I swerved the boat hard to the left, as a number of people having their lunch on the slope had started to retreat from us as well. Easing back on the accelerator, I quickly had us cruising toward the middle of the lake again.

“Yeah!” said Gail. “Let’s have another one of those!”

I’d seen our watcher for only two or three seconds. It was a woman in a plain brown shift, with longish, stringy blond hair, the color of which looked pretty fake to me. She’d done a decent job of keeping her hand in front of her as she turned and ran, so I had only a general impression of her face.

Of the very limited list of women in the Oakland area who knew me and might have wished to spy on me, I had only a few blond candidates. I very much doubted it was Sally Rand. It’s hard to judge the height of someone running away from you uphill, since they’re a bit bent over and appear small against the slope, but I certainly thought this woman was taller than Sally’s five foot one.

Culpepper had made reference to a blond receptionist at the Administration Building whose lunch of Chicken in the Rough I’d spoiled, but I didn’t think she’d take a day off from work to avenge herself.

Of course, it could very easily have been Martha Prentice in a blond wig. The drab, shapeless shift seemed very much her style.

And it might have been Vera. She’d already pursued me to my Claremont bedroom uninvited, so I knew she didn’t lack for a sense of intrigue. However, Vera’s hair had always struck me as natural looking. Then again, a real blonde who disguised herself with a fake blond wig would be displaying a level of subtlety that I would greatly admire.

But of all the women I’d encountered since coming to the Bay Area, the departing watcher reminded me most of one person I’d first encountered only yesterday and of whom, as today, I’d had only the most momentary glimpse before she ran away.

She looked like the waitress at the Centaur Luncheonette. The woman who had taken a lunch order from Nancy and me and then vanished from the premises without explanation.

Chapter 28

28

Martha

Gail had said she could find her own way from Lake Merritt to her mother’s home and asked me to join her there as soon as my business appointment (as we were calling it) was concluded. I hoped that whatever it was that Gail’s mother had to say to me, it wouldn’t take so long that we couldn’t get going on Swing that same day. We needed to start our work, and I needed to be back in Gail’s exhilarating company.