temblor, and exploded, destroying the house. He is survived by his wife, Catherine, and three children.
The Huntley home was the only one seriously damaged in the quake which, though mild according to the Richter scale, nevertheless continued for over a minute, causing pictures to fall from walls and items to tumble from shelves in stores across the Valley. Authorities are unsure why the Huntley home was so severely effected when others nearby were not. In one home not a block away, a single vase fell unbroken from a piano, the only result of the quake.
Tragically, the Huntleys were still recovering from the sudden death of their youngest child a month earlier. Samuel ‘Sams’ Huntley, 2? was found…
Epilogue
The Day After, 30 August 2010
If Only…
1
Catherine and the children were not present the next day when investigative units from police, fire, and county inspectors’ departments sifted through the wreckage of 1066 Oleander Place. The family had been driven away a few hours after the quake by her parents, Howard and Eleanor Prinz, and were now in her childhood home in Santa Barbara, physically unharmed but in deep shock. Two physicians remained in the house rest of that afternoon and well into the evening.
The police team, led by forensic specialist Emily Naples, arrived first on Monday morning. A short time later, Jorge Garces and his group, representing the Tamarind Valley Fire Department, drove up Oleander Place and, watched by small clusters of neighbors in front yards along the way, parked behind the police vehicle.
As luck would have it, Edgar Sai was assigned by the city engineers’ department to represent them. He parked several housed further down Oleander and walked slowly up the hill toward the remains of 1066. He stood for a moment just outside the police tape surrounding the front yard, then shook his head sadly, sighed, lifted up the tape, and moved toward the blackened skeleton of wood and ashes.
“How’s it going Em?” he asked as he was greeted by Naples.
“Not much left of the place, is there?” she gestured to the fire scorched concrete and the scattered clumps of what once were roof beams, interior wall supports, and outer walls. “Fire department says it was a gas leak but it sure must have burned hot. Nearly everything inside’s destroyed.”
“They got Huntley out yet?”
“Just left in the coroner’s van. What was left of him. A few bones mostly. It must have been like an incinerator in there.”
“What about the others?”
“What…?” Naples, shook her head as if to clear a moment of confusion. “Oh, yeah, the child.”
“And the dog.”
“That was the first report,” Naples said, “immediately after the first squad arrived yesterday. Mrs. Huntley was nearly hysterical-which makes perfect sense, considering what had just happened-and rambled on for a while, something about a child. And the oldest kid was crying about his dog, said he knew the dog was trapped in the house.”
Sai shook his head sadly. “Must have been tough.”
“Yeah, anyway, the squad found the husband right away, he must have gotten trapped in the back of the house. They searched but didn’t find any other remains.
“Then it turns out that the family had lost a kid about a month ago, SIDS or something, so apparently Mrs. Huntley imagined that she heard the child’s cry, or hallucinated it in the fear of the moment. Something like that.
“The kid’s dog will probably turn up. It must have been terrified by the earthquake and ran away. Someone will track it down.”
Sai didn’t answer, except to say, “Let’s get on with it, all right?”
They shuffled through what had been the family room, observing, measuring, picking up a bit of litter here and there and sniffing it.
“Morning, Em, Ed,” Garces said as he ducked under a couple of charred beams and approached them.
They returned his greeting. Tamarind Valley was a small place. The various investigators knew each other well enough from meeting at scenes of fires, murders, burglaries, and the rest.
“Found anything unusual?” Em asked, mostly pro forma, since it was pretty clear already that the true culprit behind the death and the conflagration had been Nature in the form of an earthquake.
“Actually, yes. I was just coming out to see if Ed had arrived yet. You both should see this.”
The trio threaded their way down the burned-out shell of the hallway, careful not to stumble where the concrete slab had twisted and buckled from the force of the temblor. They could see into remains of a bathroom, two bedrooms-all gutted. Carpet, drywall and most of the wooden structural supports, everything of the furniture except the metal bits and pieces left over from bed frames and dressers, melted, twisted, scored and blackened.
“Hell of a fire,” Garces said. “Though from the bits and pieces of wiring I’ve seen, this place should have gone up years ago. Looks like the builder jury-rigged all of the wiring in the house, connecting whatever scraps he had on hand. So far, we’ve found no single piece longer than a couple of feet. And they vary in gauge as well.
“If it hadn’t been the gas line, an electrical spark in the studs would have done the trick.
“The people that lived here all these years, whoever they were, those people don’t know how lucky they were.”
There was nothing more in the third bedroom or the back bathroom. In the back corner room, however, they found half a dozen police and fire personnel blocking the shattered doorway.
“Make way,” Garces ordered. The uniformed figures parted, letting the trio enter.
If the rest of the house had been burned beyond recognition, this room was devastated. Even though the plans indicated that the gas line had run beneath the converted garage/family room and into the kitchen, it looked as if the focus of the blast area had been the middle of this room.
The side wall had been forced outward from the bottom, crushed against the slump-stone fence that separated this property from the neighbors’-and which, miraculously, had not fallen over when the fragments of wood, plaster, and stucco had struck it. The roof-what was left of it-lay piled on top of the wall, heaped as neatly as if some monstrous hand had positioned it there.
In the room itself, the concrete slab had erupted. It looked as if some gigantic behemoth had shouldered its way from underground, lifting wide portions of the slab up and outward, leaving a pit in the center of the room. Two men were in the pit, bent over something.
“Find anything more?” Garces called out to them.
One of the men straightened, swiped at his brow with an ash-blackened hand.
“You’re not going to believe this, sir.”
He motioned the trio closer.
They stood as near the pit as they could get, behind a buckled hunk of scarred concrete. The upper edges were jagged and worn, almost eroded, suggesting that this break had occurred long before the earthquake had forced this portion of the foundation upward.
The other man hauled himself out of the hole.
Revealing…on the far side of the break, a long, rounded extrusion of concrete that arced beneath the rest of the slab. Originally, it must have been a solid structure, eight feet long, four feet across, three feet deep, where the original excavation for the house had been deepened before the concrete was poured. In shape, it looked almost like a roughened mummy case, slightly wider at one end, narrowing at the other.
