The van had reached the tight curve at the top of the hill, and disappeared around it. My thoughts followed it for a few moments, but I decided that yes, the episode had been slightly odd, but it could hardly be judged as ominous: As coincidences go, this one was scarcely worth noting.
“Okay,” I told my companions, resigning myself to the backseat again. “Let's keep going.”
Flo bundled herself back into her fur rug as Donny worked the starter and put the powerful car into gear. Another motor was parked at the far end of the little beach, I noticed as we drove past; a closed Pierce-Arrow, about as far from Donny's blue monster as could be imagined, with a bored-looking driver and half-shut curtains in the passenger compartment: old lady come to the beach for a Sunday drive, I diagnosed. No more ominous than finding a Fresno insurance agent hiring a local mechanic with a temporarily unemployed bread-delivery truck. I was, I realised, looking for something—anything—to distract me from the empty sensation that had been growing since we had left San Francisco.
And even before that—what else would explain my having asked two perfect strangers to accompany me to the Lodge? When I'd telephoned to Flo the previous morning, I had only meant to tell her that I wouldn't be joining the Monday party she'd talked about, but in the process of telling her where I was going, I'd somehow ended up inviting her. And then she suggested that Donny could drive us, and—I'd had qualms the instant I hung up the earpiece.
I told myself that, if their presence became too much of a strain, I could as easily send them back and hire a car to take me when I was ready.
I did not know why the death of Dr Ginzberg was hitting me as hard as it was. Yes, the woman had been an important influence at a vulnerable time in my life, but that was ten years past, and during that time weeks, even months might go by without my so much as thinking of her. Still, hitting me it was.
Looking back over the previous two days, I had to be grateful to Holmes for having pulled me out of Friday's deep funk, first by dumping me into a hot bath and then force-feeding me tea and conversation.
However, there is a drawback to allowing Holmes to involve himself in a project, particularly when he is bored to begin with—for example, following a long and tedious ocean crossing: The machinery of his mind cannot bear to run without engaging, so that he tends to adopt hobbyhorses.
Even before my emotional collapse on Friday, the minor conundra surrounding the house and the death of my parents had shown every sign of becoming his latest project, into which he had thrown himself with all the intensity that he would have given to a crucial case of international relations. There was no point whatsoever in telling him that the mystery of the house-breaking was of less import to me than the eternal mystery of why a woman cannot buy a pair of shoes that fit: His teeth had seized the bit, and he would run with his chosen investigation until it was either solved or had reached an insoluble dead-end.
It was, at times, trying, to live with a man constitutionally incapable of relaxation. Despite the emptiness within, I was more than a little relieved to get away from him for a couple of days.
Then it occurred to me, a mile or so south of where we had met the insurance man, that my embarrassing display of weakness on Friday might possibly have unexpected benefits, in setting Holmes another problem at which to worry. Dr Ginzberg's nine-year-old murder might not be of a complexity worthy of Holmes' efforts, but it was a case I would like to see solved, if he could do so in the few days left to us here. And if it turned his attentions away from the pointless and uncomfortable mysteries of the house and my past, so much the better. He hadn't seemed terribly interested in it this morning, headed to the ferry on one of his odd scholarly pursuits, but in any event, it would be difficult to ferret out any official sources of information before Monday.
I smiled: Sundays were often a vexation of spirit to Holmes.
My companion in the front seat must have been keeping a surreptitious eye on me and seen a degree of relaxation on my features, because my distant thoughts were interrupted by a solicitous question directed at me.
“Feeling a bit warmer, Mary?”
“Sorry? Oh, yes, I'm fine. It's very beautiful, isn't it?”
Satisfied, either with my answer or that I could make one, Flo gave me a smile meant to be encouraging and left me to my thoughts.
Watching the back of her glossy black hair dancing in the breeze, I realised that I liked her, and her friends, more than I had expected.
Our beginnings on Friday had not been auspicious: Flo Greenfield and her entourage were late. I was in the lobby by nine, more than ready to put the day's shocks behind me; by nine-thirty, I was pacing and considering a return upstairs. Three minutes later, gathering myself up to go, I became aware of a riot approaching rapidly down the street, a cacophony of horns and shouts. The Rolls-Royce that squealed to a halt before the doors was the colour of a cloudless sky in June, and throbbed with power from within its elegant bonnet. As the man behind the wheel attempted to perform the contortionist manoeuvre of threading himself out from behind wheel, brake, and shift levers, the passenger by-passed the entire issue of male chivalry by flinging open her door before either driver or hotel staff could reach it. A slim figure in a dress that complemented the colour of the motor stepped unescorted onto the pavement, and I realised belatedly that Flo had arrived.
She was dressed in a costume every bit as extreme as that in which she'd come home the previous morning, although this one was still in good repair. Tonight's frock was silver with a spray of beads the precise blue of the motorcar, a brief lame frock that clung and outlined a body patently unencumbered with a surfeit of undergarments. Her hair clung to her head with careful spit-curls in the height of fashion, her cheeks and lips were redder than Nature had granted, and her legs glistened with silk. Around her right wrist clustered a mass of silver and turquoise beads that I thought had been originally intended as a long necklace, now twisted over and over her hand to form a thick bracelet. Around her sleek hair she wore a silver bandeau, from which rose a bright blue ostrich plume, and her light fox-fur coat was spilling negligently from her near-bare shoulders.
She looked gloriously young and beautiful and light-hearted and
The motor contained at least six other people, although it might have been ten or eleven. As I allowed myself to be inserted into the front, ending up on the lap of a young man who told me to call him “Dabs,” Flo waved a genial hand towards me, shouted my name at the passengers in the backseat by way of introduction, and wedged herself in beside me. The throbbing engine roared into life and we spun into the oncoming traffic.
The driver, according to Flo's running commentary, was called Donny. He was a tall, elegant figure with slick blond hair parted down the centre as if he'd invented the style, a pencil-thin moustache a shade darker than the hair on his head, a warm and humorous voice, and an immaculate Tuxedo. He appeared to be something of a beau, although Flo bestowed her affections equally on the young man beneath me, on the gentlemen in the back, and on the occupants of several passing motorcars as well, blowing kisses and giggling flirtatiously at their shouted remarks.
I was coming to regret the evening long before we pulled up in front of the club. It was not in a salubrious part of town, and did not at all appear the sort of place that justified the degree of fashion we were wearing: Across the street was a warehouse, and next to that the sort of speakeasy for which bath-tub gin had been invented. The building Donny parked before was something of a warehouse itself, ill-lit, in want of paint, and with boards nailed over its few windows. There were attendants, however, one of whom hopped into the motor and drove it away while another pulled open the door, greeting some of our party by name.
Inside lay a gilded cavern with some sort of Oriental theme to it, rich colours and a surfeit of patterns. When we had been shown to a table near the band and had our drinks placed before us, I looked around and realised that the theme was intended to be that of an opium den. A highly romanticised version of an opium den—I doubted any of the patrons of the establishments I had been inside would recognise any similarity. Instead of a filthy, claustrophobic room littered with equally filthy and near-comatose individuals, this glittering palace was bursting with more energy than a classroom full of eleven-year-old boys. The only thing I could see that was at all similar was the thick fug in the air, although this had the smell mostly of tobacco instead of the cloy of opium.
Mostly, I say. There was also cannabis in the air, and the smell of illegal spirits, served openly and without apology. I accepted the glass of champagne handed me, and could only hope that there was not a raid of the premises.
Now, in the normal course of events, I have no great appreciation for a raucous setting and great lashings of alcohol, but the course of events that week had been nothing like normal. The alcohol went down smoothly, the
