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being under hand and foot. I’m turning off at Fairhaven. I’ll wait at the house until you get cut loose. Maybe I can take you out to dinner instead of lunch. If you’re really lucky, you might even talk me into spending the night.”
    I drove over to Bayside and down the steep driveway that leads to our house. Mel’s Porsche Cayman was tucked in behind a massive construction Dumpster that had taken over a big portion of the concrete slab that had once been a detached garage. The rest of the garage structure, afflicted by a terminal case of dry rot, had been red-­flagged as a hazard, knocked down, and the splintered remains hauled away during the first week of our renovation efforts. Mel had worried that perhaps it was an omen about the inadvisability of the entire project. Jim Hunt had attempted to reassure her by explaining that in sixty-­year-­old wood-­frame buildings, dry rot was simply the natural order of things, especially in the rainy Pacific Northwest.
    I wasn’t surprised to find her car parked there. Mel had told me that when things got too stressful at work, she’d grab a sandwich from Subway and drive out to our place, where she would eat lunch in her car, take a few deep breaths, and relieve the pressure by watching the birds out on the bay. I suspected that once the workers showed up, and construction kicked into high gear, parking there for lunch wouldn’t be nearly as peaceful.
    Given all that, I half expected to see her sitting in the car, but she wasn’t, so I walked on down to the front of the house and stepped up onto the sagging front porch. The door was locked, so I used the key and stepped inside.
    â€œMel?” I called into the echoing skeletal shell. “Are you here?”
    She wasn’t. The house was empty. Leaving the front door ajar, I went back outside and walked across the sloping front yard until I came to a halt at the fence that marked the end of our property.
    â€œMel?” I called down the bluff, “where are you?” Again, there was no answer.
    Mel is physically fit, but clambering around on a steep hillside even in a uniform and low heels didn’t seem in character unless, of course, someone else had been in trouble. Then all bets were off. For the first time, I felt the smallest frisson of concern.
    â€œMel,” I called again, shouting this time. I peered off down the bank. At the condo in Seattle, we keep two pairs of binoculars parked on the sill next to the window seat. We used them for occasional bits of bird-­watching, for viewing the Fourth of July Fireworks, and occasionally, during snowstorms, for being entertained while watching hapless drivers attempt to make their fender-­bender way up and down Broad. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a pair of binoculars here with me now at a time and place where I really needed them.
    If a boat had overturned, I knew Mel would have wanted to lend a hand, but it seemed unlikely that she would have gone down the bank on foot. It seemed far more reasonable that she would have used her phone to summon help. Besides, there was no sign of wreckage out on the water or on the steep bank at the water’s edge. And no sign of life either—­no sign of movement.
    There was a rough, steep trail that ran in breathtaking switchbacks down to the water. It might have been usable by mountain goats, but I didn’t think it was something that should be tackled by an old codger with a pair of fake knees. When I walked over to the path and studied it closely, I saw no sign of any recent footprints. If Mel had gone down the bluff, she hadn’t used the path.
    I stood up and looked down at the bay again. There was a stiff wind blowing in off the water. The sky above may have been a robin’s egg blue, but the sea itself was gray-­green and dotted with rolling whitecaps. It looked dangerous—­and threatening.
    Genuinely worried now and still staring down