SUMMER of FEAR Read online

  What I prayed for as I struggled up the hillside (if grunting desperately can be called prayer) was that there be something left of my old life that I could recognize and remember—and maybe, in a moment of need, cling to—other than terror, fear, and shame. A rivulet of icy fluid ran from Alice's waist down my shoulder, the coldest thing this world has ever offered me.

  The fog rolled in from the south and we vanished into the darkness of the canyon. I could hear three sets of footsteps as I labored higher, deeper into the thick, dry hillside brush. I ached and shivered as Alice's meltings ran down my body. The video light wobbled out in front of me. A pebble hit my back and I turned left into a deep ravine, an overgrown clot of oak and elderberry, sage and prickly pear. My legs burned. I penetrated the cover. I stumbled and fell. Alice rolled off and righted herself like some kind of weighted child's toy, faceup in a bed of cactus. The video light went out and I panted there on my hands and knees.

  "Good enough, Monroe," I heard Martin say. "Now get up and we'll head back down to your garage. You can't dig a grave without a shovel."

  I dug for two straight hours, and still wasn't deep enough. Marty had recommended a pair of gloves, which helped. I had to go back for a pick because the bedrock was so hard, the shovel just bounced. The fog hugged us. The moon disappeared. A dark circle formed on the earth around Alice. Keyes got most of it on video. I felt as if I'd been banished to hell, and spent probably twenty minutes trying to pinpoint—as I bent waist-deep and hurled the pick against the rock—the exact moment of my death. How could I have missed it? I half-believed, at times, that this was a severe nightmare from which I would surely soon awake. Fever, I thought: There must be fever involved.

  But the deeper the hole got, the better I began to feel! I felt closer to being real, and I wondered as the sweat ran down into my gloves if maybe—-just maybe—I would feel truly whole again when the last spadeful of canyon dirt sealed away Alice and Marty and Keyes and this hellish night forever. A surge implausible optimism went through me. And it allowed me concentrate on the particulars of this horror, on the madness that surely drove Martin Parish to put Alice's body in my freezer on the dire aspects of his murderous obsession with Amber Mae, on the way—some way, any way—that I could salvage even one handful of redemption from this night. I vowed then and there that I would never let this touch Isabella, that if I had to I would lay down my life—and certainly most anyone else's to keep the infection of this night from ever spreading to her. It seemed clear to me then that Isabella was the only good thing left in my world and that she must be spared this disease, this two-decade sickness of Amber and Martin and Grace and, most obviously, myself. I looked down at my dirt-covered shoes, half expecting to see hooves. Never, I thought, never will I let you, Izzy, be tainted by this. If I die having accomplished nothing more than that, it will be a death greeted with a secret smile. I swear. I promise. I swear.

  And with that silent vow, a clarity came to me, and I knew that there were questions I needed to answer. I was four feet down into the earth by then. I wiped the sweat from my face on the sleeve of my stinking shirt. Keyes was sitting on a rock, camcorder across his lap. I looked up at Martin.

  "So," I asked, "how much money did I murder the wrong woman for?"

  Marty's face, fog-brushed, regarded me from on high. "Well, as you know, she's worth about six million. I did some prying when I thought she was dead."

  "Did you."

  "You sure as hell didn't—you knew it all ahead of time. Grace came into the beginnings of her share when she turned eighteen. That's why you waited."

  "What is Grace's share?"

  "Five million," said Marty. "Come on, you know all this. I'm written in for half a million, and so is ex-flame, lover, friend, worshiper Russell Monroe. If you or I die before Grace does, or end up in prison, for instance, the winner gets a full million. If Grace goes first, the United Way ends up with the five. A little more prying finds you owe some pretty big bucks to the hospital. Tina Sharp, quite helpful when she thinks she's talking to an administrator. Motive, Russell. Lots of motive in the air around here."

  I could hardly believe that Amber would include me in the dispensation of her fortune. But my belief was not important.

  "Then there's the life-insurance policy she took out ten years ago, for Grace. Death benefit of another two million— payable over ten years. Were you and Grace going to split that?"

  "I don't know," I mumbled.

  "When did you figure out that you'd slaughtered the wrong beauty?"

  I couldn't answer truthfully without admitting to Martin that Amber had defected into my camp. The fact that I knew where she was and had in my possession a boxful of evidence collected by Martin Parish—to save his own ass from the gas chamber, I could now assume—were my only two remaining hole cards. Why hadn't Martin figured she would come to me?

  I thought long and hard about how best to play this. None of the obvious options seemed strong enough to bet on. I concluded that the best I could do while digging Alice's grave was to encourage Marty to dig one for himself.

  "When I saw her," I said. "The body."

  "I have to know, Russ, were you going to stick Amber my freezer when you framed me, or somewhere else?"

  I smiled up at him. My own boldness—or was it pure desperation?—frightened me, not only because it felt dangerous but because it felt good. "In your freezer, Marty, naturally."

  Martin clapped his hands together, tilted his head back and yipped into the darkness like a huge coyote. "I knew it! This first place I looked when I came up to your place two night ago? The freezer! The freezer I gave you! Damn, I just feel so good about myself!"

  He howled and yipped again, and I taxed my mind for way—a plan—by which I could take my shovel to this lunatic homicide cop and bury him, too. Keyes was the problem though, as Marty had foreseen. I wondered whether I could fatally spear Keyes by throwing the pick, but it was a faulty ides because it was a stupid one. His eyes gleamed at me in the darkness.

  "Why don't you say something, shithead?" I asked him.

  He aimed an index finger at my face and released the thumb hammer.

  "I can see a lot of brains in this one," I said to Marty. "Where do you get these guys?"

  "Wald sends us his cream."

  Keyes looked at me steadily.

  "Keep digging," said Martin. "You're almost there."

  A wisp of fog blew past him; I turned back to my hole and dug.

  "Russell, it was a good idea to make it look like the Midnight Eye, but why go to all that trouble if you were going move the body?"

  "You figure it," I said. "Earn your keep."

  "Well, I've been trying to. What I figured was, you doctored up Amber's room to look like the Eye—Grace doctored it— before I got there on the third. Grace had bashed her earlier. It was easy enough to tell Alice was fresh. You had come back that night, when you saw me leaving, to check the work and realized it wasn't Amber at all—I suspect her message on the answering machine was one obvious indicator. So you figured, why leave the wrong woman there, done in by the Midnight Eye? It's too sloppy, too risky, and besides, you might have wanted to use the same trick on the right woman sometime. The best you could come up with was just to clean up the whole mess, which you did on the afternoon of the Fourth. You thought that I'd sit on the whole thing, especially with no body left. Another few days, you'd have buried Alice up here just like you're doing now, or dumped her in a trash can, or spilled her off a pier."

  "What about that night—when I found you in Amber's bedroom with nothing on but your shorts?"

  "You were making one last pass before Amber got home. Maybe figuring how to put on another coat of paint before she saw your Eye decor."

  "You're good, Martin."

  "You're damn right I'm good. Okay, friend—you're deep enough. Trade places with Alice and fill it back up. Double time, soldier."

  I stood there, chest heaving, then climbed out. Both men were waiting for me
when I righted myself on the lip of the grave. The sudden notion hit me that Keyes was going to shoot me through the heart and leave me with Alice, but it went away as quickly as it had come—nobody films a murder they're committing, do they?

  Martin smiled and told me to put out both hands, palms up. My gloves were still on. Keyes moved to my side and his revolver barrel pressed again into my neck.

  "Just a little sting, Monroe, as the doctors like to say. Here—"

  And with that, Marty's fist raked across my right palm, his knife leaving the glove leather split and a wash of blood oozing from the gash.

  I yanked back my hand as the pain shot through it, but Keyes pulled hard on my shirt, my feet slipped, and I landed on my butt. Keyes, still behind me, took out a handful of my hair and sprinkled it into the open grave. I understood.

  "For Dina," I said.

  "For Dina," said Marty, folding up his pocketknife. "Give her something to remember you by."

  I pulled off the cut right glove—the slice in my palm WAS long but not deep—and tossed it down to Alice. Plenty of blood for Dina to work with, if it ever came to that.

  "Okay, Monroe," said Marty. "Put her in and pack it down hard. Chop-chop. Nighttime's a-wastin'."

  Keyes taped the first few minutes of the burial. Alice Full sank one spadeful at a time into the sandy canyon earth. My palm tore and bled and burned. My balls throbbed; my stomach felt like it was trying to digest itself. My legs were weak and my arms ached as the middle finger of Alice's beckoning right hand finally vanished beneath the sand. Another half hour and I'd finished everything, right down to smoothing out the extra dirt and replacing—root balls and all—the three clumps of fuchsia gooseberry that Parish had ordered me to exhume before started digging. I replaced the boulders and rocks properly so their damp undersides were against the soil, where they be longed. I hauled some beaten dry grass and strew it around. Marty used a flashlight to make sure my shovel smoothed out the last of the footprints as I backed out. A coyote might have been able to tell we'd been there—a deer, maybe, or Black Death and his buddies, for sure—but few men I knew would ever guess.

  I led the way back down the hills, the video light bouncing on the path ahead of me, then leaving me in darkness. The fog clung around us. The pick and shovel were balanced over my shoulder. My adrenaline was spent and a deep weariness spread inside me as I labored down toward my house. "Just for the record, Marty," I said, "if someone sees this video, who took it?"

  "Grace."

  "Why?"

  "Because you two are sickos? How would I know? People make movies of girls getting their throats cut in coitus. Back down to your garage, Monroe."

  I stashed the tools in a corner, then Parish motioned me over to my car. He pointed to the trunk. "Open it," he said.

  "What now?"

  "I spent an hour in your house tonight, looking for something that belongs to me. I think it's in your trunk. Open it, or I'll pry it open."

  I fished out the keys with a raw, blistered hand and lifted the trunk door. Marty smiled, flipped through the contents of his evidence box, then lifted it out and set it on the floor.

  "Amber's a fool," he said, that placid, heavy-jawed expression coming back to his face. "A beautiful, crazy fool. She always adored the men who treated her like shit. I tried, but I actually wasn't good enough at it. She must be nuts about you again. Go figure. But you're a fool, too, Monroe. You and Amber are a perfect pair. You can spend the rest of your lives trying to mess each other up. You deserve each other. My money's on Amber, though—she's got stamina and lots of cunning. You? All you've got are brief moments of inspiration."

  "Why the change, Martin? A few nights ago you were down to your skivvies in her bedroom, ready to get it on with your memory."

  Marty leaned back against my car and let his bloodshot blue eyes wander my face, then the evidence box, then the window against which the fog moved like a snake. "Amber came to me when she saw your lousy cover-up—the new nig, the bloodstain, the fresh paint. She needed me. And I was willing to put it all on the line for her. My heart went out, like it always did. Wish I'd learned earlier to control that thing. I showed her how you and Grace had tried to kill her. I offered to leave JoAnn and try to make it work again. Us, Amber and me. She listened. She agreed. Of course, Amber agrees to everything, then does whatever she wants, right So, in spite of all that, she ran off again. To you. To the son of a bitch who tried to kill her."

  Martin's face was a momentary study in confusion and disbelief. But some inner strength—the sheer muscle of madness, I presumed—brought his confusion back under control and forced it to conform to something that could pass for reason.

  "And somehow, when I realized she'd gone to you again, I saw myself from the outside. It was like a light went on. I saw myself standing there in my underwear, just like you saw me. I was ashamed. I was more than ashamed—I was nothing Then I was floating above it, and suddenly I was free. It all just snapped."

  Snapped. How many times had Art Crump used that dire verb? The idea hit me then that Martin had already traced Amber to my father's cabin and done to her what he had meant to do to her the night of July 3.

  "And I realized, Russ, that when there's nothing left to fill the cup, just throw away the goddamned cup. I'm free, and I'm going to stay this way."

  Free because he'd gotten to Amber? "What is it you want from me, Martin?"

  Marty smiled, a vile, bitter thing. "If Amber winds up like Alice, I'll make sure my best dick gets a copy of this video. I might be free of her now, but I don't want you to bash her skull. I'd rather have her alive than have her money—I don't need it. If I hear any noises from you about Marty Parish and Amber Mae Wilson, I'll deliver the video. I'll have a copy of it and an explanation in a safe-deposit box, with instructions to my lawyer what to do if I come to any sudden, uh... reversal. If you bother me in any way, Monroe, if I even dream that you're brushing up against me in a way I don't like, I'll deliver the video. You exist to write articles that reflect well upon Dan and me. You do not exist in any other capacity. Fart in the same room with me, Monroe, and I'll deliver the tape. I own you. And I own your daughter, too. And remember, if I do hand it over, nobody on earth is going to believe one word you say about me being in Amber's house or me and some silent deputy forcing you to perform a low-budget funeral. And it's not just because you had a corpse in your freezer."

  "Why else?"

  Marty stepped forward and drove a finger into my chest. "Because, you, Monroe, are one crazy, desperate bastard. It's written all over your face. And I got it on tape."

  I thought for a moment, but Parish's insane logic seemed, in terms of practical application, not very insane at all. He might suffer, but he could make it work. He had the department behind him, a good reputation. Any dick could establish my motive and opportunity in about one day—-to the tune of half a million dollars, an embittered heart, a vengeful, neglected daughter. Parish had my blood and hair mixed into the earth of Alice's grave. He had Keyes as an alibi, and the exact date and time of "my crime" indelibly tracked by the camcorder clock. Yes, Martin had built a good case.

  "Where is she?" he asked.

  "I don't know. She dumped the box and her story on me then drove off."

  "And didn't tell you where?"

  "Sounds like her, doesn't it, Marty?"

  "Sorta does."

  "Well, there you have it," I said.

  "Have this, Monroe."

  His fist caught me low—just above the groin. All I could do was turn with it, trying not to take it full. But my reflexes were slow and I got most of it, and the next thing I knew I had landing on my side and rolled partway under my car. I stared up at the rusting muffler.

  "That was for the other night at the beach," said Martin

  When I lifted my head to look, I could see two sets legs climbing up my driveway toward the Sheriff's Department car.

  I rolled onto my side and brought my knees to my stomach because that was what t
he pain told me to do. I looked my right-rear shock. I closed my eyes. I lay there for a long while because things were coming clear to me. Oh, the clarity that can come with pain. One: Marty had killed Alice that night because he believed she was Amber. He had disposed of the club. Two: He'd mocked up the scene to look like the Midnight Eye, a serial killer that only Winters, Parish, Schultz, and possibly Chet Singer even knew was on the loose. Three: He'd change his mind when he saw the opportunity to silence me—I, who had blundered into his plot—with Alice's body, which until tonight—I guessed—had occupied a similar space in Marty's own freezer. Four: He had done the cleanup. Five: He now had back in his possession any self-incriminating evidence he might have left at Amber's and any planted evidence he had wished to add. Six: I now had a body buried not far from my house that I could—for all practical purposes—do little to explain.

  I crawled out from under the car and went inside to the phone. My father answered on the fourth ring. He was okay. Amber was okay—though I made him get up and check her room.

  "Are you okay?" he asked when he got back on.

  "I'm in smithereens, Dad."

  "I can be there in half an hour."

  "No. There's nothing you can do."

  "Izzy?"

  "Worse. She was talking like a child yesterday. It... hurt me to see that."

  All of my fear for Isabella came rushing in then, and all of the grisly horror that Marty Parish had visited upon my life. I felt the same frantic, gut-wrenching terror I'd felt once at the age of ten, hopelessly lost on a camping trip with my mother and father. But this fear was stronger by far. I wanted nothing more than to cry. But I would not, though not for the reasons given by pop psychologists who bemoan the male indoctrination that tears are for girls. No. I would not cry because I was truly afraid that it would take something out of me—some fury, some emotion—that I was going to need in the coming days. I was hoarding anything that could be used as a weapon.