Moving Day: A Thriller by Stone Jonathan

Author:Stone, Jonathan [Stone, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2014-06-01T07:00:00+00:00

It is a California morning—meaning perfect. The sun is bright, the sky a crystalline blue, suspended above a deeper blue and endless Pacific. A Pacific that suitably frames forever.

Peke is on the back deck, having his pulpy, fresh-squeezed orange juice and his bowl of granola, staring out at the ocean. Rose is not awake yet; typically, she will be another hour. They are already settling into their new patterns. Their last new patterns, he knows, the patterns that will in all likelihood take them into their final sicknesses—whatever those turn out to be—and gliding frictionless and light, he hopes, into the ends of their lives.

But the thought evaporates in the vision of the blue Pacific. In its unfathomable depth. In its rhythmic wash of eternity. It is God rendered in liquid and gases. Not merely evidence of Him. People misunderstand that. It is Him. That ocean. Peke doesn’t know if that conception of God comes from a seven-year-old boy’s untutored, wild deifications in the brutal winter woods of Poland—a protective mechanism of survival, an adaptive trick of mind. Or if it is—as he half suspects—actually a genetic inheritance, an ancient collective-unconscious connectedness that someday science will better grasp. He knows only that when he looks at the ocean—or the moon, or a redwood, or a leaf, or a stone—he feels he is literally looking at God. He’s surprised others don’t simply feel that. He knows he is like primitive man in that regard. Which is odd, ironic, given the majority of his life, a life of urbanity and sophistication and intricate judgments of art and politics. He is, has always been—in many more ways he sees as he grows older—a primitive.

They are settled into the house. As planned, much has gone into storage now. The new house is gracious, California contemporary, teaks and redwoods, proud beams and broad glass soaring.

They have spent time with some old friends, Manny and Sylvia Walsh, who preceded them here, have become closer to them lately, now that all of them seem to understand—unspoken—that they will spend the remainder of their lives with one another. They have already been to dinners and local theater with some of their new neighbors. They already command respect. They are already welcome, as they have been welcome everywhere, as worldly success makes one quickly welcome, as simple civility makes one welcome. It has taken almost no time. This is already their life. Educated, civilized retirees fit in instantly in Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara is for them.

Though he can’t help thinking about Montana, of course. He debates whether to now inform the police, afraid that if he does, the story will get out somehow, the local press will somehow sniff out the appealing, irresistible tale of an old man retrieving his things from a master thief. He will be made into some representation of bravery or revenge, something abstract and unreal. The police, regardless, will not like that he acted alone, took matters into his own hands, no doubt illegally at several stages, and he will make them look bad and incompetent besides.

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