Vanishing Point

by Marcia Muller

  “This agreement-when did you make it?”

  “A few months before Josie died. Laurel was facing her own mortality. So was I, for that matter. If I’d’ve died, Laurel would have helped bring up my kids-with my husband’s blessing.”

  “You say ‘died.’ How certain are you that Laurel’s dead?”

  “I’m certain.”

  “Could she have committed suicide?”

  “I doubt it. No one who knew her considered that a serious possibility. It had to be foul play.”

  “You sound almost as if you want Laurel to be dead.”

  Sally’s eyes clouded. “I suppose in a way I do. Because if she’s not, if she’s been someplace else living some other life all these years, it would mean I never knew her at all. It would negate our friendship and everything we ever shared during all those years.”

  After I said good-bye to Sally Timmerman in the inn’s lobby, I walked back to my room across the tree-shaded central courtyard. The night air was warm and fragrant from the flowering plants that grew in profusion there; I could hear people splashing in the nearby swimming pool. By contrast, my room was chill from the air-conditioning I’d left on when I went to dinner; I turned it off and opened the balcony doors to take advantage of the summer night. Then I sat down with my files and called Derek at his Marina-district apartment in San Francisco.

  He said, “I sent you files on Jacob Ziff in Cayucos and the guy in Morro Bay, Ira Lighthill.”

  “Good, I’ll take a look at them tonight. Tomorrow I’m talking with the Paso Robles police officer who worked the case, then heading down to the coast. I’ll try to talk with the Greenwood girls’ babysitter tomorrow night. In the meantime, I’ve come up with a couple of lines of inquiry I’d like you to look into: first, Josie Smith, a cousin of Greenwood’s, deceased twenty-three years, lived up there in the city.”

  “Josie Smith. Got it. You looking for anything specific?”

  “Just fishing. Now, second: about a year before Smith died, Greenwood taught art classes for around six months at the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo. Contact them and see if they have any record of it. Try to get names of inmates enrolled in the classes, and their whereabouts at the time she disappeared. If they don’t want to give out information-and I suspect they won’t-Craig has a contact at the state department of corrections who can help.”

  “Will do. How soon d’you need this?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon will be fine.”

  My next call was to Patrick, who was still at the office. We went over my day’s activities, and I told him I’d be faxing him my notes, e-mailing a report, and messengering the tapes of my interviews in the morning. Then I made a call to the RKI condominium where Hy stayed while in La Jolla, got the machine, and left the number here at the inn. I considered calling his cellular, but if he wasn’t at the condo it meant he was probably tied up in a meeting or at a business dinner.

  It had been a long day, so I decided to take a shower and go to bed early, saving Derek’s information on the two witnesses till the morning. But first I rummaged in my briefcase, took out my copies of the newspaper accounts of Laurel Greenwood’s disappearance, and once again contemplated the head-and-shoulders photograph that had been published with the stories. It showed a woman with a delicate heart-shaped face, large, wide-set eyes, and long, softly permed dark hair; she was posed in front of a rosebush, smiling radiantly into the camera, one hand raised to cup a blossom to her cheek.

  I studied the photograph a long time, hoping for some hint of her secrets in the tilt of her head or the curve of her mouth. But they were well concealed-both from me and from whoever had looked through the lens at her.

  Friday

  AUGUST 19

  As I headed west on Highway 46 to the coast, I drove out of the sunlight and into the fog. It billowed toward the car, rushed past, and closed behind me. Suddenly I was enveloped in a grayish-white world where ordinary objects took on unfamiliar shapes and headlights of approaching vehicles appeared out of nowhere. I slowed, wishing there were taillights in front of me to show the way. Of course, I reminded myself, there was no guarantee that another driver would know the road any better than I did.

  Early that morning, Rob Traverso, the Paso Robles police detective, had called to postpone our ten o’clock meeting to four in the afternoon; fortunately I’d been able to reschedule my one o’clock appointment with Jacob Ziff for eleven. I hadn’t yet reached Ira Lighthill in Morro Bay, but I’d try again after I finished in Cayucos.

  Ziff, according to Derek’s report, was an architect with offices in his home. He’d been thirty-four on the day he’d stopped at the overlook to speak with Laurel, which would make him fifty-six now. He was twice divorced, had an excellent credit rating, and owned both the house in Cayucos and a condo on Maui. No arrest record; the closest he’d come to entanglement with the law was giving a statement as to his conversation with Laurel and his later sighting of her at the Sea Shack.

  The fog had thinned by the time the road intersected with Highway 1. The tourist town of Cambria and San Simeon, home of Hearst Castle, were to the right, Cayucos and Morro Bay to the left. I drove south between richly cultivated farmland and the flat, gray sea, past a tiny settlement called Harmony. After some ten miles, the highway split to form a bypass around Cayucos, and I spotted a narrow lane leading to an overlook on the cliffs. I turned in there, parked near the edge, and got out. Looked along the curve of the shore that Laurel had painted that day. Her easel, a finished canvas, and supplies had been neatly stowed in her Volkswagen bus, indicating an unhasty and untroubled departure from the overlook. I wondered if that final painting had remained in police custody or had been burned by Roy Greenwood, and made a mental note to ask Detective Traverso.

  The wind blew off the water, strong but not cold. Already the fog was burning off above the coastal range, promising a clear afternoon. Like yesterday when I’d sat in the car in front of Laurel’s former home, I tried to capture some sense of what had gone on here twenty-two years before, but this was merely another roadside stopping place, through which thousands of people had passed since then. I checked my watch, saw it was nearly time for my appointment with Ziff, and got back in the car.

  Studio Drive was at the lower end of town, a long residential strip that parallelled the main street to the west. The buildings there were a mixture: shingled cottages, Spanish-style villas, stucco bungalows, modernistic mini-mansions. Ziff’s was one of the latter, all sharp angles and redwood and glass, on the ocean side. I parked close to its high fence, went through a gate that opened into a tiny courtyard, and rang the bell. A voice called out for me to come around the side, and I followed a flagstone path to a door where a tall man in chinos and a polo shirt was waiting. He introduced himself as Ziff and took me inside to a large room with floor-to-ceiling windows that faced the sea. A computer workstation and storage cabinets took up the rear wall, and two drafting tables were positioned under a skylight. Ziff motioned at a grouping of leather chairs near the windows and said, “I’ll be right with you. Coffee?”

  “Yes, please.”

  He crossed to one of the drafting tables, picked up a pencil, and made a few notations on a set of plans that lay there. Then he poured mugs full of coffee from an urn that sat on a cabinet by the workstation.

  “Cream or sugar?”

  “Neither, thanks.”

  He brought the mugs over and set them on a low table between two of the chairs. As we sat I studied him. He had curly silver hair, a bony, tanned face, and penetrating blue eyes that regarded me with frank interest.

  “I’ve never met a private detective before,” he said. “You’re from San Francisco?”

  “Right.” I handed him one of my cards.

  He looked it over, then placed it on the table. “And you said on the phone that Laurel Greenwood’s daughter has hired you to look into her disappearance. It’s been a long time. I don’t know how I can help you.”

  I set my r
ecorder on the table. “I’d like to go over what you remember.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better if you read the statement I made to the sheriff’s department?”

  “Eventually I hope to. But first I’d prefer hearing about that day in your own words; it’s possible you may remember something that you didn’t tell the police.”

  Ziff smiled, the lines at the corners of his eyes crinkling. “That’s the first time anyone’s suggested that my memory’s gotten better with age. But I’ll give it a try.”

  “Thanks. According to the news reports, you were driving south on the coast highway that morning.”

  “Right. Around eleven. I’d been up to Cambria to look over a building site. Had a one o’clock lunch with a client here in town, so I wasn’t in a hurry. There was an old VW bus parked at the overlook, and this woman had set up an easel beside it and was painting. I don’t know exactly why I stopped; it’s not like me to approach strangers. But there was something compelling about the way she was working.”

  “Can you describe it?”

  Ziff leaned foward, hands on his knees, staring out the window at the sea. “You know, I haven’t thought about that day in years, but now it’s all coming back. The weather-it was exactly the same as today. Well, maybe a little warmer. The fog was just beginning to burn off, and there were occasional flashes of sun on the water.”

  I looked in the direction of his gaze, where faint glints of light had begun to dapple the gray waves.

  “The woman,” Ziff went on, “she was so intense. Her posture, her motions. As if she was working on something very important. She didn’t seem to hear my car, didn’t look up till I was standing right beside her. And when she did she acted as if… as if she were waking up from a dream, or maybe as if I were pulling her back from some other world she’d been inhabiting. She wasn’t at all intimidated about a strange man coming up to her, just said hello.”

  “And then you talked about what?”

  “Her painting. It wasn’t bad. Representational, but something more, too; she’d captured the emotional feel of the coastline. I complimented her on her technique, and we discussed that for a while. She told me where she was from, and that she was a greeting card designer. That was about it. Two hours later I went to the Sea Shack to meet with my client, and she was on the oceanside deck, drinking wine and talking with this biker type.”

  “Did you speak to her?”

  “No. I don’t think she even saw me. My client arrived, and we went into the dining room. When we left the restaurant an hour later, they were both gone.”

  “Can you describe the biker?”

  Ziff thought for a moment. “Long dark hair. Leathers. No club logo or anything like that. He might’ve had an earring, but I can’t say for sure. I only saw him for a few seconds. But he stuck in my mind because I wouldn’t have expected a woman like that to be hanging around with someone like him.”

  “A woman like what?”

  “Well-spoken. Obviously talented. And she was quite lovely. If I hadn’t had the appointment with my client, I might’ve considered asking her to lunch.” He turned from the window, his eyes troubled. “I wish I had. Maybe it would’ve prevented whatever happened to her. But probably not. She seemed…”

  “Yes?”

  “You know, the passage of all these years is putting a new spin on what happened; I’ve never articulated this before. She seemed as if something was ending for her.”

  “What?”

  “It had to do with the painting. When I complimented her on it, she said, ‘Thank you. But it’s done. That’s all over now.’ And she sighed. There was a regretful quality in her voice. It was as if she was saying good-bye.”

  “To what, do you suppose?”

  Ziff shrugged. “Maybe to her art. Maybe even to her life.”

  After I left Ziff, I drove north along the main street of town. Cayucos was an old-fashioned beach community, and in spite of the proliferation of antique and tourist shops, it felt as if it hadn’t changed much since the day Laurel drove away in her VW bus. The space where the Sea Shack had been was now a gourmet-foods shop, but the liquor store where Laurel’s biker companion had been headed was still there. I parked and wandered along until I came to the municipal pier, turned, and walked halfway out, where I leaned against the railing and regarded the beach. The sky had cleared, and people were setting up umbrellas and speading blankets for picnics. Children ran eagerly toward the water’s edge. Had Laurel witnessed a similar scene from the deck at the Sea Shack? Commented to the biker on what a nice a day it had turned into? Or had they been too involved in their discussion to notice? A discussion that had to do with the regret Jacob Ziff had heard in her voice?

  It was as if she was saying good-bye… Maybe even to her life.

  Ziff’s words had once again suggested that the reason for Laurel’s disappearance might be suicide. I understood why no one had thought it a serious possibility at the time: by all accounts Laurel had been content, if not wildly happy with her existence. And her personality was hardly consistent with that of a person who would be prone to take her own life. Also, no suicide note or body had ever been found. Still, it was one more possibility I’d have to consider.

  Morro Bay is a working fishing village, with a sheltered harbor whose entrance is dominated by a huge rock that looms like an offshore sentry. The Spanish word morro means, among other things, “snout,” and the rock must have looked like a giant sea creature rising from the water to the sixteenth-century explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo when he sailed into the harbor and christened it. In addition to the fishing industry, the local economy receives a significant boost from tourism, and as I drove along the waterfront street toward the park where Laurel had abandoned her bus, visitors were everywhere-wandering in and out of the restaurants and shops, snapping photographs, blocking the sidewalks while consulting maps or eating ice-cream cones, crossing the street without looking.

  I confess to being irritated by tourists unless I’m one myself. Then anybody who gets between me and my souvenirs had better watch out!

  The street dead-ended at the parking lot where Laurel had last been sighted. I left my car near the restrooms and walked along one of the paths to a bench facing the water, sat, and took out the sandwich and Coke that I’d bought at a deli in Cayucos. It was peaceful there; the only sounds were the cries of children from a nearby play area and the sloshing of the wake from a boat that motored past in the channel between the shore and a long sandbar. After I ate, I walked back to the parking lot where Ira Lighthill had agreed to meet me at two-thirty. Lighthill, a seventy-three-year-old former civil engineer, lived on the slope above the park.

  At exactly two-thirty, a slight bald-headed man in jeans and a blue windbreaker came toward me, walking a black dog whose fur hung in cords that reminded me of dreadlocks. The cords on its head were gathered up in a yellow band, presumably to keep them out of its eyes, and it trotted along at its master’s side, matching its speed to his.

  “Ms. McCone?” the man said.

  “Yes. You’re Mr. Lighthill?”

  “I am. And this”-he motioned to the dog-“is Csoda. That’s spelled C-s-o-d-a. Hungarian for ‘wonder.’”

  “Unusual dog. What kind is it?”

  “She’s a puli, a herding dog. My wife and I breed them for a small and select clientele. Shall we walk?”

  Lighthill turned toward the path leading to the water, and I fell into step beside him. Csoda moved ahead of us on her lead, keening the air and stopping here and there to sniff at objects of interest.

  “So you’re investigating the disappearance of that young woman, Laurel Greenwood,” Lighthill said. “Of course, she wouldn’t be a young woman anymore, but when someone vanishes like that, I suppose they’re frozen in time. A high school friend of mine was murdered; I remained close to the family for many years, and every time I visited them there would be Jon in the photographs on the mantel, forever sixteen, while I became twenty and twenty-five and
thirty. It must be much the same for that poor woman’s daughters.”

  “I suppose so. Will you tell me about seeing her that afternoon?”

  “Well, I’d been walking my then dog, Kiro, along with my friend Bryan Taft and his standard poodle, Dewey. We were coming back toward the parking lot when one of those old VW buses pulled in. I took particular note of it because I’d owned one of the same color. I remember saying something to Bryan about being surprised the thing still ran. Mine was a dreadful vehicle-underpowered, and in the end it got so bad I’d actually have to put it in reverse and back up the hills. Anyway, the bus pulled into a space at the far side of the lot, and the woman got out. She locked the bus and came straight toward us, so we got a good look at her.”

  We’d reached the water’s edge by now. Lighthill motioned to the right and we took a path leading toward the commercial district along the shore.

  “How did she seem?” I asked. “Nervous? Upset? Business as usual?”

  He considered. “I’d say purposeful. She knew where she was going and she was going to get there as quickly as possible. But first she made a detour to the ladies’ room.”

  “That wasn’t in any of the newspaper accounts.”

  “Possibly because Bryan didn’t think to mention it. And I-well, a rest stop seemed irrelevant, and really nobody’s business but the woman’s.”

  “Did you see her come out of the restroom?”

  “Yes. She wasn’t in there long. Bryan and I were still in the parking lot, standing next to his car and discussing plans to go to a regional AKC show in Los Angeles the next weekend. I only glimpsed her from behind, but it was the same woman. I recognized her by the sweater she wore-I guess they’re called ‘hoodies’ now. It was tan, and she’d pulled the hood up over her head, even though it was a warm day.”