by Daniel Hecht
But it was one o'clock, and the History Room was now open. She called Ray again, on the off chance he'd join her, but no one answered. Then she thought to check in with Bert. She tried his home, cell, and work phones and got no answer at any of them. A distant alarm bell began shrilling in her head, but she decided it was baseless. She suppressed it and concentrated on the work at hand.
The marriage of Lydia Jackson and Hans Schweitzer had triggered some questions, and now she had a good idea of how to answer them. Going back and forth between Sanborn maps, the Block Books, and the City Directories, she was able to piece together the entwined history of the two houses.
The City Directory from 1882 showed who lived at the Jackson house: Franklin and Lydia Jackson—Lydia living with some relative, either her first husband, father, brother, or uncle. By 1886, though, the directory showed only Lydia. The Schweitzer house was occupied by Hans alone until 1887, when the occupants were listed as Hans and Lydia Schweitzer.
Likely scenario: Lydia lived with family until they died or went elsewhere. She lived alone for a while, then married the newly wealthy contractor and moved one house up the hill.
The Block books had Schweitzer as the owner of the former Jackson house in 1887 and again in the 1890 and 1894 editions, proving that the couple didn't sell the property. So who lived there after Lydia married and moved out?
On to the Spring Valley Water Company tap records, which showed that until 1887 the tap was billed to Lydia Jackson. Later in that year, her account was closed and somebody named George Samson opened the tap at that address. Likely scenario: Hans and Lydia rented out the place when she moved next door.
Samson payed for the tap until 1890, when his account was closed. She checked out more microfilm spools but couldn't find any record of a new tap turned on at the Jackson house from 1890 to 1906. The year the Great Earthquake brought it down.
Prime real estate left empty for almost sixteen years? Puzzled, she turned her attention back to the Schweitzer house, and found that Hans was still paying the water bills until 1914, when his account closed and the new owner, O'Brien, paid to have the tap turned on.
On to the Great Register. Since women couldn't vote yet, it wouldn't include anything about Lydia, but it was rich with information about Hans. First registered to vote in 1868; born in 1842 in a German town called Gottingen, emigrated to San Francisco in 1860, naturalized as an American citizen, registered to vote in 1866. He had listed his occupation as "mason," and his address when he first registered was over in what was then a poor neighborhood, North Beach. A long way from the hilltop nouveau-riche neighborhood of Pacific Heights.
She got the sense of a man of humble beginnings, coming to the new world to seek his fortune, maybe trying his hand at the Comstock silver but instead plying his trade in the growing city. Became a successful contractor, married around 1887, when he would have been forty-five, Lydia twenty-seven. True love, Cree wondered, or nineteenth-century pragmatism—the Jackson family marrying off a "spinster" daughter, joining two moderate family fortunes?
An image of Lydia's portrait photo came back to her, the determined sincerity with a faint, wild and lovely hint of astonishment in that face.
Love, Cree decided.
At four o'clock she left the library with her phone at her ear. She called Ray again, got no answer, left a fourth message on his machine. Then all three of Bert's numbers and again nothing, nothing, nothing. Where were they? After her last attempt she snapped the phone shut and distinctly felt a cold slithering in her spine. The fact that neither man was answering his phone was starting to scare her.
50
BERT'S PLACE LOOKED like a treehouse, perched up in the fog-thickened shadows of foliage. There were no lights in the windows, but Cree trotted up the steps anyway. Starved, she had taken the time to grab dinner and drop her research notes at the motel, and night had come while she'd showered.
Talking with Horace last night had filled her with a contradictory sense of anxiety—no, more like dread—and hopefulness. She swore that if Bert was home she'd drink with him, she'd dance a waltz or a goddamned tango if that's what it took to make contact. His vocabulary for intimacy was so different from hers, but she swore she'd decipher it.
Open the door, she thought. Let him out of the confines of his loneliness, his obsession with past injuries and horrors. Let a little light in.
She rang the bell and knocked on the door, but there was no answer, no sound of movement inside. Almost seven o'clock: She wondered where he might be at this hour on a Sunday night, and that begot a fresh wave of concern. She hurried down the steps, into the car and through the night streets to Ray's house.
The east-side streets were anything but picturesque, not San Francisco postcard material. Some blocks were lit with acid orange, some cold blue, both turning the gritty industrial streets a harsh chemical color. In the darker side streets, a few lanterns glowed under the tarps of the homeless encampments, but aside from a few ragged shadows lurching on the sidewalks there were no pedestrians and almost no car traffic.
An idea had occurred to her as she was leaving Bert's. A plan, actually. It was a little risky, certainly, but probably the best option under the circumstances. A way of killing several birds with one stone. It was not really conniving, not duplicitous, she kept telling herself, not if she did it with genuine concern for Ray's well-being and sincere interest in him as a person, as a friend. And she was curious. There was an important element missing from her understanding of him. She could almost see it in him, a knot of idea and feeling she couldn't untangle with either her psychological training or her intuitive, empathic skills. She was increasingly certain it was central to Ray and to the whole problem.
The lights in Diamond Intermodal's windows showed he was home. She rang the bell, heard the dogs bark and go silent, and a moment later Ray opened the door. She sensed more than saw the dogs, moving in the darkness behind him.
"Where have you been, Ray? I've been calling all day!"
"Just being incommunicado for a bit. I do that now and again. But it's great to see you. Come in."
"It's not too late for a visit?"
"Are you kidding? For you it's never too late!"
The dogs had mostly recovered. They greeted her with cautious interest, flattered her with wagging tails, and followed behind her into Ray's living room. Ray gestured her to the couch and sprawled onto a big leather chair, one leg over its arm, face angled so she saw only his good side. He looked tired, pleased to see her, and worried.
"I've always been the bad-news-first type," he told her guardedly.
"Nothing particularly new to report. I was coming back from downtown, thought I'd . . . just check in, see what's going on."
He looked at her skeptically. "As in making sure I haven't done anything stupid?"
"Not exactly. But you're welcome to reassure me."
"If you're talking about Bert, no, I haven't seen him or killed him or whatever you're worried about. And he hasn't succeeded in killing me, apparently. But I did do something stupid."
Something about the way he talked, she had to wonder if there was dodge hidden in his words. But that was probably just paranoia. "What was that?"
"Went for a run after what was already a long night. I wanted to go yesterday, but it took me all day to fix my doors, and then I got called in for a late shift at the MC, a couple of the radiology people were out sick. So I went for my run afterward, down on the coastal range. Predawn's a beautiful time to do it, but stupid when you're that tired—I fell and knocked my head, scratched my hands up. Actually, I haven't been to bed at all, it's been this and that since the minute I got home." He winced a grin as he showed her the bruises near his ear and the abrasions on his hands.
"Ouch," she sympathized. "Looks like my timing is bad. I was hoping maybe you'd want to go for a drink or a walk or something. But you should get some sleep."
"Sleep? Hey, it's still the weekend for another few hours. The body is tired
but the soul is ever willing." Her proposal clearly pleased him. He swung his legs off the arm of the chair, groped on the floor for his shoes, and began putting them on.
"I'll bring you up to date on my wolfman research," Cree said. "I found a few more details. Maybe you'll get another one of your brainstorms."
She couldn't see his face, but his hands hesitated at his shoelaces. "Brainstorms," he echoed quietly, "I can pretty well guarantee."
Ray knew the esoteric pleasures of his home city. Cree drove as he navigated them north to Lombard Street, then west past Cree's motel and on into the Presidio. The great bridge appeared and disappeared as the streets wandered, great orange glowing towers and twin arcs of amber orbs muted in a thickening haze. They parked in a pullover and got out into a chill, moist wind. Cree put on a sweater and the windbreaker she kept in the car, but Ray didn't seem bothered by the cold.
They hiked along the road, through the visitor center lot, out onto the bridge. Traffic roared past only a few feet away, but its manic energy and noise couldn't compete with the majesty of the structure and its setting. The towers were impossibly tall, fading into dull glows toward the tops. Below, the plane of dark water was rimmed in lights of different colors, streetlights along the shore promenade, crisper city lights along the southern shore and the blurry ones on the far side. Lost in the expanse, the scattered running lights of smaller boats and huge freighters moved slowly. The great cables soared upward in a steepening curve, while below the bridge deck an abyss of empty space gaped. The Pacific was invisible, but she could hear its vastness in the music of half a dozen foghorns, near and far.
"This is perfect, Ray," she said.
"Strong medicine," he agreed. In the regularly spaced sidewalk lights he looked weary but unmistakably proud, as if the mighty bridge and heroic landscape were something he'd made himself.
She caught him up on what she'd learned about the house. It took fifteen minutes just to reach the first tower, geologically massive and dizzyingly foreshortened seen from so close. Cree admired the great iron plating and rivets, then bellied up to the railing on the far side of the pillar to stare out at the Bay and the distant, hazed glow of the cities on the eastern shore. The tower offered a welcome bulwark against the traffic rush and unrelenting ocean wind.
"So," she said, "tomorrow. At the church. Any ideas about what we might find?"
"I don't know. Something about Hans and Lydia. They were fairly prominent, well-off, probably big givers at the plate, right? And she volunteered at the mission. There's got to be something on them."
"Think there's any chance of finding reference to the wolfman himself?"
"No." He looked a little dejected at the admission.
They both hunched on the railing and stared out for a while as the moist cold worked its way into Cree's clothes. A tanker slid out from under the bridge in the center of the channel, and they watched the line of running lights stretch like train windows, froth silvering the hull. Two or three blocks long, Cree thought, yet tiny as a silverfish beneath the monumental, impossible bridge.
After a time Ray asked quietly, "Doesn't it kind of drive you crazy? Wondering who he was? What was going on?"
"Completely. My mind won't leave it alone. Horace is the same way—he can't stand a mystery that eludes him. Sounds like you're one of the same species, huh?"
"Yes." Ray grunted. "But what kind of critter is that? The kind so strongly compelled by a mystery?"
"Homo sapiens, I think they're called." Cree grinned.
"I mean, what? Was he . . . deranged, retarded, they kept him down here like an animal, a prisoner? Was he actually dangerous, violent? Or was it just a matter of keeping him hidden, of Victorian shame—could he have been Hans's kid from a prior marriage?"
She could feel Ray's urgency mounting, tilting toward desperation, and she needed to damp it before it swept her along with it. "We're working on it, Ray. We'll figure it out."
"Or maybe he preferred being down here, out of the light, away from people, I could easily see that. Or—"
"Or maybe he didn't live down here at all. If we'd found the bones in a bathroom, would you assume he lived on the crapper?"
Ray looked at her, astonished. " 'Crapper.' "
"Born in Brooklyn. Pop was a plumber." She laughed at his expression. "And now I think we better head back before I freeze solid."
Back at Diamond Intermodal, Ray opened a bottle of Shiraz and they sat in the living room to sip it and talk.
Another late-night session, easier this time. Ray put on some cello music and turned on a little gas fireplace, blue flames lapping to orange. If she hadn't felt so uneasy about her plan for later, it would have felt very nice in his living room. Outside, the chill fog smothered the building, but this was a sanctuary of warmth, color. Ray sprawled sideways, hammocked in his big chair, Cree stretched out her legs on the couch. The dogs drowsed noisily on their various rugs.
Their second late night together, the trust had grown, and at one in the morning it didn't seem strange to ask if she could spend the night on his couch. Ray had begun to look strained, eyes bloodshot, face puffy, and was clearly staying up only to be polite. He made a bad joke about priests, rabbis, and kangaroos to reassure her, then set her up with a quilt and pillow and bumbled off to his bedroom. The dogs shambled after him.
Cree turned out the living room lamp and lay on the couch, but she didn't undress. At the end of the hall, Ray's light went out, and she faintly heard the creak of his bed as it received his weight. She waited until she heard Ray's snores, deep and slow, then sat up and pushed the quilt aside.
Not duplicitous, she kept telling herself. Not sneaky, Ray, truly, just necessary.
51
THE GLOWING DIGITS of the clock on Ray's desk ticked ahead to one fourteen. Cree groped in her purse and dug out the digital camera and her little high-tech LED light. Barefoot, she crept out of the living room and into the hall. The bathroom seemed a good place to start: If Ray did wake, she'd have a reasonable excuse to be there, and with the door closed she could risk putting on a light. The dogs appeared in the bedroom doorway with a little rainfall noise of claws on hardwood. The advancing wall-to-wall big animal shadows gave her a little jolt, but they were calm, just checking on who was up and around. They put noses to her and wandered peacefully away toward the kitchen. She let out a breath she didn't know she'd held.
She shut the bathroom door soundlessly, turned on the overhead, and stood wincing in the glare. Cree Black stared at her from the mirror, looking guilty as hell.
Not betrayal or hypocrisy, she kept telling herself. Not cold and calculating. Not deceitful and invasive, not in this situation.
So why was she so wired up? She was 99 percent sure she'd find only exculpatory evidence, or none. Mainly, it was the question of what would happen if he caught her at what she was about to do and took it the wrong way.
Ray, you have to understand. This is the only way I'm going to prove to Bert that you're okay. If he keeps on like he is, something bad is going to happen. I'm going to give him the information he wants so that I can prove him wrong, so that he'll get off your case.
There was also the missing element, the secret side of Ray that even in his most candid moments wasn't quite clear to her.
She swung the cabinet door open and found only shaving cream, shampoo, the usual. No suspicious collection of pharmaceuticals. Ray must keep them all in his bedside table, as Bert had said—if Bert was even telling the truth about that. After the medicine cabinet, she went through the chest of drawers and the linen closet. Just bathroom stuff. No mummified fingers or ears, Bert.
She turned off the light and slipped back into the pitch-black hall. For a few seconds she held still, letting her eyes readjust, listening carefully. Ray's snoring came faintly from the bedroom, its cadence unchanged.
She glided into the living room, thought about the desk and the drifts of correspondence on it, decided to go there last. A single big dog shadow drifted i
n from the kitchen, paused, turned around, vanished. Cree crept up the exposed stairs to the studio, forgetting the top door's noisy hinges until the screech startled her. She froze and waited until she'd gotten her heartbeat under control before she eased the door slowly open and just as slowly shut.
Colder up here. The ambient light was a little better, vague city-night glow coming through the tall windows, enough to make out the contours of the room. The maps Bert had mentioned were at the top of her list. She spotted the drafting table straight ahead, not far from the head of the stairs, started to go over, then thought she'd wait until her eyes had recovered better from the bright bathroom.
Instead she padded over to the workbench with the computers and other equipment. She scanned the equipment, saw nothing of particular interest: cameras, printers, cables, pads with notations or sketches on them. A professional-size vinyl sign printer explained Ray's enlargement process.
Back at the end wall, she used her light to look at the huge photos Ray had hung. As before, her primary response was ambivalence. As pure compositions, they were gorgeous, celebrations of beautiful curving forms, pale arcs set against a deep darkness like the night sky, like the vaulted ceiling of a planetarium before the show began. They captured something mystical and revelatory. But cranial injuries, broken bone edges or foreign bodies, were always just visible, too, clearly part of Ray's intent. And the thought of someone taking these shots, manipulating and lingering over their cold dead subjects—that was unsettling. Which was the real key to Ray? Beauty or death?
A few MRIs were hung with the others, much smaller and not as successful. The computerized process made uneven blots and irregular rings of rainbow hues in the sectional view of someone's skull. One clearly included a peanut-shaped thing with branching roots, probably a tumor. They were too digital for her taste, the colors too harsh, the compositions not at all elegant like the others. She shined her light behind the MRIs and a few of the big ones, but didn't find any titles or other information.