During Scott’s vigil, cars occasionally went in and out of Powder House Road but none from Jonathan’s. Wherever the currents had carried her, it was not Dover.
Eventually, Scott chanced a drive-by of the house itself. As he inched past on the return leg he stopped, presuming it safe to check closer. He walked to the rear of the immense residence. Peering in the garage and all accessible windows at ground level, he saw no evidence of Julianna so he resumed his station at the top of the road and waited.
Shortly after Five, Jonathan’s Lexus coasted past. Scott was sorely tempted to follow him and come clean. What stopped him was the certain knowledge that Julianna would not want him to, not as things stood. He considered the apparent facts: She had not told Jonathan. There was no evidence of her seeking refuge or counsel here. And Jonathan didn’t appear like a man whose only child was in the throes of a personal crisis. Her departure from—like her arrival in—Scott’s life was to be anything but conventional. Scott decided that, whatever new digging unearthed, he would remain solo in the sandpit for now.
He waited another 15 minutes, in case Julianna’s black RX8 Sportster appeared anyway. When his deadline expired, Scott headed home.
Seeking a familiar skin for a better mood, he traded his sweats for a fresh shirt and pants. He wandered into the guest room as he tucked himself in, stopping at the picture window to lace his Oxfords up on Julianna’s seat. Glancing out, he noticed a lone couple in the veterans’ section of the cemetery. He knew the spot to be the grave of the dead soldier, Sharon Carlin. The man, whom he had last seen receiving the folded flag on a biting winter’s day over three years ago, now held a small green trash bag open for his wife. Her face obscured by a wide-brimmed sun hat, she kneeled as she tended to a vase of flowers on the plot.
Surely not, Scott thought.
The note had been anything but definitive. Maybe she had made a definitive statement, had needed to, in a way which was familiar to them both. He needed to know. He needed to accept her resolve. If she had marked their end just as she had mapped their beginning, it would be enough for him.
And if she had done so, if she thought to care so much, to do as such, then maybe she wasn’t lost. Maybe she was just misguided. And maybe the presence of a Navajo stone down at that specific grave was her message to that effect. He could debate or delude the meaning later. Right then, he had to check. And right then, the Carlin’s were cleaning it up!
Scott ran outside and crossed the Pond, saw they were heading for their car, taking whatever they had collected with them. He stepped onto the grass and hurried quietly to the grave, no reverential distance in observance this time.
He hadn’t set foot here since the funeral. Julianna had recounted her visits, time spent sitting, reading, exchanging pleasantries with the Carlins whenever she encountered them. It was Julianna who told him about the erection of the headstone and he saw it now, exactly as she described; a plain white tablet, standing knee-high. A cross was etched within a small circle at the top. Underneath, the legend read:
Sharon Carlin
Staff Sergeant
May 18, 1974
Feb 4, 2002
7th Transportation Battalion
Operation
Enduring Freedom
A plastic vase of fresh flowers and a small flag pinned in the grass were the only other items marking the small model piece of barren Homeland she had died for.
Scott checked all around, finding nothing. He lifted the vase, noting how it was weighted down with pebbles in the base. He could rifle through them when the Carlins were safely away. The only other possibility was the bag of trash being carried away. They were almost to their car now and Scott jogged after them.
“Excuse me. Hi.”
Missus Carlin turned. “Hello?”
“I’m sorry to bother you. You don’t know me. You know my wife, Julianna. We live just across the Pond. We came down the day of the… I’m sorry, I’m not making much sense. I’m Scott Jameson. Julianna is my wife.”
The couple shook his hand.
“You have my sympathies, for your daughter’s loss.”
“Thank you, Mister Jameson,” Missus Carlin replied. Mister Carlin nodded stiffly. To Scott, he looked to have aged a lifetime in the last three years.
“Anyway, Julianna sorta took it on herself to visit your daughter from time to time. I guess she just felt a… an empathy. She’s like that.” He laughed. “She said she spoke to you a couple of times, said you appreciated having someone keep an eye out when you couldn’t be here.”
Missus Carlin regarded Scott with an expression of polite impatience, as if still waiting for him to start making sense. “Well, Rick and I both thank you for your sentiments… emm… ?”
“Scott.”
“Yes. But I’m not sure if you have the right folks. Your wife’s name doesn’t ring any bells and I don’t think Sharon ever has any visitors except ourselves. Her sister comes with us whenever she visits from Venezuela. Otherwise, it’s just us, every week without fail since…” Her voice trailed off.
“Julianna?” Scott pressed. “29? Bout your height. Long black hair. Slim. She brings one of those… what’ya call it, the little picnic stool you open out into an X.” Scott mimed the act of unfolding the whatchamacallit and planting it on the ground. “Wait. I have a picture.”
He took out his wallet and showed a passport-sized photograph to Missus Carlin.
“Oh yes,” Missus Carlin exclaimed. “Rick, it’s that nice girl who told me about those very seats. We use them when we go to see the Pops play at the Esplanade,” she explained to Scott.
Scott nodded, relieved.
“I saw her sitting on one,” she continued. “She passed us when she was leaving and said ‘Hello’, and I said it looked like a handy contraption. She was carrying it folded under her arm, just the neatest little thing. She told me how I could get any number of them at Orvis.”
“So you remember? She used to sit and read by your daughter’s grave. Like I said, that’s Julianna!”
“Oh no, sweetheart,” Missus Carlin corrected. “Not by Sharon’s grave. We only ever spoke to her that one time. The days we did see her in here—which weren’t all that many—she’d just look up and wave at us.”
“Wave at you? I don’t understand.”
“From way over there, out by the Meadow.”
Missus Carlin turned and pointed to the northeast edge of Cedar Grove, some 200 yards from where they stood.
Scott stared at the ‘yonder’, unaware his expression had become glassy-eye confused. It took him a second to realize Missus Carlin was addressing him again.
“I… sorry, what was that?” he muttered.
“I said, it was nice to meet you, Scott, but we ought to be going now.”
“Yeah,” Scott murmured. “You too, both.” He managed a close-lipped smile as they got into the car and departed.
He stood there for a minute. Then he stepped onto the path toward Cedar Grove’s east boundary, the oldest part of the cemetery and the area best neglected.
The walk to the east edge took him less than a minute. As he neared the secluded border with the golf course, he entered the shade of trees which grew higher and more menacing here than any other part of the cemetery. They edged closer as he approached the boundary, and when he crossed the line from sun to shadow, it seemed the temperature dropped several more degrees than it ought have. It might just have been his edginess, the unfastening of any last certainty he held, as in 60 seconds, he walked back 300 years to the discarded ignominy of history.
The cemetery’s customary neatness ended at the last line of plots. After that, the ground quickly became a thatch of wood grass, creeping higher and more brazen as it neared the tree line. Between the boundary trees themselves, Scott found himself ankle-deep in it. Mounds of decayed cuttings festered here and there; some tossed bunches of flowers, now dried-out fossils among the mosses and leaves; a few mis-driven golf balls with yellowed and brow
n markings. Everywhere, weeds poked their gnarled ugliness into the world.
Scott didn’t need to stoop as he negotiated the spaces between the slender trunks. The lower portion of every tree was devoid of any greenery. Small bones of branch protruded here and there but these were shriveled leafless stubs. Wood flies flitted about his head as he picked his way.
A half-dozen junked headstones littered the dim undergrowth, like coral almost buried in the sea of vegetation. One appeared to erupt from the earth at an angle and its face had long since lost the words of its maker. Another had once enjoyed intricately carved shoulders at its flanks but now a missing quarter piece was evidenced by a cut-away stump. The exposed break, which might have initially revealed a jeweled seam of stone, had long since been cauterized to a weather-beaten scar. A third lay expired on its back as if even it had given up the ghost and claimed no further earthly purpose. Some retained the faintest impression of their script, so worn it was now no better than Braille to the sighted and sightless alike.
In this grave of graves, the disrepair of the rest made the otherwise modest appearance of one in particular all the more curious. It stood on the edge of the treeline, facing back into the cemetery, and Scott was grateful to return into the open to examine it. It was a short wide slab of granite, crowned with a low triangular peak. A shade of gunmetal grey, as Scott walked around it he swore he saw it change momentarily, the light subtly reflecting as lilac, then indigo. Blinking as he came square, it was simply grey again.
The most striking feature of this headstone was its guardian: a winged death’s-head skull. Inside the triangled top of the slab, his wingspan extended from his oversized skull to each end of the piece, casting claim over his domain, his plumage comprised of standing ranks of crows’ feather quills, curved like filleting blades, the Flesh Eater’s instruments of consumption.
This figure was rendered in such a crude clumsy fashion that Scott wondered if it could be the work of a child. The details were reproduced with rough imprecise cuts, not any artisan intricacy. Despite its infantile imagining, the skull was nonetheless unnerving. If the instruction was ‘Show me Death’, then here was a child’s answer; a melon-shaped cranium above a rectangular jaw, it had two large oval depressions for eye sockets. The nasal cavity was a triangle, the teeth little more than two rows of rough-lined squares across the jaw. The cranium was split in two by a simple vertical line and the eye sockets wore two eyebrows, like the caricatured twirls of a villain’s moustache—the Halloween face of death.
Beneath the image, a Latin text had only the word ‘Tempus’ familiar to Scott.
But the headstone couldn’t be the work of children, because it was a marker for children. Scott read the master inscription which ran across the very top edge of the stone.
“The Children Of Thomas & Elisha Priest”
Three individual tablets were carved side-by-side into the stone face of the main block beneath Death. Each was capped with a half-moon curve, a semi-circle which was marked-off in interval lines, as on a sundial. A unique emblem was cut beneath the curve on each of the three tablets—crossbones for one, the other an hourglass, crossed shovels for the last.
The writing under each emblem was clearly legible.
Hannah Priest Aged 4 Years Dec 1671
Emily Priest Aged 4 Days Mar 1672
Abigail Priest Aged 6 Years Jul 1672
The entire headstone listed to one side, as if its burden of innocence grieved might carry it into the earth to be rid of such heavy purpose.
In front of it, someone had reclaimed a small patch of ground from the surrounding wilds and cultivated it to become a modest plot for the marker. The spot was leveled and tidied of leaves and weeds. The grass was trim and healthy. On it now sat three large flowerheads. The fresh white magnolia blossoms, dead though they were, were still the most vital presence amidst the prevailing decay.
Scott set them aside and examined the space beneath. This revealed nothing else on the surface, but as he prepared to reset the flowers, he noticed how the grass fronds in that spot were flecked with fresh dirt. Lumps of loose clay nestled between the spiky green shoots. He pinched his grip around the tuft of grass. When he pulled, a perfect-square palm-sized swatch of lawn came easily up and Scott looked at the dark gash of earth it revealed. He dropped to his knees and clawed into the soft soil. The turf around it moved easily and suspiciously aside. From within a now larger circle, he removed fistfuls of muck as he excavated further. Soon, he was rummaging in the center of a bowl-shaped cavity which was a good six inches deep. When his fingertips finally encountered a hard object at its base, he probed more cautiously before daring to remove it. He brushed the excess mud off and examined it. It would need a proper rinse under the faucet but the luster coming off its visible edges and the weight of it in his hand left Scott in no doubt. He was holding an exquisite piece of gold jewelry, one with no earthly reason to be under a discarded pilgrim headstone. Suddenly he felt very exposed, not only by its discovery but by the appearance of what he was up to. Hastily, he probed the hole again. It held nothing else so he bundled the clay pile back into the space and smoothed it out. Replacing the turf and flowers to conceal the disturbance, he thrust the mystery item in his pocket and started back toward the path.
As he stepped off the Pond crossing, Scott spotted a familiar blue ’67 Mustang GTA parked in his front drive. He retreated behind a clutch of trees and scanned the house.
Sarah Parales emerged from his yard and returned to his front door. She pushed the doorbell and held it in for over a minute. Scott knew she’d keep to it until the motor fried. He knew how it looked to her: His car was right there. He must be inside, avoiding all-comers. She was sending him a message, in her own inimitable style. She would wait him out, sound him out, or burn him out but he better come the fuck out. Sarah was persistent, bested in that trait only by Jules. But if Jules was the slow burn, Sarah was an A-bomb. She was half-Spanish, her mother from the Old World mountain city of Salamanca, and when Sarah lost it, it was explosive. Scott has seen it on occasion, though never at work; in the office, she was sharp-starched professional. No one there got the slightest glimpse of her whipcrack temper.
His firebrand visitor finally released Scott’s doorbell. He doubted it worked anymore. He’d bet money it blew long before she stopped pressing. Sarah walked to the street corner and stood, hands on hips, first looking down Emerson and then peering the length of Spring Pond Road. Scott suddenly realized that he’d been drawn almost fully out from his cover. Sarah would surely spot him, if she happened to look in his direction. Still, he made no attempt to step back. He looked at her, thinking how she truly embodied what current pop culture regarded as a ‘sexbomb’. Sarah prowled up and down the sidewalk in her work-wear: a sleeveless form-fitting white top accentuating her toned arms, with a square-cut neckline which was high enough to be decent among her peers beneath the glass ceiling yet low enough to incite lust in her masters above it. As she moved, her long muscled legs worked against the tight confines of her calf-length dark grey pencil skirt. Scott could clearly see the rear slit, its cut ending above her knees, revealing the original sin start of her caramel thighs with each long exasperated stride she made. Her wild auburn mane was out of its regulation pony-tail now and she frequently brushed the layered tresses off her face and blew the bangs away from her forehead.
Scott doubted that any man who got this woman would ever dare dump her. But they would be lucky to survive her. No body was going to be her equal in the bedroom, and no barrier was going to deny her ambition. She was 26 years old, with an MBA and a B2D4. Pushing 5’10”, here was an Amazon, with intellect, drive, and the means to fuck—or fuck over—any man who dared challenge her in the new sexual battleground; Hilary-meets-Marilyn in the kingdom of the Playboy President. Scott truly believed she would have whatever she wanted.
To that end, all he had to do was reveal himself now.
Sarah unclipped her cell and before Scott knew it, his o
wn was chirping traitorously in his pocket. He ducked behind the trees and pulled it out, pressing his muddy fingers over the speaker. The impulse to respond was urgently seductive. But Scott knew its origins were misguided and any indulgence would only invite catastrophe. There was too much already today to assimilate. Giving in to his long-since recognized desire—for more from Sarah than just solace and sympathy—would be a betrayal of trust: trust in himself, by himself. It was the last thing of any value he held now, the easiest thing to squander and the hardest to recoup.
The ringing ceased. Scott turned away, electing only to listen as her car door slammed shut. Even after the Mustang pulled throatily away, he waited a further five minutes before stepping out.
Chapter 13
1997 – Los Angeles
Saturday July 26
Jimmy Stewart died on a Wednesday and was buried on a Monday. By then Mordy Cohen was sick of the sight of Scott in Manhattan Beach. He would scarper into the undergrowth whenever he saw his love rival’s yellow car appear on 23rd Street. It was a bittersweet Mordy who watched Scott steal Julianna and spirit her north to Napa County to work the vineyard harvests. But he was a cat now, so Oy vey!
On the eve of their departure, Julianna found a classics movie house holding a midnight screening of It’s A Wonderful Life. In the darkened theater, she snuggled against Scott’s shoulder and it was angels and bells and Zuzu’s petals and they carried the mood out into the unfestively humid LA night.
They sat in Dupar’s garden until 5am and gorged on too many sticky treats and sweet coffees. Julianna opened Kyra’s gift pack of Marlboro’s and they smoked the lot. Scott hacked and turned a deathly shade of what Julianna christened ‘Tempo Puce’. She assured him that this was their aversion therapy and they would never again touch another cancer stick after their Bogie and Bacall moment in the City of Angels.
At dawn, they drove to MacArthur Park and watched the rising sun catch the high tip of the fountain. Scott held Julianna tight while the light crept down its column, and when the new day shimmered on the reflecting pool, she asked him for one final LA story.
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