Twelve

Not so the Pagets, however.

After picking up John at the airport, the three Pagets drove without words through the city to the Southbreeze house, Norma sobbing most of the way. They arrived just about the time Schmunk was finishing his autopsy on Irene Barron and failing to determine the cause of her death.

By the time the Pagets arrived back at the Southbreeze house, Roberta was there, along with her boyfriend, Tim O’Keefe, as well as Denise and Cliff. The police had by now turned the house back over to Jack.

When the Pagets entered, John wanted to talk to Jack as soon as possible.

All the way north on the plane, John’s mind had been reeling.

“All these thoughts were rushing through my mind, while I tried to figure out whatever had possibly happened,” John recalled. “I kept thinking my poor sister has been killed. I mean, in my own mind I had already come to the assumption there was a murder.”

So John wanted to find out from Jack just exactly what happened, and what the police had told him.

“Where’s Jack?” John asked, and someone pointed at the rear bedroom, the one where Christina Hamilton had found Irene dead early that same morning. John knocked on the door and entered.

Jack was sitting on the bed with his head in his hands. John sat down next to him and put his arm around Jack’s shoulders.

It seemed to John that Jack was devastated by Irene’s death. He was still weeping. John tried to console him. Mostly, however, he wanted information from Jack.

“What happened?” John persisted.

Jack again said he didn’t know what happened to Irene or how she died. Jack again told the story of Christina Hamilton’s discovery of Irene’s body.

Jack told John that the Coroner’s Office had taken Irene’s body to the morgue, where an autopsy would be performed to find out how she died. By this time, John already knew that Irene hadn’t been shot, stabbed or strangled, as he had first feared; and that it was possible that Irene had died of natural causes.

As the afternoon progressed, others dropped by to give their sympathies to Jack and the Pagets. One was Father Duggan, the parish priest at St. Paul’s Catholic Church, in Florin. The way Father Duggan consoled Jack and the Pagets, and from what he said of Irene, John realized that Irene had been at least attending the Roman Catholic services.

That’s odd, John thought, she never told me that. But John concluded that maybe Father Duggan was just being polite. But two days later, at the funeral service, John was to realize that Irene had become a committed Catholic, and concluded that she had done so to satisfy Roberta’s anxiety about the upbringing of Jeremy and Ashley.

Later, John was to come to believe that after her divorce from Keith, Irene would have done almost anything to maintain her marriage with Jack, even to the point of adopting a religion she was unfamiliar with.

“I think it’s more likely that it was Roberta’s influence,” John said later, “because Roberta was the staunch Catholic. Irene’s nature is, she’s very serious about her marriage, she’s already had one failed marriage, she wants this one to work. Which is, I think, why she never confided to me that she’d had problems with Jack, or told me that she’d decided to become a Catholic.”

It was, in a sense, evidence of Irene’s commitment to her marriage and her children.

In any event, arrangements had to be made for the funeral, which would be held at St. Paul’s as soon as the Coroner’s Office released Irene’s body.

That happened the following morning, Tuesday. But when the Pagets asked the Coroner’s Office if they had been able to determine why Irene died, they were informed that the determination was still under consideration by the pathologist, Dr. Schmunk.

On the same day, John went with Jack to the funeral home to make the arrangements.

“I remember being in the funeral director’s office,” John recalled, “and talking about the selection of the casket. I know these things are practical realities of life that have to be dealt with, but the funeral director’s sitting there and he’s suggesting [to Jack] that you might want to get a double plot, because it’s cheaper to buy two now, than buy two separately. And Jack decides, yeah, he thinks he’s going to go ahead and do that, buy a double plot.

“Now, this is my first time of ever arranging a funeral for anybody. I had no idea of what’s involved. And a double plot like that, it’s piggy-back. They bury Irene 12 feet down and then you know, they go six feet down with the one on top.”

John thought Jack was being foolish.

“You know, Jack,” John said at the time, “you’re a young man. This is ridiculous. You don’t need to buy a double plot. You’re likely going to remarry someday. And then what are you going to do, be buried next to your first wife? After you’ve been married to your second wife for 35 or 40 years? It makes no sense. It’s going to go over someday like a lead balloon with your new wife. Why don’t you save yourself a few bucks and let’s just forget about this?”

But Jack thought the double plot option was an excellent idea.

“He wanted to be buried there with his wife,” John recalled, even if it didn’t happen for another 40 years.

The following day, both Jack and John went back to the funeral home to complete the arrangements. The main question was whether the casket should be open or closed. Denise Call, for one, strongly wanted the casket to be open, because she wanted to see her friend one last time.

By then, the two other Paget children, Paul and Debra, had arrived in Sacramento with their own families. As a result, John, Debbie and Paul all went with Jack to the funeral home. So did Roberta and Tim O’Keefe.

“This was the viewing of Irene’s body,” John recalled. “There was a—because of the autopsy, and because of the trauma to the body, and the period of time that had elapsed, there was concern as to whether this would be open casket or closed casket.

“And Jack kept insisting he wanted it to be an open casket ceremony. And I and my sister and several others said, this is really not what we want. But Jack’s—we thought, we’ve got to do it Jack’s way. So Jack asked me to go to the viewing with him to see if Irene looked good enough to be displayed.”

Even more than five years later, John Paget’s emotion from the scene that was about to unfold was still evident, even if it is hard to describe in printed words.

“So we go to the funeral home on Wednesday,” John recalled, his voice breaking. “The funeral director tried to explain or warn us.

“He said, ‘She looks really good, but she may not look the way you remember her.’ And Jack wanted to go in by himself. But Roberta wouldn’t have any part of it. She insisted that she be there. So she went in with him. And then they spent a short time in there and came back out in tears.

“And so my sister and my brother and I went in. And of course this is—I had just seen my sister for the last time alive, only a few months before. So we walked in and she was laying there. And it was obvious who it was, I mean, I could identify and recognize, This is my sister. She’s—This smack of reality hits you right in the face.

“Because from Monday until Thursday you intellectually know that she’s gone, you intellectually know that she’s at the funeral home. You know that she’s undergone this autopsy. But you’re never prepared for your own family member, as to what the reality is until you walk up to that casket and she’s laying there.

“And she was swollen …”

At this point, even five years later, John began to cry.

“I’m sorry,” he said, in an interview, and then continued, slowly. “I bent down to kiss her on the cheek,” he said, his voice breaking once again and turning to a whisper, “… and she was ice-cold.”

“So anyway,” John continued, later, “we walked out after a few minutes. And we all agreed we would close the casket. We didn’t want the rest of the family to see her. I told Jack: I do not want my parents to be subjected to this. It’s cruel.”

The casket remained closed.

A day later, Irene was laid to rest in the double plot at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Sacramento. Isn’t that something, John thought, numb, as they drove through the gates for the final farewell to Irene. Born at St. Mary’s Hospital in Reno; buried at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Sacramento.