“Ha, ha, very funny. Okay, give me a few minutes, and I’ll think of something.”
While Rob’s mind raced through his options, this not being the first time he’d been required to make a last-minute content change, his attention drifted back to that phone message Warren left. It wasn’t like him to miss a deadline. Particularly not when he called to say his column was nearly complete except for a few finishing touches.
Rob’s contact with Warren was minimal—no more than an occasional phone call to discuss the column, something that Rob regularly did with others in his small group of community reporters.
His only reason for paying more attention was that Warren was one of Sausalito’s more colorful characters and he had direct ties to the troublesome Alma Samuels and her Ladies of Liberty. More importantly, at the moment, his “Heard About Town” columns of the last two weeks had everyone talking about what was coming next: just the kind of buzz any weekly community newspaper publisher dreams of having.
Over the past week, every time he’d heard Warren referred to as the “Gossiping Gourmet,” he smiled to himself. Since the turn of the early twentieth century, when William Randolph Hearst was told by Sausalito’s ladies and gentlemen of distinction to take himself, his mistress, and his new money to another part of California, this had been a town where people famously enjoyed sitting in judgment on the private lives of others.
Paradoxically, Sausalito relished its colorful characters and any chance to gossip about their lives. Case in point: the1960s election of the renowned, albeit retired madam, Sally Stanford, as the town's mayor. Rob loved the caricature hanging in city hall, showing Stanford smoking a cigarette as she conducted a council meeting, sitting regally under a sign that read, “No Smoking Allowed.”
When Rob purchased The Standard, in the period before he added other weekly editions, he paid more attention to the catfighting and backbiting that moved the town's narrative forward from one year to the next. Rob was enough of a businessman to realize that Warren was good for the paper. One-half of his readers loved him and wanted to know what he was thinking, while the other half disliked him but couldn’t resist finding out what was in his column. For any publisher, this was the best of both worlds.
Early that evening, with the Sausalito edition uploaded to the printer, and still no word from Bradley, Rob could not set aside his curiosity regarding Warren’s disappearance. Karin was up in Corte Madera with the children at a late afternoon play date, so Rob went in search of his missing columnist.
Rob had never been to Warren’s house. Still, like most Sausalito natives, Rob knew every avenue, road, street, lane, cul-de-sac, and hillside stairway in the small town.
He discovered Warren's home was the very last address on Prospect Avenue. The substantial rains that, once every three or four years, came in December and persisted into early April could give the houses in this part of town a careworn appearance. The storms roll up and over the Marin Headlands and descend first upon an area located in the southern end of Sausalito, known to locals as “Hurricane Gulch.”
To the unknowing eye, homes like Warren’s cottage appear to be perched precariously on one of the area’s steepest hillsides. In truth, nearly all of Sausalito sits on bedrock. The real threat to these homes comes not from earthquakes, but mudslides during a year with unusually ferocious and soaking rains.
Rob had known the previous owner, Mrs. Danvers. She was his third-grade teacher at Bayside Elementary. None of the children ever met Mr. Danvers. What little they could pick up by badgering their parents was that Mr. Danvers had died many years earlier of what was referred to in discreet whispers as a “bad heart.” Based on this, it was Rob’s classmate Eddie Austin’s contention that Mrs. Danvers quite likely killed Mr. Danvers and disposed of his body late one night in the canyon brush below their house.
Unlike Rob, who was an A-student, Eddie had invariably brought home Cs. But his endless speculation on the demise of Mr. Danvers likely indicated a detective investigator in the making.
As Rob pulled his aging Jeep next to Warren’s even older Toyota Camry, the wooden deck that served as the home’s carport—an aging tangle of metal supports bolted to the steep hill below—groaned loudly. It was just past six-thirty. The headlands loomed so high over the property that the cottage had been in dark shadows for the last two hours.
The home had a system of supports, separate from the parking deck, although it appeared as though the house was sitting atop the same structure. If Rob stepped to his left, he could have walked around to the cottage’s back entrance. But, of course, the proper thing to do was to turn right and walk over the crumbling walkway to Warren’s front door.
It appeared that inside the home all the lights were turned off. For a small house, its doorbell was befitting a British country estate.
In a house this size, Rob thought, those chimes could wake the dead.
He waited a few moments more, but no Warren.
Rob was back at his vehicle when it occurred to him that if Warren had gone out, he most likely would have taken his car. Rob pondered for a few moments whether he wanted to snoop around the back of the cottage.
What the hell? I’ve come this far.
This time, as he stepped back over the creaking wood deck, he moved to his left. A sense of dread came over him that he did not fully understand. Then, he stopped suddenly. An icy chill went down his spine.
At the far end of the house, there was a porch swing, ideally positioned for sipping a morning cup of coffee while enjoying a dramatic sunrise over the East Bay. Warren sat on the far right side of the swing. He was dressed in a tweed jacket,
