Sole Survivor (11 page)

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 she 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 answered 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. Charles Delmann.

As Georgine approached with Joe in tow, she said, “Charlie, it’s Joe Carpenter.
The
Joe Carpenter.”

Staring at Joe with something like wonder, Charlie Delmann came forward and vigorously shook his hand. “What’s happening here, son?”

“I wish I knew,” Joe said.

“Something strange and wonderful is happening,” Delmann said, as transported by emotion as was his wife.

Rising from a chair at the table, blond hair further gilded by the lambent light of the oil lamps, was the Lisa to whom Georgine had referred. She was in her forties, with the smooth face of a college girl and faded-denim eyes that had seen more than one level of Hell.

Joe knew her well. Lisa Peccatone. She worked for the
Post
. A former colleague. An investigative reporter specializing in stories about particularly heinous criminals—serial killers, child abusers, rapists who mutilated their victims—she was driven by an obsession that Joe had never fully understood, prowling the bleakest chambers of the human heart, compelled to immerse herself in stories of blood and madness, seeking meaning in the most meaningless acts of human savagery. He sensed that a long time ago she had endured unspeakable offenses, had come out of childhood with a beast on her back, and could not shrive herself of the demon memory other than by struggling to
understand
what could never be understood. She was one of the kindest people he had ever known and one of the angriest, brilliant and deeply troubled, fearless but haunted, able to write prose so fine that it could lift the hearts of angels or strike terror into the hollow chests of devils. Joe admired the hell out of her. She was one of his best friends, yet he had abandoned her with all of his other friends when he had followed his lost family into a graveyard of the heart.

“Joey,” she said, “you worthless sonofabitch, are you back on the job or are you here just because you’re part of the story?”

“I’m on the job
because
I’m part of the story. But I’m not writing again. Don’t have much faith in the power of words anymore.”

“I don’t have much faith in anything else.”

“What’re you doing here?” he asked.

“We called her just a few hours ago,” said Georgine. “We asked her to come.”

“No offense,” Charlie said, clapping a hand on Joe’s shoulder, “but Lisa’s the only reporter we ever knew that we have a lot of respect for.”

“Almost a decade now,” Georgine said, “she’s been doing eight hours a week of volunteer work at one of the free clinics we operate for disadvantaged kids.”

Joe hadn’t known this about Lisa and wouldn’t have suspected it.

She could not repress a crooked, embarrassed smile. “Yeah, Joey, I’m a regular Mother Teresa. But listen, you shithead, don’t you ruin my reputation by telling people at the
Post
.”

“I want some wine. Who wants wine? A good Chardonnay, maybe a Cakebread or a Grgich Hills,” Charlie enthused. He was infected with his wife’s inappropriate good cheer, as if they were gathered on this solemn night of nights to
celebrate
the crash of Flight 353.

“Not for me,” Joe said, increasingly disoriented.

“I’ll have some,” Lisa said.

“Me too,” Georgine said. “I’ll get the glasses.”

“No, honey, sit, you sit here with Joe and Lisa,” Charlie said. “I’ll take care of everything.”

As Joe and the women settled into chairs around the table, Charlie went to the far end of the kitchen.

Georgine’s face was aglow with light from the oil lamps. “This is incredible, just incredible. Rose has been to see him too, Lisa.”

Lisa Peccatone’s face was half in lamplight but half in shadow. “When, Joe?”

“Today in the cemetery. Taking photographs of Michelle’s and the girls’ graves. She said she wasn’t ready to talk to me yet…and went away.”

Joe decided to reserve the rest of his story until he heard theirs, both in the interest of hastening their revelations and to ensure that their recitations were not colored too much by what he revealed.

“It can’t have been her,” Lisa said. “She died in the crash.”

“That’s the official story.”

“Describe her,” Lisa requested.

Joe went through the standard catalogue of physical details, but he spent as much time trying to convey the black woman’s singular presence, the magnetism that almost seemed to bend her surroundings to her personal lines of force.

The eye in the shadowed side of Lisa’s smooth face was dark and enigmatic, but the eye in the lamplit half revealed emotional turmoil as she responded to the description that Joe gave her. “Rosie always was charismatic, even in college.”

Surprised, Joe said, “You know her?”

“We went to UCLA together too long ago to think about. We were roomies. We stayed reasonably close over the years.”

“That’s why Charlie and I decided to call Lisa a little while ago,” said Georgine. “We knew she’d had a friend on Flight 353. But it was in the middle of the night, hours after Rose left here, that Charlie remembered Lisa’s friend was also named Rose. We knew they must be one and the same, and we’ve been trying all day to decide what to do about Lisa.”

“When was Rose here?” Joe asked.

“Yesterday evening,” Georgine said. “She showed up just as we were on our way out to dinner. Made us promise to tell no one what she told us…not until she’d had a chance to see a few more of the victims’ families here in L.A. But Lisa had been so depressed last year, with the news, and since she and Rose were such friends, we didn’t see what harm it could do.”

“I’m not here as a reporter,” Lisa told Joe.

“You’re always a reporter.”

Georgine said, “Rose gave us this.”

From her shirt pocket she withdrew a photograph and put it on the table. It was a shot of Angela Delmann’s gravestone.

Eyes shining expectantly, Georgine said, “What do you see there, Joe?”

“I think the real question is what
you
see.”

Elsewhere in the kitchen, Charlie Delmann opened drawers and sorted through the clattering contents, evidently searching for a corkscrew.

“We’ve already told Lisa.” Georgine glanced across the room. “I’ll wait until Charlie’s here to tell you, Joe.”

Lisa said, “It’s damned weird, Joey, and I’m not sure what to make of what they’ve said. All I know is it scares the crap out of me.”

“Scares you?” Georgine was astonished. “Lisa, dear, how on earth could it scare you?”

“You’ll see,” Lisa told Joe. This woman, usually blessed with the strength of stones, shivered like a reed. “But I guarantee you, Charlie and Georgine are two of the most level-headed people I know. Which you’re sure going to need to keep in mind when they get started.”

Picking up the Polaroid snapshot, Georgine gazed needfully at it, as though she wished not merely to burn it into her memory but to absorb the image and make it a physical part of her, leaving the film blank.

With a sigh, Lisa launched into a revelation: “I have my own weird piece to add to the puzzle, Joey. A year ago tonight, I was at LAX, waiting for Rosie’s plane to land.”

Georgine looked up from the photo. “You didn’t tell us that.”

“I was about to,” Lisa said, “when Joey rang the doorbell.”

At the far end of the kitchen, with a soft
pop,
a stubborn cork came free from a wine bottle, and Charlie Delmann grunted with satisfaction.

“I didn’t see you at the airport that night, Lisa,” Joe said.

“I was keeping a low profile. Torn up about Rosie but also…flat out scared.”

“You were there to pick her up?”

“Rosie called me from New York and asked me to be at LAX with Bill Hannett.”

Hannett was the photographer whose images of natural and man-made disasters hung on the walls of the reception lounge at the
Post
.

The pale-blue fabric of Lisa’s eyes was worn now with worry. “Rosie desperately needed to talk to a reporter, and I was the only one she knew she could trust.”

“Charlie,” Georgine said, “you’ve got to come hear this.”

“I can hear, I can hear,” Charlie assured her. “Just pouring now. A minute.”

“Rosie also gave me a list—six other people she wanted there,” Lisa said. “Friends from years back. I managed to locate five of them on short notice and bring them with me that night. They were to be witnesses.”

Rapt, Joe said, “Witnesses to what?”

“I don’t know. She was so guarded. Excited, really
excited
about something, but also frightened. She said she was going to be getting off that plane with something that would change all of us forever, change the world.”

“Change the world?” Joe said. “Every politician with a scheme and every actor with a rare thought thinks he can change the world these days.”

“Oh, but in this case, Rose was right,” Georgine said. Barely contained tears of excitement or joy shone in her eyes as she showed him the gravestone photo once more. “It’s wonderful.”

If he had fallen down the White Rabbit’s hole, Joe didn’t notice the plunge, but the territory in which he now found himself was increasingly surrealistic.

The flames in the oil lamps, which had been steady, flared and writhed in the tall glass chimneys, drawn upward by a draft that Joe could not feel.