Editor’s note: This is the second installment in a 15-part, serialized mystery by Oakland’s Robin Sloan, the New York Times best-selling author of “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore” and “Sourdough.” Start at the beginning with chapter one.
CHAPTER TWO: Easy as ABCD
I rode in an elevator with the Bay Area’s greatest detective to meet the woman who had vanished.
The elevator whispered up through the gleaming headquarters of Alta Bay City Development, built at the midpoint of the South Barrier that stretched between Hayward and San Mateo.
In the elevator, the ABCD’s security chief Arbusto Slab prepared us: “She popped back in the same spot where she disappeared. Freaking out. We hustled her upstairs and after that, she got it together fast. Too fast, maybe. Some members of the board of directors have, uh, communicated to me, in a manner of speaking, that they are, in a manner of speaking, CURIOUS to know about the chief executive’s whereabouts … during … you get it.”
Annabel Scheme got it. It was an anomaly, her specialty.
Stella Pajunas, de facto mayor of the whole Bay Area, had recovered completely from her lapse in existence. She received us in her office on the building’s top floor, where curtains of glass offered the full panorama. To the south, I saw the reservoir sparkling all the way to Salt Town and San Jose. To the north was the ABCD’s creation: all the bright, bustling cities that rose where a bay had been.
“Thank you, Mx. Scheme, but your services are not required,” she said with cool gravity. “I had a strange day.”
“Seems more like you missed a strange day,” said Scheme.
Her burrito, after all, had gone splat.
“Maybe so. As such, I am now, as you can imagine, inexpressibly behind. So, I must get to it! We’ll reimburse you for your mileage. Now —“
“When you came back,” Scheme interrupted. “You were shouting. Do you remember what you said? Something about how they didn’t fill the bay. Some kind of mistake?”
“I fell, Mx. Scheme. Burrito to the head. Gave me a little knock.”
“Mx. Pajunas, you vanished.”
“I was embarrassed. I scuttled away. Ha, ha!” She pronounced the “ha”s individually, and with zero mirth. She was done with us.
Arbusto Slab walked us out of the building. On the sidewalk, the security chief’s voice was low when he said, “I guess we’re going freelance with this one, Scheme.”
“Not the first time,” she replied.
“You know the deal. You’ll get paid, but it’ll take a year, and the check will come from the California Fish Patrol.”
“I love the Fish Patrol.”
Slab’s voice dropped into a conspiratorial whisper. “What do you think? Alien imposter?”
“She’s probably not an alien.”
“Some kinda ghost thing?”
“A ghost thing,” Scheme said, “is always a possibility.”
In the pickup, I expected her to take us back up Interstate 1080, back to the office in Rotten City where she would sit and brood. That was usually the next step in a case like this. Instead, she cut east, and soon we were speeding through Fremont, making for Niles Canyon Road.
I had no idea where we were going.
The windows were down and Scheme’s hair was whipping around, a tangled red flag. She raised her voice above the roar of the road. “Here’s the thing. Pajunas vanishes, she reappears. Maybe that happens just this once, just to her. Fine. But MAYBE it’s happened before, to other people. Maybe those other people weren’t so important.” She paused. “Not everybody gets missed the millisecond they disappear.”
That was an interesting and very Scheme-like theory. But how could we possibly determine who else in the world might have blinked out of existence and come back? Would we send an email survey?
“The world? No idea. But the bay … oh, Mr. Portacio. Didn’t you know? The bay has eyes.”
The pickup careened through the dips and folds of the road, crossing back and forth across the creek that had cut the canyon. Scheme took this road often, even though it was in no way convenient. She loved it.
“Will, I forget sometimes you haven’t been with me from the beginning. You don’t know everyone I know.”
In fact, I’d only been with Scheme a year. It had been a turbulent one. We’d solved the puzzle of the encrypted orchard in Gilroy, chased away the ghost in Google’s data center. Scheme had only been mortally wounded once.
“It’s the 21st century, Will,” Scheme said. “If something happens in the Bay Area, it gets recorded. We’re going to meet the man who sees it all.”
Tomorrow, Part 3: The painter’s algorithm
