by Betsy Draine
8
AS SOON AS HE REACHED THE RAILING, Toby pulled his cell phone from his pocket to call the sheriff and cursed when there was no connection. Angie and I reached into the car to get our phones and turn on the emergency lights. But neither of our phones worked, either. We had zero bars. The highway was deserted in both directions, so we had no choice except to drive on to the River’s End in Jenner, which was still a few miles away. From there we called Dan, who told us to report the accident to the Highway Patrol, because they were in charge of crash investigations. He promised to talk to them directly.
We spent the next hour at the restaurant, waiting for the Highway Patrol investigators, answering their questions, and watching them examine and photograph our car. Then they asked us to accompany them to the crash site and to walk through our recollection of how the wreck occurred. Emergency vehicles were on the scene when we arrived. The officers pressed us on what speed we’d been going, and they made Toby go over his driving moves from the moment he realized the other car was on our tail. He was calmer in his replies than I would have been. I was steamed that they were treating him as if the crash were his fault. It was a relief, at least, that they let us go home before they brought up the body from the site.
None of us slept well that night. In the morning, Dan called. According to his colleagues, he said, accidents with cows aren’t uncommon on that stretch of road, but he had his suspicions about the chase based on what we’d told him. He was coordinating with the Highway Patrol and would let us know when they identified the dead driver, whose body was badly burned. I felt better knowing Dan was on the investigative team. Toby opened his shop in the afternoon and suggested that Angie and I go shopping to take our minds off the crash. So she got to see our funky Whole Foods after all, but neither of us was in the mood to enjoy it.
After we came in from marketing, I rooted in the hall closet for an art puzzle that I thought we could work on to keep the inner horrors under control. But I was so nerved up that the box fell to the floor, spilling all five hundred pieces. Angie pulled me up by the arm, walked me over to the couch, and put her hands on my shoulders. “You are going to sit still till you absorb this,” she said firmly. “You’ve been dithering all day, making up errands and pastimes, apologizing to me right and left, and theorizing your head off about what happened yesterday.” She lightened the pressure on my shoulders but kept her palms there. “Nora, only two things are important. First, we almost died yesterday. Second, we didn’t.”
“I know,” I said defensively.
“But you don’t. Not inside. Just think about those two things while I get you a cup of tea. Then we can talk if you want to.” She disappeared into the kitchen.
The center of my chest was aching from tension and confusion. I decided to use my yoga breathing and treat what Angie said as a mantra. Over and over, I said to myself: “First, we almost died.” Breathe in. “Second, we didn’t.” Breathe out. Before Angie came back, tears were escaping from my closed lids.
Angie handed me a mug of hot tea. She didn’t talk. I noticed that she’d put a full spoon of sugar in the cup, just the way I like it. I felt grateful for her presence.
“I feel guilty,” I confessed. “I almost got us all killed, and you’re the two people I love most. And someone did die, not to mention the poor cow.”
Angie looked only half-surprised. “How do you figure the crash was your fault?”
“I should have known better. It was dumb to propose going up to Fort Ross on that treacherous road, fog or no fog. I should have realized that creep might be stalking us. And with my little sister in the car. Some big sister I am.”
Angie sipped her mug of tea. “Remember what Toby said about how we’re each responsible for what we do?”
“Yes, that’s just what’s bothering me.”
“And remember what I said about humility? Think about it. You’re pretty big stuff if you’re the only one responsible for what happened yesterday. It was my decision to go with you and make it an outing. It was Toby’s decision to come with us and do the driving. Then there’s whatever decisions the jerk behind us made. You didn’t know what was going to happen. How could you?” She took another sip of tea. “Have some humility, Nora.”
That took me down a peg. “We need to do something to pull you out of this,” she continued. “Something upbeat, something happy.”
“You’re right.” I decided I had had enough. “We should plan something fun for tomorrow. Do you remember what we talked about the other day?”
“You mean, golf?”
“How about it?”
“Sure, as long as we can be a foursome with Colleen and Gloria. They said they’d be patient. I haven’t played since high school.”
“Then you’re perfect for us. We call our group the Feel Good Golfers. Boy, do I need some of that.”
“Then why wait until tomorrow? How about a Pimm’s Cup and that puzzle?” Angie knows just how to handle me.
The Feel Good Golfers have a standing date for 8 a.m. on the second and fourth Mondays of the month. The Scottish-style links at Bodega Harbour form a big, sweeping course, but we’re in obligatory golf carts, so we can fit in eighteen holes before lunch at the clubhouse. In March, in deference to the weather, there’s a rain-check system. This Monday we didn’t need it. Sunday night’s wind had blown away all the weekend’s clouds.
We met Colleen and Gloria at the pro shop, as agreed. The night before, Toby and I had fielded phone calls from friends who had heard about the accident. There was a story about it in Sunday’s paper, though our names weren’t mentioned. But of course Colleen knew, through Dan, and Gloria had a friend on the Highway Patrol. So as we met the rest of the golf group, hitting the women’s room or getting paired into our carts, we took their commiserations but didn’t feel a need to elaborate. Nobody asked any questions. Everybody knew the facts, or thought they did. And everyone anticipated a long talk over lunch. Now it was playtime.
We’re the Feel Good Golfers, but we do have a few rules, which are designed to get us to lunch in time for a good gossip. First, we start on time. Tee time is tee time. Second, no mulligans. Third, if you’ve taken two shots above par for the hole and you haven’t reached the green, you pick up your ball, walk with ball in hand to the green, putt with the rest of your friends, and give yourself a 9 for the hole. Last, and this is the rule most broken, no conversations while standing. It’s fine to talk about the play as long as you don’t give unasked-for advice, but talk about the rest of life waits till you’re riding in the cart or have arrived at lunch. Once we get going, we’re in a trouble-free bubble, where the worst that can happen is you lose your ball. Without the distraction of chatter, you concentrate on the grasses, the slopes, the sea, the breeze, and how to move your ball around efficiently in the moment’s conditions.
The sun was out, and it was a perfect day for cheering me up and for showing Angie one of the most beautiful courses in the world. Each point on the course has a dramatically different vista, designed to give stunning views at every turn. One tee looks up to the graceful hills, where we often see deer. Another perches scarily above a long ravine. Hares dart around down there. Three holes nestle against the dunes, just yards from the beach. All the tees have spectacular views of the Pacific Ocean, royal blue in the morning light and studded with rugged black rocks. In the morning, snowy egrets are out, their narrow bills pecking into the grass.
Sure enough, as play began, I felt the tension ease in my back and shoulders, and after a few holes, I was fully absorbed in the rhythm of my swing. However, that feeling of placidity was short lived. We had just teed off at a mound that looks across the harbor to our side of the bay when Angie sparked a conversation that brought me out of my protective bubble.
“Wow!” she said. “That’s amazing.”
“What?” asked Gloria.
“The view.” Her hand was cupped over her eyes and she was looking out toward Bodega Head. “That’s exactly what it loo
ks like in The Birds the first time you see Bodega Bay. You know, the scene where Tippi Hedren takes a little motorboat across the water to get to Rod Taylor’s house on the other shore? That’s where it was, wasn’t it, somewhere over there?” She pointed to our side of the bay.
“Sure was,” said Colleen, nodding in the general direction. “It was called the Brenner house in the movie.”
“My mom told me about that,” said Gloria. “The set was somewhere out where Angie’s pointing.”
“Yup,” said Colleen. “The old Gaffney place. Too bad it’s gone. It would be another landmark for the Hitchcock fans, just like the Potter schoolhouse.”
Everyone around here knows about the schoolhouse Hitchcock used for the scene where the frenzied birds attack the children—only there is no schoolhouse in Bodega Bay. The building still sits atop a hill in the separate hamlet of Bodega, a few miles inland from here; even I know that. But I drew a blank when it came to the location of the farmhouse where the main action of the film takes place. It had been a long time since I’d seen the movie. That was before I moved to Bodega Bay.
As I looked out across the harbor, the penny finally dropped. It had taken a few seconds to register, I guess. “Colleen, when you say Gaffney, do you mean Rose Gaffney, the woman who led the protests against the nuclear power plant back in the ’60s?” As a real-estate agent, Colleen knows all the local property lore.
“The very same,” she answered. “Gaffney owned a dilapidated ranch house out toward the head. They used the house in the movie. Hitchcock fixed it up, of course, added a gazebo and some outbuildings and built a dock. That’s where Tippi Hedren ties up her boat, and that was the house you see in the film.”
Suddenly my head was spinning—because as I followed Angie’s gaze, I thought I could pick out the spot along the distant shore where Dan said Charlie had been killed. How close was it to the site of the Gaffney house that had been used as a set for The Birds? And was there a connection?
Gloria, who always keeps us to the rules, cut Colleen short, saying, “Let’s save this for the clubhouse. Clare’s group is just behind us.” It was true. They were already on the hole and would have to wait if we didn’t hurry up.
As we scurried to our cart and then rumbled down the golf path, my mind was racing. What did I know for sure? The Brenner house, the main setting for The Birds, was on the Gaffney property. Rose Cassini’s boyfriend Peter was working on the film when he gave the icon to her, shortly before he died. On his deathbed, Peter started to say something that sounded like a message. “Tell Rose Gaffney …” What? He died before he could complete the thought. Did he give the other panels of the triptych to Rose Gaffney? Not likely, since the icons would have shown up in her estate after she died. But what if the movie set was the place where Peter hid the panels? Along with the icon, Charlie had bought some storyboards showing the set of the Brenner house that Peter had drawn. It couldn’t be mere coincidence. And then it came to me. Peter’s message could have been meant for Rose Cassini, not Rose Gaffney. “Tell Rose …” something about the Gaffney house.
My golf bubble had been well and truly pierced. From that moment, I had trouble concentrating on the ball, and as a result, my self-effacing sister had a better game than I did. I lost two balls in the “native coastal ruff” that Robert Trent Jones Jr. proudly designed into the course. And a third ball plopped in among the cattails in a beautiful but treacherous marsh. Angie, on the other hand, shot her ball straight down the middle of the longest fairways and kept herself out of all hazards—including that marsh area, which you have to cross over on a bridge.
After eighteen holes of windy but sunny golf, we were all tired and hungry. Gloria, ever the organizer, directed us to seats at the clubhouse cafe. She wanted the other two foursomes, Clare’s and Jan’s, to get a chance to talk with Angie over lunch, so Gloria waved Colleen and me to the end of the table, as if to say we’d had our chance to socialize with the newcomer. When we were seated, I turned to Colleen to finish the exchange that we’d started back on the fourth tee.
“Colleen, what ever happened to the Gaffney house? There’s nothing out there anymore.”
“It burned up, not too long after the filming. They say it wasn’t much of a loss for Rose. She wasn’t living in it when she rented the property to Hitchcock, and it was already a wreck. She let his people do whatever they needed to the inside for the purposes of filming. She didn’t intend to live there again. Good thing. It burned right to the ground.”
Oh boy. If the icons were left on the set after the filming, they became ashes, along with the house. I didn’t want to think about that. “That’s a shame,” I said. “I guess if the house were still there, it would be worth a bundle, wouldn’t it?”
“No, it wouldn’t,” Colleen replied. “When the shore road was improved, it was rerouted right over where the Gaffney farmhouse used to be, or close enough. If the house had still been standing, the county would have torn it down.”
“You think so?”
“Oh yeah. Our county surveyor is a no-nonsense kind of guy. When he chooses the best site for a road, he gets his right of way.” Local knowledge—that’s what Colleen has. Her family’s lived in Bodega Bay for three generations.
“Do you think you could show me where the Gaffney house stood?” I asked, trying not to sound too insistent.
“Sure, but I can’t pinpoint it exactly. From your house, you head west on the shore road out toward Bodega Head. Stop when you see the sign on the right warning people not to drive into the Bodega Marine Laboratory Housing area. There’s a group of cypress trees nearby. It was right around there.”
“I know where that is. I pass that sign when I go walking.”
The arrival of clam chowder broke up the conversation. That opened me up to questions about the car crash and death, Charlie’s murder, and the break-ins. Ours had definitely been the most eventful household in the time since our last game. As we talked, I planned my afternoon: an excursion out to the old Gaffney property.
Angie was eager to come along, once I explained what was behind the outing. After showering at home, we changed and waited for Toby to join us. Monday’s normally his day off, but he had spent the sunny morning repainting the door to his shop. It had been looking scruffy since the lock was replaced. For Angie, the proposed jaunt was about finding the movie location. Toby wanted to check the crime scene to see whether anything more could be learned from it. And I was interested in the relation between the two sites. On a fine day like this one, we decided to walk.
Our first stop, the crime scene, was easy to locate. There was a ditch behind a stand of Monterey cypresses on the dune side of the road about midway between the Spud Point Marina and the entrance to the Bodega Marine Laboratory’s dorms. The sheriff’s department had cordoned off the site with yellow crime-scene tape clearly marked “Do not cross.” Within the taped area, the long grass of the ditch had been matted by trampling feet. Looking out to the harbor, I saw the marooned sailboat still tilted on its side. It was in our direct line of sight. According to Dan, the murder had taken place here, and then the killer had rowed Charlie’s body out to the boat. Yes, it could have happened that way. The rowboat was gone now. Out on the mudflats, a lonely heron stood on one leg and eyed us impassively.
Toby hunched his shoulders. “I guess Dan’s squad went over this ground with a fine-tooth comb. I don’t see anything here, do you?”
I didn’t. The lab tests might have revealed bloodstains, or fibers or what-not, but nothing of interest was visible now.
“Let’s look for traces of the movie set,” Angie suggested.
“Or anything that might tell us there was once a house nearby,” I added. “A foundation, maybe, or a fireplace or something.”
We spread out and meandered up and down the road, along the fringe of land at the water’s edge, and back from the shoreline into the dunes. But there was no sign of any remains of a house. “Colleen said she thought the place was near a group
of cypress trees,” I said. I was standing in front of some.
“The trouble is,” said Toby, “from where we’re standing, there are groups of cypresses all up and down this road a half mile in either direction, so that’s not much help. They all look the same. Anyhow, I think we’re too close to town here. Let’s go out toward the head a little farther.”
We walked on well past the driveway to the marine lab housing, stopping at every promising clump of cypresses, rummaging through the grass and scuffing along the sandy ground, but if there had ever been a movie set here, its traces were long gone. “We’ll never get anywhere this way,” I grumbled.
Toby was frustrated too. “And even if we did locate the spot where the house once stood, what exactly are we looking for?”
“That’s just it, I don’t know. It’s only a hunch. We know Charlie bought the icon. We know he also bought some storyboards depicting the set for the Brenner house. I’m looking for a thread, a tie-in to the case, but this could be a wild goose chase.”
“Don’t give up so easily,” Angie said. “Why don’t we rent the movie and see whether we can figure out where they built the set? You know, use the film as a guide. The house may be gone, but the land is still the same.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” said Toby. “It might help. Besides, I haven’t seen The Birds since I was a kid.” My thoughts exactly.
When we got back home, I started dinner while Toby went out to get the DVD. The Surf Shop in the Pelican Plaza has several racks of DVD rentals. Given Bodega Bay’s link to cinematic history, they were sure to carry a copy of the Hitchcock classic.
Dan called while Toby was gone. “I hear that your sister is pretty good at golf,” he began. Colleen had given him a full report on our game. We exchanged a few more words of banter. I hesitated reporting that I’d spent the afternoon searching fruitlessly for a movie set. After all, what real new information did I have besides a hunch that there was some connection between Rose Gaffney’s place and Charlie’s murder? I had no evidence there actually was a connection, so I held back.