The McCone Files (5 page)

I showed her Merrill's picture. “Do you remember this little girl?”

The woman smiled. “You don't forget such a beautiful child. She and her mother used to come here every Sunday afternoon and ride the carousel. The mother still comes. She sits on that bench over there and watches the children and looks sad as can be. Did her little girl die?”

It was more than I expected to hear.

“No,” I said, “she didn't die.”

It was dark by the time I parked at Mission Creek. All I could make out were the shapes of the boats moored along the ramshackle pier. Light from their windows reflected off the black water of the narrow channel, and waves sloshed against the piling as I hurried along, my footsteps echoing loudly on the rough planking. Bob Smith's boat was near the end, between two hulking fishing craft. A dim bulb by its door highlighted its peeling blue paint, but little else. I knocked and waited.

The tye lines of the fishing craft creaked as the boats rose and fell on the tide. Behind me I heard a scurrying sound. Rats, maybe. I glanced over my shoulder, suddenly seized by the eerie sensation of being watched. No one—whom I could see.

Light footsteps sounded inside the houseboat. The little girl who answered the door had curly red-gold hair and widely spaced blue eyes, her t-shirt was grimy and there was a rip in the knee of her jeans, but in spite of it she was beautiful. Beautiful and a few years older than in the picture I had tucked in my bag. That picture had been taken around the time she printed her name in block letters in the second-grade reader her mother kept in the neat-as-a-pin room Merrill no longer occupied.

I said, “Hello, Merrill. Is your dad home?”

“Uh, yeah. Can I tell him who's here?”

“I'm a friend of your mom.”

Wrong answer; she stiffened. The she whirled and ran inside. I waited.

Bob Smith had shaggy dark-red hair and a complexion pitted by acne scars. His body was stocky, and his calloused hands and work clothes told me Evelyn had lied about his job and friends on the police force. I introduced myself, showed him my license, and explained that his former wife had hired me. “She claims your daughter disappeared from the carousel in Golden Gate Park yesterday afternoon.”

He blinked. “That's crazy. We were no place near the park yesterday.”

Merrill reappeared, an orange cat draped over her shoulder. She peered anxiously around her father at me.

“Evelyn seems to think you took Merrill from the park,” I said to Smith.

“Took? As in snatched?”

I nodded.

“Jesus Christ, what'll she come up with next?”

“You do you have custody?”

“Since a little while after the divorce. Evvie was….” He glanced down at his daughter.

The cat chose that moment to wriggle free from her and dart outside. Merrill ran after is calling, “Tigger,
Tigger
!”

“Evvie was slapping Merrill around,” Smith went on. “I had to do something about it. Evvie isn't…too stable. She's got more problems than I could deal with, but she won't get help for them. Deep down, she loves Merrill, but…What did she do—ask you to kidnap her?”

“Not exactly. The way she went about it was complicated.”

“Of course. With Evvie, it would be.”

The orange cat brushed against my ankles—prodigal returned. Behind me Merrill said, “Dad, I'm hungry.”

Smith opened his mouth to speak, but suddenly his features went rigid with shock.

I felt a rush of air and started to turn. Merrill cried out. I pivoted and saw Evelyn. She was clutching Merrill around the shoulders, pulling her back onto the pier.

“Daddy!”

Smith started forward. “Evvie, what the hell…?”

Evelyn's pale face was a soapstone sculpture; her lips barely moved when she said, “Don't come any closer, Bob.”

Smith pushed around me.

Evelyn drew back and her right hand came up, clutching a long knife.

I grabbed Smith's arm and stopped him.

Evelyn began edging toward the end of the pier, dragging Merrill with her. The little girl's feet scraped on the planking; her body was rigid, her small face blank with terror.

Smith said, “Christ, do something!”

I moved past. Evelyn and Merrill were almost to the railing where the pier dead-ended above the black water.

“Evvie,” I called, “please come back.”

“No!”

“You've got no place to go.”

“No place but the water.”

Slowly I began moving toward them, “You don't want to go into it. It's cold and—”

“Stay back!” The knife glinted in the light from the boats.

“I'll stay right where I am. We'll talk.”

She pressed against the rail, tightening her grip on Merrill. The little girl hadn't made a sound, but her fingers clawed at her mother's arm.

“We'll talk,” I said again.

“About what?”

“The animals.”

“The
animals
?”

“Remember when you told me how much Merrill loved the animals on the carousel? How she loved to ride them?”

“…Yes.”

“If you go into the water and take her with you, she'll never ride them again.”

Merrill's fingers stopped their frantic clawing. Even in the dim light I could see comprehension flood her features. She said, “Mom, what
about
the animals?”

Evelyn looked down at her daughter's head.

“What about the zebra, Mom? And the ostrich? What about the blue pig?”

I began edging closer.

“I
miss
the animals. I want to go see them again.”

“Your father won't let you.”

“Yes, he will. He will if I ask him. We could go on Sundays, just like we used to.”

Closer.

“Would you really do that, honey? Ask him?”

“Uh-huh.”

My foot slipped on the planking. Evelyn started and glanced up. She raised the knife and looked toward the water. Lowered it and looked back at me. “If he says yes, will you come with us? Just you, not Bob?”

“Of course.”

She sighed and let the knife clatter to the planking. Then she let go of Merrill. I moved forward and kicked the knife into the water. Merrill began running toward her father, who stood frozen in front of his houseboat.

Then she stopped. Looking back at her mother. Hesitated and reached out her hand. Evelyn stared at her for a moment before she went over and clasped it.

I took Evelyn's other hand and we began walking along the pier. “Are you okay, Merrill?” I asked.

“I'm all right. And I meant what I said about going to ride the carousel. If Mom's going to be okay. She is, isn't she?”

“Yes. Yes, she will be—soon.”

THE FIRST time I saw the old Japanese woman, I was having brunch at the restaurant above the ruins of San Francisco's Sutro Baths. The woman squatted on the slope, halfway between its cypress-covered top and the flooded ruins of the old bathhouse. She was uprooting vegetation and stuffing it into a green plastic sack.

“I wonder what she's picking,” I said to my friend Greg

He glanced out the window, raising one dark-blond eyebrow, his homicide cop's eye assessing the scene. “Probably something edible that grows wild. She looks poor; it's a good way to save grocery money.”

Indeed the woman did look like the indigent old ladies one sometimes saw in Japantown; she wore a shapeless jacket and trousers, and her feet were clad in sneakers. A gray scarf wound around her head.

“Have you ever been down there?” I asked Greg, motioning at the ruins. The once-elegant baths had been destroyed by fire. All that remained now were crumbling foundations, half submerged in water. Seagulls swam on its glossy surface and, beyond, the surf tossed against the rocks.

“No. You?”

“No. I've always meant to, but the path is steep and I never have the right shoes when I come here.”

Greg smiled teasingly. “Sharon, you'd let your private eye's instincts be suppressed for lack of hiking boots?”

I shrugged. “Maybe I'm not really that interested.”

“Maybe not.”

Greg often teased me about my sleuthing instincts, but in reality I suspected he was proud of my profession. An investigator for All Souls Cooperative, the legal services plan, I had dealt with a full range of cases—from murder to the mystery of a redwood hot tub that didn't hold water. A couple of the murders I'd solved had been in Greg's bailiwick, and this had given rise to both rivalry and romance.

In the months that passed my interest in the old Japanese woman was piqued. Every Sunday that we came there—and we came often because the restaurant was a favorite—the woman was scouring the slope, scouring for…what?

One Sunday in early spring Greg and I sat in our window booth, watching the woman climb slowly down the dirt path. To complement the season, she had changed her gray headscarf for bright yellow. The slope swarmed with people, enjoying the release from the winter rains. On the far barren side where no vegetation had taken hold, an abandoned truck leaned at a precarious angle at the bottom of the cliff near the baths. People scrambled down, inspected the old truck, then went to walk on the concrete foundations or disappeared into a nearby cave.

When the waitress brought our check, I said, “I've watched long enough; let's go down there and explore.”

Greg grinned, reaching in his pocket for change. “But you don't have the right shoes.”

“Face it. I'll never have the right shoes. Let's go. We can ask the old woman what she's picking.”

He stood up. “I'm glad you finally decided to investigate her. She might be up to something sinister.”

“Don't be silly.”

He ignored me. “Yeah, the private eye side of you has finally won out. Or is it your Indian blood? Tracking instinct, papoose?”

I glared at him, deciding that for that comment he deserved to pay the check. My one-eighth Shoshone ancestry—which for some reason had emerged to make me a black-haired throwback in a family of Scotch-Irish towheads—had prompted Greg's dubbing me “papoose.” It was a nickname I did not favor.

We left the restaurant and passed through the chain link fence to the path. A strong wind whipped my long hair about my head, and I stopped to tie it back. The path wound in switchbacks past huge gnarled geranium plants and through a thicket. On the other side of it, the woman squatted, pulling up what looked like weeds. When I approached she smiled at me, a gold tooth flashing.

“Hello,” I said. “We've been watching you and wondered what you were picking.”

“Many good things grow here. This month it is the wild mustard.” She held up a sprig. I took it, sniffing its pungency.

“You should try it,” she added. “It is good for you.”

“Maybe I will.” I slipped the yellow flower through my buttonhole and turned to Greg.

“Fat chance,” he said. “When do you ever eat anything healthy?”

“Only when you force me.”

“I have to. Otherwise it would be Hersey Bars day in and day out.”

“So what? I'm not in bad shape.” It was true; even on this steep slope I wasn't winded.

Greg smiled, his eyes moving appreciatively over me. “No, you're not.”

We continued down toward the ruins, past a sign that advised us:

CAUTION!

CLIFF AND SURF AREA

EXTREMELY DANGEROUS

PEOPLE HAVE BEEN SWEPT

FROM THE ROCKS AND DROWNED

I stopped balancing with my hand on Greg's arm, and removed my shoes. “Better footsore than swept away.”

We approached the abandoned truck, following the same impulse that had drawn other climbers. Its blue paint was rusted and there had been a fire in the engine compartment. Everything, including the seats and steering wheel had been stripped.

“Somebody even tried to take the front axle,” a voice beside me said, “but the fire had fused the bolts.”