She moved with ease about the apartment and onto the deck, the steps between one thing and another counted so often and memorized so completely that she didn’t consciously count them anymore, but she knew her way as instinctively as a fish swimming in the depth of a night sea knows what temperatures it must seek and currents it must follow to go where it wishes and find what it needs.
She had been blind since the age of six, when her severely alcoholic mother failed to seek medical treatment for Calista’s eye infection and chose instead to treat it with herbal remedies more in line with her faith in holistic healing.
Calista’s husband—Emily’s father—married with the expectation that a blind woman could be easily controlled, oppressed, abused. Five years later, realizing his error, he abandoned wife and child when Emily was four. Mother and daughter had lived a hardscrabble life for a long time thereafter.
Seated at the table, Calista slid the index finger of her right hand around the curve of the salad plate and then reached for the wineglass where it ought to be. David had put it precisely at one o’clock, as she had known he would.
“A toast,” she said. “To the most precious son I never had.”
“And to you, dear lady, in memory of the mother I never knew.”
His mother had died in childbirth.
She waited for him to clink her glass with his, and then they drank.
“Have we a sunset?” she asked.
“The last of one. Scarlet veined with turquoise in the west, every white yacht in the harbor pinked by reflection, light in the darkling water like garlands of radiant roses floating just below the surface. The birds have gone to their roosts, and the sky in the east is midnight blue, waning to black, diamonded with early stars.”
“I suspect you’d describe a wonderful sunset for me even if night had already fallen.”
The scene was as he described it; but he hadn’t looked away from her face while he painted that word picture. At sixty, she was still quite lovely.
Having gone blind so early in childhood, she had never seen how beautiful she’d been as a young woman, and she had never seen that her daughter, Emily, had been even more beautiful.
As night took dominion, the deck lamps came on automatically, laying down a glow as soft as the scent of the jasmine.
“How is your father?” she asked. “Tell me things have been repaired between you.”
“We’re cordial,” David said. “Better than in past years. But he’ll never stop being embarrassed that his only son is a popular novelist rather than an investment banker.”
“I don’t understand that at all. Your novels are marvelous. I listen to them over and over on audio.”
“It’s the fact of their popularity that dismays him.”
“How perfectly silly.”
“Well, he comes from a family of intellectuals. They distrust the taste of the average man and woman. Nothing can be of quality unless it’s formed by the right ideas held by the proper people and offensive to the bourgeoisie mind. I have no patience for any of that. The salad is quite good.”
During dinner, they caught up with each other’s lives, and over coffee, he said, “I was at the cemetery this afternoon.”
“There’s nothing you can do, David. Nothing either of us can do. Don’t torture yourself with the cemetery.”
“It’s not torture. Really it’s not. I find a kind of peace there,” he said, which was in fact sometimes the case. “Anyway, I mention it only because someone had recently left flowers.”
She frowned. “At a grave without names on the stone?”
“You’re the only one who knows what names are intended for it. I thought maybe you sent the flowers.”
“Oh, no, dear. I’ve hoped all these years, I still hope, and I’ll continue to hope until the day I die that she’ll walk in one morning with an amazing story. I’ll never put flowers on her grave until I know beyond doubt that I can’t put the bouquet in her arms.”
| 22 |
When David got home, he checked his emails and found one from Isaac Eisenstein.
According to the private investigator, nobody named Marcus Sutton worked as an executive at Microsoft. The Seattle district attorney’s office employed no prosecutor named Claire Sutton.
If Maddison Sutton had been born in Seattle, no record of the event existed, no birth certificate.
No property in either Goleta or adjacent Santa Barbara was owned by Maddison Sutton, but she might be a renter.
The email concluded with: Call me on my personal cell.