The Spook Lights Affair by Bill Pronzini, Marcia Muller

eyes, had vanished again. And this time there was no picking up his trail.

 
    6
    SABINA
     
    She spooned some of the glutinous, evil-smelling food that her cat, Adam, loved into his saucer and set it down on the kitchen floor. Happy rumbles came from the sharp-eared, long-tailed Abyssinian and Siamese mixture; his short golden fur rippled with pleasure as he tucked into his feast.
    Better you than I, Sabina thought.
    From her small icebox she took a piece of fresh tuna, placed it in another saucer, and set that on the outside porch for old Annie, the homeless woman. Annie would not come for her breakfast until Sabina had left the flat, but she would already be waiting and watching close by.
    A cup of morning coffee sat cooling on the counter. Sabina took it to the parlor and sat in the Morris chair there to reflect once more on the bewildering events of the previous night.
    After she, Mayor Sutro, David St. Ives, and Dr. Bowers had returned to the Heights from their futile search along the Great Highway, they had enlisted the aid of servants and some of the male party guests in a thorough canvass of the grounds by lantern light. That had also proved futile, as she knew it would. Virginia St. Ives was not to be found on Sutro Heights, just as her body had not been found on the Great Highway. No matter what anyone might think—and there was skepticism among others besides the girl’s brother—Sabina had not been mistaken in what she’d witnessed on the overlook. The ghostlike figure on the parapet, its leap, the scream, the sound of the body tumbling down the cliff—all of that had happened just as she remembered it.
    The question of what had become of Virginia’s body was puzzling. But so was the reason for her death leap. The suicide note was ambiguous and offered no hint as to what would compel a lovely, rich post-debutante with the most promising of futures to commit such a drastic act.
    Unrequited love was one possibility, a serious illness another. A third was pregnancy out of wedlock.
    Adam sauntered in and jumped onto Sabina’s lap. She stroked him absently as he settled down to wash his face and paws.
    Would the fact that the girl had been forbidden to see Lucas Whiffing be sufficient cause? It didn’t seem likely. Once her parents returned from Sacramento, they couldn’t have expected Sabina or anyone else to spend days on end watching over their daughter; there were any number of ways she could have continued to keep company with the boy.
    Illness seemed just as improbable. Virginia had been too pink-cheeked and clear-eyed, too energetic, to be suffering from a severe malady. There were moments, in fact, when she had seemed to glow.…
    Didn’t cousin Callie and her friends describe women who were with child as glowing? Yes, but those discussed pregnancies had occurred within wedlock and in all cases the children were wanted. If Virginia’s glow had been the result of pregnancy, it was probable she and Lucas would have wanted the baby, and as was usual in such circumstances, the St. Ives’s would eventually have accepted their grandchild, if not Lucas as their son-in-law. Virginia would have had no cause to take her unborn baby’s life as well as her own.
    But the situation might have been far more dire than it appeared on the surface. If Virginia had indeed tossed her bonnet over the windmill and found herself in a family way, and Lucas Whiffing had refused to marry her, death might have seemed preferable to facing shame and social banishment. She wouldn’t be the first or the last eighteen-year-old girl in trouble to make that senseless decision.
    The door chimes sounded.
    Now who could that be at this early hour? She set down her coffee cup, brushed Adam off her lap, and went to peer through a parting in the draperies that covered the windows overlooking the street. Two men, one bare-headed, the other wearing a felt slouch hat, stood in the vestibule. She recognized the little chubby one in the