SUMMER of FEAR (16 page)

Karen had already pushed through the door ahead of me when Chet quietly
called me back inside. He gave me that odd look again, as if I were a specimen
under his microscope. "That was perceptive of you to remember the Eye
misspells simple words, and to mention the similarity to Dostoyevski."

I waited, wheels turning inside my head, wondering what I'd done.
"Thanks."

"But nowhere, in any of our crime scenes, did he write the word
ignorance
—correctly or not."

I could see
ignorace
on Amber's wall, clearly, as
my mind streaked for the nearest plausible excuse. Even as I stood there,
slack-jawed, probably, I saw a way to employ my befuddlement It was a superb
lie, delivered with humility and aplomb. "I write and edit hours a
day," I said with a minor smile. "I must have mistaken my ignorance
for his."

Chester continued to study me hard for a moment, then smiled.
"Well," he said, "we all certainly have enough of that go
around."

For the next hour, I interviewed Erik Wald and Dan Winters to get
Citizens' Task Force's information. The formulation of this force, I saw, was
clearly a promotional move on Winters's part, a way of enlisting not only
public support for the case but of enlisting votes in the next election—still
two years away. I tried to remain uncynical. It was also, I understood, some
kind of atonement—overatonement perhaps—for the fact that the department had
taken so long to connect the Fernandez and Ellison killings. Still, the task
force was theoretically a good idea, if it brought results. I personally
thought the T-shirts and caps a bit much. Wald seemed almost to glow in his
moment; he was sincere, glib, earnest, arrogant. I was reminded again that Erik
was an outsider here and that no amount of infiltration of this department
would ever render him a sworn officer. But for now, Wald would have heavy
coverage, and his Task Force had already produced a potentially huge piece of
evidence—the video and resultant photograph. Carla Dance dispatched a
photographer who shot Wald during the last few minutes of our conversation.
Before the shoot started, Erik brushed his hand through his curly hair and
loosened his necktie.

"Hurry
up," he told the photographer. "I need to get to work."

The last thing I
did before heading home to write the article was make a quick stop by
Sorrento's up in the Orange hills.

Brent Sides was indeed tending bar. He was tall and tanned, with a
swatch of thick blond hair, and eyebrows sun-bleached to white, which hovered
over his blue eyes like frosted comets. But in spite of his tan, he blushed
deeply when I introduced myself as Grace Wilson's father.

"I like your books," he managed. "And the article today
about the killings. The waitresses here are all freaking out."

I watched him drying glasses with a clean white towel before I spoke
again. When I did, it was to tell him that Grace was in some very deep trouble
with some very unfriendly men. He did
not seem surprised by this.

I asked him about his whereabouts on the night of July 3, and he said he
had been with Grace—first dinner, then the movies, then drinks. He took her
back to her place, late.

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-three."

He blushed again and looked away.

"Do you love her?"

He nodded. "We've never been to bed, if that's what you mean, but I
love her."

A cocktail waitress ordered a round of drinks, and Sid was relieved to
be away from my prying eyes while he made them, set them on the counter, and
recorded his action onto keyboard. He eased back my way when the waitress swung
away from the service bar, tray loaded.

"Have you seen these men?" he asked. "The ones who are
after her?"

"No. You?"

"Yeah. They look heavy. I've got some friends,
though

"That's not the point, Brent. Describe
them."

He did, and his portraits were very close to those of Grace: one fat man
with big ears and one slender young man with close-cropped hair and sunglasses.

I was quiet while he wiped the counter, apparently deep in thought.

"I'd never hurt her," he said finally.

"You'd do just about anything for her."

He nodded.

"Would you lie?"

"Probably. If she asked me to."

I suddenly liked Brent Sides for his guilelessness, his boy’s shyness
regarding my daughter, his obvious affection for her.

"Please ask her to call me,"
he said.

"I'll do that."

I paid
up, shook Sides's cool, moist bartender's hand, and stepped back out into the
heat of the afternoon.

Neither Isabella nor Grace was at home when I got
there. Instead, there was a note on my pillow:

Dear Russ,

I'm sorry but I can't be here
alone. I fell in the bathroom after the maid left. Not hurt, but it scared me.
Grace was gone. Mom and Dad came and got me up and are taking me to their
place. I wanted so badly to be your baby, not your infant. I miss you already.

Love, Your Isabella

For a while, I stood there
in our upstairs bedroom, listening to the roar of Isabella's absence. The sun
was lowering over the hills, and through the picture window came a clear,
fierce light that splashed across the carpet, hung against the far wall, angled
over the lower corner of our bed. So much was missing: Isabella's wheelchair—a
contraption that I'd despised at first,

then grown to regard with
some sort of odd affection as it came to be more and more a part of her; the
bottles of pills that always cluttered her nightstand; the cane, upright on its
four-toed foot, always waiting nearby for her; Isabella's journal, catalogs,
cookbooks, novels, and travel books that were always strewn across the bed;
even her favorite blanket.

Now they were gone and the
place—our place—was as forbiddingly neat as a motel room. A terrifying, urgent
loneliness hit me then as I had a vision—not my first—of what this house and
this life would be like without Isabella in them. A voice inside reminded me that
the liquor cabinet was just downstairs. But I didn't move. I stood there in
that unmerciful sunlight, drenched in a world without my wife.

I looked around the room, wondering whether the truest and simplest
measure of a person is in what they love, whether a life is, most basically, a
time to discover what those things and who those people are. And here was so
much of what Isabella had found to love: the crystal hummingbird dangling on a
string just inside the window; the cheap cut-glass figure of an Aztec warrior
we'd gotten in Mexico and that now stood guard on the TV; her piano, which sat
against the far wall in all its burnished, pampered beauty; her books of Neruda
and Stevens and Moore; her hundreds of music tapes—everything from Handel to
the sound track of "Twin Peaks." There it all was, illuminated by the
sun but enlightened and made precious by Isabella's love.

And as I stood in front of her piano—her deafeningly silent
instrument—and looked at the pictures framed and displayed there, I realized for
the first time that of everything Isabella loved in this life, she loved me the
most. There were pictures as we said our vows, as we climbed into the limo, cut
the cake, waltzed the first dance. I'd looked at all these in passing a
thousand times—every day, probably—and they'd always struck me as nice but
common, charming in a ritual, almost institutionalized way. After all, didn't
every married couple have a bunch of shots like these? But then, that day,
standing in our room alone saw and really understood with absolute chilling
clarity that Russell Monroe, was the prize of Isabella's life.

I, Russell, who had stumbled upon her reading poetry in the orange
grove, five million years ago.

I, who had sworn to love and honor her.

I, who had sat outside Amber Mae Wilson's home not once, but four times,
wondering whether I should go in,
knowing
that one night I
would.

I, who carried a flask so as never to be too far from my beloved
whiskey.

I, who had left her alone to fall in her own bathroom who was now not
even the first person she would call to help her get her suffering, besieged
body off the floor.

I was her greatest prize.

The sunlight continued burning the room, bearing down into my eyes. I
felt singled out by it, revealed, exposed. When I looked to the mirrored closet
doors, there was no Russ Monroe to be seen, only the bright outline of
something manlike and hollow—a glare. I wondered whether that was what Isabella
saw when she looked at me: just the shape of a man where the substance used to
be.

I walked down the
stairs, acutely tuned to the sound my shoes on the steps of our empty house.

Joe Sandoval,
broad-faced and barrel-chested, was doing something to his front door when I
parked in front of his house half an hour later. He and Corrine lived in San
Juan Capistrano, quiet inland town south of Laguna, known mainly for its
mission, to which the migration of swallows in March of each year is both a
local legend and a tourist event. Isabella and I were married in that mission
on a scorching Saturday in September, a day that felt much like this one in the
sheer overwhelming presence of its heat. I read the inscription on the silver
flask again—"With all my love, Isabella"—after taking a slug of the
whiskey inside.

Joe stopped his labor and studied me as I came up the
walkway. Years of work for SunBlesst Ranch had left his face lined and dark,
his black eyes in a perpetual, dubious squint that contradicted his general
good nature. His thick gray-black hair was combed straight back as always, tied
in a short ponytail. He transferred a screwdriver and offered me a heavy,
gentle hand. "She's okay," he said.

"Was the fall bad?"

"Just a bruise, but it scared her. Come
in."

He guided me into the house, one hand on my shoulder, the other on the
door. I noted that he had been installing a second dead bolt, courtesy, no
doubt, of the Midnight Eye. "Corrine is upset," he said quietly as we
went in. "You know."

The living room was small but comfortable, furnished in the affordable
Sears version of American colonial. There was a braided oval rug on the
hardwood floor, pictures of family on one wall, and a simple shrine to the
Virgin Mary tucked into the corner by the TV. Corrine's handmade afghans were
draped generously over the sofa and chairs. A Bible lay on the coffee table. A
window-mounted air conditioner hummed loudly. Beside it stood a .30-06 deer
gun.

Corrine sat in the rocker, but she stood when I came in. I hugged her
with the genuine affection tempered by dread that many men feel for their
mothers-in-law. She had accepted me unconditionally as a husband for her
daughter, but slowly over the last year I had sensed her respect eroding, based
on the care I was—or wasn't—giving Isabella. She had never said one word to me
about it, but I had decided that in Corrine's eye: I was not tending her
daughter as well as I could. I began resent this judgment. The thought had
crossed my mind, of course, that in my own eyes I was failing, and what I truly
resented was myself. By design, a man's conscience is eager to betray him.

Corrine is a tall woman, especially for one of Mexican blood. She was
fifty years old then, the same age as her husband and only ten years older than
I. Corrine is graceful in her height always immaculately groomed, and she is
conspicuously beautiful when she smiles. It is a smile to die for. In fact, Joe
has white knife scar across his belly, evidence of only one of the battles he
fought in the dusty back streets of Los Mochis to win her hand and protect her honor. They had come north together
just after they were married, in the summer of 1964, one year before
Isabella—who would be their only child—was born.

She hugged me generously, then sat. "She is sleeping. Please, sit
down."

I remained standing and looked toward the hallway. Joe sat down on the
sofa and glanced at his wife, then at me. A minor point was about to be won or
lost here. It was a matter of honor—or maybe only of pride—that I win it.

So I walked past the sofa, went down the hallway, and opened the door of
Isabella's room. She lay on her back, deep asleep, the breeze of a ceiling fan
riffling the bedsheet at her neck/ The room was cool, shadowed by an immense
pepper tree the backyard. From the wall directly above her head, an agonized
plastic Christ stared, it seemed, straight down at Isabel His cheapness angered
me, his unconcern for the tumor cells growing unchecked and with His blessing,
I assumed, in Isbella's lovely body. To ask Him for help seemed to grovel—the
very worst of bad faith. I shut the door quietly and went back to the living
room, where I sat on the couch and looked out the window to the street.

"Would you like for Isabella to stay with us for a while?"
Corrine asked.

"I definitely would not."

"Why, Russell?"

"Because she's my wife and it's my job to take
care of her."

Corrine's accusing silence blended with the hum of the air conditioner.
Joe got up, went into the kitchen, and came back with a pitcher of iced coffee,
three glasses. Joe and I never talked over anything but cold Bohemia. So, I thought,
Isabella has mentioned my drinking. Were the beers and the whiskey still on my
breath?