“Give me back my gun.”
“So you can shoot me? I don’t think so.”
“It’s my gun and you’re in my house.” He was looking at me funny, up and down. “What are you, some kind of sexual deviant?”
Then I remembered: I was in the buff.
“Fell in a stream, up the trail,” I said. “Had to warm up before I froze.”
“So you break into my cabin?”
“My apologies. I’ll pay for the window.”
“You’re darned right you will.”
I ejected all of the Winchester’s remaining cartridges, the shells clattering on the wood floor, leaned the rifle next to the fireplace, then proceeded to put my clothes back on.
“What’re you doing?” the old man.
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“It looks like you’re putting wet clothes back on.” He watched me ring out my socks. Water sizzled and hissed on the hearthstone. “Wait.”
He walked over, reached into a box beside the bed, and tossed me a dry, red flannel shirt, followed by blue jeans, and a rolled pair of socks, olive drab.
“I’d loan you some of my skivvies until yours dry out some,” he said, “but I’m not a weirdo.”
I thanked him for his kindness and put on his clothes while he propped a book against the pane of glass I’d broken, to keep out the cold.
“My name is Melvin Essex, by the way,” he said, “and I’m as old as the hills.”
“Cordell Logan. And I’m getting there.”
“That your truck down the road?”
“It is.”
“What’re you doing all the way up here in the middle of winter with no tire chains, no nothin’?”
I told him. Essex listened intently.
“You’ve had a rough go of it,” he said when I was done.
“I’ll live.”
“You hungry?”
“Now that you mention it…”
He had possum stew written all over him. Or fried squirrel. Something befitting a mountain man living the hermit’s life. But that wasn’t on the menu.
“Got some fresh croissants and a nice Brie. Just picked ’em up in town.”
“Works for me.”
He went outside to his truck and returned with a grocery bag, laying the food on the table, along with a quart of fresh-squeezed orange juice and two mismatched drinking glasses. We sat down and ate.
He told me he’d taught mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, and had been indicted at the height of the conflict in Vietnam for allegedly helping orchestrate an antiwar protest in which several police officers were injured. Investigators, he said, manufactured the case against him out of whole cloth. He was denied tenure. Within a year, he’d lost his job. He never found work again in academia and ended up on a General Motors assembly line in Flint, Michigan.
“I vowed after that I’d never talk to another liar with a badge as long as I lived, and I haven’t,” Essex said. “More juice?”
“No thanks.”
“It’s like when the sheriff’s department came around a couple weeks ago,” he said. “They wanted to know if I knew anything about that boy you said got killed up the trail. Sure, I could’ve told them what I saw. But I wasn’t about to.”
“What did you see, Professor?”
He slathered Brie on his second croissant and looked at me over his glasses.
“How do I know you’re not some undercover cop?”
“If I were, I probably would’ve shot you the second you came in here, blazing away with that saddle rifle of yours.”
“Could be you didn’t shoot me because you dropped your gun when you fell in that stream.”
“Could be I didn’t have a gun to begin with.”
“You’ve got cop eyes.”
I got up, walked over to my wet jeans, pulled out my FAA-issued pilot’s certificate from my wet wallet, and showed it to him.
“I’m a flight instructor.”
He studied the plastic, credit card-size certificate, chewing slowly, then nodded like I’d convinced him and handed it back to me.
“About ten o’clock the night before that boy died, I heard a car go by. Nobody comes up here that late. The engine sounded kind of strange. A dull, rotational knock, like he had a loose main bearing. I didn’t bother getting out of bed. Then in the middle of the night, I hear the same engine. Now he’s coming back down the road, and he’s coming fast. This time, I get up. There’s a good moon, and I see him out the window: a van. Green.”
I stared into the fire, my memory flashing on the high school kid who’d been shoveling snow outside his family’s house the morning Savannah disappeared from the B&B. I remembered his name — Billy. He’d called later to say he’d seen a woman who looked like Savannah trying to escape from a man parked outside a Mexican restaurant in South Lake Tahoe.
The man, Billy said, was driving a green van.
We chatted for another few minutes, mostly about airplanes and aeronautical engineering, with which the professor seemed endlessly fascinated, until my clothes and shoes were no longer wet but merely damp. They’d have to do. I changed out of Essex’s shirt, jeans, and socks, and into my own. My wallet held one twenty dollar bill. I tried to give it to him, to cover the cost of the window I’d broken, but he refused to take it.
“I’m happy my cabin was here for you. And, besides, I don’t get many visitors these days. I enjoyed the company.”
We shook hands.
“Peace, love, and rock and roll,” he said, flashing me a V-shaped peace sign as I started down the road, toward my truck.
“Groovy.”
Was the green van that Essex had observed after Chad Lovejoy was shot to death the same green van that Billy, the snow-shoveling, snowboarding teenager, said he’d seen outside the Mexican restaurant? The same green van from which a woman who Billy said resembled Savannah tried to escape?
I didn’t know, but I most definitely intended to find out.
Streeter seemed mildly interested when I called him about the possible van connection.
“Did anybody get a license number?”
“No.”
“We’ll check it out,” he said.
“When?”
“When time allows. We’re working a couple of new angles right now that look extremely promising.”
The FBI’s lab in Quantico, Virginia, he said, now was actively involved in the investigation. I assumed that the feds were assessing such evidence as tire tracks and boot prints, but I didn’t ask. Streeter would’ve been reluctant to provide any details, given the ongoing nature of his investigation, and for once, I didn’t feel like pressing the issue. I was tired. Beyond tired.
I found a low rise overlooking the south end of Lake Tahoe and sat in my truck, the heater on low. The sky was clear. Whitecaps rippled the water, while the pines swayed fluidly on a stiff south wind. The trees reminded me of Savannah, the way she used to dance to samba music on the radio, her hips keeping perfect, seductive time to the beat, her arms snaking gracefully, always coaxing me with her hands and her smile to join her. I tried to block the memory from my head. I tried not to think of her. Only masochists seek that kind of pain.
I needed to focus and find that green van.
The kid who’d first told me about it, Billy, had said he’d get back to me if anything else about what he’d seen that night outside the Mexican restaurant bubbled up from the recesses of his adolescent brain. I never heard from him after that. Maybe it was time he heard from me.
Billy wasn’t home. His mother was. She stood inside the front doorway with her arms crossed, staring at me like I was trying to sell her a subscription to Pedophile magazine.
“Why do you want to talk to him?”
“It concerns a criminal matter.”