Blood of Others (15 page)

Olivia made
a breakfast of mixed fresh fruit,
whole-wheat toast, and tea. As she ate, she fetched the long article she had
saved a few days ago from the
San Francisco Star,
the one on the life of
Iris Wood. She read every word and again her eyes glistened. Poor Iris.
Olivia’s heart ached for her, looking at the pictures. One of the photographs
accompanying the article was taken at her funeral. The caption listed the
cemetery in Colma. Olivia called the office there and obtained Iris Wood’s plot
location, writing the details down on the border of the news article. She went
upstairs to her computer, went on-line and printed off a map. Quickly, she
logged on to a few of the chat sites she had visited the previous night for
responses and made some updates. She showered, applied some make-up, then
dressed in a dark navy skirt and jacket. Then she collected some flowers from
her garden, her map, got into her bronze Saturn, slipped on dark glasses and
headed for San Jose Ave. She preferred it to the busy interstate.

Driving south, Olivia attempted
to sort out her feelings. It was confusing, maybe it would be better once she
arrived. She needed to perform a solemn duty as much for herself as for the
dead stranger she mourned.

Goodness, look what I am doing.

Olivia surveyed the city flowing
by her window. She had left her house, broken from her routine. Got her hair
fixed, was actually having conversations with other human beings. Her on-line
friends had helped her step into life, talk to people, take a chance with her
heart. She’d come a long way from her dark night on the Golden Gate. Olivia
pushed the memory from her mind, brushing the tears from her cheeks as she
entered Colma.

Most Bay Area residents were
familiar with the little town at San Francisco’s southern edge. It had at least
ten cemeteries located side by side, covering a mile-wide expanse that
stretched nearly two miles.

Following her map and directions,
Olivia found the cemetery. Using the Hillside entrance she located the section
and the grave of Iris May Wood. She parked in the shade of a eucalyptus tree,
stepped out, surveyed the area, collected her thoughts, smoothed her skirt.

Why have I come?

It was a beautiful spot. Some
gulls cried overhead. The traffic sounds were a distant low hum, like a church
organ softly reminding you that life does continue.

Olivia gazed at Iris Wood’s
grave, its fresh mound some thirty yards away. She breathed deeply, exhaled,
then collected her flowers from the car and started toward it, the soft grass
swishing under her dark dress shoes. No stone marked the spot. The brown slopes
of San Bruno Mountain ascended a quarter mile into the sky in the hazy
distance.

A memorial wreath of white roses
from her coworkers rested on the mound. A silk banner read: ALWAYS IN OUR
HEARTS.

Olivia bent her knees and placed
her vase near the wreath, neatly arranging the flowers that had shifted,
realizing that she was gently weeping.

I don’t know exactly what I
want to say, only that I knew I had to come. We never met, but I think we knew
each other because I think we fought the same fears, endured the same pain,
dreamed the same dreams, and lived the same desperate lives, up until the day
they found you.
Olivia touched her fingers to the flowers, gently caressing
them.
Maybe we were star-crossed, I don’t know. But we both have left those
lives now, and I believe in my heart that your death somehow lit the way for
me. I’ll never forget you, Iris May Wood.

Olivia brushed a tear from her
cheek, arranged her flowers, then left. The gulls shrieked as she walked toward
her car, stopping to sit on a wrought-iron bench under the eucalyptus, and
reflect.

She remained there a long time,
enjoying the serenity. Coming here felt right, it helped her understand that
she had a kinship with Iris Wood, who in death had played some cosmic role in
saving her life. She had come not only to pay her respects, but, in her own
way, to thank her.

Olivia stood to leave but held
her breath.

A man was standing next to her
car.

She didn’t hear him approach.
Standing there, hands in his pockets, looking at San Bruno Mountain. Olivia saw
some vehicles in the distance. If she needed help, would they hear? She
swallowed, then headed to her car.

The man faced her when she
neared. Dark suit, no tie. Ray Bans. Late thirties. About six feet, solid
build. He looked --

“Ms. Grant?”

He knew her? His voice was
familiar.

“Yes?”

“Ben Wyatt. San Francisco police.
We met the other day in your shop.” He removed his glasses.

“Oh yes. Hello.”

They shook hands, his large
strong hand swallowed hers comfortably.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I didn’t
mean to alarm you.”

“You have more questions?”

“Yes, sort of.”

“Here? I’m a little curious,
well, a lot actually, how did you find me?”

He indicated a van nearly fifty
yards away barely visible between some shrubs and large stones. “We’ve been
working with local police, kind of keeping an eye out, watching who comes and
goes, in case someone we haven’t interviewed surfaces.”

Olivia nodded.

“Think I could talk to you a
minute? My shift is nearly over and there’s a diner not far from here. Won’t
take long. I’m sorry to impose.”

“No. It’s fine.”

“Good. Just follow my vehicle.”
He raised an arm, signaling his good-bye to the van. Then he walked to his car,
an unmarked Chevy sedan, parked close but out of sight behind a small
mausoleum. Olivia had not even noticed it there, she thought as she followed
him out of the cemetery.

It was a new cozy place on
Serramonte Boulevard. They slipped into a booth. She ordered tea. He took a
coffee. Black. Wyatt placed his notebook on the Formica table top but did not
open it, twirling it slowly, thinking how best to break the ice here.

“I was a little surprised when I
saw you arrive Ms. Grant --”

“You can call me Olivia.”

He returned her little nervous
smile. “Olivia. Ben. I was surprised when I saw you out there because the other
day you told me you did not know her at all.” He opened his notebook. “I’m
sorry, I have to note this.”

“No problem,” Olivia dripped
cream into her tea. “That’s right. I never met her. But after I read the story
about her life, and the fact I pass by the bride shop every day…It’s so close
and the more I thought about it, the more I felt connected. It’s like
I knew
her.
You know, it’s all so sad, and it just made me take stock of my own
life, and well…” She waved a hand.

“Are you married?”

Olivia blushed. Smiled. Shook her
head.

“Boyfriend?”

“No.”

“Life partner?”

“That’s not my orientation,” she
said over the brim of her cup. “This part of the investigation?”

He was making notes, nodding.

“Actually, it is. I never asked
you in your shop and because you visited the cemetery, it’s required.” He
yawned. “Excuse me, I was up very late the past few days going through her --”
He stopped himself. “I’m just a little tired.”

“The whole thing is such a tragedy.
There must be a lot of work to do. Can you say if the police have any idea who
did it?”

“I wouldn’t know, the lead
detectives keep everything pretty tight. I just complete the assignments as
requested, and there are many.”

“Well, Ben, I hope you can get
some rest.”

He nodded, gulping his coffee.

“What about you?” she asked.
“Married? Got a girlfriend?”

He shook his head.

“Boyfriend?”

“Not my orientation,” he said,
checking his watch, finishing his coffee. “I should go. Sorry for the
imposition, Olivia. You’re the only person who dropped by on my watch. I have
to put it in the file.”

“It’s okay.”

Olivia liked him. He sounded
kind. Very nice eyes.

He closed his notebook, left a
few dollars on the table, and stood. “Know your way back to the city from here?
You can take El Camino Real, or back on Hillside. I’m heading back and could
lead you out.”

“I’m fine.” She smiled over her
tea. “Got my map.”

Slipping his notebook into his
jacket, he hesitated. “Can I ask you a personal question, Olivia?”

She laughed softly. “Why not?
You’ve already asked a few.”

“For me, I mean. Well,” he said,
“would you like to have coffee with me sometime when I’m off duty?’

“You’re asking me for a date?”

“No. Just coffee.”

“We’re sort of having coffee.”

“I guess I’m asking for a date.
Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to --”

“I’d love to go on a date, Ben.”

“Good.” He smiled then his cell
rang. He shook her hand. “I’ll call you, Olivia, I’ve got your numbers.”

“All right,” she said.

He waved to her from the parking
lot before driving off.

Olivia ordered another tea and
sat alone in the diner, in the heart of Colma, a city where the dead
outnumbered the living, where she had come to bid farewell to a life she had
buried. Now, she had a date. Just as one of her on-line friends had predicted.

I don’t think you’ll have to
wait for the right man much longer.

Really? Why?

He’ll find you.

How do you know?

It’s destined.”

A shiver shuddered through
Olivia. She sat there a long time, trying to make sense of her life, Iris
Wood’s death, and the flowers she placed on her grave on this heartbreakingly
beautiful day.

Eugene Vryke’s
fingertips were tingling.

He was racing against his own
death, peering into the night from the belly of a 737. The jetliner had just
completed its climb and was levelling off. Below, the lights of cities and
towns sweeping by like glittering rivers of the night.

The seat beside Vryke was empty.
In the seat next to it, a small woman in her eighties was asleep. Behind Vryke,
a teenaged university student was listening to a portable CD player, soft
rhythmic ticking leaking from her headphones.

The time left on Vryke’s life was
evaporating. He could feel each second, each minute, peeling down to his heart
as he struggled to complete his monument. His message through which the world
would forever know his true identity and secure his place in history.

Time to review.

Vryke switched on his laptop.

The file came to life with her
face. He had studied it over and over for hours. So many files, so many days.
The top candidates he had interviewed were impressive. Qualified. It was a
difficult choice. But he had to make his decision. Was he absolutely certain
she about her?

Yes.

It had taken him all of his life
to reach this point. To understand his fate. To embrace it.

Such a long journey.

Eugene Vryke let his head sink
into the pillow of his headrest, rubbing his fingers over his face, over the
scars, cut deep into his skin as if a misshapen spider’s web had been branded
into it.

At that instant a razor sharp
wild current sizzled through his brain delivering pain that knifed down his
spine to his toes, slamming his heart against his ribcage, forcing Vryke to
clench his jaw, slam his knees together, and grip his armrests.

Not now. Please not now.

It passed.

He prayed he had not screamed out
like the other times. He had conditioned himself to suffer in silence. He took
deep breaths, blinking rapidly. No one came. His heart rate slowed, his fingers
brushed his medical bag, assuring him. An injection was not needed at this
time, but it was within reach. In the calming, soft light of his section of the
cabin, Vryke’s brain patterns swirled and he became that sad boy again, lost in
the world, never knowing he had been chosen for a special purpose. He closed
his eyes, his thoughts carrying him back.

Florida.

Near the Cape. Sun. Loving,
warm breezes caressing him as the Atlantic laps against the sand. A shimmering
sheen of perfection with each wave.

Vryke’s mother is drunk.
Passed out on a blanket, still gripping the bottle. His father sits dutifully
beside her, brush cut, horn-rimmed glasses, his tie lifting in the wind, his
face a mask of defeat as he strokes her hair. Vryke is just a boy. When his
mother passed out, he had taken a coin from her purse, went to the nearest
public telephone and called his dad at his job.

“She came here and drank
herself to sleep.”

“Are you alright, Eugene?”

“I’m fine, Dad.”

His dad had come. He always came
for her. He drove them home in the big Ford, then returned to his job as one of
the chief computer engineers in America’s space program.

Vryke’s mother was insane. She
had gotten that way giving birth to him, his father told him many years later.

“You were a complicated
pregnancy. She went through extreme pain.”

His birth also brought her a
profound case of postpartum depression, dementia, and alcoholism, Vryke’s
father had said. She never held her son. Refused. They hired a nurse. No one
would ever believe Vryke, but when he journeys into the deepest, earliest
reaches of his memory, he can hear the echoes of her screaming rejection of
him.

“Get that thing away from me!”

Vryke’s father was a detached
computer scientist who had worked with some of the greatest minds in history.
He provided for his family but had been married to the Mission, to beat the
Russians to the moon.

It happened several years after
Vryke’s dad took on a new job with NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center south of Houston
at Clear Lake.

Vryke’s mother had ended up one
night with her son on the Gulf Coast, at Galveston. Her flashes of warmth to
him were steeped in alcohol. That night she had curled her hair, put on
lipstick, a pretty dress, necklace, bracelet, slipped a small bottle into her
purse, and took him on a Greyhound south to see the beach.

“Don’t you just love the
beach, Eugene?”

In Galveston, she had bought him
a hamburger and fries at a restaurant, sitting there spiking her Coke, then
taking him for a walk on the beach where she had passed out. Vryke had gone to
a gas station where he called his dad, giving him their location.

His father came.

But at the outset of the drive
home, his mother, still intoxicated, had begun to wrestle him violently for
control of the car. It crossed the centerline, into the path of a fully loaded
tanker, clipping it. Vryke’s mother was killed, his father’s chest was crushed,
and Vryke was fired from the rear seat, smashing through the windshield
face-first, sliding on the asphalt for some thirty yards.

Vryke’s face looked like a tomato
someone had stomped in a fit of rage. But he lived; so had his father. If you
could call it living.

After they had buried his mother,
Vryke and his dad sank deeper into their own dark worlds. His father sold their
house and they moved into a trailer park in Houston. His dad lost his job at
NASA, living on a disability pension and the small insurance payout.

His father had begun drinking,
which was okay because when he was sober he was barely able to look at Vryke.
His face had swollen into a hideous ball of stitches atop his body. The kids at
school called him a scarecrow. He refused to go to classes and stayed home,
sitting in the dark, or reading. Vryke and his dad could go for days without
voicing more than five words to each other. It was not a matter of dislike.
They were two broken souls.

Vryke had liked to read. He
digested the Bible, Shakespeare, and his dad’s old computer books. He had the
strange ability to understand what, to the rest of the world, were
hieroglyphics. Vryke had amused himself by taking apart and reassembling old
computers his dad had brought home from NASA. Sometimes they worked together on
them, his father teaching him when he was sober. Vryke felt good when he was
learning from his dad.

Then on July 20, 1969, while the
world rejoiced, Vryke felt what he now realized were the first stirrings of his
fate.

As the planet participated in the
glory of man’s first steps on the moon, Vryke’s widowed father had been passed
out drunk on his sofa in a trailer park some five miles from mission control.

Vryke had grown anxious, then
sad, watching his father.

His dad had helped construct
NASA’s computer system for the Apollo craft; had played a critical role
ensuring the Eagle’s landing on the Sea of Tranquility. But he had been
excluded from it all as the black-and-white lunar TV transmissions flickered on
their set and Neil Armstrong was emerging from the landing craft, to write a
new chapter in history.

Vryke had tried in vain to wake
his dad.

“Dad, please. It’s your work!
Your life’s work!”

As Armstrong had descended the
ladder to speak his immortal words, Vryke’s tears flowed, the flickering TV
images painting his heartbroken face with the sudden realization of his
family’s tragedy, their curse, the futility underscored by mankind’s triumph.

Why had God shunned his family?
His father had given his life, offering everything, the fruits of his labor,
only to be rejected, as if he were descended from Cain. Why?

Vryke had stepped outside into
the humid Texas night, lifting his face to the moon. As cheers had rippled
through the community, he had cursed God and the world.

My dad helped put you there
but you have forsaken him and damned us.

Vryke felt himself swelling with
a sense of vengeful purpose, the little boy, the scarecrow standing alone in a
trailer park shaking his fist at the stars.

The day will come when you
will know our name.

And history will never forget
it.

Several years later, they had
moved to a small town on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., where Vryke’s dad
got contracts repairing government computers through his small business.

They had lived in a small
apartment above the office. His dad still drank, so Vryke helped with the
business, becoming more self-taught as he studied some of the advanced national
security computer systems of the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon.

One summer, inspired by his dad’s
reminiscing about his own early years, Vryke had hitchhiked to Boston. He had
gone to Cambridge, to Harvard, and found the building housing the old Automatic
Sequence Controlled Calculator, one of the world’s first computers. It was an
electromagnetic system used to solve military problems. Vryke had peered at it
through the basement window with the utmost reverence. Upon his return, he had
enrolled in a few evening college courses, not to learn, but to meet people,
hoping older students would see beyond his disfigurement. They hadn’t. He had
heard their comments behind his back.

“What’s with that guy’s face?”

Vryke worked to ignore them but
it hurt, especially since he had no one to turn to. No friends to talk to. He
had never known a woman’s love. He had ached to connect with another human
being, but accepting how grotesque he was to others, he kept himself immersed
in computers, until one day a girl began talking to him.

Cynthia.

Blondish hair, gray eyes. Really
good smile. She had been nice to him, talked with him, even partnered with him
for some of the lab work. He had told her one day he was self-taught and built
computers, that someday computers would dominate society.

“I believe you.”
She had
smiled and squeezed his hand.

Something magical had happened.

He lay in bed that night touching
his hand. No one had ever touched him before. He had warm, pleasant thoughts
about Cynthia and began telling her more about his life. She had seemed to
care, touching his shoulder, listening, patting his hand over coffee in the
cafeteria. His heart had come alive. Soon he found he could think of nothing
but Cynthia and wanted to give her a gift. He had thought about it for days. It
had to be something special, something no one else could give her.

A poem.

He began working on it early in
the morning and late at night, tearing up pages, starting again. He had kept
his writing pad at his bedside. He consulted the classics, struggling for the
right words to convey what he had kept locked inside for much of his life.
After nearly two weeks, he had finished what he felt was a beautiful one-page
poem for Cynthia.

He had waited for the right time,
the right moment to give it to her, which came a few days later. They were
alone finishing up in one of the labs.

“Uhm,”
Vryke said,
“I
have something for you.”

“Oh. What is it, Eugene?”

“Something I wrote. Just for
you.”

“Really?”
Surprise in her
eyes and something else he --
“Are you going to give it to me?”

He had nodded, producing the
neatly folded paper hidden in his textbook, written in his best script, without
any errors, on one page. He had put it in her hands.

“Oh my.”

She had begun reading. His heart
had swelled, for he had envisioned this moment over and over, his pulse racing,
praying she would understand his love, embrace him, kiss him. His breathing
almost stopped, watching her gorgeous gray eyes following his words, the very
words he had agonized over alone at night for so many nights, her beautiful
fingers, their perfect polished nails holding the page on which he had spilled
his innermost thoughts, his soul. He had been sweating and his throat had dried
with nervousness. A hand went to her mouth, to stifle something. Her eyes
rolling, searching for something on the ceiling. Then she had spoken.

“This is funny.”

Funny? He hadn’t understood.
Funny?

“I mean, Eugene, you’re not
serious.”

Something inside had been
fracturing.

“Wait until I tell Buck. He’ll
love this!”

“Who’s Buck?”

“My boyfriend.”

Boyfriend? Now the forces
swirling inside Vryke began to coil, tense with anger. Boyfriend?

“Cynthia, I thought, I was
your, I mean, what about us?”

“Us?”
That had triggered a
chuckle, launching a spittle spray into the scars of his face.
“Eugene, no.
I’m sorry but I’m sure I told you about Buck. Eugene,  you’re  a
 nice, smart  guy,  I’m  really  getting 
good  grades  here