Now he took his time approaching that final resting place, following a roundabout route through the memorial park, as he most often did, steeling himself for the sight of the plot, because the rest that it offered wasn’t his yet and would not be his until he could lie there in death.

The previous year, at his request, the cemetery approved the installation of a headstone without names engraved. He didn’t know why he felt it was essential to take that step. But he had become increasingly agitated by the absence of a grave marker. When it was completed a week before his birthday, his anxiety abated.

In the first hour after midnight on May 14 of that same year, his birthday, he had awakened from a dream and sat up in bed in his Corona del Mar cottage, struck by the realization that he had wanted the slab of granite erected not because he suspected Emily’s remains would be found imminently, but because his own death would occur within a few years, maybe sooner.

In that birthday dream, he had seen himself in a casket, his face painted with a semblance of life by a good mortician, mourners filing past to the strains of somber music. The scene had dissolved to the cemetery, where his casket was lowered into an open grave.

They said no one ever saw his own death in a dream, that the subconscious fiercely denied mortality and would not countenance it even in the worst of nightmares. His subsequent researches seemed to support that contention. Nevertheless, he’d dreamed of his death.

The plot that he’d purchased provided two graves. The memorial stone at the head of it was wide enough for two names, two sets of dates, two epitaphs. If his heart never clarified and healed after Emily, if he never married, his intention always had been to be buried with her at his side, assuming that her body would eventually be found.

He didn’t want to die. Somewhere in the depths of his heart, he believed he had earned his death by failing Emily. Nevertheless, he loved life and would hold fast to it as long as he could.

That birthday morning, he’d made an appointment with his attorney for the purpose of redrafting his will. If he should die before Emily was found, he would be buried in this cemetery, in the shade of a graceful California pepper tree, and when her remains were eventually located, they would be interred at his side.

Years earlier, he had been granted conservatorship of her small estate and the power of attorney allowing him to arrange for the disposition of her bones.

If one day his life changed and he married, he could always make different burial arrangements.

But he did not believe that he would ever marry. As vivid as his imagination was, he could not imagine a wedding, a wife.