Sara Mason Mysteries Collection

Chapter 2

Worrying about the whereabouts of the serial killer caused Sara to lie awake too long. She rose late the next morning, running behind schedule, but finally arriving at her last stop of the day.

Winter debris littered the graves. Sara gathered a fistful of small branches and faded leaves, clutching them so tight the twigs cracked in her hands. She pitched them vengefully against the larger marker.

Three white marble headstones stood side by side in the older, forlorn section of the Elk Grove Cemetery south of Sacramento, unchanged and visible, like her memories. She stared at the inscription on the double-sized stone that said:

Mason

MasonQuincy Everett and Petra Lou.

“Both born the same year and died together. Two of a kind.” She grimaced. “I often wonder if you"re in heaven… or hell.” She stooped down and touched the ground in front of a smaller marker inscribed:

Starla Gay Mason.

“Hi, Sis,” she said. “I"m here. It"s payback time.” She remembered her sister lying in her coffin, her body whole, but ghastly pale. She always thought of her that way. Whole and sleeping, in her only dress, pink with white bows. At the last minute, Sara had stuffed Starla"s favorite toy, a fluffy white rabbit, under her sister"s arm.

Sara positioned the arrangement of pink tulips in the built-in vase beside the headstone and waited till the tightness in her throat eased. After moving to Puerto Rico following the deaths of her parents and sister, she imagined her own ashes eventually being strewn in the crystal clear water of the Caribbean Sea. Having returned to her hometown, that plan may change. She always had difficulty thinking of Starla lying in the cold ground. Sara couldn"t imagine herself lying beneath the headstone beside Starla, pre-marked for her:

Sara May Mason.

After the purchase of the other two, her headstone was a gift of pity from the marble company; given to a poor family who had nothing and whose only teenage survivor had even less.

She glanced at her parents" marker. “Poor no more,” she said. The thought of them depressed her. Sara needed to put the past behind and focus on her exciting new life.

She stared at her sister"s name. “I saw him again,” she said, smiling and feeling hopeful. She thought about the man she had recently seen on several occasions in a restaurant in Sacramento. The first time, he and his group sat in the booth behind her where she sat alone. His voice was distinct but not boisterous. He spoke of an older brother who had taught him to ride a bicycle and who, long ago, would teach him to ride a motorcycle after the brother returned from Vietnam. The man spoke of his sister as if she were a financial genius. He spoke lovingly of his siblings and parents. Clearly, family meant everything to him. Sara tried not to eavesdrop and felt guilty listening, but his family seemed the kind she could only dream of.

Their group departed ahead of her. As they passed her booth, the man turned and looked her straight in the eyes. He had short dark wavy hair and deep-set brooding eyes like blue-topaz sparklers! Their eyes locked into the kind of stare that made a connection long before words were spoken. He slowed his pace, and his intensity softened. He finally smiled, and his curiously sad expression melted.

Sara had gone back to the restaurant several times and each time saw the man leaving with a couple of other men. Her timing always seemed off. On another occasion, she had walked out of the restaurant just as they walked in.

“Hello there,” the man with the blue-topaz eyes had said.

“Hello,” Sara said. All she could do was walk away because making an excuse to go back inside seemed contrived.

On yet another of her jaunts to a furniture shop in Sacramento, that same man walked down the street with others. While she sat at the light and wondered how they might meet, he walked into a building on the next block. As she drove past, she saw that the building housed government agencies. She wondered about the man until she realized she was quite taken with him. Or was it his love of family?

“The next time I see him at that restaurant,” she said to Starla"s headstone, “I"ll start the conversation.” Sitting at Starla"s gravesite allowed her to relax and sort out her thoughts. She had not seen man in the three weeks since. She had to overcome her shyness about meeting men. Some part of her childhood programming still wanted her to believe she didn"t measure up. She knew it was wrong to think that way and vowed this was another flawed aspect of her personality that she would overcome. It was never too late to change, and she really did wish to find a new love one day.

Since returning to the Delta, she wondered if anyone would recognize her after thirty years. Would they remember her? Other than her family"s deaths, that were considered just more river drowning, her life back then had been unremarkable.

Another image that stayed with her from her teen years was when the Sheriff had to inform her about the accident. The horrible pictures and images flashed in her mind, fresh as yesterday.

She had stayed home alone to work on a class project. Her parents were late getting home, with Starla. When they drank they were always late. Unbeknownst to her, while she sat doing homework, deputies searched the Sacramento River with grappling hooks just a quarter mile down the levee. They found the old family sedan at the bottom lodged in silt under eighteen feet of water. Her mom and dad, still in their seatbelts, probably drowned easily, having been too intoxicated to know they had inhaled river water instead of air. The divers found scrawny little Starla floating with her eyes wide open in the air pocket inside the top of the car.

“Little Sis,” Sara said to the headstone. “You"ve been my guiding star all these years.” She grabbed more twigs and withered leaves and cast them aside without caring, onto her parents" graves. Her fingertips turned red and numb. The gigantic tree nearby was just a sapling when Sara buried her family. She sat cross-legged on the cool grass and stared at Starla"s name. Patches of fog slipped in with dusk.

“I learned something else,” she said. “We never were poor little w*********h girls like they used to call us.” She wished she could talk to her sister like they rattled and played when they were young. Memories flooded her mind and jumbled her thoughts.

“Today"s Valentine"s Day.”

Sara remembered that particular holiday as being nothing more than a popularity contest in grammar school to see who would receive the most Valentine cards from classmates. She was lucky to get one or two. Perky little Starla had been deprived of learning how popular she would have been.

“Your name"s famous now.”

She closed her eyes and then finally opened them. “Mandy died,” she said quietly. “But you"ve been up there watching everything unfold, haven"t you?”

Sara felt a chill and huddled inside her jacket. The breeze whipped her hair across her face and wrapped it around her neck. When she looked up, she could no longer see the grave markers in the rows ahead through the oozing white haze.

She remembered the fog of the California Central Valley. The scientific name was Advection Fog. Locals called it tule fog. The condition originated in the San Joaquin Valley. Rains and irrigation would saturate the agricultural area and when a cold mass of winter air invaded the wet valley, moisture in the air thickened and turned into fog. The low-lying blanket of white could cover nearly half of the state for days at a time. In bad years, patchiness in low areas could last well into spring.

Sara gritted her teeth, remembering. Living in Puerto Rico for the last thirty years hadn"t dimmed her memories. Tule fog was what surely blinded her drunken father, whose speeding car went flying off the levee road south of the town of Ryde.

She stood, then bent over and scraped more small debris from Starla"s grave onto those of her parents. She picked up a spindly dry branch from in front of her own marker and tossed it onto the rest. During a fog, it wouldn"t be safe to be on the roads at night. “I"ll be back,” she said.

With that, she turned to leave and couldn"t see her white SUV. She walked carefully in the direction she remembered having parked, arms outstretched to feel her way. A break in the fog came, and she found she had walked past it.