Half Moon Bay: A Novel (Clay Edison Book 3)

It’s a beach town. Thirty miles south of San Francisco, thirty miles west of Palo Alto.

Eleven thousand residents.

Four Klausens that I could find.

—

ON THE PHONE to Hayley Klausen, I introduced myself as a private investigator. It felt cleaner than misrepresenting myself as law enforcement. Not a total lie. I was investigating, and I was doing it privately.

The phrase elicited a sort of automatic candor, as though refusing to answer my questions would mar her permanent record. No, she didn’t have any relatives named Chrissy. She did have a cousin Christopher who lived in New Hampshire. She was from Pittsburgh. Post-college she’d landed a job at a hot San Francisco start-up. The frat-boy culture got to her, and she’d quit before vesting a single share. She’d come down here to be closer to nature and for the last year had gotten by freelancing: web design, short-term coding gigs. With a defeated tone she told me she was mulling over moving back in with her parents.

Her story brought to mind Gayle Boyarin and Beverly Franchette née Rice and the countless others, men and women alike, who’d found their way to the Pacific, only to discover that it was not the golden bath they’d expected but a terrifying force of nature, immense and violent and indifferent.

I thanked her for her time.

—

JERRY AND VICKI Klausen owned Pillar Point Bait and Tackle. According to the store website—written in a fisherman’s rambling, garrulous style—Captain Jerry had grown up in San Diego and been an avid saltwater angler since he was strong enough to hold a rod, working on ocean charter boats starting at sixteen. On one such trip he met Vicki Reyes, and it was love at first sight. In 1995 they bought the shop from the previous owner, establishing it as the premier supplier to the local sportfishing community. They ran charter trips for tuna, salmon, and rockfish on their fifty-three-footer, the Sweet-n-Salty, named for Jerry and Vicki (guess who was who!), as well as smaller charters and whale-watching trips on the forty-foot Hard A’s Night.

The boy who answered the phone told me Captain Jerry was on the water till the afternoon. I left a message.

—

FRANCINE KLAUSEN WAS asleep when I called. This I got in broken English from her caretaker. She deflected questions about Chrissy: She didn’t know, she was sorry, yes, she would ask the lady when she woke up, sorry.

—

MARIO KLAUSEN HUNG up on me.

A few minutes later I tried him again. He’d already blocked my number.

—

COULD BE ANY of them.

None of them.

Someone else.

Aside from his meeting with Janice Little, Phil Shumway’s final report didn’t go into detail about what he’d done or where he’d gone on his West Coast tour. If he’d headed down the Peninsula, I didn’t know how, or even if, he’d settled on Half Moon Bay. His destination could have been another, more populous city nearby—San Mateo, Redwood City—and he’d taken a detour, picking up a postcard for his wife along the way. Maybe he’d driven out for no purpose other than to see the ocean one last time before he died.

But he had a beach house of his own for that. Nor did I see Phil Shumway as the kind of guy who indulged in spontaneous seaside jaunts to satisfy a squishy existential urge.

It is the belief of this agent that the investigation to the present moment has ignored the role of Ms. Klausen and that an effort should be made to ascertain her whereabouts with all possible expedience.

His time was limited. He knew he was dying.

He’d gone to Half Moon Bay for a reason.

—

THIRTY MILES SOUTH of San Francisco, thirty miles west of Palo Alto; forty minutes from either place with no traffic.

There’s always traffic. Silicon Valley wealth manifests as multimillion-dollar shacks, a large luxury resort, and a quaintly preserved Main Street whose mom-and-pop stocks handcrafted cheese and presses fresh green juice.

I left before dawn, arriving into a morning that bloomed soft and cool. Along the coastal access road, banks of conifers alternated with grassy breaks, delivering me past the high school and through a determinedly ugly commercial strip where sandwich boards exhorted visitors to patronize Uncle Lou’s World Famous Pumpkin Patch.

I crested the hill. The haze parted, and I pulled over to stand on the running board.

Same dramatic coastline, jagged rock and turgid waters. To the north jutted a spit of sand: Mavericks Beach, actually world famous for its big-wave surfing. Tiny black dots, like a handful of pepper strewn across the ocean’s felted green, rose up and rocketed toward the shore, only to vanish in a burst of froth. Every so often, someone died there, chasing glory. Without really intending to, I began counting surfers’ bodies, waiting for them to resurface; waiting for them to stay down.

Pillar Point Bait and Tackle was a cadet gray hut, harbor-adjacent. It shared a parking lot with several other businesses catering to the local trade—surf outfitter, seafood market—none of them yet open for the day. Captain Jerry’s posted opening and closing hours were, respectively, TOO DANGED EARLY and WAY TOO LATE. I pressed my face to the glass, then headed down to the marina, walking the slips until I found the Sweet-n-Salty.

A leathery man with a stiff pewter-colored mustache was hosing off the deck. Everything about him appeared to have been left out in the rain. His shorts, once white, were virtually transparent; threads trickled from the hem of his T-shirt. His baseball cap declared that LIFE IS GOOD.

“Morning,” he said affably.

“Morning.”

He shut off the hose and came to the rail. “Can I help you?”

“Hope so,” I said. “Are you Jerry Klausen?”

“So they say.” He extended a barnacle of a hand.

I gave him my spiel: private investigator, hired to find Chrissy Klausen.

“Sorry, don’t know her.”

“What about a Francine Klausen?”

“I’ve never met another Klausen around here. Other than my wife, of course. And my cousin Mario.”

“I found a number for him. I tried calling but he blocked me.”

Jerry chuckled. “Sounds about right. Technically he’s my first cousin once removed. He used to own the shop before Vicki and I bought him out.”

“Is he married? Kids?”

“Mario? No. Lifelong bachelor.”

“Do you think he’d know of any other Klausens?”

“I wouldn’t bet on it.” He paused. “What was that name you said before?”

“Francine.”

“She lives in town?”

“I have an address for her on Miramontes Point Road.”

“Know what,” he said slowly, “I take it back. I have heard of her. I once got a package of hers by mistake. Sorry. Slipped my mind completely.”

“Not at all. When was this?”

“Geez…While back. It came to the shop and I opened it without reading the label. We get about a million deliveries a week. I took one look and knew it wasn’t anything I’d ordered.”

“What was it?”

“Wine. I go to Vicki, ‘Hey, did you order this?’ and she goes, ‘No, not me.’ I checked the address and it’s this woman named Klausen. I drove it on over.”

“Nice of you.”

“Well, I’m more of a beer guy. Anyway it looked expensive, like something a person’d want to have. The box had customs stamps on it.”

“Coming from where?”

“Boy. I don’t really remember. Europe? I don’t know.”

“Did you meet her?”

He shook his head. “Nobody answered. I left it on her doorstep. Hey, though, you think me and her might be related?”

—

YOU COULD IMAGINE that the Sea Star Residential Park had seen better days.

Easier to believe that it hadn’t, and that this was as good as it’d ever been.

The low-slung layout, pocked pink stucco, and scaly exterior railings wheezed neglect. A mile and a half inland, I could no longer see the ocean, but I could smell it: not the briny tang of summer beach days, but a penetrating iodine funk. Surrounding hills trapped the moisture, creating a clammy microclimate that slimed surfaces and ate paint. Seagull droppings stippled the walls and red roof tiles. It looked as though someone had attempted to freshen up, but they had a horrendous attention span and could only work in one-square-inch increments.

Mostly it was parking lot, an ameboid lake of asphalt relieved by curbed islets filled with brown mulch. Each of the sixty-eight units had its own numbered spot. The guidelines had worn away to specks, leaving vehicles crammed too close or spread too far apart or occupying careless angles.

Valuable real estate nonetheless; that it had escaped redevelopment seemed an errand Fate had forgotten to run. Eventually, the Sea Star would succumb. Until then it housed the remnants of a species nearing extinction: the local working class.

Francine Klausen lived in a ground-floor unit. A red midnineties Toyota Camry with a Tagalog bumper sticker and a bead cover on the driver’s seat occupied her parking spot. Next to it, conspicuous among the pickups and 100K-milers, sat a black Tesla Roadster with tinted windows.

A tiny Filipina in Looney Tunes scrubs answered my knock. Stitched in red thread above her breast pocket were the words GOLDEN STATE IN-HOME CARE and the name ENNA F. She regarded with apathy my request to talk to Francine Klausen.

“She’s sleeping.”

I recognized her voice from the previous week’s phone calls: She was the one who’d been putting me off, pretending to take my messages.

“Do you know when she’ll be awake?”

Enna F. shrugged. “Maybe tomorrow.”

“I drove down to see her.”

She made a face. Why’s that my problem.

“How about this,” I said. “I’ll hang around, and you call me when she wakes up.”

“One second, sir,” she said.

She shut the door and set the chain.

A moment later, a different woman came to the door.

Beverly Franchette.