Presumption Of Death

“Wake up!” Sandy had her by the shoulders and was shaking her.

Nina opened her eyes, sighing. “I fell asleep.”

“Uh huh.”

“Guess you were right.” She started stuffing her papers back inside her case. “Guess I should get home and get some rest. Maybe all the answers will come to me in a dream.”

“You need to call Paul.”

Nina looked at her watch. “Wow. Two o’clock. Sandy, he’s sound asleep.”

“He’ll want to hear this. I just spoke to Da

“Fantastic work, Sandy! We have to notify the police right away,” Nina said. “Back to my favorite people for the third time today.”

“Not yet.”

“Sandy, he’s taken two children!”

“They won’t be able to do anything unless we go up there and talk to her and find out where he is. She won’t say anything more on the phone. She didn’t even say she knew where he was,” Sandy admitted. “I just know she does.”

“How?”

She did not like the question, but she answered anyway. “I used to know her pretty well years ago, when Da

Strangely, she did. “Did you talk to Da

“No. He’s working, and I remember Da

“What’s she like?”

“Weak. That’s how I know he went there. He depends on her when things get tough. She always loved him, but she’s kind of a hopeless character. She never really knew how to handle him.”

What a mess, Nina thought. Sons and mothers. “She wouldn’t help him hide, under the circumstances.”

“She isn’t convinced he took any kids. She doesn’t want to believe he would hurt anyone.”

“Did she say she saw him?” Nina asked.

“No.”

But Sandy knew she had, and by extension, so did Nina. She called Paul and woke him up. He packed up a bag for himself and one for her, and met her half an hour later outside on the street, wipers going because the fog had grown so thick.

Sandy roared up in Wish’s brown van.

“You’re coming, Sandy?”

She wore her voluminous purple coat and clutched a small suitcase. “Yep. She’ll talk to me.”

Paul steered Nina’s Bronco onto Highway 101 and started the long haul over Pacheco Pass, through the central valley, and up the mountains. Nina and Sandy slept.

He had left a message for Bob on the kitchen counter saying that he should call his grandpa and stay with him for a few days. No doubt the boy would find it when he was looking for cereal in the morning. Good that Nina’s son was old enough to be left alone for a short time, bad that he lived in the study.

This late at night, the truckers ruled the highways. At the interstate heading to Sacramento, Paul got into the slipstream of a big semi doing seventy and let himself relax and think about what all this meant for him and Nina.

He had worked so hard and for so long to have Nina here with him, and here she was, entangled as always in problems, far removed from the peaceable kingdom he imagined for them both. He glanced at her, snoring lightly on the seat beside him, brown hair balled up under her neck, cheeks flushed. He wanted life to be easy for her, but it never would be.

He couldn’t accept that he couldn’t protect her. He thought of her on a su

If he’d met her then, before the baby, the broken heart, the law school, the years of grinding work, and they had gotten married-what would she be like? What would they be like? Maybe he would still be a cop. And she… an artist, a teacher maybe.

He let himself daydream another existence, because this one was so full of problems.

Because it was so late at night, they made the six-hour trip in five hours, the Bronco flying up the long slog through the foothills as lightly as a flag in the breeze. The mountains, usually a daunting prospect, offered clear sailing, twinkling stars, and a polished moon to light the way. They arrived just a little after seven-thirty on Thursday morning.

Located at the end of the highway from Truckee, stopped cold by the big lake, the road split at King’s Beach to circle Tahoe in both directions, the eastern branch taking the Nevada side to the casinos of North Lake Tahoe, and the western branch moving along the California side of the lake past Emerald Bay until it reached the South Lake Tahoe casinos.

At the junction, a shadowy blue in the early-morning light, Paul turned right, then right again into the first gas station. Nina and Sandy stirred, murmured, found their shoes, and coughed a few times, complaining about the dry mountain air. After several minutes, while Paul pumped gas into the Bronco, they emerged, fresh-ski

While they bought hydrogenated treats for breakfast, water bottles, and coffee in large containers, Paul moved into the passenger’s seat, looked away into the mirror, and realized he had forgotten his razor. But instead of ru

When he woke up, they were parked in front of a crudely built log cabin with a weedy flagstone pathway leading to a door with a single step up. No porch or overhang softened the furious winter’s passion or this morning’s mountain sun. Sandy got out, motioning them to remain behind.

“You drove?” he asked Nina. They were parked on a slight rise on the northern part of the little town.

“You got a solid ten minutes’ sleep. That plus what you got before I woke you up ought to keep us going for the day. Sandy’s inside with Da

Nina rolled the windows down. “See the white pines?” she said, her voice nostalgic. “The scent of Tahoe. Oh, Paul. I’ve missed Tahoe.”

As they watched the cabin, a yellow porch light came on.

“You think she’ll tell Sandy where he is?”

At that moment, Sandy appeared in the doorway and beckoned them inside.

“So you came.” An unusually tall woman, made taller by the lowness of the ceilings, Co

“They had to,” Sandy answered. “This is Nina. And this is Paul.” They all shook hands.

Across from the front door on the opposite wall Nina saw a stone fireplace with an efficient insert for holding the heat in winter, and wood in the wood box even now, because June at Tahoe still meant cool nights. Over a mile high in the Sierras, people around the lake could find themselves in the midst of a snowstorm any month of the year. Sandy went straight to a table and chairs under the single window in the room; they all sat down and looked through it at the rocky yard with its low stone wall. A couple of blue jays squabbled in the pine tree by Co

“Snow’s all melted,” Sandy said.

“For the next three months anyway.” Sunken-eyed and older than she had first appeared, Co