U Is for Undertow (Kinsey Millhone 21)

Meanwhile, Walker was spending his summer vacation selling dope. His parents were clueless and didn’t seem to grasp the import of his frequent absences from the house or the unannounced visits from an assortment of friends whose names they were never told. In the fall Walker would start his freshman year at UCST. He had no interest in living at home, but he didn’t have the money to pay for off-campus digs. Even if he went in with five other guys, he’d be coming up short, dope money notwithstanding. Jon was in the same boat. Once Mona and the family returned, she’d make his continued residency dependent on his paying rent. Lionel would explain this was for his own good, a means of building character, not just a variation on Mona’s abuse. Jon could see he’d have to find a job and juggle work with classes at City College. Mr. Snow had a point about avoiding the draft.

19

Wednesday afternoon, April 13, 1988

Deborah Unruh agreed to meet me on the beach in front of the Edgewater Hotel. The spot she suggested was across from the hotel entrance, at the bottom of the concrete stairs that led down from the frontage road. It was a point she’d be passing in the course of her regular weekday walk, a loop that extended from her Montebello condominium to the wharf downtown. Avis Jent had called her on my behalf and after the preliminary chitchat, she’d summed up my mission as succinctly as I might have done in her place. Deborah didn’t seem to require much in the way of persuasion.

I arrived fifteen minutes early and parked on the narrow road that ran behind the hotel. I locked my shoulder bag in the trunk of my car and took a shortcut through the property. I crossed the frontage road and trotted down the stairs. A dense fog was rolling in, spreading a thick marine layer that blotted out the offshore islands, twenty-six miles away. The April air, mild to begin with, was changing its character. Erratic winds topped the waves, creating whitecaps in the chop. It was close to 3:00 by then, and I was already operating on sensory overload. I needed time to breathe and I hoped the bracing ocean air would clear my head. My usual morning jog didn’t bring me down this far. My circuit began and ended at the wharf, with its complicated history of good intentions gone wrong.

Coastal Santa Teresa, despite its many assets, wasn’t blessed with a natural harbor. Early trade by sea was inhibited because shipping companies, fearful of exposure to rough seas, were unwilling to risk their cargo when faced with the rocky shore. In 1872 a fifteen-hundred-foot wharf was finally constructed, allowing freighters and steamers to unload goods and passengers. Over the next fifty years, earthquakes, winter storms, and arsonists laid siege to the wharf, and while it was rebuilt time and time again, it failed to solve the problem of safe mooring for the swelling number of yachts and pleasure boats owned by its wealthy citizens and sometimes wealthier summer visitors.

In the early 1920s an informal engineering survey (which consisted of setting empty jugs and sacks of sawdust afloat at Horton Ravine beach and watching which way they drifted) indicated that locating an artificial harbor to the west of the town would be folly because prevailing currents would denude the beaches of sand and deposit it all directly into the proposed moorage basin, barring both ingress and egress. A $200,000 harbor bond issue was offered in support of this ill-conceived scheme, and voters approved the measure on May 4, 1927. Tons of rocks were barged from the islands and dumped just offshore, forming a thousand-foot breakwater. Thereafter, as predicted, 775 cubic yards of sand per day shifted to the inside aspect of the barrier, creating a sandbar of sufficient mass to choke the harbor entrance. It wasn’t long before the taxpayers were forced to buy a $250,000 dredge and a $127,000 tender in a perpetual effort to keep the harbor open, at an annual expenditure of $100,000. The sum has grown exponentially since then, with no permanent remedy in sight. All of this by way of improvement.

I did a few preliminary stretches, keeping an eye on the beach. Ten minutes later I caught sight of Deborah Unruh, approaching from my left. Avis Jent’s description hadn’t prepared me for how attractive she was. She was barefoot and the wind had buffeted her silver hair into a choppy halo. She had to be in her late sixties, looking trim and fit in black velour pants with a matching jacket that she’d left unzipped, showing a red cotton T-shirt. Her eyes were brown and her face was youthful, despite numerous soft lines that came into focus as she reached me. “Kinsey?”

“Hi, Deborah.” I reached out and the two of us shook hands. “Thanks for meeting me on such short notice.”

“Not a problem. I’m just happy I wasn’t asked to give up my afternoon walk. I usually go as far as the wharf and back if that’s doable for you.”