by Rick Blechta
“Do you think Mrs. St. James would speak to me?”
“I doubt that very much. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
He turned and left the room.
Getting behind the wheel of her rental car again, Shannon felt that there had been a lot more information to glean. It was her experience that servants heard and saw far more than their employers realized and far less than they would admit. James Davis had struck her as an intelligent and proud man who would have been an exemplary butler, and therefore probably knew pretty well everything that had gone on in that house.
But he was still far too good an employee to talk about all of it.
Before starting the engine, Shannon used her cell phone to call her office for messages.
“Let’s see, boss,” Janet said as she noisily flipped through some pages.
“Not you, too,” Shannon answered wearily.
“Okay, b... I mean, Shannon. A Mrs. Jeffries called to say she’d like you to call her. And Jackie got off okay.”
Before making the call, Shannon decided to find a place to stay for the night. It didn’t take long, being so close to the New York State Thruway, but she did have to pay more than she wanted.
Once inside the room, she got on the phone.
“Thank you for calling back,” Darcy Jeffries said in a tired voice. “This afternoon I was not completely truthful with you. I was brought up to regard ‘untruths’ as a very bad thing.”
“Mrs. Jeffries, you shouldn’t—”
“No, no. Please hear me out. I know that you’re attempting to help my angel. Heaven knows, she needs the help of someone.” She sighed loudly. “I’m too old to do much, but that doesn’t mean I should do nothing.”
“Is this about Olivia’s journal?”
The old woman gasped then, surprisingly, chuckled.“I guess I didn’t do very well trying to fool you. Why didn’t you say something?”
“I figured I could always swing by later on. Do you know where the journal is?”
“I have it. I can’t tell you why I took it, and I haven’t looked at it since – until after you left today. I think you should have it, even though my entire family is against it. I’ve also spoken to James, and he’s not happy about it, either. He doesn’t want to stir up any more trouble for the family. But I can be a stubborn old woman when I want to be.” She chuckled again.
“May I come over to get it now?”
“Tomorrow morning would be better.”
“I guess that would work for me,” Shannon answered, not happy about the delay. “I’ll be there at nine a.m.”
Later, at quarter past eleven, Shannon laid her laptop next to her on the bed, leaned back against the pillows and rubbed her eyes wearily.
For nearly five hours she’d gone through every single page of the Sunnyvale website, then compared it to websites for similar facilities, and what she’d learned left her feeling decidedly uneasy.
Curran was right. Sunnyvale did sound cultish in its approach. They had all sorts of levels that “Seekers” could attain over a course of “study”, which included the usual things like group therapy, one-on-one work with their “Teachers”, but they also utilized things like “Responsibility Sessions”, a term that gave Shannon a chill.
One of the first pages trumpeted, “The core of our program is helping our Seekers to take Complete Responsibility for all their Actions and any Consequences that come as a result. Everyone is expected to follow our very strict Regime at all times. We believe it is our ‘tough love’ approach that allows everyone entering our program to make progress far exceeding what other facilities are capable of producing. We tackle the most difficult cases and can boast that our graduates’ extraordinarily low recidivism rate is second to none.”
To Shannon’s mind, this did not seem like the sort of place a person like Olivia belonged. Yes, she had some of the types of problems Sunnyvale was set up to handle, but would a drug addiction normally require a six-year stay? Something didn’t quite fit here. Jackie’s scenario seemed to be taking on more credibility.
After sending emails to Rachel, Robby and Michael, Shannon took a shower and went to bed.
Sleep was a long time coming and was not very restful.
Next morning, arriving early at the Jeffries’ house, Shannon found her way blocked by a police car. Her heart sank, and she pounded her hands on the steering wheel in frustration. If anything had happened because of her prying...
This exact scenario had run through her dreams the previous night, and she found herself unnerved. Parking her car a few blocks away, she walked back to the head of the street.
“What’s going on?” she asked the cop, even though she could see fire engines ahead on the street.
“There’s been a fire overnight. They’re cleaning up now, but it will still be a little while.”
“I have an appointment with someone at nine o’clock.” She gave him the address but dreaded what he’d say.
“Oh, that’s just this side of the fire,” he answered, taking out his walkie-talkie. “I’ll see what’s going on for you.”
“Thanks.”
Shannon couldn’t believe she’d caught this break. All the way over, she’d worried that something would have happened overnight. It’s one of those things you always see in mystery stories: the detective doesn’t jump on a key piece of evidence, and it’s destroyed or stolen or people die. Thankfully, that hadn’t been the case this time.
The cop finished his conversation and told Shannon she could go down the street.
Neighbours were still out on the street, watching the firemen going through the wreckage at the back of the house two doors down from the Jeffries. Suzanne Jeffries was out in front, talking with a group of women. She turned when she saw Shannon approaching, but her welcoming smile was tentative, at best.
“Looks as if you had a lot of excitement here last night. Was anybody hurt?”
Suzanne shook her head. “Come on inside. Granny is waiting for you.”
Mrs. Jeffries was in the living room, watching an old show on TV.
“You had some excitement here last night,” Shannon repeated.
“More than I want. Our poor neighbours!”
“Do they know the cause of the fire?”
“Arson,” the younger Jeffries said.“Somebody lit a fire under the back porch.”
The old lady cackled. “I thought it might have been started because I told you about the journal.”
The granddaughter rolled her eyes. “Granny! Isn’t that a little—”
“But I fooled ‘em,” Darcy continued, still smiling.
“When we went out to look at the fire, I took the journal with me. Hid it under my coat!”
Suzanne looked at her unhappily.
“They’ll probably find it was kids,” Shannon said.
“I think it was her.” She held up a brown leather-bound book about the size of a novel. “This must have something in it she doesn’t want us to know.”
Shannon pointedly looked at her watch, not willing to let the conversation continue. What the old lady was suggesting was pretty ludicrous. “I really have to be going, Mrs. Jeffries.”
“You will keep this very safe?”
“Absolutely, and when I’m done with it, I’ll make sure you get it back, if you’d like.”
“I want you to give it to Miss Olivia.”
“That may not be possible.”
“It will be. I feel certain you will succeed.” Darcy Jeffries made a point of getting to her feet in order to hand Shannon the journal. “Remember now, I’m counting on you.”
Shannon hustled back to her car, still somewhat unnerved, but she had the journal, and perhaps it would have something useful in it. Thinking back to what Jim Davis had said the previous afternoon, she wondered whether something wasn’t quite right with Mrs. Jeffries. She was old and perhaps going a bit senile.
Once back in her rental car, Shannon checked for messages. There was one from Janet back
in Toronto. “Shan, call me immediately. Something big has come up.”
Chapter 13
On her first morning in Portola, Jackie was jolted out of a deep sleep by a transport truck driving through her room – at least that was the way it sounded. It had been a mistake to open the window for a little fresh air. Now she understood why the motel had been so inexpensive.
Hopping into the shower, she wasted little time. It was going to be a big day for her.
She dressed in her tightest jeans and a new flannel shirt on which she left the top two buttons open. Well-worn hiking boots finished off her cover as an outdoors type. Looking in the mirror after putting on make-up – no make-up being her general rule – she felt satisfied with the way she looked, but slightly unhappy to be resorting to what she considered cheap tricks. At this point, though, success was the only thing that mattered.
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” she told her reflection.
Having scoped out Portola from Toronto using Internet maps, she knew exactly where a lot of useful places in town were: stores, cop shop, post office, library. Since the day was looking to be fine and warm, she slung a light jacket over her shoulder and headed out.
Portola wasn’t large, but had once been an important railroad town. Most of the shops were located along the state highway or on a short main street that ran south of the old railyard. The pine-covered hills rising up everywhere she looked were quite spectacular, and the air smelled fresh and wonderfully clean after Toronto. Spring had come early, and everything already glowed in soft greens. While the ground was still pretty wet, Jackie couldn’t see any traces of snow.
Feeling the need to stretch her legs after the long flight and drive of the day before, Jackie walked around looking for a restaurant, one that served up a good, basic breakfast – and the best in local gossip. She chose Dee’s Station Café close to the railyard.
A slender redhead, her hair pulled tightly back, looked up from behind the counter across the back of the room as Jackie threaded her way through the tables.
“Morning.”
“It is a good morning,” Jackie replied confidently.
She found a place at the counter and looked around. The café was about half full, mostly older gents dressed casually. All were giving the newcomer a blatant once over. In keeping with the railroad heritage of the town, one wall was decorated with lots of photos of railroad activity and the picture window at the entrance had a large locomotive model.
“Nice place,” Jackie said as she picked up a menu.
The woman poured a cup of coffee and smiled. “Thanks. I’m Dee, by the way.”
“Pleased to meet you. I’m Janice.”
Even though she really didn’t have any sort of accent, Dee immediately made Jackie as a non-local. “Where you from, honey?”
“Lethbridge, Alberta, ma’am,” which was close enough to the truth. “I’m just passing through. Going to LA to see what there is to see.”
“So what brings you through Portola?”
“I was in Reno for a few days and remembered that I have a friend from university who’s around here someplace.”
“Whereabouts?”
“A facility called Sunnyvale. Have you heard of it?” Jackie dropped her voice a bit. “Jennifer got herself into some trouble with drugs. Her folks are worth a pile, and they sent her to Sunnyvale for help a couple of months ago. Know anything about it?”
Dee’s face became hard to read, but one thing was clear: it wasn’t as open and friendly as it had been.
“They’re west and south of town a ways. They keep to themselves and don’t take kindly to people messing with their business, if you know what I mean. One thing I can tell you for certain, you won’t be allowed in to see your friend. No one in their program is allowed visitors, not even family except under special circumstances.” She pulled out her order pad. “Now, what’ll you have?”
Jackie ordered the breakfast special and ate the rather good meal in silence. The conversations going on around her contained no references to Sunnyvale.
The rest of the morning was spent working her way down the main street, casually asking questions, but always with a slightly altered background story: she was hoping to get a job there, her brother had stayed there, anything but her real reason for asking.
Some of the townsfolk were cautious about talking to a stranger about Sunnyvale. A few were openly hostile about the place, and they provided the more valuable information.
A woman working cash at the local drug store really got herself worked up. “Those people, the way they act, you’d think they own this town. My son works out at the airstrip back along the highway in Beckwourth. A lot of private planes with Sunnyvale people land there. It’s all big SUVs and ‘stay away from us, boy. We’re your betters’!”
“They don’t actually say that, do they?”
“As good as!”
“But I’ve heard that a lot of famous people go there for treatment. They probably want to keep it a secret.”
“That don’t give anyone the right to lord it over others, does it? Then there’s the place itself. You can’t hardly get within a mile of it. My son says they got cameras in the woods, and men with dogs. It ain’t good for our town.”
Jackie paid for her pack of gum and left the store. Time she went up and scoped out Sunnyvale. She knew now that it was no good trying to get in by the front door, and after talking to the woman, going in through the woods would be tricky. Perhaps all the negative things she’d heard had a good explanation.
Perhaps not.
***
Jackie hadn’t been able to find the location of Sunnyvale on any of the online map sites, and the Sunnyvale website only gave a phone number and post office box, so she walked to the town’s visitor centre, just past her motel at the east end of town.
She gave a variation of her cover story to the pleasant, older woman on duty inside, who quite happily told her she could find Sunnyvale a few miles out of town on County Road 40.
“You’ll see it just past that new hotel, the Chalet View. Runs off to the left down to Clio. Used to be impassable in winter, but the Sunnyvale folks keep it open at least as far as their place now. Sunnyvale’s several miles down. Haven’t ever been in there, though. Not many of us have.”
As Jackie pushed open the little gate in the picket fence in front of the visitor’s centre, she caught a break. A large, bright red pickup, looking as if had just been washed and hand-polished, drove right by. On the door in gold letters was the logo and stylized font of Sunnyvale.
She took off running as fast as she could while trying to see where the pickup was going. At the light down the road, it turned left, probably heading for the main street. Jumping in her car, Jackie cut off a cattle truck as she screeched out of the motel’s driveway. It was a fingersdrumming-on-the-steering-wheel three minutes before the traffic light allowed her to turn left.
The pick-up wasn’t parked on Commercial Street, so she swung by the post office on Gulling, and there it was in the parking lot. Jackie pulled onto a side street and stopped under some trees. From there, she had a good view of the parking lot, with the red pickup right at the back.
Five minutes later, a tall man in boots, jeans, regulation flannel shirt, cowboy hat and aviator-style sunglasses came out the side door and walked to the pickup. He held the mail in one big hand and had a large cardboard box under his arm.
Jackie started her engine, waited a good five seconds before moving, and began following her quarry at a leisurely pace. With so little traffic in town, she had to play it very cool.
The guy made two more stops: at a hardware store Jackie hadn’t visited, then backtracking to the café where she’d eaten breakfast. All she could hope was that Dee had gone off duty or wouldn’t mention her snooping. The man came out after only a minute, carrying a styrofoam cup.
From half a kilometre behind, Jackie shadowed the red pickup as it drove west on Highway 70. As hoped, it turned south onto County
Road 40. Keeping well behind, Jackie followed it down the dirt road.
She traversed several more winding kilometres, splashing through puddles in various places and kicking up gravel if she went too fast. The red truck wouldn’t stay clean in this very long. The tall pine trees grew close on both sides, but since the trunks went far up before the branches started and undergrowth was sparse, she got a good view of the surrounding countryside which rose and fell quite steeply. Trees were everywhere, and the road passed no houses she could see. It was a pretty lonely place and perfect for what Sunnyvale required.
Eventually the road dipped, then turned sharply left to descend rapidly. She could see fairly far ahead because of the slope, but there was no sign of the pickup. Instead of stopping, Jackie continued on for another four kilometres, stopped for several minutes where the road widened, then turned around. By the time she traced her way back at a slower rate, fifteen minutes had passed. If he’d suspected anything, the guy would have dropped his guard by now.
Approaching the top of the steep hill where she’d lost the pickup, she slowed and looked around. Just below the crest, well hidden behind some trees, a narrow asphalt drive swung off and disappeared where the road turned down the steep incline. From this direction it was hard to spot, but from the other, nearly impossible, since you’d be looking at the turn. The only marker by the road was a small post, coated with dust but with red and gold stripes clearly painted at the top.
Bingo! she thought.
Continuing back to the highway, Jackie pulled onto the narrow shoulder and consulted the detailed topographical map she’d bought in town. There was no marking for that drive leading off into the bush.
Back in Portola, she went to the library, logged on to a computer and looked at satellite photos of the area. Around six kilometres off the road, she could clearly see a large, nineteen-building facility on the flat bottom of a narrow valley. The topo map told her it was surrounded on all sides by very steep hills, good to observe from, rotten to get up in a hurry.
Four kilometres east of Sunnyvale’s drive, she spotted a logging track, heading off into the trees. It would suit her purposes well. Half an hour later, she discovered the track was little more than a light scraping of the sandy soil with a whole lot of water-filled ruts and stones. The bottom of her car scraped ominously in several spots as she backed down it, her idea being that facing out, she could make a quicker getaway if needed.
