Here in the state with the highest population among the fifty, with the bustling northern suburbs of the Los Angeles metroplex less than two hours to the south, this overlook on that rain-swept night would have been not merely lonely, but desolate.
He had been here twice before, a year after she vanished. He’d come just to see the place, first in daylight. He had returned that night, though there had been no rain.
In sunshine and in darkness, with the sea grumbling louder than it did today, he had spoken her name aloud. Not because he expected some miraculous response. Not because he thought she, in some realm of spirits, might hear him. He stood in this terrible place where she had surely known piercing terror, and he spoke her name to shame himself, for that was the least part of the penance he owed for not having been with her on that night.
Now he said her name just once and got in the car and continued south.
He soon passed Goleta, adjacent to Santa Barbara, where Maddison Sutton lived. But he had no street address for her, only the post office box on her driver’s license. Anyway, she was not there now, but in Newport Beach, pretending to be an assassin.
He drove fast and counted on the lighter traffic of a Saturday to get back to Orange County while an hour of daylight remained, because he still had tasks to which he must attend.
| 20 |
At 5:10 p.m., in Newport Beach, the shadows of the headstones yearned eastward across the gentle slopes and shallow vales of the cemetery, as if the spirits of those interred here had slept through death, only now to wake and wonder at their condition and strain to return to lives lost.
Unto this place David would bring her if ever her remains were found. The memorial park was expensive, and a portion even offered views of the distant ocean, to which it referred in its brochures.
Evidently, for some people, the sting of death might to some extent be ameliorated by the prospect of moldering to bones in a plot of high-end real estate. And why not? No one could make a fool of himself in dying, regardless of his delusions; life was the stage for fools, and no one earned mockery by going to his grave.
David had waited seven years before purchasing the plot. Seven years after disappearing without a trace, a person can by law be declared legally dead.
Now he took his time approaching that final resting place, following a roundabout route through the memorial park, as he most often did, steeling himself for the sight of the plot, because the rest that it offered wasn’t his yet and would not be his until he could lie there in death.
The previous year, at his request, the cemetery approved the installation of a headstone without names engraved. He didn’t know why he felt it was essential to take that step. But he had become increasingly agitated by the absence of a grave marker. When it was completed a week before his birthday, his anxiety abated.
In the first hour after midnight on May 14 of that same year, his birthday, he had awakened from a dream and sat up in bed in his Corona del Mar cottage, struck by the realization that he had wanted the slab of granite erected not because he suspected Emily’s remains would be found imminently, but because his own death would occur within a few years, maybe sooner.
In that birthday dream, he had seen himself in a casket, his face painted with a semblance of life by a good mortician, mourners filing past to the strains of somber music. The scene had dissolved to the cemetery, where his casket was lowered into an open grave.
They said no one ever saw his own death in a dream, that the subconscious fiercely denied mortality and would not countenance it even in the worst of nightmares. His subsequent researches seemed to support that contention. Nevertheless, he’d dreamed of his death.
The plot that he’d purchased provided two graves. The memorial stone at the head of it was wide enough for two names, two sets of dates, two epitaphs. If his heart never clarified and healed after Emily, if he never married, his intention always had been to be buried with her at his side, assuming that her body would eventually be found.
He didn’t want to die. Somewhere in the depths of his heart, he believed he had earned his death by failing Emily. Nevertheless, he loved life and would hold fast to it as long as he could.
That birthday morning, he’d made an appointment with his attorney for the purpose of redrafting his will. If he should die before Emily was found, he would be buried in this cemetery, in the shade of a graceful California pepper tree, and when her remains were eventually located, they would be interred at his side.
Years earlier, he had been granted conservatorship of her small estate and the power of attorney allowing him to arrange for the disposition of her bones.