HUMBOLDT COUNTY

Way up on the Northern California coast, sitting alongside the muddy banks of Humboldt Bay, lies the humble little city of Eureka. Since its nearest neighbor of any size is San Francisco, about 270 miles to the south, it serves, in effect, as the capitol and regional center for the entire north coast area, much as it has for the past 150 years.

In those days, the area that is now called “Olde Town” was pretty much the only town. It was a bustling seaport then and in its prime, as in most seaport towns, Eureka’s Victorian waterfront section had been alive with saloons, brothels, shipyards and merchant shops of all sorts servicing mostly the needs of not only the transient sailors but also the thousands of redwood loggers and gold miners that lived and worked throughout this remote corner of the state.

But that was over a century ago and, despite a recent attempt to turn Olde Town into a charming tourist center, the quiet, dead-end streets that ran through this part of town and the dilapidated remains of many of the original warehouses and shops that still loomed darkly around its fringes were now home mostly only to the odd assortment of fishing boats and the scores of hobos and transients that had found their way in here over time but had somehow never managed to find their way back out again.

Here, too, along the old, rotting docks of the waterfront, was Lazio’s Seafood Restaurant. Despite the fact that it was set up in a corner of the crumbling, decrepit, and otherwise deserted fish packing plant that it once had been, it was nonetheless a very well-known and extremely busy restaurant. It was here, in the winter of 1978, that I first met Karen and where this story begins.

She was working nights there as a salad maker when I returned to Lazio’s from a brief absence to resume my work as a dishwasher that January and I was quick to notice the new girl they’d hired while I’d been gone. She was no raving beauty, in the classic sense anyway, and would probably sound fairly average if I were to try to describe her looks here, she was in actuality a very attractive woman, by almost all accounts.

Though she was indeed pretty, it wasn’t on her looks alone that the strength of her appeal rested. Rather, she simply had a way about her that seemed to attract not only one’s attention but one’s affection as well. It was more of an essence of childlikeness really and carried through with such an honest sincerity that you could