down from the roof onto the third-floor balcony. Not likely, no, but possible. The situation was untenable. He had to change now.
And indeed the change happened immediately, almost as if some merciful wolf god had heard him and forced it. Or maybe he,d forced it himself.
Fighting exhaustion, he packed up and was gone within minutes.
He made it as far as the Redwood Highway just north of Sausalito. Spying a small old one-story adobe style motel, he pulled off and managed to score the room at the very back which opened on a broken asphalt alley at the foot of a hill.
In the early afternoon, he woke.
He was in near despair. Where should he go? What should he do? He knew the answer - that Mendocino provided safety, solitude, and rooms in which to hide, and that it was only up there that he might find the "other one" who might be able to help him. He wanted to be with the distinguished gentlemen on the library wall.
Damn you, I wish I knew who the hell you were.
But he couldn,t stop thinking about Laura. He didn,t want to go up there, because Laura was here.
Over and over in his mind, he played the details of their few hours together. Of course, Laura may have already called the authorities about what happened. But there had been something utterly strange and steely about Laura that caused him to hope that that had not happened.
He got some coffee and sandwiches from a nearby cafe, brought them back to the room, and started work on the computer.
It didn,t take a brain surgeon to figure out that Laura was in some way professionally connected to the forest, to the outdoors, to the wilderness surrounding her house. Yesterday, he,d found one tour guide website featuring tours for women - by an L. J. Dennys. He scanned that website now again looking for clues. But the only pictures of L. J. Dennys made it quite impossible to tell who she was beneath her hat and behind her sunglasses. Her hair was scarcely visible.
He found random references to L. J. Dennys, naturalist and environmentalist, all over the place. But no really good pictures.
He keyed in Laura J. Dennys, and let fly. There were several false leads, and then something entirely unexpected: a four-year-old news story from the Boston Globe concerning a Laura Dennys Hoffman, widow of a Caulfield Hoffman who,d died, with his two children, in a boating accident off Martha,s Vineyard.
Well, probably another false lead but he punched it, and up came the picture he,d been looking for. This was the wearer of the pearls, the mother of the two boys in the photo on Laura,s night table - staring out from a society picture of Laura with her late husband, a formidably handsome man with secretive eyes and very white teeth.
She was poised, quietly beautiful - the woman he,d held in his arms.
Within seconds, he was scanning any number of hits on the drowning at sea of Caulfield Hoffman and his sons. Laura had been in New York when the "accident" had happened, and the accident, it turned out, was no accident. After a lengthy investigation, the coroner had ruled it a murder-suicide.
Hoffman had been facing serious criminal charges in connection with insider trading and mismanagement of funds. He,d been arguing with his wife about a possible separation and custody of the boys.
That wasn,t all there was to Laura,s story. The Hoffmans had lost their first child, a baby girl, to a hospital infection when she was less than one year old.
It didn,t take much ingenuity now to close in on the life story of Laura J. Dennys.
She was the daughter of the California naturalist Jacob Dennys, who had written five books about the redwood forests of the northern coast. He,d died two years ago. His wife, Collette, a Sausalito painter, had died of a brain tumor twenty years before. That meant Laura had lost her mother very young. Jacob Dennys,s oldest daughter, Sandra, had been murdered in a liquor store holdup in Los Angeles when she was twenty-two, one of several innocent bystanders "in the wrong place at the wrong time."
It was a breathtaking litany of tragedies. It surpassed anything Reuben might have imagined. And part and parcel of it was that Jacob Dennys had suffered from Alzheimer,s in his last years.
Reuben sat back and drank a little of the coffee. The sandwich looked to him like paper and sawdust.