by Rex Burns
“What you’re suggesting is probably illegal in California, Henry. I’m not a licensed professional. Let’s just call it a learning experience for both of us.”
His pale blue eyes blinked at my refusal; then he cleared his throat. “That’s very generous. However, I do insist on paying any and all of your expenses.”
“That’s fine. I’ll let you know what they are. Now why don’t you tell me everything about Dorcas since she came home from college—friends, any names she might have mentioned, all the places she’s lived or worked.”
The rest of the visit was spent completing what could be called a background questionnaire. In addition to names and addresses, I tried to find out as much as I could about her car and license number, bank accounts and credit cards, insurance policies and medical programs, church membership, any possible fingerprints taken for any reason, any arrest record, and, finally, a recent color photograph that showed a tall girl whose blond hair was swept back into a ponytail just visible at her left shoulder. She wore a loose turtleneck sweater that hinted at full breasts. A pair of frayed jeans outlined a nicely curved hip and long leg. She was smiling at the camera, though not widely. Large, round glasses gave her face a seriousness that emphasized the regularity and balance of features that were clean-cut but not overly pretty. Still, she had grown up a lot from the skinny twelve-year-old kid I remembered.
“She’s an attractive girl.”
Margaret, looking at the photograph, nodded. “We took this just after she came home from college …”
“She looks better when she wears her contacts,” said Henry. “She insists on wearing those damned goggles instead. I don’t know why.”
“You’re sure she didn’t have a boyfriend?”
“Not that I know of.”
If a girl like this didn’t have some male panting after her, maybe the unisex revolution had gone too far. “Has she ever disappeared before?”
Henry glanced at his wife. After a long silence, he nodded reluctantly. “Two times. Once in high school and once in her third year of college.”
“Tell me about it.”
He did, in a halting fashion with occasional sidebars from Margaret. She smiled apologetically to take any blame for the disappearances on herself. Henry dismissed a lot of it with the phrase “You know how kids are about their parents bugging them all the time.” In the first instance, she had disappeared for three weeks, returning home finally after calling from a runaway shelter in Los Angeles. The second time she had simply dropped out of college and started working as a waitress at a Lake Tahoe ski resort. “That one wasn’t anger or whatever. She just said she was tired of books and people who lived only in books. Said she wanted a change of pace.”
“How long was she missing that time?”
Henry sighed. “A month or more. We didn’t even know she’d left school. They thought she’d returned home, and we thought she was happily attending classes. Then the dean’s office called about her absences.”
“She didn’t get in touch with you.”
“She didn’t bother to. I suspect she was afraid I’d try to talk her into returning to school. Which I would have—there was no damned refund on tuition.”
“But she did graduate?”
“A semester late. With a degree in philosophy, of all things. Then came home to live with us for a couple months, and then took that fool job up in Julian.” He added, “We told her she could stay here and come and go as she pleased—I was hoping she’d settle down and start looking for real work. But she wanted to be entirely on her own. She wanted to think things over, she said.”
“And she’s been up there for a year?”
“About that.”
It was possible that, after a year, she just wanted another change of scenery. Perhaps she had in mind a place that would cause her father more anger if he knew about it. “Her pattern seems to be to leave and then get in touch with you after her emotions settle down.”
Margaret looked up from staring at the pool’s surface. “I hope that’s it, Jack. I hope that’s all it is.”
“Any reason why it shouldn’t be?”
The woman’s head quivered “no.” “I just want to be sure, that’s all.”
I set down my half-full glass and stood. Henry gathered up papers and notes that he had brought from the house to answer some of my questions about Dorcas. “I’ll do what I can.”
“Don’t forget what I said about your expenses.”
“I’ll keep a record, Henry.”
He followed me to the door, manners back in place. “Fine. Frankly, I expect she’s not in trouble or we’d have heard, but you saw how Margaret’s on the edge …” He held the door open and for the first time smiled. “And someday maybe I can hear your side of that mess you got into in Washington.”
CHAPTER 3
THERE WERE THINGS I should do in San Diego before driving up to Julian. Instead of winding back to the freeway, I guided the car through the early-afternoon traffic on La Jolla Drive. Here the changes were less noticeable than in other areas of town. Modest homes were still modest, and homes that had been imposing when I was in high school were still imposing. Nevertheless, change was not totally absent. Old palm trees towered a bit taller, spacious grounds had been cut into smaller lots to allow other mansions to shoulder in, and the modest homes were now owned by doctors and lawyers rather than shopkeepers.
Mission Beach still had that same transient and temporary quality of seasonal rentals, but totally new and confusing was the Mission Bay area. Signs directed me and the other tourists to Sea World; strings of fast-food restaurants and strip malls mushroomed on the fringes of the sprawling man-made bay. A tangle of traffic circles threw me off course toward Point Loma, and I found myself on Sunset Cliffs Boulevard and climbing the Point into neighborhoods which had breathed affluence and contentment for half a century. The rental cottages and seasonal beach homes that had once squatted in shabby ease had been refurbished with manicured landscaping, paint, and quaintness to become year-round residences.
Below the cliffs, cadenced swells lifted brown, scabby patches of kelp before lunging at the rocky shore. It was a sight that pulled me to the curb for a moment to stare. Here and there, the waves peaked to spill trails of foam, and surfers scratched water to catch their faces. There were a lot more surfers, now; it was a sunny day and the waves looked good—four, maybe five feet, nothing great but consistent and not bad for this late in spring. We’d spent a lot of time off these cliffs—Tommy, Arthur, Scott. And me. Often, in those days, we had been the only four in the cold ocean. We’d push out into a fog so dense you couldn’t see the cliffs, and from that gray mist, silent swells swept in as thicker gloom. Finally, a towering, dark wall like the coming of night sucked the kelp pods under with ominous little hisses. The wave of the day and a ride blind against the fog and blown spume and plunging surf. The only thing to do was hang on and trust luck and your own skill to keep the board crackling against the glassy face of the curling wave. A metaphor for life, maybe. Which, looking back to that long-gone foggy day and almost forgotten ride, suddenly seemed to have sped as quickly.
When we’d talked, Tommy told me about retiring from his stint in the air force and starting his second career as a restaurateur. It was either that or go into real estate, he’d said, and he liked being around food a hell of a lot more than being around salesmen. Scott was still an engineer in one of the high-tech aerospace industries that crowded south Los Angeles. Arthur, who’d had his troubles in high school, was an occasional rumor of drunkenness, violence, and waste. And now I’d come back, pushed out of the Corps and on the edge of my own second career. Yet despite the years and the knowledge that none of us were the same, those ghosts brought the past forward and gave a shape to a present that startled me with its familiarity.
Had those days been so different from the ones that faced Dorcas Wilcox now? God knows, staring at the surfers and remembering, they didn’t seem so long ago. To my daughter
s, my early life was from some ill-defined time labeled “before we were born.” It had to be that way for Dorcas, too. Like the problems my daughters had faced, her problems were new to her and therefore new to the universe. And the parents who could have given her answers were parents she no longer trusted.
Dorcas—Dori, as she was sometimes called. But the girl in the photograph wasn’t someone I’d known. The Dorcas I remembered was a thin girl with straight, pale hair and blue eyes—eyes that in the newest photograph were masked by lenses. In my memory they had been neither confident nor speculative, but pleadingly hopeful. A mix of hurt and trust. In fact, I’d contrasted Dorcas’s solemnity with the bright, chatty eagerness of Karen and Becky, and wondered then at the difference. Now, try as I might, I couldn’t dredge up anything more about her. Yet, after so much change for both of us, our paths crossed again.
Twisting through the one-way streets of downtown, I located a parking spot near the gray tower of the San Diego County courthouse. Long columns of windows, recessed between modest pilasters, rose to meet in arches thirty or so stories above the sidewalk. Above the uppermost windows, little awnings looked like startled eyebrows. It was another of those landmarks that hadn’t changed. As a lieutenant in charge of interviewing military personnel held by civilian authorities, I’d made the Monday morning trips down from Camp Pendleton. The records office was where I remembered it, and a slow-moving clerk took my request and the fees required for the search. Then she handed me the receipt and said it would be a few minutes.
It was more than that, of course. But eventually my number was called and another clerk, this one younger but just as methodical, took my receipt and handed me printouts describing Dorcas’s car and license, her driver’s license number, a negative report on any county arrest record. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. The county recorder listed no deeds, leases, or licenses in her name. The voter registrar told me Dorcas had voted only in the last Presidential election and not in any of the subsequent local ones. She listed her father’s La Jolla address as her legal place of residence, and was registered—like her parents, I assumed—as a Republican. Nothing strange in that. Not that there weren’t Democrats in La Jolla—there were; I’d heard about someone who met both of them. But Dorcas’s penchant for rebellion apparently didn’t extend to political spheres.
Finally I went upstairs to the sheriff’s department and told a sheriff’s officer what I wanted. He said they had Jane Doe descriptions for unidentified bodies found in the past four weeks.
“We don’t have information on all the unidentifieds, sir.” The black officer punched a code into a computer. “Just the ones located in our jurisdiction.”
“She lives up near Julian.”
“Uh-huh. That’d probably be us, then. She Hispanic?”
“No. Anglo.”
“That cuts out some.” He scrolled another file up the screen. “Get a lot of Hispanics. Mostly coming up from Mexico.” He paused again. “How long you say she’s been missing?”
“Two weeks or so.”
“Here’s one—blond, approximately twenty years old, five-seven. Found one week ago near Chula Vista.” He read further. “Any tattoos?”
“None that I know of.”
“This one has a rose tattoo on her left buttock. Other identifying marks or scars?”
“A birthmark on the back of her right thigh.”
He shook his head again. “Not on this report. Don’t mean much though. She missing any teeth?”
“No.” I showed him the photograph and waited for his nod.
He only grunted. “This one had false front teeth. Top four teeth missing a long time.”
I felt my shoulders sag with relief. The sheriff’s officer scrolled again and then shrugged. “Nobody we got fits who you’re looking for. Try the city morgue yet?”
Henry told me he had called them himself, but sometimes when you didn’t want to discover something, you didn’t probe deeply enough. I got a list of the regional police and hospital agencies and thanked the officer. Out in a car hot from sun and closed windows, I used a map to sketch an itinerary that took me in a large loop and used up the final hours of the day. By the time I drove up the Strand from Imperial Beach, the sun, an inch or so above the Pacific, was a red ball filtered by the distant sea haze. It gradually flattened and broke against the purple water.
It had been a long afternoon’s tour: offices, waiting rooms, service counters, punctuated by three visits to viewing rooms. The silent and chill cubicle was usually furnished with a few tubular chrome chairs and a dim reading lamp. Cozy morgue decor. A coroner’s assistant would come into the room just before another man wheeled the loaded gurney into the small alcove beyond the viewing window. Then the alcove’s harsh overhead light flared on and the covered figure was silently pushed up close to the glass. The morgue attendant folded back the sheet from the cadaver’s head and neck and stood back. He kept his eyes on the coroner’s assistant and avoided my face. In the glare of the strong lighting, the dead woman’s features always seemed chiseled and any bruises or cuts were etched darkly against the bloodless skin. And, so far, the answer was the same: not Dorcas Wilcox.
Easing the car into the garage of my new house, I paused in the kitchen to pour myself a beer. Then I flipped on a couple of lights to chase the darkness from the rooms, the stereo to rid the silence with the mellow saxophone of Spike Robinson, and rummaged through the refrigerator for something to remove the hunger. The thing I really wanted to get rid of was the lingering vision of dead women blindly facing that harsh light. And the thoughts that had come with seeing the sprawling county’s unnamed human detritus. The scraps of food and the beer helped, but the painting of Karen and Becky hanging behind the small dining table helped most of all. I could see the light strokes of Eleanor’s invisible hand in the minute shades of pigment. The colors were arranged in the pattern her mind had created and brought her closer. I didn’t remember Eleanor painting this work—it had been done as a surprise while I was on one of those unplanned and unheralded assignments that weren’t supposed to be mentioned. But she had proudly hung it to greet me when I got back, and her pride was justified. It was a calming pleasure to imagine her alive and intently lost in stroking the rough paper with those little whish-whish noises of pastels, and radiating that warmth of someone in control of her work and thoroughly enjoying its discoveries.
I rinsed the dishes and added them to the breakfast stuff in the dishwasher. One of these days it would fill up enough to run, but until then I had plates and forks enough to last. The mail had come and was mostly the stuff of occupants’ dreams: free prizes, quick and easy loans, introductory coupons for hundreds of discount dollars. A comic greeting card wished me good luck in my new home and was signed “In haste—letter coming—love, Karen and Chuck.” She had mailed it before we talked on the telephone, and it brought back the worry I had about Becky—the suddenness of my retirement and move to Coronado. It would certainly surprise her, but I hoped it wouldn’t be upsetting. Karen had tried to reassure me: Becky wouldn’t be upset—she was too involved in her own life now, and that was good. Besides, Karen laughed, it would probably be more exciting to her than traumatic. Her younger sister always did like to move to a new duty station more than she did. And I reminded myself that Rebecca had been talking of staying in Europe until school started in the fall. Perhaps she’d want to spend some time here in the new house—there were worse places for a lovely girl to stay for a few summer months, and she’d have a chance to visit her sister. But it would be her decision; Eleanor and I had tried to instill independence in the girls. We’d wanted to counter the losses brought by constant moves and changes of school which could rob a child of security and leave her emotionally stunted and unsure. Now I saw in them the same self-confidence and fair-mindedness that had been their mother’s. Perhaps Eleanor and I had done it right; perhaps the girls had been old enough when their mother died that they could cope with that shock. More likely, they had
inherited enough of Eleanor’s courage and blessed good humor to survive with as little hurt as possible. Still, I’d have to send Becky several photographs of the new house with its vacant boat slip just beyond the back door. And promise that she could help choose the boat that Eleanor and I had been saving for over so many years.
The admiral answered my call and had me hold while he asked Jenny to pick up an extension. I told them what I’d spent the afternoon doing.
“Those poor girls,” said Jenny. “But thank God none of them were Dorcas!”
“What’s your next step, Jack?”
“I’ll head up to Julian tomorrow morning and start from there.” My question wasn’t easy, but it had to be asked. “Jenny, how would you characterize Dorcas’s relationship with her parents?”
The line was silent for a long moment. “It’s not a happy family, is it?” she said.
“Did Dorcas ever talk to you or the admiral about it?”
“Not for a long time. Not since she was in high school. By her senior year, she seemed … accepting. She wasn’t happy, but she seemed to have reached some kind of understanding.”
“Was that before or after she ran away the first time?”
“She ran away?”
“In her senior year. Margaret didn’t tell you about it?”
“No! This is the first I’ve heard of it. I don’t know why she didn’t tell me.”
The admiral’s voice broke in. “I damned well do: Henry. He wouldn’t want us to suspect he failed at being a father like he’s failed at being a husband.”
“Dalton, it’s not all Henry’s fault. Margaret isn’t a very strong person herself.”
“I grant that. But by God—”
“Dalton, please!”
I spoke into the angry silence. “I’ll be in touch with you as soon as I know anything more, Admiral. Good night, Jenny.”
