The Mourning Mail (FINAL)

Chapter 1

ONE MONTH AGO

I didn't know what lay ahead as I walked in quiet contemplation across the grounds of the Crestview Memorial Gardens. Bright-red summer tanagers, mercurial and insistent, flitted about the treetops. Anna's hummingbirds and lesser goldfinches darted among emerging leaves and beautiful blooms that lightly scented the air. It was the height of the mating season and another gorgeous spring day in late May. The weather made me grateful to live near the coast of San Diego.

Several more days would pass before I learned of the crimes and their gratuitous violence. But someone had already tipped the first several dominos. Among them were the violent deaths of two women and the desecration of their corpses. Those lay rotting miles from here, in shallow unmarked graves covered with fallen leaves. There'd be other dominos, and they wouldn't stop tumbling until after I would twice fear dying myself in gruesome ways. But for the moment, I was oblivious that upcoming events would consume my every waking moment. I didn't yet know the pulse-pounding dread that would linger after more than one of my dreams startled me awake.

And so, this day would be a tranquil one for me. I was here because I'd missed my opportunity last weekend. To prevent a repeat, I had set this breezy, early-spring morning aside for personal reflection and to reminisce with my family.

I kneeled before the marker, my fingertips gently tracing the inscriptions carved into the stone. A childhood memory leaped across thirty years and inserted itself into my thoughts—a sudden replay of the naïve confusion and fear I felt the first time I saw this monument. My brother, Eddie, had just passed. Dad had ordered the engraved marker pre-inscribed with all our immediate family's names: Marianne, Edward, Alexander... A terrible possibility came to me when I read "Debra Ann Wynn" beside my birth date. I yanked my father's sleeve and asked, "Dad, does this mean I'm going to die soon?" I remember sobbing in fits and starts.

"No, honey," Dad said as he lowered himself to his knees. "You are going to be fine and live a very long time." He wiped my tears softly with a tissue. "We wrote all our names so Eddie could look down from Heaven and know he wouldn't be alone," he explained.

"But Eddie doesn't know how to read," I worried as I thought about it.

"The good thing about Heaven, sweetheart," Dad replied, "is that he'll be able to do anything he wants."

And with his words, the terror subsided. The memory, however, had stuck with me for all these years.

I wanted—needed—to visit Mom and Dad at their gravesite today. An unhealthy reserve of guilt and a general sense of disappointment in myself was building inside me. The extra freelance writing assignments I'd picked up to pay my bills had placed severe demands on my schedule. With that as an excuse, I'd begun skipping weekends here and there, when I should have been finding the time to see my family. After Mom passed, Dad religiously visited her every weekend and holiday. He never shirked despite the pressures of running his construction business. And when we both knew Dad's time was coming, I promised him solemnly that I'd stop by regularly.

We buried Mom in the family plot almost four years ago. But the loving mother we once knew had left us a year before that. Her Alzheimer's had progressed steadily in the last two and a half years of her life until she could no longer remember who we were or what we meant to one another. The few memories she could share were of her childhood and teenage years, before she met my father. Those recollections didn't hold the same meaning for the rest of us.

The one person who could identify with her as a teenager was her sister, Debra Ann, for whom I was named. She was still lively and alert, but Mom didn't recognize her as an aging woman. Mom had developed a deep paranoia that we—now unknown to her—were taking and misplacing her things and playing mean-spirited jokes. Her suspicions and frustrations exposed the cruelest of ironies. She was, to us, no longer the person we'd once known, either. Six decades of warmth and familial togetherness would end with strangers to her respectfully attending a stranger's funeral. We'd lost more than a mother.

As Mom passed while her body lived on, the sadness spread itself over a long year. Each month we'd learn to accept what she'd lost. We'd then watch helplessly as a little more slipped away, a perverse installment plan for heartache. By the time she left us, I felt more a sense of general sorrow and relief than deep grieving. She'd truly gone to a better place.

Losing Dad had been very different. His diagnosis was pancreatic cancer; we had only three months together after learning of his illness. Through the end, Dad was still as sharp as ever, his mind as keen as when we'd played chess when I was much younger. Had we played a game, I suspect he still could have beaten me; but I would have hoped, as was his habit during those long-ago days, he'd let me win.

We spent many long hours discussing so much in the final ninety days. But Dad was selling his business interests as a general contractor and builder, and I had the pressing demands of my career. So, though we'd often converse by phone, we didn't get together those last two weekends.

Then came the Tuesday when he suddenly had a seizure and expired in the hospital. There were no more opportunities. Before the harsh reality strikes, you believe with every new day that surely there'll be at least one more. That way of thinking has a cost. I'd wished so many times since then that I could reclaim those two weekends to spend with him.

Maybe it was because the ending was so sudden, the door slamming rather than closing softly, that I somehow abstracted myself from the reality of Dad's passing. I felt as if my emotional being were hovering in a corner near the ceiling, silently watching the entire scene, biding its time before getting involved. Since then, I often thought the floodgates were about to burst open. Once they did, I knew I'd collapse into a sobbing heap of tears, hysteria, and grieving.

But it hadn't happened yet. I'd feel a catch in my diaphragm at some passing remembrance of him. Or I'd lose my thoughts for a moment, a sense of panic rising within me, but then it would melt away. In the past month, an overarching sorrow had sucked the upper peaks from any joy that came my way. Still, I did not feel the outpouring of grief I'd expected and that I thought Dad deserved from me.

Thirty-eight years ago, when Mom and Dad completed the adoptions of my older brother, Eddie, and me, they purchased the Wynn family plot at the memorial gardens. Dad used barter and talents of persuasion to get the oak tree from my grandparents' farm moved to the head of our burial site.

Celebrating preparations for endings alongside new beginnings had been a Wynn family tradition for centuries, since before the Battle of Hastings, when the family name and crest first appeared in recorded annals. When Dad was born, my grandparents set up a trust that bequeathed him enough money for the plot and moving the tree. They wanted to be buried at their farm and understood that Dad might have dreams of doing things with his life other than animal husbandry. So, they planned ahead.

I found out later that Dad had acquired the plot and had the tree moved in something of a rush, not usually the way he did things. Had Mom and Dad known that Eddie was sick and adopted him despite the challenges? That would have been like them.

I'd always wanted to ask and never found quite the right time. But only a year later, Eddie passed away from glioblastoma multiforme, becoming the first member of our family to make his ultimate home in the memorial gardens. In the three decades since, the oak had grown and spread its shade magnificently, reminiscent of an Ansel Adams photo. As it matured, the groundskeeper scrambled to keep up with the plentiful acorns it dropped. Each time I heard or saw one fall, it pleased me that Dad and his decisions still had a noticeable effect on the world in which I lived.

But Dad's influence was about to extend far beyond acorns falling from a tree, and I would become his willing agent.

Another of many things I didn't yet know.