I have seen photographs of California pepper trees in sunlight.  When brightly limned, they are lacy, graceful, green dreams of trees.

At night, the pepper acquires a different character from the one that it reveals in daylight.  It appears to hang its head, letting its long branches droop to conceal a face drawn with care or grief.

These trees flanked the long driveway to Kirk's Funeral Home, which stood on a three-acre knoll at the northeast edge of town, inland of Highway 1 and reached by an overpass.  They waited like lines of mourners, paying their respects.

As I climbed the private lane, on which low mushroom-shaped landscape lamps cast rings of light, the trees stirred in a breeze.  The friction between wind and leaves was a whispery lamentation.

No cars were parked along the mortuary approach, which meant that no viewings were in progress.

I myself travel through Moonlight Bay only on foot or on my bicycle.  There is no point in learning to drive a car.  I couldn't use it by day, and by night I would have to wear sunglasses to spare myself the sting of oncoming headlights.  Cops tend to frown on night driving with shades, no matter how cool you look.

The full moon had risen.

I like the moon.  It illuminates without scorching burnishes what is beautiful and grants concealment to what is not.

At the broad crown of the hill, the blacktop looped on back on itself to form a spacious turnaround with a small grassy circle at its center.  In the circle was cast-concrete reproduction of Michelangelo's Pietà.

The body of the dead Christ, cradled on his mother's lap, was luminous with reflected moonlight.  The Virgin also glowed faintly.  In sunshine, this crude replica must surely look unspeakably tacky.

Faced with terrible loss, however, most mourners find comfort in assurances of universal design and meaning, even when as clumsily expressed as in this reproduction.  One thing I love about people is their ability to be lifted so high by the smallest drafts of hope.

I stopped under the portico of the funeral home, hesitating because I couldn't assess the danger into which I was about to leap.

The massive two-story Georgian house - red brick with white wood trim - would have been the loveliest house in town, were the town not Moonlight Bay.  A spaceship from another galaxy, perched here, would have looked no more alien to our coastline than did Kirk's handsome pile.  This house needed elms, not pepper trees, drear heavens rather than the clear skies of California, and periodic lashings with rains far colder than those that would drench it here.

The second floor, where Sandy lived, was dark.

The viewing rooms were on the ground floor.  Through beveled, leaded panes that flanked the front door, I saw a weak light at the back of the house.

I rang the bell.

A man entered the far end of the hallway and approached the door.  Although he was only a silhouette, I recognized Sandy Kirk by his easy walk.  He moved with a grace that enhanced his good looks.