SUMMER of FEAR (2 page)

That was a story—a true one, I believe—Amber had told me about herself
back when we were in love. I say I believe it was true because it seemed to
capture some of Amber's several essences: her boldness, her innocence, her
willingness change the facts, her nakedness. But as I came to understand in the
two brief years we were together, Amber had always been and always remained in
the process of inventing herself. She invented herself to make Amber Mae
Wilson—I understand now—someone she could stand to be around. For her, the
truth was never static or absolute, never irreversible or binding. It was a
wardrobe to be changed as she saw fit.

I called her from a bar that night—a moist, sweltering night—and got no
answer, just the machine and message. It was twenty minutes past midnight and I
believed I had a mission.

So I drove down to her place in the south of town and sat outside in my
car, looking at the wrought-iron gate, the palms illuminated by ground lights,
the courtyard behind the gate that featured a fountain in the shape of an
airborne dolphin with a stream of water coming out of its mouth. The huge home
loomed behind, locked in darkness. It was high in the coastal hills and looked
down over the Pacific. She had paid $2.8 million for the place and the 3.5
acres it sat on, as reported in a local paper. The neighbors were hundreds of
yards away.

This was the third night in a week I'd been there.

Amber had lived in this house for five years—some kind of record for
her, I'm sure. I know for a fact that she had changed the landscaping three
times. First, brick walkways and copper weathervanes everywhere, lots of wooden
flower boxes—Cape Cod run amok. Next, a xeriscape of drought-tolerants, decomposed
granite trails, cactus. Finally, this California-Mediterranean theme. I know
all this because my work takes me all over the county. Some things, I can't
help but notice.

As I said, the night was unforgivingly hot. I rolled down the windows
and laid my head back on the rest. I thought of my wife, Isabella, at home.
Isabella, the truest love of my life, who not only taught me love but allowed
me to learn it. She would be asleep now. She would be wearing the red knit cap
to keep her head warm, in spite of the temperature. The wheelchair and quad
cane would be close beside the bed. Her medications would be lined up on a low
shelf within arm's reach, each dose contained in a white paper cup, ready to be
taken by Isabella in the dark, half-asleep, still stunned by the last
ingestion.

Isabella was twenty-eight years old. She had a malignant tumor in her
brain. She had been living with it for a little over a year and a half on that
night of July 3, when for the third night in a week I sat in my car outside
Amber Mae Wilson's home in South Laguna, wondering whether I would find the
courage go up and ring the bell on the gate.

You may say, right here, that this Russell Monroe has some explaining to
do.

You can't possibly imagine how much.

I can only tell you that then, on the humid, heated night of July 3, I
was deeply unwilling to explain anything, most all to myself. I refused to.
That would have been contrary to my mission, which was this: I was in the
process—I hoped— beginning a secret life.

I opened the glove compartment, took out my flask (slim, silver,
engraved to me "With all my love, Isabella"), and drank more whiskey.
Isabella.
I replaced the flask, lighted a cigarette, laid back my head, and
looked out to Amber's courtyard. I tried to banish all thoughts from my mind. I
replaced them with memories of Amber, of those days from our youth when the
world seemed so ripe for our picking, so pleased to have us aboard. Isn't there
always a year or two in everyone's twenties that, when remembered, seem as near
to perfect as life can get?

That was when I saw Amber's front door open and shut, and someone moving
across the courtyard toward the gate.

It was a man. He wiped something off with a handkerchief before letting
the gate swing shut behind him. He walked with his head down and his thumbs
hooked into the front pocket of his jeans, the handkerchief balled in his right
fist. He turned south on the sidewalk without hesitating, took three steps to
the curb, then angled off across the street, let himself into a late-model
black Firebird, and drove away

He didn't see me, but I saw him. Oh, did I see him.

His name was Martin Parish. He was the Captain of Detectives, Homicide
Division, of the Orange County Sheriff's. He had been an acquaintance, then a
friend, then a near friend of mine for twenty years.

Marty Parish was a large man with kind blue eyes and an ardent love of
bird hunting.

Marty Parish and I had graduated from the Sheriff's Academy together,
winter of 1974.

Marty Parish had introduced me to Amber Mae Wilson at our
"commencement" bash.

Marty Parish was the only man that Amber had ever married. It lasted one
year, about fifteen years ago. Now he had just left her home after midnight and
wiped his fingerprints off the handle of her gate.

I watched the Firebird's taillights disappear in the dark and wondered
whether Martin Parish had come to draw from the same well that I had. I always
thought Martin was stronger than that. A wave of shame broke over me. For
Martin? I wondered—or for myself?

I called Amber's number from my car phone and got the machine again.
What an inviting, conspiratorial voice she had!

I took another swig from the flask, set it back in the glove
compartment, then rolled up the windows and got out.

Don't do this,
said a
receding voice inside me—
you have no reasons, only a million excuses
—but
I was already walking toward her gate. It was not locked. The house was dark
except for a very minor glow coming from what was probably the kitchen. I
knocked, rang the bell, knocked again. The door was locked. I followed a
pathway of round concrete stepping-stones around to the backyard. The moon was
half full, and in the moonlight I could make out the rolling lawn, the orange
trees huddled in a grove at the far end, a pale island of concrete. Steam leak
up from the edge of a covered hot tub.

The sliding glass door stood open all the way. The screen door was open
about two feet. Open! My heart dropped, but fought to remain thoughtless. Is
this how a secret life begin: The drapes were pulled back on their runner. To
let in the night air, I guessed: Air conditioning gives Amber headaches. But
the screen. Had Marty come in this way? So I pressed against the screen with my
fingertip. The slit was six inches long, vertical, just left and slightly above
the lock. You could have cut it with a table knife.

Demons began to lift off inside me; I could feel them swirling up
through my arteries, coiling along my spine. They felt like sea creatures that
live down where there's no light--- knife-toothed, blunt-headed, colorless. I
could feel the vein my forehead throbbing.

What I did next went against all my training as a police officer,
against my instincts as a writer, against the logic of the situation, even
against the emotions I felt boiling up inside. Somehow, I lost it. I panicked.
I let out the fear. Maybe it was only a nod of respect for Amber Mae Wilson's
well-being--- would like to believe it was just that.

I jumped inside, found a light switch, flipped it on, and yelled her
name.

"Amber."

"Amber."

Amber!

No answer. I
charged through all the downstairs rooms---empty. I threw on lights
willy-nilly. I tripped over my own feet charging up the stairs, hit my shin on
a step, hard. I couldn’t get enough breath. The light seemed arbitrary, beveled
with the darkness into treacherous edges, planes, drops. Everything was moving.
I crashed into a low credenza in what appeared to be her study. Magazines
slipped off the top; the lamp tilted and fell over and the bulb burst with a
soft pop.

Amber!

Then I was running down a long hallway toward a half-open door. Paintings
on the walls streaked past; the ceiling pressed down low. My heart was working
so hard, there was hardly a space between beats. I was inside the door. The
switch was just where it should have been. The room snapped to attention with
light. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.

At first, I thought it was blood. My second thought was a correction:
Red spray paint. The biggest words were on the mirrored walk-in closet:

SOJAH SEH

Across the wall over the headboard of the bed:

AWAKEN OR DIE IN IGNORACE

On the far wall:

MIDNIGHT EYE IS RETURN

And everywhere
the peace symbols, those hideous sixties ankhs or chicken feet or modified
crosses or whatever in hell they were—everywhere, trailing around the room in
poorly formed, inarticulate red circles.

Amber
lay on the floor by the bed, face-up, her arms and legs spread. She wore a blue
satin robe. Her hair—thick dark brown waves—spread out against the carpet. Big
pieces of white and pink were scattered through that dark hair, strewn from
what I could see had once been her head. And her face! Amber's lovely, ageless,
beguiling face—somehow lifted back now, flap-like, hinged on only one side,
turned almost down, as if contemplating her own hair afloat in that pond of
blood.

In ten years of police work, I had never—

In ten years as a crime writer, I had never—

Never. Not once. Not even close.

I can remember standing there, weight back on my heels, thighs
quivering, face raised to the ceiling, mouth stretched open to release a howl
that I instead choked dead in my throat. The throttled scream came from deep
inside, from my very toes, felt like—a wild discharge that left my eyes
throbbing and terrible pain from my stomach clear up to my jaw. The peace
symbols swirled around me.

I went to the side where her face was. I turned toward her and, bending
low, looked into her dull gray eyes. They were lifeless and remote as old
glass.

Never, in ten years—

Reaching out from the red that had settled over me--- everything I saw
was red, tinged in red, outlined in red, steeps in it, drenched in it—I touched
my fingers to my lips, then stretched my hand toward hers. From my mouth to
Amber's, a distance it seemed my hand would never cover, how much farther could
it be? And what a cold and trembling arrival, fingertip to cool gray lip!

I stood. In the bathroom, I got a handful of toilet paper went back to
Amber, and for a moment looked around the room again. I noted the packed
suitcases—still open—on the floor beside the walk-in. Where had Amber been
going? I force myself to look at her again. Then I knelt, reached out my hand,
hesitated, then reached out again, wiping her lips with it. Then the light
switch in her bedroom as I turned it off. The other switches, too—all of them,
even ones I was sure I hadn't touched. Then the spot where I'd fingered the
screen-door flap, the front doorknob, and a few red, dreamlike moments later,
finally,
the same cold brass handle of Amber's gate that Martin Parish had cleansed.

It was roughly
ten thousand miles to my car.

I drove to Main
Beach and waded along the shore, soaking myself to the thighs. I jammed my
hands in the sand, threw the seawater against my face. I stood there,
knee-deep, and scrubbed my arms with the rough, dripping mud. Now what? I could
call the cops—anonymous tip. I could call the cops, tell them who I was, and
that Martin Parish had killed his ex-wife. I could do nothing, sit back, wait,
and watch them go to work. The one thing, though, that I was not going to
do—even with the smell of murder in my nostrils—was to admit that I had been at
(inside!) Amber Wilson's home, ever. For Isabella, I told myself. For us.

I had one more thought. And though it
seemed as dismal a product as my mind had yet rendered, I will confess also to
the sizable thrill that accompanied it down my spine and into the chaos of my
heart. As I stood there, earnestly grinding my fingernails into the abrading
Pacific sand, I realized I might have just stumbled onto the biggest story of
my life. Golden material, pure and mine only.
Play this smart,
I told
myself. For here was more than a secret life, more than a diversion. Here upon
my platter was the kind of event—
event!
—that, if handled right, could do
more for my career than a dozen secondhand crime books.
I knew these people.
I'd been there.
I felt a little sick to see finally, in all its hidden
rapacity, the true face of my own ambition. But at that moment, with the chill
of the ocean working its way up my legs and arms, what shame could find airtime
in a soul still writhing with the image of pure horror that was Amber's face?

Finally, I went back across the beach
to my car in the light of the half moon. Couples walked arm in arm. Lovers
kissed on the boardwalk. A dog trotted by.

Sojah seh.

So God speaks.

Suddenly, it hit me how badly I
wanted to be home, in bed beside Isabella. The yearning surged over me as if a
dam had been blown. Gad, take me back. I drove fast out the canyon, up the
winding road that ends at our precarious, stilted horne.