Misadventure [antikvár]

ONEShe lay enshrouded in mist, wedged between two rocks. A dead body with the sea below and, above, the brow of the cliff.The fall had already transformed her; she looked vacant and unremarkable, utterly unlike her vivid, discontented self Her death felt lunatic in its incongruity.Wave after mutilating wave curled and crashed. I felt by turns compassion and relief. All my imponderables were in the past; even had I weighed every conceivable pro and con and what-if and then-what, it wouldn't have mattered now.Far out beyond the kelp bed, a solitary boat tossed on the water. Among its running gear, inevitably, would be a pair of binoculars. Were they trained on me? Had its radio already patched into the marine police at Santa Monica?What else had I overlooked?With unsure steps, I climbed up the tumble of rocks, over the edge of the precipice, across the sprawling desolation of that rose garden where I had first set eyes on her, when her beauty was an astonishment. So far in the past that it seemed another country, another ageall of six weeks, on a day not unlike this with the wind biting into the car, hanging a curtain of sand across the dying sun, sand crawling across the road like a procession of sidewinders.