Free Bones of the Barbary Coast by Daniel Hecht Page A

every street and structure and had been redrawn often enough that she could determine within a year or two when the house had been built. She compared her city map with the old index maps to find the right blocks, then filled out a requisition form and took several microfilm reels back to a viewer.
    She scanned through the sliding frames until she found the right cross streets, and soon located the footprint of the house, just as it was today: a rectangle with its narrow end facing the street, long side stretching back into the lot, a short L wing at the rear. The most interesting feature of the 1905 map was that it showed another house immediately adjacent on the downhill side, where the terrace garden was now. She made a photocopy of the frame, then rewound and worked her way backward in time through the other spools. Both houses were represented on the earliest Sanborn map, 1886.
    Next she moved to the records of the Spring Valley Water Company, which supplied water to San Francisco from 1861 to 1915. Their ledgers recorded when a tap was first turned on at a given address and who paid for it, so by going back and forth between water records and the Sanborn maps, she was able to piece together a rough history of the two properties. The house where the bones were found was built in 1881 by a James Marcus, then sold to a Hans Schweitzer in 1882. Schweitzer was still listed as owner on the 1905 Sanborn map and received water there until 1914, when someone named O'Brien took over the water account. The house next door had been built by somebody named Jackson around 1880, but the house had disappeared from the first map drawn after the quake, and Schweitzer's name appeared in that lot's empty rectangle.
    Probable sequence of events, she figured: The Jackson house had suffered quake damage, part of it toppling into the Schweitzer house, killing and burying the wolfman; the Jacksons had not rebuilt but had sold the lot to their neighbor, Schweitzer, who had opted to leave it empty and create the garden terrace. Schweitzer had sold both properties to O'Brien in 1914, and the open space had been preserved by every owner since.
    She left the library at twelve thirty, pleased with her progress. Even Joyce would be impressed—after only three hours into her first research day, she had the owner's name for the property during the period in question, plus a general history of the house and the lot next door.
    The feeling didn't last. The plaza was a gathering place for homeless people, who huddled among the trees with shopping carts and bags, eating scavenged lunches. Crossing the square again, she passed close to a huge man with long hair matted into dreds and a beard full of food debris, dressed in layers of tattered clothing that made him bulky as a bear. When he saw her, he sort of reared, swinging toward her and baring rotten teeth. Cree quelled the startle reflex, kept a neutral face, avoided eye contact, and swept quickly past. Her chest panged in sympathy but, like anyone who had lived in big cities, she knew it was best to slip through these encounters. Joyce called it the metropolitan glide.
    Afterward it occurred to her that maybe the wolfman had been in a similar situation. Maybe he'd been one of those Barbary Coast derelicts that Bert had talked about. She could easily imagine the scenario: Shunned because of his deformities, homeless, scrounging a living, he'd secretly camped out in the gangway between the Schweitzer and Jackson houses, or had found his way into Schweitzer's basement. He'd set up his nest of rags, like the homeless people here, on the night before the quake. He might have been still asleep when the world fell on him at five thirteen the next morning. The wolfman might have no connection whatever to the Schweitzers or their house, to anyone or anything. Maybe no record of his life or death existed anywhere.
    She felt her mood sag, but then reminded herself it was still very early in the game. And there were