chapter 1: Cape June 8, 1979

Jon Megquire’s mother was the first dead person he associated with Cape Cod. It wouldn’t be the last. On this particular, sunny June day in 1979 his mother’s death was just one of the colors in the tapestry of his thoughts as he drove his MG Midget, Maybelline, to the Cape to play baseball.


In fact, the Cape was meant to be a postcard of pleasure - a happy, beautiful, joyful summer place, a place to make life-lasting, fond memories not a place to contemplate death and dying. But memories are not always predictable.


Two years before this particular day, his parents told him about their friends’ wedding plans at the historic resort on the south side of the Cape; Jon had been away at school and hadn’t paid much attention. His parents’ friends had arranged a ceremony on the beach and invited everyone to share their precious moments. Jon obliquely blamed the couple for his mother’s death. Should it have occurred to them that even the most beautiful of settings can be deadly? Should they have recognized that the membrane between happiness and pain is shockingly thin?


As the miles of highway unrolled in front of Maybelline, Jon thought about his parents, Margy and Andy, driving up from their home outside New York City and checking into a motel tucked among a collection of neon touristy American strips of establishments promoting family fun: French fries, clam rolls, miniature golf, and cheap rooms, color television, and heated pools.


Jon could hear them laughing at the tackiness and his mother saying with a soft smile, “It’s only one night.” She would have excused the tackiness if the sheets were clean and the room didn't stink of air fresheners. They would have dressed in their stiff but beautiful wedding attire. Margy would have put on makeup and fixed her hair. Andy would have told her she looked beautiful. They might have laughed about this return to their youth - no kids and a night in a motel on Cape Cod. Then they drove to the resort.


It pleased Jon to think they would have had a happy night. They were together, laughing and joking with their friends and the family members of the couple. They were drinking and might have been singing snippets of songs they grew up with. The weather had been perfect. His father had told him later the ceremony on the beach was interrupted only once by a happy Irish Setter carrying a Frisbee in its dripping jaw. The dog shook the water off its sodden fur in front of the minister and then dashed back to its master who waved an apologetic hand and disappeared quickly over a dune. “There’s nothing friendlier than a wet dog!” his father told him. At the reception, one brief flare-up occurred between two brothers who apparently never got along, couldn’t hold their alcohol, and raised their voices above the refrain of the “Chicken Dance” and had to be asked to leave the room by their embarrassed mother.


Finally, in the early hours of the morning, Andy and Margy had gotten in their car and driven the short distance to their motel where they had climbed to their second-floor room and dropped onto the creaky bed. Each time Jon imagined the scene, he wanted them to turn around, go back down the stairs, and never go in that room.


Apparently, the maid found them the next morning. He imagined the woman screaming, freaking out, dropping her cleaning tools, then calling the front desk in a panic. When the EMTs got to them, Andy Megquire was still alive, but barely. Margy had died in her sleep. At least death was probably painless so the authorities told him. But how would they know? They’d never experienced dying. The coroner’s office blamed the incident on a faulty pool heater from the indoor pool just below his parents’ room. Turned out other people had complained about that room. The owner, under legal pressure, claimed he had been told the problem had been addressed and fixed.

Death at the Edge of the Diamond - Chapter 1