Page 15 of A Week Away
“We’re going down to Sun Valley. I’m looking for a single wide on 5th or 6th.”
“Okay,” Spencer said doubtfully. “There’s probably more than one.”
“I’ve been there before. I’m hoping I recognize it when I see it.”
Spencer started the van and pulled out of the casino’s parking lot.
“So he wasn’t in there?” Cass asked.
“The bartender said he’s in prison, but he doesn’t know which one. He might be out or there might be someone at his place who knows.”
“So we’re not going to find out what we need to know tonight?”
“No. I don’t think we are.”
The thing was, I felt like we had figured it out. He admitted that his mother might have brought him to Reno after his father disappeared. In my mind, themightpart of that sentence had already evaporated. His mother had brought him out to Reno while she sold his father’s papers to Gavin, and then gambled the money away. Or she might have won. It didn’t matter if she walked away with most of the money or not. The point was, she sold her husband’s important papers. She knew he wasn’t coming back. She knew he was dead. And she probably knew who killed him. That is, if she didn’t do it herself.
It took less than ten minutes to get to the Sun Valley area. We pulled into the neighborhood. I looked for something familiar but didn’t see it. I tried to think of the color the trailer had been. Nothing came to mind. That told me something though. It wasn’t an unusual or remarkable color. I would have remembered orange, red, bright blue, bright yellow—bright anything. Pink, lime green, black. That left gray, light yellow, light blue, white, beige. All the super bland colors. All the colors trailers actually were.
We drove up and down 5th and 6th Avenues twice. I was already beginning to think about what we should do next as we passed a white single-wide with gray shutters.
“Slow down,” I said.
The chain-link fence was familiar, but then a lot of the homes on this street hand them. On one side of the yard there was a twenty-year-old Plymouth Duster sitting on blocks. It was army green. It had still been in use when I’d been there before. I remembered it because I’d owned a Plymouth Duster once. Mine had been baby blue.
“This is it.”
Spencer came to a complete stop. There was a light on in what looked like the living room. Before I’d thought much about it, I jumped out of the van. I shut the door, but before I’d gotten all the way up the driveway the door opened and Cass was twenty feet behind me. I stopped.
“Go back to the van.”
“Fuck you. This is about my father. I’m coming.”
“I don’t know if this is about anything, but I’d rather you stayed in the van.”
“I’m the one in charge here.”
I immediately regretted the comment I’d made earlier about blackmail and kidnapping. If I were being blackmailed or kidnapped, and it certainly felt like I was, then hewasin charge and there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it.
The door to the trailer opened behind me. I turned and there was a woman of about thirty looking at us through a screen door. She said, “I have a gun.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “You’re not going to need it. We’re not going to hurt you. I want to ask if you remember a guy named Gavin.”
“Gavin was my dad.”
“Was?”
“He died last year.”
“In prison?”
She shook her head. “He had cancer so they let him out early. Mostly so they didn’t have to pay for it. Did you know my dad?”
“Yeah, I met him a couple times. I came here once.”
“You’re not a friend then. So what do you want?”
“I wanted to talk to your dad about a woman who came to see him. It would have been sometime between eighty-three and eighty-six. Were you living here then?”
