by Amy Waeschle
She picked up her phone to call Emily, then realized it was the middle of the afternoon. She would be at work. Quinn had said she should call him in Aspen but she didn’t want to interrupt his training for the big race he’d trained so hard for.
In unplugging her phone from her console, she noticed several missed calls. She eyed the screen warily, then scrolled through the log. The six unknown numbers, two with messages, must have come in while she was driving with “Do Not Disturb” turned on. She deleted the messages without listening.
Stepping from the car, Cassidy felt her knees complain after the long bout of sitting. She entered the covered porch entryway, the floorboards painted white and scuffed after decades of visitors. After kicking off her flip flops, she carried her pack through the living room with its piles of unpacked boxes. The sight of the picnic table where she had sat side by side with Pete brought her to a halt. A rotating slide show swooped into her mind: Pete at the stove while she chattered on about her work, Pete next to her at the sink, kissing her in between stacking the dishes, Pete sipping coffee, dressed for a run, his body lean and strong.
Gone.
Cassidy blinked, and forced her feet to continue while her heart fought its way out of her stomach. Arriving at her room—the same she had shared with Pete—was worse and the trembling feeling at the back of her core intensified. She dropped her pack and continued toward the bathroom, hoping a splash of water on her face would help.
A long debate had raged in her head about whether or not to reclaim this room after returning from Eugene. In the end, the idea of someone else sleeping in the one place where her precious few memories remained was too much.
But the minute she saw the old clawfoot tub in her adjoining bathroom, her skin went erect with goosebumps and she wondered if her decision had been so wise after all. Unable to turn away, she entered the bathroom, its outdated tile floor clashing with the newly purchased shower curtain that smelled of plastic. Cassidy closed her eyes and the sharp emptiness of Pete’s absence pecked at her like a flock of angry crows.
Pete had been gone for almost two years, and though she hadn’t experienced any more breakdowns—like the one that had practically shut down the U. of O. Geology Department—she was far from okay and she knew it.
Cassidy slid to the floor, the cool tile chilling her skin, both wanting to remember and not wanting to. Her breaths came in shuddery hops. She tried to quell the emotions bottling up inside her but her mind returned to the first time they took a bath together here, how Pete washed her long hair and held her and how they kissed slowly, taking their time.
The hurt, broken part of her, dormant in the back of her stomach all day, bled into the rest of her with a deep, hard ache. She rested her head against the wall and let the tears tickle her hot cheeks.
There were no geology students to stay tough for, no colleagues to make sure not to cry in front of, it was just her, alone in the house where Pete wasn’t and would never be again. The ache spread in the usual way, up through her chest to her shoulders. It steamrolled over her heart and made its way to her throat, which flattened against her spine, making breathing painful.
Cassidy clenched her fists and fought it, fought it with her weak reserves after a night of poor sleep and the early run and the sound of the lovers but it came, the pain came like a wave and it crushed her, dragged her into its cave of darkness and fear and she sobbed as the realization blasted her: Pete said forever but he’s gone and you’re alone.
A howling from deep in her throat broke through and she pressed her back against the wall, hoping for support.
After a time, the ache ebbed, and, feeling spent, Cassidy rose and splashed water on her hot face from the sink. She wondered how long she had been sitting there crying and resolved to make something of the rest of the evening. Feeling woozy, she passed back through her sparse bedroom and around a tower of boxes to the kitchen, thinking she would put away the groceries, make a sandwich, and get to work.
When she came back from her car, grocery bags hanging from both arms, her phone was vibrating towards the edge of the counter. She set the bags down and grabbed it only to see that it was another foreign number.
Her fingers trembled as she set the phone down. Looking through the dusty cotton curtains hanging above the sink to her neighbor’s empty driveway, she braced herself against the counter’s hard edge.
Was this what she would be facing now? She wondered if the department knew about her involvement in the human trafficking operation. It couldn’t be true—what Uri Whoever had accused her of—was it? She hadn’t nearly blown the case for the feds. She and Jay had worked on her acceptance of “being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” and had found ways to forgive herself for letting Mel into her life. She needed to keep believing that.
She thought briefly of calling Mark, Pete’s best friend. He worked at a local television station as a video producer. He’ll know what to do. But calling Mark would mean she would have to tell him how she was doing, a topic she avoided at all costs, especially with him. At Pete’s memorial—the last time they’d spent any amount of time together—she had wanted things from him she shouldn’t. They’d kept in touch but every time they talked, Pete was there too, which made her feel like she should crawl into a hole and stay there.
Her phone bleeped and the screen lit up with another unknown number.
Maybe if she just tried to explain herself, they would go away. Carefully, she picked up the phone and answered it.
“Hey, Cassie, it’s Bill Carter, USA Today, how are you doing tonight?”
Cassidy rubbed her temple. Nobody called her “Cassie.”
“How do you feel about Mel Tomlinson going to prison, Cassie?”
Cassidy spun so that her back rested against the counter. Facing her were two large moving boxes stacked against the far wall, the top one labeled “Cooking.”
“What he did to you is a tragedy.”
“I think . . . ” Cassidy didn’t want to let this person down, but finding the words to express what she wanted to say made her feel sick. “I’d better hang up now. I’m sorry.”
The reporter tried to protest but, undeterred, Cassidy ended the call. She tossed her phone onto her bed and returned to the kitchen, a nervous energy pulsing through her.
Four
Two beers and two unpacked kitchen boxes later, Cassidy tackled sorting her grungy field camp laundry then took her tattered papers and laptop to her desk.
Even though it would mean one less tenant to help pay the mortgage (when she got around to advertising the other rooms for rent), she had claimed one of the other three bedrooms for an office.
A stack of boxes and an empty filing cabinet greeted her. After moving from Eugene in early June, she had spent only two days in the house before leaving for field work on the slopes of Sicily’s Mount Etna, which had erupted several months before. The lava flows had destroyed two of her seismic stations there, so repairs were in order plus she needed to gather the data recorded during the previous several months. Then she had raced home to prepare for field camp.
Her desk, the most solid piece of furniture she owned, had been her father’s. Made of dense mahogany, with two filling drawers on the left side and three smaller drawers on the right, it felt like a command station. If only it had a built-in espresso machine, she could rule the world from this very post.
Before leaving for Sicily, she had been re-reading some of Pete’s old stories and the polished surface of the desk lay scattered with them. Nearby, the portfolio she had requested from the Library of Congress was placed at the top right corner, papers tidily tucked away. Cassidy remembered waking in the middle of the night with a memory of a story Pete had broken, and it led to a crazy idea—probably due to sleep deprivation during those few hard days after Costa Rica—that Pete’s death might be connected to one of his stories. But after a cursory look through the stack from the Library of Congress, she found no evidence of this. And her latest conversa
tion with Bruce hadn’t helped. She thought back to the phone call, his voice so clear he could have been in the same room.
“It’s just that . . . the clan is notoriously ruthless,” Bruce explained.
Cassidy had tried to remember more—she was sure Bruce had given her the name of the clan. Herero? Hidalgo? But a search of Pete’s headlines revealed no such clues. A wave of guilt washed over her. If she hadn’t been so self-absorbed back then, worrying about publishing papers like mad and the postdoc and her job search, maybe she would have seen something, noticed more.
“Did he ever seem afraid?” Bruce had asked.
A chill had shot up her spine. “What do you mean?”
“Like did he check the locks on the doors, or did he seem hyperaware of what cars were parked on the street, or was he jumpy. Things like that?”
“No,” Cassidy said.
Bruce sighed. “Maybe it’s nothing,” he said. “And maybe it’s better for you if it is.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” She could feel her hackles rise.
“The family would have been keen to crush some of those stories he was digging into. People like that are extremely powerful. I don’t have any hard proof that they had anything to do with Pete’s death, just a hunch, and I’ve been wrong before.”
“So, you’re telling me to forget it?”
“I can’t tell you to do that,” he replied.
Cassidy waited, trying to tamp down her frustration. Had she misunderstood his comment back in Costa Rica? Or was it something else—that he didn’t trust her, maybe?
“It just might be better if you left it alone.”
So that was it—he didn’t want her stirring up trouble.
“I mean, say you get the police to open the case, and miraculously, they agree, and they even find evidence of foul play. What then?”
“Then they go to jail,” she answered in a hard voice. That dull pain rolled through her stomach again.
Bruce sighed. “Okay, let’s say justice is served and they do. Then what?”
Cassidy frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, sure, some bad guys get wiped out, and that’s awesome. But how will you feel?”
Cassidy hadn’t understood. Wouldn’t she feel great? Victorious?
“It’s a long road. A dangerous road. Are you up for the journey? And when it’s over, will the effort have brought you what you’re looking for?”
Cassidy sipped the last of her second beer, her memories drifting. She had found Pete’s story about an illegal cockfighting ring in Reno, but that hardly felt big enough for vengeance. Had Pete dug deeper, and found worse offenses? Or had he stumbled into something while following some other story? Like the coal plant that would further endanger Northwest salmon habitats, or the janitorial company that was basically enslaving its illegal immigrant workers, some of them forced to do sexual favors for the owners as a way to “work off” their transportation from places like Lithuania.
That story had inspired the book Pete wanted to write: “Immigrants in America,” a tell-all about the conditions and challenges immigrants faced while starting a new life. He had interviewed several families, enticing even reluctant people to tell their heartbreaking stories: a Russian nuclear scientist, an Argentinian political activist, a literature professor from Iraq. Cassidy remembered Pete sharing their stories with her but could not find his notes or any published stories on the subject. Likely, he had gathered everything in a folder on his laptop. Though Quinn had made her a thumb drive of everything before donating his laptop, Cassidy hadn’t the guts to peek inside it yet.
But Pete and his influence were never far from her mind. Like during her recent trip to Sicily. On her way down the mountain one evening, she had taken a back road to avoid the usual evening traffic jam. Typically, she wasn’t a very adventurous driver, but she had studied the route that morning over her coffee and memorized the detour so she wouldn’t get lost on one of the area’s many twisty backroads. Rounding a corner, in a patch of exposed dirt along the roadside, Cassidy saw two ebony-skinned women dressed only in lingerie tucked beneath black umbrellas.
Umbrella Girls.
Instantly, Cassidy had been taken back to when she and Pete had first seen these women. She and Pete had met up in Sicily after completing field work—Cassidy on Etna, and Pete in Greece. Pete had begged her to pull over so he could talk to these women, and once he discovered their horrible plight, he had become obsessed with exposing it.
But he never got the chance. Something about not having enough sources, and the hint that the Sicilian mafia was somehow involved—an angle his editor had not wanted to touch. “They’re chickenshit,” Pete had said to her, his hands braced on his hips—his usual button-down shirt rolled to the elbows and tucked neatly into his faded chinos. But without a home and a budget for the story, Pete hadn’t been able to pursue it.
So, was Bruce wrong? Cassidy felt a tingling kind of pull, a desire to find answers, the way a tempting, complex puzzle could sometimes captivate her—it happened often enough in her work and was one of the reasons she became a scientist.
Cassidy went to the box on the floor containing the rest of her office things. She pulled out books and files until she found a box of loose items. Inside she found pens and pencils, a small metal ruler, a pack of gum, lip balm, and the thumb drive containing all of Pete’s files.
Cassidy sat at her desk, flipping the tiny thing between her fingers.
But try as she might, the thumb drive stayed tucked in her palm. She put it back where it belonged and backed away. Pete’s entire life would open up before her the minute she opened the files: pictures, notes, stories.
Everything.
Later, after removing her contact lenses and taking a long shower, she slid beneath her cold sheets. Then, she remembered that her alarm was still set so slid her glasses back on and peered at her screen. A cold weight dropped through her—she had another ten missed calls. But before she swiped them away, one number stood out.
Dr. Richard Gorman, head of the geology department at the University of Oregon, had called twice.
Cassidy sat up and noted the times: just after six p.m. and again at 7:12. She tapped his message and listened to his deep voice:
“Cassidy, please call me right away. We have a . . . situation. Thank you.”
Cassidy played it again, then noticed another message, this one from Martin. Panic seeped into her pores. Had the geology van crashed? Had someone been hurt?
“Dr. Kincaid, fuck, call me,” Martin’s panicked voice rang in her ear. “I don’t know when it happened. She was in the van, I swear. We got back and she wasn’t there. Fuck.”
Cassidy waited for more, but the recording ended.
Five
Cassidy’s heart flew into high gear, fluttering wildly against her ribs. It was past midnight by now, but Cassidy hit “reply.”
Martin answered on the second ring.
“Where the fuck have you been?” he yelped.
Cassidy sucked in a gasp.
“Sorry, I’m sorry, Dr. Kincaid,” Martin said, his voice desperate. “What am I going to do?”
“Slow down, okay?” Cassidy said, inhaling a slow breath. “What is going on?”
“We drove home. Everything was totally fine. We stopped for gas, we stopped at a rest area, we got back at around three o’clock.” Martin paused. “But Izzy wasn’t in the van when we got there.”
“What?” Cassidy cried. “What do you mean she ‘wasn’t in the van’?” she asked, her mind racing. “Where else could she be?”
“Well, not in the van, that’s all I know.”
Cassidy tried to imagine herself as Martin, driving the van home. The students would have been tired, hungover. The drive should have been easy. “When you guys drove off, Izzy was in the back with Alice.”
“Alice was getting carsick so she moved to the front row.”
“Did you talk to Alice?” Cassidy asked. “Does she know
where Izzy went?”
“No.”
“Wait,” Cassidy said before she continued. “So, you’re saying that at some point during the drive, Izzy just vanished?”
“I guess.”
“You guess?” Cassidy cried. “Martin! How could this happen?”
“I don’t know! She was there at the rest area. I know because she was so deeply engrossed in texting someone in the pet exercise zone that I had to yell at her that it was time to go. That was about two hours into the drive. So, she must have got out after that. We stopped for gas in Biggs. That was about four hours in.” Martin paused, and Cassidy could hear movement, like he was pacing. “At that point she was asleep in the back! I assumed she was still there when we returned to the van. I mean, I hadn’t seen her get out.”
“Have you called the police?” Cassidy asked.
Martin sighed heavily. “Gorman says we can’t.”
Cassidy blinked. “Whoa, Martin, why would he say that?”
“Because Izzy’s father is Preston Ford.”
Cassidy tried to make sense of this, but her thoughts were too jumbled. “I still don’t understand.”
“The media tycoon? Owns Ford Media and a professional soccer team and probably his own private island in the Bahamas and is on a first-name basis with several politicians?”
Cassidy had heard rumors that Izzy’s dad was someone famous but stuff like this usually sailed right over her head. “Oh,” Cassidy replied.
“Yeah.”
“But this still doesn’t make sense,” Cassidy said. “I don’t care who her father is. Why shouldn’t the police look for her?”
“I guess Gorman and Preston Ford had a pact in place. If anything happened to Izzy, he was to be informed right away and not the police.”
“Okay,” Cassidy said. “This is getting weird.”
