Voodoo Ridge (32 page)

The fact that Kiddiot could catch anything, given his weight and lack of smarts, was surprising. But actually eating a snake? Now,
that
is truly stunning. The cat wouldn’t eat anything.

Mrs. Schmulowitz reminded me that the Denver Broncos, my favorite team, were playing on Monday night. She’d be making her usual brisket, whether I was there or not.

“No pressure,” she said. “Plus I’m thinking about baking a pie.”

“I don’t recall you ever baking anything, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”

“Last time I even thought about baking was forty-five years ago. Funny story: my dishwasher breaks, so I call a plumber. What a hunk this guy is! Tightens this, loosens that. Tells me no charge. ‘No charge?’ I tell him. ‘I gotta pay you something.’ So he tells me I can either bake him a cake or have sex with him. My third husband, may he rest in peace, comes home after work that night. I tell him what the plumber said. He’s horrified. ‘So what kind of cake did you bake him?’ he wants to know. I tell him, ‘What do I look like? Betty Crocker?’ ”

I knew my landlady was only trying to cheer me up. I appreciated her effort. But the last thing I felt like doing was laughing.

“Was he upset?”

“Was who upset?”

“Your third husband.”

“Was he upset? What’re you, kidding me? The man didn’t talk to me for six months. But what’re you gonna do? You can’t go back, right?”

Special operators are taught to backtrack when they’re in pursuit of a target and they’ve lost contact. In the haste of the hunt, little things often get missed along the trail. A broken tree branch. An overturned stone. Small clues.

You can’t go back.

I realized I had to. I needed to double back, up to the mountains, to the crash site where my life had taken a turn toward hell.

“Thank you, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”

“For what, bubby?”

“Being my compass.”

T
HE RUTTED
logging road upon which I’d driven in with Deputy Woo to rendezvous with the sheriff’s rescue team was now snow-packed and all but impassable. I drove as far as I could, fishtailing and grinding gears, traversing drifts, before getting stuck seemed likely.

I got out and walked, passing the same small, moss-roofed cabin I’d noticed that morning. The beat-up pickup that I remembered being parked out front was gone.

Forty-five exhausting, sweat-drenched minutes later, my unwaterproofed hiking shoes and feet cold and wet, I reached the trailhead. Without snowshoes, I knew that the climb up and back would easily take all day. The leg I’d scraped up after falling on my first ascent to the crash site was throbbing. I didn’t care. I was trained to adapt and overcome, “see the hill, take the hill,” no matter the odds.

Up the trail I climbed.

No one ever said being mission-oriented was synonymous with being smart.

I made it about two miles, fighting my way through snow that was at times waist-high.

Then I fell into the stream.

Anyone could’ve made the same mistake—losing their footing on slippery rocks and tumbling into icy, chest-high currents. That I did was more annoying initially to me than it was alarming. I slapped the water, angry at myself, waded to shore, and pulled myself out, drenched head to toe. Almost immediately, I began to shiver.

Shivering is the human body’s first automatic defense against the cold. Shivering causes muscle contractions, which create heat to maintain homeostasis, or a constant internal temperature. I remembered a lesson I’d learned in escape and evasion training my first year at the academy: in water approaching fifty degrees, death can occur within the first hour of immersion. The water I’d fallen into was substantially colder than that.

My teeth were chattering uncontrollably. In another few minutes, I would begin to lose muscle coordination and have difficulty thinking straight. Drowsy disorientation would set in. I would sit down along the trail and, as they say, that would be that.

My truck, I knew, was too far away, and I couldn’t very well call for help; even if there’d been adequate reception, I’d forgotten to take my phone with me, leaving it on the passenger seat when I’d started out on foot, up the trail. I needed to find someplace where I could strip down and warm up—and I needed to do it fast. There was really only one hope: the cabin I’d passed earlier.

By the time I got there, I was stumbling, willing myself forward one numb foot at a time, fighting with every waning ounce of willpower the urge to stop and rest.

I staggered onto the cabin’s small, rough-hewn front porch and pounded my fist on the wooden door.

“Hello? Anybody here? Hello?”

No answer. A window with four small panes flanked the door. I turned away from it, shattering the lowest pane with my elbow, reached my hand in, and turned the deadbolt.

The cabin was dim and warm, the air sweet with the musk of pinewood. Embers glowed in a rock fireplace big enough that I could’ve climbed into it. Split logs were stacked high on the right side.

I threw two logs on, stoking the glowing coals with a charred iron poker, and stripped naked as quickly as I could. Standing there, the flames restoring me, I glanced around at my surroundings:

The cabin was essentially one large room. There was a small Formica-topped dining table and two spindly, ladder-back chairs. A green swayback couch. A sagging La-Z-Boy recliner positioned close beside the fireplace. A galley kitchen with filthy dishes piled high in a metal, pump-handle sink. A rumpled twin bed with a brass headboard. Foreign policy magazines and engineering textbooks scattered and piled everywhere.

The logs hissed and popped, shooting embers onto the blackened slate hearth and occasionally, my legs. I didn’t care. I could feel the blood returning to my limbs, the cognitive function to my brain. I closed my eyes and began to drift amid the fragrant, delicious warmth of the fireplace.

Until the front door flew open.

TWENTY-TWO

T
here’s a reason why professionals use short-barrel assault weapons when breaching buildings. A short barrel allows for greater mobility in close quarters; the shooter is less likely to get his weapon hung up in a doorway or have some enterprising bad guy snatch it out of his hands as he comes around a corner.

The man who came in shooting at me obviously hadn’t gotten the memo.

Armed with an old lever-action Winchester, the kind of rifle you see in every John Ford Western ever made, he came storming in, firing wildly from the hip.

Cock.
Blam.

The first round ricocheted with a spark off the rock fireplace and took out an old brass floor lamp, missing me by mere inches.

Cock.
Blam.

The second round was considerably farther off-target, knocking a barn owl, stuffed and mounted, off the wall.

Cock—

I reached from behind the door before he could get off a third shot, clamped my hand around the wooden forestock, and relieved him of the Winchester.

“Old” didn’t begin to describe him. “Ancient” did. He was bald but for the thatch of gray hairs protruding wildly from each of his Dumbo-sized ears. Baggy eyes. Yellowed teeth, missing in places. An insulated, one-piece army surplus snowsuit hung on his narrow frame like a kid wearing daddy’s pajamas.

“Give me back my gun.”

“So you can shoot me? I don’t think so.”

“It’s my gun and you’re in my house.” He was looking at me funny, up and down. “What are you, some kind of sexual deviant?”

Then I remembered: I was in the buff.

“Fell in a stream, up the trail,” I said. “Had to warm up before I froze.”

“So you break into my cabin?”

“My apologies. I’ll pay for the window.”

“You’re darned right you will.”

I ejected all of the Winchester’s remaining cartridges, the shells clattering on the wood floor, leaned the rifle next to the fireplace, then proceeded to put my clothes back on.

“What’re you doing?” the old man.

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“It looks like you’re putting wet clothes back on.” He watched me ring out my socks. Water sizzled and hissed on the hearthstone. “Wait.”

He walked over, reached into a box beside the bed, and tossed me a dry, red flannel shirt, followed by blue jeans, and a rolled pair of socks, olive drab.

“I’d loan you some of my skivvies until yours dry out some,” he said, “but I’m not a weirdo.”

I thanked him for his kindness and put on his clothes while he propped a book against the pane of glass I’d broken, to keep out the cold.

“My name is Melvin Essex, by the way,” he said, “and I’m as old as the hills.”

“Cordell Logan. And I’m getting there.”

“That your truck down the road?”

“It is.”

“What’re you doing all the way up here in the middle of winter with no tire chains, no nothin’?”

I told him. Essex listened intently.

“You’ve had a rough go of it,” he said when I was done.

“I’ll live.”

“You hungry?”

“Now that you mention it . . .”

He had possum stew written all over him. Or fried squirrel. Something befitting a mountain man living the hermit’s life. But that wasn’t on the menu.

“Got some fresh croissants and a nice Brie. Just picked ’em up in town.”

“Works for me.”

He went outside to his truck and returned with a grocery bag, laying the food on the table, along with a quart of fresh-squeezed orange juice and two mismatched drinking glasses. We sat down and ate.

He told me he’d taught mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, and had been indicted at the height of the conflict in Vietnam for allegedly helping orchestrate an antiwar protest in which several police officers were injured. Investigators, he said, manufactured the case against him out of whole cloth. He was denied tenure. Within a year, he’d lost his job. He never found work again in academia and ended up on a General Motors assembly line in Flint, Michigan.

“I vowed after that I’d never talk to another liar with a badge as long as I lived, and I haven’t,” Essex said. “More juice?”

“No thanks.”

“It’s like when the sheriff’s department came around a couple weeks ago,” he said. “They wanted to know if I knew anything about that boy you said got killed up the trail. Sure, I could’ve told them what I saw. But I wasn’t about to.”

“What did you see, Professor?”

He slathered Brie on his second croissant and looked at me over his glasses.

“How do I know you’re not some undercover cop?”

“If I were, I probably would’ve shot you the second you came in here, blazing away with that saddle rifle of yours.”

“Could be you didn’t shoot me because you dropped your gun when you fell in that stream.”

“Could be I didn’t have a gun to begin with.”

“You’ve got cop eyes.”

I got up, walked over to my wet jeans, pulled out my FAA-issued pilot’s certificate from my wet wallet, and showed it to him.

“I’m a flight instructor.”

He studied the plastic, credit card-size certificate, chewing slowly, then nodded like I’d convinced him and handed it back to me.

“About ten o’clock the night before that boy died, I heard a car go by. Nobody comes up here that late. The engine sounded kind of strange. A dull, rotational knock, like he had a loose main bearing. I didn’t bother getting out of bed. Then in the middle of the night, I hear the same engine. Now he’s coming back down the road, and he’s coming fast. This time, I get up. There’s a good moon, and I see him out the window: a van. Green.”

I stared into the fire, my memory flashing on the high school kid who’d been shoveling snow outside his family’s house the morning Savannah disappeared from the B&B. I remembered his name—Billy. He’d called later to say he’d seen a woman who looked like Savannah trying to escape from a man parked outside a Mexican restaurant in South Lake Tahoe.

The man, Billy said, was driving a green van.

We chatted for another few minutes, mostly about airplanes and aeronautical engineering, with which the professor seemed endlessly fascinated, until my clothes and shoes were no longer wet but merely damp. They’d have to do. I changed out of Essex’s shirt, jeans, and socks, and into my own. My wallet held one twenty dollar bill. I tried to give it to him, to cover the cost of the window I’d broken, but he refused to take it.

“I’m happy my cabin was here for you. And, besides, I don’t get many visitors these days. I enjoyed the company.”

We shook hands.

“Peace, love, and rock and roll,” he said, flashing me a V-shaped peace sign as I started down the road, toward my truck.

“Groovy.”

Was the green van that Essex had observed after Chad Lovejoy was shot to death the same green van that Billy, the snow-shoveling, snowboarding teenager, said he’d seen outside the Mexican restaurant? The same green van from which a woman who Billy said resembled Savannah tried to escape?

I didn’t know, but I most definitely intended to find out.