by Dean Koontz
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 colored 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 liter of 7UP, 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 vapor, 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.
Bob 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 center 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 gardener on his scheduled rounds, discovered the body and immediately called the police.
When Clarise finished, Joe could say 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 secondhand 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 Friday 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 s
he showed emotion?”
“Twice. After she’d almost completely undressed, she hesitated before taking off… her panties. She was a modest woman, Joe. That’s 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 neighbors 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 demeanor 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 tumor, 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.
As Clarise and Bob followed him onto the porch, Joe said, “When they found Nora, was the photograph of Tom’s grave with her?”
Bob said, “No. It was on the kitchen table. At the very end, she didn’t carry it with her.”
“We found it on the table when we arrived from San Diego,” Clarise recalled. “Beside her breakfast plate.”
Joe was surprised. “She’d eaten breakfast?”
“I know what you’re thinking,” Clarise said. “If she was going to kill herself, why bother with breakfast? It’s even weirder than that, Joe. She’d made an omelet with Cheddar and chopped scallions and ham. Toast on the side. A glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. She was halfway through eating it when she got up and went outside with the camcorder.”
“The woman you described on the video was deeply depressed or in an altered state of some kind. How could she have had the mental clarity or the patience to make such a complicated breakfast?”
Clarise said, “And consider this—the Los Angeles Times was open beside her plate—”
“—and she was reading the comics,” Bob finished.
For a moment they were silent, pondering the imponderable.
Then Bob said, “You see what I meant earlier when I said we have a thousand questions of our own.”
As though they were friends of long acquaintance, Clarise put her arms around Joe and hugged him. “I hope this Rose is a good person, like you think. I hope you find her. And whatever she has to tell you, I hope it brings you some peace, Joe.”
Moved, he returned her embrace. “Thanks, Clarise.”
Bob had written their Miramar address and telephone number on a page from a note pad. He gave the folded slip of paper to Joe. “In case you have any more questions…or if you learn anything that might help us understand.”
They shook hands. The handshake became a brotherly hug.
Clarise said, “What’ll you do now, Joe?”
He checked the luminous dial of his watch. “It’s only a few minutes past nine. I’m going to try to see another of the families tonight.”
“Be careful,” she said.
“I will.”
“Something’s wrong, Joe. Something’s wrong big time.”
“I know.”
Bob and Clarise were still standing on the porch, side by side, watching Joe as he drove away.
Although he’d finished more than half of his second drink, Joe felt no effect from the 7-and-7. He had never seen a picture of Nora Vadance; nevertheless, the mental image he held of a faceless woman in a patio chair with a butcher knife was sufficiently sobering to counter twice the amount of whiskey that he had drunk.
The metropolis glowed, a luminous fungus festering along the coast. Like spore clouds, the sour-yellow radiance rose and smeared the sky. Only a few stars were visible: icy, distant light.
A minute ago, the night had seemed gracious, and he had seen nothing to fear in it. Now it loomed, and he repeatedly checked his rearview mirror.
8
Charles and Georgine Delmann lived in an enormous Georgian house on a half-acre lot in Hancock Park. A pair of magnolia trees framed the entrance to the front walk, which was flanked by knee-high box hedges so neatly groomed that they appeared to have been trimmed by legions of gardeners with cuticle scissors. The extremely rigid geometry of the house and grounds revealed a need for order, a faith in the superiority of human arrangement over the riot of nature.
The Delmanns were physicians. He was an internist specializing in cardiology, and she was both internist and ophthalmologist. They were prominent in the community, because in addition to their regular medical practices, they had founded and continued to oversee a free clinic for children in East Los Angeles and another in South Central.
When the 747-400 fell, the Delmanns lost their eighteen-year-old daughter, Angela, who had been returning from an invitation-only, six-week watercolor workshop at a university in New York, to prepare for her first year at art school in San Francisco. Apparently, she had been a talented painter with considerable promise.
Georgine Delmann herself a
nswered the door. Joe recognized her from her photo in one of the Post articles about the crash. She was in her late forties, tall and slim, with richly glowing dusky skin, masses of curly dark hair, and lively eyes as purple-black as plums. Hers was a wild beauty, and she assiduously tamed it with steel-frame eyeglasses instead of contacts, no makeup, and gray slacks and white blouse that were manly in style.
When Joe told her his name, before he could say that his family had been on Flight 353, she exclaimed, to his surprise, “My God, we were just talking about you!”
“Me?”
Grabbing his hand, pulling him across the threshold into the marble-floored foyer, pushing the door shut with her hip, she didn’t take her astonished gaze from him. “Lisa was telling us about your wife and daughters, about how you just dropped out, went away. But now here you are, here you are.”
“Lisa?” he said, perplexed.
This night, at least, the sober-physician disguise of her severe clothes and steel-rimmed spectacles could not conceal the sparkling depths of Georgine Delmann’s natural ebullience. She threw her arms around Joe and kissed him on the cheek so hard that he was rocked back on his heels. Then face-to-face with him, searching his eyes, she said excitedly, “She’s been to see you too, hasn’t she?”
“Lisa?”
“No, no, not Lisa. Rose.”
An inexplicable hope skipped like a thrown stone across the lake-dark surface of his heart. “Yes. But—”
“Come, come with me.” Clutching his hand again, pulling him out of the foyer and along a hall toward the back of the house, she said, “We’re back here, at the kitchen table—me and Charlie and Lisa.”
At meetings of The Compassionate Friends, Joe had never seen any bereaved parent capable of this effervescence. He’d never heard of such a creature, either. Parents who lost young children spent five or six years—sometimes a decade or even more—striving, often fruitlessly, merely to overcome the conviction that they themselves should be dead instead of their offspring, that outliving their children was sinful or selfish—or even monstrously wicked. It wasn’t much different for those who, like the Delmanns, had lost an eighteen-year-old. In fact, it was no different for a sixty-year-old parent who lost a thirty-year-old child. Age had nothing to do with it. The loss of a child at any stage of life is unnatural, so wrong that purpose is difficult to rediscover. Even when acceptance is achieved and a degree of happiness attained, joy often remains elusive forever, like a promise of water in a dry well once brimming but now holding only the deep, damp smell of past sustenance.
Yet here was Georgine Delmann, flushed and sparkling, girlishly excited, as she pulled Joe to the end of the hallway and through a swinging door. She seemed not merely to have recovered from the loss of her daughter in one short year but to have transcended it.
Joe’s brief hope faded, for it seemed to him that Georgine Delmann must be either out of her mind or incomprehensibly shallow. Her apparent joy shocked him.
The lights were dimmed in the kitchen, but he could see that the space was cozy in spite of being large, with a maple floor, maple cabinetry, and sugar-brown granite counters. From overhead racks, in the low amber light, gleaming copper pots and pans and utensils dangled like festoons of temple bells waiting for the vespers hour.
Leading Joe across the kitchen to a breakfast table in a bay-window alcove, Georgine Delmann said, “Charlie, Lisa, look who’s here! It’s almost a miracle, isn’t it?”
Beyond the beveled-glass windows was a backyard and pool, which outdoor lighting had transformed into a storybook scene full of sparkle and glister. On the oval table this side of the window were three decorative glass oil lamps with flames adance on floating wicks.
Beside the table stood a tall, good-looking man with thick silver hair: Dr.