“I’m sorry to dredge up bad memories,” David said.
“Don’t concern yourself, young man. I’m no fragile flower. Anyway, to get to what brought you here, it’s necessary to do a little dredging first.”
He set the framed photo on the table between them. “After his wife died, I understand Patrick more or less . . . withdrew.”
“He was nearly finished with the last house we did together. He wrapped it, we sold it, and he retreated to his place like a man going to a bunker to ride out Armageddon.”
David recited the address from Lew Ross’s report. “Nine Rock Point Lane.”
“Yes. The last house on the street. The only house. He bought the land a long time ago, a rare buildable tract on the coast, where he eventually meant to construct eight other houses after he built his own, but there’s only the one. After Nanette passed, he closed his business, retired. Everyone who cared about him invited him to dinner, to cards, to one thing or another, but he rarely accepted. Within a year he stopped socializing altogether. We all knew how close he and Nanette were, but we thought in time he’d get over the loss of her. He never did.”
“Sometimes it’s hard,” David said. “Sometimes there’s really no getting over it.”
Her mouth tightened. She nodded and looked down at her hands, and he knew she was thinking about her husband.
After giving Estella a moment to collect herself, which she might not have required, David said, “Five years following Nanette’s . . . passing, Patrick died of a heart attack in a supermarket.”
She looked up and unfolded her hands from her lap and put her arms on the arms of the chair. “Yes.”
“There’s no doubt he died.”
“I know the manager of the market, Brenda Ainsley. She gave him CPR. She said the paramedics were there in three minutes. They also gave him CPR. No one could revive him. It was that heart attack they call the widow-maker, but he was already a widower.”
“There was no funeral.”
“No. After Nanette died, Pat formed this charitable foundation that would inherit his entire estate. I never really understood its mission. Anyway, five years later, when he died, he was buried on the grounds of the foundation, out there somewhere on Rock Point Lane. If there was a ceremony, no one was invited. Nanette is buried here in Santa Barbara. None of us who knew those two can understand why he wasn’t buried beside her. Surely he wanted that.”
In his mind’s eye, David saw the double-plot gravestone in the cemetery in Newport Beach. He wondered if he was destined to come to rest there alone, with no name on the other half of the polished granite marker—and if he might be consigned to the earth sooner than later.
“Have you ever met Maddison Sutton?” he asked.
Estella frowned. “Who?”
“She’s the primary director of Patrick Corley’s foundation.”
Estella shook her head. “I never heard of her. Whoever they are out there at Rock Point, they’re standoffish. I don’t know anyone who’s met any of them.”
They had come to the purpose of his visit, to a discussion of the impossible. He would once have found the subject risible, but his life seemed to be sliding sideways from a world of pure reason into a dimension where what had once been fantastic became more credible day by day.
“Long after his death, you encountered Patrick Corley.”
“My one X-Files moment.”
“When was this?”
“Ten months ago, the eighteenth of August. I’d lost Haskell the previous April, and I was hurting. I went up to Menlo Park to stay with my daughter and her family for a few weeks.”
Menlo Park lay more than three hundred miles north of Santa Barbara, south of San Francisco, near the southern end of the bay. It was one of those towns where cutting-edge technology firms were booming and, in the process of raking in historic profits, were also fast changing the world.
Estella’s arms remained on the arms of the chair, but her hands were no longer relaxed. Her fingers clenched the upholstery as if she were aboard a jet and afraid of flying.
| 34 |
The creeping sun had found the tall western windows of Estella Rosewater’s study, slowly extending grid patterns of glass light and muntin shadow across the gleaming mahogany floor and Persian carpet.
Her voice remained soft and steady, and she avoided dramatics as she spoke of the remarkable encounter on the eighteenth day of the previous August.
She had been in the second week of a visit to her daughter, Rachel, and for the first day since arriving in Menlo Park, she’d been on her own. Rachel had a prior obligation. Her husband was at work. Estella decided to treat herself to lunch at La Convenable, a restaurant at which they had enjoyed dinner a few nights earlier.