19. The Unexpected Family
The Unexpected Family
There were a hundred and forty people.
Walt Ostrander was in the second row.
He had not wanted to come. He had said so in my courtyard in a voice I'd never heard from him, that he had no business at that girl's funeral, that a man who wrote *pt anxious* nine times and rang a desk sergeant once did not get to sit in a church and be sad.
And Rosalind Marsh, who had heard about this from Tess within about ninety minutes because this is a small town, telephoned him at home and said — I have it from Walt, who repeated it to me twice with his voice failing both times —
"Dr. Ostrander, you wrote down what you saw.
You are the only person in this entire city who wrote down what he saw.
Everybody else who looked at my daughter in 1998 decided what they were looking at and you wrote down what was there, and thirty years later a young woman read it and it was still true.
" A pause. "You'll sit at the front with the family. I'll have somebody save you a seat."
So he sat in the second row in a dark blue shirt with no parrots on it, next to Dolores's sister, and he cried through the whole thing, and afterward he stood at the graveside long after everyone had gone up to the cars, with his hand on the corner of the headstone, doing something I did not go close enough to hear.
The stone says CASEY RENEE MARSH, 1976–1998, and under it, in smaller letters, at her mother's instruction:
SHE WAS NOT LEAVING.
Carl Tomasetti was charged on the twenty-second of June and pleaded not guilty in July and is, as I write this, still going through the machinery, because that is what the machinery does.
The forensic geology holds. The phone records from 1998 — which existed, in a warehouse, because a phone company kept them — put his home line and Cabrillo's line in a pattern on the night of the fourteenth that the prosecution likes very much.
Two former employees have made statements about things they saw in the kitchen between 1994 and 1997 that they did not know what to do with at the time.
A woman in Arizona who worked at Cabrillo's in 1991 came forward in September and I will not write down what she said.
He is seventy-two now. He may well die before it finishes.
Rosalind Marsh has said, in public, once, to a reporter from the Independent, that she does not care whether he goes to prison and that she never did, and that what she wanted was for somebody to say it out loud in a room with his face in it, and that on the twentieth of June on Stearns Wharf, a dentist did.
The Anchor Room closed in August. The Police Activities League moved the 5K to the harbor and renamed it, and the new jackets say nothing at all across the back, which I regard as a loss.
And the county took the bench off the Douglas Preserve trail, the one at the top of the bluff, and in March of the following year they put up a different one, four hundred yards along, with a small brass plate. It faces the water. The plate says:
FOR CASEY — WHO LIKED IT DOWN HERE
Rosalind Marsh started coming to the coffee cart on Tuesdays in August.
She did it the first time because I asked her, and the second time because Tess asked her, and the third time because Walt Ostrander happened to be there on a Tuesday and they had, it emerged, a great deal to say to each other about the Santa Barbara of 1998 and about people they had both known and about the astonishing price of everything.
The fourth time nobody asked her at all.
She has not missed a Tuesday in three years.
She sits at the iron table by the lemon tree, and Floss lies on her feet, and Adele Whitcombe — who is eighty-five now and has decided that Rosalind Marsh is the only sensible woman in this county — sits opposite her with Pearl in her lap, and the two of them conduct an ongoing conversation about the city council that I would not repeat under oath.
Walt comes on Tuesdays now instead of whenever.
Marisol brings them out the things she thinks they should eat.
Mateo Alvarez, who is nine, does his homework at the next table twice a month while his mother gets her cleaning, and Rosalind helps him with long division, and he calls her Mrs. M.
Tess put a second table out there in the autumn and then a third.
I don't have a tidy thing to say about this.
The cover of the third book in this series, which I did not design and have no control over, says *sometimes the very best investigations lead to the unexpected family*, and I rolled my eyes at that when I first saw it.
But there is a seventy-nine-year-old woman who lost everything in 1998 and lived alone in a blue house on the Westside for twenty-eight years while a town told a story about her daughter, and she now has a standing Tuesday with four people who would notice within an hour if she didn't come.
That is not a consolation. Nothing consoles that. It is, however, a Tuesday, and there are a lot of them.
Nate told me about DC on the last night of July.
We were on his back deck on the Mesa with the marine layer coming in over the ridge and both dogs asleep in the doorway, and he said it without any preamble at all, which is how I knew he had been carrying it around for a while looking for a door to put it down in front of.
"I called Hargrove on Tuesday," he said. "I'm not taking it."
I put my glass down very carefully.
"Nate—"
"Let me do the whole thing," he said, "because I've rehearsed it and if you interrupt me I'll say it wrong and you'll think it's about you." He turned his glass on the arm of the chair. "I'm not taking it, and it is not because of you, and I need you to believe that, and here's why it's true."
"Okay."
"Elena said I couldn't tell whether I wanted the job or wanted to deserve it.
You said the same thing on a beach in a different way.
And I sat with that for six weeks and then I stood on a wharf on the twentieth of June and watched a seventy-nine-year-old woman ask a man one question.
" He looked at me. "And I thought: that's the work.
That's the actual work, and it has been going on four blocks from my office for three years, and I was going to fly across the country to do a version of it that had a unit name and a better title. "
"That's not the same, though. What you'd do there—"
"Is exactly the same. Color of law, public corruption — it's people with position doing things to people who can't stop them, and then everybody agreeing not to look.
" He shook his head slowly. "Lila, I've been in this town three and a half years and I have worked an art fraud that killed an old woman, a healthcare fraud that killed a dentist, and a twenty-eight-year-old homicide that a police department wrote off because a man with a plaque told them to.
That's not a quiet post. I asked for the smallest post that would take me because I thought I was going somewhere nothing happens, and it turns out that nothing-happens is just a place where nobody's looking yet. "
The fog came over the ridge the way it does, all at once, like a lid.
"I told Hargrove that," he said. "He laughed at me for about a minute and then he stopped laughing and said he'd take a resident agency that produced three of those in three years over a unit that produces a press release, and then he said if I change my mind in four years to call him, and then he said — " Nate stopped and had to start again.
"He said, 'Corrigan, for what it's worth, I've been trying to get you out of that chair since 2019 and I've just worked out that you were never in it. '"
I did not say okay.
I want that on the record, in the last chapter of the last book, after four years of being a woman who could not ask for anything: I did not say okay.
What I said was: "I want you to stay."
Nate Corrigan looked at me.
"I've wanted you to stay since the orchid room," I said.
"I wanted to say it there and I didn't, and I've wanted to say it every day since, and I've had a whole speech about how not saying it was generous and it wasn't, it was cowardice with good manners on it, and I am — " My voice went.
"Nate, I want you to stay. I want you to stay and I want you to want to, and if there is ever a version of this where you need to go, then I want you to tell me and I will figure out how to come, because I am not going to be a person who lets somebody pick her and then charges them rent for it. "
He was out of his chair before I finished.
"Say the first part again," he said.
"I want you to stay."
"Again."
"I want you to stay," I said, "you absolute—"