I realize you may be feeling perfectly horrified at the idea, in which case toss these pages into the bin and don't give me another thought. I write only as a gesture to my brother, of whom I was very fond and whom I still miss daily. If something of him has surfaced in you, and particularly if that element makes the proposal of an island sojourn appealing, please write to tell me when you wish to arrive.
Agatha Cooper
And to think, Kate reflected, that my first reaction was to laugh in delight at its absurdity. The memory made her feel ill, because in reality Lee's aunt had spoken, and Lee had answered, and now Kate was alone in the big house. She put the letter away and went into the hallway, where she gathered the shed clothes from the night before and took them not into their bedroom, but down to the small guest room at the end of the upstairs hall. She hung the denim jacket in the closet, stripped off her tank top and shorts and threw them along with the other dirty clothes into the guest hamper, and walked nude up the carpeted hall to get her work clothes out of the big bedroom. At the mirrored closet, she paused and eyed her reflection sourly. She wouldn't be surprised to find two more pounds on the scale: Long drives and comfort eating were killers. She looked pale, restless; her hair was nearly in her eyes. Even her fingernails were dirty and overlong.
"Christ, you're a mess," she said to her reflected self, and went to take a long shower with a great deal of soap.
She did not consult the scales; she did cut her fingernails.
Going back downstairs, she checked a second time, but the answering machine was still obstinately free of messages, not a red light to be seen. She even pushed the playback button, rationalizing that the light could be broken, but it merely clunked and beeped at her and was silent. She decided to go in to work after all, although she was only on call.
After the brooding quiet of the house, the gritty chaos of the Department of Justice was almost a balm to Kate's spirit. She had been away for little more than a week, but it might have been a few minutes. Kitagawa nodded as he passed her, deep in conversation with a man in the garish uniform of a doorman. Tom Boyle raised a finger in greeting but did not take the phone from his ear. She went to her desk, stowed her gun and a thermos of coffee in the bottom drawer, and sat in her chair: home again.
Dellamonica had a new tie. April Robinette had spilled something on her skirt. Gomes came through cursing furiously and carrying a massive electronic typewriter under his arm. There was another new plant on Al Hawkin's desk, already looking resigned to a lingering death. The top of Kate's desk was covered with scribbled messages that would take most of the day to decipher and deal with. Among them she found a flyer with the grainy photograph of a young girl with short hair, and she did not need to read the description of the missing girl to know that the police in Washington - no, she corrected herself, this one was from Oregon - were afraid that the so-called Snoqualmie Strangler had claimed a sixth victim. It had been several days since Kate had heard or read any news, but Jules was no doubt more up to date: This was the maniac who worried Jules, although there was no boy among his victims. Kate thought briefly of the girl's apprehension - no, her fear - that the telephone call had caused, and then her own phone rang.
Despite what she had told Jules, people did die in San Francisco on a Tuesday afternoon. In this case it was a drive-by shooting, in broad daylight, in the Castro district, with three dozen eager and contradictory witnesses to sort out; she would not have much opportunity to doze off over her files that night.
Dropping the flyer into her wastebasket, Kate retrieved her gun and her thermos, and went out to do her job.
THREE
With September began the phone calls from Jules. In the first week, the girl called twice, to check on the search for Dio. They were brief calls, depressing for both of them. Kate was, in fact, looking for him, even after Al Hawkin had returned, because although Al had told Kate to concentrate on her own work, not sweat over some kid Jules shouldn't have been talking to in the first place, Kate could hear the pride and the loneliness in Jules's voice, and she remembered what it was like to feel abandoned by the adults you loved. Jules was going through a bad patch, and Kate could justify only just so many hours at work, so anything that filled the hours at home was all right with her - even talking to an angry twelve-year-old.
The tone of these telephone conversations evolved rapidly under the pressures from both sides. After the brief, uncomfortable calls of the first week, Kate half-expected that Jules would not try again; instead, the calls began hesitantly to take on a life of their own. Under the impetus of her summer experience, Jules's inevitable back-to-school essay of "What I Did During Vacation" evolved into a major project on homelessness, with Kate as her primary resource.
Even after the paper had been turned in to the astonished but pleased teacher, the phone calls continued, always beginning with the ritual "Anything about Dio?" before wandering off into twenty, even thirty minutes of discussion about homelessness; the ethics of capitalism; the lack of good teachers in the universe; her word for the day (meniscus, braggadocio, and haruspex were among the sesquipedalian ones, but the shorter mensch, spirit, and vagrant interested her, as well); the difficulties of getting a good education when surrounded by fools who were obsessed with clothing, hair, and boys; the psychological need for a peer group; the homeless again, and what they did for companionship; the friends Jules had made in her new home; the difference between a boyfriend and a boy friend; clothing, hair, and boys; the politics of clothing, hair, and boys; the pros and cons of short versus long hair; a boy friend called Josh; Kate's work; life in general; life in particular. To her surprise, Kate found herself patient with these adolescent maunderings, and, more than that, positively missing them when three or four days passed without a phone call.
The truth was, the house on Russian Hill was too damn big and too damn quiet. One night, she came home and found a message on the answering machine: Jon was thinking of hopping over to London, since Lee was not there to need his assistance; he would ring when he got back to Boston. "Cheerio, ducks." He did not explain how he knew that Lee was still away. Pride kept Kate from calling him back on the number he had left, but the inevitable conclusion that Lee and Jon had been in communication made the house ring with silence. She tried leaving the radio on, to defuse that first awful minute of coming home to rooms that had not breathed since she left, but the ruse did not work.
One day in mid-September, unpacking the bags after a desultory trip through the aisles of the supermarket, Kate discovered a box of cat kibbles in a bag between the packages of dried pasta and a jug of red wine. She held it up, a totally unfamiliar box she could have sworn she'd never touched before. The orange cat on the front of it grinned at her.
"My subconscious wants me to get a cat," she said aloud in disgust. She took the kibbles to the back door, poured half of them onto the brick patio for the birds, and left the box next to the door. No damn cat.
The next night, late, she was getting into bed when she heard a strange slapping noise down on the patio. Cautiously, she looked over the upstairs balcony and into the face of an obese and disgusted raccoon, who all but shook the empty box at her and tapped its foot. On her way home from work the following day, she stopped at the local corner store and bought five boxes of bone-shaped dog biscuits. The Vietnamese man who ran the cash register looked at her in surprise.