“Are you with the Sons of Norway Lodge contingent?”

“Are they serving dinner?” I asked.

She gave me a funny look as if to say, “You don’t look the least bit Nordic, and if you didn’t know they were serving dinner, then you probably aren’t with them.”

“I mean I wasn’t sure if it was lunch or dinner. Actually I’m volunteering with the police department.”

She studied a list in her hand.

“Detective Jack Wall,” I said. “He should be here.”

“Is he expecting you?” she asked.

“He always needs help,” I said. That much was true. Whether I could help him or he could help me remained to be seen. “In any case, I’m a whiz at scooping mashed potatoes.” Surely mashed potatoes would be on the menu, wouldn’t they? At least I hoped so.

“Okay,” she said finally. “Pick up your apron in the closet and your hairnet.”

“Got it,” I said and hurried by before she could stop me. By following another woman, I found the closet and an apron and a hairnet. Now all I needed was to find Detective Wall. To say that he was surprised to see me behind the steam table was putting it mildly. Still he was not one to display his emotions, so he just nodded when I squeezed in between him and a large burly fellow whose name tag said “Tim” and who seemed to be in charge of mixed vegetables.

“Are you new?” Tim asked with a friendly smile.

“First time tonight,” I said, tying my apron around my waist. “I hope I won’t spill anything.”

“What are you doing here?” Jack Wall muttered under his breath. “What’s in it for you?”

“Why does anyone volunteer? I came to help out. Is that so hard to believe? That I’d do something useful besides dress rich women. I could ask you the same thing. Is this part of your job?” I took a tray and heaped a pile of potatoes on it. I smiled at the woman across the counter, and she thanked me.

“I like to keep an eye on my parolees,” he said under his breath.

“Point them out. I’ll give them an extra scoop,” I said.

“I thought I told you not to meddle in official business.”

“I’m not. I’m simply . . .”

“You’re not simply anything.”

I bit my lip. How could I answer that? “Sorry,” I muttered. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you.”

“Not now,” he said.

I wanted to show him I was not only patient but also sincere about doing a good job, whether selling women’s clothes and accessories or feeding the hungry, so I paid attention to the potatoes and I even went back to the kitchen to refill the tray when we ran out. Everyone in the kitchen was friendly, and the customers, if you could call them that, were so grateful I considered signing up for a weekly slot. I asked myself if it had anything to do with the proximity of the sexy cop working next to me, but I couldn’t be sure of my motives. Not until this Jensen case was over. Then maybe I’d be able to think clearly and I’d have no reason to see Jack Wall unless one of us wanted to make an effort and admit it had nothing to do with either of our jobs.

“You can’t be surprised I want to talk to you,” I said when there was a brief break in the line of people waiting for food.

“I’m not surprised at anything you do,” he said. “And I can’t promise to tell you anything you want to know.”

“But you don’t even know what I want to know,” I protested.

“I can guess,” he said with a sideways glance in my direction.

“How long is this shift?” I asked the nice man on the other side, who was much more outgoing and friendly both to me and to the eaters.

“Hour and a half,” he said. “First timer?”

I smiled and nodded. “But not the last. It’s a great place, and the food looks good.”

“It is. You see people coming back for seconds.”

“Is that allowed?” I asked.

“It is when I’m serving beef stroganoff,” he said with a smile. “Some of us are going out for burgers afterward. Care to join us?”

I glanced over at Jack, who frowned, and I told Tim I had other plans tonight. At least I hoped I did. If Jack bailed on me, I’d be seriously annoyed. Okay, he didn’t want to tell me anything, but he couldn’t just walk out of my fashion show with three customers and not tell me what happened.

After our shift ended at seven o’clock, my ankle hurt as well as both of my feet. I dropped my apron and hairnet in a bin in the dressing room and rushed out to catch Jack before he escaped without me. For a moment I thought he’d run off, but when I looked around, I saw him standing on the sidewalk checking his watch. I had no doubt he was giving me a certain allotted time to show up and then he was out of there. Maybe he had a date. How would I know? He wasn’t the type to talk about his social life, if he had one.

“Thanks for waiting,” I said breathlessly. “Aren’t you hungry after working so hard ? I’m starving. Can I buy you dinner? I owe you.” Taking cabs and buying dinner for a man. It was like I was rolling in money when my boss was worried about the financial state of her store. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to afford to pay me much longer. Maybe I should be worried too. I would worry later, I told myself, just like Scarlett O’Hara.

“You think you can bribe me?” he asked as we walked down the street, passing an occasional homeless person pushing a grocery cart loaded with his belongings.

“It’s worth a try,” I said. “All I want is a little information.” I remembered reading about a Vietnamese restaurant in the area that had gotten some rave reviews online.

“Do you like Vietnamese food?” I asked.

He looked surprised. “Do you?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never had any.”

“If you like Angkor Wat, I think you’ll like Little Saigon too. It’s very good.”

So he remembered I’d ordered Cambodian. “I pretty much like all kinds of food. And serving food to others makes me hungry.”

“What doesn’t?” he asked.

I frowned. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I had lunch with you two weeks ago, and I have to say it’s rare to find a woman with a healthy appetite. So many are on diets. You never know.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said. “You could have said ‘big appetite’ instead of healthy. Unless you think I should be on a diet. I know one thing, I’m glad I’m not a professional model who has to squeeze into size twos. I was raised in the Midwest. Where I come from, there are lots of steak houses and German restaurants. So when someone took me out for Cambodian food when I first got here, I was hooked. It was so different, so exotic, I was blown away.”

“Prepare to be blown away again tonight,” he said. “If you’re serious about Vietnamese food, tonight you’ll have to try the green papaya salad and the lettuce wraps. And of course the pho.”

I didn’t mention how I was looking forward to being blown away by whatever he agreed to tell me about the present case at hand. I was just grateful we’d gotten this far.

After we were seated in the restaurant with the purple walls covered with black and white photographs of Vietnam, I let Jack order since he’d been there before. Just like he’d done at lunch that day. He also ordered a large bottle of Samuel Smith’s Nut Brown Ale, which he said went well with the food. Even though this was my idea, he quickly took over. What else did I expect from a former dot-com millionaire turned city cop?

The lovely slender young waitress greeted Jack warmly and took our order.

“Do you come here often?” I asked.

“It’s a high-crime area,” he said. “So I’m around a lot. Eating here is one of the perks of my job.”

“Like wearing designer clothes is for me. Or shoes.”

He poured beer into my glass and set the bottle down. “Let’s get it out of the way. You want to know what happened to the silver shoes.”

“Of course. I not only want to talk about them, I want to see them. I think I have the right. Who else knows as much as I do about those shoes? I brought the shoes from Florida. It was me MarySue snatched them from. I’m the one she tried to kill. Oh, by the way, I found out it was MarySue who took me to the hospital that night.”

He looked surprised. “How do you know that?”

“I, uh, an inside source.” I didn’t want to get my doctor in trouble.

“I thought they weren’t allowed to divulge that information. You must have pulled strings.” I thought I detected a hint of respect in his voice, or maybe that was anger that someone at the hospital had broken the rules. If by chance it was respect, maybe I could capitalize on it to get him to share information with me.

“The Admissions people didn’t want to talk, believe me,” I said, not admitting that Dr. Jonathan had helped me.

“I believe you.”

“If I could see the shoes you confiscated, I might be able to tell if they were MarySue’s or the ones Harrington made for his sister,” I said.

“You think so?” he asked raising an eyebrow.

“I know something about footwear,” I said modestly. “I could try.”

When the waitress brought the imperial rolls stuffed with seafood, pork and vegetables, I watched Jack dip his in nuoc mam sauce and wrap it in a lettuce leaf with shredded carrot and noodles. Then I copied what he did and got a mouthful of crunchy rice paper wrapped around spicy ground pork, crab and vegetables.

“Delicious,” I said. “So do we have a deal? I help you ID the shoes and you forget my boss is a possible suspect.”

He shook his head, but he was smiling ruefully at my naïveté. “I don’t make deals, Rita.”

“Oh, sure you do. I read the papers. I watch TV. I know what goes on in big-city crime scenes.”

“If your boss is innocent, she has nothing to worry about,” he said.

I hesitated only a second while I considered the possibility that she wasn’t innocent. “She isn’t worried, I am. Because I’m the one who’s responsible for the shoes.” Dolce was very worried, more about money than anything, but that was none of his business. I paused while the waitress brought steaming bowls of the beef noodle soup they called pho. I watched Jack add bean sprouts, mint leaves, fresh basil and a large dash of hoisin sauce. Then I did the same. “All I’m asking is, what happened after the fashion show?”

“I can’t tell you that,” he said.

“Okay, I understand you have rules to follow, so I’ll tell you what I think happened.” I could only hope his reaction would reveal how close I came to guessing the actual scenario. He shrugged as if I could do whatever I wanted, he wouldn’t stop me, but he wasn’t going to help me either. I leaned forward across the table and looked him in the eye. “You mistook the silver shoes Marsha wore for the real thing. I’m guessing you made a mistake, which you found out when Harrington told you how he’d made the shoes, and I bet he could prove it by showing you, oh I don’t know, stitches or holes or marks on the shoes or maybe his initials carved on the soles. After all, he is an artiste. So you let the suspects go, and you kept the shoes as evidence or as a guide for when you find the real thing. So you don’t really need me to tell you those are copies. But where are the real shoes? That’s the question, isn’t it? Does the person who killed MarySue still have the shoes? Because why kill her if you can’t keep the shoes? That’s what I want to know. Isn’t that what you want to know too?”

He didn’t say anything. He asked for a pot of tea, and we drank it with small dishes of coconut ice cream called che.

After a long silence that wasn’t really uncomfortable considering I didn’t expect him to answer me, I said, “There’s something else I’d like to know and that’s, who put that shoe box in my garbage?”

“Sorry,” Jack said. “No luck on that. Anything else I can help you with?”

As if he would. His job was to keep me in the dark. And my job was to keep bugging him and keep investigating on my own.

“Actually there is something that’s been bothering me. It’s the fortune I got with my Cambodian food the other day. It’s not really a fortune, it’s a puzzle.” I reached into my purse and pulled out the small crumpled printed message. “ ‘You cannot step in the same river twice without getting your feet twice as wet.’ Well?”

He didn’t miss a beat. He said, “It’s obvious what it means. You should forget this investigation. Not only have you stepped in the same river twice, you’ve stepped in it too many times and you’re in danger of getting very wet. Maybe even dangerously wet.”

“As in drowning?” I asked with a little trickle of fear across my scalp. I wrapped my hands around my teacup to warm them.

“That’s right,” he said sternly.

Detective Wall drove me home in his BMW convertible he’d parked in an underground garage. “Are you sure you’re not nervous about staying here alone?” he asked when he pulled up in front of my house.

“Should I be?”

“Just keep out of this investigation. That’s my advice to you. The more distance between the shoes and yourself the better.”

“Whoever put the shoe box in my garbage knows where I live. I wish I knew who that was. Can I assume you’ve ruled out Harrington and his sister as possible suspects?”

“Let me put it this way: you have nothing to fear from them except the possibility of imitation designer shoes and clothes.”

“I appreciate your warning me, but I can’t rest until I locate the real shoes.”

“Rita, forget the shoes.”

“Okay,” I said. Why not let him and everyone think I had given up? That’s what a normal person would do. Forget the shoes, MarySue and her murder. “What about MarySue’s celebration of life next week?” I asked.

“If I were you, I’d stay home,” he said. “With a big crowd like that your absence wouldn’t be noticed.”

“But it’s a party,” I protested. “Aren’t you going?”

“Of course,” he said.

“I’m going to go,” I said. “I have to. If I don’t, it would be admitting that I’m afraid of seeing Jim Jensen, which I am, but I don’t want him to know that. He wouldn’t dare accuse me of murdering his wife again at his own wife’s party, would he?”

“I doubt it,” Jack said. I was hoping he’d say something more forceful like, “He’d better not, or I’ll arrest him,” but he didn’t.

“I’m sure Dolce will close the shop for the afternoon so we can go. Everyone who is anyone will be there.”

“I can’t stop you,” he said. “I can only warn you.”

“Here’s a warning you might laugh at but don’t say I didn’t warn you. There is a theory that MarySue may have been bitten by a vampire, which would explain why you can’t find her attacker.” I paused, expecting him to burst into uncontrollable laughter, but he didn’t.

“Go on,” he said.

“In which case according to legend she won’t stay buried long. Unless of course she’s buried in such a way she can’t find her way out of the grave.”

“And what way would that be?” he asked.

Of course he was humoring me. No way did he believe in vampires. Neither did I. But what harm did it do to speculate? We’d both be singing a different tune if MarySue magically reappeared.

“No point in looking for her killer when she is undead and has been all along.”

“Please, Rita, spare me the folklore,” he said.

“I can’t help it,” I said. “You and I don’t believe in vampires, but some people do. Those people say that one way is to bury the body facedown, then the corpse is confused and can’t find her way out of her coffin. Another way would be to—”

“That’s enough,” he said. “Let me know if you learn anything important.”

I assured him I would even though his definition of “important” was different from mine. After another pointless warning to forget about MarySue’s murder, he walked me to my door and waited until I’d bolted it. After he drove away I went to my closet to look for something to wear to the memorial. I pulled out a black crepe Alberto di Feretti dress with a sleek silhouette and stitch-detailed paneling that Dolce had given me. I took a sleek clutch out of my drawer and slipped on a Lanvin bracelet. If I were going out for cocktails to the Top of the Mark I’d wear sky-high ankle boots, but this was a celebration of life at a neighborhood tavern and I wasn’t allowed to wear sky-high heels anyway. Not yet.

I knew that at MarySue’s memorial party as well as everywhere I went, I represented Dolce and our shop and I owed it to her to look my best. So what about shoes? I sat down on a bench and tried on a pair of flat ankle boots with my dress, but they were too casual. Next, strappy sandals in glossy patent with a pair of opaque tights. Better but not perfect. Maybe glossy wasn’t subdued enough for this occasion, although MarySue would have appreciated them. I kept the tights and tried a pair of black suede peep toes. Yes. My ankle was still a little weak, but I couldn’t baby it forever.

When I got up the next morning, the air was crisp and the sun was shining. Seeing as I hadn’t been to kung fu for weeks, I decided I needed some exercise, so I joined a group of people practicing tai chi in Golden Gate Park. My kung fu instructor had recommended it to us because he had a reciprocal arrangement with the instructor. I’d observed them previously, and I was impressed by their fluid, seemingly effortless movements. Just my kind of exercise, I thought. I just hoped Nick didn’t walk by and ask me why I didn’t take his class instead of that one.

I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but sometimes it’s nice to exercise anonymously. Before the MarySue shoe episode, I did everything anonymously; now it seemed as though every time I left the house, I ran into someone I knew. Just in case I did, I was wearing a pair of stretch leggings that were comfortable as well as stylish with a high-performance racer-back tank and a black training jacket. On my feet were a pair of MBT sneakers, which as everyone who exercises seriously knows can activate neglected muscles and tone and shape the entire body. MBT stands for Masai Barefoot Technology, of course. Since the Masai tribes are the best runners in the world, I had no doubt their shoes would help me run faster if I needed to.

When I arrived at the meadow where the tai chi instructor held his class, he smiled and beckoned to me to take a place in the front row, but I stuck to the back so I could watch the others and copy their movements. I quickly found it was harder than I’d thought it would be to achieve that fluid movement I’d admired. I knew it involved deep breathing and mental focus, but today I was happy just to be waving my arms around slowly and inhaling the fresh air, and feeling proud of myself for making the effort while other fashionistas were still in bed. The focus would come later, I hoped. I wanted to focus just enough to forget the scene that had almost torpedoed Dolce’s fashion show.

After the class I felt refreshed and invigorated, so I wandered around the park, into the area called Chain of Lakes, enjoying the feeling of being away from the hustle and bustle of cars and tourists and screaming children flying kites or kicking balls in the field. I walked around the misty lake, drinking in the atmosphere and hearing the wind in the trees.

As fate would have it, there was a food, art and music festival going on in the concourse, so I stopped for a Korean taco stuffed with seasoned rice, kalbi short ribs and kimchee salsa folded into Japanese and Korean toasted seaweeds. It was so good I would have ordered another, but I had to get back and get ready for my date with Jonathan. I hadn’t even decided what to wear yet.

Layers. That was all I could think of. I started with my new skinny jeans, tossing my old boyfriend jeans aside. They were so torn up and dated I could barely believe I was ever tempted to buy them.

Next, shoes. Knee-high boots or loafers with argyle socks? The boots looked great with the jeans tucked in, but since I’d be with Dr. Jonathan, I decided to be sensible and go with the loafers. I chose a silky top and a black hooded cashmere sweater over it. Slim fitting and luxurious, it felt soft and warm. That way I’d be comfortable on the boat and on shore and in the prison and wherever we went afterward.

When Jonathan picked me up, he gave me an approving look right down to my loafers. I would have looked even better if I’d had Marsha do my hair, but I ironed it myself and it looked pretty sleek, I thought.

He told me last night had been busy at the ER.

“Like most every Saturday night, I imagine,” I said. “I’m fortunate I came through with only minor injuries. So just another typical Saturday night in the ER.”

“That’s right. Gunshot wounds, overdoses, car crashes, you name it, we’ve got it.”

“But no society women poisoned by their husbands.”

“Not that I noticed,” he said with one of his dazzling smiles as if I’d been joking. I was, but only partly.

“One of the nurses told me you specialize in sports medicine.”

“I did a rotation in sports medicine. It was interesting. Saw a lot of tendonitis, arthritis, bursitis and some fractures. But to me the ER is more exciting.”

“All those gunshot wounds.”

“And accidents like yours. You never told me how you landed in a tree that night the woman in the silver shoes brought you in. Or is that none of my business?”

“It’s a long story. Maybe later,” I said. Or maybe never. I just didn’t want to talk about it now. I wanted to hop on a boat and set sail for an island. Which we did. We stood at the railing and the wind whipped my sleek shiny hair around, but I didn’t care. I was on a date with a gorgeous doctor far from the society scene where everyone knew more than they wanted to about everyone else. I should never have gone to Marsha to have my hair done. I needed to break away from the Dolce crowd. Like today.

“I took a tai chi class today,” I said. “Have you ever done it?”

“No, but I’ve read the literature, and I hear from patients that it helps with chronic pain and stress reduction. I’m interested in all kinds of alternative medicine. Acupuncture, herbs, meditation, I’m open to anything that works.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that. Although I can’t complain about the traditional medicine you treated me with. I feel fine.”

“You look fine too,” he said with an appreciative gleam in his blue eyes.

I felt a flutter in the pit of my stomach. It could have been a twinge of seasickness, but it was more likely the proximity of the gorgeous and brilliant doctor I was with. Who would have thought a few weeks ago I’d be on a boat in the Bay admiring a spectacular view of the city with a man who was not only a skillful, highly trained ER physician, but also a sexy straight guy with fashion sense. I sighed happily as the white buildings in the city receded in the distance and we approached the island. All my worries about Dolce, the shop and the murder faded along with the city we’d left behind.

Our group was met at the landing by a guide who gave us a brief history of Alcatraz. He told us the island had a grim past but a bright future. He instructed us to “imagine yourself on a cold and windy morning. You are a prisoner headed for your final destination, Alcatraz, where no one has knowingly ever escaped from.” He paused to be sure he had our attention. He had mine, that was for sure. “It is a cold and foggy morning. Heavy steel shackles bind your ankles and wrists. You are shivering from the cold and the fear of incarceration.” I wasn’t a prisoner, but I was shivering anyway. “Your fellow prisoners on the “Rock,” as it’s called, are the most hardened criminals in the American prison system. Their crimes range from kidnapping to espionage, bank robbery and murder.” He paused and switched gears to a more pleasant subject—the history of the island. “It was used as a fort during the Civil War times to protect the San Francisco Bay and Harbor. After that it was a prison known as “the Rock” that housed some of the high-profile criminals of the day like Machine Gun Kelly, Al Capone and the Birdman of Alcatraz.

He listed the various escape attempts and said it wasn’t surprising that no one succeeded given the cold water, the waves and the high level of security.

“What about the sharks?” someone asked.

“No man-eating sharks in this water,” the guide answered.

“The water isn’t that cold,” Jonathan told me as we walked up the path to the prison gate. “Jack LaLanne swam it, and some triathletes make it every year, but the prisoners weren’t in very good shape.”

“A terrible diet and no exercise. Was that the problem?”

Jonathan nodded, and I vowed to reset my exercise program. Not that I was afraid of being incarcerated. I just wished the police would catch MarySue’s murderer before he struck again. Whoever he or she was, they wouldn’t be housed at Alcatraz. It was closed as a prison in the sixties. Whoever killed MarySue would have it easy compared to those times. “Nowadays prisoners can take classes,” the guide told us, “and work on-site jobs where they can earn money and play sports to keep in shape.”

They were probably in better shape than I was, I thought. I was determined to get serious about exercising. Tai chi was too tame, kung fu too strenuous. I turned for one last look at the city in the distance. Our tour boat was on its way back to pick up another group. What if they didn’t make it back for some reason? An earthquake, a tidal wave, or the boat ran out of gas? We’d be stuck on the island. For how long? What would we do? It would get cold at night and we had no food. At least the prisoners had shelter even if they were in solitary confinement.

Jonathan saw me shiver, and he put his jacket over my shoulders. I gave him a grateful smile.

“When we get a chance to look around the prison, we can actually go into the little dark cells in the place they call ‘the hole,’ ” he said.

“The hole?” I repeated. Now I was shivering despite the warmth of his jacket. I almost wished we hadn’t come here. There were so many other interesting places to visit on a Sunday afternoon, like the Palace of Fine Arts, that relic from the Pan Pacific Exposition of 1915 or the zoo or . . . I didn’t think this prison tour would freak me out if I weren’t up to my knees in the MarySue murder case. I knew prisons weren’t like Alcatraz anymore, but I still didn’t want to go to one for any length of time.

But determined to be a good sport with a positive attitude, I said, “How cool. I can hardly wait.”

A guide in a green uniform stepped forward to take over from the one who came on the boat with us. “Welcome home. Welcome to Alcatraz,” she said with a smile. “That’s the way the prisoners were greeted. We try to keep things as authentic for you as possible.”

“Excuse me.” A woman in the back of the crowd had raised her hand when the guide stopped. “Have there been any vampires incarcerated here?”

There was a smattering of light laughter, and the guide said not as far as she knew. I turned to see who’d asked the question, and there was Nick’s aunt, Meera, in her usual black outfit with black boots and a shawl over her shoulders.

I turned quickly, hoping she hadn’t seen me. That’s all I needed was for Meera to say hello and for Jonathan to think I hung out with vampire wannabes. Fortunately, at that moment we were all given earphones for the audio tour, which featured actual guards and prisoners speaking about their experiences. Now was the time we could proceed at our own pace, and hopefully I could avoid running into Meera.

The narration was so good I got caught up listening to the voices of real people and was startled when Jonathan nudged me. I took off my earpiece.

“Have you noticed, there’s a woman who keeps staring at you,” he said.

“Oh no,” I muttered. But he was right. Meera in her flowing black dress had her gaze fixed on me. She smiled and waved to me, and I had to say hello, though I hoped Jonathan would resume the tour without me. Imagine trying to explain the presence of a one-hundred-twenty-seven-year-old vampire to your doctor.

“It’s good to see you again,” she said. “So we are both history buffs. Who is your handsome friend?” she asked, standing on tiptoe for a glimpse of Jonathan, who’d stopped to read an account of the Native American occupation of the island in the sixties.

I could just imagine her telling Nick that I had been seen with a man at Alcatraz. Would he care? Probably not. He was meeting plenty of admiring women at his gym, along with their au pairs. Even though I appreciated his friendship and the soup he brought me, I wasn’t ready to settle down with anyone.

I should have known someday there would be a clash of at least two of my several lives, and it happened there at the prison. Jonathan came up to tell me he’d found Al Capone’s cell, and I had to introduce him to Meera. I could tell she was just dying to meet him by the way she was staring at him and batting her extra-long eyelashes. If only she didn’t say anything about being a you-know-what.

We chatted briefly about the prison and the prisoners, and I was just about to break away when Meera mentioned her old friend Al Capone. “I’m the one who picked him up when he was released from prison in 1939. They got him on tax evasion, you know. How ironic.”

“How very interesting,” I said. “Well, we have to be moving along.”

“Wait,” Jonathan said to her before I could take a step toward the solitary cells. “Did you say you knew Al Capone?” I could tell by his puzzled expression he was trying to figure out how that could be.

“Oh yes, we go way back, the Capones and I. I didn’t always live in San Francisco, you know. I spent a few years in Chicago in the twenties. What a time that was.” She shook her head with a nostalgic smile. “But originally I am from Eastern Europe, and I know something about prisons. This place is a palace compared to some I’ve been to in my country.”

I sent Jonathan a silent message. Please don’t ask why or where she’s been imprisoned. Or how old she is or how she got here or how I know her.

“Do you know what happened to the missing and presumed drowned inmates who tried to swim their way to freedom?” she asked, putting her icy fingers on my shoulder. “I do.”

Before she could say they’d turned into vampires and were haunting the island, I said we were behind schedule and had to catch up. “Nice to see you, Meera,” I said and took Jonathan’s arm to nudge him along.

“Who was that?” he asked when we’d turned the corner to face the solitary cells.

“Just a friend of a friend. She leads tours of Nob Hill, which is how I met her.”

“How old is she?” he asked, looking puzzled.

Good question. I couldn’t say she was one hundred twenty-seven or he’d think I was crazy or naïve or both, so I just said I wasn’t sure but she looked younger than she was.

Just to get the complete Alcatraz experience, I had to go into one of the solitary cells; even though I didn’t really want to, I also didn’t want Jonathan to think I was neurotic. But when I pulled the door shut, I had a panic attack. Especially when Meera came by and looked in at me like she was the warden and I was Public Enemy Number One.

“Why haven’t you called my nephew?” she asked, pressing her face against the narrow bars. “He is all alone, far from home. He needs a friend.” Her voice echoed off the concrete walls.

“I will,” I said, my heart pounding erratically. “Definitely. It’s just that I’ve been busy at work.” Where was Jonathan? Where was the tour guide? Where were the other visitors?

I looked through the bars at Meera. Her eyes were like deep black holes. Her face suddenly looked as old as she said she was. I knew she wasn’t really a vampire, but up close and personal, I could see the resemblance between her and the pictures of Vlad the Impaler. The same sharp cheekbones, the hooked nose, the same dark eyes and the same pointed chin. I decided there were worse things than being charged with murder. One of those things was being trapped by a crazy woman in an old prison.

I was breathing hard, she was leering at me. I wasn’t locked in, but suddenly I wished I was. A moment later our tour guide came around the corner. Meera disappeared down the hall in the other direction.

“The last ferry leaves in one half hour,” she said. “You don’t want to be stuck here overnight.”

Not with a weirdo on the loose, I thought. The guide smiled, but I didn’t. My face felt frozen. Before I could say, “Wait for me,” he’d hurried on by on his way to round up the rest of the tour group. I pushed on the cell door. It wouldn’t budge. Where was everyone? Even Meera had gone. I tried to scream, but my throat was clogged and I couldn’t speak. I was a prisoner inside a solitary cell even though I had done nothing wrong. I’d be here at least overnight and God only knew how long until someone found me.