Sole Survivor (10 page)

“—spiritual adviser or something,” Bob finished. “At first we didn’t like the sound of it, thought it might be someone taking advantage of Mom, her being so down and vulnerable. We thought maybe this was some New Age crazy or—”

“—a con artist,” Clarise continued, now leaning forward from the sofa to straighten the silk flowers in an arrangement on the coffee table. “Someone trying to rip her off or just mess with her mind.”

“But when she talked about Rose, she was so—”

“—full of peace. It didn’t seem this could be bad, not when it made Mom feel so much better. Anyway—”

“—she said this woman wasn’t coming back,” Bob finished. “Mom said, thanks to Rose, she knew Dad was somewhere safe. He hadn’t just died and that was the end. He was somewhere safe and fine.”

“She wouldn’t tell us how she’d come around to this faith, when she’d never even been a churchgoer before,” Clarise added. “Wouldn’t say who Rose was or what Rose had told her.”

“Wouldn’t tell us much at all about the woman,” Bob confirmed. “Just that it had to be a secret now, for a little while, but that eventually—”

“—everyone would know.”

“Eventually everyone would know what?” Joe asked.

“That Dad was somewhere safe, I guess, somewhere safe and fine.”

“No,” Clarise said, finishing with the silk flowers, sitting back on the sofa, clasping her hands in her lap. “I think she meant more than that. I think she meant eventually everyone would know that none of us ever just dies, that we…go on somewhere safe.”

Bob sighed. “I’ll be frank with you, Joe. It made us a little nervous, hearing this superstitious stuff coming from my mother, who was always so down-to-earth. But it made her happy, and after the awfulness of the past year—”

“—we didn’t see what harm it could do.”

Spiritualism was not what Joe had expected. He was uneasy if not downright disappointed. He had thought that Dr. Rose Tucker knew what had really happened to Flight 353 and was prepared to finger those responsible. He had never imagined that what she had to offer was merely mysticism, spiritual counseling.

“Do you think she had an address for this Rose, a telephone number?”

Clarise said, “No. I don’t think so. Mom was…mysterious about it.” To her husband, she said, “Show him the picture.”

“It’s still in her bedroom,” Bob said, rising from the sofa. “I’ll get it.”

“What picture?” Joe asked Clarise as Bob left the living room.

“Strange. It’s one this Rose brought to Nora. It’s kind of creepy, but Mom took comfort from it. It’s a photo of Tom’s grave.”

The photograph was a standard color print taken with a Polaroid camera. The shot showed the headstone at Thomas Lee Vadance’s grave: his name, the dates of his birth and death, the words “cherished husband and beloved father.”

In memory, Joe could see Rose Marie Tucker in the cemetery:
I’m not ready to talk to you yet.

Clarise said, “Mom went out and bought the frame. She wanted to keep the picture behind glass. It was important to her that it not get damaged.”

“While we were staying here last week, three full days, she carried it with her everywhere,” Bob said. “Cooking in the kitchen, sitting in the family room watching TV, outside on the patio when we were barbecuing, always with her.”

“Even when we went out to dinner,” Clarise said. “She put it in her purse.”

“It’s just a photograph,” Joe said, puzzled.

“Just a photograph,” Bob Vadance agreed. “She could’ve taken it herself—but for some reason it meant more to her because this Rose woman had taken it.”

Joe slid a finger down the smooth silver-plated frame and across the glass, as if he were clairvoyant and able to read the meaning of the photograph by absorbing a lingering psychic energy from it.

“When she first showed it to us,” said Clarise, “she watched us with such…expectation. As if she thought—”

“—we would have a bigger reaction to it,” Bob concluded.

Putting the photograph on the coffee table, Joe frowned. “Bigger reaction? Like how?”

“We couldn’t understand,” Clarise said. She picked up the photo and began to polish the frame and glass on her shirttail. “When we didn’t respond to it the way she hoped, then she asked us what we saw when we looked at it.”

“A gravestone,” Joe said.

“Dad’s grave,” Bob agreed.

Clarise shook her head. “Mom seemed to see more.”

“More? Like what?”

“She wouldn’t say, but she—”

“—told us the day would come when we would see it different,” Bob finished.

In memory, Rose in the graveyard, clutching the camera in two hands, looking up at Joe:
You’ll see, like the others.

“Do you know who this Rose is? Why did you ask us about her?” Clarise wondered.

Joe told them about meeting the woman at the cemetery, but he said nothing about the men in the white van. In his edited version, Rose had left in a car, and he had been unable to detain her.

“But from what she said to me…I thought she might have visited the families of some other crash victims. She told me not to despair, told me that I’d see, like the others had seen, but she wasn’t ready to talk yet. The trouble is, I couldn’t wait for her to be ready. If she’s talked to others, I want to know what she told them, what she helped them to see.”

“Whatever it was,” Clarise said, “it made Mom feel better.”

“Or did it?” Bob wondered.

“For a week, it did,” Clarise said. “For a week she was happy.”

“But it led to this,” Bob said.

If Joe hadn’t been a reporter with so many years of experience asking hard questions of victims and their families, he might have found it difficult to push Bob and Clarise to contemplate another grim possibility that would expose them to fresh anguish. But when the events of this extraordinary day were considered, the question had to be asked: “Are you absolutely sure that it was suicide?”

Bob started to speak, faltered, and turned his head away to blink back tears.

Taking her husband’s hand, Clarise said to Joe, “There’s no question. Nora killed herself.”

“Did she leave a note?”

“No,” Clarise said. “Nothing to help us understand.”

“She was so happy, you said. Radiant. If—”

“She left a videotape,” Clarise said.

“You mean, saying good-bye?”

“No. It’s this strange…this terrible…” She shook her head, face twisting with distaste, at a loss for words to describe the video. Then: “It’s this
thing
.”

Bob let go of his wife’s hand and got to his feet. “I’m not much of a drinking man, Joe, but I need a drink for this.”

Dismayed, Joe said, “I don’t want to add to your suffering—”

“No, it’s all right,” Bob assured him. “We’re all of us out of that crash together, survivors together, family of a sort, and there shouldn’t be anything you can’t talk about with family. You want a drink?”

“Sure.”

“Clarise, don’t tell him about the video until I’m back. I know you think it’ll be easier on me if you talk about it when I’m not in the room, but it won’t.”

Bob Vadance regarded his wife with great tenderness, and when she replied, “I’ll wait,” her love for him was so evident that Joe had to look away. He was too sharply reminded of what he had lost.

When Bob was out of the room, Clarise started to adjust the arrangement of silk flowers again. Then she sat with her elbows on her bare knees, her face buried in her hands.

When finally she looked up at Joe, she said, “He’s a good man.”

“I like him.”

“Good husband, good son. People don’t know him—they see the fighter pilot, served in the Gulf War, tough guy. But he’s gentle too. Sentimental streak a mile wide, like his dad.”

Joe waited for what she really wanted to tell him.

After a pause, she said, “We’ve been slow to have children. I’m thirty, Bob’s thirty-two. There seemed to be so much time, so much to do first. But now our kids will grow up without ever knowing Bob’s dad or mom, and they were such
good
people.”

“It’s not your fault,” Joe said. “It’s all out of our hands. We’re just passengers on this train, we don’t drive it, no matter how much we like to think we do.”

“Have you really reached that level of acceptance?”

“Trying.”

“Are you even close?”

“Shit, no.”

She laughed softly.

Joe hadn’t made anyone laugh in a year—except Rose’s friend on the phone earlier. Although pain and irony colored Clarise’s brief laughter, there was also relief in it. Having affected her this way, Joe felt a connection with life that had eluded him for so long.

After a silence, Clarise said, “Joe, could this Rose be an evil person?”

“No. Just the opposite.”

Her freckled face, so open and trusting by nature, now clouded with doubt. “You sound so sure.”

“You would be too, if you met her.”

Bob Vadance returned with three glasses, a bowl of cracked ice, a liter of 7UP, and a bottle of Seagram’s 7 Crown. “I’m afraid there’s no real choice to offer,” he apologized. “Nobody in this family’s much of a drinker—but when we do take a touch, we like it simple.”

“This is fine,” Joe said, and accepted his 7-and-7 when it was ready.

They tasted their drinks—Bob had mixed them strong—and for a moment the only sound was the clinking of ice.

Clarise said, “We know it was suicide, because she taped it.”

Certain that he had misunderstood, Joe said, “Who taped it?”

“Nora, Bob’s mother,” Clarise said. “She videotaped her own suicide.”

Twilight evaporated in a steam of crimson and purple light, and out of that neon vapor, night coalesced against the windows of the yellow and white living room.

Quickly and succinctly, with commendable self-control, Clarise revealed what she knew of her mother-in-law’s horrible death. She spoke in a low voice, yet every word was bell-note clear and seemed to reverberate through Joe until he gradually began to tremble with the cumulative vibrations.

Bob Vadance finished none of his wife’s sentences. He remained silent throughout, looking at neither Clarise nor Joe. He stared at his drink, to which he resorted frequently.

The compact Sanyo 8mm camcorder that had captured the death was Tom Vadance’s toy. It had been stored in the closet in his study since before his death aboard Flight 353.

The camera was easy to use. Fuzzy-logic technology automatically adjusted the shutter speed and white balance. Though Nora had never had much experience with it, she could have learned the essentials of its operation in a few minutes.

The nicad battery had not contained much juice after a year in the closet. Therefore, Nora Vadance had taken time to recharge it, indicating a chilling degree of premeditation. The police found the AC adaptor and the battery charger plugged into an outlet on the kitchen counter.

Tuesday morning of this week, Nora went outside to the back of the house and set the camcorder on a patio table. She used two paperback books as shims to tilt the camera to the desired angle, and then she switched it on.

With the videotape rolling, she positioned a vinyl-strap patio chair ten feet from the lens. She revisited the camcorder to peer through the viewfinder, to be sure that the chair was in the center of the frame.