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 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.

4

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.

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.’