“Do you know from where he would have been returning?” the detective asks.

I don’t want the police anywhere near San Rafaela. Nowhere near it. “Daly City, I believe.”

The detective makes a note on the sheet with a slim pencil that he pulls from a pants pocket. “All right. I’ll have one of the officers make a call down to Daly City to see if anyone remembers seeing him.”

“Thank you so much,” I manage to say.

The detective stands. Thank God he is finished with me. “We will be in touch if we have any news for you, Mrs. Hocking. And if you should hear from your husband or think of anything else that would be of assistance in finding him, please let us know.”

“Yes. Of course.”

The detective smiles politely. “Good day to you both.”

The man walks away from us and disappears into an office whose broken glass-paned walls have been replaced with sheets of plywood.

“Well, he was very nice, wasn’t he?” Libby says.

“He didn’t need to know all that about Martin and me.”

“And you needn’t be so ashamed of it. I was shocked at first when you told me, but look how everything turned out.”

“Indeed,” I mutter as I stand.

Libby rises as well and again links her arm through mine. “Let’s go find Chester and then head over to our new place. And then Chester can see about getting some men to clean up your old house.”

“Yes,” I answer.

Yes. The sooner the remains of my house are buried, the sooner the police will conclude that Martin Hocking, who was on his way home the morning of the quake, instead fell victim to it.

And the sooner I will be done here and can remake myself elsewhere.

Again.

28

Libby and Chester’s rented house near Lafayette Park is ten blocks away and on the other side of Van Ness, the side that did not burn. Chester apologizes that he was unable to secure a carriage, and I assure him that walking, even when it’s uphill, is not troublesome to me. After a quick stop at a Western Union office near the makeshift police station, we head west to reenter neighborhoods that I walked through weeks before when smoke and despair hung heavy in the air. But now it is June and the sun is out and homes and businesses that needed repair are being repaired. It does not feel hopeless here.

Libby’s new place is situated two blocks across from the beautiful Whittier Mansion, a massive structure of Arizona sandstone that apparently the earthquake could not wobble. Their rented cottage is far smaller than their home on Polk was, but it’s quaint and well-appointed, and I’m sure thousands of other homeless San Franciscans would be happy to occupy it.

“This house belongs to a tutor friend of Chester’s who’s in Seattle for a spell, taking care of his mother,” Libby says as she gives me a tour of the inside. It is fully furnished, two stories, with three bedrooms upstairs and a guest room off the kitchen that might have been the housekeeper’s bedroom in the home’s earlier life.