Tom Chu perched on the corner of the deck. His expression was still friendly, but a little guarded now. “What do you want to know?”
“Anything you want to tell me.”
“You mean like dirt.”
“I mean anything that might help me locate her.”
Tom looked uncertain.
“This isn’t a game,” I told him. “Or a case of a mother trying to find out more than her daughter wants her to know. Adrian’s been missing for over two weeks now. She could be in serious trouble. She could even be dead.”
“Yeah.” He sighed heavily. “Okay, I don’t really know anything. Not fact, you know? But…You talk with her boyfriend, Kirby Dalson?”
“Yes.”
“What’d you think of him?”
“What do you think of him?”
“Bad news.”
“Why?”
Tom drew one of his legs up on the desk and fiddled with the lace of his sneaker; from the looks of the shoe, Lillian should have invested in Reebok. “Okay,” he said, “Kirby’s…always into something. Always scamming. You know what I’m saying?”
“Drugs?”
“Maybe, but I don’t think they’re his main thing.”
“What is?”
He shrugged. “Just…scams. Like a few times he got his hands on some test questions beforehand and sold them-for big bucks, too. And for a while he was selling term papers. Scalping sports and concert tickets that you knew had to be stolen. He’s always got a lot of cash, drives a sports car that everybody knows his folks didn’t buy for him. He tells his parents he’s got this part-time job in some garage, but all the time he’s just scamming. The only job he ever had was cleaning up the food concession area at Ocean Park Plaza, but that didn’t last long. Beneath him, I guess.”
“What about Adrian-you think she was in on his scams?”
“She might’ve been. I mean, this past year she’s changed.”
“How?”
“Just…changed. She’s not as friendly anymore. Seems down a lot of the time. And she’s always with Kirby.”
“Did this start around the time her father left?”
He shook his head. “After that. I mean, her old man left. Too bad, but it happens.” His eyes moved to a photograph on Lillian’s desk – the two of them and a younger girl, no father. “No,” he added, “it was after that. Maybe six months ago.”
“Do you remember anything that happened to Adrian around that time that might have caused this change?”
He thought. “No-sorry, I know Adrian okay, but she’s not really a good friend or anything like that.”
I thanked him and asked him to call me if he thought of anything else. Then I walked across the park to the freshly painted Victorian where our main offices-and the attic nest where I live-are.
The set-up at All Souls is kind of strange for a law firm, but then even the location is strange. Bernal Heights, our hillside neighborhood is the southeastern part of the city, is ethnically mixed, architecturally confused, and unsure whether it wants to be urban or semi-rural. At All Souls we’re also ethnically mixed; our main building is a combination of offices, communal living space, and employees’ separate quarters; and most of us don’t know if we’re nineties progressives or throwbacks to the sixties. All in all, it adds up to an interesting place to work.
And Sharon McCone’s an interesting person to work for. That afternoon I found her behind her desk in the window bay at the front of the second floor-slumped spinelessly in her swivel chair, staring outside with that little frown that says she’s giving some problem a work over. She’s one of those slim women who seem taller than they are-the bane of my pudgy five-foot-three existence-and manages to look stylish even when she’s wearing jeans and a sweater like she had on that day. When I first came to work for her, her dark good looks gave me attacks of inferiority because of my carrot top and freckles and thrift-shop clothes. Then one day I caught her having her own attack-mortified because she’d testified in court wearing a skirt whose hem was still pinned up waiting to be stitched. I told her she’d probably started a new fad and soon all the financial district power-dressers would be wearing straight pains around their hemlines. We had a good laugh over that, and I think that’s when we started to be friends.
Anyway, I’d just about decided to stop back later when she turned, frowned some more, and snapped. “What?”
The McCone bark is generally worse than the bite, so I went in and sat in my usual place on her salmon-pink chaise lounge and told her about the Conway case. “I don’t know what I should do next.” I finished. “I’ve already talked with this Kirby kid, and if I come back at him to soon-”
“Aunt June.”
“What?” I’d only mentioned Adrian’s favorite aunt and Donna’s apparent dislike of her in passing, and Sharon hadn’t even looked like she was listening very hard. She’d been filing her nails the whole time-snick, snick, snick. Someday I’m going to tell her that the sound drives me crazy.
“Go see Aunt June,” she said. “She’s Adrian’s closest relative. Mom disapproves of her. Go see her.”
If it didn’t save me so much trouble, I’d hate the way she puts things together. I stood up and headed for the door. “Thanks, Shar!”
She waggled the nail file at me and swiveled back toward the window.
II
Adrian’s aunt’s full name was June Simoom-no kidding – and she lived on Tomales Bay in western Marin County. The name alone should have tipped me off that Aunt June was going to be weird.
Tomales Bay is a thin finger of water that extends inland from the Pacific forty-some miles northwest of San Francisco. It’s rimmed by small cottages, oyster farms, and salt marsh, and the largest town on its shores-Inverness-has a population of only a few hundred. The bay also has the dubious distinction of being right smack on top of the San Andreas Fault. Most of the time the weather out there is pretty cold and gloomy-broody, I call it-and it’s a hefty drive from the city-across the Golden Gate Bridge, then through the close-in suburbs and rolling farmland to the coast.
It was after seven when I found the mailbox that June Simoom had described to me over the phone-black with a silver bird in flight and the word WINGSPREAD stenciled on it, another tipoff-and bounced down an unpaved driveway through a eucalyptus grove to a small cottage and a couple of outbuildings slouching at the water’s edge.
My car is a 1964 Rambler American. A couple of years ago when I met my current-well, on again, off again-boyfriend, Willie Whelan, he cracked up at this first sight of it. “You mean you actually drive that thing?” he asked. “On the street?” No matter. The Ramblin’ Wreck and I have gone many miles together, and at the rate I’m saving money, we’re going to have to go many more. Barring experiences like Aunt June’s driveway, that is.
The cottage was as bad off as my car, but I know something about real-estate values (money is my biggest fascination, because I have too little of it), and this shoreline property, bad weather and all, would have brought opening offers of at least a quarter mil. They’d have to demolish the house and outbuildings, of course, but nature and neglect seemed to already be doing a fine job of that. Everything sagged, including the porch steps, which were propped up by a couple of cement blocks.
The porch light was pee-yellow and plastered with dead bugs. I groped my way to the door and knocked, setting it rattling in its frame. It took June Simoom a while to answer, and when she did…Well, Aunt June was something else.
Big hair and big boobs and a big voice. My, she was big! Dressed in flowing blue velvet robes that were thrift-shop fancy, not thrift-shop cheap (like my clothes used to be before I learned about credit and joined millions of Americans who are in debt up to their nose hairs). Makeup? Theatrical. Perfume? Gallons. If Marin ever passed the anti-scent ordinance they kept talking about, Aunt June would have to move away.