“Chinese?”
“Will do.”
Once they were both inside, he started to close the door, but stopped and looked out toward the parking lot.
“What’s wrong?” Anna asked.
Wes scanned the lot, then shook his head. It must have just been his nerves.
“Nothing,” he said, then shut the door.
THE MAN SITTING IN THE BLUE SEDAN ACROSS the parking lot lowered his binoculars and picked up the phone lying beside him on the empty passenger seat.
Once the call was connected, he said, “Looks like she’s moved to the room next to his.… Just dropped her suitcases off there, but they’ve gone to his place.… If I had a guess, I’d say they’re in for the night.… I can’t, police are still here.” There was a long pause as he listened. “Okay, so not tonight. What do you want me to do, then? … Got it.”
He disconnected the call, put the phone on the seat, then settled back to wait and make sure the couple didn’t leave unexpectedly.
WES’S EYES POPPED OPEN AT JUST AFTER 6 A.M. on Saturday morning. With no shoot that day, he tried to go back to sleep, but that wasn’t happening. So he rolled onto his side and stared at Anna for several minutes, hoping she might sense his gaze and wake up. That, apparently, wasn’t happening, either.
With a groan, he flipped over, crawled out of bed, and shuffled to his computer. He knew what he’d seen out at the Pinnacles, and it wasn’t the guy the Navy was trying to force-feed everyone. If he could only find a little more proof, then maybe he could convince Lars of that.
The first thing he did was fire off an email to Casey back in L.A., then he opened Google Images in his browser and typed in the search parameters: “China Lake pilots.” Over one million hits came back. He started flipping through the thumbnail pages quickly, scanning for the face he remembered from the crash.
A few minutes later, the icon for his email program began bouncing on his toolbar. It was a response from Casey.
The best site is called Drew’s Military Action Site. You’ll need a user ID and password to get in. Try BAN4KOOL, password onit47.
Why are you looking for military photos?
Wes typed in a quick reply.
Just some background stuff. Thanks for the help.
Drew’s Military Action Site was basically a database of military history. Wes went immediately to the Photos section. Depending on what search parameters he put in, Wes could access photos tagged “pilots,” “Navy pilots,” pilots assigned to China Lake, or pilots assigned to any other post by branches, divisions, groups, and the like.
He did China Lake first, but found nothing useful, so he widened his search to all Navy pilots. He moved rapidly through page after page of shots—some solo, some group. Then he stopped suddenly, his index finger a mere fraction of an inch above the forward arrow key, and stared at the screen.
It was a group shot. Twenty people, mostly men. And in the middle row, third from the left, was the man from the crash.
He was sure of it.
He looked for any information associated with the picture, but there was none.
Scrolling back, he checked other group shots. Most had information and names listed below them. What the hell?
He tried to move the picture to his desktop, but the image was locked and could not be dragged off. A problem, but not nearly as annoying as not finding any information with the picture. He took a computer snapshot of his screen, then opened the new image in Photoshop and cropped out everything but the group picture itself.
Once he’d saved that, he blew the picture up until the resolution deteriorated and the man’s face became unrecognizable. He was only able to magnify the picture a couple of times before this happened. He backed it down until the man’s face was clear again and saved it as a separate file, then stared at the image.
He wasn’t crazy.
He hadn’t been seeing things.
The man he knew he had tried to pull from the crash had been real.
He didn’t have the guy’s name, but he had his picture.
This he could show to Lars. The picture in conjunction with the video loop should be more than enough to prove he was right. At the very least, it would be enough to convince Lars he should look into it a little deeper. And once he did, he’d find out that Wes wasn’t the one who was making things up.
There was one other thing he could do, too. A backup, just in case.
He opened a new email and attached the photo to it. In the message body, he wrote:
Casey,
Trying to identify third man from the left in the middle row. Any chance you can help? Best if you keep this on the sly, and not just from the company. Will explain later.
Wes
After he hit Send, the knot of frustration that had been gnawing at the back of his mind began to unravel. The situation had worked him up more than he’d expected.
But now he knew the truth. Now he’d be listened to.
THE DAY HAD TURNED OUT TO BE THE HOTTEST one yet. Wes guessed it had to be just below one hundred degrees as he and Anna got out of the SUV at the self-storage facility. It was almost enough reason to climb back in and return to the hotel.
Almost.
They got directions from the woman in the office, then walked between the one-story buildings until they found the unit they were looking for.
There had been no shoot to put it off today, nothing that would make Wes too busy to carry out his mother’s request. She had initially asked him to do it years ago, and when he’d told her he was coming up for the shoot, she reminded him again.
“Your father still had a lot of the old photos,” she had told him over the phone before he’d left L.A. “I’d really like to get those. Everything else, well, whatever you don’t want we’ll donate to Goodwill.”
He still wasn’t sure he felt up to it, but he was here. And it was time.
“Wes?” Anna said.
He blinked and glanced over.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“You’re sure?”
He gave her a halfhearted smile, then slipped the key into the lock. It was stiff from the dry, dusty climate, but it didn’t put up much of a fight and was soon off. Now the only thing separating him from what remained of his father’s possessions was a metal roll-up door. He grabbed the handle and raised it out of the way.
The unit was about the size of a small, one-car garage, but much of it was hidden by a wall of cardboard boxes that filled the entrance. Someone had written short descriptors on the outside of each: Kitchen, Clothes, Office, Books, Misc.
Wes and Anna began moving them out of the unit and setting them on the asphalt to either side of the door, working slowly in deference to the temperature.
“How long has all this been here?” Anna asked after several minutes.
“About fifteen years, I guess.”
“And you’ve never come to look through it before?”
He shook his head as he grabbed a box and carried it outside. “This is the first time I’ve been back.”
Anna stopped and looked at him. “You mean since you moved away during high school?”
“Yeah.”
They worked in silence for another minute.
“Didn’t you see your dad after you left?”
“Of course I saw him,” Wes said. “I just didn’t see him here. He’d come down to San Diego.”
Removing several more boxes revealed a second wall of them behind the first.
“Whoa,” Anna said. “It’s not all like this, is it?”
“If it is, we’re stopping now.”
Wes hopped up onto a couple of the boxes marked Books, and pulled out one of the top boxes of the second wall to look through the gap.
“I don’t know if this is a good thing or not,” he said, “but it looks like it’s furniture after this.”
Once he’d climbed back down, they finished off enough of the outer wall s
o they could get at the second one, then took a break to drink some of the water they’d brought along.
“Thanks,” Anna said as he handed her a bottle. “I guess I don’t understand why you never came back up here.”
Wes uncapped his and took a long sip, then said, “He died a couple weeks after I graduated high school. Before that, it was always just easier for him to come to me.”
“What about your friends? That guy Lars. Didn’t you come back to visit them?”
He raised his bottle to his lips. “No,” he replied, then tilted the bottle back.
He could feel her looking at him, waiting for more.
Finally she said, “Tell me about your father.”
“Dad?” Wes paused. “Well, if you ever had a flat tire, he’s the guy you’d want driving by. Seriously. Any time he saw someone pulled to the side of the road, he’d stop and see if he could help. Annoyed the hell out of my mom and me. Made us late to things more than once.”
“Sounds like a good guy.”
Wes smiled, then moved back into the unit and started in on the second wall. “Yeah, he was. He cared about things. A little too much, Mom said, but doing the right thing was important to him. He always stressed that to me. He’d say, ‘It might not always be popular, but if it’s what needs to be done, popular doesn’t matter.’ ”
“You miss him, don’t you?”
“Sure, wouldn’t you if your dad was gone?”
“Every day,” she said. She moved another box out of the way. “You’ve never actually told me how he died. If you don’t want to, that’s okay, but …”
“Car crash.”
“Oh, Wes. I’m so sorry.”
Wes shook his head like it didn’t matter. “He was traveling up Nine Mile Canyon toward Kennedy Meadows in the Sierras. The road’s narrow and really winding. No guardrails. It’s also steep, hundreds of feet down. Apparently he misjudged and went off the side.”
Anna took in a quick breath.
“They didn’t even discover his car for almost a week. And only then because one of his friends got worried about him and alerted the police. By then it was just a burned-out hulk with a body inside. The only way they could ID him was from his dental records.”
“That’s awful.”
“He must have been going camping. He did that a lot. Told me he liked the feel of waking up in the mountains. It was a nice change from all the brown down here.”
They’d cleared enough away to get beyond the second wall of boxes, and stepped through into the main area of the unit. The area was lit by a 100-watt bulb that had automatically come on when they’d opened the door.
“My God, look at this stuff,” Wes said.
There was furniture and filing cabinets and lamps and odds and ends stacked haphazardly throughout the central portion of the space.
“What are we looking for?” Anna asked.
“Photo albums, pictures. That kind of thing. My mom wants them.”
He squeezed his way between two cabinets and started tilting things one way or the other to see what was behind them.
“Bingo,” Anna called out a few minutes later. “This drawer is full of framed pictures. Most of them must be you.” She paused for a moment, then laughed.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said, still giggling. After a moment she turned the photo she was looking at so he could see. “It’s you at maybe two, I think. Your face is covered with chocolate, and the only other thing you’re wearing is a diaper.”
“Oh, God,” he said. “Maybe you shouldn’t actually be looking for the pictures.”
“Too late.” She looked at it again. “I think I’m going to have to keep this one myself.”
“You might have a fight on your hands with my mom.”
“Oh, don’t worry. I’ll take her.”
Wes laughed, then went back into search mode. So far he had found nothing of interest. As far as he was concerned, they could donate it all. Then he noticed a chest-high wall of boxes near the back wall.
He pushed past a couple of kitchen chairs and an old end table, then leaned against the wall and peered into the space beyond.
“It is here,” he said.
“What?” Anna asked.
He grinned broadly. “Better if I show you.” He pulled a box marked Den off the pile. “We’re going to have to move some of these.”
They worked quickly, and soon the barrier was half gone.
Anna said, “Is that … a motorcycle?”
Wes grinned again. “Yeah. It’s my dad’s Triumph Bonneville. Got it when I was ten. Another officer who was transferring overseas couldn’t take it with him.”
Together they cleared a path through the furniture, then Wes wheeled the motorcycle out into the sunlight. The bike’s gas tank and fenders were painted a rich green that even after all these years had faded little. And the black storage compartment behind the seat looked almost new.
“There’s something else back here,” Anna called from inside the unit. “Looks like a box of bike stuff.”
She carried it out and set it on the ground near the motorcycle. Inside were a helmet, a file folder, and keys.
Wes pulled out the folder and opened it. Inside was his father’s old maintenance log, the final entry of which had been made after his father’s death:
Oil and gas drained. Battery removed.
There were some initials at the end of the entry, but they meant nothing to Wes. Whoever it was had cared enough to prep the cycle for storage. There was also an envelope that contained the pink slip.
“You think it’ll start?” Anna asked.
“We’ll have to make a stop at an auto store first to get some oil and a new battery … and then gas, of course. But I don’t see why not. Dad always took good care of it. Let’s finish up and we’ll see if I’m right.”
They spent the next hour hunting down photos, but came up with a lot less than Wes had been expecting. After that they started returning all the boxes they’d removed to the unit.
As Wes came back from carrying another load inside, he found Anna hunched over a box on the asphalt, looking inside.
“We’re not going through them,” he said. “We’re just carrying them back in.”
With a smirk, she turned the box and pointed at the side where someone had scrawled in black ink Photos.
“Would this be what your mom wanted?” she asked innocently.
She pulled out a photo album, gave it a quick perusal, then dove deeper into the box. Next out came an old Tupperware container full of loose photographs. That was followed by a second container, then a group of four thinner albums.
“I think you may have just earned my mother’s undying love,” Wes said, smiling.
“I’m still going to fight her for the Chocolate Boy picture.”
“I would have expected nothing less. Now quit browsing and put it all back in the box. I’ll take it to the truck once we get everything else put away.”
As he was picking up another box to return to the unit, Anna said, “This is interesting.”
He stopped just long enough to see that she’d removed a couple more items from the box, then continued into the storage unit. “You suck at directions. I told you just leave the photos in the box. You can look at them back at the motel if you really want to.”
“These aren’t photo albums,” she called out.
“Then just set them on top of one of the boxes we’re leaving. We don’t need them.”
Her voice grew distant as he went back into the unit. “You might want to take a look first.”
He laughed to himself, then set the box down and went back outside.
“All right. Show me what you found.”
She held out one of the books and said, “Here.”
He took it and opened it. She was right. It wasn’t a photo album. It was a day planner covering the year Wes was in eighth grade. Wes immediately recognized his father’s handwriting.
“I forg
ot about these,” he said. “They’re my dad’s. His way of staying organized so that he didn’t miss anything.”
“Maybe you should keep them.” She held out the other three.
He thought for a moment, then took them from her. “Maybe.”
From the box she pulled out some more. They put them in order. There were planners that started from when Wes was seven, right up until—
“That’s odd,” Wes said.
“What?”
“There’s not one for the year he died.”
“Maybe after you left, he stopped,” Anna suggested.
“No way. Not Dad. He would have definitely kept these up. He died in the summer, so there’s a whole half a year that should be written down somewhere.”
Anna looked through the books, just to double-check. “Maybe it’s in another box.”
If he hadn’t seen the books, he never would have missed them. But now, especially since he knew they were filled with words written by his father, he felt he couldn’t just forget about them. And it only made sense, then, to have the whole set.
He thought back, remembering those times he’d seen his father sitting at the table, writing in one of the planners.
“The kitchen,” he said. “That’s where he could have kept it.”
They located all the boxes marked Kitchen and started looking through them. It was Wes who found it in a box full of old notepads and shoestrings and ads for restaurants and the other things he knew his father had simply stuffed into the kitchen junk drawer.
He opened the book and started thumbing through the pages, stopping when he reached the last weeks of his father’s life.
There were notations about meetings at work and a reminder about someone named Charlie’s birthday. With only a slight hesitation, Wes paused before turning the page to the week that contained the day his father died. Oddly, there was nothing about going on a trip. In fact, on the day after his father was killed in the crash, he had several meetings scheduled.
A one-day camping trip? Wes had never remembered his father going on one that short before.
Then something else caught his attention. It was a single word written in the 8:30 p.m. slot on the day before the crash:
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