No, if those shoes they’d fished out downstream were indeed Paloma’s, as I very much doubted, she’d certainly never have worn them; the very idea was against her religion. She’d tossed those “booties” into the drink herself: a messenger wending its way downstream into my waiting arms—just like that trout—and likely bearing the very same kind of message.
“Where did you find those wading boots?” I asked Sheriff Ted, adding carefully: “And how were you able to discover, so soon and with such certainty, that they belonged to my sister?”
“The right boot was found yesterday, stuck in a trap,” he told me. “They cleaned it out down near the Magic Reservoir. The other was hung up, upstream here, on a cottonwood branch—right near the accident. At least, near where your Sis was last spotted. But as for how we knew that them booties was hers—that part was a real no-brainer: the shoes had her name printed on them, each one—in waterproof ink!”
I tried not to show a reaction. I just hoped to God I was right. It would fit more than neatly into that hole in the jigsaw puzzle. And it would explain something else, as well. So I had to risk it.
“Which of these boots that you located was found the nearest to the spot where you found my sister’s body?” I asked the sheriff.
Though by now, I’d guessed what his answer would likely be.
“Oh, the body, as to that we’re still waiting,” Ted told me. “We figure she hit a deep pool and got sucked down under the current. And here’s the place, right here.” He tapped one of the large, downed cottonwood trees along the bank, its dead branches drifting out into the river, and he added,
“It was right here on this spot that your Sis was last seen. That’s where the trout always like to hole up, down in those hollows under all them trees along the banks; them downed cottonwoods been there forever, all along the river; that’s why we call this river the ‘Big Wood.’ When folks goes down in spots like that, there’s no way we can troll, the current’s too fast and those hollows are too narrow and they go too deep: sometimes we don’t find the missing for months or years. Might even be never.”
“Ah, I see. Well, many thanks for explaining all this, sheriff,” I said politely, retaining my sober expression, while privately I was doing cartwheels in my head. How amazingly perfect! I had to give Palo credit for more brains than I ever realized.
There was no body around, and Palo had left the “handwriting on the wall,” on a pair of shoes. Why would she do that, unless she was planning on remaining alive and in hiding—camouflaged like a trout holed up beneath the cottonwoods—just as, after all, she’d told me she would do, hadn’t she? Now I was dying to crawl out of the icy water myself, rip off this damned rubber skin, and go try to find her.
But there was one thing that I’d nearly overlooked.
“I’d like to see those wading boots that you found,” I told sheriff Ted, “and also any of my sister’s other effects you can show me. And by the way, Sheriff,” I added casually, “who was it that actually sighted Paloma out here on the river that morning? Was it a local resident? Someone who knew her?”
Sheriff Ted was clambering up the bank by now. Perhaps it was my imagination, but he seemed to be avoiding a reply. He got to the top and stuck out his big, meaty mitt to help pull me and my rubber casing out of the water. Once on dry land, I still felt like I’d been embalmed.
“Sheriff?” I repeated, with a raised eyebrow, once we stood eye-to-eye.
Sheriff Ted looked down and shuffled his big foot in the pine needles.
“Not sure I can tell you that,” he said. When he glanced up and saw my expression of innocent surprise, he added, “I’ll check with the department as soon as we get back there. But even though you’re kin of the dead woman, this may be too confidential…” He tailed off with a look of uncertainty.
“My, this is turning mysterious,” I said. And I waited.
But when it came, I was really unprepared.
“I can tell you this much—but when we’re back at the department, you never heard this from me,” the sheriff said under his breath, glancing around, though no one was within miles of this spot. “You won’t find any ‘other effects’ of your sister’s, except maybe her clothes and whatever food was in the fridge. He confiscated the rest—her papers, computer, and everything—from her cabin. The fella who saw her wading out on the river that morning did know her, but he was no fisherman. He was Official, showed us his government badge, said he’d been keeping an eye on your Sis for her own protection. Seems like your little Sis was doing something important, up here in these parts, for the U.S. government. Mine not to guess at just what, naturally.”
I swallowed hard. I felt dizzy. My mouth had gone drier than the pit of the seventh olive. This was worse than I thought. Confiscating Palo’s possessions before they even found a body? What on earth could she have been up to, that might call for such swift action to suppress it? Who was this “Official” lying bastard, who’d grabbed her stuff?
“Sheriff,” I said, choosing my words as carefully as possible, so they wouldn’t come back later to bite me in the butt, “I’m sure you’ll understand if I say that I, also, am not at liberty to share everything about this affair nor to speculate about my sister’s untimely death. But I thank you for your confidence, which will remain safe with me. Since we are speaking in confidence, though—could you tell me what ‘official badge’ it was that her colleague showed you, which has inspired your department to support those actions of his?”
But before the sheriff could reply, or even blink, I had whipped out my own ID from The Company, which I knew trumped most others in the security field, and I flashed it before him.
Now he could blink. And he did.
“Yes sir, Officer Perez,” he said. And he actually saluted me, as if I were his military superior. “I can tell you, though, that fella’s badge was genuine: from the FBI. But it wasn’t no straight FBI case that he was on, none of that ‘Safe House’ witness protection stuff, he said. He told us that your sister was involved doing research in a case involving Homeland Security…”
I went down to the sheriff’s office in Hailey. The wading boots weren’t needed by the sheriff as evidence, since the FBI had trumped everyone and taken charge of what they wanted. But thanks to that spurious cover, no one (except me!) suspected foul play in Palo’s “accidental death.” I tucked the bag with the boots under my arm, accepted the keys to Palo’s cabin, and I hit the road in my rental Jeep, heading back up Route 75, toward Ketchum and Sun Valley.
I needed one more piece of the puzzle. This time, I knew where to find it.
Even before I’d had the chance, alone, to pull those wading shoes from their plastic bag, I’d already glimpsed the clue she’d left me (in addition to plastering her name on the sides of the floaters in indelible ink, so that everyone would know they were hers.) I kept glancing at the bag lying beside me in the Jeep.
On the top tab of each rubbery shoe, she’d tightly glued a cute little plastic sticky label that was hard to miss: a tag, about an inch long, in blue, green and yellow, with a stylized drawing of an exotic young woman with ruffled sleeves, sporting a basket of fruit on her head; she seemed to be dancing a samba. At the top, the label read: ORGANIC. And beneath the young woman’s lithe, dancing form, in large letters, it read “CHIQUITA.”