Morning
fog obliterated the world that lay beyond fifty feet. Its soft insulation cocooned them against
sounds of the Navy base activities two hundred feet below them in the harbor.
“Maybe
Mr. MacDonald forgot to lock it,” Alejandro replied. “Maybe it is a new tomb, with nobody in it
yet.”
“But
there is a name on the door--Michael Stanley Smith, February 2, 1916 - June 14,
1954.”
Alejandro
reached into his jacket pocket for his cell phone, but remembered the cone of
silence the military had placed over the peninsula. Electronics were blocked
over the strategic military base grounds.
“I better go get Mr.
MacDonald.” He walked quickly toward his
truck parked on the roadway of the cemetery, stepped up inside and started it.
Jose,
an intent worker bee, picked up his shovel and carried it to the flower bed
where a dead azalea plant crouched on the grassy floor. A little breeze swept damp gray cotton up
into his face. He squinted.
Alejandro
drove back a half mile through rows of headstones that followed the flow of
land over the cliff to the Pacific Ocean on the west and
over the bay into San Diego Harbor
MacDonald,
a military retiree with a full head of gray hair that matched his eyes double
timed over to the columbarium wall clutching a printout listing the remains for
that section of the huge wall. With over
a thousand deceased veteran graves spread over eighty acres, keeping track of
where each of them lay was his responsibility.
Having one misplaced bordered on heresy and could mean the end of his
tenure as director.
Alejandro
returned with Harold Greevy, the beefy maintenance supervisor and both of them
slid out of the truck. “Did you look
around the ground for an urn or a burial box?” Greevy asked. “We can check with
the rest of the crew for why this door is open.
Maybe the door was damaged by a piece of equipment.” His burr-cut hair contained drops of
dew. He carried an insulated Starbuck’s
coffee cup he’d brought with him on the way into work.
MacDonald
verified the crypt number with the sheet he held, then he examined the door. He found no evidence of tampering or
damage. His heart beats pushed his blood
pressure up to 180.
“It
wasn’t like that when we got here at five
thirty ,” Alejandro said, with tears in his eyes. The enormity of the situation overwhelmed
him. “Jose would have told me if he’d
seen it earlier.”
Jose
leaned on his shovel handle as the two other men arrived. He’d finished
removing the azalea plant and replaced it with a one-galleon hibiscus. He suspected a vole had eaten the azalea roots
and killed the plant. But he was not an agronomist. “That is true.
It was not open earlier.” He’d
been born across the Tijuana Mexico San
Diego , California three fifty
pound sacks of mulch, and he knew he could shovel for three days straight
because he’d filled sandbags that long when rain had fallen on his town in Mexico
“Drive
down toward the lighthouse and find the irrigation crew,” Greevy said to
Alejandro. “Ask if anybody knows why
this door is open.” He didn’t add to ask
them where the remains had gone. “I’ll
go to the commitment shelter and find Mitchie’s crew. They’re working on tree limbs in that
section. How far did the mowers get this
morning?” He couldn’t hear mowers over
the entire two miles from the gate to the lighthouse.
Nobody
knew where the mowers were. Greevy took
off at a run, tossing his coffee cup into the trash can near the vase watering
station nearby. He found his electric
cart at the maintenance shed and drove it to the commitment shelter.
The
commitment shelter loomed like a ghost ship lost in a fog storm as Greevy
approached carefully. He wanted to find
the crewmen, not run them down in his haste.
He would not call out to find them,
however. Disrespect of the hallowed
location was inconceivable, unacceptable.
To
his surprise, a lone woman sat on a stone bench of the shelter. She appeared to be meditating, so Greevy
quietly stopped his cart at a respectful distance and walked behind the shelter
out to the lawn area beyond it to find crew members. A stack of seat cushions placed on the ground
in their storage containers lay behind the wall. Funerals would begin at eight thirty and continue every half hour until five thirty this evening. The woman perhaps wanted to spend a little
time alone before the first service began.
He found no crew members in the
area. There had to be some explanation
for how a crypt came to be open with its urn box missing, and he would get to
the bottom of it. He turned back to his
cart to continue his search for someone to help him.
Greevy
saw Jerrold MacDonald arrive at his office on his way out the winding
road. MacDonald had an asphalt parking
pad squeezed in between the building and a grass strip. Greevy stopped to tell the Funeral Director about
the missing urn.
Jerrold
MacDonald returned to his office to use the telephone that the Navy allowed for
the cemetery director. But who should he
call? The heresy of a missing urn made
his hands shake. His mind tried to grasp
all of the ramifications. The Veteran’s Administration would surely shut down
the cemetery and disallow visitors. The
Navy would not be capable of appeasing the protest groups that would
justifiably arrive. All the employees
would be suspect, grilled, fired, stigmatized.
Those with GS ratings would be demoted, transferred. The news media would point and accuse and
hunt for a head to stake on the perimeter.
MacDonald’s arm ached, his heart pounded.
“What
in the world happened?” Cherrie, the office secretary said when MacDonald
entered. “You look like you’ve seen a
ghost! Come here and sit down, sir.
Shall I call your wife?”
Cherrie
had no husband and four children at home.
She’d pretty much seen everything of an emergency nature. Not much could be worse than all kids down
with Chicken Pox at the same time. She
wanted to prod Jerrold for a reason he was upset, but he’d tell her before long
anyway.
“No,
no. Please God, don’t call anybody. He fished in the pocket of his slacks for a
Tums. We need time.” He walked to his beat up 1930’s vintage
military issue desk with its broken left drawer, picked up the phone and dialed
the front gate. “Please stop all cars
going off the grounds of Fort Rosecrans
Cherrie
looked up from her desk, concern blooming.
“Yes,
sir,” the guard said. “Do you just want
me to hold them here?”
“Ideally,
yes. Close the gate until I call you,”
MacDonald told him.
Two
hours till the first funeral. Whoever
had removed the urn had to be nearby. He
rethought the woman at the commitment shelter.
He’d have to drive back over there since his heart was acting up. The last thing Jerrold needed was another
heart episode.
Vincent
slowly sawed a tree limb. It had taken
him twenty minutes to find the damaged oak in the fog, even when he knew
exactly where it was. A chain saw would
make his job much faster, but noise was not acceptable unless absolutely
necessary. He’d arrived at work at five thirty this morning and Alejandro sent
him to cut the tree limb. He didn’t like
not being able to see around him. He’d
been lost as a child in the Sonoran desert once when his mother’s car broke
down. They’d walked for miles before sun
set then coyotes took up howling. He
couldn’t see the dogs but they could see him and his mother as they plodded
down the deserted roadway. Even pressed
in his mother’s arms, he thought he could feel their teeth cut through his arms
and legs to his bones. He shut out the
bowl of gray soup and set his mind on his job.
The
woman at the commitment shelter walked along the footpath rimming the north columbarium wall. Little flowers clung in tiny vases attached
to a few of the individual doors. She
thought the wall looked like a bank of mailboxes. Mailing souls to heaven. Along the concrete pathway that was lined
with river stone between it and the ten foot tall wall, the occasional vase at
the base of the wall held bouquets of daffodils, stargazers and
chrysanthemums. Some with baby’s
breath. She’d carried baby’s breath in
her wedding bouquet down the long aisle of her mother’s church.
In
two hours her life would change.
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 her brother had done the same thing 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? The professional part of her 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.
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