Chapter Six
Six
Her phone started ringing just as Harper was letting herself into her office. It was Tariq. His tone was grim.
“I’m sorry to tell you, but Delilah Mason didn’t make it.”
And the ghastly violence of what had happened to Delilah Mason would only make things worse for the survivors.
With a start, Harper realized she was again hearing that requiem in her head—the one she had “heard” when she entered the Perles Mansion.
Maybe that was why she kept thinking about her mother; at the funeral mass, they had played a requiem for her mother’s soul.
It was a composition that, to her ears, seemed full of yearning and regret, a bottomless chasm of grief.
“Was it suffocation?” Harper asked, her voice sounding hollow to her ears.
“Surprisingly, no. The medical examiner still has to weigh in on the exact cause of death, but she’d lost a lot of blood.”
“What? I didn’t see any blood, did you?”
“No, but with all the dirt and mud on her, I wasn’t really looking.”
Harper recalled a metallic scent at the shallow grave. Had that been Delilah Mason’s blood?
“She’d been stabbed,” Tariq continued. “I got it from a friend who’s a nurse at Natividad Hospital in Salinas, where the EMTs took her. It’s the nearest trauma center. BTW, keep this to yourself, okay? The official cause of death hasn’t been declared yet. I don’t think they’re releasing details.”
“Of course. I’m so sorry. I still can’t really wrap my mind around what happened, and who could have done it, much less why.”
“I imagine Detective Serrano will be asking those very questions. Expect his call; I know I am. Listen, I gotta run.”
“Jellyfish emergency?”
“Something like that.” There was a slight pause. “You okay? For real?”
Harper nodded, her throat tight, then remembered she was on the phone. “I’m…muddling through. How about you?”
“ ‘Muddling’ is a good word for it.”
They hung up. Lost in thought, Harper slowly swiveled her desk chair around to stare out her office window.
Backpack-laden students milled about the campus common, some sitting on benches, others sprawled on the lawn, and a few hurrying here and there on foot, on bicycles, and on skateboards.
It was a warm, sunny afternoon, as was usual on the California coast in October, and most wore only T-shirts or light sweatshirts, jeans or shorts.
Years ago, when Harper arrived in Berkeley from New York for graduate school, she had found it hard to get used to the idea that this luminous warmth was the month of Halloween.
Where were the brisk days, the cold nights, the piles of fallen leaves?
Here, lichen hung from live oaks, and the ubiquitous Monterey pines and cypress were evergreens, never dropping their foliage.
Did it count as True Autumn without a chilly turn of the weather?
There were no expeditions to maple shacks or Sunday car rides for leaf-peeping, that was for sure.
Here, students played hacky sack in T-shirts and shorts.
On the other hand, it was nice not needing to gear up to go outside, much less to dig a car out of a snowed-in driveway during an early snowstorm.
Life is indeed a series of trade-offs, she thought.
Harper graded a few of her students’ early essay proposals but, enticed by the college’s rapid internet connection, pushed the stack of papers aside and began searching for information on the witch trials that the ghost tour guide, Joel, insisted had taken place in Old Monterey.
The only reference she could find linking witches to Monterey was the claim, made by a candidate for city council last year, that Monterey was a hotbed of witchcraft and satanism, “yet one more example of the ruination of American society.” The would-be council member had no evidence to back up his claim, was eventually forced to recant, and lost the election.
Temporarily giving up on the hunt for witch trials, Harper was inspired by today’s class discussion to follow a link to a vampire craze.
When historic cemeteries were dug up, she read, they often yielded violated corpses, the bodies beheaded, buried face down, or chained.
Posthumous rib fractures were also common, usually the result of someone rummaging around in the chest cavity, hoping to remove—and perhaps to burn—the heart.
Often these rituals were clandestine, lantern-lit affairs, but sometimes entire towns got in on the macabre action.
Talk about your community-building activities…
By the 1800s tuberculosis was the leading cause of mortality throughout the Northeast, accounting for almost a quarter of all deaths.
It was a terrible way to die, often drawn out over years: a skyrocketing fever, a hacking, bloody cough, and a visible wasting away of the body.
Symptoms progressed in such a way that it seemed like something, or someone, was literally draining the life out of the victim.
Hence, the vampire scares.
“The emaciated figure strikes one with terror,” read one eighteenth-century description.
“The forehead covered with drops of sweat; the cheeks painted with a livid crimson, the eyes sunk…the breath offensive, quick and laborious, and the cough so incessant as to scarce allow the wretched sufferer time to tell his complaints.”
A loud shout on the quad made Harper look up from her monitor.
Her office hours were over, and as usual, no one had dropped by to consult with her.
She wondered if the college’s expectation that faculty demonstrate “a commitment to student progress and well-being” included sneaking into abandoned military barracks.
Weary as she was from last night’s events and the lack of sleep, Harper was more than ready for the day to be over. She switched off her computer monitor and gathered her things.
The late-afternoon sun sat low on the ocean’s horizon, casting an orangey glow as she drove her dusty old Scion the seven miles down the freeway from the campus to Monterey proper.
The town might be old, but it was not large, with only about thirty thousand people.
It seemed to Harper to suffer an odd kind of split personality: A sprawling modern conference center and hotel cut off the old downtown from the historic port area, while a touristy Fisherman’s Wharf, chock-full of ice cream and candy stores, souvenir shops, and kitschy seafood restaurants, had replaced the old sardine canning factories.
Only a smattering of rickety fishing boats still headed out to sea each morning, and a beach that had been cleared for tourists had been taken over by rowdy sea lions.
Happily, though, the town was eminently walkable. Since her arrival six weeks ago, Harper had explored Monterey’s official “path of history,” and made a point of nosing around old alleyways, the relics of abandoned water tanks, and decrepit canneries long since shuttered.
Long walks were a boost to her mental health and her only real form of exercise other than the very occasional jog.
She didn’t really like jogging. Loathed it, in fact.
Hoping it might be more fun with a friend, Harper persuaded Tariq to join her one day.
They did not repeat the experiment because, Tariq claimed, if Harper jogged any slower, she risked going backward.
Living on the California coast was a radical change from her life the past half a dozen years, and she hoped it would be a chance to decompress and to heal from the barrage of last year’s humiliations.
First, she had been turned down for tenure despite her numerous publications.
There was no official explanation, but she knew why: Her colleagues and the dean considered the topic of her research to be insufficiently scholarly.
While still reeling from that professional rejection, her husband, Grant, a tenured professor in the anthropology department, announced he was leaving her for one of his graduate students.
She knew their marriage had been having problems, but the news of his infidelity blindsided her. How had she not known? Had she been so caught up in her own career and her sister Scout’s troubles, that she failed to pick up on what was going on?
It didn’t help that almost everyone she knew adored Grant, especially her father.
After picking her father up from the airport for a scheduled visit, Harper broke the news of the impending divorce, hoping against hope for some words of wisdom or consolation.
Instead, he replied, “Can’t say I’m surprised—you didn’t even take his last name!
You apologize and do what it takes to get him back, you hear me?
You’re not getting any younger, you know.
I warned you this could happen—a man like Grant is quite a catch. ”
Harper had driven in silence for a minute, reviewing in her mind a few of the things she had learned in therapy about growing up as the child of an alcoholic: how to recognize codependence and set boundaries.
In an uncharacteristic move that still made her proud, she took the first off-ramp, got back on the freeway going the opposite direction, returned to the airport, and dropped her father at the departures area.
“Send me a bill for your ticket,” Harper said, handing him his carry-on bag and speeding off. They hadn’t spoken since.
That evening, a good friend insisted on taking Harper out for dinner and drinks and commiseration.
After a round of dirty martinis, her friend suggested it was the perfect time for a fresh start, a personal and professional do-over.
Seeing as she had no other choice, Harper agreed and ordered another round.