Bones of the Barbary Coast (45 page)

64

T
HEY PARKED THE van at a place Ray knew, let the dogs out, and locked up. Ray had showed her the area on a map, but once the headlights went out Cree had no sense of the landscape at all, no sense of direction. Down here at the bottom, the coastal ridge was skirted with tall eucalyptus trees and some pines that cut lacy black silhouettes against the lighter dark of the sky. She couldn't see far enough even to tell where the mountain was.

They walked down the road to its end at a wooden fence, climbed through, continued along a path so narrow the leaves on each side brushed her shoulders. The dogs vanished into the darkness ahead. The air was clear as a piece of deep blue sapphire. Ray had said the fog would come later, and if they were lucky they could watch it roll in when they got to the top of the ridge.

After a few minutes, they came out from under the tree canopy into a mixed landscape of grass and brush, where she could see the rising slope as a lighter gray-blue mottled with patches of dark. It rose to an indistinct peak that she could barely tell from the sky. They stopped and looked up at it and it struck Cree as imposing.

"I can't run up there. It's too steep. And too rough—Ray, I'm a sissy, I'm used to urban jogging paths!"

"You're going to do great. And you're going to love it."

Ray was wired with excitement. She could see how important these night runs were to him, and that her joining him for this secret joy was a huge thing for him. She doubted she'd ever seen anyone being so pleased by her company. It was a humbling experience.

"But I'm not going to take off my clothes," she told him. "And I'd like you to keep yours on. I know there's probably nobody out here, but don't want to be worrying the whole time about somebody seeing us."

Ray laughed quietly. "This once."

They walked farther and soon the trees became just an undifferentiated mass of black behind them. Ray's bandaged forearm was the brightest thing in view. The dogs checked in and ranged away again. She could just make out their shapes going to and fro, stopping, disappearing, emerging again. They were as wired up as Ray and she were.

She knew the feeling from her own nighttime adventures. Just being outside in the dark put her on edge, made everything feel secret, mysterious. It was shot through with a sense of expectancy, of possible danger that gave her mind a sharp clarity. When you cast loose from the habitual and the familiar, you never knew what might happen.

They were fifty yards farther up when the whole slope brightened inexplicably and the bushes sprouted shadows. Startled, Cree spun around to see a mound of light nudging above the distant line of eastern mountains.

The moon.

Ray turned too, and they just stood looking at it. It rose amazingly fast, as if a giant just beyond the edge of the world had let go of a huge pale-mustard-colored balloon. It had to be near full, she thought, the kind of moon that turned people into werewolves. And sure enough, here she and Ray were. As it rose it lost the orange tint and took on more of a jonquil hue and finally a lustrous pearl. It gilded the land with a serene chill glaze.

She was taking her cues from Ray, and right now he seemed content to watch the moon rise. So she sat in the dewy grass and brought her knees up and just watched, too. Breathtaking.

She had spent the afternoon reading Lydia's astonishing journal. It told so much, yet left so much unexplained. Either there were more volumes yet to be discovered, or volumes that had been lost, or Lydia had stopped writing after their rescue of the wolfman. Or Hans had done something with them. As for the questions Ray so desperately wanted answers for—exactly what or who the wolfman was, how the Schweitzers treated him, whether they loved him or he loved them—Cree doubted they'd ever know.

And then there was Hans. Cree was sure he'd been deeply in love with and devoted to his wife. But his feelings toward the wolfman were not clear at all. What did it mean that he'd left the wolfman where he'd died, concealed him so well? Why did he inter Lydia there, rather than giving her a church burial? Why did he finally leave the house where his beloved was buried, and where did he go?

The mysteries of the heart,
Ray would say.

Bert's death made her sad: a charming guy, so lost in the world. When she'd called her mother with the news, they'd cried at both ends of the line. And yet they couldn't say they knew him, or that he'd been important. Part of the sorrow was the unspoken sense that they'd lost one of the last few links to Pop, to the early years.

The harder thing was Ray. He had deteriorated markedly in just these last two weeks, the sideways shimmy occurring more and more often in his left eye, the occasional oddly dissociated monologue. She'd decided to stay on a little longer. She was determined it wasn't going to be sad and scared. It was going to be strong and good and brave.

So far, sometimes it was. Sometimes it was just easy and fun, Ray was amazing that way—his resilience. Other times it was more like a tea ceremony again, beautiful but fragile, requiring utmost delicacy and restraint. She wasn't sure how long she'd stay, or just how she would leave. That was the hardest part.

Cree's thoughts bothered her and she stood up next to Ray again, brushing off her jeans. She had to say something but couldn't find the words right away.

"Ray. I don't know if I can . . . you know. Make it all the way." She tipped her head vaguely toward the slope as if that's what she was talking about.

"You'll do fine." He kept staring at the moon a little longer before turning back to the hill. "See that double bump to the left of the saddle? That's where we're headed. When you get closer, you'll see some boulders. Just keep them in view, you can't miss the spot. Now we better boogie, Cree. Timing is everything."

The dogs came at the sound of his voice, checked in, wagged, looking eager,
Come on, come on, come on.
Ray roughed their coats and laughed quietly.

They began to jog, slowly at first, side by side. Cree felt her breathing pick up and the night shifted again as her blood moved faster and she felt the changing contours of the ground through her feet. Ray ran effortlessly and seemed happy. This was good. This
was.
Running uphill in the wild dark.
Ad astra per aspera.
Ray's way of working through it was teaching her a lot. A man just this side of becoming a ghost. It would be hard later, but staying had been the right thing to do. The sense of joyfulness stabilized in her, and she got more confident she could linger in it.

She was in shape, good for five miles on the flat, but she wasn't used to the uneven ground and the relentless slope. Soon Ray began pulling ahead, his eagerness tugging him uphill. She put on some steam and managed to catch him for a while, but then the terrain slowed her and soon he was moving away again, an increasingly indistinct shape dwindling in the luminous dark.

And that's how it was going to be, she thought. That's how it would be.

"Hey, Ray," she called. "If I fall behind, you just keep on. You go on ahead. I'll get there, okay? I'll meet you at the top."

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My sincerest thanks and appreciation go to Walter Birkby, Ph.D., D-ABFA, forensic anthropologist at the Human Identification Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona, for clarifying aspects of his discipline and for applying his expertise to the conundrum posed by the wolfman's bones.

Thanks are also due to Dewayne Tully, SFPD Public Affairs officer, and Homicide Unit Inspector Michael Mahoney, for providing information about the San Francisco Police Department. Thanks, too, to Richard Vetterli, medical investigator, and Allen Pringle, chief investigator at the San Francisco Medical Examiner's office.

Also making great contributions to this book were the well-informed, helpful staff at the New Main Library's San Francisco History Room and at the Haas Lilienthal House.

Finally, I thank my wife, Stella Hovis, for her tireless support and great patience.

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

Daniel Hecht was a professional guitarist for twenty years. In 1989, he retired from musical performance to take up writing, and he received his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1992. He is the author of five previous novels:
Skull Session
and its prequel
Puppets, The Babel Effect,
and the two previous Cree Black novels,
City of Masks
and
Land of Echoes.