It ended up being three days - three days that felt like six. Twice she put on her frump disguise and went out window shopping or to a cafe, but she felt so conspicuous in that ridiculous wig she quickly retreated back to the apartment, to pace and fret the time away. What if the NSB uncovered and removed every single clue from that house? What if they found him first - what would they do with him? Would they shoot him when they saw him? Surely not...? Would they bring him back in handcuffs claiming treason? Would they put him in that stupid retirement community they'd threatened her with? The minute Oscar had described that place to her she had envisioned it as a a nursing home, and the very thought of it made her shudder. She was not usually prone to paranoia, but having just been through her own extremely unsettling experience with the American government, she was jumpy - to say the least. No matter what happened - even if she found Oscar and convinced him to come home, Bill Parr would most certainly try to use his disappearance to discredit him. Could it be that Oscar's days at the OSI were truly over?
To while the time away, she forced herself to sit down and watch television, but it wasn't as captivating as she needed it to be. She tried jogging on the spot and doing push ups, and that helped to settle the jitters a little. Adding to her frustration was the fact that she was killing time in DC when she could have been teaching back home. She was haunted by the thought of Kevin Melnyck - a boy in her class who had been having difficulties lately. He was a painfully serious boy who worked so hard she worried he might explode from the pressure he put on himself. He was entirely preoccupied with doing everything right (not an uncommon problem with children of military personnel, but Kevin was an acute case), and she had tried to get him to ease up on himself, but without much luck. About three weeks ago he had not done as well as usual on a chemistry exam, and then didn't return from lunch break. When Jaime called his home and found he wasn't there she got worried, and had coerced the principal into watching her class while she tore all over the base looking for him. She found him a couple of hours later at a dead end road near the railway tracks, pelting a "No Trespassing" sign with rocks, tears streaming down his face. It wasn't just the exam, of course - it was his parents. They were getting divorced, and he clearly felt it was all his fault. He hadn't done everything right. She'd spent a lot of time since then trying to convince him that he wasn't responsible, and had lined him up with the school counselor - but right now he was sitting in her class staring at yet another substitute teacher, and she only hoped he was doing all right.
Finally she was rescued from her broodings by Agatha Christie. There wasn't very much reading material in the house (the place had the feel of being nobody's real home) but there were at least two dozen of her mystery novels on a shelf in the bedroom. Some of them Jaime had read before, but most were new to her. There was something so deliciously comforting about the Christie universe, even though it was filled with characters she would likely never meet in real life - estate owning English people who kept servants and worried about them stealing the silver. And then of course, there were all those murders - but they were so abstract and so tidy they weren't the slightest bit upsetting.
As it only took her about four hours to read one, she was able to get through six before she became utterly satiated and convinced she never wanted to read another for as long as she lived. One of the things that finally irked her most was that no matter how hard she tried, she could never figure out who the murderer was - and if she wasn't clever enough to figure out an Agatha Christie novel, how was she ever going to read clues well enough to find a real life espionage expert like Oscar? Russ finally called her late on the third day by datacom to tell her that the NSB was out. They would likely return a few times so she'd have to keep her ear on high alert, but he thought she was pretty much safe.
What she found in Oscar's apartment made her angry - it was like a twister had been through the place. Did they really have the right to do this? It was demoralizing, to say the least. Chaos is hard to deal with. Deeply discouraged, she picked her way through the mess aimlessly, wondering where to begin.
Among the contents of his desk that had been removed from the drawers was the box of photos. She decided now would be a good moment to go through them as she needed an incentive to ease herself back into this daunting project. Sitting in his big leather chair, she put the box in her lap, and began to examine them one by one. There were a lot of work related pictures - Oscar at the UN, Oscar with presidents and other high ranking officials of the US government, with Rudy at the sites of big projects - these didn't interest her so much. This was how she saw him all the time. What caught her eye first was a black and white portrait of the boss as a young man - startlingly handsome, glowing with carefree youth. She suppressed the urge to steal it. People always look happy in photographs. If one were to judge by this box of pictures, Oscar's life (up until the photos with presidents) looked like one big lark - particularly while he was in the Navy. Then there were the family pictures. There was a particularly charming one - maybe taken in the back yard - his tall mother, (Oscar resembled her most) his father, slightly shorter, his sister, about ten, scowling in a print dress, Sam, a confident teenager next to her, his hands placed on the shoulders of his very small dark haired brother, smiling shyly in the foreground, wearing shorts, one ankle bent to the outside, his arms hanging loosely.
Why was she so surprised and then put out when she found photos of women in the pile? There seemed to be two significant ones, each featured in a handful of snapshots. In what seemed to be the most recent (five years ago, perhaps?) there was one of Oscar and a nice looking brunette standing by a car together, casually dressed, grinning at the photographer, and another of the same woman reading a magazine, stretched out comfortably on the couch. These hit her hard. What an irony it was - getting to know the elusive Oscar Goldman in a way she had never been able to before - but for her to get to acquainted in this way he had to be absent.
With great reluctance she put down the box an hour later, and surveyed the room. Time to get to it. It occurred to her to pull the drawers right out of the desk. It was a bit of a wrestling match, but she succeeded by tilting each drawer up and then down to pull it off the rails. Her efforts were rewarded on the shallow top drawer. There was a crumpled brochure that had obviously become jammed up top. It was for a hotel in the south of France - Manoir Le Cavalier. Once again, Jaime's heart began to race. Once again, she called Russ, who promised to look into it.
She stood, hands on her hips, and contemplated what to do next. The brochure was certainly not going to be enough. She would have to keep looking. The one thing the NSB had left untouched was the books. She gazed up at the shelves looking behind the desk, filled with history books, biology, chemistry and physics books, multiple biographies of each of the Presidents of the twentieth century, art books, the collected works of William Shakespeare, the writings of Winston Churchill, the latest by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, dictionaries, atlases, thesauruses. She thought of a story her mother had told her - of her great-uncle, a farmer. He was a long way from wealthy, but after he died, when the family was going through his belongings, they found at least a hundred checks hidden away in books. Checks for livestock sales, for debts owed to him - and he had never cashed them. Her mother had discovered it by accident when she paused to flip through a book she was about to box and found a very old check for a thousand dollars right in the middle. Though Jaime would never imagine Oscar to be guilty of such eccentricity, perhaps it was worth a look. She started methodically at the top, flipping through each and every one. When she quit at midnight, she had found absolutely nothing. Then to her frustration, she continued the search that night in her dreams, page after page flipping before her eyes.
Russ called first thing in the morning to report that Manoir LeCavalier had gone out of business two years ago. Another red herring.
Back she went to her ridiculous book search, feeling discouraged. Oscar was nothing like her great uncle after all, but right now it was the only thing she could think to do. She hadn't discovered anything before the NSB tornado had blasted through, and now her chances of finding anything were even slimmer. Three hours later she had gone through all the books on the left hand side of his desk and was feeling cross eyed and irritable. It was at this point she arrived at the atlases - naturally there were three of them. Why didn't I start here? she wondered, rolling her eyes. Frustration had made her dull witted. As atlas might actually yield something, unlike the complete works of Charles Dickens, which she had just gone through. Of course this would have to be a much more detailed search - she would have to keep her eyes open for the tiniest chicken scratches - a line here or there to suggest a route, or if he wanted to be helpful, a big red circle with arrows pointing to it. She flipped through the first one, performed a rousing set of jumping jacks and one headstand, and moved to the second atlas. She was actually beyond feeling hopeless - her movements were mechanical, her mind dull.
It was page forty seven that stopped her in her tracks. She could so easily have missed it, but her eyes happened to stop on that spot on the page. The blood rushed into her ears and she stopped breathing. There it was - exactly what she had been looking for. Just a tiny dot. Just one. Only a desperate fool would fix their hopes on it - but this had to be it. She could feel it.
Fumbling for the datacom, triumphant and disbelieving, she called Russ.
"I've got it Russ. I'll check in with you in a couple of days." Without waiting for his response, she blurted, "Wish me luck." and hung up. Grabbing a good likeness of Oscar from his box of photos, she headed back to her apartment. A rat on a mission she thought, scrambling through her tunnel. She swiftly packed a small suitcase, jammed the frumpy wig onto her head, grabbed her fake ID and called a cab. She looked like the secretary for a TV evangelist. Her enthusiasm was dampened somewhat when she learned it would take four flights to get to her destination, and it would take most of the day. This whole thing was a lesson in patience, she decided. She had already demonstrated more patience flipping through those damned books than she thought was possible, and sitting around on airplanes was not going to kill her.
Staring out the window of the plane as they taxied out, she noted a feeling of excitement, and that this feeling, (usually along with a heavy dose of trepidation) was something that always accompanied her on missions. Did this mean she was missing her OSI work?
No way.
After the first flight the TV evangelist's secretary outfit was no longer necessary, so she dumped the wig in the bathroom at O' Hare airport and boarded the next plane feeling lighter and less duplicitous.
At seven that evening, the plane touched down at her final destination - the tiny airport of Kalispell, Montana. The only thing she could think to do when staying overnight in an unfamiliar town was to drive downtown, and she found there a charming, if somewhat rough old west style main street, lined with false fronted brick buildings, housing questionable looking bars, antique shops, western wear stores and lawyers' offices. Then she came upon the Kalispell Grand Hotel, a solid sandstone edifice with reasonable rates. After checking in, she threw her suitcase down in her room and made her way to the huge dining room, where she ate a decent steak dinner with only the waitresses to keep her company.
Somewhere in the middle of the meal, she bit down on something that felt a lot like a pebble, and before she could call the waitress to complain, a pain in her jaw signaled tooth trouble. Examining her molars with her tongue, she quickly found a hole where tooth used to be. This was an inconvenient development to say the least. Fortunately the pain subsided fairly quickly, and she ordered a glass of red wine to console herself. She couldn't imagine finding - or wanting to find - a dentist on this trip. She liked and trusted her guy back home, and so hoped the tooth would hold up till she got back.
The next morning, having carefully avoided chewing anywhere near her touchy molar during breakfast, she hit the road in relatively good spirits. It was both an incredible thrill and an awful shock when she caught sight of the lake for the first time - a huge, sparkling, gloriously inviting sheet of blue, surrounded by high golden hills dotted with ponderosa pines. She had imagined driving around the whole thing in about 20 minutes, but it was clear this was not to be. Such a crazy name - "Flathead". Where did that come from? At least she had her first hunch to go with - a town called "Somers" right at the top of the lake. It was impossibly vain that she would imagine that Oscar might take up residence in a town called Somers with her in mind, but there it was, the closest town and the most obvious place to start.
Somers was tiny, much of it composed of small wooden houses in varying states of charm and repair, and one big yellow mansion that looked like a wedding cake perched high up on the rocks overlooking the lake. The main street consisted of a hardware store, a corner store, and a bar. The bar was closed until noon, but she showed Oscar's photograph in the other two places, receiving solemn shakes of the head in each.
"Whatcha looking for him for?" asked the ruddy, stout woman who ran the grocery store.
"He's my cousin." Jaime said evenly, "and I've been charged to find him because Grandpa just died and he's coming into some money."
"Well, good luck to you!" the woman answered, with some enthusiasm. "He'll be happy when you find him."
"He sure will." Jaime replied, as much to convince herself as anything.
She hung around the town for the next couple of hours, waiting for the bar to open, asking random people about Oscar, to no avail. With an hour yet to kill she made her way down to a public beach and tested the glacial waters. So clear - and so very, very cold. It was May, but the air still carried the fresh chill of the thaw. At noon, she tramped back to the bar, and finding no satisfaction there, she got back in the car and back onto the highway south. The drill was the same in the next two tiny towns, and she came up empty handed in both. Not permitting dejection to cloud her spirits, she headed back to Kalispell for the night. She would get right to the south end of the lake tomorrow.
Her first destination the next day was Rollins, a town so nondescript that except for its proximity to the lake, she couldn't have described it ten minutes after leaving it. The next two towns were much the same. Despite the distinctive names - Elmo and Big Arm, they were poor and charmless, sitting bare and exposed at the point where the rocky yellow hills rushed down to the water. She couldn't imagine anyone - much less Oscar, who presumably had his pick - staying here. She began to wonder if she had made a terrible error.
Still, she pressed on doggedly. She had begun to use that term to fortify herself when she was feeling unsure. At the first sign of doubt, she would say to herself, Don't forget - you're dogged.
It was with some relief that she reached the town of Polson that evening. It wasn't exactly bustling, but there were at least a couple thousand people here, and it had the friendly feel that accompanies faded resort towns. She checked into yet another elderly brick hotel, close to the lake, and immediately headed to the dining room. There had been no restaurants in the little towns she had visited today, and she was starving. Eating was a delicate affair. She ordered only soft foods, and let them cool before venturing to try them. Red wine, always reliably at room temperature, was the perfect accompaniment.
There was not much for her to do that evening. She quizzed her waiter and a few other people on the street showing them Oscar's photo - to no avail, but that was all she could do - the stores were closed, and, being a Sunday night, so was the bar. Would he even haunt a bar? There were too many open questions in this search. Had she ever really known Oscar at all? She ambled the wide streets for a while, and then upon discovering the local movie theater, immediately decided to spend the evening under the spell of "Grease". There was absolutely no chance she would find Oscar in there, but then again, would she find him anywhere?
The next morning she began her rounds - the two grocery stores, the hardware store, the shoe store, the mechanic, the post office - all to no avail. She wasn't feeling so dogged anymore, just frustrated and worried. This was looking like a wild goose chase, even if she did still have half the lake to go. A dark mistrust of her instincts was gnawing at her - who in their right mind would fly from Washington to Montana based on one dot of a ball point pen?
Around two in the afternoon, she spied an old fashioned soda counter through the window of the stationary store, and decided this was just the thing to cheer her up. Feeling dejected, she threw herself onto a stool with a big sigh.
"What can I do for you?" asked a smiling elderly man with a white brush cut and horn rimmed glasses.
"Your best soda please."
There was one other person at the counter, a lumpen middle aged character sipping his coffee and staring at the pattern on the counter. Though she was beginning to feel like a parrot constantly repeating the same lines, Jaime took the photo out of her pocket and slid it in his direction.
"Have you seen this guy?" she asked. "He's my cousin and I have to find him."
The man cautiously placed his index finger on the picture, slid it toward himself, and squinted at it. He then sat back and opened his eyes wide, as if to pry the lids apart. Finally he took a pair of glasses from his breast pocket and put them on.
"Oh sure." he said, in the most casual manner. Jaime nearly fell off her stool. "What's that guy's name? Funny name..." he muttered. "Felix - that's it. He's Lyle's new man down at the marina."
Jaime felt adrenaline course up from her stomach to the top of her head. "The marina? Where do I find it?" she asked, getting to her feet.
"Well, by the water, little lady." The man's eyes twinkled mischievously. "Get back on the highway through town going south, and take a left on Second. Lyle's is down at the bottom there."
"Oh, thank you!" Jaime gushed, suppressing the urge to kiss the man, "I'm so grateful!" She quickly produced two dollars from her purse and slapped it on the counter. "Can't wait!" she said. "Gotta run...sorry!"