CHAPTER 3

On the anniversary of my daughter’s death I take a room at the Tomales Bay Resort and I visit the spot where her car landed. The resort is a quiet one in the spring. Summer is a different matter. The Lodge has a small marina and the crowds come to their boats. The sailboats are all center boarders now that the bay has silted up as much as it has. At low tide the boats in the marina sit on the mud.

My daughter and I came out here several times. I rented a small boat and we sailed toward Marshall, the rising afternoon wind heeling the boat so that one rail was almost in the water. She loved to hike out on the high side, yelling at me to come closer to the wind, drop the rail even farther. “Come on Dad! Bury it!”

That’s where I was this weekend. I could imagine Earl Anthony Winslow driving his Ford Expedition out the two-lane road toward his vacation cottage. Traffic came quickly around the curves. The road was narrow. Every once in a while a big tanker truck came, either from Point Reyes Station or back from one of the dairy ranches scattered on the peninsula. Some of those ranches dated back to the 1850’s.

I drove out to North Beach on the western side of the peninsula. The parking lot is close to the water, and the beach was empty. I walked down through the soft sand to stand at the edge of the water. The surf was its usual maelstrom of surging water. There was nothing between this beach and Japan. The beach shelves off dramatically, the sand dipping and the waves tumbling over each other, smashing up the slope, one on top of the next, the following waves surging over it all. It is a mass of churning, angry water, a constant roar, and people have died on this beach. The unwary Iowa tourist who wants to dip his or her feet into the Pacific comes down to the edge and suddenly a sneaker wave engulfs them to their knees and their feet slip in the dissolving sand and they are pulled under and when they surface, the water is a hundred feet deep, the mad cauldron of surf between them and the beach, and the undertow drags them out further and within minutes the icy water immobilizes them. Anyone foolish enough to plunge into the surf to save them drowns, too. One story was of a man’s dog that got dragged into the surf. The man went after the dog, was dragged out, and drowned. ‘The dog made it back to the beach.

I could imagine Earl Anthony Winslow in that surf. I could imagine watching him flail his arms, try to swim, only to be tumbled by the violent water, and he, too, would drown, just as my daughter did when her car pinwheeled into Tomales Bay. Perhaps Winslow would be foolish enough to come out to North Beach to watch the surf and perhaps he would be foolish enough to decide to get his feet wet and perhaps he would, like that unwary Iowa tourist, find himself sliding into the churning water

I found a log half buried at the high tide mark, and sat against it, letting the log take the brunt of the wind at my back. I watched the surf. It did not change.

I drove back into Point Reyes Station and stopped at the Old Western Saloon. It’s one of those old fashioned small town saloons, and the men at the bar were workers from the dairy ranches and carpenters and the drivers of trucks for Toby’s Barn, hauling sand and hay into Petaluma and Santa Rosa and San Rafael, and taking milk from the scattered ranches to Strauss Dairy where it would become butter and ice cream and milk for breakfast cereal. Nothing fancy about the Old Western. Beer and shots and a young bartender in a tee shirt and Tule elk antlers on the wall. The bang of cups and the calls for liar’s dice resounded.

“Scotch on the rocks,” I said, pushing a five spot onto the bar. He poured, no shot glass, a generous pour, gave me back a dollar. I pushed it back at him, and he pocketed it. No small talk.

The single main street through Point Reyes Station is Highway One, the highway that follows the California coast, and it was clogged with bike riders in spandex outfits, a few motorcycles and a stream of cars and pickups. The Bovine Bakery down the street had its usual cluster of people at the door. It had been a favorite of my daughter’s. She and her friends came out on Sundays, had a pastry and a coffee, walked their dogs, went out to Limantour Beach or Heart’s Desire and came back sunburned and wind blown. She had done it since she was a sophomore in high school. And when she turned sixteen and got her license, she became one of the drivers. Two years later she pinwheeled into Tomales Bay. And now I knew who had caused her to do that.

The drive back into Fairfax goes either through Samuel P. Taylor State Park, filled with redwoods, or up to Lake Nicasio and past the Rancho Nicasio bar and restaurant. This time I stopped there, went in and sat at the bar and ordered a BLT. The walls were filled with the heads of deer, a great ugly wild boar and another Tule elk, this one staring benignly down at the people eating their hamburgers and fries and BBQed oysters. I had another scotch and tried to imagine the death of Winslow. I could shoot him. Put a gun to his head and blow his brains out. But that was risky.

Police would investigate a death like that. He could have an accident, his car could plunge off the road but I didn’t know how to engineer that. It was the stuff that you saw in TV shows. He could get poisoned, but that meant somehow getting at what he ate or drank. Or, and as I imagined this afternoon, he could go for a walk on North Beach and slip into the surf. And that would be the perfect death. A man who was taking a walk on a dangerous beach. A beach where people had died. A misstep and he would be found several miles away, washed up on the South Beach, and his car would still be in the North Beach parking lot where he had left it. And he would drown too, just like my daughter. He would find the water take him, try to breathe the heavy stuff, watch the water rise over him, know that he was dying, see the opaque world through the water and know that he was in the wrong element, an air-breathing creature who was trapped in the sea. And, like the young woman hanging upside down in the car, he would wonder why his life was ending too soon.

It required planning. Somehow I had to get him out there. Somehow it had to be in his car. And somehow I had to get myself back to Fairfax or at least to the Tomales Bay Lodge without anyone knowing that I had been involved in his death. I would be like the egret. I would wait for the right moment. I would wait until he was swimming beneath my beak, unaware that I was poised to end his life.