“No, thank you, Miss Greenfield, I've just come from breakfast. Actually, my wife doesn't know I am here. Tell me, have you spoken with her this morning?”
“She woke me up about half an hour ago, 'phoning to see if I had plans for the week-end.”
“And you've found yourself dragooned into a drive along the coast to her summer house in the mountains.”
“Yes,” she said, happily unaware that this plan ought to have been a surprise to him. “Although I wouldn't exactly say ‘dragooned.' There's a couple of boring parties going on but it's the same old people, and I'm happy to tag along. She's only here for a few days, after all.”
“Miss Greenfield, are you aware of the circumstances, and the place, of her family's death?”
“Well, sure, but why—oh, I see. Oh, I promise you, we'll drive the other way, through Redwood City. I wouldn't want to worry her.”
“You may find that she insists on the coastal route. She may feel it necessary to face the place where she survived, and they did not.”
The cup dropped into its saucer with a clatter. “Oh. Golly, yes, there is that. I hadn't thought . . .”
“May I be frank, Miss Greenfield?”
“Well, sure.”
Holmes took a breath, and committed treason against his wife. “For some weeks now, my wife has not been herself. Something about this place has been preying on her mind. I should appreciate it very much if you were to keep an eye on her, in my absence.”
“What do you mean, ‘keep an eye on her'?” She asked it warily; Holmes could see the plots of a hundred lurid novels springing up in the girl's eyes, and hastened to turn them aside.
“I only mean to say, she does not care for herself sufficiently. She has not been eating well, and sleeps briefly and restlessly. If you were to insist that she eat, and take exercise, and perhaps go so far as to swallow a sleeping draught . . .”
“Ah,” she said, her eyebrows descending with mingled relief and disappointment. “I was afraid you meant, oh jeepers, suicide or something.” She gave a merry little laugh, to illustrate that she was exaggerating, but for an instant Holmes was seized by the memory of Russell teetering over the shipboard rails, a thousand miles of empty ocean waiting to swallow her. He pushed down the image, and gave the young woman his most reassuring smile.
“Oh, she's far too sensible for that. No, just careless of herself. She needs a friend at the moment.”
“Sure, I can be that. It was nifty to meet Mary again—I remember her from when we were kids.” The thought startled Holmes a little, as he had never thought of his wife as any sort of a child, not even the day they'd met. But this young woman, just Russell's age, was still young in ways Russell had never been. She did not notice his momentary distraction, but continued on. “And her family—Mary's father was just a card, and her mother, gosh, she was amazing. Did you ever meet her?”
“I regret I did not have the pleasure.”
“No, that's right, Mary met you after the . . . afterwards. Well, don't you worry, Mr Holmes, we'll take good care of her.”
“‘We'?”
“Yes, I thought Donny—he's my boy-friend—might drive us down, if you don't mind? He's a very responsible boy, when he hasn't been drinking, anyway, and he never drinks when he's driving, honest.”
“Quite. Yes, that should be fine.” And if this relatively sensible child and her strong young escort with the bright blue motor weren't enough to keep Russell from harm, little would be. “And if I might ask one more favour: I believe Rus—Mary would be happiest if she did not know I'd been here. Collusion between husband and friend might prove . . . alienating.”
“Right-o,” she said cheerfully.
He stood up, taking her hand again, holding it for a moment so that he was bent over her almost like a courtier. Then he left, and Flo watched him go; he was, she thought, really pretty swell.
That, thought Holmes, took care of Sunday and Monday at the very least. Which left only the afternoon and evening to get through.
Walking towards the lawyer's office, Holmes noticed a news-agent's with a small sign in the window advising OUT-OF-DATE JOURNALS LOCATED. He wrote down Hammett's name, told the proprietor that he'd take anything the man could locate by the fellow, and was strolling up the street (for the seventh time) as Russell came out of Norbert's office, pulling on her gloves with little jerks of irritation.
“Holmes,” she said in surprise when she spotted him. “What are you doing here?”
“I was finished with my business, and thought I might accompany you on this fine afternoon.”
She looked at him sideways. “Holmes, I hope you don't mind, but I'd rather like to spend some time in the house on my own.”
“But of course, that was merely the direction in which I was headed. You remember the Italian cafe we ate at the other day? The owner happened to mention that his great-grandfather was a childhood friend of Paganini and had a sheaf of the composer's early attempts at music. I thought I might add a section on my monograph concerning childhood patterns of behaviour that extend into maturity.”
“Yes? I didn't know you had such a monograph in process; it sounds interesting.”
So they walked the mile in amicable discussion of the nonexistent monograph, and after Holmes had seen her safely into the house (using the excuse of seeing if the 'phone and electrical companies had done their duties) he went off, whistling a brisk tune the Italian had composed for violin.
At the end of the block, he paused to look back at the house that was holding his wife, in both senses of the word. The place reminded him of one of those primitive societies so beloved of archaeologists, where a people had stood up from their breakfast and walked into nothingness. The kitchen cupboard still held the packet of coffee used the morning the Russells had climbed into their new Maxwell motorcar and driven away, now so stale that, when he had tried it the other morning, it had given him little more than a brown colour and a sour taste in the cup. The half-packed trunks in all rooms but Russell's bore mute evidence of a future that would not exist for three people. He wondered if Russell had found her mother's night-gown inside the laundry hamper.
He shook his head and turned his back on the house of the dead.
Holmes had no intention of visiting the Italian's cafe (although its owner did in fact own two or three sheets of music in what he swore was Paganini's hand). Instead, he set about a systematic interview of those inhabitants of Pacific Heights he hadn't yet spoken with.
Eighteen years in London is nothing—there, even eighty years after an event one might expect to find a high number of houses inhabited by the families' descendants. In San Francisco, however, particularly given the circumstances of the past two decades, this was not the case. He had already discovered this when he had questioned the immediate neighbours on Friday and discovered that only two of the eleven houses contained the same residents as they had in 1906. Those two had, admittedly, proved useful, one of them describing how the Russells had been among the first to move back into their damaged house, the other providing the name of the postman who had worked the streets for many years. It had been the postman—or mailman—who had come up with the piquant information concerning the Russell argument, a detail of which Holmes had been very dubious and which had necessitated an interminable round of enticing similar feats of recall, until he finally was forced to admit that the postal gentleman had a perfectly extraordinary memory, prodigious in its powers of retention when it came to tit-bits of gossip.
He'd left profoundly grateful that the man had not delivered to Baker Street, and that he seemed to have not a sinew of the blackmailer's impulse in his makeup.
Still, the interviews with the neighbours had taken most of Friday morning, and hunting down the mailman the bulk of the afternoon. He could only hope that today's research proved more brisk.
It did not. Worse, the day's ratio of 1906 residents to newcomers was even lower than Friday's. Of the first ten dwellings to receive his enquiries, four had no idea who had lived in their house in the year of the fire; three knew the names but not their current location (“somewhere down the Peninsula” seemed a hugely popular dwelling-place for those who had fled the city); two were new householders in new houses, having bought cracked and leaning wrecks and built anew; and one alone had lived in that house at the time of the earthquake, and even recalled a period spent under canvas in the nearby park; unfortunately, that person had been twelve years old at the time, had been visiting from his home in that mythic land “down the Peninsula,” and had been ushered back to
