Half Moon Bay: A Novel (Clay Edison Book 3)
Half Moon Bay: Chapter 34

We entered a living room/dining room/kitchen combination whose boundaries existed wholly in the imagination, the surfaces throughout being uniformly matted and soiled. Most of the space was taken up by a hospital bed and its accoutrements: drips, lines, monitors, over-bed table with an uneaten meal of white bread and pudding cup and foil-top orange juice.

Beneath layers of swaddling slept the oldest living human being I’d ever seen. Veins scribbled her waxy face; liver-spotted scalp, under fine white cloud cover, made a map of the world. Begrudgingly her chest rose and fell, as if she were debating the merits of each successive breath.

To accommodate the bed, everything else had been shunted up against the walls. Rolling stand with seventeen-inch television. Love seat, its itchy upholstery the same color as the carpet. Enna F. perched on an arm, browsing Us Weekly. A portable AC unit contributed vegetal humidity. The kitchen counter was a buffet of gauze, gloves, surgical tape, linens, and bedpans. The bin for dirties sat outside on a patio enclosed by a coarse plank fence and accessible via a sliding glass door.

From under the TV stand nosed a pair of smooth black ballet flats.

Two pilled samplers hung on the wall.

HOME IS NOT A PLACE IT IS THE PEOPLE YOU LOVE

FRIENDS ARE GOD’S WAY OF TAKING CARE OF US

Sandwiched between them was a wedding portrait.

The bride’s gown was poofy and bejeweled, like an exploding soda can, the rhinestone and lace embodiment of a forgettable cultural juncture, the seventies belly flopping into the eighties.

A lot to overcome.

Chrissy Klausen had pulled it off with ease.

Her teeth were perfect. Her skin was perfect. Her bone structure was a miracle. Teased golden hair, against all odds, was perfect, with scores of dime-sized yellow sunflowers woven throughout.

One for each person whose hopes she’d crushed?

Which was Norman Franchette? Buddy Hopewell? Diane Olsen?

A closer look showed I was wrong. Her skin wasn’t perfect. There were two faint scars, one by her chin and another above her right eyebrow, reminders of a brutal beating, a vicious fall. She’d healed well, and in a way the marks added to her appeal, humanizing her so that she seemed less doll-like and more a creature of flesh and blood.

Still, it was her wedding day. She could’ve asked the photographer to airbrush them out.

She’d kept them in.

The count wore a ruffled shirt and a mustard tuxedo with shark-fin lapels. He was not prototypically Italian, but sandy-haired and bucktoothed. Leaning against a tree trunk, dazed with dumb luck, he gripped Chrissy around the waist to prevent her from bolting.

Audrey Marsh high-stepped over clutter. “It’s too hot in here.”

I followed her out onto the patio, where she closed the door and we faced each other, crosshatched by the shadow of a latticework roof.

“Why are you here? Really,” she said. “Why.”

“Peter Franchette had a sister. Peggy. That’s her as a baby, with her mother.”

“And?” Without waiting for an answer, she held up the snapshot. “This could be anyone.”

“Is that what you think?”

“You could be anyone. I don’t know what you imagine this proves.”

“It doesn’t prove anything.”

“Have you been following me?”

“No.”

“How do I know that? This could be Photoshopped.”

“It’s not. But you’re right. I don’t have any way of proving that to you.”

She rubbed at her upper arms, trying to free herself from an invisible rope.

“It’s not my intention to upset you,” I said.

“You didn’t upset me. It’s just a little surprising, is all.”

I nodded.

“What do you expect me to say?” she asked.

“I don’t expect anything.”

“You brought this here to show me. You expect something.”

“In my opinion, the resemblance is pretty striking.”

She made a curt, dismissive noise.

“You don’t see it.”

“Are you actually asking? Or are you trying to get me to say something?”

“I’m asking.”

“People look like people. It happens all the time. How many Elvis impersonators are there? How many celebrities have body doubles? Saddam Hussein had a whole stable of them, there was a story about it in The New Yorker.”

“All true.”

“Okay,” she said. “So?”

“You didn’t have to invite me in. You did. I think there’s something about that that bothers you, fundamentally.”

“Yes, because it’s surprising.”

“Is that all?”

“Of course that’s all. What else would there be?”

“I don’t know. Otherwise I’m not sure why I’m not driving away right now.”

“Good question.”

“Say the word and I’ll leave,” I said.

Audrey Marsh didn’t reply.

I said, “You implied that you don’t look like either of your parents.”

“That happens, too,” she said, turning to grab a folding chair from against the fence.

She sat down clutching the snapshot. Her legs swept restless arcs until she noticed herself doing it and jammed her bare toes into the concrete. Tension radiated up through her body, as though she might catapult herself through the lattice and into the bleached sky.

“Whatever you’re telling yourself this means,” she said, “it’s absurd.”

“In your position I’d say the same thing.”

“Completely absurd.”

“Agreed. But it’s enough that I’m standing here despite us both knowing it’s absurd.”

Silence.

I said, “Do you want to have another look at the rest of the photos?”

“No. I don’t. I don’t understand what any of this has to do with Chrissy, either.”

To that point I hadn’t mentioned the abduction. If Audrey Marsh were to draw any inference from the snapshot, adoption would have been the logical choice.

I hesitated. I didn’t want to misstep again.

She sensed my dithering and immediately glanced up, alarmed. “What?”

“Peggy Franchette disappeared when she was eighteen months old. One of the FBI agents who was investigating believed Chrissy was involved.”

Audrey Marsh stared. “Why in the world would they think that?”

“She was the sole eyewitness. That’s why I wanted to talk to her.”

“What does that mean, disappeared?”

“She was kidnapped. They never found her. They never recovered a body.” I paused. “I can show you the file, if you’d like. I have it in my car.”

Her chin vibrated, as if she might scream. What leaked out instead was a warble of laughter. “One thing at a time, please.”

I nodded.

“This is all very entertaining,” she said. “A lot better than watching Francine sleep.”

Her tone was flip. A glassy sheath over serious distress.

“Anything else you’d like to share?” she said.

“How much do you want to know?”

“By all means, go ahead,” she said. “I don’t have anything till my three o’clock.”

—

I TOLD HER everything. Gene and Bev and the affair; Norman and Claudia; Peggy and the house fire; Codornices Park; Buddy and Phil and a postcard of the Pacific Ocean. Now and again she broke in for clarification, but for the most part she sat attentive, taking slow, deep breaths, her agitation gathering into a dense ball, like a new, heavy element created from the collision of many lesser ones.

We’d been on the patio for some time when the nurse stuck her head out.

“Miss? You’re okay?”

“Fine, Enna, thank you. Is Granny awake?”

“No, miss.”

“I’ll be in in a little bit.”

The nurse nodded uncertainly and retreated inside.

Audrey Marsh said, “My first take is that they don’t sound like people I’d want to spend time with.”

“Peter’s not a bad guy.”

“He’s paying you.”

I decided not to put too fine a point on it. “I wouldn’t’ve agreed to help him if I didn’t think he was sincere.”

“Sincerity’s never in short supply. Terrorists are sincere.” She squirmed in the chair. “What does he expect?”

“He wants to meet his sister.”

“It’s so important to him, what’s taken him so long?”

“He’s been searching for years. He just hasn’t had much luck.”

“Does he look like me, too?”

I smiled. “No. Like his father.”

“Well that’s good.” She eyed the sliding glass door. “You’re talking about my family. You realize that?”

“I’m not here to force the issue,” I said. “And I’m not asking you to accept anything I’m saying on faith. There’s a simple way to answer the question.”

“I’m not taking a DNA test. Forget it.”

I raised my hands in concession.

That established, she seemed to slough off a bit of her suspicion. An ironic smile played around her mouth. “I can’t say this is how I planned my morning off.”

“Honestly? Me neither.”

“You’re lucky you ran into me. Or—I don’t know. Not lucky. But…I’m only here a couple of times a month. I used to come more often. It got to be too emotionally draining.”

“I’m sure she appreciates your coming on some level.”

“That’s a nice idea. Let’s go with that.”

“May I ask, how old is she?”

“A hundred and three.”

I whistled.

“It’s not a cause for celebration,” she said. “She hasn’t spoken a word in five years. She rarely opens her eyes. I don’t think anyone expected this to drag on as long as it has.” She gnawed the tip of her thumb. “By the way, that’s another bone of contention. My mom’s always been the one to take care of her. She’s seventy-six herself. She was coming every day till I convinced her to let me get the nurse. Meanwhile Chrissy’s over there, living the life of Riley, contributing nothing.”

“One of the other Klausens I met runs the bait and tackle in Pillar Point.”

“No kidding. Who’s that?”

“His name’s Jerry. He told me he once got a box of wine misdelivered to him, addressed to Francine Klausen, from Europe.”

She snorted. “That sounds like my aunt. Wine. For God’s sake…My mom said Granny Fran always favored Chrissy, because she was so beautiful.”

“When I talk to people about her, that’s what they remember, her looks.”

“My mother’s an attractive woman in her own right. You can tell they’re sisters. But Chrissy, everything about her was just…better. You know? It’s a major source of insecurity for my mom.”

“How’d Chrissy meet the count?”

“I don’t know the story. I have to believe she had men proposing to her left and right.”

“Do you remember when the wedding was?”

“Well, I was born in ’68, and I was around eight or nine. So ’76 or ’77.” Audrey blinked. “Wow. Saying that makes me feel so old.”

Meaning Chrissy would have been long gone by 1988, when Phil Shumway came looking for her. “Did you go?”

“Oh sure. We all flew over. It was a big deal. I think it was the highlight of my grandmother’s life, seeing her daughter marry this supposed count. I’d never left California, let alone the country. I assume Chrissy paid for our flights. Her husband, I mean. God knows we didn’t have the money.”

Designer clothes; luxury car. Yet that wasn’t how she saw herself.

“The ceremony was in this village outside Naples, where his family’s lived for ten thousand generations. All the crypts in the church had his surname on them. I was a flower girl. During the reception, they were passing out hors d’oeuvres, and I bit into a sandwich thinking it was peanut butter. It was liver,” she said, laughing, “foie gras. I started gagging and spit it out. My mom got very embarrassed and yelled at me. She was afraid of looking stupid in front of these ritzy Italians.”

“Does Chrissy have children of her own?”

“A son. I haven’t seen him in forever, either. When I was in grad school I saved up some money to do the backpacking thing in Europe. Come to think, that’s probably the last time I interacted with Chrissy in any real way. I’d ridden down from Rome to see Pompeii, and I called her from my hostel in Naples. I suppose I felt obliged to let her know I was in the vicinity. It ended up being this whole rigmarole. She invited me for dinner, but the nearest train station was fifteen kilometers from their villa. I asked if they could pick me up, and she began making excuses, saying I should take a cab. I told her I can’t do that, I’m on a shoestring budget. She offered to send one for me, but then she said I had to come that night, because she had a party the next evening, and after that I was booked on the overnight to Zurich…It was starting to feel not worth the effort. I said forget it, never mind. Then she changed her tune and said she’d come meet me the next afternoon. She gave me the name of a café, on the main piazza.

“She was really late. The café was lovely, incredibly old and incredibly expensive. I had to order something because the waiters kept giving me dirty looks. When I asked for coffee, they brought me an espresso. I asked if I could please have some cream and they acted like that was the craziest thing in the world. They brought me an enormous carafe. In my mind it’s around a gallon of cream. Not literally, but that’s how it felt, they’d made me so self-conscious. I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t, in case she did decide to show up, so I’m stalling, trying to stretch my drink as far as possible, hoping she’ll appear and I won’t have to pay for it.

“When she walked in, she had shopping bags on her arms. I couldn’t believe it. She said, ‘I’m sorry, I just never get in to the city, I have to seize the day.’ She’d brought her son with her. That was the first time I’d met him. My mom had his baby picture, and now he was eleven or twelve. He was blond, like her. Chrissy spoke to him in English and he answered in Italian. ‘Massimo, this is your cousin from America.’ He was completely uninterested in me, throwing spitballs at the waitstaff, gobbling sugar cubes out of the bowl…Chrissy informs me that in Italy they don’t drink coffee with milk or cream in the afternoon, only before ten a.m. I felt like I was a girl again, being scolded for spitting out my sandwich. Then she starts lecturing about how the café’s from the eighteenth century. It had been destroyed in an earthquake, and her husband’s family had given the owners money to rebuild. She said to her son, ‘See? They have your great-great-grandfather’s name on the wall.’ He didn’t care. She ordered him a slice of cake to occupy him and he took one bite. They lasted maybe twenty minutes in all before she stood up and announced they had to be going. I had to pay for their food, too.”

“I’m not surprised you grew apart.”

She nodded.

“What about your father?” I asked.

“He died when I was nineteen.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“He was a heavy smoker, so that confounds the data.”

“Can you tell me about him?”

“He was from Kentucky. Most of his family’s still there. There’s more of them, my cousins, uncles, and aunts. They’re real country. We see them every few years. He came out here with the Merchant Marines and met my mom at a dance. She was a senior in high school. They got married right after graduation.”

“What did he do?”

“He drove for Coca-Cola.”

“Your mom? Did she work?”

“She was a housewife. Is. She draws his pensions.”

“And you grew up in Half Moon Bay.”

She nodded.

“Any siblings?”

“No. They wanted more but they couldn’t.”

“Where do you live now?”

“Atherton.”

One of the area’s wealthiest suburbs. The Tesla fit right in.

I asked what she did professionally.

“I used to be in med tech. Now I run a consultancy for women entrepreneurs, with a focus on high-leverage practices to address issues in public health.”

“You said you went to graduate school.”

“I have a PhD in bioinformatics.”

People strike out along new paths. America relies on the promise of social mobility, and Silicon Valley fetishizes the scrappy, eccentric genius toiling in an unfinished garage. All the same, I couldn’t help noticing the contrast between her upbringing and her outcome, as well as the parallels to Peter Franchette.

Perhaps she was thinking the same thing; perhaps it had always preyed on her mind. She had begun again to chew her thumb.

“Stephen—my husband—he used to call me an alien,” she said. “It’s a running joke, I came down from another planet and they found me in the backyard.”

“Like Superman.”

“Like Superman. Or I’m adopted. That’s the other version of the joke. That’s what I thought you were going to tell me, that she’d given the baby up. But,” she said quickly, “everyone feels that way, growing up. ‘I’m not like them.’ It doesn’t mean anything. It’s how you figure out who you are. How much are you like your parents?”

“They’re tall, too. But point taken.”

“Right,” she said. “So.”

Silence.

She said, “I did ask her, once.”

“About.”

“Whether I was adopted. I wasn’t serious. I was being a teenager. ‘Ugh, you people are crazy, please tell me I’m not related to you.’ My own daughters must’ve said something similar to me at one point or another.”

“What prompted it?” I asked.

“I was going through old photo albums. It was for a school project, for my eighth-grade civics class. We were doing a unit on immigration. We were supposed to write about our family and where we came from. We had to assemble a family tree. I got out the albums to look for pictures to use. My parents at the county fair, when they were dating. Their wedding album. There’s one of me, from right after I was born, in the hospital, and one or two more after that. Then there’s a…sort of a gap.”

“How big of a gap are we talking about?”

“I really don’t…I don’t remember. I’d have to look.”

“You noticed it, though.”

“Yes. There’s no shortage of photos from when I got a little older. But if you’re going through carefully, like I was, you’d think some must have fallen out or gotten lost. And…And, I thought it was weird, because my father took lots of pictures. He loved cameras, the latest technology. He was always bringing home things we couldn’t afford, and my mother would make him return them. He had a camcorder before anyone else I knew.”

“How did your mother respond when you asked?”

“She lost her temper. Not unusual, in and of itself. She got upset at me all the time, for all sorts of small reasons, or no reason. She said something along the lines of they were too tired to take pictures of me. Apparently I was an exhausting child. That may have also been when she told me about being black Irish. I’m not sure. I worked hard on that project. I got an A. I might have it lying around somewhere. Anyhow,” she said, “we never talked about it again.”

“And you never had any reason to doubt her.”

“No.”

“Did she or your father ever get a visit from the police or the FBI?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“The agent, Phil Shumway,” I said, “he came through this area in early 1988. Does that ring a bell?”

“I wasn’t living here. I was away at college.”

“Did you encounter anything else subsequently that made you wonder?”

“Such as.”

“Do you have a birth certificate, for instance?”

“I think so. Stephen keeps all that stuff in a file.”

“Social Security card?”

“Same thing,” she said. “I’d have to check. But yes, I believe so. Yes.”

But the last word faded on her lips, and her face grew newly troubled. She began to gulp air through her open mouth, the cadence no longer meditative but labored. Her neck and cheeks flushed; she arched, rubbing at her sternum.

“Ms. Marsh. Are you feeling okay?”

“…fine.”

“Would you like a glass of water?”

“I just need a moment, please.”

To that point she had maintained a decidedly detached stance. With no real evidence, and nothing whatsoever that could be corroborated, she could, and should, disregard everything I’d said. Everything she said in return was likewise best written off as a thought experiment: a diversion to avoid having to sit in a cramped, depressing apartment with a woman unable to talk.

“Our house,” Audrey said.

She sat up, plucking at her blouse. “Our first house, in Menlo Park. We lived there for fifteen years, it’s where the girls grew up. We bought it in 1997, after Stephen made partner. I’d never owned a home before. I’d never owned anything. We were set to open escrow. The mortgage broker called me and said our application had been denied. I called the bank. They said there was a problem with my Social Security number.”

“What kind of problem?”

“They wouldn’t tell me anything else. They said I had to speak to Social Security directly. I called to ask what was going on, but they wouldn’t answer me over the phone, either, I had to come to the office in person. I went down, and they looked up the number and said it belonged to Audrey Marsh, but that she was deceased. I said, ‘That’s impossible. I’m Audrey Marsh.’ I had them check the birthday and it was the same as mine, June twenty-ninth. I said, ‘Look, this is me, I’m sitting right here. I don’t know what the source of the confusion is, but you need to fix it.’ ”

“You assumed it was a mistake.”

“Of course. A bug, or a clerical error. I’m arguing with them and holding up the line. They sent me over to talk to a supervisor. He accused me of trying to perpetrate fraud.”

“You’d never encountered any problems prior to then.”

“Never.”

“When you applied for a job, or a driver’s license.”

“No.”

“Tax return. Passport.”

“Nobody ever said a thing.”

Throughout California—throughout the country—people live and work and drive and borrow and marry and divorce without government oversight. They rely on a system that’s unwieldy, uncoordinated, and opaque, providing civil servants no incentive to go chasing after even the most blatant of cheats. The IRS isn’t in the habit of turning down money. Many of the automatic checks in place today didn’t exist twenty or thirty or forty years ago, before modern computer networks, and when identity theft wasn’t nearly as rampant. Time was you could obtain a birth certificate, over the counter, without ID. Even now it doesn’t require much more than willingness to commit a little light perjury.

That the discrepancy had ever come to her attention was the real wonder.

I guess banks cared who they were giving money to, or did, once upon a time.

I asked what happened with the mortgage.

“We rewrote it in my husband’s name. That was the least hassle. We didn’t want to lose the house. Our cars are in his name, too. He’s always managed our finances, it’s part of our division of labor.”

“Nothing’s come up since.”

“No.”

“In your mind that incident wasn’t connected to anything else.”

“Connected to what?”

“The absence of photos of you as a child, say.”

“But there are photos,” she said. “It’s just the one period that’s…”

She fell silent.

I opened the camera roll on my phone, replaceing the scallop-edged snapshot from the FBI file. “That’s Peggy, around the time of her kidnapping.”

Audrey slowly leaned forward. She stared at the screen for several beats, then sat back and moved her gaze to the ground once more. It was as if she had looked directly into the sun.

I asked, “Did your parents ever discuss why they didn’t have more children?”

“They couldn’t get pregnant.”

“Did they say why?”

“My mother ruptured her uterus.” She paused. “Giving birth to me. She had to have an emergency hysterectomy.”

“So it was just you.”

“Just me.”

“Are there photos of your mother, pregnant with you?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “There must be. I don’t know.”

I believed that Audrey Marsh had a birth certificate and a Social Security card; I believed that they were real. I believed that there was a hospital photo of a newborn.

The question was if any of them were hers.

Her face was creased and wan. In that moment I saw what Beverly Franchette must have looked like for much of her life.

She stood up. “I’ve been out in the sun too long.”

—

INSIDE THE APARTMENT Francine Klausen slept on. The nurse swung her knees aside, allowing Audrey a path to the bed. I expected her to take her grandmother’s hand, but she leaned toward the wall with the samplers and Chrissy Klausen’s wedding portrait to reach for another photograph.

I’d missed it on my way in. It was smaller, muddier, and less centrally placed. But the sobering heart of the matter was this: I’d missed it because I was too busy gawking at Chrissy in her bridal gown, sunflowers woven in her hair.

One for each fool.

“This is them,” Audrey said, handing me the second picture.

It was a Sears-style family portrait, taken before a backdrop of periwinkle crushed velvet. Print quality and clothing suggested the midseventies.

The man was short, potbellied, with straw hair in retreat and dissolving features: a shallow scratch of smile, hairline eyes. His wife stood about five inches taller. As Audrey had said, Carol Marsh was an attractive woman—more so, absent her sister. But of course Chrissy wasn’t absent. She never was, and her existence highlighted everything about Carol that was less than ideal.

Ears too wide. Brow a degree too shallow. The blond, washed-out rather than sun-kissed.

Carol wore her height without confidence, caving at the upper back so as not to tower over her husband. Her hand rested on the shoulder of a girl about nine years old. The girl’s greenish complexion and somber mien clashed with a flouncy white floral dress and matching bonnet tied over a helmet of dark, straight hair.

This is them.

You could read aloofness in her choice of words, an attempt to exclude herself: them, rather than us. But I heard a plea. I had thrown a slew of photos at her, and now she was offering one of her own as a form of rebuttal. The people Audrey Marsh knew as her mother and father were not a figment of her imagination. They’d fed her, and clothed her, and taken her to Sears for portraits.

This is my family. They are human beings.

There was another way, besides a DNA test, to begin answering questions.

Carol Marsh was still alive, and I had a badge.

Francine Klausen’s chest went up and down.

I handed Audrey the photo. “Thanks for showing it to me.”

The frame was old, starting to pull apart at the corners, its wire corroded and rough. When she put it back on the wall, it didn’t want to sit straight. It listed this way, then that, and she fussed with it until at last she achieved a semblance of balance.

—

THE SAN MATEO County Office of Vital Statistics was part of the health department, located in a bland, flat-roofed building shared by animal control. At the counter in room eleven, I spoke to a genial man named Felipe. He told me that as long as a death certificate had been issued after 1966, they could access it on-site. Otherwise I’d have to go to the office of the assessor–county clerk–recorder in Redwood City, and they’d have to call the document up from storage, which could take a couple of weeks.

I told him it was probably 1969 I needed, although it might be 1968 or 1970. I apologized that I didn’t have exact dates of birth or death.

No worries. Fill out the form to the best of my ability.

He did need to ask: What was my relationship to the decedent? Close relatives like a spouse, child, or parent were entitled to an official copy. Everyone else had to settle for an informational copy. Some sections would be redacted, and it would be labeled as such, making it useless for many types of transactions.

I said an informational copy would be fine.

In that case, they accepted credit, debit, checks, money orders, or cash. Give him five or ten minutes to complete the search.

I went down the hall to the vending machine.

I bought a bag of Fritos, two packages of beef jerky, and a Diet Coke. I ate them standing. I texted Amy that I hoped to be home by four, stuffed the wrappers in the trash, and went back to room eleven.

Felipe had it waiting for me in a plain white envelope. He wished me a nice day.

Outside the building, I sat on a low concrete bench to read.

I didn’t know when Chrissy had started nannying for the Franchettes. The earliest it could have been was February 9, 1969, the day their daughter, Peggy, was born.

By then, Audrey Rosanne Marsh, daughter of Carol and Floyd Neeley Marsh of Half Moon Bay, had been dead for three months.

How long did they grieve?

How long before they began to get desperate?

What other options did they consider?

Did they ask Chrissy outright? Or was it her idea, watching them suffer? Did she feel guilty for being the favorite? Everything came easily to her. She was nineteen and perfect.

Visiting sister for weekend, confirmed telephonically.

Did the three of them discuss it over dinner? Did they debate the mechanics? The morality? How did the turbulence of the Franchettes’ marriage factor in? Gene’s work on the bomb? Did they cobble together an argument from the greater good?

Who gave Chrissy her injuries? Her sister? Her brother-in-law? The tibia is the second largest bone in the human body. It’s built to take a beating. Breaking it would have been a gruesome process. Did they use a baseball bat? A hammer? Did they shrink back? Pull punches? Did she have to tell them to keep going? Do it again. Harder, this time.

The man walking his dog, witness to a dark sedan fleeing: His name was Floyd Neeley.

The mute woman in a hospital bed: What intelligence lay in her dormant brain?

Questions, with teeth and claws.

I wondered what I was going to say to Peter. Having met Audrey Marsh, it was hard for me to tell myself that my sole obligation was to him.

I put the death certificate back in the envelope.

Approaching the bay, I could once again smell the ocean, brackish and choked with diesel and exhaust. The road ahead ran like a needle into oblivion. Traffic was already beginning to stack up over the bridge.