The Mysteries of Angel Butte

“Brewer come by today?” he asked.

“Yeah, I saw him not half an hour ago.” Vahalik turned her head and then nodded. “Right over there.”

Duane was coming toward them from where the heavy equipment was working. When he stepped over the sagging yellow crime scene tape, his mood looked as piss-poor as his detective’s. Colin walked to meet him.

“You know what?” Duane took off his gloves and shoved them into the pockets of his parka. He must have had a hat on earlier; his graying hair was spiking every which way. “I’d like to dig up the whole goddamn park! You know there are other bodies buried here. There have to be.”

Colin couldn’t argue. He’d also wondered if the red cinder of Angel Butte didn’t cover more bones.

Feeling the cold, he shoved his hands into the pockets of his slacks. Damn, the change in temperature from rainy Seattle to the eastern side of the mountains was dramatic.

“You know we can’t log and tear up this section of woods just because.”

His lieutenant glared at him. “What do you want to bet Maddie’s here, if we just knew where to look?”

Emotion swelled in Colin’s chest until his ribs ached. The force of his desire to tell Duane that she was alive was like a punch. To say that he’d seen her, with his own eyes. Talked to her. Somehow, sad-eyed Maddie had survived whatever happened that night. Done more than survive, had found a way to touch the lives of other kids whose eyes were sad, too.

But he couldn’t. He’d promised her. He’d known, watching her press herself back against her car while fighting abject terror, that the only way he could ever learn her story, ever bring her home, was to walk away and let her make the choice herself. If he’d tried to compel her, she would flee. She would hate him, and he didn’t want Maddie Dubeau to hate him.

And also...seeing how afraid she was, Colin had to ask himself why. Twelve years later, and she was petrified because someone from her past had recognized her? Did she have a good reason? Would he be endangering her if he brought her into the open?

A part of him was thinking he should do just that. His conscience was scraped raw. What if he came face-to-face with her father? It was bad enough not telling Duane. Colin didn’t think he could look Marc Dubeau in the eye, knowing what he did.

No, he thought. He had to keep his promise. He’d leave Maddie’s photo where it hung in his office and hope that someday his cell phone rang and he would hear her voice.

“I’ve always believed she’s alive,” he said abruptly. “Don’t ask me why, but I still do.”

The older man stared hard at him. “You’ve never said that before.”

“Are you going to tell me I’m dreaming?”

Duane gave a short bark of laughter, then rubbed a hand over his face. “No. You’ve got good instincts. You always did. I hope you’re right, Colin. I hope you’re right.”

Colin waved at the scene around them. “Bring me up-to-date.”

* * *

NELL GAVE SERIOUS thought to disappearing again. She went so far as to pack a couple of her suitcases so they were ready for her to grab at a minute’s notice.

A voice of reason tried to quiet her panic. What had been dangerous to her teenage self might not be a threat to the adult she was now. It might even be that she’d spent all these years afraid of the wrong thing. This Captain McAllister said there was blood, a bike lying on its side. Someone had heard a scream. Maybe she’d had a perfectly good life before she was attacked. A family she loved.

But—reasonably or unreasonably—she didn’t think so.

Which still didn’t mean she had any reason to be afraid of the man and woman and boy she distantly remembered, now that she was grown up. It might only be that she’d thought they wouldn’t understand whatever trouble she’d been in. And she had, after all, been a teenager skewed to believe parents wouldn’t understand.

Irrational or not, panic made her stomach jittery. She hardly slept.

The next morning, she went straight to the bank and withdrew a couple thousand dollars.

Just in case. Better safe than sorry.

During the next two days, Nell made tentative, if probably ludicrous, plans. She spent the lunch hour of the first day wandering a cemetery in search of a grave marker for a child who would have been the right age if she’d lived. Whose name she could steal. She stood staring down at one such marker, an infant who had died at three days old, when she thought, Oh, that would be brilliant. Jeez. If she picked someone who’d been born and died here in King County, right where Eleanor Smith would have to disappear, she might as well draw a big red arrow for anyone searching for her. This way.

Walking back to her car across the springy, wet grass, she gusted a sigh. Assuming an identity wasn’t easy these days. The internet and shared databases made both hiding and appearing anew harder than it used to be. Harder, even, than twelve years ago. Plus, she’d have to start all over again, maybe give up her dream of graduate school, and she didn’t know if she had that in her.

What she didn’t do, not right away, was look up Madeline Dubeau on the internet. A part of her knew she didn’t have to, had known the moment he’d said the name that she was Maddie. Whatever was wrong with her wasn’t complete amnesia, the kind that made a man stumble into the emergency room at the hospital and say, “I don’t know who I am.” She did have memories, some clear as if they happened yesterday, tactile and real, while others were misty, barely seen.

She simply knew, had always known, that she didn’t want those memories to clear. The terrified, unthinking creature she’d been had held one certainty: her only hope was not to go back. Not to be who she was.

She wished now she had kept running, not stopped so soon. This policeman wouldn’t have stumbled on her if she lived in Maine or Florida. Back then, though, she hadn’t known where was safest because she didn’t know where she was from. How could she guess, when she had no idea how long she’d been in that car trunk before she became lucid?

She had come to think of her escape that night as her birthing story. The car trunk was her womb. Except a womb was supposed to be a safe place, nestled beneath a mother’s heart. Babies were forced out of the womb when the time came, crying their reluctance, only to be met with welcoming arms. They didn’t flee in terror into the night, grateful for the lash of tree branches, the scrape of bark.

If she had to start over again now, it wouldn’t be quite the same, of course; at least this time she’d retain her history and sense of self. But it would be a rebirth, nonetheless. Too close to what she’d already had to do once. And...impractical. She’d been reacting like a terrified kid, not the adult she was now.

She could call up newspaper clippings and read about Maddie Dubeau. If seeing her own face in them, the faces of her parents or friends, brought back her memories, would that be so bad?

Alone in her apartment, Nell hugged herself with intense anxiety, trying to reason with a bone-deep terror that felt as primal as mankind’s instinctive fear of fire or snakes or the dark.

I like my life. Why would I want to know where I came from?

Because, she admitted. Because she was lonely, and as things stood she didn’t dare let anyone close enough to have the right to expect answers. Because she felt hollow when she was with a group of friends, like her readers’ club, and they shared stories of their childhoods and families until she could see whole tapestries spread out, with rich colors and details so fine they made her heart hurt. Because she would like children of her own, if only she knew why the kind of trust a marriage took was impossible for her.

Because she hated being afraid of something she couldn’t even remember.

The next day, Nell went online and, first, did a search for the policeman who had confronted her in the parking lot. Captain Colin McAllister. It was reassuring when his name popped up immediately with dozens of references. Mostly in central Oregon newspapers, but a few times in the Oregonian, Portland’s daily. She randomly clicked on sites and read about testimonies in court, press conferences, promotions. The article in the Angel Butte Reporter about his promotion to captain of the Investigation and Support Services Division had a photo of him in uniform, gazing gravely at the camera. His eyes were hooded, watchful. They were gray, she decided, peering so closely her nose was almost pressed to the monitor. He wasn’t smiling, and his brows were knit together a little, adding a couple of creases to his forehead. And yes, he definitely had that remote look she was used to seeing in cops who came by SafeHold.

Not sure why she did, Nell printed the picture. Maybe if she kept studying his face she could decide if he was trustworthy.

Finally, pulse racing, she typed Madeline Noelle Dubeau into the search engine and, after a shaky moment, hit Enter. There were bunches of articles, not just in the Angel Butte paper but also in the Oregonian and even the Seattle Times. She chose one in the Portland Oregonian, and was unexpectedly stunned to see her face. She saw the date, and realized how lucky she’d been not to be recognized. She’d been in Portland by then, as naive and, in truth, almost as helpless as a newborn, trying to figure out how to survive while also staying invisible.

Now, she thought in bemusement, I know how old I really am. She’d been close, but was a year older than she’d thought.

The article summed up the history. Her history. It was assumed that fifteen-year-old Maddie had been abducted, leaving behind her mountain bike, her wallet and blood that DNA testing confirmed was hers. Her parents had thought she was upstairs in her bedroom when she had instead been riding her bike through a wooded section of park. The best guess was that she was on her way to a friend’s house in a neighborhood beyond the park. The friend, Emily Henson, hadn’t expected Maddie. Investigators had declined to share any leads police might be pursuing.

Nell read hungrily, article after article. There were her parents. Her father, Marc Dubeau, owned a major resort and had, at the time, sat on the city council. A lean, dark-haired and dark-eyed man, he looked like he might be as French as the name. He was handsome, and she couldn’t see herself in him at all. Her mother was always in the background in photos, either grief or personality making her retreat inside herself so that her face was expressionless, her wide eyes seeing something that wasn’t in front of her. She was blonde and blue-eyed, but aside from coloring Nell looked strikingly like her. The triangular, almost catlike face with a broad sweep of cheekbones and sharp chin, the eyes that were almost too big for the rest of the face. The look came together more elegantly for Helen Dubeau than it did for Nell, whose hair was plain brown and who had somehow acquired freckles across her nose. But they were recognizably mother and daughter, a fact that left her staring and winded.

Yes, these were the people in her fragmentary memories. This was the woman she pictured waiting for her in the hall outside her classroom with other mothers. There were no photos of her brother, who’d been kept out of the public eye, but he was mentioned. Felix was three years younger than she was, a seventh grader that year.

She printed articles, photos, until there was a stack a quarter of an inch thick on her desk. When she was done and closed the browser, she put Captain McAllister’s photo on top, so that it was the one she was looking at.

Exhaustion swept over her. She ached, as if she’d been hauling heavy boxes all day, climbing endless flights of stairs. She barely summoned the energy to stumble to the bathroom and brush her teeth before she tumbled into bed. She fell into sleep as if it were the darkest depths of her forgotten past.

* * *

“WHAT KIND OF fiasco is this?” Bystrom snapped, stabbing the front page article in the Reporter with his finger. The Bend Bulletin lay beside it with a similar headline. “How the hell am I supposed to make us sound like anything but idiots when the mayor asks me about it?”

Colin and his counterpart, Brian Cooper, who headed Patrol Services, exchanged a fleeting, expressionless glance. Colin wished—man, he wished—he could dismiss Angel Butte Police Chief Gary Bystrom as the dumb shit he often sounded, but the SOB was more complex than that. Unfortunately.

He looked like the Hollywood version of a sheriff or police chief, the kind who’d risen through the ranks and now used hard-won wisdom and sometimes bitter experience to lead and inspire his officers. Blond hair had gracefully turned white; he wore a tan as if he’d spent a lifetime out in the field squinting against the sun. What creases and wrinkles his lean face bore made him more handsome. His tall, athletic body was still spare and showed the uniform to advantage. He liked to wear his uniform.

The tan, they all knew, came from the sun reflecting off snow and water. Bystrom was an ardent skier and fly fisherman both. Everyone in the department was grateful that he pursued his hobbies so passionately, because it kept him out of their hair more often than not.

What Bystrom was really good at was politicking. He and the former mayor, Pete Linarelli, had been best friends. Members of the city council strongly supported their police chief. He socialized with most of them, and with most of the important business people in Butte County, too. When Maddie Dubeau disappeared, he had frequently been pictured with her parents, his face reflecting his deep concern, a comforting hand on Helen’s arm.

Colin had checked out his background and knew he’d skated through ten years as a patrol officer, back when Angel Butte was a third the size it was now, a backwater not yet transformed into a tourist town with the resulting increase in crime. He’d served briefly as a community liaison, become an administrative sergeant and then, with stunning speed, lieutenant. He made captain by forty, chief by forty-five. He hadn’t served a day in Criminal Investigations, on the Drug Enforcement Team or the SWAT team.

Temper tantrums were his answer to screwups caused by inadequate manpower, training or weaponry. And yeah, Colin couldn’t argue; this was a big one. Also the kind Colin and Brian both had been expecting, had considered inevitable, given the budget cutbacks.

What happened, so far as Colin understood it, was that a detective on his way home from work had stopped at a Quik-Stop store for some diapers for his eighteen-month-old kid. He’d interrupted a holdup in progress and, though undoubtedly irritated because he’d now have to do paperwork rather than go home, had the perp facedown on the counter within seconds. Unfortunately, a rookie officer answering the original alarm then burst through the door and managed to shoot the detective despite the store clerk’s attempt to explain and the fact that the detective had yelled repeatedly, “I’m police! I’m police!” The wounded detective had to bring down the rookie and take his gun away, a wrestling bout that the robber had taken advantage of to escape.

The good part was that Andy Palmer, the detective, had taken the round in the fleshy part of his left arm and he was right-handed. The excusable part was a kid only five weeks out of the academy getting overexcited. Inexcusable? The fact that officers were spread so damn thin he’d been out on his own way too soon, with backup more than ten minutes away.

The chief didn’t want to hear any of that. He wanted to know what a detective had been doing pulling his gun without having his badge in his other hand. The diapers he’d been clutching were no excuse.

Colin ground his teeth.

And the kid. Where the hell was his field training officer?

Brian Cooper explained that he had ridden around for a month with an FTO, but they’d needed him on patrol.

“You know how after that annexation we’re underfunded and shorthanded....”

Wasted breath. They weren’t allocating their resources adequately. They needed to teach their men to do the job and do it right. What Bystrom was going to tell the press, the council and the mayor was that the kid’s sergeant hadn’t been authorized to send him out on patrol alone. There had been a failure of communication, which he was going to right. Bystrom wanted that sergeant, and maybe the watch commander, slapped hard for embarrassing this department.

Colin suggested that this might be a great opportunity to go to the council for increased funding to plug some of the gaps that had left them so vulnerable. Use this as a lesson in what could go wrong.

Bystrom stared coldly at him and said, “I’m supposed to tell them we can’t do the goddamn job, but they should throw more money at us?”

The two police captains left the chief’s office and walked together in complete silence downstairs and straight out the station’s front door. They still hadn’t spoken a word when they reached the playground and picnic area half a block away, blanketed with eighteen inches of snow on the ground from this pre-Christmas winter blast. Neither of them was wearing a parka. Neither cared.

They paused and stood side by side, gazing toward the river running between puffy white banks. Their breath emerged in clouds.

“That asshole,” Brian said at last.

Colin made a sound that on a better day would have been a laugh. “No news there.”

“We could have lost an officer yesterday, and to friendly fire. Bystrom doesn’t give a goddamn about Palmer.” He let loose with another expletive. “But if Palmer had ended up dead, our fair leader would have looked damn fine telling the world how Angel Butte police officers take care of their own, and how he’d be there for the young wife and two preschool children. After which, hell, he’d have probably hit the slopes. Didn’t I hear the summit lift on Bachelor is open?”

“Yep.”

After another silence, he asked reflectively, “Do you think he has the new mayor in his pocket yet?”

To the consternation of the old guard, Linarelli had lost the election earlier this month to a Democrat who’d served only one term on the city council. Nobody yet knew what to make of Noah Chandler, whom everyone remembered had worn his hair in a ponytail when he moved to Angel Butte ten years ago and opened the town’s first brew pub. Still only thirty-five, he now owned three, the one here in Angel Butte, one in Sisters and a third in Bend. He was an entrepreneur who was going places. The ponytail was long gone; nobody could argue he didn’t have finely honed political instincts. Colin had voted for him and celebrated when he won. He hadn’t yet gone out on a limb and taken the problem that was his boss to the new mayor.

“I doubt it,” he said. “Did you see the press conference they did together? They didn’t look real friendly.”

“No, they didn’t,” Brian agreed thoughtfully.

A phone rang, and they both glanced down at their belts. “Mine,” Colin said, lifting it to see the number. He didn’t recognize it, but the area code was 206. Seattle. He heard the way his voice roughened when he said, “I’ve got to take this,” and turned away.

“Later,” Brian said with a nod, and started back toward the station.

Colin answered the phone. “McAllister.”

A woman said hesitantly, “This is Nell Smith. You gave me your card. I’m, uh...”

Triumph roared through him. “Maddie Dubeau.” He’d expected to wait a lot longer than four days for her to decide, however tentatively, to trust him.

There was a pause. “That’s what you called me.”

He waited.

“You said we could talk.” There was restraint in her voice. Maybe more. Fear, at a guess.

“I meant it. I’ve waited a long time to talk to you,” he told her.

“I don’t understand,” she said, so softly she was nearly whispering.

A group came out of the station and turned his way. They were all under him, a mix of people from Records and his own support staff. He nodded and started toward the parking lot.

“Listen,” he said, “are you somewhere I can call you back in ten minutes? I don’t want to be overheard.”

“Oh! No! I mean, yes, that’s fine. I’m home.”

“Okay. Ten minutes,” he promised, and hit End. He called his administrative assistant and said, “Something has come up. You can reach me at home.”

He made it there in eight minutes and let himself in. He took just long enough to crank up the thermostat and ditch the tie, then pulled her number up on his cell phone and looked at it with wonder that made him feel almost boyish. Maddie Dubeau. Who would believe this?

She answered on the first ring. “Hello?”

“This is Colin McAllister.”

“Oh.” Pause. “Thank you for returning my call.”

He’d have given anything to be able to see her face. “I’m sorry I scared you that night,” he said.

“It wasn’t so much because we were alone in the parking lot.” She took a breath he could hear. “It was just because...”

“I recognized you.”

“Yes. You’re the first person, in all these years.”

“Are you going to tell me what happened?”

“The thing is...I don’t remember.” In a rush, she said, “The first thing I knew, I was in a car trunk. I was unconscious some of the time. Finally the car stopped, and I found a latch that folded the backseat down and got out. It was...it was an ARCO station, you know, with a mini-mart, at a freeway exit in the middle of nowhere. I hid for a long time, and eventually managed to get in the back of a U-Haul truck.”

Hearing the stress in her voice, he made sure his was soothing. “You ended up in Seattle?”

“Portland. I stayed there for the first couple of years.”

“Why didn’t you get help? Come home?”

The silence this time was so long he almost broke it. Finally, she said softly, “I didn’t remember my name. I didn’t know where home was.”

“Damn,” he whispered. He sank down on a bar stool in his kitchen. “Maddie...”

“Nell.” She sounded upset, maybe even angry. “I’m Nell.”

“Nell.” He cleared his throat. “When did you remember?”

“I didn’t.” Now her voice was small and tremulous. Oh, yeah, she was all over the emotional map. “I still don’t. Exactly. That’s why you scared me.”

Stunned, he said, “But when I said your name, you knew.”

These pools of silence had such emotional density, he had trouble surfacing to draw a breath. Her distress was nearly unbearable when he couldn’t read her expressions, couldn’t touch her.

“Yes,” she said. “But not until I heard you say it. It was like...something I already knew slipped into place. See, I do have memories. Jumbled ones. When I went online and saw pictures of my parents, I knew their faces.”

“You were scared because I could identify you.”

“I’ve always been scared. I never wanted to remember. I know I was abducted, but...I think I was running, too. I think I knew someone was after me. Maybe even that...whoever it was might kill me.”

A chill crawled up his spine, one that reminded him of that night, when he’d stood in the dark staring at that bike and the blood that had pooled in the red dirt.

“You don’t think your parents could protect you.”

“No. Or else...”

The chill spread, lifting the small hairs on his forearms. “You’re afraid of them, too.”

“Maybe,” she whispered. “I don’t know.”

Now he was the one to let the silence grow while he tried to think.

“Why did you call?” he asked at last. “Why are you admitting this to me?”

“I thought maybe I could trust you. It’s been hard, never telling anyone. And not knowing if I’m really crazy.”

“I don’t know a lot about amnesia,” he admitted. “I’ll tell you this. I encourage my officers to listen to their instincts. When we feel unease, or fear, there’s a reason. We notice things our conscious minds don’t acknowledge. That doesn’t mean they aren’t real.”

Nell was quiet for a minute. When she said, “Thank you for saying that,” she sounded calmer.

“What is it you thought you could trust me to do?”

A hitch of her breath told him her anxiety had kicked up again. “I don’t know! I don’t know what I want!”