shadow slipped from the fluttering flame and purled across the steel panels, imparting an illusion of movement to the drawers, so that each receptacle appeared to be inching outward.
Turning to the door, I discovered that to prevent anyone from being accidentally locked in the cold-holding room, the dead bolt could be disengaged from within. On this side, no key was required; the lock could be operated with a simple thumbturn.
I eased the dead bolt out of the striker plate as quietly as possible. The doorknob creaked softly.
The silent garage was apparently deserted, but I remained alert. Someone could be concealed behind one of the supporting columns, the paramedics’ van, or the panel truck.
Squinting against the dry rain of fluorescent light, I saw to my dismay that my father’s suitcase was gone. The orderly must have taken it.
I did not want to cross the hospital basement to the stairs by which I had descended. The risk of encountering one or both of the orderlies was too great.
Until they opened the suitcase and examined the contents, they might not realize whose property it was. When they found my father’s wallet with his ID, they would know I had been here, and they would be concerned about what, if anything, I might have heard and seen.
A hitchhiker had been killed not because he had known anything about their activities, not because he could incriminate them, but merely because they needed a body to cremate for reasons that still escaped me. With those who posed a genuine threat to them, they would be merciless.
I pressed the button that operated the wide roll-up. The motor hummed, the chain drive jerked taut overhead, and that big segmented door ascended with a frightful clatter. I glanced nervously around the garage, expecting to see an assailant break from cover and rush toward me.
When the door was more than halfway open, I stopped it with a second tap of the button and then brought it down again with a third. As it descended, I slipped under the door and into the night.
Tall pole lamps shed a brass-cold, muddy yellow light on the driveway that sloped up from the subterranean garage. At the top of the drive, the parking lot was also cast in this sullen radiance, which was like the frigid glow that might illuminate an anteroom to some precinct of Hell where punishment involved an eternity of ice rather than fire.
As much as possible, I moved through landscape zones, in the nightshade of camphor trees and pines.
I fled across the narrow street into a residential neighborhood of quaint Spanish bungalows. Into an alleyway without streetlamps. Past the backs of houses bright with windows. Beyond the windows were rooms where strange lives, full of infinite possibility and blissful ordinariness, were lived beyond my reach and almost beyond my comprehension.
Frequently, I feel weightless in the night, and this was one of those times. I ran as silently as the owl flies, gliding on shadows.
This sunless world had welcomed and nurtured me for twenty-eight years, had been always a place of peace and comfort to me. But now for the first time in my life, I was plagued by the feeling that some predatory creature was pursuing me through the darkness.
Resisting the urge to look over my shoulder, I picked up my pace and sprinted-raced-streaked-
TWO. THE EVENING
5
I have seen photographs of California pepper trees in sunlight. When brightly limned, they are lacy, graceful, green dreams of trees.
At night, the pepper acquires a different character from the one that it reveals in daylight. It appears to hang its head, letting its long branches droop to conceal a face drawn with care or grief.
These trees flanked the long driveway to Kirk’s Funeral Home, which stood on a three-acre knoll at the northeast edge of town, inland of Highway 1 and reached by an overpass. They waited like lines of mourners, paying their respects.
As I climbed the private lane, on which low mushroom-shaped landscape lamps cast rings of light, the trees stirred in a breeze. The friction between wind and leaves was a whispery lamentation.
No cars were parked along the mortuary approach, which meant that no viewings were in progress.
I myself travel through Moonlight Bay only on foot or on my bicycle. There is no point in learning to drive a car. I couldn’t use it by day, and by night I would have to wear sunglasses to spare myself the sting of oncoming headlights. Cops tend to frown on night driving with shades, no matter how cool you look.
The full moon had risen.
I like the moon. It illuminates without scorching. It burnishes what is beautiful and grants concealment to what is not.
At the broad crown of the hill, the blacktop looped back on itself to form a spacious turnaround with a small grassy circle at its center. In the circle was a cast-concrete reproduction of Michelangelo’s
The body of the dead Christ, cradled on his mother’s lap, was luminous with reflected moonlight. The Virgin also glowed faintly. In sunshine, this crude replica must surely look unspeakably tacky.
Faced with terrible loss, however, most mourners find comfort in assurances of universal design and meaning, even when as clumsily expressed as in this reproduction. One thing I love about people is their ability to be lifted so high by the smallest drafts of hope.
I stopped under the portico of the funeral home, hesitating because I couldn’t assess the danger into which I was about to leap.
The massive two-story Georgian house — red brick with white wood trim — would have been the loveliest house in town, were the town not Moonlight Bay. A spaceship from another galaxy, perched here, would have looked no more alien to our coastline than did Kirk’s handsome pile. This house needed elms, not pepper trees, drear heavens rather than the clear skies of California, and periodic lashings with rains far colder than those that would drench it here.
The second floor, where Sandy lived, was dark.
The viewing rooms were on the ground floor. Through beveled, leaded panes that flanked the front door, I saw a weak light at the back of the house.
I rang the bell.
A man entered the far end of the hallway and approached the door. Although he was only a silhouette, I recognized Sandy Kirk by his easy walk. He moved with a grace that enhanced his good looks.
He reached the foyer and switched on both the interior lights and the porch lights. When he opened the door, he seemed surprised to see me squinting at him from under the bill of my cap.
“Christopher?”
“Evening, Mr. Kirk.”
“I’m so very sorry about your father. He was a wonderful man.”
“Yes. Yes, he was.”
“We’ve already collected him from the hospital. We’re treating him just like family, Christopher, with the utmost respect — you can be sure of that. I took his course in twentieth-century poetry at Ashdon. Did you know that?”
“Yes, of course.”
“From him I learned to love Eliot and Pound. Auden and Plath. Beckett and Ashbery. Robert Bly. Yeats. All of them. Couldn’t tolerate poetry when I started the course — couldn’t live without it by the end.”
“Wallace Stevens. Donald Justice. Louise Gluck. They were his personal favorites.”
