Vicki felt puzzled as she listened to all this. How could a lawyer like Mr. Dorn, a man trained to make investigations, not have unearthed the fact of Lucy’s job with Mrs. Heath? Except that Mrs. Stacey had said Lucy had been in and out of San Francisco several times with her friends, just around the time Mr. Dorn was here....
“Mr. Graves, did a man named Dorn get in touch with you?”
“Dorn? Never heard of him.”
“Did Lucy mention a Mr. Dorn to you?”
Gravy shook his head. Well, Vicki thought, Dorn and Lucy must have just missed each other, and some of her friends must have given him a garbled or incomplete account of her trip and plans and the respectable older lady with whom she was traveling.
“You said Mrs. Heath and Lucy were going to the hills. Can you tell me where in the hills?” Vicki asked.
“About a three hours’ drive from San Francisco, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains,” Gravy said. “It’s east of the Great Valley, in the Mother Lode country with all those little pear-growing towns like Placerville and Auburn and Grass Valley. It’s west of the mountains on the way to Donner Pass. Just about where the hills really start to roll and climb and start turning into mountains. That’s where Lucy spent some happy vacations with her parents when she was a child.”
As Gravy talked, Vicki visualized a map of California in her mind and tried to fix the locale. “Isn’t the Mother Lode country where they first discovered gold in 1848?” Vicki asked.
“Right. That was gold-rush country. They’re still mining a little gold in them thar hills,” Gravy said with a grin.
Vicki asked him what that stretch of hills was like.