Page 84 of A Future To Remember

Sarah’s eyes widened, then narrowed in on the sketch I was holding out to her. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “I remember him. We got ridda him. He and his brother were making some of the other campers real uncomfortable, so we told ’em they had to leave.”

I felt my brows arch while my heart rate ticked up, adrenaline once again flooding my system. Sarah remembered him. He’d camped here. “You catch his name, Sarah?”

“Wade. His brother’s name’s Wally. I almost had to call the sheriff on them two, but they ended up leaving without too much of a fuss.”

“Do Wade and Wally have a last name?” I pressed.

She frowned and walked over to a filing cabinet, where she rooted around inside one of the drawers for a bit, finally coming up with a thick bundle of rubber-banded receipts.

She brought them back to the counter and began to sort through them. At last, she pulled up a single receipt. “Wade Smith,” she said, handing it over to me.

I took it and stared down at the pink slip of paper, which had the dates that Wade had rented a camp slot for two weeks, beginning on October 19. At the bottom of the slip, it read: refunded one week.

I squinted at the slip. “Is that a phone number?”

Sarah leaned toward me, looking to where I was pointing. “Yep.”

I showed the receipt to Oscar. “Can you make that out?”

He nodded, tapping out the phone number on his own phone, but he didn’t call it. Instead, he simply listed it as a contact, then switched over to another contact and made a call. “Sir,” he said into the phone. “I got a name and a number we need a trace on right away.” He walked several paces away to continue to talk to Brice.

I continued to question Sarah. “Did Wade or Wally ever talk to you about where they hailed from? Or where they were going after they left here?”

She shook her head. “They were only here a couple’a days, and they left in a huff. Didn’t say nothin’ to me except that Wally called me a fuckin’ bitch and flipped me the bird on his way out the door.”

Oscar came back and tapped me on the shoulder. “Phone number belongs to a Marilyn DeGroot. She’s 86. She’s had the same number for fifty years. Wade and Wally Smith also come back a bust.”

I nodded. What else could you expect from a Three Percenter except a complete distrust of anyone wanting their information. I wondered if they knew Marilyn, though. Did they make up the phone number on the spot? Or did they use her number because they knew it by heart?

Before I could tell Oscar to reach out to Marilyn DeGroot, he said, “Brice assigned Baldwin to look into Marilyn. Baldwin’s gonna call us as soon as he speaks to her.”

“Good work,” I told him, adding, “Smith might not be their last name, but I’d bet my next paycheck that their first names are right.”

For emphasis, I pointed to the form, which listed only Wade’s or Wally’s first initial. Looking back up at Sarah, I asked, “You knew their names because you overhead them talking to each other, right?”

She nodded. “Yep. They was arguing over who was gonna get the ice. I thought they was a couple’a knuckleheads. We get a lot of their type that time of year.”

“Type?” Candice asked. It was the first time she’d spoken since we came in.

“Yeah,” Sarah said. “You know, the conspiracy-theory types. The ones that believe the government controls the weather and is listening in on their phone calls and such. When they checked in, I asked ’em if they wanted the Wi-Fi password for their stay, and they just laughed at me. I don’t think either one of ’em owns a cell phone. Some of those nuts really take it to the extreme, living off grid like Kaczynski did. There’s a reason he went crazy all alone in the wilderness, ya know. But I guess the brothers have each other, so maybe they’ll only stay a little nuts.”

“You said they were making the families around camp uncomfortable,” Candice continued. “What’s that about?”

Sarah frowned like she was sucking on something sour. “The complaint came from two families with teenage daughters. Both sets of parents said that they’d caught Wally and Wade staring at their daughters all creepy like. And then the brothers took to trailing the families around the camp, like they was waiting for an opportunity to catch the girls alone or somethin’.”

I studied Sarah while tamping down my anger. If she’d just alerted the sheriff of the men’s suspicious activity, we would’ve had a record of the incident. And a record of these men. And, maybe if they had a record, they would’ve been sitting in a jail cell on the morning my wife went to get some groceries, and Abby and I would be back home, cuddled around Eggy, making his last days as pleasant as possible.

“Why didn’t you mention this to our agents when they interviewed you?” I asked, my tone sharper than I’d intended.

Sarah stared at me with a stiffened spine. I’d made her defensive. “I didn’t connect it. Wade and Wally left the night before that lady disappeared. I figured they’d be long gone by then. Besides, most people been saying the husband did it. I didn’t like the brothers, but I didn’t want to bring a federal posse down on their heads just for getting up to a little mischief.”

I turned away from Sarah, reached for Eggy, who was still in Candice’s arms, all but pulling him into my own before I walked right out the door.

Candice followed me. “You, okay?”

I took a deep breath in and counted to ten before I exhaled. Then I answered her. “No, Candice. I’m not. But I haven’t been okay since last October, so this is nothing new.”

“If it helps, I really wanted to punch Sarah.”