“Greg? When did you talk to him?”
“Fifteen minutes ago. He wants you to call. It’s important.”
“Thanks!”
“Wait a minute—”
I hung up and dialed Greg again. He answered, sounding rushed.
Without preamble, I explained what I’d found in the wild mustard patch.
“That’s why I called you.” His voice was unusually gentle. “We got word this morning.”
“What word?” My stomach knotted.
“An identification on a body that washed up near Devil’s Slide yesterday evening. Apparently she went in at low tide, or she would have been swept much farther to sea.”
I was silent.
“Sharon?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“You know how it is out there. The signs warn against climbing.
The current is bad.”
But I’d never, in almost a year, seen the old Japanese woman near the sea. She was always up on the slope, where her weeds grew.
“When was low tide, Greg?”
“Yesterday? Around eight in the morning.”
Around the time the restaurant cashier had noticed her, and several hours before the teenagers had arrived. And in between? What had happened out there?
I hung up and stood at the top of the slope, pondering. What should I look for? What could I possibly find?
I didn’t know, but I felt certain the old woman had not gone into the sea by accident. She had scaled those cliffs with the best of them.
I started down, noting the shoes and the bags in the thicket, marching resolutely past the wild mustard toward the abandoned truck. I walked all around it, examining its exterior and interior, but it gave me no clues. Then I started toward the tunnel in the cliff.
The area, so crowded on Sundays, was sparsely populated now.
San Franciscans were going about their usual business, and visitors from the tour buses parked at nearby Cliff House were leery of climbing down here. The teenagers were the only other people in sight. They stood by the mouth of the tunnel, watching me.
Something in their postures told me they were afraid. I quickened my steps.
The boys inclined their heads toward one another. Then they whirled and ran into the mouth of the tunnel.
I went after them. Again, I had the wrong shoes. I kicked them off and ran through the coarse sand. The boys were halfway down the tunnel.
One of them paused, frantically surveying a rift in the wall. I prayed he wouldn’t go that way, into the boiling waves below.
He turned and ran after his companion. They disappeared at the end of the tunnel.
I hit the hard-packed dirt and increased my pace. Near the end, I slowed and approached more cautiously. At first I thought the boys had vanished, but then I looked down. They crouched on a ledge below. Their faces were scared and young, so young.
I stopped where they could see me and made a calming motion.
“Come on back up,” I said. “I won’t hurt you.”
The mustached one shook his head.
“Look, there’s no place you can go. You can’t swim in that surf.”
Simultaneously they glanced down. They looked back at me and both shook their heads.
I took a step forward. “Whatever happened, it couldn’t have—”
Suddenly I felt the ground crumble. My foot slipped and I pitched forward. I fell to one knee, my arms frantically searching for a support.
“Oh, God!” the mustached boy cried. “Not you, too!” He stood up, swaying, his arms outstretched.
I kept sliding. The boy reached up and caught me by the arm. He staggered back toward the edge and we both fell to the hard rocky ground. For a moment, we both lay there panting. When I finally sat up, I saw we were inches from the sheer drop to the surf.
The boy sat up, too, his scared eyes on me. His companion was flattened against the cliff wall.
“It’s okay,” I said shakily.
“I thought you’d fall just like the old woman,” the boy beside me said.
“It was an accident, wasn’t it?”
He nodded. “We didn’t mean for her to fall.”
“Were you teasing her?”
“Yeah. We always did, for fun. But this time we went too far. We took her purse. She chased us.”
“Through the tunnel, to here.”
“Yes.”
“And then she slipped.”
The other boy moved away from the wall. “Honest, we didn’t mean for it to happen. It was just that she was so old. She slipped.”
“We watched her fall,” his companion said. “We couldn’t do anything.”
“What did you do with the purse?”
“Threw it in after her. There were only two dollars in it. Two lousy dollars.” His voice held a note of wonder. “Can you imagine, chasing us all the way down here for two bucks?”
I stood up carefully, grasping the rock for support. “Okay,” I said.
“Let’s get out of here.”
They looked at each other and then down at the surf.
“Come on. We’ll talk some more. I know you didn’t mean for her to die. And you saved my life.”
They scrambled up, keeping their distance from me. Their faces were pale under their tans, their eyes afraid. They were so young.
To them, products of the credit-card age, fighting to the death for two dollars was inconceivable. And the Japanese woman had been so old. For her, eking out a living with the wild mustard, two dollars had probably meant the difference between life and death.
I wondered if they’d ever understand.
Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave
ANTONIA FRASER
Lady Antonia Fraser (b. 1932), the London-born daughter of Lord Longford, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and served as editor of the publisher Weidenfeld and Nicolson’s Kings and Queens of England series before her marriage to Hugh Fraser in 1956. Her first books were children’s accounts of King Arthur and Robin Hood, followed by Dolls (1963) and A History of Toys (1966). Beginning with the hugely successful Mary Queen of Scots (1969), she became a best-selling author of popular British history and biography. Books on Cromwell, James I, Charles II, and the wives of Henry VIII followed. Her broad literary background also includes a translation from the French of Christian Dior’s autobiography, radio and television plays, and the editorship of a number of poetry anthologies. Her first marriage having been dissolved in 1977, she married the playwright Harold Pinter in 1980.
She turned to crime fiction with Quiet As a Nun (1977), the first novel about Jemima Shore, one of the first and most successful sleuths to come from the world of broadcast journalism. In the final revised edition of his crime-fiction history Bloody Murder (1992), Julian Symons wrote that Fraser “might reasonably be called a feminist crime writer, but she could also be called a cosy one. Her writing has an evident pleasure in what she is doing that is engaging but her individual distinction is in the construction of particularly clever plots, of which Cool Repentance (1982) seems to me the most brilliant.”
Detection with a touch of romance in an exotic background show the author and character at their best in “Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave.”
This is your graveyard in the sun—” The tall young man standing in her path was singing the words lightly but clearly.
It took Jemima Shore a moment to realize exactly what message he was intoning to the tune of the famous calypso. Then she stepped back. It was a sinister and not particularly welcoming little parody.
“This is my island in the sun
Where my people have toiled since time begun—”