“Did you?”
“No. I haven't spoken with her since her check ride.”
“I wonder why she didn't come back.”
“Who knows? Money problems, maybe.”
Or maybe she'd been too busy harassing me.
Grimly glanced at her watch. “I've got a lesson in ten minutes.”
“And I've got to be off too.”
“Where?”
“Paradise.”
She stared at me for a few seconds, then laughed. “Oh, the
town!
You'll love the airport—it's on a bluff. You land uphill, slows you down nicely. And when you leave, you take off downhill, soar right off the edge of the bluff. If you run into Bulldog, say hey for me.”
“Bulldog? Who on earth is that?”
“One of the guys. You'll know when you see him, and he's sure to find
you.”
The Sacramento Valley lay below me, flat and checker-boarded, with the occasional renegade road disturbing the otherwise regular pattern. Ahead and to my right was Sutter Butte, the 1000-foot landmark that made getting lost out here virtually impossible. From 5500 feet I tracked my course by the small towns and huge farms, grain elevators and rivers—and planned what I'd do when I arrived in Lee D’Silva's hometown.
But other thoughts kept intruding: She'd gotten basic details about me from the interview I'd found tucked into her paperback book. She'd taken flying lessons from a woman instructor at the same airport I had. She'd displayed a near-obsession with flying a tail-dragger. But all of this had happened
before
my turndown letter triggered the harassment.
Had the woman been trying to
be
me? What would have happened if she'd come to work at my agency? The possibilities were too awful to contemplate.
The city of Oroville sprawled to my right now; beyond it was the big dam, the lake silvery in the sun. For a moment I let my eyes sweep the clear sky, looking for other traffic. Then I took the airport facilities directory from the side pocket, thumbed it open to Paradise, and spread it on the sectional on my knee.
Unicom, 122.8. I tuned the radio to it. Elevation, 1300 MSL. Runway, 2700 x 40. Land uphill runway 35; take off 17.
I was over the campus of Butte College now, and the land was beginning to rise. The mesa was dead ahead, the town nestled in pine-covered hills beyond it. And there was the steep drop-off at the foot of the runway.
This
was
going to be fun. A few minutes of fun, anyway.
As I was taxiing along the runway I spotted “the guys.” Every small airport has them: three or four weather-beaten men who probably learned to fly during World War II, leaning up against a hangar and watching the planes land and take off. From the deserted look of the field, they'd had a long wait between arrivals. I raised a hand as I went by, and they stared— “What's a
girl
doing alone in one of those?”—before they waved in return. There's sometimes a generation gap in the world of aviation, but in the end it doesn't matter; I knew I'd already earned the guys’ respect by making a good landing.
Beyond the row of hangars I saw a limited number of tie-downs, all occupied. I parked in front of a Cherokee that would never see the skies again unless somebody bought it a new prop, got out, and wedged a couple of chocks under the Citabria's wheels. When I glanced back at the hangars, the guys had moved into a circle and were holding a conference.
I looked the other way, saw an office with a pay phone and a sign:
FLIGHT INSTRUCTOR ON DUTY
. When I went over there, though, I found it closed. Other than that, there was nothing but a weathered picnic bench under a tree and a small building containing the rest rooms. I headed back to the plane to check the facilities directory, which had given a number for a taxi service in Paradise.
A pickup truck—once cream-colored but now speckled reddish brown by rust—was coming slowly toward me, one of the guys at its wheel. It stopped by the Citabria, and he got out: the short, beer-bellied one, whose face, on closer look, bore a startling resemblance to that of a bulldog. Apparently Grimly's pal had been elected to check out the strange woman.
“Morning,” he said in a twang straight out of a western movie.
“Morning. Okay to leave it there?”
“Piper's not going anyplace; owner's broke, and it is, too. You're fine there. Where you coming from?”
“Oakland, by way of Los Alegres.”
“The wife and I fly down to Los Alegres sometimes, have lunch at the diner. Oakland—it's gotten too crowded. I go by Bulldog, by the way.”
“I'm Sharon. And I've got a message for you: Sara Grimly says hey.”
Thus far he'd avoided eye contact—shy, I supposed. But when I mentioned Grimly, his face lit up and he looked directly at me. “Little Sara. Haven't seen her in a year now. She used to fly up here with her students, have a picnic lunch under the tree, then show them what it feels like to soar off the end of the bluff.” He laughed gruffly. “We always questioned the wisdom of feeding them
before
the demonstration. She at Los Alegres now?”
“Yes. Married, still instructing, and she bought herself a Mooney.”
“Good for her. You need transportation to town?”
“Actually, I do. Is there a rental-car agency in Paradise?”
“Couple of them. Tell you what—I've got to get home for lunch. The wife's making grilled cheese sandwiches, my favorite. I'll give you a lift, and you can fill me in on little Sara.”
My rental car was called an Aspire: ghastly purple with two missing hubcaps and well named, in that it made one aspire to a better vehicle. Not that I cared how it looked; it ran, and the agency staff had been friendly and helpful, providing both a map and use of a phone book and recommending a good motel and restaurant, in case I decided to stay over.
D’Silva was an unusual spelling, and there was only one listed—Harold, on Valley View Drive. I turned off Skyway, the wide commercial strip, and followed a winding road into a residential area where the homes sat on large lots, sheltered by tall ponderosa pines. The D’Silva place was a square two-story yellow frame house set far back at the end of a dirt driveway; unpruned rosebushes pushed their barren branches up all around it, and the house itself had a similar appearance of neglect; the lawn had gone to weeds. I parked and climbed up onto the deep front porch, but received no reply to my repeated knocks.
What now? Butte College, where D’Silva had earned her degree in police science.
I'd seen the college as I approached the airport, but at altitude hadn't been able to fully appreciate its pastoral setting. Tree-shaded, with plenty of open space covered in long wintergreen grass, it centered around a core of low brown buildings, some of graceful design with gently peaked copper roofs, others of the prefab variety. Signs along its roads advised of horse crossings. This was the new breed of California campus, and the students who moved unhurriedly about it seemed as relaxed as their surroundings.
D’Silva had given her former faculty adviser, Robert Field-stone, as a reference on her job application, and I'd spoken briefly with him to check it out. Now I located him in one of the prefabs at the south end of the campus and told him the same story I'd told Misty Tyree: Lee had come to work for me, gone out on an assignment, and failed to keep in contact.
Fieldstone—a tall man with wavy white hair who must have been approaching retirement age—looked so concerned that I immediately felt guilty for lying. He took off his pale-rimmed glasses, rubbed his eyes, and said, “Lee is so competent. I can't imagine why she'd lose contact with you—unless something very bad has happened to her.”
“That's why we're doing everything we can to trace her. Is the Harold D’Silva on Valley View Drive in Paradise her father?”
“Yes.”
“I stopped there, but no one was home. D'you know where he works?”
“I'm fairly sure he sold the family business and retired. At least, D’Silva Supplies—the big building-supply place on Clark Road—changed names several years ago.”
“Do you know Mr. D’Silva?”
“No, but a friend of mine lives across the street from him.”
“In case I can't contact Mr. D’Silva, may I have your friend's name?”
“Certainly—Ken Parrish. It's the cedar A-frame. His wife's name is Beth.”
I noted both, then said, “We talked about Lee a while back, but I wonder if there's anything more you can tell me.”
Fieldstone thought, replacing his glasses. “You know about her academic record—excellent. Everyone here thought highly of her; we were sure she'd go far. Do you know about her mother?”
“Only that Lee nursed her in her final illness.”
“Yes. The circumstances were so unfortunate. Lee was about to start a job with the county sheriff's department in Chico when her father begged her to stay home and help him with both her mother and the business. By the time her mother died, the department had put on a hiring freeze. Lee was devastated and decided to leave Paradise.”
“When was that?”
“Seven years ago. Maybe eight. Before the building-supply company changed hands, but not long before.”
“Did she keep in touch?”
“Not with anyone here at the college. Your call asking for a reference was the first I'd heard of her since she left. She had a best friend, though.” He thought, shook his head. “Sorry, I can't remember her name, but I've seen her recently. She has a business—Spin a Yarn, on Skyway. It's in a little strip mall north of the Ponderosa Pines Motel.”
I noted that too. “During the time Lee was helping out her father, did you see her?”
“A couple of times, in town. She seemed a very sad young woman.”
“Yet she stayed to the end.”
“Of course. Lee D’Silva was what in my day we called a good girl. A very good girl. She always did the right thing. Always.”
The tall, gray-haired man who answered the door at the D’Silva house seemed composed entirely of angles, some of them so sharp that the bone looked in danger of perforating his pale skin. His eyes were sunk deep in their sockets, and around his mouth were carved deep lines of discontent. When he acknowledged that he was Harold D’Silva, I showed him my identification and began relating the story about his daughter that now—by virtue of retelling—I halfway believed myself. But D’Silva quickly cut me off in midsentence.
“I have no daughter named Lee,” he said. “I have no children.”
“Her former faculty adviser at the college told me—”
“He's mistaken.”
I studied D’Silva, noted the tic at the corner of his right eye. Most people have a telltale physical reaction when they're lying about an emotionally charged subject.
“You
are
the Harold D’Silva who used to own the building supply company?”
The tic became more pronounced. “… Yes.”
“Perhaps you don't understand the seriousness of the situation, sir. Your daughter's in danger, perhaps of losing her life.”
He looked at me for a long moment, then shut the door. Through it I heard a dry, rasping cry of anguish.
Ken Parrish, D’Silva's neighbor, was chopping wood in the side yard of his A-frame. When he saw me, he anchored the ax in a stump and flashed me a smile of welcome. “You must be Ms. McCone. Bob Fieldstone said you might stop by. The old man turn you away?” He motioned at the house across the street.
“Yes. He claims he has no daughter.”
“Bitter old bastard.” Parrish took off his plaid cap and ran his hand through perspiration-soaked red hair.
“Why is he bitter?” I asked.
“Why? Who knows? Probably because Lee decided to have a life and moved away after her mother died. She put up with a lot—a
whole
lot—all those years.”
“Can you be more specific?”
Parrish hesitated, keen blue eyes moving toward the house across the road. “Raking up old dirt—will that really help you find her?”
“In a situation like this, any detail may lead to a solution.”
“Well, all right, then. I was the one who opened that line of inquiry, anyway.” He grinned. “Now I've gone and done it—revealed myself as a lawyer.”
“I work for lawyers a lot of the time.”
“Where?”
“San Francisco, among other places.”
“I was an assistant D.A. in Oakland for fifteen years. Now I've got a private practice here. Wills, even divorces, they're a lot cleaner than the cases I used to try, and the air's cleaner too.”
“About Lee…”
“I know, I talk too much. Chop a lot of wood, too—anything to keep from going to the office on a beautiful day like this. Okay, I'll put it plainly: what Lee put up with was a drunken mother and a father who wouldn't acknowledge and deal with the problem. Ladies weren't supposed to drink all day and pass out in front of their favorite soap opera, so it couldn't be happening in his household. Hal was a successful businessman, president of Rotary, pillar of the church and community. Old story: he covered up, made Lee cover up too. Her function in that family was to calm the turmoil, run the household, and tend to Mommy when she was too stewed to take care of herself, which was most of the time.”
“She didn't rebel against that?”
“She did her job. I don't know about the inside of the house—nobody got that far—but the outside was perfection. Those rosebushes weren't always the way they are now. And Lee was perfection: well dressed, well groomed, always had a smile for everybody. She covered damned well.”
“But you knew what was going on.”
“Well, sure. Beth and I have a good view of that house. And in a quiet area like this, voices carry. We'd hear Marge screaming and slurring, Hal muttering and avoiding, and Lee always soothing them. When we first moved here, Lee was in tenth grade. We saw what was happening and tried to be good neighbors. Then one day Beth found Marge passed out in the yard. She hauled her inside, put her to bed, waited to talk with Hal. He told her that Marge—who reeked of gin—had a hypoglycemic condition that caused her occasionally to go into shock. Beth used to be a nurse; she wasn't buying that. So Hal showed her the door and never spoke to either of us again.”
“And Lee?”
“She acted the same, down to the home-baked cookies at Christmastime, but her smile was brittle. Mom's secret was not to be shared.”