FLIPKA

Chapter Three

Over breakfast I reluctantly heard the story of the former counselor of Barracks Six whose disappearance from the facility two weeks earlier, sans car, wallet or Bible, still rattled the staff. The White Pine County Sheriff’s theory—that she had a secret boyfriend with whom she’d run off—left them shaking their heads in disbelief. She was apparently not that kind of girl. But, since there was no blood, no trail, just a pile of muddy shoes and uncooperative teens, the case had been closed.

“Really, folks,” I began in an attempt to placate, “I gotta tell you that young women disappear all the time (especially in this neck of the woods) and often the police are right. She might have met some guy she knew mom and dad wouldn’t approve of, and so, instead of disappointing them or creating a conflict, she set up a mysterious disappearance. Sometimes young women disappear because they crave the notoriety. They want to see their picture on the news or hear their loved ones plead for their return. Who knows? There are as many reasons for these disappearances as there are stars in the sky.”

It wasn’t that I didn’t care about the missing counselor, but I was sure the staff’s perceptions about events of the last couple of weeks had now been prejudiced by the arrival of someone like me. This is not an egotistical statement, but the arrival of a quote-unquote expert in abnormal psychology at a remote location manned by a few minimally trained though good-hearted professionals would color any remembrance of odd events. Imagine. Someone disappears from work one day, and suddenly the next day, the employees are ushered into a conference room to confer with Sherlock Holmes (not that I am Sherlock Holmes but it is the best example I can come up with at the moment). What do you think the employees would assume? Besides, I wasn’t there to solve the mystery of the missing counselor. 

After breakfast Winnie Peterson’s staff retreated to offices on the second level of Palmer House to prepare for their classes. I sat at the long table, as ordered, to review the case files of the girls in Barracks Six, but there was really only one I was interested in: the file belonging to the daughter of Doug Hyman. She was, after all, the reason I was there in the first place.

Wealthy, powerful men are rarely beauties, but Hyman took the cake. His publicity shots, posted all over Vegas, led one to assume that, yes, he might need a lot of work done on his face, and yes, he wore an obnoxious toupee, but to actually see him live and unaltered was such a shock that I spent most of our first meeting wondering how he hid his tail. Of course, my expectations upon that first meeting could not have been more ludicrous. I actually thought he sent a man in an expensive-looking Perry Ellis suit down into the bowels of the casino to fetch me because he’d seen one of my Christmas window displays and said, “Wow, what an artist!” You see, aside from working backstage, on the holidays I pick up extra cash painting Santas and Easter bunnies on storefront windows. So, of course the answer to the perplexing question of why the head of several casinos on the Vegas strip would demand to see a lowly stagehand had to be that he wanted me to decorate the windows of the Bellagio with cartoons of Santa. Ridiculous, I know, but I couldn’t think of any other reason. 

There is nothing more surreal than a penthouse view in Vegas. Imagine floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the pastel pink and blue spires of the castle at the Disney Excalibur and beyond, mountains ripped from tarpaper silhouetted against a sapphire sky. Really, Salvador Dali could not have imagined a more surrealistic scene than the Vegas landscape from Doug Hyman’s penthouse office.

“Come over here, pul—eeze.” The man himself sat with his back against the wall in the corner of the room, surrounded by a massive burl-top table, the paneling behind him covered with plaques and pictures of celebrities. There were three buffalo-skin chairs with antler-inspired wooden arms on the other side of the desk. I chose the one in the middle.