Cliff

Chapter 2 -- The Body on the Beach

Mrs. Templeton had come to the ocean to think, and that was best done while walking on the beach, with the surf drowning out everything except the sea gulls. She always had a better day when she could start it out like this, alone. She never walked far, and she never walked fast. It wasn't exercise that she wanted, but solitude. She walked slowly and carefully among the large stones, thinking whatever she pleased, and making no conscious attempt at contact with a spiritual being, or meditating, and achieving a pretty regular job of both. It generally took a half hour to decide that the rest of the day ought to begin about now, and to walk back to her house to begin it.

She was a slim lady who had passed her 60th birthday some years ago. She had never considered herself pretty, but she was, even now. She had gray hair that had once been dark brown, even features, and gray eyes that had always been gray. She looked alert and intelligent, and she was, and had always been. Librarians are often solitary creatures, enjoying books, who must work with other people for their livelihood.

The sea to her right and the cliffs above to her left served to give her some idea of her precise place in this universe. She was very small, compared to the power of the sea and the height of the cliff, and very temporary compared to the time it had taken to create this place where she was walking. She would outlive her footsteps, but neither she nor her footprints in the sand would have any lifespan to compare with time as thought of by the cliffs and the sea.

But temporary as she was, she still had a place here. Seagulls had lived here for millennia, but not individual seagulls. So although she was only an individual with a duration only slightly more than the seagull, she too had a place here, and a job to do, something to accomplish, some reason for being here. These thoughts inspired her to work the rest of her day with purpose and fortitude.

It was a beautiful morning, the fog from last night could be seen off the coast. The sun had not appeared over the cliffs yet, but was shining on the ocean. It looked crisp and inviting, somehow. The tide was going out, but Mrs. Templeton was waking on dry sand closer to the base of the cliffs. Her shoes were not waterproof and she didn't want to get her feet wet. The ocean was beautiful this morning, and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. Very different from last night, with the wet air and thick fog. Really, she couldn't see across the street from her front window.

She usually didn't notice much on the beach anymore, she had long since seen everything that could wash up on the shore, and beach combing had finally paled after some years. There were still occasionally interesting things to discover. She sometimes came upon a burnt-out bonfire, or the remains of beach parties that had faded into alcohol rather than closed down in an orderly fashion. Once she had nearly stepped on a sleeping reveler, catching him between the hilarity of the evening before and the hangover of the day to come.

At first she thought she had found another such, laying on the sand next to several large rocks below the cliff overhang. The boulders blocked her view of him until she was fairly close. She had been watching where her feet were going just then, ignoring the landscape. Suddenly, there he was, sprawled out on the sand, asleep.

As she approached, she wondered just what she should do. She could step carefully around him. She assumed that, although you couldn't really tell, he was wearing work pants, an olive-drab military surplus jacket and a rain hat pulled down over his face. I guess you don't think of women sleeping overnight on the beach alone in the fog, although Mrs. Templeton could not exactly see why not, these days.

He, or she, might not appreciate her waking him, or her, she thought. On the other hand, it was wet and cold on the beach, and he might catch cold or something worse. Mrs. Templeton cared for her fellow creature as often and as much as she could afford to.

As she got closer, the sleeper began to look to her like he might be hurt. He didn't look at all natural, laying there between the large rocks under the cliff edge.

Finally, she was standing right over him, and the same questions occurred to her, now far more acutely. Disturb him or not? He was lying face down in a sort of sprawl and for a moment she wondered how he could be breathing like that. She decided that she would wake him up.

She needn't have worried. She wasn't going to disturb him. Nothing was ever going to disturb him. That fact slowly impressed itself on her as she first spoke, then put a hand on his neck him, and then put her hand under his shoulder and turned him face up.

There didn't seem much need for emergency action of any sort, vocal or ambulatory. He didn't appear to be anything near alive. Mrs. Templeton walked briskly back to her home, where she knew there would be a telephone available, and telephoned the constable.

The Constable's office recorder answered and offered the office hours to her, and then, reluctantly, the constables home phone number, "in case of serious emergency." She would have to use that number. It didn't feel like an emergency. She felt cold inside and was, she supposed, thinking very clearly.

The Constable, once aroused, and convinced that there was a real situation to deal with, and that the caller was someone who knew him, and therefore someone he could not avoid, took a slightly more animated approach to the situation, and in time his official car and an ambulance were down on the beach below the cliff Mrs. Templeton had described to him. Later on another car arrived with the County Medical Examiner, and finally one more as the regional newspaper reporter arrived.

The Medical Examiner confirmed what the others had merely guessed, that the young man had broken his neck in a fall from the cliff above and had died instantly.

Mrs. Templeton remained at the edge of the scene, answering questions put to her by constituted authority. They didn't seem to expect too much from her, and seemed satisfied with the simplicity of her story. At one time or another everyone at the scene walked up to the edge of the cliff and looked around and over the edge. It seemed to Mrs. Templeton that they were exploring the idea that the man had fallen over the cliff, but only Mrs. Templeton, it seemed, had enough imagination to wonder if he had been pushed.

As for her own participation in the tragedy, she regretted being the eye witness, contemplating the number of times she would have to repeat her story through the village in the coming days. There was little enough to tell. She had never seen the man before, and he just looked dead, that's all. He didn't look alive. She had seen many people in her years, even the occasional dead one in a funeral home. It was easy to tell the dead ones from the live ones, which made a pretty good case for the existence of a soul, in the body in the case of the live ones and missing from the dead ones, Mrs. Templeton mused. It made one think of one's own finite existence.

She wondered how he had gotten there. She wondered if he had been pushed. That invited a whole lot of other thoughts into her consciousness. Who was he? Why was he pushed off of a cliff? Who pushed him? When did they push him over the edge? He had fallen on the rocks and it must be twenty or thirty feet down. Either A fall or a push would surely be fatal. That cliff had been discussed before, and why more people didn't fall over it in the dark Mrs. Templeton couldn't imagine. It was very dangerous and there ought to be a guard rail or a fence. Maybe now the City Council would do it now, after this accident.

It could well have been an accident. Maybe the man had been drinking. The walking path was several yards in from the edge. It would be hard to imaging someone who had all his senses wandering off the gravel path towards the ocean, even in the dark.

Finally, everyone at the scene in authority seemed to lose interest, and left. Mrs. Templeton hurried on to the Library. It would be a busy day for books and magazines. The morning's events would be generally good for business. Mrs. Templeton was the village librarian, but expected to spend much of this day speaking to each villager in turn, as they found it necessary to drop by the library today. She expected to write up a few new library cards, too. She could also hope that some of them would return their overdue books. Perhaps that would provide some of them the excuse they needed to drop in.