Heads You Lose - Lisa Lutz [51]
When he came to the Wallis exit, Paul took it without thinking. He was surprised to remember all the turns it took to reach the cabin. Taking a deep breath, he pulled into the gravel driveway. No cars were out front, and it looked like no one had been there for a while. He had expected everything to look tiny, like nostalgic settings usually do, but it all looked normal. The cabin was nothing special, but it was nestled in a beautiful little valley crowded with redwoods. Not bad for a park ranger and a fish hatchery receptionist, Paul thought.
He went around the back and climbed in one of the windows on the back porch. There was never anything inside worth stealing, unless you had a thing for mismatched furniture from the seventies, so no one had ever bothered getting locks on all the windows.
Before his feet hit the floor, Paul was transported to his childhood. On the wall in front of him was the big, dopey felt sign his mom had made: two pine trees, with WINO spelled out in stylized letters between them, purportedly representing a hammock. The Wallis International Nature Organization, his parents’ casual co-op of friends who shared the cabin. The club seemed to exist mostly to facilitate jokes about the club (which was “International,” for example, because one of the men was Canadian). The sign used to hang in the entryway but had been moved here to the laundry room, apparently by someone who didn’t have the heart to throw it away after the accident. Paul wondered if some of the same folks still had a stake in the place.
But Paul wasn’t there to reminisce. He decided to get the worst part out of the way first, taking a quick look through the bedroom where his parents had been found. The furniture seemed to have been updated by a decade or so, but nothing else struck him. He went through the rest of the cabin.
In the hallway between the bedrooms Paul came across the big maple desk. Paul’s dad was the type of man who recorded everything, even noting his mileage in a little notebook he kept in the glove compartment. If there were records for the place, this is where they’d be. In the back of the drawer, in a manila folder marked WINO, he found a sheet of names, addresses, and phone numbers. Three couples were listed: Jasmine and Walter Blakey, Grace and Victor Collaspo, Mal and Mel Sundstrom. Two of the couples rang a distant bell. He copied down the names and addresses, all of which were within a hundred miles of the place.
Suddenly feeling like an intruder, he went out the way he’d come in and got back on the highway. Instead of obsessing on the names and what he was going to do with them, he decided to go to Brandy’s for some comfort.
Up in Tulac, she greeted him warmly, and he didn’t mind when he noticed her furtively shutting down her computer—probably to hide some controversial chess gambit from the nineteenth century or something. 25 Confronting her about the intellectual stuff could wait, though.
Later that night, lying in bed with her, he couldn’t sleep. Some brotherly instinct told him to go home.
When he finally got there around midnight, Lacey was out. He plugged his cell phone into the charger and after a moment the voicemail icon popped up. The first message was from Lacey, who seemed to be having trouble catching her breath: “Paul, call me as soon as possible. This is urgent.” The second one was a calmer but equally urgent version of the same message. Paul braced himself as