The McCone Files

by Marcia Muller

  “Merrill is ten, over the age when they have to be accompanied.”

  “Maybe so, but when you’ve seen as many kids get hurt as I have, it makes you think twice about the regulations. They get excited, they forget to hang on. They roughhouse with each other. That mother was a fool to let her little girl ride alone.”

  Silently I agreed. The carousel was dangerous in many ways. Merrill Smith, according to her mother, Evelyn, had gotten on it the previous afternoon and never gotten off.

  Outside the round blue building that housed the carousel I crossed to where my client sat on a bench next to the ticket booth. Although the sun was shining, Evelyn Smith had drawn her coat tightly around her thin frame. Her dull red hair fluffed in curls over her upturned collar, and her lashless blue eyes regarded me solemnly as I approached. I marveled, not for the first time since Evelyn had given me Merrill’s picture, that this homely woman could have produced such a beautiful child.

  “Does the operator remember her?” Evelyn asked eagerly.

  “There were so many kids here that he couldn’t. I’ll have to locate the woman who was in the ticket booth yesterday.”

  “But I bought Merrill’s ticket for her.”

  “Just the same, she may remember seeing her.” I sat down on the cold stone bench. “Look, Evelyn, don’t you think it would be better if you went to the police? They have the resources for dealing with disappearances. I’m only one person, and—”

  “No!” Her already pallid face whitened until it seemed nearly translucent. “No, Sharon. I want you to find her.”

  “But I’m not sure where to go next. You’ve already contacted Merrill’s school and her friends. I can question the ticket-booth woman and the personnel at the children’s playground, but I’m afraid their answers will be more of the same. And in the meantime you little girl has been missing—”

  “No. Please.”

  I was silent for a moment. When I looked up, Evelyn’s pale lashless eyes were focused intensely on my face. There was something coldly analytical about her gaze that didn’t go with my image of a distressed mother. Quickly she looked away.

  “All right,” I said, “I’ll give it a try. But I need your help. Try to think of someplace she might’ve gone on her own.”

  Evelyn closed her eyes in thought. “Well, there’s the house where we used to live. Merrill was happy there; the woman in the first-floor flat was really nice to her. She might’ve gone back there; she doesn’t like the new apartment.”

  I wrote down the address. “I’ll try there, then, but if I haven’t come up with anything by nightfall, promise me you’ll go to the police.”

  She stood, a small smile curving her lips. “I promise, but I don’t think that will be necessary.”

  Thrusting her hands deep in her pockets, she turned and walked away; I watched her weave through the brightly colored futuristic shapes of the new children’s playground. Why the sudden conviction that the case was all but solved? I wondered.

  I remained on the bench for a few minutes. Traffic whizzed by on the other side of the eucalyptus grove that screened this southeast corner of Golden Gate Park, but I scarcely noticed it.

  My client was a new subscriber to All Souls Legal Cooperative, the legal-services plan for which I was a private investigator. She’d come in this morning, paid her fee, and told her story to my boss, Hank Zahn. After she’d refused to allow him to call the police, he’d sent her to me.

  It was Evelyn’s unreasonable avoidance of the authorities that bothered me most about this case. Any normal middle-class mother—and she appeared to be just that—would have been on the phone to the Park Station minutes after Merrill’s disappearance. But Evelyn had spent yesterday evening phoning her daughter’s friends, then slept on the problem and contacted a lawyer. Why? What wasn’t she telling me?

  Well, I decided, when a client comes to you with a story that seems less than candid, the best place to start is with that client’s own life. Perhaps the neighbor at the old address could shed some light on Evelyn’s strange behavior.

  By three that afternoon, almost twenty-four hours after Merrill’s disappearance, I was still empty-handed. The old neighbor hadn’t been home, and when I questioned the remaining park personnel, they couldn’t tell me anything. Once again I drove to Evelyn’s former address, on Fell Street across from the park’s Panhandle—a decaying area that had gone further downhill after the hippies moved out and hardcore addicts moved in. The house was a three-flat Victorian with a fire escape snaking up its façade. I rang the bell of the downstairs flat.

  A young woman in running shorts answered. I identified myself and said Evelyn Smith had suggested I talk with her. “Her little girl has disappeared, and she though she might’ve come back here.”

  “Evelyn? I haven’t heard from her since she moved. You say Merrill’s missing?”

  I explained about her disappearance from the carousel. “So you haven’t seen her?”

  “No. I can’t imagine why she’d come here.”

  “Her mother said Merrill had been happy here, and that you were nice to her.”

  “Well, I was, but as far as her being happy…Her unhappiness was why I went out of my way with her.”

  “Why was she unhappy?”

  “The usual. Evvie and Bob fought all the time. Then he moved out, and a few months later Evvie found a smaller place.”

  Evvie hadn’t mentioned a former husband. “What did they fight about?”

  “Toward the end, everything, but mainly about the kid.” The woman hesitated. “You know, that’s an odd thing. I haven’t thought of it in ages. How could two such homely people have such a beautiful child? Evvie—so awkward and skinny. And Bob, with that awful complexion. It was Merrill being so beautiful that caused their problems.”

  “How so?”

  “Bob adored her. And Evvie was jealous. At first she accused Bob of spoiling Merrill, but later the accusations turned nasty—an unnatural relationship, if you know what I mean. Then she started taking it out on the kid. I tried to help, but there wasn’t much I could do. Evvie Smith acted like she hated her own child.”

  “Have you found anything?” Evelyn asked.

  I stepped into a small apartment in a bland modern building north of the park. “A little.” But I wasn’t ready to go into it yet, so I added, “I’d like to see Merrill’s room.”

  She nodded and took me down the hallway. The room was decorated in yellow, with big felt cut-outs of animals on the walls. The bed was neatly made up with ruffled quilts, and everything was in place except for a second-grade reader that lay open on the desk. Merrill, I thought, was an unnaturally orderly child.

  Evelyn was staring at a grinning stuffed tiger on the bookcase under the window. “She’s crazy about animals,” she said softly. “That’s why she likes the merry-go-round so much.”

  I ignored the remark, flipping through the reader and studying Merrill’s name where she’d printed it in block letters on the flyleaf. Then I shut the book and said, “Why didn’t you tell me about your former husband?”

  “I didn’t think it was important. We were divorced over two years ago.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Here in the city, on a houseboat at Mission Creek.”

  “And you didn’t think that was important?”

  She was silent.

  “Is he the reason you didn’t call the police?”

  No reply.

  “You think he snatched Merrill, don’t you?”

  She made a weary gesture and turned away from me. “All right, yes. My ex-husband is a deputy district attorney. Very powerful, and he has a lot of friends on the police force. I don’t stand a chance of getting Merrill back.”

  “So why didn’t you tell me all this in the beginning?”

  More silence.

  “You knew that any lawyer would advise you to bring in the police and the courts. You knew an investigator would balk at snatching her back. So you couldn’t c
ome right out and ask me to do that. Instead, you wanted me to find out where she was on my own and bring her back to you.”

  “She’s mine! She’s supposed to be with me!”

  “I don’t like being used this way.”

  She turned, panic in her eyes. “Then you won’t help me?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  She needed help—more help, perhaps, than I could give her.

  The late-afternoon fog was creeping through the redwood and eucalyptus groves of the park by the time I reached the carousel. It was shut for the night, but in the ticket booth a gray-haired woman was counting cash into a bank-deposit bag. The cashier I’d talked with earlier had told me her replacement came on in mid afternoon.

  “Yes,” she said in answer to my initial question, “I worked yesterday.”

  I showed her Merrill’s picture. “Do you remember this little girl?”

  The woman smiled. “You don’t forget such a beautiful child. She and her mother used to come here every Sunday afternoon and ride the carousel. The mother still comes. She sits on that bench over there and watches the children and looks sad as can be. Did her little girl die?”

  It was more than I expected to hear.

  “No,” I said, “she didn’t die.”

  It was dark by the time I parked at Mission Creek. All I could make out were the shapes of the boats moored along the ramshackle pier. Light from their windows reflected off the black water of the narrow channel, and waves sloshed against the piling as I hurried along, my footsteps echoing loudly on the rough planking. Bob Smith’s boat was near the end, between two hulking fishing craft. A dim bulb by its door highlighted its peeling blue paint, but little else. I knocked and waited.

  The tye lines of the fishing craft creaked as the boats rose and fell on the tide. Behind me I heard a scurrying sound. Rats, maybe. I glanced over my shoulder, suddenly seized by the eerie sensation of being watched. No one—whom I could see.

  Light footsteps sounded inside the houseboat. The little girl who answered the door had curly red-gold hair and widely spaced blue eyes, her t-shirt was grimy and there was a rip in the knee of her jeans, but in spite of it she was beautiful. Beautiful and a few years older than in the picture I had tucked in my bag. That picture had been taken around the time she printed her name in block letters in the second-grade reader her mother kept in the neat-as-a-pin room Merrill no longer occupied.

  I said, “Hello, Merrill. Is your dad home?”

  “Uh, yeah. Can I tell him who’s here?”

  “I’m a friend of your mom.”

  Wrong answer; she stiffened. The she whirled and ran inside. I waited.

  Bob Smith had shaggy dark-red hair and a complexion pitted by acne scars. His body was stocky, and his calloused hands and work clothes told me Evelyn had lied about his job and friends on the police force. I introduced myself, showed him my license, and explained that his former wife had hired me. “She claims your daughter disappeared from the carousel in Golden Gate Park yesterday afternoon.”

  He blinked. “That’s crazy. We were no place near the park yesterday.”

  Merrill reappeared, an orange cat draped over her shoulder. She peered anxiously around her father at me.

  “Evelyn seems to think you took Merrill from the park,” I said to Smith.

  “Took? As in snatched?”

  I nodded.

  “Jesus Christ, what’ll she come up with next?”

  “You do you have custody?”

  “Since a little while after the divorce. Evvie was….” He glanced down at his daughter.

  The cat chose that moment to wriggle free from her and dart outside. Merrill ran after is calling, “Tigger, Tigger!”

  “Evvie was slapping Merrill around,” Smith went on. “I had to do something about it. Evvie isn’t…too stable. She’s got more problems than I could deal with, but she won’t get help for them. Deep down, she loves Merrill, but…What did she do—ask you to kidnap her?”

  “Not exactly. The way she went about it was complicated.”

  “Of course. With Evvie, it would be.”

  The orange cat brushed against my ankles—prodigal returned. Behind me Merrill said, “Dad, I’m hungry.”

  Smith opened his mouth to speak, but suddenly his features went rigid with shock.

  I felt a rush of air and started to turn. Merrill cried out. I pivoted and saw Evelyn. She was clutching Merrill around the shoulders, pulling her back onto the pier.

  “Daddy!”

  Smith started forward. “Evvie, what the hell…?”

  Evelyn’s pale face was a soapstone sculpture; her lips barely moved when she said, “Don’t come any closer, Bob.”

  Smith pushed around me.

  Evelyn drew back and her right hand came up, clutching a long knife.

  I grabbed Smith’s arm and stopped him.

  Evelyn began edging toward the end of the pier, dragging Merrill with her. The little girl’s feet scraped on the planking; her body was rigid, her small face blank with terror.

  Smith said, “Christ, do something!”

  I moved past. Evelyn and Merrill were almost to the railing where the pier dead-ended above the black water.

  “Evvie,” I called, “please come back.”

  “No!”

  “You’ve got no place to go.”

  “No place but the water.”

  Slowly I began moving toward them, “You don’t want to go into it. It’s cold and—”

  “Stay back!” The knife glinted in the light from the boats.

  “I’ll stay right where I am. We’ll talk.”

  She pressed against the rail, tightening her grip on Merrill. The little girl hadn’t made a sound, but her fingers clawed at her mother’s arm.

  “We’ll talk,” I said again.

  “About what?”

  “The animals.”

  “The animals?”

  “Remember when you told me how much Merrill loved the animals on the carousel? How she loved to ride them?”

  “…Yes.”

  “If you go into the water and take her with you, she’ll never ride them again.”

  Merrill’s fingers stopped their frantic clawing. Even in the dim light I could see comprehension flood her features. She said, “Mom, what about the animals?”

  Evelyn looked down at her daughter’s head.

  “What about the zebra, Mom? And the ostrich? What about the blue pig?”

  I began edging closer.

  “I miss the animals. I want to go see them again.”

  “Your father won’t let you.”

  “Yes, he will. He will if I ask him. We could go on Sundays, just like we used to.”

  Closer.

  “Would you really do that, honey? Ask him?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  My foot slipped on the planking. Evelyn started and glanced up. She raised the knife and looked toward the water. Lowered it and looked back at me. “If he says yes, will you come with us? Just you, not Bob?”

  “Of course.”

  She sighed and let the knife clatter to the planking. Then she let go of Merrill. I moved forward and kicked the knife into the water. Merrill began running toward her father, who stood frozen in front of his houseboat.

  Then she stopped. Looking back at her mother. Hesitated and reached out her hand. Evelyn stared at her for a moment before she went over and clasped it.

  I took Evelyn’s other hand and we began walking along the pier. “Are you okay, Merrill?” I asked.

  “I’m all right. And I meant what I said about going to ride the carousel. If Mom’s going to be okay. She is, isn’t she?”

  “Yes. Yes, she will be—soon.”

  WILD MUSTARD

  THE FIRST time I saw the old Japanese woman, I was having brunch at the restaurant above the ruins of San Francisco’s Sutro Baths. The woman squatted on the slope, halfway between its cypress-covered top and the flooded ruins of the old bathhouse. She was uprooting veget
ation and stuffing it into a green plastic sack.

  “I wonder what she’s picking,” I said to my friend Greg

  He glanced out the window, raising one dark-blond eyebrow, his homicide cop’s eye assessing the scene. “Probably something edible that grows wild. She looks poor; it’s a good way to save grocery money.”

  Indeed the woman did look like the indigent old ladies one sometimes saw in Japantown; she wore a shapeless jacket and trousers, and her feet were clad in sneakers. A gray scarf wound around her head.

  “Have you ever been down there?” I asked Greg, motioning at the ruins. The once-elegant baths had been destroyed by fire. All that remained now were crumbling foundations, half submerged in water. Seagulls swam on its glossy surface and, beyond, the surf tossed against the rocks.

  “No. You?”

  “No. I’ve always meant to, but the path is steep and I never have the right shoes when I come here.”

  Greg smiled teasingly. “Sharon, you’d let your private eye’s instincts be suppressed for lack of hiking boots?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe I’m not really that interested.”

  “Maybe not.”

  Greg often teased me about my sleuthing instincts, but in reality I suspected he was proud of my profession. An investigator for All Souls Cooperative, the legal services plan, I had dealt with a full range of cases—from murder to the mystery of a redwood hot tub that didn’t hold water. A couple of the murders I’d solved had been in Greg’s bailiwick, and this had given rise to both rivalry and romance.

  In the months that passed my interest in the old Japanese woman was piqued. Every Sunday that we came there—and we came often because the restaurant was a favorite—the woman was scouring the slope, scouring for…what?

  One Sunday in early spring Greg and I sat in our window booth, watching the woman climb slowly down the dirt path. To complement the season, she had changed her gray headscarf for bright yellow. The slope swarmed with people, enjoying the release from the winter rains. On the far barren side where no vegetation had taken hold, an abandoned truck leaned at a precarious angle at the bottom of the cliff near the baths. People scrambled down, inspected the old truck, then went to walk on the concrete foundations or disappeared into a nearby cave.