The Lost Coast: A Novel

Chapter 17

The trail left by ML was jumbled and difficult to trace.

The trail left by its namesake was anything but.

Emil Richard Bergstrom, born October 13, 1962, Xenia, Ohio. The databases were silent on his childhood, but I surmised it had been less than idyllic: Shortly after his seventeenth birthday, he’d gone into the army.

It must have felt like a safe bet. Vietnam was over; enlistments were down, bonuses up.

Not a good fit. Five months through his term of service, he was discharged.

I couldn’t view the complete record to know why he’d been let go. Entry-level separation was at the discretion of the military. The cause could be anything from lack of effort to disciplinary infractions.

By the mid-eighties, he’d made his way to California. And found romance. On December 3, 1984, Emil Bergstrom and Kathleen Adele Jessup wed before the Los Angeles County Clerk.

Alas, fate hadn’t smiled upon the union. Though Emil had done better at matrimony than soldiering, toughing it out with Kathleen for three and a half years.

More accurately, she’d toughed it out with him. In 1987 Emil pled no contest to one count of misdemeanor domestic battery. Ninety-day suspended sentence.

Their son, Richard Beaumont Bergstrom, was born the following March. Kathleen had already filed for divorce. Los Angeles Superior Court rendered final judgment two months later, awarding her full custody.

The late eighties and early nineties came across as a tumultuous time for Emil. In addition to the implosion of his personal life, he was paddling against a deluge of lawsuits: His name cropped up on the docket in Los Angeles, Riverside, Orange County, San Diego, and Kern.

He’d sold a lot but never transferred title (allegedly).

He’d misappropriated funds (allegedly).

These early schemes were comparatively crude, less con artistry than blatant fraud. Not all involved land. Bergstrom had dabbled in cars, electronics, scrap metal. Nor had he yet perfected how to erase his tracks. To the contrary: He displayed a flair for public relations, issuing press releases at a blistering pace. Luckily for him, small local papers had column inches to fill.

The similarities between these rackets and Swann’s Flat lay in the revolving door of partnerships, the ever-changing names and addresses.

The typical con man’s approach to skirting consequences.

Aside from the DV rap, Emil Bergstrom had never been charged with a crime or seen the interior of a jail. He often managed to get civil suits against him dismissed, and any judgments he faced were negligible. At worst he simply closed up shop and reopened elsewhere, sometimes down the hall in the same building. I doubted he’d ever paid out a cent.

In 1993, reality finally caught up to him. He defaulted on a multimillion-dollar loan. The resulting judgment forced Bergstrom to file for bankruptcy.

The plaintiff?

William Arenhold.

The lawsuit constituted my first evidence of the two men interacting. That they then went on to form a fruitful, decades-long collaboration seemed bizarre on the face of it — former adversaries teaming up, like some ill-conceived superhero franchise crossover.

But I could think of an explanation.

Bergstrom’s painted himself into a corner. Low on cash. Investors wary. Creditors with pitchforks and torches, bearing down on the gates.

So he and Arenhold strike a deal. Arenhold “loans” him a huge sum of money, backdated. Emil “defaults” and files Chapter 7. Arenhold then lays claim to the liquidated assets — enabling Emil to plead insolvency to everyone else in line to collect.

I pictured him fretting beneath his Stetson, intoning in that folksy twang of his.

Apologies, muchachos. Well’s gone dry.

In the meantime, Arenhold funnels the money back to Bergstrom. Minus a service fee.

What read like financial ruin was the opposite: a sweetheart lawsuit, ensuring freedom.

With that done, Bergstrom effectively dropped from the public record. He’d learned his lesson about seeking the limelight. Or perhaps that had been the plan all along.

The land acquisition and sales firm has operations in Southern California and intends to open an office in Northern California later this year.

He’d never opened any such office that I could find.

As with the father, so with the son: I found sketchy information about Beau’s early life — his birthday, a defunct Myspace page — but his recent history was blank.

Neither man appeared to own anything of significant value.

Chapter 18

A disgruntled person is a private investigator’s best friend.

A disgruntled spouse is a private investigator’s BFF.

Kathleen Bergstrom had reverted to her maiden name of Jessup. During the eighties and nineties, while Emil was honing his craft, she’d made a go of it in Hollywood. IMDB listed nineteen credits. A few basic cable leading roles. The majority low-grade fare such as Screaming Blonde #2 in Attack of the Face-Eating Pandas and Confused Beach Girl in Kamikaze Shark 3: Blood Fin Soup.

Her last gig was 2007’s Right of First Revenge. Old Woman.

By my math she was then forty-three years old.

Time to hang it up.

I called her, introduced myself, told her what I was after.

She laughed and sighed, in that order. “Come on by, we’ll talk.”

Like her ex-husband, Kathleen had migrated north. Presently she was living her best life at the Rossmoor Retirement Community, a two-thousand-acre independent living development on the other side of the Caldecott Tunnel, where the offbeat urban landscape of Berkeley and Oakland dissolved into open space, tract homes, and big-box stores.

The booth guard examined my driver’s license and raised the barrier arm, and I drove to the Creekside Grill. Kathleen was seated on the patio, lipstick on the rim of her Bloody Mary. Despite the ferocious heat — ninety degrees at ten a.m. — she was impeccably put together: coral twinset, honey hair feathered à la Farrah Fawcett. Discreet makeup emphasized superb bone structure.

She squeezed my fingers and smiled. “What are you drinking?”

“Water’s good.”

She waved to a white-haired waiter. “Water for my friend, please, Jack.”

He brought the carafe. “Will you want another, ma’am?”

“I’m sure I’ll need it,” she said. “Check back in a few.”

He left with a bow.

Golf carts buzzed, sprinklers chuffed, the pock-pock of pickleball rang out.

“Emil Bergstrom,” she said. “Blast from the not-so-good past.”

“Sorry to bring it up.”

“Oh, I’m a big girl.”

“How’d you meet?”

“He picked me up at a party,” she said. “You’ll have to take my word that he was good-looking back then. And I was young and naïve. I’m not ashamed to say so. I’d only been in LA a couple of months. He drove a Porsche, too. That impressed me.”

“What was he up to?”

“He called himself a businessman. He always had twenty-five deals going at once.”

“Do you remember names or details?”

“I didn’t understand it and I didn’t want to. It was exciting enough for me to go racing from one party to the next. He knew all these wannabe producer types. Guys who had money to spend, or they needed to look like they did. There was a lot of booze and drugs floating around. And Emil can talk the stripes off a zebra. He’d cook up some cockamamie scheme. Thirty seconds later they’re climbing over each other with their checkbooks out.”

“When did things start to go bad?”

“For us or for him?”

“Either. Both.”

“He couldn’t keep it in his pants. We fight, I cry, he swears up and down it’ll never happen again. You won’t find a single gal in Hollywood who can’t tell the same story.”

“I read that he was arrested for domestic violence.”

She started. “That was an isolated incident. I tried to leave the room and he grabbed my arm. Nothing worse than that.”

“You reported it.”

“Well, I was pregnant at the time. Things were very tense.”

“Were you worried about the baby?”

“No. It was... I was... It was an isolated incident.”

“We don’t have to talk about it,” I said.

She stirred her drink with the celery stalk. “It feels like another woman’s life.”

I nodded.

“It’s not in Emil’s nature to be physical,” she said. “He doesn’t have to be. If he wants something, he gets you to do it.”

“Did you maintain a relationship after the divorce?”

“We saw each other every so often. I wanted him to know his son. Not that Emil cared. He’d send Beau a birthday card with five dollars. Drop in without warning and take him for ice cream. That sort of thing.”

“Child support?”

“Off and on. I never felt he was deliberately making my life hard. More that he forgot about us once we were out of sight.”

“Are you familiar with a man by the name of Rolando Pineda? He’s a lawyer.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“What about William Arenhold?”

“Him, yes.”

“Did you ever meet him?”

“Once. We went to San Francisco for a weekend. It was a nice time, we drove up PCH, had dinner by the wharf. When we got to our hotel, there was this man waiting in the lobby. Emil introduced him as Billy. I remember he was a real charmer. He kissed my hand, and Emil sent me up to the room so they could stay at the bar and talk. I was so mad. Here we are, we’ve come all this way, it’s supposed to be a romantic getaway, and this is what you’re doing?”

She drained her drink, flagged Jack for another.

I said, “Any idea what Emil and Arenhold talked about?”

“None. But they were down there for hours. Emil woke me up when he came in, and we had a fight about it. In the morning he apologized. He bought me flowers and we went to tour Alcatraz.”

“Approximately when was this?”

“Beau was born in ’88. So before then.”

And at least five years before the “lawsuit” that had driven Emil out of LA.

I asked Kathleen about that.

“He said he had to leave town. He made it sound like it was temporary. Little did I know.”

“Did you ever get up to Swann’s Flat?” I asked.

“God, no. Good riddance, as far as I’m concerned.”

“What about Beau? How’d he end up there?”

“That came later. I remarried in 2002. Beau wasn’t happy about it, and it got worse once I had Ashley. He was so jealous of that child. I thought it was nuts. What’s there to be jealous of? She’s a baby, you’re a teenager. It got to be unbearable. He and Colin were at each other’s throats, day and night. I was worried they’d kill each other. After high school he announced he was going to live with his father. I begged him not to. He was so smart, he had good grades. He could have gone to college. But Colin convinced me not to fight it. He said it was healthy to give Beau some space. I should’ve trusted my instincts.”

I remembered Beau’s story — horseshit, I now realized — about shooting a mountain lion.

How old were you?

Ten or eleven... I basically lived out here as a kid.

“Are you in touch with him?” I asked.

“Not really. Colin died three years ago, and I moved here to be near my daughter. She goes to Mills. Some part of me thought, Oh, you’ll be closer to Beau, too. It hasn’t worked out, though. He calls on my birthday. But we don’t see each other.”

Jack brought her drink, hesitating when he saw her remote expression.

She smiled and said, “Thanks, as always.”

“Ma’am.”

He left the glass and took the empty.

Kathleen picked up the celery, stirred. “I’ve tried to make my peace with it. But it’s hard.”

I nodded.

“He was a beautiful boy. For the longest time, we were on our own together, me and him, two of us against the world. We didn’t have any money but we had fun. We liked to go camping on the beach. We did that all the time.”

“A child of the land.”

“Come again?”

“That’s how Emil described you. ‘She was a child of the land, and a child of the land she begat.’ ”

“Somebody shoulda glued his lips shut years ago.”

I laughed.

“He’s not wrong, though,” she said. “That’s one thing about Emil. There’s enough truth in what he says that it makes you question yourself.” She sipped. “At any rate. I’d like to think Beau knows that he can come to me if he needs. I’ll always be his mother.”

A tear escaped. She grabbed at her napkin to dab it away.

“When I do speak to him,” she said, “it’s Emil I hear.”

Back at my office, Clay Gardner had an email waiting in his inbox. The sender had a Hotmail address. Mistaking it for spam, I almost deleted it before noticing the first line.

His number followed.

Chapter 19

“Did you get the check?” he asked.

“I did, thanks.”

“Don’t know if that’ll cover it. You can also send me the bill once it’s fixed.”

“I appreciate it. How’d you email me, if you don’t have a computer?”

“Library in Millburg has ’em.”

“You drove all the way there to get in touch with me.”

“I was going anyway. But you deserve the courtesy, after the scare I gave you.”

“What’s life without a little excitement?”

“Nice and quiet, is what. Let me save you some time, son: I’m not selling. To you or anyone else.”

“The property’s listed.”

“As a public service,” he said. “I want folks to understand what they’re getting into.”

“What are they getting into?”

“A mess. Take it from me: You don’t want none of it.”

I said, “Mr. Bock, since you’re being frank with me, I’m going to do the same. I’m not interested in buying your house. I’m trying to understand how things work in Swann’s Flat. I think you’re the person I’ve been waiting for. And if I’m reading you right, I’m the person you’ve been waiting for.”

He said, “About damn time.”

Like a lot of people with festering grievances, Al Bock was eager to talk.

“In 1997, I was stationed at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California. I saw a notice up on the board. Land for sale. There was pictures of the beach. It looked like a goddamn painting. I called the number and spoke to this fellow who gave me a song and dance. ‘Act fast, they’re going like hotcakes.’ Fourteen thousand and four hundred dollars for a quarter-acre lot.”

“Do you remember the salesman’s name?”

“I most certainly do. Bill Arenhold.”

“Must’ve been a very persuasive conversation.”

“I was ready to be persuaded. That was where my head was at. My marriage just ended. I was staring into the future and seeing question marks. Arenhold — he sent me a buncha charts, showing how much money I stood to make. I know I sound like a damn fool.”

“No.”

“I was a damn fool. Didn’t know my ass from my elbow. They teach you a lot of things in the military, but common sense about money ain’t one of them.”

In 2002, after twenty-six years of service, Bock retired.

“I was supposed to leave before that, but after nine eleven I stayed on a while.”

The cost of living in the real world came as a rude awakening. He had his pension, but the divorce and the down payment had eaten up most of his savings. He spent some time in the private sector, scrimping, rebuilding his nest egg.

“Doing what?” I asked.

“Training law enforcement. I taught marksmanship. I did that most of my career.”

“You weren’t trying to hit me, were you.”

“If I was, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

To raise cash, Bock put the Swann’s Flat property on the market, expecting a quick sale.

No one wanted it.

“And I mean no one,” he said. “It sat there. I called Arenhold. ‘You promised it’ll be worth ten times what I paid.’ He starts yammering on, the economy, blah blah blah. He says, ‘Lemme see what I can do.’ Soon I get a call from this other guy, says he’s a corporate acquisitions specialist. Whatever the hell that is. He offers me seven hundred bucks, take it or leave it.”

“You didn’t take it.”

“Hell no. I told him where to stick it, then called Arenhold and told him I was gonna sue his pecker off. He hung up on me. Stopped taking my calls. I think he figured I’d give up.”

“Most people do,” I said. “That’s their business model.”

“They never met me.”

Life had handed Al Bock a shit sandwich. He decided to turn it into a tasty lunch.

“My plan was to build and flip. To keep the cost down I did it myself.”

“You were the GC.”

“No, sir. I mean myself.”

“You built that house?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Alone.”

“I had a guy helping me for about a minute. But yeah, me and Godzilla. My puppy.”

“I think I met him when I was there.”

“No, sir. You met King Kong. Godzilla passed, rest his soul.”

“Did you have construction experience?”

“None. I was reading library books, making it up as I went along. I bought a little run-down chain saw mill and used what was available for timber. Anything else I had to bring in, by boat or truck.”

“Improvise, adapt, overcome.”

Bock chuckled. “Yes, sir. Fubared everything there is to fubar.”

“How long did it take you?”

“Nine years. I was living in a tent for the first two, till I got the roof on. Half the time it was too wet to work, and the other half it was so hot I didn’t want to.”

Along the way, he’d gotten to know Emil Bergstrom.

“I’d had some dealings with him when I applied for permits. He was always polite, and when I first showed up, he came by to introduce himself. He had the boy with him. He wasn’t much more than a kid then, Beau. Emil goes, ‘Nice to meet you. You need anything, give a holler.’ I thought, There’s a neighborly fellah. Week later I get this notice stuck to my truck from the Board of Supervisors. Assessment. Seven hundred bucks.”

“Same amount the acquisitions guy wanted you to sell for.”

“Got a sense of humor, Emil does.”

Not knowing any better, Bock paid the assessment; the next couple, too. Then he tried to get his water and power hooked up.

“I got a notice. Eight grand.”

“Big jump.”

“He was testing me. See how deep my pockets were. I canceled the request, bought a couple of used four-hundred-gallon tanks, and put in a rainwater catchment system.”

“Smart.”

“I thought so. Then I get another notice, saying I still had to pay the fee. I went over to see Bergstrom. He and Beau live in this big house down by the water.”

“The third mansion.”

“What’s that?”

“I was at the other two residences on Beachcomber, the Clancys’ and the doctor’s. I was wondering who lived in the third house.”

“You get around, don’t you...? Yeah. That’s them. I’m talking to Emil, explaining the problem, and Beau walks in and sits down on the sofa. I didn’t think he had any place listening in, and I said so. Emil said, ‘My son’s my business partner, I don’t have any secrets from him.’ The whole time Beau was there he didn’t say nothing. He watches Emil, watches me.”

“Learning the ropes.”

“You said it. I told Emil, ‘Look, I did the work, it doesn’t affect anyone.’ No problem. He’ll issue me a variance, and they can approve it retroactively. The application fee costs five hundred dollars.” Bock paused. “You see what he’s doing? He didn’t want to run me off before they squeezed out every last cent they could.”

With the next assessment, he’d had it.

“I refused to pay. They threatened to take me to court. I told them, ‘Go right ahead.’ ”

Then the real trouble started.

“I was waiting forever for the phone company to put the landline in. The first time they sent a truck, it got stuck, and they didn’t want to come back. I wrote ’em a hundred letters before they agreed to do it. I haven’t had the line for three days before it goes dead. I go outside, start following it. Few blocks away, a tree’s come down and taken it out.”

“Cut down or fell down.”

“Cut. They weren’t trying to hide it. They wanted me to know who it was.”

“Did you call the cops?”

“No, sir. What are they gonna do? No offense, but I worked with my fair share of cops. My experience, they’ll do as much as they have to and no more. I can take care of myself.”

Al Bock’s version of self-care was to load up his rifle and drive to Bergstrom’s house.

“I told him I was using his phone till he got the phone company out to fix mine. He just smiled. ‘Okay, Mr. Bock, calm down.’ What do you know? Two days later there’s a truck.”

A war had begun.

“They’d shoot off guns in the middle of the night to scare the pup. Block the road, so I couldn’t get in or out. Every time I left for a supply run, I took a chain saw with me, and I’d let Godzilla loose in the yard, to keep them from trespassing. One time he starts puking. I rushed him up to the animal hospital in Eureka. Vet tells me he got sick from eating onions. I don’t grow onions. I don’t keep ’em around. Where’s he getting onions?”

“You think they fed it to him.”

“I don’t think it, I know it. Can I prove it? No. I was gone all day, getting him looked at. I get home that evening, every one of my windows is broke.”

“Oh my God.”

“Yes, sir. I had raccoons running around my kitchen.”

“What did you do?”

“Shot his windows out. And he’s got a lot more of ’em than I do.”

I laughed. “Did he get the message?”

“Yes, sir, he did. He even wrote me a check for three grand.”

“I have to tell you, Sergeant, you’re the first person I’ve spoken to who ever pried a cent out of Emil Bergstrom.”

“I’ll add it to my list of accomplishments.”

The harder the Bergstroms tried to dislodge Bock, the more determined he became to stay. Five years in, he realized he had accidentally fallen in love with Swann’s Flat. Abandoning his plan to flip the house, he replaced it with a new goal: build his dream home.

“You didn’t want to just cut bait?” I asked.

“Why should I? It’s my land. I bought it, fair and square. I worked it and made it what it is. I’m a United States Marine. I ain’t gonna let some buncha clowns push me around.”

“I get that. My question is if it’s worth the trouble.”

“Oh, we’re past all that by now. I’m not gonna say we like each other, but we have an understanding. They leave me alone, and I don’t depend on them for nothing. I got my water, I got my solar, I grow my own food, I keep to myself.”

“You’re still paying fees.”

“No, sir. I put an end to that.”

“How?”

“I told ’em I wasn’t paying no more.”

“He agreed? Just like that?”

“Well, maybe I made my point a little more directly.”

“Do I want to ask how?”

“Let me put it this way. Inside every bully is a chickenshit pissing his pants.”

“Did you ever consider taking legal action?”

“I don’t have the money for that.”

“You wouldn’t have to, if you joined up with other people.”

“Like who?”

“Other folks who got burned. Other residents. You can’t be the only one who’s been harassed.”

“Ain’t no other residents.”

“The doctor. The Clancys.”

“I don’t think you’ll find them to be too helpful.”

“Why not?”

“They’re on the Board of Supervisors, too.”

“All of them?”

“Maggie is, and Jason.”

“They work for Bergstrom?”

“Other way around,” he said.

“He works for them?”

“Well, for Jason, anyway.”

“Why would Bergstrom take orders from Jason Clancy?”

“Because he’s married to Leonie Swann.”

The name threw me for a loop; I had filed her away as Leonie Clancy.

Bock confirmed that they were one and the same. “She used to be married to Kurt, so that’s still how I think of her.”

The roadside memorial. “Kurt Swann.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What about Shasta?”

“You really do get around.”

“She’s Kurt and Leonie’s daughter?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Kurt’s dead, though.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How?”

“Accident. His truck went off the road. Now she owns the town.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Bylaws state that the majority landowner holds veto power,” Bock said. “You follow? Nobody lives here less they want ’em to.”

“Except you.”

“Yes, sir. Although maybe they want me, now.”

“Why would they?”

“To show that anyone’s free to come and go.”

“You’re their defense in a lawsuit.”

“Listen, son, I’m not saying I don’t want to help you out. But I’m tired. I’ll be seventy-two in November. My dad died when he was seventy. I’m on borrowed time as it is. I’d like to enjoy what I have left. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I got some weeding to do.”

I thanked him and put down the phone.

I’d gone into Swann’s Flat. And hit a Swann.

Chapter 20

The database results on Leonie Swann were strange, and strangely thin.

She didn’t just look young to be Shasta’s mother. She was young — thirty-seven — with no criminal record, no professional licenses, and no addresses prior to 2009, when the mansion at 21 Beachcomber showed up. She paid the utilities but didn’t appear on the tax roll.

In a way that made sense. Al Bock’s intel suggested a kind of ownership/management structure, with the Swanns retaining title while Emil and Beau ran the show. And if the Bergstroms could teach Leonie anything, it was how to hide assets. She could have placed the house in trust, buried it behind LLCs, transferred it to a third party.

Any such collaboration could not have begun with her. The earliest lawsuits dated to the mid-nineties, when she was in grade school.

Kurt, on the other hand, had been almost twenty years Leonie’s senior. The right age for a budding entrepreneur.

I found his obituary in the North Counties Register.

I googled the quote. Attributed to David Bowie.

Erroneous. The real quote ended I promise it won’t bore you.

I’d asked Jason Clancy: Bowie as in the frontiersman or as in the singer?

Singer. His full name’s Bowie Stardust.

You’re a fan.

I didn’t pick it.

Leonie had. Or Shasta, in memory of her father.

A fatal accident likely meant an autopsy.

I called the Humboldt County Coroner — Public Administrator and spoke to a deputy named Zucchero. He directed me to their public records portal. Four-to-six-week turnaround.

I told him I was a former Alameda County coroner. Any way he could speed things up?

“Former,” he said.

“Yes.”

“What do you do now?”

“PI.”

“How’s that working out for you?”

“Pros and cons.”

“Let me ask you something...”

For the next half hour I answered questions about licensing, overhead, health insurance.

“I’ll get back to you soon,” he said.

I went to the databases on Jason Clancy.

Age thirty-four. His credit was fair. One DUI, in 2008. He didn’t have a pilot’s license, but he did own a boat, registered to the address on Beachcomber. Previous addresses were in Sacramento; he turned up in Swann’s Flat around 2017.

I was wondering if Leonie had put the house in his name. But he didn’t appear on the tax roll, either, and when I ran a title search for 21 Beachcomber Boulevard, the actual name on the deed leaped off the screen.

Shasta Swann Irrevocable Trust

An itch in my brain.

I searched again, this time for all titles held by the Shasta Swann Irrevocable Trust.

The results filled fifty pages.

She, a teenage girl, owned the bait shop.

The boat lot.

The boat launch. The marina itself.

Jenelle Counts’s name appeared on the hotel’s liquor and business licenses. The structure and the land beneath, however, belonged to the Shasta Swann Irrevocable Trust.

In addition to owning her mother and stepfather’s residence, Shasta owned the doctor’s home at 3 Beachcomber Boulevard as well as the Bergstroms’ at number 55.

She owned Beachcomber Boulevard, all four miles of it, including the lot at number 185, the prospectus for which I had open on my computer screen in another window.

This beautiful and historically significant piece of land has never been offered for sale.

Currently it is held in trust, with any sale or development subject to approval by the Swann’s Flat Board of Supervisors.

If Clay Gardner bought it, he’d be buying it from Shasta.

The Shasta Swann Irrevocable Trust owned Pelman Auto Service at 27 Gray Fox Run along with Dave Pelman’s residence at number 29. It owned the lots with the mailboxes and the empty lots next door. It owned the unoccupied homes and the homes on Airbnb, and I was willing to bet that if I dug deep enough into all those corporations and shells offering properties for sale, that if I traveled to all the courthouses in all the counties in all the states and pulled every file and read through every page, somewhere in the tangle of red tape, I would find Shasta, her trust, lurking behind all of them.

His truck went off the road.

Now she owns the town.

I’d thought Bock was referring to Leonie.

Wrong.

I hadn’t hit a Swann.

I’d hit the Swann.

The databases suppress information on minors.

Modern teenagers fill that gap themselves, on social media.

But Shasta’s Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok accounts were set to private.

A triathlon website had her winning the girls’ under-18 division at the 2023 Race for the Redwoods. She celebrated on the podium, cheeks flushed, hair plastered to her forehead.

That was it.

I swiveled my chair toward the wall, where I’d taped a printout of Nick Moore’s missing persons flyer.

Goofy grin. The puka shell necklace and the pendant.

Shasta’s social media profile pictures cut off below the chin. No necklace visible.

In the podium photo, her unisuit was unzipped three or four inches. No necklace visible.

I logged into Clay Gardner’s Instagram. The sparse feed implied affluence. San Francisco at night, a beach in Vietnam, a Warriors game, a sushi platter. Guys like him didn’t post very often. Too busy identifying opportunities and adding value and living in the moment. His five hundred followers had cost me $6.99.

I sent Shasta Swann a friend request.

I did the same from Clay Gardner’s Facebook page.

He didn’t use TikTok, and she didn’t use LinkedIn. A demographic mismatch.

Contacting her could easily backfire.

Who was I, other than some middle-aged rando?

Who’d nearly killed her.

And was now creeping on her.

Gross.

On the other hand, she might accept my requests reflexively.

Who didn’t want more followers, especially for free?

The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System had no record of Nick Moore.

Nicholas Moore scored a hit in Santa Cruz County, along the central coast, some 350 miles south of Humboldt. The profile picture showed the same young man whose face was on my wall. Scraggly-haired, no necklace visible.

Why was he missing in one place but on a bulletin board in another?

The NamUs file had been logged in August 2024, two months after date of last contact. Aside from mentioning Santa Cruz, it added nothing to the flyer and was in one respect less accurate, listing the anchor tattoo on his shoulder but not the word across his knuckles.

I did a quick-and-dirty search. The biggest hurdle was his name. Moore is the eighteenth most common surname in the United States. For US boys born in 2004, Nicholas was the thirteenth most popular first name.

“Nick Moore” was a long snapper for the Baltimore Ravens.

He was also a minor-league baseball player, a collegiate wrestler, and a lacrosse coach.

He was an actor, a dead poet, a law school professor, a management consultant from Miami, a nurse practitioner in Albuquerque, and an addiction counselor in Waterloo, Iowa. In Santa Cruz alone there were three of him.

Across the room, he grinned at me.

Anyone with information should please contact Tara Moore.

As a rule I steer clear of missing persons cases. There’s often little I can do beyond what the cops have already tried, and I won’t string along a grieving family.

Some PIs make a decent living doing just that. Their choice.

Try not to get her hopes up.

I dialed the number on the flyer.

“Hello.”

“Hi. I’m looking for Tara Moore.”

“Speaking.”

“Hi, Ms. Moore. My name is Clay Edison. Pardon me for calling out of the blue. I’m a private investigator, and—”

She hung up.

Obviously, mine wasn’t the first offer of “help.”

I emailed her.

Chapter 21

The half hour spent chatting with Deputy Zucchero paid dividends the following day, when a PDF of Kurt Swann’s case file showed up in my inbox.

Cause of death was cerebral edema/subdural hemorrhage, secondary to blunt force trauma.

Manner of death was accidental.

I read the narrative, written by lead investigator Owen Ryall.

Having been in Ryall’s shoes, I could imagine his exasperation upon arriving at the scene only to be informed that there was no body yet. It wasn’t even clear whether this was a coroner’s case.

Kurt Swann was lying somewhere at the bottom of a rocky escarpment, dead or alive, but heavy rain and strong winds had prevented search-and-rescue from making a direct descent. The alternative — hiking up from below in the pitch black, over miles of steep, sludgy, unfamiliar terrain — was worse. They had decided to wait it out.

Al Bock had misremembered one detail. It wasn’t Kurt’s truck that had gone over the cliff. It was Kurt himself. The truck was still by the side of the road.

By 0315 on December 6, conditions had improved enough to make a second retrieval attempt. SAR threw down ropes. At 0548 they spotted the body of a male meeting Swann’s description.

He had fallen approximately three hundred feet along a sixty-five-degree incline studded with boulders and logs, the force of which had thrown him another fifty feet laterally. His clothing was torn, his skin lacerated, his skull bashed in. A branch had impaled him in the groin. He’d lost both shoes and one sock. His hunting vest had stayed on; in an interior zipper pocket was a wallet. Positive identification was made from a California driver’s license.

At 0611, Kurt Swann was pronounced dead.

I scrolled through photos.

Broken limbs in a cradle of broken, bloody vegetation.

Right eye popped out onto his cheek.

One small mercy: Rain had deterred animals from picking at him.

Additional photos, taken topside, showed the wicked hairpin turn. A dark-colored Dodge Ram sat close to the edge, jacked up, rear left tire missing. The cliffside had partially given way, as if he’d been in the process of changing the tire and lost his footing.

While Ryall’s secondary, Chris King, coordinated with detectives, Ryall proceeded to the address on the driver’s license, 21 Beachcomber Boulevard, Swann’s Flat. The road was slippery and treacherous, and he didn’t arrive until 0900.

He was met at the door by the decedent’s next of kin, Leonie Swann, and their two-year-old daughter, unnamed. Ryall asked to speak with Mrs. Swann in private and suggested she call a relative or friend to help with the child. She declined. Ryall then informed her of her husband’s passing.

She already knew.

On the previous evening, she had received a visit from an individual named David Pelman, who told her that Kurt had slipped while changing a blown tire and fallen to his death.

Good old Dave, purveyor of four-hundred-dollar coolant.

Ryall again suggested that Leonie call someone for support. This time she agreed. She phoned a neighbor, who arrived within a few minutes. Ryall did not note the neighbor’s name but proceeded to David Pelman’s residence at 29 Gray Fox Run.

According to Pelman, he and Kurt Swann had left Swann’s Flat together before dawn on December 5 to hunt elk. They drove in Swann’s truck to their favorite area, Lishin Valley, about three miles northeast of Millburg. All day long they slogged through the cold and damp without so much as sniffing a bull. Pelman was philosophical.

It’s called hunting he said not shooting.

By midafternoon it was coming down pretty hard. They decided to pack it in.

Weeks of intermittent rain had reduced the road surface to slop. Approaching the hairpin,

Ryall asked Pelman if either man had been intoxicated. Pelman replied that they each had three or four beers over the course of the day. He further stated that Kurt regularly drank beer and that he, Pelman, did not perceive Swann as impaired.

Pelman considered trying to climb down but decided it was too dangerous. Nor could he find the spare, which must have gone over with Kurt.

Left without a choice, Dave Pelman trudged to town on foot, in the rain.

At 2214 he phoned 911 from his residence. Ryall asked why Pelman hadn’t stopped at any of the other houses along the way. Pelman replied that nobody else was home.

The 911 call lasted twenty-two minutes. Afterward Pelman changed into dry clothes and proceeded in his own vehicle to the Swann residence to inform Leonie that Kurt was dead.

Ryall asked what time that conversation had taken place.

Pelman guessed it was about eleven, eleven fifteen.

Ryall noted that confirmation of death would not take place for another six-plus hours.

Autopsy revealed extensive injuries. Kurt Swann had suffered fractures to both femurs, both arms, most of his ribs, and six vertebrae. The blow to the skull was determined to be fatal, consistent with high-velocity impact from a blunt object.

Toxicology indicated a blood alcohol level of.022, below the threshold for legal intoxication.

I called the Humboldt County Coroner — Public Administrator and asked to speak with Deputy Owen Ryall. He was Lieutenant Ryall now.

“Former?” he said.

“That’s right. Alameda County.”

Ryall said, “Let me get back to you.”

I stepped out to pick up Amy’s dry cleaning and a bowl of ramen. At my desk I pried off the lid, releasing fragrant steam.

My phone rang. I replaced the lid.

“I called your people,” Ryall said.

“Who’d you speak to?”

“Brad Moffett.”

“What’d he say?”

“You’re a pain in the ass.”

“Checks out.”

“Also that you’re the best investigator he ever worked with,” Ryall said. “What’s your interest in Kurt Swann?”

“I’m trying to get a feel for the family and the place.”

“Not sure I’ll be much help. That night was the first and last time I was there. We got lost trying to find it.”

“A couple things stand out to me,” I said. “One is that Pelman goes home to call instead of trying to find a closer phone. Then he tells Leonie that Kurt’s dead before there’s a body.”

“Well, the phone, he had an explanation for that.”

“Nobody was home.”

“Yeah.”

“If he was desperate to get help, there’s other things he could’ve done.”

“You mean like break a window?”

“It’s a life-or-death situation.”

“That fall? Odds are it was instant death,” Ryall said. “Probably the same reason he told her Kurt was dead: It’s a reasonable assumption.”

“How did Leonie seem when you talked to her?”

“What I recall is tired. Like she’d been up all night.”

“It also struck me that she didn’t want to call anyone at first.”

“Could be she was overwhelmed or wanted to focus on the girl. We’re talking a toddler.”

“You didn’t sense she was hiding something from you.”

“Nope. People act weird, you know that.”

“Do you recall who it was she asked to come over?”

“I don’t, sorry.” Ryall paused. “You think something’s up here.”

“I’m asking if there was any doubt in your mind about whether it was an accident.”

“Your guy was right. You’re a royal pain in the ass.”

“I’ll take it as a compliment.”

Ryall sighed. “You know as well as I do, there’s always stuff you can’t corroborate a hundred percent. Pathologist said he hit a rock. Okay, but there’s ten billion rocks in the vicinity. You can’t tell if he slipped and hit his head on the way down, or if someone hit him and that’s why he fell. Or if he was pushed. Tire tracks melted in the rain, footprints got washed away, same for blood. Is it impossible Pelman did it? Or someone else? No. But what am I supposed to do? End of the day, we had one eyewitness. He was cooperative and the physical evidence fit.”

“Okay. Thanks for your time.”

“No prob. Hey, real quick: What made you leave the force?”

“I needed a change.”

“Yeah, huh. What do you do about health care?”

Chapter 22

I let a day elapse before answering him.

With the clock ticking on that relationship, I called Chris Villareal.

We arranged to meet at the office of the estate lawyer helping him. Her name was Priscilla Acevedo. She listened well and asked tough questions. It was a role reversal from when Chris had been fired up and indignant, and I’d had to play wet blanket. Now I was the one advocating action, my frustration mounting as Acevedo calmly poked holes in my arguments.

Every buyer I’d spoken to, including Chris’s grandmother, had received disclosures.

Anyone had the right to make a crappy investment. People bought trendy stocks, crypto, NFTs. They played the lottery and the slots.

Whatever we stood to gain would be dwarfed by the cost and the hassle.

William Arenhold was dead. Rolando Pineda’s role was ancillary and limited to a few sales. The Bergstroms were worth nothing on paper, as were Leonie and Jason Clancy. Given Shasta’s youth, her direct involvement was improbable. Trust documents were not public; we’d need a subpoena to get them, and to get that we’d first need to file suit.

Bottom line, the connections were too flimsy, the stakes too small.

I said, “That’s what the scam relies on.”

Acevedo shrugged. “I admit, this isn’t my area of practice. I’ll consult with colleagues and get back to you.”

Chris and I rode the elevator to the parking garage.

“We tried,” he said. He shook his head. “It sucks. They’re going to keep on getting away with it. But I feel like I need to be done with this and move on.”

“I understand.”

“I’m sorry to quit on you.”

“Don’t be. You stuck with it longer than most people would.”

The doors opened. We stepped out, and he shook my hand.

“Thanks for your work, Clay. Invoice me and I’ll pay you ASAP.”

I wished him luck.

Amy and I sat on our back deck, sipping wine and surveying our tiny chunk of the East Bay.

Driveway swirled with chalk petroglyphs. Brown crop circle left by an inflatable pool.

Water guns. Buckets. Tooth-marked foam balls.

Summer was in decline.

“Do our children eat foam?” Amy asked.

“I can’t rule it out.” I blew a raspberry. “What a stupid day.”

“I’m sorry, honey. I know you were excited about this case.”

“It’s fine. I have to get used to the idea that I can’t see everything through to the end.”

“That was true when you were a coroner.”

“Yeah, but at least that work came to me. I didn’t have to chase it down and convince people to keep going.”

“Your clients smell better now.”

“Poor baby,” I said. “How did you live with me for so long?”

“When you love someone you can get used to anything.”

“I didn’t have to get used to anything about you. You’re perfect.”

“Aw, thanks.”

“Perfect.”

“Someone wants sex.”

“Did I say that? I didn’t say that.”

“Years of clinical training have given me a penetrating emotional radar.”

“Huh-huh-huh, she said ‘penetrating.’ ”

“And years of marriage to you.”

I smiled. “How was your day as a trained clinician?”

“A little worse than average.”

“Did something happen?”

“I have a patient in therapy not of their own volition. They’re on a court order. And that makes for an incredibly challenging dynamic.”

“The lightbulb doesn’t want to change.”

“The lightbulb doesn’t even know it’s a lightbulb,” she said. “It thinks it’s the sun.”

“Maybe you’re ready for a new career, too.”

“Maybe I am.”

“What’s it gonna be?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but it definitely requires us to move to Paris.”

“Diplomatic corps.”

“Too much pressure.”

“Baguette baker.”

“Too early.”

“Fashion designer.”

“I already work with the mentally ill,” she said. “I think I’ll be a roving street photographer.”

“Bullseye. What do I do in Paris?”

“Teach basketball fundamentals to disadvantaged European youths.”

I started to hum.

“What are you singing?” she said.

“The theme song to House Hunters International.”

“It’s so cute that you think that’s how it goes.”

“This bright young American family,” I said, “has a budget of eleven dollars.”

“Not sure we can be in the city center for that.”

“I’m fine being a little outside.”

Amy laughed and rested her head on my shoulder, and we watched dusk purple the lawn.

I said, “We do have money now.”

She sat up. “You know we can’t touch that. It’s for her education.”

“I’m just pointing out that if we don’t have to set as much aside for the future, we’ve got some wiggle room in the present.”

“Not enough to quit our jobs and move to Paris.”

“No. But if you were really unhappy and wanted to leave, we’d find a way.”

“Thank you.”

“You did it for me,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Do you ever regret it?”

“Leaving the bureau?”

She nodded.

Captain Bakke’s top-floor office.

Her flat voice mouthing words of concern.

We need to be realistic, Clay.

The theme of the conversation: realism, and my need for it.

It’s not that I don’t value you as an individual.

But we need, you and I, to be honest about your service record, and think realistically about your future.

“Not for one second,” I said. “Refill?”

“You’re trying to get me drunk.”

“Is it working?”

“I won’t rule it out.”

She handed me her glass. I went to the kitchen, took the Chardonnay from the fridge.

“Clay,” Amy called.

I figured she’d heard one of the kids crying. But the house was quiet, and she was crossing the living room with my buzzing phone.

The number had a 559 area code. I recognized it. I’d dialed it a week ago.

“Clay Edison.”

“This is Tara Moore,” she said. “I want to talk to you about my boy.”

Chapter 23

Five-five-nine was Fresno, three hours southeast of San Leandro. Tara Moore’s ground-floor apartment fronted to a noisy drag blighted by strip malls, gas stations, and bottom-feeder motels.

She’d left the door open but the security screen locked. I rang, heard plodding footsteps, saw her shape darken the grate. She cupped her eyes to it before turning the dead bolt.

Old forty or a young fifty, dishwater blond and haggard. A long-sleeved T-shirt declared that Life Is Good. Its wearer appeared unconvinced.

“Come in.”

The apartment reeked of stale tobacco. Tidy, though everything had been used well past replacement point, luster scrubbed down to raw flesh. In Berkeley, people called that living green. In Fresno, it was called being poor.

Younger versions of Nick Moore smiled behind scratched plastic. As a boy, he’d had teeth too big for his mouth — fodder for bullies. By his early teens, the rest of him had caught up, lending him a sinewy masculinity. No resemblance I could see to his mother. I didn’t see any photos of men, either. Just Nick and more Nick and, in one shot, Tara wearing a hospital gown, a florid infant in her arms. She’d been even thinner then, distressingly so.

The drive had left me stiff and thirsty. She didn’t offer water, just plopped down on a fraying armchair and pointed me to a fraying sofa.

She said, “What do you know about Nicholas?”

Try not to get her hopes up.

“Last month I was up in Humboldt,” I began.

“Why?”

“In connection with another case.”

“What case.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t discuss that.”

She folded her stick arms. “What’d you come for if you’re not gonna talk.”

“I’m happy to talk, Ms. Moore. But I have to respect my client’s privacy. I’d do the same for you.”

“I’m not your client.”

“I know.”

“I’m not going to pay you.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

“Free trial, huh? Then how much? Five hundred an hour? You people are all the same.”

She heaved up from the chair and disappeared into the kitchen.

I gave her a few minutes, then followed.

A rear door stood ajar. I stepped through it and out into a poky communal courtyard strewn with castoffs: hamstrung bikes, unplanted pots, a charcoal grill bearing carbonized remains like a bier. Traffic rasped along the drag. Beneath the shadow of the neighboring Exxon sign, Tara sat in a lawn chair, smoking. A ceramic mug nestled in her lap.

“Ms. Moore, we don’t know each other. I don’t know what promises other people have made. I plan to look into Nick’s disappearance, with or without you. My chances aren’t great. But they’re better if I have your help.”

She ashed into the mug. “You were a cop.”

“I used to be.”

“You helped that boy.”

“Which boy.”

“The one who was in jail.”

She meant Julian Triplett. A Berkeley news site had run a series about the case, detailing my role in vacating his murder conviction. The articles came up when you googled me. The remaining hits were about basketball. As of last season, I no longer held the Cal record for assists.

“Why?” she said.

“He didn’t deserve what happened to him.”

“How come you quit being a cop?”

“I didn’t deserve what happened to me.”

Her laughter dissolved into a coughing fit.

“Not me,” she said. “I deserve every fucking thing.”

She dragged. “This paying client of yours. They got something to do with Nicholas?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“So what’s your angle.”

“No angle.”

“Pff.”

I said, “Can we try again?”

“Hell, it’s a free country.”

I pulled over a second chair and switched on my recorder. “Start with the last time you had contact with your son.”

“It was a year in June.”

“Is it Nick or Nicholas, by the way?”

“I put Nick on the poster ’cause everyone else called him that. To me he was Nicholas.”

“Did you see him in person, did he call, text?”

“Text.” She scrolled on her phone and showed me the screen.

On Monday morning, June 10, 2024, Nicholas Moore asked if Tara had sent the cards yet.

No she wrote.

You said today

I’m at work

Go after

Busy

When he asked.

When I can

K

Your welcome she wrote, adding an eye roll emoji.

“What cards is he referring to?” I asked.

“Pokémon. He used to collect ’em when he was little.”

“What did he want them for?”

“Sell ’em, prolly. I don’t know what he could get for it, it’s a kids’ game.”

“Did he need money?”

“Everybody needs money.”

“I’m asking if he had a particular need. Was there something he wanted to buy? Was he in debt?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Did he gamble? Drink or use drugs?”

She stiffened. “No.”

“No to which?”

“None of ’em.”

“Not even alcohol or pot?”

“God, you’re nosy,” she said. “No, period. Okay? He hated that stuff. Never touched it.”

“I’m sure you’re sick of answering these questions. I’m sorry to make you do it again. That’s part of the job.”

Her cigarette had burned down to the filter. She fished out a new one and lit it off the first, grinding the butt out into the mug. “Go ahead.”

“At the time of these texts, where was Nicholas living?”

“Santa Cruz.”

“Was he employed?”

“He worked for a guy who made surfboards.”

“Name?”

“Randy. Smythe. With a y. And a e. He’s got a shop in his garage. He let Nicholas sleep there, but he didn’t pay him. He called it an internship. Ask me, that’s bullshit someone lays on you to get you to work for free.”

And maybe the reason her son needed cash.

I returned to the text thread. On Tuesday afternoon, Tara wrote that she’d sent the cards. She included a photo of the receipt showing the tracking number. Shipping had cost $23.65.

CashApp me she wrote.

Friday rolled around and he had yet to reply. Tara tried again. Did u get it

Subsequent texts reflected her growing irritation. She took time out of her day to do him a favor. The least he could do was say thank you.

Another week went by with no response. On June 18, Tara fired off a series of lengthy, angry texts, excoriating him for his selfishness.

“I was mad,” she said. “I thought he didn’t want to pay me. Then I saw his TikTok.”

She took the phone and opened up Nicholas’s profile.

I’d missed it because his name didn’t feature: His handle was wat3rwh33l, the picture an image of The Great Wave off Kanagawa. He had 39 followers and followed 210 other accounts. The earliest posts revolved around skateboarding. On average they garnered a dozen likes. Never an especially active user, in spring 2023 he seemed to lose interest. He didn’t post again for over a year, resurfacing on June 19, 2024, with a video lasting twenty-six seconds.

It began with Nicholas standing in a dirt turnout along a two-lane highway dividing silver ocean from green-and-tan hills. Wind crackled. It could have been anywhere along the West Coast. He’d propped his phone on the ground and was shirtless in cutoff jeans and hiking boots. The puka shell necklace smiled against his chest, the pendant winked.

The caption read In the name of the father.

Raising his face and hands to the sky, he turned in a slow circle, his expression euphoric, sun shining on his shaven scalp. I glimpsed the anchor tattoo on his shoulder.

He completed a rotation and strode forward. The pendant swung away from his body as he leaned in to grab the camera. He straightened up, holding the camera at arm’s length and grinning broadly. I realized I was looking at the source for the flyer photo.

He displayed his left fist. The letters f a s t were tattooed across his knuckles in serifed font, oriented backward and upside down.

He extended his middle finger. Held the gesture for a three-count before poking at the screen.

The clip ended.

Tara Moore said, “That’s the last I seen of him. No texts, no calls, no nothing.”

“Do you understand what this is about?”

“He was mad at me.”

“What for?”

“ ’Cause he didn’t want to pay me what he owed.”

“The cost of shipping the cards.”

She nodded.

“What about the rest of it?” I said. “The movements. Is he acting something out?”

“I thought it’s just him being a dumbass.”

“ ‘In the name of the father.’ Does that mean anything to you?”

“Not really.”

“Was Nicholas religious?”

“We did Christmas but that’s about it.”

“Can I ask what the situation is with his dad?”

“He’s dead. He died when Nicholas was a baby. We were never together.”

“What’s his name?”

“Warren. Pezanko.”

I scrolled through the profile’s Following and Followers. Shasta Swann was not on either list. “What can you tell me about this necklace he’s wearing?”

“I never seen it before. He musta got it after he moved out.”

“Do you have a sense of where the video was taken?”

“Mendocino. Above Fort Bragg.”

“How can you tell?”

“There’s a mile marker,” she said. “You can see it when he bends over.”

I hadn’t noticed, too busy focusing on the pendant.

I replayed the clip.

The postmile flashed between Nicholas’s legs as he reached for the phone. Glare wiped out the lettering. I fiddled with the slider, bringing it into view one character at a time.

“Great catch,” I said.

Tara Moore waved that away. “Not me. It was this lady Regina Klein. You know her?”

I shook my head. “She’s a PI?”

“I figured you guys all hang out together.”

“You were working with her.”

“For a little bit. Haven’t spoken to her since prolly the beginning of the year.”

“What made you stop?”

“I couldn’t afford to pay her no more. I spent everything I had on the first two guys. Who were assholes.”

Tara scratched her nose with her cigarette hand, spilling ash on her T-shirt. She brushed at it apathetically. “I don’t blame her. She’s got a business to run. But it’s my son, you know?”

I nodded.

“I’m just so tired of chasing my tail,” she said. “I put twenty thousand miles on my car in the last year. Everything I make goes to gas and copies.”

“What brought you to Millburg?”

“I wasn’t looking there in the beginning, I thought he was still in Santa Cruz. Once Regina showed me the mile marker, I started driving out every weekend, going around and putting up his poster. I went into this shop to ask the lady if I could put one in her front window. She told me about this big bulletin board. ‘You should go there, everyone knows about it.’ ”

“I also saw his profile on NamUs.”

“I’m on all the sites. There’s about a million of them. I can’t keep track. It’s all just a bunch of useless fools crying to each other about how nobody’ll help them.”

“Let’s back up a sec,” I said. “You saw the video. Is that when you started to feel that something was wrong?”

“He missed my birthday.”

“When’s that?”

“August 18. I don’t care how mad we were, he wouldn’t do that.”

“At that point you haven’t had any communication from him in about two months.”

“Yeah.”

“Was it normal for you to go that long without speaking to each other?”

“Once he left, he didn’t want nothing to do with me. And, and” — her voice escalated — “why should I have to beg him? He’s the one owed me money. He’s the one flipping me off. He should be apologizing to me.”

“I’m not putting anything on you, Tara.”

She sucked on her cigarette. A vein ticked in her neck.

“He missed your birthday,” I prompted gently.

“Yeah. I started to get scared. Like, what if he got into an accident? He didn’t answer my texts and every time I called it went to voicemail. I didn’t know what else to do. I called the surfboard guy.”

“Smythe.”

“He said he hadn’t seen him, either.”

“Since when?”

“Around the same time.”

“June.”

She nodded. “He said he went out one morning and Nicholas is gone, his stuff’s gone, his car’s not in the driveway.”

“Did Nicholas tell him where he was headed? Did he leave a note?”

“The guy didn’t know a damn thing. He just kept saying, ‘Buuuh, duuuh, I dunno, he’s not here, he left.’ I got in my car and drove straight over there. I didn’t even stop to pee. I’m banging on his door, and he comes out with his hair sticking up, like I woke him up at two in the afternoon. I made him show me where Nicholas was sleeping.”

She scowled. “Internship my ass. Smythe had him cooped up in the garage like a friggin’ prisoner, machines everywhere, fiberglass dust. ‘No wonder he left, look at this shithole.’ He starts acting all huffy, saying calm down or he’ll call the cops. ‘Fuck you, I’ll call them myself.’

“I went to the station. Waited three hours for someone to talk to me. They told me Nicholas is an adult, he can do what he wants. I said, ‘What about this guy, Smythe, maybe he did something to Nicholas.’ They had me fill out a report and sent me home. Next day I called. They didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. They said I had to come back in and file a new report. I was ready to lose my mind.”

“I’m sorry you had to go through this, Tara.”

“You got no idea. I’m calling them every day and getting the runaround. Finally this one detective goes, ‘Ma’am, I was you, I wouldn’t sit on my hands.’ I started with the posters. Every wacko in town’s calling me up, saying they know Nicholas or they seen him. Then this guy calls and says he’s a private investigator. Portis?”

“Don’t know him.”

“Asshole... All he did was ask for money. The next guy was the same.”

She ashed into the mug. Her foot twitched anxiously.

“Kills me, you know?” she said. “Not just the money, how much time I wasted.”

She yanked out the pack and lit another cigarette. I let her smoke in peace for a bit, then said, “I’m curious what took Nicholas to Santa Cruz to begin with. Was that his thing? Surfing? I know he was a skateboarder.”

“Please. He never got wet.”

“So why do you think?”

“Beats the hell out of me. Senior year he dropped out. Said school’s for sheep. ‘Yeah, sheep who like to eat.’ I made him get a job, you’re not gonna hang around all goddamn day in your underwear playing video games. He started over at the Dick’s on Blackstone. Every day he came home whining. ‘They don’t respect me.’ No shit. Why should they? You don’t have a high school diploma. He quit and went to Chipotle. What do you know, it’s the same thing. Always been this way. His brain shuts off. He doesn’t think, he just does things. One day he comes home with this dumbass anchor tattoo, talking about his heart belongs to the sea. I said, ‘You dipshit, you can’t hardly swim.’ He got all offended. ‘Shows what you know, real sailors don’t know how to swim.’ Fine, Popeye. Go wherever the fuck you want. Just don’t come crying to me.”

She wiped her eyes roughly. “Shit.”

I offered her a tissue from a small pack I carry. A habit from my coroner days.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Do you need a break?”

She blew her nose. “Do your thing.”

I said, “In the last fifteen months, has Nicholas been in touch with anyone else?”

“Everybody says they haven’t heard from him.”

“His friends?”

“I don’t know who he hung out with over there. He didn’t tell me.”

“What about friends from Fresno?”

“They’re a bunch of idiots.”

“Be that as it may, they may know something.”

“They don’t. Call them yourself, you don’t believe me.”

“I believe you,” I said. “Who else is in his life? Siblings?”

“Just him.”

Her answers about extended family were similarly curt. No uncles and aunts locally, no grandparents to speak of.

A lonely, claustrophobic self-portrait.

“Could he have reached out to one of these people without telling you?”

“I asked my sister. She said no. She said anything happens, it’s on me, for fucking him up while I was pregnant.”

“I’m sorry, Tara.”

“She’s right.”

Smoke twined lazily toward a baked beige sky. Hard to believe that one of the most beautiful places on earth, Yosemite National Park, was less than seventy miles away.

I asked if Nicholas had any medical conditions or took medication.

“Adderall for his ADHD.”

“Anything else?”

“Like what.”

“Diabetes. Migraines. Seizures. Other mental health issues. Anything at all.”

“No.”

“Any history of self-harm or suicide attempts?”

“No.”

“What about the rest of the family? Illness or mental health issues?”

“Warren’s a fuckin asshole. Does that count?”

I smiled. “We’ll stick to official diagnoses.”

“No.”

“Does Nicholas have a criminal history?”

“Not really.”

I waited.

“When he was fourteen he and some friends got caught climbing the school fence. One kid had a can of spray paint in his backpack. Idiots,” she said. “They were going to charge them with breaking and entering till the principal got them to drop it.”

“What about as an adult?”

“No.”

“Hobbies, other than skateboarding?”

“Video games.”

“Did he have friends through either of those activities?”

“I told you, he didn’t talk to me about it.”

She looked uncomfortable. Bumping up against the limits of her knowledge.

“What kind of vehicle did Nicholas drive?” I asked.

“A Civic.”

“Do you have the license plate?”

“I got it written down. Regina had me get all that stuff together. She sent it back when she was done. It’s in a box, in his room. You can have all of it.”

“Great. Anything else you want me to know? What should I be asking, that I’m not?”

“I’m sure I’ll think of something as soon as you leave.”

“Call me, or email me. No matter how insignificant it seems. I’d also like to speak with Regina. I’ll need your permission.”

“You have it.”

“It’ll be faster if you call her yourself.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Thank you. How’d you find her, by the way?”

“Internet.” Tara tugged out her menthols. The pack was empty, and she crushed it.

The apartment had a single bedroom. A bare mattress lay on the carpet, striped by the shadows of window bars. Remnants of adolescent passions: vacant reptile tank, posters of Bruce Lee and Walter White. The gaming setup included a flat-screen, newer and larger than the TV in the front room.

I asked Tara where she slept.

“The couch pulls out.”

She hadn’t taken over her son’s space.

Too painful.

Hopeful, too. Keep the bed free, in case he comes back.

She towed a cardboard box from the closet. “When am I gonna hear from you?”

“When I learn something.”

I wanted to temper her expectations. I thought she might snap back at me, but she nodded, as if drawing courage from the admission.

She saw me to the front door, watching as I buckled the box into the passenger seat.

Chapter 24

Regina Klein had begun her investigation the same place I would have: at the computer.

The box contained copies of Nicholas Moore’s vital records, public records searches, a preliminary timeline. His driver’s license listed Tara’s address. He’d never paid a utility bill, in Santa Cruz or elsewhere, never bought or sold a property. His tenancy with Randy Smythe had been informal to the point of invisibility.

The Civic was a 2009, black, bought used in 2020. Registration had expired as of December. No record of resale or transfer.

The postmile in the TikTok video mapped to Shoreline Highway at the southern end of the Lost Coast, right before the inland detour that gave the region its name.

Thirty miles to Swann’s Flat as the crow flies.

Crows could bypass the punishing road.

Still, feasible. Though I couldn’t fathom why Nicholas would want to go there.

His bank account had lain dormant since his disappearance, the last debit card charges posting two days after the final text exchange with his mother. He’d spent six hundred dollars at a Santa Cruz camping outfitter. Klein noted the purchases: pack, boots, sleeping bag, and tent.

To know that, she would’ve had to sweet-talk some gullible employee into retrieving the sale record.

So sorry to bother you, my wallet was stolen, I’m worried someone else may have used my card. Would you mind terribly checking? Here’s the number.

Canvass of Randy Smythe’s neighborhood turned up only one person who recognized Nicholas: the clerk at a nearby mini-market. He recalled Nick coming in a few times a week for milk, bread, peanut butter, premade sandwiches.

A thumb drive held photos of Smythe’s property, backyard, and garage workshop, plus an audio file of Klein’s interview with him. Under pressure, Smythe stuck to his guns: He didn’t know where Nick had gone. Their relationship was professional, not personal.

At times Smythe came across as cagey, though that could’ve been due to Klein’s aggressive style. Her voice was girlish and high-pitched; his, marble-mouthed and narcotized. It was like listening to Betty Boop grill Matthew McConaughey.

You let him live in your house she said.

In the garage.

I don’t have anyone living in my garage she said. You just let anyone move in? You didn’t get references?

He said he wanted to learn. That’s how I learned.

Paying it forward.

Yeah.

Did he have a girlfriend?

I don’t know, man.

Boyfriend? Come on, Randy. A year? You never saw him with anyone?

It’s none of my business.

You have eyes.

That’s all I know. I’m busy.

Klein had called hospitals and shelters. She’d visited local skateparks and skate shops to show Nicholas’s photo around, and had begun working her way through gyms and bars. The lack of an active social circle was striking. A short list of friends and co-workers drew wholly on his previous life in Fresno — the people Tara Moore had referred to as a bunch of idiots. The first six names were starred. Presumably that meant Klein had spoken to them, but her reports didn’t indicate any pertinent findings.

In any event, she’d had almost no time to follow up. Invoices stamped Paid showed two weeks of work in January and February.

She’d tacked on a third week, gratis.

I left her a voicemail and began calling idiots.

Gabe Espinoza was from Fresno, a fellow skater — not an idiot at all, but bright and helpful. With a note of hurt, he told me that Nick had dropped off the face of the earth. They hadn’t spoken in close to two years.

“We’ve been friends since first grade. Now you won’t text me back? What?”

“Why do you think he left?”

“Shitty job. No girls. His mom’s psycho. What’s keeping him?”

“What makes you say that about his mom?”

“Did you meet her?”

“I did.”

“And you thought she’s normal?”

“How did she and Nick get along?”

“They didn’t. Every time I was over, they were fighting and yelling at each other.”

“About?”

“Money. School. Everything. And not the normal way you fight with your mom, okay? She’s cussing and calling him names, like he’s her boyfriend and she caught him cheating.”

“She was controlling.”

“Hella controlling. He told me once he wanted to go visit his dad’s grave. She wouldn’t tell him where it is. How messed up is that?”

“Why didn’t she want to tell him?”

“ ’Cause she’s psycho. I don’t know. Ask her.”

I would. “Did he talk to you about his dad?”

“Not much. I think it made him depressed. So, yeah. I can’t blame him for getting out of here. I would, too. But you don’t have to be a dick about it.”

“Why Santa Cruz?”

“I guess he wanted to get as far away as he could. It’s like the opposite of here.”

“Tara told me he had a thing about the ocean.”

“Yeah, that was random. He started reading books about sailors. He tried to get me to read them, too. I was like, ‘Bro, I literally do not care about this.’ ” Espinoza laughed. “He’s intense, you know? Nothing halfway. He finds some thing and goes ham. Then he gets bored and drops it and jumps to the next thing. We used to make these TikToks? At the skatepark?”

“I saw them.”

“It was stupid shit, just us messing around. Out of nowhere Nick tells me he won’t do it anymore. ‘I hate social, it’s poisoning our brains, megacorporations profiting off us, stealing our souls, stealing our DNA.’ Some of what he was saying I agree with, but then he started to get into some straight-up conspiracy theory shit. He wanted to delete everything. I was like, ‘Hold up, I shot those, they’re mine, too.’ So he left them. But the rest he took down. Discord, Twitch, IG, Snap.”

“Have you seen his last TikTok? Where he’s standing by the highway?”

“I think. I don’t remember.”

“Would you mind taking a look?”

“Hold on... okay, yeah. This.”

“Any idea what he’s doing?”

A beat while he watched it to the end. “He looks like a skinhead.”

“Was he into that?”

“What.”

“Skinheads.”

“Nick? No. He just looks weird without hair.”

“Any thoughts?”

“Not really.”

“Do you recognize the place?”

“Sorry.”

“That’s okay. Gabe, did Nick have mood swings?”

“I mean, he was never Mr. Happy. Shit was tough for him.”

“Did he ever have periods where he would get overly excited or skip sleeping? Talk fast? Ever describe hearing voices?”

“Nothing like that.”

“Did he use drugs or alcohol?”

I expected his answer to differ from Tara’s, or at least be less absolute.

But he said, “Never.”

“You’re sure about that.”

“Completely. He was straight edge. It was really serious with him, because his mom used to be a meth head. He wouldn’t even touch cigarettes.”

“Tara told me he was on Adderall.”

“I mean. Who isn’t?”

“Did he ever take more than he was supposed to?”

“He didn’t take it at all.”

“He stopped his meds?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that when his behavior started to change?”

“No, he stopped a long time ago. I think before high school.”

“What did he do with the extras?”

Espinoza hesitated.

“No judgment,” I said. “But I’m wondering if that’s how he made cash.”

“Lots of people do it.”

“I know. That’s why I’m asking.”

“He’s not, like, Pablo Escobar.”

“Okay. Tell me about Nick’s relationships. Was he dating anyone?”

“He never really had a regular girlfriend. He would get obsessed with one person, then switch to someone else.”

“That was his pattern.”

“Yeah.” He paused. “You know what. There was this one girl he was into for a while. Naomi Cardenas. She goes to Santa Cruz.”

“To UC?”

“Yeah. Or, I mean, she got in. I don’t know if she’s still there.”

“Were she and Nick together?”

“No way,” he said. “That’s what I’m telling you: They weren’t even friends. I don’t think he said one word to her, all of high school. She was in a completely different universe. And I’m pretty sure she had a boyfriend, so it was never going to happen. Stupid, you know. Don’t tell Nick I said that.”

By week’s end, I’d left Regina Klein four voicemails and sent three emails.

I called Tara Moore. “Did you get a chance to speak to her yet?”

“I did it the day you were here, right after you left.”

“Can you remind her?”

“Yeah.”

“Thanks. Couple questions, while I have you. Did Nicholas ever mention someone named Naomi Cardenas?”

“No. Who’s that?”

“He went to high school with her. Had a crush on her at one time.”

“News to me. Does she know anything?”

“I’ll let you know once I’ve spoken to her. Now,” I said, “I have to ask you something tough, and I’m sorry. You told me Nicholas’s father was dead. I looked up Warren Pezanko. I’m not seeing a death record that fits. I am seeing someone by that name in the prison system.”

“You have no right,” she said. “No right.”

I kept silent.

“He’s trash,” she said. “Evil trash. I didn’t want Nicholas anywhere near him.”

“He’s housed at Pelican Bay.”

“I don’t give a shit where he is.”

“My point is that’s in Northern California. Up the highway. Is it possible Nicholas went to see him?”

“No. How would he? I told him his father’s dead. That’s all he ever heard from me.”

“Did he ask you about visiting the grave?”

“Why would he? Why are you getting into this?”

Not lying, quite, but covering up.

I said, “What if he wanted to see the grave, so he started calling cemeteries himself? They all tell him, no, sorry, nobody here by that name. Now he’s wondering, what’s going on here? He starts looking online.”

“He couldn’t, even he wanted to. I told him a different name.”

“What name?”

“Warren Smith.”

“Is it possible he found something with Warren’s real name on it? A birth certificate?”

“I didn’t put that piece of shit on the certificate. I said I didn’t know who the daddy was.”

“Maybe a letter, or a card, a picture?”

“I didn’t hold on to nothing from him.”

“All right.” I paused. “Is there anything else I should know? Now’s the time.”

“He’s a fucking garbage piece of shit,” she muttered.

I was starting to get the feeling she didn’t like him. “Okay. You’ll call Regina for me?”

A beat.

“Yeah.”

Naomi Cardenas was more representative of her generation than either Nicholas Moore or Shasta Swann, leaving her many social media accounts wide open for the world to see.

Her favorite tags were #womeninSTEM, #womenwhoSWIM, #brainsandbeauty, and #scienceissexy. She sliced through the pool, twirled on the beach, smirked in a lab coat with her swim goggles in one hand and safety goggles in the other. A thirty-second makeup tutorial promised to teach you how to achieve that soft, seamless look. The secret, I inferred, was to be Naomi Cardenas and be born with flawless skin.

If she was half as vivacious as she wanted people to think, it was hard to picture her going for Nick Moore.

My phone rang.

“Clay Edison.”

“I know who you are,” Regina Klein said. “You’re the motherfucker trying to steal my case.”

Chapter 25

Santa Cruz is a mellower version of Berkeley: surfers and locals, students and tourists, drifting in a tranquil stupor brought on by an overload of natural beauty.

The world might be ending, but not here.

How could it, with that view?

Regina Klein, licensed private investigator, smashed the myth.

“Adultery,” she said.

I’d asked about her caseload.

“Insurance fraud,” she said. “Bread-and-butter shit. People are the fuckin same everywhere.”

We sat outside a coffee roaster and vegan bakery on Beach Street. It was a bright, blustery day, the ocean bejeweled, palm trees doing a slow hula. Breezes carried the cloying scents of cotton candy and kettle corn, punctured by fetid spurts of sea lion. The table was cramped and my knees butted the post.

Not a problem for Regina at four foot eleven. Lemon-yellow Keds grazed the sidewalk; dyed-black bangs framed a doll-like face; oversized horn-rims further magnified her brown, owlish eyes. To judge from appearance alone, she’d be good at disarming people and getting them to lower their guard.

Assuming she could tone down the stridency a hair.

She wasn’t making any such effort with me.

That was her case. Her legwork. If Tara Moore could afford to hire a PI, why hadn’t she called Regina to finish what she’d started?

“What the actual fuck, man? Have you ever heard of professional fucking courtesy?”

I offered her a second oatmilk latte.

“Do I look like I need any more fucking caffeine? Get me a peach poppyseed scone.”

I bought one and brought it to her.

“One thing about these hipster scum,” she said, “they know how to make a pastry.”

She stuffed a chunk into her mouth. “So what’s your deal, Mr. Pro Bono? You’re a trust-fund baby? Why do you want my case?”

“It caught my eye.”

“Nice try, friendo. You don’t get to horn in on my shit and then act like a fuckin schoolgirl. Pay to play.”

I sketched the contours, leaving out Shasta’s name or anything material to Chris Villareal. When I mentioned the necklace, Klein waved dismissively toward the boardwalk.

“They sell those everywhere. Tourist crap.”

“Long way from Humboldt. How’d it get there?”

“Really, Poirot?” she said. “Okay. Here’s a few theories. It’s a different necklace. Or it’s the same, but your unnamed person of interest was a tourist here, bought tourist crap, and took it home. Or they bought it on the internet. Or Nick pawned it and your person bought it. Or he dropped it on the sidewalk and they found it. He met them and gave it to them and moved on. Now he’s in Outer Mongolia eating yak cheese. You want more? I can do this all day, as long as you’re buying.”

“There’s no evidence of him being anywhere else.”

“There’s no evidence of him being anywhere, period.”

“Except the necklace.”

She rolled her eyes.

I said, “The TikTok’s his first post in a year. He’s dumped all his other social media, but he wants the world to see where he is. What’s the significance of that spot? Where’s he headed?”

“Oh, you’re one of those guys.”

“Which guys.”

“Armchair shrink.” She affected a plummy, pompous voice. “ ‘My guiding principle is that the why is more important than the how. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.’ ”

“I take it you’re a how kind of person.”

“All there is, sugar tits,” she said. “Who did what to who, how hard and how long. The rest is Monday-morning quarterbacking. Your wife cheats on you? I’ll sit in my car for nine hours and get you the proof. You want to know what’s in her head, buy a saw.”

“You’re right,” I said. “It’s thin. That’s why I’m here.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Whatever’s not in the file.”

“The file is what’s in the file.”

“You expect me to believe you haven’t thought about it?”

“Sorry, Freud, my compartmentalizing skills are world-class.”

“Did you know that Warren Pezanko is alive?”

She shrugged.

“You knew.”

“Of course I knew.”

“You didn’t put that in the file.”

“I was off the clock,” she said, cramming in the last bite of scone.

“What will it take for you to trust me?”

“You could share your Netflix login.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I,” she said. She wiped her mouth. “I’ve missed the last two seasons of The Great British Baking Show.”

“How about another scone?”

“Cherry walnut.”

I brought it to her.

“It’s a start,” she said, breaking it in half.

“I’m asking about Pezanko because I think it could be relevant.”

“How?”

She had put down the scone and was paying attention. A turning point?

“Could explain why he’s heading in that direction,” I said. “I think it’s more than theory. The video’s called ‘In the name of the father.’ ”

“It’s a TikTok, for fuck’s sake, not the Bible. And how’s he finding out? Tara never told him the guy’s name.”

“Maybe it wasn’t Nick who found Pezanko. Maybe Pezanko got in touch with him.”

“Same problem. How’s he gonna know where Nick is?”

“I don’t know. I put in a call to the warden at Pelican Bay to see if he’ll talk to me.”

“And?”

“I haven’t heard back yet.”

“You’re a disappointment and a half.”

“All I’m trying to do is avoid reinventing the wheel.”

“Easy for you. I gave you a head start. What’re you going to give me?”

“Gabe Espinoza.”

“The fuck is that?”

“Number thirteen on your list of friends and co-workers.”

“Once again: my legwork.”

“No argument from me.”

She picked at the scone, trying, unsuccessfully, to squash her curiosity. “What’d he say?”

“Nick had a thing for this girl, Naomi Cardenas. She lives here.”

“In Santa Cruz?”

I nodded. “I’m headed over to her next.”

She was quiet for a long time.

“Okay. That’s a good lead.” Begrudging admiration.

“I’m sure you would’ve found her eventually.”

“Don’t you condescend to me.”

“I’m not. I’m rubbing it in your face.”

She laughed. “Get bent.”

“Despite your uncontrollable hostility, I’ll keep you in the loop.”

“No fuckin thank you.” She wiped the crumbs from her hands, shaking her head vehemently. “He’s all yours now.”

Chapter 26

Before leaving the beachfront I made a quick circuit of the neighborhood souvenir shops. Of the many puka shell necklaces for sale, few featured pendants and none of those were a rooster. The shopkeepers claimed they’d never seen or sold anything like it. One guy suggested I try a “real jewelry store.” I asked for recommendations and he told me to google it.

Naomi Cardenas lived on the south side of campus. I loitered by the building entrance, pretending to talk on the phone and catching the lobby door as a resident left.

The roommate who answered my knock had me wait in the hall.

I heard the chain go on.

A moment later Naomi opened the door, peering at me through the crack. “Yes?”

I introduced myself and showed my license. “I wanted to ask you about Nick Moore.”

She flinched slightly; glanced back into the apartment. “One second.”

Taking off the chain, she stepped out into the hall and shut the door behind. She was less glamorous in person but prettier for it, wearing mesh shorts and a tank top and a messy bun. Dark circles under her eyes. Long night at the lab?

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“You know Nick.”

“Sort of.”

“When were you last in touch with him?”

“Is everything okay?”

“His mom hasn’t heard from him. She’s worried. It would help to know how long it’s been since you spoke to him.”

“A year? More.”

“What’s that mean, you ‘sort of’ know him?”

“We went to high school together. But I didn’t know him then, we only met here.”

“How?”

“I was on my way to class and I heard someone calling my name. This guy comes up to me. He’s like, ‘I went to Hoover. You probably don’t remember me.’ ”

“Did you?”

“Kind of? I think I recognized his face. You know what it’s like when you’re out in the world and you run into someone from your hometown. You feel this... bond. Even if you don’t really know them. We were just, like, chatting about places and people. After that we started texting a little.”

“Was there anything romantic between you?”

“With Nick? Nooo. Nooo. Totally platonic. Truthfully, I felt bad for him. He seemed kinda lost. I think he was having trouble meeting people. I invited him to this Halloween party we were having. I didn’t think he’d actually show up.”

“But he did.”

“Yeah. And... Yeah.”

I said, “What happened?”

With another backward glance, Naomi led me down the hall and into the stairwell.

She said, quietly, “He hooked up with my roommate.”

“The one who answered the door?”

Naomi nodded.

“What’s her name?”

She stubbed the concrete with her flip-flop. “I shouldn’t even be telling you this.”

“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

“...Maddie.”

“Maddie what?”

“Zwick.”

“Do you think she’d be willing to talk to me?”

“That’s not a good idea. Her boyfriend’s over right now.”

“Was he her boyfriend at the time?”

“They were broken up when it happened. Plus she was really drunk.”

A door slammed on an upper floor. I waited for the echo to fade. “Did Maddie and Nick have a relationship or was it a onetime deal?”

She touched a fingertip to her lips. “Well, it’s not like they were dating.”

“But?”

“For a while they were hanging out, and he’d stay over sometimes. Then she got back together with Alex. But it became this whole big drama. Nick kept texting her. She blocked him and he started sending her letters. Actual letters, written on paper. Who does that?”

“What did they say?”

“I didn’t read them.”

“Does she still have them?”

“I’m sure she threw them out. One night he showed up, banging on the door. Alex was there. He and Nick got into a fight.”

“How serious?”

“It was mostly yelling and shoving. Alex was like, ‘Stay away from her or I’ll kill you.’ ”

“Was that a real threat?”

“Alex? No. He’s pre-med. Trust me, Nick was out of control.”

“When was this?”

“Last year. Spring quarter.”

Prior to the disappearance.

“Has Maddie been in touch with Nick since then?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It would really help if I could talk to her.”

“I can ask, but not while Alex is here.”

“I’m in town for the rest of the day. If you can get the message to her, I’d be grateful.”

She accepted my card. “I hope Nick’s okay. I mean, he shouldn’t have acted like that. But he’s not a bad guy. Just... confused.”

I nodded.

She said, “He said some cuckoo things that night.”

“Such as.”

“He loved her, he was going to kill himself if he couldn’t be with her. Maddie was totally traumatized. So, I hope he’s okay, for his sake. But for hers, too.”

Randy Smythe’s cottage was tiny and decrepit, six or seven hundred square feet worth six or seven hundred thousand dollars due to its prime location on the San Lorenzo River.

The whine of machinery drew me along a driveway lined with kinetic sculptures in steel and wood.

The garage was a one-car, its door shut while work took place in a postage-stamp yard. Two men wearing dust masks hunched over a surfboard propped on sawhorses. The younger used an orbital sander to shape the board, while his companion — twice his age and taller, with steel-wool hair and a rawhide complexion — traced curves in the air to guide him. More sculptures rotated.

I waved. “Excuse me.”

The younger man glanced up and shut off the sander.

“Randy Smythe?” I said.

The older man said, “Yes?”

“My name is Clay Edison. If I could have a few minutes of your time—”

“We’re right in the middle of this.”

“It’s about Nick Moore.”

Smythe tugged down his mask. Taking a water bottle from the grass, he chugged it and waggled it at the young man. “Fill this up for me.”

The assistant obediently carried the bottle into the house.

Smythe said, “I’ve gone over this.”

“I realize that, but Nick’s still missing.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say, dude. I don’t know where he went, he didn’t tell me, I haven’t heard from him.”

“Let’s try to jog your memory.”

“There’s nothing to jog.”

“Did he ever mention a girl named Maddie Zwick?”

“No.”

“Did he ever bring people over?”

“No. That’s a shop rule. I don’t care what you do in your free time, you can’t do it here.”

“Before he left, did you notice changes in his behavior or mood?”

“Man, I don’t know. We were focused on the task. This is an art. It requires concentration. I can’t be having distractions.”

“How was he as a worker?”

“Fine. He learned quick, he didn’t complain. Creative. I liked him.”

“He was sleeping in the garage.”

“That’s how it works.”

“It’s not an accusation.”

“I fed him. I shared my knowledge. When I was in the same situation nobody paid me.”

“I’d like your permission to have a look in there.”

“Dude. I’m tellin you, there’s nothing, okay? He took everything with him when he left.”

A voice behind us said, “There was some letters.”

We pivoted toward the house. The shop assistant stood on the back steps. He’d removed his mask and was holding the refilled water bottle.

“What letters?” I asked.

He glanced at Smythe nervously.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Aiden.”

“Aiden, what letters?”

“They were in the locker,” he said.

I turned to Smythe.

He sighed. “Fine.”

He hauled up the garage door. A scalding, chemical stench billowed out.

I saw surfboards in various stages of completion: heaped on tables, drying on racks. Hand tools, power tools, oxyacetylene torch, fiberglass cloth, tubs of epoxy, a spray paint rainbow.

One errant match would level the neighborhood.

Good reason to work in the yard.

The three of us single-filed toward the back, where floor space had been carved out to accommodate an army cot. Creature comforts included a battery-operated fan and a clamp lamp. Aiden’s personal possessions fit into a duffel bag and a footlocker, also military surplus.

“May I?” I asked.

Aiden looked at Smythe. Smythe said, “You invited him, kid.”

I opened the footlocker. Sour Patch Kids, marijuana, a bong, lighters.

“Where are the letters?” I asked.

“I threw them out,” Aiden said.

Smythe shut his eyes. “Unbelievable.”

“I didn’t know I was supposed to keep them.”

“Why’d you tell us you had them?”

“I didn’t say that, I said they were there before.”

“Do you remember what they said?” I asked. “Who they were addressed to?”

“I wasn’t paying attention. It was somebody’s private stuff.”

“How many were there?”

“Uh...”

“A lot, or just a few.”

“Like ten?”

“Are we done, please?” Smythe said.

“Those sculptures,” I said to him. “Are they yours?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you ever make jewelry?”

“No.”

“But you have the tools to do it.”

“Nothing fancy.”

“What about Nick? Do you recall him making any jewelry?”

Smythe said, “Now that you mention it, yeah. He was cutting a piece of steel and broke a saw blade. I was not happy.”

I showed him the photo of the pendant. “Was it this?”

“Could be.”

If so, the rooster was one of a kind.

My phone buzzed with a text.

It’s Naomi. Alex left Maddie says you can come over

Chapter 27

“Thanks for agreeing to meet with me,” I said.

Maddie Zwick nodded.

She sat curled up on the living room futon, long legs folded beneath her, gnawing the cuff of her sweatshirt and gazing at me with watchful blue eyes. A miniature floral tattoo adorned the inside of her wrist. The sweatshirt read Banana Slugs Swimming & Diving.

After making introductions, Naomi Cardenas had excused herself to class. We weren’t alone — a third roommate was working in her bedroom — but Maddie still seemed uneasy, and I offered to move the conversation someplace public.

“It’s okay,” she said.

I said, “What’s your event?”

“One hundred fly and two hundred IM.”

“Cool.”

She reevaluated me. “Do you swim?”

“Dog paddle.”

She smiled cautiously. “That’s not an event.”

“Not yet. I did play basketball at Berkeley. Used to arrive for morning practice and the swimmers would be leaving. They’d already had two hours in the pool.”

“My alarm’s set for four thirty.”

“Brutal.”

“Yeah, it sucks.” Her posture eased. “In high school I lettered in basketball. Volleyball, too.”

“Triple threat. Lemme see. You’re what. Five-nine?”

“And a half.”

“Two guard.”

“Yup,” she said. “Point?”

“You know it.”

She smiled again, more fully.

I said, “Like I said, I really appreciate this, Maddie. I know you had a rough experience with Nick and I’m sure it’s not fun to talk about. Naomi told me some, but I’d like to hear it from you. Take as much time as you need.”

She spat out her cuff and shoved it up her forearm, irked by her own bad habit. “We had a party and she invited him. She must’ve forgotten, or she was ignoring him, because I went to my room to get something. He was in there.”

“Doing what?”

“Nothing. Standing there, with his hands in his pockets. I was like, ‘Uh, excuse me?’ He apologized. He said he came in to get some space ’cause he felt out of place. He didn’t know anyone except Naomi.”

“What was your first impression?”

“Part of me was creeped out, but at the same time it was kind of sweet and awkward. How he admitted it right away, most guys would be like, ‘Oh no, I’m good.’ We started talking, and you know. One thing led to another.”

“Naomi said it wasn’t serious between you.”

“Not for me.”

“For him?”

“I mean. It’s my fault.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I should’ve been clearer. I’d just broken up with Alex, I was feeling shitty about myself. Nick... He was cute. And — I did like him. Just not the way he liked me.”

“How long did it last?”

“About seven months. But that makes it sound like more than what it was. We didn’t do, like, couple things. We never went anywhere together. I didn’t want to run into Alex, and Nick wasn’t allowed to have guests, so he’d come over and we’d sit and watch TV and talk.”

“What did you guys talk about?”

“Normal stuff. Life. He wasn’t my usual type. I had a typical suburban childhood. My dad sells insurance, my mom’s a nurse. Very Orange County mid. Naomi was like, ‘It’s so adorable, you’re going through your dirty hippie boy phase.’ ”

“Opposites attract?”

“Yeah, maybe. For a little while.”

“And then?”

“It felt out of balance,” she said. “Almost from the beginning.”

“Can you give me an example?”

“Well, like... He gave me this necklace?”

“The rooster.”

Her eyes widened. “You saw it?”

I showed her the still from the TikTok video.

“Yeah,” she said. “I gave it back when we broke up. I never wanted it in the first place.”

“That’s what you mean by out of balance.”

“Exactly. I get that he meant to be sweet. But I’d known him like three weeks. You should not be buying me gifts. He goes, ‘I didn’t buy it, I made it.’ If you think about it, that’s even weirder. When did you start working on it? The day after we hooked up?”

The cuff had found its way into her mouth again.

“He’s a talented guy,” she said. “It was good. But it’s a chicken. I don’t want to wear that. When I tried it on, he looked so happy. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I’d wear it when he was around and take it off when he left.”

She pulled the cuff from between her teeth. “I’m not the best at setting boundaries.”

“Was the necklace supposed to represent something?”

“He said it was good luck for sailors. He told me that on ships they keep the pigs and chickens in crates. If it sinks, they float to shore and don’t drown.”

“At least he didn’t give you a pig.”

She laughed. “Oh my God. I can’t even.”

“The sailor fixation — what was that about?”

“We were comparing tattoos once. Mine,” she said, touching her wrist, “is for my grammy Lily. He showed me the anchor and was all like, ‘Life is a storm.’ ”

“What’s that mean?”

“I just thought he was being extra. Part of his moody-guy thing.”

“Tell me more about that, Maddie.”

“He took everything so seriously. The world’s black and white, everything has to mean something. He was very self-conscious that he’d dropped out. I think he felt he wasn’t good enough or smart enough so he had to prove himself constantly.”

“To you.”

“Actually, no. It wasn’t about me, it was about him. I’m an English major, right? So he’d always try to talk to me about books. Catcher in the Rye? High school stuff. He must’ve realized what I thought, because he started asking for recommendations. Anything I gave him, he’d read in a couple days and ask for more. It bothered me. You’re not seeing me, the person; you’re using me to fill in the holes in your life.”

She paused. “Does that make sense?”

“Perfect sense. Is that why you decided to end it?”

“Kind of. I let it drag out. But then it got really weird, really quickly, and I knew I had to just cut it off.”

“Weird how?”

“I was showing him the reading list from this seminar I took on Chicano literature. Sandra Cisneros, Richard Vasquez, people like that. I asked Nick if he’d ever read Octavio Prado.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know who that is.”

“He wrote this book, Lake of the Moon, about growing up in Fresno. That’s why I thought of it. I was like, ‘Oh, this guy, he’s from Fresno, too.’ I wasn’t implying anything about Nick personally. I just thought he might like it ’cause of the connection.”

“Is that how he took it? Personally?”

“That’s the weird part. I let him borrow it. The next morning he came back. He’d read it overnight and he was freaking out.”

“About?”

She exhaled. “So you know he never met his dad?”

“He discussed that with you.”

“No discussion, he just told me. It felt too heavy for what we were. I wasn’t thinking about it when I gave him the book. There’s a part where Prado writes about getting a girl pregnant. Nick... He was convinced the girl was his mom and Prado’s his real father.”

“That’s what he said?”

Maddie nodded.

“What gave him that idea?” I asked.

“No clue. I mean, I thought he was joking. Obviously. Then he starts showing me his notebook. He’s copied out all these passages from the book. Names and dates. And charts he’d created. Pages and pages, he must’ve been working on it all night. I’m looking at it and he’s pacing around my room, talking a mile a minute. ‘Don’t you get it? Everything lines up. This is why I came here, this is why we met, it’s destiny.’ It was insane.”

“Sounds like it.”

“Yeah. Then it started to get scary. He’s asking questions about Prado and getting angry when I can’t answer. I told him, ‘I don’t know anything else, that’s the only thing we read in class.’ Eventually he got fed up and left.”

“Had you ever seen him act like that before?”

“No. Never.”

“You described him as moody.”

“Okay, but this... It was a whole ’nother level.”

“What’s the character’s name? The woman he thought was his mom.”

“...Sandra, I think.”

“Do you have the book?”

“He never returned it.”

“When did you lend it to him? Approximately?”

“I took the seminar winter quarter, so right after that.”

“Spring 2024.”

“Yeah.”

“What happened after he left?”

“I didn’t hear from him for a few days. I was worried, but also relieved. It felt like a wake-up call. I texted him that I needed a break.”

“How’d he take it?”

“Better than I expected. He apologized. I told him we could be friends. He didn’t text for a week or two. Then it was nonstop.”

“Do you have the messages?”

“I erased them when I blocked him.”

“He began sending real letters.”

She nodded.

“Do you remember what they said?”

“I only opened the first one. I started to read it, but it was too upsetting. The rest I put straight in the trash. I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for, Maddie.”

She bit her lip. “I just wanted it to stop.”

“Of course. And this went on till the night of the fight with Alex.”

“Yes.”

“Are you okay to talk about that?”

She started to go for her cuff but caught herself. “I think so.”

“Whenever you’re ready.”

She drew the hem of the sweatshirt over her knees. “Okay, so. It was late. I’m asleep, Alex’s studying in the kitchen. He and I had gotten back together. Naomi heard a knock and saw it was Nick through the peephole. She told him to go away, but he kept banging. Alex opened the door, and the two of them started arguing. It woke me up so I came out of my room. I almost didn’t recognize Nick. He’d shaved his head, and he was sort of sticking through the door, trying to force his way inside. It was like that scene from that movie. The guy with the ax?”

“The Shining?”

“Yeah. I was afraid someone was going to get hurt. I said I could talk to him, but only if he calmed down. He goes, ‘I’d never hurt you, I love you.’ Alex heard that and went ballistic. He pushed Nick into the hall, and they started wrestling. Now I’m trying to calm him down, too.”

She’d crossed her arms protectively over her chest and was staring at the door, as if she could see them rolling around.

“What a thing to go through, Maddie.”

She swallowed. “Yeah.”

“Do you remember what Nick was saying?”

“Not really. More of that destiny crap. Basically he wanted me to come with him.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. He was babbling, not making any sense.”

“This might sound strange, but did he mention the writer? Prado?”

“I... There was a lot going on. No, I don’t think so. I was just trying to say whatever I could to get him to calm down. All of a sudden he stops and looks at me. ‘You’re not wearing it, why aren’t you wearing it?’ ”

“The necklace.”

She nodded. “I couldn’t tell him the real answer, which was that I never wore it anymore. I didn’t want him to lose his shit. I said I took it off to sleep. His whole vibe changed, like that. He sort of... deflated? It was awful. I thought he would start crying. He asked me for it back. I gave it to him and made him promise he would leave.”

“After that?”

“I never talked to him again.”

“He never tried to contact you.”

“No. Well — he put up a TikTok, flipping me off.”

“You think that was directed at you.”

“I mean. Yeah. Who else would it be?”

“Do you recognize the location in the video?”

She shook her head. “Do you?”

“Mendocino County. About a five-hour drive north of here.”

“What was he doing all the way up there?”

“Good question. Did he ever talk about heading that way? When he was trying to persuade you to come with him?”

She bit her lip again. Hard enough to leave a rosy crescent. “I’m sorry, I really don’t remember.” She wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Everything was so chaotic.”

“You’re doing great,” I said. “And you can always call me later if something comes back to you.”

She nodded.

“One last question. Do you know the date of the fight with Alex?”

“Not off the top of my head. But... Hold on.”

She took out her phone, began scrolling. “I couldn’t sleep ’cause I was so shaken up. I texted my coach and told her I wasn’t feeling well. One second, I have to find it... Okay, I wrote to her at four a.m. on June 12. So the night before.”

June 11. The day after Nicholas’s last message to his mother.

I thanked Maddie and left her looking forlorn.

Chapter 28

Octavio Prado was the writerly equivalent of a one-hit wonder. Lake of the Moon, first published in the fall of 2005, was long out of print. I browsed reviews left by a tiny, loyal following.

My favorite book of all time

Why is he not more famous?

Unsung master, so much better than today’s “literature”

Used hardcovers went for a penny, plus shipping and handling.

I ordered one, expedited.

Two thousand five. Prado had had the good or bad fortune of making his debut immediately prior to the advent of Web 2.0 — that brief window when the internet held nothing but promise and privacy still existed. His Wikipedia entry was a stub, and he didn’t maintain a webpage or use social media. The bulk of the links about him were broken. More recent pages referred to him in the past tense and regurgitated the same set of factoids.

Wunderkind, published at nineteen to raves and nominations. Hollywood knocking.

He didn’t win the awards. There was no movie, no cushy post teaching creative writing at a liberal arts college. No heroic sophomore effort.

A supernova, there and gone.

My copy of Lake of the Moon arrived two days later. The cover depicted a hybrid creature: eagle’s head, human body, dressed in baggy shorts and smoking a limp cigarette.

I opened to the back flap.

A young Latino man glared at the camera, doing his utmost to compensate for a baby face. Shaved head, pencil goatee, a soft bulge beneath his chin. But for the bare scalp, no resemblance to Nick Moore.

Octavio Prado was born in Fresno. This is his first book.

It ran to 166 pages, written in a terse, crackling style and covering three weeks in the life of its adolescent protagonist, Félix Santiágo de Jesús y Tlalolín. Aka Grillito, aka Cricket.

In the first scene, he woke up in the bedroom he shared with three brothers. Over breakfast he endured merciless teasing from his three sisters. He rode his skateboard to school. He got a B on a creative writing assignment. He talked shit with his friends in the hallways.

During lunch, a white girl flirted with him unexpectedly. Her name was not Sandra, as Maddie Zwick remembered, but Sarah.

After school he rode his skateboard to his grandfather’s house. He and the old man were rebuilding a Rolls-Royce from parts. When they were done, Abuelo gave him ten dollars from a coffee can under the kitchen sink.

At home Cricket couldn’t stop thinking about Sarah. He went into the bathroom to masturbate but forgot to lock the door. His sister walked in. She screamed and called him disgusting.

Fleeing the house in shame, he rode to a local skatepark, gliding over the ramps till nightfall.

Someone called his name. Sarah was walking toward him. They sat alone at the edge of a lake-shaped pit, talking and kicking their feet. She said she was driving home from tennis practice and saw him. She said she liked Mexican guys. She didn’t know why, she just did. She leaned over and kissed him. They went to a secluded corner of the park, lay down in the weeds, and had sex.

Post-coitus, the action jumped ahead.

Sarah confronted Cricket at school. She told him she was pregnant and demanded five hundred dollars for an abortion, implying that if he refused she would accuse him of rape.

He rode to Abuelo’s house. He intended to borrow the money, but Abuelo didn’t answer the door. Cricket went around and let himself in with the key under the flowerpot. The old man was asleep on the living room sofa, his snores boring through the drone of the TV. Cricket took the coffee can from under the kitchen sink. He peeled the lid off.

The novel ended with him staring into the can at a mess of small bills, listening to the old man’s exhausted wheezes.

On another day, I might have enjoyed it. But this wasn’t pleasure reading; I was searching for any link to Nicholas Moore, however specious.

Fresno. Skateboarding. A white girl.

Sarah rhymed with Tara.

The year of publication coincided with Nick Moore’s birth.

Still, not much.

But that was beside the point. It didn’t matter how a rational person would respond, only how Nick would. Everything I’d learned about him — intense mood swings, grandiose thoughts — suggested an undiagnosed mental illness beyond his childhood ADHD.

What Lake of the Moon left out was more important than what it contained.

We never learned if Cricket went through with his theft. If Sarah had the abortion. If, for that matter, the pregnancy was real or a shakedown.

Blanks for an overactive mind to fill in.

I looked up the seminar Maddie Zwick had taken.

Lit 193C, Chicano/a Voices, was taught by a UC Santa Cruz associate professor named Eli Ruíz. His CV positioned him as a leading authority on Prado — the sole authority, having planted his flag with a single journal article titled “Autonomía o autotomía?: Violence, Liberation, and De(con)structed Selves in Lake of the Moon.”

I emailed him and was surprised to get a callback within the hour.

He spoke at a breakneck clip, excited by my interest. As a teenager growing up in Whittier, discovering Prado had been a formative experience: the first time Ruíz recognized himself on the page. The slang was his slang, the characters intimately familiar.

I asked what Prado was doing now.

“No one knows. He left Fresno and withdrew from the public eye. I’ve reached out to his family, his literary agent. They haven’t heard from him in years. I’ve come to the conclusion that he doesn’t want to be found.”

“Why?”

“The novel caused an uproar in his community. Prado’s family is very traditional, very Catholic. More than that: His mother is fanatically religious. I gather he was made to feel excruciatingly unwelcome at home. He may have been threatened, or felt that way.”

“It’s fiction.”

“A fine line, Mr. Edison. And Prado didn’t do himself any favors, there. He’s also the youngest of seven, also three brothers and three sisters. His mother’s name is Celia; in the book it’s Celene. He mentions her church by name. He really did rebuild a Rolls-Royce with his grandfather. And so on. And, by the way, his grandfather died of a heart attack shortly after publication. Celia is quite firm in blaming Octavio.”

“What about the Sarah character? Who’s she?”

“That’s trickier. Prado attended Roosevelt High from 1999 to 2003. The student body is predominantly Latino and Latina. It shouldn’t be hard to narrow her down, but everyone I’ve spoken to denies it. The name Sarah can sometimes signify a generic white female. I’m inclined to think she’s a composite.”

“Was the pregnancy factual?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“That would be a good reason to want to leave town.”

“Yes, although I doubt he needed another.”

“Any idea where he went?”

“If only. His agent told me she was forever trying to get ahold of him, but he moved often, without warning. My impression is that he was homeless by choice.”

“I’d like to speak to her. Would you mind putting me in touch?”

“Let me ask her permission.”

“Thank you.”

“One thing you might find of interest: Prado finished a second book but it was never published.”

“How come?”

“It’s somewhat... unruly.”

“You’ve read it.”

“The agent donated it to UC Merced. I had a scan made. I can send you the PDF.”

“That’d be great. What’s it called?”

“Cathedral.”

My scalp prickled.

A grove of redwoods, whirling like dancers, writhing like flames.

The Cathedral.

I asked what the book was about.

“Easier to say what it’s not about,” Ruíz said. “You can’t characterize it as a novel, as such. More like a mosaic. There’s no traditional narrative. One senses Prado striving for a new mode of communication. He doesn’t succeed, in my opinion. But some of the writing is highly memorable. Sublime, even.”

“What does the title mean?”

“As far as I’m aware, the word doesn’t appear in the body of the text. Full disclosure: I’ve only read chunks, never the whole thing straight through. I love Prado, but that would be a lot to ask of anyone.”

“Professor, have you ever met a young man named Nick Moore?”

“He’s a student?”

“No. I’ll text you a photo.”

Seconds later: “Oh. That kid.”

“How do you know him?”

“I don’t,” Ruíz said. “I met him once. He showed up to my office hours.” A beat. “He wanted to talk about Prado, too. Lots of questions. Not dissimilar from yours, in fact. What else did Prado write, where is he now.”

“You told him about Cathedral.”

“Probably.”

“Did you send him the PDF?”

“I can check. What am I looking for?”

I gave him Nick Moore’s email address.

“No, I don’t see it,” Ruíz said. “Who is he, if not a student?”

“A young man. Also missing.”

“Oh no. Really?”

“For about fifteen months.”

“That’s terrible. Uch. His poor family.”

“Do you remember when you talked to him?”

“I had recently finished teaching the seminar, so it must have been around then. Or a little after...? I’m sorry. I don’t want to tell you the wrong thing.”

“No worries. Thinking back on the conversation, does anything jump out about him or his behavior? Was he upset, excited?”

“I couldn’t say. As I recall I was on my way to class, running out the door, and we only spoke for a few minutes. What’s his connection to Prado?”

“He’s from Fresno. He was born the same year Lake of the Moon was published, and he seems to have come to the conclusion that Prado was his biological father.”

Ruíz spluttered a laugh. “What?”

“Could that be possible?”

“No. No. Out of the question.” Then, doubtfully: “You don’t think it’s possible?”

“He and Prado have a few superficial things in common.”

“Such as.”

I described the similarities. When I got to Sarah and Tara, he scoffed. “Come on.”

“I agree with you. But I try to keep an open mind. I’d rather ask the question and sound stupid than be smug and miss something.”

“You should steer clear of academia, then.”

“Noted. I will say, Professor, you’re a pretty good PI.”

“I’m up for tenure soon. Depending on how it goes, you might be hearing from me re: a career change.”

“I’ll be ready,” I said. “Nick didn’t ask you directly about any of this, though.”

“No.”

“What about the manuscript at Merced? Did you mention it to him?”

“I might have. As I said, it was a brief conversation. I’d forgotten about it until you sent me his picture. But — look. He’s far from the first person to overidentify with a writer or character. When it comes to Prado, I’m just as guilty. Any great literature, Mr. Edison, is a mirror.”

Chapter 29

If books were mirrors, Cathedral belonged in a fun house.

One thousand, nine hundred twenty-three mind-numbing, handwritten pages, clogged with strikeouts, erasures, words running left to right but also backward. Or vertically. Or diagonally. Many sheets were blank or featured a single word. Others had been victimized by marker bleed.

Prado catalogued the shelves in an AM/PM mini-mart.

He drew motorcycles. Drew a poor rendition of Keanu Reeves in The Matrix.

A wrinkled blotch marked where he’d spilled some sort of amber liquid.

Occasionally I stumbled across passages that demonstrated his skill and concision: sharp snippets of dialogue, crystalline descriptions of people or places. But these lucid moments were few and far between, and I couldn’t pinpoint any chronology or geography, making it impossible to extract actionable leads.

On page 450 I broke for coffee and ibuprofen.

On page 889 I stopped dead.

A rectangular block of text crowded the screen. At its center was a pencil sketch about the size of a baseball card.

Prado’s drafting skills were rudimentary. But I got the gist.

Saw-toothed water.

Lumpy hills.

Two convergent lines forming a road.

On it, a stick figure.

One arm up.

One giant middle finger extended to the sky.

Sea, mountains, highway; fuck you.

I opened Nicholas Moore’s final TikTok, let it play.

Sea, mountains, highway.

Fuck you.

The drawing was far too crude to call it a match.

Was I committing the same error as Eli Ruíz or Nick Moore or countless others?

Craving meaning, finding it in the mirror?

I combed through the surrounding text, a stew of Spanish and English.

A phrase was tucked into the bottom right corner.

En el nombre del Padre, y del Hijo, y del Espíritu Santo A Men 83261

In the name of the father.

I zoomed in. The writing was faint. But then I saw it. A speck between two digits made it 83.261.

And that reminded me of something.

I replayed Nick’s final TikTok, pausing on the frame where he stooped toward the camera.

As I adjusted the slider, the postmile sign came into focus, one character at a time.

Four days and one bottle of ibuprofen later, I had yet to find another real-world reference.

That didn’t mean there weren’t any. The scan quality worsened steadily; I imagined the unfortunate work-study student assigned the task, drowning in boredom. Prado’s handwriting deteriorated, too. By the end it was a hectic scrawl that tore holes in the paper.

Something might be in there, but I wasn’t going to find it in a PDF.

I booked an appointment at UC Merced for the following afternoon.

In the morning I dropped Myles off at daycare and drove Charlotte to Chabot Park for camp. As I was walking back to my car, a counselor chased after me, calling urgently.

“Excuse me.” She was about fifteen, with box braids. “You’re Charlotte’s dad.”

“Yes?”

“I wanted to talk to you about something that happened yesterday.”

I braced myself. “Okay.”

“The kids were taking turns on the swings, and there was a child who was getting upset because he had to wait so long. Charlotte was next, but she let him go ahead. It was so kind of her.”

“I thought you were going to tell me she did something wrong.”

“Charlotte? Oh no. She’s the sweetest thing ever.”

“You know what? You’re right. She is. Thanks...”

“Nia.” She grinned. “Anyhow. I thought you’d want to know.”

“I do. Thanks for sharing it with me.”

“You’re welcome! Have a great day!” She ran off, braids flying.

I took out my phone to text Amy and tell her. It rang before I could call. Blocked number.

I said, “Hello?”

“This is Maeve Ferris. Octavio’s agent.” A mid-Atlantic accent broadened the a’s in Prado’s name. “I believe you wanted to talk to me.”

“Yes. Hi. Give me one second.”

“Bad time?”

“No, I just need to grab my notebook.”

I got it from the car and jogged along Estudillo Avenue, away from the noisy drop-off area and toward the picnic tables.

“Thanks for getting back to me, Ms. Ferris. I’m not sure what Professor Ruíz told you.”

“You’re searching for a boy who thinks Octavio is his father.”

“Correct.”

“Allow me to assure you: He’s not.”

“And you know that because?”

“Because Octavio was a virgin. And I know that because he told me.”

“Could he have lied?”

“Not a chance,” Ferris said. “He was utterly sincere. Tell me: Have you ever met a man who lied about that? Only the very best ladies do. Plus there are the issues of content and context. Anyone reading that sex scene could tell it wasn’t written from experience.”

“What I read was very short.”

“You should’ve seen the original, before I made him take a machete to it.”

“That bad, huh.”

“The word loins made multiple appearances,” she said. “One of my conditions for representing him was that he walk me through the manuscript, to review it for potential libel. You probably don’t remember, but a number of books around then straddled the line between novel and autobiography, and several of those authors ended up getting sued. Given Octavio’s subject matter, I thought it prudent to have him on record. The sex, the pregnancy — it was all made up.”

“Was Sarah a real person? I ask because the mother of the boy I’m looking for is about the right age, and her name is Tara.”

“Perhaps Octavio knew her or was inspired by her, but he certainly didn’t impregnate her. Short of a Christmas miracle, I don’t see how this boy could be his son. Who is he, anyway?”

“His name’s Nicholas Moore. He was born around when Lake of the Moon came out. Has he ever contacted you?”

“No,” she said. “Born when, exactly?”

“May 3, 2005.”

“Well, that’s another way to know. Octavio and I spent at least a year editing together, and then we had to wait for his place in the publication cycle. The first draft would have been finished no later than about 2003.”

“Ah.”

“Sorry to disappoint, Mr. Edison.”

“That’s all right. I told Professor Ruíz I didn’t think it was plausible. But it is possible Nick convinced himself it was the truth.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me. Fiction can be a springboard for all sorts of fantasies. Now, if there’s nothing else—”

“A couple questions about Prado, if that’s okay.”

A beat. “Be my guest.”

“How’d you come to work with him in the first place?”

“I’d love to claim I divined him with my exquisite literary antennae, but it was pure chance. He sent in the manuscript unsolicited. My assistant pulled it out of the slush pile. Lauren. Smart girl. She went back to law school... Regardless. She liked it, passed it to me. Et voilà. Back then we could afford to take risks. Not anymore. One reason I got out.”

“Professor Ruíz said the book upset Prado’s family.”

“Yes, it was rather tragic. They booted him out of the house. Next thing I know he’s calling me from a bus station pay phone in San Francisco.”

“Is that where he settled?”

“Not for long. He kept picking up and moving. He was terribly frightened.”

“Of?”

“His brothers had given him a righteous beating. I think they intimated that they’d do it again, or worse, if he dared to write another book. Remember, he was nineteen. To become simultaneously a darling and a pariah was a shock to his system.”

“He struggled with the spotlight.”

“Oh, did he. He was shy to begin with. Getting pummeled wasn’t nearly as threatening as being trotted out in public. It triggered a streak of paranoia in him. I invited him to come stay with me but he was afraid of flying. So he just went along like that, hopping from one fleabag to the next. I wouldn’t hear from him for weeks at a stretch. Whenever a check came in, I’d hold the money. Sooner or later he’d call needing cash, and I’d send Lauren over to Western Union.”

“Do you know where he was? Specific locations?”

“I do not. California’s one big plate of avocados to me.”

“Any chance you still have the transfer receipts lying around?”

“Goodness, no. What kind of hoarder do you take me for?”

I smiled. “How much did he make?”

“For Lake of the Moon? I think the advance was about thirty-five thousand.”

“That doesn’t go very far around here.”

“Well, it was twenty years ago. And there was option money, too, and a handful of foreign sales. Fifty or sixty K, in all. But yes, I knew he was going to run out. I kept pressing him to sign another deal, strike while the iron’s hot. He wouldn’t hear of it. He was busy, he had to concentrate, something big in the works. I said, ‘Wonderful. May I see a few pages to get the flavor?’ No, it’s not ready, he’s writing as fast as he can. All the clichéd excuses you get from writers who are choking. Then he stopped communicating altogether. Months went by, a year, two. I’d just about written him off. You can imagine my astonishment when this twenty-pound package crash-lands on my doorstep.”

“Cathedral.”

“Ah, yes. Cathedral.” She sighed. “I want to be kind. It’s a work in progress. And I believe Octavio would’ve gotten there. In time. But clearly it’s not publishable as is. He must have known it, because he sent a follow-up letter, instructing me to burn the manuscript.”

“You didn’t.”

“Naturally. I’ve worked with too many writers to heed those sorts of hysterics.”

“Where does the title come from?”

“I’ve always thought it referred to one of those medieval churches that take five hundred years to complete. You begin building knowing someone else will finish it.”

“You helped him with his first book,” I said. “Could he have wanted you to take over on this one?”

“If so, he was delusional. Lake of the Moon had its issues, but at the core it was a story, amenable to refinement. Cathedral is... was well beyond my skills. Those of any agent. Or editor, for that matter. In any event, all that’s irrelevant. Octavio never contacted me, and I had no way of reaching him. There was nothing for me to do but sit and wait for him to call.”

“When did you realize he wasn’t going to?”

“It wasn’t an epiphany. He simply faded from my consciousness.”

“You made the decision to donate the manuscript.”

“I hung on to it as long as I could. After I retired I was cleaning out my office and found it in my file cabinet. Taking up the better part of a drawer. Sap that I am, I couldn’t bring myself to toss it. Couldn’t very well give it to his parents, either. I had my assistant look up libraries specializing in California literature. I can’t remember who took it.”

“Merced.”

“Sounds exotic.”

“Only if you like cows. I’m headed there today.”

“I thought that professor sent you his copy.”

“He did, but I’d like to see it in the flesh. I’m not sure how well you remember it—”

“Not in the slightest.”

“At one point, there’s a stick figure giving the finger, and the line En el nombre del Padre, y del Hijo, y del Espíritu Santo. A Men 83.261.”

“That sounds like a Mass.”

“It is. But the word amen is broken up. You can read it as two words: A, ‘to,’ and Men 83.261. The number corresponds to a mile marker in Northern California. Mendocino County, 83.261. In other words, ‘I’m going to this place,’ and then the precise location.”

She said, “Goodness, that’s clever. If I was still in the business, I’d talk to you about a book. The real-life adventures of a preternaturally clever private detective.”

“Thanks, but the job’s mostly plodding along.”

“So is writing.”

“Did Prado ever mention Northern California? When he called to have money wired—”

“Sorry, no. As I said.”

“Please indulge me for a second and I’ll name some towns. Stop me if any of them ring a bell. Fort Bragg. Millburg. Swann’s Flat.”

“Avocados,” she said.

“Okay. Thanks anyway.”

“You’re welcome. It’s nice to think about Octavio. Amend that: bittersweet. He was a sweet boy. A sweet, sad boy. I wish I’d done more to help him.”

“What else could you have done?”

“Flown out, bought him dinner, bucked him up.” A beat. “We never met in person, you know.”

“Really?”

“Really. Everything was phone calls. That’s how we operated, in those days. Now I have to go. Husband, cigarettes, martini, then walk the dog.”

“Thanks for your time, Ms. Ferris. I’ll send your regards to the manuscript.”

“Please do,” she said. “It broke my heart to let it go. As if I was signing Octavio’s death certificate.”

Chapter 30

The newest addition to the University of California, UC Merced, was built in 2005 to serve the undereducated, low-income agricultural communities of San Joaquin Valley. From the East Bay it was a two-hour drive inland, all fields and cattle farms till the campus sprouted from the earth like some modernist bumper crop. I’d never been there before and was struck by the contrast between its boxy, no-nonsense layout and the august, tree-lined pathways of my alma mater.

Kolligian Library was one of the larger boxes. I rode the elevator up to Special Collections.

The desk librarian was a dyspeptic middle-aged guy with a waxed mustache. In exchange for my reservation number, he handed over a pair of white cotton gloves, a golf pencil, and a baggie of weighted shoelaces.

“I’ll retrieve the item from storage and deliver it to you in the reading room. Are you planning on taking pictures?”

Without waiting for an answer, he shoved a tray of forms at me. “You’ll need to fill this out. Every image requires a separate form. No flash photography.”

I held up the shoelaces. “What are these for?”

“Keeping pages flat.” As if I should’ve known. “Never press down on the binding.”

“It’s a manuscript. I don’t think it’s bound.”

“Do we have a problem, sir?”

“No problem.”

“End of the hall. I’ll meet you there.”

“Thanks. One other thing: Can I view the request history for the item?”

He reacted as though I’d asked for nudes of his grandmother. “That information is confidential.”

“Okay.”

“How would you like it if I told people what you were reading?”

“I admire your commitment to privacy.”

He sniffed. “End of the hall.”

Along the way I passed a walnut display rack stocked with the current issue of California, the UC alumni magazine. My own copy had come in the mail a few weeks ago. The cover story, “Cuisine of Culture,” was about lab-grown meat.

I hadn’t read it or any of the articles, skipping straight to the class notes to check on my peers. Who’d made partner; had a baby; won a prize; written a book. Then there were the obits, citing car accidents and cancers. No cause given translated to suicide.

The reading room was glass-walled and light-drenched. A white-haired woman pored over a folio. I chose the seat farthest from her, by a window overlooking a wide, grassy expanse. Sprinklers hiccuped in the wavy heat.

The woman cleared her throat and turned a page.

The desk librarian arrived, pushing a cart loaded with archival boxes.

He hiss-whispered, “Gloves. Please.”

I obliged, and he gently set out the boxes — five of them, made of sturdy gray cardboard with protective metal edges. They touched down on the table with a soft, confident thunk. Call labels displayed a barcode, catalog number, and author information.

I nodded thanks and the librarian departed, looking back once to ensure obedience to protocol.

I pried up the cover of box one. It resisted, then rose with a farting sound, emitting the scent of old paper and attracting the white-haired lady’s disapproval.

I set the cover aside and leaned in.

I expected Prado’s frenzied handwriting, chaos in black and white.

Instead I saw a glossy full-color photo of a tentacle grasping a sealed jar.

It was the May — June 2024 issue. The cover story, “Sucker for Learning,” was about octopus intelligence.

I removed the magazine.

Beneath it was another, identical issue.

Below that, a third.

I reached into the box and removed the entire stack.

Octopi.

Same for boxes two, three, four, and five.

I refilled the boxes and balanced them in my arms. The white-haired woman glanced up as I butted through the door and into the hall.

Seeing me coming, the desk librarian began to hop up and down in alarm.

“Excuse me, sir. You can’t do that. Sir. Please wait while I get the cart.”

I dropped the boxes on the counter. “We have a problem.”

“Excuse me. Special Collection items are not to leave the reading room.”

“They already have. Take a look.”

He frowned. Opened a box. Frowned harder.

“What is this?” he said.

“It’s supposed to be a two-thousand-page handwritten manuscript,” I said.

He started removing magazines one by one, piling them sloppily on the counter.

“What is this,” he mumbled.

“I know what it looks like to me.”

He didn’t answer. He seized the next box, shook off the cover, and dumped the contents out. Magazines slid to the floor.

“The fuck,” he said.

I held up my PI license. His pupils dilated.

I said, “How about we rethink your commitment to privacy?”

The head of library security, Roy Trujillo, was a retired twenty-seven-year veteran of Merced PD, easygoing and happy to shoot the breeze with a fellow ex-cop.

He didn’t mind civilian life. His might not be the most exciting job, but it came with a respectable benefits package. He’d tweaked his schedule to spend Fridays with his granddaughter. Add in his pension and he was doing pretty well.

“I toyed with applying to the Forest Service,” he said.

“What stopped you?”

“My wife has this thing about bears. Hates ’em. I told her: They’re more scared of me than I am of them. She said, ‘Then you need to be more scared.’ ”

We were sitting in Trujillo’s windowless basement office, reviewing CCTV footage from May 11, 2024: the day a man calling himself Nicholas Prado had visited Special Collections to view the manuscript of Cathedral.

“You think somebody’d notice he used the same name,” Trujillo said.

There were no cameras in the Special Collections reading room. The closest was by the front desk, offering a slice of the hallway, including the magazine rack.

Trujillo had set the playback speed to 3x. Bodies zipped in and out at a rate of one or two per hour.

“Hold up,” I said.

He rewound a smidge and set the playback to normal.

A man walked down the hall in the direction of the reading room. He wore shorts, a backpack, and a hoodie, and was carrying a pair of white gloves and a baggie of shoelaces. His back was to the camera. The timestamp read 14:12:50.

Five minutes later, the desk librarian appeared, pushing a cart loaded with archival boxes.

He returned two minutes after that, having deposited his cargo.

At 14:37:48, Hoodie re-emerged. He’d left his backpack behind and was wearing the library-issued gloves. I couldn’t make out his face before he turned to the display rack and began grabbing magazines by the handful.

“Son of a bitch,” Trujillo said.

“Can’t return empty boxes.”

The gloves were making it hard for Hoodie to hold on to the slippery magazines. He kept dropping them on the carpet and snatching them up, stuffing them under his arms.

He left, was gone for a few minutes, came back for more.

And again.

“Big-ass book,” Trujillo said.

The next time Hoodie appeared he had the backpack on.

He walked toward the camera.

The light caught his face. Trujillo hit Pause.

I said, “It’s him. Can you follow him out?”

Trujillo switched cameras, tracking Nick as he took the elevator to the first floor. The backpack sagged with the weight of the manuscript.

In the lobby he stopped, staring at the main entrance.

“What’s he waiting for?” Trujillo asked.

“Maybe worried about setting off the theft detector.”

“He doesn’t have to be. The tag’s embedded in the boxes.”

I raised an eyebrow.

Trujillo put up his palms. “Not my system. I inherited it.”

On-screen, Nick was still frozen. Students skirted him as if he were furniture.

He started forward, his gait stilted and unnatural. Cleared the detector pillars and pushed through the doors.

Trujillo switched to an exterior camera.

Nick crossed a concrete plaza toward the parking lot.

“What’s he drive?”

“Black 2009 Civic.”

Trujillo switched to the lot exit camera.

He said, “There he goes.”

The Civic followed Scholars Lane to the edge of campus, turning onto Lake Road toward town. Then off-screen and out of sight.

Trujillo tapped Pause and faced me. “Can you get my book back?”

I thought it ironic that Prado’s work, ignored during his life, had value now that it had been stolen. By the one person who cared about it most.

I said, “I’ll try.”

I ate lunch on the drive back to my office, where I checked the jet-setting Clay Gardner’s accounts for the first time in weeks.

I didn’t answer him, went over to Instagram.

A notification flashed: Shasta Swann had accepted Clay Gardner’s friend request.

She followed many more accounts than followed her. Peers were noticeably scarce. No one I could connect to Nick. The feed consisted of nature photos and training logs. Flowers, seabirds, Bowie the sheepdog; mileage in the captions, eliciting a few likes or heart emojis.

I scrolled back in time.

September 1, 2024.

Shortly after Nicholas Moore had set out on his journey of self-discovery.

His path revealed by two photos.

One: sunlight breaking through warped tree trunks. The Cathedral.

Two: fingers, intertwined. Left hand, smaller, feminine. Right hand, knobby, tan, tattooed across the knuckles in curlicued font.

The caption read:

Chapter 31

I texted a screenshot to Maddie Zwick, who confirmed that the male hand was Nick’s. The tattoo combined with the one on his left knuckles to yield the phrase Hold Fast — another sailor’s mark, encouragement in times of trouble.

The storm will come. Grab a rope and cling for dear life.

I called Tara Moore.

She’d never heard of Octavio Prado, Lake of the Moon, or Swann’s Flat. When I sent her the picture of Nick’s hand, though, she yelped.

“Who is this bitch?” she said.

“She’s a minor.”

“Yeah? And? You trying to say something about my son?”

“No, just that—”

“Like it’s his fault?”

“I’m not saying that.”

“That don’t mean nothing, they learn young... What’s he doing with her?”

“I don’t know how they met, but there’s a reference to the town in the manuscript. I’m thinking Nicholas went there following in Prado’s footsteps.”

“Goddamn pussy-whipped idiot. What’s her name? I’ll get acquainted with her.”

“No need for that. And to be clear, there’s nothing that adds up to evidence of a crime.”

“Oh bullshit, bullshit.” She began to weep. “Goddamn fucking idiot.”

“I know this is stressful, Tara—”

“He’s dead.”

“We don’t know that.”

“He is.”

“Until we know for sure, it doesn’t help him — or you — to assume that.”

“It’s me.” She sobbed. “I did this to him. I lied to him about Warren, that’s why he left.”

“Not necessarily. He easily could’ve found something else to chase.”

“A stupid book! Oh Jesus... You think I’m a bad mother.”

“I don’t.”

“Then you’re stupid, I am a bad mother. I’m a bad person.”

“Tara, I’m going to get to work on this now, okay?”

Silence.

“Tara?”

“...Yeah.”

“Promise me you won’t interfere.”

“I promise. I don’t know nothing, anyway.” She huffed. “Story of my life.”

Amy said, “Again?”

“I didn’t commit to going there. I said I’d work on it. Which I can do from here.”

“But you want to go back.”

“Do I think I’ll get more in person? Yes. But not at the expense of making you miserable.”

She blew out air. “Okay. Let’s discuss the risks.”

“On the plus side,” I said, “Al Bock’s my pal now. So I don’t have to worry about getting shot.”

“Not by him,” she said. “That doesn’t eliminate anyone else.”

“You’re right. The situation is more delicate. My plan is to meet with the local sheriff before I head to town. I need to speak to him anyway, to see what he knows. I’ll ask him to check in if I’m not out within a certain amount of time.”

“That only helps after the fact. He can’t do anything in the moment if he’s not with you.”

“I’m also considering bringing backup.”

“Who?”

“Regina Klein,” I said. “I don’t know if she’ll agree. My gut is yes. She cares about the case.”

“Hand it off to her, then.”

“I could do that.”

“But it’s your case. And you care about it, too.”

I nodded.

“One to ten,” Amy said. “How worried do I need to be?”

“Seven-point-five. Six-point-five if she’s with me.”

“That’s an awful lot of confidence to put in a person you met once.”

“Once was enough.”

“Then I want to meet her, too.”

The doorbell rang.

“I got it,” Charlotte yelled.

I said, “Wait for me, please.”

“Let me look through the peep, Daddy.”

I held her up.

She said, “There’s a lady with glasses holding bags.”

“Good job. You may open the door.”

Regina stood on the porch, tiny, impish, wearing purple Keds, nails refinished the same color. One bag was a rainbow gift bag and the other was from Trader Joe’s.

I ushered her in. “How was the drive?”

“Heinous.”

Amy emerged from the kitchen with Myles on her hip. “I’m Amy. Thanks for coming.”

“Regina. Thanks for having me.”

“I’m Charlotte,” Charlotte said.

“Hi, Charlotte. That’s a pretty name.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m thirty-seven. How old are you?”

“Four and three-quarters. My birthday is in nine days.”

“That’s exciting. Are you having a party?”

“It’s a pirate party. We’ve having a pirate ship piñata.”

“Fun. Can I come?”

“No. My brother is one and a half. He had his birthday. His name is Myles. He’s a baby.”

“I can see that.”

“Why are you so short?”

“Charlotte,” I said.

Regina knelt so they were eye level. “Do you know what oxygen is?”

“Air.”

“That’s right. You must be really smart to know that.”

“Yeah.”

“An interesting fact about oxygen is, the higher up you go, the less of it there is. Think about what happens if you go all the way up to space. Is there oxygen in space?”

Charlotte shook her head.

“Right. So I like it better down here.” Regina inhaled through her nose. “Easier to breathe.”

“That’s not true. You’re being silly.”

“Not me, I’m never silly. Guess what? I brought you something.”

“What is it?”

“Tuna fish ice cream.”

“Ewwww.”

“What’s wrong?”

“That’s yucky.”

“Your daddy told me it’s your favorite.”

Charlotte wheeled on me. “No. Daddy!”

“I must’ve gotten mixed up,” I said.

“Okay, let me see if I have anything else.” Regina rooted in the gift bag.

Amy glanced at me. This is Mrs. Potty Mouth?

Regina produced a wrapped box. “How about this?”

Charlotte peeled back the paper on a set of Magna-Tiles.

“Wow,” Amy said. “What a fantastic gift. Thank you, Regina. Charlotte, what do you—”

Charlotte took off running.

“Charlotte, what do you say?” I called.

“Thaaaaank youuuuu.”

Regina presented Myles with a wooden stacking toy.

He clung to Amy, one finger in his mouth.

“I know,” Regina said. “I wouldn’t trust me, either.”

The Trader Joe’s bag contained flowers, Chardonnay, and chocolate.

“I tried to cover all the bases,” Regina said.

“Yes, yes, and yes,” Amy said.

“You didn’t have to do this,” I said.

“And yet I did,” Regina said.

Over dinner, Amy asked Regina if she’d grown up in Santa Cruz.

“Nnn.” She swallowed and wiped her mouth. “LA. I came up for undergrad, then went home to do my master’s.”

“What in?”

“Social work. I was with County Children and Family Services till I got burned out.”

Amy nodded sympathetically.

“How’d you transition to being a PI?” I asked.

“I had this friend, a child advocacy lawyer. She hooked me up with a guy who taught me the ropes. I worked for him for a while. But I was sick of LA and I had all these good memories of Santa Cruz. I didn’t realize that I only had those memories ’cause I was in college. Now I’m just a person, living in a place.”

“Regina,” Charlotte said, “you have to eat your broccoli if you want to earn dessert.”

“Says who.”

“Daddy.”

“Well.” Regina forked a floret. “Rules are rules.”

Charlotte displayed her plate. “Can I be done, please, Daddy?”

“Yes,” I said. “Do you want to play for a little?”

She ran out. Immediately Myles began waving his arms, flinging specks of salmon, knocking his sippy cup to the floor.

“All done?” Amy asked.

“Ah duh.”

“Very good talking.” She unbuckled the high chair, wiped him down, and set him on her lap to continue eating. He didn’t want to sit still, began twisting and arching his back.

“You think he’ll go to me?” Regina asked.

“Let’s see,” Amy said, handing him over.

He squirmed, but within a minute his head was on Regina’s shoulder as she stroked his back.

“You’re the baby whisperer,” I said.

Regina smiled. “Do I earn dessert?”

She and Amy sat outside, drinking and talking, while I did bedtime routine. From across the house I heard their laughter, brash and honest.

I stepped out onto the deck. The wine was down to an inch.

“We’re trading war stories,” Amy said.

“She rules,” Regina said.

“I know it,” I said.

Amy stood. “Wonderful to meet you, Regina.”

“Likewise.”

“Take care of my husband, please.”

“Listen, I’m only human.”

Amy laughed, pecked me on the cheek, and slipped inside.

“She’s nervous,” Regina said. “Do I need to be nervous?”

“A little bit probably wouldn’t hurt.”

“Then we need to set some fucking ground rules.”

I took a chair. “How’d you learn to turn it on and off like this?”

“A childhood spent in musical theater.” She rubbed her nose. “Rule number one: Full transparency, starting now.”

“Cuts both ways.”

“You first. Talk.”

I did, for almost an hour.

She said, “You ran over her?”

“Not over. Into. A glancing blow.”

“What the fuck, Clay? The fuck are you getting me into?”

“She’s fine. The doctor checked her out and I haven’t heard anything from them since. No lawyer letter. No calls. She accepted my friend request.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s a valid legal defense in zero of the fifty states.”

“I know it’s not ideal.”

“No shit.”

“Silver lining,” I said. “It gives me an excuse to check in on Shasta while we’re there.”

“And what? You’re just gonna casually segue into questioning her about this guy she had a thing with who also happens to be missing?”

“I’ll ask where she got the necklace.”

She put on an adolescent whine: “ ‘This? My boyyyfriend gave it to me.’ ”

“ ‘Okay. Who’s your boyfriend?’ ”

“Don’t ask her that. Why are you asking her that? That’s fucking weird.”

“Suggestions welcome.”

“Before we get into any of that: Why assume what happened to Nick is connected to what’s going on up there? Why can’t it be that he met her, banged her, and took off?”

“It can,” I said. “But she’s still the last person to have contact with him, so we need to talk to her. I think we should at least explore the possibility that somebody didn’t like him getting close to her. She’s the majority landowner. The scheme runs through her. Nick waltzes into town, sweeps her off her feet — that poses a threat to their control.”

“You’ve decided Little Miss is free of sin.”

“No. But I told you, they’ve been at this for thirty-some years, way before she was born. She’s not the one emailing me and pumping me for information. Beau Bergstrom is.”

“Exactly why I don’t like it,” she said. “It feels like he’s trying to smoke you out.” She drummed the chair arm with her purple nails. “You think your cover’s still good?”

“I’m hoping your being there will help shore it up.”

“Me and my feminine fucking wiles. All right. How do we fold me in? Details.”

“You’re my sister,” I said. “I want your opinion on the property.”

“Are you shitting me? Sister? Look at me. Now look at you.”

I conceded the point.

She said, “The only logical story — and it pains me deeply to say these words — is I’m your, ahem, wife. And, because I’m smarter than you and oodles more practical, I’m skeptical about this whole land idea. We already own a place in...”

“Tahoe.”

“Tahoe. Why do we need more headaches? But I leave the door open just enough for them to think I could be convinced.”

“How’d we meet?”

“The circus,” she said. “We were both in the freak show.”

“A mutual friend set us up. What kind of work do you do, Mrs. Gardner?”

“Fuck off with your patriarchy. I kept my name.”

“All right, what name do you want?”

“Edison,” she said, cracking up.

“Can you focus?”

“Ah. You’re having second thoughts about me.”

“And third.”

“Regina Bloom,” she said. “I’m a pediatric social worker. You fell for me because I’m so passionate about helping people. But. I have a secret dream.”

“Impossible. You’re married to me. What more could you want?”

“I write.”

“Gives you and Beau something in common,” I said.

“I don’t share that with many people,” she said. “But I feel comfortable around him.”

“Why did you fall for me?”

“ ’Cause you’re fucking loaded. Where’d we get married?”

“Tiburon.”

“How romantic.”

“It is. Amy and I got married there. July 4, 2020.”

“You want to check with her before lending me her wedding day?”

“She’s letting me drive off with you.”

“She’s a very trusting woman, your wife.”

“Or she perceives you as no danger whatsoever.”

“Touché,” she said. “Are we staying overnight?”

“Probably.”

“Are we sharing a room?”

“If we’re married, I think we have to. I’ll bring a sleeping bag.”

“Bring earplugs. I snore. Okay,” she said, “it’s a start. We’ll work on it.”

“Your turn for transparency,” I said.

Without hesitation, she said, “I lied about Warren Pezanko. He did answer my letter.”

“What did he say about Nick?”

“He never spoke to him. He barely knew who I was talking about. He asked me to smuggle him titty pics.”

“Are we ruling him out?”

“Nothing there,” she said. “Your stuff feels stronger.”

I nodded. “Anything else you want to tell me?”

“About the case? No. But we’re not done with ground rules. Number two: Any money comes out of this, I get dibs.”

“There’s no money. Tara’s broke.”

“Go back to Chris Villareal. Get him to throw us a bone.”

“He’s not interested.”

“He might be, if we bring him these fuckers’ heads on a plate.”

“I’ll ask,” I said. “You get first crack at expenses. Then me. Anything on top of that is gravy and we go fifty — fifty. Good?”

“Good.”

I put out my hand but she held up a finger.

“Number three. We leave in ten days.”

“It’s not going to take that long to work up a backstory.”

“Ten days. Not one day sooner.”

“You have something you need to do?”

“No. You do,” she said. “Your daughter’s birthday party, moron.”