Before long I was standing there alone, shivering in the wind and watching sunset colors seep into the sky above Inverness Ridge. For no reason I walked up on top of the hump again and looked out over the peninsula, out over the bay to the wooded island, its ruins dark now with the first shadows of twilight.
Maybe I wouldn't want to live out there after all, I thought. Or maybe it's just that I wouldn't want to die out there, all alone in the cold and the fog and that endless wind.
Six o'clock had come and gone when I got back to San Francisco. I went to the office first, found it still locked up as I'd left it. Eberhardt hadn't come in; the note I'd written him was right where I had put it on his desk blotter. I checked the answering machine: three calls, all from the contacts I had phoned earlier and all negative. No one named Ellen Corneal had died in San Francisco during the past thirty-five years; but neither was anyone named Ellen Corneal registered with the DMV, or the owner of any of the dozens of available credit cards.
For a time I stood looking at my phone, thinking that I ought to call Michael Kiskadon. But I didn't do it. What could I tell him? Maybe his father had perpetrated or been involved in some sort of criminal activity and maybe he hadn't been; maybe those bones were why he'd shot himself and maybe they weren't. Not enough facts yet. And Kiskadon had too many problems as it was without compounding them for no good reason.
The office, after Eberhardt's continued absence, and with darkness pressing at the windows, only added to the funk I was in. I shut off the lights, locked the door again, and went away from there.
Kerry said, “Where can he be, for God's sake? I must have tried calling him half a dozen times today and tonight.”
She was talking about Eberhardt, of course. We were sitting in the front room of my flat; she had been waiting for me there, working on a glass of wine and her own funk, rereading one of her mother's Samuel Leatherman stories in an old issue of Midnight Detective. She did that sometimes—came by on her own initiative, to wait for me. We practically shared the place anyway, just as we shared her apartment on Diamond Heights. She had put a roast in the oven and the smell of it was making my mouth water and my stomach rumble. I drank some more of my beer to quiet the inner man until the roast could do the job right and proper.
“I called Wanda too,” Kerry said. “Somebody at Macy's told me she was home sick, but she hasn't answered her phone all day. The two of them must have gone off somewhere together.”
“Probably.”
“But where? Where would they go?”
“The mountains, up or down the coast—who knows?”
“Just because of what I did to Wanda?”
I shrugged. “Maybe they decided to elope.”
She looked at me over the rim of her wineglass. I had said it as a joke, but she wasn't laughing. For that matter, neither was I.
“You really think they'd do that?” she asked.
“No,” I lied.
“God, I can't imagine Eberhardt married to that woman.”
“Neither can I. I don't even want to try. Let's talk about something else. That roast out there, for instance.”
“Ten more minutes. Tell me some more about the bones you found.”
“There's nothing more to tell. All I know right now is that they're human. And I didn't find them; Emil Corda did.”
“Well, he wouldn't have if you hadn't been there,” she said. “What are the chances the Marin authorities can identify them?”
“Hard to say. Modern technology isn't infallible.”
“Can't they do it through dental charts and things like that?”
“Maybe. It all depends.”
“On what?”
“On how long ago the victim was buried. On how much dental work he or she had done. On whether or not the dentist is still alive and can be found. On a whole lot of other factors.”
“Victim,” Kerry said. “Uh-huh.”
“What?”
“You used the word victim. You think it was murder, don't you.”
“Not necessarily.”
“It has to be murder,” she said. “People don't bury bodies in convenient earth fissures unless they're trying to cover up a homicide.”
“By ‘people’ I suppose you mean Harmon Crane.”
“Who else? He killed some woman up there, that's obvious.”
“Is it? Why do you think it was a woman?”
“He had a frigid wife, didn't he? Besides, there's that cigarette case—”
“Men also carried cigarette cases back then, you know.”
“—and the brooch. Men didn't wear brooches back then.”
“If it was a brooch.”
“Of course it was. The brooch and the cigarette case and the keys and other items must have been in her purse. He buried the purse with her and it rotted away to nothing, leaving the buckles. Simple.”