Part 6 (1/2)

That afternoon, Lila rode Dorothy one last time. Then she bathed her, moving her soapy hands in circles over Dorothy's thick fur. She put her mouth close to Dorothy's ear and said softly, ”Good girl.” Finally, she gave her an apple and hugged her around the neck. I wondered if Dorothy realized that Lila was saying good-bye.

As far as I know, Lila never saw Dorothy again. She rarely talked about her. I wondered if she would be the same way with me. If I died in a car accident, or broke my neck diving into a swimming pool and was in a coma for the rest of my life, would she adjust as easily to my absence as she had to Dorothy's?

From then on, Thorpe wrote at the end of the chapter, there were no distractions. Lila had only one true pa.s.sion, one devotion: math.

At home that night, I went back to the beginning. It was strange to read the book again after so many years, strange to see Lila before me on the pages, alive and real, riding her horse, or sewing, or sitting at the kitchen table, pencil in hand, working through a mathematical formula. It was Lila as I had known her, as I had described her. For all the liberties Thorpe had taken with my sister's life, there was no denying that he had captured her essential spirit, her personality: the way she walked, the way she held her head when she spoke, her turns of phrase.

With McConnell, on the other hand, he had gotten it all wrong. Looking into McConnell's eyes, Thorpe wrote, one had the impression of having met a man without an ordinary conscience, a man who might be capable of anything. There was a kind of cruelty in his eyes, a hardness in his speech.

I knew this to be false. I had been struck by the softness of McConnell's eyes, the gentleness of his voice. I couldn't reconcile the man I'd met in Diriomo with the character in the book, could not believe the picture that Thorpe had painted of McConnell as a heartless, calculated killer.

Still, I came away from the book with no answers, no clue as to who else might have been involved. It was as though Thorpe had put every bit of his energy into making a case against McConnell, quickly and categorically eliminating everyone else. Why had he done that? What did he have to gain?

Fifteen.

ANDREW THORPE'S WEBSITE WAS A MULTIMEDIA affair, complete with flash graphics, background music by a local band called Sugar dePalma, podcasts, and video clips. He was running a couple of contests, including a ”name the villain” contest, whereby one lucky winner would name a character in Thorpe's first novel, which was currently in progress, and a ”first draft” contest, the reward for which was the original, handwritten draft of one of Thorpe's books. As the Thorpe I knew had never handwritten so much as a memo, I imagined he'd probably hired some poor sap to copy an MS Word file out by hand. The most popular contest appeared to be the one in which the winner would get to visit Pelican Bay State Prison with Thorpe. ”Enjoy a one-on-one conversation with Johnny Grimes, the subject of Blood in the Valley-the riveting tale of the gruesome murder of two Yahoo employees,” the website promised. The book had just been released two months before, and, judging by the slew of reviews and reader comments on his website, it was getting a lot of attention.

I clicked on the events page and saw that the San Francisco Ladies' Bureau would be hosting a luncheon with Thorpe that Thursday. The ticket price of $85 included a light lunch, a gla.s.s of chardonnay, and an autographed copy of Blood in the Valley. I called and made a reservation. The woman who took my call was very enthusiastic. ”Good timing,” she said. ”We only have a couple of spots left. Have you read the book?”

I confessed that I hadn't.

”It's brilliant. You're going to love it.”

AS I MARKED THE DATE OF THE LUNCHEON IN my calendar in red ink, I thought back to a strange night I'd spent with Thorpe, just months before he told me he was writing the book. By then, I had moved on to higher level English courses, but we still met frequently for coffee or lunch. One afternoon over the phone, he asked me offhandedly if I'd like to have dinner at his place. From the way he phrased the invitation, I a.s.sumed he was having a small dinner party.

The apartment was on the third floor of a twelve-unit building at the top of Dolores Park. When Thorpe opened the door, I saw that he had forgone the usual blue jeans and sneakers and was dressed instead in a black oxford with pinstripe slacks and loafers. It was an odd look for him, and he seemed uncomfortable in the clothes.

”Smells good,” I said.

”It's lasagna, my mom's recipe. It needs another half hour in the oven. Want some wine to start?”

I followed him into the small, spotless apartment. There was no one else there. I was surprised to realize that it would just be the two of us.

By the time the lasagna was ready, we were into our second bottle of wine. I was drinking faster than usual out of nervousness, and he was drinking considerably more than I was. He didn't have a dining room, so we sat on the sofa with our plates on the coffee table, a black-framed, gla.s.s-topped affair that screamed bachelor pad. Over the course of the night, the wine took the edge off our nervousness, and he kept touching my arm, patting my leg, and brus.h.i.+ng up against me. By the time we finished our dessert of strawberry cheesecake, which came from the freezer and hadn't entirely thawed, I understood there would be no good way to extricate myself from the evening. He put his arm around me, pulled me closer on the couch, and said, ”Promise me you'll never take one of my cla.s.ses again.”

”Why?”

”Because if you're my student, I can't do this.” Then he kissed me.

I was still grateful for his friends.h.i.+p, for the way he had helped me through the long months since Lila's death. If I had allowed myself to dwell on the fact that he was eleven years my senior, I might have been more reluctant-but I was drunk enough to brush the age difference aside. I went to bed with him because I could think of no terribly good reason not to, but even as we were undressing in the dim light of his bedroom, I realized I would not do it again. Over the course of the evening, he had undergone a subtle transformation. The outfit, the coffee table, the incense that he lit on the bedside table, all served to cast him in a different, somewhat pathetic, light. Prior to that night, I had known him only in a certain context. When the curtain parted and I glimpsed his private life, I couldn't help but feel a bit sorry for him. After that, he asked me over to his apartment a couple more times, but I declined. I was grateful to him for not pressing the issue, for following my lead in acting as if it never happened.

It had been such a glitch in our relations.h.i.+p, such a minor part of our months-long friends.h.i.+p, that it had, for the most part, slipped my mind. After all, during that year I'd been with a number of guys whom I didn't know very well at all. In comparison, Thorpe was a dear friend, a trusted confidant, and it wasn't very surprising that we would end up in bed together, if only for a night. But when I thought about it now, with the added perspective of age, I couldn't help feeling somewhat ill. I'd been only nineteen years old at the time. Apparently, it hadn't been enough for Thorpe to have my story. For one night, at least, he had to have me, too.

Sixteen.

AS I DROVE OUT OF TOWN TOWARD SOUTH City, San Francisco's picturesque skyline gave way to the flat, industrial landscape of the Peninsula. I'd taken a couple of days off work after the Nicaragua trip, and I was glad to be returning to Golden Gate Coffee. From a quarter mile away, I could smell the rich caramel scent of roasting coffee. I pulled around to the back of the building. It was a warm day, the sun glinting off the flat, s.h.i.+ning bay.

Inside, Dora was on the phone with the broker, buying coffee on the futures market. Soon, giant sacks of the stuff would be loaded onto a s.h.i.+p in Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, and begin their journey west. It would be several weeks before they arrived at the port of Oakland. Before the coffee was unloaded, samples would be brought back to the office, where Mike and I would roast and cup them.

”Wait until the Yirgacheffe hits $114,” Dora said into the phone. She covered the mouthpiece with her hand and greeted me. ”Hi, stranger.”

I'd visited the coffee trading floor only once, in the summer of 2001, when the New York coffee exchange, the largest coffee auction in the Western Hemisphere, was still housed in the World Trade Center. A few months later, the obliterated trading pits were at the bottom of tons of rubble, and the coffee traders had relocated to dismal, low-ceilinged rooms across the East River. Just days after 9/11, the new, makes.h.i.+ft trading floor was doing a robust business; no matter what happened in the world, people still wanted their coffee.

In the cupping room just beyond the office, several trays were laid out with samples waiting to be roasted and cupped. I plunged my hand into the mound of Tanzanian peaberry beans and breathed in the musty smell. Next to the peaberry was an Ethiopian Harrar. I'd also brought some beans from Nicaragua, which I poured into trays and labeled for later. I already knew we'd be ordering a large s.h.i.+pment of Jesus's coffee, but Mike liked to taste every sample himself. He was a perfectionist. His great-grandfather Milos had started the business during the Gold Rush, and it was Milos's likeness that still graced the packages of coffee bearing the Stekopolous family name.

I fed the peaberry into one of three small metal drums on the sample roaster, a Jabez Burns that had been pa.s.sed down through generations. In the second drum, I placed the Ethiopian Harrar. I lit the gas burner and waited. After a few minutes, the beans began to sizzle and pop. The room filled with a rich floral scent. I took the peaberry beans out first, scooping them into the perforated metal cooling tray. For the Harrar, I wanted a slightly darker roast, so I waited for the second round of popping to begin and end. When the beans were roasted to my satisfaction, the papery chaff removed, I checked the beans for color and ground them coa.r.s.ely before scooping a bit of coffee into each of the clear gla.s.s cups.

”Good to have you back,” Mike said, emerging from his office.

”Good to be back.”

We began tasting. Between slurps, Mike caught me up on office gossip. During my absence, Jennifer Wilson, one of the sales reps, had announced that she was pregnant, and Gabrielle, the daughter of the owner of a rival company, had started dating one of our warehouse guys. Debbie Dybsky from accounting was retiring and moving to Muir Beach. Hearing news of my co-workers made me feel at home. Aside from my mother, they were the people I was closest to in the world.

There was a large bra.s.s spittoon beside each stool, but neither of us used them. Instead we swallowed the coffee, sipping water between tastes. I had inherited Mike's down-to-earth tasting style, which got the job done without all the Sturm und Drang.

”Some guys make it all about the performance,” Mike had told me in the beginning. ”For me, it's about the coffee. That's why I like you. You can smell an exceptional bean from a mile away.”

Early on, I'd learned to appreciate Mike's mentors.h.i.+p, and I would always be grateful to him for giving me a chance. When I started in the business in the late nineties, there were still men who wouldn't deign to sit at a cupping table with a woman. Like the kitchens of fancy restaurants, the bowels of mining shafts, and the most prestigious math departments, the coffee industry was a man's world. Odd, considering that, from the beginning of coffee's popularity in the U.S., it had been primarily women who purchased the stuff and brought it to the table.

For my thirty-fourth birthday, Henry had given me a rare copy of William Harrison Ukers's 1922 book All About Coffee, the Bible of the coffee industry. Weighing in at eight hundred pages, it was filled with fine print and elaborate ill.u.s.trations. One of my favorites was an 1872 Arbuckle Brothers advertis.e.m.e.nt, picturing a perplexed-looking woman in an ap.r.o.n standing over a smoking stove, complaining, ”Oh, I have burnt my coffee again.” Another ad, t.i.tled ”A Mistake Many Women Make,” urges housewives to buy Arbuckle Brothers pre-roasted coffee instead of roasting their own, claiming falsely that ”every time you roast four pounds of coffee you lose a whole pound.” The ad wasn't just offensive; it was inaccurate. Like any narrative, the story of coffee was peppered with half-truths. It took a discerning eye to separate fact from fiction.

Even after the relations.h.i.+p with Henry ended, All About Coffee retained a prime position on the buffet table in my dining room. Like the silver lighter I bought for him in Guatemala on the day he left, the book served as a reminder of our history together. So did Golden Gate Coffee. Everyone there knew him. His blue eyes still gazed out from the huge staff photograph that hung in the lobby. In the picture we stood side by side, his arm around my shoulders, mine around his waist. Every now and then, when I stayed late at the office after everyone else had left, I'd find myself standing in front of the photograph, staring, trying to figure out what exactly had gone wrong.

Seventeen.

THE SAN FRANCISCO LADIES' BUREAU LUNCHEON was in the restaurant of a downtown hotel. The round tables were set with white plates and pink napkins. A stack of Blood in the Valley formed the centerpiece of each table. I took a seat near the back.

On my right was an attractive woman in her late forties who turned to me and said, ”And who might you be?”

”Ellie.”

”Welcome,” she said, offering me her hand. ”I'm Maggie. This is Dwight, Barbara, Stella, and my daughter Claire.”

”I'm going to interview him for the paper,” Claire said. She was pet.i.te, blonde, and blue-eyed, with the kind of skin that's featured in Cover Girl commercials.

”Which paper?”

”Mercy High.”

I suddenly felt very old. After Lila died, my father had retreated into himself, to such an extent that my mother turned to me for companions.h.i.+p. The result was that, for quite some time, I had been her frequent companion at luncheons, law firm parties, and wine tastings. We spent so much time together that I felt I had more social interaction with people my mom's age than my own. Her friends seemed to welcome my presence, and always took a sincere interest in what I was studying, whom I was seeing. I remembered so clearly how it felt to be Claire's age-grateful for the attention of my mother's friends but also smugly proud of my youth. It was impossible, at that age, not to be aware of the power that came with being young. Claire, it was clear, possessed that same pride and confidence. When the waiter came to fill our water gla.s.ses, he couldn't stop looking at her, and she accepted the attention as if it was her due.