The Ever

by Marcia Muller

“Maybe he just didn’t mention it to you.”

  “No, I’m sure Hy would’ve told me if he knew.”

  Mick shrugged. “Well, there’s nothing suspicious about owning property. He probably doesn’t use it much, or rents it out to vacationers.”

  “. . . Probably.”

  “So should I go deeper?”

  “As deep as you can. I want to know more about what he did in the Special Forces, his wounds, and that hospital stay. And about K Air. Get the details on his pilot’s license and ratings and where he learned to fly. There’s got to be something. Also try to find out if the ex-wife is still living and, if so, get an address.”

  “I’m already on it, ma’am.”

  Within the hour Mick called on the intercom. Gina Benedetti Kessell had remarried shortly after she divorced Dan and moved to Albany, an East Bay town bordering Berkeley. She’d died of a heart attack two years ago, but her husband, Eliot Hines, still lived at the same Ramona Street address. The Hineses had one child, a daughter, who lived in Berkeley.

  I looked at my watch. After four, and traffic would be heavy on the Bay Bridge, but if I could get an early evening appointment with Hines, I wouldn’t mind the slow trip. And then I could pay a call on Robin, to prove to her that I was okay. We’d talked on the phone the morning after the explosion, and she’d sounded badly shaken.

  I made my call to the Hines residence; Eliot was home and willing to talk with me as soon as I could get there. Then I dialed Robbie’s cellular and left a message saying I’d be in the neighborhood and asking if she’d be free for dinner. After I checked in with Ted and went over a few minor matters, I went forth into the rush hour fray.

  Traffic wasn’t as horrendous as I’d expected, and I reached the Hines house around five-fifty. Set on a quiet tree-lined street a few blocks off bustling Solano Avenue, it was a pale yellow bungalow whose brick front walk was bordered by gnarled jade plants. The porch light was on against the gathering mist and darkness.

  I rang the bell and in a moment a man whom I judged to be in his seventies opened the door and introduced himself as Eliot Hines. White-haired and stooped, with thick glasses and hands as gnarled as the jade plants, he let me into a tidy living room with a fireplace flanked by built-in bookshelves that overflowed with volumes. After offering me tea, which I refused, he motioned for me to be seated in one of a pair of platform rockers that faced the hearth. A Presto log burned there, throwing out very little warmth.

  Hines claimed the other rocker and pulled an afghan over his knees. “How was the traffic?” he asked.

  “Not too bad, thanks.” I took out my tape recorder, looked questioningly at him.

  He nodded his agreement.

  “I don’t get over the bridge much anymore,” he said. “After I retired and stopped commuting, Gina did the driving. She was quite a bit younger than me, and a much better driver. We used to go to the city for shopping, or to have dinner or catch a play or concert. Since she’s been gone, I haven’t seen the point in it.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Thanks.” He sighed. “I never thought she would be the first to go. You said on the phone that you’re looking for information about her former husband, Dan Kessell?”

  “Yes. A matter of a relative needing to locate him.” One of my rules is to keep my reasons for asking questions simple—and conventional. “What can you tell me about him?”

  “Well, he and Gina were high school sweethearts in Fresno. Married right after graduation—first love, and all that. Dan wanted to get on with the police force there, but he didn’t make the grade. Don’t exactly know why, and I’m not even sure Gina did. So he worked for one of the big food processors in the valley for a year or two, before he went into the military.”

  “I take it the marriage wasn’t good.”

  Hines nodded emphatically. “When he was sent to ’Nam, Gina was glad to see him go. He’d changed after he was rejected by the police department. Didn’t hurt her physically, but the drinking and the verbal abuse that went along with it were pretty terrible. She knew the marriage wouldn’t last, so she went to Oakland and attended business college so she’d have a vocation to fall back on. That’s when I met her, through mutual friends at a party.”

  A light came into Hines’s eyes that hadn’t been there before—old memories, warming him. “She was still married to Kessell, but had no intention of going back to him. I was divorced and living the high life in the city. If I must say so, I was considered quite a catch: I had a good job in management with PG&E, drove an expensive sports car, lived in a Tel Hill apartment with a bay view. Talk about having your choice of women! But when I met Gina, she changed all that, and I’ve never for a day regretted it.”

  “So she divorced Dan Kessell. Did she ever hear from him?”

  “Not a word for many years. The divorce papers came back signed, and she thought that was it. But four or five years ago she ran into him on the street in downtown Oakland. She barely recognized him at first. They talked for a minute, and then he said he had to be someplace, and that was it.”

  “Do you remember what they talked about?”

  “She never said. I sensed whatever it was had disturbed her, so I didn’t press her.” Hines thought for a moment. “You know, she might’ve told Cecily. They were pretty close at the time.”

  “Cecily?”

  “Our daughter, Cecily Alfonso. She and her husband live up on the hill on San Antonio Street in Berkeley. They’ve been on vacation in the Caribbean, but they’re getting back tonight. Why don’t you phone her in the morning—but not too early. Give them time to settle in and start the laundry.”

  Thursday

  FEBRUARY 23

  Hy and I were up early Thursday morning, he to meet with the RKI employees who were staffing the interim operation on the third floor of the building and I to go over the case with my staff members. As I was making coffee in the kitchen of the second-floor apartment in the safe house—much larger and better decorated than the one on Green Street—the phone rang. Gage Renshaw, calling from San Diego.

  “Ripinsky says you’ve opted to report to me on this job. Any progress?”

  “Nothing I care to discuss yet.”

  “I want a report e-mailed to me by close of business today.”

  Pushy bastard.

  “Now, Gage, I’m planning to be in the field all day. Would you rather I did that, or wasted time in the office writing a report?”

  “A verbal report, then. Five o’clock and no later.”

  Gage was as abrupt and commanding as ever, but I sensed something in his tone that I’d never heard before: he was unnerved. This last bombing had hit him hard, and his method of dealing with his emotions was to bully me—and probably everyone else he dealt with.

  “You’ll hear from me,” I said. And didn’t add, “When I have something to report and the time to do so.”

  The three-story building at Twenty-eighth Avenue and Balboa Street was nineteen-thirties vintage; its lobby had last been redecorated in the sixties. But the air of not-so-genteel neglect was pure façade. Near the water-stained acoustic-tiled ceiling were carefully placed surveillance cameras; the threadbare carpets covered motion sensors; and behind the cracked plaster wall opposite the garage entry was a high-tech command center from which every inch of the building could be monitored.

  Jason Ng, the daytime supervisor, looked up from his bank of screens as I entered. “Morning, Ms. McCone,” he said. “Everything all right up there? You need anything?”

  “Everything’s fine. Are you running a full surveillance on us?”

  “Only up to the apartment door, ma’am. Mr. Ripinsky was specific about that.”

  “Good. Anyone else in the building besides the company people?”

  “Two-A’s occupied as of last night.”

  I glanced at the monitors, but he’d already pressed the controls so they’d swiveled away and I couldn’t get a look at them.

  “High-risk?”
I asked.

  “Nothing we can’t handle. The party’ll be gone tomorrow.”

  A smile for the boss’s wife, but no information forthcoming.

  Goddamn “need to know”!

  My morning meetings were largely unproductive. Derek’s backgrounding on the RKI employees was going slowly. Mick was working on further information on Kessell, getting started on Renshaw, and didn’t want to be disturbed. Patrick was setting up his flow charts and entering information from the RKI file he’d read yesterday, but said they weren’t worth looking at yet. My only small success was getting an appointment with Cecily Alfonso, Eliot and Gina Hines’s daughter, for one p.m.

  I’d had a message from Robin saying she was sorry she’d missed my call last night, so I got hold of her and we agreed to meet for lunch at her apartment on Cedar Street in Berkeley. She made the promised exotic omelets, and I admired the way she’d painted and furnished the studio. Seeing me whole and healthy eased her concern, although she did say as we parted—she to the law library, I to the Alfonso house—that I was to give her no more scares of that magnitude. I assured her that I’d try my best not to.

  Cecily Alfonso’s home on San Antonio Street in the lower Berkeley hills was set high above the street and screened by yew trees. I climbed a brick stairway to a door at the side and, after I pressed the bell, took in the expansive view of the Bay and the sunlit towers of downtown San Francisco. The recent rains had fled to southern California, where they were having mudslides, and the temperature had risen into the low seventies. People who claim California doesn’t have seasons don’t know what they’re talking about; not only do we have a spring, summer, fall, and winter, but micro-seasons on a day-to-day basis.

  The woman who answered the door was tall, blonde, and deeply tanned, wearing a long turquoise-and-pink dress whose thin fabric hung loose on her thin frame and swirled above her bare feet as she moved. Strange attire for February, but then this was Berkeley, where people are known for their individuality.

  She identified herself as Cecily Alfonso and took me into a light-filled front room where plants—hibiscus and plumeria, I thought—bloomed by the windows and large paintings of tropical scenes dominated the walls. As we sat on floral-cushioned rattan chairs, she caught me looking at the ornate silver toe ring on her right foot and said, “We just got back from the Dominican Republic. My husband’s extended family lives there, and every year we visit them for a month. I love it, and when we come back, I hate letting go. So I turn up the heat and wander around the house in my Island clothes for a couple of days. Then it’s back to the old down jacket and sturdy shoes. And my job at the library.”

  “Your father didn’t tell me you’re a librarian.”

  “Oakland main branch. And don’t get me started on the shortage of funds for our collections.”

  I nodded in understanding. Our state libraries were low on the legislative priority list and woefully underwritten. The worst example that had come to light in recent years was the near-closure of the public library in Salinas—the city where Nobel Prize–winner John Steinbeck had been born and raised.

  “Tape recorder okay?” I asked.

  “Fine.”

  I turned it on. “Your father said you might be able to tell me something about an accidental meeting your mother had with her first husband, Dan Kessell. It was four or five years ago.”

  Cecily Alfonso frowned, putting the tips of her fingers to her lips.

  “Four or five years ago. That would have been . . . Of course. It was five years ago in August, the month I started at the main branch. Mom came over there and I gave her a tour, and then we went out for lunch in Chinatown. She called me the next day, very upset. After she left me, she ran into Dan, whom she hadn’t seen since he left for Vietnam.”

  “What specifically upset her?” When Cecily didn’t reply, I prompted, “Simply seeing a man she used to be married to after all that time? His appearance? Something he said?”

  “. . . I suppose all of those things. She did say that he acted hostile. Which, I suppose, would be normal for someone whose wife had divorce papers served on him while he was in the hospital recovering from war wounds.”

  “Did she repeat anything he said to her?”

  Cecily hesitated again, her eyes on a brightly hued painting of flowers bordering a sand beach and blue sea.

  “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment, “but I can’t remember. Mom could be . . . well, dramatic, and after I became an adult I kind of tuned her out.”

  “Dramatic in what way?”

  “She blew every little thing out of proportion. If a man followed her down the sidewalk for more than two blocks, he was a stalker. If the UPS guy dropped a package on the porch, rather than setting it down neatly on the doormat, he had it in for us. If Dad missed his BART train and was late coming home, he’d been mugged or killed.”

  “Paranoid?”

  “No, more like she needed drama in her life. I’m not sure she really believed any of it.”

  Interesting. She’d divorced Dan Kessell to rid her life of the drama of abuse, then gone on to manufacture various other over-the-top scenarios.

  I asked, “Was she always like that?”

  “As long as I can remember. Dad would make excuses for her: ‘Your mother is very nervous,’ he’d say. ‘Your mother is very high-strung.’” Cecily bit her lower lip. “That didn’t make it any easier to live with.”

  “Did she ever seek professional help?”

  “Once. I insisted.”

  “When?”

  “About four years before she died.”

  “A year after she ran into her ex-husband.”

  “Right.”

  “Did it do any good?”

  “No. It seemed to make her worse. She went to the therapist for two or three sessions and then she quit. After that she wouldn’t leave the house except when she was with Dad. And even then . . . well, I don’t think she enjoyed herself.”

  “What gave you that impression?”

  “Because of something Dad once said. He’s not the sort of person who communicates well about emotional things, so it surprised me, and I’ve always remembered it. He said that she couldn’t enjoy herself because she was always looking over her shoulder.”

  Before I left Cecily Alfonso, I asked her to talk to her father about giving me permission to discuss her mother with the therapist she’d consulted. Then I left and drove down Solano Avenue, intending to take the freeway back toward the Bay Bridge and the city. But as I neared the on-ramps, an impulse made me turn east on Interstate 80, toward where it branched off to the Richmond Bridge and Highway 101 North.

  The radio traffic reports warned of an accident and slowdown south of Santa Rosa, so at Petaluma I left the freeway, crossed town, and soon was in open country, where dairy and sheep ranches spread over the softly rounded hills. At Bodega Bay the weather turned foggy; the fishing village and tourist destination was relatively deserted, the saltwater taffy concessions and souvenir shops dark and closed, the extravagant kites outside one store hanging limp and damp. The weather worsened, and by the time I reached the hamlet of Jenner, where the Russian River meets the sea, visibility was poor. I pulled into the service station at the south end of town, bought a Coke, and called the office. After that point my cellular reception would be spotty to nonexistent, the high coastal ridge cutting off the signals.

  Ted reported that it had been a quiet day. No new business, no important calls for me. I asked for Mick, but he’d gone out on an unspecified errand. When I spoke with Derek, he said he was making progress on his possibles list, but as yet had nothing useful. Patrick had finished with the flow charts, but he called them “nothing special” and said he’d gone back to working on a case for Charlotte.

  Dull February afternoon.

  Hy didn’t answer his cellular. I called the apartment at the safe house and got the machine. Left a message telling him where I was and that I might continue on to Touchstone and spend the
night there if driving conditions worsened. Then I went on, up the Jenner Grade—a series of extreme switchbacks that leave those who don’t know the road white-knuckled and sweaty. The MG and I had been this way many a time, and we handled it like pros.

  The mist worsened as dusk fell, and there was no southbound traffic. I switched on my fog lights. After a few miles, they picked out the weathered wooden cupolas and towers of Fort Ross—originally settled by Russian fur traders who had trekked down from Alaska in the early eighteen-hundreds, and now a historical monument. I slowed to a crawl once I was past the fort, enveloped in a thick, fast-blowing fog, and some minutes later picked out the lights of the little gas station and store south of Timber Cove.

  The address for Dan Kessell’s property was on Sandpiper Drive.

  I went into the store, bought another Coke for politeness’ sake, and asked for directions. The street, the clerk said, was in “a buncha little houses on the ocean side” a few miles north. “Turn left at the brown-shingled place with the big satellite dish,” he advised me.

  The brown-shingled place was hard to make out in the darkness, but the satellite dish loomed over its surroundings. I turned onto pavement that was ragged-edged and potholed, crept along looking for house numbers. Kessell’s was one door away from where the road ended, its number fading on a mailbox that leaned in the same easterly direction as the wind-warped cypress on the bluff’s edge. I made a Y-turn, allowing the MG’s headlights to move slowly over the cottage.

  Aluminum siding—had to be. Dark-green paint on wood couldn’t possibly look that good after being battered by these strong sea winds. Small, perhaps four rooms, with a large window facing the bluff’s edge. Propane tank to one side. Empty chain-link dog run to the other. Woodstove chimney protruding from the flat roof. A faint light shone at the house’s rear.

  I drove back along the street and left the MG in front of a dark house. In the distance I could see the lighted “Peace” sculpture on the bluff at Timber Cove Inn—a structure with an upraised hand that resembles a giant totem pole, created by the famed San Francisco sculptor Beniamino Bufano. I walked slowly, avoiding mud and potholes, glad that I’d dressed in my new black jeans and sweater that morning. When I got to Kessell’s cottage, I slipped along the side where the propane tank sat, toward the light at the back.