“How about we start over?”
Nina went over to Paul’s chair and stretched out in it while she explained it all to Sandy.
Mikey Eubanks had left his aunt’s house at twelve forty-five, while Nina was still talking to the women at the courthouse. He had run down the hill to his house to pick up a video game.
That was the last anyone had seen of him. No ransom note.
The meeting with the men of Siesta Court took place at four instead of six. It was chaos at first. Darryl Eubanks was practically beating his head against the wall. George Hill, Callie’s grandfather, wept throughout.
They agreed to turn themselves in. Nina put them all in her Bronco and drove them to the police station, where they made limited statements, were booked, and then declined to talk further upon advice of counsel. After her lengthy palaver with Jaime, they all went into Judge Salas’s court at nine o’clock. He came in specially and heard them out.
“He would definitely have jailed them, but Jaime said he thought they’d be more use outside,” Nina said. “I owe Jaime.”
“Where’s Paul?” Sandy had taken all this in with unblinking aplomb.
“In Carmel Valley. Talking with Ben Cervantes. Trying to find Danny before he-”
“He was the one who was trying to kill Wish, wasn’t he?”
“I suppose,” Nina said. She went to the bar refrigerator and pulled out some cold bottled water, which she used to chase the three ibuprofen she swallowed.
“You should go home, Sandy.”
“I have some calls to make,” Sandy said pointedly.
“Then don’t mind me,” Nina said, putting her hands behind her head and her feet on Paul’s desk. If Sandy needed privacy, she could go home and make her calls. She picked up a folder, leaned back in her chair, and read, quickly becoming absorbed in the paperwork. She reviewed the autopsy of the body found on Robles Ridge, examined the discovery materials Jaime’s office had provided, looked over her notes on Elizabeth’s tapes, tasks she had done before, and would do again until something startling leapt off these dry pages.
Sandy made a number of phone calls, punching with vigor, but talking in such a low voice, she made a soothing background hum. In the night, the busy street outside quieted, the crickets that hid in the picturesque Carmel alleyways awakened and sang. Nina yawned and flipped through her papers. She yawned again.
“Wake up!” Sandy had her by the shoulders and was shaking her.
Nina opened her eyes, sighing. “I fell asleep.”
“Uh huh.”
“Guess you were right.” She started stuffing her papers back inside her case. “Guess I should get home and get some rest. Maybe all the answers will come to me in a dream.”
“You need to call Paul.”
Nina looked at her watch. “Wow. Two o’clock. Sandy, he’s sound asleep.”
“He’ll want to hear this. I just spoke to Danny’s mother. I think she knows where he is.”
“Fantastic work, Sandy! We have to notify the police right away,” Nina said. “Back to my favorite people for the third time today.”
“Not yet.”
“Sandy, he’s taken two children!”
“They won’t be able to do anything unless we go up there and talk to her and find out where he is. She won’t say anything more on the phone. She didn’t even say she knew where he was,” Sandy admitted. “I just know she does.”
“How?”
She did not like the question, but she answered anyway. “I used to know her pretty well years ago, when Danny and Wish were friends. And I’m a mother.” Sandy folded her arms, and Nina knew the look meant, no justifications, no proofs, just unadulterated belief. “You understand that.”
Strangely, she did. “Did you talk to Danny’s father?”
“No. He’s working, and I remember Danny being closer to his mother.”
“What’s she like?”
“Weak. That’s how I know he went there. He depends on her when things get tough. She always loved him, but she’s kind of a hopeless character. She never really knew how to handle him.”
What a mess, Nina thought. Sons and mothers. “She wouldn’t help him hide, under the circumstances.”
“She isn’t convinced he took any kids. She doesn’t want to believe he would hurt anyone.”
“Did she say she saw him?” Nina asked.
“No.”
But Sandy knew she had, and by extension, so did Nina. She called Paul and woke him up. He packed up a bag for himself and one for her, and met her half an hour later outside on the street, wipers going because the fog had grown so thick.
Sandy roared up in Wish’s brown van.
“You’re coming, Sandy?”
She wore her voluminous purple coat and clutched a small suitcase. “Yep. She’ll talk to me.”
Paul steered Nina’s Bronco onto Highway 101 and started the long haul over Pacheco Pass, through the central valley, and up the mountains. Nina and Sandy slept.
He had left a message for Bob on the kitchen counter saying that he should call his grandpa and stay with him for a few days. No doubt the boy would find it when he was looking for cereal in the morning. Good that Nina’s son was old enough to be left alone for a short time, bad that he lived in the study.
This late at night, the truckers ruled the highways. At the interstate heading to Sacramento, Paul got into the slipstream of a big semi doing seventy and let himself relax and think about what all this meant for him and Nina.
He had worked so hard and for so long to have Nina here with him, and here she was, entangled as always in problems, far removed from the peaceable kingdom he imagined for them both. He glanced at her, snoring lightly on the seat beside him, brown hair balled up under her neck, cheeks flushed. He wanted life to be easy for her, but it never would be.
He couldn’t accept that he couldn’t protect her. He thought of her on a sunny summer day, back in those days of the Bucket, sixteen or so, hanging with the local hoodlums, skimpy or nonexistent swimsuit, maybe a little grass blowing in the wind.
If he’d met her then, before the baby, the broken heart, the law school, the years of grinding work, and they had gotten married-what would she be like? What would they be like? Maybe he would still be a cop. And she… an artist, a teacher maybe.
He let himself daydream another existence, because this one was so full of problems.
Because it was so late at night, they made the six-hour trip in five hours, the Bronco flying up the long slog through the foothills as lightly as a flag in the breeze. The mountains, usually a daunting prospect, offered clear sailing, twinkling stars, and a polished moon to light the way. They arrived just a little after seven-thirty on Thursday morning.
Located at the end of the highway from Truckee, stopped cold by the big lake, the road split at King’s Beach to circle Tahoe in both directions, the eastern branch taking the Nevada side to the casinos of North Lake Tahoe, and the western branch moving along the California side of the lake past Emerald Bay until it reached the South Lake Tahoe casinos.
At the junction, a shadowy blue in the early-morning light, Paul turned right, then right again into the first gas station. Nina and Sandy stirred, murmured, found their shoes, and coughed a few times, complaining about the dry mountain air. After several minutes, while Paul pumped gas into the Bronco, they emerged, fresh-skinned, hair brushed into place. They drove a little farther along to the supermarket, where Nina told him to stop.
While they bought hydrogenated treats for breakfast, water bottles, and coffee in large containers, Paul moved into the passenger’s seat, looked away into the mirror, and realized he had forgotten his razor. But instead of running in to buy another to make himself presentable, he put his head back and closed his eyes.
When he woke up, they were parked in front of a crudely built log cabin with a weedy flagstone pathway leading to a door with a single step up. No porch or overhang softened the furious winter’s passion or this morning’s mountain sun. Sandy got out, motioning them to remain behind.
“You drove?” he asked Nina. They were parked on a slight rise on the northern part of the little town.
“You got a solid ten minutes’ sleep. That plus what you got before I woke you up ought to keep us going for the day. Sandy’s inside with Danny’s mother. Want some coffee?” She handed him a cup, which he eagerly slurped. After drinking half the cup, he ate a sticky roll without examining the ingredients.
Nina rolled the windows down. “See the white pines?” she said, her voice nostalgic. “The scent of Tahoe. Oh, Paul. I’ve missed Tahoe.”
As they watched the cabin, a yellow porch light came on.
“You think she’ll tell Sandy where he is?”
At that moment, Sandy appeared in the doorway and beckoned them inside.
“So you came.” An unusually tall woman, made taller by the lowness of the ceilings, Connie Cervantes stepped back into the gloom of her cabin and allowed them to enter. “I was hoping you wouldn’t.”
“They had to,” Sandy answered. “This is Nina. And this is Paul.” They all shook hands.
Across from the front door on the opposite wall Nina saw a stone fireplace with an efficient insert for holding the heat in winter, and wood in the wood box even now, because June at Tahoe still meant cool nights. Over a mile high in the Sierras, people around the lake could find themselves in the midst of a snowstorm any month of the year. Sandy went straight to a table and chairs under the single window in the room; they all sat down and looked through it at the rocky yard with its low stone wall. A couple of blue jays squabbled in the pine tree by Connie’s gate.
“Snow’s all melted,” Sandy said.
“For the next three months anyway.” Sunken-eyed and older than she had first appeared, Connie wore blue jeans and a sweatshirt. Black hair now going gray flowed down her back. She hadn’t looked again at Nina and Paul; her expression wasn’t exactly hostile, but she was struggling with some inner turmoil, which preoccupied her so totally that she had little interest in her visitors, and Nina felt sure she never would have talked with them at all if she hadn’t known Sandy. Nina folded her hands and listened while Paul rocked a little in his chair and kept his eyes down.
Sandy said in her matter-of-fact voice, “Where’s Gary?”
“Staying with his sister in San Diego for a while.” Danny’s parents had been married for thirty years, Nina knew, but Sandy hadn’t mentioned a separation.
Sandy and Connie seemed to be continuing some old conversation. Sandy said, “You remember my husband, Joseph? Well, he went and broke his foot. He was cutting down some limbs behind the house and tripped over a rock. He’s home in Markleeville right now.”
“Left all this trouble for you to clean up.”
“Now that’s not fair. He’d help if he could.”
