Sole Survivor
Page 12

‘A gravestone,’ Joe said.
‘Dad’s grave,’ Bob agreed.
Clarise shook her head. ‘Mom seemed to see more.’
‘More? Like what?’
‘She wouldn’t say, but she-’
‘—told us the day would come when we would see it different,’ Bob finished.
In memory, Rose in the graveyard, clutching the camera in two hands, looking up at Joe: You’ll see, like the others,
‘Do you know who this Rose is? Why did you ask us about her?’ Clarise wondered.
Joe told them about meeting the woman at the cemetery, but he said nothing about the men in the white van. In his edited version, Rose had left in a car, and he had been unable to detain her.
‘But from what she said to me . . . I thought she might have visited the families of some other crash victims. She told me not to despair, told me that I’d see, like the others had seen, but she wasn’t ready to talk yet. The trouble is, I couldn’t wait for her to he ready. If she’s talked to others, I want to know what she told them, what she helped them to see.’
‘Whatever it was,’ Clarise said, ‘it made Mom feel better.’
‘Or did it?’ Bob wondered.
‘For a week, it did,’ Clarise said. ‘For a week she was happy.’
‘But it led to this,’ Bob said.
if Joe hadn’t been a reporter with so many years of experience asking hard questions of victims and their families, he might have found it difficult to push Bob and Clarise to contemplate another grim possibility that would expose them to fresh anguish. But when the events of this extraordinary day were considered, the question had to he asked: ‘Are you absolutely sure that it was suicide?’
Bob started to speak, faltered, and turned his head away to blink back liars.
Taking her husband’s hand, Clarise said to Joe, ‘There’s no question. Nora killed herself.’
‘Did she leave a note?’
‘No,’ Clarise said. ‘Nothing to help us understand.’
‘She was so happy, you said. Radiant. If—’
‘She left a videotape,’ Clarise said.
‘You mean, saying good-bye?’
‘No. It’s this strange . . . this terrible . . .‘ She shook her head, face twisting with distaste, at a loss for words to describe the video. Then: ‘It’s this thing.’
Bob let go of his wife’s hand and got to his feet. ‘I’m not much of a drinking man, Joe, but I need a drink for this.’
Dismayed, Joe said, ‘I don’t want to add to your suffering—’
‘No, it’s all right,’ Bob assured him. ‘We’re all of us out of that crash together, survivors together, family of a sort, and there shouldn’t be anything you can’t talk about with family. You want a drink?’
‘Sure.’
‘Clarise, don’t tell him about the video until I’m back. I know you think it’ll be easier on me if you talk about it when I’m not in the room, but it won’t.’
Bob Vadance regarded his wife with great tenderness, and when she replied, ‘I’ll wait,’ her love for him was so evident that Joe had to look away. He was too sharply reminded of what he had lost.
When Bob was out of the room, Clarise started to adjust the arrangement of silk flowers again. Then she sat with her elbows on her bare knees, her face buried in her hands.
When finally she looked up at Joe, she said, ‘He’s a good man.’
‘I like him.’
‘Good husband, good son. People don’t know him — they see the fighter pilot, served in the Gulf War, tough guy. But he’s gentle too. Sentimental streak a mile wide, like his dad.’
Joe waited for what she really wanted to tell him.
After a pause, she said, ‘We’ve been slow to have children. I’m thirty, Bob’s thirty-two. There seemed to be so much time, so much to do first. But now our kids will grow up without ever knowing Bob’s dad or mom, and they were such good people.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ Joe said. ‘It’s all out of our hands. We’re just passengers on this train, we don’t drive it, no matter how much we like to think we do.’
‘Have you really reached that level of acceptance?’
‘Trying.’
‘Are you even close?’
‘Shit, no.’
She laughed softly.
Joe hadn’t made anyone laugh in a year — except Rose’s friend on the phone earlier. Although pain and irony coloured Clarise’s brief laughter, there was also relief in it. Having affected her this way, Joe felt a connection with life that had eluded him for so long.
After a silence, Clarise said, ‘Joe, could this Rose be an evil person?’
‘No. Just the opposite.’
Her freckled face, so open and trusting by nature, now clouded with doubt. ‘You sound so sure.’
‘You would be too, if you met her.’
Bob Vadance returned with three glasses, a bowl of cracked ice, a litre of 7-Up, and a bottle of Seagram’s 7 Crown. ‘I’m afraid there’s no real choice to offer,’ he apologized. ‘Nobody in this family’s much of a drinker — but when we do take a touch, we like it simple.’
‘This is fine,’ Joe said, and accepted his 7-and-7 when it was ready.
They tasted their drinks — Bob had mixed them strong — and for a moment the only sound was the clinking of ice.
Clarise said, ‘We know it was suicide, because she taped it.’
Certain that he had misunderstood, Joe said, ‘Who taped it?’
‘Nora, Bob’s mother,’ Clarise said. ‘She videotaped her own suicide.’
Twilight evaporated in a steam of crimson and purple light, and out of that neon vapour, night coalesced against the windows of the yellow and white living room.
Quickly and succinctly, with commendable self-control, Clarise revealed what she knew of her mother-in-law’s horrible death. She spoke in a low voice, yet every word was bell-note clear and seemed to reverberate through Joe until he gradually began to tremble with the cumulative vibrations.
Rob Vadance finished none of his wife’s sentences. He remained silent throughout looking at neither Clarise nor Joe. He stared at his drink, to which he resorted frequently.
The compact Sanyo 8mm camcorder that had captured the death was Tom Vadance’s toy. It had been stored in the closet in his study since before his death aboard Flight 353.
The camera was easy to use. Fuzzy-logic technology automati­cally adjusted the shutter speed and white balance. Though Nora had never had much experience with it, she could have learned the essentials of its operation in a few minutes.
The NiCad battery had not contained much juice after a year in the closet. Therefore, Nora Vadance had taken time to recharge it, indicating a chilling degree of premeditation. The police found the AC adaptor and the battery charger plugged into an outlet on the kitchen counter.
Tuesday morning of this week, Nora went outside to the back of the house and set the camcorder on a patio table. She used two paperback books as shims to tilt the camera to the desired angle, and then she switched it on.
With the videotape rolling, she positioned a vinyl-strap patio chair ten feet from the lens. She revisited the camcorder to peer through the viewfinder, to be sure that the chair was in the centre of the frame.
After returning to the chair and slightly repositioning it, she completely disrobed in view of the camcorder, neither in the manner of a performer nor with any hesitancy but simply as though she were getting ready for a bath. She neatly folded her blouse, her slacks, and her underwear, and she put them aside on the flagstone floor of the patio.
Naked, she walked out of camera range, apparently going into the house, to the kitchen. In forty seconds, when she returned, she was carrying a butcher knife. She sat in the chair, facing the camcorder.
According to the medical examiner’s preliminary report, at approximately ten minutes past eight o’clock, Tuesday morning, Nora Vadance, in good health and previously thought to be of sound mind, having recently rebounded from depression over her husband’s death, took her own life. Gripping the handle of the butcher knife in both hands, with savage force, she drove the blade deep into her abdomen. She extracted it and stabbed herself again. The third time, she pulled the blade left to right, eviscerating herself. Dropping the knife, she slumped in the chair, where she bled to death in less than one minute.
The camcorder continued to record the corpse to the end of the twenty-minute 8mm cassette.
Two hours later, at ten thirty, Takashi Mishima, a sixty-six-year-old Japanese gardener, on his scheduled rounds, discovered the body and immediately called the police.
When Clarise finished, Joe could say nothing only, ‘Jesus.’
Bob added whiskey to their drinks. His hands were shaking, and the bottle rattled against each glass.
Finally Joe said, ‘I gather the police have the tape.’
‘Yeah,’ Bob said. ‘Until the hearing or inquest or whatever it is they have to hold.’
‘So I hope this video is second-hand knowledge to you. I hope neither of you had to see it.’
‘I haven’t,’ Bob said. ‘But Clarise did.’
She was staring into her drink. ‘They told us what was in it.
but neither Bob nor I could believe it, even though they were the police, even though they had no reason to lie to us. So I went into the station on Thursday morning, before the funeral, and watched it. We had to know. And now we do. When they give us the tape back, I’ll destroy it. Bob should never see it. Never.’
Though Joe’s respect for this woman was already high, she rose dramatically in his esteem.
‘There are some things I’m wondering about,’ he said. ‘If you don’t mind some questions.’
‘Go ahead,’ Bob said. ‘We have a lot of questions about it too, a thousand damn questions.’
‘First. . . it doesn’t sound like there could be any possibility of duress.’
Clarise shook her head. ‘It’s not something you could force anyone to do to herself, is it? Not just with psychological pressure or threats. Besides, there wasn’t anyone else in camera range — and no shadows of anyone. Her eyes didn’t focus on anyone off camera. She was alone.’
‘When you described the tape, Clarise, it sounded as if Nora was going through this like a machine.’
‘That was the way she looked during most of it. No expression, her face just . . . slack.’
During most of it? So there was a moment she showed emotion?’
‘Twice. After she’d almost completely undressed, she hesitated before taking off ... her panties. She was a modest woman, Joe.
one more weird thing about all of this.’
Eyes closed, holding his cold glass of 7-and-7 against his fore­head, Bob said, ‘Even if . . . even if we accept that she was so mentally disturbed she could do this to herself, it’s hard to picture her videotaping herself naked. . . or wanting to be found that way.’
Clarise said, ‘There’s a high fence around the backyard. Thick bougainvillea on it. The neighbours couldn’t have seen her. But Bob’s right… she wouldn’t want to be found like that. Anyway, as she was about to take off the panties, she hesitated. Finally that dead, slack look dissolved. Just for an instant, this terrible expression came across her face.’
‘Terrible how?’ Joe asked.
Grimacing as she conjured the grisly video in her mind, Clarise described the moment as if she were seeing it again: ‘Her eyes are flat, blank, the lids a little heavy . . . then all of a sudden they go wide and there’s depth to them, like normal eyes. Her face wrenches. First so expressionless but now torn with emotion. Shock. She looks so shocked, terrified. A lost expression that breaks your heart. But it lasts only a second or two, maybe three seconds, and now she shudders, and the look is gone, gone, and she’s as calm as a machine again. She takes off her panties, folds them, and puts them aside.’
‘Was she on any medication?’ Joe asked. ‘Any reason to believe she might have overdosed on something that induced a fugue state or a severe personality change?’
Clarise said, ‘Her doctor tells us he hadn’t prescribed any medi­cation for her. But because of her demeanour on the video, the police suspect drugs. The medical examiner is running toxicologi­cal tests.’
‘Which is ridiculous,’ Bob said forcefully. ‘My mother would never take illegal drugs. She didn’t even like to take aspirin. She was such an innocent person, Joe, as if she wasn’t even aware of all the changes for the worse in the world over the last thirty years, as if she was living decades behind the rest of us and happy to be there.’
‘There was an autopsy,’ Clarise said. ‘No brain tumour, brain lesions, no medical condition that might explain what she did.’
‘You mentioned a second time when she showed some emotion.’
‘Just before she. . . before she stabbed herself. It was just a flicker, even briefer than the first. Like a spasm. Her whole face wrenched as if she were going to scream. Then it was gone, and she remained expressionless to the end.’
Jolted by a realization he had failed to reach when Clarise had first described the video, Joe said, ‘You mean she never screamed, cried out?’
‘No. Never.’
‘But that’s impossible.’
‘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.