Amy Stevens invited him in, then seemed uncomfortable having him in her house. He got the feeling she lived quietly, unseen and unnoticed on this stretch of road. The house was too neat. The kitchen window stared out at rows of leafless vines. The kitchen table and surrounding counters were clean and empty. There were no magazines or newspapers, no fruit in a bowl or anything at all. After she suggested it, Marquez sat down at the kitchen table.
“I made tea. It’s almost ready. I don’t know when Chris will get home.”
The mechanical way she moved, movements that started jerkily, then smoothed, the privacy invaded suggested grief and unanswered sadness. It said something about how alone she was.
“I work part-time as a librarian.”
“You do?”
“Yes, but I haven’t worked in a while. I was working full-time three years ago, but there have been cutbacks at the county.”
“Cutbacks everywhere, I guess.”
“At your department too?”
“Some cuts, yes.”
She dropped the lid of the teapot and picked it up. Then she stood quietly at the stove.
“I don’t know why it’s taking him so long to get home.”
Marquez nodded. He laid his badge on the table.
“I’m with Fish and Game, and we’re looking at a sturgeon poaching problem. One of the people I’ve been talking to is Abe Raburn. Abe showed me the posters you and he put up.”
“He didn’t help me.” She turned toward him, and there was another long pause. “If Chris had never gone fishing with him I don’t think this would have happened.”
“Can you tell me about that?”
“I already gave a statement. Haven’t you seen it?”
“No, I’m sorry, I haven’t.”
“They met in a bar, of course. Where else would you find Abe Raburn? Chris came home late one night, and I knew something bad had happened. We always eat dinner exactly at 8:00, and he wasn’t here. I sat down to dinner without him, and when he called he was on a slough road with Abe. Then he brought Abe here. They didn’t get here until after midnight and sat outside drinking beer, if you can imagine.”
“What time of year was this?”
“In the spring. They had both been drinking, and that wasn’t like Chris at all. Abe is a very bad influence on him. I’m sure that’s why he’s not home now. Chris is very organized and very careful. But Abe is just the opposite. They were probably sturgeon fishing and had engine problems with Abe’s boat.”
She placed tea cups and poured from the teapot, and he realized she’d boiled water but hadn’t added tea. The hot water steamed in the cup. She sat down across from him, her eyes intently on him.
“You will find him, won’t you?”
“I don’t know if I’ll find him. I’m trying to find out what happened to him.”
“I was afraid the police had forgotten about him. I told them he went fishing with Abe, and I wish Chris would stop that friendship. He’s gotten home very late a couple of times. The night he didn’t come home at all I thought it was another one of those situations.”
“Was he fishing with Raburn that day?”
“They were going night fishing for sturgeon. I think that’s what Chris was planning to do. Of course, Chris may have left me. I can’t have children, and we wanted children. I would have adopted, but he wanted children of his own. Maybe he couldn’t live here knowing we’d never have any. You see, we both came from large families.” She wrung her hands. “I love him so much, I just don’t understand why he isn’t home yet.”
She began to get more and more agitated, and he got the feeling that every night as 8:00 approached she imagined her husband walking in the door. It was difficult and probably wrong to ask her questions, but he continued.
“Do you have a reason to think he was going fishing?”
“Yes, he took his gear. Abe told the police they weren’t going fishing together, but I’m sure you know that already. He told the police he didn’t see Chris that day and that they weren’t mixed up in anything illegal, but I’ve been very worried.”
“Were you worried he was mixed up in something illegal?”
“Oh, no, not Chris.”
She took a sip from the tea cup, and Marquez nodded, listened to her description of Chris, the honesty, the gentleness.
“I’m very lucky. The police thought he left me, but he would never do that. They drove around and looked for his car but that was about it. I made posters and put them up and somebody tore a lot of them down, but Chris doesn’t have any enemies. He’s a very sweet man.”
“Did he tell you he was going fishing with Abe?”
“He said he thought they were going to meet after Chris got off work down at the boat landing at the state park.”
“Brannan Island?”
“Yes, and the police checked. Chris didn’t go through the booth. You know, you have to pay a fee. No one knows where he went. He just disappeared with his truck.”
“But he had his fishing gear with him?”
“Yes, he has it.”
She folded her hands in front of her, and his heart went out to her. He knew what the police had likely alluded to, what they would have suggested without directly saying it. She needed psychiatric help in a big way, but he also guessed she knew Chris was never coming home again. Her instincts told her it had something to do with Raburn, which made him wonder why Raburn brought the poster out when he did.
“I don’t know that I’ll find out anything, but if our investigation overlaps anything to do with Chris’s disappearance, I’ll call you.” He paused. “Do you have family in the area?”
“No.”
“Any close friends?”
“Not since I went part-time.”
“I think you need someone to talk to. I’m going to call somebody.”
“I don’t accept visitors unless it’s about Chris.”
She stood, and he put an arm around her shoulders, held her for a moment, thanked her for talking to him, and left. He didn’t want to make any calls that triggered her ending up a ward of the state. She was obviously getting by somehow, feeding herself, must have some income. But she needed help.
He talked to the team, then started for home, didn’t want to sleep in the safehouse tonight. On the run back to the Bay Area his phone rang, and when he saw the number he knew Katherine and Maria were home.
“We just got in and stopped at the store and picked up some food for dinner,” Kath said. “Where are you?”
“An hour away and welcome home, but aren’t you three days early?”
“Four.”
When he got home it was tense between Katherine and Maria, though both were in the kitchen cooking. Kath’s cool fingers laced through his, and he kissed her, saw fatigue on her face, disappointment in her eyes.
“How was it?” he asked Maria.
“It was great.”
“How was New York?”
“Didn’t I already tell you?”
A pasta was on the table, and the room smelled like bacon. Maria tossed lettuce with oil, vinegar, and an expensive French salt she’d been trying to get her mother hooked on. The dinner was stiff. He asked the only questions, and neither wanted to talk, begging off by saying they were jet-lagged, but obviously the decision to come home was unhappy. No great school had become the sweetheart hope, no mother/daughter bonding.
After dinner Marquez opened the heavy iron damper in the old stone fireplace and built a fire, an old defense for him. Wind gusted hard over the mountain, rattling the windows, and it took a while to get the fire to draw. The quiet coming off of Katherine was like a weight dragged around. The kindling caught and then small oak branches he’d been drying for a couple of years. He pulled a chair up close to the fire.
“I’m thinking of starting to serve tea at the coffee bars,” she said, and he thought of Amy Stevens. “It may be too late since everyone knows them as coffee bars, but I’m playing with changing the store identity.”
She’d made another tea to try a different flavor and offered him a cup. He adjusted a log, and Katherine launched into it.
“She was more interested in shopping in New York than looking at schools.”
“I already got that part.”
“But you didn’t get it with attitude.”
Marquez adjusted the fire again, liked the pungency of the oak. He got up and found the bottle of a Cuban rum he’d been given last spring. He loved the taste and smell of the rum and poured an inch. The windows rattled in the wind. Another storm was forecast to hit a few days from now. If it stayed on track across the Pacific it would drop several inches of rain and maybe a couple feet of snow. The rivers would swell, and the runoff would churn the bottom. Sturgeon loved the brown muddy water.
Katherine’s cool fingers touched his right hand. She slid her chair over as Maria walked down the hallway.
“Dad, can I ask you something in my room? Mom, I’m going to bed.”
Marquez set the rum down gently on the hearth. He walked down to the room he’d added on and still hadn’t finished. It had been a year. The walls were sheetrocked and painted, but the trim work wasn’t complete, and he wasn’t a carpenter.
“What’s the question?” he asked.
“Is my bathroom door ever going to work?”
He’d hung the door himself after watching a rerun episode of This Old House on a cable channel. The door latch didn’t meet properly. He knew he was going to have to remove the casing and rehang the door, and he hadn’t gotten to it.
“I talked to Mom on the way home, and she’s afraid it’s going to offend you if we hire a carpenter to finish the room.”
Offend was not a word Maria would have used a year ago. Marquez tried the doorknob out of habit. It still didn’t work.
“Will it offend you?”
“I’d still like to fix it for you.”
“Dad, it’s not happening, and Mom has plenty of money.” She quickly added, “I don’t mean it like that.”
“Then don’t say it that way. Tell you what, if I don’t get it fixed in the next two weeks we’ll hire a carpenter.”
“The door swings open when I’m using the bathroom.”
They’d had this conversation a few times. “Shut your bedroom door when you use the bathroom.”
He thought of Raburn talking about the room he and his brother had rented in Isleton after they’d left home and moved to the delta. They were younger than Maria was now. Raburn had said the bathroom was downstairs and they didn’t need a window because the wall was open to the back of the lot. The shower was a garden hose with a nozzle set on the spray function and held pinned in place by two nails. He and Isaac had gotten to be great fishermen just so they could eat. It was why Isaac wouldn’t eat any fish anymore, or so Raburn said, and the more Marquez turned in his head the way Raburn talked about his brother, the more likely it seemed that Isaac knew absolutely everything going on.
Now as he got ready to leave her room, Maria said, “It’s not my fault we came home early. We got in a fight, and Mom said there was no reason to stay. I made her sad. I’m a big disappointment to her. She wishes she had a different daughter.”
That was a mix of childish and true and a way of getting it out.
“What were the schools you liked?”
“The University of Virginia and Boston College, but I won’t get in to either.”
“You won’t?”
She explained as though it was obvious. It was all demographics, and she had nothing going for her. She hadn’t excelled at a sport, didn’t have any extra-currics. She’d done some community service but not enough. She didn’t have legacy anywhere. You just about had to have better than a 4.0 GPA, and she didn’t have that. You needed top SAT scores, and she’d taken them twice and said her combined total still sucked.
“What’s your combined total again?” he asked.
“1305.”
He’d graduated from high school, gone to a state college for two years, then two in the National Guard and back to college. He’d met and married Julie, and they’d planned to travel the world for a year, finding work wherever they could. When Julie was murdered in Africa everything changed.
“I think what you’ve done is pretty amazing.” She’d turned her grades around completely in the past two years. Kath had driven her to better herself, and the effort had taken root, but only because she had it in her. “You’re too hard on yourself sometimes.”
“Mom pretty much thinks I’m wasting my life.”
“I’ve never heard her say anything like that. If you want to take a year off and work and earn money for college, go for it. But whether you go next year or the year after, you should get a degree and you should find something you really care about to learn.”
“I know I’m just the ungrateful kid, and I should listen to both of you, and I don’t know anything about the real world.”
“It’s got to be a conversation, Maria, not an argument, not a posit ion statement, and I don’t really need you to tell me how I think. I’ve got a pretty good idea already.” He repeated it. “You and your mom need to try to have a different conversation. You need to give each other a chance.”
“Tell that to her.”
Then he was out in front of the fire again with Katherine. He took a sip of rum.
“What did she say to you?” Katherine asked.
“She feels like she’s failed you and she’s lashing out, but I also hear something I haven’t before. She sounds afraid she’s going to be rejected everywhere she has applied.”
“Every kid has the same challenges and most don’t have the advantages. It’s time for her to grow up.”
“It is time, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that insecurity isn’t figuring into saying she doesn’t want to go to college.”
“There’s always another excuse.” After a pause, Kath added, “I’m going to go unpack.”
He stayed near the fire, drawing some comfort from it, his head not in the college issue. He heard Katherine unpacking in the bedroom and thought about the SOU ending, whether Baird would hold him to the Christmas deadline if they were putting together prosecutable cases. He added another small piece of wood, and the wind was a low moan blowing over the top of the chimney. Kath came back out, wearing only a robe now, sitting near him, the robe sliding off one leg, her skin golden in the firelight. He reached and touched her smooth thigh.
“How’s your team taking the shutdown?” she asked.
“They’re starting to make plans. Cairo is going to grow tomatoes.”
“What about you?”
“I’m going to shut these guys down before I make other plans.”
Her skin was very smooth. He closed his eyes a moment.
“It would sure be nice to see you more. Keep that in your plans, John.”
“I will.”
“My business really is growing. I know it sounds crazy, but you could think about it.”
“Sure.”
“I mean it.”
He slid his hand higher on her thigh, felt the warm heat there. The way her coffee bars had taken with some good press had caught even Kath completely by surprise. They took all of her time now. Growing the business had become her main thing and maybe a way of dealing with loneliness when he was gone. Undercover had taken its toll, and they’d never talked about the fact that she made so much more money than he did. When she’d opened the first Presto he’d written her a check for all his savings, twenty-two grand, not much, but all he’d had. She’d opened the store with it, and no one could have predicted how successful the coffee bar would become. He knew that to some of her new friends his job was detached from normal life, and hers was not a situation any of them would want to be married into. And in some insidious way the new money was working against them, as well as providing great opportunities, like this trip she’d just taken with Maria.
Katherine would pay for Maria to go to college, and with his salary he wouldn’t contribute much. Kath had no problem paying the money. In truth, she looked forward to it because it meant Maria would get a better start in the world than she’d had. She was looking at opening more stores, while he was fighting for enough time to finish one undercover operation.
“How would I fit in?” he asked.
“We’d have to come up with a role, but with your charisma you’d make a lot of things happen. And I’d get to see you a lot more. That would be good.”
“Yeah, it would.” He looked over at her. “Hey, remember where Maria was a few years ago.”
“She put herself in that spot.”
“And she worked her way out of it.”
“I don’t want to see her get in another rut. She works at the Presto on Union, and her friends come in and hang out for hours. Her picture of a good life is living with them in the city and going out clubbing at night. I’m around her, I know what I’m talking about. She’ll be with a completely different crowd at college.”
“What I remember of college is everybody having a good time, then working hard for a week or two around midterms and again at finals.”
“It’s not at all like that everywhere.”
The fire burned lower. Colder air drafted from the thin window glass, and Katherine shivered. She drew her robe back over her leg and turned toward him. “I’m sleepy,” she said and then put her head against his chest, and Marquez held her.
“I promise we could create a job for you that you would really like. I promise, and we would get to see each other so much more. You’ve given so many years already. You’ve done your share. We can travel like we’ve talked about.”
He didn’t answer but pressed her close, never wanted to let go of her. He saw Raburn’s face in the last firelight, heard him say again as he held up the poster, “This guy disappeared.” The look on his face like he couldn’t believe it.