Out Cold (16 page)

Shirley nodded. “Thank you. Yes. I will.”

“We can talk some more, too, sometime, if you want,” said Evie.

“That would be nice. Thank you.”

We all stood up. Shirley left the room and came back a minute later with our coats.

At the front door, I turned to Shirley. “I'm wondering if you might have a recent photograph of Dana that I could borrow.”

She looked up at me. “What in the world for?”

“If we're going to try to figure out where she went and what happened to her,” I said, “I'll need to have something other than the picture that the policeman had to show to people.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Of course. I do have one. I'll be right back.”

She left the room, and then I heard her stomping up the stairs.

She was back a few minutes later. She handed me a three-by-five snapshot. It showed Dana leaning against the side of a blue car, possibly the Escort that was parked in the driveway. She was wearing white shorts and a pale blue T-shirt, and she was squinting into the sun and smiling shyly. She looked young and pretty and vulnerable.

I tucked the photo into my shirt pocket. “Thanks,” I said to Shirley. “I'll return it to you if you want.”

She waved that idea away. “I have others. You can keep that one.”

We said good-bye, promised to keep in touch, and then Evie and I climbed into her car.

Just as she started up the engine there was a tap on the window beside my head. I turned. Bobby Wetherbee was standing there.

I rolled down the window.

“You were talking to my nana about Dana, right?”

I nodded. “We're trying to figure out where she went, who she was with when she left. Did she say anything to you?”

He shook his head. “Not really. Just one day she told me she had to leave for a while. She said it was something important, something she wanted to do.”

“Important how?” I said.

“I don't know,” said Bobby. “I asked her. I asked her where she was going, what she was doing, but she just said that I shouldn't worry, she'd be okay and she wouldn't be gone long. It was me she was worried about. Ever since our mother died, she was always worrying about me, asking if I was okay, trying to get me to talk about how I was feeling and everything. I know she was sad, too, but she never talked about herself. Anyway, I don't know if this would help, but…” He stuck an envelope into the half-open window. “I got this around Christmas. It's from Dana. You can keep it if you want.”

I took the envelope from him. “Thank you,” I said.

Evie leaned over to my window and said, “Did you talk to Dana after she left?”

He shook his head. “My nana said she called once when I was out. She didn't leave a number, and she never called again.”

“So you have no idea where she went, or why, or with whom?”

“No,” he said. “She didn't tell me anything. I'm sorry. Look, I gotta go.” Bobby Wetherbee waved his hand, then scurried down the driveway and disappeared behind the house.

“What is in the envelope?” said Evie.

It was addressed in green ink to Bobby Wetherbee, 27 Marlboro Road, Edson, Rhode Island. Inside was one of those religious Christmas cards with a nativity scene on the outside and the words “Wishing You a Blessed Christmas” printed on the inside.

Under that sentiment, in the same green ink, she had written: “Be good. Love, Dana.”

I turned the card over, but there was no other message, no information, no clue.

I handed it to Evie.

She read it, shrugged, and said, “Let's see the envelope.”

I handed it to her.

She glanced at it, then looked at me. “Where's Churchill, New Hampshire?”

“I don't know,” I said. “But that van, the one with the bears on it? It had New Hampshire plates.”

When we got home, Evie and I opened our Rand McNally
Road Atlas
on the kitchen table and looked for Churchill, New Hampshire. We needed our magnifying glass to locate it. The name was marked in the small, faint print reserved for a town barely worthy of Mr. McNally's notice. It was tucked into the northwestern corner of the state near the place where the border between Vermont and Quebec touch it. Churchill straddled an unnamed thin blue line that appeared to be a tributary of the Connecticut River.

I estimated that Churchill, New Hampshire, was a little more than 200 miles from Boston. The index in the back of our two-year-old atlas said the town's population was 941.

“What in the world was Dana Wetherbee doing there?” said Evie.

“That's the question,” I said.

“Pregnant and alone and far from home,” she said.

“Maybe she was just passing through when it was time to mail her Christmas cards.”

“Mm,” she murmured. “Let's see what we can find out.”

I followed her upstairs to our guestroom, which doubled as Evie's home office. Besides the twin beds, nightstand, and bureau, there was a small desk for her beloved iMac in the corner by the window that looked down onto Mt. Vernon Street.

She sat at the desk. I sat on the end of one of the beds. From there I could see the pictures on her monitor but couldn't read the words.

“Tell me what you're doing,” I said.

“Googling Churchill, New Hampshire,” she mumbled. A minute later she said, “Hm. The town doesn't even have a Web site.”

“Should it?”

“Most towns do.”

“Too small, huh?”

“Not necessarily,” she said. “A lot of towns with populations under a thousand have very nice Web sites.”

“Too backward, then.”

“Or poor,” she said. “Or stubborn, or indifferent.”

I watched the images and colors change on her monitor as she popped up Web sites.

“Would you mind getting me a beer?” said Evie.

“It would be my honor.”

I went downstairs, snagged two bottles of Long Trail from the refrigerator, popped their tops, and took them upstairs.

I put one of them on Evie's desk and resumed my seat on the bed.

“Interesting,” she said.

“What?”

She swiveled around in her chair, picked up her beer bottle, and took a long swig. “Churchill, New Hampshire,” she said, “is a very old town with a long history. A crucial battle in the French and Indian War was fought there. In the nineteenth century, it had a big lumber mill that employed a couple hundred people, mostly Canadians. They were running pulp down the Skiprood River through Churchill as recently as the nineteen-fifties. The paper company had a factory on the river there.”

“Sounds like your typical old northern New England village,” I said. “Run down and worn out.”

She nodded. “When the paper company shut down, it's as if the town died. As near as I can determine, aside from a gun shop, a boat builder, a café, an auto-body shop, a gas station, and a few dairy farms, there's not much enterprise in Churchill.”

“So what do nine hundred citizens do?”

“Work somewhere else, I guess.” She took another gulp of beer. “Raise cows. Grow corn. Collect welfare checks and food stamps. The question remains. What was Dana Wetherbee doing there?”

 

Before I left for the office the next morning—Friday—I called Gordon Cahill.

Cahill was the best private investigator I knew. Over the years I'd hired him to do some jobs for me, typically researching financial records for clients who were in the middle of contentious divorces. You might hide an asset or two from the IRS, but you couldn't hide it from Gordie Cahill.

He used to do surveillance and missing-persons and bodyguard work, but a couple of years earlier—while tracking down a client's husband for me, in fact—some bad guys smashed his leg with the blunt end of an axe and locked him up in their cellar. By the time I found him and got him to a hospital, the infection had nearly killed him, and as a condition of remaining married to him, his wife demanded that he quit the business.

Gordie hated that idea, but he loved his wife, and they ended up compromising, as functional couples do. Gordie, they agreed, could keep his business, but he'd stick to the office and restrict his sleuthing to computer and telephone work.

As it turned out, the whole issue was moot. Gordie ended up with a chronically aching leg and a severe limp. He leaned heavily on his cane and hired freelancers to do his legwork. Gordie always made a joke out of the word “legwork.”

He liked to compare himself to Nero Wolfe, Rex Stout's famously sedentary detective. He called his freelancers “Archies.”

When he answered the phone, I said, “It's Brady. I got a little job for you. Interested?”

“How little?”

“I don't know,” I said. “For you, it's probably easy. For me it'd be impossible. I want to put names and faces and places and dates on a logo.”

“Sounds like fun,” he said. “What kind of logo?”

“A company logo, I assume. It looks like a pair of bears. A big one and a little one. I saw it on the side of a panel truck.”

“I'll need more than that, my man.”

“I can give you a sketch.”

“No words?” he said.

“There were words,” I said, “but I didn't catch them.”

“That's good,” he said. “Words would make it too easy. You want to fax me that sketch?”

“I can drop it off on my way to the office.”

“Even better,” he said. “I've got the coffee, you bring the donuts. Glazed or jelly. One of each, preferably.”

“That's a deal. I'll be there in an hour.”

“Hey,” he said, “you're a big fisherman, right?”

I found myself smiling. Gordie loved to inflict bad puns on his friends, and I suspected one of them was coming at me. “Sure,” I said. “I'm a very big fisherman. Why do you ask?”

“Well,” he said, “this buddy of mine, guy name of Crockett, he's like you, a fanatical fisherman. So he's telling me how he's out bass fishing in his rowboat one afternoon last August and he accidentally drops his wallet overboard. He's anchored in shallow water, so he leans over the side, hoping he can spot the wallet so he can reach down and grab it, or maybe snag it with the treble hooks on one of his lures. So Crock's shading his eyes and peering down into the water and he sees this big orange carp swim along and pick up the wallet in its mouth. Next thing Crock knows, another carp swims over and grabs the wallet away from the first one. So carp number one starts chasing after carp number two, and then a third carp comes along, and Crock's poor old wallet is going back and forth between those fish like a volleyball.” He paused. “So he's telling me about this, and—”

“Gordie,” I said, “I'm warning you.”

“Crock,” he said as if I hadn't spoken, “says to me, Gordie, he says, you should've seen it.” He paused. Then, “It was carp-to-carp walleting down there.”

“You are a seriously disturbed person,” I said.

“See you in an hour,” he said. “Don't forget the donuts.”

 

Gordon Cahill's office used to be on St. Botolph Street around the corner from Symphony Hall, where he rented a dingy second-floor suite over a Thai restaurant. He welcomed the shabbiness and the pungent odors of Thai cooking that wafted up from below, he claimed, because they nauseated him and encouraged him to get out of the office and onto the streets, where the action was.

After his accident, out of deference to his gimpy leg and his wife's ultimatums, he moved to a first-floor storefront on Exeter Street between Boylston and Commonwealth. Donna, Gordie's wife, helped decorate the new office. She installed comfortable furniture, divided the open space with movable partitions, hung watercolor seascapes on the walls, painted it in orange and tan earth tones, and created a workplace for a man who could no longer roam the streets.

It was bright and airy and altogether cheerful, and so was Gordie when I walked in. “Hooray,” he said. “The donut man.”

I plopped the bag of donuts onto his desk. He ripped into it, fished out a glazed, and took a giant bite. “Pour us some coffee, why don't you.” He pointed what was left of his donut at the aluminum urn on the table in the corner.

I poured two mugfuls and brought them back to Gordie's desk.

“So lemme see this bear thing,” he mumbled around a mouthful of glazed donut.

I unfolded the sketch I'd made and put it in front of him.

He looked at it and laughed. “This is supposed to be bears?”

“It's pretty much what I remember the logo looked like,” I said. “When I saw it, I thought they were bears. What else could they be?”

“You don't have to be defensive,” he said. “Maybe they're wolverines or a groundhogs or something.”

“What do wolverines look like?”

“How the hell should I know,” he said. “I'm a city boy.”

“They were bears,” I said.

He squinted at my sketch, then touched it with his finger. “And this here, these squiggles, that's where the writing was?”

“Across the bottom. Yes. It was fancy writing. Cursive, like handwriting. Not printing.”

“But you don't remember what it said, huh?”

“Look,” I said, “I only saw it once. Just a glimpse, really. It was night, the street was poorly lit. What the hell do you want?”

“Nothing. I wasn't being critical. It's actually an excellent sketch. You're a talented artist, no doubt about it. If you gave me any more detail, there'd be no challenge.”

I rolled my eyes.

“I'll give you a call when I've got something for you,” he said.

“When might that be?”

Gordie shrugged. “Sometime today. Later this morning if we're lucky. I got a couple other things to clean up first.” He pulled another donut out of the bag and took a big bite. Then he wiped his mouth with a napkin, put his forearms on his desk, and leaned forward. “So these two frogs are sitting beside a pond—”

“Must you?” I said.

“This'll just take a minute,” he said. “It's a pretty summer's day and these frogs are crouching there on their lily pads, their long tongues flicking in and out, finding plenty of bugs to eat, basking in the warm sunshine, living the good amphibian life, and one frog turns to the other frog and says, You know, Charlie, time's sure fun when you're having flies.”

I got the hell out of there.

 

Gordie called a little after noontime. “I got some information for you if you want it,” he said.

“Of course I do.”

“It'll cost you a ham and Swiss on pumpernickel, hot mustard, dill pickle.”

“You want something to drink?”

“Nah. I got a fridge full of drinks.”

“I'll stop at the deli,” I said. “Be there in half an hour or so.”

Gordie's office was just a short walk across Copley Square from mine. I took a detour to Manny's deli on Boylston and got us both a ham and Swiss. When I got to Gordie's, I clomped the slush off my boots, hung my coat on the hook beside the door, and put the bag of sandwiches on his desk. Gordie was peering at his computer monitor. He didn't bother looking up. “Grab me a Dr Pepper,” he said, gesturing at the minifridge against the wall near the coffee urn. “Help yourself.”

I got a Pepsi for myself, a Dr Pepper for Gordie, took them over to his desk, and sat down.

He swiveled around in his chair and grinned at me. “Don't suppose you want to hear about the baby who was born without a torso or limbs, do you?”

“No. Sounds sick.”

He nodded. “Sure. It is. Later, maybe.” He took his sandwich out of the bag, unfolded the waxed paper, and bit into it. With his other hand, he shuffled through some papers and pushed one of them across his desk to me. “That logo. Something like this?”

The logo I'd seen on the side of the panel truck was printed on the sheet of paper. It was in the shape of an oval. The bears, I was pleased to see, more-or-less resembled those in the sketch I'd made from my memory. They were crouching there with a couple of pine trees in the background.

Curving under the bears were the words “Ursula Laboratories Cambridge, Massachusetts.”

“That's the one,” I said. “Ursula, huh? That's how you tracked it down?”

“Google needs words,” he said. “I tried plain old bear, bruin, Kodiak bear, brown bear, black bear, polar bear, grizzly bear, panda bear, koala bear, Winnie-the-Pooh bear, teddy bear. Got millions of hits, of course, which I had to plow through. To no avail. So then I tried
ursa
,
ursus
,
ursine
, like that.” He arched his eyebrows at me.

“Latin for bear,” I said.

“Yes. And lo, Ursula popped up, and there you are.”

“But this place is in Cambridge,” I said. “I'm positive those were New Hampshire plates on that truck.”

“They did business in Cambridge,” said Gordie, “but actually, Ursula Laboratories was a New Hampshire corporation.”

“Aha,” I said. “The New Hampshire connection.”

“You can incorporate anywhere, you know,” Gordie said, “and do business anywhere. It's not necessarily a connection at all. Most likely, all it means is that their lawyers thought being a New Hampshire corporation was favorable tax-wise.”

“And they registered their truck in New Hampshire for the same reason?”

He shrugged. “I don't think it works the same way.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Did you say it
was
a New Hampshire corporation? Past tense?”

“Yes I did,” he said. “Urusula Laboratories was incorporated in June of 1996 and closed down in October of 2002.”

“Closed down? Or moved?”