On Location

by Elizabeth Sims

  The rental car's GPS was a straightforward female. She said, "Slight left to stay on access road." The rain strengthened, and he fumbled for the windshield wipers and the defogger.

  Just a week ago Rita had let him into her deepest heart, telling him the story of Gina's accident. The next night, she'd invited him over.

  She had cooked a fine pot of spaghetti, and Petey was sleeping over at a friend's, and Rita had melted over the big, beautiful bouquet he'd brought—all deeply colored flowers like she liked, red and purple and orange. He opened some wine and they ate and talked.

  At one point he noticed her smoothing her pretty yellow sweater.

  "Oh," he said. "That sweater you're wearing, it's new, isn't it?"

  "Yes, they were having a huge sale at Macy's last week. Do you like it?"

  "Yes! It's exactly like—" He stopped. That was his mistake right there.

  "It's exactly like what?" she asked, munching a sesame breadstick.

  "Oh, just...like...another one I saw—the other day."

  "Oh?"

  He smiled, hiding his panic. "Here, let's have a little more wine."

  "Where did you see a sweater just like this the other, quote, day, unquote?"

  The garment was distinctive, golden-yellow and smooth across the breasts, with a deep-orange stripe down the sleeves. He loved that shade of orange, like the California Golden Poppy, which is why he'd really noticed the sweater in the first place.

  "Oh," he said, "just another lady had one like it."

  "You can tell me, George: someone else you're seeing?"

  Her affect was so easy, he thought he could be honest. "Yes, someone else I'm seeing."

  They had agreed on an open relationship, although he didn't think Rita was seeing anyone else.

  "Do I know her?"

  "No."

  "Honey, I don't have a problem with it! I really don't." She smiled genuinely. "I'm this loose cannon in your life, and she's probably a steadier presence, not to mention brilliant and gorgeous."

  He'd made the further mistake of relaxing then. He helped himself to more tomato sauce so that his pasta would come out even.

  "Well, I guess she's steady. Brilliant? I don't know that I'd say that." He laughed.

  Twirling her wineglass stem offhandedly, Rita said, "But gorgeous?"

  He knew enough not to speak of the woman's sex appeal, so he said, "Well, she's—nice. Sweet. She's a sweet person. She's no you, though."

  "Sweet tempered?"

  "Mm-hm."

  "Sweeter tempered than me?"

  In his business, private investigation, Rowe was able to lie smoothly, make up totally fake personas, and handle shifting situations, even dangerous ones, easily. But with Rita, he found he couldn't. This realization came as a tremendous shock. He had never tried to fib to her before, had never tried to weasel. His equilibrium was disturbed. Oh God.

  "Rita, let's talk about something else."

  "I see," she said lightly. "In what other ways is Miz Sweet Nameless Thing with Big Tits in Tight Yellow Sweater superior to me?"

  Perhaps she was joking, pretending to be jealous. Even if so, he didn't like it. He felt manipulated, so he went ahead and hurt her, using the same light tone. "She's a better cook, to be perfectly honest. And she gives great backrubs."

  That was it, boy.

  "Oh-ho! Well, what the heck are you doing here, then? Go eat with her! Go stay at her place tonight! Get a backrub! Better looks, better temper, better food, better sex!" She jumped up, overturning her chair.

  He'd felt driven to it by her insecurity. Well, the wine had been flowing, he'd been feeling mellow, and his guard was down.

  Now she was shrieking. "Ha! You want to see some sweet temper, I'll show you sweet temper!"

  He rose, furious too. "Rita, I've been damned patient with you for two years. This is getting old, you know? All your fears about marriage—I think they're just a bullshit excuse!"

  "A bullshit excuse for what?"

  "To lead me on! I don't think you love me at all!"

  She screamed, "Now you're calling me a liar?"

  "Don't put words into my mouth! God damn it! You create these dramas just for the sake of—"

  The plate of spaghetti barely missed his head.

  That snapped the mood, and, careful not to step in the mess, he went to her and tried to soothe her. "Rita, Rita."

  She pushed him away. Now she was crying on top of it, those tears of fury he knew so well. Mad at him, mad that she was crying, mad that she was mad.

  "Rita, I'm sorry."

  She wasn't ready to make up. "Sorry, hah! We! Are! Finished!"

  He sighed. "Again?" That got her madder still, and he realized the evening was unsalvageable.

  Why did he dig himself even deeper by psychoanalyzing her further? "Come on, we had such a great day at the zoo on Sunday—and a great night, I thought, by the way—but you couldn't let it be. Couldn't let it last like that. All you want to do is hang on to your baggage."

  She flew at him and slapped his face.

  He took it motionlessly—it always stings more than you expect it to—then turned and walked out.

  "Right on exit ramp to Four-oh-five East," said the GPS lady. The GPS lady had no temper. The worst she could express was disappointment when, if you missed several prompts in a row, she would resignedly murmur, "Recalculating."

  ——

  "Don't worry," said Daniel. "I mapped it online. We've only got seventeen hours to go. I still don't understand why the sheriff or the Forest Service couldn't just launch a search right now."

  A custom pickup truck in flamethrower yellow blasted past us from behind. I glimpsed the crown of a cowboy hat in the driver's seat. A happy cowpoke skinnin' it along fast in the night.

  "Because I was honest," I said. "The deputy asked if they were overdue to have physically emerged yet—that's how he said it, 'physically emerged from the wilderness'—and I said no before I realized I should have lied. They're supposed to be up there for a week at least, I told him, but my sister promised to call, and she's missed two days."

  "But that didn't cut any ice with him."

  "Right. I cannot tell you how thankful I am that you're—"

  "You've thanked me a dozen times already," said Daniel, "and we're not even to Fresno."

  We flew through the ink of the Central Valley night, cars flowing like individual photons along the snake of the I-5. You look up to the solemn sky, and your eyes adjust and stars emerge, and there's a meteor, skipping its excited way to oblivion. Daniel's Porsche was new and fast.

  It'd been about three in the morning when we'd crammed Petey and an afghan in the back, which he found thrilling—a space just his size—and I'd thrown a hastily packed bag into the trunk next to Daniel's duffel and camping gear.

  "Thought you might've wanted George to help you in this," my friend remarked.

  "A) he's out of town somewhere on a new case, and b) we broke up."

  "Oh, Rita."

  Daniel was the kind of friend who would drop everything and drive you twelve hundred miles to an appointment with destiny, no questions asked. Well, maybe not no questions; if his job on the new cable series had already started, I'm pretty sure he'd have simply done one sleepless night helping me pack and reassuring me I could handle this myself. The new show was called The Devil You Know, a drama about a team of exorcists who solve old crimes by communicating with the spirits of dead convicts.

  "What was it this time?"

  "The usual," I said. "He said something insensitive and I went insane."

  "Well, are you going to apologize?"

  "Hell, no! Not unless he apologizes first."

  "He probably did, but you didn't hear him."

  "H'h."

  "Well, maybe he's just not the guy for you after all." Daniel was trying to bait me, but I didn't fall for it.

  "Yeah," I said curtly.

  My plan, such as it was, was to show up at the sheriff's office in Harkett,
Washington, and demand, beg, or half of each that they launch a search for Gina and Lance. And as I said to Daniel on the phone just hours ago, "If they won't do it, I'm packing my hiking boots and my Girl Scout knife."

  The wind rushed silently by the windows. The stereo was playing soft jazz, some MJQ, mellow vibraphone. The music melded with the smell of the car's leather interior. The seat felt sublimely soft.

  "You know she's OK, don't you?" said Daniel. I knew his vocal overtones so well I could tell he was just doing his job of being reassuring, whether he believed it himself or not.

  "No. My intuition does not say that."

  The sharp, stabbing point of my distress had dulled to a general heartsickness.

  "Well, you know you're not going to be able to just walk into the woods and start looking for her yourself, don't you?" He accelerated to pass a Greyhound bus, breathing in with pleasure as the car's horsepower pressed against our backs.

  "Who says?"

  "Rita, you don't want to get yourself in trouble too, do you? Then you won't be any good to Gina or anybody."

  I didn't respond to that. I had no intention of getting into any trouble.

  Who ever does?

  Daniel asked, "What's Kenner doing?"

  "He thinks it's all a big joke. He thinks Lance has crapped out on him, that Lance and Gina are holed up somewhere, partying, using the expense money he gave him. Maybe they are! But I can't just wait."

  "But where is Kenner?"

  "In New York. He said his mom needed him to take care of some business there. I guess he left, what, yesterday."

  "I find that a bit odd."

  I looked at Daniel's gorgeous profile as he drove and thought how funny life was: we'd make a great couple. Or would we? I suppose I'd find a way to fuck it up. Well, we did make a great pair anyway: a great couple of friends.

  "Well," I said, "he said he'd get worried if we don't hear from them by mid-next-week. You know, those brothers—I think their relationship is sort of Lord of the Flies-esque."

  "Seems to have worked well for them."

  "Ha, yeah."

  When Daniel got sleepy, around Tracy, I took over driving and he conked out in the passenger's seat. Petey snored in back, and I felt competent behind the wheel of the Porsche. My, how that beast wanted to go. You touch the gas and before you know it you're doing 95 and the car feels glued to the road. The LED of the state-of-the-art radar detector Daniel had installed glowed reassuringly green. I was taking care of my two unconscious guys.

  .

  Around eight in the morning I pulled into a truck stop south of Sacramento and we all unkinked and washed up. We went into the restaurant, which smelled of relatively fresh grease, and ate gigantic breakfasts. Daniel ordered chicken-fried steak, which he said is the only thing to eat at a truck stop, but I saw one go by, enrobed in its white glop, and decided on toast and eggs.

  Petey, at the window seat, wanted silver dollar pancakes. After carefully spreading purple jam on each one, he tipped them into stacks of three and ate them like dollhouse hamburgers. Then he got out his colored pencils and sketch pad. He drew a bright silver milk tanker as it idled at the gas pumps, complete with the shiny big-tit girls adorning the mud flaps. He had not, apparently, smuggled his ScoreLad along against my decree, so I had to be happy with what I got. Daniel was impressed. "You even got the trees reflected in the tanks," he told him.

  "I want to run around," Petey said.

  "OK, let's go outside," I agreed. "My legs need action too."

  Petey raced the perimeter of the weedy lot next to the truck wash, stopped, agape, to watch a truck emerge from it, ran another lap, then came panting to me. I chased him around a little, then we walked to the gas pumps where Daniel was filling the car.

  "Mom, look!" Petey, eye to his spyglass, pointed to the far side of the picnic area where a teenage girl had just trudged her goth self over to a trash bin and thrown in a pop can. "She's not recycling!"

  "Petey, stop!"

  "But Mom—"

  "I have had it with you, buddy! No tattling!"

  Daniel took the wheel again, and all through that long day we alternated driving as the grandeur of the American West rolled past the windows. Petey got good at sketching on the fly.

  Around Portland the sky, which had since Redding been stomped-newspaper gray, opened up and a screaming rain drenched the dust off the cars and trucks and highway signs. I didn't know it at the time, but the rain would keep falling all the way to Harkett, and then it would keep falling steadily for at least the next week and a half. For all I know, it's still raining up there.

  Chapter 5 – Rowe Meets an Equal

  Mrs. de Sauvenard had driven herself, and the first thing she said to George Rowe was, "You could've taken rooms downtown, somewhere nice; I'd have reimbursed you, of course."

  He answered, "I like a low profile."

  Big urban hotels have parking valets, more staff hanging around the lobbies—too troublesome to come and go.

  He'd picked a hotel in Renton used by mid-level business travelers. Renton seemed a neither-here-nor-there kind of place between the airport and downtown, but it hummed with office parks, light industry, and a colossal blunt-blue Ikea. Rowe had gotten a suite with a conference area.

  For this meeting he had put on a jacket and tie.

  He took Mrs. de Sauvenard's white wool coat and hung it up, the soft material warm in his hands. She was standing next to the round-topped conference table watching him, her head turned slightly over her shoulder, and he was reminded of a sculpture he'd once seen in a museum, of a curvaceous woman draped in a straight Grecian-type garment; the combination of the statue's swelling bosom, lush bare arms, and don't-shit-me expression had made him wish he could know her.

  She had looked good in the coat, too.

  It was one thirty in the afternoon and his guest seemed relaxed.

  He had prepared hot coffee in the room's machine, and she accepted a cup. "Such a drizzly day," she said. As he poured, she took a transistor radio from her purse, fiddled with it, and set it on the table, the sound turned low.

  "I have to hear the commodity quotes," she explained. "They'll be on in a little while. I always need to hear copper at close." She poured a cream thimble into her coffee and swirled it.

  "OK," he said.

  As soon as his butt hit the chair, she launched in.

  "I didn't want to get into it on the phone, Mr. Rowe. I like to see who I'm dealing with."

  He nodded agreeably.

  "I was lucky that Gina mentioned you. I like that girl! At first, when she went on about how good you were, I thought maybe she was exaggerating. I couldn't have my own security people check you out, because I'm a little strapped for trust, you see."

  "Yes."

  "So I appreciated your putting me in touch with those other clients. They're certainly fans of yours for life!"

  "That's good to know."

  "I never knew the show dog world was full of such skullduggery."

  "Neither had I."

  "Ha. OK, here's the beef: I've got a sneaking suspicion that a fellow who works for me—a lawyer, his name is Leland Harris—is scamming me."

  "What's he doing?"

  "I keep a pretty close eye on my accounts, let me say first. And Leland being my late husband's right-hand man—chief operating officer—well, when Big Kenner died, Leland was so helpful, working day and night to make sure the company was safe. When you're a private company of this size, there are great advantages. Not having to answer to shareholders—little piranhas!—but of course then the downside is you're on your own in a crisis.

  "From lumber, it's easy to diversify into other building products, paper products, and from there into real estate development and the construction business itself. Of course, such isn't really diversification in my opinion—I mean it's all in the category of harvesting raw materials and making them into things. They're all related. The environmental movement against American logging has really
hobbled us. True diversification for us would be—oh, I don't know, buying up some digital technology, or retail. Which doesn't really excite me. We do have some mining interests," she said thoughtfully, "and those are doing all right. A bright spot, there. I'm not gonna touch foreign debt securities."

  Rowe liked Mrs. de Sauvenard's brisk frankness.

  She had on a black dress of some lustrous fabric, with maroon dots the size of dimes. The maroon dots looked so true against the black that Rowe wanted to touch the dress.

  She went on, "I'm running this company out of a sense of obligation to Big Kenner, and to the boys. Big Kenner said before he died, 'Don't sell anything!"'

  Silver Coast, Inc., was one of the smaller timber companies, Rowe had learned, though with annual revenue of half a billion dollars, it was no pop stand. "Your husband died of leukemia, right?" he asked, to show he'd briefed himself, and she nodded.

  "Didn't take him long once it got hold of him. You know"—she turned toward the window—"terminal illness actually became him. He got more...transparent, somehow. Isn't that an odd thing to say? True, though."

  She sighed, paused, and continued. "I consider myself more of a steward of Silver Coast than anything. I keep trying to get Lance to take over, but he's not interested yet."

  "What about Kenner?"

  "You'd think, because he's the oldest. The scion. I hate that word, it sounds—phony. We hoped he might go into it, yes. I have to hand it to him, he is more dutiful than Lance; he'll go on whatever business errand, knowing I'll make it worth his while sooner or later. He's in New York now attending a meeting with one of our industrial partners."

  "Oh?"

  "Because, you know, at quite a young age Kenner had an interest in the business. He was so cute! His eleventh-grade project—yes, I think it was eleventh grade—he put on a suit and came downtown and Big Kenner let him look at the company ledgers, showed him around the various departments. He wanted to do a report on the structure of a diversified company—isn't that something, 'The Structure of a Diversified Company,' I remember that was the title. He felt so important, looking through all the minutiae. 'Analyzing' it, he called it. 'I was analyzing,' he said."

  "Back to Leland Harris."