There were cocktail lounges on most of the Key System’s ferries. I sat myself near a window and ordered an Indian tonic water with lime. I had to travel to San Francisco and back. This gave me plenty of time to think.

When I went to pay for my tonic water, the receipt from my lunch with Nancy and Gail at the French café fluttered from my billfold. I looked at where the waiter had indicated at the bottom of the check that service was not included, and it made me think again about the check that Adeline Head had handed Nancy and me at the Centaur Luncheonette.

When I finally disembarked back in Oakland, I walked not to RC Copying but to the Centaur, where the manager had found someone to fill the vanished waitress’s job but not his empty seats.

He sat in the same booth we’d occupied. He had a prop sandwich in front of him and was reading the newspaper, trying to look like a customer. The new waitress was sitting in another booth, doing her nails.

He saw me enter and became excited, but I counseled him to stay seated. “I have a few questions to ask you,” I said and slid five dollars across the table as I sat in the booth.

He took the money but said in his thick accent, “Only if you have some coffee and a slice of pie while we talk. If someone comes in, you must look like you’re enjoying it. Arlene, the rhubarb pie, cheese, and coffee.”

By the time I was done eating and drinking and asking, I’d learned why no one wanted to dine there, and that the vanished waitress had started working for him the same morning Nancy and I had encountered her. She’d shown up with no references, just a driver’s license identifying her as Adeline Head of San Francisco, eyes brown, five foot six. She’d told him she had moved out of her apartment owing to a romance that had gone bad, and while she looked for suitable employment, she’d work for him dirt cheap, off the books, mainly for tips if meals came with the job. She’d walked out after taking our order and had never come back.

I asked him what her voice was like. He said, in an accent that oozed of retsina, that he’d only been in this country a few months and that everyone’s accent sounded foreign to his ears, including mine.

I asked him if we were currently sitting in booth five of the luncheonette’s five booths. He said no, that we were in booth one. Things were beginning to click.

I walked back to RC Copying. Professor Haffner had already left for the day, but Gilbert Rice was still there. I thanked him for staying.