SUMMER of FEAR Page 24

  "I guess she got my housekeeping style instead of yours,"

  I said.

  "What she got was a maid I pay for."

  "How come you keep reminding me who pays the bills?"

  "I think you should know."

  "If I remember correctly, my child-support checks came

  back."

  Amber looked away from me, visibly perturbed. She glanced at Chester, whose presence had started to resemble that of some acute and silent conscience.

  "Say what you need to say," he said. "You don't have much that will surprise these old and increasingly hairy ears.

  "I provided everything I could, Russ. I still do. That's what I mean. And that's why this whole thing she's fantasized hurts me so deeply. I don't expect a medal, but it would be nice if my only child tried thanking me instead of recreating her life with me as some kind of hell."

  "Amber," I said, "not everything is about you."

  I considered Amber's misty eyes, her quivering chin, was right, I thought—not everything was about Amber. Nor about myself. This was about Grace, and how we might keep her from Parish's tightening net.

  Chester broke the silence. "Ms. Wilson, begin in the bathroom and research what you can on your daughter's nail: Russell and I will try to find some sign of Mr. Parish. Since you are more familiar with her home than we are, anything you notice that wasn't here before, anything that seems out of place might be of help to us. Remember, Martin Parish's goal is to demonstrate that Grace was in your home the night of July the third. Our goal is to demonstrate that he was here."

  Chester began in the cupboards of the kitchen, no doubt wondering whether Parish had had the audacity to plant something incriminating there—the club, perhaps.

  I went into the bedroom. Grace's nightstand held a leather-bound Bible with her name embossed in gold on the cover. Midway through Leviticus was a color postcard of the Champs Elysees, with the words, "Our city welcomes Grace with an open heart." It was signed "Florent." It had not beer mailed. Hand-delivered to her hotel, I figured, by Florent himself or perhaps a friend, just in time for Grace to take it back with her to Orange County.

  Under the Bible was a notebook that was mostly empty. Grace had made a few journal entries—May 2,4,10,21—then stopped. I read them, learned nothing except that her job was boring and she wanted to travel again.

  There were two photograph albums at the bottom of the stand drawer. I took them out and looked through: London, Paris, Cannes, Rome, Florence, Rio, Mexico City, Puerta Vallarta, Hong Kong, Tokyo. Most of the shots were faces that appeared once, then never returned. Only a few were actually of Grace. A girl's record of travel, I thought—the sights, the strangers, the obvious. Not one picture was of Amber. Strange.

  I closed the drawer and pressed the message button on the answering machine that sat atop the stand. I wrote down in my notebook the names, messages, and numbers. Three calls from Brent Sides. Two from work. Eight from people I didn't know. Three from me, four hang-ups. One from Reuben Saltz, asking after Amber.

  I lifted the cordless phone and pushed REDIAL. A recorded voice told me that I had reached the home of Brent Sides. The last call Grace made from home, I thought. I wondered.

  For a long moment, I stood there and studied the stuffed animals that crowded Grace's bed and bed stand, covered her two chests of drawers, rested on her windowsills and bookshelves, even the floor. There must have been a hundred of them. The idea struck me that I was more interested in getting to know my daughter—at this late date—than I was in finding some trace of Martin Parish's presence in her house. I tried to concentrate: What could Parish have left behind? What did he transfer from this home to Amber's in order to find it as 'evidence' later?

  I dug into Grace's jewelry chest, wondering whether Parish could have had the cunning to remove the tiny screw and leave it at Amber's. If he had, I could not match the screw to any piece of jewelry or to any of the several watches in the chest. Everything seemed... natural.

  Chester continued his more objective path: He checked the closets for incriminating clothing that Parish might have put there; I heard him throwing open all the kitchen cupboards and drawers, doing likewise in the laundry room.

  I opened the window, sat in a chair, and lighted a cigarette The clock said 11:35. I watched the smoke slide through the window screen, felt the nicotine surround my brain, and realize how exhausted I was. The sounds of Amber's bathroom search issued down the hallway from the bath. Chester had joined her and I could hear their voices, muffled, through the walls. Gad knows what she was telling him. I heard them leave the place and assumed they were headed down to the dumpster. What a pleasant business. I looked across the street to the dark water of the harbor. A rage continued to build inside me, directed at Martin. Had Martin done what he did so that I didn't have to? Had he been chosen for darkness, just as Izzy was chosen for disease and Ing for madness? Did it matter?

  I was in no mood for understanding or forgiveness. No, I was much more in the mood to line up all the Parishes and Ings and tumors and evils in the world and bash out their live with my ax handle. I would bash until I could bash no more. I would loose an ocean of blood upon which I would tread—my head held high. My wife would rise and walk to me and we would embrace. We would begin our family. My daughter would smile, thrive. We would have a son. My first-person account of the Midnight Eye would be a best-seller, receive awards, become a major film. My stilt house would become a museum after I died. Izzy would live to be 103, remember me fondly in blockbuster of her own, marry a rickety old man who wore bow ties and adored her.

  "Are you going to be sick?"

  The voice was Amber's.

  "Oh." I focused my eyes, which revealed my ankles and shoes, crossed before me on the carpet. My cigarette had burned out and dropped its ash. "No. I'm fine. Resting."

  She was standing directly beneath a recessed ceiling bulb, the light from which lent her a specific radiance. "Look what we found downstairs."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Amber regarded me with an odd look of pity but also with an exaggerated expression of pain, behind which I sensed some kind of victory. She stopped in the doorway of the bedroom. For a moment, tired as I was—or maybe because of it—all I could do was behold her form before me, the shape of her space, the hang of her dress, the slight tautness of the material at her stomach and chest, the straightness of shoulder, the droop of hair.

  "Let's have it," I said.

  "It's from the dumpster outside. We found a wastebasket liner like the one in the bathroom—tied up and stuffed down around other people's things. I pulled out about five handfuls of pink-stained tissue, and these were there."

  Chet came forward and gave me the small white bag.

  A little covey of fingernails scratched down into the corner and when I tilted it back the other way, they slid to another. Some wobbled on convex backs. They were uniform, off-whit nearly opaque. Fakes. Remnants of pink polish remained on a few of their edges, just shadings really, as if the paint had been removed with solvent. I counted them once, moved them around, counted them again, moved them some more, and counted them a third time.

  "Nine," I said.

  "Nine," echoed Chester. "There're a few others things in there you should see."

  They led me to the bathroom. The door to the cabinet under the sink stood open. Amber knelt down and pointed to a package of new, blank acrylic fingernails.

  A terrible weight settled on me. My heart was wooden, mechanical, huge. My legs felt shaky and my ears were ringing. "What about polish?" I asked, hardly recognizing my own voice.

  "They're all in that basket on the counter," said Amber. "Take your pick."

  I took up the basket and looked in. I shuffled the bottles around. There were six shades of pink. I removed the Baggies from my pocket, spilled the vacuum-cleaner nail onto the cobalt blue tile of Grace's counter, flipped it upright. A color called Rosebud looked close. I painted my left middle fingernail with it, blew it
dry. If there was a difference between the pink on the fake and the pink on my finger, I couldn't see it. Neither could Amber, an expert on such matters, whose face had gone pale, almost cadaverous in the harsh bathroom light. Chet nodded along gloomily.

  "Martin planted the one at Amber's," I said but the feebleness of my conviction clearly wavered in my voice.

  "No," said Chester. "If so, he'd have kept these nine, not thrown them out."

  "Then he planted all ten," I protested.

  "Not logical, Russell. He needs either the one from the vacuum or else these, in his possession. If he did place the nail at Amber's, he certainly would have absconded with these by now. It supports his case against Grace. The tenth nail establishes the match."

  "My daughter was in my house," said Amber.

  My own voice sounded to me as if it were traveling across continents. "There will be an explanation. This isn't what it looks like."

  We spent the next hour searching Grace's apartment for more proof that she had been in her mother's room on the night of July the third. She had done an exemplary job of either hiding it, or taking it somewhere else.

  "We've got one more stop to make," I said.

  We let Amber do the knocking on the door of Brent Sides's apartment, identify herself, and ask to come in. Chet and I stood against the wall so he couldn't see us through the peephole His lumpy briefcase sat at our feet.

  When we followed Amber in, Sides's sleep-heavy eye went wide. All he had on was a pair of boxer shorts. His hair was a mess. He had a carving knife in his hand.

  "Mr. Monroe." He blushed and set the knife on the counter. "Sorry. I was just dreaming about the Midnight Eye getting in here."

  "Just us, tonight."

  "Mr. Sides. This is Mr. Singer, Orange County Sheriff' Department. We need to talk."

  He gaped momentarily at Chester's badge, then at Amber recognizing her face—as would nearly any man in the country--- without being able to place it. He blinked.

  "Wanna sit?"

  "No. I want you to tell me which part was the lie."

  "Which part of what?"

  "Of what you told me about you and Grace. You told me a lot, Brent, but there was one thing you made up. You made it up because she asked you to, and because you love her."

  "No, man. Everything I said was true."

  I stared at him, not wanting to hurt him, although certainly I was willing.

  "There's been a murder, Brent. Grace is in terrible trouble. You don't understand that trouble, but you love my daughter. So do I. You have ten seconds to tell me what your lie was. If you don't, I'll make you wish you had, then you will, anyway."

  He looked to Amber, the softness of appeal in his eyes.

  "You really should talk with Mr. Monroe," said Chet. "Unless you would feel more comfortable in an interrogation booth at County."

  "Please, Brent,'.' she said.

  Sides glanced at me again, then sat in a director's chair in front of the TV. His back was to us. I could hardly hear his voice when he finally spoke.

  "We weren't together on July the third," he said. "I worked and came home. I don't know where Grace was. I was afraid to ask."

  "Why was that?" I demanded.

  "Oh... you know."

  "I don't know. Why were you afraid to ask where she'd been?"

  "Because of the way she... looked."

  Clarity came to me at that moment. Of course. It would account for everything we hadn't found in the last hour of searching Grace's home. It would account for her showing up at Brent's house late that night, after her deed was done.

  "You weren't with her that night, but you saw her. Right?"

  He nodded.

  "How did she look, Brent?" Amber asked him gently.

  "Uh... real scary, like. And she smelled."

  "Like what?"

  "Like she was terrified, like, or had just been close to something real bad."

  Brent turned then to face us, adjusting the director's chair in our direction in disconsolate little jerks. He looked at each of us in turn, then down at the carpet. "I tried to help. I'm not complete idiot, though. You all should know that I'd do anything for her. Almost anything. I don't know where she was. But know she was scared."

  Chester looked up at me with the same ambivalent expression that always came to him when he'd nailed someone. A moth spiraled out of the patio light and landed on the screen

  Sides excused himself to the bathroom.

  I stepped outside and smoked. I was watching the smoke rise and vanish into the air. I was thinking back to a time some years ago, just after Isabella and I were married, when we talked about selling the house and moving out of the county for good. We'd talked about other places: northern California, Hawaii Mexico, Texas. What had made us decide not to go? We told ourselves, finally, that family was most important—-Joe and Corrine, my mother and father, even, in some indefinite way, the promise of proximity to Grace. We told ourselves that we had everything we wanted right here: a house and a little land, clear air coming off the ocean, and no need to get out in the hellish rat race that commenced each morning on the roads that ran just a few miles from our private, isolated stilt house of an Eden. We had told ourselves that we could take on the world from our perch, defend our citadel and live our lives with whatever happiness and purpose we could bring to bear. We braced out selves for success. But what had made us wonder in the first place? What had made us doubt? We did not confess it then but I am certain Isabella suspected—deep in her heart, as did I—that this life of ours was not to continue, that some dark actuality, far off in the future as it may have been, had already brushed us with the shadow of its terrible outstretched wings. Perhaps this was the moment when the first cell metastasized in Isabella's lovely and loving mind. We will never know. But I do know that all I could think of that night, leaning against the rough wall of Brent Sides's apartment, was that we'd somehow made the wrong move, that we'd have been so much better off somewhere else—somewhere without cancer and Midnight Eyes and Martin Parishes and daughters so battered by bad fortune that the very cores of their futures were uncertain as the smoke from my cigarette, which continued to rise into the darkness.

  Chet joined me on the patio.

  "Texas," I mumbled to myself.

  Chester Fairfax Singer, an unhappy spirit whose last effort for the side of innocence had revealed nothing more, probably, than just another exercise in the brutal, the stupid, the desperate, the eternal, studied me from behind his thick glasses.

  "They say San Antonio is very nice," he offered. "May I ask you, where is your daughter at this moment?"

  "My house. With Dad. Give me a day with her, Chet."

  "Yes. One day."

  Amber and I drove back to Laguna without saying a word to each other. But I was aware of her, acutely so: I could locate the precise plane—just beyond my right shoulder—where the perimeters of our heartaches met. We shared a common border. It buzzed like a power line.

  Amber said the first words of our trip just as I was about to turn off Laguna Canyon Road onto my street.

  "No, Russ. Keep going. Drive fast."

  "Why?"

  "Because I asked you to."

  I eased back into the fast lane of the deserted road and pressed down the accelerator. The power of the V-8 seemed to start behind, then pick us up and take us with it. We were guest of velocity. We rode it through the curves, eucalyptuses rushing past the windshield like fence pickets. We gorged ourselves on distance. Amber rested her head on my shoulder and wrapped both her hands around my arm. And what a surge of remembrance shot through me: We had been here before, hundred times, a thousand years ago. I had forgotten how much Amber loved this motion, how she melted into it, how it calmed her. We used to drive too fast together, just for fun. The speed relaxed her, released her. I could smell the sweet dank odor of her hair and the light perfume of her breath when she sighed. You may not forgive, but you will understand that my craving for Amber came rising with all
the power of an incoming tide.

  The city appeared, was gone. We hit Coast Highway eighty, raced through four green lights and a final red before settling into the open four-mile stretch to the next town. The Pacific glittered to our left. The moon presided. A trailer park vanished behind us, quickly as a road sign. The center divider on the highway blurred. To our right, the hills moved by with steady precision.

  "I have a confession to make," whispered Amber.

  "Make it."

  "First, can I tell you how I feel right now? I feel dead. I believe that Grace was in my house to kill me. I feel like she accomplished what she wanted. I feel tainted and stupid and black. I feel like I've wasted everything that's been set on my table. Every single thing that could have turned out good."

  "I'm sorry. I do, too."

  "What do you think it was, specifically, that we did wrong?"

  ."Everything. But I think we did the best we could, with the tools we had."

  "Is there any consolation in there?"

  "Not much that I can see."

  "Is there consolation in anything else?"

  "In tomorrow, maybe. At least we can tell ourselves that."

  "Gad, Russ, tomorrow's here."

  "There is that problem."

  "Won't this thing go any faster?"

  "Oh yes."

  The digital speedometer pegged at ninety-nine, but the car sped crazily on. Horn blasts followed our passage, fading quickly. For a moment it seemed possible, and somehow imperative, that we overtake the pools of our high beams shooting steadily before us. Hope impossible is the purest hope.