Voodoo Ridge (6 page)

“Sure. Why not?” Savannah slowly unwrapped the box, careful not to tear the paper, as all women inexplicably do.

Inside was a night light. Embossed on the plastic lens was a full-color rendition of Orville and Wilbur Wright.

“Their eyes light up when you plug it in,” Marlene said. “We got a whole bunch of ’em on eBay for next to nothing. Isn’t it beautiful?”

Savannah wasn’t sure how to respond.

I managed a persuasive smile. And then, if only to wow my ex-wife with my civility, I added, “Thanks for such a lovely gift, Marlene.”

Savannah seemed duly impressed.

C
HAD SPREAD
a copy of the San Francisco-area FAA aeronautical chart on a long wooden conference table in the pilots’ lounge. I pointed to the location where I’d spotted what I assumed was wreckage.

“And you’re sure that that’s where it was?” Deputy Kyle Woo said.

“Affirmative.”

Woo leaned over the map, studying it and jotting notes in a black leather binder. He was Asian-American, stocky, in his early thirties. The pumped muscles under his tan uniform shirt told me he was a power weight lifter. His insulated nylon sheriff’s jacket matched the deep green of his tactical pants. A .40-caliber Glock rode on his right hip.

“I used to go camping up there off of Chalmers Peak all the time,” Chad said. “I’m real familiar with that area. Saw a porcupine up near there once. I’m on this game trail and the dude walks right out in front of me, like, no big deal. Didn’t even look at me or nothing. I thought at first maybe it was a wolverine or a beaver or some such, but nope, it wasn’t. It was a damn porcupine. Can you believe that?”

Woo looked up at the kid from his note-taking and said, “Pretty weird.” His dark, narrow eyes betrayed zero emotion and seemed to miss nothing.

“Yup, pretty weird,” Chad said. He seemed nervous under the deputy’s gaze. “Well, anyway, I’m outta here. Started work at six this morning. So, unless there’s anything else I can do for you gentlemen . . .”

“I think we’ve got it under control,” Woo said.

“Cool, cool. Well, enjoy the rest of your day.”

Chad turned and nearly collided with a large man with a ragged haircut who reminded me a little of Fred Flintstone. He was carrying an oversized soda cup with a straw in it and a food bag from McDonald’s.

“What’re you still doing hanging around here, Chad Lovejoy? You were supposed to be off shift an hour ago.”

“I was just—”

“You were just stealing my money, is what you were doing,” the man said, cutting him off. “I’m not paying you overtime. How many times I gotta tell you that?”

“Fine. I’m leaving.”

“You do that. But before you do, there’s a couple boxes in the back of my station wagon. I want you to move them into the supply room.”

“You’re the boss,” Chad said as he left, shooting an anxious glance in the direction of Deputy Woo, who was still writing in his notepad. “I’ll get right on it.”

Chad’s boss was decked out in tan Dockers and a white, oxford-cloth dress shirt, over which he wore a blue, Northface ski parka embossed with the Summit Aviation Services corporate logo. His dour sneer suggested he was not happy at the sight of Deputy Woo.

“So, what’s going on?” He plopped his burger bag on the table along with a fat key ring. Attached to the ring was a small metal silhouette of a tailless Australian shepherd dog.

Woo barely gave the man a glance.

“This is Gordon Priest,” the deputy said. “Mr. Priest is the manager here at Summit Aviation. He’s suing me because I cited his sixteen-year-old daughter for minor in possession.”

“She has
one
lousy beer and you treat her like it’s her third strike.”

Woo kept his calm. “Mr. Logan’s a transient pilot. He thinks he may have observed a downed airplane while he was flying in this morning.”

“Welcome.” Priest unwrapped a Big Mac and devoured half of it in one bite. “What kind of plane was it?”

“Couldn’t tell. All I saw was what looked like a section of a wing.”

“The Civil Air Patrol routinely notifies us of any missing or overdue planes,” Priest said, a bit of lettuce clinging to his lower lip. “Same goes for any ELT signals anywhere in northern California and western Nevada, and we haven’t gotten any of those in a long time.”

Not everybody files a flight plan, which requires a pilot to list, among other information, the estimated time of arrival at his intended destination. If he’s late getting there, the FAA will begin looking for him in short order. Without a flight plan on file, nobody will come looking unless someone reports that plane missing, or saw it go down.

Moreover, not all emergency locator transmitters, which are designed to automatically trigger after a plane crashes, will prompt rescue teams to swing into action. The problem is that most older airplanes are equipped with transmitters that broadcast emergency signals on a frequency no longer monitored by orbiting satellites. In other words, if what I’d seen was, in fact, a missing airplane, there was a good possibility that nobody in officialdom even knew about it. If injured souls were on board, it was imperative to reach the crash site as quickly as possible.

“Where’d you see this supposed wreck?” Priest said, polishing off his Big Mac and unwrapping a second.

I showed him on the chart.

He frowned. “I haven’t heard of any airplanes going down in that area in all the time I’ve been working here. You ask me, if it
is
a plane, it’s probably been up there for years, and it’s already been reported. Happens all the time, old wrecks getting reported as new.”

“I hope you’re right. You appear to be a man who usually is.”

He was too busy stuffing his face to acknowledge the dig.

Woo asked me if I’d be willing to accompany him on a drive up to the mountains, to give him better perspective of where to begin looking. I said yes. Anyone with any sense of responsibility would’ve done the same.

The nuptials would have to wait.

S
AVANNAH SAID
she more than understood, though I’m not sure she did. Our suite at the romantic Victorian B&B that she’d found online, she told me over the phone, didn’t disappoint. We had an antique poster bed with a view of the lake and our own private deck. She wanted to know when I’d be back.

I looked across the center console shotgun mount of Deputy Woo’s Jeep Wrangler, with the sheriff’s star on the doors, and relayed Savannah’s query to Woo as he and I rode west out of South Lake Tahoe on US 50, toward Echo Summit.

“Depends on what we see,” Woo said. “Probably around five.”

“The marriage license office closes at five,” Savannah said.

“We’ll pick up the license tomorrow. What’s one more day? No big deal, right?”

“Right.” She was disappointed, but trying not to sound it.

“I’m not changing my mind between now and then, Savannah. I’m not bailing, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I know. It’s just that . . . I had everything all planned out for tonight. I wanted it to be . . . special.”

“It’ll still be special tomorrow night.”

“Let’s hope so.” She cleared her throat. “See you tonight.”

“You can count on it.”

I slid my phone into the front pocket of my jeans and gazed out at the passing landscape: rocky escarpments to the right and a sheer drop-off into steep canyons to our left. Traffic was sparse.

“You getting married?” Woo said.

“Remarried. We split a few years back. Decided to give it another go.”

He said nothing, his dark, expressionless eyes fixed on the road ahead.

I asked him if he was married.

“No.”

“Girlfriend?”

“No.”

“Boyfriend?”

Long silence.

“You always this chatty, Deputy Woo?”

The right side of his mouth turned upward a couple of millimeters into what I gathered was a smile. That was all I got out of him for the next ten miles or so until the cliffs to the north gave way to dense stands of lodge pole pines on either side of the highway. Woo flipped a switch, activating the flashing red and blue police lights atop his Wrangler, as we came up on a break in the trees, then pulled off the road, onto the shoulder. From under his seat he produced a pair of binoculars.

“Where you pointed to on the map,” Woo said, “it’s up there.”

He checked his mirrors for oncoming cars before getting out. I joined him on a low berm just off the road, affording an unobstructed view of the mountainous terrain to the north. The air was crisp, approaching brisk. I wished I’d thought to bring a warmer coat.

“That’s Mount San Carlos on the left and Chalmers Peak on the right,” the deputy said, pointing, “and that area between is where you said you saw whatever it was you saw.”

He handed me the binoculars. It wasn’t difficult to orient myself. Through the magnified lenses, I clearly recognized the bow of craggy, barren rocks linking the two mountains, below which I’d first spotted from the air what I was increasingly convinced were the remains of an airplane. Beyond that, I could make out nothing identifiable other than trees; the forest was too thick.

Woo estimated we were about six miles from the site as the crow flies. He knew of an unpaved logging road that wended about halfway there. The remaining miles would have to be negotiated on foot.

“It’ll be sunset in a couple of hours,” he said. “Search and rescue can head up first thing in the morning. I’m sure they could use your company.”

“Why not fly? Doesn’t the sheriff’s department have a helicopter? There could be injured people up there.”

The sheriff did, in fact, have a helicopter, Woo said, but the conditions of its use in tight budgetary times were extremely restrictive. Unconfirmed reports of downed airplanes apparently fell outside those limits.

“That’s all I can do, Mr. Logan.” He turned and trudged back down the slope toward his Wrangler, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his jacket.

I scanned the mountainsides with the binoculars one last time. There was really nothing to see beyond those towering peaks and a forest so deep and silent as to be almost unreal.

I’m not a big believer in extrasensory perception. People who claim powers of clairvoyance are con artists half the time, by my experience, and the other half, fruitcakes. But I couldn’t shake the powerful sense that
something
was up there, beneath those trees, waiting for me, and that whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

FOUR

J
ohnny and Gwen Kavitch operated Tranquility House, the meticulously kept, Victorian-style bed-and-breakfast where Savannah had booked us a bungalow. They were unbelievably nice in a laid-back, Grateful Dead kind of way. I was immediately suspicious of them.

It was late afternoon. The four of us were commiserating in their parlor. A full-sized concert harp was propped in one corner. The Kavitches had laid out a spread of cheeses on an antique sideboard, paired with bottles of what I assumed was good wine. So far as I could tell, we were their only guests. At 300 bucks a night, there was no mystery as to why.

Gwen was a gaunt blonde gone gray with a world-class overbite and a pair of those shaded, prescription glasses that are supposed to lighten indoors but never quite do, leaving the vague impression that the wearer is either high or hung over. She’d spent nearly thirty years as a special education teacher in San Jose, she told Savannah and me, before budget cuts forced her to take early retirement.

“We’re just so pleased you chose to share your special occasion with us,” she said. “It’s just so
awesome.”

Gwen said “awesome” a lot, a habit that I found less than awesome.

Johnny was even more pallid than his wife. Garbed in Mexican sandals, faded corduroys and a gray “Old Guys Rule” T-shirt, he rocked a wispy goatee and a shaved head that reminded me more than a little of a hardboiled egg.

Savannah complimented them on their selection of paint color for the parlor’s nine-foot walls.

“It’s called ‘fallen oak leaf,’ ” Johnny Kavitch said. “Isn’t it gorgeous?”

“Looks pretty much like tan to me,” I said.

Savannah gave me a look. There was a lull in the conversation. Being a whiz at small talk, I took note of the harp leaning in the corner.