Нельсон Демилль - The Best American Mystery Stories 2004

She hesitated briefly. “Really?”

“Yes, we were stationed together in Germany some years ago. Actually, I didn’t even know she lived in Washington until an art dealer told me, and I’d like to get in touch with her.”

She thought that over.

Collier was a good looking woman, tall with a long, straight body that her black suit emphasized. She wore burr-cut salt-and-pepper hair on an elegantly shaped head, and had a well-arranged, make-upless face, with a pair of deeply dark blue eyes that just then seemed wary of me.

I said, “If you’re being cautious, I do understand. I could leave my phone number and you could give it to Carole for me.”

Collier smiled slightly. “That’s not the problem,” she said wryly, waving a hand toward the hall behind her. “Please,” she said. “Coffee?”

I told her coffee would be good.

She led me down the short hall into her office, the sight of which once I’d entered made me stop dead in my tracks.

“Whoa,” I said with a laugh.

She saw my face and smiled.

This inner office, done up with huge mirrors and floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over downtown Seattle and most of the rest of the world, gave me the immediate impression of being airborne.

“You’re not going to be sick, are you?” she asked with a laugh. “It’s happened.”

“It’s just a little startling,” I told her,

Adding to the sense of openness, the room was sparingly furnished — a large glass table for a desk, a couple chrome-framed white leather chairs — and that was that.

“You’re bothered by heights?” she asked.

“A little,” I admitted.

She waved me to a chair, which I gratefully took.

“I love the sense of height,” she explained. “The cleanliness of being above everything.”

She could have it, I thought.

Collier took a thin cigar from a pack on her uncluttered desk, lit it, leaned against the edge, and looked at me. “Now, you say you’re a friend of Carole’s?”

“I am,” I told her, “though we haven’t been in touch for some time.”

The door behind me opened then, and I got my coffee in a small china cup on a tiny glass tray.

Collier watched the receptionist quietly leave as I sipped.

“Well,” Collier told me, “The problem is, I don’t know how to get in touch with Carole myself.”

“I see,” I said.

“And frankly,” she added, “I’m a bit concerned.”

I put my cup on the tiny tray, put the tray on her desk, and said, “Concerned?”

She frowned a little. “How well do you know Carole?”

“Well enough to like her. Why are you concerned?”

She sat back in her chair. “A few months ago, Carole gave up her apartment in Seattle and — well — disappeared. I was surprised she hadn’t contacted me because we’d become quite friendly over the past year since her divorce.”

“I didn’t even know she’d been married.”

“Yes,” she said, “for about a year before I met her, but she eventually saw her mistake and got out of it.”

I nodded.

She sighed. “A month ago, her ex-husband placed four watercolors at Wellman’s Gallery for sale on consignment. They comprise a project Carole called Rainier Summer.”

“I saw the exhibit at Wellman’s”

“Yes, and its clearly her best work,” she told me. “Carole and I had no written contract between us, and if she wanted to sell her work by the side of the road, it would be of no legal concern of mine, but my personal concern issues from the fact that it was her ex-husband who delivered the watercolors.”

“I see.”

“Carole’s divorce last year,” Collier continued, “was terribly bitter. At one point she was forced to get a restraining order against the man, so you can understand why I was surprised that she would have him deliver the watercolors.”

“But she kept his name?”

“For business reasons, purely. She started selling her work as Dorin, and kept it that way.”

“And where does he live?”

She frowned. “His name is Phil Dorin,” she said, as if the name pained her to utter. “He has a farm near Eatonville, I think.”

“That’s on the way to Rainier,” I pointed out. “The mountain was Carole’s subject.”

“I know. I called him, thinking — I don’t know — that she might be living there, but he said she wasn’t, and I don’t think, now, she would be living there really.”

“Did Dorin say he knew where Carole was living?”

“He said he didn’t, but I thought he was lying.” Her elegant head shook slightly. “He’s a very disagreeable man.”

“And you haven’t heard from her, since...?”

She frowned, then replied, “I haven’t seen or spoken with Carole since early August.”

“Three months.”

“It’s crossed my mind to call the police, but...”

“But?”

“It’s also crossed my mind that I might be over-dramatizing.” She shrugged slightly. “I tend to do that.”

“What’s that?”

She smiled. “I tend to think the worst. Oh...” She shook her head. “Carole is probably fine. Just happy as a clam, and hopefully at work.” She looked at me, as if to make her statement a question, but I didn’t know the answer.

I didn’t know what to think.

When I left her office a few minutes later, I still didn’t know.

Collier seemed like a grown-up, responsible type, and if she thought she was over-dramatizing her concern for Carole’s disappearance, who was I to disagree.

But along with my disappointment at not being able to see Carole again, I felt a bit unsettled. I would have liked knowing she was all right at least, but I had no idea how to find her.

That put my thinking in a circular pattern, so I decided on a drive down to Redondo to get in some stroll-and-think time walking along the shore, which has straightened out my thoughts in the past — but not today.

After an hour’s walk, I had decided only that I was hungry.

So I grabbed a sandwich at Salty’s, then sat a while out in the sun on a bench at the end of the pier.

I watched an old man at the rail fishing for flounder, watched tugs out in the sound ferrying cargo up from Tacoma, watched some gulls teasing a dog on the beach — landing and waiting for the dog to chase them off, then flapping their way down the beach, waiting for the dog to chase after them again.

Until around three o’clock, when I gave up thinking and drove back to Seattle.

At a stoplight, through some trees and off in the distance, I caught a brief glimpse of Rainier — a smudge of white on the blue horizon.

And that’s when I had the idea

A kind of cart-before-the-horse idea, but it was all I could think of, so I decided to go with it.

I went back to Wellman’s, where the same clerk let me take pictures of Carole’s paintings and even helped me arrange them so my shots were complete.

Afterwards, I dropped them off at an overnight photo lab near my apartment and went home. I put in some phone time with a friend who had access to things not easily accessed, learning that Carole wasn’t even unlisted in the state of Washington.

Phil Dorin was, however, though his phone had been disconnected. But I did get his address.

And then I did nothing, except sit around the apartment, watch the sunset off the rear balcony, and look at a little TV. I went to bed early, but I couldn’t sleep.

A small but persistent sense of anxiety — my unconscious working behind my back — having to do with Carole’s disappearance, naturally, but mixed up with a vague sense of obligation — something owed — kept sleep from me.

I ended up going out for a walk, and getting back to the apartment around two in the morning, where I finally managed maybe two hours’ sleep in the next six, rising around eight A.M.