AllFreeNovel
Share Us
With Balfour dead, they would never know whether he had met with Wallace and learned anything about the case. They also wouldn’t learn how Balfour drove Toompas’s car to Lincoln City and returned to Pacific City for his own vehicle.
Wallace wasn’t the only one on Greta’s mind. Plummer and Simpson also knew enough details of the investigation into Balfour, making up the other two of the four people who had known. She couldn’t see any possible connection with Simpson because he was only a transient in the county, in addition to being a U.S. marshal. That left Plummer. He was a local and knew as much about the investigation as Greta, but she couldn’t see a connection there either.
This sort of thing can get you into paranoid places if you aren’t careful, she told herself. Not everything ties together. Bruce warned me, sometimes you just never find out everything.
She and Plummer sat back in their chairs and looked at each other. For both of them, it was a moment of frustration and closure—especially for Greta, given the time and energy she had spent tracking down leads. Details were missing and would likely remain missing, but the case was, for all practical purposes, closed. While they couldn’t have proved a murder charge against Balfour beyond a doubt, Greta was firm in her own mind that Toompas’s killer had been punished, albeit not the way she would have preferred. It was all so anticlimactic.
Greta endured several interviews with print and electronic media reporters before they gradually lost interest and moved on to newer stories. The first couple of times, she felt awkward and mumbled through the experience. By the fourth one, it was easier. The fifth and final time, a reporter and a camera crew from a Portland TV station wanted a combination news and special interest story on the woman sheriff’s deputy who fought off a killer and solved both a murder and a major fraud case.
Naturally, Wallace edged himself into the filmed interview. At first, Greta was angry, then she saw an opportunity with the camera rolling. She thanked Wallace for hiring her and for his mentorship, successfully fighting down her gag reflex. A confused Wallace stumbled through praise of his woman deputy and her bright future with his department. Greta figured he was now locked into her tenure. She wondered how far she could push him and for how long.
After another two weeks, Greta returned to patrol duties. The fraud investigation would be subsumed within the Oregon State Police, the FBI, and State Department. Elsewhere, everything was the same, and everything was different. There were speeding tickets to give out, lost dogs to help find, missing cows to investigate, burglary reports, summonses to deliver, truancies, Salt Lake squatters to roust, and talks at schools.
The weather drifted into spring, meaning less rain and low fog, with more overcast skies and high fog.
The shock of the fall of the Church of God Arising still reverberated in town. The ownership of the church property was not in Balfour’s name but was listed as a corporate entity owned by a member of the congregation, a lumber mill operator. While many of the congregation abandoned the church, the property owner and half of the congregation were trying to reconstitute the church under a different name. They still believed in the goals and the community, though they planned to scrutinize any future leadership more thoroughly.
Helen Snyder’s fear of her husband’s reaction was understandable, but the result, a puzzle. Greta made a point of checking in on Helen several times. Instead of Joe Snyder being angry, even violent, when he found out about his wife and Balfour, he was more hurt than angry. The last time Greta visited, Helen seemed almost bemused at her husband’s changed attitude toward her. Greta suspected the marriage might actually last and be better than before. Maybe. But Greta thought Helen should move on without Joe. Who knew how things might work out?
James Plummer reverted to Jimbo now that he wasn’t working with Greta anymore. She regretted the reversion but tried to understand that he still needed to get along with Wallace on a daily basis. Habits lasting that many years were hard to change.
Greta was no longer the inexperienced rookie deputy hired to fill a quota for women. She was now a veteran of the department, as evidenced by attitude changes she perceived when interacting with most of the department’s staff and other regional law enforcement. People seemed to greet her more often and more warmly than before. She wondered whether it was others’ behavior that had ch
anged or her own view of them and herself. She was different. When she saw her reflection in windows and mirrors, she noticed a new aura, a new demeanor.
She thought deeply and often of her life in Tillamook and whether something else lay in her future. Her routine duties as a sheriff’s deputy brought satisfaction when she helped people who needed it. Less rewarding was dealing with minor infractions such as traffic violations, transporting prisoners, and responding to missing animals. Even on her relatively solitary workdays, there was too much bullshit whose main purpose seemed to be preventing people from accomplishing anything. Intellectually, she knew some of it was important, and she performed her duties conscientiously—but did they need to be done by her?
The Toompas case had captivated her like nothing else had, in her year and a half in Oregon. Despite Toompas being a nobody, he was a person. Justice had been done, though it didn’t end as she had imagined or wished, but the frustration of spending months on a fruitless investigation had vanished with the solution.
Would it always be like this? she wondered. Were the tedium and disappointment worth it in the end?
And what an end! She’d had no time to be frightened when Balfour had attacked her. It all happened so fast. Even when she stumbled back down the beach to find help and didn’t know how serious her injuries were, she wasn’t frightened as much as determined not to die. In the hospital, later at home, and now back at work, she felt confused that the memory of the events elicited feelings, not of fear, but almost of exhilaration. In a way, it reminded her of when she discovered basketball. At first, the sport had been an outlet for a withdrawn child. Later, it was a way to impose herself on others and the world in a manner that fell within accepted rules.
She relived the seconds of the fight with Balfour. She knew she had done well, given the circumstances, but not well enough. She needed to better defend herself. She also wanted to become a crack shot. Granted, she had been stabbed and cut, and he had run off, but she had emptied an entire .32 clip at Balfour and only made one solid hit. She could and would do better. Though better for what? Maybe time would tell. Whatever her feelings, she was not altogether comfortable with them.
Despite how it ended, the Toompas murder investigation reminded her why she had initially been attracted to criminology. It certainly had nothing to do with the daily routine of a deputy sheriff on patrol. She pondered where she would go next in life. Try for a detective position, where investigations were the norm and not an aberration? Would Wallace support her? If not in Tillamook, then in some other county or city police department? Maybe somewhere else in Oregon? Definitely not back to Missouri, despite her mother’s increasing pressure after learning the details of Greta’s injuries. What about the Marshal Service? She didn’t think a six-foot, three-inch woman would get to do much undercover work. She was an intermittent viewer of the police and justice TV shows and since the attack had re-watched movies involving U.S. marshals. Maybe she’d ask Simpson.
There was also the possibility of making the Olympics. Although in the last six months it had recessed to the back of her mind, she still had time to make a final decision. For some reason, she felt more energized about the challenge.
For now, she had the daily routine. For now, she would continue to exercise. She hadn’t been to Portland for her dance weekends in three months. Although she wouldn’t notice it for some time, eventually she would come to see the dancer as herself, instead of someone else, someone different from Greta.
I wonder if Simpson dances? she thought. How much longer will he be around? And what are his future plans?
Whatever the future, Greta felt changed. She smiled to herself, thinking of the hated nickname other girls had given her as a twelve-year-old during her growth spurt. Her skinny arms and legs seemed to flail in all directions, even when she walked, and she was often dressed in pink by her mother. They told her she looked like a flamingo, the scrawny wading bird with the funny face that moved like a joke on land.
But there was more to the flamingo. As awkward as it was on land, once in the air it was poetry in motion, gliding effortlessly with the wind and cruising gracefully over the water. That was how she wanted to see herself, as a graceful, gliding creature of the skies. Where would she fly?
The End
