Dean Koontz - Sole Survivor

‘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 omelette 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 experience, 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. Nevertheless, 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 rear-view mirror.

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 watercolour 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 grey 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, because it seemed to him that Georgine Delmann must be out of her mind or incomprehensibly shallow. Her apparent joy shocked him.

The lights were dimmed in the kitchen, but he could see the space was cosy 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 bevelled-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 a-dance on floating wicks.