The Room of White Fire

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Freed from Arcadia, she wore a loose floral dress with a light white jacket, and her hair was down. The day was sunny and warm. I’d told the Irregulars I wanted privacy for this lunch and they’d decided to see a matinee and go bowling.

  She flinched as she reached to pour more wine into my glass. A couple of fat red drops hit the tablecloth. “Ouch,” she said.

  “Here.” I poured some wine for her. I served her some of the ahi salad that Lindsey and Burt had made for the occasion, pushed the baguette basket closer to her for an easier reach.

  I broke off a piece of bread. “You invented Dan,” I said.

  She set down her fork and looked at me, her irises brown with some red in them—rust or cinnamon—and her expression flat.

  “When did you suspect?” she asked.

  “The first time you said his name.”

  “I thought you believed me.”

  “Not quite,” I said. “But I didn’t know what to believe instead.”

  “Yes. I invented Daniel.”

  “Remember, he went by Dan.”

  “Don’t peck at me,” she said. “I’m not proud of what I did.”

  I heard waterfowl skidding to a stop on the surface of the pond behind me. Figured it due to the brace of mallards that had shown up last week. Watched Paige Hulet’s eyes tracking them right to left. “Why pretend you were married and he had died?”

  She met my gaze, then looked away. “I wanted a way into you. So I made myself a widow in my mind. To understand yours.”

  “To heal me.”

  She touched her side very lightly. “You see what I did for Clay.”

  “I’m in awe of what you did for Clay. Were your five years without a dance invented, too?”

  “No, Roland. I gave up dancing and what goes with it. It was all about my patients and my writing. I was thriving. But, when I got to know you, I thought you were beautiful and I wanted to dance again. I knew from the start that your heart would be in the right place.”

  “How did you know?”

  She studied me over her wineglass. “Everything I found about you told me that you were a good and feeling man. The killing of Titus Miller. What you did and didn’t do when your partner opened fire. What you said and didn’t say. I admired you. And later, the U-T article about you doing well as a PI, and marrying a beautiful public defender—I was happy for you. What you said about her death a year after that. So, at the moment I met you, I already believed in you.”

  “Yesterday I looked at our contract again. I was trying to figure out how much money I’d return to Dawn Spencer. And I saw that you were the only Arcadia principal who actually signed the contract. Another light went on. It wasn’t Briggs or DeMaris who thought to hire me. It was you.”

  She held my gaze.

  “You amaze me, Paige. And I’m hard to amaze.”

  “Over time, I hope you forgive me.”

  She sipped the wine and looked at me. I could feel the turmoil inside her. I expected her to say she didn’t regret her deceptions because they had been done for good reasons. Ends and means. Protecting Clay. Getting what she needed. Dancing again. I felt a ripple of hurt pride as the facts of being researched and lied to sank in. But my pride was no match for Paige Hulet’s passions.

  “I forgive you.”

  “I know I’ve been reckless.” She reached out and set a hand on mine.

  I heard the blur of wing beats and turned to see a flock of red-shouldered blackbirds lifting off the cattails, a hundred black-and-red jewels rising into the blue. Wesley and I had had three good walks in the last three days. The hooded orioles. Quail paired up and the great horned owls moving into an unused hawk’s nest, for the third year in a row. Wesley’s vision fading.

  We finished the lunch and I poured more wine. Light pours, given her performance during our previous social engagement. She smiled and lifted the glass, and in this moment, under this palapa on this day, Paige Hulet was beautiful. I thought of the pictures on her office wall. Girl. Camper. Tennis champ. Scholar. Biology summa cum laude with a minor in French. Medicine. Psychiatry. Moral injury. Dancer. Maybe I’d get my picture on her wall someday. I couldn’t not forgive her.

  “Does that rowboat work?” she asked.

  “It’s floating.”

  “Take me out?”

  Justine in her floppy hat in that boat on spangled water. “Sure.”

  —

  Paige sat on the bow bench, facing me as I rowed. Her dress rippled in the breeze. She hooked her hair behind her ears with both hands. “Rex and Patricia have hired me to be Clay’s doctor again. I’ll be moving up to their area soon. Quite a generous offer.”

  I congratulated her. I would rest easier knowing that this obsessive physician would be in charge of Clay’s recovery.

  “Thanks to you,” she said, “I’ve got another chance to help him heal. I’ll do just about anything on earth to let that happen. As you know.”

  “But would you take a bullet?”

  She smiled and shook her head, turned her face up to the sun, and closed her eyes. I had that plunging feeling that is part biology and part mystery.

  I manned the oars and let her talk. So much to do, she told me. The next few months were critical for Clay, though the most pressing question was where he would actually be. He was an obvious flight risk. The Justice Department, the DoD, and the Air Force all wanted control of him. The Bureau of Prisons provided a compromise—the U.S. penitentiary in Lompoc, California—an hour and a half drive from Ojai. As Clay’s personal physician, Paige would have daily access to him. She had booked an extended-stay hotel in Lompoc for one month, easy to arrange in a prison town. Sequoia Blain had done likewise.

  The sun was warm and there were hawks keening high up and golden poppies on the hills. She opened her eyes and looked at me. “Don’t be a stranger. Lompoc is just over an hour flight from Fallbrook Airpark. I checked it.”

  “Okay.”

  “That look on your face now . . .”

  “Just be alert, Paige. Alec is dangerous. And Bodart’s people are worse. It’s hard to know about men like that.”

  “Don’t worry so much.”

  Itch on my forehead. “It’s my job and I’m good at it.”

  I turned the rowboat back toward the dock. She squinted into the sunlight, much like that first day at Arcadia. “You brought something back to life in me. I’m going to miss you very much.”

  —

  I held open her car door as she carefully lowered herself into the seat. I closed it and she wiped a tear. Shoulder strap, radio, window lowered for a gotta-go smile. Then the dust rising as she headed down the drive. Sun on chrome, music. Hand out the window, waving.

  Flash of red, a voice but no words.

  You.

  —

  At twelve hundred feet the Pacific sparkled and heaved and the onshore flow pushed against me as I rose over Point Loma. Lighthouse and toy boats below, whitecaps and seabirds. Sails and wakes. I banked gently south to make the same loop we’d always made.

  In the air my thoughts come and go more quickly than on land. I don’t know why. Pressure drop? Temperature change? The ecstasy and risk of leaving earth?

  I thought of Clay Hickman in Lompoc penitentiary. Of Paige on her way there. Of Sequoia already arrived. She’d sounded happy on the phone. Of Vazquez and Tice and Alec. Of Bodart. Of Briggs Spencer and his agony, of his sudden celebrity and Hard Truth, all of which had been the subject of endless news stories in print, on TV, and on the Internet. Everywhere you looked. Then not, sliding into the great yawning past of yesterday’s news.

  Funny enough, Nell Flanagan called me not long after Paige had driven away. Nell wanted to know if I’d do her show, talk about Clay Hickman and Briggs Spencer, the mysterious psychiatrist Paige Hulet, the shootout on my property, the torture video, Whit
e Fire. I declined politely, told her I loved Nell Flanagan’s San Diego, and would donate as always to KPBS during pledge week. She said if I ever changed my mind she would love to hear my story.

  Over the National City docks I began my southwest bank, which took me out over the Pacific. Engine drone rattling flesh and bone. Came around northwest as we always did, as she had on her sudden side trip to eternity.

  Rage, Wrath & Fury lurched up inside me again, just as they had the moment I’d heard what had happened to her. And nearly every day since, many, many thousands of times. I looked straight down at the Pacific from 2,500 feet—approximately where Justine had begun her final descent.

  I held that altitude and came toward the coast as she had, just south of Point Loma, headed for Coronado, whose elegant blue bridge now curved before and below me. I knew that by the time she had reached here she had been too preoccupied to notice that bridge. Preoccupied? How about disbelieving? Terrified? So I noticed the bridge extra, for her. She loved the beautiful. My angry friends butted in again, haranguing God on my behalf:

  You took her, You Son of a bitch. You. Took. Her.

  But Roland doesn’t want to hate You forever.

  He wants to forgive You.

  He believes.

  Isn’t that enough for now?

  They were silent for a moment, and in that silence something finally either broke or healed. It felt so right. So necessary and overdue. Neutral buoyancy. State of grace.

  Of course, Rage, Wrath & Fury couldn’t just let it be. So they added a parting shot. Their voices softer:

  You better leave Wesley one of his eyes.

  We demand that You help Wesley.

  Please help him.

  Please.

  Tough words from a history major Marine and mediocre boxer PI.

  Tough words from a locator who knows he can’t find the one person he most wants to find.

  I ignored my counselors and listened for something better. For something beyond anger. For words that could throw a little light. Words that did not mean everything and nothing. I listened for seven things that I believed in, as asked of me by Justine in that lifetime long ago, and which I had been thinking about a lot lately. I heard them, mixed into the prop noise:

  Gloves up, eyes open

  Hold the living

  Free the dead

  Waste laughter

  Save rain

  Lower the volume

  Give them the whole bitchen world

  I push forward on the yoke and come off the throttle and send Hall Pass 2 down. Like jumping off a mountain. Long fall, then speed building, Gs climbing, the rough constriction of gravity. Metal shudder and roar. A peregrine’s stoop can reach two hundred miles per hour. Breathe now. Push. Down. Down. So easy. So fast. Justine taught me this. Could touch her now if I wanted. Stay the course and meet up with her. Together forever. No. Then full throttle and the blast of turbocharge, the haul of the yoke and the plane begins to level, slowly and steadily, grinding through air.

  Gradually I feel the nose lifting and the invisible curve of bottom. All that has been charging up at me folds open and away. Parts around my propeller. Rushes past my windows, past me. Velocity so smooth and pure. Almost touching the green-jeweled chop that glitters for miles around. Bright hulls, billowing sails, rooster tails of motorboats on the mounding swells, and the black rocks of Zuniga Point hurtling past. Hold her steady. Push Clay’s flash drives through the window, wind-snatched.

  Then climb into the world again, headed home.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The following books were illuminating and helpful in the writing of this novel. I congratulate these authors on their fine and sometimes disturbing work.

  Madness in Civilization, by Andrew Scull

  A Battle Won by Handshakes, by Lucas A. Dyer

  Predator—The Remote-Control Air War Over Iraq and Afghanistan: A Pilot’s Story, by Matt J. Martin with Charles W. Sasser

  None of Us Were Like This Before, by Joshua E. S. Phillips

  Torture Central, by Michael Keller

  On Killing, by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman

  What It Is Like to Go to War, by Karl Marlantes

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  T. Jefferson Parker is the author of numerous novels and short stories, the winner of three Edgar Awards, and the recipient of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for mysteries. Before becoming a full-time novelist, he was an award-winning reporter. He lives in Fallbrook, California, and can be found at tjeffersonparker.com.

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