The Rivers Run Dry

by Sibella Giorello

  “I hear things in this house. At night. Do you hear them?”

  “The cats. They creep around.”

  She examined my face, her brown eyes changing to hazel. “It’s going to rain. That’s what they say.”

  “Yes, I heard that too.”

  “They say it rains all the time here. They say it never stops raining.”

  “Then plenty of raincoats for sale.” I smiled.

  She nodded.

  “Don’t be late for dinner.” She closed the door behind her.

  A six-mile moraine of land ten minutes from downtown Seattle, Mercer Island boasted more millionaires per capita than any other city in Washington State. Later that night, after choking down tofu, I crossed the bridge that connected Mercer Island to the city. Lights from the waterfront mansions danced on the lake, glimmering like castle fires in a kingdom moat.

  The VanAlstyne estate sat on the west side of the island at the end of a long winding descent, an iron gate guarding the property. I leaned out my car window, speaking into the rectangular metal box bolted to the ironwork. Moments later, the gate slid back and I drove toward what looked like a small hotel. In the circular driveway, my headlights brushed a black Porsche. I could hear water lapping against the rocky shore beyond the house, a wet percussive sound without detectible rhythm.

  At the front door, a young woman stood waiting. She was dressed entirely in black, including massive eyeglasses that gave her a severe appearance, and her dark eyes swept over my credentials. I followed her efficient steps across a wide marble floor, a pink rock, probably from Italy. The woman, who had yet to introduce herself, walked up a curving staircase where her steps were suddenly muffled by white carpeting. We turned right at the top, her stiff back leading us down a gallery with brass sconces bowing over abstract paintings sealed under glass without glare. With one knuckle, she rapped on the final door, absently smoothed her short black hair, and at the word spoken within, turned the knob.

  “This is Special Agent Raleigh Harmon with the FBI,” she said. “Would you like me to stay?”

  The king-sized bed was covered with gray silk pillows, dark and translucent as winter rain, and in the far corner, directly below a picture window that framed Seattle’s nightline, a man and a woman ate dinner. The round table was covered by a starched white tablecloth. Steaks were on their plates.

  “No, thank you, Sequoia,” the man said. “We’ll call you back.”

  Sequoia closed the door without looking at me.

  The man lifted a decanter of red wine, refilling their glasses. The woman beside him had a languid posture that reminded me of a waterfall. She lifted her glass, staring at me over the crystal edge, while the man cut a bite from his rare steak, then pushed back his chair.

  “Raleigh Harmon, was that it?” He was still chewing as he extended his hand.

  “Yes, sir.” His skin felt like pumice.

  “Martin VanAlstyne.”

  “Nice to meet you, sir.”

  “This is my lovely wife, Alex.”

  Alex VanAlstyne lowered her sculpted chin just enough to acknowledge the introduction.

  “Perhaps you’ll be able to tell us what the FBI is doing to find our daughter,” he said.

  “Sir, the Issaquah police are in charge of this case. We were called in for forensic tests only.” I carefully explained that unless a federal crime was committed, the case would remain in Issaquah’s jurisdiction, although we would help in any way possible.

  “But a federal crime has been committed,” he said. “Our daughter was kidnapped.”

  “Did you receive a note?”

  His body was wiry, younger than the face etched with fur-rows. He seemed to twist with coiled fury. “No, we don’t have a note. But we have every reason to believe she’s been kidnapped.”

  I glanced at the wife. Her wineglass poised in her hand, she watched her husband.

  “And what reasons are those?” I asked.

  “Money,” he said. “What else? My daughter’s life is worth a good deal of money, Miss Harmon.”

  I nodded, as if agreeing with his theory. “And the last time you saw your daughter was . . . when?”

  “Saturday evening.”

  It was the woman who spoke. Her dull voice was somehow alluring, the sound of steady wind over an open field. “It was close to 6:00 p.m.,” she continued. “We were getting ready for the symphony. Courtney stopped by. And then we went out.”

  “Why did she stop by?”

  “No reason in particular. We talked. My husband and I left, Courtney left after us. I spoke to her again Sunday morning, on her cell phone. She was on her way to the math library at the university.”

  “My wife and daughter speak to each other several times a day,” Mr. VanAlstyne said. “Our daughter has never gone a single day without contacting us. It’s been two days since we heard from her and her car is sitting at Cougar Mountain. Doesn’t that strike you as suspicious?”

  I assured him it was highly suspicious. “But in the eyes of the law your daughter is considered an adult. Which means she wasn’t officially missing until yesterday, twenty-four hours after you spoke to her.”

  “This is complete idiocy,” he said. “Your legalistic perception has nothing to do with what’s actually happened. How can you stand here and say these things?”

  “Sir, I understand your frustration, but until the evidence says otherwise, the Issaquah police will have to handle the case.” I also explained that the FBI doesn’t automatically get involved with kidnappings unless there’s extortion or the kidnapper crosses state lines.

  “You’re telling me the FBI isn’t going to help us?”

  “Sir, is it possible that your daughter went—”

  “No,” he interrupted.

  “She was going to the math library,” the wife said. “She would have told me if she was going somewhere else.”

  “Perhaps somebody has seen her,” I said. “The media can help publicize her disappear—”

  “No,” she interrupted. “Absolutely not. We know how the media works. They’ll dig into our personal lives, creating scandals.”

  “Any attention like that will only put Courtney at greater risk. What if the kidnapper decides it’s too risky to contact us, and he kills her? No, my wife and I agree. Publicity will make things worse for Courtney. We want this settled, quickly and quietly. We will pay whatever they ask.”

  “But you just said there was no ransom note.”

  “That’s what we need the FBI for—to find her.”

  I counted to ten. “Sir, I—”

  “Quit blowing smoke at us with all this feigned respect,” he said. “What we need is a real search for our daughter. Forty-eight hours might not sound like much to you, but we know our daughter. Courtney has never—not once—been out of touch with us. Something is wrong. Somebody took her.”

  “Sir, I wish you would—”

  “I told you to stop that.”

  He stepped across the white carpeting, his wiry body moving with an electric urgency. Beside the door, he pressed a tiny brass button set within the green wall. Sequoia appeared.

  “See her out,” Martin VanAlstyne said. “We’re finished with her.”

  chapter three

  Driving away from the VanAlstyne estate, I followed the narrow twists of island road, passing through a phalanx of mansions, each positioned for a commanding view of the water that mirrored city lights and all the bright skyscrapers shaped like crystals of smoky quartz.

  In my hometown of Richmond, new money was relatively unknown. As in most of the old South, an ingrained caste system still played itself out among the tobacco and aluminum dynasties and the vast plantations that passed like an open secret from generation to generation. But during my years away from home, I had met new money similar to the VanAlstynes. One of the most memorable introductions came on my first day at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts, after I found a new cell phone on my dorm room desk. By today’s standards, t
he phone was enormous, but back in the 1990s it seemed as sleek and exotic as a python. The phone contained five hundred free minutes, part of the gift for every girl in the North Mandelle dormitory, courtesy of Mark Tomlinson.

  Mr. Tomlinson’s daughter Ashton was in my freshman class, and her father held the patent for a particular mechanism used on every cell phone. At the parents’ reception that day, I went to thank Mr. Tomlinson for his generosity. He was a diminutive man who wore a baseball hat and torn tennis shoes to a formal gathering, and later that day his bright red Ferrari sped away from the dormitory, never to return. In the spring, after report cards had gone home to parents, I was walking down the dormitory hallway when I heard a keening sound, like the wail of some small animal caught in the teeth of a metal trap. It was coming from the showers. Ashton Tomlinson was crouched on the floor, her sobs echoing off the white subway tiles. She had been caught breaking the college’s honor code, all of her term papers a plagiarized mess of aspirations. The next day Ashton Tomlinson took the bus home to Greenwich, to stay.

  In all these encounters, I’ve learned that when people are unaccustomed to the transformations that great wealth brings, they tend to wear their new identity with peculiar self-consciousness. One moment gripped by an arrogant insulation against the daily rigors of making a living; the next so deeply needy and insecure, so profoundly fearful that the former definitions might surge forward and steal the recent foothold in their new strata, that their moral code disappears. But new money was still money, and the morning after my visit to the VanAlstynes, I was reminded of how it exerted influence where money mattered most.

  “Harmon, in my office,” my supervisor said.

  Still sweating from the weighted climb from the car, I blotted my forehead with the back of my wrist. McLeod closed the door to his office. It was a glass cube. Every agent turned to watch our conversation.

  “You went to the VanAlstyne’s last night?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Drop that ‘sir’ stuff.”

  “It’s a habit.”

  “Break it,” he said. “This morning I got a call from Washington, and I don’t mean here. I mean DC. Soon as you left the VanAlstynes, they dialed the senator again. This time he called the director. The director, Harmon. The director called our SAC who called the ASAC who called me. You keeping up?”

  “Yes—”

  “This was 4:00 a.m. Are you still with me?”

  I nodded.

  “The ASAC asked—again—what we’re doing with the VanAlstyne case. I didn’t even know it was a case.”

  “It’s not. The Issaquah PD called us when the girl was officially missing twenty-four hours. No sign of struggle at the vehicle. No blood evidence. No fingerprints but hers. Yet the VanAlstynes insist she was kidnapped. There’s no evidence pointing to that. No phone calls, no ransom note. We’re involved only to cover the local PD against trial attorneys.”

  Allen McLeod had hands like oversized mittens, and when he rubbed them over his face, they made scritching sounds against his whiskers. “We need to get all our ducks in the fire,” he said.

  I nodded as though that made sense.

  “I can’t tell headquarters these people are crazy until you give me something more to work with,” he said. “No later than 2:00 p.m.”

  By West Coast standards, Courtney VanAlstyne’s condo building in Kirkland was practically prehistoric. The squat stucco structure, painted the color of sandstone, was built in 1948 with concrete pylons that sank into the edge of Lake Washington so that the front units perched over the water.

  Standing in the living room, I stared at the water below and felt an imaginary shifting sensation, the feeling that usually comes from being aboard a boat. Beside me stood Courtney’s roommate, a girl named Stacee Warner, a tiny twentysomething with olive skin that hinted of ethnic heritage.

  “Did you come here alone?” she asked me.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “I don’t know . . .” Her voice trailed off. It was 10:20 a.m. and my arrival had woken her up. “I just thought maybe some-body else would be with you, like you work in pairs. Like on TV.”

  The girls met as freshmen at the University of Washington, I had learned, and moved in together because the VanAlstynes refused to allow their daughter to live on campus unless she joined a sorority.

  “Courtney refused,” Stacee said with a drowsy smile. “It’s not her style to hang out with a bunch of girls who spend all their time shopping and gossiping. She’s way too cool for that. But the parents wouldn’t even let her get an apartment near campus. They think the U-District is too grungy. Her dad owns this condo from way back when, maybe his bachelor days. And he gave it to her. Gave it to her. Free. She doesn’t even charge me rent.”

  “You must be close.”

  “We have a lot in common. Like, we both think advanced algebra is easy. We both like working with numbers. Only Court’s a math genius and I’m not. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  She stared out the window. The sunlight on the blue water shot oblong flashes of silver on the white walls. “It’s not like her to be gone this long.”

  “That’s what her parents said.”

  “She calls them every day. Sometimes her mom and her talk, like, four or five times a day. About nothing.” Her tone was a mixture of admiration and jealousy.

  “Mr. and Mrs. VanAlstyne believe she was kidnapped. What do you think happened?”

  She tucked short strands of dark hair behind her ears, her sleepy face suddenly gamine. “Alex—that’s Mrs. VanAlstyne—she called here Sunday night looking for Court, because she wasn’t answering her cell phone. I told her they make you turn it off in the library.”

  “How do you know Courtney was at the library?”

  “That’s where she said she was going.”

  “Has she ever left town suddenly, not told anybody?”

  Her dark eyes darted toward the water. “Are you reporting back to her parents?”

  “That depends.”

  “I want to tell you, ’cause I think you should know this, but I don’t want to get Court in any trouble.”

  “What if she’s already in trouble?”

  “Sometimes she used to take off for Las Vegas with her boy-friend. She had me set up three-way phone calls, so her mother wouldn’t see roaming charges on her cell phone. They pay all her bills, credit cards, everything. I had to hold my breath the whole time they were on the phone, waiting for the conversation to end so I could hang up.” She laughed, then abruptly stopped. “But I’m not feeling like this is funny. I feel like this is really serious. Shouldn’t you have a partner or something?”

  I guessed it was my age throwing her off. She expected an older agent, a veteran.

  “What time did she make those trips to Vegas?”

  “After we first moved in together, like, two years ago. But she broke up with that guy.”

  “What time did she leave here on Sunday?”

  “Ten. Maybe eleven. Actually, it could’ve been noon.”

  I waited for an explanation. In the bright sun, her eyes looked like dark seeds.

  “I’m not much of a morning person,” she explained. “My mind doesn’t really function until the afternoon. Like, right now, my brain feels stuffed with socks.”

  “Tough if you’re a student,” I said.

  “It was.” She pursed her lips. “I dropped out last year. It just costs too much, you know? Besides, I make plenty of money now. So it’s no big deal.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a waitress.” Her brown eyes came to life. “I work nights. Nobody ever tips big at breakfast, so no loss for me.”

  “If Courtney went to the library, why was her car at Cougar Mountain?”

  Without a word, she walked across the room and into the kitchen where a refrigerator stood like a stainless steel sentry and the black granite countertops were covered by a micron of dust. Above the desk tucked in one corner, a map from
the United States Geologic Services showed green areas—state and federal lands—with swirls of fine lines for the altitudes. Someone had drawn in the roads with pencil. Pushpins punctured several summits.

  “We have this bet,” Stacee said. “Who can hike the most trails in one year. Winner takes all. We both love to hike.”

  “What’s the prize?”

  “No more laundry. The loser does all the laundry, like, for-ever.”

  The colorful pushpins marked several mountain summits, but the pins were only three colors—yellow, green, and blue. When I asked if the colors meant anything, Stacee said yellow was for a trail Courtney hiked solo; blue meant Stacee hiked by herself.

  “And green means we hiked together, because yellow and blue make green.” She turned to me. “I really think Court went to Cougar Mountain to hike Clay Pit Road. She wanted to beat me to it.”

  “You didn’t tell this to the parents?”

  “If they think something happened to her because of our bet, they’ll kill me. I drove out there Monday, looking for her. I walked over that mountain, screaming my head off. I stayed until it got dark.”

  “And the parents don’t know?”

  “About the bet?”

  I nodded.

  “They hate her gambling, on anything.”

  She led me to Courtney’s bedroom. The room was about twenty feet square with walls covered by black-and-white photographs, each showing an image of stunning symmetry, and all the mahogany frames were hung so perfectly level they seemed like an abstract sculpture. The double bed’s sheets were bunched at the bottom, like layers of ruptured gray silt.

  “Does she have a new boyfriend?” I asked.

  “She doesn’t need a boyfriend. Guys hit on her like you would not believe. Even when they don’t know she’s rich. She’s that beautiful. And when she didn’t come home Sunday night, I thought maybe she met somebody at the library and you know . . .”

  I peeked into the closet. Courtney VanAlstyne had organized her clothing by color and type. Every red blouse together in one section—all the white T-shirts, the black skirts, a section of pressed blue jeans. Her shoes stood floor to ceiling on cherrywood shelves, organized into groups of tennis shoes, flats, heels, sandals, and boots.