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"And if they came in through the kitchen, you're right, that ground would be a
morass after a rain. Did you find any signs of lamps, candles, torches,
anything of the sort?"
"The woman had a carpet-bag she set down several places, which could have held
anything. But I saw
no signs of dripped wax or any impression of a lamp's base. I think it
probable they did their work during the daylight, so as not to alert the aged
but sleepless watchdog across the way."
"Coming in before dawn and leaving after dusk? I'd have thought that risky.
Unless "
"Yes," he said. "It would be satisfying to discover that the full moon
coincided with a dry spell, would it not?"
And so it proved, in a pleasingly neat confirmation of how the intruders came
and went unnoticed. When we repaired to the hotel an hour or two later, for
supplies, soap, and sustenance, enquiries at the desk were followed within
minutes by a simultaneous knock on our door and the ringing of the telephone.
Holmes went to the door, holding it open for the man with the laden tea tray,
while I received the information that February had been wet more or less
throughout, but two weeks of dry weather in the middle of March had been
broken by rain the morning of the twenty-fourth. The March full moon had been
the twentieth.
I thanked the manager, then: "Oh, and Mr Auberon? Could you please have
someone look into train reservations to New York, the middle of next week?
That's right, two of us. Sorry?" I listened for a minute, then asked him to
hold on, and covered the mouthpiece with my hand.
"Holmes, he says the hotel has another guest who is planning a cross-country
aeroplane flight to leave the middle of next week, and wants two partners in
the enterprise. Might we be interested?"
The vivid memory of our recent, nerve-fraying night-time flight over the
Himalayan foothills winced across his face, but Holmes' upper lip was nothing
if not stiff. "Up to you," he replied mildly, and returned to pouring the tea.
I addressed myself to the telephone.
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"Perhaps you could get the details of both, and we could decide which fits
better with our plans. Thank you."
Holmes brought me a cup of tea and a selection of sandwiches, settling down at
the window with his own refreshment. He ate two sandwiches in rapid
succession, then sat back with his cup. "Have you a schedule for the morrow?"
he asked.
"Norbert's arranged various appointments in the morning, but I have the rest
of the day free. Would you like to see something of the city? We could go out
to the ocean and sun-bathe, if the sun comes out. And there's a famous
salt-water baths out there as well, if you'd like those."
He fixed me with a disbelieving gaze. "You wish to play the tourist?"
I kept the innocent expression on my face for as long as I could, but
a slight movement of my mouth gave me away, and the answering relief on his
face released the laughter. "Holmes, I wouldn't think of getting in the way of
your glass plates."
He shook his head with disapproval, but said only, "You shall ask Mr Norbert
about the keys?"
"Certainly, and if he knows where I can find Mah and Micah."
"You might also enquire if his watch-dogs saw anything out of the ordinary
before the twentieth of March."
"I shall."
In the end, we did play the part of tourists, for that evening at least. We
took a motorcar out to where San Francisco ended, and ate dinner at the Cliff
House restaurant with the Pacific Ocean pounding at our feet, watching the sun
go down. Wine again proved to be available, albeit decanted into an anonymous
pitcher, and if the cooking was not as exceptional as the view out of the
windows, the food was palatable. When we had finished our coffee, we walked
down the steep hill and onto the sand, strolling along the beach. The wind had
died down and the fog was lying well off-shore; it was quite pleasant.
At the far end, with the western sky darkening towards deepest indigo, Holmes
settled onto a section of the sea wall that kept the sand at bay and took out
his tobacco.
"Is this beach familiar to you?" he asked.
"It is, although the Cliff House I remember was a magnificently absurd
Victorian monstrosity, so enormous and top-heavy it was a wonder that it
didn't topple into the sea in the earthquake. We used to come here a lot with
my father. Levi would build elaborate Gothic fortified castles using dribbled
wet sand while I read a book, and my father would alternate between swimming
and reading one of his dime novels. Which reminds me do you know what I found
on the shelves in the library?"
"Oh, Lord," he said.
"Yes, three of the stories Conan Doyle published. Oh, Holmes, my father would
have been so delighted by the situation. He had a very droll and complicated
sense of humour you saw the cat carving on
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the high shelf?" I explained to him my father's canary perch, and he chuckled
around the stem of his pipe.
"Were the library books his?"
"A lot of them were in the house when he took it over. You see, his parents
badly wanted him to remain in Boston, but he refused to leave California, and
lived on his own here for years before they decided that, for the sake of the
family name, if their son wasn't coming home, he might as well comport himself
in as civilised a fashion as one could in the wilderness of San Francisco.
They gave him the family house and its fittings to permit him to do so. I
think they'd bought the books by the linear foot when they built the
library you know how it is, books look good on the shelves, even if they're
never read. Actually, my father wasn't a huge reader himself you may have
noticed that many of those books still have uncut pages. He used to come home
with a book he'd bought, spend half an hour skimming through it to extract the
essence, and never look at it again."
"Your mother was the reader, then?"
"A rabbi's daughter? Of course. Father used to say she was the brains in the
family, but I think it was just that her intelligence was intellectual, his
was practical. His mind grasped patterns he could have been a superb chess
player, if he didn't find the game so tedious. He loved gadgets, bought a new
motorcar every year and tinkered with it himself. He was..." I thought a
moment for a word that distilled his essence. "He was strong."
"And your mother?"
"Mother was... alive. She was dark and bright and very funny she had a much
quicker sense of humour than Father did, and the infectious giggle of a child.
She was orderly she didn't mind if things were turned upside-down in the
course of the day, but she liked to see them restored to their places
eventually. She was a natural teacher, knew how to present things so they
caught the imagination of a child. She taught us both Hebrew, through the
Bible, and with me she used an analytical approach how slight changes in
grammar affect meaning, for example whereas with my brother she concentrated
on the mathematics. She and his maths tutor worked out a system for
integrating math problems and Torah studies, using the Bible to build problems
in calculus and such; I never did understand it. Looking back, she might have
been worried that Levi would turn his back on his faith, and wanted to ensure
that Torah was in his bones from early on."
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