11
IT WAS NEARLY noon when Peter parked the Suburban in the lot behind the City of Orange civic center buildings. Wishing he was anyplace else than where he was, he walked around to the front sidewalk, past a tile-and-concrete fountain that had four painted steel egrets standing on top of it, spitting water into the air. The water blew away in the wind, out onto the lawn and walkway. A half dozen sycamore leaves floated like boats on the fountain pool.
He had seen the fountain a thousand times, driving and walking along Chapman Avenue, but it looked strangely alien to him now. Abruptly he felt the urge to run—not in order to hide, but just to run, for the sheer sake of running, to make his legs work, to justify his heart. He found himself at the door of the police station without having run anywhere. His reflection in the glass looked back at him like a windblown ghost.
There was no one visible inside, no activity at all. A line of empty chairs sat along the windows to his left. Straight ahead was a long, silent hallway, and to his right lay a glassed-in reception office containing three cluttered desks empty of people. Maybe nobody got into trouble on Saturday morning. He ran a pocket comb through his hair and straightened his collar. There was no use looking the way he felt.
A woman appeared from a back room just then, carrying a cup of coffee into the reception office. He stepped to the window and said hello. She smiled at him, looking efficient and friendly, but her face changed when he explained what he wanted, as if she could read something in his voice and eyes. “If you could have a seat for a moment, Mr. Travers,” she said, nodding toward the chairs by the window. At that, she turned around and went out again.
He sat down, although he didn’t want to. Full of nervous energy, he was nearly compelled to get up again, to walk up and down the hallway or back and forth across the carpet, as if any movement at all would hasten him toward an answer. Eventually a man in a gray sport coat stepped into the reception cubicle. He patted his coat pocket and then paused for a moment to pull a pen out of a desktop penholder, looking out at Peter as if sizing him up before stepping out through the door. He carried a clipboard with several sheets of paper attached to it.
“Detective Slater,” he said, introducing himself. “Ray Slater.”
“Peter Travers,” Peter said back to him.
“What seems to be the problem, then, Mr. Travers? How do you spell that? T-R-A-V-E-R-S?” the detective asked. The pen scratched across the paper on the clipboard. He sounded a little tired.
“That’s right. My wife and child are missing. My ex-wife. We’re separated.”
“Their names?”
Peter reeled off their names and ages. He handed the detective a pair of photographs he’d brought along from Amanda’s house as well as an inked set of David’s fingerprints taken a couple of years ago during some sort of school safety program. After looking the photos over, the cop slid them under the papers on the clipboard, snapping the clip down across them.
“Missing since when?”
“A week ago,” Peter said.
“A week?” He looked up now, a puzzled expression on his face, as if he must have heard something incorrectly. “Come with me,” he said then, turning around and walking away up the corridor. He pushed open the door of a small room, furnished with a couple of upholstered office chairs and a desk. He gestured at one of the chairs, and Peter sat down. “Cup of coffee?”
“No, thanks,” Peter said. This was the part that Peter didn’t relish—admitting that Amanda and David had vanished last Sunday but that Peter was only now getting around to telling anyone. Either it would make him look guilty as hell or incredibly stupid. “As I said,” Peter started in, “we’re separated, and it was only this morning that I stopped by her house and found out that she and David were missing.”
The detective nodded, tilting his own chair back, listening to Peter as if he were a psychologist and not a cop. Peter rolled the story out carefully, trying to make the whole thing sound a little less lame than it was. He left nothing out, though—the argument, Peggy, the airline tickets and traveler’s checks, the Honda still in the garage. He avoided any talk about premonitions and hallucinations.
Partway through, the detective abruptly sat up straight, looking as if he had just then remembered something, or as if Peter, finally, had said something that made a difference. Peter stopped talking.
“You live out in Trabuco Canyon?” the cop asked.
Peter nodded.
“Where? You mean Trabuco Oaks? Coto de Caza?”
“No, out in the canyon itself—Alder Springs area. Above the lower campground. Cabin with a Forest Service lease.”
“Where do you work?”
Peter hesitated. The seeming irrelevancy of the question forced him to stop in order to process it. “Sycamore College,” he said. “I’m a teacher. Architectural drafting.”
“You were at school last week, Tuesday, say?”
“No. In fact I’m off right now. Lot of work to do on my house. I’m on half-pay leave until February.”
“So where were you the first of last week, then? Down at the lumber yard?” The cop stared at him, waiting for him to say something good.
Surprised, Peter gaped back at him. He hadn’t said anything yet about having gone to Santa Barbara to visit his brother. It had seemed irrelevant to him. “I was gone for a couple of days. Up north. Let’s see … Monday through Wednesday. I stayed with my brother. He can—”
“I believe you,” Detective Slater said, holding up his hand. “I don’t want to talk to your brother. Wait here.” He didn’t sound irritated or suspicious, but he didn’t look tired anymore, either. If anything, his voice held a note of compassion now, and the tone of it filled Peter with instant dread.
The detective stood up and pushed out through the door, taking his clipboard and pen with him, leaving the door open. Peter was suddenly nauseated. His fears and premonitions were like ghosts slowly growing visible in a night-darkened room. He closed his eyes and waited, wondering what the news would be, trying to anticipate it, to make himself ready.
The weight of the long morning oppressed the air of the room. The seconds ticked by. He nearly stood up in order to pace around the small room, but instead he forced himself to look out the window. Across the street people walked in and out of the savings and loan, going about their simple business. The bushes in the flower beds blew fitfully in the wind. A hook-and-ladder pulled out of the fire department garage, turning on its siren and swinging around onto Chapman Avenue, followed by a paramedics truck.
Detective Slater walked back in and sat down. “Change your mind on that coffee?” he asked.
“No,” Peter said. “Thanks.”
After shuffling through the few papers on the clipboard, the detective scanned a sentence or two. “Trabuco Canyon is out in county territory,” he said, looking up, straight into Peter’s eyes. He spoke slowly, seeming to choose his words carefully. “So we don’t have any jurisdiction out there. A lot of it lies inside the Cleveland National Forest, where your house evidently is. Still, it’s the county sheriff that covers that area. If they find anything back there that might concern us, the sheriff’s department sends out a notice.” He paused, as if to establish that Peter was taking all of this in.
“What did they find?”
“Nothing, really. Keep that in mind. What we’ve got is this. A hiker claimed to have seen two bodies out there.” He looked at his clipboard, either reading or else pretending to read in order to give Peter time to wrestle with what he was saying. “This was back in a place called Falls Canyon.”
“Right near my house,” Peter said, nearly unable to breathe.
The detective nodded. “It was night. This hiker was back in there with the idea of sleeping somewhere. I gather he was some kind of transient. He claims to have heard a scream right as he came around in sight of the falls, and there were the bodies, maybe thirty feet away. He was alone, and apparently it scared the hell out of him, and he hiked back out to the road and all the way down to the ranger station at O’Neill Park to report it. One of the rangers called the sheriff and then beat it back out there. When they got back into Falls Canyon, the bodies were gone. They just weren’t there anymore.”
Peter looked at him for a moment before asking, “A woman and boy?”
“I’m afraid so.”