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However, track and field was where she excelled. By the spring, she was dominating discus and hammer as she had in high school. Her national ranking rose to number four in discus and number five in the hammer by the time the Olympic trials were due to be held at the University of Oregon facility in Eugene. Only the top three in any event moved on to the Olympics. The months before the trials were intense, with almost nothing else in her life except training.
Greta’s months of work and fantasies all crashed for the most innocuous and stupid of reasons.
As she walked to a criminology class, she passed three male students going the other direction. All three eyed the woman taller by inches than any of them. Once they passed, she heard them speaking and then laughing, she assumed at her. Angry, she turned to retort, not watching her step. Her right foot came down on a slanted curb, and the unexpected angle and her weight twisted the ankle. She fell, crying out. The three boys came back to help her. Only later did she acknowledge to herself that they’d probably hardly noticed her, except to make the casual observation that she was tall. She had only herself to blame.
The severe ankle sprain precluded her from participating in the field trials in Eugene. If she had been higher ranked or from a major track school, the U.S. Olympic Committee might have given her a separate trial when she recovered. However, the committee declined to even consider the separate trial, and her chance at the games vanished.
She lapsed into a week-long funk, the year of commitment lost to a moment of inattention and misplaced sensitivity. She threw herself into coursework she’d neglected, due to the training regime. As she recovered her equilibrium, her final semester ended, and she turned to what she’d do next.
She had already accepted the Tillamook job offer when track coach Villars asked her to come see him.
“Greta, I appreciate how bad you feel about missing out on the Olympic trials, but there’s still a chance for you in the next games in four years. This isn’t just my opinion. I’ve been talking to some of the Olympic coaches. In the field events, especially throwing, peak performance tends to come later when the body finishes maturing, often in the later twenties into early thirties. You’re only twenty-two. When the next games roll around, you’ll be twenty-six and coming into your peak years.”
Hope flared up only momentarily. “But I’ll be out of school and working in Oregon.”
“I looked it up,” Villars said. “It’s a hundred and forty driving miles from where you’ll work to Eugene, Oregon, the site of the U.S. Olympic trials. Many athletes live in the area to be close to coaches. You’ll be farther away but close enough to keep in contact. Of course, if you decide to do it, you’d have to commit to pretty much full-time training for two years.”
“What am I supposed to live on for those two years?”
“That’s a problem. If you were higher ranked, the U.S. Olympic Committee could probably work out support by a sponsor or even the USOC itself. Since you’ll be out of school, more likely you’d need to work part time and possibly get family support or whatever else you could put together. It wouldn’t easy. I’m just saying it’s possible. Of course, the higher you get ranked, the more support would be found, but that would require you to continue training and entering non-collegiate meets to improve your ranking.”
Villars sat back in his chair. “Greta, this is now just me talking, not any other coaches. I think you have a real shot at a medal but only with total commitment on your part. I know I’ve ragged on you about it, but with basketball, your studies, and your own hesitancy to improve, for whatever reason you’ve never made that level of commitment before. I’m willing to help where I can, but it’s all going to come back to you and how much you want this.”
She didn’t give Villars any encouragement, and he didn’t push further. Four years of scrimping to live while training was not in the cards. She had a full-time job in Oregon. However, she figured she had two years to decide. If she opted to go for the Olympics again, she needed to stay in minimal condition. Four years seemed like forever, and two years wasn’t much shorter. Although she couldn’t commit, she wouldn’t rule it out, which motivated her runs and visits to the weight room. In addition, despite her self-consciousness, part of her liked the energized feeling she got from staying in condition and the empowerment of knowing her own strength.
CHAPTER 12
By the time Greta finished working out, it was nearly time to meet Bruce at the café. She showered quickly, dressed, and pulled up at the curb in front of Doris’s when a radio call came.
“Oh-Nine. This is Tillamook. Come in.”
“Tillamook, this is Oh-nine. Havorsford here.”
“10-50 on 101 between Cloverdale and Hebo. Can you 10-19?”
She mentally translated, An accident. Can I respond? Greta had studied hard the first month on the job to memorize the code system used by Tillamook County. It was only upon watching a TV police show that she learned the same system was not used everywhere—to her disgust.
“Copy. Oh-nine is 10-17.” She stepped out of the cab and waved at Bruce through the café window to get his attention. She mimed talking on the radio and slid her right hand over her left to indicate she had to go. He nodded and waved.
The call didn’t give the exact location, but she found the accident three miles north of Cloverdale. She could have written the accident report before talking to anyone. A Honda Accord with Arizona plates lay down an embankment off 101. Three other vehicles were parked alongside the road. Patches of fog lingered—not fog off the ocean, but from the adjacent fields. On sunny days, a short-lived fog often rose and burned off before it reached thirty feet in the air, though not this morning.
Greta confirmed her prediction once she talked to the drivers and the witnesses. The Arizona driver had passed another car, oblivious to oncoming traffic hidden by a fog patch. When the driver saw the approaching cars, he was alongside the pickup he was passing and was faced with four choices: brake and try to get back to his lane, speed up to pass in time, crash head-on, or go off the left side of the road. Greta figured he did the only thing he could to avoid disaster and went off the road. While he might have been more careful given the fog, the road conditions here were tricky for foreigners, and the road’s line markings indicated that passing was allowed at the point where he’d made the attempt.
Fortunately, no injuries resulted, although Greta assumed the Honda was totaled—a broken front axle, along with major damage to the front and passenger side of the car. She set out flares and cones and called in for a flatbed truck from Tillamook City. The car’s damage precluded towing. She got statements and the required information, took photos, and stayed until the truck driver loaded the damaged car and headed back to Tillamook City. Then she picked up the cones and kicked any remaining flares off to the side of the road.
She called in.
“Tillamook. This is Oh-nine. The 10-50 north of Cloverdale is 10-24. Oh-nine is 10-8.”
That translated as: Accident cleared, back on patrol.
She proceeded to the next major law enforcement mission worthy of Sherlock Holmes. Four children from Netarts had missed the previous week of school. The parents hadn’t reported reasons for the absences, and no one answered the family’s phone. The county was on a serious binge of enforcing truancy laws and assigned Greta to check with the parents. She would also stop at the site where they’d found Toompas’s body. There, she would mentally review the case and mull over the progress or, more precisely, lack of progress.
She resolved the case of the four absent students through crack police work. She knocked on the door, and a harried-looking woman answered, coughing and wiping a runny nose. The entire family was suffering from bad colds—husband, wife, and six kids—two not yet of school age. Naturally, it fell to the wife to care for everyone else, despite her own condition. Technically, Greta should have warned the parents about not calling in to the school, but she figured the woman had enough problems and made a note claiming she had counseled the parents.
From Netarts, she drove the few miles to the Lincoln-Tillamook border and the same pullout where the Coca-Cola driver had found Toompas. She stood by the guardrail for three or four minutes, remembering the morning Boylan had called about a possible body.
She got back into her vehicle and checked her Sheriff’s Department phone. Wonders of the Internet, she connected to the department web page, logged in wit
