At the mention of the young woman who disappeared, Laska had hung her head. But at the mention of Rufus Porter, she started marching off toward the highway again. "I don't know anything about it," she said. "And if I never hear about Idaho again, it will be too soon. Now, if you don't mind, I need to hitch a ride back to town so I can go to work."
"How about I give you a ride back?" Marlene asked. "Saves you the trouble, I get to ask you a couple of questions; I'll drop you off at your house and then drive off into the sunset, you'll never see me again."
Marlene's rapid-fire speech brought a partial smile to Laska's lips. She looked down the highway. There were no cars in sight. "It can be a pretty tough time of year for hitchhiking," she conceded. "All the tourists are gone… Okay, you get to ask a few questions, I'll decide how to answer them, but then you leave me alone and forget you ever found me. Deal?"
"Deal."
The two women walked to the truck Marlene had rented. Stowing the board in the back, they got in and buckled up, and Marlene asked, "Does the name Maria Santacristina sound familiar?"
Laska looked out the window toward the ocean and didn't look back when she answered. "She was the girl who disappeared. I remember the newspaper stories that she was missing, but there wasn't much else. I didn't know her."
Marlene could almost feel the tension in the girl. "Why are you living here in Lincoln City? I mean, didn't you leave the beach to live in the Rocky Mountains?"
Laska half laughed and half snorted. "I went to Idaho because I knew that if I stayed in SoCal to go to school, or anywhere with an ocean and waves for that matter, I'd never go to class," she said. "So I chose the middle of the country. And I loved it. I was getting into snowboarding and backpacking."
"Then why back to the ocean?"
Laska sighed. "Because after what happened, I felt dirty all the time." The young woman's voice grew strained as she struggled to hold it together. "Only the ocean makes me feel clean. If I could, I'd stay in the water all of the time."
"Does it work?" Marlene asked.
"When I'm surfing, nothing else matters," Laska replied. "It's me, the waves, and my friends. I feel strong and good about myself. But at night, I still have to live with the memory and by morning I just feel dirty again."
"Do you have a boyfriend?"
Laska shook her head. "I was always a little shy around boys. Strange, huh, for a California beach girl. Anyway, I wanted the husband, kids, white picket fence-the whole enchilada. But now I really don't trust men, except my surfing buddies, and I'm just one of the guys to them."
Marlene turned off the highway and down the sandy road leading to Laska's house. It was now or never with the tough questions. "Why did you refuse to go forward with the charges against Porter?"
Laska was growing antsy as the ride drew near its end. "I didn't want to go through with the crap of a trial," she said. "It was all falling apart anyway-the evidence disappearing, people changing their stories, and then…well, and then it just wasn't worth it."
"Wasn't worth it? He raped you, didn't he?"
The young woman looked out at the ocean, her hand on the door handle as if she just wanted to get out and into the water. "Yes," she whispered at last. "He raped me."
"And you are going to let him get away with it?"
Angry again, Laska turned to face Marlene. "It's done. I just want to go on with my life and hope that someday I can forget. Going back to Idaho won't make it better."
Marlene ached for the girl, but she pushed on anyway. "What about the next girl he rapes, or maybe worse, if Maria Santacristina is also a victim?"
"And what about the protection I needed and didn't get," Laska shot back. "I'm sorry about whatever happened to Maria, but I have a life, too, and parents who have been threatened. Porter's crowd are not nice people."
"All the more reason to put him away," Marlene said as she pulled into the driveway of Laska's house.
Laska reached for the door handle. "I'm sorry. I'm scared and I want nothing to do with this anymore."
Marlene reached out and put a hand on Laska's arm. "Please, I'm not asking you to come back, but if there's anything you can tell me about Porter or what happened after you reported the rape, maybe it would help. Please, Maly…Maria's father sets a place for her at his table every night, and every morning he puts it back away until the next night. He's left her bedroom the way it was when she was a child. He can't move on until he finds her."
Laska pulled her arm away. Tears were streaming down her face as she jumped out of the truck and walked to the back to get her surfboard. She got halfway to the house before she stopped and looked up at the sky. Without turning, she said, "Wait here a minute," then walked swiftly to the house, leaned the surfboard next to the door, and went in.
Five minutes passed and Marlene was beginning to wonder if Laska was going to return when she came out of the cottage carrying an envelope. She walked around to the driver's side of the truck.
"This was sent to me after the evidence 'disappeared' from the police station," Laska said, and handed the envelope to Marlene. "Go ahead, open it."
Inside was a piece of white paper with a single typed line and a photograph. "Leave now or take a last ride," Marlene said, reading the paper. She set it aside carefully in order not to disturb any latent fingerprints and looked at the photograph beneath it. When she looked up again at Laska, her eyes glittered with rage. "Can I make a copy?"
Laska shook her head. "Take it, it's yours," she said. "I hope it helps. But either way, I'm done, okay? If you come back here again, I won't be here. And this time I'm going to be a lot harder to find."
"I understand," Marlene said. "I won't try to find you again." She looked out at the glimmering ocean. "I hope you find peace out there."
Laska nodded and smiled grimly. "Thanks. Me, too, if it's possible."
20
Marlene gasped as she stepped outside the sliding glass doors at Denver International Airport. The pilot had warned his passengers that the temperature on that Sunday in early March was "a balmy ten degrees below zero; button up." But looking at the bright blue skies and sun-drenched peaks beyond the windows had convinced her that the pilot was mistaken.
He wasn't. Pulling the edges of her coat around her cheeks, she was convinced that the exposed parts of her face were already frostbitten when an old Lincoln Continental pulled alongside the curb and honked. The driver's-side door opened and a round-faced man with a full white beard poked his head above the roof.
"Hop in, you must be freezing…unusual for the second week of March," he said, running around to the trunk and depositing her suitcase. "Sorry, can only offer you the backseat, my wife Connie's riding shotgun with me today. I wanted you two to meet so that she can see that you're way above my speed and can quit accusing me of having an affair whenever I run off to see you about a case."
Marlene laughed, climbed into the backseat, and introduced herself to the tall, angular woman sitting in the front passenger seat. "He's quite right," Connie Swanburg said. "Now that I see you, I know there's no way in hell you'd have anything to do with him." She leaned closer to Marlene and whispered, "Not that I would ever believe it anyway, but it does his ego good to play like I'm jealous every once in a while."
"What's that, dear?" Jack Swanburg asked as he plopped his round body into the driver's seat.