Season of Fear

by Brain Freeman

  His mother had known that something was wrong, but she’d been unable to pry the truth out of him. In reality, she hadn’t tried hard. She’d been busy filming television commercials, bolstering her millions with advertising sponsorships in anticipation of her retirement. Selling out, as she cheerfully put it. She’d been away most days, tramping around the orange groves with film crews.

  Cab stayed at Diane’s house, tunneling inside himself. He’d spent the days reliving his time abroad, his relationship with Vivian, the things they’d said to each other, the lies she’d told. He’d been looking for an escape.

  That was when Diane found him.

  Diane, who was living in her own kind of hell with Birch.

  There were nasty rumors.

  Cab sat in his candy-red Corvette outside the radio station, and he remembered that week with more clarity than he wanted. It was a vivid week in a vivid, terrible year. They’d spent hours together. He’d listened to Diane talk about her life, the struggles with her son Drew, Birch’s affairs. She was depressed. She was lonely. He was riven with guilt. They were primed for a mistake.

  He remembered the afternoon that last day when she reached for him, and he reached back. They were both voracious with need, stripping off their clothes in the heat of her bedroom, with the summer air blowing inside. The two of them, naked, hungry. Her mound, moist as he kissed it. Her gasping scream as he entered her. She hadn’t had sex with Birch in four years, she said. He hadn’t had sex since Vivian, and he thought he could erase her memory in a single afternoon in Diane’s bed. He remembered the lust of being inside her, this woman who was his mother’s best friend, and he remembered the burning shame afterward.

  He left Florida that night. He never saw her again.

  He began to run.

  Cab heard the vibrations of his phone over the purr of the Corvette’s motor. He wondered if it was Lala, finally calling him back, but it wasn’t. Her absence made him angry. He needed her.

  ‘Cab, it’s Caprice,’ she said, her voice as fruity and intoxicating as a tropical drink.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ he said.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Actually, I’m about to drive to a federal penitentiary.’

  ‘Hamilton Brock?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, good luck. And thank you for helping Diane.’

  Cab wondered if he’d ever really helped Diane, now or in the past. He remembered their eyes meeting the previous night, just for a moment. It brought back the guilt and shame. ‘I guess I can’t say no to my mother,’ he said.

  ‘Really? Here I thought you couldn’t say no to me.’

  Caprice was flirting with him, and he liked it.

  ‘Are you checking on your new employee?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I wanted to see if you would go to dinner with me tonight.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘It’s Saturday, Cab. That’s when people go out to dinner.’

  ‘Is this work or a date?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘I guess not.’

  He thought about Diane, and the recollection of the afternoon he’d spent with her was still arousing. He thought about Lala and the intensity of their relationship. Fire in bed. Arguments out of it. And for days now – silence.

  ‘So?’ Caprice asked. ‘Shall we dance?’

  ‘Yes, we shall.’

  ‘Excellent. The Columbia in Ybor City at eight o’clock. Don’t be late.’

  8

  Peach watched Annalie Martine from her Thunderbird. The newest foundation employee – the woman who’d replaced Justin – sat at a table outside an ice cream shop in Indian Shores. The Saturday noontime traffic on Gulf Boulevard was a parade of weekenders making a beeline for the sand. The strip mall where Annalie waited was tucked among pastel hotels and condos, and bikini-clad teenagers pushed and giggled past her toward the white beaches. Annalie lazily licked a single scoop of maplenut ice cream from a sugar cone.

  She had let her hair down since the previous day. Literally. Lush and black, it cascaded to her shoulders. She wore stylish sunglasses that slid down her nose as her skin sweated in the heat. No more Clark Kent frames. She wore shorts and heels, and her legs were crossed. Her black tank top sported the letters DC in a block white font across her chest. The tank top dipped low, offering an ample view of cocoa-skinned cleavage.

  Peach wandered across the parking lot. When she passed Annalie as she went inside the shop, the thirty-something woman glanced idly at her but made no sign of recognition. Peach wore a mousy-brown wig today, taken from the head of Bon Bon Mannequin, and the hair was bushy around her face. She wore big red sunglasses, jeans, and an untucked striped button-down blouse.

  Inside, she ordered mocha-chip ice cream, took the cup outside, and sat in the chair next to Annalie.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m waiting—’ the woman began, but then she stopped and said: ‘Oh. Peach?’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘It took me a second to recognize you.’

  ‘That’s the plan,’ Peach said.

  Annalie stripped off her sunglasses and pointed at herself with an inquiring glance. ‘So, do I pass inspection? You said dress to get noticed.’

  ‘Looking good.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Annalie licked her cone. ‘You live near here?’

  ‘Not too far.’

  ‘Where’s not too far?’

  ‘A few miles.’

  Annalie’s eyebrows flickered. She didn’t miss the fact that Peach wasn’t offering specifics. ‘Why did you want to meet so far west? We’re heading back into the city, aren’t we?’

  Peach shrugged. ‘Sorry, force of habit. I used to meet Justin here. He had a place on the Gulf a couple miles south.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Parental money.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t know what that’s like,’ Annalie said with a sigh. ‘Anyway, I came early and walked on the beach.’ She tilted her chin toward the blue sky. ‘Beautiful day, huh? It’s like the calm before the storm. Everyone says Chayla will be bad.’

  ‘Storms don’t scare me,’ Peach said.

  ‘No? Me, I worry about waking up in Oz. Sounds like the weather people think Chayla will make landfall around the Fourth of July.’

  ‘Unless it veers away. They never know.’ Peach checked the time again. ‘We should probably go. The convention takes an afternoon break in a couple hours. People will be outside smoking. We’ll want to be listening.’

  ‘Listening for what?’

  ‘Whatever we hear,’ Peach said. ‘It’s amazing what people will say. Do you smoke? You’ll fit in better if you smoke.’

  ‘Occasionally. What about you?’

  ‘I don’t smoke. I don’t drink. But I can fake it.’

  Annalie grinned: ‘You don’t drink, and you don’t smoke. So what do you do?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know, that Adam Ant song? “Goody Two-Shoes”?’

  ‘I don’t know it.’

  ‘Wow, I’m way too old,’ Annalie sighed.

  ‘Can you drive?’ Peach asked.

  Annalie pushed the last bite of her cone into her mouth with one finger and stood up. ‘I’m the banged-up Corolla,’ she said, pointing at a black car on the far side of the parking lot.

  Peach finished her cup of mocha chip and deposited it in the wastebasket outside the store. She grabbed her backpack and followed Annalie to the old Corolla. When they got inside, Annalie looked sideways at her as she started the engine.

  ‘I get the feeling you don’t like me,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know you,’ Peach replied.

  ‘Is it because of me taking over from Justin? Was he like your gihow or something?’

  ‘Gihow?’

  ‘Guy I Hang Out With. Sounds better than partner or boyfriend or live-in or whatever.’

  ‘Oh.’ Peach felt herself shutting down at the mention of Justin’s name. ‘No, nothing like that.’

  Ann
alie stared at her, as if she knew that Peach wasn’t telling the truth. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Do you have a gihow?’ Peach asked.

  ‘Me? No way. No time.’

  She said it breezily, but Peach didn’t believe her. This woman was gorgeous. She had to be fending off passes from guys day and night.

  They drove south on Gulf Boulevard, trailing a shuttle bus headed for Pass-a-Grille. She’d traveled this stretch of asphalt thousands of times: sometimes alone, sometimes with Deacon, sometimes with Justin. To Peach, this was Florida, with every building squeezed so tightly together that they looked as if they were holding their breath. The sidewalks were crowded with bare flesh. She saw turtle-like men with little heads jutting out of enormous torsos. Sagging old women in floppy hats. Boys with big bulges and girls with wiggling cheeks. Behind the buildings and parking lots, only steps away, the Gulf teased her, as motionless as glass, glinting with a million sun drops. There was hardly a wave cracking the surface now, but in a few days the Gulf would awaken like a monster and hurl itself against the land. Chayla.

  Justin on storms. Hurricanes make you feel small. It’s good to feel small every now and then.

  ‘I looked up Justin’s murder,’ Annalie said. ‘So it was a drug thing, huh?’

  ‘That’s what they say.’

  ‘You don’t think so?’

  ‘I’m not a cop,’ Peach said. ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘I just thought, you worked with him, you’d know something.’

  ‘I don’t know anything.’

  They stopped at a stop light. Peach cracked the window, and a briny sea smell wafted inside. A crowd of teenage boys hooted at them as they ran through the crosswalk toward the beach.

  ‘If Justin was your friend,’ Annalie said, ‘you must be sad. Or angry.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, you look like you’re working pretty hard not to feel anything, which tells me you feel something big way down deep. I think you were close to Justin, and you won’t say so.’

  ‘You just met me,’ Peach said. ‘You don’t know anything about me.’

  Annalie accelerated again. The engine rattled.

  ‘Your parents were killed when you were eight,’ she said. ‘Your oldest brother was murdered when you were twelve. The guy you worked with for a whole year just got shot selling cocaine. I guess I know some things, or at least how to find them. I’m a researcher, and I know how to read people’s faces, too. You’re not the mannequin you like to think you are.’

  Mannequin.

  It was probably nothing, but Peach didn’t like that Annalie used that word. As if it were a message: I know you, I know what you keep in your bedroom. You can’t hide from me. She didn’t like being grilled for her secrets. Everyone wanted something from her these days, and it all involved Justin.

  ‘Stop the car,’ Peach said.

  ‘Hey, sorry. I was out of line. I get in people’s faces too much. It’s a character flaw.’

  ‘I said stop. Pull over.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I can’t do this. Not now. Not today.’

  ‘Look, Peach, I didn’t mean anything—’

  Peach pushed opened the door of the Corolla while it was still moving. Annalie jerked on the brakes, and horns wailed behind them. Peach undid the seat belt with clumsy fingers and spilled into the street, ignoring Annalie, who shouted at her. She left the car door hanging ajar and ran between the pink condos for the Gulf beach.

  *

  The water was hot. It didn’t cool her down at all. Peach’s bare toes squished in the wet sand. The cuffs of her jeans were soaked. She’d tied the laces of her Chuck Taylors together, and she spun the shoes from her hand like clunky tether balls. She walked, staring at the shells in the surf. She’d ran for a half-mile, ducking under fishing lines and dodging Frisbees that landed in the water. People looked at her because she was crying, but no one said anything. It was Florida. People broke up, and they went to the beach to cry.

  Annalie was right. Peach had been lying to Deacon, and to herself, about feeling nothing. She’d been in love with Justin, and now he was gone, taken from her. Like her parents. Like Lyle. The emptiness was so great it made her want to swim into the deep water and drown herself. Justin had been someone she’d never anticipated, the one man she had ever invited to share her solitary existence. She had gotten up every morning, anxious to hear his voice and see his face. He made her smile.

  They had sworn to be loyal to each other forever. No one else knew. Not Deacon or Caprice or Ms Fairmont or Ogden Bush. It was like being married, but better. They had something more sacred than love or sex.

  That was what hurt the most, because Justin had betrayed her. He’d shut her out of what was happening to him and what he was doing. He’d gotten killed. She couldn’t bear the loss of him, but even more than that, she couldn’t bear not knowing why. It was not drugs. It was something else. Something he couldn’t share with her.

  Why?

  Peach stood on the sand and stared at a four-story apartment building on the other side of the strip of beach, fifty yards away. The building was stucco, painted a fading color of red that got worn each season by the salt and wind. Balconies and picture windows, one above another, jutted over the dune. Wooden steps led down from the rear door. It wasn’t a new building, but the condos were expensive. Everything was expensive here.

  Justin’s place.

  This was why she’d come here. This was why she’d escaped from Annalie’s car. She needed to see his apartment again. She needed to find out what he’d been hiding from her.

  Peach trudged up the sand. She passed an old woman sprawled in a white plastic lounger under the shade of an umbrella. She had brown wrinkled flesh. Spanish music played from an old battery radio beside her. Peach knew her, because she was Justin’s neighbor, a widow who lived one floor above him. Mrs Jabohnne. The old woman’s eyes slitted open at the noise of Peach’s footsteps, but she made no sign of recognition.

  At the top of the beach, among flowers and long grass, Peach wandered under the shade of the first-floor apartment deck. Sand leached into the building’s covered parking lot. She saw a faucet, and she turned on the water to wash her feet. When they were clean, she shoved her damp feet back into her sneakers. She still had Justin’s key to let herself inside.

  The building smelled musty. Bugs clung to the walls. She waited for the elevator, listening to it hum, and then took it to the second floor. Outside, in the open-air hallway, she turned right and opened the metal screen door. She let herself into Justin’s apartment, which was stifling. More than eighty degrees. The apartment was dark, with the lights off and the vertical blinds in the living room mostly shut, letting in narrow cracks of sun. It still smelled like him. Justin loved scented oils, and the aroma of cherry blossoms permeated the space. She expected him to wander from the bedroom, towel knotted around his scrawny waist, toothbrush hanging out of his mouth like a cigarette.

  He didn’t.

  The apartment was sparsely furnished. It had always been that way. He kept almost nothing personal here. None of his antiques. None of his papers or photographs or books. When they came here, he left his work in the car, but at some point when he was alone, the work disappeared. He put it somewhere. Not here. He’d been open about the fact that he had another place, but when she asked him about it, he’d said: It’s not safe for you to know. Not yet.

  Drugs, the police would say. That was where he kept his drugs. But they were wrong.

  She needed to find out where he lived his other life. His safe house.

  Peach passed the kitchen and went into the living room. He had leather sofas and a big television, and rocking chairs by the window that looked out on the beach. They’d sit there night after night, sipping tea, watching the sunsets. He’d read poetry to her and play classical music, no matter how much she said she hated it. It was all too dark, loud, and strong.

  She stood by the windows, watching the water. Lookin
g down, she saw a dead, desiccated salamander on the tile floor. She had no idea what she was looking for here. If the police hadn’t found it, she wouldn’t either. Maybe there was nothing to find, no clue to his secret, and yet she knew Justin. He would’ve left a message for her. Something.

  Justin on life after death. I want to come back and haunt you. Keep an eye open for me.

  She looked around the dusty apartment and willed him to make contact with her. She was here. She needed him. What was it that you didn’t want me to know? How do I find it? She could tell from the clutter that the police had already pawed through the cabinets and drawers. Justin was typically very organized, and most of the apartment was in a state of chaos.

  Or maybe it wasn’t the police. Maybe it was someone else.

  Peach wandered into the bedroom, which also faced the Gulf. Sheets had been ripped off the king bed and lay in a crumpled pile on the floor. The mattress had been knifed, exposing padding and springs. Looking for drugs. Looking for anything. On her left, double doors led to the deck. The apartment bathroom was there, too, where she would shower before bed and in the mornings. She’d practically lived here. That last week, when Justin disappeared, she’d spent every night waiting for him, and he never returned. He’d been somewhere else.

  Where?

  She picked her way around the debris. Justin kept a dresser on the wall opposite the bed, and the drawers had been removed and overturned. Clothes lay heaped on the floor. She recognized his T-shirts, his cut-offs, his boxer briefs, and his athletic socks. There were personal things, too, scattered on the tile. Tins of breath mints. Batteries. A wind-up Snoopy toy. Local restaurant menus. Even a box of condoms – unopened – which made her wonder if he’d been rethinking his willingness to remain celibate with her. Or maybe she hadn’t been the only girl in his life. She didn’t want to believe that.

  Peach spotted a small book on the floor, and she bent and picked it up. It was old, bound in fraying green cloth, with embossed gold letters on the cover. She’d found it at an antiquarian bookshop months ago and purchased it for Justin as a gift. It was a book of poems by William Blake, his favorite poet. Every time she’d visited his apartment, it had been on his nightstand, next to his bed. The pages were delicate and yellowed.