“Bill Sanders?”
Bill looked up at a waitress who had approached his table. He was puzzled that she knew his name.
“Aren’t you Bill Sanders?”
“I am. I’m sorry, but do I know you?”
“Bill, don’t you remember? I’m Donna Sharp. Actually, now I’m Donna Wolfe. We were lab partners in Mr. Dennison’s chemistry class.”
Bill flushed with embarrassment. He did remember Donna Sharp, but that memory had little in common with the woman standing before him now. Donna Sharp was a cute, peppy cheerleader he had once wanted to date but never worked up the courage to ask out because she was so popular. Donna Wolfe was a stout woman whose gray hair was coiled into a bun on top of her head. She looked older than he knew she was; she reminded him of a storybook grandmother.
“What in the world brings you back to these parts? Where do you live now? Have you been to Jefferson?”
“Actually, I’m on my way there.”
“Gosh, it must be great to travel around the way you do. You know, the Jefferson library had a display of your books last year. They also had a lot of old pictures of you, from high school and all. I’m real sorry about your wife. That was terrible. There was a story in The Jefferson Courier about her being on that plane. That story was also part of the display. I really am sorry.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“Are you gonna see Paul? Wasn’t it terrible, what happened to him and his wife? What’s her name? Sharon? Yeah, Sharon.”
“What happened? I haven’t heard.”
“Gosh, it’s been all in the news around here. Newspapers and television. TV trucks from Louisville and Indianapolis and Cincinnati with those big antennas that shoot up into the air were parked all over Jefferson. There was even a short item on CNN about it. But they all left after two or three days. You know how they are with a story like that. Big deal for a couple of days and then nothing. On to something else, I guess. Some of the online comments were awfully hateful to Paul. You really haven’t heard?”
Bill shook his head. “I’ve been out of the country for the past month. In some remote places. I didn’t get much news.”
“Well, about two weeks ago their little girl disappeared. Some people think she ran away from home, but she’s only ten. The police say they’re investigating the possibility she was kidnapped.”
Bill was stunned. Why hadn’t Paul told him? Why all the secrecy? Why hadn’t somebody called him? Then he realized that the only person from Jefferson he’d kept in contact with even remotely was Paul. Whatever national news the story of Cindy’s disappearance made, he had missed it.
Donna continued, “When you see Paul, tell him I said hi and that I’m real sorry. I don’t get back to Jefferson much these days, even though it’s only twenty miles away. I guess you didn’t know that I married Brent Wolfe. He’s from Vevay. He has a real estate agency here that his father left him. Business isn’t great, but we get along. Things picked up some with the casino, but not like we hoped. Bet you also didn’t know that I have three boys and six grandchildren? Do you have any children?”
Bill again shook his head.
“Well, to each his own, I always say. Gosh, it’s getting late. Do you want to order now?”
Bill ordered a chicken sandwich and a glass of iced tea. He only finished half the sandwich.
As he left, Donna introduced him to the hotel manager who escorted him to his car. “Come back anytime, Mr. Sanders. It’s a pleasure to meet you. We don’t get many famous authors around here.”
Bill smiled to himself. Guy’s a natural at public relations.
CHAPTER 2
Fifty feet underground in Ulster County, New York, Colonel Richard West studied a computer printout. He stood in the middle of a big, brightly lighted, white room. Against one wall was a bank of four computer monitors, a white-jacketed technician quietly working at each one. Another wall was lined with soundproof printers, constantly burping out sheets of numbers and text. Another wall contained a bank of colorcoded phones.
Colonel West, a short man dressed in a dark three-piece business suit and a bright red tie, leaned heavily on his cane as he walked over to the fourth wall, covered with a huge map of the United States.
He located Indianapolis and ran his index finger south along Interstate 65 and then east a bit to Jefferson.
He looked again at the printout, pulled a red pushpin from his jacket pocket and stuck it between “Jeff” and “erson.” There were five other red pins in Indiana. Stepping back a few feet, Colonel West studied the map, his eyes taking in hundreds of pins scattered around the country, many of them in tight clusters.
Still leaning on his cane, he walked over to a green phone and picked up the receiver and spoke quietly into the mouthpiece: “Sector nine. Case 85-43. Terminate. Acknowledge and report.”
CHAPTER 3
Bill arrived in Jefferson with time to kill. He was bewildered at what Donna had told him. He thought about stopping at some fast-food restaurant with WiFi to check on the stories he had missed about Cindy’s disappearance. He also considered stopping at The Jefferson Courier’s office. Maybe a reporter could give him some background information that might be helpful. He finally decided to do neither. He wanted to talk to Paul first, which he had promised he would do. His encounter with Donna Wolfe had been an accident. A sudden memory reminded him that the newspaper office was probably closed on Sunday anyway. When he worked there it was an afternoon paper that published Monday through Saturday. He figured it still was. A quick drive past the office just off Main Street confirmed this.
He drove around town, amazed at how little things had changed. Whenever he described Jefferson to friends, he told them it was a town where Mark Twain could return and feel right at home. He realized again how true that was. The nineteenth-century buildings in the old part of town had been carefully preserved, partly out of civic pride and partly to attract bed-and-breakfast tourists looking for a calm weekend with a dose of nostalgia. Shopping malls, Walmarts, and new housing developments were kept on the outskirts of town. The population had remained a stable eight thousand or so over the years, mainly because of Jefferson’s relative isolation, which also saved its Neo-Classical and Federal architecture from developments spawned by growing populations. The town was just far enough away from Cincinnati, Louisville, and Indianapolis so that it had never become a bedroom community for those cities. It existed on its own terms, supported mainly by farming, tourism, and some light manufacturing.
Bill parked in front of the high school, built a block from the riverfront in the nineteen-twenties, got out of the car and walked up to the building’s massive wooden front doors. The smell of locker rooms and polished wood floors seeped from behind the locked doors, releasing a flood of memories from more than thirty years ago. His senior prom had been in the school’s gym. He could still smell Patti Smith’s too-strong lavender perfume. They kept in touch for a year or so after high school. Bill had no idea where she was now, other than in his memory, dancing at the prom. Other smells flooded his memory. Burning leaves in the fall, their acrid yet somehow pleasant odor mingled with the pungent, ripe-apple smell of cured tobacco hanging in warehouses that used to ring the town.