SUMMER of FEAR

A Novel

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

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.

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?"