Voodoo Ridge by David Freed Page A

sorry for damaging their home and for casting aspersions on their son, Preston, even if he was a creepy slacker. Repentance is a demonstration of wisdom as far as Buddhists are concerned. Admitting guilt and accepting responsibility for one’s actions are supposed to lessen the effect of negative karma. Selfishly, I hoped that my feigning contrition would bring Savannah back. But I’d racked up more than my share of negative karma over the years. It would take a lot, I knew, to balance the scales.
    Are we rewarded, ultimately, for the good we do in life? What about when we do bad things for ostensibly good reasons? If you pump two rounds into the head of a sociopathic jihadist at point-blank range as he enjoys oysters on the half shell at an upscale French restaurant in Cairo, and one of those rounds exits his skull, killing his otherwise innocent, twenty-two-year-old mistress, does bad erase good? I didn’t know. I still don’t.
    The sheriff’s print technician arrived at 0925, crunching into the snowy parking lot of the B&B in a silver Toyota Camry. The car had chains on the front tires. The technician wore UGG boots, gray leggings, and a military-style parka, the hood trimmed in fake wolf fur. With her briefcase kit in hand, she flipped open her ID with a flourish and showed it to me as I opened the door. Brown unkempt hair. Small brown eyes. She was petite and looked about twenty-five. I didn’t catch her name.
    “I don’t know what was so important that I had to drop everything on my day off and race over here,” she said, striding past me, inside. “I’m missing my Pilates class.”
    I shut the door behind her. “I’m missing more than that.”
    She asked me if I’d touched anything. Door knobs? Plumbing fixtures? Wood surfaces?
    “All of the above.”
    “What about this?” She stooped at the waist and peered closely without handling an empty drinking glass sitting on a nightstand, the side of the bed Savannah slept on.
    “Not that I recall,” I said.
    She opened her kit, got out a small brush, a cold-cream-size jar of finely ground carbon powder, and went to work while I threw on my leather pilot’s jacket and went for a walk.
    The thermometer had dipped into the high teens. I was sweating. Savannah was in trouble. I could feel it. The urge to take control of the situation, to do something, was overpowering. In my wallet was a dog-eared picture of her, wearing long gold earrings and a strapless, sparkly purple gown, taken on the day we first met, at the wedding reception for my Air Force Academy roommate. She was unquestionably the most exquisite woman I’d ever known. Even after our divorce, I couldn’t bring myself to part with her picture. Sometimes at night, when sleep eluded me, I would take it out and gaze for hours at her perfect face to remind myself how much her leaving had wounded me, hoping my bitterness would swell such that I could force her out of my head once and for all, forever. Only the strategy never seemed to work. The pleasure I derived from staring at Savannah’s likeness, knowing that she was once mine, outweighed the pain of having lost her. So I kept the photo. And, now, walking residential streets near the Tahoe lakefront, my hair and beard wet with snow, I stopped to show it to anybody who was willing to look at it.
    “Have you seen this woman this morning?”
    Nobody had, but everyone I approached expressed concern and assured me that they’d all keep a sharp eye out for her.
    A wispy Filipino mail carrier in his US Postal Service Jeep spent five minutes telling me in great detail how his own sister had gone to get milk and eggs at a corner market in Fresno one morning and never came home.
    A kindly looking grandfather walking his golden retriever remarked how beautiful Savannah looked in the photo, joking that it would be his lucky day to find her before I did.
    A big, rangy-looking sewer cleanout technician wearing a beat-up straw cowboy hat felt compelled to give