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Glory be! The sun is out, she thought.
It wasn’t that the sun never shone in Tillamook County, just not usually this time of the morning. Greta got in the vehicle, set the bread loaves on the passenger seat, and checked her official phone. Another text: a reminder to be on time to meet Wallace, as if she would have forgotten since the last message.
Another reminder. At two-thirty that afternoon, she would talk to a student assembly at the Cloverdale Junior/Senior High School ten miles north on 101, giving standard legal warnings about drugs, driving, how to report crimes, and any other hot topic. It wasn’t her favorite part of the job. However, she’d now done it enough not to be stressed at facing hundreds of skeptical high school students, many only six or seven years younger than herself. She preferred the elementary school audiences versus older students who were confident they knew everything about life. An exception was the Cloverdale High School. It had fewer than t
wo hundred students enrolled and small but adequate facilities. It also had one of the country’s worst longtime records for futility in girls basketball. The year before Greta arrived, the team had won just a single game, and that against a private Christian school with only eighty students and a girls’ team of six players. And it had been a close game.
On one of Greta’s first school visits, she met the principal at Cloverdale High School. Emily Sievers, who was also the girls’ basketball coach, took one look at her and asked a question Greta had heard too many times.
“Did you play basketball?”
***
Greta was accustomed to such questions ever since she’d spurted taller than other girls her age. She supposed any man over six foot six would get similar questions.
Around her twelfth birthday, Greta discovered the first benefit of her height—basketball. A teacher convinced her to play for the elementary school girls’ team. Greta had hardly ever touched a basketball before and had grown into a solitary child to avoid other children’s meanness, especially other girls’. Basketball changed her life. She was the tallest girl on her team and on any other team from the small schools they played. After learning the rules, she quickly dominated the games. Not much of a shooter at first, she ruled the rebound areas and served as an impenetrable barrier to opposing players shooting near the basket.
To everyone’s surprise, especially her own, she blossomed. Basketball gave her something she excelled at and provided a source of more praise than she’d previously experienced. After she found an advantage in her height, her attitude toward school changed from being a place she had to go to one where she wanted to go. Even her grades improved, as she became interested in learning.
When she moved on to high school, she was almost six foot two when practice began for the girls basketball team. Although a freshman and still relatively inexperienced at the game, by the end of the season she was the first-team center. In the next three years, her skills improved as she topped out at six foot three, and her lanky freshman frame filled out.
Again, she dominated the league—enough so that before the start of her senior season, she received full athletic scholarship offers from thirteen colleges and universities, both within Missouri and in neighboring states. Although she had become less withdrawn, she succumbed to self-doubt and accepted the offer from Southwest Missouri, less than a half hour from home. Greta insisted she would live in Springfield at the campus. Her father supported her over her mother’s vociferous assumption that Greta would continue living at home with the family.
***
“Yes, I played in high school and college,” answered Greta.
“You know, Deputy Havorsford, I’m not a real coach. I never played the sport, watched it on TV, or attended more than a few games. I serve as the girls’ coach only because league rules required it, and there were no other teachers interested. I’ve made efforts to read up on basketball, but the team essentially coaches itself and does what they can for each game. I’m afraid losing by lopsided scores has almost become an honored tradition. I’m sure we’d all appreciate it if you could drop in occasionally to give the girls some pointers.”
That first year, Greta managed to stop by practices once or twice a week and tried to attend at least one of the two games each Friday and Saturday night, especially home games or nearby away games. By mid-season, the principal and the players insisted Greta sit on the bench with the team during games, not just to give advice, but because they began winning games and attributed the success to her coaching. The girls’ team ended up with eight wins and fourteen losses for the season, the best record the team had had in more than twenty years. Attendance also spiked. The novelty of the girls’ team not only winning games but also staying competitive even in losses did more for Greta’s acceptance by the local community than anything else.
Success continued in the current season. The girls’ team won three of their first four games, decisively in two of the games. By now the players, other Cloverdale students, and many citizens of southern Tillamook County commonly greeted her by “Greta,” “Deputy Greta,” or even “Coach” on occasion. The warm and fuzzy feeling she got from the locals’ familiarity surprised her. She’d had few friends in Missouri and had kept mostly to herself. Here, the almost forced familiarity with people had at first seemed uncomfortable, but now she took it for granted.
Her recognition for helping the Cloverdale girls’ team spread north to Tillamook City to a high school with more than three times the Cloverdale enrollment. When the Cloverdale girls beat the Tillamook City girls’ team in the first game of this season, the chagrined Tillamook City coach asked Greta if she could stop by sometime to help the Tillamook City girls. It was too far to come to practices regularly, and Greta already had her hands full, but she said she would drop by from time to time.
Today might have been one such opportunity because she would already be in Tillamook City, but the timing wouldn’t work because of the Cloverdale commitment. She texted the Tillamook City coach that she couldn’t make it today unless they did something around lunchtime.
Greta checked her personal phone for messages. She tried not to look when she first got up in the morning, especially on workout days. She looked now . . . and sighed. A text from her mother, as relayed through Jeanine, her younger sister: Why didn’t Greta call last night!
Their mother didn’t do texting or other “gadgety things.” Greta had scheduled Wednesday nights for the weekly call home to her parents. She also exchanged occasional emails, texts, and calls with Jeanine and her father, although she preferred to avoid interacting with Mom Havorsford as much as she could, and as much as guilt would allow. Even the weekly calls used to be on Sunday night. However, her mother always asked what Greta had done on Friday and Saturday nights, with particular emphasis on any social activities, such as dates and men. Then, if Greta admitted a lack of any such activity, her mother would launch into why Greta needed to be more social, have lower expectations of men, and buy more attractive clothes, ending with how her poor mother might never have grandchildren, and on and on. Finally, Greta shifted the call to Wednesdays, which, as she’d hoped, succeeded in giving her mother three days to forget to ask about the previous weekend’s social report.
I’ll call tonight, Greta promised herself. At least, my mother will have something else to berate me about—not calling on the regular night.
There were no other calls on her phone. Nothing from Alex, yet. She would check again later for the first iteration of Toompas’s acquaintances so she could start interviewing.
She pulled away from Doris’s café. Instead of going inland to meet 101, she drove back past her neighborhood along Cape Kiwanda Drive, heading north. She had time, so would take the smaller, more coastal road. Kiwanda turned into Sand Lake Road, then she drove past mudflats and bottomlands with dairies and took a left on Cape Lookout Road. She continued along to Netarts Bay Road and took a shortcut on Whiskey Creek Road to 131 into Tillamook City.
The route was slow driving. In the center of Tillamook City, she hit 101 and turned south toward the county airport. The turnoff to the co-located county sheriff’s office and the local Oregon State Police office branched just before the airport.
The Tillamook County Airport was a local oddity, originally built during World War II as a base for dirigibles to patrol for Japanese submarines off the Pacific Coast. Two enormous wooden hangers were built to house the blimps. One hanger had burned down years ago. The remaining hangar served as the Tillamook Air Museum, containing vintage planes of different eras. The county advertised the hangar as the largest wooden structure in the world, whether true or not. A common local discussion was predicting when a good Pacific storm would bring the old structure down; whether it would eventually burn, as had the other hangar; and whether the planes should be moved elsewhere before the anticipated collapse or conflagration. A few years before Greta arrived, the World War II planes were transferred to another air museu
m, but the remaining collection was varied and interesting.
Besides the museum, the original intersecting runways had also served military fixed-wing planes all those decades ago and were still operational. Now, however, the airport provided facilities for only a few small private planes and as an emergency runway for commercial traffic.
As she passed the runways on her right, she wondered whether an airliner making an emergency landing at the airport would be able to take off again because takeoffs needed more runway than emergency landings.
She pulled into the home office parking area and checked her watch: 9:42 a.m.
