Free Civil Twilight by Susan Dunlap

his back to it. But then, I realized, it made perfect sense. His clients sitting nervously on the other side of his desk eyed the view; Gary eyed them.
    If I were Gary . . . I pictured Karen Johnson facing him. She’d cross one leg over the other as he shifted the stack of folders he’d scooped up to clear a place for her. She’d be amused by the office, just as I’d been the first time I met Gary here. He’d have put the stack where? I concentrated, channeling my brother’s habits of mind, trying to re-create his routines.
    If this were her first appointment, he’d make notes on a yellow pad and put them in a folder with her name written on a sticky. By her next visit her file would have a typed label and be waiting on his desk. Even after he’d sent her off to meet me, it would have sat there until he heard my call, or something else sent him racing out of here.
    Holding my hand over the flashlight I checked the desk. “Oh, shit!”
    Someone had been in here! Someone had been rooting around on his desk. With the insane mess of clutter no one, not even Gary, would realize
the place had been searched—no one but me. But I’d been perched on the corner of the desk when I’d been talking to John there, and now that space was piled high. What was going on here? I made for the door.
    Halfway there, I stopped. Whoever was here had looked through the cases; he was hardly coming back.
    Unless he was still here.
    Common sense said: clear the building pronto. It said: call John. But I didn’t have time to deal with him telling me to get out quick. Be careful, more careful than you think you should.
    I walked back to the desk. The concession I made to carefulness was that I knelt on the floor, head just about desk level so I could scan the room as I examined documents. If anyone moved I’d . . . do something.
    No luck. I found nothing, and no Karen Johnson–related notes or file usefully presented themselves. But I couldn’t leave empty. I surveyed the floor. Folded open was the Las Vegas Sun. Dammit, had Gary gone to Las Vegas? Was that where he was hiding out? Or . . . or had he advised Karen to go there to get her divorce? Or for some other reason? Or was Vegas just a neon herring?
    I stood. My knees screamed. Gary needed thicker carpeting.
    A clock chimed. I panicked, then forced myself to smile. He needed a quieter clock.
    It chimed again. Two o’clock. How had it gotten so late? It’d been between eleven and midnight when we left the site, midnight when John dropped me off—when he said he’d call in an hour! He would never, ever be unreliable, especially now. I tried his cell. This number is not accepting calls, the automated voice buffed me.
    John, I wanted to yell, where are you? What happened? Why isn’t your phone working?

11
    I RACED OUT of Gary’s office. And found myself standing on the sidewalk, in the fog-thick middle of the night without a clue what to do next. I had three brothers and at this moment they were all missing. My anguish over Mike remained at the center of my life. In the two decades before I gave up my exile and braved the city again, it had been possible to have days when I didn’t flash on his taking me on my first trip to the notorious Haight-Ashbury or cutting under the fence to climb around the ruins of the Sutro Baths, and whole weeks when disasters on the news didn’t spark new fears about what might’ve happened to him. Back at home now, as I was, every block held memories of us kids dangling our feet on the cable car’s outside benches, pushing through crowds to the edge of the Bay to watch the fireworks explode overhead. But last night, worry about Gary’d eclipsed all that.
    And now the crisis was John.
    I’d liked Karen. Obviously, John had liked her, too. But she’d grabbed his car and left him to twist in . . . in his own stupidity and whatever else he wasn’t telling me. Then she turned up dead! I didn’t know what to think—or feel—anymore.
    Without