Velasquez's intention was to stay the night in Santa Barbara, he said, at the St. Charles Hotel, and then return to Rancho Rinconada de los Robles early the next day. Quincannon asked and was given directions, in the event that he was required to stay in town longer than just one day. He also managed to find out that O'Hare was stopping at the Delgado, a small lodging house on Gutierrez Street. If for any reason another talk with the historian became necessary, he wanted to know where to find him.
Quincannon saw Velasquez into a waiting hack, said good-bye to O'Hare, who set off on foot, and then engaged a hack for himself. It deposited him at the Arlington Hotel on State Street, Santa Barbara's finest hostelry-an elegant three-story building surmounted by a tall, square tower that concealed a water tank, and surrounded by lush gardens. The desk clerk insisted that no rooms were available. Fifteen minutes later, after a private discussion with the manager, Evander Boggs, chief of the Secret Service's San Francisco field office, was personally escorted to a large and comfortable third-floor suite.
Quincannon spent a few minutes refreshing himself, went downstairs again, treated himself to a brace of ten-cent Cuban panatelas at the tobacco counter in the lobby, and strolled outside. There was fine spring weather here, too; instead of taking another hack, he decided to walk to Anacapa Street. He unwrapped one of the cigars, lighted it, and set out to meet James Evans.
What he found at number 1206 Anacapa Street, however, was a German family named Kreutz.
James Evans had not resided there for three months, and neither the Kreutzes nor anyone else in the neighborhood knew what had happened to him.
PART III
1986
ONE
By Sunday noon I was back home from the hospital, relieved in one way and disturbed in another. When Nick and I had arrived there at seven, Mama had already been given something to relax her before surgery. She kept telling me I should go to work, and after the third time I stopped reminding her that I didn't have to go, it was the weekend. She asked Nick about how his run had gone at least seventeen times; since it was a subject that interested him far more than going to work interested me, he replied to each question, dredging up more details to keep her mind off her imminent operation. He was explaining how his buddy Ed's pulled hamstring might keep him out of the Carpinteria Marathon two weeks from now, when they came to take Mama down to surgery.
Then Nick and I went to the cafeteria to wait. While he drank milk and read the Sunday paper, I gulped down what seemed like gallons of black coffee. I'd bought a sweetroll, too, but I couldn't eat it; my huge grief-induced appetite of the night before had vanished and I felt choked up and slightly queasy. Anyway, every time my hand strayed toward the roll, the old health nut's jaw pushed out in a way that made him look like a bulldog.
To keep my mind off what might be going on in the operating room, I thought back to the old detective's report I'd read the night before. It had actually been only a fragment of a report, ending abruptly, as if the rest of it had been lost. I wondered what had happened in-and to-the additional pages. Had John Quincannon found Don Esteban Velasquez's missing artifacts? There was no way of knowing.
Finally Dr. George found us and said the operation had gone well; Mama was on her way to her room from Recovery.
It was when I saw Mama that I started to worry all over again. She was groggy, but I'd expected that. What I hadn't expected was for her to be as closed and unresponsive as she'd been the afternoon before. She held Nick's and my hands and said she was relieved that everything was going to be okay, but she didn't ask when she could go home, or if we'd gotten hold of Carlota yet, or any of the other things that would have made me feel she was really there with us. And when Dr. George said we should go and let her rest, she didn't protest. As we went out, she was staring at the ceiling just as she had been when we'd left the day before.
I tried to talk to Nick about it, but he was looking preoccupied and said something about having errands to run; he left me in the hospital parking lot. His abrupt departure made me feel even more shaky inside. I got into my car and sat there for a few minutes, thinking. All my life I'd depended on Mama, and now she was weak and in need of support herself. And ever since I'd known him, Nick had seemed strong and self-assured, but Mama's illness seemed to have unnerved him. This was, I decided after a few minutes, one of those growing-up experiences when you realize that your elders are not invincible but mere humans who are easily frightened when their increasingly fragile bodies seem to be letting them down. Being able to categorize it that way made the situation a little less threatening but did nothing to comfort me. I've found that coming-of-age events are seldom reassuring until their emotional barbs are blunted by time.
When I got home I thought about having some more coffee, then drank a glass of wine instead. It eased the shakiness somewhat but also made me feel light-headed and curiously directionless. With several hours until I could go back to see Mama again, I prowled the house, straightening a pile of books on the bedside table, putting away a couple of pairs of shoes, washing the few dishes that stood in the sink. I tried Carlota again, and when I got no answer, I decided to pay some bills. But once I was back in the living room, I couldn't make myself sit down. So I paced.
My thoughts kept moving, too: from Mama to Dave; from worry to disbelief. I felt disoriented, and there was a strangeness in my usually familiar surroundings. The living room walls seemed whiter than before; in contrast, the furnishings looked shabbier. I wasn't sure about that painting I'd bought a couple of months ago; it was a primitive, but maybe the technique was amateurish. Even my pottery sun face by an artist named Candelario looked strange to me; its wide red mouth and blazing eyes seemed too intense for a room I'd intended as a restful haven.
Suddenly I had an overpowering impulse to drag all the furniture into the center of the room, pile the smaller things on top of it, and begin rearranging. To resist what could only be a disastrous urge, I finally paused and thumbed through the old detective's report that I'd left on my desk when I'd finished reading it the night before.
After only a few lines, my mind was no longer on my troubles; instead it was with John Quincannon, arriving in the Santa Barbara of those earlier, more tranquil times. There would have been no shopping malls and housing tracts, no cars and trucks and exhaust fumes, no cute boutiques and trendy restaurants and all the other things that were now spoiling the charm of the town. I wished I could see Santa Barbara as Quincannon had seen it; wished I could go along with him as he pursued Don Esteban Velasquez's missing artifacts. It was strange, I thought, how I felt a kinship with the long-deceased detective. I wanted to know more about him, what had happened to him while he was here, how his case had turned out. I was terribly disappointed that the rest of the report was missing.
Paging through the report again, I picked out the name of the church that the Velasquez family had constructed on their rancho-San Anselmo de las Lomas. Saint Anselm of the Hills. There was a little town in the Santa Ynez Valley, northeast of Santa Barbara, called Las Lomas; since the rancho had been located in that same general area, it was probable that its name was an abbreviated version of the church's.