Nobody's Child (The Jeri Howard Series Book 5)

by Janet Dawson

I let her escape out the door, followed by Emory, who kept pace with Kara as she walked toward the campus. I found myself examining two conflicting interpretations. It was possible that Emory’s attentions to Kara were indeed an unwanted irritation. Her uncomfortable reaction to him certainly bore this out Or his appearance at the coffeehouse window was a setup, something to give Kara a reason to escape her interview with me.

  I still had questions for Kara. She knew more than she was telling me, particularly about the question she answered before I’d asked it.

  Ten

  “I LOST MY LUNCH, I CAN TELL YOU THAT.”

  Even now, in the offices of Blamey & Son, General Contractors, in an industrial section of Oakland next to the Nimitz Freeway, Elvin Blamey looked queasy as he thought about what he and his coworkers found on Buena Vista Avenue that October afternoon up in the hills. He took a sip of black coffee as though he were trying to wash away the memory.

  “I was on the backhoe. Over the past couple of years, the rains had washed a lot of dirt and debris down against the concrete. I saw the blade turn up something, so I went to investigate. It was this rug, one of those Indian or Mexican things you can get at Cost Plus. And inside it was something red. I thought it was a bundle of old clothes. Then I took another look. It was a red shirt. But there was somebody in it.”

  He shuddered. “I lost it.”

  “What did the body look like?”

  Blamey grimaced and took another slug of coffee. “It was mostly skeleton. And the parts that weren’t smelled awful. And the backhoe had knocked a few things around.”

  He looked very unhappy at having to even think about the condition of Maureen Smith’s body. Someone had dug a long narrow trench parallel to the foundation and placed the body there, rolled in the area rug, then covered both with loose dirt that had turned into mud with one of the first rainstorms of the season. Maureen had been in the ground three to four weeks. From what I knew about decomposition, that was long enough for the corpse to show significant decay on its way to skeletonization.

  Based on what little Sid had told me, because of the damage the backhoe had done to the upper part of the body, the pathologist must have had some difficulty, not only in determining the cause of Maureen’s death, but when she died as well. Life and death, from a medical examiner’s standpoint, are a lot more convoluted these days. It used to be that life was respiration, and when that stopped, a person was dead. But now we have more knowledge and more machines. As in many other aspects of our lives, technology has complicated rather than simplified.

  Blamey took another sip of his coffee as I asked him questions. He told me the job had been unexpected. There had been a holdup with the lot owner’s construction financing, then suddenly it had come through. Who owned the lot? Some outfit in San Francisco. He looked up the name in his files. Cavagnaro Industries, with an office in the city’s Financial District.

  I thanked Blamey for the information and left. Now I drove downtown and snagged a parking spot a block from the Alameda County Courthouse.

  The Oakland fire was etched vividly in my mind. On that warm Sunday morning in October, I met a friend in North Berkeley for brunch. After we’d eaten, we walked down Shattuck to a gallery, because she needed to buy a wedding present. Then we crossed the street to a vacant lot which had been spread with straw, bales of hay, and pumpkins of all sizes. I decided it was time to purchase one for my Halloween jack-o’-lantern.

  We had noticed the plume of black smoke earlier. It was hard to miss, rising into the sky like one of Moses’ pillars from the Old Testament. But it seemed to be getting worse. As we strolled amid the pumpkins, looking for that one with the perfect shape and color, I could smell the acrid odor of char and burn. The smoke grew denser, blacker, and what started out to be a bright sunny Sunday dimmed as clouds blocked the sun, turning it into a smudged orb.

  We expect fires around here, of course. The dry season is fire season. From the time the rains stop, in late May, until they begin again in the fall, the summer hillsides are gold rather than green, due as much to California’s Mediterranean climate as to the recent years of drought. The grass and trees are dry and combustible, making good tinder. It only takes one spark.

  My friend and I stood there in that lot, each holding a pumpkin, staring up at the sky and wondering how bad it could get. As we walked back along Shattuck I saw people standing in clusters and gazing at the spreading cloud of smoke, talking in subdued tones about the fire and what they’d heard reported on the radio.

  It wasn’t until I was driving home that I got a glimpse of how bad it could get. As I neared the intersection of Martin Luther King and Ashby, I looked to my left, all the way up Ashby toward the Claremont Hotel, and saw bright orange flames greedily licking the base of the black smoke pillar. When I reached my apartment, I turned on the television and sat mesmerized, the way I had in the aftermath of the earthquake two years before, until I couldn’t bear looking at the destruction anymore.

  Later I found out that a friend from the law firm where I’d worked as a paralegal had been burned out. She and her husband had thrown their kids and the cat into their station wagon, fleeing down their street as houses ignited all around them. They had no possessions left but the clothes they wore.

  I thought about her as I looked through the real estate records at the Alameda County Courthouse, about the stunned look on her face when I finally talked to her a week later. I had gone through my closet, pulling out anything I thought she could wear. They were staying with friends in Berkeley, mourning the things they’d lost but glad to be alive, trying to decide what to do next. They had owned their house for ten years but hadn’t felt like dealing with the hassle of rebuilding on that lot. Besides, they wanted to get their lives back in some sort of order. Eventually they sold their lot and bought a house somewhere else. As had many others, including the people who had owned the lot where Maureen Smith’s body was found.

  I hit the assessor’s office first, to confirm what Blamey had told me. The property taxes on the lot where Maureen’s body had been found were being paid by a real estate developer in San Francisco, Cavagnaro Industries. Many people in the fire zone had rebuilt or repaired their homes. Those who didn’t have the money or the heart to do so sold their lots to developers or others, who put up new houses, then sold them. There had been a lot of construction up in the hills over the past few years.

  The microfilmed record gave me the information I needed to look up the real estate transaction. The developer had purchased the lot from the former owners about six months after the fire. Those people were named Kelton. The name meant nothing.

  I found a vacant pay phone and called Cavagnaro Industries. It was on Kearny Street in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get any information over the phone. A pleasant-sounding woman named Jenny said she’d dig out the file to see if she could locate a forwarding address for the Keltons. But she couldn’t do it right away, and suggested I call her back in a few days. The only address in the real estate records was that of the realtor, who, as I discovered after several phone calls, was no longer with that particular firm. The person at the real estate office had no interest in helping me locate either the former employee or the Keltons’ address.

  I retrieved my car and drove north and east, heading for the fire zone. The neighborhoods in this part of Oakland feature steep hills and winding streets, both of which had made it difficult for firefighters to battle the blaze.

  Houses had been rebuilt or were going up on a number of denuded lots, many of them far larger than the homes they were intended to replace. I recalled reading something about this in the Oakland Tribune, about the debate concerning permits for these larger structures that crowded to the very edges of the lots. Many of these houses looked raw and new, and the fact that there weren’t any trees around them contributed to their hard edges. Here and there I saw lots where nothing had been built yet, where only foundations were visible, painful reminders that someone’s h
ome had been obliterated.

  This neighborhood must have looked like a war zone after the fire, I thought as I parked at the curb in front of the lot where Maureen’s body had been found. The parcel was on the downslope side of the street. I looked down the incline and saw where the construction crew had been working when they’d uncovered the corpse. As I gazed at the makeshift burial site, I felt a chill not entirely attributable to the fine misty rain that fell this late afternoon.

  It’s difficult to go door-to-door in a neighborhood devastated by fire. Looking around me, I estimated that half the homes on this block-long section of Buena Vista had fallen prey to the firestorm. Of those, about three-quarters had been or were being rebuilt. Several homes had been completed, and the others were in differing stages of the construction process. A couple of lots were overgrown with weeds and native grasses. Nothing yet had been done with these real estate parcels, and I wondered why. Permit hassles? Not enough insurance, thus not enough money? Or maybe the owners had died, sold out, moved away.

  I started up one side of the curving street, knocking on the doors that remained here in this neighborhood, not expecting to find many people home this afternoon. Of those who answered my summons, several didn’t know the Keltons at all. Others knew they’d left after the fire. They knew the body had been discovered, but no one had any idea when or how it had gotten there. I was covering ground the police had already trod.

  Finally, at the end of my circular path, I stopped at a house next door to the burial site. The woman who answered the door was in her late fifties, small and dark, short black hair streaked with silver. She looked at my identification and frowned. “This is about that body they found down the street, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. I’m trying to locate the Keltons, the people who used to live there.”

  “I can’t imagine that they’d know anything about it.” She peered at me. “You look chilled to the bone, walking around on an afternoon like this. I’ve just made a pot of tea. Would you like a cup?”

  “Very much. Thanks.”

  I hadn’t realized I was shivering until I stepped into the warmth of her living room. A fire blazed in the stone fireplace, contained by a black iron inset with glass doors, putting out a good deal of heat. How welcoming the flames looked, trapped behind all those restraints. And how frightening the flames must have been as they raced down this street, consuming everything in their path.

  Her name was Elaine Naruhito. She went to get another teacup, then we settled on a comfortable sofa in front of the fireplace, where she had been doing needlework. She moved the embroidery frame and a small basket of floss and accessories to a side table. I asked her about the fire.

  “My husband was up on the roof with the garden hose. Him with his arthritis and a bum knee.” She shook her head and sighed heavily. “He kept spraying water until we lost pressure. Then the police came around and told us to evacuate. We barely had time to grab the family photographs. One of our cats never came home. I guess the other hid in the sewer. He showed up about two days after the fire, singed whiskers and very hungry. But our house was still standing. I’m sure it was because Hank watered the roof. The houses on either side of us went.”

  “Including the Kelton house.”

  “Yes.” She raised her teacup to her lips. “They’d lived there for a long time. They were here when we moved in, and that was eight years ago. I thought they would rebuild. But they didn’t Neither did Mrs. Carson on the other side of us. Poor woman. Her insurance didn’t begin to cover the loss. Her husband had died a few years before. So she sold her lot and moved in with her daughter. And the Luganos, just up the street. Their house survived the fire. But they were elderly and their kids were worried about them. So they sold the house and bought a condo out in Rossmoor.” She sighed again and ran one hand through her gray-streaked hair as she looked at the flames flickering in her fireplace.

  “That’s the sad thing about the fire, Ms. Howard. It didn’t just destroy buildings. It destroyed a community. We really had a neighborhood, with potlucks and parties and games of catch in someone’s front yard. The fire consumed all that.”

  “Maybe you and the other people on this block will build the community again.”

  “I know. It takes time to do that. But it’s just not the way it was. I miss it.”

  “Where did the Keltons go after they lost their house?”

  “They stayed with some friends in Piedmont. Well, I think it was Piedmont. But it might have been Montclair. Either way, they wanted the children to be close to their school. I know they bought another house, but I don’t know where.”

  Piedmont. That sounded promising. “Do you have a name, an address?”

  “At one point I did,” she said. “But I’m afraid I’ve lost track of the Keltons. Or they lost track of me. The first year or so after the fire they came back to the neighborhood while they tried to sort out the insurance and the sale of their lot. But after that, we didn’t see much of them. I haven’t talked to either of them in a couple of years.”

  “Any ideas where I can start looking for them?”

  “No, I’m sorry. I don’t.”

  As I drove home I thought about the different ways people became homeless. Sometimes it was a disaster like a fire or an earthquake. Sometimes it was a more personal disaster, like the one Maureen Smith had experienced, the one that led her to the sidewalk in front of Cody’s, where she’d asked her former classmate for spare change. Even though they’d lost their house, the Keltons had resources to draw on, insurance, money in the bank, relatives to stay with.

  Maureen had nothing, besides herself and her little girl.

  Eleven

  EVER SINCE DAD HAD CALLED THE FERAL KITTEN Black Bart, I’d been using that name too, though it would require closer inspection to tell if the little scrap of black and white fur was male or female. By now I had been feeding the stray for several days. Black Bart was getting used to regular meals on the patio of Chez Jeri.

  I had a plan, of sorts. Each evening, I moved the bowls of water and food closer to my back door. And cold and rainy or not, I sat on the doorstep until Black Bart finished eating. The first night I pulled this change in the routine, the kitten was so wary of my presence on the doorstep that it almost didn’t stick around. My nose and toes grew very cold as we outwaited one another. Hunger won out and finally Black Bart crept from the observation point beneath the bushes and wolfed down the bowl of kibble. On subsequent days the wait was a bit shorter each time. Tonight the kitten hesitated for only a moment before crossing the wide band of concrete. My patio wasn’t that large. It would take another couple of days before I pulled the lure of the food within range of my hands. But would Black Bart cross the patio, risking apprehension, when the bowls were right at my feet?

  When the kitten had dined and disappeared, I got up, stiff from sitting motionless for so long, and went back to the warmth of my apartment Abigail had been watching from the dining room table, as she had on previous nights, and now she huffed at me as though she knew exactly what I was up to. I stroked her silky fur and rubbed her ears. She deigned to purr at me until we were interrupted by the phone.

  “I found a Douglas Widener teaching in the Cal State system,” my father said when I picked up the kitchen extension. “I think it’s the same Widener you’re looking for. He left San Francisco State two years ago. Now he teaches math at Sonoma State up in Rohnert Park.”

  Sonoma State. Ramona Clark had told me that when Maureen Smith visited her mother earlier this year, she had a sweatshirt bearing the Sonoma State University logo.

  “Before you talk to him,” Dad continued, “I should let you know that I heard an unpleasant rumor about him. He supposedly left Claremont College in Southern California under a cloud. Something about a relationship with a student.”

  College administrations frown on that sort of thing, I thought cynically as I hung up the phone, but it happens all the time. There’s something so compelling about forbi
dden fruit especially if it has a doctorate and seems to have all the answers. So Widener likes younger women. Did he limit this interest to college students only, or had his eye been caught by Maureen Smith, in her senior year of high school?

  A thin winter sun filtered through the cloud cover the next morning as I drove west across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. I passed San Quentin, spread out to my left, and sped through the outskirts of San Rafael, where I caught U.S. 101 and headed north through Marin County and into Sonoma County.

  Rohnert Park is just south of Santa Rosa, the county seat, a good hour’s drive from Oakland. Up here the sun had lost out to the gray clouds massed in the sky. Off to the west, toward the ocean, the clouds were tinged with dark blue, promising rain. I left the freeway, found the university, and parked. Once on foot, I located the university’s administrative offices in Stevenson Hall, where someone directed me to the math department, on the first floor of Darwin Hall. A student in the department office pointed at the closed door of Douglas Widener’s office and at a classroom down the hall. The professor was in class, he said, and wouldn’t be free for another half hour.

  I checked my watch against the clock in the corridor. Both read ten-thirty. Then I examined the schedule Widener had taped to his door. He had office hours after this class. Good, I wouldn’t have to buttonhole him during a ten-minute class break.

  “Where can I get a cup of coffee?” I asked the student, poking my head back into the department office. She told me how to get to the student center.

  I’d already passed the building once that morning. Now I pushed through the double glass doors and located the cafeteria. Sonoma State, too, was winding down its fall term, and the students gathered around the tables seemed to be hitting the books rather than talking, except for one group over in the corner who made up for everyone else. I sat near a window and nursed a cup of mediocre coffee, watching the weather change outside. The sky over the coastal hills to the west darkened and the slopes blurred as a squall moved eastward. I checked my watch and dumped the rest of the coffee. I was halfway back to the math building when the rain began, splattering the concrete sidewalk with increasing intensity. I sprinted the rest of the way. By the time I reached the entrance, gray rain was pouring from a gray sky.