They ignored her, turned up the volume of their argument.
“You’re glad he’s gone,” Judy said. “He was always an embarrassment to you.”
“How can you say that? I loved our son.”
“Past tense.”
“I
love
him.”
“Nonsense. You’ve always looked down on him because you think he lacks intellect. And because he’s gay.”
“I think he lacks drive, not intelligence. As for him being gay, I have no prejudice in that area. Didn’t I invite that Ben
friend of his for weekends and holidays? Didn’t I show him every courtesy? Don’t I still, whenever he drops in?”
“A butler would behave more warmly than you do.”
“Please listen to me,” Julia said.
Neither of them looked her way.
“Goddamn it, Judy, what do you want from me?”
“What do I want? I want my son back!” Judy Peeples bent forward from the waist, hugging her midriff, and began to cry. “This
may be our last opportunity—no matter what he’s done—to find him and bring him home.”
Tom Peeples’s lined face crumpled and he put his hand over his eyes, but he made no effort to comfort his wife.
At last Julia could step into the situation. She went over, put her arms around Judy Peeples’s bent body, and helped her into
a chair.
After a moment, Tom Peeples stood, his lined face resigned, and laid a rough hand on his wife’s shoulder. “You’re right,”
he said. “It’s just so hard for me to accept it.”
She looked up at him, eyes streaming.
“I’ll do anything you ask, if it’ll bring Larry back to us.”
“… Thank you, Tom.”
To Julia, Peeples added, “Please excuse our quarreling. We’re not ourselves today. Haven’t been in six months, actually.”
“No problem. You’ve been dealing with stuff I can’t even imagine. Will you show me the money now?”
“Yes. Come with me, please.”
He led her into the hallway, through an informal dining room and a kitchen that Julia would have killed for. All this money,
she thought, all this land, but these people were broken. The loss of an only child, the uncertainty of what had happened
to him—that made every material thing meaningless.
If Tonio vanished without a trace, she would spend her life searching—and grieving.
Peeples led her along a lighted graveled path through an oak grove.
“My wife thinks this money will lead you to some magical solution to our son’s disappearance.”
“But you don’t.”
“No. I’m not doubting your abilities, but I think if Larry disappeared voluntarily he’s hidden himself where no one can find
him. Or else…”
“Yes?”
“Foul play.” Peeples’s voice was choked.
Hombre pobricito
. He couldn’t bring himself to use the word
dead
.
They came to a big white barn. When Peeples opened its doors, the smell took Julia aback, and she hesitated.
“You afraid of horses?” Peeples asked. “They’re all confined to their stalls. They’ll get restless when we go in, but settle
down pretty quick.”
“I don’t know anything about horses,” she told him, “but the smell…”
“Well, yes, they’re stinky buggers. I’m not crazy about them myself, but my wife, she loves them. We’ve got six. She gives
free riding lessons to the vineyard workers’ kids.”
Julia started liking the Peepleses a lot more.
Peeples turned on a light. At first it blinded Julia, then she started, face-to-face with a blond horse that had a white star
on its forehead. It whinnied, but its brown eyes were gentle.
“This way,” Peeples said.
The tack room was to the right. It was small, with saddles on stands, its walls covered with riding apparatus, none of which
Julia could identify. Until tonight she hadn’t been any closer to a horse than the ones the police rode in the city parks.
Peeples said, “I was moving some things around in here this afternoon, trying to consolidate them. There was a loose floorboard
under one box that I’d never noticed before.” He went to the far side, pried up the board, and lifted out a small leather
travel bag.
“One hundred thousand dollars,” he said in a hollow voice. “Small bills. I’ve counted it twice.”
He held out the bag and Julia looked into it. Rows of bills banded together. More money than she’d ever seen in one place.
Peeples looked down at her, his tanned face slack and aged beyond his fifty-some years.
“I can’t believe our son stole this money and hid it here,” he said. “But how else could he have gotten his hands on this
much cash?”
Right,
Julia thought,
how else?
“Do you have a safe?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Then let’s put it there until I figure out what to do about this.”
T
he late supper Judy Peeples had promised her had been good, their guest room was super-comfortable, but it was too damn quiet
in the country. She could sleep through the wail of sirens and the grumbling of buses and people shouting on the city streets,
but here in rural Sonoma County, where the only sound was a rooster that kept crowing all night, she tossed and turned. Weren’t
roosters supposed to crow only at dawn? What was
wrong
with the thing?
Around three in the morning she got up and sat on the window seat looking out at the oak grove between the house and the stables.
She focused on the slight movement of the branches in the breeze, and after a while she felt sleepy. The bird had finally
shut up. Maybe she could—
Motion under the oak trees.
Julia tensed up. An animal? What wild kinds did they have here? Deer, raccoons, opossums. For all she knew, coyotes and mountain
lions. Well, she was safe inside.…
But this shape didn’t move like an animal, it moved like a human. Larry or Judy Peeples, going to check on the horses? No,
she’d have seen them or heard the back door close if they’d left the house.
The dark figure kept moving. In the direction of the stables? She got up quickly, pulled on jeans, and tucked her sleep shirt
into them. Went out into the hall. A night-light burned there, showing her the way to the stairs. She crept down them, guided
by another light on the first floor, then felt her way back to the door off the kitchen.
The night air was warm and felt like silk against her skin. Something tickled her nostrils, and she had to stifle a sneeze.
From her second-floor bedroom the night hadn’t seemed so dark because of a scattering of stars, but out here it was inky.
She started toward the oak grove, and the damn rooster went off again. Nearly made her jump a foot.
She moved through the grove, keeping to the path, wishing she’d thought to put on shoes.
Estúpida.
When will you learn?
The stones cut into her soles; a couple of times she had to hop on one foot. Finally the stables came into view. Dark, but
the horses sounded restless.
So here she was—barefoot and unarmed. Unarmed because after all the violence she’d seen growing up on the streets of the Mission
district, she hated guns and had opted out of getting firearms-qualified. And suddenly scared. What had she been thinking
of, coming out here like this?
Movement by the stables—slow, stealthy. A bulky shape slipping off to the left. Unarmed or not, Julia took off running in
pursuit.
The person—she couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman—plunged into the vineyard that bordered the stables, heading toward
the road. Feet pounded the dirt between the plants, branches snapped and rustled. Julia followed through the rows of gnarled
old vines.
After a moment she stopped to get her bearings. The person she was following must’ve stopped too: there was no noise except
for the distant cry of the rooster. Then another bird joined the chorus. No one moved among the vines.
Julia wiped beads of sweat from her forehead, looked around. Blackness, crouching shadows. Narrow paths stretching in all
directions. Then, off to her left, a faint rustling. The intruder was on the move again.
She went toward the sound, took a path, and ran down it, kicking up clods of dirt. The intruder’s footsteps now sounded uneven,
labored.
Julia was gaining, gaining—
Then in the darkness something slammed into her. An upright grape stake. Pain erupted on the bridge of her nose, and she fell
to the ground, the gnarled vines scratching on her way down. She lay there stunned for a few seconds. By the time she regained
her senses and her feet, a car’s engine had started up in the distance.
Lost them, whoever he—or she—was.
Mierda.
She put her hand to her nose, felt blood welling. Injury to insult. This was a great beginning to her day.
P
ale pinkish light seeping around the drawn blinds. Must be very early in the morning. There’s been a shift in the weather,
I can feel it. Today will be beautiful.
But not for me.
I lay there, depression gathering again. After the nightmare flashback to when I’d been shot, I’d had a peculiar dream in
which Hy was looking into my eyes, but he couldn’t speak any more than I could. Then others appeared—Mick, Rae, Ted, Ma—and
they couldn’t speak either. And finally I realized it wasn’t that they couldn’t—they wouldn’t. Keeping something from me.
I thought back to Hy’s behavior the day before. At first he’d been elated to connect with me. Then they’d done a CT scan and
some other tests, and he was a little subdued but still upbeat. But later he’d been quiet, wrapped up in his own thoughts,
and his smile was slightly off.
Definitely holding something back. Something those tests had revealed.
Dammit, if that was the case, I deserved to know. When he came in today, I’d ask him—
Right. I couldn’t ask him anything. All I could do was respond to questions.
All I could do was lie here. Silent. Motionless. Afraid.
T
he sky was glowing over the eastern hills when he awoke, cramped and cold, in his SUV at a pullout on Highway 1 near Big Sur.
He’d driven almost to the Spindrift Lodge, where San Francisco’s president of the board of supervisors and the state representative
had arranged their secret meeting, then parked about ten miles north. No reason to arrive in the middle of the night and roust
the innkeeper from his or her bed; no need to attract attention to himself. Amanda Teller and Paul Janssen would probably
check in in the afternoon, and by then he’d be tucked away, hopefully in an adjoining unit.
He ran his hands over his face and hair, then got out of the car and breathed in the crisp salt air. Fog misted the gray sea;
its waves smacked onto the rocks some thousand feet below. But the pink light to the east indicated the day would clear. He
turned that way and looked up: towering pine-covered slopes, through which a waterfall had cut a channel. Now, because of
the dry summer conditions inland, its flow was barely a trickle. Come the rainy season, it would be a torrent.
All around there were reminders of the 2008 wildfire, sparked by lightning, that had burned more than 160,000 acres in the
area: blackened sections, redwoods with charred branches, deadfalls. Many residents had lost their homes, even more had been
evacuated, and the Pacific Coast Highway had been closed to traffic. People in the Big Sur area were strong and resilient,
though; it had always been subject to floods, mudslides, and avalanches. Often in winter it was cut off from the surrounding
territory, but no matter how bad the disaster the community clung together and regrouped quickly.
Craig loved Big Sur, but he and Adah had spent little time there. It was remote, down a very dicey part of the coast highway,
and there really wasn’t much to do. Better to go to Carmel, with its interesting shops and good restaurants, for a getaway.
Still, there was something magical about this long stretch of tall trees and rugged sea cliffs; if he were a believer, he’d
say being here was akin to a religious experience.
But he wasn’t a believer. His exposure to religion had been limited to Christmas Eve and Easter services at the Methodist
church in Alexandria, Virginia, where he’d been raised. He never contemplated the existence of a deity or eternal life; it
simply wasn’t in his makeup. Adah was the same: she’d been reared in the religion of her parents—communism—but she hadn’t
taken her radical parents’ beliefs too seriously. In fact, when they’d become disillusioned and begun labeling themselves
as “wild-eyed liberals,” she’d been relieved.
He thought of Shar: what did she believe? She’d been raised Catholic, but he’d never known her to go to church. And the beliefs
of her Indian ancestors hadn’t been passed on to her. He hoped if she had any faith at all she was leaning heavily on it now,
during the toughest battle of her life.
Nature called. He went into a stand of pines clinging to the clifftop, out of eyeshot of early passing motorists. Returning,
he looked at his watch. Six-thirty. He’d grab breakfast somewhere, even if it meant driving north, then play tourist till
around ten, a respectable time to arrive at the Spindrift Lodge for a spontaneous weekend getaway.
S
he was starting her search for Bill Delaney, the name she’d found in the phone book in Callie O’Leary’s hotel room, when the
fog showed signs of breaking over the Golden Gate. Delaney’s cellular had been out of service consistently when she’d called
it last night during breaks in a family evening with Ricky and the girls.
She was surprised how much she enjoyed the times when Molly and Lisa, their older sister Jamie, and even their troubled brother
Brian were in residence. The eldest girl, Chris, was a student at Berkeley and dropped in often. So did Mick.
Family had never played a big part in Rae’s life—unless you counted the people at All Souls and, later, at the agency. Her
parents had died in an accident when she was just a kid, and she’d been raised by her grandmother in Santa Maria—a cold, begrudging
woman who had died of a heart attack while trying to murder a perfectly good rosebush.