imagine Dad or Aunt Anna doing that. But my birthday was ten months later. Why are you interested in it?”
“I’m trying to put events in context.” Vague replies involving words such as “context” and “nuance” and “subtext” have stood me in good stead over the years.
Quickly I ended the conversation and went down the catwalk to Derek and Mick’s office. Mick had gone home-it was after six-but Derek remained at his desk, hands poised over his keyboard. As I stepped through the door, he hit the print command with a flourish and swiveled around.
“Shar!” he exclaimed, looking startled. “I just e-mailed you my file, and it’s printing out.”
I sat down on Mick’s chair and propped my feet on the bottom shelf of the workstation. “How many people were you able to find current addresses for?”
“Most of them. A few have died, a few are untraceable, but the others aren’t far from where they were twenty-two years ago. I backgrounded all but two of them and can finish up tonight if you need me to.”
“Let me look at the list first.”
The printer clicked and whirred and clattered on, sliding out pages. When it shut off, Derek put them in order and handed them to me.
Mary Givens, the neighbor who had been close to the Greenwood family, had died five years ago, but Laurel’s best friend, Sally Timmerman, was still at the same Paso Robles address, as were Roy Greenwood’s dental assistant, the pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church, and the printer who had produced Laurel’s greeting cards. Jennifer and Terry’s regular babysitter had married and moved to nearby Templeton. Bruce Collingsworth, chief of the Paso Robles Police Department at the time, was deceased, but the detective who had handled the case was still on the force. Jacob Ziff, the Cayucos man who had stopped to chat with Laurel at the overlook where she was painting, was listed at an address on Studio Drive in that town, but the Sea Shack restaurant had gone out of business in the early nineties, and its staff had scattered. One of the dogwalkers who had spotted Laurel in Morro Bay was still living there; the other was untraceable. Derek had backgrounded all the individuals except for Jacob Ziff and the Morro Bay man.
Not bad, given the length of time that had passed. Tomorrow I’d fly down to Paso Robles-fortunately, Hy had taken a commercial flight to San Diego so the Cessna was free-and start with the maternal aunt, Anna Yardley, then talk to the other people there. They would probably suggest still others I might interview. I like to think of the initial inquiries in this type of investigation as pebbles dropped into a pool of water: concentric circles spread out around them, each bringing you into contact with people who knew the subject in different ways and bring different perspectives to the case.
Tomorrow afternoon, I’d drop the first pebble.
Thursday
I put the Cessna into a descending turn and looked out its left window at the lower Salinas Valley. Narrow, as California valleys go, it was bordered to the east by the stark Gavilan Mountains and to the west by the more verdant Santa Lucias. Highway 101 ran more or less straight through it, paralleled by the Salinas River, its waters winking through the trees that lined its banks. King City, which I’d passed over some minutes before, spread to the north along a maze of railroad tracks, and below me the little farm town of San Ardo nestled among well-cultivated fields and vineyards.
To the south, however, the landscape changed abruptly. Oil wells peppered the pockmarked terrain and barren hills rose around them, crowned by holding tanks. I spiraled closer, saw the rocker arms of the wells moving up and down, like the heads of giant insects boring into the earth’s core. An image of its essence being sucked dry put a chill on me. Quickly I pulled up into a wide climbing turn, then headed south again. The Paso Robles Municipal Airport lay only a few miles away; with any luck, the rental car that I’d reserved would be ready for me.
The town hadn’t changed much since those pit stops I’d made during college. The drive-in wasn’t an A &W anymore, but it was still in operation. The Paso Robles Inn looked as if it hadn’t changed since it was built in the late 1800s. I saw no evidence of earthquake damage, other than scaffolding around a couple of boarded-up storefronts. To familiarize myself, I drove the length of Spring Street, the main arterial, then turned back toward the central business district, where I found a coffee shop and ate lunch while pinpointing addresses on a local map.
My first stop was on Chestnut Street, which paralleled Spring three blocks to the west. In the middle of a row of California-style bungalows shaded by tall trees, I found the Greenwoods’ former home: beige stucco with green wicker furniture crowding its small porch and wind chimes suspended from the eaves. I pulled to the curb and idled there, trying to get a sense of the lives that had gone on in this place twenty-two years ago. But too much time had passed; the house was probably not even the same color now, and who knew what other alterations had been made. When a curtain moved in a front window and a woman looked out, I took my foot off the brake and pulled away.
It was time for my interview with Anna Yardley. As I drove to Olive and Tenth streets, I reviewed what Jennifer Aldin and Terry Wyatt had told me about their maternal aunt. A retired insurance broker, Anna Yardley was unmarried and lived in the home where she and her sister Laurel had grown up. She’d spent little time with Jennifer and Terry prior to their mother’s disappearance, but afterward assumed a stern presence in their lives. “Warm and fuzzy was not Aunt Anna’s thing,” Terry had commented. “Her big sentimental gesture toward each of us was the gift of a thousand-dollar whole life policy-on which she probably collected the commission-when we graduated from high school.”
The Yardley house was white clapboard surrounded by a picket fence with an arched gate, on a corner lot. An oak tree-oaks, on Olive Street!-took up most of the front yard, and an old rope swing hung from one of its massive limbs. Anna Yardley came to the door before I could ring the bell.
She was a big woman, tall and heavy, with iron gray hair pulled back from her face and coiled at the nape of her neck. Her features were severe, her jaw strong, her lips drawn into an uncompromising line. Although the temperature must have been in the low nineties, she wore a long-sleeved black dress of a heavy fabric whose folds rustled as she led me to a formal front parlor.
At her suggestion I sat on a settee upholstered in pale green brocade. While she settled herself on a matching chair, I placed my briefcase beside me and took out my recorder.
“You can put that away,” Anna Yardley said. “Anything I tell you is to remain in strict confidence.”
“The tape is only for accuracy’s sake.”
“Take notes instead. I have no guarantee where that tape might end up.”
I wasn’t about to argue with her, so I put the recorder back in my case and took out a legal pad. After noting the date, time, and her name I began, “Ms. Yardley-”
“Before you get to your questions, I want you to know that I’m only talking to you as a favor to my niece Jennifer. Quite frankly, I think this investigation is a horrible idea. She should have made her peace with what happened years ago. There are some things we’re not meant to know, and my sister Laurel’s fate is one of them.”
Odd way of putting it. I wrote down the word “fate” and circled it.
Anna Yardley squinted at the legal pad. Before she could ask what I’d written, I said, “What about you-have you made your peace?”
“Well, certainly. It’s been nearly a quarter of a century.”
“Tell me-what kind of a person was Laurel?”
Anna Yardley’s thin lips curved downward. “A very impractical woman. A dreamer. Always reading. Painting. Dabbling in those silly greeting cards.”
“I had the impression that she was a successful businesswoman, and the greeting card business looked promising.”
“I admit that the cards were beginning to sell, and she was making a small profit. But she could have earned much more if she’d kept up with her nursing.”
