by Rex Burns
A shrug from the admiral. “No. They just don’t have much time for us old folks.”
Jenny looked up from swirling the olive in her drink. “Why don’t you ask him, Dalton.”
The words rang like a tiny bell in the quiet room, urgent and tense and timid. And they confirmed a growing feeling: that there had been another reason for the admiral’s invitation. In the silence, the man heaved a long sigh through his nose. But he said nothing.
“Ask me what, Jenny?”
“Please, Dalton.”
“She wants …” The rigid man couldn’t find the words.
“She’s your granddaughter, too.” She watched the admiral mash the cigar end between his teeth. Then she turned to me. “We want to ask your help, Jack. All of our friends our age … Well, we’re so out of touch with things. We thought perhaps you might know what to do.”
“I’ll sure help if I can. What do you need?”
The admiral jabbed his cigar into the large ashtray. “We didn’t invite you over on false pretenses, Jack. We wanted to see you—to welcome you back. This” —his hand waved vaguely, the stone in the heavy Naval Academy ring glinting— “this came up … we got a call this morning. And I swear to God, we don’t know what to do about it.”
“It’s Dorcas. Our granddaughter. Margaret’s worried she might be in some kind of trouble.” Before I could ask what kind of trouble, she added, “Margaret wouldn’t tell me much else … She—Margaret—she’s not well, Jack. Henry doesn’t admit that anything’s wrong with her, but …”
“But their marriage has been lousy for years, Jenny. You know that. I don’t know why Margaret married him in the first place, and I don’t see why she stays with him.”
They had brought the issue up and now circled around it, the admiral embarrassed to have to ask for help, his wife hesitant for some reason of her own. “Did Margaret say what kind of trouble?”
“Only that they don’t know where she is.”
“They’re afraid she’s run off,” snorted the admiral. “Quit her job, left her house—run off.”
Jenny added quickly, “They called the police—sheriff—whoever, but those people are no help. Dorcas is over twenty-one and Margaret has no evidence that she didn’t leave willingly. No evidence of anything … bad … happening.”
The admiral picked up his cigar to stare angrily at the crumpled and still smoldering tip. Then he tossed it back. “Theirs isn’t a happy family, Jack. Never has been. But Margaret’s got too damned much pride to call it quits. And she’s a grown woman—it’s not our place to butt in where we’re not asked.” He cleared his throat. The anger gave way to a worry that pinched his white eyebrows together. “And Dorcas’s life hasn’t been a happy one, from what I’ve seen. I don’t know what the cause is; hell, I’ve been on sea duty most of the girl’s life. But I remember her as a bright, laughing little thing. Just a beautiful little sprite who was into everything—just like Margaret used to be.”
“How long has she been gone?”
“It’s been over a week, now, I think.”
“Margaret waited until today to tell you?”
The fragile woman looked even smaller. “She called to know if we’d heard from her. When I said no, she told me about it.” Jenny studied her knotted fingers. “We—Margaret and I—were never as close as we should have been, Jack. There were so many things … time passed so quickly, and then she was grown and gone …”
“They’ve called her friends? Places where she might visit?”
“Henry did,” said the admiral. “No one’s heard anything from her.”
“I’m not sure what you want me to do.”
Jenny leaned to place her fingers with their swollen joints on my arm. “Can you talk to her? To Margaret? Dalton’s told me something about the kind of work you’ve been doing. Maybe you can think of some way to help find out where Dorcas is, Jack. I know Margaret’s worried about her. We are, too. But we don’t know what else to do. We don’t know who else to ask.”
“Why don’t you give me her address and number? I’ll call and make an appointment to see her.”
CHAPTER 2
THE VOICE ON the other end of the telephone had a tautness that tried to mask tension but only served to increase it. It reminded me of the voices reporting on one of those nightmare operations that had gone wrong: things were out of control and people were hurting, and no one could help now. But this voice wasn’t an operations officer; it was Henry Wilcox, Margaret’s husband and Dorcas’s father. I hadn’t talked with the man for over a decade and remembered him only slightly, and with no particular warmth.
“The admiral suggested you come over?” A stress on the first two words suggested sarcasm and an awareness of Admiral Combs’s feelings toward his son-in-law.
“He thought I might be able to help. Is Margaret there? May I talk to her?”
As I spoke, I gazed through the window of a living room whose angles and echoing emptiness still smelled of fresh paint. Outside, sprouting from cramped and newly sodded backyards, small docks anchored a forest of masts and rigging. Beyond the marina, San Diego Bay spread gleaming and flat in the sun.
“She’s not awake yet.”
Even though it was a weekday morning, some sailing club was having a regatta. Distant bright spinnakers ballooned in silent explosion as the crews rounded a buoy into the downwind leg of the course. I watched one of the tiny blossoms tangle and collapse and jerk angrily from the thrust of a jib pole. Despite what I felt like telling Wilcox, I’d promised the admiral and Jenny I would do what I could. “It’ll take me an hour to get there. That’s enough time for her to be up and about, right?”
Another long pause told me that Henry was definitely unhappy at the idea of some agent of his father-in-law nosing into his life. But finally he said grudgingly, “I guess it can’t hurt. God knows I’ve done every damn thing I could.” And he gave me directions to his home.
The drive to La Jolla took longer than an hour; traffic north on the San Diego Freeway was snarled for no apparent reason, and the Mission Freeway dumped additional cars into the lanes like someone cramming marbles down a slot. There used to be a rush hour, I remembered, but now that hour had turned into gridlock. The rest of the day was the rush. Still, beneath all the changes and swollen growth that covered what used to be dry and empty hills north of San Diego, I could see remnants of the old. Even this stretch of the freeway had a familiar feel, one that recalled the restless high school years and my beat-up Triumph motorcycle that had terrified my mother. Then, speed and motion were the popular narcotics; it was enough to be going somewhere—anywhere—down those warm and sun-filled lanes of empty concrete, the wind popping my shirt and stinging tears from my eyes. Sometimes Tommy Jenkins would ride behind, his boot stuffed into the exhaust trumpet to muffle the rap of the engine when we passed a highway patrolman. It didn’t seem that long ago, and I regretted having to call Tommy and ask for a rain check on today’s lunch. But the man had understood—”Hey, Jack, somebody needs your help, go to it”—and we would be getting together soon.
The twin bands of busy freeway swept past the flat, man-made islets of Mission Bay. Marinas and parking lots were both crowded. The green parks glimpsed through billows of pink and white oleander were dotted with strollers and joggers. Above the frayed tufts of palm trees, bright kites shaped like swallows or airfoils or long, snaking dragons hovered and dived in the wind. West, over the Pacific, a line of haze marked the fog that followed the chill waters of the Japanese current offshore. North toward the rise of Soledad Mountain and La Jolla, the sun glinted on thousands of whitewashed houses half hidden by trees. This California green was different from the urgent, moist green of the Virginia countryside. The freeway, despite its familiar blue information signs and green exit markings, lacked the tunnel effect of tall trees crowding the interstate to screen colonial brick homes and shopping centers from the constant traffic around Fairfax. Here, the highway lifted away from the bright irrigation of park and lawn an
d arced between brown, dead-looking manzanita that covered hillsides too steep and sandy for development. Above, cresting the ridge against the sky, the fringe of dull green started again: the exclamations of Lombardies, the showy burst of date palms, the dark, well-watered hedges of oleander protecting homes perched over the canyon’s rim. My two memories of landscape—one sharp with recent severing, the other beginning to stir under a blanket of years—churned up echoes and juxtaposed emotions and brought that unreal feeling of not actually being where I was.
I hadn’t felt that way in years, not since childhood. Then, uprooted by my father’s transfer from one duty station to another, I often had a sense of disconnectedness that cushioned me from the surrounding world until, gradually, I could center myself in the new landscape. It was strange to feel that again after so long, and I found myself recalling an associated game from that same childhood time: searching the days and deeds for favorable and unfavorable omens, for hints of whether this new place would be welcoming or hostile. Strange, I didn’t remember feeling it in Viet Nam. Maybe it was the intense map study. Maybe it was my unblinking focus on treeline and ridge and avenues of approach. And though I’d never felt at home in Viet Nam either, by God I knew exactly where I was when I was there.
The La Jolla exit swung me onto the twin lanes of Ardath Road. This, too, was new. The asphalt swerved to pulse traffic between clusters of shops separated by dry and brushy canyon walls. Finally the road tangled with the more familiar streets of downtown La Jolla where crowded, stop-and-go traffic glittered in the mid-morning heat like crumpled aluminum foil. I kept glancing at the directions Henry had given over the telephone. If I needed a reminder that talking with Henry wasn’t something I was all that eager to do, it was the fact that I did have to keep studying the road names and turns. Jobs I was eager for needed only a single glance and I had the directions memorized.
But my father’s friend had asked for help, and it was Jack Steele to the rescue. Not quite sure what he was supposed to do or how he was supposed to do it, but admitting more than a little relief at shifting his attention from his own sour memories to someone else’s problem. Maybe that’s one of the wellsprings of benevolence, the discovery that another’s worries can dwarf our own.
The final turn was beyond the La Jolla Cove with its facing high-rise apartments and dignified hotels. A winding lane tilted steeply up from the blue of ocean and into an older, half-remembered residential district. Set back from the street, the homes were protected by curving brick walls or thick shrubbery that masked houses and insured privacy despite tiny lots. The Wilcox house was like a lot of the homes I thought of as typically Californian: shouldered down among a rich variety of trees and bushes, it offered only the garage door and a sliver of wall for greeting. Then the house opened to the secluded patio area with its pool and sliding glass doors surrounding. Henry, an unsmiling man almost my height, gripped my fingers once and dropped them. The gesture said he wasn’t one to forget his manners despite an apparently unwelcome intrusion.
“So the admiral thinks you can help us somehow?” He led me through the entry and living room and an open patio door. A small swimming pool filled a yard surrounded by oleander. “Margaret’s out here.”
The man’s creased face with its heavy ears and long, graying hair seemed even more weary and hound-like than I remembered. Our last meeting had been more convivial; that was the time Henry welcomed any friend of Margaret’s, especially those who might have an interest in putting money into an exciting new project of beach front condominiums. When Eleanor and I hadn’t warmed to the idea, the camaraderie chilled.
“Jack?” Margaret, wearing sunglasses, shielded her eyes from the glare as she looked up. “My God, you haven’t changed at all in—what is it, ten years now?”
“About that, Margaret. How are you?”
She didn’t look well. The flesh peeking beneath the sunglasses was a puffy and unhealthy gray. Her lips had shriveled into a tight wrinkle that pinched the corners of her mouth. On the glass breakfast table shaded by a bright umbrella stood a pitcher half-filled with cheery red liquid. “I mixed up a batch of Bloody Marys for you, Jack. I remembered how much you and Eleanor used to like them.”
That wasn’t true, but I accepted a glass anyway. Margaret apparently needed some kind of excuse for mixing a drink. Henry shook his head. “I’m having coffee. Can’t you remember that?”
Ignoring Henry, she settled me onto one of the wrought-iron patio chairs and drank deeply. “I talked with Daddy last night. He said you were coming over. I hope you can help us, Jack.”
“When did you last see Dorcas?”
She listened to the faint clink of ice cubes in her drink as she counted back. “It’s been almost a month now.”
“She’s been missing that long?”
“No,” said Henry. “That’s the last time we saw her, which is what you asked. We also talked to her on the telephone a couple weeks ago.”
“She called you?”
“Yes.”
“How soon after that did you know she was missing?”
Henry shrugged. “We’re still not certain that she is. That’s why the police are no damned help—they say there’s no proof of any crime being committed.”
“But obviously you’re worried about her.”
“We hadn’t heard a thing from her since she called,” said Margaret. “So Henry went up there to see if she was all right. She was gone. No word to us or to anyone. Just gone.”
“Up where?”
“Near Julian.” Henry sipped at his coffee and leaned back in the iron chair. His animosity gradually ebbed as he talked about his daughter. “It’s a small town about fifty miles east, in the San Bernardinos. Dorcas likes the mountains.”
“She lives up there?”
“Yes. She has a job in a gift shop—wanted to be on her own, she said. Away from us, anyway.” The man stared into his cup and then looked up. “Some people complain about their kids moving back in with them after college. Dorcas came home for a few months and couldn’t wait to get away again. So she took this two-bit job up there because she said she liked mountains.”
Henry made it sound like a social disease. “Have you talked to her employer?”
“Of course. A Mrs. Gannet. That’s how we found out Dori was gone—we called the shop to talk to her. Mrs. Gannet said Dorcas was gone. That she simply stopped coming to work. She went by her cabin a time or two, but nobody answered the door. She has no idea where Dori is. So I drove all the way up there and saw just what Mrs. Gannet did—nothing.”
“Friends? Boyfriends?”
Henry shrugged again and looked at Margaret. She shook her head. “I’m not sure … She doesn’t really tell us much anymore. She wants her freedom, she says. You know how young people are …” She looked across the blue water of the kidney-shaped pool. “You have daughters, don’t you, Jack? You know how they can be.”
I had daughters, yes, but thank God both of them were considerate enough to let their old man know what was going on. Which was more Eleanor’s influence than mine. “Dorcas never mentioned any friends at all?”
Margaret seemed to be drifting away in her thoughts. From somewhere beyond the thick barrier of shrubbery came the steady scrape of a gardener raking leaves under bushes surrounding the neighbor’s pool. Finally, she shook her head. “Only her friends from high school. She calls a few of them when she comes home for visits. There are three or four friends she keeps in touch with, mostly just gossiping on the phone.”
“You talked to them?”
“I did,” said Henry. “They didn’t know anything. Not that they’d tell me, anyway.”
“What’s that mean?”
He shrugged. “Just the secrets the young keep from the old.” He snorted into his coffee cup. “Making up for those the parents keep from the children, I suppose.”
“But you told them she might be missing?”
“They said they hadn’t talked to her in weeks. I don�
��t think they were lying. And I don’t know why they’d have any reason to.”
The man had shifted his gaze from his coffee cup to the pool. A stray breeze made quick traces across the surface of the blue water and Margaret, too, watched the busy shadows on the pool floor.
Hers was an aching pensiveness that called for gray, overcast skies and a steady drizzle, weather suitable for moroseness and reflection. But it was spring in Southern California and it wasn’t raining. The sun was that beautiful, misty gold of the Pacific coastline, and this La Jolla home was a long way from a dreary moor. It was hard to reconcile a setting like this with the festering unhappiness that Margaret and Henry showed. We may not be able to make every place heaven, but we seem able to make any place hell.
“How about a private detective, Henry? I’m sure your family lawyer would be able to recommend a good one.”
“Daddy suggested a private detective. Henry said no.”
A stubborn look made his creases deepen. “I—we’ve—thought of that. But I don’t want anyone I don’t know meddling in my family affairs.”
Nor anyone he did know; especially the admiral. Margaret waved the pitcher at my still-full glass and then refilled her own.
“When Daddy said you were coming by, I was so relieved. He said you’ve had a lot of experience in investigations. And because you have daughters of your own, I know you can understand how we feel.”
“I have no experience in the civilian sector, Margaret—”
“Please, Jack. We don’t know where she is! Or why she’s gone. We don’t know if she needs help or if she’s just going through a phase. We need to at least know that she’s alive and well. Oh, God, I need to know!”
“Margaret, that’s enough!” Henry set his empty coffee cup down with a sharp rap. “ ‘Daddy’ said you would help, Jack. And people usually do what ‘Daddy’ wants, by God! Now are you going to help or not?”
“Is it what you want, too, Henry?”
The man sucked a deep breath, then he nodded. “The admiral assures me you’re a friend of the family. Certainly I accept his assurances. Just the same, I want this on a businesslike basis. I expect to pay a reasonable sum for your services. What sort of fees do you anticipate?”