The Disappearance

Frances Cole stood at the front window of her house on California Avenue on the morning of March twenty-third, 1934, holding the second edition of the Reno Evening Gazette in both hands, reading the front-page column for the third time without taking it in.

She was fifty-one. She had been a Reno resident since 1898, the daughter of a Bluff banker who had died in 1916, the widow of a Bluff attorney who had died in 1927, and she lived alone in a two-story shingled house her father had bought her the year of her marriage. The house was on the west side of California Avenue, four blocks south of the river, in the neighborhood the city called the Bluff because it stood on the gravel rise above the Truckee floodplain. The neighborhood had been built between 1890 and 1915 by the men who had owned the early banks, and she had been at school with most of their daughters, and she knew which house belonged to which family the way other women knew the names of streets.

The Gazette’s front-page column reported that Mr. Roy Frisch, of 247 Court Street, had been missing since approximately ten o’clock the previous evening. He had walked from the Majestic Theater on First and Center toward his home on Court Street after attending the evening performance of Hold Your Horses, and he had not arrived. His mother and his sister had reported him missing at eight o’clock that morning. The chief of police had issued an appeal for information. Mr. Frisch was thirty-five, slight of build, dark-haired, and last seen wearing a brown overcoat and a brown hat.

Frances Cole knew Roy Frisch in the casual but specific way Bluff people knew Bluff people. He was the cashier at the Riverside Bank. His father had been the assistant cashier under her father at the old First National before the consolidation. She had spoken with him perhaps twenty times in her life, the last time the previous October when he had come to the door to collect for a subscription drive at the Episcopal church. He had stood on her porch in the same brown overcoat she was now reading about in the second edition.

She set the paper on the table by the window.

She rang for Mrs. Otis, who came out of the kitchen with flour on her apron.

“Mrs. Otis.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What have you heard.”

“About the Frisch boy.”

“Yes.”

“The grocer’s son heard from the boy on the corner who heard from a man at the desk at the Riverside that Mr. Frisch was going to be a witness in the federal case next week.”

“Was he.”

“That is what they say at the Riverside, ma’am. The federal grand jury in San Francisco. The mail fraud case.”

“The Wingfield matter.”

“They are not calling it that, ma’am. But yes.”

Frances Cole nodded once. She turned back to the window.

The Wingfield matter, as she had come to call it in her own thinking over the past twenty months, was the slow and public unwinding of the twelve banks that George Wingfield had built across the state through the twenties and that had collapsed together in the November holiday of 1932, taking with them the savings of perhaps thirty thousand Nevadans and the working capital of the state’s ranches. She had lost very little herself. Her late husband’s estate had been moved out of the Wingfield banks in 1930 on the advice of a Reno attorney who had since left town. Many of her friends on the Bluff had not been so warned. Some of them no longer kept a maid. One of them had moved back into her mother’s house in Sacramento. The reorganization of the state’s banking and the federal proceedings had been the principal subject of conversation in the Bluff for fifteen months, the subject around which other subjects arranged themselves.

She had not, until the morning of March twenty-third, considered that the proceedings would have a personal cost in this particular way.

She stood at the window for a long time. The street outside was quiet. A delivery truck passed and turned at the corner. A neighbor’s gardener was pruning the hedge across the way.

She walked through the house to the back porch and stood there looking at the river through the bare cottonwoods. The river was low. It had been a dry winter and the river had been low for three weeks. She thought about Mr. Frisch walking home from the Majestic the night before. She thought about the route. She had walked the same route herself when she was a girl, from the picture houses on First Street up Court Street to the Bluff, perhaps fifty times. The route had a stretch, between Sierra Street and the corner at Court, where the street lamps had been farther apart than the city standard for as long as she could remember. She had complained about it twice to the council, twice without result, and she had given up complaining. She had walked the route at night herself as a young woman and she had thought of it as a perfectly safe walk.

She returned to the front room.

Mrs. Otis was setting the table for the noon meal.

“Mrs. Otis.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“There will be no callers this afternoon.”

“No, ma’am.”

“If anyone comes to the door, please say I am at the library.”

“At the library.”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to the library.”

“No.”

Mrs. Otis set down the soup spoon. She looked at Frances Cole for a moment and then she nodded and went back to the kitchen.

Frances Cole sat in her chair by the window. She picked up the Gazette again. She read the column a fourth time. She read the description. The brown overcoat. The brown hat. The slight build. The dark hair. The walk from First and Center toward Court Street and the Bluff.

She set the paper down.

She did not, in the months and years that followed, expect Roy Frisch to be found.

She was not asked to testify in any proceeding. She had nothing she could have testified to. She had read a paragraph in the Gazette and she had stood at a window. The federal mail fraud case against George Wingfield went forward without its cashier witness from the Riverside Bank, and the verdict, when it came, was not a verdict that surprised her. She lived in her house on California Avenue for another twenty-two years. She walked, in the evenings, only along the south side of the river, where the lamps were closer together. She did not, after the spring of 1934, walk in the alleys behind Court Street, where she had walked since she was a girl.

In the fourth year after Mr. Frisch’s disappearance, in the summer of 1938, she planted a small magnolia at the corner of her lot. She did not mention to anyone what she was planting it for. The magnolia took. It was still standing the year she died.

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