The Dark Room(25)

She’d led him to the music room. As soon as she sat down, she began to play, swaying in the current of cold air rushing through the windows. It was nothing he’d heard before, played in a way he’d never seen. Maybe this was something she saved for herself. In the quietest stanzas, the Golden Gate’s foghorn rattled low through the windows. He thought of the path it took, that sound, traveling over the Presidio and down the long avenues, a mile and a half or more to reach them.

She’d gone on and on, one piece after another. Debussy. Chopin, and Brahms. Clementi. He didn’t think of getting up, of disturbing her. The music held him in place.

“Are you pregnant?” he said, at last.

He thought she’d stopped, but she hadn’t. He knew the answer to his question, but he needed to hear it from her. But she didn’t say a word that night. She just nodded, and didn’t miss a note.

He came to sit on the bench next to her, as her students did when she was showing them something new, her hands folded on top of theirs. Two bodies, and four hands, coming together to find one song.

He’d never wanted her more than he had right then.



In the closet, he stood to go. He kissed the top of her head and she looked up at him.

“Hey,” she said. “Did you want me to save you a blintie?”

“Now you’re just making fun of me.”

“But do you?”

“You have them,” he said. “I told Grassley I’d buy him dinner.”

“Then you have to do better than that,” she said. “Before you go, I mean. The top of my head, that’s nothing.”

He knelt down next to her, slipping his fingers into her hair. She lifted her face to his, and he kissed her the right way. It didn’t matter if they were in the bed, or pressed against the kitchen counter, or on the floor in the back of her closet. The instant they came together, there was nothing else. Maybe that’s what he’d been fleeing.

Jesus, he thought. This woman.

This fiercely brave, and totally fucked-up, perfectly wonderful Lucy.



Half an hour later, he was at the China Beach parking lot. It was late January. Four thirty in the afternoon, and dusk was already closing out the sky. He got out of the car and put on his jacket, then walked down the concrete ramp that switched back and forth to the beach. The surf was running out of the north, and it curled and boomed into the sloped dark sand. He stepped off the pavement and onto the beach and followed the shoreline toward Castelli’s house. To his left, across the water, the Golden Gate Bridge came in and out of the weather.

He slowed a moment when he first picked out her silhouette, and then went up to meet her. She was standing on a promontory of rock, the surf breaking on either side of her.

“Good,” she said. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

She was barefoot but still in the gingham dress she’d worn that afternoon. It couldn’t have been very warm, and was already sticking to her thighs and stomach where it had gotten wet in the windblown spray. From down here, in the last of the light, he could see the path she must have followed to reach this spot. A winding boardwalk clung to the cliff’s face beneath her parents’ house. It descended from her mother’s sunroom, then zigzagged to the tide pools a hundred feet beneath. A few lights glowed through the windows, but it was one of the darker houses on the cliff.

“Your mom and dad up there?”

“Just my mom, and she’s getting ready to go out,” Alexa said.

“That’s normal?”

“Normally, she’d be passed out. But tonight she’s hosting a thing in Monterey.”

“You wanted to tell me something?”

“You said a girl disappeared, in 1985.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?” Alexa asked. “Which part don’t you know?”

“What do you know about her?”

“Nothing.”

He started toward the walkway, his back to her.

“Mr. Cain, wait.”

He turned around, and she was lifting up a black plastic bag that had been near her feet. She’d weighted it with a rock so the wind wouldn’t take it.

“I found this,” she said. “When I was little. He probably thought the maids threw it out—but it was me, and I had it hidden.”

“Show me.”

She put it behind her back.

“The girl from 1985—she was a blonde?”

Cain nodded.

“And she would’ve been a good model,” Alexa said. “Fine features, beautiful lines.”

“What’s in the bag?”

She ran her free hand up the bodice of her dress, cupping herself.

“Full figured, up here,” Alexa said. Then she touched her face. “And all the right angles, here. A face you want to see. A face you can’t stop seeing.”

Now she kissed her fingertip.

“Perfect lips,” she said. “Full and soft.”

“What’s in the bag, Alexa?”

“Am I right about her?”

“Yes.”

She handed him the bag, and he pulled out an eight-by-ten photograph. He took out his flashlight, and there she was: the woman from the photographs he’d first seen in Castelli’s office. She was handcuffed to the bed, wearing nothing but a pair of dark-colored panties. This wasn’t a picture he’d seen before, but it must have come from the same roll of film as the first four. The differences were obvious. There was no number in the corner. The woman was in the same position, but the angle was slightly different. The photographer had moved around to the end of the bed. Cain slipped his glasses off and held the glossy print close enough to study it carefully. It had the same subtle distortions as the others, everything warped just a little bit.