SUMMER of FEAR Read online

  Inside, the shed smelled of wood rot and mildew and motor oil. It was neat because all of my father's things were neat.

  Amber opened the K car's trunk and looked at me. "I took everything Marty collected from... Alice. All the Baggies and fingerprints and pictures—all his notes. There's some stuff in here; I don't even know what it is. I thought you might want it."

  "Damn, Amber."

  "Did I do wrong?"

  I prodded through the cardboard box containing finger print cards; a dozen or more bags containing hair and fiber paint chips, soil samples; a tape recorder he'd probably use to catalog and walk himself through the scene; one loose audiotape; a pile of Polaroids; a neat stack of enlarged 35-mm prints. There was even a notebook, with entries matched to the "exhibits." There were several folders of the type the county uses for its criminal files—some empty, some containing the basic rap sheets. I opened one: County Sheriff's employment history of Russell Monroe—1976 to 1983.

  "Nice work, Amber, I think."

  "He was carrying all that around in his car," she said "Please take it. He said he found that audiocassette in my stereo, the night that Alice... died."

  I slipped the tape into my coat pocket.

  On the way back to the house, I put the box into the trunk of my car. My father was sitting at the kitchen table, dressed now, drinking his coffee. I walked Amber into the small bedroom. A lamp on the bed stand cast a warm light against the knotty-pine walls.

  "Can I ask you a question?" she said.

  "Sure."

  "Did you like me better when you thought I was dead?

  It was half surprise at the question and half uncertainty of my answer that left me quiet. All the deep silence of the night outside seemed to enter that small room and encircle us.

  "No," I said.

  Amber looked at me while she reached up, pulled off her wig, and shook out the great brown waves of her hair. They lengthened as they loosened, down past her shoulders. And I was struck then, as I had been struck before—but never, never so hard—by how much Amber looked like Isabella. In the burnished lamplight of the cabin, Amber was, at the moment her hair settled, radiant.

  "Thank you," she said. Then she gave me that look, the one that had launched a hundred products into a billion households, that look half virginal and half carnal, inviting—no, imploring you—to partake in what was being offered, reassuring you that this transaction, no matter how publicly tendered, was and would forever remain a conspiracy of only two.

  What she saw in my face, I do not know.

  "You're welcome," I said. "Good night."

  "Good night, Russell."

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I went to the Marine Room, had two shots and two beers, sat on a stool at the window, and watched the people walk by. The early-morning fog began to settle over the coast. I watched claim the shoreline, the beach, the boardwalk, then ease across Coast Highway, lap against the buildings, feel its way up Ocean Avenue, bury the streetlights, enfold the men and women and babies in strollers, the bums and dogs, the pigeons and gulls, the cats in the shadows, the eucalyptus and bougainvillea, the parking meters, Hennesey's Tavern, the art gallery, the sunglasses shop, the patrol car turning right on the highway, the sidewalk and the cracks in the sidewalk and the weeds growing from the cracks. With the fog came a hush I was not the only one aware of; it was a collective involuntary pause, a hiatus the minds of everyone on that busy summer sidewalk. It crossed their faces with the fog, and they slowed just a beat, like film decelerating to almost slow motion, responding as if to a great invisible psychic speed bump that everyone hit at once and no one knew was there. Something rippled across their faces at that moment, a question. Husband glanced to wife; wife looked to husband; lovers cuddled closer; those alone turned to look over their shoulders, crossed the street suddenly, stopped to look around them, all faces asking, What was that, me, someone, who, me? And at that precise second, the band in the back room ended its song on the downbeat, and the hush asserted itself through the bar in one of those rare moments during which all conversation waits and silence rushes in to remind us that there was silence in the beginning and there will be silence at the end and silence runs through everything like a secret no one wants to hear. A flicker of fear crossed every face in that bar. Our dread was one dread. Every expression confessed the superfluity of our pretensions, the sheer effrontery of assuming that life in the next heartbeat will be the same jolly thing we pretend it is now. Deep in that silence, I heard a voice—a groan, a low-frequency command—but I couldn't understand what it was saying. I have no idea whether anyone else heard it, too. Then a great gust of laughter—forced, counterfeit, desperately applied—rose up to claim the quiet and deny the truths the silence carried. The band kicked in. I left.

  I sat in my car for a few minutes without running the engine and listened to the tape that Amber had stolen from Martin Parish. It was the Midnight Eye. He stuttered and mumbled his way through more unintelligible phrases:

  "C-c-cun seed brat cun wormin from he...

  Mustery move s-s-slime..."

  I could make no sense of it. Surely, I thought, if Amber was right and Martin was trying to blame the murder of Alice on me, this tape should have been destroyed by now. When I had listened to it twice, I placed the tape carefully beneath the floor mat of the car, where I wouldn't step on it.

  ■ ■ ■

  Traffic slowed to a crawl in the canyon, just out of town, and took me twenty minutes to inch along far enough to find out why. The Highway Patrol had set up one of its Sobriety Check points to find drunken drivers. I could see the lights flashing, the orange pylons cutting down the outgoing lanes to one, the CHP officers shining lights into drivers' faces. I was secretly rooting for the ACLU when it challenged the legality of these spot check but the courts upheld the CHP's contention that they are necessary and constitutional. More of my distrust of authority, more of my rankle at the long arm of control. The thought came me that I might be better suited to a career in bank robbery than law enforcement, but this was neither a new nor very probing idea. Writing seemed a good way to split the difference.

  I rolled down my windows, lighted a smoke, waited.

  Up ahead, flashlights beamed into cars, officers leaned toward open windows, a stream of released drivers pensive accelerated north. In my rearview, I could see the fog moving in. Ten minutes later, it was my turn. I steered the car between the rows of orange pylons, greeted the officer with a nod, and waited. Behind him, I saw a familiar shape standing outside prowl car, but just as I started to figure who it was, the flashlight beam ached into my eyes.

  "How are you tonight, sir?"

  "Fine."

  "Drinking tonight, sir?"

  "Couple of beers."

  "That's all?"

  "That's right."

  "For a total of how many, sir?"

  "A couple still means two, last time I checked."

  He paused then, ran the flashlight across my backseat, the passenger seat, then into my face again. A voice came from behind him, but all I could see was white light. There was a moment of consultation—voices hidden by the brightness of the beam—then the officer stepped away, and Martin Parish leaned into my window. His eyes were bloodshot, his big, morally superior chin was unshaven, his knit necktie fell forward against the door. With the flashlight out of my eyes now, I could see the Sheriff's Department cars waiting up ahead—three of them.

  "Well, I figured we'd run across you, Monroe," said Marty.

  "Not hard, since this is the only road to my house."

  "Shall I let 'em test you? This clever Chip is just sure you've had more than two."

  "Up to you, Marty, but two is what I've had."

  "That'll be the day."

  Marty walked around the front of my car, the headlights throwing his shadow along the asphalt. He opened the passenger door, got in, and closed it. "I'll escort you home, Russell. These Chippies have your number."

  "I sense an ulterior
motive."

  "I'm one big ulterior, Russ. Drive."

  "Long walk back, Marty."

  "I got it covered."

  The officer waved me down a long corridor of pylons that angled into the road. My turnoff was less than a mile out. I stopped at the box, got my mail, then headed up the steep, winding drive that leads to the stilt house. When we made the top and leveled off, I could see the Sheriff's Department car parked outside my home. The idea came to me that it was more than just Marty's ride back to the checkpoint. I swung around it and down into my driveway. A deputy in uniform learn against the car and watched us go by. I wondered whether Marty was about to return the beating I'd given him at the beach on the night of July the Fourth. Overkill, I thought. I parked the garage.

  We got out and walked back up the driveway to the departmental car. The deputy was a tall, wide man with short black hair, a strong nose, and high cheekbones. He looked Indian, and his badge said Keyes. Marty introduced us, but he neither spoke nor offered his hand. His eyes were black, small and contained an unmistakable meanness.

  "What's the deal?" I asked.

  "There really is no deal," said Marty. "Not in the sense that you can negotiate anything."

  "Sounds like you've got me cold."

  "Everybody's cold tonight, Russ. Look, we're going to do something kind of unorthodox here, but the alternative is I take you downtown for the murder of Alice Fultz."

  "Who in the hell is that?"

  "Keyes," said Marty. "Roll em."

  Keyes produced a video camera from the front seat his car, Marty stepped away from me, and then the light went on and the lens aimed into my face.

  "Come on, Marty," I said. "Get in here."

  "I'll edit out what you fuck up, so never mind."

  "Like the camera, Keyes? Like your job with the Sheriff of Orange County?"

  Keyes said nothing, but he looked away from the eyepiece and the light went out.

  In the moment of bedazzlement that hits the eye when brightness goes to black, Marty swung a heavy fist into my sternum. I heard my breath heave out into the canyon air, felt the pressure shoot into my head, heard a siren whine shriek into my ears. Doubled over and still waiting for fresh air to get to my lungs, I tried to keep my balance. Marty grabbed my hair and belt and threw me straight down onto my face. The asphalt was warm; the gravel bit into my elbows and cheeks. But my breath came rushing back. I lay there, letting it in.

  "This is what you're going to do, Russ. You're going to walk down the driveway to your garage, go in, turn on the light. Then you're going to stand in front of your game freezer and open it. Then we'll cut and I'll tell you what the next scene is. I'm the director; you're the star. Got it?"

  "Yup," I said, but my voice was feeble and soprano-high.

  "Repeat," he said.

  I did.

  Then he dragged me up by my hair, steadied me, and shoved me toward the garage.

  "Action," he said.

  I lumbered on reluctant legs down the steep driveway. The light of the video camera sprayed out on either side of me. I looked for a moment toward town, from which the fog continued to advance like a white blanket pulled by invisible hands. Where the slope of the driveway levels off at the garage, I stumbled and almost fell. My ears were still screaming.

  The garage door was up and I went in. The video beam followed me, but I hit the light, as instructed. I turned to the right, away from my car and toward the freezer. I stopped in front of it, looked once at Marty, then reached out and lifted the heavy handle. The door followed, gaskets sucking, then releasing a brief cloud of frost into the air. When the frost cleared upward, I looked down and saw what I had been half-expecting ever since Marty had outlined his screenplay idea.

  Twisted, stiff, blue-black and covered with blood, her hair a solid block against the far wall, her face beaten beyond recognition and frozen in a horror that seemed freshly, eternally preserved, lay the body of Alice Fultz. She still had on the blue satin robe. In her hair still lodged the white and pink particulars that had jumped forth from her bursting skull. Her legs had be crammed to fit the freezer, but her arms were still spread they had been on Amber's floor—open, apart, frozen in mid now as if welcoming me: Come down, come down here, my love, take me, embrace me, own me. I am yours.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Keyes came up behind me and to my left, aiming the camera down into the freezer. I turned right, finding Marty, fixing him with a look that must have been half outrage and half revulsion. The idea crossed my mind that my expression could do more to establish my innocence than a thousand words, but by the time I turned to Keyes, his camera was down and he was studying me with his black unforgiving eyes.

  "I guess we both know by now that you killed the wrong woman," said Parish.

  "I didn't kill her."

  "Right. Grace killed the wrong woman. It was a mistake even a daughter could make—a dark room, a bed that's usually got someone else in it, all those emotions boiling up inside. The way I've got it figured, Grace probably thought she'd done her mother until you got there later for the transfer and saw the, uh, mix-up. You cleaned it up anyway—that's what the fallback plan called for—but you couldn't dump Amber's body in the freezer because you didn't have Amber's body. So you put Grace's mistake on ice until you could figure out what to do with it. That thing in there used to be Amber's sister, Alice, you haven't figured it out by now."

  I searched Marty's face for a flicker of the madness I knew was in him, but all I saw was a gloomy, bovine conviction that he knew a terrible truth. It disturbed me almost as deeply as the woman lying in my freezer.

  "Everything you believe is wrong," I said.

  "Then enlighten me, Monroe."

  "I can't. All I can say for sure is, I didn't kill her and Grace didn't kill her, and I don't know what's going on."

  Marty nodded, a humoring, condescending thing. "That sure wouldn't play in court, friend, not with a body in your fridge. And it doesn't play with me."

  "I'll take my chances," I said. I put my hands together front of me—offering them for the cuffs.

  "No."

  "No? You're the head homicide dick for the whole county, you pinch me with a body in my garage, and you won't even make an arrest? What's the problem, Martin?"

  "The problem is, I love two things that you don't—my wife and my job. If I take you down, both of those go with you. I'll be damned if I'm going to let JoAnn hear you testify that I was in Amber's house those nights. I'll be extra damned if I'm going to make Winters answer for what I did. He'd have to deliver my head on a plate, just to keep his own on. No! You're not worth it. Neither is Alice Fultz—God rest her soul. You surprise me, Monroe, in a weird way. I didn't think you be willing to drag Isabella through all that. Seems like the last thing she needs is you in jail on a murder rap. I guess anybody fucked-up enough to kill a lady for money is fucked-up enough to wreck his own wife, too. Or was trotting Isabella into court in her wheelchair one of your defense licks—if it came to that?"

  I stared at Marty's smug, heavy face while the fury whirled around inside me. For a second, I was blind.

  "Still want the cuffs, Russ?"

  Martin Parish knew me well enough to know what I was feeling, and he was ready. He caught me coming in with a foot to my groin, then a fist to the back of my lowered neck, and I went down. I felt the cool steel of Keyes's revolver behind my ear as I gawked at the swirling pattern of the oil stains on the garage floor. For a long moment, I was lost in that aching, sucking pain that starts at a man's balls and makes him feel like shitting, pissing, vomiting, and crying all at once. For whatever reasons, I focused on the laces of Marty's scuffed brown wing tips.

  Finally, Martin dragged me up by my shirt collar. The revolver rode up with me, adamant against the back of my skull.

  "Damn, Russell, I'm offering you the opportunity of a lifetime."

  I stood there, feeling the pain elongate through me. My ears were screaming from the blow and my neck ached.r />
  "Pick her up and carry her up the hill," he said. "I'll toss a rock when I want you to turn."

  "Why?"

  "You don't ask why, Monroe. You do. You do, or I'll throw your ass in jail and you can watch the minutes tick by—all day long. You can think about your defense, and Isabella, and how you're going to make the payments for your lawyer and this stilt thing. Or, you can pick up Alice and march up the damned hill."

  The revolver left my head. Marty motioned to the freezer. I looked down through the mist at Alice.

  If epiphany is a moment of revelation and insight, what came to me next was no epiphany at all. It was blinder than any kind of sight, it revealed nothing, and it came to me not through the brain but from a deeper, instinctual place inside me—a place of earth and stone, blood and birth, flesh and bone: It would have taken no dread of our criminal justice system to eschew the scenario Martin had just sketched for me. In fact, would have taken a faith akin to religion to offer myself into it maw of society for the purpose of proving my innocence. No, I was a simpler being in that moment, honed by circumstance to something more essential. What I needed, what I desire more than anything else at that point in time, was a practice workable method of saving my own trembling ass.

  Judas's heart could not have been more heavy as he placed the final kiss than mine was at what happened—at what I did next!

  A patch of Alice Fultz's frozen hair broke off with a click and stuck to the wall as I wrestled her out. I hefted her over my shoulder and put one foot in front of the other, heading up the driveway. Her waist rested against my left shoulder, and I had to spread my arms in order to grasp each of her icy, stiff ankles. I could see her right arm waving out in the darkness as I climbed. Her left arm knocked against the back of my head as if in some horrid reminder, and in the far-right periphery my vision I could see her pale fingers jiggling tautly with each footstep.

  I realized as I climbed, with every step I took, that few things in my life after this night would ever be the same. The terrible march was a simple, clear dividing line—a border—that would separate my future from everything that had gone before. The two might not be able to cohabitate within me; this much, I knew. New rules would apply; alternate systems would be required; considerable adjustment would have to be made, bargains struck; concessions offered; treaties signed. My soul would never again belong only to me, but to this woman, these men, this night. I had never dreamed that I would be forced to tender it for so little.