The Shape of Dread

by Marcia Muller

To establish rapport, I said, “This is a lovely room.”

  She glanced around, then shrugged disinterestedly. “Yes, I suppose it is. I barely see it anymore.” After a brief pause, she added, “It’s good of you to take an interest in my daughter’s disappearance.”

  “I should warn you right off that my interest is in behalf of the young man convicted of killing her.”

  She nodded, picking at a piece of lint on her velvet-covered thigh. “I have no problem with that.”

  I removed a notebook and pencil from my bag. “I’ve come to you for two reasons. First, I’d like to get some idea of Tracy as a person, hear what she was like.”

  “Is like, Ms. McCone. Tracy is still alive.”

  “That brings me to the other reason I asked to speak with you. You’ve told people that you believe she’s alive, and I’d like to know why.”

  She nodded again and waited. Apparently she expected me to conduct a formal interview, as the police would do.

  I said, “What kind of a young woman was…is Tracy?”

  “A normal young woman. More talented than most, but quite…normal. If anything, her normalcy borders on the pathological. At least, that’s what my husband would say-he’s in psychology, you know.”

  “Could you explain that more fully?”

  “Tracy is overly conscientious. She works very hard and is extremely self-critical. Very harsh on herself at times. With girls of her age you expect some irresponsibility: they’re late for appointments; they forget to call home; they miss birthdays or Mother’s Day. But not Tracy. Even her play has a serious quality, as if she’s playing for keeps. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “Yes, I do. You and your husband-”

  “We’re separated,” she said quickly.

  “I see. Both of you are professors at Stanford?”

  “Yes, although we’ve elected to take extended leaves of absence. From the university and from one another.”

  I debated probing into the marital situation but decided it had no bearing on the case, other than as a by-product. “I notice that Tracy was working as a cocktail waitress before she began to break into comedy. Were you disappointed that she chose not to attend college?”

  “Actually she did attend for two years-Foothill Junior College. But when the time came for her to transfer to a four-year school, she opted to move to San Francisco and try her wings at comedy instead. Frankly, Ms. McCone, Tracy isn’t academically inclined. I doubt she would have been happy or successful continuing with her education.”

  “So she moved to the city with your blessing?”

  “Well. Neither of us was exactly delighted with her decision. It’s a rough world for a young single woman with no marketable skills, and show business is even rougher. But it was what she wanted, and I knew what it was like to have parents who pressured me to succeed academically. In the end it turned out well for me, but there was a lot of pain along the way. I didn’t want to do the same thing to my daughter-particularly when chances of it working out were slim-so I persuaded George to let her have her way.”

  That, I thought, might have been one of the causes of the breakup of the Kostakoses’ marriage; perhaps he blamed her for sending their daughter to her still-undetermined fate. I said, “I recall reading somewhere that you subsidized Tracy’s income with an allowance. Does that mean that she couldn’t have supported herself on what she made at Café Comedie?”

  “Not at first. We gave her the allowance and use of our credit cards so she could afford a decent place to live and a few luxuries from time to time. She never abused the cards; she isn’t that kind of girl.”

  “Has there been any activity in those accounts since her disappearance-activity that could be attributed to her?”

  “No. During the year before she disappeared, she established her own credit. She didn’t need our cards anymore.” Mrs. Kostakos sounded faintly mournful. “A few weeks before she disappeared, she told me that soon she wouldn’t need the allowance anymore, either. I told her it wasn’t necessary to push herself to be self-sufficient. We have plenty of money; we both have good positions, and George inherited a substantial amount of money. But Tracy needed to be her own woman in every respect.”

  “The reason she wouldn’t need the allowance anymore was that her career was taking off?”

  “That’s what I assumed.”

  Or her declaration of impending financial independence might have some connection with her disappearance. I made a note on my pad. “You and Tracy were close?”

  “Yes. We had a weekly lunch date, on Fridays. We were to have lunch the day after she vanished. I’d planned a drive across the hills to the coast. We often did things like that-going for long drives, taking picnics.”

  “What kinds of things did you talk about?”

  “The usual things a mother and daughter talk about, I suppose.”

  “Could you be more specific?”

  “Well. My work, my students. Her career, how it was going. People we knew. What we’d done in the past week, books we’d read, movies we’d seen.”

  “Did she ever talk about problems? Ask your advice?”

  “Tracy has always been capable of solving her own problems. And as far as I know, she had none at that time.”

  “She never gave any indication that she might be unhappy-with her work, her living situation, her boyfriend, perhaps?”

  “No.”

  “Mrs. Kostakos, I’ve studied the news accounts of Tracy’s disappearance, as well as the Foster trial transcripts. All along you’ve firmly stated that you believe Tracy disappeared voluntarily.”

  She nodded.

  “Yet you say she gave no indication of unhappiness, never mentioned anything that was troubling her.”

  “…That’s right.”

  “Then why are you under the impression that she would just vanish of her own free will?”

  Laura Kostakos shifted on her chair. She brought her hands together in her lap.

  “Why, Mrs. Kostakos?”

  Silence.

  “You continue to pay the rent on her apartment. Even though you have plenty of money, that strikes me as the sort of thing you wouldn’t do unless you had a reasonable expectation that one day she’d return.”

  “I have never for a moment doubted that she will return.”

  “But why? And what about the ransom note, the car that was found in the mountains? How do you explain them?”

  She rose from her chair so quickly that it startled me. I watched as she moved in her old-woman’s walk to the center window seat and stood with her back to me, one knee resting on the cushion. The afternoon had darkened beyond the glass; the black lava rock pool made me think of a lagoon teeming with alien life forms.

  “Mrs. Kostakos?”

  “There’s a hummingbird feeder hanging on that pine beyond the pool,” she said. “Can you see it?”

  I looked, spotted a smear of red. “Yes.”

  “I put it there last summer. I wanted the hummingbirds to come around, so I’d be less lonely. But there’s one that is vicious. Every time the others come to drink, he swoops down and chases them away. It reminds me of how people have swooped down and chased away my hopes.”

  I couldn’t think of an appropriate comment.

  “Do you know what I’m going to do about that bird?” she went on. “I’m observing him, learning his habits. I’ve found a stone, a nice flat one that will skim through the air. As soon as I’m sure I’ll get the right bird, I am going to kill him.”

  The words were delivered dispassionately, but there was a disturbing undercurrent of rage. I chose not to respond to it, said mildly, “If you kill him, one of the remaining birds will take up the role of the aggressor.”

  “I’m going to do it anyway.”

  Maybe it would help her, but I doubted that. Probably she’d end up trying to murder the entire hummingbird population of Palo Alto. “Mrs. Kostakos, let’s get back to Tracy-”

  “People think I’m
crazy, you know.”

  I was silent again. She seemed to be approaching the subject in her own way, and I was content to let her do so.

  “My husband left me because he couldn’t stand living with a crazy woman anymore. He considers me dangerously obsessed with Tracy’s disappearance. My students and colleagues in the math department began handling me with kid gloves, as if they were afraid one wrong word would send me screaming into the streets. Of course, anything deviating from the statistical norm is unsettling to mathematicians. You can understand why I had to take a leave of absence.”

  “Are you working on anything now? Articles or a book-”

  “No, nothing. I can’t concentrate. I hardly ever go out of the house anymore.” Her words were coming more swiftly now. “The neighbors have mostly stopped speaking to me; they look at me strangely. When I do go out, people in the stores, in the street…it’s as if I radiate an aura that frightens them. Do I frighten you, Ms. McCone?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think I’m crazy?”

  “I think you’re lonely, and under terrible strain.”

  She took her knee off the bench and turned toward me. “Thank you for saying so, even if it’s not true.”

  “I meant it. Do you think you’re crazy?”

  The question made her sink onto the window seat. “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Perhaps you should see a therapist.”

  “I was, but I just can’t anymore. It doesn’t help. The only thing that would…”

  “Would be finding out what happened to your daughter.”

  She nodded, bending her head so her hair fell against her high cheekbones. The walls of the recess cast shadows over her that made her hair more gray than blond, and totally lifeless.

  “Mrs. Kostakos,” I said, “please help me. You’ll be helping yourself. And Tracy.”

  “How?”

  “Tell me what makes you think that Tracy vanished voluntarily.”

  She didn’t speak. I let the silence spin out into minutes. The gray year’s-end day was drawing to a close; already the crimson of the hummingbird feeder had faded into the background of pine needles.

  Finally she said, “All right. There was one thing, the week before she vanished. At lunch that Friday she asked me if I thought she was a good person. I said yes, of course-the way you do when someone catches you off guard with an important question. She seemed to sense it was a reflexive response, however, because she said maybe she once had been, but she didn’t think she was anymore.”

  “Did you ask her what she meant by that?”

  “Naturally. But she refused to be specific. She merely said that circumstance changes people, leads them to do things they never would have, as well as not to do things they know are right. When I pressed her, she said she’d done a number of things that were hurtful to others, but that her worst sin was one of omission-of not correcting a situation that was sure to harm someone she cared about. After that, she refused to talk anymore. Later when she disappeared, I assumed she’d gone away to escape whatever circumstances were making her feel she was a bad person. I’ve always believed she would eventually work it out and return.”

  I noted the approximate date of the conversation on my pad, then wrote in block letters: BAD PERSON/OMISSION/HARM. I studied them for over a minute, then said, “This may have a great deal of bearing on what happened, but it still doesn’t explain why you seem to dismiss the ransom note you received, as well as the bloodstained car that was found in the mountains.”

  She sighed deeply. “I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to….Ms. McCone, this may sound horrible coming from her mother, but Tracy isn’t the…paragon the newspapers made her out to be. She is, as I said, self-reliant and conscientious and loyal to those she loves, but she is also very ambitious and…”

  “And?”

  “She can be quite…ruthless when it suits her purposes. She is an achiever, and people who wish to achieve a great deal often can be self-centered and cruel. My daughter had already achieved a great deal in a very short time. It had whetted her appetite, the way the taste of blood will whet a predatory animal’s.”

  It was an odd and disturbing comparison. “So you’re saying that the note and the car are evidence manufactured by Tracy to misdirect anyone looking for her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would she actually let Bobby Foster die in order to keep anyone from finding her?”

  Laura Kostakos raised her eyes to mine. They caught faint glimmers from the lamp beside me, seemed cut of the same lava rock as the pool. “I cannot believe that. She must be planning to return before that happens.”

  And in the meantime she was putting Bobby Foster-her supposed friend-through a living hell. If her mother’s theory about her disappearance was correct, Tracy had chosen a strange and contradictory way of working out problems that were making her feel she was a bad person.

  I said, “Can you think of anyone-a friend or a relative, perhaps-who might be hiding her?”

  “I’ve contacted everyone I could think of. No one has heard from her, and given the circumstances, I’m fairly sure they wouldn’t lie to me.”

  “What about a place outside the Bay Area? Someplace she has a connection to or knows well?”

  She considered briefly. “We had a summer cottage on the Mendocino coast, but it was sold years ago. Otherwise, no, I can’t think of any other place.”

  Of course, she couldn’t have known of all the places Tracy might have visited after she moved away from Palo Alto. Nor could her inquiries have covered any number of people she wasn’t aware her daughter knew.

  I had one more question. “Why do you suppose she felt she had to disappear to work out these problems?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you must have speculated on it.”

  “Of course I have!” It was a cry of pain. “I’ve scarcely thought of anything else since it happened. I’ve gone over the conversation we had at lunch, time and time again. I’ve reexamined everything that she told me for weeks and months before that. But I don’t have a single, solitary idea.”

  Her glimmering eyes moved away from mine, to a point somewhere in the encroaching darkness. The fear in them was almost a palpable presence. I came close to turning my head to see what or who stood there. But I didn’t have to. I knew.

  It was the amorphous shape of dread-that chimera that, once glimpsed, forever waits implacably in the shadows.

  5

  The icy wind gusted across Upper Market Street. It sent litter swirling along the gutters and plastered sheets of discarded newspapers against the iron bars of the fence that guarded the edge of the east sidewalk. Beyond it the hill dropped off precipitously. The lights of the flatlands below were fog hazed, the usually panoramic glitter of the Bay Bridge and East Bay barely discernible.

  Traffic rushed by me on the downhill slope. The vehicles’ headlights washed over me, then their taillights disappeared around a sharp curve. I hunched against the capricious gale and walked along, hands stuffed in the pockets of my pea jacket. Parking was at a premium here on the overpopulated east side of Twin Peaks; I’d had to leave my MG a long block from Tracy Kostakos’s former apartment building.

  The row of apartment houses that clung to the lower part of the hill started about a hundred yards from where I’d parked. When I reached their shelter, the wind was not so severe. On the west side of the pavement the buildings rose in tiers, crammed side by side on the smaller streets that snake their way toward the radio transmitter and the overlook crowning the third and fourth highest of San Francisco’s forty-three hills.

  The architecture on Twin Peaks is mostly rabbit-warren modern: lots of postage-stamp-sized balconies that people seldom use because of the wind; picture windows that afford spectacular views and cause the residents’ heating bills to rise; standard thin walls and bland décor; too few garages and too many cars. If it wasn’t for the views, the area would probably have gone the way of the “desirab
le” part of East Palo Alto many years ago, but the vistas keep the apartments filled and the rents high.

  Of course, I thought as I walked quickly downhill, not all the buildings on Twin Peaks were tacky or overpriced. My former lover Greg Marcus owned a tasteful little redwood-sided house on a cul-de-sac off Parkridge Drive. Perhaps I should stop by there after talking with Amy Barbour. I could persuade Greg to let me look at the files on the Kostakos investigation tomorrow, rather than waiting until next week….

  No, I decided, bad idea. It could create all sorts of complications. Better to wait and catch him at the New Year’s Eve party.

  Tracy’s former building was brick faced, three stories, with a fire escape scaling the front wall and a plain tree growing out of a planting area in the sidewalk. A lighted entryway contained three mailboxes, and a metal security gate barred the way into the building proper. Beyond the gate was a door to the ground-floor unit; fake marble stairs rose to the other apartments. I examined the names on the mailboxes and found a plastic label-the kind you make yourself with one of those punch-out gizmos-on number two, reading BARBOUR/KOSTAKOS. As I pressed the bell, I wondered if the fact that Tracy’s name remained was the doing of the roommate or the mother who continued to pay half the rent.

  There was no intercom, but Amy Barbour was expecting me-Rae had assured me of that when I’d checked in before leaving Palo Alto-so I went over and put my hand on the gate. The buzzer tripped the lock quickly, and I stepped into the vestibule. The gate clanged noisily behind me; the traffic sounds were so loud that I barely heard a voice call out “hello” from the landing above.

  “Ms. Barbour?”

  “Come on up.”

  The young woman who stood in the door off the second-story landing had dark red hair, a square-jawed face, and a short beaky nose. Her hairdo looked like one of those spiky punk styles that was being allowed to grow out; it drooped in little petals that reminded me of an artichoke’s leaves. She wore jeans and a red sweatshirt stenciled with a fanciful lion’s head; her figure was round and a trifle bottom heavy.

  I introduced myself and extended my hand. She grasped it firmly, met my eyes in a forthright manner.