Free Double Image by David Morrell Page B

after he finished making the prints and went to the living room to press the play button on his answering machine, he frowned when all he heard was mournful classical music.
    Jennifer stopped next to him. “The same as on Saturday night?”
    Coltrane nodded, troubled. “And this time, we know it wasn’t Packard.”
     
7
     
    REPRESSING HIS MISGIVINGS ABOUT THE PHONE CALLS, Coltrane left his apartment the next morning shortly after seven. He brimmed with energy, never having been this enthusiastic about any project. First, a few blocks away, he stopped at a mailbox to drop in an envelope addressed to Diane. Along with three copies of her photograph, the package contained a copy of Packard’s Falcon Lair photograph and Coltrane’s parallel version of it. His note read, “Here are some mementos of our photographic adventure. Enjoy your honeymoon. I wish you every happiness.” He watched the lid close on the mailbox. To grab at life, he thought.
    With that, he went to work.
    There was a time, he knew, when pepper trees had grown on Hollywood Boulevard, when Beverly Hills had bridle paths, when streetcar tracks occupied the route that freeways now did, when Sherman Oaks, North Hollywood, Burbank, Tarzana, Encino, Van Nuys, and all the other communities in the San Fernando Valley (how Coltrane loved the litany of their names) were distinct villages separated by farmland. Each had a different architecture, English-style cottages in one contrasting with mission-style bungalows in another, Victorians in this area, colonials in that. The distinctness of each area was destroyed as the farmland shrank and the communities merged, although sometimes, driving from community to community, if Coltrane ignored where the borders met and concentrated only on the historical core of each area, he could still see the contrast between one community and another.
    Randolph Packard had managed to capture those differences. He recorded a sense of welcoming space, of sun-bathed separateness. As always in his photographs, a detail here and there predicted the impending doom — the tiny figures of surveyors on a field in the background, for example, or a half-completed skeleton of a building on a distant hill. Coltrane brooded about those changes as he took the 405 into the smog-filled valley. He imagined what it must have been like in Packard’s youth to have a clear view of the now-haze-shrouded San Gabriel Mountains. As he followed Packard’s route, trying to see with Packard’s eyes, he had the sensation of going back in time.
     
8
     
    THE TRAILER COURT WAS IN GLENDALE — drab rows of dilapidated mobile homes, overflowing Dumpster bins at the end of each row, gravel in front of each trailer, no grass anywhere, no trees, just a few flower boxes here and there, spindly marigolds and geraniums drooping over their rims. Coltrane drove down to the third row and turned left, passing an elderly man wearing suspenders over a T-shirt and carrying a basket of laundry toward a clothesline at the side of his trailer.
    Halfway along, Coltrane reached a small playground, stopped the car, got out, and approached the playground’s rusted waist-high chain-link fence. The swings and the teeter-totter were tarnished and unpainted. The ground was like concrete. A thin black woman pushed a young boy in a swing. The woman’s dark hair hung in half a dozen braids. She wore sandals, wrinkled shorts, and a red pullover, which, although faded, was the only bright spot in the trailer court. As the boy stretched his legs to give more force to his upward momentum, the soles of his running shoes were visible — and their holes.
    The woman narrowed her eyes toward Coltrane, then returned her attention to the boy.
    “Hi,” Coltrane said.
    She didn’t answer.
    “I used to live here,” he said.
    The woman stayed silent.
    “Every once in a while, when I’m in the neighborhood, I come back.”
    The woman shrugged.
    “My mother used to push me in those swings,”