To read an excerpt from the book, please click on the following link:

ashaveilbook.blogspot.com

An excerpt from The Pleasure Palace, my romantic comedy, can be found here:



Tuesday, August 26, 2014

That Time

Such strange occurrences--the person in question's therapist (whose husband I know very well from Al-Anon, and she also used to be my therapist for a short time) happened to be in a local coffee shop and hung close to me for a few minutes as I talked to my neighbor friend from Lompico; she was obviously listening to me as she rather slowly put fixings in her coffee.  Wonder what that was all about.  Hm.

Anyways, on to the task of the day: I went to the Ben Lomond Market for some mashed potatoes, weirdly to eat something that Asha might have liked (her last meal on earth was Chinese chicken and fried rice, persumably from the deli--horrible to think about her buying it, not knowing this would literally be the last thing she ever ate. She ate lunch that day with McClish and coworkers--yes, she ate lunch with the man who would kill her just a few hours later.-She liked a "special meatloaf plate" from there also--the closest thing I could find was a dinner plate they make during the month; presumably they will serve it next month).  Part of my devotion to getting inside Asha's life a little can be seen in the fact that I am a nearly-vegan vegetarian, but I am going to sample a little of the meatloaf because I want to understand why she liked that particular thing.  Usually stuff like that which is heavily spiced, cooked, etc,, doesn't really taste like meat anyways, just...well, meatloaf.

The light is beginning to change in the San Lorenzo Valley, taking on that pale-white-and-golden aspect which I have seen nowhere else; I used to live in Watsonville and the quality of autumn light there is much more spectacular, a champagne-gold Rembrandt light.  Here in the Valley, the summer-falling-into-autumn light is also lovely, a harbinger of change.  Summer seems overlaid with a delicate veneer of autumn; the nights are a promise of colder weather to come.  This is a season of change: back to school, the smell of wax crayons and pencils and kindergarten alphabet paper in my life again with Thistle--the evocative going-back-to school scents and colors of a little girl's school supplies, denied forever for Richard, Asha, Anina, and all the people who loved them.

Anina would have been seven years old, seven going on eight. probably a second-grader by now.  To imagine what was lost, in bits and pieces, can eventually create the whole mosaic, the expanse, breadth, and depth of lost lives and all that ended with them.

This is how I step carefully into her life, as delicately as possible, as if touching my toes into deep, icy creek water.

Writers must do this sort of thing.

I drove to where McClish dumped Asha's car after searching on Google Maps last night--the place was much farther away than I thought, nearly at the junction of Love Creek Road, where the madman drove through the night to the place where he hid her body.  I kept feeling like Will Graham from Hannibal, saying "This is my design."  I now see how interesting that particular device is, to get an idea of the killer's motivation, get inside his head, a sense of how quickly he had to get rid of things: the area is rural, but not extensively so, and there are houses everywhere.  There could be no screams, no loud noises, nothing.  He took her to a place where she could not be heard.  Did she try to drive her car away, did he block her?  Why did no one hear anything?

Anyways, yes, the light these days has definitely changed, and it helps me to enter into that time: September, when Asha disappeared, almost without a trace.


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