by Betsy Draine
I held up a palm to stop Angie from barging through. I knocked and called Sophie’s name. No response. We opened the door and walked into the hot baking room, with its bright lights, large ovens, and long working tables. It took a second’s sweep of the eyes to spot Sophie, slumped on the floor, in her baker’s whites, with flour spilled all around her. Near her head, the flour was smeared with blood. We started toward her, calling her name, but again I blocked Angie.
“Watch out. There are footprints in the flour on the floor—don’t step on them. I’ll check if she’s alive.” I made my way carefully over to Sophie and reached toward her neck to take a pulse. She stirred and moaned. I didn’t see a wound, but the gray hair on the back of her head was darkly matted and there were abrasions on her neck, face, and hands. I knew better than to move her.
“Toby! We need you! Call 911. Then call Dan.”
The ambulance arrived first. By the time Dan pulled up, the paramedics had Sophie on a stretcher, and they were sliding it into the back of the ambulance. She was unconscious but her vital signs were good, one of the paramedics said. She had suffered an obvious blow to the head. If there were other serious injuries, they would be discovered in the emergency room. Angie was tormented by self-blame and insisted on riding along in the ambulance, but that wasn’t permitted. Besides, Dan needed to question her.
After checking the scene, he led us back into the front room of the bakery. On the phone, Toby had given Dan only the briefest information. Now we brought him up to date, starting with my discovery of Sophie’s icon and ending with the unanswered phone call this morning that had brought us here.
When the ambulance, its blue light twirling and siren sounding, left with Sophie for Palm Drive Hospital in Sebastopol, Angie burst into tears. I put my arm around her shoulders. Dan needed Angie to be lucid. To her credit, she was calm again in a few moments and provided a thorough account of her conversation with Rose, repeating what she’d told us at breakfast, omitting nothing.
“What was the last thing she said to you again?” Dan asked, going over the same ground a second time.
“That she’d get the truth out of Sophie. She sounded pretty mad.”
“What do you think she meant? What truth?”
“Whether Peter Federenco was the father of her baby.”
“And those were her exact words?”
Angie hesitated. Dan waited.
“She said she’d get the truth out of Sophie one way or the other.”
Dan jotted down those words. Angie looked dejected.
“Nora,” Dan said, “you were the first one to find Sophie injured this morning, right?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t move her, did you? Or touch anything?”
“I touched her neck to check her pulse. Otherwise, no one’s touched anything. We tried to be pretty careful about that. Like the footprints in the spilled flour. We walked around them.”
“Smart. Put these on now.” He handed each of us a pair of paper shoe covers.
“Those are fairly small shoe prints in there,” Dan said. “They could be a woman’s.” I knew they weren’t Sophie’s, since the footsteps led away from where she was lying on the floor. Sophie was short, so she could easily have been hit from behind by a woman.
“How well do you know Rose Cassini?” Dan asked me.
“We interviewed her just that one time. You’ve read my notes.”
“Yes.” He thought for a moment. “I’m sending a car out to Cazadero to pick her up.” Dan dialed a number and gave the order over the phone.
“You’re not arresting her, are you?” Angie said in consternation.
“I’m bringing her in for questioning. I have to, don’t I, based on what you’ve told me?”
“I suppose so,” Angie conceded in a meek voice.
Dan put his notepad in his shirt pocket and looked around the room. “Is anything missing, do you know?”
We glanced around the bakery shop. Everything looked untouched. The cash register hadn’t been opened. Dan gave the buttons a push and found them unresponsive.
“There’s probably a key for that,” he said. “We’ll check later to make sure the register wasn’t tampered with. Step back into the baking room with me, and tell me if you see anything amiss.”
I told him that none of us had been inside it before this morning. “But if you just want other eyes on the room, let’s do it. Toby, why don’t you wait here?”
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll man the shop.”
Angie and I stepped in, just a few feet, so as to leave the site clean. I remarked to Dan that the scene told us something about the timing of the attack. The ovens were on. Bread loaves were cooling on a back shelf. On the counter in front of where Sophie had lain was the mess made when she was disturbed rolling out some pastry, maybe dough for croissants. A bin of flour—probably open for dusting the pastry while rolling it—had overturned and spilled over the counter and onto the floor. The rolling pin still lay on the floor where Sophie had dropped it. With no pastry yet in the oven, Sophie must have been interrupted before 5 a.m.
I looked at the white footprints, which led away from the counter toward the back of the room. Dan’s eyes were following mine. The prints pointed in the direction of a stairwell. That must be the inner stairway toward Sophie’s apartment.
I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before. “There’s nothing of value down here, but what about the icon? Sophie lives upstairs. Her icon was hanging in one of the bedrooms.”
“You better show me,” said Dan. He motioned to Angie and me. We walked awkwardly upstairs, slowed by the paper shoe covers.
When we entered the apartment, everything was orderly. Nothing seemed different from the way it had looked the day before. But above the dresser in the second bedroom where the icon once hung, a naked picture hook on the wall confirmed my fear. “Oh, no,” I cried. “It was here yesterday. We both saw it.”
“Rose must have taken it,” said Angie.
Dan looked at me inquiringly.
“She couldn’t have known its value,” I said. “Otherwise she wouldn’t have put hers up for auction. She still doesn’t know what we know about the triptych, unless you told her about it, Angie.”
“You mean about the other painting underneath St. Michael? I never said a word. But that wasn’t why she wanted the icon. It was jealousy. She wanted it because Peter gave it to Sophie. She took it from Sophie to get even.”
But Rose wasn’t the only person who might have wanted the icon. I now told Dan about the suspicious phone call George Greeley had received from a caller with a Russian accent. “I tried to reach you yesterday to tell you about it.”
“I got your message. I was going to call you today. That changes things,” Dan agreed. “I’ll get in touch with Interpol to see what leads they have on other Russian mafia in the United States.”
“But that’s not all.” I reported seeing Arnold Kohler with a friend of Tom Keogh’s at the Willow Wood Café while Angie and I were talking about Sophie’s icon. “They may have overheard us.”
“I’ll get on that, as well,” said Dan. “But right now I need a search warrant for Rose Cassini’s place.” We stood by while he made the arrangements by phone.
Angie shifted impatiently from one foot to the other, waiting until he finished. “Can we go?” she asked. “I want to get to the hospital.” Dan nodded yes. He stayed behind to wait for his crime scene team to arrive.
We drove to Sebastopol through the rain, which now was coming down in sheets. By the time we made it inside the hospital, we were soaked. We sat in our wet clothes in the waiting room while Angie paced the halls searching for a doctor who could inform us of Sophie’s condition. When she finally found one, the news was guarded. Sophie had a concussion, a serious one. She was still unconscious, but her life wasn’t in danger, in the young doctor’s opinion. At this point no visitors were allowed.
“We can’t do much good here right now,” I said
to Angie, “so let’s go home, dry off, and have some lunch.” She started to protest, but I continued. “Then you can come back in your own car and stay all day if you want. Would that be okay?”
Reluctantly, Angie agreed. The news about Sophie’s prognosis had relieved some of her anguish, and keeping vigil at the hospital would give her a purpose.
When we got home, I made lunch and bagged some nuts and raisins for Angie to take with her. “Sophie will pull through,” I said. “She’s going to be all right.”
She nodded silently, her chin on her chest.
“Now I understand why you slunk home yesterday like a guilty dog with her tail between her legs.”
“I should have told you about it last night, but I was too ashamed,” she admitted.
“But you told us this morning, and that’s what’s important. We got there in time to help.”
“I hope so.”
“We did, Angie.”
She managed a weak smile.
After lunch, Angie gathered what she needed for a long stint in the waiting room. She took a thermos, the snacks I’d bagged, a poncho, a blanket, and some magazines. I followed her out to her car. “Are you coming home for dinner, or will you get something in Sebastopol?”
“I guess I’ll decide later. I’ll call from the hospital.” She gave a distracted wave and drove off.
15
TOBY CAME OUT OF THE HOUSE and walked up beside me as I stood on the curb. “Poor Angie.”
“She’ll be okay.”
“Are you still up for our treasure hunt after all that?” He pointed to the gardening tools he’d fetched from the garage this morning and had left leaning against the side of the house.
“I think so. There’s no reason to put it off.” The rain had stopped an hour ago, but the sky remained threatening. The ground underfoot was soggy, which might even help with the digging.
“All right, then,” said Toby, “let’s go.” We loaded everything into the car—Peter’s storyboards, two shovels, a hand fork and spade, and a tarpaulin that Toby had found in the back of the garage. That was optimistic. He was hoping to find the missing panel to wrap up.
This time we drove all the way out to the end of Westshore Road and worked our way back toward the marina, using the storyboards as our guide, searching for just the right cluster of trees. According to what Colleen had told me on the golf course, the Brenner house had stood somewhere near today’s entrance to the dormitories for the marine lab employees. It turned out we weren’t far from their driveway when we found the most promising area. In fact, we parked right in front of a sign that said “Restricted Access.” That brought up the question of digging on the marine lab’s land. This was UC–Davis property. It was something we hadn’t considered, but now we realized we’d better ask for permission. We rang Dan again and asked him if he would call the marine lab office and request authorization for us to proceed. He warned us they might require a search warrant, and that could take time. We told him we’d wait to hear back.
Meanwhile, we felt safe enough to scout around with the storyboards in hand. There were clumps of Monterey cypresses at the shoreline just opposite the housing entrance, as well as to the right of the entrance and to its left. The ones on the shore were too close together and too small to match those on the storyboards. The cypresses to the right of the entrance were all in a line, following the contours of a ditch. We needed to concentrate on the grove to the left of the entrance.
A light fence, made of two thin cables stretching between posts, defined the entrance to the housing area and ran the west length of the road for a quarter of a mile or more. The top wire was chest high. As I waited, I saw that we could do some of our analysis from this side of the fence without ducking under the lower wire. There were fifteen to twenty trees in the shallow grove, about half of them very large and obviously old. The grandfather of them, toward the back of the space, had started to fall apart with age. Its trunk was so thick that it might have started with two or three trunks that had grown together. Half of its crown had fallen in some recent storm. It looked like our landmark tree. I pointed that out to Toby.
We took another look at the storyboards and the triangular composition they delineated. “So now we need to look for two cypresses that are up here near the road and are more or less equidistant from the big old guy,” Toby said.
And there they were, only two yards in from the fence and about three yards apart from each other. Without crossing the barrier, it was hard to tell if the big tree was set at the correct distance to be the apex of a triangle that was approximately three yards on each side. But it seemed about right.
We looked around for other candidates to match the storyboards, but with every passing moment I became more confident. We were anxious to dig, but where exactly to begin? “The area inside the triangle isn’t that huge, but it’s too big to dig the whole thing up,” I said. And something else was nagging at me, too. “How deep do we have to dig before we decide we’re at the wrong spot?”
Toby replied, “I thought about that problem last night, and just as I was falling asleep, the answer came to me.”
“Don’t tell me you had a vision too.”
“No, it’s just logic. If Peter buried the icon out here during the filming, he wouldn’t have had much time to do it. There’d be people around. He’d have to come out at night and dig in the dark, using a flashlight. And he wouldn’t want to leave a big pile of dirt nearby or leave the ground looking obviously torn up. Ergo, he didn’t dig too deep a hole.”
“I hope you’re right.” I was losing heart, standing in the damp with a storyboard in one hand.
“Besides,” Toby continued, “I’m beginning to see the way this guy’s mind worked. On top of everything else, he was superstitious. There was a pattern to everything he did. He was obsessed with the number three.”
That struck a chord. I sensed that Toby was on to something. “Go on,” I said.
“Three panels. Three hiding places. Three trees,” Toby ticked off on his fingers.
I saw he was right. “Three storyboards. The rule of thirds. The Holy Trinity,” I added.
“There you go. Everything comes up three. It was like a magic number for him, some kind of good luck charm.”
“But how does that help us now?” I asked.
“We start at the center of the triangle and dig three feet down. The center, I admit, is a guess.”
“It’s worth a shot. Let’s call Dan and see if he’s getting permission for us to dig.”
Toby phoned and found Dan in the middle of a call with the security officer at the marine lab. Toby asked Dan to tell the security man that we hoped to limit our digging to a couple of holes no more than three feet deep. Of course, we would fill in any dirt we removed when we were through. Dan put Toby on hold and came back shortly with the needed permission. “This is your lucky day,” Dan said. “The guy I talked to was a drinking buddy of your partner. He said if this was related to Charlie’s murder, he wanted to be of help.”
“So we can go ahead.”
“Yes. Go ahead and get started. But the security guy—Joe’s his name—will be coming down to check you out. Be nice to him. He’s doing you a big favor.”
We bent down and crawled under the fence’s lower cable. Then together we mapped out the triangular area between the trees. Toby walked toward the center of the triangle, while I checked around from different positions to see if it looked like the center from every side. Finally I gave a nod, and Toby made his first thrust with the big shovel. The rain had indeed softened the earth, and the work went rapidly once we were working together, Toby with his shovel, me with my smaller one.
By the time the security man pulled up in a pickup truck, we had a hole about two feet deep and wide. He rolled down his window and rested a beefy hand on the side-view mirror. We had a friendly chat with Joe, who wanted to talk about Charlie and the good times they used to have with a poker group at the Guerneville Tavern. Joe was th
e outgoing sort, in his midthirties, with a ruddy complexion and an easy smile.
“So you used to play poker with Charlie,” said Toby. “Was Arnold Kohler running that game? We heard Charlie was in debt to him.”
“I heard the same thing. But no, those stakes are too rich for my blood. Kohler is one of the big boys. The guys at my table play for dollars and change. Why do you ask? You think Kohler had anything to do with Charlie’s murder?”
“The sheriff’s still looking into that,” I said. “What we’re hoping to do is find out what Charlie was doing out here the night he was killed.”
“Yeah, Dan told me about it. Well, you go ahead. As long as the sheriff’s okay with it, it’s all right with me.” For Charlie’s sake, Joe was prepared to go out on a limb with his bosses, letting us dig for whatever Charlie might have been looking for when he was killed. Joe took our names, address, and phone number as well as our car license and advised us that if anyone stopped and questioned us to have them call him in the security office. We thanked him, and he gave me his card. We promised to call him when we were through digging. He wished us luck, returned to his truck, and drove back up the road toward the lab.
Digging was harder now that we were deeper into the earth. Thankfully, this was well-mulched earth, thick with the loose debris of a grove undisturbed for decades. We ran into tendrils of root, but they were tender enough to cut through with the smaller shovel, which had sharp edges. When the hole was three feet deep and no box had turned up, Toby moved over a little and started again—with the same result. Next he moved over in a different direction and tried once more. Again, nothing but dirt. He continued, gopher-like, in this vein while I labored with my shovel and the hand spade, trying to widen the girth of the several holes. By now both of us had worked up a sweat. I took out a handkerchief and mopped my brow. The gray light of the afternoon was growing dimmer. It was going to rain again.