'Sure,' Tom said, knowing no one else would listen.
'Excellent. Which means we only have one remaining thing we're to sort out.'
'Some kind of proof.'
'I'm not talking court-of-law proof, of course. We had that then I'd say screw Front Page, let's get talking to the BBC and CNN and NYT But we need something. You got a description that sounds promisingly like the thing the hunters ran into, but you could have picked that up somewhere else.'
'But I hadn't heard…'
'I believe you. Others won't. You had a footprint, too, but that will be long gone, plus there's the inconvenient old woman with her stupid boots.'
'But that's it,' Tom said. 'That's all I had.'
'Actually no.' Henrickson shook his head. 'Not from what you said. You might have something you don't even realize. Tomorrow we'll go take a look.'
Tom just looked confused. 'Trust me,' the man said again, and winked.
— «» — «» — «»—
Al Connolly was leaving the station for the night. A quick conversation with Patrice Anders had explained Melissa's find: she had put the herbs there. The situation was nice and tidy again. He considered heading over to Frank's for a soda and some wings, but decided it had been a long day and that a beer in front of the tube at home would do just as well. His house was big and empty, but it was quiet and the phone wouldn't ring.
That sounded good.
13
Ten minutes after her phone conversation with Sheriff Connolly, Patrice was still standing in the little kitchen area of her home. A scant four-by-six-foot corner of the main living space, it had a window that looked out into the trees. She was looking out through it now, though if the truth be told she wasn't seeing anything. Not anything anyone else would see, anyhow.
— «» — «» — «»—
For almost all their lives Bill and Patrice Anders had lived in Portland. When the kids left home in the mid 1980s the adults started tentatively to remind themselves how you spent free time: like staff from an abandoned zoo, released with the animals back into the wild. They began to go for weekends out of the city, enjoying themselves in a somewhat aimless way, but it wasn't until they discovered Verona that they had horizons once again.
Little more than a bump on 101, the coast road down the state's Pacific edge, Verona has a few streets, wooden houses, a grocery, not much else: chances were you'd be through and past without it occurring to you to stop. But if you were dawdling south, and kept your eyes open as you left town, then just after the bridge over the inlet there's a sign for the Redwood Lodgettes. A sign burned into an old log, pointing into trees. Patrice saw it, and they pulled in to have a look. That whim changed the rest of their lives.
The Lodgettes were a piece of fading history, the kind of old-school resort that used to mark the end of a morning's driving and the dawn of an afternoon's swimming and shrieking and padding to the sea and back with sand and pine needles underfoot; mom happy because the place was nice and had somewhere to wash clothes, father relieved a budget had been met; the children knowing these things, however vaguely, and basking in the warmth of a family bound in simple satisfaction for once. Fourteen cabins were dotted around a couple of wooded acres, bordered by rocky shoreline on one side and the inlet on another. On that first visit Bill insisted on sketching out the layout of their cabin (Number 2), so taken was he with the way it had been put together: sitting area, kitchenette, bedroom, bathroom and storage eking every spare inch of living space out of sturdy log constructions twenty feet square. A wood-burning stove in the sitting room made it the perfect place for chilly spring evenings; the bedroom was cosy on cold winter nights. The wraparound porch was where you lived in summer and autumn, listening to the birds and the distant sound of water, musing about what you might have for supper, keeping a book open on your lap to legitimate not doing anything, including reading it.
In the evening they wandered over the bridge back into the tiny town. They found a bar that stood on stilts in the bay and had pool tables and loud music they recognized, and further up the hill a restaurant as good as any in Portland. They drank local wine and local beer and were enchanted. It was a long time since that had happened. Enchantment isn't easy to come by, in this day and age. Verona pulled it off, in spades. Bill and Patrice found themselves breathing more slowly, holding hands on the beach and smiling at fellow walkers, looking out to sea and feeling the curvature of the earth. They chose the same appetizers three nights running. The old couple who ran the Lodgettes — the Willards — were calling them by first name by the second day. When it came time to leave Patrice had to be hauled away by a tractor, and extracted a promise from her husband that they were coming back as soon as they could.
It was decided there and then. When the world needed getting away from, this was where they'd come.
— «» — «» — «»—
Ten years passed, with twenty visits, maybe twenty-five. The Willards retired in 94, but nothing much changed: Patrice and Bill kept pulling in to the Lodgettes like seabirds bobbing up on a twice-yearly tide. They nearly brought their children, once, but the visit fell through. This was far from unusual. When discussing Josh and Nicole one time, Bill described the relationship they had with them as 'cordial', and that pretty much nailed it. Everyone loved each other, there was no question of that, but they kept their heads about it. Nobody went berserk with affection. Phone contact was regular, visits friendly. They met for the major festivals, when well-chosen gifts were exchanged and everyone was helpful in the kitchen. Their children worked hard. If their careers were more important than visiting, there wasn't a great deal that could be said. They went down to Verona anyway. It was nice to have the place to themselves, not to have to worry whether others were finding it quite so comfortable as them. They didn't suggest a family trip again.
Then they happened to be in Verona for a weekend one late August and fell to talking to the new owners. It wasn't that they had a close relationship — unlike the Willards, Ralph and Becca seemed to forget them after each visit and affability had to be forged anew — but they soon picked up something was afoot. There was an air of non-renewal. They asked, and Ralph confirmed it without much evident regret: this was the Lodgettes' last summer.
On hearing this Patrice's heart was pierced, and her hand went up to her mouth. She barely heard as they were told the business wasn't making enough money, though the town was growing in popularity as Cannon Beach and Florence and Yachats got too expensive and people looked further down the coast for romantic minibreaks. This wasn't helping the Lodgettes. Young money didn't want rustic cabins. It wanted DVD players and organic juices. Stone Therapy was a baseline requirement. The resort occupied a prime location and a spa hotel there would be a no-brainer for someone who knew the business. Bill later muttered to Patrice that if Ralph or Becca had mastered the art of remembering guests between stays then things might have gone differently, but that's the way it was. A developer up from San Francisco had made an offer they weren't prepared to refuse.
They sat on the deck of the bar before dinner, sipping their Verona drinks: a rare beer for him, an even rarer Sweet Manhattan for her. Patrice felt more glum than in a long, long time. Why did life have to be this way? It seemed as if with every passing year the world accepted into it more and more things that meant nothing to her, innovations that seemed trivial or confusing but were heralded like the dawn of a new age. She put up with all that stuff, did her best to understand the attractions of cell phones and Windows and Eminem: but why did the parts that mattered to her have to get shoved aside in the process? Bill was also quiet. There was a look on his face, the one he got when he was trying not to think about something. He was reserved during dinner, not even bothering to look through the wine list, something which — since more or less giving up beer — he'd tried to get in the habit of doing. Patrice put it down to him feeling the way she did, to asking himself the same questions, most of all a question she was too sad to put into words.