Day 2 The Mystic of Fog

A piece of Chapter 3: The Overlook

She had meant to leave Astoria that morning, and the Column was the reason she did not. It stood at the top of Coxcomb Hill above the town, a tall pale tower wound round with a painted mural gone soft with age, and from the little observation deck at the top of it you could see, on a clear day, the whole green sweep of the river meeting the sea. Nora remembered being taken up it as a girl, climbing the long spiral stair until her legs shook and her mother told her to stop counting out loud. She had not planned to climb it again. But the fog had burned off into one of those rinsed blue mornings the coast gives you once in a while as an apology for all the gray ones, and she thought, before I go, I will go up and look at all of it from the top, and remember being nine. So she pointed the Marigold up the hill with the camera on the seat beside her, and that was how she came to be there when they covered the body. She knew before she reached the top that something was wrong, the way you always know. There were two patrol cars parked at an-gles across the little lot, and an ambulance with its back doors open and its lights turning slow and pointless in the bright air, and the yel-low tape strung from a trash can to a young pine to the leg of a picnic table, making the loose, improvised shape that official tape always makes when no one quite expected to need it. A handful of people stood at the edge of the lot the way people do, drawn and repelled in equal measure, holding their coffees, not talking much. Nora parked the bus well back and got out, and the old machinery in her came awake all at once, quiet and complete, the way it had not come awake in a long time. He was at the base of the tower, on the grass below the observa-tion deck, and they had a blanket over most of him by the time she could see, which she was grateful for. An older man. That was all she let herself take in at first. An older man in a brown jacket, lying on the green hill below the white tower, with the sea shining behind it all as if nothing at all had happened. A medic knelt by him doing the slow careful nothing that medics do when there is nothing left to do. A sheriff's deputy stood over the scene with his hands on his belt, and he was already, Nora could see, finished with it. His whole posture said finished. A fall. A bad fall from the deck, a railing too low or a man too careless, a tragedy, a thing to write up and go home from. Nora knew she should get back in the bus. But she did not.