SUMMER of FEAR Read online

  SUMMER of FEAR

  A Novel

  T. Jefferson Parker

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  .

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  On a bad night here in the canyon, the wind can hit so hard feels like my house is coming down.

  The place is built on stilts, perched high on the steep east slope of Laguna Canyon. From the road below, the stilts look frail as mosquito legs, wholly insufficient for holding up a home. When the wind is strong, it can change course a hundred time a minute, trapped as it is by the canyon walls. With too much gale in too little space, the air doubles back, howls in fierce frustration, then whips around for another bellowing pass. Order breaks down. My home sways, leaning with each crazy reversal. Windowpanes ripple and timbers groan. Within the fury of these moments, I await a nudge from the master's hand. Infinility yawns back.

  Some nights, when the wind is at its worst, I sit outside on the deck, feel the deep sway of the structure in which I live, look down through thirty feet of darkness to the sandstone below, and admire the way that nature can go so quickly from order to chaos. The popular notion is that nature's world is ultimately ordered and systematic, that only man's woeful intrusions can ruin that balance and harmony. This is not true. When I sit on my deck in the blackness of a high-wind night— the higher the better—I realize that the natural world isn't neatly ordered, isn't flawless, isn't perfect. Sometimes it is just like our human one: angry and yearning for mayhem. People want to "get back to nature." But she wants to get back to man sometimes, too, to regress to the liberating, transcendent state of violence. On a dark night with a high wind in the canyon, it's obvious.

  My wife and I are leaving for Mexico next month. That leaves me thirty days to finish this, then pack our bags and drive to the airport.

  My name is Russ Monroe, and I am a crime writer. I was once a cop. I retired from duty ten years ago to write—first newspaper pieces, then books. My first book, Journey Up River: The Story of a Serial Killer, was a mild success, well received, and into a second printing before publication. My last two books you've probably never heard of. I find them sometimes at Friends of the Library used-book sales, often inscribed to the original purchaser, who started the book on its journey to the fifty-cent bin. I harbor resentment at this, one of my thousand faults. I still write newspaper stuff because I need the money.

  This is the story of the Summer of Fear. The Summer of Fear. I coined that phrase myself. Not terribly imaginative, I know, but how much imagination can you get into a headline?

  There are a few things you should know about me. I offer them both as background and for the simple reason that for the first time in my life as a crime writer—and I pray the last—I myself play a major part in the story. This is a terrible burden for an author. But it is nothing compared to the burden of that summer, and I was there, centered in the middle of it like 2.6 million other Orange Countians. It changed us all.

  I am forty years old, tall and dark-haired, of English-Irish extraction. My family has been here in the county since 1952 when the orange groves outnumbered the housing tracts and it was a beautiful place to live. My great-grandfather married a Yukon Territory dance-hall girl during the Alaskan gold rush. His son was an explosives expert who invented a triggering device for dynamite that was patented and is still in use today. He secretly wrote science-fiction stories, which I found in a trunk of his belongings passed down to me by his son—my father The stories are frightening things, obviously written more as an exorcism of my grandfather's many demons than as entertainments or for serious publication. I used one of his titles for my second book, Under Scorpio, which, if you read the critics should have been locked away in a massive old tool chest, as was grandfather's original text.

  My father was ranch manager—Director of Field Operations, Citrus Division—for the SunBlesst Company here in Orange County. SunBlesst, during my father's tenure, made the transition from farming to leasing out land for development. Later, in the sixties, they began selling off the groves outright. My father grew bitter as he watched his kingdom dwindle. At the end of his working days, I remember him as a tall, wiry man who still rode his groves on horseback. He was always tall in the saddle, paramilitary and fierce, to no particular effect. He stated his refusal to let the shrinking of his empire shrink him.

  But on the inside, it did. He grew harder and more knotted with each season. He moved way out to one of the remote canyons when he finally retired, five years back. The canyon is called Trabuco, which is Spanish for a crude firearm the settlers brought to the county in the 1700s. My father now lives in a cold little cabin, deep in Trabuco, a place constantly in the shadow of the haunted native oaks.

  My mother's side of the family accounts for a certain self-absorption I am prone to, along with an appetite for chaos, and a distrust of authority that runs, I will confess, not very far beneath my generally peaceful surface. (This made my first career in law enforcement difficult.) She was a farm girl who grew up an only child, spent hours alone with her imagination and a pet goat named Archie. To say that she mastered self-reliance is an understatement. To my mother, most things in life were intrusions on her inner world, her secret world, the world she inhabited with Archie for those long years of childhood. She graduated from high school early. One day shortly after, she closed her eyes, put her finger to a map of the United States, and found herself pointing at Denver. At age seventeen, she was living in the YWCA there, working as a secretary and taking an occasional job as a model for Daniels & Fisher department store. My father fell in love while looking at her through a store window one afternoon. Two months later, they were married and moving to California for my father's work. A year after that, Russell Paul Monroe was in the offing.

  She lived out in a remote canyon, too—one very much like my father s—until her death three years ago, exactly one year to the day since divorcing my father. She was fifty-five. I thought it was telling that they divorced, left the SunBlesst ranch house where I'd grown up, then each proceeded to his and her own distant canyons, ending up just a few miles apart. They each proclaimed happiness then, a contentment at being apart that they had never admitted when they were together. I want to think they were lonely, but this may be a son's way of believing that his parents still loved each other. She died in her sleep; likely of an aneurism, though I would not allow—because of my father's insistence—an autopsy. The idea of scientists sawing into the head of this intensely private woman seen to us an atrocity beyond bearing. She had a long history hypertension.

  It is winter now, but nothing is the same—not here in my house with my wife, not two miles south of here in the city of Laguna Beach, where so much of it all happened, not anywhere in a county that once prided itself on Disneyland, an airport named John Wayne, a thriving
weapons industry (they call it aerospace), and real estate prices among the highest in the nation.

  It has all changed because the Summer of Fear taugh that there is something about ourselves—something in us—that breeds a terrible, terrible thing.

  The Midnight Eye—I first brought his name into print--- was not our first. We have a track record of serial killers here in Orange County. But before, we always let ourselves view them as predators who inflicted themselves on us. You've heard of these monsters. You've read about the breakins, the strangulations, the knifings, the close-range hollow-points, the knock-out drugs hidden in beer offered to hitchhikers, the pentagram on the palm of the drifter, the poisoned, sodomized remain servicemen quartered like beef, then bagged and dumped side freeways or far out in the National Forest that make: the border of our county (near where my father now lives).

  You have heard of them—the Freeway Strangler (ten alleged victims); the Nightstalker (fourteen); Randy Kraft (seventeen). Incidentally, they play bridge against one another now in the maximum-security wing of Vacaville State Correctional Facility. This has been documented in, of all places, Vanity Fair magazine. (Kraft generally wins. He is impatient with the Freeway Strangler and treats him like a crude child. The Nightstalker is vindictive and makes foolish opening moves. Kraft admires his aggressiveness.)

  These men we regarded as outsiders. Even Kraft, a mild-mannered computer programmer who grew up in the county, seemed alien. Maybe that was because his victims were all young men, many of whom he had either seduced or raped in one way or another. Kraft's homosexuality seemed to confine him to a subtle, mysterious world. He inhabited a place where few of the county's straight population could imagine themselves. The unspoken rationale went something like this: I'm not gay, so I'm not going to worry. During Kraft's trial I had a number of talks with him, and I was struck by his intelligence, his humility, his apparent forthrightness. I might add that he was found to have in his possession at the time of arrest (l) a dead Marine Corps private in the front seat of his car and (2) an address book with the names and descriptions of several men who had been drugged, buggered, chopped to pieces, and dumped. A great many of the other entries were of men listed by police as "missing." In spite of all that, Kraft never worked his way into the county's subconscious the way that the Midnight Eye did during our Summer of Fear.

  The Midnight Eye came from among us. He was created by us, fostered by us. In the end, I think, people believed he was us, and in a smaller degree, of course, that we were him.

  Now it is winter, and the county can begin to forget.

  One thing I will not forget is this: The truth will not always make you free.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I can't fully explain why I called Amber Mae Wilson that night. Saturday, the third of July. Yes, I had once been her lover, but that was twenty years ago. Yes, I had thought about her—off and on—for all of those twenty years. Yes, I had been married, happily and without a trace of regret, for the last five.

  Maybe it was the dream I had had the night before, which four-year-old Amber Mae Wilson stood on my porch buck naked and said to me, "My name is Amber Mae. I'm three years old. I live in the white house. Can I have a cookie?"

  That was a story—a true one, I believe—Amber had told me about herself back when we were in love. I say I believe it was true because it seemed to capture some of Amber's several essences: her boldness, her innocence, her willingness change the facts, her nakedness. But as I came to understand in the two brief years we were together, Amber had always been and always remained in the process of inventing herself. She invented herself to make Amber Mae Wilson—I understand now—someone she could stand to be around. For her, the truth was never static or absolute, never irreversible or binding. It was a wardrobe to be changed as she saw fit.

  I called her from a bar that night—a moist, sweltering night—and got no answer, just the machine and message. It was twenty minutes past midnight and I believed I had a mission.

  So I drove down to her place in the south of town and sat outside in my car, looking at the wrought-iron gate, the palms illuminated by ground lights, the courtyard behind the gate that featured a fountain in the shape of an airborne dolphin with a stream of water coming out of its mouth. The huge home loomed behind, locked in darkness. It was high in the coastal hills and looked down over the Pacific. She had paid $2.8 million for the place and the 3.5 acres it sat on, as reported in a local paper. The neighbors were hundreds of yards away.

  This was the third night in a week I'd been there.

  Amber had lived in this house for five years—some kind of record for her, I'm sure. I know for a fact that she had changed the landscaping three times. First, brick walkways and copper weathervanes everywhere, lots of wooden flower boxes—Cape Cod run amok. Next, a xeriscape of drought-tolerants, decomposed granite trails, cactus. Finally, this California-Mediterranean theme. I know all this because my work takes me all over the county. Some things, I can't help but notice.

  As I said, the night was unforgivingly hot. I rolled down the windows and laid my head back on the rest. I thought of my wife, Isabella, at home. Isabella, the truest love of my life, who not only taught me love but allowed me to learn it. She would be asleep now. She would be wearing the red knit cap to keep her head warm, in spite of the temperature. The wheelchair and quad cane would be close beside the bed. Her medications would be lined up on a low shelf within arm's reach, each dose contained in a white paper cup, ready to be taken by Isabella in the dark, half-asleep, still stunned by the last ingestion.

  Isabella was twenty-eight years old. She had a malignant tumor in her brain. She had been living with it for a little over a year and a half on that night of July 3, when for the third night in a week I sat in my car outside Amber Mae Wilson's home in South Laguna, wondering whether I would find the courage go up and ring the bell on the gate.

  You may say, right here, that this Russell Monroe has some explaining to do.

  You can't possibly imagine how much.

  I can only tell you that then, on the humid, heated night of July 3, I was deeply unwilling to explain anything, most all to myself. I refused to. That would have been contrary to my mission, which was this: I was in the process—I hoped— beginning a secret life.

  I opened the glove compartment, took out my flask (slim, silver, engraved to me "With all my love, Isabella"), and drank more whiskey. Isabella. I replaced the flask, lighted a cigarette, laid back my head, and looked out to Amber's courtyard. I tried to banish all thoughts from my mind. I replaced them with memories of Amber, of those days from our youth when the world seemed so ripe for our picking, so pleased to have us aboard. Isn't there always a year or two in everyone's twenties that, when remembered, seem as near to perfect as life can get?

  That was when I saw Amber's front door open and shut, and someone moving across the courtyard toward the gate.

  It was a man. He wiped something off with a handkerchief before letting the gate swing shut behind him. He walked with his head down and his thumbs hooked into the front pocket of his jeans, the handkerchief balled in his right fist. He turned south on the sidewalk without hesitating, took three steps to the curb, then angled off across the street, let himself into a late-model black Firebird, and drove away

  He didn't see me, but I saw him. Oh, did I see him.

  His name was Martin Parish. He was the Captain of Detectives, Homicide Division, of the Orange County Sheriff's. He had been an acquaintance, then a friend, then a near friend of mine for twenty years.

  Marty Parish was a large man with kind blue eyes and an ardent love of bird hunting.

  Marty Parish and I had graduated from the Sheriff's Academy together, winter of 1974.

  Marty Parish had introduced me to Amber Mae Wilson at our "commencement" bash.

  Marty Parish was the only man that Amber had ever married. It lasted one year, about fifteen years ago. Now he had just left her home after midnight and wiped his fingerprints off t
he handle of her gate.

  I watched the Firebird's taillights disappear in the dark and wondered whether Martin Parish had come to draw from the same well that I had. I always thought Martin was stronger than that. A wave of shame broke over me. For Martin? I wondered—or for myself?

  I called Amber's number from my car phone and got the machine again. What an inviting, conspiratorial voice she had!

  I took another swig from the flask, set it back in the glove compartment, then rolled up the windows and got out.

  Don't do this, said a receding voice inside me—you have no reasons, only a million excuses—but I was already walking toward her gate. It was not locked. The house was dark except for a very minor glow coming from what was probably the kitchen. I knocked, rang the bell, knocked again. The door was locked. I followed a pathway of round concrete stepping-stones around to the backyard. The moon was half full, and in the moonlight I could make out the rolling lawn, the orange trees huddled in a grove at the far end, a pale island of concrete. Steam leak up from the edge of a covered hot tub.

  The sliding glass door stood open all the way. The screen door was open about two feet. Open! My heart dropped, but fought to remain thoughtless. Is this how a secret life begin: The drapes were pulled back on their runner. To let in the night air, I guessed: Air conditioning gives Amber headaches. But the screen. Had Marty come in this way? So I pressed against the screen with my fingertip. The slit was six inches long, vertical, just left and slightly above the lock. You could have cut it with a table knife.