“Then you know what she’s like-cold, disapproving. Laurel didn’t want her negativity influencing the girls. It’s a shame that afterwards she took such a hand in their upbringing. Laurel would not have wanted that. In fact, it was a role she’d asked me to assume if anything ever happened to her.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Roy made it plain I wasn’t welcome to. Oh, he didn’t come right out and say ‘You’re not wanted here,’ but he did say things like, ‘You have enough to do raising your own kids,’ and, ‘After all, Anna is their flesh and blood.’ It hurt me to be pushed out of their lives that way, but what could I do? The agreement between Laurel and me was only a verbal one.”
“This agreement-when did you make it?”
“A few months before Josie died. Laurel was facing her own mortality. So was I, for that matter. If I’d’ve died, Laurel would have helped bring up my kids-with my husband’s blessing.”
“You say ‘died.’ How certain are you that Laurel’s dead?”
“I’m certain.”
“Could she have committed suicide?”
“I doubt it. No one who knew her considered that a serious possibility. It had to be foul play.”
“You sound almost as if you want Laurel to be dead.”
Sally’s eyes clouded. “I suppose in a way I do. Because if she’s not, if she’s been someplace else living some other life all these years, it would mean I never knew her at all. It would negate our friendship and everything we ever shared during all those years.”
After I said good-bye to Sally Timmerman in the inn’s lobby, I walked back to my room across the tree-shaded central courtyard. The night air was warm and fragrant from the flowering plants that grew in profusion there; I could hear people splashing in the nearby swimming pool. By contrast, my room was chill from the air-conditioning I’d left on when I went to dinner; I turned it off and opened the balcony doors to take advantage of the summer night. Then I sat down with my files and called Derek at his Marina-district apartment in San Francisco.
He said, “I sent you files on Jacob Ziff in Cayucos and the guy in Morro Bay, Ira Lighthill.”
“Good, I’ll take a look at them tonight. Tomorrow I’m talking with the Paso Robles police officer who worked the case, then heading down to the coast. I’ll try to talk with the Greenwood girls’ babysitter tomorrow night. In the meantime, I’ve come up with a couple of lines of inquiry I’d like you to look into: first, Josie Smith, a cousin of Greenwood’s, deceased twenty-three years, lived up there in the city.”
“Josie Smith. Got it. You looking for anything specific?”
“Just fishing. Now, second: about a year before Smith died, Greenwood taught art classes for around six months at the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo. Contact them and see if they have any record of it. Try to get names of inmates enrolled in the classes, and their whereabouts at the time she disappeared. If they don’t want to give out information-and I suspect they won’t-Craig has a contact at the state department of corrections who can help.”
“Will do. How soon d’you need this?”
“Tomorrow afternoon will be fine.”
My next call was to Patrick, who was still at the office. We went over my day’s activities, and I told him I’d be faxing him my notes, e-mailing a report, and messengering the tapes of my interviews in the morning. Then I made a call to the RKI condominium where Hy stayed while in La Jolla, got the machine, and left the number here at the inn. I considered calling his cellular, but if he wasn’t at the condo it meant he was probably tied up in a meeting or at a business dinner.
It had been a long day, so I decided to take a shower and go to bed early, saving Derek’s information on the two witnesses till the morning. But first I rummaged in my briefcase, took out my copies of the newspaper accounts of Laurel Greenwood’s disappearance, and once again contemplated the head-and-shoulders photograph that had been published with the stories. It showed a woman with a delicate heart-shaped face, large, wide-set eyes, and long, softly permed dark hair; she was posed in front of a rosebush, smiling radiantly into the camera, one hand raised to cup a blossom to her cheek.
I studied the photograph a long time, hoping for some hint of her secrets in the tilt of her head or the curve of her mouth. But they were well concealed-both from me and from whoever had looked through the lens at her.
Friday
As I headed west on Highway 46 to the coast, I drove out of the sunlight and into the fog. It billowed toward the car, rushed past, and closed behind me. Suddenly I was enveloped in a grayish-white world where ordinary objects took on unfamiliar shapes and headlights of approaching vehicles appeared out of nowhere. I slowed, wishing there were taillights in front of me to show the way. Of course, I reminded myself, there was no guarantee that another driver would know the road any better than I did.
Early that morning, Rob Traverso, the Paso Robles police detective, had called to postpone our ten o’clock meeting to four in the afternoon; fortunately I’d been able to reschedule my one o’clock appointment with Jacob Ziff for eleven. I hadn’t yet reached Ira Lighthill in Morro Bay, but I’d try again after I finished in Cayucos.
Ziff, according to Derek’s report, was an architect with offices in his home. He’d been thirty-four on the day he’d stopped at the overlook to speak with Laurel, which would make him fifty-six now. He was twice divorced, had an excellent credit rating, and owned both the house in Cayucos and a condo on Maui. No arrest record; the closest he’d come to entanglement with the law was giving a statement as to his conversation with Laurel and his later sighting of her at the Sea Shack.
The fog had thinned by the time the road intersected with Highway 1. The tourist town of Cambria and San Simeon, home of Hearst Castle, were to the right, Cayucos and Morro Bay to the left. I drove south between richly cultivated farmland and the flat, gray sea, past a tiny settlement called Harmony. After some ten miles, the highway split to form a bypass around Cayucos, and I spotted a narrow lane leading to an overlook on the cliffs. I turned in there, parked near the edge, and got out. Looked along the curve of the shore that Laurel had painted that day. Her easel, a finished canvas, and supplies had been neatly stowed in her Volkswagen bus, indicating an unhasty and untroubled departure from the overlook. I wondered if that final painting had remained in police custody or had been burned by Roy Greenwood, and made a mental note to ask Detective Traverso.
The wind blew off the water, strong but not cold. Already the fog was burning off above the coastal range, promising a clear afternoon. Like yesterday when I’d sat in the car in front of Laurel’s former home, I tried to capture some sense of what had gone on here twenty-two years before, but this was merely another roadside stopping place, through which thousands of people had passed since then. I checked my watch, saw it was nearly time for my appointment with Ziff, and got back in the car.
Studio Drive was at the lower end of town, a long residential strip that parallelled the main street to the west. The buildings there were a mixture: shingled cottages, Spanish-style villas, stucco bungalows, modernistic mini- mansions. Ziff’s was one of the latter, all sharp angles and redwood and glass, on the ocean side. I parked close to its high fence, went through a gate that opened into a tiny courtyard, and rang the bell. A voice called out for me to come around the side, and I followed a flagstone path to a door where a tall man in chinos and a polo shirt was waiting. He introduced himself as Ziff and took me inside to a large room with floor-to-ceiling windows that faced the sea. A computer workstation and storage cabinets took up the rear wall, and two drafting tables were positioned under a skylight. Ziff motioned at a grouping of leather chairs near the windows and said, “I’ll be right with you. Coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
He crossed to one of the drafting tables, picked up a pencil, and made a few notations on a set of plans that lay there. Then he poured mugs full of coffee from an urn that sat on a cabinet by the workstation.
“Cream or sugar?”
“Neither, thanks.”
