I arrive at the hill house and pull out my phone to double-check the address. A droplet of sweat clings to the tip of my nose and I blow it off. It splashes on the screen, just missing the jagged crack across the front.

It’s the right place.

Patrick Bloom’s house is smaller than I’d expected, only two stories high. But when I peer through a gap in the massive wooden fence, I can tell that it’s nice — one of those Berkeley homes with old bones, scaled all over in brown shingles. This whole street is stacked with unassuming multimillion-dollar houses.

I lock my bike to a No Parking sign and try to catch my breath. When I moved back to Berkeley from New York, everyone told me I should get a bike. Unfortunately for me, I’d forgotten why I never biked when I was growing up here. Worse than the shitty drivers are the hills, like the one up to this house. I had to get off my bike after nearly keeling over backward.

October has brought its unseasonal, and unfortunately named, Indian-summer heat. While my friends back east are bundling up for autumn, I’m wearing a tank top featuring the leering Cal mascot, Oski, and my dark hair is twirled in a bun, and I’m still pouring sweat. The wet strap of my duffel bag bites into my shoulder.

I unlatch the gate and walk through a garden to get to the front door. Tomatoes on tangles of vines, plumes of herbs, beans racing along trellises like string lights, fireworks of green leaves belonging to carrots, kale, lettuce, beets. There’s even a raised bed with corn — who the fuck grows corn at home?

Patrick Bloom, I guess.

I knock, willing my stomach to untie itself from its knot. After a moment, Patrick Bloom, the world’s most renowned health writer, opens the door and looks out, not in an unfriendly way, just a little blank, until he sees my shirt and bag and realizes that I am the grad student there to house-sit.

“Mariana?”

I nod and he lets me in. It’s the kind of house designed to feel like a home. I’d seen it featured in a magazine before. In addition to Patrick Bloom’s writing, his wife designed book covers, a few of them famous. Their home has long been the subject of public interest.

Patrick Bloom shows me how to work the oven, where to find the bathroom, how to access the deck with a view of San Francisco. His famous mop of curly white hair is even bigger in person; a thin spot burrowed at the back of his head makes it look a little like a halo.

Patrick Bloom stands for something that intrigues me. Cleanliness. Health. Wholesomeness. The idea that your life can be better if you eat quinoa and listen to your body and walk more. Not that his work isn’t based on science, just that the resulting advice is so simple and smart that you hate yourself for not thinking of it first. I devoured all of his books while I was living in New York, bartending and filing the odd music review for an alt-weekly. I applied to journalism school at Cal, where Patrick Bloom is a professor, with the assumption that I wouldn’t get in. When I showed up for the new student tour, the admissions officer flashed a crocodile smile and told me that she thought my essay was excellent. I don’t remember what I wrote, though I do know that I mentioned Patrick Bloom.

Patrick Bloom’s assistant is a second-year student named Eloise. She’s blond and so skinny that the bones of her knees show through her jeans. She snacks on baby carrots and hummus while she uses the school computers to plow through research for Patrick Bloom’s upcoming book. She must use the printers ten times as much as any other student. She delivers his reading material in hard copy. Hulking scientific studies, long articles, entire e-books.

There are only a handful of teaching assistants in our program. Most of them, well, teach. But Eloise is entirely dedicated to Patrick Bloom. The university covers her tuition. That’s how much he’s worth to them.

Eloise was handpicked by the TA before her and someday she, too, will pass the torch. It’s competitive — rumor has it that a recommendation from Patrick Bloom will snag you a job at any top magazine. Eloise was the one who suggested my house-sitting for Patrick Bloom when she was called away for her grandfather’s funeral in Connecticut.

“Is that something you do a lot?” I asked. “House-sitting?”

“Yeah, but it’s not weird. And his house is amazing. So it’s, like, fun.”

Patrick Bloom leads me upstairs. Photos of him and his wife posing with various celebrities, feminine touches in a throw pillow here or a watercolor painting there. We walk past his children’s rooms. Nautical theme for the boy, with model ships lining his windowsill. The girl’s is painted ballet-shoe pink.

It looks like a family of four still lives here, but his children are off at college and his wife died three years ago. I know this because he wrote an award-winning memoir about cooking for her as she was dying. She designed the book cover as her last major piece. I thought it was kind of ugly and maudlin, if I’m being honest, but the writing was some of his best.

We pass a room with a big wooden door. His study. The door is locked. He doesn’t have to tell me that it’s off-limits.

I think he’s going to show me to a guest room, but instead he leads me to the master bedroom.

“This is where you’ll stay.”

I drop my duffel. The walls are painted brown and there are wide windows with no blinds. It’s like the mouth of a cave.

“A little unconventional, I know,” he says. “The design of the room is based on scientific research on the optimal sleeping environment. I’m writing about it in my next book.”

He doesn’t seem to think it’s odd that I just smile and nod at everything he says. I’m a terrible journalism student — I don’t ask nearly enough questions.

Downstairs, he drums the refrigerator with his fingers and tells me to eat anything I like, he doesn’t mind. He shows me back out to the garden and tells me to harvest.

“Whatever you don’t pick will go bad.” He considers a zucchini, small but plump. He yanks it from the vine. “It will rot. Especially in this heat...”

A car pulls up out front and honks lightly. Patrick Bloom dashes inside for his luggage. He can’t possibly be leaving already, I barely know anything about his home. But, indeed, he is. He shakes my hand and thanks me. His skin is still sticky from the zucchini.

“If anything comes up, my number is on the fridge,” he tells me.

And then he is gone.

I go inside. The zucchini remains on the table where he left it. I pick it up and sniff. It smells green. I hate zucchini. I put it down and retrace my steps from the tour, exploring for a second time at my own pace. I realize I’m holding my breath. No one is here monitoring me. I don’t know why I’m afraid.

I go to the bathroom and see a flash of highlighter-bright urine in the bowl. Jesus. I flush the toilet before sitting down. A rack of magazines flank the toilet. Food, lifestyle, travel. Do all rich people keep their magazines in the bathroom? Has he ever run out of toilet paper and had to rip off a page to use on his ass?

It’s nearly dinnertime and the sun streaming through the windows turns orange. I only brought two things to eat — a jar of peanut butter and a box of granola bars. I had planned to bike to the grocery store. I’m grateful I can eat his food. Fuck dealing with that hill again. Plus, how many people can say they’ve eaten something from Patrick Bloom’s garden?

I text a photo of it to my brother Jack. We are not related by blood, but we grew up together and I’m an only child, so he’s the closest thing to a sibling I have.

Got any tips about picking this stuff? I write.

I know zilch about gardening, but Jack does, in a way.

When Jack was fifteen and I was eleven, my mom found pressed pills in his backpack. He told me they weren’t for him, just something he was selling. I don’t know what explanation he gave my mom, but it wasn’t good enough. She went ballistic. The next day, we woke up and Jack was gone.

Two weeks later, a farm worker visiting family in Oakland saw the poster with Jack’s face and called us with a tip. We drove an hour and a half to Gilroy, where we found Jack kneeling in a strawberry field. He had grown tan enough that, with his bandanna and hoodie, he fit in with the dozens of scrawny Mexican guys out there. The biggest difference was that, while they wore steel-toed work boots, he had on his scuffed-up Doc Martens.

The car ride back to Berkeley started out quiet. Even from the backseat, I could see that his hands were dirty and blistered.

“You stink,” my mom said finally. It was true. A cloud of stench, sweet and earthy.

“If you’re not going to let me make money my way,” Jack said, “I’ll make it another way.”

“I don’t give a fuck about what you do on the street, you’re not my kid. But don’t bring that shit into my home. I find anything else and you’re out.”

After that, Jack took odd jobs doing yard work for frat houses and rich professors near campus, though I’m fairly certain he kept dealing on the side.

Now in Patrick Bloom’s garden with the late-day sun beating on my bare shoulders, I stare at my phone. I know Jack isn’t going to respond to my text, but I wait for a few minutes anyway.

I guess I’ll have to do it myself.

I pull a cucumber off the vine, pluck some late-season tomatoes, and rip a head of lettuce from the ground.

In the kitchen, I find some knives. Japanese. Very sharp. I cut open the cucumber to discover that it’s disgusting. Pulpy and warm. The lettuce is okay, though I find dead winged insects lining the crotch of the leaves. I wash it five times. I slice into the tomatoes but miscalculate and catch the end of my finger. It spurts. Shit. I wrap it in a paper towel and then wipe the little droplets of blood from the cutting board.

It’s not until I’m eating the salad that I taste the metallic tang of the blood I missed. The cutting board I used is made of a porous wood and, by the time I rinse it after dinner, it’s stained.

It seems atmospheric to read Patrick Bloom’s books at his house during my first night there, and he has copies on the bookshelf with uncracked spines. I take a couple to the living room and flip to my favorite sections. A preface about foraging for mushrooms in the wilds of Humboldt County. A chapter about our genetic similarities to flies. A passage that compares Gatorade with the sugar water left out for hummingbirds.

Normally, I read his books and feel excited about the possibility of language and how bizarre the world is. Tonight, it just exhausts me.

It’s stuffy in here. It feels like my insides are stewing. I fight to keep my eyes open. The words swim on the page. I need to sleep.

I go upstairs and lie down on Patrick Bloom’s bed, but I can’t drift off. This room gives me the creeps. It’s the kind of room where someone would go to die, dark and primitive.

Every time I roll over, I catch my reflection in the shadeless windows and my heart jumps, certain that I’m seeing a ghost. I almost pass out, but the howl of a distant Amtrak jolts me awake.

It is shockingly, terribly hot. I jump out of bed and rattle the windows, but there’s no way to open them. There are no fans, either. I swing the door open, praying for circulation.

I pluck my iPhone off the bedside table. No response from Jack. Not that I’ve gotten one from him in months, but still. Nighttime is Jack’s time. My mom always hounded him about staying up until three, four, five in the morning and then sleeping all day long.

If he’ll ever respond, it’s now.

My mom met Jack’s dad, Dez, when I was four and she was a freshman at Cal. She had recently returned to school after my birth derailed her life; Dez managed a Top Dog. When Dez replaced my spot in my mother’s bed, I moved to a cot in the living room. Jack slept on the couch. We weren’t supposed to have more than two people in the apartment, but nobody ratted on us. Our neighbors had all kinds of things they weren’t supposed to. Pets, drugs, massage businesses, subletters.

Jack was twice my age and a mystery to me even then. He had a sullen, boyish beauty. At night, if I turned over toward the couch and opened my eyes, I’d usually find him awake and staring back. I began to think of Jack as nocturnal; something other than human.

Just before finals week of her junior year, a crushed-lilac bruise appeared around my mother’s eye. She made Dez pack his bags while she was off in some lecture hall filling in the bubbles on a Scantron. She ended up getting an A.

After that, I moved back into the bedroom with her. Jack stayed on our couch and Dez sent money every month. What kind of guy dumps his kid with an ex like that? A guy like Dez. He wasn’t a junkie or a criminal, just the world’s biggest asshole. Still, in turn, my mom cared for Jack. In turn, Jack cared for me.

When a girl pushed me down on the playground, he followed her after school, shoved her against the wall, and said that if she ever touched his little sister again he’d break her arm. He walked between me and the homeless folks we passed on the street; when they hassled us, he covered my ears and cussed them out. He always shared his candy, panicked if I ate it too quickly, watched me chew as if he were afraid I might choke. He stole pretty things for me — origami paper, hot-pink erasers, stickers.

My mother ignored the ways Jack grew stranger and darker. As a teenager, he came home with a lip pierced in the school bathroom with a safety pin and tiny, squiggly shapes pricked into his skin by a friend’s shaky hand using a sewing needle dipped in pen ink. But that was the Bush era, a time for Bay Area teens to go to punk shows and rage against The Man. Besides, I may have called Jack my brother, but my mom never called him her son. Her responsibility to him, as she saw it, was to make sure he survived to adulthood, no more and no less.

I hadn’t heard anything from Jack for more than a decade when I got a call from my mom in March.

Jack had gotten in touch to tell her he was back in Berkeley. He gave her a phone number, which she read to me.

“I have nothing to say to him,” I snapped. But I still remembered the number long after I hung up. Memory works in funny ways.

When the acceptance letter came for journalism school, I said yes, even though I’d never wanted to move back to Berkeley and even though it felt too much like following in my mother’s footsteps. This was different. It was grad school. Patrick Bloom was an instructor there. And I had applied before I knew Jack was back.

I hadn’t made my decision for him.

But I had called him the first week of classes.

“Jack?” I said after he picked up. When the line went dead, I was certain that it was him.

I’ve been texting him since, but I haven’t heard a thing.

I roll over to face the ceiling. I angle my phone toward my face and it lights up. Spots flood my vision. No wonder I can’t sleep when this shit is so bright.

The house I’m watching is cool, you should swing by, I type. And then I add the address. Not that he’d ever come. Not that I’m certain I’d want him to, anyway.

I leave my iPhone faceup, but it does not illuminate with a message that night. I don’t fall asleep until sunrise.

Kaylie’s grandma weighed only ninety pounds by now, and so carrying her out to the car wasn’t too difficult. She cradled the old woman, one arm under her knees and the other under her shoulders, and gently placed her, lying down, along the bench of the backseat. She saw that she’d left her grandma’s sneakers untied, so she made secure knots in the laces and then straightened the purple windbreaker, which had bunched up around her bony hips. Kaylie gently shut the door.

Would the trunk be better? Just the thought sent a prickling uneasiness down the backs of Kaylie’s arms. She would not put her grandma in the trunk. Period. Besides, she’d need to put the kayak in there. She pointed the remote at the garage door, afraid that it wouldn’t open — her grandma hadn’t taken the car out in months — but it did. The old white Pontiac started too, and Kaylie backed into the street, carefully straightened the wheels, and put the automatic transmission in park.

This whole plan was fucking crazy. So much so that, if she got caught, she could probably plead insanity. Which was worse, the psych ward or prison? She tried to think of a way out of the course she’d started down, but none came to mind, and so she quietly exited the car and walked over to her neighbor’s side yard where they left the kayak, which hadn’t been used in so long that lichen crusted its hull. She’d return it before they even realized it was gone. Luckily it was a short boat, with an open deck, none of those scary little hatches to get stuck inside, but it was heavy. Kaylie ended up having to drag it to the car, the pavement grating the plastic, as loud as a cement mixer. If any neighbors looked out their windows, who knew what they’d surmise. Thankfully the Pontiac’s trunk was the size of a small room, and she managed to stuff about half of the kayak in, bow first. She put a hand on the stern and pressed down. It didn’t wiggle. Not much. It was only a mile or two to the pier — and downhill. Gravity ought to keep the kayak in place.

Kaylie jumped into the driver’s seat and began the short journey. As she turned left on San Pablo Avenue, panic fluttered in her chest. The stern end of the kayak angled out of the trunk like an erection. She should have attached a red flag. She should have secured a seat belt around Grandma.

Never mind. She was almost there, and no place calmed her frayed nerves more than the Berkeley Pier, the way that long wooden structure stretched far out into the bay, a lovely straight line conveying people into the world of fish and salt water and sky. Grandma and she had spent their happiest hours sitting in their short chairs, sipping iced tea, Grandma smoking Chesterfields, hands cradling the grips of their fishing rods, gazing at the most profound intersection on earth, the one between sky and sea. They rarely talked while fishing, not to each other, anyway. They didn’t have to. Water, fish, air, time. What else did a person need?

Kaylie had almost relaxed, at least she’d regained that gathering of resolve right behind her breastbone, the knowledge of doing right, when that damn Jimi Hendrix guitar riff vibrated in her pocket. Her sister Savannah had been calling repeatedly all day, at first once an hour, and recently about every twenty minutes, as if by calling multiple times today she could make up for the weeks and months she hadn’t called. When they had talked, the times when Kaylie thought Savannah would want to know about developments in their grandma’s condition, Savannah liked to cite her three children, making it crystal clear that Kaylie’s childlessness put her in a complete fog of ignorance about what real life entailed. “Three children,” Savannah would practically shout, as if parenthood was on par with being the CEO of a prison. She’d also note her “handful” husband. Or her “high-maintenance” husband, if she was irritated with him. Or her “demanding” husband, if she was outright angry with the man, which she often was. And yet all of these adjectives were spoken with pride, emphasizing the heft of her family responsibility load, how full her life was with this man — all to communicate that helping with Grandma was inconsequential compared to what she had on her plate. A man. A family.

Kaylie had tried to keep her resentment, her anger, in check: she too might have had someone “on her plate,” had she not spent the last few years caring for Grandma. Don’t mind that ragged cough in the next room, that’s just my grandma dying of emphysema. Very romantic.

Kaylie let the repetitive Jimi Hendrix phrase play out and then tried to return to her memories of hot summer nights, much like this one, on the pier with Grandma. But a siren, just a few streets away, pierced her thoughts. Even the sound of the Pontiac’s big rubber tires peeling along the still-sizzling pavement unnerved her. Noises tonight were too loud, as if the god she didn’t believe in had turned up the volume. Kaylie twisted on the radio and almost laughed at the sound of Frank Sinatra’s voice. Her grandma’s favorite. But of course Savannah wouldn’t allow a moment of respite — oh no, the woman could be fucking telepathic when it came to moments of joy that needed to be destroyed. Jimi Hendrix began playing his bit, yet again, and Kaylie couldn’t help it, she pulled her phone out of her pocket and looked, hoping it might be someone benign, like the woman she’d met at a conference in Dallas a couple of weeks ago, but no, of course it was Savannah. Again. She should have turned off her ringer, but somehow her sister’s angsty presence was almost a comfort. At least it was familiar. And the only family she had left. She tapped Ignore and kept driving.

Stopping at the intersection of University and San Pablo, Kaylie put her head out the window and breathed deeply, hoping for a hint of that fishy rotten-wood smell of the pier. Of course she was still a half mile away, but knowing that it was just there, in front of her, another couple of minutes, relieved her. She knew she was doing not just the right thing, but the exact perfect thing. Savannah could go to hell.

A pulsing red light swarmed into the Pontiac. Kaylie was riding the crest of her confidence, and she felt sorry for the poor sop getting pulled over. She strained her eyes toward the dark horizon, toward the bay, pretended she could maybe see, if she looked hard enough, the Golden Gate. That put her in mind of the future, her future, and the possibility that, at long last, she’d be free to pursue a life. A real life. Maybe she’d take a trip to Dallas. She and that woman had had a lovely one-night stand, and it’d felt authentic, not like a quickie, more like a glint of possibility. Kaylie had told Grandma all about it when she got home and Grandma had said, yanking off the tubes running to her oxygen tank so she could speak as forcefully as she wanted to speak, “For fuck’s sake, get on a goddamn plane for Dallas. I got a few months at best. Pull my damn plug and go get that woman.”

Kaylie had laughed and lied, saying, “Nah. She wasn’t my type. Besides, I’m not going anywhere.”

“You can sell my house when I’m gone. That’ll be a nice grubstake for you.”

“I’ll retire,” Kaylie said, lying again. Her grandma’s termite-infested house needed a new roof, a few coats of paint, and probably a new foundation. She wouldn’t be leaving her job or chasing some woman in Dallas, at least not for a couple of decades.

The pulsing red light, as viscous and deeply colored as cough syrup, kept flooding the interior of the Pontiac. Of course Kaylie was that poor sop getting pulled over.

Breathe, she counseled herself. Just breathe through this. Make sure the cop doesn’t try to wake up Grandma, that was key. For all Kaylie knew, the Pontiac’s registration hadn’t been renewed in years. She drove through the intersection, hands at two o’clock and ten o’clock on the steering wheel, and carefully pulled into the Blick Art Materials parking lot. The patrol car followed. The wait, both of them in their cars, felt interminable. Kaylie carefully took her driver’s license out of her wallet, and actually found a paid, up-to-date registration in the glove compartment. The uniform finally approached, coming from the rear with a hand on the grip of her gun. Kaylie thanked all the deities for the pale shade of her skin, her fucking whiteness, an accident of fate that would increase her chances of finessing her way through the encounter.

The cop hefted a huge flashlight to shoulder height, as if it were a spiked javelin. She blinded Kaylie by shining it right in her face. Kaylie fumbled her license and registration out the car window as fast as she could. She might have white skin, but other variables in this situation — the contents of the backseat, the kayak in the trunk, and the ancient Pontiac itself — were not going to be helpful. As the cop turned the flashlight’s beam on the documents, Kaylie tried to memorize the information on her badge. Officer Marta Ramirez was pretty, even with her hair pulled back in a tight bun, and wore no makeup — a hopeful sign — and carried a nice solid build. She might have been family, but Kaylie knew flirting would not be a good idea in this situation. Still, she might be able to signal sisterhood. Uh, did you go to Pride this year? Or, How does your wife like your uniform?

Of course that could backfire if she was in fact straight. Or even if she wasn’t. Kaylie kept her mouth shut.

Marta (and why not be on a first-name basis in the privacy of Kaylie’s own mind?) shined her light into the backseat. “Who’s this?”

“That’s my grandma.”

“Why is she—”

“She’s ninety-three. Full-on Alzheimer’s. Sleeping is so difficult for her. You’ve heard of sundown syndrome?”

The cop’s whole body loosened, slumped a little. Her eyes softened. “Oh, yeah. My grandma too.”

“Really? I’m sorry to hear that. Anyway, Grandma’s like a baby who can only fall asleep in a moving car. So I take her out at night sometimes, just drive her around so she can sleep.” Kaylie was pleased with her quick thinking, and as she spoke, she tried to come up with as good of an explanation for the kayak.

“You should put the seat belt on her.”

“I know! I usually do. I was just realizing that when you pulled me over.”

“I pulled you over because the kayak is improperly secured.” The cop shot the beam of her massive flashlight at the erect kayak stern. “That’s a real hazard. It doesn’t look like you’ve tied it at all. If it slides out, someone could get killed.”

“God, I’m sorry. Stupid of me. Yeah, I borrowed the kayak from a friend this past weekend. I figured if I was going to drive Grandma around tonight, I might as well use the opportunity to return the kayak. I mean, she won’t wake up when I get to my friend’s house. I just have to slide the kayak out and drag it to her side yard.”

Just shut the fuck up. Less is more, idiot. Stop talking.

The cop paused for far too long. Kaylie could see all the questions flashing through her mind. The woman took a deep breath of assessment.

“I’m sorry,” Kaylie repeated, with lots of feeling.

Officer Marta Ramirez (Kaylie returned, in her mind, to the more respectful full title and name) began a slow circumnavigation of the Pontiac, using her flashlight to examine all four tires, and even look under the carriage. She shined her light into the passenger-side back window and gazed at Kaylie’s grandma for a long time. A very long time. Long enough for Kaylie to wonder if prison was really like Orange Is the New Black, long enough for her to consider the possibility that behind bars she might actually, at long last, find a girlfriend. She wouldn’t have to worry about fixing up or selling the house. She wouldn’t have to lift anyone in and out of a bathtub, clean sheets soaked with piss or streaked with shit, listen to the painful sounds of someone she loved trying to breathe. That part was all over now — it was as if she realized this for the first time, just now as the cop stared at her grandma in the backseat — whether she went to prison or not.

When Officer Ramirez circled back to the driver’s window, she pressed her lips together and made eye contact. “Okay. I’m not going to write you a ticket.”

Wait. Kaylie had almost begun looking forward to prison. To not having a single job other than surviving. If she’d been given another few moments, she might have started fantasizing about prison sex. Maybe instead she should start fantasizing policewoman sex, gratitude sex.

“I really, really, really appreciate that,” Kaylie said. “Thank you.”

“Get Grandma home. And get a rack for that kayak.”

“I will! Tomorrow. I mean, I’ll get Grandma home right now, and a rack for the kayak tomorrow. I mean, for next time I borrow it.”

Now that their official interaction was over, could Kaylie ask Marta Ramirez for her phone number? She imagined cracking that joke, if it was one, for Grandma, and Grandma’s loud honking laugh. Do it! the ghost of Grandma shouted. Do it!

“Hey,” Kaylie said as the cop started walking away. “I mean, I don’t know if you’re married or not. But I wondered if maybe some time you’d like—”

The woman spun around on the soles of her shiny black practical tie-up shoes. “Really?” she responded. “I just let you off. I mean, I just let you off, and—”

“And I said thank you. Good night.” Kaylie rolled up her window and started the engine, the car lurched forward, and she almost hit a parked car as she tried to turn the huge tank around. Marta Ramirez was busy getting into her own vehicle and didn’t bother to look up again.

Five minutes later, Kaylie parked the car in one of the spots along the Berkeley waterfront, on the east side of the pier. She rolled down her window and sat listening to the wavelets lapping against the giant stones which formed the barrier between the bay and the parking spaces. It was high tide, and the water splashed within feet of her car. At last she could fill her nostrils with the salty wet smell of the bay.

Twisting around in her seat, she couldn’t see much of Grandma in the dark, but Kaylie knew exactly what she looked like: the sparse pale smoke hair, the tissuey skin with deep laugh lines, her thin frail limbs, knobby with arthritis.

“We’re here, Grandma,” she whispered, and a wave of grief rolled through her.

Only to be interrupted by Jimi Hendrix.

Savannah lived an hour away, in Vacaville, but Kaylie could count on the fingers of one hand the times her sister had been over to help with Grandma in the past six months. Oh, but she’d had plenty of advice. She’d done research. She’d suggested herbal remedies. New doctors. Just last month she proposed a trip to the Mayo Clinic. As if there were a cure for advanced emphysema.

When Kaylie let her know a few weeks ago that the end was near, and wanted to keep her in the loop about their options, Savannah had responded with outrage. She thought Kaylie’s “predictions” were “premature.” She specifically said that using the words “dying” and “hospice” were manipulative on Kaylie’s part. As if she were maliciously trying to pry Savannah away from her blue-ribbon children and husband. At the end of her rant, Savannah announced that she’d “look into the situation,” and hung up.

Late this afternoon, as Grandma had struggled to draw air into her lungs, her whole body racked with pain, Kaylie spooned doses of morphine into her mouth. One after another. Once Grandma lost consciousness, it was nearly impossible to get her to swallow more, but the other options for killing her were horrifying, and so Kaylie cradled her ancient skull in the crook of her elbow, wrapping her arm around so she could use her hand to hold Grandma’s jaw open. She continued dripping morphine onto her tongue, sometimes massaging her throat to ease it down, until she finished her off at eight fifteen p.m., just as dusk softened the harsh light of day.

Kaylie knew, without a shred of doubt, that Grandma would want exactly that — to have Kaylie be the one — and exactly this, what she was about to do next.

But now that they’d at long last arrived at the pier, back at the pier, Kaylie’s will began collapsing. Not her resolve. She knew this was right. But the physical energy necessary to carry it out went missing. She realized that she hadn’t eaten anything all day, not even a bowl of cereal. She briefly considered stopping in at Skates Restaurant, just on the other side of the pier, for some sustaining nutrients, but the idea of sitting at a table clad with a starched white cloth and shiny cutlery, surrounded by the sounds of clinking cocktails, digging into sole meunière, while her grandma waited unguarded in the backseat of the Pontiac, just wasn’t right.

Kaylie stalled by listening to her phone messages. In the first one, from midmorning, Savannah simply asked, “So how is she?” This one was followed by a couple of insistent demands of, “Why aren’t you calling me back?” In the next, Savannah announced that she was coming to Berkeley, that she’d leave right after she put the kids to bed. Kaylie should expect her by nine o’clock.

She must have just missed her. By now Savannah had probably parked her Lexus in front of Grandma’s house, keyed her way in the front door, and found the empty bed. Kaylie had made sure to bring the bottles, eyedropper, and even the spoon with her, to not leave anything sketchy at the bedside, but now she wished she’d stopped on her way to the marina to drop them in a garbage bin far from home, and also far from the marina. She should chuck them now, in any case. If Savannah called the police, and that would definitely be her style, then Kaylie needed to be free of evidence.

She grabbed the plastic bag into which she’d stuffed all the paraphernalia and got out of the car, locking Grandma in, as if that would be necessary. Walking at the pace Savannah used for exercise — she called it pep-stepping — Kaylie hustled along the harbor until she came to one of the public bathrooms. Perfect. Her bagful of gear looked like it belonged to any addict, and she stuffed it deep into the garbage bin, shoving it under some McDonald’s bags. Then she crouched down by water’s edge and washed her hands, the rank iciness triggering so many memories, though she refused to cry. She had to finish what she’d begun, and she had to do it quickly.

And yet, walking back to the car she couldn’t resist stopping at the entrance to the pier, long fenced off due to structural issues too expensive for the city to fix. One of her most painful regrets was how, in the past few years during Grandma’s illness, she hadn’t been able to bring her to the pier. They’d come a few times to the water’s edge, where the Pontiac was now parked, and even tried fishing from the rocky barrier, but it wasn’t the same, not even close. Navigating a catch across those sharp, massive rocks was nearly impossible. Anyway, all their friends were gone.

Kaylie put a sneaker toe through one of the diamond-shaped openings of the chain-link fence barring admittance to the pier. It was an easy climb — only a few feet high, and no barbed wire — and a moment later she leaped down on the other side. Oh, how good it felt to walk that length, smell the barnacles clinging to rotting wood, the soft breeze a balm against the inland heat, its touch as intimate as a lover’s. And beyond, the lights of San Francisco, blinking their friendly message of hope in a ravaged country. Best of all, though, was the splash of the bay, slurping and wallowing, concealing all its bounty, so much life swimming right below her feet, the perch, bass, crabs, halibut, and stingrays. Once they’d caught a small shark.

Duong and Tham Nguyen had helped them land the shark and that night Grandma invited their family over to dinner. It was one of the best nights ever. They brought a bunch of crazy Vietnamese dishes, and she and Grandma made potato salad and green Jell-O with canned tangerine slices. The adults drank a lot of beer and smoked lots of cigarettes. They all shouted jokes into the night.

Kaylie was fifteen that year. Savannah had long since disowned her sister and grandma. She hated that they ate fish they caught themselves, hated that Grandma chain-smoked, hated even her array of friends from the pier, claimed that they were just a bunch of homeless people. “Maybe,” Grandma had answered the first time Savannah shouted that assessment, but actually they weren’t. Duong and Tham Nguyen ran a framing business in Berkeley. Pamela Roberts, an ancient black woman who fished every single day, even well into her dementia, and who everyone watched out for, had had a union job at the Ford auto assembly plant in Richmond until she retired. Shelly, a young black woman, was a public librarian in Oakland, and always fished with her two terriers as companions. James and Frank, a couple of Irish brothers, who staged loud, funny arguments as they fished, mostly for the entertainment of others, worked construction when they could get it. Everyone shared food and drinks and stories, when they felt like it, and also respected a person’s desire for solitude and quiet. Kaylie and her grandma knew everyone and their stories. Who’d recently arrived in the Bay Area, or even in the country. Who’d been left by a partner. Who was struggling to make rent. One white guy, probably around sixty, was reportedly a billionaire, and yet every Sunday he sat with his feet up on the railing, a fishing line draped into the bay, never talked to anyone, but never bothered anyone, either. Fishing was a community, and Grandma had been at its heart.

Once over the chain-link fence, Kaylie walked quickly to avoid being spotted by anyone on shore. The pier was no longer lit, and soon the tangy brine of dark night encompassed her stride. She didn’t think Savannah would look for them here. Would she? It certainly made the most sense — that they’d come here — but it was a completely different kind of sense than the kind her sister possessed. If Savannah did call the police, it was possible that Officer Marta Ramirez had filed some sort of event report, even if she hadn’t written a ticket, and they could be tracked pretty quickly. Kaylie shouldn’t dally. Because once her sister decided on a course of action, good luck trying to divert her. At the age of twelve, Savannah had talked her way into a scholarship at a private school in Berkeley. Her biggest fear was that her classmates would so much as glimpse their grandma, with her wispy hair, the scalp showing through even when she was young, and her smoky breath and exuberant manner of talking, her loud honking laugh. Savannah moved out when she was seventeen and worked at Nordstrom to put herself through community college. She won sales awards with big bonuses. She now sold high-end furniture. She’d already said, well before it was an appropriate concession, that Kaylie could have the house. Now wasn’t that generous, inasmuch as the house needed more work than its value.

Kaylie heard voices. The dark lumps at the end of the pier were people. Quietly, she started backing up. She’d heard of rogue youths robbing people out here. One time armed teens forced a couple to jump into the bay where the water is so cold, hypothermia claims a body in about ten minutes. Even if you’re a good swimmer, you don’t have a chance.

Unfortunately, that’s when her phone rang again, Jimi Hendrix joyously making love to his guitar, loud and encompassing, as if he were playing the very night air.

“What the fuck?” a voice at the end of the pier said.

“Shit,” said another. “We got company.”

She heard the crinkle of cellophane bags, the clunk of dropped half-full aluminum cans. A second later, three youths sprinted past her, their bare chests — two white and one brown — skinny as hope. They passed so quickly she didn’t even have time to be scared. She listened to their sneakered feet pound all the way to the end of the pier. She heard the faint clinking of the chain-link fence as they heaved themselves over it. Then she cracked up, laughed out loud: those boys were afraid of her.

Kaylie’s laughter morphed into tears, and she collapsed onto the wooden planks of the pier, stretching out on her back and looking up through the blur of her tears at the few pale stars, the ones bright enough to shine through the city haze of artificial light. She wished she’d brought a fishing rod, longed for the feel of its grip in her hand, the jiggle of a bite, the tug at the beginning of the fish’s resistance, and then the gentle, steady, focused reeling in. No one could clean a fish as expertly as Grandma, slicing through the fish belly with her boning knife, scraping out the guts. Of course the best part was eating the fried fish, usually with a side of chips or nothing else at all. Every single time, after cleaning her plate, Grandma would say the exact same words: “Nothing better than eating fish you caught yourself.” Then she’d grin ear to ear as if it were an original comment or the first time she’d said it. Often after a good fish fry, they went to the grocery store for ice cream, which they brought home and ate straight from the carton. Once Savannah had made one of her rare visits as they were scraping the bottom of a tub of double-fudge caramel swirl, and she’d literally groaned out loud in disgust.

Kaylie wiped her wet face with the bottom of her T-shirt, got to her feet, and walked to the end of the pier. The kids had left half-drunk beers and half-eaten bags of chips. She was sorry she’d scared them away. Stupid kids trying to enjoy a summer night. Kaylie climbed up on the thick railroad tie that formed the bottom of the blockade at the pier’s end. She peered through the vertical pilings at the long stretch of black water. A breeze ruffled the surface.

No, not a breeze. Something was there, in the water. A hard shiver shot through to Kaylie’s core. Yes, it was a body, dark and wet, and apparently alive, as it slithered out of the water and then sank again. Someone was drowning. She grabbed her phone at the same time as she looked down the pier, trying to see if the kids were still nearby. She could call the police with one tap, but despite earlier fantasies, she didn’t actually want to go to prison. The police were much more likely to book her than the kids, since she was here and they were gone, not to mention the dead body in the Pontiac. Anyway, the dark night, the teeming bay, the decaying wood, her jagged hunger, her grief, the crazy tsunamis of grief — these all converged to destroy any brain function she had left. She at least knew enough to not trust her perceptions anymore.

Kaylie pushed her face back through the pilings and studied the surface of the bay. Had she imagined the body? She reached into the bag of Doritos, tossed a handful onto the water, and then screamed as something surged to the surface, opened its whiskered jaws, and swallowed the chips. She tossed in another handful, and the beast was joined by two more, writhing, diving, snorting.

The fright manufactured by her traumatized imagination prevented Kaylie from actually laughing, but she might have at another time. Just sea lions. The fishing community hated them. Their ranks were growing, and they ate more than their share of the bay fish. Also, they’d become bold. Sometimes people fed them scraps, after cleaning their catch, teaching them that people meant food. Recently a sea lion literally boarded a docked fishing boat and bit a woman’s leg. Another had lunged so forcefully out of the water that it had nearly inhaled a guy’s arm as he tried to toss fish heads in the water. A swimmer had been attacked by a sea lion just last year. Kaylie threw them the rest of the chips, and then, what the hell, poured them what was left of the beers too.

Walking back down the pier, she figured she’d better call her sister. She should have much earlier, to ward off the search. To give Kaylie a bit more time.

“Where are you?” Savannah screeched. “I’m at Grandma’s. She’s not here.”

Savannah had always had a sixth sense, maybe full-on telepathy, born of her desperation to ward off the dangers she saw and felt and heard at every turn. Especially the dangers of Kaylie and Grandma and their embarrassing presences in her life. Of course Savannah couldn’t know that Kaylie — and Grandma — were at the Berkeley Pier. And yet, it was very hard for Kaylie to not believe that she did know.

“Answer me, Kaylie. Answer me now. Is Grandma okay?”

“Of course Grandma’s okay. Why wouldn’t she be?”

“Uh, maybe because she has emphysema?”

“I think she said she’s having dinner at the Garcias’ house tonight. Did you try there?”

“Of course I didn’t try there. I have no idea who the Garcias are.”

“Yellow house on the corner.”

“I’m supposed to just go knock on their door?”

“If you want to see Grandma.”

“It’s after ten. She wouldn’t still be there. Plus, she hasn’t been out of bed in days.”

“Can’t help you.” Kaylie tapped off her phone. Naturally, it rang again immediately. She debated the pros and cons of answering, and was not able to conjure logic about either choice, so she went with the pull of a ringing phone and answered.

“I’m calling the police,” Savannah said. “Grandma better not be with you, because if she is, they’ll find you. I can give them your phone number and they can track you.”

“You’re sounding crazy, Van,” Kaylie said, using the nickname she knew her sister hated.

Even now, even with the prospect of their grandma being missing, her sister took the time to correct: “Sa-van-nah.”

Kaylie tapped out of the call again and vowed to not answer until she’d finished. How long until Savannah checked the garage and discovered that the Pontiac was missing?

Back at the car, she realized that getting the kayak and her grandma over the giant craggy boulders would be next to impossible, so she drove quickly to the boat ramp on the other side of the marina. There, it was easy to slide the boat into the water. She gently hefted Grandma out of the backseat and placed her in the front of the kayak. She couldn’t cry now. She just couldn’t.

She dropped into the back of the kayak, placing a leg on either side of Grandma, and used the blade of the paddle to shove off the floor of the cement ramp, and just like that, they were adrift in the harbor. She paddled hard, and damned if a half-moon didn’t rise over the hills just as she cleared the breakwater. It’d been plenty bright even without the moonlight, but now she could see perfectly well, maybe too well, because others might be able to spot them from shore too. But there was no turning back. She couldn’t quite predict what her sister would do. She’d be crazy irate, and so it was possible she’d go full bore for a murder charge. But no, she definitely wouldn’t want that publicity. One way or another, though, somehow someone would have to account for the missing person. Then again, maybe not. People died all the time and folks didn’t ask for specifics on body disposal. The neighbors would just express their condolences.

The strong bay currents carried the kayak with its two passengers, the dead one resting against the stomach and chest of the living one, swiftly away from shore. The moonlight sparkled on the crests of the wavelets as a fresh breeze whipped up. Kaylie tugged the blade through the thick black water, but with the wind and the currents, her efforts seemed to have no effect at all. She looked over her shoulder at the Golden Gate where even stronger currents swept out to the Pacific Ocean.

She’d hoped to get under the pier, where she’d gently ease her grandma into a beloved last resting place. She’d imagined a quiet decorous ritual, a peaceful slip into the salty depths. But she didn’t have the strength to fight the forces of nature, these strong bay currents. So she rested the paddle across her thighs and allowed the westward drift.

The Jimi Hendrix riff danced against her breast where she’d shoved her phone into her jacket’s inside pocket. She reached in, grabbed the phone, and threw it as far as she could, the splash much too tiny to feel satisfying. Maybe they’d think she drowned. She could move to another part of the country, somewhere entirely unexpected, like North Dakota, and become a different person altogether.

The idea of disappearing, of faking her own death, reminded Kaylie that she did in fact have a life, a fairly nice one — sure, no girlfriend yet, but a decent job, a place to live. Funny how a person can keep functioning even when they think they can’t. Life goes on. Hers would anyway. With its devastating disappointments. Its small joys. The occasional ecstasy. She didn’t want to move to North Dakota. She wanted to stay here. Her grandma’s death felt like obliteration, like suffocation, like too deep a hole to ever emerge from, but she would emerge. Kaylie knew that.

When a dark shape, like a colossal slug, surfaced alongside the kayak, Kaylie startled. The wet mammal was joined by another, and then another. Kaylie’s brain quivered like a jellyfish, the fear squishing thought, until, all at once, she realized how much Grandma would love this. How somehow, in the midst of her confusion and grief, she’d taken all the exact right actions. There was only one left, and it would be brutal, clumsy, horrific. But she had no choice at all, and even if she did have a choice, this would be the one she’d make. She imagined Grandma’s grin if she could see herself now, dead in the front of a small plastic kayak, cruising along a speedy San Francisco Bay current at night, a pod of sea lions swimming alongside, their snorts prehistoric, their smell as rank as rotten oysters, as they chaperoned her into the next life.

For courage, Kaylie gazed out at the Berkeley Pier, a thin black line in the distance, a horizon itself, splitting the moon-sparkled water from the pale gray sky. Then she laid the paddle along the length of the kayak; it wouldn’t do to lose it now. Nor would flipping the entire boat be a good idea. She’d have to muster superhuman strength, and also be swift.

Kaylie shoved her arms under her grandma’s shoulders and clasped her ribs. One, two, three, heave.

The kayak rocked to the side, nearly capsizing, but the body remained on board. Already Kaylie was sweating.

Ambulating on her hands and feet, she crawled over Grandma’s body to the other end of the kayak, again nearly capsizing. Once there, she rested a moment, steadying her heart and mind, and then swung her grandma’s stiffening legs into the water.

That’s when the head of one sea lion rose up, the beast making eye contact with Kaylie. Maybe it smiled. Maybe its yellow teeth and deep maw gave Kaylie a shot of adrenaline. She pitched her grandma’s body into the water with a single shove. The splash was modest, and the old woman sank instantly. Several dark hides mounded out of the water before diving after the body.

Kaylie paddled away with all her might, hoping for a tide change that would sweep her toward shore, toward her house and modest life, her decent job and the possibility of a girlfriend one day, maybe even Officer Marta Ramirez. You never knew. What she did know was that she wanted to live awhile longer. She wanted to be around when the pier reopened, if it ever did, and wondered if Duong and Tham Nguyen, Pamela Roberts, Shelly the librarian, James and Frank, the lone rich dude, all their friends, whether they’d come back, or if there’d be a whole new crowd. Maybe they’d gentrify the pier, bring in food trucks and artists tables. Kaylie didn’t know. But she paddled as if her life depended on it, which it did.

Final interview with Núria Callas Perales, September 12 and 13, 2018, Barcelona, Spain. Transcribed and edited by Montse Àrcadia Sala, amanuensis of the Gumshoe Division of the Church of Núria, Berkeley, California. Translated by Mara Faye Lethem.

The rule was simple: no patrons were to be admitted to the library before it opened, no matter how hard they knocked on the big glass doors. The staff wouldn’t even bother with eye contact. Patrons could knock till their knuckles broke and complain till their voices cracked, but they weren’t getting in.

Mason, a cautious man who’d been working at the Berkeley Public Library as an aide for only three weeks (sneaking back into Berkeley after four years away, following his mother’s death and his family’s turbulent dissolution), understood this immediately.

He’d arrived at nine a.m. that morning with the manager of the day, Slim, an enormous languid fellow with spiky yellow hair and a wart on his nose that turned red during heavy rain, such as had been whipping the Bay Area the last three days with frenzied enthusiasm. BART service was sputtering even more than usual and ACT busses were detouring around flooded areas. Most everyone else would be late.

Except for Mason who, for his own reasons, left his closet-sized studio apartment near the Ashby Street BART extra early and took carefully planned detours.

Once Slim had punched the alarm codes to the Bancroft Street employee entrance and let Mason in, he apologized profusely. The new library director was arriving today, first day on the job, loose ends with the catering for the welcome reception. Slim would only be a few minutes. Would Mason mind being left alone, just for a while? Then he dashed back out into the rain.

Too new to object, Mason got right to work, opening the sorting room, checking the phone messages — sure enough, even Cleve, his manager, was mired in traffic. (Oh well. It was three hours until opening.) Mason next pinned the daily assignment sheet to the bulletin board. His first-hour duty: clean up and straighten the new bookshelves on the first floor, the first thing patrons saw as they entered from the sunken plaza.

The task was mundane to anyone but Mason, who sank into happy reverie: this was the best time to be in the library, alone, before anyone else arrived, among all the minds great and small, talented and not, that could fit on the shelves. As always, he found some of these minds had fallen or slumped over since yesterday; others had been picked up and abandoned far from home and now lay rejected, lost, and unloved. Mason took them all home. He’d edge the rows of books until the spines were perfectly snug (except for books by his favorite authors — those he brought forward out of line just a fraction). Then he’d run his fingertips over the rows of Mylar mirrors, each spine labeled NEW in red block letters, shining with promise.

Deep in his fun, he only heard the pounding on the glass door as a murmur from far above. When it finally penetrated, desperate and persistent, he swam awake like a drowsy fish. Then his irritated glance turned into a double take.

It was Sharpie banging at the door. He was a regular patron, one of the two kinds of characters who made the library a second home. The first were those who had someone to take care of them; the second, the majority, were those who had no one — the homeless.

Sharpie was among the latter. He was still very young, his fuzzy face not yet cured red by exposure; friendly, boyishly handsome, but clearly hapless. He wore the same tracksuit every day, black nylon with yellow stripes, and grimy black-and-yellow cross-trainers with loose heels that slapped against his bare feet as he walked. Extremely claustrophobic, his usual spot was the first-floor reading room, by the romance novels, an enormous greasy backpack, swollen with his material life, by his side. He’d spend most of his day reading the romance novels, or seeming to. It was strange, Mason’s fellow staffers remarked — a young man reading romance novels, a homeless young man.

It was Mason who said, “I bet that’s where he finds love.” Then, blushing, he added, “I mean, he’s not finding much of it anywhere else, is he?”

And now here he was, over two hours early, without his backpack, clutching his left side with one hand, thumping on the glass with the other, smearing it with reddish-brown paste, while outside the three-day storm was whipping into day four.

“Help me!” Sharpie cried, a sad voice under the hard rain. “Help me, man! I’m hurtin’!”

Rising to face a real emergency, Mason’s conscience brushed the rule off the table.

He let Sharpie in.

The plan, a quick gel in Mason’s mind, was to sit him down, then thumb 911. But as he took Sharpie by his cold, wet nylon arm, bony and trembling, and started to guide him between the new fiction shelves to a nearby bench, the door banged again, so violently it shook. This time, someone was calling — no, barking — Mason’s name, like the knuckles on glass. As Mason turned to look, Sharpie slipped out of his grasp.

Mason grew sick as his vision shook, spun, and tilted. He’d been dreading this moment ever since he’d snuck back into Berkeley — his big brother Harry, long lost and best forgotten; Harry pounding on the blood-smeared door as he shouted Mason’s name. His fevered face and rusty-gray beard ran and dripped with rain. As the brothers faced each other through the glass, Mason’s reflection stared back out, a homely big-eared ghost under his brother’s brilliant sharp bones. A memory of their mother’s face briefly joined them and Mason once again heard her last words, from years ago, and a promise he’d made.

“Hey! Ma-son!” Harry banged again on the door, his cracked grinning face still handsome as a god, though one left out in the weather for too long. No matter what happened, Harry’s corpse would be a beautiful ruin, handsomer dead than Mason alive.

Mason crept toward the door, drawing out his wallet, fumbling out a tenner. He opened the door just enough to insert his face: Hi, Harry, gee, what d’ya know! Uh, I’m busy, nice to see you; sorry, Harry, the library doesn’t open till noon; here, ten bucks, take it, Harry; get outta the rain, buy a sandwich at the E-Z Stop Deli.

But, like a big camel, once Harry got his nose in, he took the whole tent. He slapped the door open and passed through Mason as though he were mist. “My brain’s so big,” Mason remembered him saying, “I don’t see the world. It’s just some shit to play with.”

Nope, no telling Harry what to do when or when to do what.

Mason turned to follow him, but Harry suddenly spun about and pulled him into a rib-bending embrace.

“Bro! Awwww, my little broaaaa! Where ya been, Big Ears!?” Mason’s feet left the floor as Harry spun him around like a dance partner. Close up, his face looked flayed and pitted by the weather, his pupils widening, turning his eyes into black pits. A wet bouquet of the street steamed from the fake-fur collar of his thick coat. His breath was a cloud of stale tobacco and dead animal.

Harry set Mason down hard enough to bend his knees. Mason, now facing the door again, tried to glance behind him. Where’d Sharpie—

Harry punched his arm, that familiar hard-knuckle jab: “Wake up, Mase, y’twerp! You ain’t seen me in more years than I got fingers left.” His mutilated right hand stole back into its stinky coat slot, where he preferred to keep it. “So, how’s it goin’, buddy?”

“Um, all right. Harry—”

His brother blew right past him: “Never mind. You don’t give a shit. I don’t give a shit.”

Mason stood staring for a few seconds out at a small crowd that was filling the sunken plaza in the dismal downpour. Someone held up a smartphone. A young girl was now banging at the door — young and fresh (but not for long), shabby in a strangely boutique manner, homeless du jour. But Mason’s mind was a frozen swamp of panic, so there’d be no more early entries. He turned to find his brother had passed through the security gate and was now pretending to marvel at the blond-wood bookshelves on wheels.

“Wow! Workin’ the library! Mighta known you’d be workin’ for The Man! Good hustle there, bro! Are these all the pwecious tomeths?”

“Just the new ones. Got ’em on the back wall, there too. And the DV — look, Harry—”

“Whoa, lovely beautiful building, man.” He gazed around with his wide black eyes. “Love those green art deco walls outside.” He shoved one of the shelves so it moved. “But here you got these dumbass shelves on wheels.” He rolled his eyes. “Cheap, cheap, cheap,” he sang. “You’re so brilliant, you work in a library that uses Ikea shelves.” Then he sneered. “Of course, you can read. You’re dyslexia freeee, y’stuck-up little shit.”

“You’re not supposed to be in here, Harry,” Mason dropped his voice and tried to enunciate like Harry, each word a hammer tap. “We don’t o-pen un-til noon—”

“You’re not supposed to be in here, Harry,” the big man mimicked, a skill that once rolled waves of laughter across a room. He jabbed a finger right at his little brother: “You just let some other asshole in, Mase.” His voice scraped like a file, his eyes two black marbles. “I saw you.” He splayed his good left hand over his chest, nodding. “And I... me... I’m your lonnnng-lost bro-ther.” Harry’s lips curled and split apart to show his brown teeth, a bad omen. “How long you been back in town? You been avoidin’ me since you got this job. I seen you, man. I seen you peekin’ up over the BART steps, like a little prairie dog! Too chickenshit to go outside!”

Mason’s eyes skittered about. He was still all alone in the building. The manager hadn’t returned. Maybe an assistant had arrived, or another aide, better that, they’d be more likely to help him cover his mistake — no, mistakes. He’d made two of them — no, that was one mistake, twice in a row. He needed assistance, but by no means wanted it. Better, much better, if he could shovel this mess out the door all by himself, so no one would ever go What the fuck? and... what... what about—

The new library director! Ohhh, fuck me! New boss, first day on the job, maniacs crawling the floor before the doors even—

“Whoa! What’s this!?” Harry fixed his bullet stare on the floor at his feet, right by the “Lucky Day” shelves, which housed especially popular books.

“Blood!” He fully bared his big brown crumbling teeth, the gums shrunk to the roots. He marched deeper into the library, toward the circulation desk, following the blood spatters.

“Wellll, what the fuck we got here? Trail of blood! Ooo! That could be the title of your next shitty screenplay, Mase! I’d say someone’s hurt! What d’ya say we go help him!?” He stopped and turned to Mason, his face aghast, slapped his good hand over his mouth. “Oops! I forgot! Ssshhh in the library!” Then he pointed the finger, whispering, “And you’d better hush too, lil’ bro.” He turned back to the hunt. “Fuck libraries, man,” he whispered loudly. “Can’t read, can’t talk like I like to. Can’t be myself.” He swayed as he followed the trail of little red splashes, dissolved from rainwater, toward the first-floor reading room.

“Harry...” Mason maintained his library voice, compressed and quiet, sitting on the dreary apprehension that he and his brother were rebooting the same goddamn movie.

Harry spun around again, pointing, suddenly growing larger and larger, until Mason began to feel neck strain.

“Mase, mind your own fuckin’ business for once, will ya? Three, four years and I’m still findin’ you under my feet!” His finger was shaking. It was a familiar pattern. The angrier he got, the more his brain, sloshing with chemical imbalances and bad wiring, would misfire. “All the times I kicked you and... y’just didn’t learn...”

As Harry ranted away, Sharpie slipped out of the reading room behind him and up the old main staircase, still clutching his side. Harry must have seen Mason’s eyes shift, because he turned back toward the reading room in time to see the tail of Sharpie’s shadow paint the steps. He turned on Mason again, his fist raised. Mason flinched and ducked. Harry laughed. He laughed harder as Mason feebly patted at his pants pocket, where he kept his cell phone.

“Playin’ with yourself in public again!” Harry teased. “Never could keep your hands off your pecker!” Then his face darkened further. “Or is that a gun you got there? Better not be. ’Cause I got... this!”

Harry yanked a little pistol out of his pocket. It was a .22, dull black, brown taped handle. It was much too small for his huge hands and with two fingers of his gun hand missing — ring finger and pinky, blown off while juggling a lit cherry bomb — Harry’s grip on it was clumsy at best. But even a bad shot can wound or kill.

“Harry! Harry, what’re you doing?” Mason cried as his brother started up the steps.

Harry stopped to stare down, offended: “What am I doin’? I’m killin’ the little fuck I caught screwin’ my girlfriend in my tent! Do you know what that does to a man!? No, ya don’t. ’Cause you’ve never been a man. Now you stay down here like a good boy, or I’ll shoot your funny ears off!”

Then he stomped on up the stairs. “Sharpie, you fuck!” he called, hissing like a rattlesnake. “I’m comin’ for ya! Fuckin’ better run, Sharpie, ’cause I’m the fuckin’ Term-in-a-tor! I’m gonna shoot your dick off and stuff it in your mouth!”

Then he tripped and the pistol fell from his hand, clattered on the landing. He picked it up with his left hand, his not-gun hand.

Mason ran to the bottom of the stairs. “Listen, Harry—”

Harry spun around on the landing, pointing the pistol: “No, you listen. You promised Mother you’d look after me. And you didn’t. See what happens when you don’t keep a promise, Mason? You pay! Now you stay there, got me? This ain’t none of your business.”

That’s not what she said, Mason wanted to argue, but arguing would have been madness. Instead, as Mason dashed up the stairs after Harry, he did what he should have done the second he saw Sharpie at the door: he pulled out his cell phone. He fat-fingered the keypad as he tripped up the steps: 011, 912, 921, finally: “Berkeley Police Department Emergency Services... Slow down, sir... What’s the address again?... Is this a medical or police emergency?... How many intruders, sir?... One of them is armed? Your name again, please—”

BATTERY LOW, the little screen broke in. And then it closed its eye with perfect timing as a gunshot cracked from the reading room, echoing through the whole building. Mason jumped and so did his phone, right out of his hand.

He now stood in the grand old former lobby. He turned to the high-ceilinged reading room to see Sharpie dashing out from the Japanese-Spanish section, clutching his side as he scurried behind the double row of long reading tables. He ran into the far corner, into the modern world and US history section. Harry came out from between the Chinese DVDs and nonfiction, awkwardly clutching the little gun in his big hands. His fingers would barely fit in the trigger guard. No wonder Sharpie was still alive.

“Oopsie! Sorry, Mase!” Harry waved the .22 in the air. “I forgot my silencer! Next time!” Then he disappeared behind the first row of the 910s, the travel books: “Sharpie, you little shit!”

He moved in on Sharpie, winding from shelf row to shelf row. He fired again, then again, aiming through gaps in the shelves. The first bullet banged off metal. The second bullet, fired from the 920s, the biographies, broke the spine of Deirdre Bair’s Al Capone biography. As the book shuddered and slumped over, the bullet ripped out the other side and sent a Gandhi biography sprawling to the floor.

Sharpie scurried back and forth crying and whimpering at the far end. Harry seemed to take a teasing pleasure in the hunt. As he drew closer, he swept row after row of books to the floor, as though that would give him better aim; books that Mason had spent a good part of yesterday reshelving, straightening, until they were lined up like the proudest soldiers in the best army on parade. All that work... all the care Mason took... now this!

Mason followed, staying back a couple rows. The pattern was clear now. Harry was losing the point of his anger, which was congealing into a ball of rage firing in all directions. This was Harry all over: he’d never be happy until everyone else was drowning in the same lake of misery.

Mason had no plan either, only a dismal fear and a deeper despair. He’d lost his job now. What else was left to lose? At that moment another emotion appeared — spontaneously, it seemed.

“Harry!” Mason suddenly shouted. “Harry, stop it!”

His own voice scared him. It startled Harry too, because he spun around and stared back at Mason through a gap in the shelves. He put a finger to his lips and took aim right at Mason.

“I told you to shush!”

Crack! went the pistol. Zip! went the bullet as it split the pinna of Mason’s ear. Warm liquid ran between his fingers and down his arm.

“Awwww! I shot Mason’s poor widdle ear! Keep it up and you’re gonna say goodbye to the other one!”

But as Harry spun back to his quarry, he fumbled his gun again and accidentally kicked it out from the shelves into the middle of the room. As he stepped out and kneeled to retrieve it, Sharpie made a break. But he’d lost a lot of blood and as he crossed the reading room back the way he came, he slipped on it, fell hard on his wounded side, with a sad cry.

Now Harry rose to his full height. He marched down on Sharpie with high stalking steps, as though stepping over trip wires. Sharpie was going nowhere. And weak little Mason, what would he do? What he always did. Shake like a leaf.

But, as he had been about so much else, Harry was wrong. Mason was staring at his bloody hand, watching it turn into a bloody fist as he fully remembered their mother’s last words.

And they weren’t “Take care of Harry.”

They were “Have Harry put away.”

That was the promise Mason had failed to keep. His fear and confusion turned inside out like a sock, into purpose and rage. Even though he was already as good as fired, he’d defend Sharpie and this library, this island in the world for both of them, to the last. He was nowhere near Harry’s size, but he had an idea to make himself look bigger.

As Harry reached the far end of the first row of reading tables, Mason jumped from floor to chair to tabletop. He dashed and leaped over the tabletops, avoiding the fixed study lamps, heading right for Harry, who stood a few steps from where Sharpie lay helpless and bleeding.

Swaying about, Harry took aim with both hands: “Fuck my girl, will ya—”

“Harry!” Mason shouted.

Harry spun around as Mason sprang off the table through the air. The pistol cracked again as Mason slammed down onto his brother and they crashed together into a bare wall. Mason took a hard punch in the shoulder. His ears exploded, a jolt shook his whole body. The air sputtering out in a rosy mist from his right lung choked off his scream as he hit the floor.

Mason opened his eyes as Harry slammed down flat and hard inches away. A tooth flew out when his face bounced on the floor. He’d been tackled, knocked flat, by a someone Mason had never seen before, a stoutly built woman with bushy hair. She’d hit Harry like a falling bookshelf.

“What’s going on here? Are you all right?”

Harry tried to get up, but she cracked him a good one with a hammy forearm. “Oof!” His head bounced on the floor again.

“Stay put!”

But he wouldn’t listen, so she thumped him once more. Harry surrendered in blubbering tears.

Good hit, Mason wanted to say. Anxious cries swirled in with galloping footsteps. He also wanted to ask if Sharpie was all right, but by then he was shutting down as Harry sputtered in fury, his face reflected in the sheet of blood spreading between them.

“Fuck!” Harry spat out another bloody tooth. “How come this shit always happens to me?”

Roy’s grandfather subscribed to several magazines, among them Time, Field & Stream, Sport, and Reader’s Digest, but the one that interested Roy most was San Francisco Bay Crime Monthly. One afternoon Roy came home from school and found his grandfather reading a new issue.

“Hi, Pops. Anything good in there?”

“Hello, boy. Yes, I’ve just started an intriguing story.”

Roy sat down on the floor next to his grandfather’s chair. “Can you read it to me?”

“How old are you now, Roy?”

“Ten.”

“I don’t know everything that’s in this one yet. I wouldn’t want your mother to get mad at me if there’s something she doesn’t want you to hear.”

“She’s not home. Anyway, I’ve heard everything.”

“You have, huh? All right, but I might have to leave out some gruesome details, if there are any.”

“Those are the best parts, Pops. I won’t tell Mom. Start at the beginning.”

Henry Wheeler walks into the Inn Kensington looking for all the world like a man who’s just gotten laid. He wears a humid sort of smile and his arms dangle from his shoulders like sausage ropes. With him is a woman: younger, her long dark hair parted in the middle, her mouth set straight and firm. She leads him by the hand like a mother. He bumps into a square table, holds his hand up, and mumbles something, still smiling, still wrapped in the good love or slow sex or whatever has tugged him into this Friday morning. Shaila has spotted him, I can tell. Her chest tenses. Dread and longing course by on opposite tracks as our man Henry scoots into a booth, flips his hair back, squints, grins, and examines the hot sauce before him.

He takes a few seconds to spot us. His smile drops. The woman is talking and he tries to look at her, but his eyes dart back, again and again, to Shaila. At last, he gets up.

“Fuck,” Shaila whispers. “Fuck fuck.” He walks to the bathroom and Shaila gets up and follows.

They speak all at once. They stop. I can feel the pump of Shaila’s heart, the heat rising up her neck. They stand and look at each other, waiting.

“What are you doing here?” she finally asks.

“I need to come clean, Shaila.”

“Henry.”

“I need to.”

“No.”

“I won’t tell anyone you were involved—”

“No. You promised.”

“Cynthia says it’s breaking me. She said I need to get this off my conscience.”

“Cynthia.”

He points weakly to the booth.

Shaila shakes her head, faster and faster.

“Cynthia said if I just go to the police and tell them about the—”

“Cynthia,” she hisses. “Cynthia.”

“You’ll be fine, Shaila—”

“They’ll know, Henry! They’ll know I was there!”

Diners begin to turn to the noise. A manager stomps toward us. That’s when I leap from her pocket and run. They see me. They all see me. A lady screams. Feet everywhere, scraping chairs, mayhem. I escape through the door and scoot behind a telephone poll, my chest pounding.

Shaila finds me. The street is quiet again, but for a man standing in the café doorway, growling and cursing. “What were you doing?” she asks me.

“Creating a diversion.”

“You could have been killed!”

A rat’s heart, on average, beats four hundred times a minute. This sort of excitement is no good for me. My heart isn’t used to such things.

My stalkers come in two flavors — communists and occultists. The former, despite the millions dead at their feet, are gormless fetishists. The latter, though theurgy is nothing but applied dishonesty, they are the dangerous ones. I know; in my time I was both a revolutionary socialist and a ritual magician. Then, after my mentor was murdered, I had to kill a few people, my own father included, in self-defense. I went to prison. I had some time to think. Some crackpot wrote a true crime book about me, entitled, Love Is the Law: Patricide, Power, and Perversion on Long Island. It was a best seller for a season, and well-creased mass market paperbacks can still be found in Moe’s, Pegasus, and the shadier sort of used bookstores beloved by the creeps who like to follow me around. There used to be some fan websites about me, on Geocities and Angelfire, with black backgrounds and fonts that dripped red. But I got old, moved to California, had a kid, and started a new life. Now only the hard-core remain.

I’ve found that the best defense is a good offense. I teach yoga, in the park. The aging Reds of Berkeley still call it Ho Chi Minh Park, but the occultists, who are middle-class squares and generally out-of-towners as well, know it as Willard. I lead a group through four basic asanas as described in “Liber E vel Exercitiorum.” If you threw a stick in this town and managed to miss a frozen yogurt shop, you’d hit a yoga studio, and one staffed by young lithe blondes with serious ponytails and welcoming smiles. There are only three reasons to come to my class instead — that it’s free, and it’s me, are the exoteric reasons.

One of my students attends faithfully, for the esoteric reason. She sweats, she grinds her teeth, every morning. Tense every muscle and be still. She gets off on that. When I finally asked her for her name — Lindsey — she nearly orgasmed on the spot, her white-girl dreadlocks shivering, thanks to the sheer attention I paid her.

It was just me and her the morning of the Hayward quake. Even the big redwoods in the northeast corner of the park started to sway, and the chain-link fences of the nearby tennis courts sang. Lindsey opened her eyes, let an undisciplined gasp escape. I glared at her. Stay still. A car roared up Hillegass Avenue, swaying more wildly than it needed to; the driver honked the horn as a telephone wire snapped and whipped the asphalt. The lawn chairs we used for our first asana, The God, tipped over as well.

“How long...?” Lindsey asked through gritted teeth. I found myself focusing on my Muladhara chakra, and imagined my coccyx sinking into the earth, a bone drill in black dirt. Lindsey couldn’t hold her posture anymore and fell over. A moment later, the quake subsided. Nothing but the sound of flapping wings, and then the creak and roar of falling branches, of people opening doors and shouting into the streets, and of sirens. The air smelled like ozone and sweat.

“Next position is—” I started to say, but a male-seeming groan stopped me. I didn’t turn my head, but Lindsey could see him.

“That guy was behind a tree...” she said. In Berkeley, in general, it is not at all unusual for some mentally marginal individual to spend all day hanging out in a copse of trees, but I already knew who he was. “We have to help him.”

“Is that our will?” I asked Lindsey. “Or just your will? Or is it his will that you end our session prematurely?”

“I also need to walk it off,” she replied, gingerly picking herself up.

“I do need help!” Heinrich said, a pile on the ground, pinned under a heavy-seeming branch. “I think my leg is broken!”

“A lot of people are going to need help,” I said as I assumed the thunderbolt position, left heel under my ass, arms over the knees. “Why chose the one who’s closest?”

Heinrich was one of Berkeley’s freelance revolutionaries. He was in his late forties, born too late for campus riots and the Free Speech Movement, but right on time for ninety-second punk rock songs about Reagan nuking the world and polyamorous tangles with patchouli-drenched sex-positive sex bunnies and occasionally their mothers. He was microfamous for a series of pamphlets attempting to rehabilitate Bukharin as an anarchist, but every four years he blinked and voted for the Democratic candidate for president. Heinrich was, of course, in love with me.

“Can you walk?” Lindsey asked him. Yoga had made her strong. She lifted the branch off Heinrich’s leg; he grunted hard, slid out from under it, and picked himself up. “I can,” he said. “I can stand anyway.”

“Walk yourself to Alta Bates before the ER fills up,” I said. “Maybe you have internal bleeding, or a concussion.”

“Don’t say that!” he hissed at me. I smiled. He was superstitious, or at least worried about the possibility that what I articulate in words might soon manifest in reality. I don’t believe in making things too easy for my stalkers.

“You’re a little old to be climbing trees, or playing the Peeping Tom,” Lindsey said. She moved away from Heinrich to reclaim her spot on the grass near me. Heinrich limped after her and announced that he was going to join the class, then tried to twist himself into the asana. It’s a difficult posture when one is in the best of health, and he’d clearly banged himself up.

“What do you want?” I asked him.

“Why... there was an earthquake just a minute ago? Don’t you want to go to your home and check for damage?” Heinrich asked.

“Don’t you?” Lindsey asked.

“He’s homeless,” I said. “Sheltered, probably with a storage unit, but homeless, probably for economic reasons that he recasts as political to his friends when he takes advantage of their showers and electrical outlets.” I pushed myself back into my position, mouth sealed shut, nostrils pulling air into me, then expelling it.

“Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore...” said Heinrich. “But I heard something the other night that I thought you’d want to know.” I didn’t move. One shouldn’t even speak while holding an asana. Heinrich had already shattered Lindsey’s concentration. “It’s about Riley.”

Riley was his sole name, because he considered it more efficient to become world famous and win the Google Awareness Lottery than it was to keep his surname. Riley doesn’t need an introduction. What does need an introduction is why Heinrich would bring him up to me — Riley and my father had gone to college together, and there both of them got involved with magick. Riley became a millionaire, and my father became a drug addict who tried to kill — no, sacrifice — me to the spirit of capitalism. That was in 1989, just as the Berlin Wall crumbled. Now Riley’s a billionaire, and my father’s in the grave I put him in. Do you have one of those vocal-activated Internet of Things Assistants in your home? That’s thanks to Riley. He clearly conceptualized of the service as a type of familiar, but Alexa or some other disembodied voice that does your bidding isn’t your familiar, it is his. You just invited it into your home.

I still didn’t move. Let there be a void, I thought, and let Heinrich fill it with his voice.

“He’s building something in the hills,” he said. He gestured broadly to the west, toward the end of Derby Street and the beginning of the Claremont Canyon Regional Preserve. Another silence, another void.

Lindsey, the good girl, said, “He’s not building anything. He owns a company. Someone else is doing the actual work.” She looked to me for a nod of approval, but I didn’t grant her one.

“People have seen him out there,” Heinrich said.

Finally, I was driven to speak. “Have none of your friends anything better to do than follow around people more notorious than you are.” I stood up out of my stance. “Class is over. Do what thou wilt, comrades.” Then to Heinrich I added, “If you try to follow me, I’ll stab you.”

Heinrich smiled. Stalkers know their prey — he got me.

I have loved leaving things behind: lovers, cities, jobs. Leaving before the end of things, the nasty part, the annoying part. I just bought a computer, my first. You tap the track pad with two fingers and a little box comes up. You can tap “back” with one finger and it returns to the previous page. Back, back, back, though what I liked to do was skip forward, forward, forward.

But then something lies in wait for you, doesn’t it? Life itself taps back, back, back; time itself wheels around and bites you.

Hired for a weird job, that’s how I met you.

I came into town too broke for a room so I slept behind a building on the campus that first night. Next night I was drinking one long beer at a place called Marvell’s, sitting at the bar reading — it was Giles Goat-Boy — and you spilled my beer and apologized a little too much and bought me another and then two more and at the end of the night I was in your bed in a rooming house down the street and had a particularly unspecific bit of work for the next day.

In the morning you bought me eggs and toast at the Cecil — it just closed only last month — and we drank lattes and I began to feel situated. I relaxed a little. There you go. See? I go back, back, back, and I can trace exactly where it went the wrong way, where it went, as they say, down.

We walked around the corner and got into your beat-up truck with a Six-Pac on the back. I noticed the gun rack sans guns running behind our heads. The truck was old but the interior was clean — no wrappers, old coffee cups, not even dust or dirt. I felt even more keenly how stinky I must be getting — well, that night I’d have money for a laundromat.

The work was at the marina, you said, simple stuff. Shifting boxes, cleaning. Ever work around boats? I’d done a little trawling in Alaska, like everybody, and before that stewarded on a cruise ship, but that was like waiting tables. Besides, I got fired and put off at the next port, hence Alaska, hence the trawler.

You listened and nodded and turned on the radio. We rolled down University Avenue and onto the road leading past boatyards and bait shops, then fancy restaurants at the end of the pier. It was your basic winter morning, nothing spectacular, but even so, the water glittered as the sun rose, the air smelled different, the wind was sharper, all giving me the feeling things were shifting forward, forward, forward...

You told me to stay in the truck while you opened the gate and checked the boat. Coming back a few minutes later you said that the owner’s selling and needs to move his stuff off and clean the boat. That’s it. But really clean — I thought you meant oil the woodwork, polish the chrome, but you brought out disinfectant, rubber gloves, scrubbers.

The hold was jammed with boxes. We began by pulling some out, then you were down in there handing them to me. These weren’t boxes picked up behind the liquor store. Not large, maybe a foot square of super-sturdy cardboard and all about equal weight. When they were all out on deck the boat looked like a sandcastle moving gently with the tide. You went to the truck and brought back a dolly; as I stacked the boxes on the dock you ran them back to the truck. It probably wasn’t two hours gone when we were done.

You handed me a hundred dollars in twenties and told me to start scrubbing — every inch. The boat needed to be pristine for the new owners. You’d be back in a few hours with another hundred but if I finished before you were back just lock up the boat — it was a simple Yale lock on an iron bar — and meet back at the rooming house.

A kiss and you were gone.

Captain Ron Tagus was pairing a whiskey with a weather check when his phone rang. He glanced at its display: 2:35 a.m. Blocked. He finished the pour, turned down the VHF, and took the call. “What’s up, boss?”

“We’re going out.”

“Sure.” Captain Ron glanced over his shoulder at a calendar tacked to the bulkhead behind him. “What day?” He set down the bottle and drew the flat stub of a carpenter’s pencil out of the folded brim of his watch cap.

“Tonight.”

He moved the tip of the pencil to a square labeled Monday. “What time?”

“What time is it now?”

“Two thirty-six.”

“Let’s shoot for three fifteen.”

The faceted lead of the knife-sharpened pencil hovered above the empty square. “That’s not tonight. That’s this morning.”

“Your circadian hair-splitting is of no interest to me at the moment.” That was the boss’s carefree vocabulary all right, but the tone was off. Brittle, like.

Ron turned away from the calendar. “Regan—”

“Under sail,” the boss added.

Captain Ron glanced at the darkened porthole that topped the whiskey bottle like the dot on a letter i. “There will be a little weather.”

“All the better.”

Pause. Ron asked her where she was.

“On the bridge.”

“How fast are you going?”

“A hundred and three.”

He believed her. “Hey.”

“Hey what?”

“You okay?”

“Just peachy.” She hung up.

Before reverting to its matrix of icons, the display informed him that the call from Blocked had lasted fifty-three seconds. Captain Ron dropped the phone into a gimbaled cup holder and chased it with the pencil. On the bulkhead behind the settee on the other side of the chart table hung a handsome analog barometer, an antique with a six-inch bezel of tarnished brass. Its arrow pointed almost straight up, and Captain Ron could easily discern its reading of 29.3 inches of mercury. He slid off the settee to administer the glass two taps of a fingernail, and the needle dropped a single mensuration, to 29.2. It had been falling all day, creeping counterclockwise over the lovely italic script of the word Change inked onto the card covering the instrument’s face, leaving the telltale behind at 30.1. For a couple of days, Stella, the common name around the waterfront for the female version of NOAa’s weather-reading robot, and Stanley, her male counterpart, had been predicting a blow, with winds hooting into the thirties bringing one to two inches of rain. A typical winter storm. The cube of ice capsized in the dram of whiskey. A gust tugged at the trucks. A standing wave rippled through the lengths of the paired staysail halyards, taut along the mizzen, so that they clattered up and down the mast like a little girl running from one end to the other of a hardwood floor in her mother’s shoes. The elevating pitch of crescendoing whistles and whirring shrieks, peculiar to a couple of acres of masts and rigging as a rising wind combs through them, virtually encouraged windward vessels to crush their fenders between hull and dock, and the lines of leeward vessels to stretch their snubbers, so that the otherwise deserted marina was phantomic with sound. We won’t even take the cover off the main, thought Ron, as he took up the glass of whiskey. Boy Toy could certainly be sailed under a reefed mainsail; but as she went short sail, being a ketch, she handled much better under a foresail with mizzen and no main at all, a suite commonly known as jib and jigger. We’ll motor out of the harbor, of course, a series of tight zigzags, and once out we’ll stay out. After the low pressure has made its way down the coast we’ll come home, and not until. It’ll remain a little rough in front of the breakwater, shoal as it is there, but we’ll be coming back by daylight. He glanced at a light-blue line that undulated across the calendar week — by daylight and on the flood. Altogether, the makings of an excellent excursion. He downed the whiskey at a go, tossed the ice cube into the sink, parked the empty glass next to it, and set about stowing anything that wasn’t nailed down.

If it takes time to rig a sloop, with its single mast, it takes approximately twice as long to rig a ketch, with its two. Tonight the timing would be about the same as the latter because, despite leaving the main furled, he wanted to switch out the jib. After little debate he went with the No. 4, which was 80 percent of the foretriangle, instead of the spitfire, at 35 percent the smallest sail aboard. A spitfire would be flown only in the most extreme conditions, to keep headway on the vessel sufficient to maintain steerage, a situation in which, so long as Captain Ron had been in charge, Boy Toy had never found herself. Ron rigged the mizzen first, a simple matter of removing the canvas cover and shackling the halyard to the head of the sail. Dropping the rolled cover down the companionway as he moved to the bow, he unrove the sheets from the clew of the No. 2 jib, moved the sheet leads forward to a mark on each genoa track, and unbent the 125. Despite the rising wind and because of a big motor cruiser called Pay Dirt, three stories high and seventy feet long, to windward, whose bulk blanketed the dock between her majesty and Boy Toy, he managed to fold the 125 into its bag without spending the rest of the night keeping both on the dock and out of the drink. He was reboarding with the sail bag when a chirp of tires alerted him to a car, and he looked up in time to see a pair of headlights swivel off Spinnaker Way into the parking lot. This would be a Jaguar roadster, green as a pool table, with two leather seats, many horsepower, and, inevitably, its top down. The roadster’s brakes locked up and it skidded to a stop in its reserved parking place. Bits of gravel tumbled down the riprap to the water, just in front of the Jaguar’s front bumper. A little hasty.

The sky had darkened considerably, leaving no stars visible, and the north wind that had chauffeured the storm down the coast now backed southwest. At perhaps twenty knots the wind made quite a racket as it foraged through the huddled shipping, on the prowl for the unbattened, the unstayed, the carelessly lashed. Even as Ron made this observation, an improperly secured roller furler aboard Cohiba, a sixty-five-foot sloop with an eighty-foot mast docked on the other side of the marina, unspooled the better part of its charge in less time than it takes to tell it, leaving a thousand square feet of high-tech fabric thundering to leeward, sheets aflail.

That’s an easy ten or twelve grand worth of trouble, thought Ron. The spreaders will tear that sail to shreds if somebody doesn’t soon get it under control; dangerous, too, even in broad daylight. It’s hard to comprehend how much power a big sail like that has until you get launched off a boat by one. Meanwhile, back on Boy Toy, there would be no such thing as raising the No. 4 dockside in order to double check the positioning of the sheet leads. Not in this wind. Captain Ron backed down the companionway ladder, dragging the sail bag after him. He gathered up the mizzen cover in passing, and as he backed along the cabin sole with his arms full of textile, he caught a glimpse, through the chart table porthole, of a pair of open-toed stiletto heels, red with a pedicure to match, and heard them overhead as they boarded the boat. When Captain Ron came out of the forward locker bearing the No. 4, Regan Ellis was standing at the chart table, half turned away from him, downing a shot of whiskey, after which she promptly poured another. The neck of the whiskey bottle made a little tintinnabulation against the rim of the glass, for her hands were trembling. Feeling the skipper’s presence, however, Regan pulled herself together. But she didn’t greet him, nor did she meet his eye. Okay, thought Captain Ron, we’ve had a rough night at the office. I’ll just go about my business. To get himself and the sail through the narrowest point in the saloon, he backed around her, turning as he went, so that he and the sail bag swiveled from facing forward to facing starboard to facing aft.

Despite his determination to manage otherwise, their eyes met, and Captain Ron could draw only one conclusion: tonight, a woman he knew for her remarkable self-possession was a mess. “What’s up?”

No answer.

“You seem...” What’s the word? Upset? Pissed off? Disconcerted?

Regan refocused a thousand-yard stare onto Ron’s face, mere inches in front of hers. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. Her eyes, which were of a green that the roadster could only hope to rival, liquified. She clutched the glass to her sternum. She shook her head.

Captain Ron dropped the sail bag and embraced her. He didn’t know what else to do. Her hair smelled of cigarette smoke. The glass smelled of whiskey. A shudder passed through her. Captain Ron realized that, beneath the knee-length faux-ermine coat, his boss might not have any clothes on.

After a full minute she pulled back far enough to place the empty glass against his own sternum, but not so far as to break the embrace. She watched her fingernail, lacquered to match the shoes, trace the rim of the glass. “I’m not going to cry,” she told the glass.

“If you can’t cry on your own boat,” replied Captain Ron, “where can you cry?”

She pursed her lips at the evident truth of this, but made no reply. A gust thrummed the stays. Boy Toy rolled to the limit of her snubbers and rebounded.

Captain Ron raised his eyes toward the overhead. “If this keeps up we’ll be sailing right here at the dock. We won’t have to go—”

“We’re going out,” she interrupted, still addressing the whiskey glass. “Are you ready?”

Captain Ron nodded toward the sail bag, on the sole abaft him. “Need to bend on the small jib. Then we’ll see if we can get out of here without holing somebody’s million-dollar yacht.”

“I’ve got insurance,” she whispered. And added, “The bastards.” Regan turned out of Ron’s arms and finished the drink. She placed the empty glass in the galley sink, and at last she looked at him in the eye. “I’ll change clothes, and we’ll be off.”

That is one good-looking woman, Captain Ron reflected, not for the first time, who pays me to take her sailing.

The hint of a smile crept over her lips. “That’s right.”

“Which part?”

She smiled only a little more.

“All of them.”

“Dress for weather.” Ron hefted the sail bag and pushed it ahead of him, out the companionway.

When Sergeant Endo Maduri talked about the case later he’d start off, “That was the last time Shelby and I rode together.” It made the guys on the force uncomfortable, but Maduri didn’t care.

“Where’d you nab him?” Maduri had asked Callahan that night.

The patrol officer had the suspect on the ground. She jutted her chin toward Walnut Square. “On the walkway.”

Maduri raised an eyebrow. The original Peet’s Coffee and Tea sat at the corner of Walnut and Vine. The walkway looped behind it. “He the perp?”

“Witness said perp was in a brown hoodie, mahogany color.” She eyed the suspect’s puffy black jacket. “Close enough in this light?”

At five thirty p.m. chilly mist was turning to icy fog. The shops fronting the Walnut Square walkway were closed. Few Peet’s Coffee addicts even considered cutting through the walkway from Walnut to Vine. Even fewer were likely to clamber up the Everest of cement steps in the other direction.

Certainly not Jeremy Lampara.

Jeremy Lampara was not ascending any steps.

He was lying dead on the Vine Street sidewalk. White male, middle-aged, blood thick on the chest area of his camel’s hair coat.

“Camel’s hair?” Maduri said aloud.

“Classic Jeremy Lampara,” Detective Harry Shelby snorted.

“The flipper? The guy who owned that building over by campus? The place that got torched?”

“More to the point, someone got him.” Lampara wasn’t likely to get sympathy from anyone in Berkeley, least of all Shelby. Lampara was lucky anyone bothered to put a sheet over his face to keep dirt from blowing up his nose. Not that he was going to be blowing it again.

“Gonna be one bitch of a case,” Maduri said.

“Unless we can run down the perp pronto.”

“Perp’s gone.”

“Gate, gate, paragate.” Shelby liked to drop in Buddhist talk. Liked to make the team ask what it meant.

Maduri’d been on the team awhile. “Perp’s gone, gone, gone beyond, eh?” He motioned at the suspect Callahan was holding on the ground. “You sure the perp’s gone.”

“Twenty says he is. We’ll take your car.”

“Huh?” Maduri wanted to say: Take my car for what? But he wasn’t willing to give Shelby that too. He waited.

“Single witness, that kid over there,” he nodded at a thin, sandy-haired white kid in an inadequate white T-shirt and jeans, standing next to a blonde in a gray CALIFORNIA sweatshirt.

“We got just one witness? At Walnut Square? There are more people standing around holding lattes than that.”

“Not this late. But Brian Janssen is what we got. He saw the perp shoot, saw him run. We’re going to circle the area, hope he can spot him.”

Fat chance. If Janssen didn’t spot the perp, this whole investigation was going to be a field day for the press: Cops’ Cordon Catches Nothing! Cops on Scene 90 Seconds After Shooting; Killer Long Gone. Maduri could just imagine! Real Estate Developer Shot Dead Outside the Original Peet’s Coffee and Tea. There’d be columns detailing the laws Lampara had charged through like a rhino clearing a papier-mâché doorway. There’d be lists of the ordinances he’d skirted, interviews with the tenants he’d evicted, pictures of the buildings he’d demolished, op-ed after op-ed about the shoddy construction of his shoddy new condos. And the fire!

And then there’d be the Shelby connection. And the question: did Detective Shelby give Lampara’s killer a pass?

Shelby sighed. “Small chance, but all we’ve got.” He nodded toward the tall, skinny kid and said to Maduri, “Brian Janssen, nineteen years old, sophomore at Cal, lives up by campus by the building that burned. He saw the fire guys carry out the victim. Saw the vic’s cartons on the sidewalk soaked from the fire hoses. If the poor fuck’d left an hour earlier he’d be home in LA now.”

Maduri shot a glance to make sure no reporter had heard that. They’d be hard enough on Shelby if the perp vanished. From habit he slid into the patrol car and leaned toward the computer screen. Nothing there he didn’t know. He turned on the engine as Shelby lowered his butt into the car and shouted, “Left on Shattuck!”

Two cars, lights and sirens, squealed to stops across from Peet’s. The crime scene van idled in front. An unmarked Maduri knew to be the medical examiner’s blocked the sidewalk.

Maduri turned on the engine, checked the side mirrors then the rearview, and did a double take.

Janssen was in the backseat, with the blonde in the CALIFORNIA sweatshirt beside him.

“Who’s she?” he half shouted even though it was quieter in the car with the doors shut.

“Lisa Kozlovski,” the girl said.

“You saw the shooter too?”

“No, I was down the block, on Walnut, when I heard the shots. When I got here the man was dead. I mean, I think he was dead. He was on the sidewalk, all bloody. Dead.”

Maduri raised a questioning brow to Shelby.

“Mr. Janssen wanted Miss Kozlovski to accompany him. He thought it would be interesting for her.”

“Help me to think,” Janssen sputtered.

Maduri had to jam his jaws together. Half the department would be circling the area. Every cop of the force would be dragged back in. And Brian Janssen was like a twelve-year-old on a date. Like he had Maduri and Shelby driving him and his date to the movies. The girl was a knockout blonde, three levels above what Janssen could ever hope for. But suddenly the kid had a novelty to offer. Want to ride in the back of a cop car? In the cage? Look for a murderer? Maduri didn’t expect Janssen to spot the shooter — then again, he figured if this deer-in-the-headlights kid was managing to sit thigh-to-thigh with this blonde, he had to be sharper than he looked.

Janssen nudged her.

“Would you leave the doors unlocked?” she asked. “Uh... I’m a little claustrophobic.”

You, not him, huh? But Maduri just said, “Sure.” As he clicked the lock, a patrol car Code 3’d around the corner, its sirens screeching in Maduri’s ear as it passed inches away.

“Damn sirens,” Shelby grumbled. “Know why they blast your ears off?”

It took Janssen a moment to realize the question was to him. “Uh-uh.”

“New cars! They’re so airtight; music blaring inside. Drivers don’t hear the sirens anymore. Not ours, not the fire trucks.”

From Janssen’s guilty expression Maduri figured the kid was one of those drivers.

Dark night, pedestrians in black, some under umbrellas. The white Christmas lights snaking up poles turned the dark blacker. Maduri hung the left onto Shattuck. If the perp was planning to escape on BART he’d be running down Shattuck toward it, or jumping on a bus. Or hiding in the Arts and Crafts Co-op standing over a sculpture he had no intention of buying. Or he’d have hidden in the hundred and one spots BPD was not going to uncover on a dark, foggy December night. He’d have gone... anywhere.

Janssen would want to be the hero. Maduri slowed the car. “On the sidewalk, there! In front of the French Hotel!” He pointed to a white guy in a hoodie that could have been mahogany but was more likely black. “What about him?”

Janssen shot a glance at the girl before turning toward the window. Maduri noted Shelby’s mistake — he’d sat Janssen where he’d have a clear view out the passenger window. He should have put the girl next to window and let Janssen look over her since that was the way the kid was looking anyway.

But Janssen was staring toward the dark figure moving into the Andronico’s supermarket parking lot.

“What so you think?”

“No. Not him.”

Maduri caught the kid’s hesitation. “You sure, Mr. Janssen?”

Janssen shrugged. In the rearview Maduri could see him shiver and slide closer to the girl, who looked none too warm herself.

“Sorry about the car. Heater repair isn’t high on the department’s budget plans.”

Janssen started to put an arm around the girl’s shoulder but she gave him a quick head shake. “She’s from LA,” he said quickly. “It’s like Nome here for her, right?”

She nodded.

“It’s like Nome here period tonight,” Shelby said. Back at the scene, officers were standing in the cold, laboriously interviewing every man, woman, and child, writing every name and address, double-checking spelling, triple-checking e-mail addresses, getting colder every minute. Getting no closer to tracking down the perp.

“Mr. Janssen? That the killer?” Maduri said as a hoodie’d figure cut into the parking lot heading to the store or on out the other exit to Henry Street. Maduri hit the gas, swung a right, circled around and into the lot from the back. “There he is. By the first line of cars. Do you see him, Mr. Janssen? Is that the killer?”

Janssen dragged his attention from the blonde and looked out the window. “Nah, not him.”

“Are you sure?”

“Not him.”

“Not him how?”

“How... what?”

Maduri glanced in the rearview mirror in time to catch the boy’s smart-ass grin; the sarcasm was for the girlfriend. Only witness, Maduri reminded himself yet again. Have to keep him on our side. “How’s the killer different, Mr. Janssen? Shorter, taller, fatter? More hair, less? Different clothes?”

“There was something... odd... about him. He was a little guy.”

“How little?”

“Five two, maybe.”

Five two doesn’t even make the chart! Probably he meant five six or five eight. Janssen was a good six feet. From his view anyone under five eight was a shrimp. “Short, huh? That all?”

“He seemed spooked, you know, like he couldn’t decide which way to go.”

“But he ended up running down Vine to Shattuck, right?”

Janssen just nodded, shrugged at the girl beside him.

“That right, Miss Kozlovski?”

“To this street? Sorry, I don’t know this part of the city. My boyfriend’s car—”

“Former boyfriend,” Janssen put in.

In the rearview, Maduri saw her jaw go tight. Janssen did not. The kid was, Maduri thought, an idiot. He eased the black-and-white out of the parking lot back onto Shattuck just as a fire engine hit the siren behind him. He jerked to a stop.

Shelby shot him a glance that said, You get to the point when you block out even that. Not good!

“The shooter, Miss Kozlovski, how would you describe him?” Maduri was yelling over the fading siren.

“By the time I got there,” she yelled back, “he was gone!”

“Citizens of Berkeley,” Shelby grumbled as the siren faded away, “they bitch about everything. But a guy guns a man down and trots off and not a single concerned citizen bothers to follow him.”

Maduri shot a panicked glance at the detective. Don’t give up, damnit!

As if she caught his vibe, Lisa Kozlovski said, “Maybe this will help. I heard someone say you wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley—”

“Which you took to mean...?”

“Bigger. I mean like more substantial. I’d say bulky too” — she turned to Janssen — “don’t you think, Bri?”

Janssen hesitated as if he was scanning the still shots in his mind before agreeing with her. As opposed to the decision he was weighing. Hesitantly, he placed his hand on her thigh, the way Maduri used to test the burners for heat on the ancient electric stove.

“Mr. Janssen?”

“Yeah.”

The girl poked an elbow into his rib and he grinned, seemed to be squeezing her thigh, though Maduri couldn’t be sure. “Yes, officer, she’s right. He was stockier. That’s why it was so odd, see, that he was bouncing around trying to decide what to do. Only a minute. Less than that, I think. I was looking at the guy lying on the sidewalk.”

Maduri shot a glance at Shelby, but the detective was off in his own world.

Maduri pulled into the intersection and hung a left. Circling back on Walnut, paralleling Shattuck, eyeing the ivy-covered hurricane fence that surrounded a block of university plantings. Good place for a perp to leap into. But dicey if anyone spotted him. Maduri aimed the spotlight at the vines, on the small chance it’d jolt the perp. Nothing.

Janssen’s head was turned toward the vines, but what he was eyeing was the girl.

Look for the perp, damnit! Maduri forced himself to inhale slowly. “Mr. Janssen, I want you to do an exercise for me. While you’re scanning the sidewalks, run through what happened when you got to Peet’s.”

“When I arrived on the scene?”

“Yeah, exactly. But keep looking out the window.”

“Like patting my head and rubbing my stomach.”

Patience! “Sure. So...?”

“Well, you know, I got coffee and left and—”

“What was Peet’s like — crowded, noisy, half-empty?”

“Pretty empty. I only had to wait behind one guy in line before I ordered, and he was just getting regular, not like Lisa and her macchiato.” He grinned at her, raking his fingers softly up and down her thigh.

“Keep checking the sidewalk, Mr. Janssen.”

“Oh, yeah, sure.”

“So you got your coffee—”

“Espresso.” His head twitched toward her but he caught himself before letting his gaze leave the window. “It was in a paper cup. I walked outside—”

“How did it strike you out there?”

“You mean, set the scene?”

“Exactly. You’re doing great.” The car was back at the Peet’s corner now, on Walnut. Crime scene tape was strung across the entry to the Walnut Square walkway. Tech lights shone off shop windows. The bark of radios cut through the buzz of talk.

Maduri hung a left onto Vine. Janssen was on the passenger side, looking toward the far side of the street across from Peet’s as he would have been when he came out the door with his espresso. In front of the coffee shop, the scene techs were laying down markers. Maduri didn’t want Janssen seeing that, coloring his memory of the scene.

An update flashed on the computer screen. Shelby’d read it, said nothing.

“So, Mr. Janssen, light? Dark, warm, cold, crowded...?”

“Well, you know, it was getting to be night. I remember now I was surprised. I mean I wasn’t in there more than a couple of minutes, but it seemed lots darker when I came out. And, you know, wet, like now. Like moist, but not raining.”

“You’re doing great. Were there people on the sidewalk?” Where was the suspect Callahan nabbed? Anyone else? Anyone who could be the killer?

“A couple, I think. Like I said, it was dark and cold and no one was hanging around, not like they do in the morning. These were, like, people going someplace.”

Maduri stopped at the light at Shattuck. “Where was Lampara, the victim? When you came out. Before the shots.”

“Dunno. He could have been... I didn’t pay attention to him till I heard the shots. Till I heard him groan. When I saw him go down.”

The girl squeezed his arm, but for the first time he didn’t seem to notice her.

“Tell me about it. See it. No, don’t close your eyes. See it in your mind. Keep looking out the window.” Maduri turned left onto Shattuck as he had minutes earlier. “That guy, in front of the Cheeseboard? Did you see him at Peet’s?”

“No,” Janssen responded so quickly it surprised him.

“Go on, Mr. Janssen. You walk out of Peet’s. You’re holding your cup. Did it have a lid?”

“It was just an espresso. I wasn’t going to be drinking it that long.”

“Okay, so you walk out...?”

“I come out the door there on the corner. I turn left, downhill. I get, like, to the Peet’s window, no farther. Like three steps from the doorway. I hear — wait! — I hear someone yell, ‘Mr. Lampara!’ and then the shot.”

This is it! Maduri struggled to keep his voice even. “What did it sound like? Man, woman, high, low, accent? Hear it now!”

Janssen was trying, trying to hear. Shelby was swallowing any reaction; Maduri’d seen him do that before when the witness was on the verge of something.

Maduri was trying not to tell Janssen not to squeeze his eyes closed.

Janssen was thinking.

“Don’t think! Remember!”

Janssen jerked.

Shit!

“Nothing special. I mean, it was like a growl, like right next to him. Just those two words: Mr. Lampara? Like a question.” Janssen’s jaw was quivering.

“Five thirty at night. How’d the killer just walk away?”

Did Shelby realize he was muttering aloud? Or was he just losing it?

Whatever. Maduri knew it was all up to him now. He checked the rearview. The girl was looking out the window; the boy’s expression was blank, his shoulder moving up and down in response to his hand on her thigh.

“I’m not surprised,” Shelby continued. “Lampara’s well known in this town. Well hated.”

Janssen and Kozlovski cocked their heads toward him. Almost in unison.

“You know what the Law of Karma is?”

“Sure,” Janssen said.

“Right. It’s the one law citizens in Berkeley respect.” Shelby uttered a weary chuckle. It was an old joke at the department. “I’ve been on the force a long time. I used to laugh when the new guys whined about driving up one block and down the next every morning, eyes out for a parking spot, them hauling themselves out of bed half an hour early to do it, to find parking within a mile of the station, then having to run to make the squad meeting. I didn’t respect the Law of Karma then, so I laughed. Then they bitch about coming back at the end of shift and finding a parking ticket on their windshields! Rite of passage, I’d tell them, and I’d still be chuckling when I walked the four blocks home to a sweet two-bedroom cottage I was renting there... Lampara, he taught me about karma. Evicted me. Flipped my house.”

Now Shelby drove an hour in traffic each way to the lesser house he could afford in the lesser town. The best he could say was that by the time he got there, he only had an hour or two to listen to the wife go on about the ugly streets, the bland neighbors, the boredom. The exile.

“Lampara was just beginning then,” Shelby went on in that musing voice, almost like he was inviting them all inside his head. “That was before he could buy four-plexes, eight-plexes, four-story places — and slumlord the tenants out. Mostly near campus. And then there was the fire last month, the grad student who died. You live near there, don’t you, Mr. Janssen?”

The girl jumped. Had Janssen squeezed her thigh that hard?

“You live near that apartment of his that burned, right? You must’ve heard the sirens, seen the engines roll in, the water, heard about the shitty wiring that sparked it. Didn’t you?”

“Yeah, but... Yeah.”

“You live across the street, right?” Shelby said. “Did you see the fire from your window, Mr. Janssen? Did you watch? Did you know the guy who died? In the flames? The smoke? Was he your friend, Brian? Did you see him at the window, trying to break the glass, Brian?”

Janssen was shaking, trying to get words out.

“Did you see his suitcase on the sidewalk? Taxi for the airport? To fly to LA? To get married? Did you see that? Did you know that? Did you, Brian?”

“Stop it. Just stop it, now!” The girl wrapped her arms around Janssen and pulled him to her. She was shaking too.

Maduri shot a glance at Shelby to see if the old guy had a plan or if he’d just lost it. If all those hours on the freeway had wadded into rage. Or if it wasn’t that. If, maybe, it was the boy who’d died in the fire. But all he saw was the back of Shelby’s head. Shelby was staring hard out the window, or just staring blankly. He said to Janssen, “Black, could be brown, hoodie ahead walking fast. What do you think?”

Now Janssen was staring hard, wanting it to be the suspect.

“Wait, wait! Slow down,” the girl said. “Think that’s him, Bri?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can we get closer?”

“Not without spooking him.”

The computer flashed. Shelby leaned toward it. “Wait! They’ve got something.”

Janssen stretched up to look over the seat.

“The guy on the street” — Lisa Kozlovski pointed frantically at the window — “what about him?”

“The jacket!” Shelby said. “They found the coat. Puffy hoodie. Bloodstains.”

Maduri flipped on the flasher and siren and pulled into the left lane. From inside the car it shrieked so loud that Maduri wanted to slam his hands over his ears. “Where’d—”

“Behind a fence on Walnut. Brown hoodie. Reddish-brown!” Shelby was reading off the computer. “Go! Let’s go!”

Maduri hung a hard U.

The back door popped open.

Janssen slid across the seat, grabbed for the cage wire, caught himself.

Lisa Kozlovski was gone.

Maduri slammed on the brakes. The crash from behind shocked him, sent Janssen into the cage. Sent Shelby into windshield.

The EMT van didn’t stop. Maduri was trying to make the call; he was cradling Shelby’s head. Lights flashed white, red. Sirens screamed.

A patrol officer pulled up, Maduri didn’t get his name. He flipped him the keys, muttered “Witness” toward Janssen, and pushed into the van with Shelby.

The first thing he did was cut her hair. He cut as gently as possible, but when she screamed and jerked away, nearly causing him to stab her cheek, he gagged her, then tied her hands to the back of a chair and her feet to a table leg. When he finished, there was a pond of hair at his feet. He swept and vacuumed and saved a few strands in an envelope. The second thing, he burned her clothes. The embroidered blouses and shawls, the hand-loomed pants and skirt, the head wraps, he had no choice. They were clothes that looked distinctive. They could easily be remembered. If she managed to get out, someone could identify her. People in Berkeley were curious about all things ethnic. No doubt a handsome young woman in ethnic garb, looking lost and far from home, would attract someone’s attention. If she didn’t stop them, they might approach her to ask where she was from. They might offer to get her help. Instead of her own clothes, he had bought jeans, T-shirts, and sweaters in the teen department at Macy’s. Dresses would have to wait. He’d bought socks in case her feet got cold, two pairs with rubber grips so she wouldn’t slip. A salesclerk picked out bras, panties, pajamas, and a fluffy robe. “Nothing sexy,” he told her. Later, when it was appropriate for her to go outside, he would get her a winter coat and a rain jacket. At the pharmacy, he purchased toiletries: sanitary napkins, rose-scented deodorant, dental floss, an electric toothbrush, etc. Next, he took away her flimsy plastic shoes. They aroused feelings of disgust in him which he couldn’t explain. Barefoot she was less likely to run away. He also locked up her jewelry (the gold earrings and shell and bead necklaces) and documents, including her passport. He couldn’t bring himself to destroy the documents. He told himself that entirely wiping away her past existence, like the name of her hamlet and family, was inhumane. He locked up the signed contract with her mother and the sales receipt for nine hundred dollars, which was a way to protect himself — that is, legally. Finally, he taught her yes, no, goodbye, hunger, and thirst in English and sign language.

In advance of her arrival, he’d had a portion of his attic renovated. The new soundproof walls had been painted pale blue, a color reputed to induce calm. He’d debated about a window, knowing that to gaze at trees and sky and hills was a great pastime, a source of spiritual renewal, especially for a child accustomed to the natural world. But in the end, he thought a window would only make her sad. The bed and dresser were new. The sheets were pima cotton, the duvet goose down, the pillows hypoallergenic. The bathroom had hot running water and a flush toilet, luxury conveniences for her. He’d considered installing a tub with the shower, but he feared she might try to drown herself. He placed a small bookshelf in the corner of the room with early readers, a pictorial dictionary, a simple atlas, and copies of National Geographic. He put a clock radio on the console and tuned it to KDFC, the classical music station. As far as he knew, she never changed the station or turned it off.

Most of the day, he sat near her at a small library table. They didn’t attempt to communicate, only sat. He read. He graded his students’ papers. He worked on the outline of a presentation he was to deliver at a conference in July. He wasn’t sure what she did. Eventually, he would find a way to have her tell him her earliest impressions. But for now, he hoped his presence was reassurance that he was taking care of her.

He prepared her meals himself. In the future, he might have to resort to frozen food, veggie burritos, Cheese Board pizza, or soup from Poulet, but the homemade fare was part of the way he welcomed her. He was a good cook, an avowed vegetarian since he read Lorca’s Poet in New York in college (“...the terrible cries of crushed cows fill the valley with sorrow where the Hudson gets drunk on oil...”). His students loved to be invited over for mushroom stroganoff and shepherd’s pie with green lentils. It was during his own lifetime that the preoccupation over food provenance had gone from fringe co-ops to mainstream. Berkeley had been in the vanguard of the food revolution. In the vanguard of many revolutions, he often said with pride.

She wouldn’t touch any of it. That he expected. His food and customs of eating were foreign. The last time he gave her something to eat, she’d slept for eighteen hours. Hoping to counter her fears, he set the table in her room for two. Two plates and bowls, two forks and spoons (no knives), linen napkins, glasses of water, cups of coffee at breakfast, iced tea at lunch, and a carafe of red wine at dinner with a single glass for himself. In the center of the table, he put a hand-painted vase with daffodils (in his humble opinion, the most cheerful flower in the world). At every meal, he demonstrated how to use the napkin and utensils. As he ate, he smiled. He made a grunt or two of pleasure. For three days, she ate nothing, but on the fourth morning, she unfolded her napkin and put it in her lap, then dipped her spoon in a bowl of hot buckwheat cereal that he’d mixed with manuka honey and roasted almonds. One spoonful, then another. After she finished, he patted her hand, conveying both approval and gratitude.

Meanwhile, he documented the details of their encounters in a database. He planned to write a book with the current working title of Pygmalion’s Paradox. But whether it was ultimately called Paradox or Plight was unclear. It was she who would determine the course of the relationship, and thus, the final title. She was the variable, he was the constant.

The long weekend was over. The days had passed without dramatic incident. She’d decided not to starve herself, which alone counted as success.

On Monday morning after breakfast, he made the sign for walking. On his fingers, he counted out the hours he’d be gone. Five or six. Then he pointed to the clock and tried to explain with the numerals when he would return. As he left, he bolted her door on the outside. It was a risk, he knew. If there were an earthquake, or fire, or landslide, she might not survive. Fire season was over, but with the recent heavy rains and flooding, and the ground hard from several years of drought, the runoff was tremendous. Two nearby streets had recently been blocked with debris. Asphalt had cracked and caved. A neighbor’s foundation had been compromised. Around town the roots of a dozen large trees had loosened, causing them to fall. There’d been one fatality when a tree crashed onto the roof of a moving car. Above Tilden Park, six families were ordered to evacuate before their houses slid down a hill. Where he lived, there were several tiers of houses above him, road after road that circled through the hills, each positioned with steep slopes into its downhill neighbor’s yard. And his house, built in 1898, was positioned at the lower end of the spiral with only brick pilings for a foundation. However, his house had survived earthquakes, fires, and landslides for over a hundred years. He trusted it would survive another day.

He put the Times into his satchel and walked down the hill, turning once to wave at the large brown-shingled house as if she could see him and wave back. From La Loma, he dropped onto Virginia Street where he paused to view the sparkling bay and dark hills of Marin. From where he stood, he saw almost nothing manmade. No sign of highways or blocks of commerce and housing, only the Golden Gate Bridge and perhaps a ship or barge. Bridge and barge were not enough to mar the view. Prelapsarian, he called it.

He entered campus through the North Gate. Rain-washed, it looked especially beautiful, everything shimmering in the cold blue air. The sylvan paths, the towering redwoods, the bare knobby limbs of the plane trees, and the Japanese magnolias dotting the grounds with their voluptuous winter blossoms. When the long, solemn chimes of the Campanile rang out like a muezzin’s call to prayer, he felt summoned to a higher purpose. The chimes, the brisk air, the pungent medley of bay laurel and wet leaves, the students on skateboards and bikes, the fresh, smiling faces, he was buoyed by their insouciance as if he’d fallen in love. He guessed it was the nearness of her.

His buoyance typically terminated at the entrance to Tolman Hall and the elevator ride to his office on the third floor. It galled him that the magnificent discipline of psychology, whose discoveries rivaled twentieth-century physics in its understanding of the universe of human behavior, was housed in one of the ugliest buildings on campus. And that mining, the most destructive of all human endeavors, should occupy the university’s most elegant building with palladium windows and a pantile roof. He took it as a personal affront, but when he remarked on this “disgrace” to the department head, his comment was deemed a joke. A good joke that passed among his colleagues so that they started to mutter disgrace under their breath whenever they passed him, and break out in laughter.

He was popular with students, his courses famous for their eccentric syllabi. The readings for this semester’s seminar, The Psychology of Slavery, included Story of O. In his generation, no other book was so eagerly devoured (except Laing’s The Politics of Experience). Now, it was a rarity to find a student who’d heard of it.

Today’s question under discussion — Are there happy slaves? — sprang from a chapter in Frederick Law Olmsted’s The Cotton Kingdom. Before Olmsted became the country’s premiere landscape architect, he was hired by the Times to chronicle the South and its peculiar institution. He wrote as a journalist, an agronomist, an abolitionist, and periodically described the plantation of a “good” master, whose slaves lived in sturdy housing with adequate food, bonuses in dollars and provisions, and free time to cultivate their own gardens and engage in crafts to earn extra money. Consequently, they worked harder, with fewer whippings, for their good master than their fellow immiserated slaves.

One student suggested that “happy slaves” was inherently racist. Another countered that slavery was colorblind until Europeans invaded Africa. A third remarked that in ancient texts, citing the Iliad and Gilgamesh, slaves were honored to serve a noble master, causing another to protest, “Those were servants, not slaves.” At one point, he suggested they unload the terminology of master-slave, and substitute it with free versus unfree. At the lowest end of “unfree” were war slaves, work slaves, prisoners, orphans, captives, even a battered wife or child. But what actually constituted free? What were its physical, mental, and ontological parameters? Or was it easier to define freedom by its restraints on the individual or collective, such as prejudices, expectations, prohibitions, impositions, desires, customs, and laws? These were questions that had absorbed him for the last two decades.

After class, the seminar usually adjourned for a few minutes and reconvened at Caffe Strada. “I’m sorry to disappoint you today,” he said, apologizing to the loyal group awaiting him. “But I have...”

“We understand,” a student said.

“A puppy,” he said.

“What kind? What’s its name?” they asked.

He was surprised by their enthusiasm.

“It’s a little mutt I’m taking care of... Aimee,” he said.

“If you need help walking Aimee or anything,” a girl offered.

Aimee was the name he’d chosen to call her. Not only was it his mother’s name, but those two long vowels (a and e) were sufficiently elementary for a dullard to pronounce, if dullard she proved to be. However, he was certain from the first and only time she’d looked him in the eye that he had read her correctly. And in making his final selection, it was not her lovely face, or sheen of her skin, or strength of her well-formed limbs, or straight white teeth, but the spark of a deep intelligence. What she had called herself and what she was called by family and friends — her name would be the last thing expunged. After months or perhaps years, the person of Aimee would override her past.

When he went to her mother to negotiate, by way of introduction, he’d announced to the family that he was a tenured professor at a university in California with a doctoral degree in psychology. He also mentioned he was an accomplished pianist and fluent in German and French. And although he had prepared an explanation of his intentions, no one was interested. He guessed they normally met hustlers and pimps and would assume he was a liar.

They were liars, too. He’d been told she was eighteen, but he estimated fifteen or sixteen; she was malleable and frightened, the youngest girl of eleven children.

“You making baby?” the mother asked, giving him a wink. Prostitution and fertility were the reason that men came.

Her question horrified him, as if he were a common trafficker. “No, thank you,” he said, baffling whoever heard him.

The lush mountains, the simple communal life, the tearful farewells, the exchange of money nearly changed his mind. But he rationalized. Throughout his life, for whatever he wanted, he’d been taught (albeit, expected) to rationalize.

Zipping his jacket, adjusting his blue-and-gold Bears beanie, and winding his muffler around his neck, he now walked out of the campus across Hearst Avenue alongside a mob of students en route to La Val’s for pizza and beer. He recalled the defunct art cinema behind La Val’s where he’d seen WR: Mysteries of the Organism thirty-plus years ago. At the time, he’d been interested in Reich and thought he might build an orgone box in his backyard. Another unrealized scheme.

“Dreamer,” his mother used to say instead of loser.

He continued to climb Eunice to Virginia, and struggling uphill, he reached the corner of La Loma and the small concrete staircase built as a parapet, its sharp right angle offering a corner where he could stand. Every afternoon, he stopped there to catch his breath and watch the western light on the water. He was always tired and less hopeful than in the morning.

“Aimee,” he cried softly, and hurried home.

First of all, I think it’s only appropriate for me to extend a hearty congratulations to my fellow graduates (and to all you proud family members)! I’ve been there with you these past four years and I understand how you all must feel, sitting up there on that stage.

But as much as I would love to recount all the ups and downs of the past four years, as much as I would enjoy reminiscing about Spirit Weeks past and shedding a tear over the last days of our youth, a higher duty calls me to task. What I present before you, in this, my last column as editor of the Berkeley High Jacket, is a tale that needs to be told, burns to be told, even if some people out there (Mrs. Eliason!) won’t be happy I’m telling it.

By now, some of you (especially all you proud family members) might be wondering: Who the heck is this guy? What is he talking about? I thought this was the graduation edition of the Berkeley High Jacket.

I can assure you that this is indeed the graduation edition of the Berkeley High Jacket. In the rest of these pages you will find the traditional fare for such an issuance. On pages 6–9, you can see where your dear child and their friends are going to college (as if you didn’t already know!). On pages 12–15, you can read a variety of melancholy farewells to our fair school. And so on and so forth.

If you would rather not read this story, you are obviously free to turn the page. But I can assure you that you will be glad to have read it.

The events in question began late one Wednesday night a few months ago (actually, technically, it was early Thursday morning). As the editor of this fair paper, it was my responsibility to drive the finished proofs down to our printer in Fremont once every other week. It’s a long drive, and on my way home, I would often stop at a little park near my dad’s house.

You may be familiar with Indian Rock, around the corner. You may also know Grotto Rock, a few blocks up the hill. Chances are, though, you’ve never heard of Mortar Rock, which is why I like it. There’s almost never anyone there.

On the night in question, I was coming home particularly late. The moon was high and white and the streets were empty. I parked across the street from the rock and climbed to the top, which is when I noticed the two men in a beat-up white Volvo.

There are any number of reasons why two men might be sitting in a beat-up white Volvo across the street from a park at two thirty in the morning. But these two seemed a little shady. They were both uncommonly large, with Nordic features and a slightly dented appearance that seemed out of place in the neighborhood. Was I stereotyping? Yes, my fellow graduates, I was. And, like any good Berkeley High student, I felt bad for succumbing to my biases. But as we will see, my biases, in this case at least, were spot on.

After sitting quietly on top of the rock for five or ten minutes (not smoking a joint or anything like that), I realized that there was someone else in the park with me: a tall, gangly man bent over a trash can. It took me a moment to process that this man, digging frantically through the trash in a public park at two thirty in the morning, was none other than my English teacher, Mr. Balz.

As most of my fellow graduates know, Mr. Balz is not your typical teacher. He can recite Beowulf by heart in Old English. He often delivers Shakespearean monologues from atop his desk. And once he dedicated an entire period of my Bible As Literature class to the poetry of Liz Phair. I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of Mr. Balz. (My own personal feeling is that he’s kind of a poser.) But I also don’t have any particular ill will toward him. And I’ve always thought that the jokes about his name are a little cheap.

So there we were. Me and Mr. Balz, staring at each other across Mortar Rock.

“Michael Lukas,” he said in the same voice he used to call my name off the roll sheet. “AP British Literature.”

There was a short silence, then a car door slammed and Mr. Balz took off running.

Those Scandinavians were big but they were fast. Half a block down the hill, the dark-haired one caught up with Mr. Balz and grabbed his shirt while the blond one tackled him to the ground. There were some grunts and a crunching sound as bone hit asphalt. Before Mr. Balz could shout for help, the Scandinavians duct-taped his mouth, bound his wrists, and carried him to the trunk of the Volvo. You could have been sleeping in your bed a few dozen yards away (perhaps some of you were) and not heard a thing.

If I were a less reliable narrator, I would tell you that I leaped into action right then and there. I would say that I put my dislike for Mr. Balz aside, hopped in my dad’s Subaru, and sped after the Scandinavians on a wild chase through Tilden Park. But the truth is, after watching all this transpire, after seeing my AP British Literature teacher tackled, stuffed into a trunk, and driven to who knows where, I did nothing.

I drove home and spent the rest of the night with my covers pulled up over my head, praying the Scandinavians hadn’t seen me or heard my name. Sometime in the dark hours of the morning, I decided that the most prudent course of action was no action at all. I would keep this whole thing to myself, wipe what I had seen from my mind, then finish up the school year and head off to college.

But, as Mr. Balz often said, the truth will out. That next morning, when I saw Sarah Meyers at the bus stop, I couldn’t help but tell her.

“Wait, what?”

“They put him in the trunk and drove away.”

Sarah stared at me, squinting, like she wasn’t sure I was even real. “What?”

Most of my fellow graduates probably know Sarah Meyers. For those who don’t, I would describe her thusly: She has bright red hair. She does not suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. And she always keeps a box of Froot Loops in her backpack. She’s two parts Joan Didion, one part Simone de Beauvior, and one part Courtney Love. Some people say she took the SATs on acid, which may or may not be true. What I know for sure is that she aced them, and that she’s going to Columbia next fall on a full scholarship.

“Did you call the police?”

“I—”

“Did you tell your parents? Did you tell anyone?”

“I told you.”

“And what am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Clearly.”

She swung her backpack around and dug into the Fruit Loops. “Okay,” she said midchew, “here’s what we’re going to do. First, we’re going to go over to his house and check things out.”

“Now?” I had a calculus test second period, we both did. More importantly, I didn’t want to run into those Scandinavians again.

“Yeah, now,” she said, already walking down the hill. “OR, do you not consider this an urgent situation?”

Mr. Balz’s house was on one of those tiny streets off Indian Rock Road, a three-story brown shingle with a front yard so overgrown you could barely see the house itself. The bottom-floor windows were all covered with sun-faded tapestries and the mailbox was stuffed full of junk.

“It was his grandparents’ house,” Sarah said, standing in the driveway. “I think his grandpa was a judge or some kind of politician?”

“Very interesting,” I said. “Now, how are we going to get in?”

Sarah gave a little smile and hoisted herself up over the fence. “I just might know where he keeps the hide-a-key.”

Most of my fellow graduates will probably have heard some of the rumors about Sarah and Mr. Balz. You might have heard that they went camping together last summer, took mushrooms, and stayed up late into the night reading passages of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. You might have heard Cindy Lee say she saw Sarah coming out of Mr. Balz’s house. I don’t know if any of these rumors are true. They probably aren’t. What I do know is that their relationship goes beyond what most people would think is appropriate. Sarah once told me she considered Mr. Balz “more of a friend than a teacher” and I know that he wrote her a recommendation letter that used the phrase beautiful mind at least three times.

“Is this how his house usually looks?” I asked once we were both inside.

There was mail scattered around the entryway. Half-filled mugs lined the stairs. And a huge oak dining table blocked the way to the kitchen.

Sarah turned and looked me dead in the eye. “How much of a slut do you think I am?”

“I don’t,” I said. “But I mean, you’ve been here before, right? You knew where the hide-a-key was.”

“I’ve been here twice. Once for a study group, and once to feed his cats when he was out of town. And yes, it does usually look like this.”

I followed Sarah up to the third floor and into a bedroom that seemed to be inhabited almost entirely by cats. There were litter boxes everywhere, little felt mice, and nests of old fabric. Two black cats stalked the edges of the room while an orange one stared down at me from the top of an eight-foot-high scratching post. I turned to say something to Sarah, but she was already crouched down in front of a small safe at the back of the closet.

“You’re going to try to guess the combination?”

She looked back over her shoulder, still spinning the knob. “I’m guessing it’s the same as it was when I was house-sitting,” she said. As she fiddled with the knobs, one of the black cats doubled back and rubbed its flank against her knee. “Two, two, seventy-four.” The safe popped open and she smiled to herself. “But at the length truth will out.” When I didn’t catch her reference, she explained: “Mr. Balz’s favorite line in all of Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice. Act two, scene two, line seventy-four.” She took out a sheaf of papers and leafed through them. After a few moments, she held up a manila folder. “Bingo.”

In the top right-hand corner was one word, written in Mr. Balz’s distinctive block letters: Evidence.

At this point we probably should have gone straight to the police. At the very least, we should have been more careful with the evidence. Instead, Sarah and I sat down in the middle of the floor and began going through the folder, piece by piece.

“This is what he was talking about,” she said under her breath. “He was always saying how shady Mrs. Eliason is.”

She laid out two pieces of paper (schoolwide test results, both reproduced here for your benefit) and was beginning to explain what they meant, how they might have been manipulated, and so on, when there was a crash downstairs.

“One of the cats?”

Sarah shook her head. “Come on.” She motioned for me to follow her upstairs to the attic, a dusty open room filled with banker’s boxes and old surfing equipment. Downstairs, there were the muffled sounds of conversation, then another crash.

“Did you take the files?”

I looked down at my hands. “I have these,” I said, still holding the two pieces of paper we’d been looking at.

“Great,” she said, jiggling one of the windows at the other side of the room.

“I thought you had it.”

“Nope.”

When the window wouldn’t open, Sarah wrapped an old wetsuit around her hand.

“What are you doing?”

“Come on,” she said as she punched through the window and stepped out onto the roof. “Don’t be such a baby.”

For those of you who have never been on top of a roof, I will tell you this: two stories is a heck of a lot higher than you think. From where we were standing, Mr. Balz’s backyard looked like it was about fifty feet down. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. It probably is. In any case, it was not a jumpable distance, not by any stretch of the imagination. But don’t tell that to Sarah Meyers.

I can’t say exactly what happened next except that one moment she was peering through the sunlight in the middle of the roof. The next she was jumping into an overgrown hedge. There was a crash and a long silence. Then she crawled out from under the hedge. Her face was pretty scratched up and there was a massive gash on her hand. Still, she was smiling.

“It’s not as far as you think,” she called up.

“I don’t know. It looks pretty far.”

Just then, the attic door shook. There was a quick shout, a grunt, and the doorframe splintered. Another few seconds and there would be no more door.

My fellow graduates, I would like to tell you that I reacted to this situation with cool detachment. But the truth is, I fell. In the grips of fear and indecision, I lost my footing and slid to the edge of the roof, whereupon I somehow caught my arm on the gutter and dropped the fifty or twenty or fifteen feet to the ground.

I blinked. I was still alive, but my leg was on fire. No, it was fire. Molten pain.

“I think I broke my leg,” I said as Sarah helped me up.

“If you broke your leg you wouldn’t be able to walk,” she replied. “And anyways, we’re not walking anywhere. We’re getting the fuck out of here.”

She dumped me into the backseat of Mr. Balz’s old Audi, and seven harrowing minutes later we arrived, mostly intact, at our destination: the Berkeley Police Department parking lot.

The woman at the front desk seemed to recognize Sarah. “Detective James?” she asked, and without waiting for Sarah to respond, she buzzed us back.

“Detective James helped me out when I was getting that restraining order against Tom Kantor,” Sarah explained.

“Oh,” I said, not sure how else to respond. I hadn’t heard about any restraining order. I just thought they had a bad breakup.

“He’s a sweetie,” Sarah said. “Not Tom — he’s a dick — the detective. A little rough around the edges, but very avuncular.”

When we walked into his office, the very avuncular Detective James was having a little nap, leaning back in his chair, his chin tucked into the soft pillow of his chest.

“What?” he barked awake, softening when he saw Sarah. “Meyers. That little pervert still bothering you?”

“No sir,” Sarah said. She was sitting up straight. Her eyes were open in a kind of vulnerable and hopeful tilt. “It’s something else, something about our English teacher.”

“Okay.”

She turned to me.

“So,” I started, “I guess it was, sir, I suppose it all began—”

“Son,” Detective James interrupted me, “take a deep breath. This isn’t story time. And you aren’t being interrogated. Just tell me what happened. Plain-like. Start to finish.”

“All right.” I took a deep breath. Then I told him everything: the Scandinavians at Mortar Rock, Mr. Balz’s house, the documents.

“And you gained entry to the house with a key?”

“Yes sir,” Sarah said.

“The location of which Mr. Balz informed you of previously?”

“Yes sir.”

“And the safe?”

“It was open,” Sarah lied without blinking an eye.

“The safe was open?”

“Yes sir.”

Detective James leaned back in his chair and held the documents in question up to the light. He thought for a few rattling breaths, then wrote a couple things on a yellow legal pad.

While he was writing, Sarah glanced down at her phone. Something she saw made her jaw loosen slightly. She drummed her fingers on the desk, as if trying to make out a difficult equation, then slipped the phone back in her bag.

“Here’s my number,” Detective James told me. He pointed to a yellowed stack of business cards on the corner of his desk and I took one. “Call me if you see those Scandinavians again.”

Sarah stood up and swung her bag around her shoulder.

“Wait,” I said, “don’t you need us to, I don’t know, help out?”

“Help out?” Detective James chortled a little. “No, son. We’ll take it from here.”

“But how—”

“Like I said, we’ll take it from here. The case is in good hands.”

Keisha waited until everyone else left the office. It was Friday night and nobody seemed to be working late. Still, she shoved her sweatshirt up against the bottom of the door, in case any light could be seen. Only then did she turn on the fluorescent light in the windowless copy room.

A few weeks before, she had swiped a contract on letterhead from a real estate agency. Earlier that day, she had borrowed a coworker’s computer to write the fake lease for a rental apartment. She had copied the language off the Internet, but was anxious about any spelling or grammatical errors. Especially because she couldn’t save a forged document on a company computer. She had sat at her data-entry cubicle during lunch, reading the words over and over until they blurred, proofreading it to the best of her ability.

That night in the copy room, she cut and pasted and made copies of copies, until she had a reasonable-looking forgery on fine linen paper. She squinted at it in the glaring fluorescent. It looked legit. It “proved” that she rented a two-bedroom apartment in Berkeley.

Keisha and her seven-year-old son Marchand lived in Holloway, a few towns north of Berkeley, just past Richmond at the end of the BART line. Holloway’s student population was nearly all black and Latino, but the teachers were predominantly white. All of the schools were performing far below the national average, and the district was on the verge of bankruptcy. Her son had been bullied by bigger boys, and one of the teachers had been fired for hitting a student. Apparently, the administration had tolerated it for years, but one of the staff had caught it on video, and it had gone viral on social media.

That was the last straw. Keisha wasn’t going to allow her son to be in a school where white teachers were physically abusive. But she couldn’t afford private school. Even a partial scholarship was out of the question. Bay Area rents were exorbitant.

When she first got pregnant with Marchand, she and her boyfriend had a great one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment in Richmond. She was working at the law office doing data entry. Her boyfriend was working as a security guard at the mall. They had enough income to save for the baby. But one night, her boyfriend got stopped by the cops for no apparent reason. Ultimately, he was hauled off for resisting arrest and battery on an officer. The dashboard cams, however, had been turned off. They beat him badly enough that he was in the hospital for a week. Then he was locked up.

Keisha gave up the apartment and moved in with her mom in Holloway. She was numb with grief for the first couple weeks, then she cried for another month.

“Girl,” her mother had told her two weeks before her due date, “you need to stop all that crying and get ready to have this baby.”

Her ex-boyfriend’s mom called after the video went viral of the teacher hitting the student. “One of my friends from church called me,” said the woman who would have been her mother-in-law. “She asked me, Isn’t that your grandson’s school in Holloway?”

The two of them talked, and Marchand’s grandmother offered Keisha the use of her address to get Marchand into the Berkeley public schools. They had much better test scores, and Berkeley was the first district in the US to voluntarily desegregate in the 1960s. They wouldn’t have crazy racist white teachers hitting the kids.

The mother-in-law put Keisha’s name on her energy bill to document her residency, and Keisha breathed a sigh of relief.

But when she went in to the district office to figure out how to register her son for school, there was much more documentation required.

The Gilman District, newly named by realtors, was mostly industrial a few years ago. You’d go there for Urban Ore if you needed a broke-down couch to replace your more-broke-down couch. There was a body shop and a good Mexican restaurant, perhaps too good because it brought in too many urban pioneers on the hunt for good manchamanteles. From famous red mole to the Gilman District. There goes the neighborhood.

I had been coming to West Berkeley since the aughts, yes, for the mole, but also for the books. SPD for the poetry, and Jeff Maser’s place for used, rare modern firsts, just to browse and occasionally to sell something. I do a little book scouting, although not full time like in the old days. It just doesn’t pay, and I get a little freelance work as, believe it, an unlicensed detective, something I sort of backed into that now pays the bill at Berkeley Bowl and for the rent-controlled studio southside.