by Dale Mayer
“Oh, those would have been adorable to add to gardens,” Doreen cried out. “What did you end up doing with them?”
Mack sighed. “What he did was, he asked everybody if they wanted one or two, and they came to his grandmother’s house and were allowed to pick up two each.”
“I love that,” she said. “Spreading the joy around.”
“I was thinking more about spreading the junk around and not having to dispose of them myself,” David said, laughing. “But I think people enjoyed their gnomes.”
“Absolutely,” she said, “What’s your grandmother’s name?”
“Sheila. Sheila Monterey.”
“I’ve seen some stuck in the corners here and there. I guess Nan intended them for the gardens, once they were cleaned up. I’ll have to remember to ask Nan whether any of the gnomes she has here came from Sheila’s place.”
“I doubt it. At the time I think Nan was collecting a few more of them, and my grandmother was very much of the opinion that Nan already had enough.”
“It’s almost like people thought she did have a hoarding problem,” Doreen said. “When I came into the house, it never occurred to me. And honestly, it still doesn’t seem like anything close to a hoarder’s house. Although the basement and garage are probably full of junk …”
“It looks that way,” Mack said. “Let’s deal with the inside of the house. Then we’ll deal with the rest.”
“Good plan.” She glanced around the kitchen. “How much longer do you think you’ll be?”
“Why? Trying to get rid of me already?” Mack asked.
As the ding of the arrival of an email sounded, she chuckled and walked over to her laptop to check her inbox. It was from Oceanic with the Okanagan Lake surveys. She raised her eyebrows as she read. “Oh, good.”
“Oh, good what?” Mack asked suspiciously.
She shrugged. “Nothing. Just a little hobby of mine.”
“Your hobbies tend to get me in trouble,” Mack said.
“Actually they tend to get you accolades.” She clicked on the email and looked at all the attachments. She had specifically laid out the area she was interested in. “We’re in a dry season currently, right? And the water is likely to get much lower when we hit summertime, correct?”
“I’m not sure what water you’re talking about,” David said, “but, if you’re talking about Okanagan Lake, then, yes. It’s likely to drop another couple of feet, if not more. Unfortunately the city made a mistake earlier this year and let out too much water from the dikes, so the water levels will be low, and we’ll be conserving water soon.”
“It’s already happening,” Mack said. “People are only allowed to water their gardens two days a week, and that’ll stop too if the water supply drops any lower. We haven’t had any rain in thirty days, so we’re definitely heading into a drought.”
“I guess all kinds of things must come up when the lake drops.”
“To a certain extent, yes.” Mack turned to study her curiously. “Where are you going with that idea?”
She shrugged. “Maybe nowhere. Any new leads on the poor woman in the carnations?”
He shrugged. “Read the newspapers. That’ll tell you.”
“Ha,” she said. “The reporters are always trying to get the story out of me.”
“Are they still bothering you?” he turned and asked.
She shook her head. “No. They don’t know I’m the one who found her, so that’s all good.”
“You do have the darnedest luck tripping over bodies, don’t you?” David asked with a smile.
The men stepped back from their handiwork.
It didn’t take very long to do the back door. She was surprised at how efficient they were on the second door.
Mack showed her how to work the remote for turning it on. He then opened the back door, a horrible shriek going off. He shut it off immediately, but Thaddeus still squawked in pain, and Goliath was nowhere around. Mugs barked like crazy.
She crouched to hug Mugs. “Hey, buddy. I’m sorry about that.”
“Yeah, that’ll wake up all of you,” David said.
“It’s kind of a rough system. It’s not for long-term,” Mack said. “It would be better to get a proper system in here and to arm the windows as well.”
She hadn’t even thought of the windows. She looked at the big window in the living room, then glanced at Mack.
He shook his head. “I highly doubt they’ll come in that way. There’s no way to do it quietly.”
She nodded. “This should hopefully do what I need done for the next few days anyway.”
He turned as he looked at his watch. “On that note, we have to leave.”
The two men packed up their tools, and, before she had a chance to say, Thank you, they were gone. She stood on the front porch and watched as they drove away. They presumably had other police work to do, and this was just a timeout in their day. Since they’d been here for well over an hour, they were probably well past being late for other work.
She hadn’t had a chance to ask Mack any case-related questions. She groaned and headed back to her laptop.
She studied the map the company had sent her of the entrance to Mission Creek, then all the accompanying images. She didn’t have a program that would let her look at them close enough, leaving her wondering if anybody did.
It was fascinating to consider. She studied where the mouth of the creek became more of a river, where it widened and changed color, darkening as it deepened. She had only been down there once, maybe twice. The path along the creek did go all the way to the end though. Maybe she should take a long walk and sort it out.
How far was it? And then she realized it was less than a mile. Determinedly she picked up her coffee mug, filled it, and called Mugs to her. Goliath looked at her. “Do you want to come too?” She looked twice at the alarm panel and talked herself out of setting it. After all, they were only going one mile away. One mile there. One mile back. How long could that take? Plus with Mack’s presence here again, surely the intruder wouldn’t come again today in broad daylight.
Would he?
With Thaddeus on her shoulder, she headed out into the backyard, Goliath walking beside them. He sauntered with a nonchalance that made her smile. Mugs, on the other hand, sniffed everything, overjoyed to be outside. Thaddeus even seemed to enjoy the outing as he ruffled his feathers and chirped on her shoulder.
“Now you sound like a normal bird,” she said, chuckling.
He leaned over and brushed her cheek with his beak. She loved it when he did that. She hadn’t considered birds to be affectionate, but this one definitely was.
It was a beautiful walk. They passed the cul-de-sac in the path they normally took to get to Nan’s. Goliath and Mugs both thought they were heading that way, but she kept going. The creek widened and became a lazy rolling stream of water. It was beautiful.
The spring water runoff had definitely come and gone. Now the river level was much lower. She understood it would get lower yet. But she didn’t know how low, considering the lake was already down from its normal level.
She kept walking, enjoying being outside, loving the birds and the trees blowing gently in the wind. She had a good six-foot-wide walkway to lead her. At this point, it was a public walking path. Houses on one side were fenced for privacy.
Then she reached a crossroad with a bridge. The path went underneath. She stayed on the path, and, of course, private property was on one side, but, on the other side, she walked alongside the water.
Eventually she came to where the river dumped into the lake. She smiled. Mugs was having the time of his life. Goliath, on the other hand, was still walking as if this was too much bother.
She stopped, realizing just how very empty the area was. She really enjoyed being in a small town again. Kelowna was a step back in time. She knew both sides of the river were slated for big developments, but they planned to leave a boardwalk in place for the foot traffic.
S
he proceeded to the point, then realized she was trespassing because it was now private property. She frowned and walked into the river bed. She didn’t like people trespassing on her place, so she didn’t intend to here. It was just hard to know where one property started and another stopped. The corner was definitely the prime place, but a huge sandbar was down here too. She stood on it, amazed. How big did this sandbar actually get in times of extreme drought?
An old man at the corner looked at her. She walked over and said, “Sorry. Am I trespassing here too?”
He shook his head. “My property ends along the water line. That sandbar has been around for a long time, but, with the low water levels, it’s huge this year,” he admitted.
“Was it here all the time, like thirty years ago? It looks like it would stop anything coming down the river from getting past here,” she said. “I can’t imagine the amount of debris that’s built up on the river side of this sandbar.”
“Oh, that’s because the river has filled in so much,” he said. “Thirty years ago we used to have sailboats and motor boats up and down this river all the time. But the rocks came down from the mountaintops and slowly filled in this river. It used to be a huge wide basin here. Couldn’t touch bottom. We’d be boating all year-round. Now with the whole thing filled in with rocks, boats can’t be used here.”
“Oh,” she said in a crestfallen voice. “Well, that shoots that theory.”
“Why? What are you talking about?”
“I was just wondering if a vehicle could have been washed away in the heavy spring runoff water or a flash flood some twenty-nine years ago,” she said. “If it could have been washed down here, would it now be buried?”
“During that ugly flood we had twenty-nine years ago, a truck or a car could certainly have been washed down here, and chances are we would never have seen it. It would have sunk another couple hundred yards out. When the fast-moving water hits the wall of nonmoving lake water, it slows down quickly and drops any debris it carried downriver just offshore where the lake bottom drops off. The sand follows the same pattern,” he said. “So, a hundred yards past, that’s where it would be.”
“Does anybody ever come here to look for missing vehicles?” she asked.
He frowned at her. “You know? I’m not so sure they have. Not in the thirty years I’ve been here. But, if they didn’t look right away, I imagine it would sink deep enough and fast enough that nobody would ever know.”
“And how would someone go down there and look?”
He frowned at her. “Do you have a particular reason for asking?”
She made a wry face. “I’m working on a theory that a man and a boy in a truck that went missing twenty-nine years ago might very well have been caught up in the floods and are lying at the bottom of the lake here.”
His eyebrows shot up. “You’re talking about Gunderson’s grandson Paul, aren’t you?”
She shrugged. “The story intrigued me. It’s very unusual for a boy and a man, as well as the truck, to never pop up again.”
“There are chop shops that could have easily changed the color of the truck, cut it up into parts, and sold them on the black market. And you could disappear if you just drive halfway across the country or even across the border.”
“But it was also the year of the heavy flooding. What if that handyman wasn’t a killer or a pedophile? He didn’t have a criminal history, so what if he just helped the boy get home, and he made the decision to cross a bridge when it went out, or when the floods came over it, and they got washed down here?”
The man stopped for a moment; then he said, “You know what? I’ve never thought of that. Apparently it was pretty rough there for a while. The flooding went on for days.”
“My point exactly,” she said. “I gather the river gets the highest at about two o’clock in the morning, but it doesn’t make sense that the little boy would have been out at that hour.”
“Sure. But logjams are a fact of life on a river. We clean up a lot of the fallen debris during the year, but we can’t get it all, and the logs can collect, then break free at any time, and come down in a massive torrent of debris,” he said. “If that truck got caught up in something like that, it’ll be out there.” He pointed to the lake beyond. “The question is, how far beyond, and how could we possibly know?”
She nodded, looking to where he pointed.
“Well, now that you got me thinking about it,” the man said, “I’m a scuba diver myself, but I’ve got bad lungs now too. But I do belong to a club. I could mention it to them and see if anybody’s interested in going down for a practice run or maybe just a fun diving outing.”
“Not much fun though,” she said with a sad smile.
“No, but it’s a mystery, and I love those.” He grinned at her. “And I guess that means you must be Doreen.”
She wrinkled her face up at him. “How did you know that?”
He chuckled. “You’ve found enough dead people already to make a name for yourself.” He motioned at the wide expanse of lake in front of them. “If you think the truck might be out there, then I think we should consider looking for it.” He stopped and looked at her. “Have you talked to the police about it?”
She shook her head. “Not really. I know it’s a cold case because Mack mentioned it to me. But honestly, the reason I thought of it is because the license plate from that truck the little boy was said to be in when he went missing just unearthed in the back of my garden, or Nan’s garden, and it borders the creek. So, if the truck got caught up at my end, and the license plate ended up torn off with such force, then I imagine that truck would have gone for a header down here and didn’t have any hope of being stopped.”
“Wow. That would make so much sense because we had that massive logjam come down. … In all these years everybody thought he took off with that little boy and now …” He shook his head and stared back out at the lake. “I never once considered that maybe he got caught up in that logjam. But it makes sense.”
“What kind of person was Henry?”
“He was a good guy,” the neighbor said. “I would have sworn by him back then, but everybody had so much bad to say, once the little boy was known to have been picked up in his truck. I guess I got caught up in public opinion, and I never did know what to think about it.”
“I think that’s the worst,” she said sadly. “Everybody has an opinion when things go wrong, but often they don’t know the truth.”
“True, but once everybody knew he’d picked up the little boy, all the negative gossip started.”
“Exactly, and all without proof,” she said. “And how sad is that? This is just my running theory. I did contact the company that did some imaging of this area, to see if they had pictures that would show a truck or something down there. But I can’t see the images close enough on my monitor.”
He looked at her with respect. “Wow. That’s a really smart thing to do. What you need is a tech company with that kind of capability.”
“I don’t know anyone in that field,” she said. “I’m new in town, so I really don’t know the local companies.”
He snapped his fingers several times and said, “But you know something? I do. My son works for an IT company. And my nephew works in the video-gaming industry, and graphics are definitely something they do.”
“But this would require looking through photographs, maybe getting satellite images, even something more intense to see what is down there. I understand it’s very deep, and, like you said, filled with mountain rocks. I don’t know of anything that would show us exactly what’s down there.”
“No, you’re probably right,” he said. “The best thing would be to search ourselves. And, if that one truck is there, how do we know there aren’t half a dozen more down there?”
“I figured, because the water was so low this year and getting lower, that maybe now would be the best time to see what exactly is down there.”
“I like it,” he announced. “And I li
ke you. You’re an out-of-the-box thinker. And that’s a good thing.”
She laughed. “The only reason I thought of it is because Thaddeus here”—she pointed to the bird on her shoulder—“found the license plate in my backyard.”
The man looked with interest at Thaddeus, who had been quiet up until now. Thaddeus rose up on his feet, flapped his wings, and said, “Thaddeus here. Good day.”
The old man chuckled, reached out, and gently rubbed a finger down the bird’s breast. “Nathan here. Nice to meet you, Thaddeus.” He looked down at the menagerie at her feet. “I understand these guys go with you everywhere.”
“They’ve become family,” she said with a smile. “This is Mugs.” She rattled his leash, and Mugs sat down and raised a paw.
Enchanted, the neighbor dropped down, picked up the paw. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Mugs.”
She didn’t correct him on the name. Goliath, not to be left out, sauntered between Mugs and Nathan to get a pat too.
When Nathan finally straightened, he was enthralled with the critters. “I think you’re a heck of a good addition to the town.”
“I’m glad you think so,” Doreen said, “because I’m not sure anybody else does. It’s been kind of crazy getting used to being in town, and then with so many issues popping up right away …”
“Nope. That’s a good thing. Those poor people needed to be found. And, if it took somebody like you from out of town to do it, well then, so be it.” He turned to face the lake. “Now I’m really intrigued. Do you have any contact information? I’ll make some phone calls and see what I might find out.” He pulled a pair of glasses from his shirt pocket and a little piece of paper.
In her purse she found a pen. She wrote down her name and phone number and handed it to him.
“I’m Nathan Trusswell,” he said with a smile.
She nodded. “If you find out anything, let me know.” At that, she turned to walk home, but pivoted and said, “Nice meeting you.”
He was already walking with purpose toward his house. He reached up a hand and waved at her in good-bye.
