Nineteen

Jack was at work while these events unfolded; or at least, that’s where the EMTs found him when they told him by telephone of Ashley’s death.

Jack left work immediately and drove to the hospital, where he learned that the Coroner’s Office would begin another investigation of a death in his family. Then he drove home to spread the bad news.

“Denise, are you sitting down?”

“What?”

“Ashley’s gone.”

Denise exploded at Jack.

“How can this be?” she shouted. “Jack, three people in the same family can’t die for no reason. What are you doing? What’s going on?”

Jack mumbled something about some sort of toxic waste in the neighborhood, and said the experts were going to do some tests. He didn’t care anymore, Jack said. He was going to move, just give up the house, abandon it. He said he was going to move to Klamath Falls, Oregon, to get away from all the bad memories. Dave was going to help him get a job.

Denise hung up the telephone, furious with Jack. She told Cliff the news. Cliff just shook his head. By now both he and Denise were almost but not quite convinced that Jack had to be a murderer.

The first John Paget heard of any of these events was later the same afternoon.

For most of the year, John had maintained communications silence with Jack and Norma Paget. What information each side received was communicated through third parties, like John’s aunts and uncles or his sister and brother.

Thus, when John’s secretary told him that his uncle was on the telephone with “bad news,” and that he wanted to talk to him, John’s immediate concern was that something bad had happened to his parents.

“And so,” John recalled later, “I got on the phone, and Les informed me that Ashley was found in her bed in the early morning by her baby-sitter, and that she had died in her sleep.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” John told Les. “This is bizarre. There’s just no way she died in her sleep.”

“I know, John,” Les said. “We don’t know anything yet. I do know you and your father have been having problems this past year, but you need to know that they need you right now.”

John thought this over.

“This is really going to be tough,” he told Les. “I don’t know what to do.”

“You’re just going to have to forget about the past and take care of business,” Les told him. “They need you right now.”

John let a few hours pass, trying to figure out how he should make the telephone call and what he should say, in light of the estrangement.

“Eventually I picked up the phone, and my mother answered,” John recalled.

“I just heard a couple of hours ago about Ashley,” John told Norma. “I just don’t know what to say, I’m so sorry. I just want you to know that I’m taking the next plane that I can and I’ll be there to be in support of you and the rest of the family.”

“Under the circumstances, John, we don’t want you here,” Norma told her son.

John felt this as a stab in the heart.

“That was the last thing I needed to hear from my mother,” he recalled. But John was determined to do what he could to ease his parents’ pain. He persisted.

“Well, Mom,” he said, “maybe you don’t and that’s okay, if that’s the way you feel. But I’m still going to be there, because maybe someone else needs me. Besides that, Ashley was my niece, I was as fond of her as you were, and I intend to be there. I’m not going to cause any scene, I’m not going to impose myself on you if you don’t want me to be around. Can I talk to Dad?’

“I don’t know if he’ll talk to you,” Norma told John. “Just a minute.”

A minute or so later Jack Paget picked up the telephone.

“I just told Mom, I’m going to be there for Ashley’s funeral,” John told his father. “I’m going to be there to support the family in any way I can. I know that you folks are having some difficulties with me, and now with Ashley on top of everything, I know things are really tough for you, and I just want you to know that I’m here if you want me.”

“Thanks, John,” Jack Paget told his son. “Do what you have to do.”

This was hardly a ringing cry of enthusiasm, John thought.

“So I’m thinking, boy, that was pretty bad,” John recalled. “You know how they say, things are never as bad as you expect or as good as you hope?

“This one was as bad as I expected. So I said to myself, ‘Well, I can’t be in control of their feelings, I can only control my own.’

“I’m going to go ahead and come on up,” John told his father.

John flew into Sacramento the following day. He rented a car and got a hotel room, where he met one of his aunts, his father’s sister, and her family. The aunt told John that a family dinner was being planned, and that they wanted John to attend.

John shook his head no.

“I can’t go out to dinner if Mom and Dad are going to be there,” he told his aunt. “They don’t want to see me.”

“No, Les insisted that you come,” John’s aunt said.

John gave in, dreading the scene and the freeze-out he was expecting.

“So, okay, I went up to the dinner,” he recalled. “And when we got there my mother and father were there with Ruth and Les. And I walked in the room, and they both broke down in tears and came over and hugged me, and all was forgiven. And not a word about that situation has been spoken since.”

Here it was, then: the essential, all-too-human difference between the Barrons and the Pagets: the capacity to forgive, and to love.