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She’d had the oddest feeling for several hours that something lurked just beyond her consciousness. Something she was missing or hadn’t connected. Was it about the Toompas case or something else? She pushed it from her mind. If it was important, it would come up again.
She went to bed early, anticipating a call because of the storm. It was a wise move. At 2:54 a.m., her phone rang.
“Havorsford? Jenkins here. Tillamook dispatch office. You’re up. Truck off the road just south of the Pleasant Valley straightaway.”
“That’s in Barstow’s district.”
“Can’t reach him, so it falls to you. Call in on the radio when you’re en route.” Jessica Jenkins hung up without waiting for Greta to ask questions or say she was responding. The wind still howled among the trees around her house, and rain drummed on the skylights and the windows.
Greta groaned in resignation and threw off the covers. Within minutes, she was pulling out of her driveway, a selection of jackets and rain gear in the passenger seat.
It was a nasty night. She was surprised she hadn’t gotten a call before this.
She saw no traffic. Locals were either sleeping or had better sense than to be outside unless necessary.
I bet it’s a delivery truck. Hopefully, not one of the big rigs. What other kind of truck would be out on a night like this?
The answer came when she found the accident scene. It was U-Haul moving truck at the south end of the Pleasant Valley straightaway where 101 curved to the right. The truck was on its left side off the road. Probably took the turn a little too fast, and a gust of wind hit the side of the truck. Then, over it went.
There were a couple of flares on the road, not that anyone could easily see them in the rain and wind, but someone had made the effort. She went past the overturn, did a U-turn, and came back to park off the lane right before the turnover. She switched on her flashing lights and went over to two men standing near the truck. One was the U-Haul driver, unhurt but shaken, and the other a local who happened on the scene as he drove north and called 911. After confirming no injuries, she called in a report, then set out more flares two hundred yards on both directions, and cones near her vehicle and the overturn. The local asked if he was needed anymore. Greta questioned him about whether he seen the accident, which he hadn’t. She got his name and information and told him he could go. She thanked him for stopping and helping.
She let the U-Haul driver sit in her vehicle and use her personal cell phone to call his family. He had been on his way from Portland to Newport, where he was transferring to the Homeland Security Office there. His family was due to follow the next day to unload furniture at the house they were renting.
Greta waited with him until a tow truck from Tillamook City arrived. The first thing they had to do was get the truck back on its wheels. The tow truck had an industrial-strength hook and pull, big rig accidents not being unknown on the coast’s windy, narrow roads. The two-man crew had the U-Haul upright in short order. They then hooked it up and towed it to Tillamook City. The driver of the car rode in the tow truck.
It was eight-thirty in the morning when the accident scene was cleared. The U-Haul driver had effusively thanked Greta. She figured there was no harm in having someone in Homeland Security feel he owed her, though she didn’t think it would be a chit she’d ever call in.
She collected her cones, kicked any still active flares to the side, and called in that she’d be off duty for the next few hours or until the next call. Then she drove home and made herself a bowl of oatmeal. After eating, she crawled back under the covers and listened to the storm that still had not let up.
She lucked out and got three solid hours of sleep before the next call. One of the trailer families at the Sand Lake Dunes Park couldn’t find their five-year-old daughter and had frantically called in for help. Once again, Greta was up and out the door in minutes. When she arrived, the family
and nearly a hundred others were searching the beach and the dunes. The mother catastrophized about the girl wandering out to the beach and being swept away during the storm.
Greta helped organize the search and spent three hours in the driving wind and rain until the girl showed up. She had gone to a neighboring trailer of a friend and fallen asleep. No one in that family had thought to check their own trailer. The girl’s mother was ecstatic at the daughter’s return, hugging her too tightly and crying. Then she proceeded to spank the howling child back into their trailer, while cursing her all the way. Greta shook her head. As it happened, right about the time they found the girl, the storm subsided. Greta left the dune area, as the late afternoon sun broke through the clouds.
She was due to have dinner with Doris and her family that night. She called to see whether the storm had canceled their dinner plans.
“Why would it?” replied the puzzled restaurant owner. “It was only rain and wind, and it’s clearin’ up.”
Because Doris didn’t drink wine and bringing a dessert to a baker didn’t make sense, Greta brought flowers she had picked up in the Pacific City market. Doris and her husband, John, were a welcome diversion from Greta’s activities that day. They talked about the town, the girls basketball team, and the Seattle Seahawks, who had just finished a good season after losing the NFC Championship game to Green Bay. Greta wondered whether John and Bruce Penderman should form a fan club, maybe to meet at the Brewery. They could be charter members.
Although Greta liked the couple, they pretty much exhausted every topic of conversation by dessert and decaf. Greta excused herself as having had a long day, which was true. She left with a promise to invite them to her place next month.
At home, she had one last duty before sleep. Her sister Jeanine had left a message to call back on her cell phone, no matter what the hour. Worried about bad news, Greta called immediately. The only news was that Jeanine wanted to talk to her, which actually was news because it so seldom happened. They talked for almost an hour about nothing in particular. Greta got the impression her younger sister just needed a sounding board. Greta didn’t think she was the best person to give life advice; however, she knew from experience that her family was not a good source of non-judgmental female listeners.
Finally, at eleven o’clock she turned out the lights and pulled the covers up to her chin. Sleep followed quickly.
CHAPTER 17
When the Toompas case broke open, it happened unexpectedly and not due to the investigation team’s work. Remaining bands of wind from the big low-pressure system were still blowing when Greta went for her run. Seagulls flapped hard or simply allowed the wind to carry them. Greta laughed to see groups of gulls sailing backward. They even faced into the wind coming off the ocean, only to fold their wings in a shallow dive to gain speed and then beat furiously against the wind to recover lost ground. Most gulls didn’t try to fly, staying in groups of ten to several scores, huddled on the beach. Some squawked at her and hopped aside when she trotted by. Others didn’t move at all, and she swerved to avoid stepping on them.
The tide ebbed, and the broad band of damp sand gave good footing, except for piles of small animal shells and bodies. At different times of the year, the beaches could be bare or covered with debris. Often branches, logs, and stump fragments from logging piled up on the sand. Some were so weathered, one had to wonder how long they had floated at sea and where they’d come from. Given that the Humboldt Current ran south along the coast, that meant the trees must have grown farther north: Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Alaska, or even Japan and the eastern territories of Russia. The one exception was Greta’s landmark redwood stump, which inexplicably must have floated north from California, the only place coastal redwoods existed.
At other times, there might be sand dollars—round, flattened shells with their five-pointed star pattern on top. They could be found scattered or in clusters of hundreds within a short stretch of beach, only to disappear the next time she ran. They were her favorite.
Sometimes piles of various seaweeds covered the beach or, as today, the one- to two-inch creatures she found covering the sand—copepods, small, multi-legged, shelled creatures that looked like large beetles. Occasionally, their shells and carcasses littered the sand by the tens of thousands, and she wondered where they had come from, and why only at certain times of the year.
With the variety of weather systems along this coast, the vagaries of tides that shifted the shape of the beach, and washed-up debris, Greta never felt like she jogged the same course for even a second time.
