by Betsy Draine
Meanwhile, Dan had news about the crash. “Looks like you were right about who the driver was. The corpse we recovered from the vehicle was badly burned. But get this—he was a big man and he had a gold front tooth. But that’s not all. There was a briefcase in the car that was thrown clear of the fire. We’ve got a Russian passport, so we’ve got a name, and some other stuff. I’ll know more about him when I hear back from Interpol, I hope tomorrow. His name was Ivan Mikovitch. He’s been in the country for about a month.”
“Do you think he’s the one who killed Charlie?” I asked.
“It’s too soon to say.”
“But I’m right that he was stalking us.”
“Looks like it. I do think he was following you. He’s involved in this one way or another. I think he broke into Toby’s gallery and searched it, then did the same with your house, and then, when he didn’t find what he was looking for, he tailed you up to Fort Ross and back.”
“But why try to run us off the road? If he was hoping we’d lead him to the icon, it doesn’t make sense that he’d want us dead before he found it.”
“Maybe he wasn’t trying to kill you. Look, the fog was bad, he didn’t want to lose you, he was following too close. Then, bam! He hits the cow. All I’m saying is what looked like an accident may have been an accident. Give me another day or two and I’ll know more.” Dan promised to call again when he had solid information. He reminded me that Charlie’s funeral was tomorrow and confirmed where it would be held. Meanwhile, his advice for us was to try to take our minds off the accident.
Over dinner I relayed Dan’s report, and Toby thought it made sense. In any case, watching a film tonight with my husband and sister would be a good distraction. While Angie and I did the dishes, Toby popped the disk into the player and cued the DVD. A short time later, we were sprawled on the L-shaped sofa in our living room, settling in for the show. I even made popcorn.
“Look, there’s Hitchcock,” Toby pointed out in one of the early scenes in the film when Tippi Hedren, who plays Melanie, goes into a bird shop in San Francisco. “He always gave himself a walk-on. That was his trademark.” Sure enough, we spotted the portly director coming out of the shop, leading a couple of dogs on a leash. In the film’s setup, Melanie meets Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) inside, where he’s shopping for a pair of lovebirds as a birthday gift for his kid sister. In a variation of the boy-pursues-girl scenario, Melanie decides to follow Mitch up to Bodega Bay, where his mother and sister live, and to deliver the birds as a surprise. A nice touch, I thought. The only innocent birds in the movie are the caged lovebirds, since all the free birds turn vicious and attack the town.
When she gets to Bodega Bay, Melanie asks the postmaster where she can find the Brenner house. He sends her to the dock at The Tides Restaurant and points straight out across the bay. It’s near those “two big trees,” he says. Toby paused, reversed, and played the scene again. The postmaster was pointing in the direction of where we had searched that afternoon.
Melanie hires a small boat with an outboard motor and chugs across the harbor (dolled up in a fur coat, for some reason). As she approaches the opposite shore, we get our first good look at the Brenner house, which is close to the water, nestled behind a stand of cypress trees. There’s a white fence surrounding the property, which contains several outbuildings, including a red barn. The house backs up against the dunes, and there’s a little dock in front of it, where Melanie ties up the boat.
How familiar it looked. Yes, we must have passed the spot this afternoon, but where exactly was it? House, fence, barn, dock, were gone, of course; only the trees remained—but which trees? As Toby had noted, there were multiple stands of trees all along the road, a road that hadn’t been there at the time of the filming, and several places where trees stood near the dunes.
The next important scene for our purposes was the birthday party for Cathy (Mitch’s little sister). Mitch and Melanie climb one of the dunes and look down at the house from above, watching the kids playing under a grape arbor in the yard. There’s a split-second vista looking back toward the marina, and then, as the camera pans, a glimpse of the mudflats in front of the house at what must have been low tide. Toby paused, reversed, and froze the shot. The view was tantalizing but inconclusive. We couldn’t match it with any place we’d been in the afternoon.
The children’s party is interrupted by a bird attack, and from this point, the pace and violence pick up. The children are attacked at school, and Annie, the schoolteacher, is killed. There’s an explosion at a gas pump outside the restaurant, a neighboring farmer has his eyes pecked out, the birds continue to go berserk, and Melanie and the family hole up inside the Brenner house. But the remaining scenes are shot inside, which provides no clues as to the site. The climax occurs when Melanie decides to investigate some sounds coming from the attic. She goes up alone (was she crazy?) and is badly bloodied by the avian zombies. The final frame was probably a shot done in the studio against a painted backdrop. It shows dawn breaking as the survivors drive off surrounded by thousands of perched and gathering birds, massing for the next attack.
By the end of the film, we were no closer to pinpointing a location for the house than we were at the beginning. I enjoyed seeing the movie again, though. Some of the special effects looked cheesy compared to today’s computer-generated images, and a few of the birds looked fake. Even so, fifty years later, the film stirred primal fears.
That night I had a disturbing dream. It wasn’t about being attacked by birds; it was about Charlie. I was standing in a grassy clearing ringed by a circle of low cypress trees. It was getting dark. Rain was threatening. Out of the trees, something gray and low to the ground started coming toward me. At first I thought it was a wolf. But as it got closer, I saw that it was a human head carved out of stone, like the head of a statue that had fallen off—and it was moving under its own power. It was upright and tipping from side to side, walking, except it had no trunk or legs. It was Charlie, or rather, it had Charlie’s face. It advanced to the center of the clearing and then rocked back and forth. When it stopped, the face was looking straight at me. It seemed to be trying to tell me something, but its stone lips couldn’t move. Suddenly the gray eyes came to life. They gazed into mine and then looked to the ground.
Then I woke up.
9
LEAVE IT TO TOBY to have a rational explanation for everything. It sometimes bothers me that there’s so little room in his makeup for the mysterious side of life. In this instance, though, he probably was right.
“You’re going to the cemetery today for Charlie’s funeral. The grave will have a headstone. Get it? That’s your unconscious dreaming self at work. Head. Stone. You’re upset that he’s really dead. So am I.” Toby spooned out a helping of scrambled eggs and poured another cup of coffee.
Yes, that was it. I was steeling myself for Charlie’s funeral.
“And the bit about the headstone walking upright, tipping from side to side? Remember the documentary we saw on Nova a few weeks ago about Easter Island? They tested a theory about how those giant stone heads could have been transported from one side of the island to the other.”
I did remember. An archaeologist had a theory that teams of men could have moved the statues by beveling the bottoms and attaching ropes to either side. As each team pulled in turn, the big stone moved along in an upright position, tipping from side to side, like an awkward giant walking.
“There you have it,” Toby concluded. “And the trees? Well, that’s from last night watching the movie and trying to figure out where the house was. Charlie was trying to tell you something, but he couldn’t.”
It made sense to me, but my mood stayed gloomy. I wasn’t going to feel better till the funeral was over. I poured a second cup of coffee. Angie was still asleep. I’d promised to take her out to lunch and shopping when we got back from the service.
Bad funerals are dull and painful. Good ones are original and cathartic. Charlie’s friends saw to
it that he got a good one. Annie arranged to have the gathering at the Guerneville Tavern, where many of Charlie’s friendships had been made and nurtured. She was serving coffee at the bar. The closed casket was right in the front window. From nine to nine-thirty, people poured in the door, paused before Charlie’s coffin, and shook hands in the short receiving line—Charlie’s brother, Jim Halloran, and his wife, and beside them, Tom Keogh. Tom was standing up as the bereaved partner, in spite of the rift before Charlie’s death.
Among the crowd, I recognized the two friends who had been sitting with Tom at the bar at River’s End, as well as the owners of art and antiques galleries all around the Russian River Valley. Our friends Ken and Gloria were among them. Some of the staff from River’s End were there, along with workers from the Cape Fear Café and the Applewood Inn. The majority were men I didn’t know, chatting together in friendly knots. I spotted Dan Ellis in the back of the room. He waved, and I walked over.
“Interesting to see who’s here,” he observed. “For instance, see that guy over there in the suit? That’s Arnold Kohler.”
“The gambler Charlie owed money to?”
“The same.”
He was a husky, middle-aged man with dark, thinning hair, sideburns, and a mustache. Everyone else was in casual clothes, which made Kohler conspicuous in his blue pinstripes. He was standing in the back talking to a nervous-looking man who surreptitiously passed him a thick envelope. Kohler rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger, and slipped it inside his jacket. Dan had been watching them. “I haven’t been able to tie him to the murder, but it’s interesting he’s showed up.”
“Do killers really go to the funerals of people they murder?” I asked.
“Some do,” said Dan. His eyes swept the rest of the room as Tom Keogh stepped forward to speak.
At first Tom sounded frail, but his voice strengthened as he went on. “This is not going to be a formal service. This is just a little bit of time when you can say what you’d like about Charlie, or to Charlie, so that we can say goodbye before we put him in the earth. For myself, I just want to say one thing about Charlie. We had our problems, but he was a lovely man. He was tender toward us all. He loved many things, and many people. And we loved him back. We’ll miss him. Terribly.” His voice was shaky again, but after a pause he continued. “I’ll call on just one person, and then the floor will be open. Jim?”
As Charlie’s brother moved up to the front of the room, I turned to Dan and whispered, “Tom isn’t still a suspect, is he?”
Dan whispered back, “Like Kohler, he’s still in the picture. But Mikovitch is the prime suspect now. We’re waiting for final lab reports. I’ll call you when they’re in.”
Charlie’s brother, who looked remarkably like him, only older, talked about their youth in Santa Cruz, when they were boys who took crazy risks playing on the docks. It was Charlie’s bravery he remembered most. On hot summer nights, Jim would stay on the dock playing lookout, while Charlie jumped from yacht to yacht in the marina, looking for liquor or cigarettes carelessly left out on a deck. Charlie never returned till he found some contraband. He’d hold his heist high in the air, bringing it proudly to the dock to share with his brother. In later years, Jim took the safe route—college, business school, a lifetime job in Santa Cruz city administration. Charlie took the risky route—skipping college, crewing on cruise ships instead, then learning antiques, and finally finding a business and life partner in Tom Keogh, here in Guerneville. Jim thanked Tom for giving Charlie a sense of home and a reason to stop taking risks. He paused and looked up and around the room as if looking for the next volunteer to speak about Charlie.
Nobody jumped in. My guess is that everybody was thinking what I was thinking. First, Charlie had not stopped taking risks. His murder proved that. Second, he no longer was at home with Tom. He had moved out to his own apartment and a new shop.
Annie stepped forward from behind the bar, her girth well swaddled in a white apron. “The awkward truth is,” she said, “that Charlie was still adventuring. If you loved Charlie, you had to love him for the scamp he was. He was charming and affectionate and surprising, and that was sometimes the problem. Tom loved him that way, and his friends did too. When Charlie left Tom, some of us wanted to kick him, remember? But we’d be ready to forgive him and understand him, whether he got back together with Tom or not, which I think he would have. I’m just sad that Charlie didn’t get a chance to make that decision. His life was cut short by a terrible crime. Already we miss him very much.”
Annie’s honesty broke the ice, and from there a dozen people spoke movingly in tribute to their friend, Toby among them. “I didn’t know Charlie as long as some of you did, but in the short time we worked together he became more than just a business partner. He was a friend. I’d always worked alone, and when Charlie came into the business, I didn’t know how I would feel having another person in the shop with me. But in fact, he brightened up the day. Charlie was a fabulous conversationalist, and he knew his stuff. I learned a lot from him. And he was fun to be with. This is a sad day for me. And Tom”—Toby looked directly at Tom Keogh—“I’m sorry for your loss. And yours.” He nodded toward Jim Halloran and his wife. “I hope whoever did this will be brought to justice.”
Several others added reminiscences. The last turned to the undertaker. I hadn’t noticed him standing near the casket at the front of the room. He signaled with his eyes to the men who’d be pallbearers, including Toby and Tom, and they moved into position as he told the crowd to follow the hearse to the cemetery on Woodland Drive, just a few minutes away.
Outside, the dim sky had clouded over and a misty drizzle had begun. Dan had remained inside to talk to Arnold Kohler. Neither arrived at the gravesite. There, once everyone had gathered, the ceremony was brief. Don Carlin, an ex-priest who had come out after leaving the church and was now active in the gay community, spoke the final words. He too had been a friend of Tom and Charlie.
“We now commit Charlie’s body to the earth. In our grief, we take consolation from whatever beliefs we hold most dear. For some, those beliefs may be religious; for others, not. Perhaps the important question isn’t which beliefs are true, but rather which beliefs help make the world a better place. Since I’ve left the priesthood, I’ve come to think that those beliefs that harden the heart are harmful. Yet those that open the heart are blessed. ‘By their fruits shall ye know them’ (Matthew 7:16). So let us open our hearts in memory of Charlie Halloran. And now let us pray.”
We bowed our heads, and the casket was lowered into the ground. Behind me I heard a woman say, “He’s gone to a better place.” The former priest demurred. “Charlie liked it here just fine.”
On the way back, Toby said, “That was good, what the priest said at the funeral.”
“Ex-priest,” I corrected. “You mean about opening our hearts?”
“That too. But it’s what he said afterward to that woman about Charlie. It reminded me of a favorite poem of mine in college. I used to quote it all the time. ‘To Ford Madox Ford in Heaven.’ Do you know it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s by William Carlos Williams. Williams wrote the poem as a lament for his friend when he died. The gist of it is he asks Ford whether it’s any better in heaven than it was in Provence, which was Ford’s favorite place.”
“And what was the answer?”
“There wasn’t one. It’s a rhetorical question. Williams is saying that nothing beats being alive. And there’s this line I love. He says, ‘Provence, the fat assed Ford will never again strain the chairs of your cafés.’ Now, that’s a great line.”
“Did Ford really have a fat ass?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, and that’s part of it. The poem becomes a kind of ode to earthiness.”
Earthiness. I thought about that as we drove through the redwoods, then alongside green hills splashed with streaks of yellow broom, with the ocean ahead of us. “Provence is lovely, but I don’t th
ink it’s any more beautiful than Sonoma County,” I said. “We’re lucky to live here.”
“We’re lucky to be alive,” said Toby.
I dropped Toby off at his shop and headed home to pick up Angie. She was hunched over the half-completed art puzzle, trying to fill out the green sea around Botticelli’s Venus on the half-shell. She invited me to join her. “Good funeral therapy,” she said. In the interests of maintaining the illusion that the broken pieces of the world can ultimately be put together, we worked till we finished an hour later.
We then had to hustle, because we were going to Occidental, a craftsy little inland town, where the café renowned for its bison burgers keeps lazy hours and closes in midafternoon. Over lunch, we plotted Angie’s shopping mission. Mom was on the top of her list, because her birthday was coming up. But Angie had trouble focusing her search. The gift should be natural and luxurious, but that’s all she could say. With that fuzzy goal in mind, we had license to visit every store in town and try on the best of everything: locally made earrings, necklaces from Africa, knitted hats from Argentina, and tie-dyed silk in the form of scarves, skirts, and dresses. We couldn’t see any of these on Mom. When there were no shops we hadn’t scoured, we wanted to pout over a cup of tea, but the café was closed. So we shared a bottle of ginger ale from the General Store before starting on our way to meet Toby.
When we got to Duncans Mills, instead of heading for his shop in the back, I parked in the front, where there was one store that might have something for Mom. Duncans Mills Textiles showcases local weaving, knitting, sewing, and crocheting. When we’d been there a minute, I knew we’d found the right place. Angie was humming as she picked through sweaters and shawls in Mom’s favorite colors. Finally, she chose a luminous weave of purple and blue in the shape of a shawl.