The Room of White Fire

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Back to the bathroom, oddly empty. No toothbrush or toothpaste, no shampoo, no deodorant, no perfume.

  No problem. I’m hearing you, Sequoia.

  Kitchen again. Fridge lightly stocked. By the sink a plastic grocery bag stuffed with more plastic grocery bags. Coffeemaker grounds still warm and damp.

  Off on an adventure, I thought. Home and job now distant blips in the rearview of a trashed silver pickup. Plastic bags for luggage, a cute hunk calling himself Jason Bourne for company. What more could a girl ask for?

  I crunched across the needle-covered grounds to Sequoia’s sister’s trailer. No light on, no car out front, and no one answered the door. A squirrel undulated across the grounds and climbed a tree, pausing to consider me, tail waving.

  When the manager answered her trailer door, she looked and smelled as if she’d slept through a fifth and a beer or two. She hadn’t seen Sequoia since the day before, had neither seen nor heard anything unusual earlier this morning. She studied my card as if it were a complex legal document. “I sleep like the dead,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Rolando. Sequoia’s a good girl. Early riser. You don’t worry about her. I’ll have her call you.”

  I started up my truck and checked my phone. Watched the rearview for a minute for a pale SUV or a black muscle car, saw only the dirt road and a pair of crows squabbling in the trees beyond. I wondered what exactly they had to argue about, but every creature has its grievance. I had mine right at that moment: It annoyed me that my target, Clay, and my semiresponsibility, Sequoia, were now in the wind together, not far from here, in a vehicle that would be easy to find. Easy if you’re a cop, that is. As a deputy I’d have hot-listed the truck plates and stood a good chance of it being pulled over within an hour. I miss that power sometimes. But I had not been a good team player. I would have loved to have had some of that power again just long enough to find Clay Hickman and get him back to Arcadia.

  I thought of calling Sequoia, but that could surprise or anger Hickman. I didn’t want an angered psychopath driving around with a trusting teen.

  I called Dr. Paige Hulet and told her I’d be at Arcadia by nine that morning to talk to some of Clay Hickman’s friends.

  “Yes, yes, Mr. Ford, I’ll make sure. That he’s available. There’s one best friend, really. I can do that.” She sounded flustered and short of breath, or both.

  “You’re okay, Doctor?”

  “Yes. Of course. I’m on the treadmill.”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  She rang off.

  6

  Clay’s best friend at Arcadia was Evan Southern. Dr. Hulet introduced us out at the pool. Mid-morning, and the April day was sunny and cool, showers in the forecast. Southern wore seersucker shorts and leather deck shoes and a white pullover sweater with navy trim on the cowl and cuffs. His tortoiseshell glasses magnified his eyes, which were blue. He was deeply tanned and parted his hair, dark brown, in the middle. He looked to be in his late twenties. Evan removed his earbuds and rose slowly from the thick blue pad of the chaise longue. “A friend of Clay? Why, this is a pleasant surprise. Where has that boy gotten to?” I heard the South in Southern’s speech.

  Dr. Hulet excused herself, then walked away along the pool edge. Evan watched her, exhaled audibly, and offered his hand. “I’m not surprised by Clay,” he said, not much above a whisper. “We need to talk. But we need to move. There are microphones and cameras hidden in the trees, and some of the birds you see are actually surveillance drones. So speak quietly and face the ground if possible. Come.”

  We left the pool area. Evan took one of the gravel pathways around the main building, then another across a big sloping lawn on the eastern side. He walked slowly, bent at the waist, with his hands held loosely behind his back. A white-clad attendant trailed us a hundred feet back, gave me a brief salute when I turned.

  “Explain your presence here,” he said, more to the path than to me.

  I told him my profession and that I’d been hired to find Clay Hickman.

  “I sensed that he would do this,” said Evan. “Clay is utterly tormented by the ghosts of the war. I sensed an awakening in him over the last few months. He told me he had a mission. He wants to bring ‘white fire to Deimos.’ Deimos, you may not know, is the Greek god of terror, but it’s also a nickname for someone Clay knew in the war. Do not look up now but there is a camera in the jack pine coming up on our left, twenty feet up, right side, near the trunk. Where the branches are trimmed. You can’t even see all the mics. Be silent as we go by.”

  When we came to the tree I looked anyway, and saw a small video camera strapped to a truncated branch. When the path forked just past the camera tree, Evan went left, west into the forest.

  “I wasn’t able to unravel his metaphor,” he said, glancing at me. “I see no relevance between Deimos and Clay and white fire, whatever that might be. Clay insisted that he has friends to help him. I heard that he slipped past his guards before lunch, threw a blanket over the razor wire, and climbed over. Is that true?”

  Do you tell the truth to a crazy man in a crazy place? Will it make him free, or are you inviting harm to him and others? I thought about that and said nothing.

  “If you don’t tell me the truth I can’t help you find him.”

  “He dug out,” I said quietly, facing down. I realized how suddenly and easily I’d entered his world.

  “Did his friends help him?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  We walked deeper into the forest, which I noted, upon this second tour, was cleared of brush and saplings. There was no thick bed of pine needles as an authentic forest would have, no fallen trunks or drying branches, no tangles of old growth or dead limbs. I saw that most of the trees had been laced so they were balanced and attractive and nonwild looking. Arcadia, I thought. A region of ancient Greece known as a place of simple pleasure and pastoral quiet.

  I looked back at our keeper, still a hundred feet behind us, now with a phone to his head. Deeper in, the forest was less groomed, darker. We came to the firebreak and the chain-link fence topped with coils of razor wire, maybe two hundred yards from the escape hole that curious Sequoia Blain from Oregon had helped Clay dig. I hadn’t seen a camera along the last hundred yards of trail, and saw none on the fence. Maybe DeMaris’s security team figured they were too expensive to install this far out. Large and heavily wooded, the Arcadia grounds would be very difficult to fully secure without towers and guards.

  “See that hummingbird hovering over the razor wire?” asked Evan. “It’s not a hummingbird. It’s a surveillance drone. They send information from sensors in their eyes back to the main computer in the security room.”

  I looked up. The tiny bird was whirring in place as hummingbirds do, maybe twenty feet away from where we stood, near the top of the razor wire. A male, by the bright, metallic-red blazes on his head. Evan Southern’s magnified blue eyes were excited and calculating. He seemed to be waiting on a decision from me.

  “Who told you that?” I asked him.

  “Everyone knows. Just climb up there and scare it off and you’ll see it’s a drone by the way it flies.”

  “Why don’t you climb up and see what it does?”

  “Because I already know what it will do.”

  It sounded logical and doable enough. The worst that could happen was I’d climb up part of the fence, scare off a hummingbird, and have a lunatic down on the ground laughing at me. I turned and looked at our escort again. He’d stopped his usual hundred feet away, crossed his arms, and now stood watching us. I found a rock and lobbed it up near the hummingbird.

  The bird didn’t dodge it. So I got a big pinecone and arched it closer, just a couple of yards from the bird, more than close enough to scare most hummingbirds I’d seen. The bird moved slightly. I looked back at our guard.

  “He w
on’t mind,” said Evan. “Mickey is an Alabama gentleman, like myself.”

  The fence was the good-quality chain-link, with rubberized black coating, which would be easy on the skin. I spread my hands and legs, got my fingers and toes set, then began pulling and toeing my way up to the bird. Halfway there it flew off. I clung there mid-fence, craning my neck to watch it disappear into the trees behind me. It didn’t make the usual low thrum of a hummingbird, but rather a high-pitched whirr. And it didn’t fly in swift, bottom-heavy swoops like hummingbirds do, but in a straight line. Its wings looked weird. It was one of the strangest things I’d ever seen. I lowered myself a foot or two, pushed off, and landed with a puff of dust.

  I waved at the guard. He shook his head slowly.

  “See?” asked Evan.

  “I saw.”

  “I can let you examine one later if they haven’t found it yet.”

  “You caught one?”

  “Two. They found the first one in my room but I put the second one in a much tougher place to find. I do love hiding things from these people. It’s one of the little pleasures of captivity.”

  “Why did you bring me all the way out here?”

  “The farther you get from the hospital the less surveillance. That is why. And because I wanted to tell you that before Clay came to Arcadia, his very favorite place in San Diego was the Waterfront Bar and Grill. I’m sure you know of it. He went there often when he returned from Romania.”

  “He was in Iraq.”

  “No. Romania. Somewhere in that dark and humble country, home to vampirism and werewolfery, lie the seeds of Clay’s madness. I think you might actually locate him at the Waterfront.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate your help.”

  “If you have anything to ask me, especially if it’s secret or very serious, you should do it now, away from the cameras and mics and surveillance drones.”

  “Did he tell you where he was going?”

  “No, only that he had the mission.”

  “Was Clay given electroshock therapy here?”

  Evan fixed me with a stare from behind his thick lenses. There was nothing playful in him now as there had been when he challenged me to climb the fence. Instead, there was something frightened. “I’m certain of it. Without his informed consent. They will deny it.” He seemed ready to add something, but did not. “The Waterfront, Mr. Ford. The Waterfront is the best lead I can give you.”

  We stood in awkward silence, both looking back at Mickey, our overseer, as the hummingbird motored back into view, stopped and hovered above us, then whirred off into the forest again.

  “Let’s head back, Mr. Ford. I want to show you the art studio.”

  We were still in the trees when we came upon three all-white-clad orderlies looking up into a large sycamore with low-hanging branches. Halfway up a young man was crouched in the crook of two branches. He had something in his hands, a phone maybe, or a remote control. One of the orderlies, a thin black man, called up to the man in the tree, asking him to come down safely and right now.

  “That’s Remsen,” said Evan. “They blame the drones on him and his friends. Handy, don’t you think?”

  —

  The art studio was a big room on the first floor. The entire north-facing wall was solid glass. There was only one artist at work when we walked in, a woman standing at a high table, forming a pot with her hands. She looked from the pot to us, a gray slurry dripping off her wrists, then dropped her attention back to her vessel. Easels stood throughout the room, some holding works in progress, others empty.

  “Clay and I dabble in the fine art of painting,” said Evan. “I prefer portraiture, whereas Clay is more of an abstract expressionist, with maybe some Bay Area figurative thrown in. But should we categorize art or just make and enjoy it? Here’s one of mine.”

  The painting was maybe two by two feet. An oil. From the canvas Evan’s face looked back at me. The eyes, nose, and mouth were clear, detailed, and realistic, right down to the glimmering trapezoids of light caught on the lenses of Evan’s glasses.

  “Nice,” I said. “Very you.”

  “Thank you. It’s hard to be objective about oneself. But it helps the art to detach and examine, just as Dr. Hulet says detachment and examination help a person understand himself. Isn’t she one of the most attractive women you’ve ever seen?”

  “She’s easy on the eyes.”

  Evan fixed me with a look. “More like a direct assault on mine. But a most welcome one.”

  The potter looked over, hands still working the vessel. “You’re nothing to her but a case number. A nutcase number.”

  “Julie, you charmer you! This is the famous private investigator, Mr. Roland Ford. Star of film and TV.”

  She ran her eyes up and down me just once, then turned back to her work. “I only watch PBS.”

  “Let’s see Clay’s work,” I said.

  “Over here.”

  Our watcher from the forest looked in from the doorway, caught my eye briefly, then backed off. Evan put a hand on my shoulder as if we were old friends, guided me to the far side of the huge glass wall. We picked our way through the easels and paint-splattered worktables and stools. Through the floor-to-ceiling window loomed the mountainside, sharp with pines.

  Clay’s painting was on an easel near the window. It was small. It looked complete but unclear. Against a black-orange background—a burning black curtain, a cave wall lit by a bonfire?—a figure stood above another figure lying on the ground. They had elongated, almost pointed heads. Human or simian, I couldn’t tell. No faces. Both were dark, twisted, and anguished, as if writhing in a fire. But somehow resigned, too. A performance or a ritual? I stared at it for a long time.

  “What’s going on in the painting?” I asked.

  “Clay’s mind.”

  “Are those people?”

  “Clay will have to tell you. I can’t. I just know that when we paint, Clay is very involved. He never paints from a model. Or uses a picture. It all comes from memory.”

  Evan led me to the back of the room, where dozens of canvases leaned against the wall. Clay’s were not hard to find, two rows of four, all small in size. I knelt and flipped through them. The dark, longheaded figures repeated painting to painting. The backgrounds differed, though: some had similar red-black interiors, others brightly illuminated by what looked like cold white sunlight, and still others were dense, constricting fields of green that might have been forest or woods. But all of them featured the same two skinny, possibly charred but living figures.

  “A fucked-up mind imagined that,” said Evan. “Pardon my language. Where I grew up they’d bullwhip you for using a word like that.”

  “Alabama, right?” I asked absently.

  “Shelby County. Hill country.”

  I finished studying the last painting in the second row, tilted the canvases back against the wall. Then I went to the first row and looked at every painting one more time. I didn’t know why I couldn’t take my eyes off them, only that I couldn’t. Painful stuff. Pain itself. They had the simple brute allure of a highway wreck. Another way into the mind of this strange creature I’d been hired to bring back to the world. I stood and looked around. Back to this, I thought. His world.

  “Do you think he’s capable of violence, Evan?”

  He studied me, blue eyes narrowed, wheels turning inside. “His violence is not upon others. He smashed one of his paintings not long ago. Kicked a hole in a door.”

  “Do women set him off?”

  “No, Mr. Ford. He’s a gentleman or he wouldn’t be my friend. Anyway, that’s our art studio. Like to see that hummingbird drone in my room?”

  —

  Evan’s room was similar to Clay’s but looked considerably more lived-in. There were curtains over the big window with the nice forest view, several posters of Civil War–them
ed movies—Cold Mountain, Glory, Gettysburg, Sherman’s March—taped somewhat randomly to the walls. I guessed that poster glass or even plastic was prohibited. I let my eyes wander the living area while I listened to Evan rooting around in the bedroom. He had a desk, a laptop computer, and a printer, as had Clay. Also on the desktop was a loose stack of white printer paper and dozens of crayons of various colors and use. I nudged the laptop but it was fixed to the desk as firmly as Clay’s had been. And like Clay’s room door, and undoubtedly all the others, this door was lockless.

  Evan came from the bedroom with a grin on his face and a small hummingbird-like thing riding on his palm.

  7

  We do have a drone-flying club here at Arcadia,” said Dr. Hulet. “One of Dr. Spencer’s interests. That’s what you saw.” I was back in her sixth-floor office. I’d told her about the strange little drone and Remsen in the tree.

  “The pilots are supervised, of course. The drones have to be small and harmless. No cameras. The partners fly them around and end up crashing most of them. Evan of course knows all this but prefers a grand surveillance conspiracy.”

  A drone-flying club at Arcadia. It didn’t sound as reasonable as an art studio. Or a nice swimming pool, or a play-money casino and a walk-in aviary where patients—partners—tended to small, frightened birds. And certainly our security escort wasn’t concerned when I climbed the fence to better see the bogus hummingbird.

  Paige Hulet was wearing what I figured to be her standard work uniform: black pantsuit and shoes again, white blouse. This blouse had small black accents on the collar and buttonholes. Her hair was up in a tight bundle identical to the one she’d worn before. Her makeup was light or she wasn’t wearing any, and I thought of her treadmill voice early that morning.

  “Where’s your power pencil?” I asked.