The second girl died on the sand. It was my birthday. I was two years old and eight hundred miles away. She had a red plastic purse, and it had gone missing. Her hair was dark, and her eyes were light, like mine. Horrible things were done to her body. Her name was Claire.
I grew up in Del Mar, across the street from Torrey Pines State Beach. We moved to a condo when I was eight and my bedroom opened to a patio through screen doors. As a teenager, I liked to sneak out at night for no reason. It was easy. All I had to do was open the door and hop over a short stucco wall, and then I could walk down the hill to the beach. I brought my Discman, a pack of cigarettes.
That was exactly what Claire was doing the night she died. She snuck out a patio door for no reason. She walked down the hill to the beach, bringing her music and cigarettes. The only difference between her and me was she had a boombox instead of a Discman, the difference of a decade and a half. I did what she did and walked where she walked, but I didn’t die. I lived.
Torrey Pines is named for the Torrey pine, my favorite tree, the namesake of so many things in Del Mar—my high school, the main road, the golf course, the beach. It only lives two places in the world. The tree is distinct because of its eight-inch-long needles, and large cones, bigger than my hand, which are sharply lobed and heavy with edible nuts. They fall onto the ground with a fat smack.
The man who found Claire was named Ezekiel Driver. He was a war veteran, a psychic, and a beachcomber. That’s what he’d been doing when he found her—looking for cans. It was just past dawn. He’d been drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup when he saw her, the pale skin and the sand caked with blood. The cup fell from his fingers into the sand, and then he found a payphone. The discarded cup became evidence.
The first girl died on the sand too. It was one week and four days before my birthday, except I wouldn’t be born for four years. She had a boyfriend sleeping beside her, and he was beaten by her killer, but he lived. Her hair was dark, and her eyes were dark, like my best friend when I was fifteen. Horrible things were done to her body. Her name was Barbara.
The Torrey pine is rare, endangered. Besides Del Mar, it only lives on Santa Rosa Island, two hundred miles north. Nobody knows why just these two places, if it was birds with seeds or tectonics or something else.
Scientists, in an attempt to explain the existence of the Torrey pine, concluded that it was the one remaining survivor of a multitude of coastal pines, which all likely died due to a warmer, drier climate. The evidence for this is a dramatic decrease in pollen found in ocean sediment. There are grains of pollen settled into the floor of the ocean that are over ten thousand years old, dredged up by scientists to sift through our past.
Maybe I am right. Maybe that piece of land is a portal to something.
That beach is dead girls, but I didn’t know that until I’d moved away, twice the age of Claire and Barbara. My whole childhood, Torrey Pines State Beach was just Torrey Pines State Beach, the beach in front of my home. At night, the neighborhood is so quiet: crickets, the sound of the waves, the occasional train. The beach is dark and on a moonless night you can’t see your hand in front of your face. The beach at night always frightened me, but I assumed it frightened me because it was dark.
Claire was killed at Tower 5, the lifeguard tower closest to the main entrance at the parking lot. The mouth of the ocean comes in under the bridge and feeds into the estuary. At night, the fog rolls in from the still water into the hills. That bridge is right near the 101—just a few hops and you’re on the rocks, and then you’re on the sand. Tourists park there at night and watch the water. From our condo, their taillights glow in a red strip, and everything else is black except for the pale writhing streak that is the foam of the waves.
Barbara was killed at Tower 7, the lifeguard tower nearest to the entrance that’s only accessible by footpath. The path is sand, and it cuts through a blank space that has been designated as part of Torrey Pines State Reserve but is otherwise an unremarkable patch of chaparral. The path goes under a viaduct bridge, over the railroad tracks, and then you’re at the sand. The bridge was once rated the least structurally sound in all of San Diego, one of the worst in the country, but they have since repaired it. It took them twenty years.
The blank space takes up an inordinate amount of my subconscious. It is where my father buried my dead cat, likely poisoned by an unhinged neighbor. It is where I had sex with my best friend’s boyfriend, the one with the dark hair and the dark eyes, an act I felt humiliated by even when it was happening, in the middle of the footpath in the darkness. It is where I played house as a child, in the hollows of the only tree, a twisted coastal oak with its branches touching the ground. That tree is where I used to hide as a teenager to smoke pot.
Del Mar has its own microclimate, the best explanation why the Torrey pine lives there and nowhere else. It’s a scrunched-in strip of coast, bordered by a tall stretch of bluffs. In the summertime, the air warms, but the ocean stays the same temperature, and clouds bunch in like a curtain, trapping moisture. It is called May Gray or June Gloom but often stretches into August, and the temperature in Del Mar will be ten or twenty degrees cooler than just a mile inland. This curtain is what allows the Torrey pine to survive. It needs the moisture, the coolness, the protection from the clouds. For the Torrey pine, Del Mar is a cradle.
That night, after Ezekiel went home, after he’d stayed for hours at the beach talking to police, he had one of his psychic visions. He lived in a little bungalow miles east near the air force base. He paid for it with his military pension and the little bit extra he got from disability. He kept his house very neat, even though he rarely had visitors, just his daughters, occasionally. He collected things, which he kept in oak hutches—depression glass, porcelain animals, different cultures’ representations of Jesus. Every Sunday, he took out each item and dusted it, placing them back neatly in their designated spots. He didn’t need electric lights because he could see in the dark, but he did like the glow of the TV. He had four of them, three color and one black and white. In the evenings, he turned them on, each to a different channel. That is how he lit his house. That is how he kept himself company. The four voices combined into one and then his thoughts finally settled.
He was sitting on his porch, listening to the jet planes streak overhead. The soft glow of the televisions shone out his screen door. That is when it hit him, the image of Claire, her body in the sand, the blood. She was so young. He couldn’t believe that somebody could do that to a girl, somebody’s daughter. It was an image he couldn’t scrape from his mind.
He looked in the sky, the stars washed out from the light of the city, and he saw it. The blood was gone, and the dead look was gone, and there was a smile on her face. She floated up into the light-washed sky, and then the dull yellow went black before exploding into white. She smiled down at him as she floated to heaven.
That’s what he told the police the next day, when they had him come down to the precinct for more questioning: “I saw her smiling down and floating up to heaven.” He was eating a candy bar they had given him and said it like it was nothing strange. Of course, the police grew suspicious. The man who found her body, now saying he saw her in a vision, smiling.
I’ve remembered one dream for decades. It happened right before my ninth birthday, seven years after Claire was killed and thirteen years after Barbara. That was when we had just moved to the area, and I slept with the patio door open to cool off the air. The sound of the ocean pushed through the door at night, a rhythmic roar that lulled me to sleep. My parents picked that part of Del Mar because it was safe, and you could do that—leave your daughter’s door open at night.
I dreamt the blank space was filled with animals, fantastical animals that had horns or long ears and sticks for limbs or gnarled haunches. They were all black, but not like the color, instead like the absence of light. Animal-shaped holes. The only thing with any sort of detail were their eyes, which were white and completely round. They moved slowly out of the blank space, at first just a few of them and then more, a swarm, staggering, and I knew where they were headed. They were going across the street, up the hill, through the patio door, headed to me.
The Torrey pine’s stature depends on where it lives, and where it lives changes how it’s treated. Close to the beach, the trees are short and gnarled by the salt air and wind. In the reserve, they are protected both by law and by the soft curves of the sandstone hills. The trees grow a hundred feet in the air, tall and straight.
The trees in the parking lot of the beach are all Torrey pines. That close to the ocean, they grow slanted and twisted like gigantic bonsai, except the only thing they are shaped by is wind. One of the trees is growing into the rusty chain link fence. Everything rusts in Del Mar, the corrosive salt air. The fence is bowing, and the tree is leaning, and it is a battle, the fence and the Torrey pine and gravity. The tree is winning, pushing the fence down, its thick bark lipping around the metal.
There is no Tower 6 anymore. It goes 5 and then 7. Tower 6 sits on the ground, rusting in a corner of the parking lot, next to a twisted Torrey pine.
Ezekiel kept in contact with Claire’s family for years, writing them letters. The police encouraged this, told Claire’s parents to write him back. But he never offered more than that one description—that he saw her smiling down on him as she floated to heaven. Other than that, it was just inquiries about how they were holding up, followed by lines of thought nobody could follow, his time in the military and what the Air Force planes were doing at night, how he could see in the dark, the government, Iran Contra, the Cold War, JFK, streams of thought that were basically the letter equivalent of “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Ezekiel didn’t kill the girl. These were just the letters of a lonely man with psychic delusions.
Torrey Pines is where two girls were murdered, but it is pretty too. The sandstone bluffs are white, except where they turn red, bending into caverns with rich labial folds. Even the sunsets are fair, peachy-pinks and lilac blues and powdery, golden light. Sage grows in the hills, puffs of buckwheat, tufts of sea lavender and pops of yellow flowers. Creeping here and there, blooming only at night, there is sacred datura, a poisonous plant that can be used as a hallucinogen, but the dose that induces hallucinations is nearly the same as the dose that causes death.
In the beach parking lot, in the seventies, when Barbara was alive, people used to camp, burning bonfires long into the night. Barbara and her boyfriend had come down to Del Mar from Long Beach with two of their friends. In retrospect, their decision to stay at Torrey Pines makes no sense. They were looking for waves to surf, and that day the waves were all washed out. Barbara’s two friends slept in the parking lot in their car. Barbara and her boyfriend slept on the beach. They wanted privacy. They zipped two sleeping bags together, built a fire in the sand. Barbara was cut and strangled, but mostly she was bludgeoned by one of the rocks around their fire pit, found a few feet away, dark with her blood and some raw pieces of her scalp.
One night, in high school, a bunch of boys and me and a twenty-four pack of cheap beer, drinking under the viaduct bridge. We threw the cans in the bushes like shitty teens, put pennies on the train tracks. The train lights flashed white against us in a strobe light, and the wind of it rushing by blew my hair. Later, so drunk, I got into one of their cars to go somewhere else, and as we pulled out onto the road, I was flooded with an indeterminate fear. I asked them to let me out. I explained it was because I thought my mom would see me, the best lie I could up with at the time, not a good one. I leapt out of the car and hid in the bushes. I was feeling this kind of thing all the time, a symptom of my newly emerging mental illness—a sense of impending doom. But that night, it was worse than normal, a feeling like I had opened a portal. And maybe I am right. Maybe that piece of land is a portal to something.
When Claire was alive, in the eighties, you could no longer camp, but you could still have bonfires. In the nineties, when I was alive, you couldn’t do that either, but you could smoke and drink. Now you can’t do anything.
Ezekiel tried to kill himself by driving his car off a bridge in 1986, and he survived. Ezekiel tried to kill himself by jumping off the thirteenth floor of an apartment building in 1988, and he died. For years, the police took his suicide as an admission of guilt. He’d been dead for twenty-four years before DNA technology became powerful enough to clear him. He was a suspect that whole time, and now he was just a dead man with mental illness.
The Torrey pine can push down a fence, and it can survive a new glacial period, yet it is so fragile. Of course they’re endangered; they only live in a small strip a few miles long. They’ve always been protected, revered, obviously special, from the Native Americans who ate their pine nuts to the first white people who saw them, officially a conserved species since 1850, the same year California became a state. The early Spanish colonizers called this part of the coast “Punta de los Arborles,” or “Point of Trees,” the Torrey pines an important landmark for sailors.
I still dream about that blank space. I have a recurring dream where I am at the edge of the condo complex. There is a short stucco fence. I am on the other side where there is a small footpath that goes down to the beach. In the dream, I always have some vague and urgent sense of unfulfilled responsibility. I wobble over the fence and go on the footpath and look at the patch of chaparral. You can’t see it because of the bridge and the train tracks, but if you could, Tower 7 would be right there, a straight line of sight. The unremarkable yet remarkable-to-me patch of land. The dream ends. It doesn’t go anywhere. It just rattles around in my subconscious.
The conservation of the Torrey pine began in earnest in the sixties, out of necessity. Two residents were walking in the canyon when they heard bulldozers ripping it up. They were alarmed. In this era, the neighborhood was full of academics and weirdos, people who worked at the newly constructed university and people who did things like build their house out of oil cans. That man’s walls dripped black. Varying degrees of hippies, all of them. With the destruction of the canyon, the residents organized, and they rallied. The conservation campaign lasted until the seventies, resulting in the transformation of two hundred acres of canyon into the Torrey Pines State Reserve Extension. Their efforts consisted of petitioning neighbors for land donations, making pamphlets that were later commended by the White House for their quality, holding bake sales. The school kids sold saplings and organized dances and “slave days.” I don’t know what the latter means and so I look it up. Kids would be “slaves,” offering up services like mowing lawns. Kids pretending to be slaves to protect a tree.
Years later, I saw one of the boys from that drunken night in a bar, a man now. “Remember that time you got out of my car and hid in the bushes?” He laughed. “You said your mom would see you. It didn’t make any sense.”
I tried to laugh with him, but the fear I felt then jolted through my body. I hadn’t thought of that night for years. I still didn’t know about Barbara or Claire, but in my mind I saw the train light up the bridge and something felt deeply wrong with the picture.
A few hundred yards inland, in the condo complex that contains my childhood home, people complain about the Torrey pines. They obstruct the view. Their limbs are shorn strategically, a process that requires a long sequence of permits. Like other drought-tolerant trees, its roots reach out wide and deep, spreading in every direction. They buckle the streets.
A few months ago, a new resident moved in. This man was mad because a Torrey pine was getting sap all over his patio. He wanted it cut down. The complex caved, worried about a lawsuit. But first the condo residents protested, this tree which had been there long before this man, this species that had been there long before recorded history. They encircled the tree, holding arms. But it got cut down anyway. Their efforts for protection meant nothing.
After Ezekiel was cleared, the police tested a small patch of blood on Claire’s shorts that wasn’t hers. It was presumably from her killer, Ronald Tatro, a convicted rapist, a man who had lived in San Diego for just two years after getting out of prison in his home state of Arkansas. Except that was where he had been when Barbara died, the perfect alibi—locked up, a thousand miles away. There had to be two men, two men who killed teenage girls on the same stretch of beach in the month of August, a lifeguard tower and six years apart, who strangled them and sodomized them and bludgeoned them with rocks, who shoved sand in their mouths and cut off their nipples. Maybe Ronald was just a copycat killer, but that is so many things to copy. What is it about that quiet beach, in this neighborhood with virtually no crime, that causes men to act this way?
The Torrey pine has burned. The most recent fire, summer 2024, lit up twenty acres. The cause of the fire has not been determined, but it is thought to be arson, with two separate fires started that day, one just a few hundred yards from my childhood home. My mother was evacuated but for only a few hours. She went to the mall with her dog and ate tacos, and when she was done she could go back home.
They couldn’t get any answers from Ronald because he was dead. On my twenty-ninth birthday, exactly twenty-seven years after Claire’s death, he took his boat out to a river in Tennessee. He folded up his shirt and placed it and his wallet neatly in the passenger seat of his boat, and then he got into the water, and then he drowned. It was impossible to tell if it was an accident or suicide, if the date was a coincidence, if the neatly placed wallet was a sign or just habit. I was twice the age of Claire when she died. It’s hard to keep that in mind sometimes. The dead girls on the beach were children.
Sometimes a diseased Torrey pine will develop a witch’s broom—its needles growing grotesquely in a massive ball. At night, you can see through the Torrey pine branches reaching like arteries into the sky, but a witch’s broom is just a ball of black.
There have been other fires, other instances of arson, a fire in the sixties and another in the nineties. Also in the sixties: a ten-foot gulley of erosion from excessive rains, eating up the canyon. There have been other threats, climate change and bark beetles. Now, the reserve controls the beetles with traps, which look like massive plastic beehives hidden in the brush. For climate change, they do nothing. The reserve has many rules: no dogs, no food, no removal of anything, not a leaf, certainly not a Torrey pine. It is treated as what it is, a uniquely delicate ecosystem, in need of conscious preservation and protection.
I visited Del Mar shortly after the fire, staying for three weeks, my usual summer trip. The reserve was closed due to unsafe conditions, and, when I wanted to walk, I walked around the neighborhood instead.
I went up to the top of the complex, where there is a series of sidewalks carved into the hill. The sidewalks go nowhere, ending at the side of the reserve. I walk to the end of one, and then the end of another.
Maybe Ronald was just a copycat killer, but that is so many things to copy.
One of them does, technically, go somewhere—to the mouth of the condo complex. I walk down it and then up the hill. There is a Torrey pine at the top, which looks over the ocean. You can see the bridge and the waves but not the beach. When I was in high school, we’d drive up here, park nearby, smoke pot, stare at the view. I walk down the hill, and there is the footpath, the short stucco fence, the one I dream about. I walk down it, go to the beach.
I walk under the bridge, I walk on the sand, I walk past Tower 7. One evening, it is near dusk, and the beach is mostly deserted, just a few runners and surfers and me. There is only one party who is still enjoying the beach as a beach, a young mother and her child. They are camped out near Tower 7, on a beach towel, next to a big ocean-smoothed branch that someone has shoved vertically into the sand. It looks like a dead tree. They are laughing and playing.
I pull out my phone, find the picture. It is of the police officer who originally investigated the deaths of both Barbara and Claire, now an old man. He is pointing to the spot where Barbara was found in the sand, forty-six years in the past.
I compare where the man is pointing, find Tower 7 for reference. I am correct. Barbara was killed and then found in the exact same spot where the woman and her child are playing now. They smile. They laugh.
I suppress the urge to tell them what happened. I turn to the ocean, and the setting sun cuts through the clouds, bright orange, and gold rays fall on the ocean waves like they are coming down from heaven. For once, the sunset is not pretty and fair. Today it is beautiful and dramatic.
I keep walking aimlessly around the neighborhood, walking on the same paths but trying to find new ones. I start to feel depressed. I can’t figure out what it is, where this gloomy feeling is coming from, and then I do. I am feeling what it felt to be a teenager, the girl who once wandered these streets, who walked the same paths as Barbara and Claire, before I knew about their lives and their deaths, when life in Del Mar felt protected to the point of suffocation.
Now it has become something else. Now it has become a portal, some sort of dark hole for things to fall in and crawl out.