“Right at the end, when she drops the knife…there’s a soft sound that may be from her, hardly more than a sigh.”
“The pain…” Joe couldn’t bring himself to say that Nora Vadance’s pain must have been excruciating.
“But she never screamed,” Clarise insisted.
“Even involuntary response would have—”
“Silent. She was silent.”
“The microphone was working?”
“Built-in, omnidirectional mike,” Bob said.
“On the video,” Clarise said, “you can hear other sounds. The scrape of the patio chair on the concrete when she repositions it. Bird songs. One sad-sounding dog barking in the distance. But nothing from her.”
Stepping out of the front door, Joe searched the night, half expecting to see a white van or another suspicious-looking vehicle parked on the street in front of the Vadance place. From the house next door came the faint strains of Beethoven. The air was warm, but a soft breeze had sprung up from the west, bringing with it the fragrance of night-blooming jasmine. As far as Joe could discern, there was nothing menacing in this gracious night.
As Clarise and Bob followed him onto the porch, Joe said, “When they found Nora, was the photograph of Tom’s grave with her?”
Bob said, “No. It was on the kitchen table. At the very end, she didn’t carry it with her.”
“We found it on the table when we arrived from San Diego,” Clarise recalled. “Beside her breakfast plate.”
Joe was surprised. “She’d eaten breakfast?”
“I know what you’re thinking,” Clarise said. “If she was going to kill herself, why bother with breakfast? It’s even weirder than that, Joe. She’d made an omelet with Cheddar and chopped scallions and ham. Toast on the side. A glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. She was halfway through eating it when she got up and went outside with the camcorder.”
“The woman you described on the video was deeply depressed or in an altered state of some kind. How could she have had the mental clarity or the patience to make such a complicated breakfast?”
Clarise said, “And consider this — the
“—and she was reading the comics,” Bob finished.
For a moment they were silent, pondering the imponderable.
Then Bob said, “You see what I meant earlier when I said we have a thousand questions of our own.”
As though they were friends of long acquaintance, Clarise put her arms around Joe and hugged him. “I hope this Rose is a good person, like you think. I hope you find her. And whatever she has to tell you, I hope it brings you some peace, Joe.”
Moved, he returned her embrace. “Thanks, Clarise.”
Bob had written their Miramar address and telephone number on a page from a note pad. He gave the folded slip of paper to Joe. “In case you have any more questions…or if you learn anything that might help us understand.”
They shook hands. The handshake became a brotherly hug.
Clarise said, “What’ll you do now, Joe?”
He checked the luminous dial of his watch. “It’s only a few minutes past nine. I’m going to try to see another of the families tonight.”
“Be careful,” she said.
“I will.”
“Something’s wrong, Joe. Something’s wrong big time.”
“I know.”
Bob and Clarise were still standing on the porch, side by side, watching Joe as he drove away.
Although he’d finished more than half of his second drink, Joe felt no effect from the 7-and-7. He had never seen a picture of Nora Vadance; nevertheless, the mental image he held of a faceless woman in a patio chair with a butcher knife was sufficiently sobering to counter twice the amount of whiskey that he had drunk.
The metropolis glowed, a luminous fungus festering along the coast. Like spore clouds, the sour-yellow radiance rose and smeared the sky. Only a few stars were visible: icy, distant light.
A minute ago, the night had seemed gracious, and he had seen nothing to fear in it. Now it
8
Charles and Georgine Delmann lived in an enormous Georgian house on a half-acre lot in Hancock Park. A pair of magnolia trees framed the entrance to the front walk, which was flanked by knee-high box hedges so neatly groomed that they appeared to have been trimmed by legions of gardeners with cuticle scissors. The extremely rigid geometry of the house and grounds revealed a need for order, a faith in the superiority of human arrangement over the riot of nature.
The Delmanns were physicians. He was an internist specializing in cardiology, and she was both internist and ophthalmologist. They were prominent in the community, because in addition to their regular medical practices, they had founded and continued to oversee a free clinic for children in East Los Angeles and another in South Central.
When the 747–400 fell, the Delmanns lost their eighteen-year-old daughter, Angela, who had been returning from an invitation-only, six-week watercolor workshop at a university in New York, to prepare for her first year at art school in San Francisco. Apparently, she had been a talented painter with considerable promise.
Georgine Delmann herself answered the door. Joe recognized her from her photo in one of the
When Joe told her his name, before he could say that his family had been on Flight 353, she exclaimed, to his surprise, “My God, we were just talking about you!”
“Me?”
Grabbing his hand, pulling him across the threshold into the marble-floored foyer, pushing the door shut with her hip, she didn’t take her astonished gaze from him. “Lisa was telling us about your wife and daughters, about how you just dropped out, went away. But now here you are, here you are.”
“Lisa?” he said, perplexed.
This night, at least, the sober-physician disguise of her severe clothes and steel-rimmed spectacles could not conceal the sparkling depths of Georgine Delmann’s natural ebullience. She threw her arms around Joe and kissed him on the cheek so hard that he was rocked back on his heels. Then face-to-face with him, searching his eyes, she said excitedly, “She’s been to see you too, hasn’t she?”
“Lisa?”
“No, no, not Lisa.
An inexplicable hope skipped like a thrown stone across the lake-dark surface of his heart. “Yes. But—”
“Come, come with me.” Clutching his hand again, pulling him out of the foyer and along a hall toward the back of the house, she said, “We’re back here, at the kitchen table — me and Charlie and Lisa.”
At meetings of The Compassionate Friends, Joe had never seen any bereaved parent capable of this
