“He keeps his mouth shut and lets her vent,” Sandy said, speaking of her husband. “Says it’s time for her to decide some things for herself.”

“Sounds like a good relationship. Too bad your son isn’t a big talker.”

“I wish Wish would tell me more. I never know what he’s up to. Thinks he’s all grown up.”

“Boys are hard.”

“Bob stopped by the other day while you were in court.”

“Oh?”

“He’s not doing so good at the high school.”

No doubt he had unloaded his closest secrets on Sandy. When had being a parent translated into being a pariah?

“I should go,” Nina said, consulting her watch. She picked up part of a stack of paperwork on Sandy’s desk and set it down again. “You go home now. Your work’s done. We’re okay. You need your weekend.”

“What time will you be back?” Sandy said, rearranging the stack Nina had upset.

“Twelve-thirty?”

“Meet you here.”

Back home, on Aunt Helen’s porch, the bald happiness on Bob’s face made Nina feel better about her decision to let him go alone. She pulled up to the cottage, but he had run down the front steps and short pathway in front to meet her before she even turned off the car.

“Ready!” he said.

“So glad,” she said.

He ran back and hauled his suitcase off the porch. Hitchcock made a frantic good-bye sprint through the orange poppies and overgrown grasses in the front yard before hurling himself toward the back seat.

She had to go inside to make sure the place was locked up. Bob had done a good job. He had remembered to turn off the fan in the living room and lower the thermostat. Even the windows were shut and locked. Sometimes, he was fourteen going on thirty. That would be when he wasn’t fourteen going on two, she laughed to herself, finding a heap of wet towels forming a white scar over the hallway’s lovely aged oak boards.

North of Salinas, she started to speed to seventy or seventy-five. But she had forgotten the traffic narrowing from two lanes to one for construction, which caused everyone to slam on their brakes and jerk left simultaneously. The Bronco, tippy and therefore not the best car to maneuver, gave them a minor carnival-ride scare, righting itself just in the nick of time.

Tall pink oleander bloomed on the sides of the road, blowing in the hot summer wind. Her usual driving style, to haul it uphill but drive the speed limit on downhills to avoid lurking patrol cars, wasn’t really an option in the heavy weekend traffic, so she had time to admire the yellow mountains in all their splendor. The traffic got bad again in San Jose, at the junction with 280, and they crawled the rest of the way to the station.

She tried to imagine Paul making the much longer drive from Monterey to Tahoe over and over to help her on her cases, as he had so often in the past.

She waited with Bob until the train to Sacramento arrived, then waved him off. He would have to change there, and had to listen to many instructions about what to do if there was a problem. She rode back to Monterey wondering what the hell she was doing, sending her boy up to their home in the mountains while she remained stuck like dried salt along the coastline.

11

Saturday 9/20

PAUL WOKE UP ON SATURDAY IN A ROTTEN MOOD, NOT HELPED BY the nightcaps he had drunk the night before.

He had slept alone on the thick new foam pad Nina had bought to soften up his stiff bed. Tossing, unable to sleep, he decided he didn’t like the heat the pad created or the cozy embryonic illusion of comfort, so he ripped it off and threw it to the floor. Damn woman, coming in here, changing everything to suit herself and then moving out!

He did not like uncertainty. He lived by rules, such as the first rule he had established when he went into business: if someone was going to get hurt, that someone would not be him. He had just gotten used to her living with him, to her scent and a particular softness of hair. Then her kid arrived, and before he could blink she had gone.

What use was it, having her in Pacific Grove, ten miles away? How was that getting together?

Now, very early, cup of coffee in hand, he stood on the deck watching the sun filling in the morning shadows, the distant line of ocean in the west, and the blue jays flitting around in the eucalyptus trees. He listened to the radio news while he ate, then made the bed and threw the foam pad into the condo Dumpster. He checked his e-mail.

Damn, but the house was quiet and the morning was long.

Wish showed up at Paul’s office at eight.

Sandy’s son, Wish Whitefeather, towered over everyone, even Paul, and weighed one-forty on a feast day. Twenty years old, he walked into the room with the insouciant glowing health only youth possessed, even if he had spent the night on a pal’s floor. His hair was getting long again, just touching the collar of his wrinkled green polo shirt. He was all bone, with a long face with a high forehead, a jutting nose, and a prominent Adam’s apple that bobbed as he swallowed the last of his caffeine fix.

“Let’s do it, good buddy,” Wish said, adjusting his sunglasses. He was wearing his trademark Doc Martens and brown khaki shorts, drinking from a cardboard coffee vat. Evidently Sandy was leaning too hard, because he launched into his problems with his parents, and how he could never escape their watchful eyes. “I leave Tahoe to come here and be on my own, you know? And they follow me!”

“All for a good cause. You’re going back soon, anyway,” Paul said, picking up Dean Trumbo’s shitty investigative report on Alex Zhukovsky and locking his office door behind him. On the landing he glanced down below at the Hog’s Breath, always on the lookout for a pretty girl to start the day off right, but the courtyard below was deserted. “You’ve got nothing to squawk about. You don’t have to stay with your parents.”

“That’s the whole problem. My mom hates letting me out of her sight.” He sighed deeply. “I stay with friends and she really kicks.”

“Where are your folks staying?”

“With old friends in Big Sur. They got to know each other when my dad was doing truck driving. They’re starting an abalone farm off the commercial pier in Monterey.” Wish took the stairs down two at a time, and barely seemed to be working at it, saying, “You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to farm abalone.” Paul followed at the more sedate single-step pace. “Actually,” Wish went on, “since I’m taking a bio course this fall, they’ve been able to help. They know a lot.”

They got down to the street. “We’ll take my car,” Paul said, leading to the red Mustang parked by the curb.

“Can I drive?”

Paul tossed him the keys.

Wish lectured Paul about the wild ways of abalone, which Paul had heretofore only known as sizzling breaded objects on a plate, all the way up the cottage-lined streets of Carmel. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I’m still into criminal justice. Bio’s important these days because of DNA.”

“DNA’s our worst problem in this case. You know Stefan Wyatt’s blood was found at the scene.”

“Yeah. The case.” Wish blinked and came back to their mission of the day, the interview of Alex Zhukovsky, Christina’s brother.

“If you were on a jury and heard that, you’d think he did it, wouldn’t you?” Paul asked.

“Well, it wasn’t enough to nail O.J. So Stefan’s got that going for him. But between you and me, Paul, ya know, she threw a glass that broke, right? And his blood was on the glass, right?”

“The tests are even more reliable than in O.J.’s heyday,” Paul said.

“Nina thinks he’s innocent, so we go with that, right?” Paul did not answer, because he wanted Wish to maintain his zeal, but the truth was, Nina hadn’t expressed an opinion about Wyatt’s guilt or innocence. That could be because she wasn’t sure, or thought he was guilty, or he had confessed to her and that was confidential, or simply because she was a lawyer and not stupid.