“You told him about the sandwiches?”
“I did. Honesty. It’s something new I’m trying. Apparently, the fact that the boat was offshore made it easier. Not many cell phones ping from the Pacific Ocean. Those were the only two Android phones in the area at the time. He said the geolocate isn’t always exact.”
“Yes, there’s a give-or-take of a hundred and fifty yards. Sometimes more in the fog. The signal skews off moisture.”
“So these could be phones from other boats,” she says.
“Could be. These are also just Androids, so if there are iPhones present, we wouldn’t know. On the other hand, right place, right time. It could be our man, and it could be our swimmer.”
Nicole sips her coffee. “Too bad I don’t know any engineers from Apple.” Maybe she’s joking. Probably not.
“Are you going to see your coder again?”
“If you need me to, I will. He texted me twice this morning, invited me to some hipster peewee golf slash bar in the Mission for a drink tonight.”
“That sounds painful.”
“Not really.” I think she means it. “You’d be surprised. You should try it sometime. Hooking up, I mean.”
“What makes you think I don’t hook up?”
The truth is, I can’t imagine hooking up with anyone. Not now, not ever. I had Fred. He was my hookup.
34
Square feet is to cubic feet as time is to what?
Moss Beach is just a blip on Highway 1, so it’s no surprise when I miss my turn and find myself driving past a field of artichokes. Although the area is famous for the annual pumpkin festival, it’s the artichokes that pay the bills. When I pull onto a dirt road to turn around, the farmworkers pause, look up, and immediately return to their business. The farmworkers are on edge these days. There was a time, not that long ago, when they could simply do their jobs and not worry about an unfamiliar car passing by. That’s not the only thing that has changed here. When I was growing up, the fog provided a protective layer of moisture on this stretch of coastline nearly year-round, but the day, like the year, is hot and dry, not a wisp of fog in sight.
The house at 670 Pacific Way is squat and run-down with a dead lawn and an empty driveway. A plywood board nailed to the fence, 670A displayed in red spray paint, points around back. I go through the gate and take the gravel path to a guest house, even smaller than the main house.
I knock on the door, but there’s no answer. Through the window, I see an unmade mattress, clothing littering the floor, an open box of Life cereal, three empty packages of Sudafed. Orange Home Depot buckets sit beside the back door, along with a funnel and an empty propane canister, signs of amateur hour in the meth trade. Ivy Blankenship doesn’t live here anymore. She probably hasn’t for a while.
I walk across the street to the fancier place, the one with the balcony overlooking the ocean, with a bird’s-eye view over Ivy’s former home. A woman in a loose white linen dress opens the door. She’s speaking into a headset—something about a warehouse, shipments, and then the conversation turns to Swedish. She raises her finger to tell me it will be one minute.
She finally clicks off the headset. “Crazy day. May I help you?”
“Sorry for the bother. I wanted to ask you about the people who live across the street?”
“I don’t know them at all. Haven’t seen them in a while.” She speaks in a nervous burst. “Are you a friend of theirs?”
“Not exactly.” I slide my creds out of my pocket and angle them up in her direction.
“Oh!” She glances from my face to my photo and back again. “Wow, I’ve never seen those in person before. Come in.”
Her house is spotless and impeccably decorated. Black-and-white photos line the walls of the living room. Music is playing somewhere else in the house.
She gestures to a white sofa. “Have a seat. Coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
While she’s in the kitchen, I survey the room. A collection of Fan Ho photographs on the coffee table, weighted down with a white conch shell. Rows of cameras, from the simplest Holga to a top-of-the-line Nikon DSLR, line the shelves of a corner bookcase. An ivory sheet hangs from the ceiling along one wall. The space is so beautiful, so calming in its well-ordered minimalism, it makes me want to throw away even more things when I get back to my dad’s house.
She returns with the coffee. “I’m Elsa.”
“Lina.” I take a sip. “Thank you, this is really good coffee.”
“Lina? That’s a fine Swedish name. Are your parents Scandinavian?”
“Nope. Scotch-Irish. Oddly enough, I was named after the German runner Lina Radke or the American silent film actress Lina Basquette. Depends on who you ask.”
“I don’t know either.”
“Lina Radke was the first Olympic champion in the women’s eight hundred. As for the other, my mother was a silent film buff. When she was pregnant, she discovered that Basquette was born in San Mateo. She liked the legend that Basquette had once kicked Hitler in the balls. My dad wanted to raise a runner, and my mom wanted to raise a little ball kicker. So here I am, Lina with an i.”
“That’s fantastic!” Elsa says, breaking into a wide grin. It’s been a while since I told that story.
“You’re a photographer?”
“Indeed.” She sits down in a wooden chair facing me and puts two white mugs on the oak coffee table, casually marked with coffee rings. I think of something George once said to me right before we made entry on a search warrant at a residential address in Riverdale. “Inside every house, a new adventure.”
Elsa opens her mouth to say something but then stops. She stares at my face for several moments. “I like your cheekbones,” she declares. “Good angles, great for black and white. You are rather unusual looking. Have you ever modeled?”
I laugh, caught off guard. Fred used to tell me I looked unusual. No one has ever asked if I modeled.
“Can I take your picture?”
“I actually just wanted to ask you about the neighbors.”
“Of course, I will tell you about the neighbors. Just one picture first.” She stands and glides over to the shelf, where she picks up a Leica and a light meter.
“Do you know them?” I ask.
Elsa is distracted, adjusting the buttons and dials on the camera. “Not really. Those guys were bad news. I avoided them. But now they’re gone, thank heavens.” She presses a button on the light meter and glances at the result.
“What about the woman who lived there?”
Elsa hovers over me with the camera. “The swimmer, Ivy?”
“Yes.”
“She lived there before the last renters. My husband and I like her.”
“So you know her.”
“No, no, I mean we liked to look at her.” She glances down at her light meter again and then back at me. “Just one picture. With the coffee cup.”
The agency psychologist I often worked with on the BAP team used to say, “Every interaction is an exchange. A little give, a little take.” I pick up the coffee cup and begin to raise it to my lips. Just then, Elsa presses the shutter release several times in rapid succession, then glances down at the Leica’s screen.
“Ah,” she says, pleased. “I was right!” She turns the camera toward me to show me a photo, but I only give it a quick glance. I hate pictures of myself. I remember exactly when I started hiding from cameras: My dad took a picture on my fourteenth birthday, just weeks after my mother left. The face that stared out at me from that photo was such a sad, lonely face. I didn’t want to have a record of that girl.
Satisfied, Elsa sets the camera down. “Bill, who lives down the block, said Ivy almost made the US Olympic team. She seemed like a good girl. Her boyfriend, though, was a loser. No job. Bad friends, always playing music too loud, drinking. The girl was driven, though. Every
morning at five she was up and out of the house. She would go swimming in the ocean! Can you imagine?”
“How did you know she was swimming in the ocean?”
“I asked her. I’m an early riser too. The light here is better in the morning. I would always see her getting into her car while the whole neighborhood was still asleep. So one time I just walked over and asked her: ‘Where do you go so early every morning?’”
“What did she say?”
“Montara Beach. Insane, yes? I told her those currents would kill her, but she didn’t seem to care.”
“Do you know where she lives now?”
Elsa shakes her head. “She told Bill she was moving to Pescadero. But one morning, I was out at Montara Beach taking photos, and I saw her car. I think she still swims there. If she lives in Pescadero, why would she drive all the way to Montara to swim?”
“So you think she was lying?”
“Yes. She isn’t in trouble, is she? My husband always said that boy was dragging her down. I think that’s the reason she lied to us about where she was moving, in case he asked us. I think she was afraid of him.”
“What makes you say that?”
“There were noises in the house sometimes. Yelling, things crashing around. Of course, he was scrawny, out of shape. In a fair fight, I’d put my money on the girl, but he was mean.”
“You know his name?”
“No, we never did meet him. Never did want to, either.”
I finish my coffee and stand to leave. “Thank you. I’ll let you get back to work.”
“Wait. I might having something else for you. Follow me.”
Elsa leads me through the kitchen into the back of the house to a room with fifteen-foot ceilings. Light shines down through a dozen skylights. The music is still on. Photo equipment is lined up along the walls. She sits down at an iMac Pro with a twenty-seven-inch monitor.
She clicks through several file folders and stops on a folder labeled “Ivy.” The screen fills with hundreds of tiles, each one a photograph of Ivy, all taken from this house. Some pictures are up close and others are far away, different lenses, different weather, different days: working in the yard, bringing in groceries, checking the mail, climbing into her silver Suzuki Samurai. In each picture, Ivy seems totally unaware that she is being watched. In many, she wears sweatpants and a sweatshirt, the straps of her bathing suit peeking through. I’m struck by the calm focus in her expression. And also by how nonchalant Elsa is about letting me in on the secret of her surveillance.
Elsa plugs her Leica into the computer, and I watch the screen. Scanning the photos, I see the telltale dot of red.
“Wait,” I say, pointing to the tile. “Can you pull that one up?”
She clicks on the photo.
There she is on the huge screen, the last photo in the folder, maybe taken the day Elsa saw her at the beach: Ivy Blankenship in a red bathing cap.
“Can I have a copy of that?”
“Of course.”
Elsa hits a button, and a printer across the room comes to life. I walk over and take the photograph from the tray, the slick paper still warm. When I return to the computer, Elsa has pulled up the picture she took of me. She is fiddling with the contrast and the light, blurring the background. “See,” she says. “You’re unusual, like I said. Beautiful even.”
Looking at the screen, I don’t see a beautiful woman. I see myself, only older, more tired. I see the brutal effects of a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad year.
At home, a pamphlet from Harris Ojai has been stuffed into the mailbox. On the front, he has scrawled the words: “Time is running out. I will get you an excellent price!”
I make coffee, open my laptop, and do a deep dive on Ivy Blankenship. I get 1,037 hits, mostly articles from her days swimming at Oregon. There are also a few mentions of her in national newspapers leading up to the US Olympic trials for Beijing. She had the best time that year in the thousand-meter freestyle and was expected to easily clinch a berth on the team. Then the trial results: fourth-place finish, 0.07 seconds away from making the team, a photograph of her standing poolside, looking up at the clock, stricken.
That defeat was followed by ten years of nothing. She has no social media profiles, at least not under her name. There’s more on her brother. A few years ago, he landed a job with a fourth-tier VC firm, and he apparently made the most of it. His Twitter feed is populated by earnest notes regarding rising tech firms, earnings reports, kudos to this person and that person for various business achievements. No mention of his sister. I set up Google alerts.
I take out the piece of paper Nicole gave me and place it on the table beside my laptop.
A search for John Murphy and his two boats produces even less satisfying results. Both boats are crab trawlers with a long history of registrations in Eureka and later El Granada. The name John Murphy is so common it takes hours to narrow the search. He first went bankrupt in 2009 and again in 2015. No-cost divorce. A short, failed business as a seafood purveyor. Murphy owns three properties: a cheap townhouse in Fortuna connected to a possible son, a pricey house in El Granada where the ex might live, and a condo in Pacifica. In the single photo I find of him online, he looks unremarkable: close-cut beard, graying hair, the deep tan and leathery skin you expect from a guy who has spent his life on boats.
But there’s something else. John Murphy has kind eyes. I can’t describe them beyond the color—pale blue—but if you saw the photograph, you’d think so too. How could a guy like this and a woman like Ivy be connected to the disappearance of high school kids from Greenfield? It doesn’t add up. Maybe I’m on the wrong track. Maybe those pings from the middle of the ocean at the same time Gray Stafford appeared on the beach at Half Moon Bay mean nothing.
It doesn’t add up: unless.
Unless you factor in the unfortunate truth that bears itself out again and again, a grand human theme on endless repeat: some people will do anything for money.
35
Demonstrate Chan’s theory of retrieval-induced facilitation. Complement your response with three answers you have given that were aided by this retrieval-induced facilitation.
As I pull up to the curb at school, Kyle approaches my Jeep. I’m surprised to see him. I roll down the passenger-side window. “You’re sure looking healthy. Dispatcher told me you were sick.”
“Nope, I just decided to take a personal day.” The way he says it, the spring in his step, tells me there’s either a woman or a surfboard involved, maybe both.
“What’s her name?”
“Holly.”
“Is it serious?”
“It used to be. She’s visiting from Michigan, second chance. I’m trying not to mess things up this time.”
Now I understand why Kyle wasn’t answering his phone. He’s protecting his time with his girlfriend, protecting his home life, avoiding cross contamination. It’s likely he sees Holly as the best thing life has to offer, and he thinks he can keep his two worlds separate. I want to tell him it’s a worthy goal but impossible. If you let this job in, it can be insidious, quietly invading everything you hold close.
He props his elbows on the window and leans into the car. “About that video footage you asked me to look into? Turns out there isn’t any. CCTV has been out at the school for a few weeks. They’re doing an upgrade. I asked around while I was getting coffee in the teacher’s lounge. The proctor for Sunday’s practice test said Caroline seemed like her usual self. She also said a few of the kids had family trips and were going to be out all week. She wasn’t certain if that was the case with Caroline, but she assumed so.”
“Family trips, huh?” I think of Marc Rekowski’s family packing up their SUV, getting out of town.
“I checked with the registrar too. Caroline has had several unexcused absences in the past. The registrar said the parents never return phone calls.�
��
Kobayashi is waving the cars forward, giving Kyle impatient looks, so I have to pull through. I don’t tell Kyle about the meeting with Nicole, not yet. It’s tricky. The information Nicole provided is critical and useful, but in a courtroom, its provenance could create challenges for a prosecutor and endless fodder for a defense attorney.
As Rory climbs into the front seat, Kobayashi approaches the window and hands me a red paper bag. “Our parents and friends have provided us with an embarrassment of riches,” he explains. “Vitamin Central and our district nutritionist have collaborated to create a unique supplement cocktail for each student, in order to help them meet the rigors of the test with confidence and vitality. As the great Japanese warrior-poet Hiraku once said, ‘In battle, preparation / In preparation, battle.’”
I nod to Kobayashi and finish off the quote: “Know in your heart, young one, / the war has been lost or won / before the first footprint on the battlefield.” I’m not sure I’m remembering it correctly, but Kobayashi’s wry smile tells me I got it right.
“Show-off,” Rory says after we pull away. His tone is different, though. He’s relaxed, in a much better mood than this morning. “Good news,” he says. “Dave Randall told me Caroline’s parents surprised her with a last-minute cruise in Norway.”
“Reliable source?”
“Dave is student council president. He seems on top of things.”
“So, why does he know about Caroline’s trip if you don’t?”
“According to Dave, knowing where everyone is during Wonder Test week is part of his job description. He also said Melissa Madsen is touring elite music programs, and Jordan Kingsley is spending a week on the set of a Martin Scorsese film. He won a contest from a movie studio or something.”
“Wow, maybe it’s time for us to start entering contests.”
The Wonder Test Page 15