“You expect me to believe that bullshit, Willis?”

“All right. Wait until your wife disappears, then,” Willis said.

T.C. turned around. He looked at the prisoner through the dirty plastic divider. Anyone would look like a criminal through that plastic, he thought.

“I tell you what. If she disappears, I let you go,” T.C. said. “How’s that?”

“If she disappears, you won’t want to let me go,” Willis said.

The deputy pulled out of the gas station and crossed the frontage road, into the almost-full Denny’s parking lot. “You hungry?”

Willis looked at him.

“I guarantee this will be your last good meal for a while. I’d come in if I were you. I promised your mom I would make sure you had a square meal. If you try to escape, I’ll shoot you. I swear to God, Willis. Do you understand that? I’m not supposed to let you out of the goddamn car, much less take you into Denny’s for a meal.”

Willis nodded. He felt himself being picked up out of the back in the wind and cold. He felt the handcuffs come off his wrists.

“Thank you, T.C.,” Willis said.

“You’re welcome, Willis.” The deputy, much bigger than him, turned him around and they walked toward the restaurant together.

“Would you really shoot me?” Willis asked. He looked over his shoulder at T.C.. Willis was wearing the clothes his mother had brought him: a clean t-shirt, blue jeans and a heavy Sheriff’s Dept. green nylon coat that Quentin had lent him so he wouldn’t catch cold on the ride.

“Why, you feeling lucky?” T.C. asked.

CHAPTER 3

Quentin knew when he opened the car door that his life was going to change. He grabbed the door’s handle, but couldn’t make himself open it.  His eyes fixed on the red Denny’s sign showing through the falling snow. He’d been listening to the chatter on his police radio: Caltrans crews were about to blow a massive snowdrift on Emigrant Gap ridge. He knew that if the drift wasn’t blown, they were risking an avalanche that would close the road connecting Timberline to HHhighway 50, the town’s gateway to the outside world. Caltrans was broadcasting alerts to all police, sheriff departments, and Highway Patrol in the area. Quentin listened to an excited voice on the radio counting down. “Ten, nine, eight.” He switched the radio off.

You have to go on with your life. You’re only forty. Do you really want to be sitting by the fire alone the rest of your life? Okay, like the commercial says: Just do it.

He felt the door handle depress, the car door cracked open, a two-year spell broken. The life he’d lived before now—the years with his wife, who had been everything to him—were sucked out into the lightly falling snow. It wasn’t a betrayal; his wife, Marie, was dead after all. He felt the pain of that cold separation one more time nonetheless.

Time changes everything, he thought.

Quentin stepped out of his patrol car, slamming the door behind him. He looked up at the face of the Sierra, the sun nowhere to be seen.

You aren’t dead, you’re alive. So act like it, for Christ’s sake.

   Inside the packed restaurant he nodded to a table of Rotary Club members; the town’s prominent business people and ranchers ate at this Denny’s every Friday morning. The Rotary Club had contributed to all his campaigns over the years. He stopped and shook hands and made the necessary small talk about Founder’s Day, Timberline’s mid-winter holiday celebration that was right around the corner. They asked him about the possible highway closure and Quentin assured them the road would be back open in an hour, in plenty of time for the weekend’s festivities.

While he shook hands, Quentin searched the big dining room for Patty Tyson, the girl he’d come to meet. He saw her head bent over a newspaper in a booth in the back, along a row of windows with a view of the Emigrant Gap Ranger Station. Quentin lifted his cowboy hat, nervously slipped it off, and shook the last hand at the Rotary’s table. He made a passing joke to the business people, all old-time Timberline residents, about his not having had an opponent in the last election—an embarrassment, he told them with a smile, he was willing to undergo again.

   He left the Rotarians, most of whom he’d grown up with, and walked across the busy dining room. He tried to relax but couldn’t. The butterflies in his stomach rioted as he crossed the restaurant.

You’re an idiot for doing this. She probably just wants to talk about search and rescue, and now you’ve built yourself up for something else and you’ll be disappointed. She’s too pretty and young for you, anyway.

California State Park Ranger Patty Tyson watched the man she’d fallen in love with come into the Denny’s. For some reason, she immediately pretended she was immersed in the San Francisco Chronicle. She’d broken down and called Quentin at home, and, for all practical purposes, given herself away. She’d broken the Big Rule that she’d read in all the women’s magazines, but she didn’t give a damn.

What do rules have to do with it, she thought. Venus and Mars my ass.

She wanted to hook up with Quentin Collier, it was a natural and powerful feeling, and she didn’t feel like fighting it anymore. Desire was exhausting her.

She had fallen in love with him that past summer up in the high country when they were together on a search for a little girl who had been kidnapped from her parents’ car at one of the freeway rest stops on the highway, just a mile from the ranger station. They’d never found the little girl, or her body. But they had found something else, she thought now, pretending to read her newspaper: a quiet understanding on horseback. For one whole week, that summer, the entire search and rescue community, from Sacramento to Lake Tahoe, had come out, hundreds of volunteers, into the Emigrant Gap Wilderness to help look for the little girl who’d come from Los Angeles with her young parents for a weekend in the mountains.

Patty let herself look up from the newspaper and study the sheriff as he stopped to talk with a table of older men and women. He was like a presence that wasn’t a presence, she thought. He was quiet and yet, when they’d talked those six July days—sometimes traveling on horseback, sometimes resting in the shade of a big pine tree with views of the Central Valley spread out green-beautiful below them—he’d told her stories about the Timberline he’d grown up in, stories about sheriffing, stories about deer hunting with his father and uncles in the Emigrant Gap Wilderness before it became a state park. As she’d come from the east coast, the stories fascinated her.

Something was compelling about the way he spoke to her. Something inside the story, something that he told with his eyes and his big cowboy smile. The way he patted a horse, or cinched a saddle, or stretched out by the campfire propped up on his saddle blanket, his shirt stained with sweat and grime. At those moments Quentin Collier looked like a man from another age. When she saw him back in town he seemed a little out of place. By the second day of the search, the others in the posse had disappeared for her.

The problem, she knew, was that she’d always loved cowboys. And Quentin Collier was a cowboy. It was the reason she’d come west from Virginia; it was the reason she’d gone to the University of Nevada. It was the reason she’d called the sheriff and made herself sound like a schoolgirl with a bad crush.

But it was more than just the physical attraction, which was very strong. He made her feel safe. She remembered standing next to him one morning in the ranger-station parking lot, after they’d come down from the mountain, empty-handed, and depressed that the little girl hadn’t been found. Quentin was talking to the assembled press, radio and television. She’d felt a sense of well-being just standing next to him in the late afternoon sunshine, sweaty and saddle-sore, his voice deep and sonorous. She could read his body language already; he was trying to say the right things, nothing the little girl’s family might read, or hear, later and be hurt by. It was like standing next to one of those big old pine trees up on the mountain. You knew, that no matter what, the tree could survive it.