Hellbox

7

The sheriff’s deputy in charge of the Six Pines substation was the fresh-faced young guy who’d come running up to me in the Verrikers’ driveway. His name was Broxmeyer. I waited half an hour for him; the only person in the station when I walked in just before dusk was a gray-haired woman who worked the desk and the radio dispatch unit, and she wasn’t in a position to help me. So I waited, alternately squirming on a wooden chair and pacing, sweating even though the air-conditioning was on, trying to adopt Jake Runyon’s method of blanking his mind during a downtime period. It didn’t work. All sorts of dark images kept spinning and sliding around inside my head, banging into one another. The knot that had formed in my stomach, cold and hard and acidic, kept funneling the sour taste of bile into the back of my throat.

Broxmeyer looked draggy and worn out when he finally showed. His uniform was rumpled and stained under the armpits; a smudge of something darkened one cheek. He smelled of smoke and sweat. So did I, probably; I hadn’t even thought about changing clothes.

The woman asked him if the fire at the Verriker place was completely out and contained yet. He said yes, but there was still some concern about a flare-up that would endanger the surrounding timber; one of the VFD trucks would remain on watch all night. I made some noise getting up off the chair to remind the woman that I was there. She said to me, “This is Deputy Broxmeyer,” and then to him, “Man’s been waiting to see you, Greg.”

Broxmeyer took a look at me. “You’re the man I talked to at the fire scene.”

“That’s right.” I told him my name.

“You’re not local. What were you doing there?”

“Looking for my wife. She’s missing. That’s why I’m here.”

“Missing? For how long?”

“Since sometime this afternoon. Six, seven hours.” I was making an effort to keep my voice even, unemotional, but some of the fear leaked through and made it break a little here and there. “She went for a walk, just a short walk, and she hasn’t come back. I can’t find her anywhere.”

Broxmeyer ruminated for a few seconds, chewing on a corner of his lower lip. Then he said, “Let’s talk in my office.”

He led me through a gate in the waist-high partition that cut the station into two uneven halves, then through another door into a glass-walled cubicle. He said, “Have a seat,” and sat heavily behind a modular gray desk strewn with papers. I stayed on my feet; I was too jittery to do any more sitting.

He took off his cap, revealing a mop of lanky blond hair, and pinched at his eyelids with thumb and forefinger before he was ready to talk. “Your wife went for a walk, you said. From where to where?”

“The Murray place on Ridge Hill Road. She may have gone into the woods nearby… I don’t know for sure. I was away part of the day fishing.”

“And when you came back, she was gone?”

“Yes. She left me a note about the walk. I waited until I got worried enough and then went out looking for her. In the woods first, on foot. Then in the car. I was up on Skyview Drive when the house exploded. That’s the reason I was on the scene so quick.”

“Uh-huh. I wondered about that.”

“I talked to some of the neighbors before I came here, as many as were home. None of them had seen her.”

Broxmeyer nodded and then asked, “Has your wife ever done anything like this before? Gone off someplace and not returned when she was supposed to?”

“No.”

“Two of you have an argument, anything like that?”

“No.”

“Was she upset or worried about anything?”

“Not that I know about. No.”

“What was her frame of mind when you left her?”

“She was fine. Cheerful. We’re enjoying… were enjoying the stay. Like the area, were thinking about making an offer on the Murray property.”

“Retiring up here?”

“No. Second home.”

“Where’s your first home?”

“San Francisco.”

“Uh-huh,” Broxmeyer said. “Well. How long have you been here?”

“Since early Saturday.”

“No, I don’t mean Green Valley. I mean waiting here in the station.”

“Better than half an hour.”

“Could be your wife’s come back in the meantime.”

“She hasn’t,” I said. “I tried calling on my cell phone a couple of minutes before you came in.”

“She have a cellular, too?”

“Yes, but she didn’t take it with her. It’s in her purse at the house.”

Broxmeyer scrubbed at his face again, blew out his breath in a heavy sigh. “Well, I hate to say this, but there’s not much I can do for you right now. Officially, I mean. A person has to be missing forty-eight hours before I can make a report, mount any kind of organized search.”

“I know that. But at least you can put out a BOLO alert.”

“BOLO alert. You seem to know a lot about it.”

“I’m in the business myself.”

“Is that right?” He was more alert now. “Police officer?”

“I used to be. Licensed private investigator since I left the SFPD twenty-five years ago.”

I had my wallet out and opened it to the license photostat, laid it on the desk in front of Broxmeyer. He leaned forward to look at it, looked at me, looked at the license again before he shunted the wallet back across the desktop. Whatever he thought of my breed, he wasn’t letting me see it; his lean face was expressionless.

“About that BOLO,” I said.

“Sure,” he said, “I’ll do that for you. Least I can do. I’m married myself-I know how worried you must be.”

No, you don’t, I thought. You can’t imagine how worried I am. Or how much I love Kerry. Or that I’d cut off my right arm, give up my life in a nanosecond, to save her from harm. Nobody can possibly know how I feel right now but me.

Broxmeyer rummaged around on his desk for a pad of paper and a pen. “Your wife’s name?”

“Kerry. K-e-r-r-y. Kerry Wade. She kept her maiden name.”

“Description?”

I gave it to him, in detail. Age: 55, but after her facelift, she could easily pass for ten years younger. Height: 5'4". Weight: 120. Body type: slender, willowy. Hair color: auburn. Hairstyle: medium short, with a kind of underflip on the sides. No visible distinguishing marks.

“What was she wearing?”

“White shorts, light blue blouse, white Reeboks with blue trim. And probably a wide-brimmed straw hat. She wouldn’t go out in the bright sun without it.”

“Okay,” Broxmeyer said when he’d finished writing, “I’ll have Marge put it on the air right away.”

“Thank you.”

“One more thing. Contact phone numbers-the house, your cellular. Your wife’s, too, for the record.”

I recited the cell numbers from memory. “I don’t know the house number. Not even sure the phone’s connected.”

“Cellulars’ll do. I’ll call you, or somebody will, if there’s anything to report. Your wife comes home on her own, let us hear from you right away.”

I said okay.

He worked on his tired eyes some more. “Look,” he said, “this kind of thing happens a fair amount up here in the summer. People wander off into the woods, get themselves lost. Usually, they find their own way out.”

“Unless they have an accident-a bad fall so they can’t walk.”

“Well, that’s possible. But she couldn’t have gone too far on foot. She’s still missing come morning, I’ll get one of the other deputies to start combing the area. Or do it myself if I can free up the time. She’ll turn up.”

“Or I’ll find her.”

“Right.” Then, as I took a step toward the door, “One thing you should know. Green Valley is a quiet place. Low crime rate. Very few assaults against women, and none against a nonlocal as far back as I can remember.”

“I wasn’t thinking along those lines,” I said.

But I had been. After what had happened to me, the three months of hell at Deer Run, how could I not think along those lines?

The house was just as I’d left it: locked door, dark windows, empty silence.

Hurt to see it like that, but it didn’t make me feel any less hopeful. Kerry had told me that she’d never given up hope the entire three months I was missing and presumed dead; never once lost faith. She’d lived on it, and so would I.

But I couldn’t just sit around doing nothing. Still a little daylight left. I unlocked the door, reached in just far enough to turn on the porch light, then locked it again, and put myself back into the car.

I don’t know how long I drove the hillside and valley roads in the general vicinity, stopping at three lighted homes that had been unoccupied before, showing the portrait photo of Kerry I kept in my wallet, and watching heads shake and listening to voices saying the same words over and over: “No, sorry, haven’t seen a woman looks like that. No, sorry. No, sorry.” At least an hour, maybe two, until long past dark. A fat harvest moon made it easier to see what lay along the shadow-edged blacktops, but there was nothing to see. Every few minutes, I hit the redial button on my cell phone. Nothing to hear, either, except the empty ringing.

The only reason I gave it up was vision-blurring fatigue. I lost my bearings and spent five minutes roaming around in a maze of darkness and distant flickering house lights before I came upon a street sign with a name I recognized. Then I misjudged a turn and nearly slid off into a ditch. Danger to myself and to others. And this kind of aimless search wasn’t going to find Kerry, no matter how long I kept it up. There were just too many places she could be, hidden by the night.

Back to the house. I still couldn’t make myself go inside, wrap those unfamiliar walls around myself, so I sat out on the deck. The darkness was alive with the pulse of crickets, a soothing sound on previous nights, but one that had the opposite effect now. It had gotten cold, the kind of after-dark chill that descends on mountain country even in summer, but I noticed it only when the wind kicked up, and only then in a peripheral way. Same with a dull, throbbing headache.

The section of woods I could see on the north side was a clotted wall of black rising up against the moonlit sky. What if that was where Kerry was? I should have gone in there earlier. Checked the timber on the south side, too, and down along the far side of Ridge Hill Road. She couldn’t have walked far from the house, Broxmeyer had said that himself. But there were so damn many copses and stands and wide stretches of timber within a radius of a couple of miles; she could be anywhere.

If she wasn’t back by first light, I’d start combing the woods nearby and work my way outward and downward. As much ground as I could cover, by myself and with Broxmeyer or whoever he sent out to help search. If I couldn’t find her by noon, I’d appeal to Broxmeyer again for an organized hunt; and if that didn’t work, try to talk Sam Budlong into helping me prod the local politicians into it. Tourism was Green Valley’s major industry and the powers that be couldn’t afford the bad publicity that would come from letting too much time pass; a suddenly missing fifty-five-year-old ad agency executive and wife of a longtime San Francisco private investigator was sure media fodder.

Even so, it was bound to take time. Broxmeyer and his fellow deputies had other worries-last night’s explosion, and people pouring into the valley for the holiday weekend among them. No matter how much pushing I did, it wasn’t likely Kerry would become a priority until Wednesday morning at the earliest. And the longer she remained unaccounted for, the slimmer the odds she’d be found in good health.

Getting ahead of myself. Still a chance a law officer responding to the BOLO alert would find her tonight, or she’d make it back here on her own. Or that I’d find her in the morning. The rest of tomorrow and the day after were a long way off. One hour, one minute at a time.

The night chill sharpened, built a tingling in my hands and face, and started me shivering. That, and exhaustion drove me out of the chair, into the house. Get as much rest as possible, or I wouldn’t be worth a damn in the morning.

I took one unshakable certainty to bed with me, let it carry me into a fitful sleep.

Kerry was alive.

I’d know it if she wasn’t. The bond we shared was so deeply forged that if it had been broken, the knowledge, the loss, would be like a piece of steel thrust into my brain. I’d know it, all right.

Wherever she was, whatever had happened to her, she was alive.