Wolf in the Shadows - Marcia Muller [2]
Hy—Heino—Ripinsky. Gentleman sheep rancher and director of an environmental foundation in the Mono County town of Vernon on the shore of Tufa Lake. Multitalented: airplane pilot, book collector, naturalist, sometime diplomat, sometime protester for worthy causes. Long rap sheet to go with the latter. Multilingual: English, Spanish, Russian, and French, speaking all with unaccented fluency. Tall, lanky, hawk-nosed, with shaggy dark-blond hair and a droopy mustache. Given to rugged outdoorsman’s clothing, but also at home in formal fund-raising attire. A gentle, passionate man, but a man whom I’d also heard described as dangerous, perhaps violent.
And he did have his darker side. Tragedy in his background: one wife, Julie Spaulding, who had, as he put it, saved him from hell and later died of a debilitating disease. Julie, who had understood his self-destructive urges and wisely established the Spaulding Foundation to occupy his lonely hours. Mystery in his background, too: a nine-year hole, years away from Tufa Lake about which rumors abounded. Rumors, from employment by the CIA to a prison term—and none, I was convinced, that came close to the true story.
Hy refused to tell me the truth, even after we became lovers late in March. The barrier of silence had driven me to set up a case file containing what fragmentary information about his past I’d been able to gather. A file that I’d destroyed only a little over a week ago, convinced I had no right or need to pry into what he seemed determined to conceal, and had set up once again just this morning when I learned from his assistant at the foundation that Hy had apparently staged a deliberate and well-thought-out disappearance.
At first tracking him down had seemed like an adventure, perhaps a response to a subtle challenge on his part. But after an hour of thought, I began to wonder if the disappearance was deliberate after all. Hy didn’t play games, not that kind. Now tracking him down seemed imperative. Now I was afraid for him.
* * *
Oakland Airport was nearly socked in by fog, and the wind gusted across its north field, where the general aviation terminal was located. A couple of corporate jets were fueling up, but otherwise there was little activity. I skirted the terminal building to the small aircraft tie-downs.
The wind made the Cessnas and Beechcrafts and Pipers strain at the chains that tethered them; their wings creaked and shivered, looking deceptively fragile. I moved quickly among them until I spotted Hy’s Citabria Decathlon in the tie-down where he’d parked it last Wednesday morning. Even if it hadn’t been in the same place, I would have known it instantly by the blue silhouette of a gull that seemed to soar against the white background and the identification number, 77289. It was a small, high-winged plane—tandem two-seater, and aerobatic. Hy had once proudly informed me that it could fly upside down, but so far, thank God, he hadn’t treated me to that experience.
As I approached the Citabria, I felt deflated, a little shaky, even. I supposed that in the back of my mind I’d hoped to find it gone, learn that Hy was on his way back to Tufa Lake, and be able to stop worrying. But seeing it here brought the gravity of the situation home to me, and now I was sure that Hy’s disappearance wasn’t a playful challenge to my investigatory abilities.
When we’d climbed out of the plane last Wednesday morning, back from a Memorial Day weekend vacation in the White Mountains, he’d said he planned to refuel and immediately continue on to San Diego, where one of his many unnamed old buddies had a business proposition to make him. True to form, Hy hadn’t given me a hint as to what the proposition might be or where to reach him, had merely said he’d fill me in if it worked out. Probably I should have become concerned for him sooner, because he hadn’t called me. One thing— practically the only thing—I could depend on Hy for was to keep in touch.
“Can I