by Terri Thayer
“Did any of you see her? Talk to her?” It was a long shot, but she had to come from somewhere. Maybe she’d walked this way.
“She had long, red curly hair, kind of wild,” I said, appealing to their esthetic. “And she was wearing a long cape, crazy quilt style.”
I was drawing nothing but blank looks.
“Crazy?” one of them said, but it was only a comment on the world at large.
The surfers looked at each other blankly, and returned to looking over my shoulder at the shore line. It was obvious these guys saw nothing that didn’t relate to the waves, the conditions, the clouds.
I remembered the van that had gone past me on my way back to Asilomar. I wasn’t sure it had anything to do with Ursula, but the timing was right. These were guys. I should have started with the mechanical, not people.
I said, “How about the van? Did you see a gray VW bus go by?”
Eyes perked up. A young guy brushed his long hair out of his eye. It was covering half his face. I felt old standing next to him, resisting the urge to hook his locks behind his ears so I could see his face. God, it was awful being thirty.
“A Vanagon?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
He said to his buddies, “I saw a bitchin’ Synchro pull up when I was leaving yesterday.”
“I thought that was Cotati’s,” the old guy said.
“Nah, his got repossessed. Anyway, this one was silver.”
“That’s it,” I said. I mentally kicked myself; I should have known to start with the car. I’ve got enough men in my family to know that cars are a common language. Most of my deeper conversations with my Dad started with queries about the oil in my car.
“Did you see where it went?” I needed an accurate description of the car to take to the police.
No one answered.
“Where’s this Cotati guy?” I asked, looking around at the pickups and vans parking along the road. A group was grilling breakfast sausages on the side of the road. The smell was tantalizing and my stomach growled.
“Don’t see him.” Hairy guy shrugged. “Maybe later,” he said. “He’s always here if the surf is good.”
I looked out at the placid sea. “Is the surf going to be good?”
Sleepy-eyes said, “Depends if the gods are smiling on us, man.”
Surf philosophy was more than I could handle so early in the day. The sausage smell was joined by grilled bananas. I felt my mouth water, even though I’d just eaten.
“Have you seen a well-dressed, gray-haired guy walking along here?” I asked.
“You mean that dude whose woman went in the drink?” The question came from a new guy whose tattoos covered both arms completely.
I was surprised. “Yes, that’s him. Did you talk to him?”
From the smell of pot that lingered in the air like a not-so-fresh air freshener, I doubted these guys would have any sense of time or be good informational sources, but I needed to find Paul.
“Yesterday. Man, was he bummed out. The ocean, man, it’s a killer.”
I waited for something more succinct, but the surfer was lost in his thoughts, staring out at the waves, and mindlessly banging his fingers against his thighs. I wondered what was so frightening in his life that he dulled his senses with pot and surfed in the very essence of what terrified him.
“Did you see him today?” I asked.
Another surfer looked up from waxing his board and said, “He was walking past the golf course when I drove in this morning.”
We were surrounded by golf courses. To the north was Pacific Grove Muni. To the south were the exclusive Pebble Beach courses, where Buster and I had walked last night. He pointed south.
Ursula had gone in north of where we were. I could see a figure standing on the sand, staring out to sea. Was that Paul?
“Thanks,” I said, heading to the shoreline. I’d walk on the packed sand near the water and make faster progress.
He didn’t see me at first. His eyes were on the water, watching each wave as it hit the short jetty.
“Any word?” I said. No matter what else he was, right now, Paul was a man grieving his wife.
He blinked, looking at me with unseeing eyes.
“How goes the investigation?” I asked.
“It’s over,” Paul said.
“Over?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
“They’re finished. There’s no sign of her body.”
The terrain looked so different from the way it had in the early morning fog when I’d seen her go over. Today the water was sparkling blue, with green translucent stripes, like a wonderful batik. The white caps had calmed down and the waves gently moved in.
The ocean looked serene, but it was teeming with life. The same was true for Paul. His exterior was calm, but his guts had to be churning.
The sky was a bright blue, and several clouds scudded across but without breaking up the bright day. The black rocks, the white sands, the wildflowers, the craggy coastline were all the makings of a dream. But for Paul, it was a nightmare.
“What was she doing here? Mercedes told me Ursula hadn’t attended the conference the last couple of years.”
“She did. she came every year. I wrote the check, and booked her ticket. For the past ten years. The second week in May. I put her on the plane myself.”
I thought about what he was saying. “At the airport, did you drop her at the gate? Or just at the curb?”
I saw his face change as he recognized that he didn’t know where she flew to. She could have turned in her ticket for a new destination, paying cash for any penalties.
He must have hated it when the airport rules changed. I was sure before that he’d walked her to her plane and stayed until takeoff.
He thought for a moment, his hand stroking the stubble he’d been growing. He’d let himself go these last two days and didn’t resemble the dapper man I’d met on Monday. His hair was dirty, plastered to the back of his head, and his fingernails were bleeding at the cuticles.
I almost felt sorry for him. He was a batterer, yes, but wife beaters weren’t created in a vacuum. Who knew what kind of life he’d had? What things in his past had led him to this path?
I couldn’t forgive him for making his wife’s life hell, but he was in his own kind of torment. He would never be able to right things with Ursula now. He could only wait for her body to be found.
“How do you even know she came here? She could have gone anywhere.”
He turned to me with a triumphant look. “Each year, she brings me an edition of the local paper.”
That was proof of sorts. The Pacific Grove Bulletin was not readily available. I had never seen it outside of a couple of shops right in town. She must have been here. At least in Pacific Grove.
His eyes had been drawn back to the endless sea. His mouth was drawn into a frown and his eyes were vacant. He was watching the horizon as though Ursula would pop up, like a sea otter.
He said he didn’t believe she’d gone in voluntarily, but he couldn’t keep his eyes off the water.
“Why was Ursula in California, Paul?”
“I told you,” his voice was muffled as he curled into himself. “She was taking the Sewing-by-the-Sea seminar. I wrote the check myself. It was cashed months ago.”
That was interesting. Paul had given fifteen hundred dollars to Mercedes for a phantom registration. In the past, the Ghost had paid for the class, shown up on the first morning, and then wasn’t seen again until the last night. Everyone assumed she had a boyfriend. But what if she didn’t have a boyfriend at all? What if she was just trying to get away from an abusive husband once a year?
A woman like Ursula would have no money of her own. Paul probably controlled all the money coming in and going
out. Where would a woman like that get money? From Mercedes.
Paul wasn’t moving, just kept staring at one spot as though waiting for something to surface.
My mother used to write a check at the grocery store for ten or twenty dollars over the amount of her purchases. She called the change she got back her “mad” money. Dad thought it was money she’d spent on groceries, and she had a little cash she could call her own. It never got spent on anything more than socks for us kids or an occasional lunch out with a girlfriend or a gift for my dad, but it was important to her to have some money she didn’t have to account for. And my father was not a tyrant.
I could only imagine what lengths a woman in Ursula’s position might go to get some mad money.
It was easy to fall in love with a place like Asilomar. The ocean breezes, sculpted cypress trees, the cute sea otters, the healing balm of the repetition of the waves. Why wouldn’t a woman come back year after year?
How hard it must have been to go home each time. Knowing what she was going back to. Did he promise to be good? Did he swear never to touch her in anger again? Was she fooled time and time again by his inability to stop?
There had to have come a time when she said enough was enough. Paul had said he’d been treating her well in the last few years. What if he’d suffered a relapse last year, and she decided to make the break once and for all.
It could have taken her a year to get the resources she needed to escape.
I needed to get my hands on Mercedes’ registrations.
Paul spoke, startling me. “My wife has been killed,” he said. “Murdered.”
I said, “I saw her. She was alone. She wasn’t pushed.”
“There was a man after her, making her life miserable.”
I didn’t believe him. Only one man had tortured Ursula. He was standing right next to me.
I pointed down the beach.
“If you loved your wife so much, why are you out here, instead of down there where she went in?”
Paul turned to me. His eyes were hooded and his face expressionless. “The police said it might take days, but bodies usually get hung up on that sand bar. And surface right here.”
“Ready to go take some legendary pictures?” Cinnamon asked. She looked like Jimmy Olsen, with huge cameras and lenses hanging from leather straps around her neck. The rest of us, gathered in front of the classroom, were carrying palm-sized digitals.
“Let’s go off to the dunes,” Cinnamon said. “I want you to start seeing what’s right in front of you.”
We headed through the trees, on a bark path I hadn’t noticed before. It led past the sleeping rooms and around the back of the Mott Ranger training station. We crossed Sinex Road and went through the parking lots surrounding other classrooms. Through the windows, I could see quilts hanging on walls. One group was outside dyeing fabric, using a makeshift clothesline to hang colorful newly created pieces.
We talked as we walked. Harriet told me about her ideas for her legendary quilt, a family tree honoring the women on her mother’s side. She was subdued, but I was glad she’d come to class. Lucy told me she didn’t want to hide away.
A raven squawked, and I could smell the salt air. The dunes were just ahead. I felt a lifting in my heart. What a cool thing to be doing on a normal week day. Spending hours outdoors instead of hunched over my computer. I let the images fade of Paul Wiggins staring out to see and Nan wringing her hands over her missing kit.
Here the seagulls greeted us, and the pelicans performed their Rockettes routine, flying in an impossibly straight line, dipping as one. Cinnamon had the right idea. I never stopped to smell the roses, never mind trying to imitate them in fabric. I was daunted by the task, but energized at the prospect that I might create something unique and meaningful.
After ten minutes of pointing out the minute flowers in the sand dunes, showing us the tiny bugs and the deer tracks, Cinnamon broke us apart.
“I’ll give you one hour, people. Use your time to take pictures that appeal to you. I don’t want you shooting what I’ve shown you or looking over your neighbor’s shoulders to see what they’re doing.”
We laughed as she leered at the closest student as she demonstrated.
Her smile disappeared.
“I’m serious. This is the chance to make something unique. Just for you. We share our homes, our workspaces, with spouses and friends and children. Now is the time to find your vision. I don’t care what it is, as long as it’s uniquely yours.”
The idea of making a quilt about something important in my life had never occurred to me before. Most of the quilts I’d seen were made from quilt blocks, set together in interesting patterns with cool fabrics. A few landscape quilts came into the store. One I remembered was a replica of the Vatican. I’d seen memory quilts, too made with specially treated fabric that transferred pictures onto cotton or silk. Last year a customer had showed us one she made for her parents, celebrating sixty years of marriage. The pictures had run the gamut from baby pictures and vacation shots to their original wedding day photo.
But this was different. Cinnamon’s idea was to recreate a feeling, a thought.
In college, trying to decide my major, I’d taken a Chart Your Life seminar. For a weekend, we cut up magazines. The goal was to find pictures that appealed to us and use them to collage our heart’s desires. The idea was that beneath the conscious minds were wants and needs that we were barely aware of. Mine had been a jumble of disconnected images and trite sayings used as ad copy. I’d learned nothing about my ambitions or myself.
Despite the splendor of the outdoors, I knew what I wanted to photograph. The stone and wood that made up the original historical buildings. The thirteen remaining buildings that Julia Morgan had built nearly a hundred years ago. She’d managed to merge man-made structures into the natural beauty. I wanted to try to capture that.
I started in the chapel, concentrating on the windows that framed the dunes beyond. I shot the frieze and the graceful choir loft. I moved on to the Lodge. In the living room, I took pictures of the elegant staircase.
Next up was the Administration building. The historical placard told me this had once been the Phoebe Hearst Social Hall. Here was where the young women arrived by train to spend their summers at Asilomar. I could only imagine what it meant to have this kind of recreation available to a young woman in the 1920s. I sensed it was a freedom that I, who’d never been repressed, could not begin to appreciate.
I moved around the massive river rock fireplace, zooming in on the vertical pieces Julia Morgan had added for stability. They added beauty as well.
Someone was playing the piano. I didn’t know the tune being played, but it was slow and sad. I glanced over at the player, recognizing her with a jolt. It was Nan.
I walked over to her. “Hi, Nan,” I said.
She looked my way, her eyes sad. “Hi, Dewey.”
“I’m sorry about the boxes going missing. Please know I had nothing to do with that.”
She nodded glumly, her fingers caressing the piano keys. I was interrupting her mourning. Her chin dimpled as though she might cry.
“I know it wasn’t you,” she said.
I didn’t know what else to say, but I felt awkward just leaving her.
She finished her song, arms and shoulders getting into the act.
She shut the piano lid with an abrupt crash. “It’s not right. That box was made in Pennsylvania more than a hundred years ago. It has nothing to do with politics.”
“Is that why you think the German Cross was stolen?” I asked.
“Why else?” she said.
“But what about the other box? Is the Rose Box valuable?”
She shook her head. “Not really. Remember? One of the tools was missing.”
I nodded. I did remember. It had a t
ray that nested in the box. Each piece had its own slot, the exact shape of the tool. The design was the height of efficiency. There could be no misplaced tools. It reminded me of my dad’s pegboard in the garage. He’d outlined the shape of each tool that hung there. He’d done that when we kids were little, to ensure that the tool got returned to its proper place. He could see at a glance what was missing, then send us kids out to look for it. It was usually under Kevin’s bed, or on his desk, until Dad built him his own tool bench.
Tony had never borrowed Dad’s tools, preferring the camp stove and Coleman lantern.
“But how does that affect the value?” I asked.
“If the kit is incomplete, the value goes way down. Some of the boxes I displayed had their tools replaced long ago. But the Rose Box is almost intact, except for that one missing bird.”
Nan’s fingers caressed the piano hinge. “The Rose Box is the most beautiful piece I own. The workmanship is amazing and it is one of a kind, but without the missing sewing bird, it’s practically worthless. I believe whoever took it was trying to hide the fact that she was really after the German Cross box.”
Harriet, in other words.
“Has stuff gone missing in other years? I’ve heard about quilts being stolen.”
“From Sewing-by-the-Sea?” Nan grew thoughtful. “Let me think. I think there was a Featherweight sewing machine that someone lost.”
“There are a lot of expensive quilts hanging on the walls of rooms that are open all day.”
“But they’re locked up every night. And most of the time, those rooms are full of students.”
“I know. I’m thinking of the woman, the Ghost, who comes every year but doesn’t attend class. Maybe she helps herself to people’s things. That’s why she stays anonymous.”
“That’s horrible,” Nan said. Her voice quavered, and she put a hand up to cover her mouth. I touched her arm, and she forced a smile.
“I’m sure the police will find the thief,” she said bravely.
