A week before Ray Walker disappeared, the Radium Town Board had taken an action that created a ruckus. The board unanimously followed the recommendation of the superintendent of the West End School District and made Fourth Street one-way between Main and Herron where it passes by the school.
Now, barely a week and a half after Ray Walker’s disappearance, the town meeting hall was full of citizens up in arms that such a momentous action had been taken without more public discussion.
Tom sat in his usual place at the back, taking notes.
“When there is a controversial matter before this board,” Anne Carson, a former board member said, “then you need to ask your constituents. You need to put something in the newspaper so we know what you are up to.”
Oh, but I did, Tom thought to himself as the crowd murmured agreement, a reminder that his journalistic efforts were fundamentally in vain.
“This was not controversial at all,” Mayor Harry Denny said. “At least none of us thought it was at the time.”
“Well, as one board member, I apologize,” Greg Holstrom said. “I am sorry I made the motion.”
“I submitted this request to turn the road into a one-way in sound mind,” Superintendent Larry Tice said. “My daddy always taught me to make decisions that I could sleep with. After I asked this board to make the street one-way, and you did it, I slept like a baby. I don’t think anyone on this board should apologize for anything.”
“If the idea was to protect school kids, there was a better way to do it,” Tom’s friend Dave Best said. “Did you stop to think that the one-way would make it so trucks can’t get down the alley behind my store? Now, how are we going to unload merchandise? Did you stop to think that speed bumps or a flashing light might work better?”
“What about teaching the kids not to walk in the middle of the street?” Lulu Lack asked.
“We’ve obviously got a problem,” Mayor Denny said. “I guess we didn’t necessarily make the right decision. But we voted unanimously and so now we have a law on the books that makes Fourth one-way, so what do we do about that? Seems to me this is a health-safety issue and if we go back on our decision we’ve got a real liability problem.”
“That’s right,” Tice said. “I urge you not to go back to the way it was unless there is some other safety measure in place first. I wouldn’t want to be a member of this board if you did that and then some child was hit by a car and killed.”
Checkmate. You can win any argument, Tom mused, by threatening the life of a child.
“If I may,” town manager Luanne Pillsbury proposed, breaking the silence. “The board could leave matters as they are, and before our next meeting in three weeks we could work with the neighbors who are concerned about the one-way and bring you some options.”
It is far better that life goes on, Tom thought, as he walked back to his office, for what was the alternative? That everything should stop just because a man was missing? He himself was relieved. This was precisely the sort of story he preferred to spend his days reporting. Should Fourth Street be one-way or not? Despite the school superintendent’s dire warning, this was not life or death.
Tom immersed himself in his daily routine. The school lunch menu sat on his fax, and he wondered if Sarah Walker had sent it. Had she gone back to work? He had some ads to build, one for Scenic Realty featuring single trailers and doublewides and tract homes, not one of them listed at more than $125,000. Dave delivered his Merc ad, along with a snide comment about the idiocy of the town board. Tom typed up the lunch menu. He wrote up the one-way street story. And then he wondered what, if anything, he should print about Ray Walker. Was it news that he had learned Ray’s parentage? Clearly not. Would there be any purpose served in calling Sheriff Martin for another update? Doubtful. If this was a case when no news really was news, then how long would that be true?
He decided to run the one-way street story as his lead, and to run the familiar picture of Ray below the fold, with a caption stating the basic facts, that he was still missing and had been missing for 15 days, and that there were no new leads in the case. Walker had led the news after all, for two consecutive weeks. Pushing the story to lower prominence would be part of the healing process. It was time to let Ray go.
Just then the phone rang.
“I just called to make sure you got the lunch menu,” Sarah Walker said.
“You’re back at work.”
“I couldn’t sit at home any more, making soap and waiting for the phone to ring.”
“I understand,” Tom said. “I’m sorry, Sarah.”
She said nothing but did not hang up, either. He sensed that she was working to control her emotions.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes.” But her voice was weak.
“Would you like to go for a walk after work?” he asked, absolutely unsure if it was his reporter’s instincts kicking in, or something else. Either way, he was sure she had some as-yet unspoken reason for having called him.
She didn’t answer quickly.
“Can you meet me at the drive-in?” she said.
Desolate but on a hill, the drive-in offered both privacy and safety. A person could sit in his car at the drive-in and watch the single entrance to see who was coming well before they arrived. At the same time, it was possible to remain inconspicuous, parking off to the side or sitting among the boulders at the edge of the mesa, behind the crumbling screen.
That’s how Tom found Sarah, waiting for him, in the safety of her car, watching him approach.
When he pulled up she got out of her car and joined him in his.
“You can’t imagine how hard this is,” she said.
“No.”
“I feel awful for saying it, but it would have been easier if he’d been killed. Then, at least I’d know.”
“I’ve thought about that. How a disappearance is worse in a way than a death. You must feel like you can’t go on. How will you know when it’s okay to keep living your life?”
“Every day I wake up and I’m living my life. It goes on, it just goes on. Why did you want to meet me?”
“I just thought maybe you needed someone to talk to.”
“I thought you might have questions you want to ask.”
“I might.”
“Do you think I have secrets? That I know more than I’m saying?”
“Do you?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
Though he’d been looking forward to seeing her, he hadn’t anticipated they would be sparring with each other, each seeking some kind of tactical advantage, even if their underlying purposes were ambiguous. He had imagined something gentler, but she looked at him hard, an expression that could be read either as a challenge to Tom to try harder to uncover her secrets or a warning to back off, or maybe she was toying with him for the hell of it. Regardless, her aggressiveness presented bigger questions: Why had she called him in the first place? Surely it was not, as she had professed, to make sure that he’d received the school lunch menu. That was far too easy an alibi. Her suggestion that he had initiated their meeting was not exactly accurate, either, or had he only imagined when he heard her voice on the other end of the phone when she called to ask about the school lunch menu that she was inviting a further interaction? She had sounded hesitant, to which he had responded, but it is easy to misread the silence in a pause. If this was a seduction, it was not clear which of them was more interested in pursuing it. Each had, after all, revealed an attraction to the other before Ray disappeared, before he knew she was married to Ray, when they had innocently flirted with each other.
In any case, just when Tom had convinced himself that the story of Ray’s disappearance was nearing its conclusion, however unsatisfactorily, she was drawing him back in. But why? The calculus involved so many variables, emotional and mercenary, and so many unknowns, that Tom could never be confident he’d accounted for all of the possibilities. The simplest and least compromising was that she was lonely in her husband’s absence and needed someone to talk to.
“Do you think I’m mysterious?” she asked. “That I know what happened to Ray?”
“Maybe you do,” he said, a tacit acknowledgment that she made a plausible femme fatale. “But you haven’t been at the top of my list of suspects. At least not until now.”
“Go ahead and ask me something,” she said. “Maybe I’ll give you a clue I don’t even know I have and you’ll be the one to figure out what happened to him.”
Her condescension demanded an equivalent response, so Tom delivered one.
“Did you know that your husband, that Ray, was conceived here?”
“That’s getting awful personal awful fast!” she said, her armor dented, but for no more than a second. “But it’s a safe guess. I’d say half the people born on the West End were conceived here. And that’s why the place is dying. The drive-in movie theater is shut down and there’s no place for people to go fuck and make babies so they have to get married and get stuck here for the rest of their damn lives.”
He frowned and nodded, as if to process what she said.
“Of course,” she added, “Angie figured it out somehow, even without the drive-in.”
“Is that what happened to you? You got pregnant and stuck?”
“Not exactly.”
She didn’t volunteer more, so they sat silently for a moment.
“I suppose I’m impressed,” she said. “Mostly people from away never understand the first thing about this place. But you’ve got the whole damn thing figured out.”
“You know Ray was Dick DeRichter’s son….”
“I’ve been married to the man for 20 years,” she said, plainly growing annoyed by his presumption.
“But you told me his father is dead.”
“What else would you expect me to say for you to put it in the paper?”
Her tone had shifted, signaling that she was finished teasing him and was deploying a different element of her game. She was a complicated woman, subtler and more in command of how she presented herself than he had expected.
“Listen,” she said, “I called and asked to meet with you because I wanted to tell you something.”
“Yes?”
“I don’t want you to investigate my husband’s disappearance.”
“I’m not,” he said, surprising himself with his own hurried denial. “I’m not an investigative reporter and even if I were The Forum is too small, I’m too small. I don’t have the resources it takes to investigate anything.”
“Why did you go meet Elizabeth?”
How did she know? Had the nursing home director found out about his visit and reported it back to the family?
“Why wouldn’t I?” he asked. “I’m reporting a story of a man’s disappearance so I met with his mother. The same way I interviewed you. It would be odd if I didn’t. But it’s not an investigation.” He shifted gears: “I guess you keep up with her.”
She turned to face him and look him in the eye and impress upon him that she was serious.
“You don’t know what you’re getting into,” she said, enunciating every word for emphasis. “It could be more dangerous, much more dangerous, than you think.”
Did she also know he’d met with Albert DeRichter?
“Dangerous how?” he asked.
She didn’t answer.
“Was Ray having an affair?”
“No!”
“Was he using meth? Or cooking it?”
“No! Why would you ask those things?”
“What else dangerous is there?” he asked. “There’s sex if he was having an affair or drugs if he was messed up with meth or possibly money if the DeRichters are involved. Doesn’t that cover everything dangerous? Sex, drugs, and money?”
“There’s always a boring old car wreck,” she said without conviction.
“Everybody is telling me something different,” Tom said. “And I wonder why.”
He told her about Dave Best’s suggestion that Ray might be involved in some “bad shit,” meth, and that Dave wanted him to know that Ray was Dick DeRichter’s son. And he told her about Sheriff Martin’s reaction when he asked if he knew that it was DeRichter’s son who was missing. He told her the sheriff hinted that Ray was having an affair. These were all leads that nobody was following, at least not to Tom’s knowledge.
“Those are all the clues I’ve got,” he said. “And now you’re telling me that he wasn’t having an affair or doing meth and that it’s no big deal who his father is, and you also don’t think he was in an accident, but you don’t want me to investigate because of some vague danger. Whatever happened to Ray can’t be that complicated. It’s got to be simpler.”
Sarah seemed to choose one of the complications to tell him about, whether to appease or misdirect him he wasn’t sure, or even, just possibly, because it was relevant.
“There was a woman who lived here, a beautiful Russian woman, she lived in town for a year and then she left, about six months ago, and I don’t think she touched but one or two lives…. Ray’s life, and mine, I suppose,” Sarah said. “She worked at the auto shop.”
“Oh?”
“Ray taught her how to install windshields, and repair cracks in them. He could have done it himself and saved what he paid her, but he just felt so terrible for her. She needed the work, and she needed to get out of the house, and Ray, he was so kind to her, to Anya, she was so cultured, not just another West End hick like the rest of us, you know, she was … educated, and she had this spirit. She was blonde and so skinny and she had these high cheekbones and bright eyes and she laughed a lot, even though she was sad. She was from St. Petersburg, over in Russia, and she got over here as a mail-order bride.
“I’m sure you never heard of Mark Brubaker, either. He is a trucker, lives out on the mesa, doesn’t know anyone and nobody knows him. He’s one of these guys who has his own rig and he only works when he has to and he lives as cheaply as he can between jobs, and that’s why he lives here, outside of Radium, because it hardly costs him a cent. He can live three or four months off of what he earns on one long haul and then he can sit around in his underwear and drink beer and fart all day long. He paid for Anya to come over here, with her son, Nick, but he lied to her. Her life in Radium was nothing at all like what he told her. She hated it, probably thought she’d ended up in Siberia or someplace god-awful, and she hated him, too. She is so beautiful and he must have sent her a fake picture or she would have chosen someone else, because he’s a toad. I mean, a complete loser. You can’t imagine how anyone could have sex with him.
“Anyway, Anya decided to leave him, there was nothing else to do, and so Ray helped her. Brubaker took off on a long road trip and Ray helped Anya and Nick pack up their things into a truck he rented for them. They were great friends. I caught them once horsing around, playing like a couple of kids, he was pushing her around in a wheelbarrow, and they were both laughing. So the plan was that her husband would come back home from a long haul and she’d just be gone. And he wouldn’t know where to find her. She would disappear, kind of like what happened to Ray, how Ray disappeared from my life. And that’s exactly what happened to Brubaker, and it would make me feel sorry for him if he wasn’t such a creep. I mean, we have this horrible thing in common, except he knows that she left because she couldn’t stand him and I have no idea at all what happened to Ray. But I really don’t believe they were lovers, Ray and Anya. I don’t know if I could have blamed Ray exactly if they were lovers because she was so… just so beautiful. She would be hard for any man to resist.”
“You shouldn’t… You’re beautiful, too, you know.”
She brushed past his awkward attempt to console her or to get more personal, if that’s what it was. Tom himself wasn’t sure.
“If they were lovers, Ray would have tried to keep it all a secret, because he is not cruel and he would not have wanted to hurt me or his children, but he didn’t do that. He was perfectly honest that they were friends, just really good friends. She was different from anyone else Ray could ever meet, so foreign, and you can’t blame him for being fascinated by her.”
“But her husband might not believe they were just friends, and might have been jealous even if they were,” Tom said. “And if he knew that Ray helped her leave him, he could have wanted revenge.”
“Sheriff Martin is convinced that Ray and Anya were having an affair. He can’t believe two adults of the opposite sex could be just-friends. He figures that if they were fucking, well, then, obviously Ray ran off with her, and that’s that. Case closed. That’s why he’s not investigating.”
“I’m sure they questioned this trucker about Ray’s disappearance.”
She shrugged: “Probably. But maybe not. Who knows?”
“And Anya? It seems like somebody should find her and ask if she’s heard from him….”
“…or to see if Ray ran off with her and they’re living happily ever after. But that’s not what happened. I know it isn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
“Why would Ray become so involved with Anya and her son if he didn’t care about her? Maybe he cared more than you want to believe. If he didn’t care, why would he take the risk?”
“He couldn’t bear the idea of her getting stuck here, like the rest of us. He wanted to help her get away. If you knew Mark Brubaker, you’d understand. It really is that simple. And if you knew Ray better, you’d understand. That’s the kind of guy Ray was … Ray is, the kind of guy he is.”
That’s unlikely, Tom thought, confident that the mystery was all-but-solved and that it really was that simple, although not simple in the way Sarah imagined. No wonder the sheriff was disinclined to investigate. It seemed obvious that Ray Walker had fallen in love with another man’s beautiful and exotic Russian mail-order bride and had run off with her. What hurt most was Sarah’s unavoidable recognition that even she couldn’t blame him if he did.
There was no crime; and there wasn’t even any news. There was only the terrible vulnerability of the woman left behind. As much as he admired her gallantry and spirit, poor Sarah was simply in a horrible state of denial, denial so deep that she frankly preferred not to know the truth. That’s why she wanted Tom to leave the story alone, not because it was dangerous to investigate, but because the truth hurt too much and was dangerous to her fragile psyche.
He was touched. He reached over and put his hand on hers.