“You’ve been very helpful.” Shephard gave her a card and shook a cool, unresisting hand. “If you think of anything that might help us, give me a call. Immediately, if you see that man again.”
He stopped at a pay phone to relay the parking ticket search to Pavlik. The crime scene investigator had rebounded since his grim encounter with Hope Creeley; his voice was excited again, his words coming quickly. Robbins and Yee had started early on the body, he said. Robbins had called to report that again turpentine had been splashed in liberal amounts over the body. Yee’s lab had already issued a preliminary cause of death, unremarkable considering the evidence: death by burning. Pavlik took to the parking ticket search like a bird to the sky, ringing off in a hurry and telling Shephard to call in an hour. “Let’s nail this sonofabitch,” he said.
Dorothea Schilling of the Laguna Beach Historical Society looked historical, Shephard thought as he introduced himself. She was bundled in a pink sweater, even though the day was already eighty and the musty Society rooms were unventilated and stifling.
After Shephard asked to see Hope Creeley’s recent donations to the Society, Dorothea led him to the back of a second room and pointed to a lumpy couch. “Right here is where you sit,” she said. With his back to the doorway, sinking into the couch so far he wondered if he’d ever get back out, Shephard waited for her to return. Some time later she was back, pushing a dull gray cart with a loose wheel that squeaked and wobbled. Finally she was before him, smiling, offering a low, wide box that bulged at the sides. “I thought you might like some peace and quiet,” she said.
He studied the box. “How about the diary, Dorothea? May I see that too?”
She shook her head gravely. “I’m sorry, but Hope’s desire is that the diary remain sealed until five years after her death. It’s a matter of—”
Shephard brought out his badge. “I forgot to mention, Dorothea, that this is police business.”
She nodded, brows furrowing. A moment later she was back with a heavy, leather-bound book.
He felt like the prisoner of an overly kind aunt, but the feeling was not altogether unpleasant. She brought him a cup of instant coffee so strong that it was undrinkable, so hot that the plastic spoon had wilted into uselessness. He thanked her profusely, smiling as she hobbled off to the front room cinching the bright sweater around her neck.
The box contained newspaper clippings taped to notebook paper. The articles were yellowed and weakened by time, and the tape had collected a dark residue of dust around its edges. But each sheet was dated in the upper right corner, and they were arranged chronologically. Shephard set the stack on the couch beside him, glanced at the vile coffee, and started at the beginning.
Hope Augustine had first surfaced in the press in 1943, when she was pictured in the Laguna Week News as one of several local women honored for her work with the Red Cross. She was third from the left in the group shot, a dreamy smile on her face, her hair held severely back with a clip. The article said that she had recently returned from service overseas. Later that year she was again pictured in the Laguna Week News, this time for organizing a volunteer support group for the South Laguna Hospital. The group called themselves the Angelitos — Little Angels — and the other women were like Hope Augustine: young, pretty, happy. They had dedicated themselves to outpatient care and fund raising. Hope was president. She was quoted succinctly in the short article: “I think work like this is the least we can do in wartime.”
A year later she was pictured in the engagements column of the same paper. Her betrothed was Burton Creeley, an accountant and partner in the newly formed Surfside Sail and Tennis Club in Newport Beach.
No wonder she was a member, Shephard thought. Had she known Tim Algernon then?
Apparently, Hope Augustine had become Hope Creeley and moved to Newport Beach, five miles north of Laguna on the same unspoiled coast. The Newport Ensign picked up her story again in late 1944, when she was pictured as the new bride of businessman Creeley. He was beside her in the wedding shot, a frail, dapper man who was five years her senior. The couple appeared regularly through 1944 and 1945, favorite targets of party-going photographers. They were pictured aboard yachts, at ground-breaking ceremonies for additions to the Surfside Club, in tennis garb at post-tournament parties. One photograph was similar to the one he’d seen in Creeley’s house: Hope and Burton standing on the Surfside court, a trophy at their feet. The happy couple continued their public lives through the forties, always surrounded by the postwar gaiety and newfound opulence of the Surfside Club.
Then Burton Creeley was dead. An article dated September 26, 1951, said that fishermen had discovered his body dashed against the rocks of the Newport jetty. The next day’s Santa Ana Register said that Creeley was known to swim every evening in the ocean, sometimes in the channel at Newport, sometimes south in Laguna Beach where the currents were known to be treacherous. Burton Creeley was officially classified as the victim of a swimming accident by the Newport Beach Police on September 29.
But on the next day, the Register ran a short article with a large headline, claiming that Creeley had been seen by two friends in Laguna shortly before the accident had taken place. A follow-up story stated that the friends turned out to be two gas station attendants who “believed” they recognized Creeley from newspaper photos. A Newport Beach police captain wryly questioned how a body could wash six miles north, around a jetty, and end up in the Newport Channel in less than a night.
The press lost interest, and Hope Creeley disappeared from the public eye for twenty-four years.
Shephard felt a keen sadness as he looked at the next picture. It was dated November 28, 1975, and showed Hope Creeley, thin and undeniably without happiness, staring back at the photographer. She had organized a support group for the South Laguna Hospital again, and again they called themselves the Angelitos.
Hope Creeley had never looked so far away from heaven, Shephard thought. The women around her were young and vibrant, as she had once been, but Hope Creeley looked pained. Her eyes were still large, but her face had shrunk around them, sagging heavily at the mouth. A year later she was pictured again, this time receiving an award from the hospital’s board chairman, whose beefy grin dominated the one-column shot.
Hope Creeley’s forced and very minor smile was the last one of her public life.
Shephard turned the last clipping onto the pile beside him and lit a cigarette. A sad life and a sadder death, he thought. But why would an avenging God come to make His misery hers? Hadn’t she had enough?
The cigarette tasted raw and bad. He dropped it into an ashtray and watched the smoke lift upward through the stale air. Behind him, from the Historical Society lobby, he heard Dorothea Schilling sneeze, open a drawer, dryly blow her nose. She doesn’t even know yet, he thought.
He hefted the leather-bound diary onto his lap. As he scanned through the book, he saw that the handwriting evolved from a graceful, purposeful flow to a more pragmatic curtness, and finally into wild scribbles that made up the last several entries.
The opening passage was dated January 1952. Four months after her husband’s death, Shephard thought. He felt the pain in her words as he read:
I have fulfilled one half of my New Year’s resolution by beginning this diary, and I’ll fill the other half when I join the Angelitos again. The truth is I’m awfully tired of the support group, even though momma and everyone else tells me to get out of the house and participate. But every time I feel any energy, it takes me back to a time when such things meant something to me. Now, being part of a group is just like taking dead flowers and putting them in the vase I used to put Burt’s roses in. And speaking of that vase, I put it on the kitchen table today and watched the sunlight break through it into a small rainbow. It was lovely but I cried. I feel him everywhere. Mother says I should slowly remove such things from my life and only hold onto the good memories. This seems like good advice, to hold onto only good things. But I’m not sure what to do with the vase. Can good things hurt, too?