Chapter 1
Fog Rolls In
Copyright © 2012 by Linda Howe Steiger
Fog may have been a factor in what happened, although there’s nothing unusual about heavy fog forming along the Northern California coast this time of year. It has done so for millennia, rolling dramatically off the Pacific in the afternoon, shrouding everything in its cold damp blur. Usually fog burns off before noon the next day to reveal a sky of breath-taking blue, but not always. Fog can hang around too, sometimes for days, becoming part of the landscape, mental as well as otherwise.
Suffice it to say, when fog began to gather early that particular Saturday afternoon out over the cold waters of the North Pacific Current gyring south out of Canada, no-one felt even the mildest twinge of foreboding. Great milky rolls of the stuff tipped eastward and rode inland on winds powered by a late summer heat wave out in the San Joaquin Valley. By four o’clock, dense fog was crawling over the coastal cliffs, billowing like a tsunami in slow motion across the Marin Headlands, and plunging down the red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. Fog buried everything except the high masts of Sutro’s radio antenna and the wind-swept ridges of Mount Tamalpais. By evening much of the city and the North Bay lay shrouded under its dark, damp, dull grey cloud. All night the foghorns moaned.
Up in Marin County, north of the Golden Gate, just off the shoulder of Mount Tamalpais and nestled into a valley under Ohlone’s gentle peak, the little town of Quarry Canyon quite disappeared into the fog. Quarry Canyon—so proud of its Gold Rush heritage—was an innocent sort of place by today’s dystopian standards, a kind of sixties Shangri-la, remote from urban crowds and urban angst, yet not so remote one couldn’t hop the freeway and be sitting in the dress circle of San Francisco’s Symphony Hall in under an hour. In Quarry Canyon people knew their neighbors, and, for the most part, liked them. Tolerant of eccentricity, encouraging of diversity, understanding of “difference,” the citizens of Quarry Canyon believed their town to be a safe haven in post-9/11 America. Or so it seemed until that weekend.
Not that anyone blamed fog for what happened, not seriously, or at least not until later, for people were comfortable with fog up there in Quarry Canyon. Fog is commonplace and despite its hazards most people give it little thought. It’s only weather after all, only the “marine layer.” So when the fog rolled in, most people did the usual sort of thing: stayed home, stayed warm, watched television, ate ice-cream, had a few drinks, and went to bed early. Next morning, when folks awoke in the wee smalls, most of them—though not all—yawned, rolled over, and drifted back to sleep. It was Sunday after all, and it feels so cozy when a thick fog settles across the valley. Wet, dark, chilly—fog does rather dull the senses.
Rosa Sanchez did not, however, roll over and go back to sleep. Rosa got up as usual and went off to work, parking her ancient Saab as usual in the alley behind the Station Café at a little before six in the morning. She entered the kitchen, switched on the lights, and pulled a fresh apron over her head. Doubling its strings around her waist, she strode through to the front, unbolted the wide door, and stepped outside into the deserted, fog-filled downtown plaza.
Nice plaza, she thought for the umpteenth time, and perfectly sized for this town: small enough to hurry across in a minute or two, large enough for an hour or two’s amusement sitting on one of the benches, watching kids in the tot-lot or people come and go to the shops across the street. At least once a day, everyone in Quarry Canyon seemed to pass through or by the downtown plaza, which of course meant good business for Rosa’s café. At the moment, however, the plaza was empty, empty except for Rosa that is.
Rosa closed her eyes and breathed the sweet smell of earthy, pine-scented, sea-flavored fog. A splash of cold water hit her neck. She frowned up at a leaking gutter. Shivering, she shoved a table out of the way, cranked down the awning, and climbed onto a stool to ignite the propane heaters.
Over the burst of gas, Rosa listened for the baker’s truck. Fog or no fog, her intrepid regulars would soon be appearing, steaming and smelly from their runs on the mountain, demanding latté and blueberry scone. But Rosa heard no truck sounds, only a quiet rustling in the undergrowth along the creek that curled out of Creekside Park and wandered down one side of the plaza—a cheeky red squirrel, perhaps, or a fat raccoon, snuffling in the ground litter to expose a flash of orange, the first chanterelles of the season.
Eight-year-old Justin Drexel did not roll over either. He opened one eye, then the other, and stared out his bedroom window at the redwoods, hung like Christmas trees with tendrils of silver fog. Justin loved thick fog. It made him think of Sherlock Holmes, of fog-shrouded moors and creepy London alleys. Justin knew all about Sherlock Holmes because Aunt Izzy, who owned the bookshop down on the plaza, had given him the complete set of Sherlock’s Adventures for his last birthday.
Justin’s bedroom was on the second floor at the back of a rambling old brown shingle house with a mossy slate roof. When the wind blew, branches scraped against the window glass like fingernails on blackboard. When the rain pummeled, the corner of the upstairs bathroom dripped. That made his father curse a blue streak, or so Justin’s mother said. Justin had often heard the curse; he’d yet to see the blue streak.
He rolled onto his back and gazed at the glowing hands of the Mickey Mouse clock on the wall above his high, wooden dresser. He imagined helping Mom “fall back” the clocks. That would happen soon, for it always happened around Halloween. Then, his mother would let him climb up the dresser. Justin loved climbing, and he was pretty good at it too, although not as good as he thought.
Dad called Mickey Justin’s morning helper, because Mickey told him whether it was time to get up or time to go back to sleep. Justin always checked the mouse before getting out of bed. Not that he always minded the mouse. This morning Mickey’s hands were not yet straight up and down, so Justin knew it was too early to get up. He knew he ought to go back to sleep. But Justin had something important to do, and he had a plan, a plan whose success depended on this nice thick wet fog. He knew Mom wouldn’t like this plan, but if he got up now, he could go do what he wanted and be back home before breakfast. She’d never know.
Justin lay in bed listening to the scrape of branches against the house and the drip of fog off the roof, listening for any sounds to suggest Mom or Dad was awake. But all he heard was snoring. Dad said Mom’s snoring sounded like cat-purr. Mom said Dad’s snoring sounded like buzz-saw. If the buzz-saw woke her up, she’d stroke Dad’s arm until it stopped. Justin listened long enough to the steady snoring down the hall to convince himself that neither parent was going to wake up any time soon; then he slipped out of bed and began to dress. He hitched his Harry Potter spectacles around his ears, stepped into his jeans, and pulled a shirt over his head. He tip-toed out his room. Gently he pulled the bedroom door closed until the latch made its little click, thinking—if Dad comes down the hall early, heading for the bathroom or for his computer, now he won’t see my empty bed. Pleased with this idea, he went softly downstairs.
Justin loved exploring the house before the family was up. Dad said he’d become a “morning person,” although Justin preferred to think of this time not so much as “morning” but as a “secret in-between time”—no longer night, not yet day. Funny how heavy fog outside made this in-between-time more interesting, more mysterious, quite filled with dangerous possibilities. He aimed a tiny flashlight across the furniture and into the corners, checking for changes since he’d gone up to bed.
From the dried frothy stains on two tumblers sitting side by side on the coffee table, Justin knew his parents sat next to each other on the couch last night, probably with their feet on the table, drinking beer and tickling toes together as they watched Romancing the Stone on DVD. He knew it was that movie because the disk was still in the player and its box open on the top of the TV. He found Maia’s beat-up sneakers piled under the front rung of the telephone stool. His big sister was always running down her cell phone’s battery. He found her phone in the wall charger and checked its history.
Justin was practicing his skills of Sherlockian deduction. He could already amaze Maia, but then his sister was unbelievably stupid and unobservant, even if she was sixteen and a half. This morning, however, his object was not spying on Maia or nosing around the house; his object was to head up the Crossways Steps and hunt for clues in the stream running along beside it. Better get going.
The Crossways Steps was one of Quarry Canyon’s many public stairways. Constructed a hundred years ago of rough hewn rock, cobblestone, and redwood boards, this old stairway rose out of Creekside Park and marched straight up the side of Ohlone Peak through a fence-lined drainage right-of-way, its route crossing and re-crossing the pavement of Bay View Road as it looped in long, lazy S-curves up the same mountain side. Eventually both Steps and road arrived up on Ridgeline Avenue and the open field at the edge of the nature reserve. The Steps provided a popular shortcut into town for those living up the mountain. Hikers too used the Steps on their way to the trails on Mount Tam or one of the state-owned beaches along the Pacific coast. Indeed, running up the Crossways’ thousand steps was a popular form of exercise. Twice, Justin and his dad hiked all the way to the top, crossed the field, bushwhacked through the nature reserve, and scrambled down a cliff to the ocean. They ate sandwiches on the beach and watched seals dive in the surf and loll on rocks like giant, smiling slugs.
The Crossways Steps was one of Justin’s favorite places in Quarry Canyon. Climbing them was hard, but also fun for there were many distractions along the way. For example, he could straddle the metal handrail and slide down to the next road crossing. Or he could crouch in the shrubs and spy on joggers. But what he liked best to do was mess about in the little stream that ran beside the Steps all the way down to Creekside Park. Channelized in places, running free in others, this stream was filled with interesting things, particularly where rocks and sticks choked its flow forming pools or little waterfalls. Newts and salamanders lived beside the stream. Local cats and dogs frequented its route, as did various wild critters, even deer. But for Justin it was really more about the detritus, the “clues” he could find there. People dropped the most amazing stuff. Justin could have spent hours. . . days. . . weeks even. . . . But, alas, Mother didn't want him playing on the Steps. She said the stream was nothing more than a filthy drainage ditch, filled with pesticides and fertilizers and who knows what. So, unless Dad or Maia came along, he wasn’t supposed to climb the stairway. She said the Steps could be treacherous: they were only haphazardly maintained; treads were often loose or worn, broken or uneven. Whole sections sometimes washed out in the winter rain. She worried Justin would fall, sprain an ankle, break a limb.
Which is exactly why Justin had to sneak out that morning.
He dug through the box in the kitchen for his Giants ball cap, wondering why his ball cap always lay at the bottom of the box. He slapped it on with a flourish. He found his yellow sweatshirt wadded into a ball and quickly pulled it over his head, thereby tangling his head, his cap, and his glasses in the hood. Sighing, he extricated himself and started over, first releasing his cap and his glasses from the mess. Then he smoothed the sweatshirt on the floor, flattening the hood and making sure the neck tag was on top so that when he ducked his head through the neck hole, the tag would come out in back. Grandma taught him this procedure when he was three years old. It made no sense, but it always worked. Then he carefully hooked his glasses back over his ears and slapped on the ball cap, backwards this time, so the cap’s bill would protect his neck from the wet drip of fog.
Nearly ready, Justin listened once more for noises from upstairs. No cat-purr now. And no buzz-saw either. Nor any padding of slippers down the hall. Nothing but dead silence. Justin had plenty of time. On foggy Sunday mornings, Mom and Dad and Maia could sleep ‘til nine. There was plenty of time to mess around in the stream, to find clues and deduce their stories; plenty of time to climb up to the field if he wanted and still get home for pancakes. In retrospect, plenty of time for trouble too.
Justin pushed his feet into his cool cowboy boots. At least Justin thought they were “cool.” The boots came almost to his knees and were two sizes too big, but they had fancy red and blue stitching in the leather, extremely pointy toes, and one-inch heels. The boots made him feel important and tall, although walking in them was a teensy bit difficult. But Justin was careful, and Mom said he would grow into his boots in no time flat.
He tip-toed across the kitchen, took a toaster-tart from the cupboard. Then, holding it in his teeth and not breathing at all, he unbolted the backdoor and eased it open, listening all the while for sounds of life from upstairs before stepping out into the fog. Gently he pulled the door shut, then devoured his tart—raw—in three big bites.
The Drexel house sat back among the redwoods on the uphill side of lower Bay View Road looking down into Creekside Park. Justin galloped round the back corner of the house at top speed and took the steps to the street-level garage two at a time. He was bursting with energy and excitement. Suddenly his left boot-heel hit a patch of wet moss. Justin grabbed out at the railing to avoid a head-long tumble. Dumb old boots, he thought, slowing himself down.
The astringent smell of evergreen mixed with the sweet fragrance of late blooming jasmine. Fog swirled through the towering redwoods, its long tendrils dangling from the canopy overhead. Justin’s imagination shifted into turbo-charge. He saw a bloody-jawed hound poised to leap from the laurels down at the edge of the road, Jack-the-Ripper hidden in the shadow of the garage. He half scared himself. Then he remembered Mom’s saying all the real murderers were safely locked behind the walls of San Quentin Prison out on the point beyond Larkspur Ferry. Anyway, Sherlock Holmes was never afraid of what might be lurking in the fog. Justin pushed the imaginary hounds and murderers from his mind and turned to the real business—finding clues.
Shoving through the brambles he disappeared behind the garage, coming out again among the ferns on the far side of the driveway, his eyes intent upon the ground. Suddenly he squatted down and began inspecting some tire ruts in the mud. Too narrow for Dad’s SUV, but they matched exactly the wheels on Maia’s ancient vomit-green Beetle. Maia must have taken her car out after all, after Dad told her clearly not to go driving in the fog. And she was probably talking on her cell phone when she returned—or texting—because the ruts went right through Mom’s garden, squashing the biggest fronds flat. Stupid sister. She bragged she could drive with one hand—or none. Wrong!
Justin pulled his hood up over his ball cap and trotted on down Bay View Road towards the park and the bottom of the Crossways Steps. The roadway was narrow, curvy, lined with shrubs, oaks, and redwoods. He circled a place where the roots of a huge tree heaved up the asphalt. He took care not to catch his boot heel again, and he remembered to keep his ears tuned for the sound of motors coming from behind, his eyes alert for headlights breaking through the blur ahead. Condensation dripped and drizzled as great puffs of fog billowed off the mountains. Houses up the mountains, including his own, disappeared. Fog shrouded the park below. Justin watched for potholes, for broken asphalt, for hubcaps, for scars in the trunks of trees smashed by cars as he walked down the middle of the road. He himself once crashed his bike along here somewhere, pedaling too fast around a curve, skidding out on the gravel, nearly careening over the embankment and into Big Creek. He imagined the excitement of a high speed car chase down Bay View Road. Or a motorcycle chase!
At long last, a pair of low concrete pillars emerged from the blur ahead of him. These marked the bridge over Big Creek. The Steps rose on the other side. Already Justin could hear the lively splash of the little stream—the so-called ditch—dumping through the culvert into Big Creek. Good, he thought. Lots of water mean clues for sure.
He stopped to stare into the fog below him. Something was moving in the bracken along the Big Creek, a big dark shadow. The rump of a deer? He tossed a stone. The shadow moved away. Curious what it was, Justin stepped off the pavement and began to work his way down the bank towards the creek, hoping to find signs of this deer, or its half-grown fawn. The vegetation was thick and soggy. A branch punched him in the ear. All he found were some muddy people prints, a burnt match, a crumpled cigarette pack. He picked up the cigarette pack, crushed it, and shoved it into his pocket. It might turn out to be a clue. Then, hopping from rock to rock along the stream, he went under the bridge, pushing out of the weeds near the life-sized effigy of an old sawmill that cantilevered over the water. An idea crossed Justin's mind. Maybe he wouldn't climb the Steps—maybe he’d climb the roof of the old mill instead. Of course, it wasn’t a real sawmill, more like the suggestion of a sawmill, an open frame of two-by-fours with a shingled roof, a platform, and some picnic tables. Dad said it was supposed to remind people of the first sawmill in the county, built centuries ago by the lumbermen who chopped down all the old redwoods to build houses in Quarry Canyon and San Francisco. The real old mill burned down years and years and years ago: this one was fake.
Fake or not, though, from the roof of this mill-thing, a boy could see all the way downtown to the stores around the plaza and the schools and the public library on the other side of the park. Now was his chance, for the high school boys usually had the ridgeline staked out. They'd sit up there smoking and laughing like stupid crows, shouting off the little boys. Justin did climb the roof once though, when no-one was around. It was not that great. He saw four dogs running in a line behind the library. Still, he felt almost like a teenager being up there—even though he didn’t smoke. Justin touched the crumpled cigarette pack in his pocket. Then his attention was caught once more by the sounds of splashing, and he imagined all the clues washing down. Well, he wasn’t stupid—climbing the mill-thing was dangerous in cowboy boots.
Justin turned and headed off towards the Steps.
Too bad he didn't climb that roof.
Fog Rolls In
Copyright © 2012 by Linda Howe Steiger
Fog may have been a factor in what happened, although there’s nothing unusual about heavy fog forming along the Northern California coast this time of year. It has done so for millennia, rolling dramatically off the Pacific in the afternoon, shrouding everything in its cold damp blur. Usually fog burns off before noon the next day to reveal a sky of breath-taking blue, but not always. Fog can hang around too, sometimes for days, becoming part of the landscape, mental as well as otherwise.
Suffice it to say, when fog began to gather early that particular Saturday afternoon out over the cold waters of the North Pacific Current gyring south out of Canada, no-one felt even the mildest twinge of foreboding. Great milky rolls of the stuff tipped eastward and rode inland on winds powered by a late summer heat wave out in the San Joaquin Valley. By four o’clock, dense fog was crawling over the coastal cliffs, billowing like a tsunami in slow motion across the Marin Headlands, and plunging down the red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. Fog buried everything except the high masts of Sutro’s radio antenna and the wind-swept ridges of Mount Tamalpais. By evening much of the city and the North Bay lay shrouded under its dark, damp, dull grey cloud. All night the foghorns moaned.
Up in Marin County, north of the Golden Gate, just off the shoulder of Mount Tamalpais and nestled into a valley under Ohlone’s gentle peak, the little town of Quarry Canyon quite disappeared into the fog. Quarry Canyon—so proud of its Gold Rush heritage—was an innocent sort of place by today’s dystopian standards, a kind of sixties Shangri-la, remote from urban crowds and urban angst, yet not so remote one couldn’t hop the freeway and be sitting in the dress circle of San Francisco’s Symphony Hall in under an hour. In Quarry Canyon people knew their neighbors, and, for the most part, liked them. Tolerant of eccentricity, encouraging of diversity, understanding of “difference,” the citizens of Quarry Canyon believed their town to be a safe haven in post-9/11 America. Or so it seemed until that weekend.
Not that anyone blamed fog for what happened, not seriously, or at least not until later, for people were comfortable with fog up there in Quarry Canyon. Fog is commonplace and despite its hazards most people give it little thought. It’s only weather after all, only the “marine layer.” So when the fog rolled in, most people did the usual sort of thing: stayed home, stayed warm, watched television, ate ice-cream, had a few drinks, and went to bed early. Next morning, when folks awoke in the wee smalls, most of them—though not all—yawned, rolled over, and drifted back to sleep. It was Sunday after all, and it feels so cozy when a thick fog settles across the valley. Wet, dark, chilly—fog does rather dull the senses.
Rosa Sanchez did not, however, roll over and go back to sleep. Rosa got up as usual and went off to work, parking her ancient Saab as usual in the alley behind the Station Café at a little before six in the morning. She entered the kitchen, switched on the lights, and pulled a fresh apron over her head. Doubling its strings around her waist, she strode through to the front, unbolted the wide door, and stepped outside into the deserted, fog-filled downtown plaza.
Nice plaza, she thought for the umpteenth time, and perfectly sized for this town: small enough to hurry across in a minute or two, large enough for an hour or two’s amusement sitting on one of the benches, watching kids in the tot-lot or people come and go to the shops across the street. At least once a day, everyone in Quarry Canyon seemed to pass through or by the downtown plaza, which of course meant good business for Rosa’s café. At the moment, however, the plaza was empty, empty except for Rosa that is.
Rosa closed her eyes and breathed the sweet smell of earthy, pine-scented, sea-flavored fog. A splash of cold water hit her neck. She frowned up at a leaking gutter. Shivering, she shoved a table out of the way, cranked down the awning, and climbed onto a stool to ignite the propane heaters.
Over the burst of gas, Rosa listened for the baker’s truck. Fog or no fog, her intrepid regulars would soon be appearing, steaming and smelly from their runs on the mountain, demanding latté and blueberry scone. But Rosa heard no truck sounds, only a quiet rustling in the undergrowth along the creek that curled out of Creekside Park and wandered down one side of the plaza—a cheeky red squirrel, perhaps, or a fat raccoon, snuffling in the ground litter to expose a flash of orange, the first chanterelles of the season.
Eight-year-old Justin Drexel did not roll over either. He opened one eye, then the other, and stared out his bedroom window at the redwoods, hung like Christmas trees with tendrils of silver fog. Justin loved thick fog. It made him think of Sherlock Holmes, of fog-shrouded moors and creepy London alleys. Justin knew all about Sherlock Holmes because Aunt Izzy, who owned the bookshop down on the plaza, had given him the complete set of Sherlock’s Adventures for his last birthday.
Justin’s bedroom was on the second floor at the back of a rambling old brown shingle house with a mossy slate roof. When the wind blew, branches scraped against the window glass like fingernails on blackboard. When the rain pummeled, the corner of the upstairs bathroom dripped. That made his father curse a blue streak, or so Justin’s mother said. Justin had often heard the curse; he’d yet to see the blue streak.
He rolled onto his back and gazed at the glowing hands of the Mickey Mouse clock on the wall above his high, wooden dresser. He imagined helping Mom “fall back” the clocks. That would happen soon, for it always happened around Halloween. Then, his mother would let him climb up the dresser. Justin loved climbing, and he was pretty good at it too, although not as good as he thought.
Dad called Mickey Justin’s morning helper, because Mickey told him whether it was time to get up or time to go back to sleep. Justin always checked the mouse before getting out of bed. Not that he always minded the mouse. This morning Mickey’s hands were not yet straight up and down, so Justin knew it was too early to get up. He knew he ought to go back to sleep. But Justin had something important to do, and he had a plan, a plan whose success depended on this nice thick wet fog. He knew Mom wouldn’t like this plan, but if he got up now, he could go do what he wanted and be back home before breakfast. She’d never know.
Justin lay in bed listening to the scrape of branches against the house and the drip of fog off the roof, listening for any sounds to suggest Mom or Dad was awake. But all he heard was snoring. Dad said Mom’s snoring sounded like cat-purr. Mom said Dad’s snoring sounded like buzz-saw. If the buzz-saw woke her up, she’d stroke Dad’s arm until it stopped. Justin listened long enough to the steady snoring down the hall to convince himself that neither parent was going to wake up any time soon; then he slipped out of bed and began to dress. He hitched his Harry Potter spectacles around his ears, stepped into his jeans, and pulled a shirt over his head. He tip-toed out his room. Gently he pulled the bedroom door closed until the latch made its little click, thinking—if Dad comes down the hall early, heading for the bathroom or for his computer, now he won’t see my empty bed. Pleased with this idea, he went softly downstairs.
Justin loved exploring the house before the family was up. Dad said he’d become a “morning person,” although Justin preferred to think of this time not so much as “morning” but as a “secret in-between time”—no longer night, not yet day. Funny how heavy fog outside made this in-between-time more interesting, more mysterious, quite filled with dangerous possibilities. He aimed a tiny flashlight across the furniture and into the corners, checking for changes since he’d gone up to bed.
From the dried frothy stains on two tumblers sitting side by side on the coffee table, Justin knew his parents sat next to each other on the couch last night, probably with their feet on the table, drinking beer and tickling toes together as they watched Romancing the Stone on DVD. He knew it was that movie because the disk was still in the player and its box open on the top of the TV. He found Maia’s beat-up sneakers piled under the front rung of the telephone stool. His big sister was always running down her cell phone’s battery. He found her phone in the wall charger and checked its history.
Justin was practicing his skills of Sherlockian deduction. He could already amaze Maia, but then his sister was unbelievably stupid and unobservant, even if she was sixteen and a half. This morning, however, his object was not spying on Maia or nosing around the house; his object was to head up the Crossways Steps and hunt for clues in the stream running along beside it. Better get going.
The Crossways Steps was one of Quarry Canyon’s many public stairways. Constructed a hundred years ago of rough hewn rock, cobblestone, and redwood boards, this old stairway rose out of Creekside Park and marched straight up the side of Ohlone Peak through a fence-lined drainage right-of-way, its route crossing and re-crossing the pavement of Bay View Road as it looped in long, lazy S-curves up the same mountain side. Eventually both Steps and road arrived up on Ridgeline Avenue and the open field at the edge of the nature reserve. The Steps provided a popular shortcut into town for those living up the mountain. Hikers too used the Steps on their way to the trails on Mount Tam or one of the state-owned beaches along the Pacific coast. Indeed, running up the Crossways’ thousand steps was a popular form of exercise. Twice, Justin and his dad hiked all the way to the top, crossed the field, bushwhacked through the nature reserve, and scrambled down a cliff to the ocean. They ate sandwiches on the beach and watched seals dive in the surf and loll on rocks like giant, smiling slugs.
The Crossways Steps was one of Justin’s favorite places in Quarry Canyon. Climbing them was hard, but also fun for there were many distractions along the way. For example, he could straddle the metal handrail and slide down to the next road crossing. Or he could crouch in the shrubs and spy on joggers. But what he liked best to do was mess about in the little stream that ran beside the Steps all the way down to Creekside Park. Channelized in places, running free in others, this stream was filled with interesting things, particularly where rocks and sticks choked its flow forming pools or little waterfalls. Newts and salamanders lived beside the stream. Local cats and dogs frequented its route, as did various wild critters, even deer. But for Justin it was really more about the detritus, the “clues” he could find there. People dropped the most amazing stuff. Justin could have spent hours. . . days. . . weeks even. . . . But, alas, Mother didn't want him playing on the Steps. She said the stream was nothing more than a filthy drainage ditch, filled with pesticides and fertilizers and who knows what. So, unless Dad or Maia came along, he wasn’t supposed to climb the stairway. She said the Steps could be treacherous: they were only haphazardly maintained; treads were often loose or worn, broken or uneven. Whole sections sometimes washed out in the winter rain. She worried Justin would fall, sprain an ankle, break a limb.
Which is exactly why Justin had to sneak out that morning.
He dug through the box in the kitchen for his Giants ball cap, wondering why his ball cap always lay at the bottom of the box. He slapped it on with a flourish. He found his yellow sweatshirt wadded into a ball and quickly pulled it over his head, thereby tangling his head, his cap, and his glasses in the hood. Sighing, he extricated himself and started over, first releasing his cap and his glasses from the mess. Then he smoothed the sweatshirt on the floor, flattening the hood and making sure the neck tag was on top so that when he ducked his head through the neck hole, the tag would come out in back. Grandma taught him this procedure when he was three years old. It made no sense, but it always worked. Then he carefully hooked his glasses back over his ears and slapped on the ball cap, backwards this time, so the cap’s bill would protect his neck from the wet drip of fog.
Nearly ready, Justin listened once more for noises from upstairs. No cat-purr now. And no buzz-saw either. Nor any padding of slippers down the hall. Nothing but dead silence. Justin had plenty of time. On foggy Sunday mornings, Mom and Dad and Maia could sleep ‘til nine. There was plenty of time to mess around in the stream, to find clues and deduce their stories; plenty of time to climb up to the field if he wanted and still get home for pancakes. In retrospect, plenty of time for trouble too.
Justin pushed his feet into his cool cowboy boots. At least Justin thought they were “cool.” The boots came almost to his knees and were two sizes too big, but they had fancy red and blue stitching in the leather, extremely pointy toes, and one-inch heels. The boots made him feel important and tall, although walking in them was a teensy bit difficult. But Justin was careful, and Mom said he would grow into his boots in no time flat.
He tip-toed across the kitchen, took a toaster-tart from the cupboard. Then, holding it in his teeth and not breathing at all, he unbolted the backdoor and eased it open, listening all the while for sounds of life from upstairs before stepping out into the fog. Gently he pulled the door shut, then devoured his tart—raw—in three big bites.
The Drexel house sat back among the redwoods on the uphill side of lower Bay View Road looking down into Creekside Park. Justin galloped round the back corner of the house at top speed and took the steps to the street-level garage two at a time. He was bursting with energy and excitement. Suddenly his left boot-heel hit a patch of wet moss. Justin grabbed out at the railing to avoid a head-long tumble. Dumb old boots, he thought, slowing himself down.
The astringent smell of evergreen mixed with the sweet fragrance of late blooming jasmine. Fog swirled through the towering redwoods, its long tendrils dangling from the canopy overhead. Justin’s imagination shifted into turbo-charge. He saw a bloody-jawed hound poised to leap from the laurels down at the edge of the road, Jack-the-Ripper hidden in the shadow of the garage. He half scared himself. Then he remembered Mom’s saying all the real murderers were safely locked behind the walls of San Quentin Prison out on the point beyond Larkspur Ferry. Anyway, Sherlock Holmes was never afraid of what might be lurking in the fog. Justin pushed the imaginary hounds and murderers from his mind and turned to the real business—finding clues.
Shoving through the brambles he disappeared behind the garage, coming out again among the ferns on the far side of the driveway, his eyes intent upon the ground. Suddenly he squatted down and began inspecting some tire ruts in the mud. Too narrow for Dad’s SUV, but they matched exactly the wheels on Maia’s ancient vomit-green Beetle. Maia must have taken her car out after all, after Dad told her clearly not to go driving in the fog. And she was probably talking on her cell phone when she returned—or texting—because the ruts went right through Mom’s garden, squashing the biggest fronds flat. Stupid sister. She bragged she could drive with one hand—or none. Wrong!
Justin pulled his hood up over his ball cap and trotted on down Bay View Road towards the park and the bottom of the Crossways Steps. The roadway was narrow, curvy, lined with shrubs, oaks, and redwoods. He circled a place where the roots of a huge tree heaved up the asphalt. He took care not to catch his boot heel again, and he remembered to keep his ears tuned for the sound of motors coming from behind, his eyes alert for headlights breaking through the blur ahead. Condensation dripped and drizzled as great puffs of fog billowed off the mountains. Houses up the mountains, including his own, disappeared. Fog shrouded the park below. Justin watched for potholes, for broken asphalt, for hubcaps, for scars in the trunks of trees smashed by cars as he walked down the middle of the road. He himself once crashed his bike along here somewhere, pedaling too fast around a curve, skidding out on the gravel, nearly careening over the embankment and into Big Creek. He imagined the excitement of a high speed car chase down Bay View Road. Or a motorcycle chase!
At long last, a pair of low concrete pillars emerged from the blur ahead of him. These marked the bridge over Big Creek. The Steps rose on the other side. Already Justin could hear the lively splash of the little stream—the so-called ditch—dumping through the culvert into Big Creek. Good, he thought. Lots of water mean clues for sure.
He stopped to stare into the fog below him. Something was moving in the bracken along the Big Creek, a big dark shadow. The rump of a deer? He tossed a stone. The shadow moved away. Curious what it was, Justin stepped off the pavement and began to work his way down the bank towards the creek, hoping to find signs of this deer, or its half-grown fawn. The vegetation was thick and soggy. A branch punched him in the ear. All he found were some muddy people prints, a burnt match, a crumpled cigarette pack. He picked up the cigarette pack, crushed it, and shoved it into his pocket. It might turn out to be a clue. Then, hopping from rock to rock along the stream, he went under the bridge, pushing out of the weeds near the life-sized effigy of an old sawmill that cantilevered over the water. An idea crossed Justin's mind. Maybe he wouldn't climb the Steps—maybe he’d climb the roof of the old mill instead. Of course, it wasn’t a real sawmill, more like the suggestion of a sawmill, an open frame of two-by-fours with a shingled roof, a platform, and some picnic tables. Dad said it was supposed to remind people of the first sawmill in the county, built centuries ago by the lumbermen who chopped down all the old redwoods to build houses in Quarry Canyon and San Francisco. The real old mill burned down years and years and years ago: this one was fake.
Fake or not, though, from the roof of this mill-thing, a boy could see all the way downtown to the stores around the plaza and the schools and the public library on the other side of the park. Now was his chance, for the high school boys usually had the ridgeline staked out. They'd sit up there smoking and laughing like stupid crows, shouting off the little boys. Justin did climb the roof once though, when no-one was around. It was not that great. He saw four dogs running in a line behind the library. Still, he felt almost like a teenager being up there—even though he didn’t smoke. Justin touched the crumpled cigarette pack in his pocket. Then his attention was caught once more by the sounds of splashing, and he imagined all the clues washing down. Well, he wasn’t stupid—climbing the mill-thing was dangerous in cowboy boots.
Justin turned and headed off towards the Steps.
Too bad he didn't climb that roof.