BY THE TIME we finally got to Ely, the coffee shop at the Old Ely Hotel and Gambling Hall had quit serving lunch, and the waitress, who’d been working since four thirty am, had no sympathy for us. We could walk across the street to the Dairy Queen. Or get munchies in the hotel bar. Or drive down the street to the market and make our own damn sandwiches for all she cared. Her coffee shop was closed. We had a two-thirty appointment with the sheriff, which didn’t leave a lot of time to find a bite to eat so Creamo opted for the bar (the Dairy Queen didn’t serve whiskey). Besides he couldn’t leave the hotel; Doug Hyman would be calling momentarily for an update.
“I need a bit more than peanuts and pretzels. I’m going across the street to the DQ. Want something?” I asked.
“What if Hyman calls?”
“What if?”
“No,” Creamo ordered, “you better stay here. Someone has to tell him why we just wasted a grand on that little dipshit and it’s not going to be me. You know, this isn’t one of those detective shows where the rich guy hands you a wad of cash to get a job done and doesn’t care how you spend it. Hyman cares. Trust me, he cares where every penny . . .”
“Just tell him that . . .”
“No, no, no. You tell him! It’s your wacky theory. You know what I think.”
Creamo wasn’t buying the notion that Meredith Hyman had gone in search of an underground Shangri-La described in the journal of a long-dead cavalryman. He’d already ordered someone in Las Vegas to track down her past-and-present boyfriends, and now it was just a matter of time before one of those acne-ridden, lovesick hounds confessed. Then he would pick up Merry and rough up the boyfriend. Case solved.
“I thought Sabrina Hyman was staying at this hotel,” I asked, as I followed him into the abandoned bar. “Shouldn’t we talk to her too? After all, she was there the night—”
Creamo ignored me. “Bartender!” he yelled. Behind the heavily shellacked bar sat row upon row of tempting libations but, alas, no bartender to serve them.
“I can’t imagine what it must have been like for her—by herself out here with her daughter missing. I think I would have gone crazy,” I continued.
“Bartender!” he yelled again. Until he got relief, I’d have better luck stirring up a conversation with a slot machine.
Like the hotel itself, the “saloon” (as it liked to be called) had resisted all attempts at modernization, except for the addition of electronic gambling devices and pinball machines ching-ching-chinging in every nook and cranny, even on a still-as-death afternoon in October. It was the same all over Nevada, gambling machines and pinball machines in restaurants, grocery stores, laundromats—all businesses save funeral homes. And, then it was probably only a matter of time before an enterprising mortician broke through that particular barrier of decency and installed a slot machine in his waiting room. Ho! Or, maybe he would decide to create the first drive-through funeral home. Drive up. View the departed. Drive away. Next!
“Where is the goddamn bartender?” Creamo scowled, after a few minutes of playing piano with his knuckles.
“The bartender is probably in the back doing the lunchtime dishes,” I chuckled. “It’s not exactly the height of tourist season. Why not help yourself? And while you’re at it, hand me some pretzels.”
I couldn’t blame Creamo for being grouchy. Thanks to me, he was low on cigarettes and even lower on patience. We’d had to bribe Nancy Jean with his Marlboros to get her to put her clothes back on. (I have a strict policy against hypnotizing naked people.) Then he’d had to occupy himself in the cold, snapping photos of tire treads while he waited.
I’d used Braid’s technique to put the girl under. It’s the oldest and most ridiculed method, cartoonish in its simplicity but remarkably successful. “Nancy Jean, focus on the silver dollar,” I’d ordered.
“You can’t hypnotize me!”
“Oh yeah.”
I swung my silver dollar key chain back and forth about a foot from her face. “You’re not going under. You’re just feeling sleepy.” I have to admit I felt a little silly, sitting in a Jeep in the middle of the desert in broad daylight, trying to put a girl under. Luckily, she proved to be extraordinarily susceptible to suggestion, following the silver dollar with her eyes until her lids drooped close. I must admit, I was surprised. Susceptibility to hypnotism generally correlates to open-mindedness. Not a trait generally associated with surly teenage girls.
“Nancy Jean, I want you to return to the day when you girls first found the mine.”
Her chin slumped down to her chest, a sign that she was regressing, and then she muttered without expression, “We didn’t find it. Merry did. She was always wandering around the cemetery making up romantic shit about the dead people. It’s so stupid.”
“Where did she find the journal?”
“In the tunnel. Stupid.”
For a second I was afraid I’d lost her, or that she was pretending. Her eyes fluttered beneath closed lids. Her shoulders crimped. “Oh, how stupid,” she finally muttered. “I’m not going.”
“Where? Where aren’t you going?”
“Merry wants us to come with her into the tunnel. I’m not going! Lettie says that cannibals live in the mountain. They ate the miner’s children. Stole them in the middle of the night, slaughtered them like baby pigs and then cooked their bodies over the fire. Merry says that’s stupid. She has a flashlight she stole from Palmer House, and she’s going down into the mine whether we’re going or not.”
She began twitching again. “Nancy Jean, what’s happening now.”
“There’s a strange light ahead. This is weird, really weird. Something . . .”
“Nancy Jean, where are you now?”
“At the pool.”
“The pool?”
“The tunnel ends at the pool. It’s like the ground caved in—I see sunlight above, and below is a pool of green water that kind of glows like a swimming pool at night, you know, one of those in-ground pools that has underwater lamps. My mother’s always trying to get Dad to buy one for her but he won’t. She’s says she needs it for her arthritis, but she just wants to have her friends over for one of her dumb parties. Wait for me, Lettie, wait for me.”
“What’s happening?”
“Merry’s found a box—a metal box lying there like it was waiting for her or something.”
She was quiet again.
“Nancy Jean?”
“It had the book. Seb’s book and the ointment. What’s that noise? Is someone coming?”
“Nancy Jean?”
“That’s all. We left. But the book, the book said Echoing waters was just beyond the pool . . .”
That was as far as I got before Creamo ran out of pictures to take—and patience. He opened the front door. “We’re out of here,” he announced, shaking the blowing sand from his hair like a wet dog. The girl quickly snapped out of the trance, leaving me more confused than ever. She described a cenote, a sink hole like those you’d find in the jungles of the Yucatan, not the parched deserts of Nevada. Had I just walked her back to a childhood memory?
Luckily the bartender turned out to be a young lady with a good sense of humor and an ever-so-much-nicer personality than the waitress at the coffee shop who I found out, after an unfortunate comment, happened to be her mother. Insult to mother aside, she rustled up leftovers of that day’s meatloaf special from the kitchen. Creamo wouldn’t eat it. He had stomach ulcers that apparently were unfazed by Jack Daniels. He sat at the bar trying to ignore me. Then he went to his room to make a few calls, while I snuck across the street for an ice cream cone.
The sheriff, almost an hour late, readily accepted Creamo’s offer of a Coors draft and then wrapped himself awkwardly across from us in a corner booth in the bar. He was a long, lean man with a nervous tick and a cowboy hat twice as big as it needed to be.
“We think Meredith Hyman was picked up by a boyfriend outside the reformatory last Saturday night,” Creamo explained.
“That’s exactly what I said.”
“Have you canvassed the local hotels?”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“To find out if any strangers had checked in recently.”
“Who else would check into a hotel in these areas but a stranger?”
Creamo changed gears: “According to your report, the matron in charge of the barracks said she saw Meredith Hyman at lights out—9 pm—and yet an hour later when Miss Peterson and her mother went to get her, she was gone. Did you speak to the matron directly?”
“Of course. Why would you ask that?”
“Because in the report you refer to the woman as, and I quote, ‘Miss Smith.’ The matron for Meredith Hyman’s barracks is named Isabella Rodriquez.”
The sheriff huffed up like a rooster: “You gotta understand, a lot of people go missing out here so when some privileged brat disappears from Enev, I’m not gonna screw up my Sunday over it—and I don’t care who her daddy is. He can come up here and kiss my ass!”
The sheriff spoke loudly enough for any nearby voter to hear and then, noting Creamo’s reaction, softened his tone: “Look, Enev is on federal land and it’s a state facility. We generally don’t get involved in their affairs. I mean, if an inmate escapes from any other prison, the sheriff doesn’t file a missing person’s report, now does he?”
“Then why did you take the report?”
“Because Sabrina Hyman insisted. She said technically her daughter was no longer a detainee and that she had reason to believe she was hiding some place on Enev—some mine tunnel or cave or something. She wanted me to arrange a search party. So I went out there with her the next morning and looked around. She’s a real looker, you know. Classy but not too, you know, hoity-toity. But the mine tunnel had caved in years ago, according to Peterson, so there was no way the girl could be down there.”
“When did, ah, Sabrina Hyman arrive in town?”
The sheriff chuckled, “Late Saturday night. It was hard to miss her!”
“What do you mean?”
“The engine of that foreign pile of crap of hers blew up right in front of the station, and then she went wacko, I tell you! She wouldn’t calm down till I promised to give old Winnie Ralston a visit.”
“Winnie Ralston?”
“Did I say Ralston? Well, I meant Winnie Peterson.”
Creamo, who wrote down everything in his steno pad, boldly underlined Ralston. “I see. How long have you known Ms. Peterson?”
“Well, she’s been out at Enev a dozen or so years but no one knows too much about her. I only see her when she comes into Ely for a hearing at the courthouse, and then she’s gone; she doesn’t hang around and have dinner or nothing.”
“You mean you didn’t take a missing person’s when the counselor disappeared? I have . . .”
“Oh, that. Oh yeah. Well, her parents came to town, you see, claimed she’d never go anywhere without her Bible. Some folks are real clueless about their kids, know what I mean?”
“Where is Mrs. Hyman now?”
“I haven’t seen her since Sunday afternoon, but I heard she’s out at Longleys.”
“What’s that?”
The Sheriff chuckled. “It’s a cathouse! A high-class cathouse, but a cathouse nonetheless. The lady who owns the place, Sal Longley, used to be Vegas showgirl before she inherited the ranch. I guess that’s how them two ladies hooked up in the first place.”
“Figures,” Creamo moaned, “I know Sal Longley.”
“You know, they had to tow Sabrina’s foreign piece of shit all the way to Elko. No mechanic in this neck of the woods would even touch it.”
“Did you talk to the other girls in Meredith’s barracks?” I asked. “Bonny, Thanh or Leticia?”
“Shit, Dr. Butters. You ever talk to those girls out at that place?”
“Did you know they’re no longer out at Enev? According to Ms. Peterson, two were released and the third was supposedly sent to the psychiatric facility in Pioche? Convenient, don’t you think?”
“Like I said, that’s a state facility. None of our business.”