Lionel insisted that Anne would go there. It was a haven for runaway kids, and though he didn't tell his parents, he felt certain that the runaways could live there for years without being recognized or turned in. There were thousands of them, crushed into tiny apartments, living like ants in the houses of the Haight-Ashbury, the houses painted a riot of colors, with flowers and rugs and incense and drugs and sleeping bags everywhere. It was a place and a time that would never come again, and Lionel instinctively felt that Anne was part of it. He had felt it from the first moment he'd arrived. It was just a question of finding her, if they could. He and John had combed the streets for months without success, and there wasn't much time left for them. They had promised to return to school by June for the summer session to make up for the time they'd lost.
“If you don't find her in three months,” Bob Wells had said, “then you have to give up. You can only search for so long. She could be in New York, or Hawaii, or Canada.” But Lionel knew he was wrong. She would come here, to search for the love she felt she'd never had from them. And John agreed with him, and now he was certain that he'd seen her walking in a daze near Ashbury, wrapped in a purple bedsheet, with a crown of flowers on her hair, her eyes so glazed he almost wondered if she had seen him at all. But for an instant, just an instant, he had been certain that she had known who he was, and then she had drifted off again. He had followed her to an old broken-down house that seemed to be housing an entire colony of obvious druggies and runaways. The smell of incense wafted right out into the street, and there must have been twenty of them on the steps, singing an Indian chant, and holding hands, crooning and laughing softly and waving at friends. And as she came to the stairs, they parted like the Red Sea for her, helping her up the stairs through their midst, as a gray-haired man waited for her in the doorway, and then carried her inside as John watched. It was the strangest sight he had ever seen and he tried to explain it to Lionel, describing her again.
“I have to admit, it sounds like her.” But the others John had found had too. Every day they split up and wandered through the Haight-Ashbury looking for her. If she was there, it was amazing they hadn't found her yet. And at night, they went back to the hotel room they had rented with the money Lionel had borrowed from Faye. They usually ate a hamburger quietly somewhere, they never went to a single gay bar. They stayed unto themselves. And in the morning, they started all over again. It was a labor of love the likes of which Faye had never seen. She had flown up several times to join them in their search, but as Lionel finally explained, she only hampered them. She stood out in the crowd of flower children, her shirts were starched, her jewelry reduced to a minimum was still too much, her jeans were too clean. She looked like exactly what she was, the mother of a runaway from Beverly Hills, looking for her child, and they ran from her like rats. Finally, Lionel had told her straight out. “Go home, Mom, we'll call you if we see anything. I promise,” She had gone back then to work on a film. She had urged Ward to take a co-producer on this one, because he was drinking so heavily, and things had gone from bad to worse with them. He still refused to even speak to Lionel. And when Lionel called her to report on what he had seen in the Haight-Ashbury, the moment Ward heard his voice, he hung up on him. It made communication with Faye extremely difficult for Lionel and Faye was furious. Eventually, she put in a separate phone for Lionel to call her on. But she noticed that the children avoided him as well, they were afraid of what their father would do if they talked to him. The twins never answered the phone Lionel called her on, as though Ward would know if they had talked to him. They had taken him at his