"Damn," I muttered, "you'd think someone would have seen at least one of them. Kendall was certain we had everybody rounded up."
"Kendall is wrong," she announced. "Remember that skinny little gal that works in the village office? The one that gave us directions to the Widow Austin's place?"
"Angie. Her name was Angie."
"How interesting. You remember her name, huh?"
"Easy name to remember," I lied. Actually I didn't have the foggiest idea why I remembered the girl's name. "Why?"
"Thought you didn't like flat-chested women?" B.C. purred.
"Damn it, B.C., I'm too tired to play games. What about the girl?"
"From what I'm told, she's the one who went out to get Bert and Polly. She supposedly took a van so that they could get Polly's wheelchair."
"And?"
"Well, apparently nobody has seen her since."
"What about the Johnsons?"
"No one has seen them either."
Madden's reaction was the same as mine. The three of us jumped into his four-by-four and hightailed it for the old motel. The whole process of informing him on what we had learned and racing the mile and a half to the motel took less than five minutes, even with the fog.
It took no more than a couple of steps to hit the motel's front door, throw it open and half-hurdle my old body into the tiny lobby. Bert had the shotgun at waist level, finger on the trigger, ready to fire. The look on his face read more terrified than committed to shooting whatever it was that was coming through the door, however, and we stood there looking at each other.
"Damn," he sputtered, "you don't know how close I came to emptyin' both barrels."
There was still too big a lump in my throat for me to say much of anything.
Bert had no more than gotten the words out of his mouth when Madden hit the door with B.C. right behind him. The look on Jake's face was a mixture of surprise and relief.
"What the hell happened?" he thundered.
Polly wheeled around from behind the lobby desk, her normally placid face mirroring the stress of the long night. "Angie here came out to tell us that the RCMP wanted everyone in the area to move into town," she explained. "But we couldn't get the car started."
"Don't know what's the matter with it," Bert groused.
I had that funny feeling you get when you think someone isn't giving you the straight story.
"Never did that before," Bert grumbled. The feeling intensified. He wasn't at all convincing.
"Why didn't you call into the village?" Jake asked. "We'd have sent someone out to get you."
"The phones are dead," Polly said calmly.
"We always have phone problems when one of these fog blankets settle in like this for several days."
"What's the situation in Chambers Bay?" Bert questioned.
Jake shoved his hat back and leaned against the counter." 'Bout the only thing for certain is that we made it through the night. We got some eyewitnesses that say they saw the thing head down to the pier and veer off into the woods. Too foggy and too dangerous to follow it through."
Anything I can do to help?" Bert inquired.
"The RCMP is organizing another sweep of the area that starts at ten o'clock," Jake informed him.
"If you can help me get Polly and Angie into the village where they'll be safe, I'll be there."
There was a fleeting moment when I read something into Polly s expression other than wifely concern, but I let it pass without comment.
We made another unsuccessful effort at getting Bert's car started, but after several minutes of grinding, Angie's van finally coughed to life. Jake muttered something about damp plugs, which I had a little trouble buying, but the bottom line was that we got them back into the village and Jake and I headed for Freeman Field to catch up with the sweep effort.
We still had 30 minutes to spare when Jake pulled off the main road and stopped at the diner. He drove around to the back door, produced a ponderous set of keys, sorted through them and opened the door to the diner's kitchen.
"Vernice gave it to me," he said a little sheepishly. "Said I might never know when I'd need it."
It was obvious the big man knew his way around the kitchen. He fired up the front burner on the big gas range, dug through the pantry until he found a jar of instant coffee, put some water on to boil and leaned casually up against the cooler with his arms folded. "I can rustle you up some bacon and eggs if you're hungry," he offered.
At the moment I was having trouble conjuring up visions of anything except a platonic relationship between Jake and the hawk-faced Vernice, but I'd be the first to admit that the libido does funny things to people.
"I know what you're thinking," Jake began defensively. "It just sorta happened. Started right after I took over this job, 'bout the same time she bought this place. We was both puttin' in fourteen and sixteen hour days. I'd stop by here for coffee in the mornin' and a cold one the last thing at night. One night it didn't make much sense to go on home. Been an off and on thing ever since."
"Where is she now?"
Jake gave me one of his casual bull-shouldered shrugs.
"In town, I reckon… we don't keep close tabs on each other." Somehow I had the feeling Jake thought he knew, but he wasn't about to lower his defenses and admit it. He pushed himself away from the cooler, went through the swinging doors into the dining room, crossed it and went over to the window overlooking the bay. I followed. The room smelled stale and greasy.
There wasn't much to see. The water was placid, the sky a dreary gray. Both were void of detail. Together they blended into a monotone of colorless sameness. We stood there for several minutes, staring out at the featureless seascape, feeling the effects of the long, sleepless night.
"Think we'll find that damn thing out there?" Jake mused.
"Been wondering the same thing myself," I admitted absently.
Jake studied me briefly, then turned his attention back to the bay.
Men, I have observed over the years, approach even the most difficult of situations from a great many different perspectives. For me, the head-on approach has always been the most rewarding, and most of the time, solutions just generate more questions. For others, solutions are the end-all, and then they turn to something else. For me, Chambers Bay was simply one more adventure, one more exploration into the fascinating world of the bizarre and unusual, one more unexplainable situation to be defused with logic. For Jake, it had evolved into something decidedly different. My detachment was my sanity. His involvement was his reality. For me, Vernice, Jake, Caleb, Harlan, Bert and Polly were all living, breathing human beings, but there was a time, still some way off, when they would be little more than carefully scribed recollections over Scotch in front of a crackling fire. For Jake, they were a very real part of tomorrow — and the day after and the day after.
The big man checked his watch, sauntered back into the kitchen, fixed each of us a cup of coffee and drifted out on the back porch. He stood there for several seconds before I heard the protest. "Oh, God… no," he cried.
He stared across the narrow expanse of oil-stained gravel at the front door of Vernice's faded silver and gray house trailer. The front door was open. On the top step was Vernice's robe-clad body.
Jake bolted for her with me on his heels.
He bent over the woman's lifeless body and tenderly cradled her head in his bearlike paws. The look on his face betrayed the unbridled gamut of his emotions — disbelief, loss, sorrow, outrage.
I reached down and touched the woman's hand. It was cold and stiff; she had been dead for several hours. The faded cotton robe was damp from its nightlong exposure to the blanketing fog.