Murder Alfresco #3 (9 page)

“Definitely,” said Wade. “No cream, by the way. I haven’t been to the market lately. No sugar either, but I have syrup.”

“For my coffee?”

“It’s just like honey, but maple flavor.” Wade twisted the top of the maple syrup, scowling at its stubbornness.

“Here.” Sunny twisted the top off easily and poured some syrup in her coffee.

“The McCoskey brute strength.”

“Anything red open?”

Wade took a bottle of Zin from the counter and she added a splash to her coffee. “It would become a message of intimidation.”

They pulled chairs up to the old wooden table. A new three-legged ceramic pot, a souvenir from his recent trip to Mexico, stood in the middle of it.

“Right,” said Wade. “If Farber left a human head and entrails on my doormat, I would be worried about my next trip out to the woodshed.”

“Exactly. And why would he want you to feel that way? What is to be gained by making someone afraid of you?”

“They do what you want,” said Wade. “You can control them.”

“My thinking exactly. I think somebody at the winery knows that message was for them,” said Sunny. “Somebody over there is very, very nervous right now. We’ll find out who it is eventually, because they’ll crack under the pressure. That is going to be the cops’ biggest lead.” She tasted the coffee. “Odd, but not bad.”

“Except that the message didn’t get delivered as it was intended,” said Wade. “You intercepted it. All that got through was that a girl was killed. What if that’s not enough? What if they don’t know it was for them? Nobody saw her but you.”

“Right again. The police haven’t identified her yet. That’s when the fur is going to fly, when the name is released. If I heard a man was killed and left in a tree at Wildside, I’d be upset. But if I learned it was a guy named Monty Lenstrom, for example, I’d freak out.”

Wade went to the kitchen and came back with a slab of cheddar cheese and a couple of apples. He cut both into wedges and added dishes of walnuts and raisins to the spread.

“You eat like a hunter-gatherer,” said Sunny.

“If cheese grew wild, I’d never go to the grocery store again.” He walked into his office and returned with a newspaper. He put the front page down in front of Sunny. “I wasn’t going to show you this. I thought you might want a break from all this business. But since you brought it up.”

The entire top half of the front page of the
Santa Rosa Press Democrat
was dedicated to the girl with the long black hair. Sunny read the article three times, wringing each sentence for every nuance of meaning. She had been identified as Heidi Romero. Her family had reported her missing on Thursday night after she never showed up for work that day. She was twenty-six, grew up in Rohnert Park, and lived in Sausalito, a little fishing village turned tourist destination right across the Golden Gate
from San Francisco. She worked at the REI in Corte Madera. Her coworkers said she loved being outside, mountain biking, and surfing. Her mother said they knew something was wrong when they found her car in the parking lot and her purse inside her house. Sergeant Harvey was identified as the investigating officer and quoted as saying his team was pursuing a number of leads and awaiting the coroner’s report.

Next to the article was a photograph of Heidi Romero at the beach. She had just come out of the water and was standing with her arm around her surfboard and an ecstatic smile on her face. Sunny studied her. Was there any chance this sporty, wholesome-looking girl was into serious bondage? Can you tell who has that kind of kink just by looking? People have their secrets.

“How do you get from this picture to what I saw Wednesday night?” asked Sunny. “Those two worlds aren’t supposed to meet. Not ever.”

“If I knew,” said Wade, “I’d be knocking down somebody’s door right now.”

They spent the morning hiking the hillside vineyard, examining bud break and pulling weeds. Wade cursed like a pirate whenever he spotted a growth of thistle, pulling it up with passionate hatred. His vitriol continued between offenses. “Thorny bastards,” he muttered. “How dare they open up shop in my vineyard. I’d sooner burn the place down than let the thistle have it.”

At lunchtime, they visited the garden for greens, baby carrots, and green onion. Sunny made an omelet and salad and rubbed toasted slices of peasant bread with garlic. After lunch,
they opened a bottle of Wade’s experimental Sangiovese and sat down to stick labels on the Zinfandel harvested four years earlier that was finally ready to be released. When the sun went down, Wade followed her home and they watched his DVD of
The Adventures of Robin Hood
with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, a film they could both recite.

Andre came in late and left early. Sunny stayed in bed. She wanted the forgetfulness of sleep.

It was a garden party
like any other. Sunny held a paper plate loaded with food and chatted with people she seemed to know. The afternoon sun warmed the patio pleasantly. Through the trees, she could see a green slope. Beyond it was the pale blue of the open sea. Just inside the trees stood Heidi Romero. She was wearing a skirt and blouse and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She beckoned to Sunny with a smile, inviting her to come over so she could tell her something. Sunny stared, her heart racing.

“You can’t be here,” she said. “You’re. . . You’re. . .” The word would not come out. She tried to say it, but her throat would permit no air, no sound to pass.

Heidi smiled, encouraging her to walk over so they could talk.

Sunny shook her head. “You can’t be here. You’ve been. . . You’ve been. . .” It was as though the words lodged in her throat. She woke gasping for air.

“This was one of those super-realistic, vivid dreams, exactly like it was really happening,” said Sunny, huddled over a cup of tea.
It was still early on Sunday morning, but she had decided to call Rivka anyway. If Rivka was seeing someone, it would be different. She wouldn’t call and wake up two people. But since Rivka had ended her romance with Alex Campaglia, she’d been in a dry spell. “What do you think it means?”

“It’s more important to know what you think it means,” said Rivka, yawning. “It’s a message from your subconscious, not mine. Tell me again what happened in the dream. Give me the high-level summary.”

“Heidi wanted to talk with me, but I refused to go over to her. I was afraid of her because she’s dead. I tried to say so, but I couldn’t.”

“And what about when you woke up? How did you feel?”

“I was sorry that I hadn’t allowed her to speak to me. I wished I hadn’t been afraid. I wanted to know what she was trying to tell me.”

“Well,” said Rivka, “that seems pretty clear. You couldn’t say the word
dead
because she’s not dead in your mind. She is still very much alive in your subconscious. There is still something Heidi Romero needs to tell you, and you’re going to have to overcome your fear in order to find out what it is.”

“Fear of what?” said Sunny.

“Well, in a murder there are plenty of things to fear, but this is probably something more elemental, less rational. Death itself, maybe. You couldn’t say the word and you avoided her because she’d dead. Maybe you have to overcome your fear of death in order to find out what she is trying to tell you. Or maybe, as far as your subconscious is concerned, she’s not dead. Her spirit is still with you. Maybe you picked her up like a hitchhiker by being the first one to discover the body.”

“Where did you get that idea?”

“Nowhere in particular.”

Sunny thought that if Heidi’s spirit was lingering anywhere, it was more likely at Vedana Vineyards. That was what was bothering her. Endings were important. To end up hanging in a tree, caught up literally and figuratively in somebody else’s nightmare, was not a fate she was willing to allow Heidi Romero to endure for all eternity. Something so ugly could not be the end of what sounded like a very pretty life. Maybe the best thing she could do was try to help her make a transition from the hell of her last hours back to someplace she felt at home. “I think I need to see the water,” said Sunny.

“Like maybe where she liked to surf?” said Rivka.

“She lived in Sausalito. Where would you surf if you lived in Sausalito?”

“I have no idea. But I know someone who’ll know. I’ll call while you drive over.”

“See you in fifteen.”

They drove down Highway 29 and turned west at the 120 split, heading into the Carneros hills. A delicate light touched the vineyard-covered hillsides and turned the sky exuberant blue. At 101, they went south, passing the rolling green hills of San Rafael, the Space Age civic center building famously designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and finally the downhill stretch to Mill Valley. It was still early enough for the freeway to be empty. Rivka looked toward the upcoming exit.

“Coffee at the Depot?”

“I was thinking Caffe Trieste,” said Sunny.

“Sounds good,” said Rivka.

They topped the final rise and the truck gathered speed down the other side, rounding a turn at the bottom that opened up a
view of the bay, from the mansions of Tiburon to the eucalyptus-covered slopes of Angel Island, the concrete edifice of Alcatraz, and beyond, the distant high-rises of San Francisco crowding the water’s edge. To the east, the ridge line of the Oakland Hills ran the length of the horizon. Sunny turned off and cruised into the seaside town of Sausalito.

“If we talk to anyone, we’re friends of Heidi Romero,” she said. “Nothing more. I don’t want to get into anything about finding the body.”

“Right.”

They parked on the main street in front of the Sausalito marina. The café was peppered with locals, up early to beat the tourists. The guy behind the bar had a grizzled look, with unshaved whiskers and a wide, red face. His fingers were fat as sausages. Sunny ordered a latte and watched him under-tamp the grounds and over-heat a pot of milk. Rivka sighed.

“Would you mind if I gave that a try?” she said.

“You wanna make your own coffee?” the barista joked, his face breaking into a gaping smile. He poured the scorched milk on top of the watery shot, turning it a uniform, ashen gray. “Be my guest.”

Rivka came around behind the counter. “That thing you just made? That’s not a latte, that’s a laxative. Let me show you how to make a real latte. First you warm the milk, gently. Then you need a shot with a nice, golden layer of crema on top.”

The barista took Sunny’s money, looking amused, while Rivka pounded the old puck out of the portafilter and whipped the espresso station into shape.

Sunny carried a glass of water out to the terrace to watch the boats while Rivka conducted coffee school. A few minutes later, she and the barista arrived at the table, bearing perfectly layered Chavez-style lattes.

“Your friend knows what she’d doing, I’ll give her that,” he said, standing in front of them with his hands on his hips, shielding the view of the marina like a partition.

“And she’s not afraid to say so,” said Sunny, putting down the paper she’d been reading. She tapped the front page. “Sad story. This was a local girl, right?”

“That’s right. She lived over on one of the houseboats docked at the end of town. A real shame. She came into the café sometimes.” He looked around at the tables and picked up a dirty plate and napkin.