The Thing I Didn't Know I Didn't Know (Russel Middlebrook: The Futon Years Book 1) (18 page)

I remembered when I'd seen Trai and Lena together out in the parking lot, the night of the Fourth of July. Min had thought they were hiding their physical affection from me. But they'd also been hiding it from her.

"I don't even think Trai's really polyamorous," Min said. "I think it's just an excuse to fuck lots of different people."

It was all I could do not to agree with her. But I'd been around long enough to know that just because people break up, that doesn't mean they might not be back together in a day or a week.

Besides, this was about what Min felt, not me. (See? I'm really
not
an asshole.)

Min and I talked a while a longer. I even got her out of her bedroom and into the living room (it was like coaxing a wet kitten out from under the porch). Once there, I made us both some Top Ramen, and I could tell she hadn't eaten all day since Min normally wouldn't be caught dead eating Top Ramen.

Before I knew it, it was after eleven, and I realized that Gunnar still hadn't come home. When he went home to visit his parents, he was usually back by mid-afternoon.

"Where do you think Gunnar is?" I asked Min.

"I don't know," Min said. "But I was gone for a while. He could've come home and left again."

It was possible that he'd come home and left again. It was also possible that he hadn't made it home at all—that he'd gotten distracted by something somewhere between our hometown and home.

Gunnar had been acting weird enough lately that I wanted to know exactly what was up. But when I texted him, he didn't respond. When I called, he didn't pick up—it went right to voicemail. And unlike Trai and Lena, he'd either blocked himself on Find My Friends, or his phone was off or out of range.

I decided to call his parents. His mom told me that Gunnar had left their house in the early afternoon, just like I'd thought. I didn't want them to worry or to get Gunnar in trouble, so I lied and told them everything was okay, that I thought I heard him coming in the front door just then.

After I ended the call, I looked at Min. This was officially weird. But we still decided not to call the police or anything. After all, Gunnar
was
an adult (of sorts).

We finally went to bed, but in the middle of the night, Min woke me up, concerned. She showed me that Gunnar's bed hadn't been slept in. He hadn't come home that night at all.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I was now officially worried about Gunnar.             

"We need to do something," Min said. Her eyes were still red—I think the reason she'd checked in on him was because she'd never really gone to sleep herself.

It was almost four in the morning, but we tried texting and calling Gunnar again. He still didn't pick up. Hopefully, his cellphone was just off for the night.

So did we call the police now? I'd heard somewhere that you weren't supposed to contact them until a person had been missing for twenty-four hours, but I had a feeling that was just something they said on TV. Even so, I felt weird about calling them. Gunnar was still an adult (of sorts). And the last thing in the world I wanted to do was upset his parents.

The first thing Min and I did was look for some evidence in the houseboat of where Gunnar might be. He hadn't dated anyone in over a year, and I'd never known him to have anything approaching a one-night stand, but anything was possible (men are pigs). Or maybe he really had come home the day before, in between Min's leaving and coming back again, and maybe he'd left some clue as to where he'd gone after that.

But if Gunnar had left a clue, we couldn't find it. He'd definitely thrown away the Trader Joe's chicken burrito wrapper in the kitchen trash, but I didn't know if he'd done it Sunday or Saturday before we left. Meanwhile, his computer was password protected (and I can barely remember all my
own
passwords, much less his passwords too).

Gunnar's bedroom was on the lower level, and as I was walking back up to the front room, I passed the houseboat's one storage closet. On a lark, I opened it. And yeah, once again, I had to take everything out in order to see the things in the back. But then I realized:

Gunnar's tent is gone. And so is his sleeping bag.

I was instantly relieved. He
had
come home the day before, but then he'd left again, on another Bigfoot search. Of course he had. It! Was! So! Obvious! Why hadn't that occurred to me before?

The point was, everything was okay.

All that said, it did seem odd that he hadn't told Min or me where he was going (or his parents, for that matter). He hadn't even left a note. So something still nagged at me.

I told Min what I'd deduced, and then I went to my computer and started searching for Bigfoot websites. I didn't even know Ben's last name, but it didn't take long to track down his email address (thank you, Bigfoot blimp Kickstarter campaign). Maybe Ben had cellphone coverage even though Gunnar didn't, so I decided to send him an email:

Hey Ben: Hope you guys have finally bagged your Bigfoot. Would you tell Gunnar to call or text me when he gets a chance? He left without telling us where he is. Russel (Gunnar's friend)

By that time, it was still early in the morning, so Min and I both went back to bed.

When we woke up again, I had to go to work (at Bake) and Min had a seminar.

It was just after noon when I finally heard back from Ben:

Gunnar's not with me.
We may have a problem. Call me ASAP.

*   *   *

I was instantly worried again. I took a break as soon as possible and called Ben (he'd sent me his number).

"There was another Bigfoot sighting, on Saturday," he told me. "A good one too—Class A. These are the ones you really pay attention to, sort of like a close encounter of the third kind."

Ah HA!
I thought, even though this totally wasn't the time.

"So is that where you are?" I said. "Did Gunnar leave early or something?"

"We didn't go. It was just too remote. Private property, and the only access is logging roads." What had Ben said before about loggers? Something about how they see Bigfoot in the distant backcountry?

"But Gunnar's tent and sleeping bag are missing," I said.

"That's exactly what I was afraid of. We were all discussing the sighting on Saturday night, online. Gunnar had really wanted to check it out—he'd argued that we should do it.
Strenuously
. But it was just too hard to get to. This is exactly the kind of thing the Bigfoot blimp would be perfect for."

Enough with the stupid blimp!
I thought.
Where's Gunnar?

"In the end, I thought Gunnar agreed with us," Ben said. "I wish the coordinates hadn't been listed on our website. I had no idea he'd try to go on his own."

Ordinarily, I wouldn't think that Gunnar would be stupid enough to do something like this on his own either. As strange as he could be, he never took risks. But it had been weeks since he'd been acting normal. Something was going on with him, and it had something to do with this damn Bigfoot obsession.

"Well, he's not in any real danger," I said, forcing a laugh. "Right? I mean, it's not like anything bad is going to happen."

Ben didn't say anything for a second.

"Ben?" I said.

"I won't lie to you. Those logging roads can be pretty screwed up. It's way too easy to get lost and run out of gas. And who knows if there's even a trail?" He hesitated a second, then he said, "It also doesn't help that he's gone deep into grizzly country."

*   *   *

As Min had recently pointed out, I'm a terrible liar, so I went back inside Bake and told Jake and Amanda the truth about what was going on. I was hoping they'd be all concerned and offer to let me leave early for the day, but they didn't. When I asked outright, Jake said, "Sorry, we really need you today."

Later, we got a nasty complaint from a customer, and after the customer left, Jake turned to Amanda and said, "That was
your
fault."

"How do you know I burned the loaf?" Amanda said. "Maybe
you
baked it." That's when I knew for a fact Amanda had baked it. If she hadn't, she would've blamed it on me.

"That was a gluten-free loaf," Jake lectured. "Gluten-free needs to be baked at a lower temperature."

"Seriously?" she said. "You're seriously telling me this? The person whose idea it was to have gluten-free bread in the first place?"

I simultaneously rolled my eyes and shook my head. If Jake and Amanda had to argue about every little thing, couldn't they at least argue about letting me go home early?

By the time I got home that night, it was after eight p.m. Min was home too. It was too late to leave for the woods, but Ben and Katie lived in Cle Elum, this little town in the middle of the Cascade Mountains. It was a couple of hours closer to where Gunnar supposedly was, so Ben said we could come and spend the night with them. Min and I threw some things together and left right away. Min drove, and on the way I worked my usual magic, swapping work schedules via text in order to get the next day off.

It was almost midnight by the time we arrived at Ben and Katie's. They lived in a small cedar cabin on the outskirts of town. Ben invited us inside to the front room. They had lots of bookshelves with what looked to be just about every book ever written about Bigfoot.

As for Katie, I'm not saying she was any less committed to the search for Bigfoot than Ben, but in the hours since Min and I had left Seattle, she'd made us an impressive-looking batch of Rice Krispies treats (with mini M&Ms).

"Tell me about this latest sighting," I said to them, later, over hot tea and treats. "What made Gunnar so excited to go there?"

"It was a compelling one, that's for sure," Ben said. "It was a group of loggers—five in all—and best of all, a forester, someone with actual scientific background. One of them noticed a figure watching them from the top of a nearby ridge. His first thought was, 'A gorilla has escaped the zoo.' But of course that made no sense at all, not where they were. He pointed it out to the others. They all saw it. And they took photos."

Ben nodded down to blown-up photographs right in front of me on the coffee table. I wasn't sure how I'd missed them before.

Like every Bigfoot photo ever taken, it was impossible to know anything for sure. None of the pictures were completely clear, and they'd been taken from pretty far away. But whatever the thing was, it definitely looked to be walking across this rocky ridge—
walking
, not crawling. In other words, it was definitely no grizzly bear.

"Those loggers were out in the middle of nowhere," Ben said. "If this was a prank, it was a pretty damn elaborate one."

As interesting as this was, I was more concerned about Gunnar. "So just how dangerous is this place we're going?" I asked.

Katie nodded down to the photos. "Dangerous enough that we saw
these,
and decided not to go there."

"Honestly, I'm mostly worried about Gunnar getting lost," Ben said.

"What about the grizzlies?" I said.

He smiled. "It's not like in the movies. Bears try hard to avoid people—even grizzlies." He looked at Min. "But it is true they're attracted to women menstruating."

"That's not a problem," Min said.

"But it's not just the area that has me worried," Ben said. "It's Gunnar. The way he's been acting. At first, it was great having someone younger get so excited about Bigfoot. But then I met him in person, on that trip. And ever since then...well, to tell you the truth, he's sort of scared me. Even if we had decided to do this expedition, I wouldn't have invited him. I gather he hasn't always been so intense?"

"No," I said. "This is something new. And we've been just as baffled by it as you."

But later that night in the bedroom Min and I shared (our idea), I said to her, "I feel guilty. It's obvious that something's been going on with Gunnar. I mean, Ben barely knows Gunnar, and he picked up on it right away. But I've been so caught up in my own life that I just sort of ignored it."

"Me too," she said.

The lights were off, and we laid in the darkness for a few minutes.

"Gunnar's going to be okay, right?" Min said.

"Yeah," I said, sounding so certain that I almost believed it myself.

*   *   *

We left early the next morning in a two-car caravan with Clive and Leon. Min and I rode in the car with Ben and Katie.

Once we were on the road, I said, "Maybe we should call the ranger station."

"And say what?" Ben said. "That someone went on a hike? Besides, where he went, it's not exactly legal. He could get arrested. Let's see if we can find him on our own first."

We drove for a long time. Along the way, I kept checking my messages and trying to contact Gunnar. But I quickly lost my coverage, and I never got it back.

We kept driving north along a two-lane highway.

Then we left the highway and turned onto a side road. We were traveling northwest now, and going up, deep into the North Cascade Mountains.

Eventually our paved road became a gravel road. The smell of dust was even stronger than the pine and fir trees that surrounded us.

Finally, we came to another gravel road, this one blocked by a metal gate.

We got out and inspected it. It wasn't locked, but there was a place for a padlock, and the metal was dented. Someone had broken the lock, maybe with a rock. It had to be Gunnar, but I'd never known him to break a law in his life. This wasn't like him at all.

I'd thought the gravel road we were on was as bad as the roads were going to get. What I didn't know was that logging roads, at least the logging roads behind locked metal gates, are barely even roads. They're more like "suggested guidelines" for your vehicle. I guess when you're in a harvester or a loader (different kinds of logging tractors), things like "an actual road" just aren't that important.

But Ben and the others had four-wheel drive, so for the time being, we were okay.

We wound our way through the logging roads for a long time. I read once that the difference between a "labyrinth" and a "maze" is that a labyrinth has only one path that winds like crazy to the end, whereas a maze has an endless number of off-shoots and dead-ends before you finally reach your destination.

I don't think these roads were either a labyrinth
or
a maze, because it didn't seem like they were leading anywhere at all.

Ben had GPS which he used to follow the coordinates. But the area was hilly, and some of it had been clear-cut already, but most of it had not. All this interfered with the GPS. Needless to say, there weren't any signs or numbered markings on the trees. And even if we found the right spot, what guarantee did we have that Gunnar had found it too? The thing we were most worried about was Gunnar getting lost. But how did you find someone who was lost—someone who himself didn't even know where he was?

And no, this time, that's not a metaphor for my own life. It was Gunnar I was worried about now, not me.

Then, totally without warning, we came to Gunnar's car, parked alongside the "road."