Vivian Hutchins, a slender woman with shoulder-length, light-brown hair, hazel eyes, and a creamy complexion, stood and gazed at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, a cemetery located in Glendale, about eight miles east of her residence.
Her grandmother, Desirée Hutchins, her father, Charles Hutchins, and her husband, Rob Peterson, were all buried in the Whispering Pines section of the sprawling cemetery. A fourth relative also lay in the ground there, but that individual’s grave happened to be fifty yards away from the others. Vivian didn’t want to think about this particular person. Instead, she thought about her younger brother and baby sister.
Twenty-two years is a long time, she thought. I should’ve looked for them after I had come back seven years ago. Instead, I feel as if I’ve wasted all those years waiting for them, hoping for word from either of them. I’m forty-four and before I know it, I’ll be fifty, then sixty, then . . .
Vivian felt melancholic as she stood on the flagstone veranda alongside a patio table with its hunter-green parasol closed. She breathed in the cool, mid-morning spring air with its sweet aroma of freshly cut grass and a tinge of night-blooming jasmine which still lingered from the evening before. A gentle breeze made her shiver, and she pulled her yellow-and-white cardigan tighter. She momentarily closed her eyes, then looked in the direction of the cemetery once again.
It’s nothing but a constant reminder of . . .
She couldn’t finish the sentence. She’d thought it many times before and now wondered, Why think such thoughts again? It only made her feel worse. She had previously said that she would not think about what had happened, when the unfortunate events had occurred. But, perversely, she continued to dwell on it time and again. When she would catch these thoughts invading her mind, she’d try to quash them—sometimes with success, sometimes without.
Just don’t think about it again, she thought. Be grateful for what you have had these past several years. Be grateful for what you have now.
Many times, Vivian admitted to herself that she had always appreciated the things she had, including this house that commanded a panoramic view from the Santa Monica Mountains. The mountains act as a barrier between the San Fernando Valley to the north and the greater Los Angeles Basin to the south.
It would have helped to know where they had gone, Vivian thought.
She sipped hot chamomile tea and briefly turned from looking at the cemetery. She wiped a tear from her eye. Then she glanced again at the well-manicured green hills of Forest Lawn, with the white colonial-style building near its entrance. She inhaled the bittersweet air and let out a weary sigh.
Shortly after a light lunch, Vivian went upstairs to the master suite on the second floor. She walked over to a trio of large, floor-to-ceiling, sliding closet doors, and crouched on her haunches and opened the middle section.
I shouldn’t have done without it for so long, she thought. After all, busy hands are happy hands and idle hands are the devil’s workshop.
She withdrew from the semi-dark confines of the closet an ivory-colored embroidery bag with large wooden loop handles at the top. She pushed aside spools of colored thread and skeins of yarn plus packages of various needles for sewing, cross-stitching, and needlepoint. There were several pre-printed canvases, one of which had two oversized long-stemmed roses, its petals with shades of reds and pinks, and its long stems and leaves with hues of greens highlighted with soft tinges of yellow. A pre-printed inscription above the roses, to be stitched in black, read Bless This House.
“Where is that . . . thing?” Vivian said as she looked in the bag.
It should’ve been in here, along with everything else, she thought. Well, guess it’s my payback for neglecting my needlepoint work for so long.
She looked deeper in the closet and pushed aside boxes. She stood and looked at the shelf above the rack of hangers where her clothes hung. There was nothing, but more timeworn cardboard boxes of various sizes and shapes.
She grabbed her sewing kit at one end of the shelf. Something fell and slapped the wooden surface of the shelf. She glanced in the direction from where the sound came and shrugged her shoulders. Giving her undivided attention to the sewing kit, she opened it and glanced inside.
“No, that’s not it,” Vivian said to herself.
She lifted the sewing kit, and before setting it back on the shelf, saw the thing she had been looking for—a thick, ten-inch wooden hoop. She pulled it off the shelf and while putting it in the bag, fleetingly thought, I wonder what fell up there?
As she went to put the sewing kit back on the shelf, she noticed the edge of a black, wooden picture frame.
So, that’s what fell, she thought.
She used her fingertips to grasp the picture frame and slide it toward the edge of the shelf. She brought it down to eye level and gazed at the portrait which stared back at her.
An eight-by-ten black-and-white glossy of a beautiful, twenty-year-old woman looked back at Vivian. The woman in the picture had a Betty Grable type of look, sweet and cherubic, with a subtle smile. Her hair was light blond and styled from the 1960s era. Light, shadow, and makeup were exquisite. An autograph had been written in cursive script with a black felt-tip marker in the lower right-hand corner: Rose Hutchins, 1966.