The Breakers

by Marcia Muller

  We’ve had to shut down the renovation efforts—temporarily, we hope. Two members of the crew went into town on Saturday night and never came back. I think they may have stolen my Visa card because I can’t find it anywhere and I’ve had a devil of a time canceling it. And I’m worried about that guy I told you about who’s been acting weird. I can’t help feeling something bad is going to happen. Spooky here now. I wish we’d never

  The letter ended there.

  “Spooky here”—in what way?

  And “that guy” Mrs. Krist had been worried about—who was he, and in what way had he been acting weird?

  I rummaged through a drawer in the table and came up with a small address book. Leafed through it looking for someone named Nadia. There it was—Nadia Johanssen, 132 Merriwell Street, Camden, Ohio.

  There didn’t seem to be anything more to look at here, and I was anxious to get back to the city. The San Luis part of the investigation had been fruitful, but I had the germ of an idea about Zack Kaplan’s murder and Chelle’s disappearance, and if I was right, the answers were back in San Francisco.

  I pocketed the unfinished letter and headed for the iron gates. My car was littered inside and out with buckeye leaves, and I scolded myself for having put the top down.

  As I turned onto the road, I took one last look at the winery. Spooky, yes. I seldom used the word, but it was appropriate for the place.

  6:30 p.m.

  Before I started the long, boring drive back to San Francisco I tried calling the number listed for Nadia Johanssen in Camden, Ohio, but it was no longer in service after seven years. So then I called Mick, but the call went to his voice mail. Out somewhere or too busy to answer calls. I left a message asking him to see if he could track down the Johanssen woman’s current whereabouts and contact information.

  A heavy, stationary mist lay over the city when I finally arrived. It was particularly thick in the Marina, blurring familiar landmarks and masking the lights of other vehicles until they were nearly upon me. I nearly missed the driveway of my own house—an off-white Spanish Revival on a large corner lot. I loved the house: its spaciousness, the light that entered through the many vaulted windows, the arches that allowed one room to flow into another. We’d furnished it in contemporary casual, with area rugs to protect the intricate parquet floors, and added tiles handcrafted by a friend to the bathrooms and kitchen, to replace the badly worn ones that dated from 1915, the year the Panama-Pacific International Exposition had been held nearby.

  I stowed my car in the garage and went inside. Hy was at the kitchen table drinking coffee. He got up as I came in, engulfed me in one of his bear hugs. I filled him in on my visit to the old winery, showed him the letter I’d found.

  “That mention of a person she was worried about might be a lead,” he said, “depending on what she meant by ‘acting weird.’”

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing. I’m hoping Nadia Johanssen can provide the details, if she’s still alive and locatable.”

  “Mick will find out. Oh, I recorded the Pincus footage on KOFY. Want to see it?”

  “Yes.”

  He flicked the TV set on. A city official whom I didn’t recognize—politicians have all begun to look alike to me—was calling Pincus “another amusing San Francisco character.” Next a brief clip appeared of a tall, rail-thin man dressed all in white with a red sash, cavorting in front of the old hotel. Tyler Pincus during his thirty seconds of fame.

  “God,” I said, sitting down at the table, “this city is turning into a lunatic asylum.”

  “Turning into?”

  “More of one.”

  Truth be told, San Francisco and its residents have always been, to put it gently, a bit off-center: The gold rush, the Barbary Coast, and the robber barons; tong wars and labor strikes; flower children and religious cults; out-of-control housing costs and the homeless. Murder and mayhem at city hall; suicides from both bridges; protest marches and provocateurs. In my years here, I’ve seen naked men proclaiming their right to be naked in public; the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, pseudonuns on roller skates; dancing pandas; socialites riding camels down Van Ness Avenue to raise money for charity; the mayor playing the donkey in a game of pin-the-tail-on.

  It’s been interesting. I really love this city—its past, its present, and whatever outlandish things its future will bring.

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 14

  12:10 p.m.

  We read the Sunday paper, and I made French toast. Just after we finished eating, I heard from Mick. He’d found Nadia Johanssen, alive and well and now living in Virginia. When I called the number he gave me, a landline answering machine picked up. More frustration. I explained in my message who I was and why I wanted to speak with her, and asked for a callback at her earliest convenience.

  Hy left for the office, citing paperwork. I suspected he felt antsy, being cooped up and waiting for something to happen. Well, I was too, so I decided to drive out to the Breakers and see if I could round up Tyler Pincus and find out what had caused his outburst.

  The old hotel matched the gray of the afternoon. A strong wind whipped the waves into a frenzy and blew sand from the dunes, peppering its already pockmarked exterior. Pincus wasn’t in sight—no one was, except for a solitary dog walker. I approached him and asked if he or anyone he knew had witnessed last night’s performance. He had, he said, and while his cocker spaniel licked my fingers and flopped its long ears around my hands, he described a bizarre dance that had culminated in a cacophony of grunts and howls.

  “Scared the hell out of Buffy here,” he ended.

  After the man resumed his walk, I went up and tried the front door. Locked again, but I had the key Cap’n Bobby had given me. Inside, all was chill and silent. I went up and knocked on the door to Pincus’s apartment anyway. No answer.

  I thought about picking the lock on the door, a fairly easy task judging by the ancient lock, and having a look inside. But there didn’t seem to be much point in it. It was Pincus himself I wanted to see.

  No telling where he was and what he was up to. Unless maybe he’d taken his crazy magician act to Danny’s Inferno, being another habitué of the place. I drove over there to check, since it was close by.

  Pincus wasn’t there, but Ollie Morse was. Sitting by himself in a small, dark corner booth. Two empty Budweiser bottles were lined up, ready to be taken away, and a fresh one sat in front of him.

  I slid into the other side of the booth. “Hey, Ollie,” I said. “Where’s your buddy?”

  “Al? I don’t know.” He shrugged glumly. “Or much care.”

  “Something the matter between you two?”

  “Nah. He just hands me a pain sometimes, is all.”

  “Well, how’re you doing, Ol?”

  “Not so good.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Just the blues. I get them a lot.” He swigged beer, then wagged the bottle. “I thought a few brews would help, but not so far.”

  I didn’t tell him to go easy; he knew he should, but given his war-induced condition, knowing and acting on the premise were two different things.

  “I guess Al told you about my PTSD,” he said. “I have these hallucinations. Like today, I keep flashing back to the field hospital in Kunar Province after the Battle of Ganjgal where I took the grenade hit.” He shuddered. “Was bad. Real bad. Opened up my right side, shattered my ribs, broke my arm.” He cradled his left elbow. “The pain was something fierce.”

  “Do you feel pain during the flashbacks?”

  “Sometimes I do—or I think I do.”

  “Do you have any warning that you’re about to have one?”

  “Yeah, there’s a tingling in my hands and feet, little white lights sparkling like stars.”

  Pamela Redfin appeared without having been summoned, bringing two bottles of Budweiser. “From Danny and me,” she said. “Hi, Sharon. Any news about Chelle?”

  I shook my head. “Have you seen Tyler Pincus today?”
/>   “No, and I’m glad of it. You hear about his latest performance?”

  “Saw a replay of it on TV.”

  “He keeps getting weirder and weirder. D’you think he’s dangerous?”

  “I doubt it. Likely just an exhibitionist.”

  “A totally whacked exhibitionist, if you ask me.”

  After she returned to the bar, Ollie said, “I wonder if that’s the kind of thing they say about me. Getting weirder, I mean.”

  “Why would they? You don’t dance in the streets.”

  He smiled faintly. “Well, sometimes I get…a little strange when I have a flashback.”

  “Does alcohol help you keep from having one?”

  “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I just happen to like beer. Me and Al, Danny calls us the Beer Brothers.”

  “You and Al must’ve been friends a long time.”

  “Since we joined up in our unit. His tour was over a few months before mine. After he mustered out he came here and started up his construction company. We stayed in touch, and when I got out he took me in with him part-time. Got me my apartment in the same building as his so he could watch over me, I guess.”

  “You still work with him part-time? I thought the two of you were partners.”

  “Nah. It’s Al’s business, though I put some money into the shop on Innes. He thinks my spells make me unreliable.” The expression on his face said he didn’t like being controlled that way. “He’s wrong, though,” Ollie added. “I’m no more unreliable than the next wage slave. But that’s Al—he’s always gotta run things his way.” He sighed. “Oh, well, he’s the one pays for any equipment we might need and the rent on the shop, deals with government forms and stuff like that. I guess he’s entitled.”

  Still, he looked disturbed. He picked up his beer, drank a little, made a face, and put the bottle down again. “Damn beer doesn’t taste good any more. Look, I gotta get outta here, get some fresh air. You staying?”

  “For a while.”

  He nodded curtly and slid out of the booth.

  3:31 p.m.

  After Ollie left, I asked Pamela to substitute a cold glass of Chardonnay for the warm beer. I sat sipping it, staring into the glass. A dark feeling had stolen over me all of a sudden, as if a bad weather front were moving in. Why? I couldn’t explain it.

  Pamela said, “Are you okay?”

  I shook my head: Yes, no, I don’t know.

  “You want me to get Danny over here?”

  “No need.” The sense of foreboding kept hanging over me…

  I’d been sitting there for about ten minutes when my phone buzzed. Rae.

  “Shar,” she said in a subdued voice, “I’m afraid I’ve got bad news. There’s no way to say it except straight out: your mom passed away suddenly this afternoon.”

  Her words hit me like a jolt of electricity. In its aftermath I couldn’t think. I shook my head to clear it. My voice, when I could make it work, was wooden. “When? How?”

  “About twenty minutes ago, just before I got to the hospital.” At the same time the dark, oppressive feeling had come over me. “The doctor wanted to be the one to notify you, but I told him it would be better if you heard it from me.” She paused and then said, “It was very peaceful, while she was in bed napping. She was just…worn out, I guess.”

  “I’ll come down there—”

  “No, don’t. There’s nothing you can do here now.”

  “But the arrangements…”

  “Don’t worry about those now. Deal with that issue later. Do you want me to notify John, Patsy, and Charlene?”

  “No, I’ll do it.”

  “One other thing I need to tell you is that she left a letter for you. Are you home now?”

  “I will be soon.”

  “I’ll have it delivered to your house by special messenger.”

  Oh, God, what kind of message was Ma sending me posthumously?

  After we disconnected, I sat feeling numb. I’d experienced other losses, of course, among them my adoptive father and my brother Joey, who had overdosed in a shack in Humboldt County. My best friend from high school, Linnea Carraway, had died in a helicopter crash in Alaska, and Chronicle reporter J. D. Smith had been murdered while working on one of my cases. Matty Wildress, Hy’s close friend and my flight instructor, had been killed in an air show while we watched from the ground. But Ma…

  As Rae said, she had been special, the heart and soul of our family. She had already borne John and Joey, but she didn’t hesitate to take me in when Saskia couldn’t support me, and then proceeded to expand the family with Charlene and Patsy. Although we never had much money, she made life’s trials an adventure for us, such as when a sonic boom from nearby NAS Miramar cracked our small backyard swimming pool; the navy wouldn’t pay to repair it, so she had a truckload of soil brought in and planted a vegetable garden that supplied not only us but many of our neighbors. When she divorced Pa, who had more or less stopped noticing her over the years, and married wealthy Melvin Hunt—whom we called King of the Laundromats—she remained the same down-to-earth person, only with a better hairdo. And when Melvin died, she moved from San Diego to Pacific Grove on the Monterey Peninsula, where she took up watercolor painting. Her work was good, and she’d had a couple of local shows.

  It was this past Christmas season that I’d started noticing little cracks and flaws in her already quirky personality, among them her fixation on her “romance” with Elwood Farmer. Saskia, with whom Ma had become close, noticed too. But then the fixation disappeared and Ma covered up for it with a tale that convinced me she should have been a fiction writer. When she returned to Pacific Grove after the holidays, I’d assumed she’d again take up her painting and her active social life.

  Well, I’d been wrong. And now she was gone.

  How do you come to terms with it when a person with whom you’ve had a very conflicted relationship dies? Do you let go of all the old resentments and guilt? Think, “Well, she didn’t mean what she said”? Think, “Well, I didn’t mean what I said either”? Or do you gather the bad feelings about you, pick and gnaw at every bone of contention? Do you cling to them because it’s the only way to keep the sorrow at bay? Which way would I deal with Ma’s death after this numbing fog dissipated?

  I’d just have to wait and see…

  4:45 p.m.

  I posed the same questions to Hy after giving him the sad news. He’d offered as much comfort as he could, holding me, and now, seated at the kitchen table, he took both my hands in his. The cats, ever sensitive to their people’s feelings, wound around my legs, brushing their faces against me.

  “Everybody’s different in how they deal with something like this,” he said. “When Julie died”—his first wife, environmentalist Julie Spaulding—“initially I was relieved because her suffering was over.”

  Julie had suffered from multiple sclerosis and was confined to a wheelchair most of her life. She hadn’t let her illness stop her, however, and with money she’d inherited from her father, a big Kern County lettuce grower, she’d established a foundation to provide backing to various environmental organizations. When she’d died, her will had named Hy director of the foundation, and he still sat on its board.

  Hy said, “I’d always been wild, as you well know, but Julie was a steadying influence on me; when I lost her, I was angry and out of control. Until you came into my life.”

  I squeezed his hands.

  “I’m not saying it’s the same for everybody,” he added. “Right now you’re grieving, but you also feel regretful because you and your mom didn’t get along very well. Next, you may feel guilty because you didn’t go down there to see her. Or you may feel angry with her for not wanting you there. With complicated relationships like yours, you never know.”

  “I already feel guilty. For not going down there and not making more of an effort to resolve the conflict between us. I always thought there’d be time…”

  “And probably your mom did too. Maybe this lett
er Rae’s forwarding will make things clearer.”

  MONDAY, AUGUST 15

  9:50 a.m.

  The letter from Ma was delivered by special messenger in the morning. I sat down at the kitchen table and read it, then handed it wordlessly to Hy.

  After a moment he said, “I wonder if she wrote something like this to your brother and sisters?”

  “Rae said only to me. I was adopted, the outsider in the family, you know.”

  “Did you feel like an outsider?”

  “No. I just felt…different.”

  “It sounds as if she was trying to emphasize once and for all that you weren’t an outsider. She may even have been trying to tell you that you were her favorite child.”

  “She had a strange way of acting on it. She was always riding me about one thing or another.”

  “I understand that’s what people do to their favored ones.”

  I took the letter from him and read it again. The most meaningful words and phrases stood out.

  You were such a lively baby, you brightened our world.…The best thing that ever happened to us.…Such good grades and such drive to succeed.…Sorry about all the lies we told you about your parentage, but at the time it seemed best.…I didn’t express much appreciation of your choice of career; it seemed too dangerous…but every time I heard about you solving one of your cases, I was so proud of you, honey.

  This and the rest of what she’d written would remain with me the rest of my life.

  My eyes stung with tears, the first time I’d been able to cry since receiving Rae’s call. “This letter is in Rae’s handwriting. Ma dictated it to her. That means she knew she was going to die soon, but she made the effort anyway.”

  “All the more reason to treasure it.”

  I folded the letter and put it in my shirt pocket, feeling drained. I’d spent the evening before notifying friends and relatives who should receive the news, speaking at length with my brother and my sister Patsy, as well as half sister Robin, Saskia, Elwood, Rae, and Hank. Charlene I’d been able to talk to only briefly.