Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

The teenagers had been waiting for the mother and her two children, a towheaded boy and girl, both of whom had found a million things to cry about all afternoon, to finally leave. It was after six and the sun was beginning to dip downward in the late summer sky. Across from Point Defiance, where Samantha Maxwell and Brant Logan were sitting in a tangle of driftwood, they watched the sun as it inched lower to the tops of the craggy Olympic Mountain range, the western-most reaches of the United States. They’d been drinking beer smuggled from Samantha’s father’s supposedly secret stash in the garage refrigerator. It was better beer than they were used to, and there was no denying they were feeling the effects of the alcohol.

“I thought they’d never go,” Brant said, running his fingertips along Samantha’s inner thigh. He grinned at her in that dopey way that he did when he’d been drinking.

Samantha pushed his hand away. “Hey,” she said, “I’m not that drunk.”

“But you look so unbelievably hot,” said Brant, a lanky six-footer, said, rolling on his side on the blanket, throwing his leg over hers. “And I’ve been good all day.”

“You’re gonna have to do better than that,” Samantha said, pulling away, and applying the last bit of coconut-smelling lotion to her lightly browned skin. She pulled her hair back into a loose ponytail and got up. “I’m going in,” she announced, getting up and starting toward the cold blue water.

Brant rolled his eyes in a very dramatic manner. “You’re crazy. Freaking cold out there,” he said.

“Then you should come with me,” Samantha said, turning back to look at him. The sun framed her head like a halo. “You need to cool off.”

“Oh, I do, do I?” he said, his brow arched as he shielded his eyes from the sun. “You really want me to cool off?”

By then Samantha was already halfway to the water’s edge.

“Last one in’s a rotten egg,” she said, laughing at the absurdity of the statement. Why a rotten egg? Who but my mother comes up with these dorky sayings?

Brant watched his girlfriend step into the clear, cold Puget Sound, but with the sun in his eyes, he turned away and put his head back on the blanket. He put his earbuds in and turned up the volume on his iPod. Soon his feet were twitching as he listened to Nickelback’s newest music. Not classic. But good enough, he thought.

Good enough, he’d later think, to lose track of the time.

About an hour later, Brant sat up with a start. He’d drifted off to sleep. He looked at the spot on the blanket next him, but Samantha wasn’t there.

He looked toward the water. “Sam?” he called out, getting up to see where she’d gone. “Where the hell are you, babe?”

He looked south, then north. The pebbled stretch of the beach was deserted. Maybe she’d gone off to the restroom? Brant slipped a T-shirt over his head and started walking up the beach toward the restrooms. He called out Sam’s name several more times, but there was no answer. His eyes scanned the shore. There was no one to ask if he or she had seen Samantha. There was no reason to worry, really, but he did anyway. Later, he would say he’d just “had a feeling” that something was very wrong. He couldn’t explain it; it just was something deep inside telling him over and over that Samantha was gone.

Where is she?

The restroom by the parking lot was smelly and empty. Adrenaline and beer made him feel anxious and woozy. He planted himself in front of the urinal, reading graffiti and wondering where Sam went. A second later, he was out the door and back where they’d spent the day. He told himself that she’d be back any minute. By the time the sun started to slide behind the Olympics, however, Brant’s worry increased tenfold.

He picked up his phone. No messages. No calls. He dialed Sam’s number, and her phone, still in her purse, rang next to him. He told himself he wouldn’t mention that he’d left her purse unattended.

Sam wouldn’t have gone off somewhere without her phone. Brant knew that. The phone was almost a part of her. Next, he pressed those three digits, in that sequence that sends a palpable wave of anxiety through the phone lines. It was the number no one ever wants to need to call.

“My girlfriend is missing,” he said to the 911 operator, after giving his name.

“Okay,” the operator said, “missing. What do you mean by that?”

“Samantha is gone. I can’t find her.”

“You two have a fight?”

“No,” he said, suddenly feeling defensive. “I fell asleep. I’m kind of worried about her.”

“Did she go off with someone?”

Why is she saying that? Sam would never. We’re in love. Have been since we were sixteen.

Brant bristled a little. “She would not do that. That’s not Sam.”

The operator kept on questioning Brant. Her tone cool and clinical. Brant wondered if she would act that same way if a caller was inside a burning house. Didn’t the operator grasp the urgency of the situation? Sam was gone!

“When was the last time you saw her, exactly?” she asked.

Brant continued to scan the beach. “I can’t say for sure. Maybe an hour or two hours ago? She went swimming in the sound. Like I said, I fell asleep and when I woke up she was gone.”

“Are you sure she just didn’t leave, Brant?”

Again, why was the operator acting like that?

“Without her purse? Without her phone? Not Samantha. No way. What girl would?”

“All right. Sit tight. Police are on the way.”

A half hour later, a team of first responders arrived at the beach to mount a search-and-rescue effort. It had turned to dusk by then and a helicopter hovered along the shoreline with a searchlight punching through the thickening air. Someone gave Brant a blanket and he wrapped it around his shoulders. As he watched everyone, he thought to himself that it was like some kind of scene out of a movie. Not real. Just pretend. No one used the words “possible drowning,” but all of them figured that was likely what had happened. To their credit, the searchers showed no sign of fatigue. Even as the stars replaced the pink hue of sunset, they gamely continued doing what most all of them knew was futile.

If Brant’s story was true, Samantha had been yanked from the shore by the swift water.

No one needed to point out the obvious. Ten feet from where the teens had put their blanket and pilfered beer was a sign: DANGER! NO SWIMMING! RIP CURRENTS!

Every day for the five years since her husband left her for their dog sitter, Abby, Colette Robinson had walked a stretch of beach along the southern end of Puget Sound. Low tide. High tide. When the shore was pelted with raindrops the size of dimes. Or, the best of all, when the sun lit up the edges of the water like a fuse. It didn’t matter what time of year, there was always something to stick into her bag. Colette collected bits of beach glass that she’d used to fill four mason jars in the window of her bathroom. She’d recovered enough fishing floats to string a garland over the fireplace in the living room, too. Every time she ambled over the rocky shoreline near Tacoma, Colette found at least one thing that got her blood pumping with the excitement of discovery.

That day her eyes caught an out-of-place hue a few yards down the beach. It was a fragment of pink and white, absolutely not colors evocative of the Pacific Northwest, a brooding landscape fashioned of grays, blues, greens, and blacks. This was a spray of light against the dingy, dark backdrop of a cliff.