He stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket and shook his head.
“You’re from San Francisco?” I said.
“How’d you know that?”
“Lucy told me.”
“She was talking about me?”
“I took a family history.”
“Oh. Actually, I’m from Palo Alto, but I’m down in L.A. quite a lot on business—real estate, mostly buyouts and bankruptcies. What with the economy, I’ve been down here more than usual, and I started thinking about connecting with Puck and Lucy—it seemed wrong that we never even tried to get together. Lucy wasn’t listed but Puck was, so a few weeks ago I called him. He was shocked to hear from me; it was awkward. But we talked a few more times, finally agreed to try dinner.”
“Was Lucy going to be there, too?”
“No, he didn’t want her to be—protecting her, I guess. It was a trial balloon. The deal was that if it worked out, we’d get her involved . . . he was pretty nervous about the whole thing. Still, I was surprised when he stood me up.”
“Have you heard from him since?”
“No. I tried him a couple times from here, no answer.” He looked at his watch. “Maybe I should try again.”
There was a pay phone up the hall. He called, waited, and came back shaking his head.
“Poor kid,” he said, looking at the door to Lucy’s room. “Puck said she’d been through some kind of rough jury duty and was pretty freaked out, but I had no idea she was this . . . vulnerable.”
He buttoned his jacket. Tight around the waist. “Too many business dinners,” he said, smiling ruefully. “Not that I imagine she’s had it easy. Did she tell you who our father is?”
I nodded.
He said, “I don’t know if she’s had any contact with him, but if she has, I’d be willing to bet that’s at least part of her stress.”
“Why’s that?”
“The man’s a total and complete sonofabitch.”
“Have you had contact with him?”
“No way. He lives here—up in Topanga Canyon, big spread. But that’s a call I’ll never make.” Unbuttoning his jacket. “When I first started in the business, I used to have fantasies of his going bankrupt and me buying his land up cheap.” Smile. “I’ve been in counseling myself—got divorced last year.”
“What happened twenty years ago?”
“Pardon?”
“You said the last time you saw Lucy was twenty years ago.”
“Oh. Yeah, twenty, twenty-one, something like that.” He squinted and scratched the side of his nose. “I was nine, so it was twenty-one. It was the summer my mother decided to go to Europe to take painting lessons—she was an artist. She drove us—my sister Jo and me—down to L.A. and dropped us off at Sanctum. That’s the name of his place in Topanga.”
“I’ve heard of it—a writer’s retreat.”
“Yeah. Anyway, here she is, dumping us on him, no advance notice. He was about as happy as getting a boil lanced, but what could he do, kick us out?”
“And Lucy was there too?”
“Lucy and Puck. They came up a couple of weeks after we did. Tiny little kids, we didn’t know who they were; our mother had never told us they even existed, only that he’d left her for another woman. As it turned out, their mom had died a few years before, and the aunt who had taken care of them had gotten married and dumped them.”
“How old were they?”
“Let’s see, if I was nine, Puck would have had to be . . . five. So Lucy was four. We looked at them as babies, had nothing to do with them. Tell the truth, we resented them—our mother was always bad-mouthing their mother for stealing him away.”
“Who took care of them?”
“A nanny or some kind of baby-sitter. I remember that because they got to sleep with her in the main house while Jo and I had to stay in a little cabin and basically fend for ourselves. But that was okay. We ran around, did whatever we wanted.”
“Twenty-one years ago,” I said. “That must have been right after Sanctum opened.”
“It had just opened,” he said. “I remember they had this big party for the opening, and we were forced to stay in our cabin. Along with plates of food. Tons more spread out on these long white banquet tables, leftovers for weeks. I used to sneak into the kitchen and swipe pastries. I gained ten pounds—that was the beginning of my weight problem.”