looked out over Casco Bay. I got out of the car. A couple of long-boned hunting dogs, sprawled in the sun on the deck facing the ocean, shook themselves awake and barked. A tall guy with a long body and short legs came out of the house and squinted at me in the near noonday sun. He had shoulder-length gray hair, and a week's growth of white stubble. His white vee neck tee shirt stretched kind of tight over his stomach and his wrinkled khaki pants hung low on his hips, below his belly.
'Vaughn Richard?' I said.
'Yeah?'
I walked toward him. The dogs continued to bark, but they were merely doing their job. There wasn't much menace in it.
'My name's Spenser,' I said. 'I'm looking for a woman named Angela Richard.'
The dogs circled around and began to sniff at me. I scratched one of them behind the ear, and the other stuck his head in to get scratched too.
'Why?' Vaughn said.
There was the smell of booze on his breath. 'She's missing. Her husband's worried about her.'
'She got a husband?'
'Yeah.'
'Shit, I didn't know that.'
'Now you do,' I said. 'She your daughter?'
'You could say so.'
'I could?'
'I mean, yeah, she's my daughter, but I ain't seen her in fifteen, twenty years. The old lady wouldn't let me near her.'
'You wouldn't have any thoughts where she might be?'
'Hell no.'
'You heard from her in the last few months?'
''Course not,' Vaughn said. 'She didn't want nothing to do with me.'
'She told people she'd like to find you,' I said. 'She doodled your name on her calendar pad.'
'My name?'
'Vaughn,' I said.
'Yeah. That's me. Middle name, actually. You know? First name's Lawrence, but I never used it. She wrote it down on a pad?'
'Un huh.'
'Why'd she say she wanted to see me?'
'Far as I know she didn't say. People she told assumed she wanted to come to some terms with her family, maybe put her childhood to rest.'
The dogs got through sniffing and having fulfilled their contract went back to sprawling in the sun. There was a sliding door between the deck and the living room of the small house. I could see a quart bottle of vodka standing on the table, and beside it one of those jumbo plastic bottles of Mountain Dew. There were lobster pots piled against the house beyond the deck, and firewood in a wooden rack someone had cobbled together out of two-by- fours. At the foot of the sloping hill a skiff jostled on a short rope against a small jetty that looked no better built than the wood rack.
'She wanted to find me?' Vaughn said.
'So she said.'
'What do you mean she disappeared?'
'Her husband came home one day and she wasn't there. No note, nothing. She was gone.'
Vaughn frowned. 'You a cop?'
'Private,' I said.
'Her husband hire you?'
'Yes.'
Vaughn had a prominent lower jaw and he shoved it out now so that he could chew on his upper lip with his lower teeth.
'You think she run away?'
'I don't know. Her purse is gone. And the clothes she was wearing. Nothing else. She didn't take any money out of the bank. There haven't been any ATM transactions. She hasn't used her credit cards.'
'You think something bad might have happened?'
'I don't know what happened,' I said.
'Shit, I wouldn't want nothing bad to happen to her.'
'That's nice,' I said.
