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  "Where does she live in San Francisco?"

  "On Temescal Terrace, near the university."

  "University of San Francisco or S.F. State?"

  "U.S.F."

  "She lives alone, is that right? No roommate?"

  "Alone. Never had a roommate, even when she was in school."

  "What's the street number?"

  "Nine-eight-seven."

  I made a note of the address.

  He said when I was done writing, "I got a key."

  "Key?"

  "To her apartment. She give it to me the last time I visited her. Never asked for it back."

  ". . . You want me to go there and snoop around?"

  "First thing I'd do," he said. "You got my permission."

  "Legally you don't have the right to give permission."

  "Hell, I'm her father."

  "Doesn't matter. It's her home, not yours."

  "Might be something there that'll tell what's troubling her." There was frustration in his heavy voice now. He wasn't interested in his daughter's personal affairs for any nosy paternal reason; he was genuinely worried about her. "I'll take responsibility. I'll put it in writing that it was all my idea."

  I sighed, not too audibly. "We're getting ahead of ourselves, Mr. Haas. Some more questions first, all right?"

  He drew a deep breath and let it out slow before he said, "All right."

  "Did Grady attend U.S.F.?"

  "Four years. Got her degree in business administration, graduated in the top five percent of her class. She's smart, Grady is—real smart." She'd given him that much to hang his pride on, at least.

  "She works in the city, does she?"

  "Intercoastal Insurance. Been with them since her graduation. Got promoted to assistant chief adjuster in their damage claims department a couple of years ago."

  In my profession you get to know the insurance companies pretty well, particularly the small ones; they can't afford to employ full-time investigative staffs, so they farm out that kind of work to private agencies like mine. Intercoastal was a newish outfit based in L.A.; their San Francisco office specialized in marine and marine-industry insurance. Rumor had it that they were not the most financially stable of companies these days.

  I said, "Could be she's having some kind of work-related problem. Maybe even lost her job for internal reasons. That would explain her suddenly wanting to come home for a while, give herself time to regroup."

  "Wouldn't explain her being tore up like this," Haas said. "Losing her job wouldn't do that to her, not Grady. Anyhow, I thought of that myself. So I called up Intercoastal Insurance this morning, before I called you. She ain't been fired, don't have any problems at work. She had some vacation time coming and she asked for it and they give it to her, that's all."

  "Who'd you talk to at Intercoastal?"

  "Her assistant. Seems even assistants got assistants in their damage claims department."

  "Who would that be?"

  "Lisa Fisher."

  I wrote the name down in my notebook. When I looked at Haas again, he was staring at something or someone not in this room. The patch of sunlight coming through the window on his left had lengthened so it touched the withered side of his face, giving it a pale radiance. Gus was still moving restlessly at the rear of the house. I could hear the wind, too, playing tag with itself among the shade trees outside.

  Abruptly Haas blinked and focused on me again. "The thing that happened to her ... it ain't as simple as something wrong at work. It's bad trouble, the kind that rips up your insides. You know what I mean?"

  "I think so, yes."

  "Somebody did that to her," he said. "Tore her up that way, tore her up so bad she may never be the same again. I ain't exaggerating about that."

  I nodded and said nothing.

  "Got it locked up inside her, whatever it is, like poison in a jar. I want to help her, but she just won't let me get at it, won't let nobody get at it. That's why I need you."

  I stayed silent, thinking about her up there on the hill— hunched against the wind, her hair blowing wild around her, then turning and hurrying away, back to where there was nothing but barren earth and empty sky. I had been torn up myself not so long ago, and alone with my pain for three terrible months, and during that time I would have given anything to have people around me; even now, more than a year later, there were days when I needed the closeness of crowds. But Grady Haas was just the opposite. She embraced solitude and in a crisis retreated even more deeply inside herself. Still, she was chained to the person or thing that had damaged her, just as I had been chained for ninety-seven days to the wall of an isolated mountain cabin.

  Her father mistook my silence for indecision. He said with as much pleading as he would ever be able to muster, "I got to know what's going on so I can help her get shut of it. I got to. You can understand that, can't you?"

  "I understand, Mr. Haas."

  "She's all I got left," he said.

  There was no way I could refuse him, even if I'd been inclined that way. I told him what he wanted to hear. And watched the keen edge of his anxiety slowly dull. And thought again of her up there on the hill—Little Miss Lonesome, running away.

  Chapter 2

  San Bernado was like something caught on a snag in the river of time. The snag was 1940, and all the years since seemed to have flowed around and away from it without touching it except at the edges. There was nothing illusory about its look and feel of the past; it was an actual physical anachronism that even smelled a little musty and dusty, like something old and lost and mostly forgotten. Even the few modern touches—cars, trucks, house trailers, satellite dishes— seemed to have a washed-out, prematurely aged look, as if the town had bled their newness out of them while absorbing them into its time-snagged persona.

  Back before the bypassing freeway was built, when Highway 101 passed right through San Bernado, it had had activity and a certain energy; now, thirty years later and on a Monday afternoon in April, it was all but deserted and wore a somnolent air that was probably perpetual. The business section was three blocks long; the rest of the town—eight or ten square blocks of it—was spread out to the south under the inevitable water tower. The buildings were all old, many of them Spanish-style; among them was one of those all-but-extinct Texaco stations made of white stucco, with an arched, tile-edged portico built out over hand-crank pumps. I passed a railroad yard, a farm-equipment company, an auto body shop, a liquor store, a market. Next in line was a café that in its front window advertised Mexican food and barbecue. Hunger made me pull over in front of the café; I hadn't bothered to eat breakfast this morning.

  I had the place to myself while I tucked away a bowl of pretty good chili. I had my thoughts to myself, too, and I kept wondering if I hadn't made a mistake in agreeing to help Arlo Haas. And an even larger mistake in accepting the key to his daughter's apartment that he'd insisted on giving me. It was not the kind of investigation most private detectives would take on, and rightly so. Too many unknown factors; too many personal angles. But hell, I was a sucker for this kind of thing. Now more than ever. That was something that hadn't been changed by the three months I'd spent chained to the cabin wall, the victim of a madman's warped desire for revenge. I'd lost things during that time of suffering and its immediate aftermath: patience, certain ethics, a kind of innocence. And I'd gained things, too: the capacity for sudden anger and sudden violence, an impulsive recklessness, the sporadic fear of being alone. I was a different man; there was no question of that.

  And yet in certain fundamental ways I was still the same man. I still had compassion, sentimentality, the desire to right wrongs and create order out of chaos; I was still the original bleeding heart, a minor-league champion of the oppressed. If I'd lost those qualities along with the other good ones, or if they had been corrupted in any significant way, I could not have continued to function as a detective or as a human being. There would have been nothing left for me to live for, and before very lon
g the madman would have had his revenge after all.

  * * * * *

  The San Bernado Union School was casy enough to find. It was a block off the main drag, at the western end of the town's residential area. Here, the Depression-era atmosphere was even more pronounced. The streets were either partially paved or of unpaved gravel. Most of the houses had been standing when I was born; were set back under tall cottonwoods or droopy willows, or behind fences along which cactus grew in thick clumps. Their yards had dusty grape arbors, their porches rusty swings and discarded iceboxes and clutches of moldering Sears, Roebuck furniture.

  The school was relatively new at age thirty or so—a low, beige cinder-block building, with two short wings that made it into a stubby, squared-off U. Behind it was a weedy football field, cracked asphalt tennis and basketball courts, a public swimming pool. Parked in front were two lines of vehicles, mostly pickups piloted by women waiting for their kids. Some of the pickups had horse-trailers attached to them. Life in the country. It was a shrinking way of life, though, narrowing down to pockets like San Bernado. In the not too distant future, if the developers and the technocrats and the hucksters had their way, the San Bernados would disappear, too, and the customs and conventions of rural folk would become nothing more than quaint historical curiosities . . . and then not even that. Then they would be as forgotten as the man who invented buggy whips, as the conveyances he invented them for.

  I found a place to park, went inside the school's main entrance. The halls were empty; it was fifteen minutes shy of two o'clock and classes were still in session. I followed an arrow that said office and learned from a lady in gray that Mary Ellen Crowley taught grades one through six and that her homeroom was number eleven, in the south wing. The gray lady said it would be all right for me to go there and talk to her, but not until her last class let out at two.

  I didn't want to go immediately to the south wing and hang around in the hall; it would have made me feel like a dirty old man. So I waited in the office instead. Finally a bell rang and little piping voices and thundering feet rose to a crescendo in the halls. When the stampede ended, I ventured forth. There were still some kids loitering at rows of lockers; a couple of them gave me wary looks as I passed, which made me feel like a dirty old man anyway. Some days, you just can't feel good about yourself no matter what you do.

  Mary Ellen Crowley turned out to be a plump blonde with attractive features, which she spoiled with too much eyeshadow and plum-colored lipstick. She was smiling and friendly until I showed her the Photostat of my investigator's license and told her why I was there; then her manner turned grave. But she was willing to talk about Grady Haas. She sat behind her somewhat cluttered desk, and since there was no place else I perched on one of the kids' desks. That didn't do much for my self-esteem either.

  "I'm worried about Grady too," she said. "Something's badly wrong in her life, her dad's right about that."

  "Did she give you any idea of what it is?"

  "No. She didn't have much to say, didn't seem to want my company. I didn't stay long."

  "Are you and she still close friends?"

  "I wouldn't say close, no. We've never been close."

  "You keep in touch regularly?"

  "Oh, we talk on the phone every few months."

  "Letters?"

  "No. Neither of us is a letter writer."

  "Does Grady confide in you?"

  "About her personal life? Not really. We've never shared secrets, never talked about anything intimate that I can remember. She's a very hard person to get close to."

  "And she's always been like that?"

  "More or less."

  "How would you characterize her?" I asked. "Is she withdrawn because she's shy or what?"

  "Well, she's not exactly shy; just an extremely private person. I guess you could call her a dreamer."

  "In what sense?"

  "Not the romantic kind—you know, knights in shining armor and all that. She has an idealized version of the way things should be, and the real world doesn't measure up. Neither do people, even the ones she cares about. So for the most part she shuns the real world and lives according to her own ideals."

  "That's a lonely way to live."

  "I know. But that's how Grady wants it." Ms. Crowley paused thoughtfully. "I think her mother dying had a lot to do with the way she is now. And her father's stroke, too, later on."

  "How do you mean?"

  "Her parents were and are important to her. She wanted them to go on as they'd always been—strong, healthy, there for her when she needed them. When her mother died, it had a profound effect on her."

  "Made her dislike and distrust the real world even more?"

  "Yes."

  "When did that happen?"

  "Sixteen . . . no, seventeen years ago. We were juniors in high school."

  "Cancer, wasn't it?"

  "Breast cancer. Mrs. Haas was sick about six months. Grady took it even harder than her dad did. That's the real reason she left the valley right after graduation. She didn't even stay the summer before moving to the city and entering college."

  "Was there any particular reason she picked U.S.F.?"

  "Well, her family is Catholic."

  "Aside from that. Why San Francisco? Why not a school in a smaller town?"

  "She preferred the city. She never did like living here in the valley."

  "Why, as private as she is?"

  "It's easier to be alone in a big city than it is in the country," Ms. Crowley said. "Don't you think so?"

  I thought so—and that it was a perceptive insight into Grady Haas. In an urban environment, if you choose, you don't have to deal with people except in glancing ways; you can wall yourself off, become a faceless entity in crowds of faceless entities. In the country, especially a little farm community like San Bernado where everybody knows everybody else's business, you can avoid neither contact nor scrutiny. It's like living in a house made of glass.

  I asked, "Have you visited her in San Francisco?"

  "We've had lunch a few times. And a couple of years ago, when my car broke down while I was in the city, I spent the night at her apartment."

  "Did you meet any of her friends on those occasions?"

  "I doubt if Grady has any friends up there."

  "She's never mentioned anyone to you?"

  "Just one person. A man she was seeing last year."

  "Ted or Todd something? Her father couldn't remember."

  "Todd Bellin."

  "B-e-l-l-i-n?"

  "I don't know, I never saw it written out."

  "How long was she involved with him?"

  "Three or four months, I think."

  "And then they broke up."

  "Around Thanksgiving."

  "Did Grady tell you why?"

  "He asked her to marry him and she said no."

  "Why did she turn him down?"

  "She wasn't ready to make a commitment, she said."

  "Meaning she wasn't ready to let anyone share her life?"

  "That's what it amounted to," Ms. Crowley said, nodding. "Being married not only means living with someone, it means sharing yourself with that person every day. You can't live inside yourself when you're married, and I guess Grady realized that. Of course, if Todd Bellin had been her ideal man . . . well, then her answer might have been different. But obviously he wasn't."

  "What is her ideal man?"

  "She'd never say. But every woman has one, just as every man has an ideal woman."

  "How did Bellin take her rejection?"

  "She wouldn't discuss it."

  "Did you feel there might have been bitter feelings on his part?"

  Ms. Crowley considered that. In the silence, a kid's voice yelled suddenly outside the windows, "You stupid shit! You do that again and I'll kill you!"

  Well, that was one thing that had already changed in the country, one of the little corruptions of modem society: aggression, public and obscene, and so prevalent that eve
n little kids picked it up. But it wasn't the only change, not by a damn sight. Drugs, AIDS, unrepentant greed, casual violence— those and a dozen others, simmering just under the surface of this and a thousand other little American towns. San Bernado wasn't frozen in the past; it just looked that way. Its metamorphosis was under way, insidiously, and it wouldn't be long at all before it emerged into the new century. Reality check; pay attention now. The past is dead and gone. And the present is barely controlled chaos under a thin veneer of high-tech civilization. And the future . . . the future scared the hell out of me.

  Ms. Crowley's voice intruded. I shook my head and said, "I'm sorry, I didn't catch that. I was woolgathering."

  "I said that when Grady came home last Christmas, she seemed even more withdrawn than usual. I don't know if that had anything to do with Todd Bellin, but I suspected at the time that it might."

  "Did she mention his name then?"

  "No."

  "Do you have any idea where he lives?"

  "In the city, I think. But not where."

  "Or what he does for a living?"

  "I'm not sure. He may work in a bank."

  "What gave you that impression?"

  "I remember Grady telling me she met him in a bank. Of course, that might mean they were both customers, but she also said he kept asking her out every time she saw him and finally she surprised herself by saying yes. I took that to mean every time she saw him at the bank."

  "Which bank does she use, do you know?"

  "No, I don't."

  "Did she tell you anything at all about Bellin? What kind of man he is, good and bad qualities?"

  "Nothing like that, no. Just that they liked the same things—you know, music and films and types of food. And that she felt bad about turning him down. He doesn't sound like someone who would become violently angry over a rejection."

  "No, he doesn't," I said.

  "Besides," Ms. Crowley said, "it's been six months since they broke up. I don't see how Todd Bellin could have anything to do with Grady's trouble now."