by David Freed
“Oh, absolutely.”
“Maybe you know her,” Chad said opening the Duck’s baggage door and taking out our luggage. “Her name’s Cherry Rosales. She works at Nordstrom, the store downtown. Sells jewelry.”
“Actually,” I said, “I’m more of a Sears kind of guy.”
The air was cold enough that we could see our breath. Chad asked how long we planned to stay and whether we needed any recommendations on accommodations in the Tahoe area. Savannah gave him the name of the local bed-and-breakfast where she’d made reservations.
“As for how long we’re staying,” she said, “that all depends on how well my pilot and I are getting along.”
“We’re getting married,” I said, clarifying matters.
“Seriously?” Chad’s expression implied that people our age were as likely to croak from some incurable disease as they were to get hitched.
“Yeah. Seriously.”
“Hey, that’s totally cool. Congratulations.”
Savannah said we’d need a rental car, to which Chad replied, “No problem.” I said that the Duck’s gas tanks would need to be topped off to which he offered the same response.
“Got your complimentary hot coffee inside, sodas, cookies, peanut butter pretzels, what have you. Feel free to help yourself. Marlene’ll hook you up with all the paperwork for the car and your fuel order. I’ll bring your bags in. Anything else I can do for you folks today?”
“You can call the local search and rescue team for me. I saw something when we were flying in. West, about 10 miles out, up in the hills. It looked like a downed airplane.”
“You’re shittin’ me. A downed airplane? Really?” Chad promptly apologized to Savannah for swearing and said he was trying to break the profanity habit.
No big deal, Savannah said. She’d heard worse.
“I haven’t heard of any planes missing for a while,” Chad said, “either coming in or going out of here, but, hey, you never know, right?”
“Could be it’s been up there for some time and nobody noticed,” I said.
The kid nodded, then snapped his fingers like he’d just thought of something.
“Hey, what if it’s Amelia Earhart?”
“Hey,” I said, tipping him a five-spot, “what if it’s not?”
THE AFOREMENTIONED Marlene, Summit Aviation Services’ zaftig, forty-something receptionist, made Chad seem downright rude by comparison. She waived the overnight parking fee for the Duck because we were buying gas, and upgraded our rental car from a compact to a GMC Yukon at no additional cost. Then she brewed a fresh pot of coffee and insisted on serving us oatmeal cookies more freshly baked than the ones that had been sitting on her desk.
“And did I mention we have complimentary bicycles for your enjoyment?—though it’s probably not the best time of the year to go for a bike ride. Been pretty darned nippy around here.”
She leaned over the coffeemaker and poured us Styrofoam cups of hot joe.
The steam fogged the lenses of Marlene’s red-frame bifocals and made her brunette shag even shaggier. Her face was soft and full. I noticed faint dark rings obscured by makeup under both eyes. Natural shading, or the result of being punched? I couldn’t tell.
“So nice of you,” Savannah said. “Thank you.”
“Just trying to keep the customer satisfied.” Marlene smiled. “I believe that was a lyric in an old Simon and Garfunkel song, was it not?”
“I believe it was,” Savannah said.
My ex-wife caught my eye and winked subtly. She knew that I keenly distrusted overtly friendly people until such time as they’d shown their true colors—people like genuinely nice Mrs. Schmulowitz. Geniality, I’ve learned the hard way, often belies the blackest of instincts, hard-wired impulses that cruise sharklike behind cordial smiles, ready to surface at little provocation. I’ve known remorseless murderers who would’ve been perceived as “nice” by any definition when they were not out slaughtering innocents. I’ve personally removed a few of those “nice” people from the planet. But that was before I was introduced to the Buddha who is all about giving strangers the benefit of the doubt, including seemingly well-meaning receptionists.
“Another cookie?” Marlene said.
“Don’t mind if I do.”
The door opened and Chad came in off the flight line, holding his iPhone to his right ear.
“No, ma’am, I’m not the pilot. I just work here. The pilot’s right here.” He handed me the phone. “El Dorado Sheriff’s Department. They want to talk to you.”
The voice on the other end identified herself as Sergeant Somebody. I didn’t catch her name. She said she was the watch commander on duty. I told her what I’d told Chad, about what I’d seen, and approximately where I’d seen it. If I’d had any presence of mind, I told her, I would’ve noted the exact location on my GPS receiver, the latitude and longitude, and written it down. But I hadn’t.
“Nobody’s perfect,” the sergeant assured me.
What I’d seen was likely nothing, she said, but department policy compelled her to have the tip thoroughly investigated regardless. Was I willing to talk to a deputy in person? She could have one at the airport in about half an hour.
I was in no hurry, I said, and handed Chad back his phone.
“My lord, a plane crashed?” Marlene’s hand was over her mouth as she sat down behind her desk. “I hope everyone’s OK.”
“We don’t know if it’s a plane crash yet,” Chad said, delivering an invoice to her, documenting how many gallons of fuel he’d pumped into the Duck. “It might be a crash. Or nothing at all.”
I noticed a small, round spider web tattooed on the right side of Chad’s neck as he leaned across the counter to hand Marlene his paperwork. Web tats of any kind commonly convey that the bearer has done prison time, but Chad didn’t seem like the inmate type to me. I kept the observation to myself.
Savannah said she wanted to drive into South Lake Tahoe and check into the $300-a-night bed-and-breakfast that she’d carefully researched online and insisted on paying for because she knew I couldn’t. When I was done talking to the deputy, I would call her. She’d then come back to the airport and pick me up. Time permitting, after that, we would drive to Incline Village at the northeast end of the lake, on the Nevada side, and take out a sixty-dollar license at the Washoe County Marriage License Bureau. Then we’d stop in at the Dream-Maker chapel—where Tom Selleck, among many other Hollywood types, got married, according to Savannah—and retie the knot. No muss, no fuss, she said. I wouldn’t even have to change my clothes.
“You’re getting married? How romantic,” Marlene gushed. “You should’ve said something.” She waddled into a back room and returned seconds later with a box about the size of a Twinkie. It was wrapped in plain red paper with a silver ribbon tied around it. “A small token of congratulations from Summit Aviation Services. We get a lot of people coming up here wanting to get married. Tom Selleck got married up here, you know.”
“So I’ve heard,” I said.
“You can open it now if you want,” Marlene said.
“Sure. Why not?” Savannah slowly unwrapped the box, careful not to tear the paper, as all women inexplicably do.
Inside was a night light. Embossed on the plastic lens was a full-color rendition of Orville and Wilbur Wright.
“Their eyes light up when you plug it in,” Marlene said. “We got a whole bunch of ’em on eBay for next to nothing. Isn’t it beautiful?”
Savannah wasn’t sure how to respond.
I managed a persuasive smile. And then, if only to wow my ex-wife with my civility, I added, “Thanks for such a lovely gift, Marlene.”
Savannah seemed duly impressed.
CHAD SPREAD a copy of the San Francisco-area FAA aeronautical chart on a long wooden conference table in the pilots’ lounge. I pointed to the location where I’d spotted what I assumed was wreckage.
“And you’re sure that that’s where it was?” Deputy Kyle Woo said.
Woo leaned over the map, studying it and jotting notes in a black leather binder. He was Asian-American, stocky, in his early thirties. The pumped muscles under his tan uniform shirt told me he was a power weight lifter. His insulated nylon sheriff’s jacket matched the deep green of his tactical pants. A .40-caliber Glock rode on his right hip.
“I used to go camping up there off of Chalmers Peak all the time,” Chad said. “I’m real familiar with that area. Saw a porcupine up near there once. I’m on this game trail and the dude walks right out in front of me, like, no big deal. Didn’t even look at me or nothing. I thought at first maybe it was a wolverine or a beaver or some such, but nope, it wasn’t. It was a damn porcupine. Can you believe that?”
Woo looked up at the kid from his note-taking and said, “Pretty weird.” His dark, narrow eyes betrayed zero emotion and seemed to miss nothing.
“Yup, pretty weird,” Chad said. He seemed nervous under the deputy’s gaze. “Well, anyway, I’m outta here. Started work at six this morning. So, unless there’s anything else I can do for you gentlemen . . .”
“I think we’ve got it under control,” Woo said.
“Cool, cool. Well, enjoy the rest of your day.”
Chad turned and nearly collided with a large man with a ragged haircut who reminded me a little of Fred Flintstone. He was carrying an oversized soda cup with a straw in it and a food bag from McDonald’s.
“What’re you still doing hanging around here, Chad Lovejoy? You were supposed to be off shift an hour ago.”
“I was just—”
“You were just stealing my money, is what you were doing,” the man said, cutting him off. “I’m not paying you overtime. How many times I gotta tell you that?”
“Fine. I’m leaving.”
“You do that. But before you do, there’s a couple boxes in the back of my station wagon. I want you to move them into the supply room.”
“You’re the boss,” Chad said as he left, shooting an anxious glance in the direction of Deputy Woo, who was still writing in his notepad. “I’ll get right on it.”
Chad’s boss was decked out in tan Dockers and a white, oxford-cloth dress shirt, over which he wore a blue, Northface ski parka embossed with the Summit Aviation Services corporate logo. His dour sneer suggested he was not happy at the sight of Deputy Woo.
“So, what’s going on?” He plopped his burger bag on the table along with a fat key ring. Attached to the ring was a small metal silhouette of a tailless Australian shepherd dog.
Woo barely gave the man a glance.
“This is Gordon Priest,” the deputy said. “Mr. Priest is the manager here at Summit Aviation. He’s suing me because I cited his sixteen-year-old daughter for minor in possession.”
“She has one lousy beer and you treat her like it’s her third strike.”
Woo kept his calm. “Mr. Logan’s a transient pilot. He thinks he may have observed a downed airplane while he was flying in this morning.”
“Welcome.” Priest unwrapped a Big Mac and devoured half of it in one bite. “What kind of plane was it?”
“Couldn’t tell. All I saw was what looked like a section of a wing.”
“The Civil Air Patrol routinely notifies us of any missing or overdue planes,” Priest said, a bit of lettuce clinging to his lower lip. “Same goes for any ELT signals anywhere in northern California and western Nevada, and we haven’t gotten any of those in a long time.”
Not everybody files a flight plan, which requires a pilot to list, among other information, the estimated time of arrival at his intended destination. If he’s late getting there, the FAA will begin looking for him in short order. Without a flight plan on file, nobody will come looking unless someone reports that plane missing, or saw it go down.
Moreover, not all emergency locator transmitters, which are designed to automatically trigger after a plane crashes, will prompt rescue teams to swing into action. The problem is that most older airplanes are equipped with transmitters that broadcast emergency signals on a frequency no longer monitored by orbiting satellites. In other words, if what I’d seen was, in fact, a missing airplane, there was a good possibility that nobody in officialdom even knew about it. If injured souls were on board, it was imperative to reach the crash site as quickly as possible.
“Where’d you see this supposed wreck?” Priest said, polishing off his Big Mac and unwrapping a second.
I showed him on the chart.
He frowned. “I haven’t heard of any airplanes going down in that area in all the time I’ve been working here. You ask me, if it is a plane, it’s probably been up there for years, and it’s already been reported. Happens all the time, old wrecks getting reported as new.”
“I hope you’re right. You appear to be a man who usually is.”
He was too busy stuffing his face to acknowledge the dig.
Woo asked me if I’d be willing to accompany him on a drive up to the mountains, to give him better perspective of where to begin looking. I said yes. Anyone with any sense of responsibility would’ve done the same.
The nuptials would have to wait.
SAVANNAH SAID she more than understood, though I’m not sure she did. Our suite at the romantic Victorian B&B that she’d found online, she told me over the phone, didn’t disappoint. We had an antique poster bed with a view of the lake and our own private deck. She wanted to know when I’d be back.
I looked across the center console shotgun mount of Deputy Woo’s Jeep Wrangler, with the sheriff’s star on the doors, and relayed Savannah’s query to Woo as he and I rode west out of South Lake Tahoe on US 50, toward Echo Summit.
“Depends on what we see,” Woo said. “Probably around five.”
“The marriage license office closes at five,” Savannah said.
“We’ll pick up the license tomorrow. What’s one more day? No big deal, right?”
“Right.” She was disappointed, but trying not to sound it.
“I’m not changing my mind between now and then, Savannah. I’m not bailing, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I know. It’s just that . . . I had everything all planned out for tonight. I wanted it to be . . . special.”
“It’ll still be special tomorrow night.”
“Let’s hope so.” She cleared her throat. “See you tonight.”
“You can count on it.”
I slid my phone into the front pocket of my jeans and gazed out at the passing landscape: rocky escarpments to the right and a sheer drop-off into steep canyons to our left. Traffic was sparse.
“You getting married?” Woo said.
“Remarried. We split a few years back. Decided to give it another go.”
He said nothing, his dark, expressionless eyes fixed on the road ahead.
I asked him if he was married.
“No.”
“Girlfriend?”
“No.”
“Boyfriend?”
Long silence.
“You always this chatty, Deputy Woo?”
The right side of his mouth turned upward a couple of millimeters into what I gathered was a smile. That was all I got out of him for the next ten miles or so until the cliffs to the north gave way to dense stands of lodge pole pines on either side of the highway. Woo flipped a switch, activating the flashing red and blue police lights atop his Wrangler, as we came up on a break in the trees, then pulled off the road, onto the shoulder. From under his seat he produced a pair of binoculars.
“Where you pointed to on the map,” Woo said, “it’s up there.”
He checked his mirrors for oncoming cars before getting out. I joined him on a low berm just off the road, affording an unobstructed view of the mountainous terrain to the north. The air was crisp, approaching brisk. I wished I’d thought to bring a warmer coat.
“That’s Mount San Carlos on the left and Chalmers Peak on the right,” the deputy said, pointing, “and that area between is where you said you s
aw whatever it was you saw.”
He handed me the binoculars. It wasn’t difficult to orient myself. Through the magnified lenses, I clearly recognized the bow of craggy, barren rocks linking the two mountains, below which I’d first spotted from the air what I was increasingly convinced were the remains of an airplane. Beyond that, I could make out nothing identifiable other than trees; the forest was too thick.
Woo estimated we were about six miles from the site as the crow flies. He knew of an unpaved logging road that wended about halfway there. The remaining miles would have to be negotiated on foot.
“It’ll be sunset in a couple of hours,” he said. “Search and rescue can head up first thing in the morning. I’m sure they could use your company.”
“Why not fly? Doesn’t the sheriff’s department have a helicopter? There could be injured people up there.”
The sheriff did, in fact, have a helicopter, Woo said, but the conditions of its use in tight budgetary times were extremely restrictive. Unconfirmed reports of downed airplanes apparently fell outside those limits.
“That’s all I can do, Mr. Logan.” He turned and trudged back down the slope toward his Wrangler, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his jacket.
I scanned the mountainsides with the binoculars one last time. There was really nothing to see beyond those towering peaks and a forest so deep and silent as to be almost unreal.
I’m not a big believer in extrasensory perception. People who claim powers of clairvoyance are con artists half the time, by my experience, and the other half, fruitcakes. But I couldn’t shake the powerful sense that something was up there, beneath those trees, waiting for me, and that whatever it was, it wasn’t good.
FOUR
Johnny and Gwen Kavitch operated Tranquility House, the meticulously kept, Victorian-style bed-and-breakfast where Savannah had booked us a bungalow. They were unbelievably nice in a laid-back, Grateful Dead kind of way. I was immediately suspicious of them.
It was late afternoon. The four of us were commiserating in their parlor. A full-sized concert harp was propped in one corner. The Kavitches had laid out a spread of cheeses on an antique sideboard, paired with bottles of what I assumed was good wine. So far as I could tell, we were their only guests. At 300 bucks a night, there was no mystery as to why.
