U Is for Undertow (Kinsey Millhone 21)

He turned, and when he saw me he shut down the lathe. “Hey.”

“Are you Shawn?”

“Absolutely. You must be the investigator from S.T.”

“Kinsey Millhone,” I said. “Nice meeting you. I see I caught you hard at work.”

“Always. I’m glad you figured out where I was.”

“The girl who came to the door told me you were back here.”

“You met Memory.”

“I assume so, though she didn’t introduce herself.”

His expression was wry. “She sometimes comes up short in the manners department. Sorry about that. She doesn’t mean to be rude.”

“No need to apologize. You’re the one I came to see.”

“Hope I can help. How’s Deborah doing these days?”

“Good. We did a beach walk last Wednesday, and she’s in better shape than I am.”

“Have a seat if you can find one,” he said.

“This is fine.”

He hoisted himself onto a bare patch of workbench while I leaned against the table, keeping us eye-to-eye. We chatted for a bit, working our way around to the subject at hand.

Finally, he said, “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

“I’ll try to be succinct about this,” I said. I launched into my tale, distilling it down to the salient points. “An old kidnapping case has popped into view again for reasons too complicated to go into. A little girl named Mary Claire Fitzhugh disappeared in July of 1967 and hasn’t been seen since.”

“That’s bad.”

“Very bad, but at least there’s hope we’ll find out what happened to the child. As I understand it, you and your mom and dad were in Santa Teresa that same summer—”

“Greg wasn’t my dad,” he said. “Just want to be clear on that since Mom was.”

“Sorry. I’m hazy on the details, which is why I’m here.”

“Matters not. Go on.”

“I know the three of you were staying with the Unruhs. Deborah tells me Greg was pressing them to hand over the money his grandfather had left him so he and Shelly could buy a farm . . .”

Shawn was already shaking his head. “I heard ’em cooking up the story, but it was fiction, every word of it. Nitwits. I don’t know what they were thinking. Patrick wasn’t going to underwrite their cockamamie plan, even if it had been legitimate. The money was in trust and there was no way they could’ve busted into it. Well, maybe with a legal hassle, but Greg wasn’t in a position to stick around for that.”

“What was he up to? Can you fill me in?”

“Sure. Greg dropped out of Berkeley in his sophomore year, which meant he lost his 2-S student deferment and was reclassified as 1-A, ready for immediate induction. His draft notice caught up with him and he promptly burned it. He and Mom were both paranoid about authority, her more than him. He decided to go to Canada. She wasn’t keen on the idea, but he had friends in hiding up there and he figured he could take advantage of the connections. If he got his hands on his inheritance, they’d have enough to live on while they applied for citizenship.”

“I can understand the kind of pressure he was under.”

“Well, yeah, from his perspective. I’ll tell you what was dumb. I didn’t realize this until later, but in July of ’sixty-seven, Greg was twenty-five years old. Once he turned twenty-six, he’d be off the hook, so all he had to do was wait. I don’t think they were taking married guys, so if he and Mom had been willing to go that far, he’d have been home free. Not that they’d have done anything so pedestrian. They were hippies and way too free-spirited for anything as mundane as a civil ceremony. Anyway, once it was obvious the Unruhs weren’t going to cooperate, we hit the road, which was their solution to just about anything.”

“Why such an abrupt departure?”

“They did everything on impulse, though there might have been something more going on. I heard a lot of heated whispers from the back of the bus. Greg was in a panic.”

“Any idea when that was?”

“Not a clue. I was a kid. What did I know? I remember Mom lobbied hard for San Francisco. There was all this talk about the Summer of Love and she was pissed she’d be missing out. She said it wasn’t like they’d have a posse on their tails. There were thousands of guys ducking the draft, so all they had to do was keep on the move and they’d be fine. Cut no ice with Greg. He was anxious to get out of Dodge, so to speak. As far as she was concerned, that was his problem, not hers. She knuckled under in the end, but not without a lot of knock-down, drag-out fights. You want my take on it, I got the impression somebody called the draft board and dimed him out.”