Tahoe Hijack

by Todd Borg

  “Thanks,” I said, as I held the dough under running water again. “Good to know whatever I can about those boys.”

  The dough was starting to flex and bend once again.

  Diamond nodded, rang Spot’s head again, and left.

  I put the ball of dough in the center of a glass pie pan and set it in the oven to rise. I’d found a hint online about turning on the oven light to give it a little warmth to aid rising. What a pro.

  I dialed the number that Joe said used to be Melody’s and Grace’s apartment. A recording said the number was no longer in service.

  I dialed their older neighbor Veronica Place. She answered on the third ring.

  “Hello?”

  I knew it was her because she had a stage voice, husky and strong enough that she could still probably project out over a full house.

  “Ms. Place, my name is Owen McKenna. We met three years ago under stressful circumstances.” I went on to explain that I was with SFPD and worked the Grace Sun murder. “I tried to do a follow-up call to Melody because it appears that we have caught the killer. But the number is not in service.”

  “Oh, my word,” Veronica Place said with dramatic flair. With her deep voice, she sounded like a drag queen who didn’t bother to talk in falsetto. “I haven’t seen Melody for a very long time. I suppose it’s over two years. That girl was so scared to go back into that apartment that she lived with me for two or three months. Then she finally got up her courage and moved back in. But it gave her the terrors. She would come running back down the block and pound on my door at midnight, begging to sleep with me. I still remember her standing on my doorstep, that long black hair all stringy and wet with tears and sweat and fear. Poor Melody lost something important the day her cousin died. Eventually, she sold the apartment and bought a townhouse in Woodside, down the peninsula near Palo Alto or Mountain View, or one of those techie places. She said she’s at the base of the mountains where the redwoods grow. It sounds lovely. She wanted to start over. New house, new job, new life. Can’t say that I blame her.”

  “What was her new job? Or her old one, for that matter?”

  “Oh, I have no idea. At my age, I remember the nature of people, but I can’t keep track of the pedestrian details of their lives.”

  “Would you happen to have her new number and address?”

  “Certainly. One thing I learned in stage work is that you have to be organized. You can’t risk missing your line or your entrance just because you forgot to make notes on your script. Hold on. Here it is in my little book. Melody Sun.” She gave me the phone and address.

  “Another question that came up,” I said. “Do you remember Grace’s daughter?”

  “I never knew Grace had a daughter.”

  “Did you ever see another woman with Grace? Someone…” I paused as I did some quick subtraction to account for Grace having a child when she was very young. “Someone in her late twenties or early thirties?”

  “Well, of course there were other women around. Grace and Melody had friends. Co-workers. I saw lots of other women over the years. But I never thought one of them might be a daughter, and I don’t think something like that would have escaped me. And certainly Grace never mentioned a daughter.”

  “Thank you so much, Ms. Place. I really appreciate it.”

  “Say hi to Melody from Veronica,” she said.

  “Will do.”

  “Mr. McKenna, may I call you Owen?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Owen,” she said, “you sound like a real man, a solid man. If you’re ever in the area and you want to visit, I’m nearly always home. I build a martini that will make your hair stand up and wave like you’re Vincent Price.”

  “I bet you do, Veronica. Thanks for the invitation.”

  We hung up and I dialed the number for Melody’s address in Woodside.

  A man answered. When I asked for Melody, he said I had a wrong number.

  I Googled the address Veronica gave me and got yet another phone number. I dialed that, and a young woman answered.

  “Redwood Bank and Holding Company.”

  I tried to think fast. Why would a bank be in the data bases for Melody’s residential address?

  “I’m hoping you can help me,” I said. “I’m inquiring about ownership on a townhouse I’d like to buy. Your bank came up. Perhaps this property is in foreclosure? Could you please direct me to the appropriate department?”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll transfer you to our real estate division.”

  The phone rang, and another woman answered. I explained that I was interested in the property and asked if she could give me information.

  “We’ve listed that property through Bonnard Realty. I’ll give you their number.” I wrote it down as she spoke. I thanked her, hung up, and dialed that number.

  I gave the property address to the receptionist, then asked for the listing realtor.

  “That would be Sheila Stone. Please hold.”

  “Sheila Stone,” said a woman.

  “I’m an investor looking to shift some of my portfolio into bank-owned properties. I’m interested in a townhouse you have listed in Woodside.” I gave her the address. “I understand that it is owned by Redwood Bank and Holding Company. Is it still available?”

  “Yes, it is, and it’s a lovely property, a great setting near the redwoods and horse country. These townhouses are in demand. This one will sell fast. Can we set up an appointment?”

  “Perhaps, but tell me, please. If it’s a good property that will sell fast, why didn’t the owner sell it? How did it end up in foreclosure?”

  “It’s another one of those sub-prime mortgage casualties. The owner realized there’d been a run-up in value in the short time since she bought it, so she got into one of those shady refinance deals where she borrowed one hundred and ten percent of the appraisal on the assumption that the property would keep going up in value. Of course the opposite happened, and she ended up owing much more than the house was worth. So, like a lot of upside-down borrowers, she walked.” The woman sounded disgusted.

  “Along with her refi money.”

  “Right. You don’t want to know how realtors feel...” She stopped talking.

  I didn’t want to get into that conversation, so I kept quiet.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “I’d love to set up an appointment. The lender’s loss is your gain.”

  “Let me go take a look at it. I’ll call if I want to get inside.”

  I next called the insurance office where Grace worked at the time of her death. I got handed around to three different women. Two of the women said they knew Grace well. Neither of them had heard of a daughter.

  One of Grace’s colleagues, a woman named Frances Mirra, was especially effusive about Grace. I asked about Grace’s work.

  “She was an adjuster. You know, someone whose job it is to reduce the payouts on claims. It’s the worst job in the business. You get these people who have endured something terrible – a flood or something – and you’re supposed to go in there and say that their home was rundown and not worth very much before the flood, and their family heirlooms were just old furniture that had no value. It can get pretty bleak. But after a few years with the company, Grace wouldn’t do it. She said that fair is fair, and she’d file these reports that supported the claims. So the insurance company put in a new manager. Danielle Rimbottom. A scruffy blonde who only cared about cats and chocolate and whose only trump card on Grace was that Danielle had these perfect hands, long, slender fingers, perfect nails. She flaunted those hands constantly, just to make Grace feel extra unwanted. Danielle was determined to get rid of Grace from the beginning.

  “So Grace – who was like a Girl Scout or something, always prepared beyond any reasonable point – Grace went into preparation-for-combat mode. ‘Document, document, document,’ she always said. She collected all of the materials that could impact her different cases. She organized and collated and wrote up transcripts of
conversations – every phone call – highlighting every important point. She collected all of the cost estimates on claims and correlated them with actual expenses. She even edited a video collage of customer claims and the resulting insurance abuses.

  “When the day came that Danielle Rimbottom asked her into the conference room where the bosses were waiting for the inquisition, what happened was that Grace pulled out her documentation, notes, case files, and the video that she played on her laptop, and the whole premise that Grace was the Achilles heel of the team collapsed. Instead of Grace being fired, Danielle was pretty much destroyed. She raised up those pretty little hands to her horrified mouth and ran out in shame.

  “Afterward, Grace came back to our little group in the office and said that it came down to being prepared. You could be a superhero, but if you were caught off guard, you’d go down. However, if you were prepared, you could be the class nerd and you would still triumph.”

  I thanked the woman for her time and hung up.

  An hour later there was a knock at the door. Spot jumped up, tail on high speed, which meant it was Street.

  TWELVE

  I opened the door.

  Street stood there wearing tight black jeans over thin black boots with enough heel to add two inches to her height. She had on a black turtle neck and over it a sweater with an elaborate, ornate design of red and orange and black. Persian, maybe. It seemed a sign of healing that she was wearing attractive clothes instead of being swaddled in multiple thick layers.

  Spot pushed past me and leaned up against her as she bent over to hug him.

  I gave her a little kiss.

  “Will an Oakstone cab suffice?”

  She nodded.

  I got out the large glasses, poured a short inch for her and three inches for me. We chatted a bit, and I told her about my endeavors.

  Street said, “The only thing I can think of that would explain a daughter that no one knew about would be if Grace had a daughter years ago that she gave up for adoption. She may have kept quiet about it. No one would know, possibly not even her cousin Melody.”

  “Could be,” I said as I pondered the idea.

  “Then what if that daughter searched out her biological mother?” Street said. “Grace would suddenly have a new, very important person in her life. She might not tell her cousin or others she was close to. But she might tell a stranger.”

  “Ah,” I said. It made good sense.

  “She’d be bursting with this news, but hesitant to tell people she knew lest they judge her harshly. So she might test-drive the idea by telling a stranger like Thomas Watson at the library, just to see how it felt.”

  “You might be onto something,” I said. “I’ll have to look into it. Although in all of my different traces over the years, I don’t remember ever tracking down any kids given up for adoption. This will be new territory.”

  “I know a woman who teaches at UC Davis,” Street said. “The daughter she’d given up for adoption found her online and sent her an email. She was scared to death and overjoyed at the same time. They ended up meeting. Now they see each other quite often. Let me call her and see if there is a standard way to track these things.”

  Street went out on the deck to use her cell.

  I opened the oven door to see how much my bread dough had risen in the couple hours since I made it.

  I wasn’t sure, but it looked to have expanded at least a quarter inch. Too late to wait any longer, so I consulted the recipe, turned the oven on to 350 and set the timer for 35 minutes.

  Street was still on the deck, talking on her phone.

  I went to work on my stir-fry. I put on a pot of brown rice to simmer, then cut up an onion, chopped several cloves of garlic, cut chicken into strips, and sautéed it with the garlic and onion. I chopped celery, green pepper, red pepper, and carrots, and put them in the pan. I saved the sugar-snap peas and the stir-fry sauce. I’d add them shortly before I served it up.

  Street came back inside.

  “There is an entire online world that has sprung up around biological parents and children reconnecting years after adoption,” Street said. “I gave Grace’s name to the woman at Davis and told her what you told me. She went through the various websites she knew and came up with a woman who had posted on a bulletin board for biological parents and children looking to reconnect. It was three years and six months ago. The woman posting gave her name as Arianna, thirty-two years old. She wrote that she lives on the West Coast and that she was adopted as a newborn. The only information she’d learned from her adoptive parents was that her birth mother’s first name was Grace, and that her mother was nineteen years old when she gave birth at Saint Anne’s Hospital in San Francisco.”

  “Was there any information that suggested that Grace got in touch with her or that they ever met?”

  “No. Any direct communication between them would have been private unless they put information about meeting on Facebook or some other public site.”

  “Was there contact information for Arianna?”

  “Just an email. I wrote it down.” Street handed me a folded scrap of paper she’d torn off of an envelope.

  “Thanks. You’re amazing,” I said.

  “I’m practically like a private investigator or something,” Street said.

  “Yeah. We could switch businesses, except I wouldn’t like studying bugs. I’ll send this woman a message.”

  Street suddenly wrinkled her nose. “The stir-fry smells great, but what’s that strange smell?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. The only thing I smell is the wonderful aroma of baking bread.”

  Street looked at me, squinting just a little. “Aroma? Euphemisms we know and love.” She walked into the kitchen nook and peeked into the oven. “Oh, a mini-loaf! Fun. You made a partial recipe so it would be like a personal dinner serving.”

  “Well, not quite. But I’m sure you’ll love it.”

  I could see a question forming on Street’s face, but she thought better of it and didn’t speak.

  When the timer went off, I pulled out the bread. It was heavy and very brown.

  “I don’t think I can wait until this cools down,” I said. “The excitement of fresh, warm, baked bread is too much to resist.” I got out my knife to slice off the end of the ball. After sawing a bit, the knife hadn’t broken the crust. “I forgot to sharpen the knife,” I said.

  “Fresh bread always requires an extra-sharp knife,” Street said.

  I stropped the knife multiple times, and tested the edge on my fingernail. The knife was now a razor. I went at the bread again. It was like trying to cut a cobblestone. I finally stabbed the tip of the knife into the bread and by levering and tearing and pulling, I was able to break a chunk off.

  Another hacking, ripping maneuver split the chunk into two small pieces. I had been a little worried about the hardness of the shell. But when the inside of the bread also appeared to be hard, I thought it best to test it myself before giving it to Street. So I gave it a bite.

  Street watched me as I masticated.

  “Well?” she said.

  I tried to talk as I chewed. “The, uh, bread isn’t really, well, chewable in the normal sense.”

  “Normal sense being like you chew it up and swallow it?”

  “Yeah,” I mumbled, still trying to work enough moisture into the bread to be able to give my jaws a proper workout without breaking teeth. I felt a little grit and then a string of hair. I pulled at it, but it broke off. No doubt remnants of the roll across the floor.

  While I was still chewing, I made the decision to spare Street the same frustration. So I took the other little chunk and tossed it to Spot, knowing that he probably wouldn’t even bite down on it more than once before swallowing it.

  In fact, he did bite down several times, then spit it out.

  Eventually, I gave up, spit my piece into a paper towel, walked over and picked up Spot’s reject.

  “Not quite up to restaurant stan
dards?” Street said.

  “I guess I was too focused on the stir-fry,” I said.

  “Right,” Street said.

  I added the peas to the stir-fry mixture, stirred in some sauce and served it up a couple of minutes later. It was tasty.

  “I don’t know what I did wrong on the bread,” I said as we ate. “Maybe I got a faulty recipe.”

  Street nodded. “I’m sure that’s it. Happens all the time. Artisans develop great chemistry recipes for faux stone and then accidentally post them under the Bread heading. But the stir-fry is great.”

  After dinner, Street finished the last of her single small portion of wine, kissed me goodnight, and left. I understood her need to go home and be independent, but it left a physical ache in my chest as real as if I’d pulled a rib muscle.

  I put on a Miles and Trane CD, poured another inch of wine and got out my monograph on Thomas Hill. Partly, I wanted to look at the magnificent nineteenth century landscapes. Partly, I wanted to see if he painted any pictures of Chinese miners.

  I sat in the rocker in front of the woodstove and turned the pages the way a little kid looks at a picture book. No great mental inquiry. No scholarly questions. No academic analysis necessary. Something much better. The childlike gaze at a new world as only a picture book can present. Youthful imagination of a different life. Questions that begin with ‘What if…,’ and ‘Why is the...’

  Thomas Hill was born in England in 1829, emigrated to the U.S. and came of age in New England. He moved to San Francisco after the Gold Rush. Along with masters like Albert Bierstadt, Hill became one of California’s major painters of Romantic Realism. And his most famous paintings were of Yosemite and the Sierra and Mt. Shasta.

  I turned the pages one by one. Moving slowly. Pausing on each image. They took me back over a century to a time when people in the Eastern U.S. were still trying to understand the magnitude of the western landscape. I stared at each image, imagining what it would be like to see these astonishing places before highways and cars and hotels and fast food restaurants arrived.