Seated at a table for two, by the front window, she overlooked a patio shaded by a striped awning, with the sidewalk and the busy suburban street beyond. This was a white-tablecloth establishment, but cozy and welcoming: a black-and-white-checkered tile floor, black wainscoting, white walls, a patterned tin ceiling, black chairs with bright-yellow cushions.
The customers were a varied bunch. La Convenable was such a perfect place for people watching that Estella never opened the book she had brought to read.
“I looked up from my salad and saw him coming forward through the restaurant, returning from the hall that led to the lavatories.”
When Estella seemed to be lost in the memory, David said, “Patrick Corley.”
“Yes. I had no doubt that it was him. He was identical to Pat in every detail.”
David played devil’s advocate. “This was—what?—six years after his death. Memory fades.”
“Not mine,” she said. “Not after all those years of wonderful friendship, doing business together. Anyway, though he hadn’t seen me when he went to the men’s room, and though I hadn’t noticed him earlier, he saw me as he returned, and he knew me.”
“He reacted at once to you,” David said, recalling Lew Ross’s report.
“He looked shocked at the sight of me. He halted in the middle of the restaurant, froze for a moment, staring, then turned and hurried back the way he’d come.”
“You went after him.”
“I surprised myself, how quickly I reacted. It wasn’t what you might think, not astonishment or curiosity. In retrospect, I realize it was anger that drove me up from my chair. Why would he have faked his death, caused such pain and grief for his friends? What selfish purpose would have motivated him to do such an outrageous thing?”
“But he didn’t fake his death. He really died. Your friend the supermarket manager attested to that. And the coroner.”
Her eyes, the gray-blue of hawk’s-eye quartz, seemed to focus on something at a great distance. Only when her stare returned to David did she reply. “Yes. They attested to it. However, when I saw him and when he reacted to me, I put aside everything I knew. It all became only what I thought I knew—it was no longer reliable. Instead of returning to the lavatory hallway, he pushed through a swinging door into the restaurant kitchen. By the time I followed, he was exiting a service door at the back. I barged right through the kitchen staff, went after him, and came out in an alleyway. He was nowhere in sight. The restaurant sits midblock. He could have gone around the south corner or the north, or through a back entrance to a business on the farther side of the alley.”
She noticed how fiercely her fingers clutched the arms of the chair, and she relaxed them.
“You returned to your table?” David prompted.
“In something of a daze, assuring the hostess that I was fine, apologizing for the commotion I caused. By the time I got to my chair, shaken and confused, a scene was underway on the patio. This waiter delivering appetizers, and this young woman refusing them but throwing money down to pay. Two glasses of wine hardly touched. Two rolls uneaten on the bread plates. She rushed off the patio, onto the sidewalk, just as a van pulled to the curb. She boarded it. I had a clear view of the driver, and I’ve no doubt that he was Pat Corley. Then they were off. I wasn’t able to get a license number.”
“What color was the van?”
“Sort of tan, I think. A Ford. I sat down and finished lunch. I ate very slowly, poring through the whole encounter again and again, so I wouldn’t forget any detail.”
David wondered if Pat Corley built this house. In moments like this, when he waited for Estella to continue, the room was as silent as a mausoleum, the structure so well insulated that no sound seemed able to penetrate from the street, as though the world beyond these walls had been vacated by humanity, while Nature, with all her power and creatures, had settled into stasis.
“How many people have you told about this?” he asked.
“Just two. Well, four now that I’ve told Mr. Ross and you. My daughter was the first. Rachel is a dear soul and good to me. But I didn’t have her until I was thirty-five. I’m sixty-three now, and she’s twenty-eight. She’s of a generation that thinks itself wise, that doesn’t even intuit its massive ignorance. She was kind when I shared the story, but she had a dozen explanations that made sense to her. I was only sixty-two when this happened, but I could tell she worried I might be in an early stage of dementia, so I relented and accepted one of her explanations, feeble as it was. When I got back to Santa Barbara, I told my best friend, Marsha Gasparelli. Marsha is three years older than I am and has no patience for anyone who thinks that old age inevitably involves a mental decline. She believed me implicitly, but neither of us has been able to imagine what it all means.”