The Silent Witness — Ruth McCarthy Sears

The place where Ann Jeffers met Cady was like a harbringer of the terror to come. Ann and her friend, Maquette Forman, two farm girls from Hays, Kansas, had come to San Francisco to shed the past and pursue careers. Wanting to savor that other side of the city--the part tourists never see--they ventured to an "after-hours" club. There stood Cady, tall and thin, with a long shock of golden hair and unkempt clothes.

He was not the sort of man Ann's father would approve of--nor did Maquette, either. But Ann soon found herself falling in love--powerfully, really in love--for the first time in her twenty-one years.

But Ann's growing love was fated not to play out against the backdrop of the picture-postcard San Francisco. For along with Cady, she became immersed in the city's underworld--a serpentine maze of dark and dangerous intrigues.

What had really happened the day Bertram Carteridge, her young neighbor, fell off the Yosemite cliff to be crippled for life? Why was Cady, who was supposed to guide the Yosemite trip but hadn't, blamed for the tragedy? And most perplexing and painful of all, why did Cady vanish with no word to Ann? When she tried to find out, she was met with threats on her life.

As events rushed to their terrifying climax, Ann was faced with the most difficult choice of all--her own safety or her love for Cady.