Tuesday, June 23
IN A MOMENT THEY’LL FIND HER.
Find her where she floats, fingers splayed wide in the marbling water, hair spread like a Japanese fan. Fish glide beneath it, push through it; skate along the line of her body.
The filter hums. The pond simmers, shimmers. She trembles on the surface.
Fog prowled the ground earlier this morning—San Francisco swirl, velvet-thick and chill—but now the last of it burns off, and the courtyard basks in light: paving stones, sundial, a chorus line of daffodils. And the pond, that perfect circle sunk near the wall of the house, with its glowing fish, its lily pads like stars.
In a moment a scream will crack the air.
Until then, all is silent and all is still, except for the shiver of the water, and the slow traffic of the koi, and the ripple of her corpse.
Across the courtyard, the French window opens, sun sliding off glass. A breath. Then that scream.
They’ve found her.
Six Days Earlier: Wednesday, June 17
1.
“YOU LIKE MYSTERIES?”
Nicky cuts her eyes to the rearview mirror. The cabbie is squinting at her through lenses round and thick as shot glasses.
“Looks like you’re reading a mystery there,” he rasps. The car coasts over a pothole, shudders beneath them.
She brandishes the paperback. “Agatha Christie. Murder in Mesopotamia.” The man fancies a chat, and Nicky aims to please. Cabbing must be a lonely gig.
“You smoke?”
“No, sir.”
“Good.” Poking a cigarette between his teeth. “Too pretty to die young.”
He sparks it with a bashed Zippo, and Nicky taps the window switch. White air spills in, cool and damp, swamping the backseat; she presses the switch again to a half inch up top and tilts her head toward the glass, sees herself twinned there: lashes spiky with mascara, gloss glinting on her lips. She isn’t too pretty—she knows this, doesn’t much care.
The cab jolts. Her bag jumps to the floor. “I think you clipped the curb there.”
“Yeah, well.” Glaring at the windshield. “Surprised they were landing planes. Miracle you touched down.”
For Nicky, who is not a flyer born, it’s always a miracle when she touches down. She peers past him into a stagnant tide of evening fog, lustrous as pearl in the headlights.
“June gloom. Bet you don’t get weather like this back east.”
“Nope.” Back east—it sounds impossibly distant, mythical.
He grunts, satisfied, then bats the turn signal as they hug a corner and surge uphill. Nicky gropes at her seat belt.
“Mysteries, I was saying.” Smoke chugging from his mouth, roiling in the cold air. “Lots of mysteries in San Francisco. You heard of the Zodiac?”
“They never caught him.”
“They never—yeah.” He scowls in the rearview. Nicky shuts up; it’s his city, his story. “He’s our Jack the Ripper. Then we got the Romance of the Skies. She was a jetliner disappeared back in the fifties. Flying to Hawaii, and she just—” A suck of his cigarette. “Gone.” A puff of smoke.
“What happened to . . . her?”
“Who knows? Same with the ghost blimp. Wartime, coupla army boys float up in a Goodyear, and when she crashes in Daly City, no one’s on board. It’s a mystery, like I—that over there!” He flaps a hand to the right. “Oldest house in Pacific Heights.”
Nicky spots an albino Victorian with wide-eye windows, rearing back from the street as though startled. “Built fifty years before the quake,” brags the cabbie. “That was a middle-aged house, and she survived.”
“She looks surprised,” Nicky observes. “Like she can’t believe she’s still around.”
He grunts again. “I can’t believe she is, either.”
They tunnel ahead. On either side, white street signs flash in the fog, phantom fingers pointing forward: This way, keep going.
“Said you’re from New York?”
“Yes.”
“Well, this is the most expensive neighborhood in the country.”
The houses loom roadside, spectral in the haze: nineteenth-century ladies, slim and prim, dressed in pastels; a Spanish-style sprawl swarming with ivy; a mock Tudor, timbers and plaster atop herringbone brickwork; two Queen Annes, wood trim lacy as a doily.
“Some of ’em are tech people,” the cabbie informs her. “Google. Uber. Uber, I’ll tell you something—” He glowers, but doesn’t tell her something. “Still a lot of old money here. We’ve-been-rich-forever types.”
Vapor haunts the streets ahead. They ride swells of pavement, waves of it, now cresting, now dropping. Nicky catches her breath.
“We got mystery writers in San Francisco, too. Dashiell Hammett—he lived back there. Post Street.”
Another sign thrusts through the mist, urging them onward. Keep going. This way.
“Oh, here’s one for you.” Chewing the cigarette. “Mystery writer used to live in—was it Pac Heights? Somewhere swell. Well, fellow’s wife and son up and vanish one night.”
Nicky shivers.
“Thin air. Like that plane. Must be twenty-five . . . no—twenty years ago. New Year’s Eve, nineteen ninety-nine.” The words float in a cloud of smoke, bob there like buoys.
“What happened to them?”
“Nobody knows! Some folks suspected the brother—the writer’s brother, I mean—or his wife, or maybe both of ’em. Some folks swore it was their kid. The brother’s kid, I mean. There were employees, too, a guy and a gal. But most people . . .” Curving around a corner. “Most people believe it was the writer himself. And here we are,” he announces, as the cab brakes against the curb with a yelp and Nicky pitches forward, her book skidding from her lap.
She watches the cabbie unpack himself from the front seat, circle to the trunk; the tip of his Marlboro glows in the mist, bright as a will-o’-the-wisp.
Nicky tucks the paperback into her bag. Inhales deeply, coughs—the cabin of the car smells like a fire pit—then pushes the door open and steps into the fog. The street is a ghost town, the hulks of houses mere shades, façades like skulls, staring each other down across the pavement. She shivers again.
“You came ready in that sweater,” says the cabbie as the door closes behind her with a clack.
Nicky inspects herself. Her single most expensive piece of clothing: cashmere, a simple charcoal V-neck, newly dry-cleaned. Somewhere over Nebraska she’d knocked a beer down the front. Her jeans, she sees, are still dusted with coarse mutt hair, even though she spent an entire time zone trying to tweeze them clean.
When she glances up again, the cabbie is gawking at the steep pitch of the driveway. He turns to her.
“This is that house,” he says. “The mystery house. Did you know?”
“Guilty.” She feels it, too.
“Shoot. You let me blab.”
“I didn’t want to interrupt,” she explains gently—she hadn’t meant to deceive. But she’s read all about the wife and son who up and vanished; by now she knows as much as anyone. Or almost anyone.
The cabbie huffs his cigarette, casts it to the street, a little comet-tail of sparks trailing it. “How ’bout that. Just visiting?” A glance at her luggage, a compact roller and a small vintage steamer trunk, leather clasps and nailheads, spotty with travel labels.
“On a deadline.” She dips a hand into her bag, digs out three twenties and a five.
He fondles the bills. “Don’t see cash much anymore.”
“I’m ol’-fashioned.”
“And you ain’t frightened? You don’t think he killed ’em?”
Sotto voce, like he’s asking if she doesn’t suppose she’s had too much to drink. “I hope he didn’t,” says Nicky brightly.
“Well. Enjoy that mystery of yours.” Moving past her in a waft of nicotine; Nicky wonders if he means the murder in Mesopotamia or the disappearance in San Francisco. As he ducks into the front seat, the car wheezes, and the cabbie with it. “Enjoy the city, too,” he calls. “Fifty square miles surrounded by reality.” The door bangs shut.
Nicky remains gazing at her luggage, her back to the vehicle. The engine clears its throat; the tailpipe spouts exhaust against her leg; she listens as the car rolls away.
When she turns around, the fog has closed in upon itself, iced over, smooth and still as a mirror, as though the cab and its driver had never been there at all.
2.
SHE STANDS IN THE MIST, arms folded across her chest, hands curled around her shoulders: hugging herself, as is her custom when excited or anxious, or both. Behind her she feels the house holding its breath. She holds her own.
Nicky isn’t much for theatrics, not usually—among her friends, she is acknowledged as both sweetest and sanest—but she’s waited five years to introduce herself. Her mind rewinds: past five summers, an electric-blue blur; past five winters, Manhattan under snow; five years exactly, this same month, when she wrote that first letter.
Dear Mr. Trapp: You don’t know me . . .
Nicky had fan-mailed mystery novelists as a teenager, pleading for insight and autographs; later, during her graduate studies, more thoughtful letters, more probing questions. She still keeps up with the few willing to ditch their screens and tip letters into the postbox. Nicky, a sentimentalist, values pen and paper. Ink sinks into stationery, indelible as a scar; email is breath on glass, an instant dissolve.
Then, in the dregs of July—a pale blue envelope, her name slashed across it, scored deep in the paper: Mr. or Ms. Nicky Hunter.
She inspected the flap, the San Francisco address. Smiled, softly.
For three weeks she workshopped a response before at last batting back. (Dear Mr. Trapp: I am in fact a woman.) Another month, another blue envelope. And so on into autumn, into winter, into the New Year, into four more—perhaps a paragraph or two from her, a few sentences from him—until their latest correspondence, typewritten in that same cracked ink, the letters heaving and jostling like passengers at sea. We look forward to welcoming you to our home.
She rubs her arms. Turns, slowly. The fog ripples, parts like curtains, unveiling the house, risen above her in a great frozen wave.
Château revival in soft cream, built by Bliss and Faville in 1905, the year before the earthquake; since then home to just four families, present occupants included. “One of Pacific Heights’ most elegant and tasteful mansions, commanding a spectacular view of the Golden Gate Bridge,” panted Architectural Digest in a piece headlined MYSTERY HOUSE. “Grand in its proportions, gracious in its décor, and jealously guarded by the lord of the manor.” The article was breathless to the point of asthma.
Still: More than thirteen thousand square feet, spread across four stories (aboveground). Seven bedrooms. Eight bathrooms. A walnut-paneled library housing some six thousand books; a parterre courtyard with sunken koi pond. White-oak flooring throughout. Dormer windows peering from the steep slate roof. Vaulted foyer. A fireworks display of exotic finishes.
Nicky eyes the front door, damming within all that elegance, all that grandeur. And somewhere inside, the author who most intrigues her. She feels little-girl giddy.
Thirteen steps glide up in a smooth sweep of marble. Nicky scans them, squares her shoulders. Her body is light yet wiry, pared and planed; five years ago, when she took up boxing, Nicky Hunter—a happy person, a softie, a hugger—discovered a talent for battery.
She hoists her trunk, hikes the roller bag under her other arm, and mounts the steep front steps.
At the landing, she sets the luggage down. A black-bronze knocker bulges from the door: a question mark, extravagantly curled and swollen at the top, like a hooded snake. Nicky traces the curve with one hand, then aims a finger at the doorbell.
The chime cries, dies.
Dear Mr. Trapp: You don’t know me, but I found what might be an error in your novel . . .
The quick snick of a lock. Nicky retreats a step.
The door opens.
There before her, backlit in amber, stands the most beautiful woman she has ever seen. ...
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