The helicopter didn’t find anything either. Ray Walker, it seemed, had not run off the road, but had either left on his own accord or had met up with foul play. To those who knew him, foul play was the obvious answer, since the Ray Walker they knew would never abandon his family. But to Slickrock County Sheriff Trace Martin, the alternative explanation was far likelier.
“Many people have secret lives,” the sheriff told Tom in an interview at the Forum office, upon completing a day’s search from the air. Martin, who was in his sixties, relished his role as a Western sheriff out of central casting, dressing the part in cowboy shirt, boots, Wranglers, a big hat, and a potbelly. He made no pretense at all to being modern and suffered no job insecurity, habitually winning reelection every four years with Bush-like margins in both the west and east ends of the county, if he was opposed at all, and he did it without campaigning. He was that much of a fixture.
“People in law enforcement find out pretty quick when an adult disappears that niney-nine times out of hunert, there’s been no foul play,” the sheriff said. “So we have to investigate the other possibilities first. People disappear when they run ’emselves into debt, or if they have a fight with their spouse, or fall in love with somebody they’re not supposed to, or when they get depressed.”
He pronounced it “dee-pressed,” as if it were a foreign word for a concept he’d heard about at a law enforcement seminar but had never actually seen, much less experienced. So, too, the four reasons persons typically disappear sounded textbook.
“Now I’m not trying to say anything about Ray Walker,” Martin hastened to add. “I don’t know that boy personally, and I’m not trying to in-sin-u-ate anything about his character. But odds are he’ll call home in a day or two or he’ll turn up and he’ll be terrible sorry for all the worry he’s caused.”
Tom could not discount the sheriff’s wisdom. He knew firsthand about disappearing acts.
The very idea that Tom Austin was the publisher and editor of a small-town paper in the smallest town in the most remote and sparsely populated corner of the United States would have seemed impossible to Tom or to anyone who knew him just fifteen years before. Then, living within twenty miles of where he was born in suburban Boston, Tom himself couldn’t have imagined a place that was a seven- or eight-hour drive on mostly two-lane highways from any of the four closest cities of Denver, Salt Lake City, Phoenix or Albuquerque, even if you drove the entire distance speeding at 80 miles per hour. The town of Radium was even more isolated than that: well over an hour’s drive from the nearest towns with a modern supermarket – Cortez, Colorado, and Moab, Utah.
Tom had been a young reporter for the Worcester Union-Leader, with no shortage of ideas or ambition. Right out of j-school, he eagerly took any assignment handed to him, covering school board meetings without a murmur of complaint, anticipating a quick rise in the ranks, and soon, he imagined, job offers from bigger papers and then, a Pulitzer, followed by book contracts or a senior editor position at The New York Times – all by the time he was 40. He had so much promise, he was quick and likable, and a facile writer. Like the other junior reporters, he pitched ideas at story meetings and was shot down, and often had his best ideas stolen by senior reporters who utterly mangled them. Then he got a break, the assignment of reporting the reaction within the town’s tightly knit Hmong community after a Hmong grocer shot and killed a couple of hunters who challenged him after he trespassed on their private hunting reserve. The Hmong man was not crazy, Tom believed. He just felt threatened. The assignment was to do a sidebar to a hard news story about the incident, but Tom went big with it, working overtime to interview dozens of people and detailing the community’s isolation from the society around them, explaining how the tragedy emerged from cultural assumptions on both sides. Against the odds, the paper’s top editor saw the quality in the story and ran it on page one.
Tom was recruited by The Boston Mail. Not yet 30, he was recognized as a comer and was given good assignments and turned in stories that won him increasingly more latitude to range widely. He covered Wal-Mart’s decision to locate in unincorporated New Hampshire across the Vermont border from a town that, in a doomed effort to preserve its traditional New England downtown, had refused to give approvals for the development. He wrote about a generations-old conflict between a couple of Gloucester lobster families for control of a particular lobster grounds after it erupted into violence, leaving one young husband dead and another crippled. He reported the human cost of a scandal that cost a married suburban mayor his job after he was arrested cruising for gay sex in a public park. Tom was especially good at the human angle, with a knack for getting people to talk to him, and the stories came easily.
Along with the bright career, Tom had a synchronous life, an apartment near Fenway and enough money to buy Red Sox tickets without a second thought, even from a scalper who marked them up two hundred percent. He had some drinking buddies with whom the conversation never got too heavy. He saw his mother, who still lived in his childhood home, every couple of weeks for dinner or Sunday brunch at her club, sometimes joined by his sister, who was just finishing law school, and her husband, who was a stockbroker. He operated on the assumption that his life would continue to progress according to the cosmic plan, from one preordained stage of existence to the next, from childhood through adolescence to young adulthood, each stage with its own set of manageable challenges, until, finally, he achieved maturity. Someday, but not too soon, he would meet the right woman and they would settle down, and they would probably get a dog, and then have children.
Only later did Tom realize that he was operating in a rare and fragile state of grace.
The first days after Ray Walker’s disappearance had an unreality about them. Tom was reminded of his father’s funeral, when he was 13: the long line of cars to the cemetery as he rode in a black limousine with his mother and sister at the head of the procession in the first car following the hearse. Out the window he saw a woman holding a little girl’s hand as they waited to cross the street. He could clearly read the woman’s expression as she wondered what dignitary had died who was so important to have a funeral so fully attended, with such a long procession of mourners. It’s just my dad, Tom mouthed, but she couldn’t see him behind the darkly tinted window. Her life was interrupted for only as long as it took for the funeral caravan to pass. His life, and his mother’s and sister’s lives, were interrupted forever. His father’s life was over, cut short by a heart attack. But life itself went on, without remorse, that very day of the burial in a series of mundane moments that had a striking crispness to them. Even at the cemetery, while his mother appeared steady and calm – an entirely false display of dignity, it seemed to Tom – and his little sister wailed, equally false, Tom found himself quietly cataloging these banal details: a plane flew overhead leaving a white contrail, wind rustled the leaves in a tree, the priest droned, a man waiting by a small bulldozer to fill his father’s grave with dirt tapped his fingers restlessly against his knee. His father’s best friend whispered something irrelevant to his wife. Were they making dinner plans? With each passing moment, and each observation Tom registered, his father was left further in the past.
But it was not at all clear that Ray Walker was being left behind as life continued in its usual way in Radium. Indeed, it was quite possible that it was just the opposite, it was the community of Radium that had been abandoned by Ray, and he was carrying on with his life in new surroundings, leaving the town behind to continue its slow decay into the landscape, as if it were an isotope of its namesake natural element, with a half-life of, perhaps, a century or two. And yet there was still the sense of heightened reality Tom associated with death, a sense of the abnormal in the familiar, in the sounds of a truck passing on the highway, a screen door slamming, or a telephone ring. Any of these, after all, could be the first indication that Ray had returned home with an explanation of where he had been, an explanation so simple that nobody had thought of it. Or that he had been found, dead or alive.
The Forum was rarely called upon to cover a breaking story. Instead, Howard Knapp, the publisher from whom Tom bought the paper, had told him that his first priority was supporting his advertisers, and he introduced him to Dave Best at the Merc.
“If you and Dave aren’t great friends,” Howard told him, “then you lose your business.”
People pick up a community paper to see what’s on sale at the grocery store, and to see pictures of their friends and children, and to see their own names in print, Howard had explained. Of course, it was essential to cover the Radium Town Board, school sports, local business and church news, and the latest outrage perpetrated on the community by bureaucrats at the federal Bureau of Land Management or the Colorado Division of Wildlife, who were under the thumb of radical environmentalists over in Denver and up in Telluride, the closest upscale alpine resort and “a yellow jackets nest of damned libral atheists,” Howard said. More than anything, though, the Forum was a community bulletin board. The paper’s most important feature might be the school lunch menu, which was faxed over to him every week by Sarah Walker, Ray Walker’s wife, who worked as a secretary at the Radium School.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Howard had asked when Tom eyed him skeptically as Howard showed him how to process the lunch menu for publication.
But Howard misread him. This was journalism that made perfect sense to Tom, beautifully artless, and his expression did not speak of any misgivings; it spoke instead to the fact that he appreciated the simple honesty of it. There was something reassuringly specific about the school lunch menu. “Monday: franks and beans, lime jello. Tuesday: hamburger pizza and green salad….” Tom was more than willing to treat the school lunch menu with respect, and the social calendar, too, and especially the obituaries. The Forum had about a thousand out-of-town subscribers, virtually all of them old timers who had moved away, many living in nursing homes in Grand Junction, Montrose, Cortez, Farmington, and Moab. As he hand-labeled the papers for mailing each week and the names of the subscribers became familiar – there were more than a few Redds, Pattersons, Bests, and Morgans – Tom started to feel as if he knew them personally. The subscribers shared news of one another’s passing through the Forum’s pages, Howard told Tom, and it would pay to make a few phone calls to gather some details about the deceased and write something more than what the mortuary sent over. Tom could not help noticing how many of the old-timers died of cancer, and particularly of leukemia, and lung and kidney cancer, all associated with long-term exposure to low levels of uranium, and he quietly kept tally of it.
When he first took over the Forum, Tom had toyed briefly with the idea that he would do some serious journalism. He was the publisher, editor, copy editor, production manager, and senior writer, not to mention advertising director, circulation director and janitor. He was free to assign himself any story he wanted to do, say, a feature about what commuting 160 miles round-trip to a minimum wage job in Telluride could do to a worker’s family. He was quickly enlightened when he made a few ill-fated inquiries into the legacy of uranium mining, sharply reminded that there are stories people don’t want to tell and don’t want to read, and to do them justice requires more doggedness and insensitivity than he was prepared to give to it, especially now that he planned on living and working in Radium for years to come. An ex-miner could be dying of leukemia and still believe that the tragedy of his life was when the mine company shut down and put him out of work. It didn’t matter. Tom soon found that the routine work of publishing the paper and meeting his weekly press time was plenty to keep him occupied and was comforting in its predictability, whereas his erstwhile ambition, when it asserted itself on increasingly rare occasions, was just a distraction.
Now, though, Tom had a real story to contend with. To ignore it was not an option.
On Monday, November 14, the fifth day after Billy Pederson walked into his office to tell him that Ray Walker had missed his daughter’s wedding, and after Tom had given two days to helping with the search, he drove over to Walker’s Auto Repair, just a quarter mile down the highway from his own office, thinking that if nothing else he’d take a picture of the business for the upcoming Thursday’s paper. The place was tightly locked up, the already ubiquitous poster depicting its missing owner taped to the door. Tom peered in through a window that had not seen a spray of Windex in a decade. In the dim light, he could make out the front counter, and behind it Ray’s desk, papers strewn on it, a coffee mug sitting there as if Ray had just set it down.
Tom walked around to the back where several cars in various states of disassembly were littered in the yard, along with a small junkyard’s worth of car parts. They were a couple of Ray’s stock cars, which he rebuilt in his free time and raced on weekends. Tom looked through a back window into the garage, where another vehicle was under repair. He tested the rear door, but it, too, was sealed tight.
Tom had no real purpose in being there. He already knew the place, having had his car serviced by Ray, work that Ray was always willing to trade in exchange for some newspaper ads. It was extensive barter that made it possible to survive on the West End on a meager income.
Tom felt a little foolish snapping pictures of this unremarkable business, which looked as if its owner had locked the door and had stepped away and would probably be back in a few hours. But he felt a growing sense of responsibility to the story of Ray Walker’s disappearance, and to his readers, who would be looking to the Forum for a sense of what had happened, and what was being done about it.