“I don’t remember seeing her either,” the other one said, “but maybe she’d already gone by the time we got here.”
I thanked them and headed down toward the ruins.
A little farther on, in the dense thicket through which the path wound, something caught my eye and I came to an abrupt stop. A neat pile of green plastic bags lay there, and on top of them was a pair of scuffed black shoes. Obviously she had come here on the bus, wearing her street shoes, and had only switched to sneakers for her work. Why would she leave without changing her shoes?
I hurried through the thicket toward the patch of wild mustard.
There, deep in the weeds, its color blending with their foliage, was another bag. I opened it. It was a quarter full of wilting mustard greens. She hadn’t had much time to forage, not much time at all.
Seriously worried now, I rushed up to the Great Highway. From the phone booth inside the restaurant, I dialled Greg’s direct line at the SFPD. Busy. I retrieved my dime and called All Souls.
“Any calls?”
Ted’s typewriter rattled in the background. “No, but Hank wants to talk to you.”
Hank Zahn, my boss. With a sinking heart, I remembered the conference we had had scheduled for half an hour ago. He came on the line.
“Where the hell are you?”
“Uh, in a phone booth.”
“What I mean is, why aren’t you here?”
“I can explain—”
“I should have known.”
“What?”
“Greg warned me you’d be off investigating something.”
“Greg? When did you talk to him?”
“Fifteen minutes ago. He wants you to call. It’s important.”
“Thanks!”
“Wait a minute—”
I hung up and dialed Greg again. He answered, sounding rushed.
Without preamble, I explained what I’d found in the wild mustard patch.
“That’s why I called you.” His voice was unusually gentle. “We got word this morning.”
“What word?” My stomach knotted.
“An identification on a body that washed up near Devil’s Slide yesterday evening. Apparently she went in at low tide, or she would have been swept much farther to sea.”
I was silent.
“Sharon?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“You know how it is out there. The signs warn against climbing.
The current is bad.”
But I’d never, in almost a year, seen the old Japanese woman near the sea. She was always up on the slope, where her weeds grew.
“When was low tide, Greg?”
“Yesterday? Around eight in the morning.”
Around the time the restaurant cashier had noticed her, and several hours before the teenagers had arrived. And in between? What had happened out there?
I hung up and stood at the top of the slope, pondering. What should I look for? What could I possibly find?
I didn’t know, but I felt certain the old woman had not gone into the sea by accident. She had scaled those cliffs with the best of them.
I started down, noting the shoes and the bags in the thicket, marching resolutely past the wild mustard toward the abandoned truck. I walked all around it, examining its exterior and interior, but it gave me no clues. Then I started toward the tunnel in the cliff.
The area, so crowded on Sundays, was sparsely populated now.
San Franciscans were going about their usual business, and visitors from the tour buses parked at nearby Cliff House were leery of climbing down here. The teenagers were the only other people in sight. They stood by the mouth of the tunnel, watching me.
Something in their postures told me they were afraid. I quickened my steps.
The boys inclined their heads toward one another. Then they whirled and ran into the mouth of the tunnel.
I went after them. Again, I had the wrong shoes. I kicked them off and ran through the coarse sand. The boys were halfway down the tunnel.
One of them paused, frantically surveying a rift in the wall. I prayed he wouldn’t go that way, into the boiling waves below.
He turned and ran after his companion. They disappeared at the end of the tunnel.
I hit the hard-packed dirt and increased my pace. Near the end, I slowed and approached more cautiously. At first I thought the boys had vanished, but then I looked down. They crouched on a ledge below. Their faces were scared and young, so young.
I stopped where they could see me and made a calming motion.
“Come on back up,” I said. “I won’t hurt you.”
The mustached one shook his head.
“Look, there’s no place you can go. You can’t swim in that surf.”
Simultaneously they glanced down. They looked back at me and both shook their heads.
I took a step forward. “Whatever happened, it couldn’t have—”
Suddenly I felt the ground crumble. My foot slipped and I pitched forward. I fell to one knee, my arms frantically searching for a support.
“Oh, God!” the mustached boy cried. “Not you, too!” He stood up, swaying, his arms outstretched.
I kept sliding. The boy reached up and caught me by the arm. He staggered back toward the edge and we both fell to the hard rocky ground. For a moment, we both lay there panting. When I finally sat up, I saw we were inches from the sheer drop to the surf.
The boy sat up, too, his scared eyes on me. His companion was flattened against the cliff wall.
“It’s okay,” I said shakily.
“I thought you’d fall just like the old woman,” the boy beside me said.
“It was an accident, wasn’t it?”
He nodded. “We didn’t mean for her to fall.”
“Were you teasing her?”
“Yeah. We always did, for fun. But this time we went too far. We took her purse. She chased us.”
“Through the tunnel, to here.”
“Yes.”
“And then she slipped.”
The other boy moved away from the wall. “Honest, we didn’t mean for it to happen. It was just that she was so old. She slipped.”
“We watched her fall,” his companion said. “We couldn’t do anything.”
“What did you do with the purse?”
“Threw it in after her. There were only two dollars in it. Two lousy dollars.” His voice held a note of wonder. “Can you imagine, chasing us all the way down here for two bucks?”
I stood up carefully, grasping the rock for support. “Okay,” I said.
“Let’s get out of here.”
They looked at each other and then down at the surf.
“Come on. We’ll talk some more. I know you didn’t mean for her to die. And you saved my life.”
They scrambled up, keeping their distance from me. Their faces were pale under their tans, their eyes afraid.
