VANISHED PART V
Cherrie couldn’t handle just standing around the office
looking at paperwork she couldn’t get her mind around. She put on her light jacket and walked
outside. If she stayed within sight of
the office she could at least help look for the box. Trees and shrubs were not dense on the
peninsula except in the wilderness area and it was blocked off by the chainlink
fence. The fog was beginning to break up
so she could work her way to the fence and still see if anybody approached the
buildiing. The normal function of the
office had ceased anyway, as if the world suddenly waited to exhale. Whoever had moved the box had moved her heart
with it. The missing urn box could have
been that of her father or her husband.
She, in fact, could be interred with her husband’s location in the
columbarium, which is what she’d planned.
Her life had mostly died with him anyway. If she didn’t have four children to raise,
she had no idea of what her purpose would be.
Looking for the box was not the same as looking for missing
car keys.
Vincent
seemed to get more angry as he walked.
How stupid that everybody was out wandering around eighty acres of
cemetery looking for a little ten inch box.
Whoever had taken it surely had an agenda. Could one of the workers there removed
it? But why would they do that? He counted the ones he knew had family buried
there--only three of them he could recall.
If he eliminated those people, the number of suspects was cut down to
the Mexicans and the crazies. He always
wondered about Harold. The guy was
single with no relatives. So there were
actually five of them. Harold would be
his choice.
But why would he do that?
Vincent would have to take matters into his own hands and go over to the
maintenance barn to search it.
Jose was
certain that since he’d found that the urn was missing, he’d be the one to find
it again and return it to its proper place.
To restore order. The job at this
cemetery was the only stable thing that had ever happened in his life of
chaos. His wife and their six children,
his wife’s mother and Jose’s brother and his wife and their two children all
lived together forty miles east away toward El Centro ,
California
Waiting was
stressful. Natalie was grateful for the
cushion she could sit on now that they’d been distributed. The concrete bench was cold. With the fog rolling back toward the west,
the sky had begun to clear in the east and turn the clouds red. Her very curly
dark hair tumbled onto her forehead, which made her look six years old and took
away her credibility. She rethought her
plans.
Jerrold
walked through the commitment shelter, looking for the lone woman, preparing
for the first funeral, that nothing was out of place, looking for a lone box
perhaps abandoned under a shrub.
When he
found her he introduced himself. “I see
you are here early. It’s good the fog is
lifting.”
She nodded
to him.
“We’ve had
a little difficulty and I’m not sure the funeral will be on time today.”
He watched her closely for a response.
“That’s
okay. I can wait. Did the minister not come? What has happened?”
“Just an
issue has arisen. It should be taken
care of right away.” He learned
nothing. He didn’t know what to look
for, had never been an interrogator. He
excused himself and returned to his office to look for his little bottle of
nitroglycerin.
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