Cape Disappointment (34 page)

“You're talking,” I said.

“This is different,” Hutchins said, glancing around to make sure we weren't being observed. “I consider you a friend.”

“Thanks, pal.” I slapped him on the shoulder, touched that my personal dilemma had affected him so deeply.

When I finally hopped off the fence, I could barely walk, my quadriceps cramping from cold and inactivity. Snake was gone, probably in the car harmonizing with Willie Nelson. This was turning into an ordeal for him, but still he refused to leave my side. The Coast Guard personnel in the lighthouse had been watching me, a suicide watch, no doubt, for they knew who I was but not exactly what I was hoping to accomplish out here. All I knew was that this was the last place I'd seen Kathy, even if she'd been a mile away; the last place I'd heard her voice. And it was the spot, give or take a few paces, where I'd watched her fall four thousand feet to her death. Whenever I thought about it, the shock ran through me like an electric current.

When I reached the parking lot, there were only four or five cars,
mostly tourists whose timetables had been upset by the weather. A vehicle was turning around in the rain. The elderly woman at the wheel had short-cropped white hair and a large, blunt nose. Her passenger sat unmoving, as stiff as a mannequin, her head bound tightly in a scarf. It was only when the driver switched on the car's headlights and the interior panel lights lit up that I was able to glimpse, for just a fraction of a second, the passenger's profile. The nose. The chin. The position of her head, that slight cant to one side. As they drove away, I screamed, “Kathy!” The car didn't slow, and neither the driver nor the passenger gave any indication they'd heard me as I slopped through the puddles in the parking lot, running after them.

It was a faded red Subaru wagon, early eighties, the rear bumper dented, the plates so muddy I couldn't read the digits in the dusk. Who the driver was or why Kathy would be riding around beside her like a zombie was something I couldn't fathom.

My wet jeans pulled against my knees as I sprinted across the lot to my Taurus. The car doors were locked. I checked my pockets, but I didn't have the keys. “Snake? Snake, where are you? God damn it! Snake?”

I was racing toward the trail that led to the World War II bunkers when Snake emerged from the narrow path leading to them. “What d'ya want?”

“Give me the goddamned keys!”

When he flipped me the keys, I turned and ran to the car. “What the heck? What's going on?”

“I saw Kathy.”

“In the ocean?”

I was scrambling into the car now, pushing the seat back so I could get my long legs in. I fired up the engine. “Come on, man,” Snake said, climbing in. “Slow down. You trying to kill me?”

“Close your door.” We were already moving.

“Close my door? I'm not even in yet.”

We tore through the lot, spewing gravel and water behind the tires, then slewed onto the roadway, where I stopped and looked in both directions. There was no traffic in sight. On a hunch, I jumped out of the car and examined the road, hoping I could track the Subaru in the
puddles the way an expert tracker would track a deer. It was a demented idea, and I found nothing except water and macadam. “Crap!” I said, climbing back in. Snake was fooling with the stereo, trying to get Willie Nelson to sing again. I grabbed the disc out of his hands, rolled down my window, and flicked it out into the afternoon rain squall.

“Christ, Thomas! Have you gone mad?”

Right or left? These were long country roads, and if I guessed the Subaru's direction and drove fast enough, I could be on them in minutes. I went left. “Thomas? Are you okay?”

“I told you. I saw Kathy.”

“Kathy's dead. You know that. You know you do.”

“It was her.”

“You've seen her before. She was dead then, and she's still dead.”

“Those were mistakes.”

“Did you get a clear look?”

“She was in a car. The windows were steamed up.”

“And it was dark in the car, right, ‘cause it's dark in cars at this time of day. Look, Thomas. You only think you saw Kathy. You're out here at the Cape, and you and I both know this is the last place you spoke to her. This area will always bring back memories. It will always—”

“It was her.”

“Okay. You saw her. Did she see you?”

“I don't know.”

“If she saw you, why didn't she stop?”

“Some woman was driving.”

“Kathy was the passenger?”

“Right.”

“What were they doing out here?”

“I don't know.”

“Kathy's alive? Okay. I can accept that. After all, they haven't recovered a body. Explain it. Did she parachute out of the plane?”

“I didn't see any chutes.”

“She survived the impact and swam to shore?”

“I don't know.”

“Think about it, Thomas. If she was alive, don't you think she would go home? Or at least call you to tell you she was okay?”

“She called the other night.”

“How many times have you seen Kathy since the crash? How many?”

“Eight. Ten. I'm not sure.”

“And none of them were her, were they?”

“No.”

“I rest my case.” A few moments later he added, “You're not going to stop, are you?”

“No.”

By the time we'd driven a few miles down the road, careening at breakneck speeds, it became clear I'd chosen the wrong direction. I whipped the Taurus around in the middle of the road and headed south. Although his knuckles were white on the door grip, Snake didn't say anything. I had to give him credit for gumption. If I'd been in his place, I would have opened the door and bailed out.

FOR THE NEXT TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES
I drove like a meth freak looking for his next hit, but during the lunacy, all Snake did was fasten his seat belt and push himself back into the seat. We drove down 101 and across the Columbia River into Oregon, and we still had not caught sight of the Subaru. “You going to pursue this to the end?” Snake asked, when I finally came to a stop at a red light and put my head on the steering wheel.

“What's the end?”

“You tell me. You actually
believe
that was your wife in the Subaru?”

“Yes. I don't know. Maybe. It looked like her.”

“That was four different answers.”

“All I know is I have to find out.”

“You're beginning to worry me, Thomas.”

“I'm beginning to worry myself.”

“Tell you what. You want to find Kathy? Get a grappling hook and eight hundred feet of line. Go drag the ocean floor.”

“I'm going to find that car. If it wasn't Kathy, I won't chase anybody else.”

“Is that a promise?”

“Yes.”

“I'm going to hold you to it. But we've got to get organized. We know they left Cape Disappointment and headed south, because we went
north first, and if they'd been anywhere on the road we would have flattened them like a two-cent pancake. I suggest we go back and start at the Cape. We'll traverse every road south of there. We'll go into Naselle and Chinook, and we'll take 401 and we'll even …”

“The problem is, they could be anywhere. They might be on their way to Seattle.”

“Don't get your panties in a twist. We'll get organized and make this work.”

We searched until midnight, talking to anybody we could find, gradually widening our search pattern. I called my house in Seattle every half hour, saddened anew each time I heard Kathy's voice on our answering machine— the old recording, not a new one. I'd vowed never to erase it, but eventually I knew I would have to. It made me sick to think about replacing the message, even sicker to realize I'd lapsed into some sort of Alice in Wonderland parallel universe. But I had. I would play through this last obsession and regroup. I wanted to stop, but I couldn't help myself. Snake was right. I was becoming delusional.

It wasn't until after midnight that Snake insisted we find dinner and a place to sleep. We found both in Astoria, on the Oregon side of the Columbia River. The next morning, after sleeping maybe a total of two hours, I got up at six-thirty and called home from our small motel room, listened to Kathy on the answering machine, and got us back on the trail, Snake in the car beside me wolfing down a bag of maple bars and doughnuts we'd procured. My clothes were finally dry, though my shoes remained damp. By eight Snake had a pretty good sugar buzz going and a half hour later dropped off to sleep against the passenger door. Passing Naselle for about the fifth time since I'd begun the odyssey, I pulled into a gas station and bait shop where we'd gassed up the night before. The attendant was new. “I'm looking for a dark red Subaru wagon. Nineteen-eighties. Older woman driver. Short white hair. Know anybody like that?”

“Just about every woman who comes in.”

“They all driving Subarus?”

The man wore a baseball cap and had a wad of chewing tobacco bulging one cheek. He was about twenty-five, fresh-faced, and I hoped destined for better things. “Why are you looking for her?”

“I saw her at a flea market and she said she had a boat to sell, but then I went and lost the slip of paper with her number on it.”

“She comes in for beer and chips and stuff. Always pays cash. She don't live far.”

“How do you know?”

“She don't ever turn off her engine. Says if it ain't running longer than five minutes, she can't get it started back up.”

“I guess that puts her less than five minutes away.”

“I would say so.”

On my way out the door, I turned back. “Anyone come in with her?”

“She's by herself. Seems to like it that way.”

“Ever say anything?”

“Just about the weather and so on. I know she follows the Seahawks. God, they're having a great year, aren't they?”

“Sterling.”

“What's going on?” Snake asked, coming out of his coma with a start when I slammed the car door.

While I explained, I took the first local road that branched off the highway. We examined every property, disturbing noisy dogs and in one case a curious goat. It took an hour and a half to locate the car on a serpentine farm road north of Naselle parked in front of a two-story ramshackle house with moss on the roof. The weed crop in the yard had gone to seed. A fifty-year-old rusted logging truck and a partially disassembled logging trailer hunkered in the trees on the side of the property. Parked haphazardly next to the Subaru was an older Toyota Corolla.

As we approached the house, I began having misgivings. True, it was a Subaru and it was old, but the rear license plate was clean and readable, not obscured by mud. It occurred to me that there was probably more than one red Subaru wagon in the area. “I bet these are old people,” Snake said. “Don't go scaring the shit out of them.”

“All I want to do is talk.”

“Remember, they live out in the boonies. They won't be like city people.”

“What the hell does that mean?” I asked, climbing the high front porch.

“People out here pack weapons.”

“Just don't you be pulling yours.”

“I'm trying to warn you so you won't get your fool head blowed off.”

“Just stay out of my way.”

“That'll be the day,” Snake said, keeping close behind. Inside the house somebody was playing a Hank Williams record. Loud.

I knocked and waited. The porch was barren of everything except an empty flowerpot. I knocked again. It was impossible to see through the windows.

“Thomas, I swear to God, you're going to regret this. These are ordinary folk, and you're going to feel like a jackass.”

“I feel like a jackass every day. Always have.”

I had to knock three more times before he opened the door and blocked the narrow space with his body. He was medium-height, brown and brown, short hair, unshaven, with spindly arms and the beginnings of a paunch that was going to overpower his slender frame. Hard to tell how old he was. Around thirty, maybe. He had something in his right hand, because when he raised his arm I heard it clunk against the inside of the wooden door. A woman behind him turned the music down and said something I couldn't hear. He replied over his shoulder. “I got it. Probably some damned Jehovah's Witnesses.” Looking at me, he said, “Yeah?”

“I'm wondering if I could talk to the owner of that red wagon.”

“Why?”

“I clipped it in a parking lot yesterday, and I need to make things right.”

He thought it over a few moments, then a wary look crept into his eyes. “She never said nothing to me about getting crunched.”

“It wasn't bad. She probably didn't even see it.”

“How did you know where to find us?”

“I just—”

“Get the fuck outa here, asshole.” He tried to slam the door, but I had my foot in it. I could feel the pressure against my shoulder as he tried to close the door from one side while I pushed from the other.

“Jesus, Thomas,” said Snake. “Get out of there.”

Suddenly the weight on the other side stopped and his face reappeared in the opening, then the door opened wide. Still huffing from
our fray, the disheveled man stood in front of us with a pistol dangling at the end of his limp right arm. He seemed flummoxed when he saw Snake, whose appearance took all the fight out of him.