No Time to Wave Goodbye (20 page)

“I’ll take this property description,” the sheriff said. “I don’t know that there’s anything we can do with it. But thank you. And we will, of course, be needing access to this office. So, Blaine, if you would, don’t keep digging. I’m glad you did …”

“It’s like I think he’s here,” Blaine said, tears springing to her eyes, her long pale fingers clenched. “It’s like if I keep searching, I’ll find him. I’ll find whatever made him this way in here.” Sheriff Switch reached out and quickly hugged the younger woman. Vincent could feel the force of her pity.

“You did the right thing, Blaine,” said the sheriff.

Back in the vehicle, she shook her head and set the map on the seat between them as she drove. “Twenty miles of rough country between the beginning of that fire road and what … some itty-bitty cabin that maybe isn’t even there? And this weather? It’s twisted. Seems like it wants to warm up but the cloud cover means the sun can’t get down here. Up there, back on the ridges behind those hills, it’s probably clearer. But I can’t send my paid deputies, much less other people’s, much less the SAR volunteers out looking for … what? Maybe a piece of land that looks like a hundred other clearings? Maybe a guy who could be in Thailand or wherever that was she said by now?”

“Malaysia,” Vincent replied. “But he wouldn’t take the baby away, far away. Sheriff …”

“Sarah,” she said.

“Okay, Sarah, he said she would be returned. Berriman says that means he’d drop her off at a hospital or a church someplace.”

“Vincent, we don’t know that. His word isn’t exactly his bond, is it? He told his wife of twenty years that he was going to a conference …”

“I know. I know. But my niece is just a baby. I’m responsible.”

“I know you feel that way, but you’re not. And believe it or not, I feel responsible too, in some way that’s probably also twisted. I feel like
hell about this. People from all over the place, from as far away as New Mexico and Oregon and
Chicago,
for Pete’s sake, want to come and help.”

“Don’t you want to accept their help?” Vincent asked.

“It makes me look as effective as a cartoon character,” said Switch. “I don’t care, but the sheer traffic defeats the thing, you know? There are reporters out there from places I’ve never been. Baltimore. New York. Pittsburgh. The dispatcher is losing her mind. She’s getting calls at home from the BBC. I’ve had deputies from other counties come up here and look for people in dozens of households anywhere near this place and either there’s no one around until summer or no one saw anything. I’ve had the public roads blocked off now for two days and there are people who need those roads to do their jobs.”

Vincent said, “I know. It’s a mess.”

“Do I let the press in? If I do, I mess up anything there might be here. But I have to tell you, I don’t think there is anything here. If a guy built some kind of shelter up there, like one of those little houses on that website, either he did it with a ghost crew or someone would have seen or heard something in the way of materials going in.”

Vincent said, “About the press. I’m sorry. If this had happened a week ago, I would’ve just been some moke. Another guy.”

“Apology accepted. If you had been another guy, there wouldn’t be so much press here,” she said. “This is the biggest boom in Durand since Miss California came from here thirteen years ago.”

“I’m sorry,” Vincent said.

She sighed. “No, that’s not fair. I guess with the resident genius, because that’s what Bryant Whittier was, and his daughter being lost, and then you and your poor little baby niece and your Oscar, and the goofy letter, there still would have been everybody from Katie Couric to Katie Mulhone from the
Cisco County Register,
who went to high school with me. Maybe that’s who’ll help you. Maybe those pictures will be what will find her. Maybe Whittier gave up when he saw the snow and changed plans. Maybe someone will see her in … Chicago. Someplace. Maybe he really will leave her in a hospital, still.”

Switch unlocked the door to her office, sat down, and poured herself a cup of coffee, the number of cups of which Vincent had lost count of hours before. He’d seen people drink coffee—his family was renowned for it—but nobody drank coffee like Switch, who also seemed to have the bladder of a camel. Her deputy, a guy called Jackson, didn’t even bother with the pot. He put his mug right under the percolator spout. Detective Humbly was in the second, smaller room of the office, using Jackson’s desk for some paperwork.

“Where’re your folks?” she asked Vincent.

“At the little inn, in town. My sister-in-law, Eliza … needs a doctor. She can’t really sleep or eat. They all wanted to get her settled.” He paused. “It’s my job anyhow. It’s my doing.”

“You did this?” Switch said. “Pretty bad guy, I’d say.”

“You know what I mean,” Vincent said.

Switch motioned to Vincent to take a coffee cup. He refused, smiling, having drunk so much Cisco County coffee that he feared he’d have to have part of his stomach removed surgically. The way the sheriff drank it down, without even blowing on it, like a kid drinking lemonade, made him think that people up here had different DNA. Nothing, he noticed, however, erased the gray fingerprints at the inner corners of her eyes. A sudden gust of gratitude shook him, making his fingers tremble even more than the Cisco County coffee had. She had done all she could and more. Detective Humbly called out, “I heard the helicopter.”

“Yeah,” said the sheriff. “But you didn’t know about the secret property.” Humbly was at her side within seconds, as she explained the visit to the Whittiers.

“Maybe Whittier went from the other side. There is another side?” Bill Humbly asked.

“There’s always another side,” said the sheriff. “But it’s probably … wow, it’s probably almost in another state.”

“Still, Sarah, it could have happened that way,” said Vincent. “He would be smart enough to know that his wife would tell people to look for him here if his plans went off the track.”

“Mr. Cappadora …” the sheriff began, weariness in every syllable, as if she were saying his name on a slowed-down recording.

It was his turn to say, “Vincent.”

“Vincent, you LaLas …”

“I’m from Chicago,” Vincent said. “I’ve only lived in California for three years.”

“Then I’m sorry. People from SoCal come up here and think it’s just like where they live only with trees and big pretty hills. But this is dangerous country. There are bears up there and a lot worse, crevasses you fall into and you don’t get found until you’re archaeology. I grew up here. My father was sheriff here. The other side is up near redwood country. It would be another hundred miles at least to get to this place …”

“Could the roads be better on the other side?”

“Not as steep maybe but … Vincent, if you go to another part of the state, it starts all over again. New sheriff. New case number. Even the FBI guy, if he wants to get more people up here, he has to get clearance and that takes time. Frankly, and this kills me to say, much longer and we’re looking at a recovery…. And we might be already.”

“You mean you think they’re dead,” Vincent said. He felt, rather than saw, Humbly brace himself for some kind of explosion.

Switch said, “I don’t know. If Whittier provisioned himself for three days, even four days, and the fuel is gone, and he’s melting snow for water … If this were TV, you’d be asking me now, who’s the fastest gun in Dodge? But this isn’t TV.”

“Who is the fastest gun in Dodge?” Vincent asked.

The sheriff paused. She had removed her hat and sunglasses and shaken her hair loose from its customary tight braid and was now using her finger to do it up again: Vincent had noticed this before. She braided when she was nervous, when she failed to find precise or commanding words. She looked from the Los Angeles detective to Vincent and then back again. Finally she asked, “What do you mean?”

“A rescue tracker who’s extraordinary. The best. In any state, anywhere.”

Switch didn’t hesitate.

“She’s here. Lorrie Hanna Sabo. The tracker who led the search for the family that got stranded camping. The one I said was in the hospital for a day. Her dog Roman has done some amazing stuff. Spooky stuff. He found a little girl last summer who hid herself in a cave and put rocks in front of her and stayed in there two nights. She was four miles from where her parents camped and had climbed up over terrain that would give me pause. But Lorrie just got out of the hospital a few days ago after that camper rescue and, uh, recovery. She’s on leave. She’s a volunteer but I rely on her. She teaches SAR at Snowy Mountain Community College, for people who are doing Outward Bound training.”

“Can I hire her?”

It was as though he hadn’t spoken. The sheriff said, “I’m going to have to call off the formal search until this fog clears off.”

“The FBI guy said maybe they could authorize more,” Vincent said.

“I hope he does,” said Sheriff Switch. “Let them come. As long as they let me organize them, I welcome them. This is a tiny county with limited resources. This is only our second numbered case that wasn’t a broken mailbox or a kid with a bag of pot this whole year. The other one ended in a tragedy. It will take time, though, to put this together.”

“Could I hire her?” Vincent asked again. “This Lorrie Sabo?”

“She’s on leave.” The tall sheriff got up and stood looking out her window in the little office that reminded Vincent of every place he’d ever waited to have his oil changed—old-mustard walls and cast-off furniture, the tabletops invisible under layers of long-outdated magazines and strange tracts that called attention to everything from youth baseball to Bible study. She kneaded her lower back and Vincent noticed how slender she really was. Half a head taller than he was but probably didn’t weigh as much. She finally said quietly, “I will say this. If it was my niece, I’d pay Lorrie anything she wanted and get anyone else who had brains and any sense of the wilderness to go with me and I’d be out there myself right now. It’s not the right thing to do, but I would. And if she gave up, I would not. I would keep going.”

T
he sheriff herself drove him to Lorrie Sabo’s house, and waited with Vincent while he called his father. He asked Pat to call Ben. Then they went inside together.

Lorrie Sabo was making soup. It was something she did every Sunday with her daughters—putting away meals for the week. To Switch, Lorrie Sabo said, “Sarah. I was wondering when you’d come.”

“It’s up to you,” the sheriff told her.

“I have two daughters, sir,” said Lorrie, a small, compact woman younger than Vincent’s mother, but not by much. “So yes, of course, I’ll try. But on my terms. And that means no one except me goes …”

Vincent said quietly, “I have to go.”

“Absolutely not. I go alone, and in this weather, I might take my buddy Greg, or have him come in if I need him …” Switch nodded. Apparently, everyone knew who Greg was. “No one else.”

“I need to go. And my brother needs to go. Stella is his child.”

“When was the last time you climbed slick rock in the snow?”

“I’ve never climbed any rock in the snow. But I have to go. Her father has to go.” Vincent added, “You’re lucky his mother-in-law isn’t insisting on coming. She’s a police officer too.”

“I’m not going to put up a tent with an air mattress and cook eggs and bacon. I’ll eat meals you add a little water to to get them to taste like crap. Most of what I carry will be for Romy …”

Vincent leaned against the wall. Okay, he thought. He’d spent a lifetime faking his way out of most things he’d stumbled into. And he could do this too. He waited until the woman had wound down, her last shot involving something about chocolate and buffalo jerky.

Then he told her, “You might think looking at me that I’m some spoiled little boy from palm-tree land but I grew up in a neighborhood where you wouldn’t last ten minutes even with your trail mix and your big old deer rifle over there.” This wasn’t even remotely true but he had a feeling that Lorrie Sabo would buy the bluff. Already, he saw something in her eyes lift a lid. “I know it’s not a matter of strength or how many hours I put in at the gym. I know it’s about skill I don’t have. But I’m not an idiot and I won’t say a word to you or do anything but what you tell me. But this is the bottom line. Where I come from no one would let a stranger take a risk for his family he wouldn’t take himself.”

The sheriff and her tracker exchanged looks.

“Go on, Sarah. Leave him here. I’ll call you,” Lorrie Sabo finally said. “I guess I have compadres here.”

That had been four hours and about a gallon of sweat ago.

Lorrie Hanna Sabo taught Ben and Vincent to walk on snowshoes—although it took her two hours.

Ben caught on right away. He began marching around as though the big webs were some kind of appendage he’d been born with that had grown along with him until he happened to need them. On winter breaks and at college in upper New York State, Ben had hiked and
skied with friends. He and George had taken trips to Colorado and northern Minnesota. Ben already knew how to walk on snowshoes in a rudimentary way and the two pairs Lorrie gave them made it easier. They were common bear-paw snowshoes—without the tails used on flat land that could droop and drag on a leg trying to dig a toe for purchase on a steep grade or rock pile.

But after forty-five minutes, the best rescue tracker in California—according to Sarah Switch—looked ready to throw her entire five-foot-one-inch, hundred-pound body on Vincent and pummel him.

Instead, she sat down on her porch and pulled her thick stocking cap down over her eyes. “Breathe, Lorrie,” she said. “Breathe deep.” Finally, she got up. “You’ll have to be able to do this like a person,” she said. “This isn’t a Sunday picnic.”

“I never acted like it was,” Vincent answered grimly. “Give me a minute here.”

All of the family group was gathered in Lorrie Sabo’s yard. Each snowshoe was forty-eight inches long and twelve inches wide, but they were beautifully light and supple and sturdy, handmade by Lorrie’s husband, Doug. He used a straight-grained wood that wouldn’t crack or buckle on a half-buried stump, the cross bars painstakingly mortised tight. He strung them with lightweight lamb’s hide. Doug skinned those lambs, too, Vincent learned, while he wasn’t working as an economics professor at San Francisco State.