Bill Pronzini: The Vanished

‘He was alone?’

‘Oh sure, alone.’

‘Did he say much to you?’

‘Come to think of it, he asked me for Coachman Road. Same as you did a while ago.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Not as I can remember.’

‘What time did he leave the next morning?’

‘I couldn’t say,’ Jardine answered. ‘He was gone, key in the cabin door, when Frances- that’s my old lady-went in at ten.’

‘Then you didn’t see him leave?’

‘No.’

‘Isn’t it a little unusual for somebody to check out that way, without turning the key in to you here?’

‘Not if they’ve paid in advance, like he did.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Can you tell me where the bus station is?’

‘Don’t have one, exactly. Greyhounds stop at Vanner’s Emporium, two blocks back on Main.’

‘Is there a police station in Roxbury?’

‘Well, yeah.’

‘Where would I find it?’

‘In the City Hall. Same block as Vanner’s Emporium, one street north. State Street.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Sure,’ Jardine said. ‘Glad to oblige.’

I went to Vanner’s Emporium first, and a very old man with the look and actions of a centenarian told me that he didn’t remember selling a ticket to anybody who looked like Roy Sands, but maybe he had, since his memory wasn’t so good here the past couple of years. He also told me that there were buses to Eureka every other day-Monday, Wednesday, Friday, at 2:00 p.m. You could make connections there for Eugene. Buses south or east? Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays to Redding, departing 1:00 p.m.

I walked down the block a couple of doors to a café and had some coffee and watched nightfall enfolding the ancient, monolithic redwoods. Apparently Sands had not gone to Eugene by bus; he had spent the night of Monday, the twentieth, in Roxbury, and there were no Grey-hounds out to Eureka and eventually Eugene on Tuesday. He could not have gone to Redding on the 1:00 p.m. Monday bus; that was the one he had come in on, according to what Jardine at the Redwood Lodge had told me. So even if there were some explanation for his heading south to Redding instead of west to Eureka for the transfer to Eugene, he could not have gotten by bus to Redding to do it. Still, he had been in Eugene on Tuesday night, the twenty-first, to send wires and to check into the Leavitt Hotel; he had to have gotten there somehow.

Had he left Roxbury by train, then? I had not seen anything remotely resembling a railroad depot, and I doubted seriously that a town as small as this one would have passenger service. Sands had not had a car, that had been confirmed by Jardine. Taxi? Possible. But even if Roxbury had some type of cab service, and I suspected that they did not, the cost seemed prohibitive. That left hitchhiking and/or a private vehicle of some kind.

I thought again of Nick Jackson. Was it possible that Jackson, who had been touring the Northwest with this WAC nurse, had drifted into California as far south as Roxbury-and that Sands had met him here, gone with him to Eugene for some reason? Possible, yes, but not probable; the coincidence of a chance meeting like that was a little too much to swallow. The more I thought about things, the more I was inclined to eliminate Jackson-he seemed too far removed from the core of the whole affair; but until I located Sands, I could not afford to cross him completely off the list.

I paid for my coffee and walked through the cold, lengthening shadows to State Street. I found the City Hall, a white clapboard building which had been freshly painted and had a set of wide wooden schoolhouse steps up to the double entrance doors. Inside, there was a short hallway with low counters on both sides. Behind the one on the left were a couple of desks and a large switchboard and two young guys in uniform listening to police calls; the counter on the right belonged to the City Water Department and had a sign midway along reading Pay Here. At the end of the hallway was a closed redwood door with Mayor’s Office etched on it in gold leaf.

One of the uniformed cops-the owner of a blond crew-cut and an officious manner- came over to the counter and asked if he could help me. I spread my wallet open so that he could read my identification, and he looked at it as if he could not quite believe what he saw. He read it again, looked at me, read it a third time. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘a private detective,’ with no inflection at all.

‘No kidding,’ the other cop said. He wore his black hair parted in the middle, like the kid in the old Our Gang comedies. He came over and read the identification, and then the two of them stood there staring at me. I thought: Oh Christ, we’re not going to play one of those seriocomic sketches now, are we? I had dealt with small-town law enforcement a couple of times before, and they were a breed unto their own: you never quite knew how things were going to go.

But it was all right this time. The blond cop said finally, ‘Well, hell, you kind of took us by surprise. The closest we get to private eyes up here is on the television.’

‘Sure, I understand.’

‘What can we do for you?’

I told him why I was in Roxbury, leaving out some of the non-relevant details. They were willing and talkative, but there was not much either of them could tell me. There had been no incidents of any kind involving a transient just prior to Christmas, and neither had ever heard of a man named Roy Sands. There were no trains that stopped in or about Roxbury, passenger or freight. There were no taxis operating in the village, and no one had sanction to hire out a private vehicle for the transportation of passengers. Hitchhiking was of course illegal, and the law was strictly enforced, especially within the city limits. There were no automobile-rental agencies or dealerships; you had to go to Eureka or Redding or Weaverville.

I had no other angles to ask them about; we had covered the spectrum of immediate possibilities. I thanked them for their time, asked them to make a note of Sands’ name and to contact me in San Francisco if anything developed that might shed some light on his disappearance; I gave the blond guy one of my business cards. Then we said good night and I left City Hall and wandered back to Main Street.

Now what? I asked myself. Canvass the town-cafés, bars, cigar stores, and the like? That seemed the only thing to do, eighty percent of investigative accomplishment being legwork; any cop, past or present, could tell you that. So I wasted an hour and a half patrolling both sides of Main, a little of State, a little of Portland Street on the opposite side. Fat zero.

It was after seven now, full dark, and I was hungry. There was a chuck-wagon grill near where I had parked my car, and I went in there and pondered over a rib steak, and a cold draft beer. The nagging prescience was still with me, and it was an irritating, frustrating thing because there was no reason for it, no way to explain it or dispel it. Was there something I had overlooked somewhere along the line? Was there something I had failed to consider? More rhetorical questions for which I had no immediate answers.

Another beer and a couple of cigarettes, and it was eight-thirty. I was very tired from too much driving, too much walking, too much thinking. I decided I would return to the Redwood Lodge and get some sleep; I did not want to have to drive back to San Francisco just yet-but in order to justify my remaining here, I had to have something to work on, a direction. Maybe a decent night’s rest and the cold light of morning would open up some potentiality of which I was unable to think tonight.

I took the car back to the motel. They had floodlights set up along the side of the road, illuminating the jungle of ferns fronting the office with soft yellow light; a large redwood sign above the office entrance told you the name of the place and that there was Vacancy. I drove past there, and along the graveled half-moon to where number five sat darkly among the gray-black shapes of the trees.