Ray and Sarah Walker and their two children lived in an aging doublewide a mile outside of town, on a gravel road lined by an irrigation ditch where wild asparagus grew abundantly in the spring. The trailer was shaded by a couple of towering cottonwoods. A half-dozen old cars, some on blocks, occupied much of the yard; further back there were fruit trees. The trailer and vehicles, a couple of sheds and the orchard spread across about an acre of rocky land, surrounded by irrigated green pastures. The fields stretched for a few miles across the mesa, beyond which the land fell away to canyonlands, with the snowcapped San Miguel Mountains as a distant backdrop to the east and the La Sals, just over the Utah line, on the western horizon.
Just to the side of the driveway where Tom parked, there was a new slab of concrete and a basketball hoop mounted on a pole, where a boy, undoubtedly the Walkers’ son, Ray Jr., was the only outward evidence that anyone was at home. He had been shooting hoops when Tom pulled up, and he rested the ball on his hip as Tom climbed out of his car.
As he approached, Tom put out his hands to receive a pass. Ray bounced the ball to him. Tom spun around and took the jumper. The ball bounced off the rim. Ray rebounded and dribbled to the back of the court to set up his turn on offense. Tom defended the basket as Ray drove past him for the easy lay-up.
“Nice,” Tom said, bringing a faint smile to the boy’s face.
Tom guessed that it was the first time Ray had smiled since his dad’s disappearance. His easy warmth resembled his father’s, as did the deep set of his eyes and the broad forehead; in a few years, if he chose to grow out his beard, the family resemblance would be striking.
“Tough time,” Tom said.
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.”
Tom passed the ball, which he had rebounded, back to Ray.
“I lost my dad when I was about your age. How old are you?”
“Thirteen.”
“Same age exactly, except my dad didn’t disappear. He died of a heart attack. But I might have some idea what you’re going through.”
“Maybe. I dunno.”
Ray’s smile had been replaced by a scowl, and Tom knew that he had said enough, or maybe he had said too much, too soon. But he also remembered clearly that it was everyone’s walking on tiptoes – and their hushed, solicitous tones and prolonged silences – that had most disturbed him when he was Ray’s age and facing similar circumstances. It was far better, he felt, to be direct.
“I’m Tom Austin,” Tom said, extending a hand. He introduced himself as the owner of the Forum, an identification that made no discernable impression on the boy.
“Is your mom at home?” he asked.
Tom had not called ahead and did not know if Sarah Walker would be there, just one week after her husband’s disappearance, or would be out searching, or was perhaps staying with friends.
“Yeah,” Ray said. “She’s in the shed.”
He nodded in the direction of a small addition at the rear of the doublewide. Then he turned, dribbled once, and took a shot from beyond the free-throw line, nailing it.
Although she had sent him school lunch menus for five years, Tom had not met Sarah Walker. Their longest conversations on the phone followed a couple of occasions when the faxed menu didn’t arrive as expected and he called her to ask about it. He was surprised to discover, when she answered his knock on the door, that she was the woman who had caught his eye when they saw each other shopping at the Merc or elsewhere around town; he never would have pegged her as Ray Walker’s wife, a school secretary, or a mother of two. She was too young, only in her mid-thirties, and too alternative for any of those roles. She looked like someone who had taken a disastrously wrong turn off the interstate at Grand Junction while driving through from one urban center to another, from Salt Lake to Denver perhaps, or even Los Angeles to New York. She wore her blonde hair short and fashionably spiked, with streaks of black, and a small diamond stud in her pierced left nostril. She dressed simply in tight jeans and loose embroidered shirts.
He had guessed that maybe she was an artist, a contemporary Georgia O’Keeffe, living alone and quietly making fabulous ceramics or paintings or jewelry in a remote studio and selling her high-priced work at some prestigious gallery in Santa Fe, Aspen or Telluride, where she made rare appearances. Or she was an urban refugee like he was, who had found herself in the West End by a path as eccentric as his own. She always met his glance and held it a beat longer than she should have – unless it was her intention to give him the wrong idea. He’d enjoyed the flirtation and the fantasy that they were destined to meet someday and have an affair, or at least a tryst, but instantly upon learning she was Ray Walker’s wife he knew that she’d probably recognized him as the man to whom she faxed the weekly school lunch menu, even if he didn’t recognize her, and that was all she’d meant by making direct eye contact and smiling at him.
“Sarah Walker,” he said, upon instantly connecting his fantasy of her to the reality. “I never put the name and face together.”
“I knew that.”
“You knew?”
“You always looked like you were hoping I was single. So I could tell you had no idea who I was.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
She shrugged and Tom couldn’t help feeling a little deflated. While Sarah had enjoyed his interest in her and had encouraged it, she’d never really been available. It was a married woman’s harmless flirtation, and nothing more; worse, in the context of their first face-to-face meeting, it was trivial.
Tom could see in the workshop behind her that she was, just as he had imagined, involved in some kind of craft and true to her artsy demeanor, though it wasn’t immediately obvious what she produced there.
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” he said.
“I was just making a batch of soap,” she said. “It doesn’t require constant attention at this point.”
“Making soap? How do you do that?”
She stepped back, a gesture that wordlessly invited him inside for a closer look.
“You basically mix warm oils and lye dissolved in water to create a chemical reaction called saponification.”
“There’s a word you don’t hear everyday.”
“When you’re stirring it, you can see the oils and lye water turn into soap before your eyes,” she said. “It’s called tracing when that happens. Then, when it reaches the right consistency you add color and texture and scent. This batch is lavender.”
“Then what?”
“Then you pour it into molds and let it harden and cure, and you cut it into loaves and let it cure some more.”
There was soap at all stages of the process she had described in the shed. Tom reached out to touch some that was sitting in a mold on a shelf, but she stopped him.
“It’s not safe to touch yet,” she said. “It has to cure for six weeks before all of the lye has been neutralized.”
“Sorry.”
“Did you know your skin is the body’s largest organ?” she said. “And that most commercial soaps aren’t really soap at all. They’re chemical detergents made from petroleum products and they draw moisture from your skin.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Real soap contains glycerin, which is a natural emollient, so it moisturizes your skin.”
“Very interesting,” he said.
“The glycerin part?”
“No, the whole thing, making soap. I didn’t know people made soap. I thought it was made in factories and people bought it at the Merc or Wal-Mart.”
“Most people do buy it at the store, but I find it therapeutic to make it,” she said. “Especially now, with everything that’s happened. I like how the chemicals always react exactly the way they’re supposed to. It’s a lot more predictable than people are, that’s for sure. As long as you have the temperatures and proportions right, and you use good ingredients, you get beautiful soap. I like how you take lye, something caustic and dangerous, and turn it into something soft and wholesome and clean….”
Sarah stopped herself, shot him an awkward glance, and laughed.
“Sounds like a bunch of bull, right?”
Having completed the tour of the soap studio, they had stepped back outside, into the sunlight.
“Not at all,” Tom said. “Sounds a whole lot better than taking something beautiful and turning it into something nasty, which is what a lot of people spend their time doing.”
“You’ve got that right.”
“What do you do with the finished product? You can’t use it all yourself.”
“I wrap it in nice paper and tie it with straw and sell it at a couple of shops up in Telluride, and at the farmers market there. The rich people up there like it and I make a little extra money. Heck, Dave Best even sells a few bars of it at the Merc. I’d like to get it into more shops, farther away, but I can’t produce enough volume or find time to market it like I should. I can only really put time into it in the summer when there’s no school. I keep thinking that someday, if I stick with it, it might grow into a real business.”
“Maybe I could do a story about you and your business, for the paper.”
“Missing man’s wife makes soap,” she said sardonically. “Why, that’d make a catchy headline, for sure. Might even sell a few papers.”
“It might, but it’s not what I was thinking,” Tom said.
“I know. I’m sorry. I know you mean to help. And I’d appreciate a story, I really would, maybe in a few months.”
“Of course. Not now. I didn’t mean now.”
“No.”
“I’m so sorry about Ray.”
“Well, thank you for that. Everyone’s sorry. Ray has sure made one heck of a mess.”
She glanced out toward the horizon as if she might right then spot a plume of dust kicked up by the tires of Ray’s truck, a herald of his belated homecoming.
“Where the heck is he, anyhow?”
A teenaged girl emerged from the back door of the doublewide and stepped up behind them. She was pale and slight, dressed in a worn Aerosmith t-shirt, torn jeans and flip-flops, and she held a newborn. She was blonde, and resembled her mother, just as Ray Jr. had inherited his father’s darker colors.
“This is my daughter, Angie,” Sarah said. “And my grandson, Tyler.”
“Hi, Angie,” Tom said.
“He’s fussy again.” Angie said, addressing her mother as if Tom weren’t there and making no effort to mask her exasperation. “But he can’t be hungry. I just fed him.”
“Well go back in the house and try and rock him, but do it gently, and I’ll help out in a bit, after I’m finished talking with Mr. Austin.”
Tom was surprised that nobody had thought to mention that Ray Walker’s daughter was a new mother. But then it was probably because everyone else knew. He was some newsman, he thought: always the last to hear the most salient local gossip.
He knew Angie slightly, having interviewed her a few years earlier when she and Ray stopped by his office to submit a photograph for publication. It was a picture of Angie, posed rifle in hand, with the carcass of a mountain lion she’d shot.
“I just got lucky,” she had told him when he asked her to describe her kill, and didn’t have a lot more to offer. Angie was being far too modest, her father interjected. To take a lion requires nerves of steel, he explained proudly. If Ray was right, Tom remembered thinking, Angie’s courage was well camouflaged by adolescent diffidence. But perhaps a proud parent can see depths in his offspring that are obscure to anyone else. Or maybe, and this was likelier, Ray, who had surely helped his daughter hunt the lion, was trying to endow her with some of his own courage.
To see Angie again now, still a child to Tom’s eye but with a baby of her own – and one she was struggling to nurture – Tom wondered if her trophy lion might have been not only the bravest but also the luckiest moment in her life, not unlike her absent father’s game-winning hit in a Little League championship a couple of decades before, and would remain her biggest accomplishment even if she were to live to an old age. It was no wonder that the bread-and-butter for a small town paper like the Forum was coverage of kids’ sports and snapshots of hunters and fishermen with their trophies.
“I’m real sorry about your dad,” Tom said to Angie.
“Uh-huh,” she said, offering no hint that she recognized him.
“Who is it?” a male voice bellowed from inside.
“It’s all right, Craig,” Sarah shouted. “It’s for me.”
Sarah turned back to Tom as Angie retreated.
“My new son-in-law,” she explained. “We couldn’t cancel the wedding even with Ray not being there after it was all planned. We had the caterer booked with a big chocolate cake with white chocolate frosting and a disc jockey and people coming from out of town….” Her tone was apologetic.
“I understand. It must have been difficult.”
“Well, it was still nice, I suppose, if you could put it out of your mind that Ray wasn’t there. I kept thinking he’d walk in any minute and tell us why he was late and say he was sorry. Of course, if he had shown up like that with some lame excuse I don’t know if I would have hugged him or slugged him. Probably would have hugged him and then slugged him, and that would have spoiled the wedding more than him being gone. But what can I do for you?”
“I can come back another time if you need to help out with the baby,” Tom said. “I was just hoping we could sit and talk a bit.”
“Angie can’t expect for me to jump every time Tyler whimpers,” she said firmly. “She’s got to learn to care for him by herself sooner or later, and now’s as good a time as any.”
Tom nodded. “As good a time as any” sounded like Sarah’s resignation to fate. He had observed before in his reporting career that a person in a state of shock following a trauma can sometimes open herself up in just this way, as if her defenses have been entirely breached, or because she has nothing left to defend.
“I’m here more or less to do my job,” he said. “I want to make sure that what I write about Ray in the paper is right.”
She gestured toward a worn redwood picnic table and the two of them sat.
“He’s out there for hours at a time,” Sarah said, looking toward the basketball court, where Ray Jr. was still at it, practicing free throws.
“It must be something he and his dad did together.”
“They built the court together last summer.”
She turned her attention back to Tom.
“I’ve got no idea what you can write about Ray that people don’t already know,” she added. “Everyone already knows he’s gone missing. We made up hundreds of those posters and put ’em everywhere. And you put it in your paper, of course. And I’ve talked to everyone, too, to ask them if they know something.”
“You must have some idea what happened to him.”
“All I can think is an accident,” she said. “But it seems like if that’s what it was, they’d have found him by now. So I guess I don’t know.”
“Ray lived his whole life here?”
“His whole life, except when he was in the army for a couple of years. Even then he didn’t get all that far away. He was stationed over in Fort Carson, you know, next to Colorado Springs.”
“And you too? Lived here your whole life?”
“Yep. Born and raised. Never been anywhere else. Well, except I’ve been to places around here like Telluride and Grand Junction. There’s a nice store in Junction that sells my soap. And I was in Denver a few times. Ray and I kept thinking we’d travel someday, when the kids were all grown.”
“Was he out on the road a lot, answering service calls?”
“A couple a times a week, more in the summer when there are tourists passing through on their way to Arches or Mesa Verde. The next closest tow truck is Junction if you head north and Moab if you head west, or Cortez to the south, so he got more than his share of the calls from Triple A. But he never was gone more than a few hours, not until now anyway.”
“It’s a real mystery, isn’t it? How he could just be gone like this.”
“I would certainly say so,” she said. “I don’t really know what I should be doing, you know? Should I be out looking for him? But where would I look that people haven’t already looked? Do I need to stay here by the phone? Or should I just go to work like it was any other day? I can’t afford not to work, or to lose my job. They’re not going to let me stay home forever.”
An experienced reporter, Tom knew that sometimes the best way to ask a question is to remain silent.
“Ray was….” she stopped herself and started over. “Ray is the kindest, the best man I’ve ever known. I told the sheriff he would never have run off, not with Angie getting married in a few days and a new grandson to spoil. He wouldn’t ruin her big day. Not on purpose. And it just burns me that he won’t believe me and thinks I’m some kind of idiot that would lose her husband.
“I’ve got no idea what it is, but I know something real bad happened to Ray. I just know it.”
Tom hesitated, and then asked the obvious but indelicate question: “How can you be so sure?”
She looked at him quizzically, as if it was his impertinent question and not her tone of absolute certainty that had sounded an off-key note.
“Why, what on earth else could it be?”
To Sarah, it was just that self-evident. What else could it be? Her quick response – unvarnished, unrehearsed and unself-conscious – made for a convincing bit of testimony.
Sarah Walker had a sharp edge, but Tom felt he could see past it to her underlying vulnerability. To him, she seemed authentic, but he wasn’t surprised to learn that the sheriff was suspicious of her. He had seen how a crime victim’s family can come to seem tainted in the course of an investigation; how, in their public display of grief, or their insufficient demonstration of grief – of either one or the other – observers can discern something unnatural, something that brought the tragedy to them. Thus does humanity begin to separate the wounded and the weak from the herd. Even so, Tom wondered if the sheriff knew something that gave him good reason to harbor misgivings about Sarah Walker. As close as she professed to be to her husband, and as deeply as she seemed to love him, was it entirely plausible that she had no idea at all, truly none, what had happened to him?
To take Sarah at face value, the only possible explanation for Ray’s disappearance was something random, an accident or a violent encounter with a stranger, just as she insisted. Though it was certainly possible that she was hiding something, any implication to that effect did not belong in The Forum, or at least not yet.