What Remains of Teddy Redburn Read online

The search dogs from Bisbee and a special corpse-sniffing hound brought from Tucson massed under a streetlight four days later when a general search of all the hotels and bed and breakfasts in and around Los Hombres turned up no old men, and the car’s owner hadn’t appeared on his own. Then the patron of the Big Gulch Diner turned up at the Los Hombres police station to tell his story of seeing a man drop down into the arroyo. Finally, Jan Jansen provided her observation of the skinny man crossing her property and they were fairly certain she’d seen Theodore Pennington Redburn strolling out into the desert. Some strange theories about UFOs, which she appended to her narrative, amused them.

  Shouts from policemen in the search team erupted and the dogs milled and whined on the sidewalk that day when they began the search. All at once, a commander signaled with the drop his hand and yelled “okay!” and the men and dogs plunged over the embankment into the ditch.

  The way down was steep. They scrambled with their boots scraping the sides of Big Gulch, clouting rocks and dirt down with them. The mass of men and hounds spread out across the sandy bottom of the arroyo, but the narrow stream bed crowded them, and the hounds tangled their leashes, causing curses and stumbles from the dog handlers. Sand in the arroyo bed partially covered a large rock and one policeman stubbed his toe on it and fell on his dog’s back, and it yelped loudly. A few empty beer bottles poked up in the sandy bed as though they were spectators along with the human onlookers peering down at the search team from the sidewalk. A few curious patrons left the Big Gulch Diner and joined them to consider the search party’s departure.

  “We’re pretty sure he was here,” yelled the commander. “We’re all heading for the mobile home park where he might have been spotted. We phoned Las Vegas and the word has come back that this guy has Alzheimer’s in an early stage. He could be confused and disoriented. Let’s go out there and find him!”

  Running forward in the sand, the younger officers led and the older, fatter men waddled behind, their boots sinking and their pants sagging, so that they had to stop to yank them up periodically.

  “Hit on it! Hit on it, boys!” yelled the policeman who was running fastest in the sand. His loud call set several unruly dogs barking.

  Up arroyo banks at times, always heading toward the flatland, the commander radioed their position and dispatched an ambulance and several jeeps following them. When the arroyo banks flattened and the bed widened, the unremitting corpse dogs bounded into the dry mesquite bosque and toward the rocks and cactus farther out.

  Eventually, the search party reached the mobile home park where Jan Jansen and her sons, recently back from their fishing trip and cleaning out the back of their trucks with hoses, gawked as men and dogs flow over their land in the direction of the border.

  “And to think you saw him, Mom,” said Jan’s eldest son. She had bragged about probably being the last person to sight the lost millionaire.

  “And I know what happened to him, too,” said Jan proudly. “I told the police, but they didn’t listen. They never do.”

  Asking her for her theory would be a bad decision; all her sons knew of what she’d say. Her rants about U.F.O. abductions drained them!