No Return (12 page)

“Didn’t you see your dad after you left?”

“Of course I saw him,” Wes said. “I just didn’t see him here. He’d come down to San Diego.”

Removing several more boxes revealed a second wall of them behind the first.

“Whoa,” Anna said. “It’s not all like this, is it?”

“If it is, we’re stopping now.”

Wes hopped up onto a couple of the boxes marked
Books
, and pulled out one of the top boxes of the second wall to look through the gap.

“I don’t know if this is a good thing or not,” he said, “but it looks like it’s furniture after this.”

Once he’d climbed back down, they finished off enough of the outer wall so they could get at the second one, then took a break to drink some of the water they’d brought along.

“Thanks,” Anna said as he handed her a bottle. “I guess I don’t understand why you never came back up here.”

Wes uncapped his and took a long sip, then said, “He died a couple weeks after I graduated high school. Before that, it was always just easier for him to come to me.”

“What about your friends? That guy Lars. Didn’t you come back to visit them?”

He raised his bottle to his lips. “No,” he replied, then tilted the bottle back.

He could feel her looking at him, waiting for more.

Finally she said, “Tell me about your father.”

“Dad?” Wes paused. “Well, if you ever had a flat tire, he’s the guy you’d want driving by. Seriously. Any time he saw someone pulled to the side of the road, he’d stop and see if he could help. Annoyed the hell out of my mom and me. Made us late to things more than once.”

“Sounds like a good guy.”

Wes smiled, then moved back into the unit and started in on the second wall. “Yeah, he was. He cared about things. A little too much, Mom said, but doing the right thing was important to him. He always stressed that to me. He’d say, ‘It might not always be popular, but if it’s what needs to be done, popular doesn’t matter.’ ”

“You miss him, don’t you?”

“Sure, wouldn’t you if your dad was gone?”

“Every day,” she said. She moved another box out of the way. “You’ve never actually told me how he died. If you don’t want to, that’s okay, but …”

“Car crash.”

“Oh, Wes. I’m so sorry.”

Wes shook his head like it didn’t matter. “He was traveling up Nine Mile Canyon toward Kennedy Meadows in the Sierras. The road’s narrow and really winding. No guardrails. It’s also steep, hundreds of feet down. Apparently he misjudged and went off the side.”

Anna took in a quick breath.

“They didn’t even discover his car for almost a week. And only then because one of his friends got worried about him and alerted the police. By then it was just a burned-out hulk with a body inside. The only way they could ID him was from his dental records.”

“That’s awful.”

“He must have been going camping. He did that a lot. Told me he liked the feel of waking up in the mountains. It was a nice change from all the brown down here.”

They’d cleared enough away to get beyond the second wall of boxes, and stepped through into the main area of the unit. The area was lit by a 100-watt bulb that had automatically come on when they’d opened the door.

“My God, look at this stuff,” Wes said.

There was furniture and filing cabinets and lamps and odds and ends stacked haphazardly throughout the central portion of the space.

“What are we looking for?” Anna asked.

“Photo albums, pictures. That kind of thing. My mom wants them.”

He squeezed his way between two cabinets and started tilting things one way or the other to see what was behind them.

“Bingo,” Anna called out a few minutes later. “This drawer is full of framed pictures. Most of them must be you.” She paused for a moment, then laughed.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said, still giggling. After a moment she turned the photo she was looking at so he could see. “It’s you at maybe two, I think. Your face is covered with chocolate, and the only other thing you’re wearing is a diaper.”

“Oh, God,” he said. “Maybe you shouldn’t actually be looking for the pictures.”

“Too late.” She looked at it again. “I think I’m going to have to keep this one myself.”

“You might have a fight on your hands with my mom.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I’ll take her.”

Wes laughed, then went back into search mode. So far he had found nothing of interest. As far as he was concerned, they could donate it all. Then he noticed a chest-high wall of boxes near the back wall.

He pushed past a couple of kitchen chairs and an old end table, then leaned against the wall and peered into the space beyond.

“It
is
here,” he said.

“What?” Anna asked.

He grinned broadly. “Better if I show you.” He pulled a box marked
Den
off the pile. “We’re going to have to move some of these.”

They worked quickly, and soon the barrier was half gone.

Anna said, “Is that … a motorcycle?”

Wes grinned again. “Yeah. It’s my dad’s Triumph Bonneville. Got it when I was ten. Another officer who was transferring overseas couldn’t take it with him.”

Together they cleared a path through the furniture, then Wes wheeled the motorcycle out into the sunlight. The bike’s gas tank and fenders were painted a rich green that even after all these years had faded little. And the black storage compartment behind the seat looked almost new.

“There’s something else back here,” Anna called from inside the unit. “Looks like a box of bike stuff.”

She carried it out and set it on the ground near the motorcycle. Inside were a helmet, a file folder, and keys.

Wes pulled out the folder and opened it. Inside was his father’s old maintenance log, the final entry of which had been made after his father’s death:

Oil and gas drained. Battery removed.

There were some initials at the end of the entry, but they meant nothing to Wes. Whoever it was had cared enough to prep the cycle for storage. There was also an envelope that contained the pink slip.

“You think it’ll start?” Anna asked.

“We’ll have to make a stop at an auto store first to get some oil and a new battery … and then gas, of course. But I don’t see why not. Dad always took good care of it. Let’s finish up and we’ll see if I’m right.”

They spent the next hour hunting down photos, but came up with a lot less than Wes had been expecting. After that they started returning all the boxes they’d removed to the unit.

As Wes came back from carrying another load inside, he found Anna hunched over a box on the asphalt, looking inside.

“We’re not going through them,” he said. “We’re just carrying them back in.”

With a smirk, she turned the box and pointed at the side where someone had scrawled in black ink
Photos
.

“Would this be what your mom wanted?” she asked innocently.

She pulled out a photo album, gave it a quick perusal, then dove deeper into the box. Next out came an old Tupperware container full of loose photographs. That was followed by a second container, then a group of four thinner albums.

“I think you may have just earned my mother’s undying love,” Wes said, smiling.

“I’m still going to fight her for the Chocolate Boy picture.”

“I would have expected nothing less. Now quit browsing and put it all back in the box. I’ll take it to the truck once we get everything else put away.”

As he was picking up another box to return to the unit, Anna said, “This is interesting.”

He stopped just long enough to see that she’d removed a couple more items from the box, then continued into the storage unit. “You suck at directions. I told you just leave the photos in the box. You can look at them back at the motel if you really want to.”

“These aren’t photo albums,” she called out.

“Then just set them on top of one of the boxes we’re leaving. We don’t need them.”

Her voice grew distant as he went back into the unit. “You might want to take a look first.”

He laughed to himself, then set the box down and went back outside.

“All right. Show me what you found.”

She held out one of the books and said, “Here.”

He took it and opened it. She was right. It wasn’t a photo album. It was a day planner covering the year Wes was in eighth grade. Wes immediately recognized his father’s handwriting.

“I forgot about these,” he said. “They’re my dad’s. His way of staying organized so that he didn’t miss anything.”

“Maybe you should keep them.” She held out the other three.

He thought for a moment, then took them from her. “Maybe.”

From the box she pulled out some more. They put them in order. There were planners that started from when Wes was seven, right up until—

“That’s odd,” Wes said.

“What?”

“There’s not one for the year he died.”

“Maybe after you left, he stopped,” Anna suggested.

“No way. Not Dad. He would have definitely kept these up. He died in the summer, so there’s a whole half a year that should be written down somewhere.”

Anna looked through the books, just to double-check. “Maybe it’s in another box.”

If he hadn’t seen the books, he never would have missed them. But now, especially since he knew they were filled with words written by his father, he felt he couldn’t just forget about them. And it only made sense, then, to have the whole set.

He thought back, remembering those times he’d seen his father sitting at the table, writing in one of the planners.

“The kitchen,” he said. “That’s where he could have kept it.”

They located all the boxes marked
Kitchen
and started looking through them. It was Wes who found it in a box full of old notepads and shoestrings and ads for restaurants and the other things he knew his father had simply stuffed into the kitchen junk drawer.

He opened the book and started thumbing through the pages, stopping when he reached the last weeks of his father’s life.

There were notations about meetings at work and a reminder about someone named Charlie’s birthday. With only a slight hesitation, Wes paused before turning the page to the week that contained the day his father died. Oddly, there was nothing about going on a trip. In fact, on the day after his father was killed in the crash, he had several meetings scheduled.

A one-day camping trip? Wes had never remembered his father going on one that short before.

Then something else caught his attention. It was a single word written in the 8:30 p.m. slot on the day before the crash:

Pudge

Wes stared at the name for a moment, unable to comprehend why it would be here.

Pudge?

It was a nickname Wes’s dad had come up with.

The name his father had called Lars.

LARS LIVED ON RANDALL STREET, ON THE RIGHT
side, near where the road dead-ended. His house was a modified ranch, longer front-to-back than side-to-side, with a lawn, lush and green, like most of the others in the neighborhood—their owners attempting to ignore the fact they lived in the middle of the desert.

Wes and Anna pulled in to the driveway on his dad’s Triumph and parked next to an old Ford F-150 pickup. He wasn’t even off the bike when Lars ran outside, a bottle of beer in his hand.

“Is that what I think it is?” He was grinning ear to ear.

“You remember it?” Wes asked.

“Hell yes, I do. We all wanted one just like it.” He circled the motorcycle. “Damn, it looks exactly like it did back then. You’ve kept it in great shape.”

“Thanks.” Wes didn’t bother correcting him.

Anna walked up beside him and slipped her hand into his.

“You remember Anna,” Wes said. “You met her yesterday at the shoot.”

Lars shook Anna’s hand. “You’re one of the few I do remember.”

Wes’s eyebrow rose. “What exactly does that mean?”

“It means keep her close or she may be riding in my truck by the end of the evening.”

“Is that the 4.6 liter or 5.4?” Anna asked, nodding back at the truck.

Both men looked surprised.

“Oh, I like her,” Lars said. “You are definitely in trouble, my friend.”

There was laughter all around as they headed across the lawn toward the front door.

“This wasn’t your parents’ house, was it?” Wes asked.

“You think I could afford this on a Navy salary, even in Ridgecrest?”

“But I thought they lived on the other side of town.”

“Moved here after you took off.”

Wes realized he hadn’t asked his friend about his parents yet. “Are they …”

“Very much alive. Believe it or not, living on a golf course in Phoenix. Retired to the desert from the desert. Would have expected nothing less from them. What about your mom?”

“Still in San Diego.”

“Glad to hear it,” Lars said. “Come on. Let me show you around.”

He led them inside and gave them the dime tour. Living room, three bedrooms, two baths, dining room, and a nice, large kitchen. All of it neatly furnished in that Spartan way men living alone liked.

“The only thing you need to remember is the bathroom,” Lars said as he pulled open the sliding glass door that led to the backyard. “Because the party’s out here.”