Dead Midnight by Marcia Muller Page A

but wild and unpredictable. We didn’t really approve of her, but she brought Roger out of his shell, so we decided to keep him on a loose leash. They were together twenty-four seven, as the kids say today. They made joint plans to attend U.C. Berkeley in the fall, but that summer she ran off to Hawaii with an older boy who was visiting her brother.”
    Roger had been devastated. He disappeared from home and, when he returned shortly after his frantic parents filed a missing-person report, he refused to say where he had been or what he’d been doing. From his appearance, they suspected heavy drug and alcohol use. After that he withdrew to his room, neither eating anything from the trays they placed outside his locked door nor answering them when they tried to talk through it.
    “He proved he had backbone, though,” his mother said, “because in three days he came out of there with a plan.”
    He had decided not to enroll at Berkeley—too painful in light of the plans he and his girlfriend had made. Instead he would work for Margaret’s publishing firm for a year and study journalism at City College. He would also reactivate his application to the University of Michigan, one of several schools where he’d been accepted, and enroll there the following fall. He carried out the plan to the letter, left the next August, and except for brief visits at the holidays didn’t return to San Francisco for close to seven years.
    “Effectively we lost him,” Margaret said. “It was as if he blamed us for what the girl did to him.”
    “I doubt that. He probably didn’t want to be reminded of the relationship. What happened to her, do you know?”
    “She married the boy she ran off with, then returned here, divorced, a few years later. At least that’s what Harry says. He was a friend of her older brother, the one the boy from Hawaii was visiting.”
    “And her name is?”
    “Dinah Vardon.”
    Dinah Vardon, the Webmaster at
InSite
. “Are you aware that she and Roger worked together at the magazine?”
    Margaret’s eyes flickered with surprise. “Roger never mentioned her. Perhaps she didn’t matter to him anymore. Or perhaps they were able to put the past behind them and become friends.”
    “It’s possible. This friend of Roger’s—Gene Edwards. He’s not on my list of people to interview. Were they still in touch?”
    She looked away from me. “Gene’s dead. He … killed himself two years ago, after his wife left him. On Christmas Day.”
    Another suicide, on another special day. Christmas, for Gene. Valentine’s, for Roger. What day had Joey died? April sixth. He’d been dead for seventy-two hours before anyone found him. Nothing special about April sixth, though—
    Nothing? Jesus! April sixth was Joey’s birthday.
    “Ms. McCone?” Margaret Nagasawa’s voice sounded far away. “What is it?”
    “Sorry. I was just thinking.”
    No, I thought, I wasn’t thinking at all. Not when it came to my brother.
    It was very late in Bangkok—or very early, depending on your point of view—but I badly needed to hear Hy’s voice reassure me that I wasn’t the monstrously uncaring person I felt like. Trouble was, I also needed a phone that didn’t chirp at me every fifteen seconds.
    As I merged with the sidewalk crowd on Grant Avenue, I looked around. Chichi shops, restaurants, and not a phone booth in sight. The prevalence of cellular units was forcing the phone company to phase out many booths, and it had been my experience that when you found a working one it was bound to be in an inconvenient and noisy spot. Besides, if I stopped to make a call, I’d be cutting it close for my appointment with Harry Nagasawa. I scuttled the notion for now and headed for the parking garage.
    The family’s home was on Vallejo Street in Cow Hollow, a district named for the dairy farms that once were prevalent there. Nowadays the only bovines associated with the place are cash cows—the buildings from which owners