Dean Koontz - Sole Survivor

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. She was an investigative reporter specializing in stories about particularly heinous criminals — serial killers, child abusers, rapists who mutilated their victims — 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 offences, 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 any more.’

‘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 offence,’ 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 Theresa. 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 coloured 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 lamp lit half revealed emotional turmoil as she responded to the description that Joe gave her. ‘Rose 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 Rose’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 Rose but also… flat out scared.’