CHAPTER
 
One
 
 
“It’s a beautiful house.” Leslie Barnes turned regretfully from the panorama before her. The early lights of winter dusk twinkled below her, and on a clear day, she knew, the entire bay would spread out here, where now the lights of the Golden Gate made a ribbon of jewels above the fog.
Perhaps for this view she could make minor adjustments, remodel the small room off the foyer—no, there was no time or energy to spare for that. Her work must come first.
“It’s truly a lovely place, the nicest I’ve seen. But, as I told the agent when I first called, I must have a separate room or two to see my clients.”
“Clients? You’re a lawyer, Miss?”
“A psychotherapist.”
“The rooms on the ground floor—”
“I’m sorry,” Leslie repeated. Why was she apologizing? This was her business. “My sister is a student at the Conservatory, and we need room for a grand piano and a harp.”
The agent shrugged and sighed. “This place will go fast, you know. I have three people waiting to see it, and I couldn’t even guarantee I could hold it till Monday.”
“It simply isn’t large enough,” Leslie repeated. But she looked again with regret at the view she would have loved to live with.
The agent saw her regretful look and pressed on. “Look, one of the people considering this house is a family with three teenage kids; that little room we showed you, they’re going to put two girls in there and let the boy have the attic room. You take the little downstairs room off the garage for your patients, and the piano can go in the living room—” He was sounding like a reasonable man beset by a silly woman who didn’t know what she wanted, and when Leslie shook her head he said, “Well, lady, I think you’re making a big mistake, I really don’t have anything else to show you. That place on Geary, maybe—”
“No parking; besides, I can’t live in a place where neither Emily nor I will dare step outside after dark.”
He shrugged. “Well, if we get anything, I’ll call you. But you’re not going to find anything bigger than this, unless you’re talking about half a million dollars.”
The unspoken part of that, you’re too fussy, stayed with her as she went to her car and watched the agent drive off in his. But she had a right to be fussy; it was the house she would live in, perhaps forever. She could not afford to move again within ten years. And she was not sure marriage was for her, in spite of Joel—
Her thoughts ran a familiar track. If he could get it through his head that her work was important to her, as important as his law career, not just a stopgap until Mister Right came along. She stopped herself.
She was always telling her clients not to enter any serious relationship with the idea of changing the other party. She could accept Joel as he was, marry him and live with him that way, or she could refuse him. But he wasn’t going to change, or if he did it would be for his own reasons which had nothing to do with her.
In any case she must build her home with the assumption that she would live in it for years. San Francisco was necessary; she could no longer live in the East Bay, with Emily at the Conservatory. The long commute every day by public transit was expensive and took up precious time as well as draining energy Emily needed for practice.
Maybe, she thought, as she turned onto the skyway approach to the Bay Bridge, she was too fussy; the piano could have gone in the living room—she would, after all, have been down with her clients half the day or more. The little room downstairs off the garage would have made an office, with some remodeling; at worst she could have found office space somewhere outside. In any case it would have been no worse than the rented apartment, cramped even for one, and since Emily had joined her, bulging at the seams with her office and Emily’s piano. The harp was still in storage.
And how could she, with the small amount of family money coming from her grandmother, who had for a short time been a concert harpist and recording artist, afford anything more spacious than that little jewel on Russian Hill? Emily’s share was earmarked for the Conservatory, and even so Leslie would probably have to help her before she was through. But at whatever cost they must have a place with space for them both; Emily was already chafing at the necessary rule that she could not practice until the last client had left for the day.
She had a good counseling practice, though not as good as it could have been; she still set her fees on a sliding scale based on ability to pay, instead of doing as her colleagues insisted she should do: charging what the traffic would bear. Counseling, they said truthfully, was a luxury service, and the higher fees were set, the higher the therapist’s reputation. How much good had she really done with the school counseling, which was just part of the system, which she had doled out in Sacramento—
Leslie felt she had a singular rapport with disturbed teenagers. She had been cheated out of her own adolescent rebellion; when the whole world, it seemed, had been rebelling, everything from protest marches to pot, she had been working hard to survive, put herself through graduate school, and was already fighting Emily’s battle for freedom. Their mother had successfully forced Leslie into taking a position as a school counselor instead of opening her own office as a therapist; and now their mother was determined that Emily’s talent could be best served by earning a certificate to teach music. The idea of Emily teaching in the chaos of the public schools was rather like imagining Secretariat hauling a coal cart. Or more accurately, Leslie thought, visualizing her high-strung and highly gifted sister giving music lessons, Maria Callas as a high school basketball coach.
She had resolved that Emily should have her chance, even if it meant she herself must spend her life teaching. The inheritance had come too late for a normal adolescence or carefree college days for Leslie; but it meant freedom for Emily. And the scandal which had driven Leslie out of the public school system had at least freed them both. Her mother, Leslie reflected bitterly, had been glad to see her go. But she would never forgive her for taking Emily away.
Leslie cursed as a huge double-trailered semi truck cut into her lane of traffic, remembering the headlines splashed across the National Enquirer.
PSYCHIC TEACHER LOCATES BODY OF MISSING SCHOOLGIRL!
PIGTAIL KILLER TRAPPED BY PSYCHIC!
A fluke, Leslie reminded herself. Everybody had a psychic flash now and then. She clenched her teeth, gripping the wheel…the traffic was heavy; she had hoped to be back before rush hour traffic built up on the Bay Bridge; there must be an accident on the Bridge. She concentrated fiercely on the crawling car ahead, trying not to see again before her eyes the flash of Juanita García’s body in the drainage ditch, covered with blood, long hair tightly braided by the killer who had raped and mutilated four young girls.
No, she would not remember that. She had a different life now, and a different world. Joachím Mendoza, dubbed “the Pigtail Killer” for his habit of braiding the long hair of his victims, was still on Death Row. Leslie did not approve of capital punishment, but would not have lifted a hand to save his life; she had seen Juanita García’s body, had led the police there.
What if the newspapers had made a Roman holiday of the lucky hunch or psychic flash which had led to the killer? The local headlines had lasted only a day or two; Schoolteacher finds pigtail killer victim. And who ever remembered what was printed in tabloids like the Enquirer?
She had left the notoriety in Sacramento. When she relocated in San Francisco, it would be entirely behind her. If she ever found a place in San Francisco. This was the fifth house she had turned down.
She knew herself well enough to wonder why she kept finding reasons to reject every new house. The perfect house, she told herself firmly, just didn’t exist. One way or another, she would have to make up her mind to some compromises. She tried hard to dismiss her own indecision as she took the freeway exit and drove through the Berkeley streets to the tiny house she had rented when she came to Berkeley.
She pulled up and parked in the driveway. The lease here was up on May first: she didn’t want to be stuck with a lease for another year.
But she could think about that later. She was seeing a new client for the first time tonight.
Mentally she riffled through the file. Eileen Grantson. Fourteen. Disruptive behavior, temper tantrums, breaking china, lying about it, constant fights in school. Broken home; father has custody, mother remarried and living in Texas, no siblings. The girl probably had a right to be angry at the conditions of her life. It would be easier to deal with a girl already able to express her anger than one who claimed she felt none. The human mind, Leslie told herself, was a fearful and wonderful thing, and that was why she had become a therapist; because she had never lost her sense of wonder about all the things the mind could do.
Eileen Grantson was not a prepossessing teenager. Her hair was mousy and lank, eyes a pale washy blue, hidden behind thick plastic-rimmed glasses. She slumped in a chair as if her spine was made of poor-quality cardboard.
In nearly an hour she had said almost nothing; Leslie had had to extract a few admissions from her by painstaking questions. Most teenagers were all too ready to pour out all their grievances against the world.
“You get very angry with your father sometimes, don’t you, Eileen?”
“He’s crazy,” said Eileen s...