by T. R. Kelly
“Sylanski. Barbara Sylanski. They’ve been on-and-off since they were kids. Mostly on.” But I recalled, again, that I hadn’t seen either in several weeks.
“Well, there you go. That’s probably where I would focus my attention. Perhaps he had a hoop game in Seattle. I know he’s played a lot at the Montlake Gym in Seattle and probably just slept over instead of driving that nasty lake road.”
“I hope that’s the case,” I said.
“Maybe he joined a traveling team to Portland or Spokane,” Dolan said. “Players pick up and go in a heartbeat. I’m sure guys like him get last-minute calls all the time.”
“I’ve making a list of some of his basketball buddies,” I said. “Just haven’t gotten around to calling them.”
“If I were a betting man, Ernie, I’d say Barbara whisked him off to a hot time between the sheets, and Linn let somebody use his car while he was gone. Kids lend out their cars these days like women lend out scarves. Some clown probably had too much to drink and left that little wagon on the boat.”
“We’ll see,” I said. “Pretty early in the evening for a kid to be hammered.”
“C’mon!” Dolan laughed. “You ever see how fast they drink after work?”
We turned at the rustling in the hallway outside the conference room. I could make out at least one man who was wearing a brown suit and gold necktie. Several people were talking at the same time, like students outside their next classroom waiting for a long-winded professor to finish. A woman said, “Didn’t you reserve it?” The door opened slightly and then closed.
“Say, did I ever give you any extra key to the place?” Dolan said. “I gave the one on my key ring to Harvey Johnston’s guy.”
“Nope, took the one from the lockbox and put it back,” I said. “Used it last night.”
“OK, I’m glad that one’s still there,” Dolan said. “I’ve been trying to reach my dad to see if he has any extras, but he must have gone fishing. The place looked pretty good, right?”
“Looked great, Jim,” I said. “Linn really only uses the downstairs bedroom, the bath, and kitchen. The rest of the rooms all show well.”
An office associate opened the door wide enough to mouth We have reserved the room. I held up the black receiver and pointed to it, indicating I was on a call.
“Well, I can’t ask for much more than that,” Dolan continued. “I’m happy to help the kid in any way I can. His family, especially his great-granddad, did a lot for families in this area. The guy was the Father of North Fork, for chrissake.”
Chapter Six
5 p.m., Monday, April 16, 1877
“Skagit gold group forming. Inquire at the front desk.”
Henry Oliver tucked the note in his shirt pocket and headed for the wooden staircase that overlooked the lobby and saloon of Murphy’s Hotel in Calaveras County. The short, squatty proprietor had taken a liking to Oliver since the young man prepaid four nights’ lodging upon his arrival from San Francisco. Henry, though born in Maine and raised in Wisconsin, was interested in understanding the components of mining and panning, plus the other materials that hardworking men needed in their gamble to find and process gold on the West Coast.
Henry found the proprietor in a tiny office behind the front counter, nose-deep in the hotel ledger. He closed the large cloth-bound register and removed his delicate wire-rimmed spectacles as Henry approached.
“One of my employees accompanied a party led by a man named McBee to an area north of Skagit a few years ago,” the proprietor said. “I’m told McBee is considering another journey. You mentioned visiting the gold country north of Seattle.”
Henry was more than intrigued. Such a trip would place him in the middle of the latest gold territory and allow him to estimate the number of gold seekers and the need for future supplies. Henry realized that if the throng was significant in size, his personal strike would come from selling the gear and services those people needed. His mind raced with possibilities, boom or bust.
“Last time, they all returned with gold,” the proprietor said. “But my man said McBee turned selfish and reclusive. He will not work for him again.”
Henry nodded. After arriving in San Francisco by steamship, he’d explored the California gold country for two months, astonished by the numbers of mesmerized prospectors, and the scope, placement, and variety of their bizarre claims. He understood how greed could cloud judgment and damage partnerships. “Do you know when this group is scheduled to depart?” he said.
“Fairly soon, I would assume. The rivers have begun to slow from the winter rains. I’ll send word of your interest to my employee.”
That evening, Henry Oliver met with Ernest Twombley, the hotel cook who joined Angus McBee’s first of two trips to the Skagit gold country. The men talked long into the night about Twombley’s experiences during the rainy summer of 1872. The transporting of gear was far more arduous than he had ever imagined. McBee hired native guides to paddle the party and supplies up the Skagit River to a wide clearing known as Goodman’s Trading Post. The most difficult portion of the trip was the twenty-mile trek along the river’s rocky cliffs from Goodman’s that led to prime gold-panning river sites. Twombley said that the backbreaking work, pitiful return, and constant bickering among team members had turned McBee into a drunken conniver.
Twombley told of one particular afternoon when Angus, six-five and two hundred and forty-five pounds, got in the middle of a fight between two miners over borrowed goods. Clubs and fists landed on faces, legs, and shoulders. A wayward fist crushed McBee’s nose. He gashed his hand falling on the jagged shale. When the fracas finally ended and the fighters had moved on, Twombley sewed up the hand with fishing line.
“Angus was covered in blood,” Twombley said. “Spewed from his huge nostrils, and his hand. It took a long time to close that wound. I watched as he washed his bloody face and hands in a spring near the riverbank. At first, it appeared blood from his hand had dried on a rock, giving it a deep-red tone. After rinsing, the color remained. He slipped the stone into his pocket. I didn’t think anything about it until we returned home. The rock he discovered that day was a precious, fiery ruby worth more than his home and farm combined.”
Twombley revealed to Henry that McBee planned to parlay his ruby with other discoveries and buy hundreds of acres along the Skagit River where he could prospect and farm for the rest of his life. Twombley said McBee returned to the same location on the river three years later, this time in secret without partners.
“The man wanted to keep everything to himself,” Twombley said. “He’d dig a hole and hide it before he would split any gold with anybody. Selfish bastard. Only reason he needed anybody was to carry his load.”
McBee reportedly named the creek meandering from the spring “Ruby River,” and focused his digging and exploring in the area near his original find. Twombley said McBee collected a significant amount of gold by panning smaller tributaries above the confluence of the Skagit and Ruby rivers.
“If you go, know that the river changes Angus. It makes him a different man.”
In 1877, Henry, age twenty, signed on as McBee’s professional assistant. McBee was adamant that he keep confidential their business—and ultimate destination. When the pair arrived at Goodman’s Trading Post in mid-June, the river bank was already brimming with nearly forty newly built canoes, along with calloused miners, surveyors, panners, guides, and a variety of restless chickens, horses and goats.
“We’re headin’ up river tomorrow,” McBee told Henry. “No use lookin’ for any nuggets in this sorry crowd. Now, don’t go tellin’ anybody because we don’t want to be followed.”
For two days, they coaxed stubborn pack mules through rocky crevices above the river. Exhausted by the journey, McBee and Henry finally approached the natural spring where Angus had discovered the most valuable asset he’d ever possessed. Instead of tranquility and seclusion, they encountered three men from Colorado camping on the site.
“Yo
u boys best move along,” McBee said, sizing up the trio. “I staked this claim years ago, and anything taken from around here is mine. I understand if you didn’t know, but ...”
“Name’s Tyler,” said a wiry man, who Henry took to be the oldest. Henry also heard that three brothers named Tyler had instigated a fight at the trading post for refusing to pay “injuns” for hauling their gear upriver. “I’ve got all the proper papers,” the man continued. “Show ’em to ya if you like.”
As Tyler retreated to his tent, McBee pulled a gun from his satchel and fired wildly into the night. The bullet whizzed past Henry’s ear as he raised his hands to cover his head. Tyler raced back from the tent, leaped upon McBee’s back, and drove a rusty oyster knife under the big man’s ribcage. McBee shrieked, turned, and before he could raise his weapon toward his attacker, Tyler jammed the blade into McBee’s ample midsection. McBee collapsed backward like a falling hemlock, his panicked face highlighted by the glowing fire. The three men quickly rifled through McBee’s pockets and tossed his worn leather shoulder bags into their tent.
“Get out of here, kid,” Tyler told Henry, the oyster knife dripping with McBee’s blood. “If you ever say anything about this, I’ll cut you right down the middle.”
Chapter Seven
2:30 p.m., Thursday, February 3, 1982
I needed to know which cops had cased the Dolan place, what they found, and how long they were there. After I hung up with Jim Junior, I cruised back across the river to the cop shop in the dreary county administration building. Like many small-town municipal complexes that designers deemed modern and impressive at one time, the sprawling campus of shaded windows and skinny Roman bricks is what you’d now expect to find inside a barbed-wire fence. Interiors bathed in brown and off-yellow cried out for light; the hallways were as stale as an old man’s closet.
I found Harvey Johnston behind his desk, scratching his balding head and dragging an eraser over his three-day whiskers. The pencil tip at the other end was dull and needed sharpening. From his tone and demeanor, so did his day.
“Ernie, when’s the last time we caught a fish?” the county’s chief criminal investigator said, arms crossed over his chest. “I take that back. When’s the last time we even got a line wet?”
I hadn’t expected the first question of the meeting to be about fishing. Nonetheless, the topic deserved careful attention. And immediate planning. “Well, let’s see.” I said. “We didn’t get out on any river in January; rivers were too high to fish. So it must have been late last year. Maybe that week before Thanksgiving?”
“That’s poor,” Harvey said. “Piss-poor. For years it was every other weekend.”
The question was merely small talk, probably to avoid aggravating bigger talk. Harvey had built his reputation on thorough research, a network of resources, unfailing logic, and a memory like Dick Clark recalling oldies rock and roll. Harvey instantly remembered evidence from cases he studied, observed, or read about more than twenty years ago, including every run-in with the law involving one of my players. He always provided an early heads-up and even let me help him investigate some of those cases in which I had access to a tribal community, like troubled kids, that were sometimes out of his questioning reach. We became friends and fishing partners along the way. Harvey had risen through the ranks, cracked a handful of high-profile state cases, and become so revered nationally that he could telephone law-enforcement officials, physicians, and academics throughout the country at any hour. They all took his calls, then asked why he hadn’t accepted a big-city job. “No steelhead streams in that city” was his stock reply. He fiddled with his pencil and thumbed the top page of his notepad over, exposing a fresh one.
“When I heard you were coming in, I figured it wasn’t about fishing or basketball,” Harvey said. “I did go by the Dolan place at Lake Wilhelmina late yesterday, but I wasn’t happy about going up there.”
I rose out of my chair and circled behind it. Confused by his apparent lack of interest, I gripped the brown fabric on the top of the chair with both hands. “Harvey, this is a great kid that everybody knows.”
“Look, as much as I know your concern for Linn, he hasn’t been missing long enough for this office to get hot and bothered about it. I mean, we usually don’t even pay attention until a person’s been gone for twenty-four hours.”
That wasn’t good enough. Not for this kid. “Harvey, we’re coming up on forty-eight.”
“I understand that. And that was yesterday and today is today.”
I bit my lip and pushed the chair until it bumped against the front of Harvey’s desk. “I don’t get it,” I said. “If Linn’s disappearance failed to meet your minimum time requirements, why did you bother to drive that awful road and come home after dark?”
Harvey rolled his eyes. It didn’t happen often. “The state patrol made the mistake of broadcasting the result of the license-plate inquiry. It went out on the cop CB early yesterday. One of our guys heard it, drove up there, and patrolled the lake all day asking about Linn. Word got around. I got some calls. I went up there to calm people down.”
I figured as much but didn’t want to say so. “Tell me something,” I said. “Were there other county vehicles with you last night at Dolan’s? Maybe a truck from the lake’s fire department?”
Harvey pushed his hands together like an altar boy, then lifted his fingers to his lips. “I got there first,” he said. “And Deputy Dawson met me there a few minutes later in his patrol car. There were no larger vehicles when we were at the site, but I did see some fatter tracks.”
“Dawson . . ? The man’s a meathead. A real walking weasel.”
“Whoa, Coach. Take it easy on the guy.”
“Harvey, Arnold Dawson probably already bragged the news about Linn to some teenagers, trying to impress them. Did he show you the box of Snickers under the front seat that he saved for young girls?”
Harvey coughed at the thought and shook his head. “You’ve never thought very highly of him, have you? And, I grant you, he did make a mistake here letting the word slip. Did you have a few run-ins with him at the high school, or is it something else?”
“He flirted with the girls and bullied the guys,” I said. “Really upset them, but they felt they could do nothing about it. My players said he tailed them home from games—especially if they had a date. Stopped them for no reason but to check out the tops on the females.”
Harvey appeared surprised, but I knew he really wasn’t. Besides, a supervisor wanted only so much criticism about one of his own. Even from a friend.
“I looked around a little bit inside Dolan’s place,” Harvey said. “I didn’t bring out the magnifying glass, just putzed around. Dawson stayed outside.”
“Great decision. Keeps him from stealing televisions. I hope you had him counting raccoons.”
“Help me think this through a second, Ernie. Linn either works or plays basketball. That’s it. I wonder what Barbara thinks about that and him living up there?”
“When I rented him the place, they thought it would work,” I said. “But he moved in September, and that’s a heck of a lot different than the cold of February. I’ll make a point to see her and ask about the past few weeks.”
“Maybe he took her skiing in Whistler. They’ve opened a bunch of new chair lifts up there. Who knows? Possibly he drove to a hoop tournament in Missoula.”
“You been talking with Jim Junior? That’s about what he said.”
“Yeah, I spoke to him,” Harvey said. “Had to get the OK to go in to his lake house. But you know, he’s probably right about Linn’s whereabouts.”
“Then how do you account for his abandoned wagon on the ferry? It feels like people are trying to explain that away before there’s anything to support their explanations.” I knew I sounded like Sherlock.
“That’s one of the things I like about you. Always looking at the possibilities. It’s your coaching background, dissecting routines and tendencies. You see stuff others
don’t.”
“You should tell that to the old biddies at the office,” I said. “They think I’m blind to colors, stains, and anything on a calendar.”
“They could be correct.”
“Well, this might surprise you,” I said. “But I did see something you might have missed last night at the Dolan place.”
Harvey spun the pencil on the yellow notepad in front of him, leaned back in his chair, and maxed-out its spring. His head rested on the office wall behind his desk. His collar was frayed; battered by years of stubby growth.
“Wait a minute,” he growled. “You were in there after I left?’’
“Hey, I’m a licensed Realtor, a dues-paying member of the MLS who simply entered a house for sale. You never know when I might have a potential--”
“Dammit, Ernie! I hope you didn’t touch anything.”
“Why? I didn’t hear anybody say it was a crime scene. Besides, I had gloves.”
“Right. You just happen to wear latex gloves when you’re out on tour?”
“Wasn’t on tour. I was up doing some dock work for a friend. And they were painter’s gloves.”
“Well, at least you were covered. Look, I don’t mind you asking your former players, coaching buddies about Linn, but leave the heavy lifting to us. Particularly if this becomes an official investigation and we start gathering evidence. I don’t want to be lifting your fingerprints from every place I go.”
I smirked and bent over to tie one of my desert boots.
“Are we clear on that?” Harvey said.
While still hunched over, I laughed. “Crystal.”
“I’m serious. I love your intuition, but I can’t have you walking into buildings looking for clues and interrogating people. That would be extremely confusing and a huge mistake.”
“A clue is simply a mistake by another name.”
“Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles?”
