Midday Clouds - The Charlie Swan Story

Chapter 60 (Eclipse 19)

I half expected Jake's onslaught of calls to continue for the rest of the week, but whatever urgent business the kids had with one another had evidently been quashed – the phone hung silent the following Monday. I was back to work, and while a police chief was never entirely off duty, the official working hours on my schedule ran 8 to 4, Monday to Friday. I'd put in enough late nights and weekends in my early days on the force to enjoy that particular perk mostly guiltfree, but if a deputy needed a weekend off for a family emergency, or even just a few well-deserved days off, I'd usually try to be the first to cover the hours. Those evening and weekend shifts were generally when the real policing happened, anyway; the likelihood of car crashes, drunk and disorderlies, petty theft, and any number of other smalltown policing concerns generally weren't taking place while the majority of folks were at work or in school. All that to say, most of my day was spent at my desk, helping with the computerization of our decades of files, thumbing through pay stubs and expense reports – the boring monotony of a police station in a small, quiet town.

We'd obviously had our fair share of excitement over the previous year, however, and I was reminded of all that had happened as I organized and inputted the files into the desktop. First, there was the alarming increase of disappearing hikers in our region last spring. Washington State had actually put out a code yellow warning for outdoor enthusiasts that summer, urging them to proceed into Olympic National Park with extreme caution at the least, or to avoid the area entirely at most. The numbers we got back in the fall of 2005 showed that whatever had been the cause of the disappeared hikers that spring had evidently stopped – there was no further increase in state-wide reports for the region. If anything, cases had gone down due to the heightened vigilance of the outdoors community over that summer.

But just when we'd let our guard down and settled into a slow winter, the reports of missing persons, hikers especially, shot up this past January. More troublingly, it was paired with sightings of massive animals – some witnesses describing bears, others wolves, neither of which were in short supply 'round these parts – resulting in the usual finger-pointing people are wont to do, linking one scary thing with the other. I wasn't so sure that these creatures were the cause of the disappearances, having long ago learned to recognize the folly of equating correlation to causation, but it had evidently been enough to bring the brass down on Fork, Washington.

Sgt. Smith and his band of agents had swept in like a spring gale; blowing all sorts of air, causing a mess, and then leaving the next dawn without having accomplished all that much. It had been just a few months since I'd last seen the man, and the cellphone he'd left me, that glorified one-way walkie-talkie, still sat diligently in my pants pocket like a wet river stone. I flipped it open, ensuring the battery was charged, the ringer was on, and that there were no messages or missed calls waiting for me. There weren't. I'd been starting to foster a suspicion that Smith and the crew he'd come with hadn't given a rat's ass about the missing hikers or the overlarge creatures that were allegedly haunting our forests – with hindsight, his visit had begun to stink more of an info-gathering op than anything else. The whole lot of them had left the very day that the Cullens had returned, and so far that pale family had been all that Smith seemed concerned about.

Whether or not the woods around this town were, in fact, harbouring monstrosities the size of rhinos was a moot point. I'd done what I could to warn the folks of Forks to avoid venturing out into the woods alone, and Billy had assured me he'd done the same for the Quileuete. The fact of the matter was that we simply didn't have the humanpower, nor the will, to go traipsing in search of something out of legend. Not after I'd already lost Harry in the pursuit, and especially not after the last report of a missing hiker had been months past.

I took a long draw on my coffee. It had gone cold. The station was quiet. Steve was out on patrol, and Janet was off on her lunch break, likely a few streets over at the diner. I unclipped my keys from my belt and unlocked the bottommost drawer at my desk. The list of Italian regions surrounding Florence sat at the top, staring back at me. I signed and pulled it onto my desk. I'd been so curious just a week ago, crossing off the names of places I'd never even heard of, searching for any clue of... well, of what? Deaths? Missing persons? Criminal activity? It's not as though that type of information was readily available for these small hamlets of a few thousand, let alone an English translation. It was a waste of time. And did I really want to know, in the first place? So the Cullens might, or might not, be linked to some sort of organized criminal syndicate. If it was true, there sure as hell wasn't anything I'd be able to do about it. If it wasn't true, then I'd been wasting precious taxpayer dollars by chasing a ghost, instead of doing the (arguably as wasteful) work of computerizing decades of files. I took one last look at the list, Agliana to Volterra, before crumping it up and tossing it into the can. I felt something of a weight lift off of me, one that I hadn't known was there. I went back to the slow, monotonous task of tapping information from yellowed, faded paper to the crisp white of a computer screen.

I'd been at it for a grand total of 10 minutes when my phone buzzed. Not the landline on my desk, nor the flip phone in my pocket, but my personal cell, the trusty brick. Not many people would be calling that number. Hell, not many people even had that number.

I answered with my usual "Yello?"

"Hey Charlie," a voice sang sweetly from the other end of the line. I could hear the smile at the tail end of my name. "Got any plans for lunch?"