Like hospitals, fire departments, and other essential services, the Coroner’s Bureau was running on generators. To conserve fuel, the thermostat had been set to seventy-six. Entering the intake bay I felt the mild air crush around me and started shivering violently.
“You okay?” Harkless said.
I said I’d meet him upstairs.
I pushed into the men’s locker room, threw the tissue in the trash, and peeled off my sodden shirt, rubbing a towel over damp hair and gooseflesh, watching for a call or text from Luke.
Nothing.
I put on a clean shirt, composed myself, and went up to the squad room. Jed Harkless was in his cubicle next to mine, mired in the initial paperwork on Vandervelde. Deputy Nikki Kennedy had a pen between her teeth and was scooping her Kool-Aid-red hair. Deputy Lindsey Bagoyo murmured consolingly into the phone.
The techs: Carmen Woolsey in her big witchy skirt. Dani Botero and Lydia Januchak, gossiping by the printer.
Down the hall, Sergeant Clarkson laughed behind her office door. “I know it.”
Everyone doing their jobs.
To them, it was a regular afternoon.
Ten years is a long time to remain a deputy coroner. I should be a sergeant by now, at the least. Higher-ranking friends have implied that I would be, if not for a couple of incidents that have earned me a reputation for insubordination.
Over the spring I’d applied for permission to take the exam. It was granted and I passed. The catch was that there were no openings in the Coroner’s Bureau. Moving up meant moving out to another duty station. Amy and I agreed that we needed the extra money. But she wasn’t going to push me to leave the post I’ve kept for so long and that I love.
Then fate brought a reprieve: Juanita Clarkson gave notice. Her husband’s employer was relocating its HQ to Austin, effective January first.
Less than three months remained till I took her place.
My new shirt was already wicking. I put Rory Vandervelde’s house keys in a desk drawer. The nub of paper with the Camaro’s tag and VIN was in my back pocket. I felt it as if I were sitting on a nail. The urge to check my phone was a rag in my throat.
I reopened the drawer and buried the phone at the back behind the keys.
Focus.
I clicked on Rory Vandervelde’s case file, opened the photo folder, and plugged in the Nikon to upload. Thumbnails sprouted in tidy rows, reproducing my run of the house in miniature. They dragged me, herky-jerky, across the foyer to the living room, around the fallen end table and bloody glass, over the marble tiles and along the bloodstained hallway and into each of the myriad rooms and through the trees toward the garage. What if I’d forgotten to delete the picture of the license plate? I had to stop myself from yanking out the cord. The hangar door appeared, followed by the flash-saturated garage interiors, opulent forms and lustrous colors; the key safe and the hydraulic lift; Frank Sinatra and the hidden crank mechanism, and then the camera skipped over to the pool house and the putting green and the tennis court, dusty and benign.
I minimized the window and moved on to Accurint.
Several addresses for Rory Vandervelde came up, the most recent being the mansion I’d just left. Built in 2013. No previous owners and all the personalization said Vandervelde had commissioned the house. He also owned property in Sonoma and Lake Tahoe.
Associates included Martha F. Vandervelde, born in 1952, and Sean C. Vandervelde, born in 1980.
I stood up and hung over the cubicle wall. Harkless was typing. The pleather estate planning portfolio sat on his desk.
“I can get started on that.”
Without taking his eyes off the screen, he handed me the binder.
Fastened to its inside cover was the business card of a Palo Alto law firm.
Turlock and Bain, LLC
Sterling Turlock, Principal and Founder
A cover letter, dated May 13, 2020, detailed the portfolio’s contents: Rory Vandervelde’s living trust, his last will and power of attorney and healthcare directive, plus numerous codicils and revisions thereto. The list of documents ran to three pages, allowing me to chart his emotional ups and downs with bleak precision.
The original will had gone into effect on April 17, 1983. In it Rory William Vandervelde declared himself a resident of Santa Clara County. He had married Martha Frances Vandervelde (née Roberts) on July 12, 1975. She was his sole beneficiary and personal representative, and vice versa. They had one child, Sean Charles Vandervelde, born on December 4, 1980.
By the early nineties the Vanderveldes had amassed enough wealth to establish a charitable foundation, to which they apportioned ten percent of their estate.
For a while that was all. Starting in 2013, however, the pace of change picked up.
First, a codicil transferred the Vanderveldes’ place of residence to Alameda County. A house of that size didn’t get built in a day. You had to get approvals, attend hearings, submit revisions. You proceeded on faith, dreaming of the future, like the architect of a medieval church that took centuries to complete.
Martha Vandervelde had never seen her dream realized: In November of that year, she died. A new will was accordingly drafted.
Eleven months later Rory amended his healthcare proxy, empowering Dr. Nancy Yap to make decisions on his behalf should he become incapacitated.
Two years after that, he cut Nancy in on the estate. Her ten percent came out of Sean Vandervelde’s share. Soon that was upped to fifteen. By 2019 Rory had made Nancy Yap his executor and granted her burial rights. He declared for the record that he wished to spend eternity lying between the two women who had brought him joy in life. To that end, he had purchased an additional plot, next to his and Martha’s, earmarked for Nancy.
The coup de grâce was a radical change to the estate distribution. Now Sean got a third, Nancy got a third, and one-third went to the foundation.
Even Sean’s reduced portion would be more than most people earned in their lifetimes.
That wasn’t the point. He’d been knocked down several rungs.
I found a Sean Charles Vandervelde living down in Pacific Palisades.
I dialed the law offices of Turlock and Bain, LLC. The receptionist patched me through.
“Deputy.” Sterling Turlock’s booming voice commanded attention with a single word. I could imagine the effect on a courtroom. “What brings you my way?”
“Good afternoon, sir. I’m calling about a client of yours, Rory Vandervelde. I’m afraid I have some bad news. Mr. Vandervelde’s passed away.”
Silence.
“Sir?”
“Oh no. Rory?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“God. Another heart attack?”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t discuss that before we’ve had a chance to speak to his next of kin.”
“Right. Right. That’d be Nancy. You need her number? I can give it to you.”
“It’s Sean Vandervelde I’m trying to reach, actually.”
Turlock cleared his throat. “He’s not the one in charge.”
I explained that I had been to the house and read the estate documents. “I’m not seeing anything about Mr. Vandervelde and Dr. Yap being married.”
“No.”
“In that case, we’ll speak to Sean first. I was hoping you could confirm that I’ve got the right person.” I read Turlock the phone number and address in Pacific Palisades.
“That’s him.”
“Thank you. We will speak to Dr. Yap, too, but for the time being I’d appreciate it if you’d hold off on informing her.”
A beat. “Of course.”
I had no more confidence in his of course than in Detective Cesar Rigo’s. “I was also hoping to ask you a couple of questions. How long have you worked with Mr. Vandervelde?”
“Good grief. Forty years? Forty-five?”
“You must have known him well.”
“Quite. We were good friends, all four of us, Rory and Martha, Diane and I. We belonged to the same club. That came later, though. When I first met them, they were living on peanut butter sandwiches.”
“I’m not sure what he did professionally.”
“How he made his money, you mean.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well,” Turlock said, “it’s something of a Horatio Alger story. Rory and Martha had this little mom-and-pop shipping store over in Sunnyvale. One day a fellow walks in carrying a circuit board. It so happens the store’s down the block from one of the big microchip companies. This fellow’s an engineer. He needs to send a prototype to Washington, DC. Lightweight, very fragile. Their mailroom already broke two of them in transit. He’s so fed up he decides to go out-of-pocket.
“He asks Rory, ‘What do you have that I can pack this up in?’ Rory shows him newspaper and Styrofoam peanuts. The engineer says, ‘No, that’s no good, we tried that.’ Rory’s about to tell him sorry, no dice. Then he remembers he’s got a packet of balloons, extras from some promotion they ran. He blows some up, and they wrap the thing in tissue paper and snuggle it in there. Rory sends it off and forgets about it. I don’t think he charged him for the balloons.
“Next week the engineer comes back. Rory’s afraid the thing arrived in pieces and the guy is going to ream him out. Turns out the balloons worked like a charm, he’s ecstatic, like Rory’s some kind of genius. Rory thought that was hilarious, because the guy’s an engineer, after all, and here he is, going wild about balloons. Now he’s got another prototype he needs to send. So Rory does it the same way. This time he charges him for the balloons. Day after that, two more engineers come in. ‘Can you pack this up for us?’ You get the picture. Pretty soon Rory’s buying balloons in bulk, and he realizes there’s a business there. As an added benefit, there’s less waste, and it keeps shipping costs down, cause it’s mostly air. You ever order from Amazon? Those air pockets they use? You know the ones I’m talking about.”
I did. I rarely took the trouble to deflate them, so they constituted half the volume of our weekly household trash output. “Yup.”
“Rory’s idea.”
“Good idea to have.”
“You bet your boots,” Turlock said. “He wasn’t what you’d call educated, but he had a head for things you can touch and feel. He got into manufacturing. That’s about the time he brought me in. From there he branched out, cargo, trucking, storage, import-export, you name it. Did a lot of business overseas. Next thing you know he’s joining the golf club, and the same computer fellows who used to ask him to pack their boxes are begging him for seed money.”
He let out a gale of cathartic laughter.
“Dammit,” he said. “I don’t believe it. He was healthy as a horse.”
I’d never understood that phrase. Horses get sick. They die. The slightest defect, people shoot them.
Maybe that was the idea. For a horse, anything short of perfection spelled the end.
“You mentioned a heart attack,” I said.
“Well, sure, but it was minor. Anyway it was a long time ago.”
“How long?”
“Eight, nine years ago. After Martha died.”
Right around the time Vandervelde made Nancy Yap his healthcare proxy. “Do you remember the circumstances?”
“He and Sean had a fight.”
“Fight?”
“An argument,” Turlock said. “Words.”
“Bad blood between them?”
“That kid’s an asshole. He made life rough for Rory and Martha when he was growing up. Now he’s grown up and he’s still an asshole. I’ve told Rory a thousand times not to take it so hard. But it’s his son. I’d feel the same in his shoes.”
“What were they arguing about?”
“Who knows? Money, probably. Or Nancy. Sean didn’t like his mother being replaced. What’s he expect Rory to do, don sackcloth till the day he dies? He nursed Martha for years. He sat through every chemo session. God’s sake, let him have a little happiness.”
“I’m seeing a lot of changes to the terms of the estate.”
“I discouraged that. I didn’t think it would help matters. But Rory could be stubborn. The kid gets it from somewhere.”
I mentioned the timeline on the mansion, how its completion coincided with Martha Vandervelde’s death.
“Sad, her never seeing it. They tried to build here but got held up on permits and started looking elsewhere. They poured everything into that damn house. Emotionally, I mean. It kept Martha’s mind off being sick, too. Boy, you should’ve seen their old place. Tiny run-down thing.”
Which might explain the shopworn furniture crowded into Vandervelde’s office: a reminder of his roots. “Before they moved, where’d he keep his cars?”
“The cars,” Turlock said. “Wonder of the world, eh? Yeah, he bought those first. Used one of his warehouses over in San Jose. Bear in mind, he didn’t have as many back then. Ten or twelve.” He laughed. “Come to think, that is a lot.”
“How did he acquire them?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Did he buy them at auction? Through dealers, or private sales?”
“That I couldn’t tell you. All of the above, I presume. Me, I couldn’t care less about cars. I’ve driven the same Mercedes for twenty years. Rory ribbed me about it. ‘You need to look the part, clients will think you’re poor.’ By the way, that was another thing Sean didn’t like. After Martha passed, Rory got a lot freer with his money. He moved into the new place and had Nancy do the decorating.”
“She doesn’t live there full-time, though.”
“No, no. Here. Palo Alto,” he said. “Lily—that’s her daughter from her first marriage, she’s still in high school. Nancy stays at home with her most of the time. Rory would’ve loved for them to move in. You understand, she could say the word and never have to work again. But she’s her own woman.”
“What does she do?”
“She’s a doctor, works at Stanford. Listen, Deputy, I’ve been doing this my whole life. Something’s going on here or you wouldn’t have called me. Is there going to be an autopsy?”
“Yes, sir, there is.”
“You can’t tell me why.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“Okay. Should I be there? Or Nancy?”
“I appreciate the offer, but that won’t be necessary.”
“Fine,” he said reluctantly. “Good grief, what a lousy way to end the day.”
We hung up, and I called the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner to request they make notification to Sean Charles Vandervelde.
The sun melted into the Bay. The sky glowed radioactive peach. It was an unnatural color, unsettling, beautiful. Impossible to get used to and sadly normal.
October in Northern California. And September. August and July and June.
Lindsey Bagoyo rose from her cubicle. “Night, everybody.”
A chorus of farewells.
She started for the exit, pausing by my desk. “How’s Amy holding up?”
My wife was fourteen weeks pregnant with our second child. Yesterday morning, with the outage looming and the air quality index climbing into the purple, she and Charlotte had gotten on a plane to the preferred destination for anyone yearning to breathe free: Los Angeles.
“My dude,” Nikki Kennedy said. “Living that sweet, sweet bachelor life.”
Carmen Woolsey said, “They’re calling the wind a once-in-twenty-years event.”
Dani Botero said, “Nice, just like last year.”
Bagoyo patted me on the shoulder. “Stay cool.”
I wished her a good night, too.
Harkless left soon after, followed by Kennedy and the techs.
Two and a half hours had elapsed since I’d tried to reach Luke.
I unearthed my phone from the back of the drawer.
No missed calls. Six unread notifications.
A photo of Charlotte, her face smeared with what I hoped was chocolate ice cream. They were having fun, Amy wrote, but they missed me. I wrote that I’d call them soon.
The next message was from a reporter I’d once made the mistake of talking to. She had since anointed me her go-to source. A Hayward man with COPD had died after his power cut out and his BiPAP machine failed. Did I care to comment? I did not.
A Berkeley detective named Billy Watts asked me to get in touch when I had a second.
A former Cal teammate who’d moved out of state had been following the news about the fires and wanted to make sure I was okay.
Texts five and six were automated alerts. Red flag warning for Alameda County. High wind advisory. Elevated fire risk. AQI hazardous. Sensitive groups such as the elderly and those with underlying respiratory conditions were urged to remain indoors. For more information visit their website.
The utility company announced that the public safety power shutoff had been expanded to cover additional areas and extended for twenty-four hours, subject to further expansion and further extension. For more information visit their website.
Nothing from my brother.
I was the only one left from my team. Night shift was settling in, getting coffee.
I reached into my back pocket for the nub of paper. I unfolded it in my lap and ran the tag for the green Camaro in Rory Vandervelde’s garage.
It came back registered to Luke A. Edison, 1259 Jupiter Creek Road, Moraga, CA 94556.
The VINs matched.
Amorphous dread crawled through me.
“Closing time.”
Brad Moffett, the night shift sergeant, was ambling over.
I closed the search window and stuffed the paper in my pocket.
Moffett pressed his chest like an opera singer. “You don’t have to go home,” he crooned. “But you can’t. Stay. Here.”
“Daddy, I got ice cream.”
“Hi, lovey. That’s fantastic. What flavor?”
“Daddy, I can’t see you.”
“It’s the connection, sweetie,” Amy said. “You can talk, he can hear you.”
“He looks silly.”
“I often do,” I said. “Hi, hon. How are you?”
“We’re fine. How are you? Can you breathe?”
“More or less.”
“Did they say when the power’s coming back on?”
“They keep changing it. It was tomorrow morning. Now it’s Wednesday.”
“Uch. I’m so sorry.”
“Tell him we went to the museum,” Charlotte said.
“Why don’t you tell him yourself?” Amy said.
“You tell him.”
“Charlotte would like you to know that we went to the museum.”
“Cool,” I said. “Which museum?”
“Tell him there were dinosaurs.”
“And there were dinosaurs.”
“Wow. Were they scary?” I asked.
“No.”
“Did you get ice cream before or after the museum?”
“We got it at the museum.”
“Was it dinosaur-flavored ice cream?”
“Daddy, I can’t see you.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I love you so much. Are you having fun with cousin Sarah and cousin Jake and baby Liam?”
“He’s a baby. He doesn’t go on the potty.”
“Not like you. You’re a big girl.”
“Their place is bananas,” Amy whispered. “I feel like a Kardashian.”
I thought about the crazy house I’d been in that day.
“Tell me,” I said. “I want to hear all about it.”
While she talked I stretched out on the living room floor and let her voice wash over me. I could smell the overdone air infiltrating our leaky windows and the dust in the area rug and the baked scent of the cardboard boxes stacked against the wall. We’d moved in months ago. Same week I passed my sergeant’s exam, in fact. I’d thought that leaving the boxes out in the open rather than putting them in the garage would spur us to deal with them sooner. Instead we’d learned to ignore them. Now we had a cardboard accent wall.
Amy said, “Do you have enough to eat?”
“Beef jerky for days.”
“Honey. That’s not dinner.”
“Many cultures would disagree.”
“What about the leftover lasagna?”
“I ate it last night.”
“Can’t you order in?”
“Nobody’s open. Drake’s is pouring, but no food and cash only. Don’t worry about me. How was your morning sickness today?”
“Better, thanks. On the whole it’s definitely been easier than last time. Sarah says that means it’s a boy.”
“Sounds scientific.”
“What should we name him?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Hey, Charlotte, what should we name the baby?”
“Charlotte,” Charlotte said.
“You want to name the baby your name?” Amy asked.
“It is a good name,” I said. “But don’t you think it might get confusing?”
“No.”
“Like if Mommy calls you for dinner, and she says, ‘Charlotte,’ how will you know which Charlotte she means?”
“They both need to eat dinner,” Amy said.
“That’s true. Let me think of a better example.”
“Daddy, when are you coming here?”
I sighed. “I’m not sure, lovey. Will you eat some more ice cream for me?”
“Okay.”
Amy said, “We’re heading out with Sarah and the baby in a few minutes. P-I-Z-Z-A.”
“Excellent. Have fun.”
“I’ll call you tonight after she’s down.”
“I might go to bed early. There’s nothing to do. TV’s out, Wi-Fi’s out.”
“Read by flashlight.”
“It’s too hot under the covers.” I paused. “Maybe I’ll tackle the Great Wall of Cardboard.”
“Mm-hm.”
“You sound skeptical.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Should I be insulted that you sound so skeptical.”
“You should be happy that we understand each other so well. Try you around eight?”
“Sounds good. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
“Bye, lovey.”
“Bye, Daddy.”
I opened the text thread with my brother. My last two attempts, hours old, unanswered.
Yo sorry what’s up
Call me please
I’d balked at calling Luke’s wife. I didn’t want to worry her and frankly I wasn’t sure she’d pick up. We’re not close, either.
I tried her. She didn’t pick up. I texted her.
Hey Andrea. Can you please ask Luke to give me a quick ring or call me yourself. Thanks
I considered calling my mom. Then I came to my senses.
I showered, hanging my work clothes over the towel rod to air out.
The house was fully dark. I fetched out LED lanterns and a box of candles, holdovers from the previous two blackouts, and placed them at intervals to create stepping-stones of light. It felt like I was stranded between the twenty-first and seventeenth centuries. The piercing glare of the lanterns hurt my head. I turned them off.
In the kitchen I fanned four packs of jerky and two slices of bread on a plate. I filled a glass with tap water. I surrounded the meal with candles and texted a picture to Amy.
#BachelorLife
She sent me a photo of their pizza, oozy cheese, golden crust.
I sent her a scowling emoji.
She sent me a kissy emoji.
I tore open my beef jerky. One and a half packs in I had lockjaw. Neither Luke nor Andrea had responded to any of my calls or texts. I put my plate in the sink and got dressed.