No Show (2 page)

Once across the Carquinez Bridge, the Bay Area’s influence came to an end, giving way to small towns that punctuated endless fields. Passing from town to town, Spanish town names rubbed shoulders with English ones. It was easy to see who’d been out this way a hundred and fifty years ago. The driver picked up speed, and it wasn’t long before he peeled off I-80 for a two-lane highway divided by a grass median. Walnut farms lined either side of the highway. The trees were in perfect rows at forty-five-degree angles to the road. Not a single tree was out of place. The precision amazed Terry.

After twenty minutes, the driver pulled off the highway for what seemed to be no more than a farm track. After a mile or so, the track developed into a road and Terry realized his journey had come to an end. He was in Edenville.

He hadn’t been sure what to expect. Sarah hadn’t really described Edenville during their phone calls or in her e-mails. He hadn’t been expecting the size and sophistication of San Francisco, of course—the town’s name summoned up images of small-town America.

The driver came to a halt at the four-way stop. Edenville greeted Terry with a bandstand-style gazebo perched on a square of well-tended grass on his left. At the entrance to the compact park, the town’s monument announced that Edenville was the gateway to Lake Solano. The driver crossed the intersection.

They continued traveling down Edenville’s main street—and back in time. Buildings dating back to the turn of the twentieth century stood shoulder to shoulder, giving the town a frontier feel. Terry expected Jesse James to come running out of a bank, his guns blazing.

“Do you mind pulling over for one minute?” Terry asked the driver.

The driver eyed his rearview mirror and frowned. “Why?”

“I just want to pick up some flowers for my wife. We’ve been apart for six months and I want to surprise her.”

The driver mumbled something in Spanish before saying, “I have a schedule to keep.”

“It won’t take a minute. You’d be doing me a big favor.”

“Does anyone mind?” he asked Terry’s fellow passengers with a roll of his eyes.

Terry saw they just wanted to get home, but no one objected. The driver pulled over and Terry ran into a supermarket, bought a bouquet, and clambered back into the van.

“Thanks a lot, everyone. I really appreciate it.”

Disinterested looks greeted him. Terry didn’t much care. He had his flowers, and Sarah would love it when he gave them to her.

The driver got on the road again, and it wasn’t long before he was pulling up in front of Terry’s house. His home on Sutter Drive was located in a quiet neighborhood. All the homes looked to be forty to fifty years old, but well maintained and nothing like their English counterparts. None of the houses were built from brick. They were either stucco or wood-sided, and virtually every home was single story. Bungalows, he would have called them, but he remembered Sarah referring to them as ranch style. He wasn’t much reminded of a ranch. He didn’t see any two-hundred-acre plots of land and not a hint of cattle.

Terry got his baggage from the driver and overtipped him for stopping.

“Welcome to America,” the driver said before pulling away.

Terry walked up to the front door and pressed the doorbell. He hoped to God Sarah was inside. He gave the doorbell an extra push.

Nobody answered the door.

He tried the doorbell again. Sarah wasn’t at home.

Stepping back from the doorstep, an irritating thought struck him. He didn’t have a key, and he didn’t know how long it would be before Sarah got back from wherever she had gone.

“I hope you’re on your way back from the airport, Sarah,” he said to his absent wife.

He crossed to the other side of the property and tried the side gate to the backyard. It was locked.

“Sod it,” he grumbled.

He turned to face the street. A blank street stared back at him. He exhaled, feeling conspicuous.

“Well, I’m not standing ’round here all day,” he said.

He tossed his carry-on bag over the six-foot-high obstacle, then unsaddled himself of his backpack and launched it over the fence as well. He gave the street a second glance and hurled himself over the gate. He made it easily, even with the bouquet under one arm, but he wouldn’t have scored a perfect ten for his landing.

He left his bags where he’d thrown them with the flowers on top. He walked over to the patio door. The big glass door gave him a view of the interior. Fruit was in a bowl on the dining table, the TV remote was on the couch, and a newspaper was on the coffee table in the living room.

He could have waited on the patio or in the hammock in the shade of a redwood tree, but he didn’t want to wait. He wanted to get inside. A message could be waiting for him or the phone could ring at any time, and being stuck in the backyard wasn’t going to do him any good. But if he was expecting the patio door to be unlocked, he was out of luck. It wasn’t. He didn’t get lucky with any of the other windows or doors. All of them were locked.

But the fortress did have one chink in its armor. The patio door had a cat flap built into it. As far as he knew, Sarah didn’t own a cat or any other animal, but that flap was going to be his way into the house.

Terry dropped to all fours and slid his arm through the flap. He reached up toward the door latch—and his arm didn’t reach.

“Bollocks.”

He leapt to his feet and scoured the backyard for an arm extension. He snapped a branch off an orange tree and stripped the leaves off. It looked strong enough.

He stuck the branch through the cat flap and maneuvered it toward the door latch. It took a couple of attempts to position the branch, but when he did, his idea worked like a charm. The branch flexed close to the breaking point, but the latch gave first, unlocking the door.

“Bingo!”

Terry jumped to his feet, grabbed his bags and the flowers, and slid the door open. The first thing to strike him was the smell. The air smelled stale, as if the house had been closed up for some time. His stomach tightened at the idea that Sarah hadn’t been around for a while. He shrugged off his bags and dropped the flowers on the dining table.

The answering machine in the living room blinked. Terry pressed P
LAY
. There were seven messages: his call from the airport, three calls from telemarketers, two hang-ups, and one actual message from a person who left no name or number. From the way the guy spoke, he sounded like a friend. The oldest message dated back several days. Terry erased all the messages, except the personal one. Sarah would probably want to hear it when she came home—if she came home.

He hoped to find a note on the kitchen table, stuck to the fridge, or on the bed, but found nothing. He wandered from room to room. There was no sign that a surprise welcome was waiting for him.

He returned to the kitchen and opened up the fridge. It was low on supplies with little to no food in it. He sniffed an open carton of milk. It had gone sour, and he dumped it down the sink. The only interesting item in the fridge was an unopened bottle of champagne with a red ribbon tied around its neck. Sarah had certainly planned for his arrival in one respect.

The mail slot was in the garage. There wasn’t a car in the garage, but there was a whole bunch of uncollected mail in the basket. Most of it was crap—junk mail, coupon books, and supermarket and department store flyers. He examined the postmark dates on the envelopes. Allowing for transit, he guessed that Sarah had been away from home for three to four days. He knew it wasn’t longer. They had spoken last weekend, and that was five days ago.

Weekends were the best time to talk. The eight-hour time difference between England and California limited the window of opportunity. A call from the United States at five in the afternoon made for a 1:00 a.m. wakeup call in London. But they had the weekends. On a Friday or Saturday night, they could afford to talk well into the wee hours of the morning.

Messages stacked up on the machine, uncollected mail, and an empty fridge…Had she gone away? She wouldn’t have done that without telling him. There was no way she’d leave him high and dry like this. Not a chance.

He checked the closets and dresser. He couldn’t tell if Sarah’s clothes were missing. If she had gone anywhere, she was traveling light. He did notice one thing missing. When they’d met in Costa Rica, she had been carrying a small San Francisco 49ers sports bag. He’d seen it the last time he’d been over, just before they got married. Though she could have dumped it when she moved, he couldn’t find it now. A couple of roller bags and an Eddie Bauer backpack, yes, but no 49ers bag.

There was one way of knowing whether she had packed for a trip—the bathroom. He didn’t find a toothbrush, makeup, or any other toiletries.

She’d gone somewhere. She knew he was coming, so why would she disappear on him?

The doorbell rang.

Sarah
.

The doorbell rang again, this time sounding more urgent.

He ran through the house, grabbed the flowers, and hurried to the front door. He called out, “Hold on a sec. Coming.”

He stopped abruptly at the front door. If Sarah was back, why was she ringing the doorbell? Wouldn’t she have a key or be coming through the garage to park the car? Still believing in his heart that it was his wife, he opened the door and found himself staring down the barrel of a gun, with only a screen door for protection. Instinctively, he raised his hands.

A short, muscular black woman dressed in a Christmas tree–green windbreaker was at the other end of the gun. Embroidered on her jacket was a five-pointed gold star with Santa Rita County Sheriff’s Department emblazoned on it.

“Don’t move a muscle,” she said. “You’re busted.”

Terry nodded.

She removed a supporting hand from the revolver and eased open the screen door. “Now back up and turn around. Put your hands behind your head, interlacing your fingers.”

The dining-area patio door squeaked. Terry craned his neck. A second person from the county sheriff’s office entered the house, this time a man, much older than the woman.

“You’d better do as the officer tells you, son.” His words were calm and smooth, comforting, in fact. The gun he held was not.

Terry dropped the flowers and did as he was told.

“You are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

Oh Sarah
, Terry thought,
where are you when I need you
?

“O
bviously, you can understand the confusion. To a passerby, you did look like a burglar,” the sheriff said.

The confusion had taken its time getting resolved. Terry’s protests had gone ignored while his arrest had been processed and he’d been reduced to a line of cop statistics—age: thirty; height: five nine; weight: one hundred and sixty-five pounds; hair: brown; eyes: blue. When they got around to taking his statement, the cuffs finally came off.

The sheriff had been the kindly man with the gun who’d entered his home through the back door. Now he held Terry’s green card up for inspection yet again, and turned it around to look at the magnetic strip. For a moment, Terry half expected the sheriff to lick his green card, as though its taste would give him a better clue as to its authenticity.

“I suppose,” Terry mumbled.

He massaged his wrists. The handcuffs had been off twenty minutes, but he still felt the ghost of their existence. The removal of the cuffs had given him the illusion that he was free. But he was in an interview room, and the sheriff liked to give his gun a touch now and then, as if to remind himself and anybody in the vicinity that he still knew where to find it. The gun was an awesome weapon, rivaling anything Dirty Harry toted. No one
needed to be reminded of its existence. The gun possessed plenty of personality.

While the sheriff studied Terry’s paperwork, Terry studied him. Sheriff Ray Holman was just like Terry imagined a sheriff to be, but not a modern-day sheriff. He belonged in the Old West. Holman was a hundred and fifty years out of time. He was tall, eclipsing six feet with ease, and lean, with a weather-beaten exterior that only triple-digit summers could inflict on a man’s skin. His face was deeply lined with the flesh pulled taut against his skull, accentuating his cheekbones and razor-sharp jawline. His blond hair bordered on red and his moustache wouldn’t have been out of place on a seventies porn star, but on him, it was nothing but masculine. Holman dripped testosterone.

“I’m still not sure I understand what’s going on here.” Sheriff Holman put down Terry’s documents. “So why don’t you tell me?”

Terry frowned.

“Just so I fully understand.” Holman flashed a smile that would have been at home on a shark. The smile tightened his features.

Terry sucked in a deep breath and let it slide out. “I left England to come to the US. As you can see, I have all the correct immigration paperwork.”

Holman nodded.

“My wife was supposed to meet me at the airport, but she wasn’t there.”

“Your wife’s American, right?”

“Yes.”

“She lived here in California and you in England, correct?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a funny setup, isn’t it?”

Terry sighed. “I know how it sounds, but with immigration laws these days, normal isn’t possible. To get through the system, you have to do some things to keep everything moving.”

“Hmm. I see. Do you want a coffee or something?”

“No, thanks. I just want to go home.”

“So how long have you been married?”

“About six months.”

“And where did you marry?”

“Las Vegas.”

Holman’s eyebrows climbed halfway up his forehead. “Vegas?”

Terry sighed again. It was another of those elements that smacked of tackiness. Getting married in Vegas had been Sarah’s idea. They’d joked about having an Elvis wedding. It had been funny at the time, but now, in a sheriff’s windowless interview room, it wasn’t so amusing.

“The reason we got married in Las Vegas was for simplicity. We were going to get married in the Caribbean, but immigration sometimes doesn’t recognize marriage certificates outside of the US. So Las Vegas it was.”