accidentally locked in the cold-holding room, the dead bolt could be
disengaged from within. On this side, no key was required; the lock
could be operated with a simple thumbturn.
I eased the dead bolt out of the striker plate as quietly as
possible.
The doorknob creaked softly.
The silent garage was apparently deserted, but I remained alert.
Someone could be concealed behind one of the supporting columns, the
paramedics’ van, or the panel truck.
Squinting against the dry rain of fluorescent light, I saw to my dismay
that my father’s suitcase was gone. The orderly must have taken it.
I did not want to cross the hospital basement to the stairs by which I
had descended. The risk of encountering one or both of the orderlies
was too great.
Until they opened the suitcase and examined the contents, they might
not realize whose property it was. When they found my father’s wallet
with his ID, they would know I had been here, and they would be
concerned about what, if anything, I might have heard and seen.
A hitchhiker had been killed not because he had known anything about
their activities, not because he could incriminate them, but merely
because they needed a body to cremate for reasons that still escaped
me.
With those who posed a genuine threat to them, they would be
merciless.
I pressed the button that operated the wide roll-up. The motor hummed,
the chain drive jerked taut overhead, and that big segmented door
ascended with a frightful clatter. I glanced nervously around the
garage, expecting to see an assailant break from cover and rush toward
me.
When the door was more than halfway open, I stopped it with a second
tap of the button and then brought it down again with a third. As it
descended, I slipped under the door and into the night.
Tall pole lamps shed a brass-cold, muddy yellow light on the driveway
that sloped up from the subterranean garage. At the top of the drive,
the parking lot was also cast in this sullen radiance, which was like
the frigid glow that might illuminate an anteroom to some precinct of
Hell where punishment involved an eternity of ice rather than fire.
As much as possible, I moved through landscape zones, in the nightshade
of camphor trees and pines.
I fled across the narrow street into a residential neighborhood of
quaint Spanish bungalows. Into an alleyway without streetlamps.
Past the backs of houses bright with windows. Beyond the windows were
rooms where strange lives, full of infinite possibility and blissful
ordinariness, were lived beyond my reach and almost beyond my
comprehension.
Frequently, I feel weightless in the night, and this was one of those
times. I ran as silently as the owl flies, gliding on shadows.
This sunless world had welcomed and nurtured me for twenty-eight years,
had been always a place of peace and comfort to me.
But now for the first time in my life, I was plagued by the feeling
that some predatory creature was pursuing me through the darkness.
Resisting the urge to look over my shoulder, I picked up my pace and
sprinted-raced-streaked-flew through the narrow backstreets and
dark-ways of Moonlight Bay.
I have seen photographs of California pepper trees in sunlight.
When brightly linmed, they are lacy, graceful, green dreams of trees.
At night, the pepper acquires a different character from the one that
it reveals in daylight. It appears to hang its head, letting its long
branches droop to conceal a face drawn with care or grief These trees
flanked the long driveway to Kirk’s Funeral Home, which stood on a
three-acre knoll at the northeast edge of town, inland of Highway I and
reached by an overpass. They waited like lines of mourners, paying
their respects.
Yi As I climbed the private lane, on which low mushroom-shaped
landscape lamps cast rings of light, the trees stirred in a breeze.
The friction between wind and leaves was a whispery lamentation.
No cars were parked along the mortuary approach, which meant that no
viewings were in progress.
I myself travel through Moonlight Bay only on foot or on my bicycle.
There is no point in learning to drive a car. I couldn’t use it by