much farther can he go? He’s gonna be in the ocean pretty soon.”

  At this point there’s no other traffic so Stern has to fall farther behind. He loses sight of Posner as the road bends and when it straightens out the blue Lexus is gone. Stern speeds up and goes for another mile before he realizes that Posner must have turned off. He makes a sharp U-turn and speeds back the other way. He barely looks at the road ahead as he scans both sides of the highway until he comes to a sign announcing the Montauk Overlook turnoff and wonders why he didn’t see it when he first passed. He slows and enters the parking lot and sees the blue Lexus on the far end where it’s hidden from the main road.

  He pulls into a spot as far from where Posner parked as he can and still keep it in sight. There is no movement in the Lexus. Now he must decide whether to exit his car or wait till Posner returns. He squirms with indecision for a few minutes, then decides he just can’t wait and opts for leaving his car and moving with as little sound as possible along the fringe of the woods until he approaches Posner’s car. In less than a minute he’s close enough so that a subtle noise draws his attention down the slope. Posner is stooped over the ground and picking up an object. From a distance Stern can’t identify the item but he sees Posner put it into his windbreaker pocket and look around furtively. For an instant Stern thinks he’s been seen, but Posner’s subsequent stride up the slope without a second look convinces him otherwise. He races back to his car, considers taking off, but then decides he’d rather Posner be unnerved about being seen.

  He lights a cigarette and watches as Posner exits the woods and looks in his general direction for a moment before he reenters the Lexus. Now he’s been seen. He’s sure of it. He watches Posner hesitate then put his car in motion. Stern slides down the seat and half turns the other way to avoid any possible detection.

  As soon as the Lexus clears the parking lot, Stern pulls ahead to the area where Posner parked. He gets out and moves down the slope. He’s heading for the gnarled sand pine that he noticed moments before. He reaches the area in seconds, but there is nothing special to see. He scans the ground. Maybe there’s more of what Posner picked up, he thinks, but he sees nothing but pine needles and cones. He turns in an arc one last time. He’ll have to come back again. There is no need to remember the spot. The gnarled pine is a good landmark, but he remains puzzled as to why Posner would come all the way out here for just a few minutes. Back at the parking lot, he uses a felt-tipped pen to darken the base of the sand pine closest to the edge of the lot, so he’ll know where to park the next time.

  He drives back westward through Montauk and passes the Lexus parked in front of a drive-in restaurant. “Surprised he’s not stopping at a bar for a real drink,” he says to his unspecified companion before he dissolves into a spasm of giggles.

  That night the dream returns, but there’s a difference. He wakes moments before the end, just as the shadow carrying the body disappears from his view behind some trees. He doesn’t scream. Every sensation in his body tells him she’s dead and that the shadow carrying her body is Posner’s. The landscape in the dream is familiar. He’s been there. That very day he walked among the same sand pines in his dream. The thought drives him awake and all he can think of now is an image of Posner burying Heidi’s body. He has to prove it to himself. He doesn’t care anymore about the police. They’ve been useless. Even imagining him as somehow involved is idiotic. No. He’ll have to find some evidence and then confront Posner. He relishes the thought of seeing Posner sweat and plead for his life, knowing that it’s a plea he will not grant.

  The next day he goes to the hardware store and buys a shovel and a flashlight.

  “Looking for night crawlers, are ya?” asks the woman behind the counter.

  “Something like that,” Stern answers as he wonders over the woman’s unintentional insight.

  Then he drives to Posner’s house. He sees the car in the driveway, pulls up, and calls the number, but it’s busy.

  “Too bad. I almost wanted to reintroduce myself,” he says and exhales a stream of mock laughter. Then he turns the car to the east and begins to drive out to the Montauk Overlook.

  After a few minutes on the highwa
y his voice returns to normal. “There must be something in that area near the gnarled sand pine that he wants to hide. He must have been the one carrying Heidi. What do you think?”

  His companion’s silence affirms the assertion.

  Everything about the drive to the overlook seems mechanical. He drives at maximum speed along the highway, slows through Montauk village and accelerates again until the overlook turnoff. The spot he’s marked on the base of a tree the previous day is still there, but he realizes he could have found it easily enough without the marking. One car is parked in the lot near where he pulls up. Actually, it is a small white pickup with the words “Marine Patrol” printed on the side and rear. He presumes it’s some official car and prepares himself to wait until the occupant moves. He turns on the radio and lights a cigarette. The wait isn’t long, as a uniformed officer of some kind appears from the far side of the lot. The man raises a small hand in greeting.

  Stern nods and raises a hand in reply. He tries to act like he’s a local by remembering how the men he knew growing up in a small town in the Berkshire foothills would greet each other and strangers alike. Friendly, but not too much so. It seems to work. The man smiles back, enters his truck, and drives off.

  Stern waits ten minutes to see if the man plans to return. A heavy cloud cover sits over the area and a chill seeps through his sweater. He feels he should have worn something warmer, but the first few steps down the slope convince him that he will soon have enough exercise to heat his limbs. In seconds he is back at the gnarled bent pine. He randomly starts to dig. The sandy soil is soft from recent rains and the ground carves with ease under the shovel’s blade. He digs a wide swath around the tree creating a perimeter encompassing the area he remembers where Posner walked. None of the trenches are more than a foot deep. He works for fifteen minutes, stops, and then begins a new search area at a spot some ten feet farther down toward the shore.

  After nearly an hour all he can show for his effort is sweat. He begins to fill in the trenches, but doesn’t take the time to smooth out the soil, or brush pine needles back across the surface. In his haste he fails to notice a two-inch square of silver plastic torn from some bag that became mixed in with the soil.

  CHAPTER 11

  Peter Wisdom looks across the backyard lawn of his sister-in-law’s house, smiles, and raises a half-empty can of Bud in the direction of his wife, Karen. She smiles back. Karen stands out among the other women plucking bits of sliced vegetables or chips from the platters on the picnic table. She is short, but her smile is never ending.

  He stands near his brother-in-law, Rollo, who tends to the steaks and burgers on two adjacent grills. It’s a family Sunday afternoon picnic. Rollo lets his staff set up the restaurant today, but he’ll go over later when it starts to get busy. Wisdom’s son, Kevin, kicks a soccer ball around with his two cousins and a neighbor. It is a sweet, early fall afternoon with far more sun than chill. He wonders if sweet is the right word, but decides it’ll do.

  His family’s been in East Hampton long enough to be considered locals. It started with a summer vacation cottage his father bought in the area called the Springs when he got out of the army and began working as a New York City firefighter. That’s when they lived in Queens. Wisdom was the youngest of two boys and one girl. He remembers that they spent most summers at the cottage, and then year-round weekends after his father expanded and insulated the house. His sister still lived in Queens as did his brother who became a city cop as soon as he was old enough to take the test.

  Peter Wisdom was going to be different. He went to Hofstra and studied English lit and marketing, but when it came to working at it after graduation, his interest in business cooled. That’s when his father suggested he take the Suffolk County Police exam and move into the East Hampton house where his parents were by then living full time when they weren’t spending the winters in Florida.

  He took the exam, passed everything, and did particularly well on the physical part; the sit-ups, pull-ups, and mile-and-a-half run. He didn’t need to wait too long after that until East Hampton town asked County for a list of those with local addresses who passed the exam. He was near the top of the list and began within a few months. Nearly fifteen years later he was one of the more experienced detectives on Bennett’s squad. He married a local girl who teaches English at the East Hampton Middle School and they bought their own starter house in Sag Harbor. Not a bad way to live, he tells himself with thanks every morning. Not bad at all.

  He puts down his beer and leans against the wall at the back of the patio. It’s a nice crowd, not too big, maybe twenty people or so. Friends and relatives. They try to get together a few times every year either before or just after the high season. People talk about family, their jobs, or the aggravation of summer visitors, but they rarely ask him about his work. He understands. People he’s close to know enough not to ask him to remember stuff he’d rather not talk about most of the time.

  He looks again at Karen. She’s in animated discussion with one of Rollo’s neighbors.

  She’s very beautiful and for the millionth time he wonders why she picked him. She could have had any guy. And if he’s so lucky, then he wonders why he was so attracted to Brigid. Or even weirder why he was attracted to the picture of Heidi when he knew she was very probably dead.

  He tries not to think what he might have done if Brigid had really come on to him instead of just playing a role. He tries not to think of the guilt he might have created, and even now, knowing that she was playing a game to prove a point, he feels guilty for even having these thoughts. And he hadn’t even done anything. He shakes his head imperceptibly and reaches for the beer. He takes a sip then puts it back down. Too warm.

  He leans back against the building and looks up at the top of trees on the edge of the property. He muses that while sex maybe a very strong drive, the actual act can never take too long. But guilt can last forever. He shudders. With him it would. Happy he’s never been unfaithful or even close.

  Oh, there was the time shortly after their marriage when he answered a call about a possible prowler. He hadn’t been on the force very long and was working the eleven to seven Montauk shift one night when a late call came in about a prowler.

  “Better get over there just to be sure,” said his dispatcher’s voice, with a film of lilt atop his normal crankiness.

  It was a small cottage at the top of Tuthill Road up past the lobster store, but in January everything was flat-out quiet. Even the sound of his cruiser seemed to splinter the night. She answered the unlocked door, a fortyish woman with long straight black hair and an oversized nose on an otherwise average face. The only unordinary thing about her was a barely closed bathrobe.

  “The noise came from in there,” she said, and pointed to a room behind her.

  He moved ahead and found himself in a small bedroom. He moved to the window and checked that it was locked. It was.

  “No problem here.”

  When he turned she had one foot up and resting on the still-made bed, but her robe had become a bit undone. He had a clear view of her upper thigh and a dark patch beyond. Above her waist he had an even better glimpse of one rather large breast and an erect pink nipple. He took a deep breath, moved back through the front door, and didn’t turn around till he was halfway down the porch steps.

  “Best keep that door locked,” was all he said, barely looking at her.

  Even before he got into the cruiser, he felt his heart hammering away and the sweat on the back of his shirt. He reported in that everything was quiet. When dispatch answered, “You’ve done a real quick check,” amid background laughter. He knew he’d been had. Seems they set up all the rookies with this one nympho. But he laughed about it with them later and there’d never been anything close since then. And that was twelve years ago.

  He’d been innocent then and he’s innocent now, but a seed of guilt still runs through his brain about the way his body reacted back there at Brigid’s house. He knows it’s
stupid and if he told Karen, she’d probably laugh at him, but he still decides it’s better not to tell her. What’s the point? Someone once told him about a Playboy magazine article years ago where Jimmy Carter admitted that he’d lusted after other women in his heart, but never did anything. If a born-again guy like Carter can own up, then why is he so bothered? He wants the whole issue to go away. Maybe it will by next week when he has Brigid meet everyone involved. Then she’ll go back to Europe and the idea will crawl away. He remembers something else. No one’s gotten back to him about setting up a meeting with the good doctor Stern. He pulls a notepad from his pocket and jots down a reminder to call Bennett, who’s acting as liaison with NYPD.

  He moves to the large tub of cold drink cans floating in icy water and chooses a Diet Coke. Just then Karen appears with two paper plates overflowing with steak, corn, and salad.

  She gestures to one of the tables where he sees Kevin already busy biting into a burger between yapping with his cousins about whatever. A nice normal American weekend afternoon, he thinks and smiles at the simplicity of it all. In this little setting, they’re a million miles away from a missing, likely murdered, woman. It never ceases to amaze him how his work and its emphasis on the unexpected negative aspect of human nature runs so close and yet so far from ordinary behavior. Today’s optician could turn out to be tomorrow’s axe murderer. At least that’s the kind of issue they talked about at length in the criminal psychology course he’d once taken.

  “You were deep in thought over there. Anything you want to share?” asks Karen.

  “Just that I love you,” he says, meaning every word.

  The next day he gets a call from Bennett.

  “They can’t find Dr. Stern.”

  Bennett’s voice seems hoarse, almost fragile. Wisdom hopes he hasn’t started smoking again.