Anonymous Page 3

  Chapter Five

  Madison stared at her phone on the floor like it was alive and would continue the conversation on its own if she picked it up. This was no longer theoretical. “Anonymous” was connected to Twitter. And she hadn’t been tweeting about anything else. If he wasn’t connected to the Gaslamp mystery, he at least followed Madison on Twitter and knew where she lived—and thought that she was investigating him. What else did he know about her? Had he been following her?

  Her best guess was that he was connected to the missing women and thought Madison’s tweets had gotten too close to discovering him.

  She went back to the whiteboard and stared at it. Her arms were shaking. She took a deep breath and tried to calm down. She wouldn’t respond to Anonymous on Twitter. She’d sent the tweet to draw him out; hell, she’d sent it on a whim and hadn’t thought he’d even respond. Now that he had, she wasn’t going to get anywhere playing cat and mouse on Twitter. She needed to do a real investigation. And that meant doing the usual things, being meticulous and organized. And she needed to keep moving. What next?

  Under Suspects, she put Elissa’s boyfriend. He came across as really shady to Madison, not that it would explain the death of Samantha two years before. But she had to follow every string until it led either to the answer or to a dead end. No one knew for sure if the two disappearances were connected, and she would pursue every avenue that presented itself. How many avenues would that be? She had a stalker who was threatening to kill her. She didn’t trust anyone else, even the police, to take this as seriously as she did. She wasn’t going to sit and do nothing about it. She had to figure out who this guy was. Madison’s head was spinning and she was still shaky from the adrenaline rush.

  She opened her front door and went out onto the landing. All was quiet in the alley; no strange cars parked nearby. She could hear the waves. The sun had made its way over the top of her apartment and shimmered above the ocean in front of her. Sometimes that was all that kept her going: glimpses of sunlight like glimpses of hope. Two seagulls were fighting over part of a hamburger in a fast-food container they’d pulled out of the trash can in the alley. She took a deep breath and stretched her arms up high over her head and let the breath out in a huge sigh.

  She knew that this investigation, and baiting a possible murderer to get him to come out of the woodwork and expose himself, which she’d just done with that tweet, was dangerous. But when she asked herself Can I handle this? her answer was yes. She refused to live her life afraid. One time she’d told Tom about ripping into a guy on the street who had catcalled her, and he’d said, “Madison, the way you talk to guys I’d think you either had a really big guy nearby or were carrying a gun.” She had neither. Maybe she didn’t have much to back it up, but she wouldn’t be intimated by anyone. It wasn’t that she was brave; she just didn’t like being afraid. And she was a great investigator. She could do this.

  As she released her arms and bent all the way down to put her palms flat on the sun-washed deck, she saw her neighbor Ryan walking up the path in their shared garden, surfboard under his arm. He kept his surfboard under an overhang below her apartment. As he walked toward the hutch, he stared up at her; he didn’t know she could see him through her hair from her bent position.

  “Hi Ryan,” she said while upside down.

  “Oh!” He stopped and shifted from bare foot to bare foot, his long hair full of sand and clinging to his wetsuit. “Hi there. I didn’t even see you.” Right, Madison thought. You mean you didn’t know I could see you staring at me. She stood up and grabbed her hair to replace it into the bun it had fallen out of.

  “What are you up to?” Ryan asked. He wasn’t unattractive; in fact, he would normally be Madison’s type. Meaning likely a criminal, she thought wryly. She definitely liked bad boys, and he was rugged, confident, and a surfer. But she hadn’t thought it wise to date someone who lived downstairs from her, just across the neatly manicured garden that the landlord had fashioned after an English countryside. Also, even though she and Dave weren’t exclusive, she didn’t think he’d appreciate her bringing another surfer into the picture—one he probably surfed with every day. She hadn’t asked, but Ryan and Dave likely knew each other, even if just casually. La Jolla, especially Windansea, was a very small town.

  “Not much.” Then she realized she should probably question him about anyone he might have seen hanging out around her apartment—or putting a note on her door. “Do you have a minute?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer for a second; he just stared up the stairs at her with his mouth open. The moment went on a little too long, to where Madison thought she might need to repeat herself.

  “Right now?” he said. “With me?”

  Now she was confused. He was younger than she was, maybe twenty-five to her thirty-five, and with the rapidly changing vernacular among people younger than she that made her jump to urbandictionary.com on a daily basis, she wondered if she’d just accidentally propositioned him. Was there a double meaning to “Do you have a minute?” Was it like “Netflix and chill” or something?

  “I’m not sure what you think I’m asking you,” she said. “I’m wondering if I can talk to you for a second. Just talk.”

  “Oh,” he said. Then he laughed. She hadn’t seen him laugh before. His laugh was disarming. “It’s just you never talk to me. I … no I didn’t think you were … no. Let me just get out of my wetsuit and take a shower and I’ll knock on your door?”

  “Awesome.” She watched him stow his surfboard and then hobble down the cement path to his front door. He lived with three roommates in the front house; in the 1920s, her apartment was the carriage house for his house. His was a classic California Craftsman home, with carefully crafted built-ins like bookcases and breakfast nooks, although she hadn’t seen the inside of his house specifically. Maybe that would change soon, Madison thought. She loved a guy with a great laugh. He was a bit young, which was why she’d never really paid attention to him. But these days a guy ten years younger wasn’t that big a deal. That’s what she would tell herself, anyway.

  She went inside her apartment and started going through her tweets to see if she’d missed anything that should go on the whiteboard. She’d mentioned rideshare drivers the most in her tweets. Surely the police had checked that? Couldn’t a rideshare service tell where its drivers had been on a particular day and time? She wrote that down as a lead to follow up on.

  About ten minutes later there was a knock at her door.

  “That was fast,” she said as she let Ryan in.

  “Yeah, I just had to rinse the sand off, you know.” He was about six feet tall and had changed into board shorts and a green surf-competition T-shirt. He had the classic Southern California surfer accent, like Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The surfers in San Diego didn’t have quite that thick of an accent, but Madison was always amused by how close they sounded to that famous surfer played by Sean Penn. The only thing Madison felt he’d gotten wrong: the surfers she knew were laid-back only up to a point. Madison had lived at Windansea long enough to see the rougher side to surfers, which for some reason hadn’t made it into popular culture. When kooks—surfer terminology for someone who couldn’t surf—tried to ride the notoriously difficult surf break at Windansea, they might find themselves confronted in the parking lot on Neptune Place afterward. It wasn’t just territorial, although that was certainly part of it; when you didn’t know what you were doing in dangerous waves, you could get someone else killed. And surfers spent their days paddling out against heavy surf, so they were deceptively strong. The fact that they also spent time doing community service work just made them perfect men to Madison: strong, brave, and kind. Just the thought of it made her swoon.

  Ryan was looking out the windows of her apartment. “Damn, you have the view alright!” he said. “I always imagined what it would look like from up here, but this is better than I thought.”

  Madison was standing behind him when
he said this. Ryan turned around, smiling, still amazed by the view, and then he saw the look on Madison’s face.

  It took her a moment to find her voice. “You’ve ‘always imagined’ what it would look like from up here?”

  “I just … sorry, I just …” And then he blushed.

  “Do you want a beer?” she asked. She walked into the kitchen while she tried to figure out what had just happened. Why was he imagining what her view was like?

  “Yeah, a beer, that’s cool,” he said. “I don’t … like … think about being up here or anything. That sounded really weird. It just seemed like there’d be a cool view from here, and there is.” He looked like he wanted to die. It was kind of cute.

  “The view was definitely the selling point.” She walked into the room and handed him his beer. She pointed to the wingback chair and indicated that he should sit. She sat in her office chair.

  “So you know Dave Rich?” he asked.

  That took her by surprise.

  “Yeah, I know him,” she said.

  “I’ve seen him walking up your stairs. I figured you guys were … is he your …?” And he blushed again.

  It was really rare to meet a guy who blushed. Dave had told her that she was intimidating to guys, an observation she took offense to at first. Was she supposed to reduce her strength or power so as not to intimidate guys? “No,” Dave said. “You’re just beautiful and confident, and guys get stupid around you.” She told him that was a nice save to get out of a feminism discussion, and they’d left it for the time being. Was that what was causing Ryan to stammer and blush?

  “No, he’s not my boyfriend,” she said. “But we’re close. So … anyway. I need to ask you if you saw anything weird this morning. Did you see anyone hanging around here?”

  “Ummm, I don’t think so,” he said. “I was in the water starting at about seven AM, though. So what time would this have been?”

  Madison realized that most of the people in the houses and apartments near her weren’t around when she went out for her run at seven thirty that morning. Either they were on their way to work, difficult at that time of the morning to get out of La Jolla with traffic, or in the water surfing.

  “Oh, right. Okay. Well, can you let me know if you see anything weird? I had something happen this morning, and I’m trying to get to the bottom of it.”

  “No problem,” Ryan said. “If I’m not surfing I’m usually at home studying, so I can keep an eye out.”

  “Studying? Where do you go to school?” she asked.

  “Oh I’m getting my master’s in mechanical engineering at UC San Diego.”

  The only thing Madison liked more than surfers was smart guys. “Cool,” she said. She stood up to indicate that they were done, and he stood up to be polite and knocked into her by mistake; her immovability and his trajectory caused him to fly back down onto the chair. Nothing like knocking over a six-foot-tall guy to make you feel feminine, Madison thought. They both laughed.

  “Well I better get going,” he said, and stood without falling this time. “But I wanted to ask you: do you think you’d want to have dinner with me tomorrow night?”

  Madison wasn’t good at being asked out. Her inclination was always to say no. In fact, she usually said no without thinking. Part of it was her attachment to Dave; part of it was that she didn’t want to make small talk at dinner with a stranger: she’d rather stay home by herself and read. But Dave did not practice the same faithfulness, and she spent enough time alone as it was. It might be nice to have someone to do things with. She didn’t have to marry him. And he was the kind of guy who blushed.

  “Sure, why not?” Besides, going out to dinner would give her mind a break from the dangerous investigation she’d decided to pursue.

  Chapter Six

  Madison had stared at the whiteboard and her tweets for another hour after Ryan left, and she decided that was enough. She walked down to the beach for sunset, a Windansea tradition. All of the locals, and now some of the Airbnb tourists, had a tradition of walking down to the beach with their plastic cups of wine and beer or cocktails to stand on the bluff and watch the sunset together. It was one of Madison’s favorite things about living there. It allowed her a sense of community without demanding too much of her. She could smile at her neighbors and acquaintances, but there was no expectation of talking to other people.

  She walked out her front door, turned right, and was at Neptune Place—the place to be in the summer and every evening throughout the year. Less than a mile long, it was the demarcation for Windansea Beach. A small parking lot fit the surfers’ cars during the week; on summer weekends every available parking space was taken with beachgoers who’d discovered the short stretch of beach, covered in boulders at high tide but gleaming with a mile of white sand at low tide. Named for a hotel built in 1919 along the beach that had long since burned down, Windansea Beach boasted a palm-covered shack built in 1946 as its landmark. At night Madison could hear the waves, which were sometimes too loud to sleep. The waves were always louder at night.

  It was a perfect summer evening: the sun was near the horizon, shining on both the water and the gray clouds in the distance, melting a deep amethyst hue onto the entire scene. It was chilly despite being summer, and Madison had thrown a UCSD hoodie on over her tank top. She’d always wanted a Windansea Surf Club sweatshirt, but only actual members of the club, who were initiated mainly on their surfing ability, could wear the shirt. It made her want it even more.

  She scrabbled down the short bluff onto the massive boulders that stood high above the sand. The tide had been high but was going back out, so there was sand available for her to sit on. She stepped and then shimmied down the boulders until she reached the sand, then sat tucked against a boulder as she faced the water. The crowd on the sidewalk above her was no longer visible; she was hidden in her own little world.

  No matter how many times she sat here, she thought of her father’s last days. She’d rented a condo for him in his last month of life, just a block down from her apartment. She had stayed there with him, watching the dolphins with him during the day and barbecuing on the front patio at night. They knew he was going to die—an inoperable brain tumor would take his thoughts and his life in almost exactly the thirty days the doctors had given him—so she worked on making his last few weeks memorable. He told her, right before he died, that it had been the best weeks of his life.

  A surfer Madison recognized as a friend of Dave’s came out of the water and grabbed his flip-flops and towel that he’d left on the beach. Madison had seen him at a Windansea Surf Club “Day at the Beach for Special Surfers,” where the surf club members taught developmentally challenged children and adults to surf. Was his name Mike? She couldn’t remember. It had been the last community event before he became a member of the club. Being among the best surfers in the country wasn’t enough to get you in the club: you had to show considerable community involvement. The guy clambered up the path to the sidewalk, shouting a greeting to someone he saw there.

  Just then Madison spotted Dave surfing in the last wave of the night. She could never figure out which of the surfers he was when he was far out in the water, but as he got closer to the shore, his silhouette was distinctive. Tall and broad shouldered, he had thick blond hair that he always kept too long.

  “Hey,” he said. He jumped off his board and walked the rest of the way in, flipping his wet hair out of his face as he approached her. He squinted to see her better, to assess her mood. Squinting caused his blue eyes to be even more piercing.

  Emotion was like a drug to her: she couldn’t have just a little, or soon she’d stop being able to function. She had perfected her equanimity. But the sight of Dave Rich always shot a thrill from her tailbone to the top of her scalp, even after all these years.

  “I thought that was you,” he said. “But I thought, ‘Maddie wouldn’t be waiting for me, would she?’”

  “My God you’re vain,” she said
. “I’m watching the sunset. I didn’t even know you were in the water.”

  She reached her hand up for him to help her up, and he grabbed her and pulled her up and into his wetsuit—which was wet. He was so strong that her almost-six-foot body caught air as her feet came off the ground and she slammed into his chest. It had become a running gag for them; it got her every time. He looked tall and thin, maybe a little wiry, but he was stronger than any guy she’d ever met. It was like being with André the Giant. She threw her head back and laughed.

  He set her back on her feet.

  “What are you doing? Do you want to get something to eat?” he asked.

  “No, I have work to do.” She glanced up at the sidewalk and saw that quite a crowd had gathered—a lot of people for a Wednesday, watching as the sun took its final dip into the ocean. Dave knew all of them.

  “Really?” He grabbed a towel he’d left in the sand before he went surfing and wrapped it around his waist. “You got a case?”

  “Well, sort of.” She’d been dreading this part. “Actually, after my run this morning, there was a note on my door.”

  Dave was doing the surfer striptease: surfers perfected changing out of their wetsuits in public without showing skin. He had wrapped a towel around his waist, and now he was easing his wetsuit off underneath the towel. “What kind of note?”

  Madison explained about the threat and her idea that it had to do with tweets she’d sent out. She told him she’d given the note to Tom, a friend in the police department, and that he was looking into it.

  “Okay, so the police have it. What do you have to do?”

  “I have to figure out who wrote the note!”

  Dave had gotten his wetsuit off and was now pulling his board shorts on under the towel.

  “No, the police do. And I don’t like that this guy knows where you live.”

  Madison pulled her sweatshirt off, which was now wet, and tied it around her waist. “Oh, you ‘don’t like it’? You’re staking a claim to me now and I have to do what you say?”