VANISHED PART III
Harold Greevy slammed the door to the Cemetery office as he
hurried inside and looked around for Jerrold.
“Where’s the boss?” The
maintenance supervisor was dressed in a golf shirt he’d apparently slept in and
the same dark khaki pants and boots he wore every day.
Cherrie
turned to him in her gray slacks and white blouse with little pink flowers
dotted on it. Her youngest daughter
learned her numbers by sitting on Cherrie’s lap and counting the blossoms on
that blouse. “He’s still looking for
Mitchie’s crew, I think. What in the
world has happened?”
“Jerrold
didn’t tell you?”
“He was so
upset I didn’t want to ask.”
Harold
scanned the small room as if anybody could be standing where he could not see
them, and lowered his voice. “An urn box
is missing from the columbarium. The
door was standing open.”
A violent
oven seemed to ignite in her chest. “But
how can that be? It’s a mistake.” Her eyes welled up and tears ran down her cheeks
so quickly she didn’t know it was happening till drops fell on the papers she
was holding.
He walked
around the desk and held her close.
“We’ll find it. You’re right,
this is a mistake. I’ll go check it
again.”
Cherrie
hadn’t been held like that since a complete stranger had done the same thing in his sympathy at their
father’s funeral. She was surprised it
meant so much and wanted to stand there wrapped in Harold’s arms for as long as
possible. As it was, he appeared to not
be anxious to turn loose of her either.
They’d worked at the cemetery for four years together and had never
touched. Now she didn’t understand how
that could have happened, along with confusion about how an urn box could go
missing. Her head spun and life as she
knew it no longer made sense. Even her
desk looked odd from Harold’s shoulder.
The last
Cherrie had heard, Harold was seeing somebody.
But that was how many months ago?
Her professional side made her pull back from his arms. Her father, now buried outside in the green
carpet of conventional plots, had been a lifer in the Marines. Cherrie understood protocol. And standing in the middle of her office in
Harold’s arms was not protocol.
Harold’s
face turned red right up including his ears.
He asked Cherrie to let Jerrold know he would check all of the
columbarium walls in person. In fact, he
would test each door to see if any were open, though that had never happened in
the years he’d been associated with the cemetery. He hurried back out to his four wheeler and
started toward the southeastern columbarium.
Cherrie
tried to watch him go, but the fog had settled into a wall of tin plastered
against the office windows.
Jerrold had driven to the extreme southwestern end of the columbarium wall. His grandfather was buried in a laydown urn
plot near that end. He stopped and read the
headstone marker for the ten thousandth time as he passed it. Walter Lawrence Greevy, May 6, 1962 - November 17, 1952. He took the footpath that ran between the
lawn graves and the wall, checking for anything odd, somehow hoping to find the missing urn box. But found only a couple of weeds that were not
there yesterday. When he got to the end
he walked west toward the sea, around the perimeter of the lawn graves. He rolled down hill remembering the feel of
his legs on the lurching ships he’d been assigned to as an ensign in the
navy. Flying was what he’d really wanted
to do, but that didn’t happen. Now, at
the bottom of the cemetery where the chain link fence separated wilderness
growth from manicured lawn, Jerrold gazed over the three hundred foot cliff,
tried to see the ocean. He heard it
below him, the surf rolling in, softly pounding against the sand with a kind of
breaker thunder. If he only had wings,
he’d soar out to the beautiful expanse that he knew was there. Fifteen miles north, hang gliders
peeled off the same type cliffs at UC San Diego’s Glider
Port La Jolla .
He should have been born ten years later.
Or a hundred years later when men will be able to fly on their own. He'd almost bought a hang glider once. Now he was too old.
He still couldn’t see fifty feet in
front of him but he’d been there so many times before he could walk it
blindfolded, with or without the fog.
He’d memorized the headstones nearest the ocean and silently nodded to
Peter, to Jim, to Sancho, to Nathaniel and all the rest as he continued to
walk. The tour of his “friends,” calmed
him as he silently made a vow to find Michael Stanley Smith.
When he
returned to the office, Cherrie began to hover.
Did he want a drink? Did he want
to go to breakfast, take a break, call home?
One message on his desk was from Harold and one said he should call his
wife. He picked up the receiver and
dialed his home number, though there were strict instructions to make no
personal calls. Janet had never called
him at work before today. The message
machine picked up. Could this day get any worse?
Janet
MacDonald, the funeral director’s wife, was stopped at the gate at the land end
of the Point Loma peninsula. The navy
guard would not raise the cross bar for her to continue to the cemetery, though he would not
explain why. Alarm rose in her
breast. Was the base on alert? She frantically dialed through her Lexus’
radio stations for news of some disaster.
She
hadn’t treated Jerrold very well lately.
He’d become remote, she’d become petulant. He hadn’t noticed. So she started making emergency plans in case
he was going to leave her. She was
insulted he didn’t care enough about her to see she needed more attention. If he loved her, he’d notice, wouldn’t
he? Of course he would. But why did Cherrie call from Jerrold’s
office? Why had Jerrold called and left
no message? Only out for an hour for her
standard bi-monthly pedicure, what could have happened in one hour? Jerrold had decided there was no point in
having a cell phone he couldn’t use. She
hadn’t known she would not be permitted on the cemetery grounds when she drove
over from their retirement home just three miles away. It may as well be a hundred miles.
She’d
noticed the man reading the newspaper looked at her several times while she
drank her latte at Starbucks on her way to her pedicure. He didn’t have as much hair as Jerrold,
wasn’t as good looking. But he smiled at
her.
The woman
named Natalie Christophsen who’d arrived very early for the first funeral
walked to the USS Bennington Memorial to get out of the way of the cemetery
staff who were distributing the leather seat cushions for mourners to sit on
during the funeral services today. She
read about the 62 sailors who were killed in 1905 when their ship blew up, perused
their names. Then she walked up hill
toward the grave locator kiosk to find where her uncle was buried. As she walked with her new found resentment,
she planned the steps she would take today.
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