Noss: 1

June, 1972

Toward the end of my fourth year at Central Washington things finally came to a head. Summer had just rolled upon us, the type accompanied by a drowsy field heat and the unbearable urge to stick your head into a refrigerator. Mosquito nets sagged from ceiling hooks; popsicles ran red and sticky down children’s sunscreened arms; cement roads wobbled in the distance like a tourist guide’s promises of Yes, the sea is that way while it was in truth hundreds of miles further west, up the bronze hills and over the mountains, stretch after stretch of bare country highway. The cornflower sky, the caroling birds. From the dorms on the outskirts of campus you could hear the occasional Chevy or two juddering by before turning into the gas station a few blocks down. It was the only gas station for quite some miles around, if not the only one in Ellensburg, and it was there that I first met him: a tall, shrewd man with a homburg hat and graying whiskers, well into his fifties yet never without a certain air of spry finesse.

Curious, he was—the afternoon he came into the gas station I learned he preferred his coffee lukewarm, no milk, no sugar, but yes extra water please. We had a lean-to café on the side of the building, and as I was the only one on shift, I was running the whole place.

“Never been ’round here before,” he said as I brewed the coffee, and introduced himself as Detective Rhett Fletcher. “There was a murder at La Tavola last night, y’see, so I’ve been called in.”

“No one gets murdered in Ellensburg.”

“My point exactly!” he declared. “Never been ’round here before.”

The blistering afternoon heat was rolling off the ground in waves, and his car was parked under the low-slung pump canopy: a rust-brown Ford Country Squire which reminded me, out of nearly nowhere, of oiled meat between two worn butcher blocks.

“A woody?” I asked. “We see those even less than murders.”

“Ah, yes—I’m from Seattle.” He fished a box of Marlboros from his pocket, lit one with a brisk up-click-down, then leaned back against the column support and took a long drag. The smell of it filled the air. Gasoline and coffee and smoke, and underneath it all the mellow sweetness of monardas in bloom behind the station.

“Why didn’t they call in someone local instead?”

He studied me from the corner of his eye, considered for a moment, then harrumphed, “Big shot, big case.”

“Who was it?”

“You haven’t heard?”

“No,” I said mildly, and pushed the lukewarm, no milk, no sugar, but yes extra water please coffee toward him. “I don’t have a TV. Word of mouth never works around here, either.”

“Rodge Millar,” he answered, “the fellow who narrates everything like a nature documentary host. Y’know, the actor, the—Rodge Millar?”

I thought for a moment. “‘And here we see the human in its natural habitat, reaching for the last avocado.’”

“Yes, yes, that Rodge Millar. Stabbed right in the chest. Poor guy was out mournin’ his tenth anniversary. Never really recovered after he lost his wife.”

“What was her name?”

“Elaine, I think. The script girl for one of his movies. They were in that crash some years ago, up near Cle Elum, but Millar survived. Guess he was the lucky one. Not so much now, though.”

“How tragic,” I murmured. “Well, have you gotten any leads yet?”

He sipped his coffee, slowly, as if persuading time to wait for him while he thought. “A few,” he finally said.

“Oh?” I replied, more reflex than curiosity, but the detective, for his part, seemed in no rush to elaborate. The summer heat drew out into a torpor around us. From far off came the zit-zit-zit of cicadas, a dog’s frenzied barking, the muffled slam of a screen door. Then silence again.

“La Tavola, you said?” I circled innocently around the makeshift café counter, wiping my hands on my overalls. “Funny, I was planning to meet a friend there in an hour or so—”

He knew what I was doing. “Not a chance. Keep your nose outta it.”

“But I could help!”

“Help,” he repeated. “What would you do to help?”

“I’m a criminology major,” I said, almost petulantly. “Just wrapped up my last year at CWU, down the block. I’ve interned with the Ellensburg Police too.”

He looked at me for a moment, suddenly very pensive. He didn’t speak. Then his gaze strayed to something just beyond my shoulder, as if he was done thinking and already moving on to something far more important. Perhaps this was his way of saying yes without saying yes at all. City people, I thought, how strange.

The detective dropped a notebook onto the counter. “Well, stay outta my way,” he said. “There’s a suspect list in there. Go on, take a look, if it’ll keep you busy. But no pokin’ around La Tavola. Last thing I need is you tryin’ to play Sherlock and scarin’ folks off.”

I suppressed a smile, picked up the spiral notebook, and flipped through. On page seven, to which a bagged, tattered ticket was taped, I lingered a bit. Timothy Anderson. What a familiar name.

Age: Unknown

Physical description: Unknown

Profession: Unknown

Relationship to victim: Unknown

Evidence: Train ticket, California line

I closed the notebook and handed it back. “What’s your take on them?”

“They’re all quite sketchy,” he said, tossing a handful of coins onto the counter as payment for coffee, “but the Anderson fella—the ticket right by the body—what was he doin’? How’d he drop his ticket?”

“Hm.” I paused and pretended to deliberate something. “Well, I’ll let you know if I’ve thought of anything when you come by again.”

No sooner had I started to make my way back into the building than he suddenly spoke. “I didn’t catch your name.”

I smiled and pinched my overalls between my thumbs and forefingers so that he could see the letters stitched there in red.

“Mitch,” he said slowly. “Mitch what?”

“Noss.”

He looked at me again, pensively. “That’s a strange name.”

“Name shaming now, are we, sir?” I said, and politely closed the door in his face.

A day later he came back. Same woody parked under the pump canopy, same spry shrewdness. Homburg hat, graying whiskers, lukewarm coffee.

“Well?” he said as way of greeting.

“Well,” I answered. I paused in mopping the maintenance garage, which we never used but had to clean anyway. “I thought about it awhile. The train ticket—Timothy Anderson, his last name—doesn’t it sound familiar?”

“Can’t say it rings a bell.” The Marlboros came out, up-click-down, and he smoked while he watched me wring out the mop. “Why? Y’know somethin’ bout him?”

“Not directly. I heard his brother was quite close with Millar’s late wife, way back. They were together before she went off with Millar. Then she had that horrible accident…”

“And the brother?”

“Didn’t take it well,” I said lightly, and slid the mop to rest against the wall. “Especially when he found out Millar had survived. Some say he never got over it. Anyway, he’s gone too. Years back.”

“So you think the Timothy fella was out for revenge?”

“Oh, perhaps.”

“Shame. Guess no one really knows what folks are carryin’ around, eh?”

“No one,” I agreed. He was watching me again, squinting a little, but that could’ve been from the sun, or the smoke from his cigarette, or the wind.

“But why leave a ticket?” he said suddenly. “Dumb, wouldn’t you say?”

I shrugged and reached casually for the notebook he’d left on the counter again, already flipped open to the page with Timothy Anderson’s name. “People make mistakes.”

He exhaled a plume of smoke. “And here I thought you’d have somethin’ more useful to say.” He rubbed his temples with one hand, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, head slumped. “Timothy Anderson—if he was the killer, it’d be a neat trick to vanish without a trace.”

I nodded placatingly. “Oh yes, a neat trick. But I’m sure you’ll find him eventually.” I threw him a sharp glance, then carefully slid a hand over the ticket, drew it off the page, and closed the notebook.

By the time he looked back up, I’d tucked the ticket into my overalls and returned the notebook to its place on the counter. “If it helps,” I added, “I could keep an eye out. Or ear. You know, in case he shows up in town again.”

“I doubt he’d be so stupid as to circle back here.”

I nodded again. “Well, if there’s anything else I can do, let me know.”

He grunted in reply. I gave him a nonchalant salute and headed back into the building.

Inside, I locked the restroom door and held up the ticket, smooth and disposable between my fingers. California. Tonight, the train would pull into the station, unload a scant few passengers, take on a few more, and I’d be gone.

If the detective returned here, he’d find it empty. And if he thought of me at all— By then the train would already be gliding southward, all the way to Portland and then to Redding and Sacramento, then down further to who-knows-where, and the only proof I’d ever been in Ellensburg, in the old gas station just a few blocks from Central Washington, amidst the zit-zit-zit of cicadas and the blooming monardas and the summer torpor, was the body of a certain Rodge Millar stabbed to death at an Italian restaurant named La Tavola.