“All right then!” he said as much to himself as to me. “All right then, something’s definitely up when you have a lady in the men’s room and a man in the ladies’ room. Thought maybe it was me who had it wrong, but no.”

I ran back out to the gallery’s railing and saw Adeline Head running out of the lobby below me and into the street.

By the time I’d hit Fourth Street, it was clear I had lost her. There was, however, one possible checkpoint at which I might catch her again. I knew that Ada used to live in San Francisco. If for any reason she was going back there now, she’d certainly take the ferry from the Embarcadero. I hailed a taxi and told the driver I wanted the Key System’s landing off Clay.

As I got out of the cab, and as my luck both good and bad would have it, I saw Ada stepping onto one of the smaller damson-colored ferries, the Castro, a second before its metal gangway was removed. A horn sounded and the ferry began to move away from the two piers that flanked it on either side. There wasn’t that great a distance from the port side of the boat to the landing, perhaps four feet but widening . . . I foolhardily took the leap and found myself on board.

“There’s a fine for doing what you just did, buddy,” said the ferry conductor.

“I’m sorry, I’m from out of town. It won’t happen again.”

“Don’t let it,” he said and walked away. I looked to my left and right. No sign of Adeline. I laced my way through the crowd that was queuing up at the refreshment counter and reached the other side of the open deck. Still no trace of her.

I moved quickly to the stern of the ferry, stepping around some coils of rope and avoiding a puddle of oil. I looked back to the pier and groaned as I spotted Adeline standing like a crane, raising one foot to put her shoe on, her long-necked profile completing the ornithological image. Dammit. Somehow, just as I’d leapt onto the ferry from the port side, she must have taken off her heels and leapt from the starboard side onto the enclosing pier. I felt a perverse sense of importance that she would have gone to such measures just to avoid me.

As the ferry towed me farther away from her, I saw her spin around to make certain I hadn’t managed to return to the pier myself. Seeing nothing, she completed her pirouette and walked quickly to one of several identical DeSoto Sky Tops on the taxi rank. Unless I wanted to swim to shore, I had lost her.