Solitude Creek

Dance turned to see a teenager. Pretty, but with a face distorted and puffy from crying. Her hair had been carelessly herded into place with fingers, not a brush.

‘Mommy’s gone.’

Oh. The ex was the fatality.

‘Trish, go back to the car.’

Staring at the club. ‘She was trapped. Against the door. I saw her. I can’t — we looked at each other and then I fell. This big man, he was crying like a baby, he climbed on my back and I went down. I thought I was going to die but I got picked up by somebody. Then the people I was with went through another door, not the fire exits. The crowd she was in—’

‘Trish, honey, no. I told you this was a bad idea. Let’s go. We’ve got your grandparents to meet at the airport. We’ve got plans to make.’

Martin took his daughter’s arm. She pulled away. He grimaced.

To the girl: ‘Trish, I’m Kathryn Dance, California Bureau of Investigation. I’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.’

‘We do,’ Martin said. ‘We do mind.’

Crying now, softly, the girl stared at the roadhouse. ‘It was hell in there. They talk about hell, in movies and things, but, no, that was hell.’

‘Here’s my card.’ Dance offered it to Frederick Martin.

He shook his head. ‘We don’t want it. There’s nothing she can tell you. Leave us alone.’

‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

He got a firmer grip on his daughter and, though she stiffened, maneuvered her back to the Lexus. When they were seated inside, he reached over and clicked on her belt. Then they sped from the lot before Dance could note the license plate.

Not that it mattered, she supposed. If the girl and her mother had been inside during the panic, they wouldn’t have seen what really interested Dance: the person who’d parked the truck in front of the doors and lit the fire.

Besides, she could hardly blame the man for being protective. Dance supposed that the father had now been catapulted into a tough, alien role; she imagined that the mother had had a higher percentage of custody, maybe full.

The Solitude Creek incident had changed many lives in many different ways.

A gull strafed and Dance instinctively lifted her arm. The big bird landed clumsily near a scrap of cardboard, thinking it was food. It seemed angry the prize held aroma only and catapulted off into the sky once more, heading toward the bay.

Dance returned to the club and had a second difficult conversation with Sam Cohen, still bordering on comatose, then spoke with other employees. No one could come up with any patrons or former club workers who might have had gripes with Cohen or anyone there. Nor did competitors seem behind the incident — anyone who might want to drive the man out of business or get revenge for something Cohen had done professionally in the past.

Heading back outside, Dance pulled her iPhone from her pocket and phoned Jon Boling, asking if he could pick up the children at school.

‘Sure,’ he replied. She enjoyed hearing his calm voice. ‘How’s your Civ Div going?’

He knew about the Serrano situation.

‘Awkward,’ she said, eyes on Bob Holly, interviewing some of the same people she just had. ‘I’m at Solitude Creek.’

A pause.

‘Aren’t you handling soda-bottle deposits?’

‘Supposed to be.’

Boling said, ‘It’s terrible, on the news. They’re saying a truck driver parked behind the club to smoke some dope. Then he panicked when the fire started and left the truck beside the doors. Nobody could get out.’

Reporters …

She looked at her iPhone for the time, now that her watch was out of commission. It was two thirty. ‘I’ll be another three, four hours, I’d guess. Mom and Dad are coming over tonight. Martine, Stephen …’

‘The kids and I’ll take care of dinner.’

‘Would you? Oh, thanks.’

‘See you soon.’

She disconnected. Her eyes did a sweep of the club, the jobbing company, then the parking lot.

Finally the bordering vegetation. At the eastern end of the lot was what seemed to be a tramped-down area leading through a line of scrub oak, Australian willow, pine, magnolia. She wandered that way and found herself beside Solitude Creek itself. The small dark tributary — thirty feet wide there — was framed by salt and dune grass, thistle and other sandy-soil plants whose identity she couldn’t guess at.

She followed the path away from the parking lot, through a head-high tangle of brush and grass. Here, overgrown with vegetation and dusted with sand, were the remnants of old structures: concrete foundations, portions of rusting chain-link fences and a few columns. They had to be seventy-five years old, a hundred. Quite extensive. Maybe back then Solitude Creek was deeper and this was part of the seafood industry. The site was fifteen miles north of Cannery Row but back then fishing was big business all along this area of the coast.

Or possibly developers had started to build a project here — apartments or a hotel or restaurant. Still would be a good spot for an inn, she reflected: near the ocean, situated amid rolling, grassy hills. The creek itself was calming and the grayish water didn’t necessarily mean bad fishing.