Swann knew better, and he was learning not to mind. Sure, he looked the part. He was a careful observer, and within a year of arriving he’d learned how to dress down to look like a local: T-shirt, open chambray shirt, fleece vest, blue jeans, ball cap. Maybe a couple days of beard. He’d come to the conclusion that although it was possible for country people to move to a city and eventually adapt, it didn’t work the other way around. He’d never fully get used to doing without; not having a vast choice of restaurants, grocery stores, shopping, the welcome blanket of anonymity within a white noise soundtrack. Here, they noticed you, talked to you without hesitation, asked where you were from. To deal with that he’d invented a persona and wore it around like he used to wear blue. People knew him here as affable Oscar Swann, retired cop who sought the simple life, raised some hogs, chewed tobacco, and admired the pure country goodness of the natives. They’d never know in his heart he thought of them as jaded Europeans thought of Americans: as childlike, boisterous, loud, too insular to appreciate what they had, too unsophisticated to realize how easy it had been for them. Nevertheless, they seemed to accept him although he learned too late that raising hogs wasn’t exactly common. By then he’d come to like it. When he knew Monica, he sensed she’d seen through him, knew intuitively it was an act. He pulled away before she could confront him and confirm it, but that didn’t keep him from still wanting her and jumping on this opportunity. He had needs, after all.
“No, no,” he said to the newswoman, who had paused in her hair-raking while he strode toward her. “There’ll be no interview.”
The reporter glared at him. “What do you mean, there’ll be no interview? I asked her, and she agreed. She wants to put out a plea for her children.”
“Sorry, that won’t happen.”
The reporter reacted as if he’d slapped her, and she squared off to fight back. “And who in the hell are you?”
“Oscar Swann,” he said, extending his hand but looking across the lawn to make sure the camera wasn’t rolling yet.
The newswoman didn’t reach out. “That name means nothing to me,” she said.
“I’m with the task force for the sheriff’s department,” he said, showing her a laminated graphic of a badge on a lanyard they’d made just that morning. “We’ve been authorized to help with the investigation. If you want an interview, you need permission from Sheriff Carey. In fact, he’s going to hold a press conference in a few hours. But we need you to leave Mrs. Taylor alone for now.”
The reporter hesitated, looked at his plastic badge, then his face. He knew he looked fatherly, concerned, avuncular. Trustworthy. He always had.
“Are you a cop? I’ve never seen you around.”
“Retired,” he said in a way he thought clipped and official, as if Singer were addressing the media. “Twenty years, Los Angeles Police Department.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “The woman already agreed to speak with us.”
“Consider that permission revoked,” Swann said. “Let me talk with her.”
“Hey …” the reporter called after him, but he was already gone. He positioned himself between the camera and Monica, who had watched the whole thing.
“Oscar,” Monica asked, “what’s going on?”
He kept his voice low. “Monica, I need to ask you not to speak on camera. This isn’t a good idea.” He told her about the task force at the sheriff’s department, how they’d met and decided to funnel all requests for interviews through the sheriff’s department so they could keep some control of the information.
“But why?” she asked, her eyes big. He took a moment to look at her. She was tired, pale, worn-out. There were dark rings around her eyes, and she wore no makeup. Still, though, he thought she was lovely.
“We don’t want things to turn into a circus sideshow,” he said. “We’ve seen it a million times. These people live on rumors and speculation—anything to fill up airtime. They’ll dissect every word you say and turn it around to use against you. If we want to do the right thing, we’ve got to keep a lid on the information we put out and make sure it’s straight and accurate. You could accidentally say something that would give all the armchair experts in their studios a reason to suspect you. I’ve seen it happen.”
She obviously didn’t understand what he was saying, and shrugged. “Me? Why would they think that?”
“Another thing. Look, the person who has your kids might be watching the news. In fact, he’ll probably be watching. We don’t want him to know what we know yet or what leads we’re pursuing. You might inadvertently say something that will help keep him from us. We’ve decided that only the sheriff should speak to the media, that it all be focused on him. That will keep the reporters in one place—the county building—and not camping out here at your house. If they know you won’t give them interviews, but the sheriff will, they’ll focus on him, not you. That’s how we want to play it.”
“I’m not sure I understand. I just want to find my kids.”
“Monica, you’re in the hands of professionals. We’ve been through this before.”
“That means nothing to me.”
Swann tried to remain calm, maintain the authoritative voice and demeanor. He could sense the cameraman behind him moving his tripod for a shot of Monica. Countering it, Swann moved to his right to stay between them. “We don’t know yet where Annie and William are,” he said. “If the person who has them decides to bring them back or contact you, we don’t want camera trucks and reporters to scare him off. We also have to think about how things look to the bad guy. We want the face of this investigation to be the sheriff, not the victim. Does that make sense?”
She studied him, then shook her head. “No, not really.”
He pointed to the reporter, who had finished with her hair and was standing with her hands on her hips, smoldering. “Look at her. All she wants is a story. She doesn’t care about you or your kids.”
That seemed to work. Monica assessed the reporter in a different light now, he thought.
“You have to decide to trust me, trust us,” he said. “I’m here to help and protect you. Believe me, I’ve been through these kinds of situations before, we all have. There are ways to do them right, and one of those ways is not to turn this into a media frenzy. Monica, we’ve got only your best interests—and the welfare of your kids—in mind.”
She looked at him as if she wasn’t sure about that, but she called, “Later, maybe,” to the reporter, and turned back toward her house. He followed her in through the front door and closed and locked it behind them. Through the front window she could see the reporter and the cameraman talking, heatedly, the reporter gesticulating with her hands. He closed the curtains on them.
What he didn’t say to Monica was what he was thinking: And we don’t want your children to see you crying for them on television.
Saturday, 12:20 P.M.
ON HIS way home, Jess Rawlins stopped for lunch at the Bear Trap, which was located halfway between town and the ranch, at an old culmination of logging roads that came down from the mountains. The Bear Trap was a peculiar, idiosyncratic icon: a rambling structure made of logs that had never been as elegant as intended and was now descending into senility. Once a dance hall, boardinghouse, restaurant, and touchstone for loggers and miners (with prostitutes upstairs), the building, once bold, now seemed to be withdrawing in on itself, looking frail and spindly, ready to collapse at an errant sneeze. It had a vast covered porch filled with mismatched weathered rocking chairs, and a hitching post out front that had been hit so many times by trucks pulling in that it leaned over almost to the ground.
Jess’s father had once been a steady customer for meals but had boycotted the place when some people from Spokane bought it and attempted to gentrify it, upgrading the kitchen, remodeling the upstairs rooms, closing the credit accounts that were delinquent beyond thirty days, taking chicken-fried steak off the menu, and generally ruining it as far as he was concerned. The Bear Trap changed in
character from a local tavern to a tourist stop. Trinkets replaced bullets and fishhooks on the retail shelves. Recently, though, the Spokane owners had thrown in the towel rather than invest any further in the deteriorating structure, and the building had been purchased by a retired crosscut saw foreman and his wife who were trying to make a go of it. Jess stopped there as often as he could, more out of support than desire, each time hoping the food would improve.
As he pulled into the lot he noticed the only other vehicle was a tricked-up SUV with Washington plates, ski racks on top and a bike rack on the rear bumper, a UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON decal in the back window, and FREE TIBET and WE VOTE, TOO bumper stickers. Idaho had long been considered a third-world country by Washingtonians, a kind of northwestern Appalachia. Despite the changes in the valley and the influx of new residents, the old perceptions still ran deep.
Inside, it was dark and cluttered, and smelled of decades-old spilled Hamm’s beer as well as grease that needed changing out. Jess skipped the tables and went to the bar, waiting for the proprietress, who was busy delivering orders to the four raggedy college-age students occupying a big table in the center of the room. Jess swiveled on his stool and looked at them: two men, two women. They were very loud. The group was obviously passing through. The two men—boys, actually—wore baggy clothes and days-old growths of beard, their hair hanging down over their eyes. One boy had a mass of red hair and light freckles, with a squared-off, oafish jaw. The other was dark, angular, his face slack as if he had just awakened. The girls were young and pretty, one blonde, one brunette, with straight hair parted in the middle. The blonde wore a white tank top and jeans, and the brunette wore a dark T-shirt cut short to expose her belly. A glint of gold winked from a stud through her navel.
As the waitress put down their plates and gathered empty beer glasses, she looked up at Jess with an exasperated expression.
“Another round of beer for my horses!” one of the boys shouted, and the girls giggled, although one of them reached across the table and hit the boy in the arm.
“We’re not, like, fucking horses,” she squealed.
Jess winced. Of course, he had heard the word before, many times, and used it on occasion. But she was so young, and it came so naturally from her.
He thought of his own son, the first year he had come back from college. He was like that, like those boys. Exuberant, loud, crude, full of himself. For almost a year, Jess Jr. was the smartest human being on the planet, and the people he had grown up with were the most ignorant. He had been charismatic in his way, attractive the way a turbo-charged red convertible is attractive to some girls. Jess had been alarmed by the change in him, but his wife had assured him it was normal. She told Jess their son had been repressed all those years and was now feeling his oats. Her implication was that Jess had been responsible for the repression. But no matter how she characterized the change, Jess still couldn’t say truthfully that he liked what Jess Jr. had become. He still didn’t. What he didn’t know at the time was that he would never see Jess Jr. like that again.
The proprietress came around the bar with her spiral notebook out, eyeing Jess with a plea for understanding and sympathy.
“They’re loud,” Jess said.
“It’s not just that,” she whispered. “It’s the mouths on them. Hell, I’m used to loggers, and these kids even offend me. They said they were on their way to Missoula to visit some friends at the U of M, but they don’t seem to be moving very fast. Maybe I’m getting too old for this.”
Jess ordered an open-faced roast beef sandwich and a jar—the Bear Trap served nonalcoholic drinks in Mason jars—of iced tea.
While Jess waited for the short-order cook to cover white bread with presliced, shiny cuts of beef, he thought about his meeting with Jim Hearne. Hearne was a good man, no doubt about it. The banker was doing all he could to put off the inevitable and cushion Jess’s fall. He might even come up with something that would defer the fate of the ranch on a temporary basis. Jess was out of options, though. There was no way to work himself out of the hole he was in, besides selling the place. And he couldn’t yet wrap his mind around that, couldn’t yet consider it as a legitimate option.
Behind him, the din increased. A beer glass crashed to the floor, and a girl whooped. The jukebox started up. The college kids were settling in.
“Another beer, barwoman!” one of the boys shouted.
“Give me a sec,” she said tersely, sliding the plate in front of Jess. “It’s hot,” she said.
Jess absently touched the rim of the plate. No it isn’t, he said to himself.
As the proprietress filled another mug of beer from the tap, Jess overheard one of the boys say, “Dig the white meat on the poster. I could use a little piece of that.” And the other boy laughed. “Stop it,” one of the girls said, mock-alarmed.
Jess turned to see what they were talking about, saw the poster for the missing Taylor children that had recently been tacked up to a bulletin board, along with years’ worth of flyers and notices. No, he thought. They couldn’t be referring to that poster. It must be something else. Jess turned back to his plate but watched the table in the mirror, his anger rising. It had been the dark boy who had spoken of white meat.
“For sale,” the redheaded boy said in a mock rural accent, “two white-trash northern Idaho, um …urchins!”
“Urchins!” the other boy repeated, laughing, reveling in the word choice.
“We plumb ran out of uses for ’em when they cut our welfare checks,” the redheaded boy continued in the hillbilly accent. “Since Billy Bob got laid off at the lumber mill, we been eating squirrel and drinking beer. Squirrel don’t go as far as it used to …”
The girls were now laughing. Drunk and laughing. They loved the redheaded boy’s imitation of a working-class accent, even though the blonde kept saying, “Stop it, stop it, someone will hear you.”
“Look at that girl,” the dark boy said, pointing toward the flyer. “She’d get a few bucks in a white slave deal, don’t you think? Hell, we could sell her to frat boys!”
The girls laughed, the brunette covering her mouth with her hands.
Jess felt dead for a moment, as if someone had hit him with a bat. He couldn’t believe they were joking about the Taylor children, and especially the photo of Annie, whose image had broken his heart an hour before. How could they be joking about that? How was it possible? What world did they live in? Where did these kids come from, that a tragedy like this could be fodder for jokes? Sure, the kids were drunk. But how could the girls laugh at that?
Jess looked up to see the proprietress frozen at the beer tap, glaring at the table. Beer spilled out of the mug and poured into the trap. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing either, and that the mug was full and spilling over the side didn’t register with her. And there was something else, a kind of hurt-puppy look. Jess knew what it was. The college kids were steeped in that old Washington vs. Idaho view. What happened here was beneath them.
He felt something burning in his stomach and behind his eyes, and he slid off the stool. His boots clunked on the hardwood floor as he approached the table of college kids, and they didn’t notice him until he was there. Leaning down and placing his hands on the table, he nodded at each of the boys.
“You two,” he said. “I need to talk with you outside.”
Without waiting for an answer or looking back, Jess straightened up and walked across the restaurant and out the batwing doors. He could hear the redheaded boy say, “What the fuck is wrong with that guy?” and the other say, “We don’t have to go anywhere we don’t want to,” and one of the girls say, “Yeah, we have our rights.”
What rights? Jess thought. He remembered when his son returned from college. Jess Jr. had also thought he had all kinds of rights.
Jess waited on the porch with his arms crossed. He didn’t want to have to go back in and get them if they didn’t come out. He could hear them discussing it, one of the girls telling the boys to
stay right where they were, that an old cowboy had no right to tell them what to do.
Finally, the batwing doors swung out and the redheaded boy stepped through them holding a half-drunk mug of beer. The dark boy followed, his face inscrutable in its slackness.
“What’s the problem, dude?” the redheaded boy said. “We just want to enjoy our lunch and soak up some local atmosphere, you know?”
Jess didn’t know where to start. He glared at them, felt a hot kind of hatred build up in him, felt himself on the razor’s edge of violence. But he kept his voice low.
“You were laughing about those missing children in there,” Jess said. “That’s not appropriate to the situation. I need to ask you to leave.”
The redheaded boy started to argue, then looked quickly at his companion, talking about Jess as if he wasn’t able to hear him.
“What’s wrong with this old dude, man? He’s got no right to give us orders like he owns the place …we’re paying customers, dog.”
The dark boy nodded his agreement, but didn’t take his eyes off Jess. There was a hint of uncertainty in his eyes, something the redheaded boy didn’t show.
Jess said, “Apparently, while they were telling you how many rights you had at your school, they forgot about teaching you any respect or decorum. What you were saying in there about those missing kids isn’t clever or funny, and it pisses me off because I’m from here.”
The redheaded boy looked back at Jess, his expression wounded. “Man …”
“I’m sixty-three years old,” Jess said, his eyes narrowing, his voice getting hard. “More than three times your age. And there are two of you. But if you don’t walk back in and get those girls, right now, and drive on down the road, I’m going to knock you both into next year.”
The boys stared back at him, frozen. Jess had no doubt that if they rushed him, it would all be over quickly, and he would be the worse for it. But in the mood he was in, he wanted them to try.