The Breakers

by Marcia Muller

  I stood next to the old-fashioned staircase that was collapsed in the middle and called out Zack’s name, but I received no answer. Then I stood still and listened. No sounds other than the wind whistling through cracks in the walls and the normal creaks and groans of an old structure.

  Zack had mentioned that his apartment was number five, halfway down the first-floor hallway. I went there and tried the door, but it also was locked. Again I called out, and received no answer.

  I searched the rest of the building. Zack wasn’t in any of the other rooms on this floor, or in the apartments on what I’d come to call the “ladies of the evening” floor. And a more careful look around Chelle’s nook and the vast vacant space beyond showed no signs of recent habitation.

  I slumped down on Chelle’s mattress and thought about her.

  I’d known her since she was the teenager next door, who took in my mail and packages and fed my cats when I was out of town. She’d always been industrious and precocious, working at small businesses she created—“Cat Dragging: Fat Felines Need Fitness”—and socking away her earnings to fund others. In the meantime she’d maintained an A average in school, and she’d later been accepted as a scholarship student at four top-flight colleges, including Cal Berkeley, which she attended for a year before declaring that the real world could teach her more than academia. A Cal grad myself, I had to agree with her; my own sociology degree had prepared me only for work as a security guard.

  So far Chelle was doing well with her rehabbing business, but it was grueling because, as a perfectionist, she ended up doing most of the work herself. And her habit of living in the derelict buildings struck me as risky. Of course, at her parents’ house she’d have run the same risk as a woman alone, because Trish and Jim traveled extensively. A minimal risk, however: I’d lived alone in the house next door to the Curleys, and the biggest risk I’d encountered was the neighborhood raccoons, which were fond of upsetting my garbage cans.

  But now Chelle could be in serious trouble. Her lack of communication, especially with her parents, was totally atypical. My thoughts kept turning to some sort of horrible situation or even death…

  No, don’t think that way. No defeatist attitudes for you, McCone.

  The words that echoed in my ears were Hy’s. We’d always communicated through time and distance, so why not now?

  “Right,” I said aloud to him.

  I considered my options. Go home and wait for Zack or even Chelle to contact me? Didn’t feel right; I had my phone, they could always get a hold of me on it. Call upon members of my staff and mount a full-scale search? My people were overloaded with work as it was; they wouldn’t appreciate being called out at this hour for the boss’s personal problem. Badger SFPD’s Missing Persons detail about both of them? No, they’d tell me to call back in seventy-two hours. No matter that she’d been gone a week and I had no proof of the exact time and circumstances of her disappearance.

  Okay—stay here at the Breakers and wait for Zack to return? It seemed best; the front door was locked, and odds were that few people knew about the tunnel entrance.

  The decision didn’t take long; I was tired, so I’d stay here. The building was cold. I took a look at the blankets on Chelle’s bed, was glad to find that the top one was the electric type. Chelle liked her creature comforts.

  11:01 p.m.

  Sleep, as it all too often does, eluded me.

  The old building creaked and groaned, cold wind and fog seeping through its many cracks. I could hear the roar of the waves on the beach—high tide now—and the bellow of the foghorns had never sounded so lonesome. I shifted restlessly on Chelle’s air mattress, smelling her favorite exotic scent—sandalwood. The bed had been made up with fresh sheets, as if she’d been expecting me.

  After a while an edgy feeling crept over me, as if something unnatural lurked in the huge space surrounding Chelle’s cozy nook. That damned killers’ gallery hidden behind her screen?

  I am not a person who dwells on her anxieties—although God knows I’ve had cause for more of them than the average person. I seldom utter the words “spooky,” “eerie,” or “creepy.” I believe in a sort of ESP because Hy and I share it. From the first we’ve had a connection that allows us to tune in to one another’s thoughts and emotions—especially in times of trouble. But communications with the spirits of the dead are simply beyond me. (Although sometimes I wonder if I’m unwilling to accept the concept of such communication because there are certainly a number of the dead who would like to take a whack at me.)

  I breathed deeply and focused on nothing at all, as a Zen friend had recommended for relaxation. I curled up in the fragrant sheets, clutching the pillow. Strangling the pillow, I soon realized. This situation couldn’t go on!

  I got up, pulled Chelle’s heavy wool robe around me, and went to confront the individuals in the killers’ gallery.

  11:31 p.m.

  Nothing on the wall had changed. There had been no removals or additions; it looked the same as before.

  But why shouldn’t it? I wasn’t sure why I’d expected alterations, except for a suspicion in the back of my mind that the killers’ gallery might have something to do with Zack’s discovery. But apparently not.

  The criminals depicted there were an odd lot: different, but somehow the same, like pictures of middle-class kids in a high school yearbook. Homely, attractive. Scruffy, well groomed. Long haired, short haired. Bearded, clean shaven. Young, older. Serious, smiling. Most were familiar, but there were a few strangers.

  “Ordinary” was the word that came to mind.

  I could discount Jack the Ripper, since no one had actually seen him, but the photos of the Zebra killers showed young black men who could have been college students, pro athletes, accountants, or TV repairmen. The Zodiac’s Identi-Kit reconstruction showed a serious-looking man with black-rimmed glasses; apparently he’d thought he possessed a literary bent, because he’d sent many taunting letters and cryptograms to the SF Chronicle. Charlie Manson was weird—anybody could see that, except possibly his followers. Most of them were troubled young people alienated from their families, and they came mainly from middle-class backgrounds. Scott Peterson—most ordinary-looking of all of them—had been a fertilizer salesman in the Central Valley city of Modesto; his outstanding attribute had been his excessive womanizing. The ones I couldn’t place also looked on the normal side of the scale.

  I scanned the first few paragraphs of the cases I was unfamiliar with: Alan Johnson, who had murdered three female students in Fresno a decade ago; Tara Smith, a nurse who had killed four of her patients at a Eureka hospital over the course of two years in the late nineties; an unknown person on the Central Coast known as the Carver because he left a bloody symbol on each of his victims. There was a reproduction of the symbol, a crude circle pierced by an arrow.

  How, I wondered, could such ordinary-looking people commit such hideous crimes? Shouldn’t there be some weirdness that captured one’s attention? Of course, the criminals that I’d apprehended had seemed weird to me, but that was because I’d known what they were up to while I was pursuing them.

  But then I spotted it, the one thing that stood out. Even the artists who had drawn Jack the Ripper and the Identi-Kit likeness of the Zodiac Killer had captured it.

  It was in the eyes.

  Expressionless. Flat. Vacant. Lacking emotion. In essence, nobody home.

  I could imagine these people out of control: in a rage, screaming, slashing, stabbing. But I could not imagine a single one of them reaching out to touch another human being with sympathy, compassion, or tenderness. That was the divide that separated them from the rest of us.

  But what had created that divide?

  Something in the parent-child relationship? From what I knew, a few of the individuals had been abused, abandoned, or banished from home at formative ages. And society: Had it labeled and condemned these young people for circumstances over which they’d had no control? My sociology profs fr
om college would’ve said yes. As for me, I’d had a lot more experience with types like them than the average professor, and I really didn’t know. But I didn’t fully buy into the parental-abuse-caused-them-to-become-psychos school of thought either.

  Sometimes people are just born evil.

  A sound downstairs near the front entrance froze me. Footsteps, and then someone rattled the front doorknob. No one except Zack and Pincus—so far as I knew—had a key. More rattles and a mumbled curse; footsteps going away. Probably a transient searching for a place to spend the night.

  I let myself down through the open trapdoor and listened. Total silence.

  Then I checked to make sure the door was still securely locked. Finally I went to Zack’s apartment: still locked.

  The apartments in this building were fitted with the cheapest type of snap locks, and I kept a ring of keys in my bag for just such occasions as these. I took it out and tried them one after the other until I found one that worked.

  The apartment was empty. No sign of Zack. This was a bare-bones place like several I’d lived in during my college years at Cal. Worn, stained beige carpeting. Makeshift brick-and-board bookcases. Thrift-shop chairs. And a big-screen TV, maybe forty inches. One can live in squalid reality, but TV and all its promises do give relief and hope.

  As I turned away, I spotted a blue envelope and sheet of notepaper on a catchall table next to the TV. “To All” was written on the envelope in Chelle’s messy back-slanted cursive. And on the notepaper, one single line in her equally messy block printing:

  I’VE GOT A RIGHT TO DISAPPEAR.

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 7

  12:02 a.m.

  I’ve got a right to disappear.

  Why?

  I took the note over to Zack’s desk and turned on a high-beam light. The envelope looked shabby, as if previously opened and rumpled. By Zack before he’d run out? Was this what had prompted his excited call?

  The message was puzzling in the extreme. If Chelle was so disturbed about something that she felt the need to run away, why hadn’t she come to one of us—the people who loved her?

  It couldn’t have been a romantic problem. She’d banished Damon. Not a money problem either. Cap’n Bobby would’ve extended the escrow indefinitely. She had friends, family, a professional support group that she herself had founded.

  Health issues? Nothing could be so bad that she couldn’t have depended on us. Pregnancy? She was determined not to have kids until she was able to support them, and she’d told me she used excellent protection.

  Had she done something so terrible she couldn’t turn to us? The part of me that’s an investigator said it was possible, but the part of me that was a friend said no way.

  So that left fear.

  Fear for herself? Or for someone she cared about?

  Whichever, the cause had to be fear.

  I double-checked to make absolutely sure the handwriting was Chelle’s. Looked like, but I’m no expert on the subject. And there was something about the wording. Her personality was exuberant, spilled over into everything she did. But this note, that one single line, felt so…dead.

  The word “dead” hung in my mind, and I actually waved my hand to dispel the thought.

  Finally I put the note into my briefcase. I was too tired to think any more about who had delivered it or what it meant. Or to think about Zack’s continued absence.

  Right now I badly needed sleep.

  2:17 a.m.

  Sleep. Yeah, right. Wasn’t in the picture for me tonight.

  I lay there for a while listening to the creaks and groans and the slowly diminishing roar of the waves. Then, as I often do when I’m alone and can’t sleep, I thought about Hy.

  Where was he now? I didn’t have any intimations of danger; my husband’s schedule is as erratic as mine. On impulse I called his cell, and was glad I had. He answered right away, sounding as awake as I felt. It was a relief to hear his voice.

  “McCone,” he said, “what’s happening?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Amsterdam, in a very luxurious hotel suite on a canal.”

  “I thought you were in Boston.”

  “I was, but the guy there liked our proposal and wanted me to meet with the head honcho. But I don’t think you’re interested in that right now. What’s wrong?”

  I filled him in on what I was contending with. “Any ideas?” I asked when I finished.

  “If I didn’t know Chelle, I’d say it was a plea for attention. But she’s not like that. If she’s gone into hiding, she may have left that note because she wants everybody to know she’s okay.”

  “Hiding from who or what, though?”

  “What’s she been doing lately—before she started the Breakers rehab project?”

  “Well, she took a few months off after the previous job. Traveled around the country visiting fellow rehabbers and friends.”

  “Who and where?”

  “I don’t have any names yet, but she drove that miserable truck of hers all the way to Vermont before it broke down; when she got back here, she borrowed one so she could haul equipment and supplies to the Breakers. In May she moved in there, and it wasn’t long before the trouble with the rehabbing started.”

  “Trouble with Damon?”

  “At first, but she threw him out when she found out he was spreading lies about her other workers stealing from her.”

  “How sure are you that they were lies?”

  “Not a hundred percent certain yet. I’ve got Will working on locating Damon’s present whereabouts, and he’s also going to check with the people she visited on her trip, in case she mentioned anything about trouble.”

  “This Zack—what d’you know about him?”

  “Just that he’s a friend of Chelle’s and the one who let me know when she went missing.” I stifled a yawn.

  “What about his background? What does he do for a living?”

  “A professional student, I think. Will is checking into that too.”

  “How long has Zack been gone now?”

  “Not very. I got over here pretty quick after he called me.”

  “No clue as to where he went or why?”

  “None.” This time I yawned out loud.

  Hy laughed. “Sounds like you’re ready for sleep now. Love you. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  We disconnected and I drifted off, cradled in the scent of Chelle’s sandalwood perfume.

  10:29 a.m.

  Banging noises. Couldn’t a person get any sleep—?

  Groggily I propped myself up on my elbows. The space around me was shadowy. Where…? Oh, right. Chelle’s bedroom in the Breakers. But who was making that unholy racket?

  I got up, put on her robe, and let myself down through the trapdoor. A belt sander started up below. I peered over the banister of the defunct staircase. Ollie Morse, about to attack the hardwood floor.

  “Ollie!” I called.

  He looked around and then up, frowning, then shut the tool off.

  “Hey,” he said, “what’re you doing here?”

  “I could ask you the same.”

  “Oh, right. Nobody told you. Last night me and Al got to talking about Chelle and decided to help her out while she’s gone. So we went to see Cap’n Bobby, and he told us that the floors should be first.”

  That didn’t sound right to me. I’d renovated my former house on Church Street and done the plumbing first and the floors last. That way they wouldn’t be marred by equipment being dragged over them.

  “Is Al around?” I asked.

  “Someplace.” Ollie sounded annoyed.

  “I’ll find him.”

  But I didn’t. Al was nowhere on the premises. What was it with this building? I wondered. Did it swallow people whole?

  I went back to Chelle’s lair and tried to do something with my hair.

  No way; it wasn’t about to let me. Finally I shrugged, gathered my jacket and purse, then went out for food and more information.

/>   11:43 a.m.

  Cap’n Bobby didn’t look too well this morning: the whites of his eyes were red streaked and the pouches beneath them were more pronounced. He waved for me to help myself from the coffee maker at the end of the bar. When I’d collected it and sat at the table nearest him, he asked, “Anything new?”

  I told him about the “right to disappear” note.

  He frowned and shook his head in a puzzled way. “Funny kind of message to write, just that one line.”

  “I think so too.”

  “Where’d Zack Kaplan get it?”

  “I don’t know. Do you have any idea why Chelle would want to suddenly disappear?”

  “No. Doesn’t make any sense that she would.”

  I sipped coffee and set it down; it was one of those ultrasweet brews that were clogging the market lately. “Here’s another odd thing: Zack seems to have disappeared too. Last night he called me and asked me to come to the Breakers right away, said he had something to show me—the note, probably—and to tell me. When I got there, no Zack.”

  “That’s odd.”

  “It sure is. His Jeep’s still parked outside. What can you tell me about him?”

  “Well, he’s lived in number five over there since he started college at SF State. Has always had money problems, but makes up on what he owes. Is helpful, fixes stuff when it gets broken.” Cap’n Bobby frowned. “Zack’s an all-round good guy, but I don’t really know him.”

  “Did Chelle ever tell you what she intended to do with the building?”

  “Oh, yeah. We were working together on the plans. She’s going to get it in shape and then sell it to ElderCare, one of those services that provide for the old and infirm. In this case they’ll use it for disabled vets, like I was going to.”

  I’d heard of ElderCare; it was highly rated.