Marcia Muller: Vanishing Point

Laurel Greenwood had a ritual that provided a respite from her busy life as a wife, mother, and small business owner: every so often she would take a “mental health day” and travel to some location within an easy round-trip drive of Paso Robles, to paint landscapes. During each of these getaways, she would select a postcard that she felt best represented the area and mail it to herself for inclusion in a collection she kept in a file box in her office. The collection, she would joke, would probably be the only legacy she’d leave her daughters, but at least they’d know where Mom had been.

An ordinary, uneventful, pleasant family life. Until June twenty-second, when it was forever altered.

Laurel had planned to paint seascapes at the coastal hamlet of Cayucos, some twenty-five miles southwest of Paso Robles. She was seen doing so at a coastal overlook north of town, and one man, Jacob Ziff, stopped to look at her work and chatted with her for a while. Later Ziff spotted her in the Sea Shack, a restaurant in the center of town; she was at a table on the oceanside deck, drinking wine with a long-haired man in biker’s leathers. Ziff noted that the two left separately, the man walking north on the highway to a liquor store and Laurel getting into her beat-up Volkswagen bus and driving south. The bus later turned up at a waterfront park in Morro Bay, less than ten miles away. According to a pair of dogwalkers who saw Laurel arrive, she got out and walked toward the nearby shopping area. After that no one saw her-or would admit to seeing her-again.

Roy Greenwood wasn’t aware that his wife didn’t return that night. He’d had a busy day, including two difficult surgeries, and went to bed early. In the morning he wasn’t overly concerned; occasionally if Laurel stayed away too late on one of her painting trips, she would take a motel room and drive back in the morning. But it did puzzle him that she hadn’t called to tell him her plans, so he checked back at the house at noon. When he found she still wasn’t there, he called the chief of police, Bruce Collingsworth, a good friend and tennis partner; Collingsworth alerted the highway patrol to be on the lookout for Laurel’s van, and later sent officers to the Greenwood house to question Roy.

When the highway patrol located Laurel’s bus in Morro Bay and she failed to return the second night, the search intensified; the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Department stepped in. Television and newspaper reportage prompted a rash of calls from people who claimed to have sighted Laurel, the most promising being those from Jacob Ziff, the staff at the Sea Shack, and the dogwalkers in Morro Bay. Descriptions of the biker she’d been seen with at the restaurant were broadcast, but they were vague at best, and he seemed to have vanished as completely as Laurel. What further alarmed Roy Greenwood was that no postcard from Cayucos appeared in his mailbox. Laurel had never failed to add to her collection before.

And then, suddenly, the case was back-burnered. Press inquiries were routinely referred to the sheriff’s department’s public information officer, who merely said they were pursuing “various leads.” Roy Greenwood, who had been forthcoming with the media, declined to give interviews, citing the need to “return to normalcy for the sake of my little girls.” A silence settled, and since the press does not feed on silence, interest in the case waned and finally disappeared entirely.

So what had happened to Laurel Greenwood? Kidnapping? There had been no attempt to collect a ransom. Foul play or suicide? Quite possible. The bodies of many victims of violent crimes-both inflicted by others or themselves-are never found. Voluntary disappearance? Again, possible. Even though the families, friends, and associates of most missing persons insist that they would never desert them, a vast majority of disappearances are just that. Family, friends, and associates aren’t always privy to an individual’s true feelings and inclinations. Laurel Greenwood could have had a secret life apart from them, one she’d finally decided to disappear into-or one that had claimed her life.

And what about Roy Greenwood burning his wife’s paintings so soon after her disappearance? What had prompted that? His desire for a return to normalcy, as reported in the press? His determination to make a new life for the three of them without, as he’d told Jennifer, missing her so badly?

Could have been either. People have their different ways of dealing with loss and grief.

Or it could have been something else entirely.

This case fascinated me. Both the what-happened and the why-it-happened. Tomorrow I’d assemble my staff in a meeting, reshuffle assignments, and get the investigation under way.

At nine-thirty that night I was reclining on my bed, watching Hy pack for his trip to La Jolla. Over dinner at a favorite Cajun restaurant, I’d told him what I could about the new case without violating client confidentiality, and now I was mulling over some of his comments and planning tomorrow morning’s presentation to my staff.

“Damn!” he exclaimed, startling me.

I looked over to where he stood at the chest of drawers.

“I don’t have any black socks,” he added.

“You just bought some.”

“Yeah, but they’re either at the ranch or Touchstone. I’ll have to buy more.”

“Well, they’re not exactly a rare commodity.”

He shut the drawer that was designated as his and examined the contents of his duffel, then zipped it. “McCone, does it ever strike you as ridiculous, having your possessions travel around from place to place and never knowing where they’re at?”

“Sometimes. I’m always running out of underwear at the ranch, and I’ve never driven up to Touchstone without the trunk loaded with… well, stuff.”

“Exactly-stuff. It goes back and forth, one place or the other, and when you want it, it’s never where you are.”

“It would be an expensive proposition to have enough of everything at each place.”

“Exactly. Three places is too many for two people. We ought to get rid of one.”

“We’d never give up Touchstone, especially after all we went through having the house built there. And we need a base here in the city.”

“I was thinking of my ranch.”

“You love the ranch.” It was a hundred acres of sheep graze in the high desert of Mono County, near Tufa Lake, on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. Hy had inherited it decades ago from his stepfather.

“I do love it, but I’m hardly ever there. If it wasn’t for Ramon Perez, the place would’ve gone to hell a long time ago.” He paused. “Ramon’s a good foreman, and he’s saved practically every penny I’ve ever paid him. When I was up there last month, he hinted he might want to buy the place.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Like I said, he only hinted. But if I did sell to him, I think I could work a deal where he’d let us come up and stay from time to time.”

“It wouldn’t be the same, though.”

He sat on the bed, put a hand on my ankle. “Things change, and sometimes it’s for the better. I was thinking if I did sell, we could use the money to buy a bigger place here in the city.”

“A bigger- You mean sell this house, too?”

“Well, it is a little small for two people to live on a near full-time basis.”

“But it’s… my home .”

“I know that, and it’s just a suggestion. Something to think about, is all. Now, how about we open that bottle of brandy that Mick and Charlotte gave us? Toast to us and our new beginnings.”

Damn, the man certainly could drop a bombshell and just walk away while the rubble was settling. But it was a conversation I’d just as soon walk away from anyway, so I smiled and said, “Why not?”