Wilds of Wyoming – Part 2
by Swellison
Dean drove down highway 189, watching for the intersection with Bryan Flats Road. Sam kept his eyes peeled for the turnoff onto Camp Davis Road. "There it is!" He pointed at the squat roadside marker, University of Michigan Camp Davis Field School, and Dean veered right.
Clumps of dust rose from the dirt road. Dean frowned, trying not to think about how dirty the underside and lower half of his baby was getting as they progressed further down the dirt road. As Zephyr had indicated, they soon saw the two clusters of tin cabins, shimmering like mirages in the strong sunlight. The professors' cabins were on the left hand side.
The students' cabins were set back from the right side of the road, arranged in three rows. Dean slowed to a halt, and Sam hopped out, promising to call when he was ready to leave. He watched Sam heading for the professor's cabin closest to the center of the complex, saw his tall figure stride up to the cabin's door, open it and disappear inside. Then he restarted the Impala, slowly following the road that had curved into a huge circular driveway, looking for a place to park close to the cafeteria, the large rectangular building now in front of him.
Dean parked and got out, heading for the cafeteria door. He knocked and then swung open the screen door. Stepping inside, he walked between two long banquet-style tables in the center of the room. "Hello? Anyone here?"
A girl in who looked about twenty came out of the kitchen proper, stepping around the food bar to join Dean in the main dining hall. She had a large white industrial-type apron covering her chest and lower body, tied over a pair of dark blue jeans and a short-sleeved heather grey shirt. Her brownish-auburn hair was covered by an unflattering, regulation hair net, and she wiped her hands off on her apron as she approached. "Can I help you?" She eyed Dean's jeans, gray t-shirt and plaid overshirt.
"Hi, I'm James Pankow." Dean extended his hand.
"Marissa Shelby."
"I'm looking for the chief cook, Greg Ferrin, is he around?"
She frowned. "What do you want with Greg?"
"I represent the Sunrise Bakery, over in Palisades. We're a small specialty shop, newly opened, and I think we'd be a perfect fit for Camp Davis' needs. I understand you go through a substantial amount of bread each week, supplying your students with their lunch sandwiches. The Sunrise Bakery would very much like to become your bakery, we can cook and deliver several loads of broad daily, bringing you a fresh supply. In addition, we can cater to any special needs your students might have-kosher bread, or wheat-germ free bread, to name a couple of options."
"That sounds like an interesting proposition, but Greg's not here."
"Oh, I'm sorry I missed him, will he be back soon?"
"No, you don't understand. He's—he's missing, we haven't seen him since the holiday."
"What? You mean, he disappeared, no warning or anything?"
"Yes, that seems to be the size of it. Although I saw him leave, it was just like any other afternoon off, he wondered down to the main road to catch a ride, maybe, or just walk over to the hiking trails. He'd done it lots of times before, nothing out of the ordinary. But this time, he didn't come back."
She shrugged and continued rattling on, "We were busy, trying to do something special for the Fourth of July supper for the students. We knew they'd be tired after climbing the mountain, and Greg planned this cool layered Fourth of July marble cake, with red, white and blue confetti in the frosting. It looked really neat when he sketched it that morning."
"Wait, you're telling me that Greg had something special to do for that night's dinner, that he was personally involved in it?"
"Greg's personally involved in all the meals we prepare, we all are."
Dean heard the girl's bristly tone, loud and clear. "But that means that he was planning on coming back!"
"Well, of course it does, what did you think he was going to do, hide out and live off the land?" Marissa scoffed. "Although he probably could, Greg's very self-sufficient."
"I heard that you were interviewed by the police. What did they ask you?"
"Just stuff about Greg's movements, when did I see him leave, did he take anything with him? Had he been in any arguments lately, did he seem nervous or worried or anything? Once I described the last time I saw Greg, it was a whole bunch of 'no' questions. And some pretty stupid ones, like did I have a thing going on with Greg. I snorted at that, told them that Greg was already taken, and he most emphatically wasn't the cheating kind."
"Already taken, anyone around here?" Maybe Dean pressed his luck too far with that question.
"You're kind of nosy, for a bakery salesman," the girl snorted.
"Sorry, just gathering some nice conversational tidbits for my next cold call. It helps to get my foot in the door, letting my customers-to-be know that I care about the community, that my finger's on its pulse."
"You sound like a water cooler gossip."
"Yeah, maybe. But the disappearance of a grown man in broad daylight—that doesn't happen very often around here. I can't help being curious. What happened to him? Did he get lost? Was he into something he shouldn't have been?"
"What's that supposed to mean, 'something he shouldn't've been?'"
"Well, the usual answer to that is drugs."
"Mister, you don't know Greg Ferrin at all. I've known him for two years, and I've never seen him so much as smoke a joint. Sure, he drank—beer and the hard stuff—but that's legal. Greg is one of the most law-abiding guys I know. Well, he did go along with the Hot Springs trips, but other than that. . . "
Dean's cell phone rang, cutting off Marissa, and he snatched it open, glancing at Sam's Cell in the caller ID window. "Hello? Yeah, okay, I'm just leaving."
SPN*SPN*SPN*SPN*SPN*SPN*SPN*
Sam closed the door and carefully surveyed the cabin's interior. It was a simple one room cabin, with two windows, no kitchen, and a Franklin stove at the back. All the furniture was nondescript—bed, desk, dresser and bookcase. A round braided wool rug in front of the bed and a radiator along one wall provided the only creature comforts in the sparse, neat as a pin cabin.
Certainly, it wouldn't take long to search the place. Sam considered where to start; the room didn't afford too many hiding places. He began with the obvious, pulling out the dresser drawers and going through their contents thoroughly.
Nothing was hidden in the socks, underwear, jeans or shirts neatly folded in the drawers. The bottom drawer was completely empty. Sam tapped the bottom and sides experimentally, even removing it to examine the joists and underside for any signs of tampering. Nothing. He methodically checked the other drawers, but came up empty there, too. He pondered the other possibilities, deciding on the desk next.
Sam walked over to the desk, opened the one shallow drawer under the desktop and browsed through the paper, stamps, and writing tools that he found inside the drawer. There was also a well-thumbed Jackson phone book from 2002 and some pins, paper clips and rubber bands. Sam absently pocketed a couple of paper clips, remembering past instances when they'd come in handy. The only other thing that the desk contained was a laptop. Sam hesitated, and then extracted it from the drawer and set it up on the desk. While waiting for it to power up, he checked the top of the desk, finding an artist's sketch pad, a textbook on architecture of the 19th Century and a couple of science fiction paperbacks.
Picking up the sketch pad, Sam flipped it open. The first page showed a couple of views of what seemed to be an abandoned log cabin, slats missing from one of the window covers, an off-kilter door left ajar, dirt and tumbleweeds sketched in right up to the one-story structure's door. An outside water pump was visible at the edge of the house, with a rough wooden horse trough underneath it. The next page showed a bird's eye view of what Sam recognized as Camp Davis, in colored pencils. The many small buildings were drawn in proportion, two different sized areas of cabins, with simple A-line roofs drawn on top of them, larger buildings in the correct places to be the cafeteria, showers and bathroom facilities, and the classroom. There was also one larger house, which must've been the caretaker's house, or the main house, as Zephyr had called it.
Turning another page, Sam saw a ground-level view of Camp Davis with several cabins in the foreground and a row of mountains carefully drawn with details like exposed streams and rock faces meticulously shown on the mountains. Then there were several more pages of precisely drawn, modern day log cabins, roomy, almost luxury-looking buildings, with decks, flower boxes and elaborately carved storm shutters around the windows. The next few pages were a couple of blue prints. After a few minutes of flipping pages back and forth, Sam worked out that the blue prints probably matched the log cabin drawings from the previous pages.
The last page was a surprise: four sketches of Zephyr, done in carefully colored in pencil, faithful to the model, her blonde hair not just colored yellow, but streaked with a few darker shades, the pattern on her long-sleeved shirt in one picture painstakingly drawn to clearly show the four different floral groupings in it. Sam could practically feel the care that the artist took in drawing these portraits. He closed the sketchbook gently. The laptop was powered up and had gone into sleep mode by now. Sam tapped the spacebar, and the screen came up with a locked user icon.
Crossing his fingers that Greg hadn't been any more security conscious than the average college kid, Sam clicked on the OK button under the icon. The screen opened, showing the default browser page. Sam quickly checked the browser history, to see if anything unusual was stored there. Quite a few sightseeing pages for the Jackson Hole area, some U of M websites dealing with engineering and architecture, and a few hiking pages were the main contents of the browser history. Taking out his notepad, Sam wrote down the URL's for the most recent entries.
Deciding that he couldn't take the time to try to crack Greg's email password, Sam did a little more surfing to see how far back in the dude's browsing history he could get. Then Sam checked the recently saved files, which yielded a bunch of photographs and a few documents on 19th Century architecture. Eventually, he logged off and put the laptop back where he found it.
Where hadn't he looked? Sam eyed the bed, a basic full-sized bed with a bedspread over it. Zephyr had said that the students only had sleeping bags for their rooms. On impulse, Sam stuck his hands under the pillows, and then felt around the pillow cases, finding nothing. In for a penny, in for a pound, he thought, bending over to search between the mattress and the box spring. To his surprise, he found something, his fingers encountering two small boxes. He pulled out the first box, it was a full box of bullets. The second box was the same thing, only it was opened and almost half-empty. Thoughtfully, he slipped both boxes back into their hiding place.
Sam's eyes took another sweep of the room. Very little in the way of personal belongings cluttered the place, but it was only a temporary living quarters, not meant to be as lived-in and individualized as an apartment or even a dorm room would be. In a mood to dot his I's and cross his T's, Sam walked over to the Franklin stove and opened the iron door grate in the center of the dark black iron stove. The opened door revealed a small area where past fires had left a layering of ashes. Sam hauled a pen from his pocket and poked around in the ashes, again surprised when he found a small, square box. He yanked out the box, wrapped in a double layer of sealed sandwich bags. He could easily see bright red through the two layers of plastic. Sam unzipped the sandwich bags and extracted the small red box.
Opening up the box, Sam saw an engagement ring. The ring had a brilliantly cut diamond, well over a carat, surrounded by a row of tiny red rubies. Sam's heart stuttered, because he recognized this ring. He had been seriously contemplating purchasing one just like it for Jess. Only the ring he picked out had a row of emeralds surrounding the diamond center. Sam had been taken with the symbolism of his birthstone surrounding and protecting the diamond perfection of Jessica, keeper of his heart. He was willing to bet that Greg was born, if not on the Fourth of July, sometime during the seventh month.
Sam shook himself back to the present. He eyed the ring, snapping the ring box shut. He considered re-burying it in the old stove's ashes, but wrapped it back up in the plastic wrap and stuck it in his pocket instead. He would make sure that Zephyr got the ring, but for now, it was safer with him than left in an unlocked cabin.
Sam took a last look around the cabin, deciding that he'd left behind no evidence of his visit. He pulled out his cell phone and speed dialed Dean. "I'm done. Meet you in two minutes."
SPN*SPN*SPN*SPN*SPN*SPN*SPN*
Dean drove the Impala down the Double F Ranch's private road, not happy that it was another dirt road, adding another layer of dust to his baby. Seriously, Sam owed him big time for the amount of visual damage alone inflicted on his beloved wheels. Not to mention that the hunt had so far failed to materialize. If these yahoos copped to hiding Greg for some emo relationship-gone-bad reason, then he and Sam would be on the road for Casper, quicker than Sam could say "But, Dean—"
"Those two over there." Sam pointed out as they approached the clearing. "Might be our guys."
"Ya think?" Dean muttered, parking in the sparse shade of a pine tree. They got out, walking across thankfully cow paddy-free ground to join the two men standing at one end of the open field.
"Hi," Sam greeted the pair who looked roughly his age, but lacked his height by a good half-foot each.
"You lookin' for something?" one of the cowboys asked.
"Randy and Keith Ferrin?" They'd decided to play private eyes this time, so the Winchesters flashed their badges in easy synchronicity. "Your mother told us we'd find you out here." Dean said easily. "Private investigators, Tull and Hatchet. We're looking into the disappearance of your cousin, Greg Ferrin."
"Oh? Look, we've already talked to that deputy, why don't you go talk to him?"
"We prefer getting our information directly from the horse's mouth. We don't interview middle men." Dean dismissed the local authorities. "However, we do listen to their theories, and Deputy Hanson seems to think that you two are hiding something—or someone. Like your cousin, Greg Ferrin."
"Hey, we told him we've got nothing to do with that! Greg's disappeared on us, too!"
"Disappeared on you?" Sam entered the conversation. "Then you were planning on seeing him again? When?"
The younger cousin chimed in. "Hold your horses, we didn't have anything specific planned, just figured we'd see Greg again before he went back to Michigan. He has to give Randy back—" abruptly the man cut himself off.
Dean's eyes pinned the older man while Sam completed the guy's sentence, helpfully. "Give you back your gun?"
"Nothin' wrong with carrying a firearm in these parts!" The younger cowboy jumped to his brother's defense. "There's all sorts of wild animals and stuff out here. Our great-great-grandpa shot an Indian trying to steal his horses, back in the 1890's. And Greg certainly knows his way around guns. He's been a crack shot for as long as I can remember."
Dean gazed sternly at them. "I think you're in the middle of the conversation here, boys. Why don't you go back to the beginning? When did you last see Greg?"
"He called when he first got to Jackson, in mid-June." Keith started talking. "We hadn't done much more than email in the past few years, so it was kind of out of the blue when he called. He came out here to the ranch the first weekend he had off, and we. . . reminisced, I'd guess you could call it that.
"Greg was all full of plans to be an architect, went on about school and how he couldn't turn down the chance to work the summer out here. He's always been a big picture kind of guy. I knew he wouldn't settle for the simple life, even when he spent summers bumming around with us, years ago. "
Randy continued the explanation. "Y'see, Greg was all dazzled by life in the city. Not even all the summers running around here in God's country could turn his thinking around. He's got Wyoming running through his blood as much as we do, but he didn't get it."
"Didn't get what?" Dean asked.
"I know you look at us and see two hicks in a small town, but I can walk into any bar in Jackson and meet a girl from halfway across the world. I don't have to go out to see the world, it comes to us, so we've got the best of both worlds. Awesome skiing, too."
Sam brought the conversation back to the topic at hand. "So, why did Greg borrow your gun?"
"He asked if he could have one of mine, the second time he came out here. Not sure why, I thought it was to practice for the County Fair shooting rally, really. Greg's won it before. He doesn't have a gun back East, they're not so Pro-Second Amendment in Michigan, I guess."
Dean let his impatience color his question. "So, are you yahoos hiding Greg out on your spread?"
"No!" both Ferrins denied, sincerely. "Look, maybe we let Deputy Hanson draw his own conclusions, but we only told him the truth."
"Deputy Hanson's had it in for us since Randy's senior year, anyway."
"Oh? Why is that?" Sam asked.
"I got a little creative with my history project." Randy admitted. "We were supposed to do something that captured the pioneer's lifestyle. I chose the cowboy's life, and re-enacted cattle rustling. I kept it authentic, used horses, not trucks, and we taped it." He paused as if considering his next words. "Using Dad's herd didn't seem real enough, so I er, borrowed ten head of the Rollicking R's cattle—our nearest neighbor. Kind of forgot to ask his permission first, though."
"Deputy Hanson almost arrested Randy for cattle theft," Keith ended the tale. "Dad got him out of it, but Hanson's real quick to lay blame on us for anything that's happened, ever since."
"Neither one of us have seen Greg since the Tuesday before he vanished." Randy brought the conversation back to the present. "He didn't say anything about buggin' out, either. Came out here to borrow my revolver—did a little shooting, to make sure the gun was up to snuff." Randy motioned towards a twenty foot log lying on the ground at the other side of the clearing, four beer bottles standing in a staggered row along its top, gaps indicating where other bottles had been shot off the log.
Dean glanced from the log back to the Ferrins. "May I?" He slowly withdrew his Desert Eagle from where it was tucked into his waist and waited for Keith's nod before he clicked the safety off, sited and squeezed off four shots, breaking a bottle with every bullet.
"Nice shooting," Sam commented.
Dean wasn't interested in Sam's reaction, though; he was hoping he might've rattled Keith or Randy into spilling the beans, if they hadn't been telling the truth so far.
"Wow!" Keith looked at Dean with new respect. "Maybe you should enter the County Fair's shooting rally, mister."
To be continued