Marcia Muller - Locked In

P ale pinkish light seeping around the drawn blinds. Must be very early in the morning. There’s been a shift in the weather, I can feel it. Today will be beautiful.

But not for me.

I lay there, depression gathering again. After the nightmare flashback to when I’d been shot, I’d had a peculiar dream in which Hy was looking into my eyes, but he couldn’t speak any more than I could. Then others appeared-Mick, Rae, Ted, Ma-and they couldn’t speak either. And finally I realized it wasn’t that they couldn’t-they wouldn’t. Keeping something from me.

I thought back to Hy’s behavior the day before. At first he’d been elated to connect with me. Then they’d done a CT scan and some other tests, and he was a little subdued but still upbeat. But later he’d been quiet, wrapped up in his own thoughts, and his smile was slightly off.

Definitely holding something back. Something those tests had revealed.

Dammit, if that was the case, I deserved to know. When he came in today, I’d ask him-

Right. I couldn’t ask him anything. All I could do was respond to questions.

All I could do was lie here. Silent. Motionless. Afraid.

The sky was glowing over the eastern hills when he awoke, cramped and cold, in his SUV at a pullout on Highway 1 near Big Sur. He’d driven almost to the Spindrift Lodge, where San Francisco’s president of the board of supervisors and the state representative had arranged their secret meeting, then parked about ten miles north. No reason to arrive in the middle of the night and roust the innkeeper from his or her bed; no need to attract attention to himself. Amanda Teller and Paul Janssen would probably check in in the afternoon, and by then he’d be tucked away, hopefully in an adjoining unit.

He ran his hands over his face and hair, then got out of the car and breathed in the crisp salt air. Fog misted the gray sea; its waves smacked onto the rocks some thousand feet below. But the pink light to the east indicated the day would clear. He turned that way and looked up: towering pine-covered slopes, through which a waterfall had cut a channel. Now, because of the dry summer conditions inland, its flow was barely a trickle. Come the rainy season, it would be a torrent.

All around there were reminders of the 2008 wildfire, sparked by lightning, that had burned more than 160,000 acres in the area: blackened sections, redwoods with charred branches, deadfalls. Many residents had lost their homes, even more had been evacuated, and the Pacific Coast Highway had been closed to traffic. People in the Big Sur area were strong and resilient, though; it had always been subject to floods, mudslides, and avalanches. Often in winter it was cut off from the surrounding territory, but no matter how bad the disaster the community clung together and regrouped quickly.

Craig loved Big Sur, but he and Adah had spent little time there. It was remote, down a very dicey part of the coast highway, and there really wasn’t much to do. Better to go to Carmel, with its interesting shops and good restaurants, for a getaway. Still, there was something magical about this long stretch of tall trees and rugged sea cliffs; if he were a believer, he’d say being here was akin to a religious experience.

But he wasn’t a believer. His exposure to religion had been limited to Christmas Eve and Easter services at the Methodist church in Alexandria, Virginia, where he’d been raised. He never contemplated the existence of a deity or eternal life; it simply wasn’t in his makeup. Adah was the same: she’d been reared in the religion of her parents-communism-but she hadn’t taken her radical parents’ beliefs too seriously. In fact, when they’d become disillusioned and begun labeling themselves as “wild-eyed liberals,” she’d been relieved.

He thought of Shar: what did she believe? She’d been raised Catholic, but he’d never known her to go to church. And the beliefs of her Indian ancestors hadn’t been passed on to her. He hoped if she had any faith at all she was leaning heavily on it now, during the toughest battle of her life.

Nature called. He went into a stand of pines clinging to the clifftop, out of eyeshot of early passing motorists. Returning, he looked at his watch. Six-thirty. He’d grab breakfast somewhere, even if it meant driving north, then play tourist till around ten, a respectable time to arrive at the Spindrift Lodge for a spontaneous weekend getaway.

She was starting her search for Bill Delaney, the name she’d found in the phone book in Callie O’Leary’s hotel room, when the fog showed signs of breaking over the Golden Gate. Delaney’s cellular had been out of service consistently when she’d called it last night during breaks in a family evening with Ricky and the girls.

She was surprised how much she enjoyed the times when Molly and Lisa, their older sister Jamie, and even their troubled brother Brian were in residence. The eldest girl, Chris, was a student at Berkeley and dropped in often. So did Mick.

Family had never played a big part in Rae’s life-unless you counted the people at All Souls and, later, at the agency. Her parents had died in an accident when she was just a kid, and she’d been raised by her grandmother in Santa Maria-a cold, begrudging woman who had died of a heart attack while trying to murder a perfectly good rosebush.

Maybe that was why she could put up with the trials and tribulations of the Little Savages: they were so much more of a family than Nana, as the old lady had insisted Rae call her.

Of course, there was Jamie’s abortion last year: Rae had finessed that so Ricky hadn’t made it more stressful than was warranted upon his second daughter. And while Brian’s OCD, which had surfaced shortly before Charlene and Ricky divorced, was difficult to deal with, he was a sweet-natured boy and lately Rae had become close to him. Brian seemed better all the time; he did get manic once in a while, dusting and washing everything in sight, but Rae kind of appeciated that. In spite of their having a full-time housekeeper and a maid, chores at the Kelleher-Savage home were often left undone, what with the band members and recording company people and friends constantly traipsing through the house.

Back to the search for Bill Delaney. She’d called his cellular minutes ago. Same lack of response. No way of knowing whether it was Callie who’d written down the number or when. The phone could’ve been a throwaway or the account canceled long ago. With no information on Delaney, an ordinary name in this city with its high Irish population, locating him wouldn’t be easy.

Okay, if a hooker had his cell number, what could he be?

A fellow sex worker. A pimp. Someone in the porn industry. A lawyer…

Yes!

Google search of ABA members. Many Delaneys. She worked her way through them, both in the city and around the state. Narrowed it down by type of law practice. Came up with two possibles, one on Forty-eighth Avenue near Ocean Beach, the other on Shotwell Street, close to where the former All Souls Victorian stood on Bernal Heights. It was Saturday, but ambulance chasers who bailed hookers out of jail were always reachable.

As she passed through the living room on the way out, she called to Ricky, Molly, and Lisa, “When you go to the zoo, tell the baby giraffe hello for me.”

Ricky had an arm around either daughter. They were watching something on TV that sounded nonsensical. He grinned and said, “Good hunting, Red.”

She has got to be told today, before the visitors start coming,” he said to Dr. Saxnay.