She reached her hand up for him to help her up, and he grabbed her and pulled her up and into his wetsuit—which was wet. He was so strong that her almost-six-foot body caught air as her feet came off the ground and she slammed into his chest. It had become a running gag for them; it got her every time. He looked tall and thin, maybe a little wiry, but he was stronger than any guy she’d ever met. It was like being with André the Giant. She threw her head back and laughed.
He set her back on her feet.
“What are you doing? Do you want to get something to eat?” he asked.
“No, I have work to do.” She glanced up at the sidewalk and saw that quite a crowd had gathered—a lot of people for a Wednesday, watching as the sun took its final dip into the ocean. Dave knew all of them.
“Really?” He grabbed a towel he’d left in the sand before he went surfing and wrapped it around his waist. “You got a case?”
“Well, sort of.” She’d been dreading this part. “Actually, after my run this morning, there was a note on my door.”
Dave was doing the surfer striptease: surfers perfected changing out of their wetsuits in public without showing skin. He had wrapped a towel around his waist, and now he was easing his wetsuit off underneath the towel. “What kind of note?”
Madison explained about the threat and her idea that it had to do with tweets she’d sent out. She told him she’d given the note to Tom, a friend in the police department, and that he was looking into it.
“Okay, so the police have it. What do you have to do?”
“I have to figure out who wrote the note!”
Dave had gotten his wetsuit off and was now pulling his board shorts on under the towel.
“No, the police do. And I don’t like that this guy knows where you live.”
Madison pulled her sweatshirt off, which was now wet, and tied it around her waist. “Oh, you ‘don’t like it’? You’re staking a claim to me now and I have to do what you say?”
Dave had gotten his shorts on and removed the towel, which he folded and set on the rock. He looked at Madison but saw something over the top of her head on the street. He looked up and waved ruefully at someone. Madison didn’t turn around to see who he was waving at.
“No,” he said, looking back at her. “I’m not ‘staking a claim,’ and you wouldn’t like it if I did. But I can worry about you, can’t I?” He reached out and touched the part of the scar that was peeking out from underneath her tank top. “Even if you are a badass, Madison Kelly.”
She grabbed his finger. “Stop it, freak.”
He bent down and kissed her. Sometimes she thought the only reason she kept him around was because of the way they kissed.
“Wow,” she said. “What if one of your girlfriends sees us?”
“Oh my God Maddie, I don’t have ‘girlfriends.’”
“Right, Dave, save it for the judge,” she said. “I have to go.”
He laughed and she turned and walked up the path.
* * *
She had left Dave on the beach, grabbed something to eat, and then taken a nap. She wanted to go to the Gaslamp District late at night and get a feel for the scene. She arrived around eleven PM, when things were just starting to hop. She parked her car in the same parking lot Elissa had used the night she disappeared, around the corner from Bourbon Baby, the club where she was last seen.
Madison walked all the way down Fourth Avenue to Hank’s Dive, the bar where Samantha was last seen alive. She didn’t see much; she hoped this trip wasn’t a waste of time.
She wouldn’t try to interview the staff at the bars in the middle of a busy night. She would need to come back in the early afternoon for that. However, whenever she started a case, she needed to get a feel for the scene, and like it or not, this was the scene: music blaring out of restaurants and clubs, people walking in twos and fours and groups in various levels of intoxication, couples on first and second dates slipping into nice restaurants with cute patios on red-brick streets. Hank’s was just as obnoxious as she had remembered it; in fact, there was a fight on the street in front of the bar that she deftly avoided. As she jogged to safety a block away, she wondered why she’d bothered to come down there. Sure, it was the “scene,” but she’d been to the Gaslamp before and knew what it was like at night. I had to start somewhere, she thought. And she was trying to keep her mind off the fact that she was taking on a case that seemed insurmountable, and she wasn’t even getting paid for it. She needed a starting point. A toehold. She’d thought she might find it in the Gaslamp, but she hadn’t. Feeling defeated, Madison walked back to her car from Hank’s.
The summer air felt soft on her face. The air feels different at night; like hope. She heard a sound—swoosh—and she stopped abruptly and leaned her hand on the wall next to her. Sometimes pockets of sadness came out of nowhere and took her by surprise—like a punch to the gut. If she waited, it passed.
Her father had started having seizures their last week in the Windansea condo; she’d had to admit him to a hospice for regular medication and monitoring. The hospice was in a beautiful setting on a hill overlooking Mission Valley, not far from where she stood in the Gaslamp District. Her father lay trapped in his bed and in his thoughts, the brain tumor sitting on a part of his brain making him unable to understand what he saw out of his eyes. So he kept them closed.
“What’s that sound?” he’d asked.
She’d looked up from a Sue Grafton novel she was rereading for the third time. She hadn’t heard anything, and she thought her father, a genius who’d ungracefully fought every loss to his senses because he missed them more than most, was imagining it.
“There it is again!” he said, and then she heard it. A swoosh. She got up from the couch in his hospice room and stepped outside to the private garden. She looked over the cliff to the Fashion Valley mall below and saw the red electric trolley pulling away from the station at the mall. Swoosh.
“It’s a trolley,” she reported when she got back in the room.
“A trolley,” he said. “That’s perfect.” And then he fell asleep.
For the next week, as her father slipped into a coma and she waited for the inevitable, the swoosh of the trolley kept her company. It was a dreamy sound, like a train whistle: the hope of brighter days in distant places. It became the sound of her dreams.
Back in the Gaslamp District, the trolley had passed, and so had her melancholy. She lifted her hand off the wall and wiped it on her jeans. The brushing motion caused her bracelet to catch on her jeans and fly off. It landed in the crevice between two buildings. Madison at first tried to reach between the buildings to get the bracelet; she could just barely see the silver clasp where the streetlight hit it at an angle. The buildings were built as a pair, and the developers had really tried to keep them on the same lot—to the point that they were almost touching. It was no good. She couldn’t reach it.
She probably would’ve left it, but the bracelet had been her mother’s. She saw a piece of metal rebar, rusted and dirtied, lying in the gutter. She picked it up and walked back to the crevice. As she stood deciding the best way to attack it, a homeless guy walking by made a fake scream and held his hands up.