Gary doubted that this was going to end quickly.
Or well.
He had to force himself not to imagine what was happening to Joan right now.
“Call me if you learn anything,” Reyn told him. “You have my cell. And call me when you get back no matter what happens. I’ll see what I can find out here. I think I’ll check in with the cops, too. Just in case.”
“Thanks,” Gary said gratefully.
“You’d better get going.”
Cayucos was a picturesque little town on the hilly central coast, halfway between Morro Bay and Hearst Castle. A community so small that Gary was almost past it before he knew it was there, its main street was on a narrow stretch of land between the raised highway and the beach, hidden from view by a line of pine trees bordering the side of the road. It was only an unobtrusive sign near an off-ramp that alerted him to its location, and he pulled into the short left-turn lane, crossed the nonexistent southbound traffic, and headed down a winding, sloping road that led into town.
He passed a couple of oceanfront homes, a gas station, a gift shop. Slowing down at the first cross street, he looked to his right, toward the beach. The road ended less than half a block down, at the foot of a small and refreshingly uncommercialized pier, a narrow wooden platform that ended just past the wave line. Several men were fishing off the side of it. Unlike the piers in Southern California, there was no restaurant at the far end, no shops anywhere along its length. The entire downtown, in fact, was enchantingly quaint and stretched for only a few short blocks. There were a smattering of hotels, a few old buildings from the late 1800s that had been converted into antique stores and bars, a couple of restaurants and that was about it.
Gary continued on, businesses segueing into homes, before finally pulling into the small parking lot of a small library. He had muted the volume of his GPS way back in Los Angeles, tired of hearing the incessant, insistent monotone of its robotic voice giving him directions at every curve and corner, but he turned it back on now and discovered that he had passed the street he needed to take in order to get to Joan’s parents’ house.
Once more, he picked up his cell phone and attempted to call them. He had tried calling three times this morning already: before leaving the dorm, at a McDonald’s in Oxnard, and while on the road, even though he didn’t have an earpiece and knew that if a cop saw him on the phone while driving he would get a ticket. There’d been no answer during any of those attempts, and there was none now. He closed his phone.
He was starving, Gary realized. He hadn’t eaten breakfast, hadn’t had anything at all this morning save a wake-up cup of coffee from the McDonald’s drive-through. He should find Joan’s parents first, though. That was the most important thing. Afterward, he could grab something to eat.
His stomach gurgled noisily, and there was a pain in his midsection so sharp that it made him wince.
Still, it would only take a few minutes to wolf down some food. Then he could meet her mom and dad and not have to worry about embarrassing himself.
If they were there
Yes. If they were there. He hadn’t wanted to think about that, but it was impossible to avoid, and perhaps putting off the meeting a bit longer would help calm his nerves, prepare him. It might also give him a chance to plan out what he was going to say to them if they were there. Because he hadn’t really done that yet. He’d been on the road all morning, thinking of nothing else but Joan and Kara and Burning Man, but he hadn’t decided how he would tell them that their daughter had disappeared. If he was lucky, the police would have already contacted them, but if not, he would be the one to break the news, and he had no clue how to do that.
He drove back two blocks to the center of town. There were no fast food joints here, but adjacent to the sea wall that separated a public parking lot from the beach was a small white shack, with people eating on plastic tables on the sidewalk out front. Gary turned left onto the short dead-end street, pulled in front of the tiny building and got out of the car. The sign above the door identified the little restaurant as RUDELL’S SMOKEHOUSE.
Inside, there was a refrigerated glass case filled with individually packaged smoked fish and meat. There was even an entire smoked chicken. Taped to the top of the counter was an article from a local newspaper explaining how the Smokehouse and its owner had been featured on a Bobby Flay show on the Food Network. The menu was written in ink on a white dry-erase board, and among the list of items was a smoked albacore taco. Gary had no idea what that was, but it sounded interesting. A woman was chopping vegetables in the area behind the menu board while discussing a bluegrass concert with a man who could not be seen. She looked up at Gary. “My brother’ll be right with you,” she said.
The unseen man emerged from what looked to be a closet or small storeroom in the back and offered a friendly greeting. Gary asked him what was in the smoked albacore taco. There were a whole bunch of ingredients, including chopped apple and celery, and while the combination seemed weird, Gary was hungry enough to try anything. He ordered two, as well as a Peach Snapple, and took his food out to one of the tables in front. As it turned out, the taco was delicious. He’d never tasted anything like it, and even before he’d finished the first two, he went back inside and ordered another. They were big and filling, but this might have to last him the rest of the day, and it sure as hell beat stopping at some hamburger chain on the side of the highway on his way home.
Looking out at the waves, he felt guilty. How dare he enjoy the view, how dare he enjoy the meal, while Joan was still missing?
Dead.
No, he didn’t feel that she was dead, and though he had nothing whatsoever to base it on, the notion was close to a certainty in his mind. Wherever she was, whatever had happened to her, she was still alive. As frazzled as he was, that gave him comfort.
He quickly finished his last taco and his bottle of Snapple and tossed his trash into a nearby container before getting back in the car. Joan’s parents’ house was located two streets up from the main drag on a road so narrow and barely paved that it was little more than a dirt alley. All of the houses on the street were of the wooden clapboard variety common to seaside communities, and the Daniels home was a white single-story structure virtually indistinguishable from those to either side of it.
There was no vehicle parked in the short driveway or along the narrow road in front of the house, but that didn’t mean anything. Their car could be inside the garage. He pulled in front of the closed garage door and got out, walking up the flagstone path to the porch. He rang the doorbell. Waited. No one answered, and he rang again. He didn’t hear any chimes and wasn’t sure the bell was working, so he reached out and knocked.
There was movement as the door gave under his fist, and he took a step back, surprised. He hadn’t noticed before because, while the door hadn’t been latched, it had been shut almost all the way, but he saw now that it was not only unlocked, it was open.
This couldn’t be good.
“Hello?” Gary called.There was no answer. He hadn’t expected one, and he looked around to see if anyone else was watching. There were no cars or pedestrians on the street, no people in their yards, but someone could very well be looking at him from a window in one of the houses opposite. He used his foot to push open the door a little more. “Hello?” he called again.
There was no sound from inside, no sign of movement, and on impulse, he pushed the door all the way open. The house was dark, still, and he knew instantly that no one was home. There was an indefinable but unmistakable sense of emptiness that hung in the air of a building that was uninhabited, and Gary felt that now. Although he knew he shouldn’t, he stepped over the threshold and inside. His mind was racing through scenarios: they had been kidnapped and were being held hostage; they had been kidnapped and killed, their bodies dumped somewhere; they had fled, escaping before their attackers arrived; they had been slaughtered, their bodies left here in the house. Every one of these possibilities ended with him being arrested because the police simply could not believe the coincidence of him reporting both the disappearance of his girlfriend in Nevada and the disappearance/death of her parents in central California.