City of Sand

by Robert Kroese

  “Try to keep it to yourself if you can,” said Benjamin.

  “They won’t find out about you from me,” said Lentz. “I did give your name to the coroner’s office, though. They had no next of kin listed.”

  Benjamin nodded and shook Lentz’s hand. “Thanks, Detective Lentz.”

  “You’re welcome, Mr. Stone.”

  Benjamin turned and walked back to the Buick. He started the car, drove down the street and made a couple of turns at random, finding himself in a virtually identical part of the housing development. He pulled over and took a look around. The only significant difference between this cul-de-sac and the last was that this street had no police cars, ambulances, or gawking residents. It was enough.

  Benjamin rested his head against the steering wheel and sobbed.

  Chapter Four

  If the Sunnyview authorities worked on the same timeframe as Portland, it would take them seventy-two hours to release Jessica’s body. That meant seventy-two hours for Benjamin to spend in Sunnyview with nothing to do but wonder how his daughter had ended up face-down in a creek.

  As he had been standing there looking at the face of his dead daughter, something else had come back to him from the dream: when he was standing in the orchard, he had reached into his pocket and found an apricot pit. A stone, they used to call them. Hard and substantial, and holding within it the potential for an entire tree. Sitting alone in a booth at Carl’s Jr., he reached into his pocket, half expecting to find the apricot pit, but the only thing in his pocket was Cameron Payne’s business card.

  “XKredits,” he read aloud. “The future of currency.”

  The flimsy card with its airy slogan seemed ridiculous and insubstantial in comparison to the apricot pit. But the apricot pit was the one that wasn’t real, being only a remnant of a half-remembered dream of a reality that no longer existed. XKredits were the future, and the Sunnyview of venture capital, IPOs and intellectual property was the present.

  But Stone’s thoughts drifted back to Cameron Payne’s BMW with the XKredit license plate. Someone had paid for that car—someone with real money earned by creating something with actual value. How Cameron Payne had convinced someone like that to fund his castles in the sky was something of a mystery to Benjamin, and he had a hunch that if he could solve that mystery, he might gain some insight into what had happened to Jessica.

  After lunch he headed back to the library, where he did some research into XKredits’ funding. Their major backer was a company called Farscope Capital. The principal owner of Farscope was William Glazier, the elderly founder of Glazier Semiconductor. Jessica had worked for Glazier Semiconductor before her stint at XKredits. And that wasn’t the only connection: Benjamin’s father had sold their orchard to Glazier in 1960. He wondered if William Glazier would remember him. Benjamin had been only eighteen years old when he’d met Glazier, and Glazier had to be in his mid-eighties by now.

  Benjamin found a contact number for Farscope Capital and pulled his cell phone from his pocket, earning a glare from the librarian. He held up his hands in supplication and walked outside. The odds of William Glazier remembering him—or returning his call even if he did remember—were slim, but Benjamin figured it couldn’t hurt to try. He left a message with Farscope’s secretary—who was polite but non-committal, and left the library to go for a walk downtown.

  He was standing on the corner of First and Main, trying to picture the downtown Sunnyview of his youth, when his phone rang. The voice was raspy and quiet, but clear.

  “Benjamin?” the voice said.

  “Yes,” Benjamin replied. “This is Benjamin Stone.”

  “You’re Andrew Stone’s son?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  There was a sound like tree branches rustling in a fall breeze. After a moment Benjamin realized William Glazier was laughing. “What can I do for you, Benjamin? I’m afraid I can’t give you your orchard back.”

  “No, sir,” said Benjamin, aware that he was speaking like a child addressing an elder—or the way children used to address their elders, anyway. He didn’t seem to be able to help it. “I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about Cameron Payne and XKredits.”

  The line was silent for a moment. “You fishing for investment advice, Benjamin?” said Glazier curtly.

  “No, sir,” said Benjamin again. “My daughter works… worked for them. She…” Benjamin’s voice cracked, and he paused to take a breath.

  “My God,” said Glazier, more quietly. “That girl, Jessica Stone. The one that’s been on the news. She’s your daughter, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Benjamin. “She was. They found her body this morning.” Lentz had told him there was going to be a press conference this afternoon, so he figured there was no harm in telling Glazier she was dead.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” Glazier said. “But why do you want to know about XKredits?”

  “I wasn’t very close to my daughter,” said Benjamin. “I was just hoping to learn a little more about her life.”

  “I see,” said Glazier. “What are you doing for dinner tonight, Benjamin?”

  “I have no plans.”

  “Well, I’m not planning anything fancy, but how would you like to come up to the house for dinner?”

  “That would be very hospitable of you, sir,” said Benjamin.

  “Fine,” said Glazier. “1010 Skylark Lane. Be here at six.”

  “Sounds good,” said Benjamin. “Thank you, sir.”

  Benjamin hung up and looked at his watch. It was two thirty. Lentz had said the press conference was at three. He’d also said not to watch, but he couldn’t seriously think Benjamin would miss it.

  He drove the Buick back to the motel and found the local NBC affiliate station on the crappy old TV in his room. The press conference started shortly after three, and Lentz was right: Benjamin didn’t learn anything. Lentz spoke for about thirty seconds, and then took three questions. He didn’t mention the cause of death, and he was noncommittal about the possibility of foul play. As far as the media were concerned, Jessica may have just stumbled into Sand Hill Creek and drowned. After the press conference, the station cut to an interview with Cameron Payne, who somehow managed to use the occasion as an opportunity to plug the XKredits IPO.

  After easing a bit the previous night, Benjamin’s headache had returned in full force. He downed three more ibuprofen tablets and lay down in bed. He hadn’t intended to sleep, but woke with a start at 5:45. He jumped out of bed, used the bathroom, and grabbed his keys. Mercifully his headache had ebbed to a dull throb.

  William Glazier’s house was in the Hidden Oaks subdivision, on the opposite side of town from the low-income housing development where Jessica’s body had been found. As Benjamin made his way down Skylark Lane, he marveled at the disparity between Hidden Oaks and the Sand Hill Creek neighborhood. The two areas were roughly equidistant from downtown, and fifty years earlier they had both been primarily agricultural. As Sunnyview developed and became a hub of information technology (and land became too valuable to be used for such mundane purposes as farming), one might have expected the Sand Hill Creek area to become an enclave for the new rich and Hidden Oaks to become the working class ghetto, but the opposite had occurred. Whereas the houses in the Sand Hill Creek area were small, crowded stucco structures with scraggly Bermuda grass lawns, Hidden Oaks had been taken over by sprawling “McMansions” with painstakingly manicured lawns and gated entryways. Broad sidewalks featured an assortment of joggers, dog walkers and bicyclists in brightly colored Lycra, Gore-Tex and rayon. The residents were all white, and an unlikely proportion of them were young or blond, and many were both. The only brown-skinned people Benjamin saw were raking bark near a white pickup with MAVERICK LANDSCAPING scrawled on the side.

  The lawns got larger and the houses more opulent as Benjamin continued down Skylark Lane, and at the very end of the street was William Glazier’s house. It was older and less ostentatious than the other
houses in the area, but it had a certain stately charm. Glazier probably had the place built back when real estate was affordable and Hidden Oaks was synonymous with “the middle of nowhere.” The rest of the neighborhood seemed to have grown up around his estate.

  Benjamin pulled up to the gate and pressed the call button on the intercom. A moment later the gate swung open and he continued in toward the house. He had to laugh as he pulled up behind a later model Buick parked in front of the garage. Evidently Glazier’s distaste for ostentation extended to his choice in automobiles.

  He was met at the door by an attractive Latina who seemed to be in her mid-thirties. “Come in,” she said with a shy smile. “Mr. Glazier is waiting for you on the patio.”

  She led Benjamin through the tastefully but sparsely decorated house to the back patio, where an elderly man sat stooped in a wrought iron patio chair in front of a small table. He stared out across the spacious yard, seemingly transfixed by the light of the afternoon sun filtering through the redwoods planted at aesthetically pleasing intervals just inside the tall fence that hemmed in the yard. Redwoods were popular trees in this area, particularly for borders, because they looked impressive and grew fast, but they weren’t a native species. There were no redwoods in the Sunnyview of Benjamin’s youth. In fact, there had been few trees of any sort outside of orchards, now that he thought about it. The natural landscape had tended toward more drought-resistant plants, given the fact that it rarely rained in this region from May to October. It was only the large-scale importing of water from the Sierras that made the lush lawns and landscaping of Hidden Oaks’ palatial homes possible. In Portland, trees grew anywhere there were a few square feet of vacant ground. In Sunnyview, trees grew where the gardeners had planted them. Benjamin found the thought vaguely disquieting; it was just one more way in which modern-day Sunnyview seemed artificial, even insubstantial.

  William Glazier took no notice of Benjamin until he and the housekeeper were standing only a scant few paces away, and even then he didn’t stir until the housekeeper cleared her throat.

  “Thank you, Lucia,” Glazier said, and the woman slipped away like a shadow. He smiled at Benjamin. “Have a seat, please.”

  Benjamin sat down across from Glazier, and a moment later Lucia reappeared, deposited a platter of roasted chicken and vegetables on the table, and vanished again without a sound. Benjamin mumbled a thank you as she disappeared into the house.

  “Very sorry to hear about your daughter,” said Glazier, stabbing a chicken thigh with his fork and moving it to his plate. “Please, help yourself.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Benjamin.

  “I’m not sure what I can tell you about Cameron Payne’s operation,” said Glazier. “I’m just an investor.”

  “You must be pretty familiar with the company, though,” said Benjamin, “to put up that kind of money.” Wired estimated that Farscope Capital had invested twenty million dollars.

  Glazier shrugged. “We invest in a lot of companies.”

  “Yes,” replied Benjamin, “I did a bit of research. But Farscope has a pretty conservative portfolio. You haven’t put a lot of money in these dot com companies.”

  “That isn’t true,” said Glazier with a frown. “We just put $800,000 into SurfDaddy.com.”

  “Yes,” said Benjamin, “but Surf Daddy has been around for twenty years. They’re well known in the Bay Area as a manufacturer of surfing accessories. SurfDaddy.com is just an online extension of an established business that manufactures actual products.”

  A smile crept across Glazier’s face. “You have been doing research, haven’t you, Benjamin?” he said. “You know, you sound like your father. Did you know that when I bought your father’s orchard, I originally offered twenty percent more than the price we eventually settled on? I was going to pay him in Glazier Semiconductor Stock. You know what he said? He said, ‘Keep your stock. I want something real.’”

  Benjamin nodded. That sounded like his father alright. “Real meaning cash,” he said.

  “Exactly,” said Glazier. “The irony being that there are few things less substantial than cash. It’s a paper note that is backed up by nothing more than the good intentions of a government that is five trillion dollars in debt. The U.S. dollar has lost ninety-five percent of its value in the past fifty years. Meanwhile, Glazier Semiconductor stock has risen six hundred percent.”

  “Dad did okay,” said Benjamin.

  “Absolutely,” said Glazier. “He provided for his family. That’s the most important thing. Like a lot of people who grew up during the Depression, he was risk averse, and that served him well, given his goals. But as the senior member of a venture capital firm, I can’t afford to take no risks.”

  “Well, I’m no expert,” said Benjamin, “but if you’re looking for risk, XKredits.com seems like a good bet.”

  Glazier laughed out loud. “You may be right,” he said. “Maybe I’m just sick of seeing these snot-nosed kids drive by my house in their goddamned BMWs blasting their rap-metal shit. Did you know that Yahoo! is worth more than Glazier Semiconductor these days? It’s insane. Our components are used in machines in forty-six countries. Do you even understand what Yahoo! does? They call it an Internet portal. A portal is a door, for Christ’s sake. A fucking door is worth a hundred and forty billion dollars?” Glazier was trying to maintain his light-hearted manner, but Benjamin saw the fork shaking in his hand.

  Benjamin nodded, taking a bite of carrot. The food was delicious. He made a note to thank the housekeeper. Lucia?

  He and Glazier ate in silence for some time. When it seemed that Glazier had calmed a bit, Benjamin asked him what made him pick XKredits.com, of all the Internet startups in Silicon Valley.

  Glazier gave him a strange look. “But surely you know, Benjamin. I thought that’s why you’re here.”

  Benjamin was confused. “I’m sorry, Mr. Glazier,” he said. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “Jessica was the one who suggested I look into XKredits,” said Glazier.

  Benjamin nearly choked on his food. His daughter was the last person on Earth he’d recommend seeking out for investment advice. Glazier must have picked up on his skepticism.

  “I didn’t invest purely on her recommendation, of course,” Glazier said. “I talked to Cameron Payne, reviewed their business plan, and ran a lot of numbers before I decided to commit any of Farscope’s funds. But it was Jessica who first brought the company to my attention. She used to work for me, as I’m sure you know.”

  Benjamin nodded uncertainly, not sure how to proceed. None of this sounded right to him. When he’d spoken to Glazier on the phone, he’d gotten the impression that he only knew Jessica from the news reports of her disappearance. But now he was saying she had given him investment advice? Jessica Stone giving William Glazier investment advice. That was a million kinds of wrong.

  “Did you know Jessica well?” asked Benjamin at last.

  “Honestly, no,” said Glazier. “As I mentioned, I didn’t even make the connection that she was your daughter. But when she came to my office to talk about XKredits.com, I had to admire her resourcefulness. Not many people would have the balls to make that sort of overture—if you’ll pardon the expression.”

  “She just walked into your office and told you that it would be a good idea to give XKredits twenty million dollars?”

  Glazier chuckled. “The details of my investment aren’t public, so I’m not going to verify the dollar amount. But yes, that’s more-or-less how it went. She was very professional about it. She’d done her research.”

  Benjamin had to exert significant mental effort to reconcile what Glazier was telling him about Jessica with his memories of her. Had he really been so blind to his daughter’s potential? Worse, had Benjamin been the one holding her back? Was it only after she had gotten out from under his thumb that she’d been able to become the savvy, assertive person that Cameron Payne and William Glazier described? If that was true, then the
success she’d achieved was only in spite of him.

  “I’m sorry,” said Benjamin. “I’m just having a hard time seeing how this works. An ex-employee walks in off the street and gives William Glazier a hot investment tip?”

  Glazier frowned. “You don’t think much of your daughter, do you?” he asked.

  Benjamin didn’t respond.

  “It’s often difficult for parents to see the potential in their own children,” said Glazier. “I myself never had children, so I won’t theorize as to why that is. But if nothing else, you must have known how beautiful Jessica was.”

  “You’re saying you gave money to XKredits.com because my daughter is pretty?” Benjamin asked. The idea of William Glazier noticing his daughter’s looks struck him as a bit creepy.

  “I’m saying it got her noticed. I didn’t know her name, but I remembered seeing her in the office. Half of life is just getting noticed, you know. For all the gender inequality bullshit you hear about, attractive young women have a big advantage in business, if they’re confident enough to use it. Of course, you have to follow up with some substance, and Jessica did. She put together a solid case for why I should invest in XKredits.com. My research confirmed XKredits’ potential.”

  “What did Jessica get out of this?” Benjamin asked. “She was just a low-level XKredits employee. Why would she go to bat for Cameron Payne?”

  Glazier shrugged. “You’d have to ask Cameron. Presumably he offered her some options. Actually, not to pry in your personal affairs, but if you’re Jessica’s next of kin, you may own a pretty good stake in XKredits. Or you will, once the legalities get sorted out.”

  Benjamin nodded dumbly. The thought of him inheriting assets from Jessica—possibly significant assets—was so bizarre that he had to file it away for later processing.