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-flew through the narrow backstreets and darkways of Moonlight Bay.
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 Pietà.
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 Glück. They were his personal favorites.”
Sandy smiled and nodded. Then: “Oh, excuse me, I forgot.”
Out of consideration for my condition, he extinguished both the foyer and porch lights.
Standing on the dark threshold, he said, “This must be terrible for you, but at least he isn’t suffering anymore.”
Sandy’s eyes were green, but in the pale landscape lighting, they looked as smooth-black as certain beetles’ shells.
Studying his eyes, I said, “Could I see him?”
“What—your father?”
“I didn’t turn the sheet back from his face before they took him out of his room. Didn’t have the heart for it, didn’t think I needed to. Now…I’d really like just one last look.”
Sandy Kirk’s eyes were like a placid night sea. Below the unremarkable surface were great teeming depths.
His voice remained that of a compassionate courtier to the bereaved. “Oh, Christopher…I’m sorry, but the process has begun.”
“You’ve already put him in the furnace?”
Having grown up in a business conducted with a richness of euphemisms, Sandy winced at my bluntness. “The deceased is in the cremator, yes.”
“Wasn’t that terribly quick?”
“In our work, there’s no wisdom in delay. If only I’d known you were coming…”
I wondered if his beetle-shell eyes would be able to meet mine so boldly if there had been enough light for me to see their true green color.
Into my silence, he said, “Christopher, I’m so distressed by this, seeing you in this pain, knowing I could have helped.”
In my odd life, I have had much experience of some things and little of others. Although I am a foreigner to the day, I know the night as no one else can know it. Although I have been the object on which ignorant fools have sometimes spent their cruelty, most of my understanding of the human heart comes from my relationships with my parents and with those good friends who, like me, live primarily between sunset and dawn; consequently, I have seldom encountered hurtful deception.
I was embarrassed by Sandy’s deceit, as though it shamed not merely him but also me, and I couldn’t meet his obsidian stare any longer. I lowered my head and gazed at the porch floor.
Mistaking my embarrassment for tongue-binding grief, he stepped onto the porch and put one hand on my shoulder.
I managed not to recoil.
“My business is comforting folks, Christopher, and I’m good at it. But truthfully—I have no words that make sense of death or make it easier to bear.”
I wanted to kick his ass.
“I’ll be okay,” I said, realizing that I had to get away from him before I did something rash.
“What I hear myself saying to most folks is all the platitudes you’d never find in the poetry your dad loved, so I’m not going to repeat them to you, not to you of all people.”
Keeping my head down, nodding, I eased backward, out from under his hand. “Thanks, Mr. Kirk. I’m sorry to’ve bothered you.”
“You didn’t bother me. Of course you didn’t. I only wish you’d called ahead. I’d have been able to…delay.”
“Not your fault. It’s all right. Really.”
Having backed off the stepless brick porch onto the blacktop under the portico, I turned away from Sandy.
Retreating once more to that doorway between two darknesses, he said, “Have you given any thought to the service—when you want to hold it, how you want it conducted?”
“No. No, not yet. I’ll let you know tomorrow.”
As I walked away, Sandy said, “Christopher, are you all right?”
Facing him from a little distance this time, I spoke in a numb, inflectionless voice that was only half calculated: “Yeah. I’m all right. I’ll be okay. Thanks, Mr. Kirk.”
“I wish you had called ahead.”
Shrugging, I jammed my hands in my jacket pockets, turned from the house once more, and walked past the Pietà.
Flecks of mica were in the mix from which the replica had been poured, and the big moon glimmered in those tiny chips, so that tears appeared to shimmer on the cheeks of Our Lady of Cast Concrete.
I resisted the urge to glance back at the undertaker. I was certain he was still watching me.
I continued down the lane between the forlorn, whispering trees. The temperature had fallen only into the low sixties. The onshore breeze was pure after its journey across thousands of miles of ocean, bearing nothing but the faintest whiff of brine.
Long after the slope of the driveway had taken me out of Sandy’s line of sight, I looked back. I could see just the steeply pitched roof and chimneys, somber forms against the star-salted sky.
I moved off the blacktop onto grass, and I headed uphill again, this time in the sheltering shadows of foliage. The pepper trees braided the moon in their long tresses.
6
The funeral-home turnaround came into sight again. The Pietà. The portico.
Sandy had gone inside. The front door was closed.
Staying on the lawn, using trees and shrubs for cover, I circled to the back of the house. A deep porch stepped down to a seventy-foot lap pool, an enormous brick patio, and formal rose gardens—none of which could be seen from the public rooms of the funeral home.
A town the size of ours welcomes nearly two hundred newborns each year while losing a hundred citizens to death. There were only two funeral homes, and Kirk’s probably received over 70 percent of this business—plus half that from the smaller towns in the county. Death was a good living for Sandy.
The view from the patio must have been breathtaking in daylight: unpopulated hills rising in gentle folds as far to the east as the eye could see, graced by scattered oaks with gnarled black trunks. Now the shrouded hills lay like sleeping giants under pale sheets.
When I saw no one at the lighted rear windows, I quickly crossed the patio. The moon, white as a rose petal, floated on the inky waters of the swimming pool.
The house adjoined a spacious L-shaped garage, which embraced a motor court that could be entered only from the front. The garage accommodated two hearses and Sandy’s personal vehicles—but also, at the end of the wing farthest from the residence, the crematorium.
I slipped around the corner of the garage, along the back of the second arm of the L, where immense eucalyptus trees blocked most of the moonlight. The air was redolent of their medicinal fragrance, and a carpet of dead leaves crunched underfoot.
No corner of Moonlight Bay is unknown to me—especially not this one. Most of my nights have been spent in the exploration of our special town, which has resulted in some macabre discoveries.
Ahead, on my left, frosty light marked the crematorium window. I approached it with the conviction—correct, as it turned out—that I was about to see something stranger and far worse than what Bobby Halloway and I had seen on an October night when we were thirteen….
A decade and a half ago, I’d had as morbid a streak as any boy my age, was as fascinated as all boys are by the mystery and lurid glamour of death. Bobby Halloway and I, friends even then, thought it was daring to prowl the undertaker’s property in search of the repulsive, the ghoulish, the shocking.
I can’t recall what we expected—or hoped—to find. A collection of human skulls? A porch swing made of bones? A secret laboratory where the deceptively normal-looking Frank Kirk and his deceptively normal-looking son Sandy called down lightning bolts from storm clouds to reanimate our dead neighbors and use them as slaves to do the cooking and housecleaning?
Perhaps we expected to stumble upon a shrine to the evil gods Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth in some sinister bramble-festooned end of the rose garden. Bobby and I were reading a lot of H. P. Lovecraft in those days.
Bobby says we were a couple of weird kids. I say we were weird, for sure, but neither more nor less weird than other boys.
Bobby says maybe so, but the other boys gradually grew out of their weirdness while we’ve grown further into ours.
I don’t agree with Bobby on this one. I don’t believe that I’m any more weird than anyone else I’ve ever met. In fact, I’m a damn sight less weird than some.
