Chapter 43

Ever since I could take a bus, then drive, I’ve made a weekly pilgrimage to the legendary Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Always on Sunday. Located on Santa Monica Boulevard across from Paramount Pictures, it’s equidistant from both my house and Ned’s. A short fifteen-minute drive. I bet with binoculars you could see it from the edge of his former Hollywood residence.

Many residents of Los Angeles as well as tourists come to this popular California landmark to see the outdoor, mostly iconic movies they play on weekends throughout the summer. I’ve never done that. I couldn’t. I can’t.

This is where my sister and her baby are buried.

Usually before visiting them, I go to mass at a nearby church, but today I don’t have time. I park Ned’s Lamborghini in the visitor parking lot and hastily make my way into the cemetery.

The verdant park-like grounds are graced by stunning flowers, trees, and swan-filled lakes, and I know my way around the sixty acres like the back of my hand. Carrying a bouquet of flowers that I purchased at the flower shop by the entrance, I wend down a serpentine brick path passing myriad tombstones and mausoleums, some as big as Beverly Hills mansions, including one belonging to one of my sister’s idols, Judy Garland, until I reached my destination—the modest but stately mausoleum that houses my beloved sister and her baby. The pediment is inscribed with our family name. Mann. One day I will rest here too…with my child.

Though my sister had no directive—why would she at the age of seventeen with her whole life ahead of her?—Mama knew this is where she would have wanted to be buried. To be among the movie and television stars she worshipped…with her baby. With the money I saved, I erected the mausoleum and entombed them inside it. Maybe it isn’t the size of a Bel Air mansion, but it’s the closest I could get to one. And I knew it would make my sister happy.

Despite the gloomy weather—the air is thick and sticky and it even looks like it may thunderstorm, which is rare in Southern California—my heart feels lighter than usual. After today, I may not be here again for a long time, but I know that at last they will rest in peace. Well, at least more peacefully. Eternal peace will not come until all of them are dead. The butcher, the enabler, and the man who betrayed her.

Despite my lightness of being, tears fill my eyes as I kneel to lay the flowers on the freshly cut grass that surrounds the masonry structure. Evil stole my family from me all too soon. Shutting my eyes, my mind flashes back twenty life-changing years ago.