Chapter 1

It's always a shock when someone you've known dies unexpectedly. But when it's your oldest friend's daughter, whom you've known from birth, baby-sat, bought presents for over the years and who always called you 'uncle' and who was only eighteen, it hits you like a sledge hammer.

Bill and Connie were two of my closest friends. Bill and I had met when we were assigned the same dorm room in college and I'd actually introduced him to Connie, who was a blind date set up by a girl I was seeing at the time. It was the early seventies and we had become more than close. Bill and I were pretty much an odd match up, he being in business and me an arts major in photography. His parents were rich and mine were blue collar. His tuition was paid and I was a scholarship student who'd lucked into being accepted at Ann Arbor by the skin of my teeth.

One thing we had in common was an interest in smoking dope and bedding as many girls as we could. And sometimes we'd bed the same girls, sometimes at the same time. I can't say for sure how many girls we 'double teamed' during our college career, not without taking a long time to go through old photos and racking my brains, but it was somewhere between twenty and thirty. And when I say that I was close to him and his wife Connie, I mean we were skin to skin close, and not just during our wild and crazy college days. Don't get me wrong here, I wasn't sneaking off with Connie for a little adultery now and then. Whenever I would go to visit them, I would usually sleep in their bed more often than not. It wasn't all one way, as when they would come and visit me when they were passing through the bay area, they would always come and spend the night with Nancy and me.

Darlene was born about eighty one, and this put a cramp in our unusual friendship when she was old enough to be aware of mommy and daddies friend's sleeping arraignments. It didn't keep us from having sex with each other, but we knew that kids pick up stuff and we made sure to keep our displays of affection down whenever she was around. They lived outside of California and Nancy and I visited them in New Mexico, Oregon, Florida and New York. Bill's company kept transferring him as he worked his way up through the ranks.

The 'keeping up appearances' in front of Darlene strategy had, (we thought, ) been successful and it wasn't until after she died that I found out just how wrong we were about that, but I am getting ahead of the story here. She was attending Berkeley and being 'old friends of her parents', Nancy and I had invited her over to our place for dinner a few times and I would make it a point whenever I had to go over to the east bay area to try to get together with her and take her to lunch or dinner or whatever. Being an honorary uncle, I got to spoil her a bit. She was aware of the life style that Nancy and I enjoyed and was a pretty hip young woman. She'd sometimes come out for a weekend and sometimes brought boys with her, knowing that we didn't care about her sharing a bed with a boy. Sometimes the boys had a bit of trouble understanding that it was okay with us and would go through an awkward stage with us at first.

Bill and Connie had taken six weeks off in January and February and gone on safari in Africa. Not the Great White Hunter routine, but for taking photographs of the wild life and just getting away from everything. Bill had made sure that there was no way that they could be contracted, as the last two vacations that he'd tried to take had both been interrupted by emergencies involving his work and Connie had threatened him with castration if that happened again. Which is how I happened to get a phone call early on Monday morning from Darlene's roommate at Berkeley. Actually it was Nancy that got the call and ... well, to say that we were both in shock is an understatement.

The circumstances of the tragedy were simple. A gasoline tanker going over Donner Pass in the Sierra's had lost control after an SUV driver going too fast for the conditions had spun out in front of the tractor tanker. The driver had swerved to miss it, jackknifed and hit a guard rail, bouncing back into three other cars inching their way over the summit in a snow storm. Darlene and some of her friends were in one of the cars and the tank full of gasoline had split and there were eighteen dead in the accident. That was on Friday night and it took the police a while to identify the victims. All of their belongings and identification was incinerated in the fire and they had to trace who the driver was from the license plate, then find out who the others in the car with her were.

Darlene's roommate had spent the weekend on a Christian retreat and hadn't gotten back to the dorm until Sunday evening and there was a message taped to the door of their room. She'd called the number and then been informed that her roomy was dead. Darlene and her roommate weren't on the best of terms, her roommate trying to convert her to her evangelical brand of Christian fundamentalism and Darlene finally having to give her an ultimatum about it. I knew about this from conversations with Darlene and had always gotten a frosty attitude from her whenever I called Darlene on the phone and the bible thumper picked up the phone. It put a cramp in Darlene's style and she had been intending to make other living arraignments as soon as the semester ended. When the police couldn't get an answer at Bill and Connie's, they'd asked her if she knew of any other friends of her parents that they could contract. She'd been in shock and couldn't think of anyone right away. After they had gone, she'd thought about Darlene's 'Uncle Tony' and found our number in Darlene's day planner and called us. She might have been in shock, but I felt like smacking her from the phone conversation we had. She wanted to know when I could come and pick up Darlene's stuff and implied that she'd gotten what she deserved, making sure to mention that Darlene was planning on spending the weekend with a boy in a hotel room.

I got in touch with the police, who were understandably reluctant to disclose information to someone not a family member. I finally had to get out some family photos and go over to Berkeley and 'prove' that I was someone that she'd known and that I knew her parents and explaining the circumstances of Bill and Connie being out of touch. A call to Bill's company confirmed my story, but that was about as far as I could go with them, as they could only release the body to the family. This took several hours and it was exasperating, but they finally believed me and told me what they could about the accident.

I wasn't able to do anything further until we got in touch with Bill and Connie. Darlene's remains would have to wait in the morgue until a family member showed up. Nothing anyone could do about it, it was just 'one of those things.' Burying my closest friend's daughter would have to wait.

I drove over to her dorm and talked to the woman in charge of the dorm about picking up Darlene's things from her room. She and I went up to her dorm room and the Christer bitch she was sharing it with admitted that she knew that I was a friend of both Darlene and her parents. So after signing a piece of paper, I was allowed to start packing her stuff and get it out of the room. Her roommate, whose name was Kate, hung out while I was packing her stuff to make sure that I didn't take anything that didn't belong to Darlene. The residence den mother, or whatever her title was, picked up on the vibes and hung out and helped me pack up Darlene's stuff. The hostility from Kate was pretty evident.

I found a couple of vibrators in her bedside night table, along with some rubbers and lube. It didn't bother me, but embarrassed the resident den mother a little bit, but she didn't say anything. Kate started to say something about it, but I cut that off with a rather savage remark. She went storming out and left the den mother and I to finish packing in peace.

There is something odd about going through someone else's belongings. Darlene's life had stopped unexpectedly and there was a bag of dirty laundry that she'd left for a weekday night. There were study notes on her desk, post-its surrounding her computer screen, books from the library she'd taken out for class work, little mementoes of this or that that meant something but only to her. The den mother had sent someone out for boxes and we put her clothes into them. She sorted out the library books and put them into a box to return to the library for me. I noticed that she would get kind of embarrassed when we'd find something sexy, like the see-through underwear, or her vibrators and dildoes. She asked if I wanted her to get rid of it, but I said that it was all right. I'd been a college student once myself, and during the seventies. I didn't think that she was a virgin and explained that she would sometimes come over to Marin County, where Nancy and I lived, and bring boys with her for the weekend. After about three hours or so we had all of the stuff in her drawers and closet packed up and she went out to find the Christer bitch, just to make sure we had everything that belonged to Darlene. She came in and looked over what was still there and I packed up the remaining things that I hadn't been sure about. The den mother got some girls to come and help move the boxes and some of them had been Darlene's friends and told me how much they were going to miss her. I lost it there and had to go into the bathroom and cry for a while. Finally I got into my van and drove back over the Richmond Bridge and brought her worldly possessions back to our house, where I left them in the van until the next day. I was in no condition to deal with any of it right then.

The next morning, I lugged the boxes and stuff out of the van and Nancy and I sorted out clothes and stuff. Nancy started to do her laundry, fold up what was clean and put it in storage boxes. I got busy on the boxes of things from her desk, which had been sort of haphazardly just tossed in. I sorted out things that would have to be dealt with, like bankbooks and checking statements, from stuff like homework and the like. I put all of the addresses on napkins and her date planner aside, so that we would have them for her memorial service later. There were things like sketches, a few cartoons that someone had drawn, memento's from various trips and bars and such like that accumulated in anyone's life. Her mini-stereo and CD's I put in a box, putting the CD's that were in the changer into their jewel boxes. There were snapshots of friends of her's that I didn't know, a few of some boy friends that I had meet and I was glad that she'd labeled the back of them. Those I put aside to match up with the numbers in her address book.

Nancy gave me a hand with some of it, but she'd get kind of misty eyed at times and go check the laundry or make sandwiches or whatever. I kept working my way through the stuff she'd left behind, not wanting to set the job aside for later. I needed something to do to keep myself busy, but it was torture, going through the girls stuff like that. Sad, meloncolic, sometimes just plain brutal. There were pictures from a picnic at Pt Reyes that we'd had last fall. A shot of her and a boyfriend that I had taken out in the back yard of our house: Nancy just couldn't handle it.

Darlene had been a very bright, vibrant young girl and had always been welcome in our house. She'd never gone through the 'awkward' stage of growing up, but had this long, coltish grace to her that she got from her mother. Connie was one of those long necked, small breasted women who reeked of elegance and her daughter had inherited her slender good looks.

She had a small Mac notebook computer for doing her homework on and I cleared off some space on my desk and plugged it in. I fired it up and checked her to do lists and found her inter net address book in the machine. I didn't have any information about who any of those people were, and briefly thought about sending out an email to everyone on her list telling them what had happened, but I just couldn't figure out what to say. Sorry your friend/acquaintance/student/other is dead and there will be a memorial service sometime in the future as soon as we can get in touch with her parents once we find out where they are? I browsed through her calendar and saw mostly things about school work, like when certain reports were do and when certain finals would be, call so and so about such and such.

This had been a very long, long day and I finally had enough and went out and poured myself a drink of whiskey someone had given me for a gift for some occasion. I got ready to toss it down straight, then paused and raised my glass and said 'to you Darlene, ' and slammed it down.

Then I went to bed and lay there for a while. Nancy came in and looked at me and climbed in and held me and we talked about how we felt about it all and we fell asleep finally, fairly early for us.

The next day, I was somewhat over my shock and we started to figure out what we could do about the situation. There wasn't any way we could put off trying to find Bill and Connie, and there wasn't anyone that I knew in Oregon that knew them, or where they lived. Nancy dug through the Christmas cards and found their new address and I booked a plane to Portland, paying through the nose for the last minute tickets.

The airport was its usual catastrophe with construction and the chaos of the flights returning from the holidays. I was seated in the exact middle of the airplane, with young couples on either side of me who were more interested in each other than the old guy in the middle so I had time for my thoughts. I tried to lose myself in the best seller I had picked up at an airport shop, but there wasn't anyway that I could concentrate, and set it aside.

I got a rental car and a map and went off to find the new house that Bill and Connie had just bought last spring. Nancy and I hadn't been up to visit them in their new digs, and it took me a while to find the place. I found the key in the backyard planter where they usually left it and went into the house through the back door. Right inside the door way was a keypad for the alarm system and I didn't have a clue about what the code was for it, so just picked up the phone and dialed 911.

When the cops got there, the emergency operator was still on the phone and I had almost developed a relationship and I had put together a pot of coffee while we talked. The constant Oregon rain makes me think that it's always seven a.m., and there isn't enough coffee on the planet to make me really wide awake when the day is constantly overcast.

When the cop came up on the back porch with his gun drawn, I was still on the phone and just motioned him in through the back door. A guy in his fifties holding a cup of coffee isn't the usual kind of burglar they get up there, so he relaxed somewhat and I invited him in and asked what he wanted in his coffee? It took some explaining and we had to find our way through the house to the front door to let his partner in. I had let the emergency operator go after it was obvious that I wasn't trying to make off with the silverware and the TV and she had called them on their radios so they knew that I had been talking to her and they had a few words with her on the phone and we sat around and had coffee while I explained the reason I was in Bill and Connie's kitchen. For proof, we went wandering around the house until I located the book case they kept their photo albums in and showed them a lot of pictures of me and Bill, going back to our college days. It was a slow day for them, and they helped me look around the house for clues about how to get in touch with my friends and tell them their only child was dead. It sucked, being in that cold house and having to go through a lot of things that I usually would never see of theirs. How often have your browsed through a friend of yours desk looking for a credit card statement or a bankbook?

The cops were pretty helpful, actually, something I would have found hard to believe in my younger days. They were especially good about calling their desk sergeant and having him call the bank to find out if there was a check drawn on a travel agency, but no luck there, either. They kept me company until we finally admitted we didn't have any good clues to go on, and they took off after talking to their sergeant again about having missing persons give me some help getting the credit card company to spring loose of an advanced copy of their bill. One of them actually suggested that I try the State Department in Washington to see if they could help, but we decided to see if the credit card bill would show where they bought their tickets. Besides, it was too late to call Washington, as everyone would have gone home by then.

Being in a cold house is creepy and the chill was just coming out of the air in the place as the cops were leaving. I figured I was pretty much on my own for a while, and went out for some food. I walked around in the shopping mall near their house and wondered if Darlene had hung out here with the teen age kids? Then I thought about it, and realized that they hadn't lived here that long, and she'd had her driver's license for a while, so probably not. Which brought me around to figuring out how to the hell would we get together a service for her? She'd spent three or four years in the last place that Bill's company had sent him, then maybe five, no, was it six? Or seven? Years of being pulled in and out of schools might be a problem, because where were her friends these days? Berkeley? Not too many in Portland, they'd only been here since the start of the summer and we hadn't come up because they would be coming down in the fall when Darlene started her sophomore year. Shit, where are we going to bury her? That took me out of the mall and into that dreary rainy day and back to the house I'd had such a hard time finding the first time, and practice didn't make perfect, as the exits and entrances didn't line up on the freeway and it was pushing five o'clock when I got back there.

The cops had gotten the alarm company to disable the alarm until I left. I drove the rental into the driveway, but didn't bother with the garage. I'd say that there was a good chance that any cars that they owned would never see the inside of that garage, as Bill had his wood working stuff set up in there. He said it helped him sometimes to actually make stuff with his hands, as he worked with his head all day and produced nothing but paper. Nice knowing trees were good for something else, he'd laughed.

The house was nice and toasty and I was surprised to find lights on in the house and nobody there. One table had a cord draped all over it and plugged into a box with a dial that was in an extension cord and I realized they had set up timers to make the place look occupied while they were gone. I went around and turned off a few of the lights or turned them up. There was a fire laid out in the fireplace and I torched off the kindling. It took me a while to find the flue and the house filled with smoke. Once I had the flue solved, I had to open the front and back doors to air the place and propped the back one open with a chair. There was enough of a breeze to clear out the smoke but it took a while. While I was waiting and shivering, I decided that a good stiff drink was what I needed right then and searched through the cupboards for a while. I finally opened up the freezer and found a bottle of Stoli, some canned o.j. and figured what the hell. Where Bill kept his bourbon would have to wait, and with that thought, I proceeded to make a screwdriver by pouring vodka into a glass and spooning in some concentrate. I closed the back door, walked through the house and was just about to close the front door when a woman came up the stairs with an apprehensive look on her face.

"Hi," I said, "I'm Tony from California. I'm up here trying to get in touch with Connie and Bill. You have any idea of where there are in Africa right now? It's an emergency."

"How did you get in?"

"Key under the geranium. Uh, the police came out when I saw there was an alarm. Here's their card." I'd put them in my shirt pocket and dug them out.

"What is with the smoke?"

"Uh, I lit a fire and couldn't find the handle for the flue."

She eased up on her body language and relaxed. Obviously, not many burglars start fires and then have to fumble around with the flue.

"What's wrong?"

"Uh, you know Darlene?" I asked. Maybe she was an off duty cop, but I kind of doubted it from her clothes. She nodded.