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Friday started with Greta checking her email every hour. Her inbox filled with advertisements for miracle weight-loss supplements, airfare specials, mortgage refinancing, and penile-enlargement devices, none of which rated high on her interest list. No email from an unknown source about the mystery photos.
At noon, she and Plummer reported to Tillamook City for a deposition about the Umstead case. Umstead’s lawyer claimed his client had not tried to deliberately run Plummer down with his pickup but simply hadn’t seen him, and that Greta had irresponsibly fired at the vehicle, causing the angelic Mr. Umstead grave bodily injury and wrecking his vehicle. Despite the supposed plea deal, the lawyer hinted that Umstead wouldn’t sue the county and a certain Deputy Havorsford for millions if they dropped all charges. It was an indication of the state of the litigation system that everyone took the lawyer seriously. Wallace ordered Greta and Plummer to go over their formal reports before being deposed.
By the time they finished the deposition, the lawyer or, as a red-faced Greta referred to him, “That slimy piece of shit,” in no mincing terms told them he thought they were lying, and he would see to it that justice was done. This meant he would share in a payoff to entice Umstead not to file a lawsuit. The lawyer left the station all in one piece, to Greta’s wistful regret.
During a break, Plummer reporte
d he had looked into Balfour’s finances. Although no hard numbers were found, Plummer sensed that Father Merstory’s guess of a few hundred thousand dollars’ intake yearly by Balfour might be on the low side. Even granted that some of the funds went to operate the church, that still left room for Balfour’s scam to add up to some real money, especially if it had been going on for five years.
It was now past four o’clock. They both felt more exhausted than if they had been on their feet the last two-plus hours, instead of sitting across from a lawyer. He’d kept asking them the same questions over and over, in hopes that they would deviate as much as even one word in their report about Umstead, thus providing “definitive” proof of their unreliability. Afterward, neither of them was in the mood to do anything except go home. Which Greta intended to do, until she reached the Tillamook City limits on 101 south and remembered that Emily expected her at the girls basketball game that evening. She was tempted not to attend, knowing Emily would understand. By the time she reached Cloverdale, the vehicle’s clock read 4:38 p.m. The game would start at five o’clock. She decided to call Emily the next day to say she had been too involved in work to attend.
Yet when the turnoff to the high school came into view, her vehicle seemed to take the exit without her consciously making the decision. She drove the curving approach to the high school and parked in the lot in front of the school.
She justified her change of plans: It’ll do me good to focus on something totally different if only for a couple of hours. Besides, even if I’m in a funk, it doesn’t mean I have to crawl in a hole.
Self-buoyed, she went into the gym. People streamed in and bought tickets at a table set up outside the main door under a covered walkway. A middle-aged man she thought was a history teacher was selling the tickets and waved her through.
The girls’ locker room was crowded and noisy. Even with only eleven teenage girls, their coach/principal, and Greta, they filled the small room. Every time she saw the locker room, Greta wondered at how much chaos there must be with thirty girls getting ready for or showering after a regular gym class.
The noise was typical for a group of young women and increased in volume when they greeted Greta. The opposing team hailed from Vernonia, a small town about a hundred miles northeast as the crow flew—or maybe here a seagull was the more appropriate allusion. It took more than four hours for the visiting team to drive the twisting 180 miles of roads to Cloverdale.
The girls’ good spirits helped Greta’s mood. The team had won their last four games, and Vernonia wasn’t expected to give them much of a challenge. However, instead of concentrating on the coming game, the girls’ only topic of interest was that a junior backup guard had fainted during a practice. A medical exam later found her pregnant, and the girls speculated on the father among multiple candidates.
Here’s a sixteen-year-old girl getting it from several males, Greta thought, and I might as well be cloistered. Where’s the justice?
The distraction of figuring out their teammate’s extracurricular partners almost cost them the game. The halftime score stood at 29–23, Vernonia. Emily’s polite pleas for the girls to concentrate on the game were met by bored looks from the team. Greta’s more direct assessment of their performance resulted in red faces and one set of tears. Outside observers might have argued over the cause and effect of the halftime session, with Greta scowling as she sat on the Cloverdale bench during the second half. Cloverdale won 64–37.
The girls insisted Greta join them in the team hug and cheer. When she left, she admonished them to be more focused on Saturday’s game, which was also at home. This time, the opponent would be more formidable—Madison High School from Salem, the state capital. Madison was seven times the size of Cloverdale and had twelve wins versus two losses in the season against bigger schools than those on Cloverdale’s schedule.
It was almost eight-thirty when Greta got home. Still no email about the photos. She made herself a bowl of oatmeal, ate it without noticing, and turned in.
Saturday morning proved even more disappointing. Plummer called early and said he had family obligations and wouldn’t be active on the case, unless something major broke. Greta felt a moment of irritation that he wouldn’t be any help. Her second reaction was a tinge of envy that he had another life to interfere with work.
Greta checked her email. Ads, a chatty email from Jeanine, a query from Coach Villars asking whether Greta was keeping in shape—she groaned at that one. Nothing related to Peruvian photographs.
The clear skies and the bright sun were both unusual for this time of day and year. They irritated her because they didn’t match her mood. After an hour of putzing around the house, she checked her email. Nothing. Another hour of cleaning the bathroom and the kitchen, neither of which needed much attention because she always studiously cleaned up after herself. She put a load of laundry in the washer, then checked her email again. Ads.
At twenty past nine, she felt hunger pangs. She resisted the urge to go to Doris’s for breakfast because she wanted to be around to check her email, which she did after eating toast and two bananas. Nothing.
She transferred the wash to the dryer, then sat on the living room couch and browsed through her Toompas file. She almost knew the entire two-inch-thick pile of papers by heart, yet she figured something might pop out that she’d missed, or she might make some connection based on the latest information. None of that came to pass.
Then it was time again, on the hour, to check her email. Ad, ad, an email from Jeanine—something about a cat, an ad, and one email with no title. She didn’t recognize the address. Her heart rate picked up. She clicked on it. There was no message, only two Internet addresses.
She copied the first address into the browser and clicked to connect. The first thing she saw was the picture with the Malagasy sign in the background. It was part of an article with several pictures and pages of text. She looked at the source. It was a South African newspaper story about Madagascar and that island country’s poverty crisis. She scanned through the text. As the title indicated, the article talked about the problems being faced within a subsistence economy. The photo of interest was from a small village called Ambodihazomamy. How it might be pronounced was anybody’s guess. The photo supposedly included citizens of the village, gathered to hear a local government official explain how well things were going. Their expressions conveyed their conviction.
She printed out the article to read more carefully later, even though the crucial point was obvious. It wasn’t some village in Peru. Balfour had cribbed it off the Internet because it looked plausibly as if it depicted a poor rural South American village.
She copied the second address and clicked to connect. Another article, this one published in a Spanish language magazine. When her high school Spanish didn’t get her too far, she connected to an English-Spanish dictionary. She managed to figure out that the article described the plight of the Huaorani Indians in the western part of Amazonian Brazil, where it bordered on the Orellana province of Ecuador. The photograph showed a group of Indians living in makeshift huts near the town of Purna Susa, where part of the tribe resided and intermarried with Brazilians.
Further inquiries were needed, but she was convinced Balfour was running a scam using a fake Peruvian mission to justify raising money. Where the funds actually went, she would find out. The “saved” Reverend Balfour saved only for himself.
The phony mission had been going on for several years, according to the local news articles. Greta wondered how much he’d bilked from his congregation. For that matter, what other funds intended for the church itself had been channeled into his pockets?
These thoughts made Greta angrier than the possibility Balfour might be involved in Toompas’s death. She didn’t know Toompas, whereas she probably knew a few members of Balfour’s congregation. Those she didn’t know were innocent everyday people being robbed of not only their money, but inevitably part of their trust in life and its institutions.
I’ll get this prick, even if he’s not involved with Toompas, she thought, and I’ll see him spend as many years as possible behind bars.
