High cirrus clouds appeared as I approached the coastal ridgeline, whipping across the moon like horsetails. The road bisected a meadow, meandered through woods, began climbing, then descended. At its intersection with Oregon 101, I came up against a wall of thick, stationary fog. I checked the odometer and turned north, driving slowly past the small settlements scattered along the shore: Neskowin, Oretown, Pacific City. Then I began looking for the old-fashioned wooden water tower that the rental-car clerk, a native of the area, had told me was the landmark for Eagle Rock. It loomed up suddenly, dark and bulky through the fog.
As I came closer I spotted a long line of mailboxes fastened to a rough board stand. Beyond them high wooden fences, most of them overgrown by vegetation, shielded the roadside houses from view. Tall trees—some type of pine— formed a canopy over an unpaved lane leading into the settlement. I turned left, pulled my rental up to the mailboxes, and got out.
The boxes were of different sizes and shapes: standard Postal Department issue; birdhouses; tin drums; lighthouse replicas. Some were painted with flowers or abstract patterns; others were corroded and battered by the elements. Gaps between them indicated vacation homes where no deliveries were made, and the space for 32 Beach was empty. I took out my flashlight and checked names; what few were painted on the boxes were not familiar. Then I got back in the car and went in search of Beach Street.
The cottages I passed were small, built mostly of clapboard or weathered shingle. Lights shone dimly in a few windows. Some of the dwellings had fenced yards, but most were fronted by gardens where plants grew lushly, encouraged by the moisture of the climate. The intersecting lanes were marked, but poorly, their signs bleached and pitted. I crept along, shining my flash on them, and finally located Beach—a short block ending at a stone seawall. The house numbers proved impossible to read from the car, so I parked under the low-hanging branches of a cypress tree at the lane’s far end and proceeded on foot. The fog was thick there, muting the sound of the surf. A dog barked in one of the yards as I passed, and another answered from a couple of blocks away.
Number 32 was pale clapboard, with an overgrown front garden and a carport to one side. A vehicle was parked in the driveway: Ford Taurus, this year’s model, an Enterprise Car Rental sticker on its bumper. I tried the doors, which were locked, then took down the license plate number.
The plants in the yard were rhododendrons, set close together and several feet taller than I. I worked my way through them till I could see the front of the house. Lighted first-story window with blinds shut; lighted dormer window upstairs, curtained. In the dim yellow glow of a bare bulb on the porch I saw an envelope wedged into the frame of the screen door. I stepped up there, snagged it, and retreated into the bushes. It contained a five-dollar bill and a scribbled note signed by Houston. “United Airlines—Please leave bag here.”
I considered my options, then went through the bushes and walked back down the street to the car. At Houston’s cottage again, I carried my own travel bag up the front path, keeping my head down; if Houston were looking outside, she wouldn’t recognize me, would naturally assume I was an airlines courier. I knocked loudly. There was no immediate response, but after a minute I heard motion and an erratic intake of breath on the other side of the door.
“United Baggage, Ms. Houston,” I called. “Thanks for the tip, but I’ve got to get your signature.”
Silence, then Houston’s voice spoke up close. “I signed the note. Won’t that do?”
“Sorry. You know how it is with the Department of Transportation—forms, and more forms. It’ll be my butt if I don’t get it on the dotted line.”
A sigh of resignation. “All right.”
A chain rattled. I dropped my bag and braced myself. The deadbolt turned, the door opened, and I shoved through, knocking her off balance. She staggered back against the newel post of a steep staircase, face pale, eyes wide. Then she put her hands over her mouth and sank onto the bottom step. A whimper sounded in her throat.
I felt for a light switch, got the overhead on. Kept my distance as I said, “It’s okay. I’m not here to hurt you.”
A wisp of relief crept into her eyes, and after a few seconds she took her hands from her mouth. There was a spot of blood where she’d bitten her lower lip. “I … know you. You’re … ?”
“Sharon McCone. We met the other day at Roger’s flat.” “… Oh, right.”
“I spoke with Daniel Nagasawa. He told me about your call. I’ve been trying to contact you.”
The blood from her lip was dribbling onto her chin. She wiped it with her fingers, wiped the fingers on her jeans. “How’d you find me? Nobody knows, not even the friend I leased my flat to.”
“I’m a private investigator. Tracing missing persons is one of the things I do.” I handed her my card.
She put it in her pocket without looking at it. “What d’you want with me?”
“To talk. I’d like to help.”
“Help? Yeah, sure, like you give a shit about me.”
“I ‘give a shit’ about any innocent person who’s so frightened she abandons her whole life and runs.”
Her eyes moved jumpily—left, right, left. “I can take care of myself.”
“I don’t think so. Look at you: you’re so scared you practically peed in your pants when I came through the door. You’ve been here since, when? Wednesday night? I’ll bet you haven’t changed your clothes, washed your hair, or bathed. Have you been out of the house? Do you even have enough food on hand?”
“I’ve been out, damn you! I’ve got food!” She ran her hand through her cropped hair, added in a weak voice, “I’m fine.”
“Jody, I meant it when I said I’d like to help.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Because for the moment I’m all you’ve got.”
Houston led me to the kitchen at the back of the house— a tiny room with an adjoining breakfast nook containing a table and built-in benches next to a window that overlooked the backyard. Before we sat she moved two full grocery bags to the counter by the refrigerator, giving me a pointed look that said, “See—I have been out, I do have food.”
More rhododendrons crowded in close to the window, tapping on the glass in the rising wind. Houston shivered and lowered the canvas shade. “Those bushes really creep me,” she said. “They’re like hands trying to reach inside.”
“Whose place is this?”
“My great-aunt’s. At least it was. She’s eighty-nine, in a rest home in Portland. Last year she signed the deed over to me.”
And that meant her ownership of the cottage could be traced. I’d have to get her out of there.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s talk about Roger, and what has you on the run.”
She fidgeted. Clasped and unclasped her hands. Finally she began to speak—haltingly, breaking off whenever a real or imagined sound startled her. The wind baffled around the small cottage; the branches clawed at the glass; beams creaked and groaned. She sat on the edge of the bench, ready to leap off at the slightest provocation. I’d seldom questioned anyone more frightened.
It had started, she said, on a cold, blustery day the previous November when she and Roger holed up in her flat, ordered pizza, shared a joint and some Chianti. Roger was depressed, and not only by the weather. The smoke and wine loosened his customary reserve, and he broke his silence about his job.
“He said he and Dinah Vardon had gotten into a physical fight, and Max Engstrom had threatened to fire him. Not Dinah, just Rog, even though she was the one who attacked him.”
“Did he tell you what the fight was about?”
“He was standing up for a tech department staffer Dinah had humiliated to the point of tears. He called her— Dinah—a monster, and she came after him, scratched him up pretty bad. Rog was furious with her and the other VIPs at the ’zine, said he wanted to expose their abusive behavior to the press. I told him he’d better collect some solid evidence, because the press doesn’t like to turn on one of its own.”
Three days before Christmas Roger appeared at Houston’s door with champagne and caviar and lobster tails. He wanted to celebrate his finally having found a way to get the evidence he needed to expose the abuses at
InSite
. Jody was concerned about his manic behavior, but she went along with the celebration.
“He wouldn’t tell me exactly what he planned to do—except that he was going to take all of them down. A lot of what he said that night didn’t make much sense at the time. You see, with Rog, it was like he was speaking in code, and sometimes I really had to work to get at the meaning behind it. His perceptions didn’t come from the same place as mine—which was one reason why I could never love him. I mean, don’t you at least have to understand what the person you love is saying?”
Early in the new year, Jody continued, she invited Roger to dinner. Once again he was out of sorts, edgy and preoccupied. When she first asked what was wrong, he dismissed his mood as a figment of her imagination. But as the wine flowed, he admitted that his plan to expose the abuses at the magazine had gotten sidetracked.
“He’d found out some things, but when he tried to fit them together, they didn’t compute. And he’d gotten off in a wrong direction, forced somebody to do something un-ethical for him, and now the person’s career was in jeopardy.”
“He didn’t go into the specifics?”
“No. Rog could be secretive. I told him maybe he should just give it up and look for a new job. But he said he couldn’t do that. Once he got started on something he couldn’t quit.”
“Okay, what happened then?”
“I screwed everything up.”
Late in January Roger had grown more optimistic. He told Jody he’d uncovered something wrong at the magazine—something more serious than management’s poor treatment of the employees—and it was only a matter of time till he had the evidence he needed to go public with it. Again he wouldn’t go into specifics, except to say it was major. He discussed his options, said he favored taking the details to the print media, as it would be a difficult sell to an online publication or even television. The
Chronicle,
he thought, would be the ideal venue.
“Did he contact anyone on the paper?”
“Not that I know of. To tell you the truth, he made me uncomfortable. He was completely obsessed with getting back at those people, and at the time I wondered how much of this stuff wasn’t coming from his imagination.”
On the last Friday of the month Jody received a call from Max Engstrom asking her to come to his office to discuss her most recent freelance assignment; there, in the presence of Jorge Amaya and Lia Chen, he rejected her graphics for a story on California housing markets as not being up to the magazine’s standards.
“I was pissed. There was nothing wrong with my work. I’d had to struggle to come up with something that was visually interesting, and it had taken longer than it should have. And I was counting on their check to pay some overdue bills. I tried to be reasonable at first, but Max wouldn’t listen.”
For most of the meeting Engstrom stood with his back to Jody, staring out his office window at the beehive of staffers below. Jorge Amaya examined his manicure and smirked. Lia Chen squirmed and refused to make eye contact. When Engstrom made an imperious gesture of dismissal, saying his mind was made up, Houston lost it.
“Totally lost it. I reamed into him. Said the trouble with his magazine was that the people in charge didn’t give a fuck about the staffers or freelancers—in fact, took pleasure in hurting and humiliating them. Max told me I had no proof of that, and I said the scratches on Rog from when Dinah went after him were proof enough. And then I made my big mistake.”
“Which was … ?”
“I said they’d better tell Dinah not to put her claws on Rog again, and the rest of them better watch their behavior too, because he and I had proof of everything that was going on there, and could nail them bad. And then I stormed out.”
That night Jody told Roger what she’d said. He seemed shaken, but quickly covered up, trying to make light of it. She suggested that if anyone asked him, he should tell them she was simply making idle threats, and he said he’d do that. And he’d also be more careful in collecting his final pieces of evidence.
“But after that night everything was different between us. He started to avoid me. If we ran into each other he’d be polite, but he turned down my offers of drinks and dinner. Then on Valentine’s Day he showed up at my door around ten in the evening. I thought he wanted to apologize for ignoring me, but instead he asked if he could use my computer to send a couple of e-mails; his server was down. He was in my office for five or ten minutes, then thanked me and left. I thought about going up after him, taking him a bottle of Valentine’s Day wine. I mean, I valued the friendship. In a way, I loved him, even if I wasn’t
in
love with him. But then I thought, the hell with it. He’d been using me, was all. So I didn’t go up, and around eleven-thirty I heard the elevator going down from his floor. And the next morning there it was on the TV news: Roger Nagasawa, son of prominent …”
“Hey, don’t cry.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Those e-mails, did he leave them on your computer or delete them?”
“He deleted … Oh, God, I don’t know what to do!”
“About what?”
“I don’t know who to trust.”
“Try me.”
“But how do I know … ? I’m in worse trouble than you can imagine.”
“Then you need me to help you get out of it.”
“… Okay. All right. But before I tell you anything else, there’s something I better show you. I’ll get it. It’s upstairs.”
She got up and went along the hallway. I waited, listening to the gusting of the wind and the rattling of the window-panes. A roofbeam gave a tremendous crack, and I looked up apprehensively. When several minutes passed and Houston hadn’t come back, I went upstairs after her.
The second story was one room, with a dormer window at the front. The window was open, and Houston was gone.
Saturday
The white curtains billowed out from the window, and fog-damp touched my face. Somewhere on the floor below a clock chimed—one, two, finally a dozen times.