Fear itself: a novel

by Jonathan Lewis Nasaw

  “What do you mean you ‘had to take it off’?”

  “The brown just bled. Into the tree trunk. Behind you,” she called between brushstrokes. “I needed the splash. Of pink. For the composition. Now quit. Fidgeting.”

  “I want my hat.”

  “Think of it. As a sacrifice. To art.” But much as she hated to interrupt her work, Dorie could sense from the growing tension in the reclining figure that a little TLC oil was going to have to be applied to the subject. She put down her brush and crossed the lush green lawn, knelt on the edge of the blanket. Pender, lying on his left side, his right arm suspended in a clean sling (a trapezoidal patch of white in the painting; another reason why she needed the whitish-pink of the scalp for balance), started to sit up. She touched his shoulder lightly. “Pen, please—this is important to me.” Pen was her own private nickname for him; somehow, he just didn’t feel like an Ed to her. “It’s been years since I last tried putting a human figure into one of my paintings.”

  “The mask thing?”

  She nodded. “The faces—I couldn’t finish a face and I couldn’t leave one blank.”

  “Well, you picked a hell of a one to start with.”

  “It’s only this big.” She held her thumb and forefinger about a quarter of an inch apart. “Please, Pen? I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”

  And after a brief, whispered lovers’ conference, during which they discussed just how she might make it up to him, Dorie returned triumphantly to her easel and Pender to his nap. When she’d finished, she packed up her gear, crossed the green again, slipped his beret over his scarred scalp, and lay down next to him.

  “When do you have to be back in Washington?” Much as she treasured both her independence and her privacy, with Simon still on the loose Dorie wasn’t exactly looking forward to sleeping alone again.

  “I have a meeting with my ghostwriter on Friday. I’m supposed to be taping my memoirs for him. Funny little guy named Bellcock—you’d like him. He says he’s cowritten so many books his friends think his first name is As Told To. He loaned me a Dictaphone, told me just start talking, tape is cheap, he’ll sort it out later. Then he said don’t censor myself, he’s heard it all. And I’m thinking, my friend, you have no idea.” Pender shook his head sharply, as if to clear it of a quarter century of serial killers—the rippers, ghouls, collectors, and necrophiles that comprised his all.

  “So Thursday?” asked Dorie, nestling close against him.

  “At the latest. Abruzzi could probably use a helping hand, too.” He slipped his good arm under her head for a pillow, and they lay together listening to the raucous seagulls, the barking seals, the waves breaking gently against the rocks at the tip of the point. “I could sure get used to this, though,” he added after a few minutes.

  Oh, do, thought Dorie.

  “Say, you want to come with?” Pender asked her casually, as if the idea had just occurred to him. He’d been thinking about it for a while, though—with Childs still at large, he wasn’t real thrilled about the prospect of leaving Dorie alone.

  “You mean, like, come home with you? To Washington?”

  “Maryland, actually. Just for a little while—at least until Childs is behind bars.”

  “You don’t think—”

  Pender quickly backtracked. “No, no. Of course not—there’s no reason to think he’d be coming back for you. He’s not that stupid. I just thought you might enjoy a little vacation. I could show you around, you could do some painting.”

  “No can do.” Dorie was tempted—but there was no sense getting all worked up over an impossibility.

  “Why not?”

  “Aviophobia.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Fear of flying.”

  “Maybe it’s time to deal with it.”

  Dorie sat up, annoyed. “What are you, my shrink now?”

  “No,” replied Pender. “But I know enough about fear to know that it makes a useful servant and a lousy master.”

  “Oh, swell,” muttered Dorie. “First he’s a shrink, now he’s Yoda.”

  “Think it over, scout. Do me a favor, just think it over. I’ll be there holding your hand every inch of the way.”

  “It’s not just the fear of flying,” Dorie temporized—phobics were good at temporizing. “I have too much work to do here—I have to get another half-dozen paintings done in time for my show.”

  “Why, that’s perfect, then. The trees around Tinsman’s Lock are a knockout this time of year. Box elder, white ash, sugar maple, sycamore, hickory, elm—I bet you’d have to buy a whole new box of crayons.”

  “Hey, Pender.”

  “What?”

  “Give it a break, would you?”

  “You bet,” said Pender, making a mental note to pick up a ticket for Dorie when he called for reservations. He had a first-class ticket to turn in—it would more than cover two coach fares.

  9

  Scarlet fever, thought Ida, the moment she clapped eyes on Arthur Bellcock. You didn’t spend thirty years as a small-town GP’s wife without learning to recognize a scarlet fever victim.

  “Mrs. Day?”

  “Mr. Bellcock—come in.”

  Bellcock had arrived around six, an hour earlier than scheduled. No problem, though: on Monday there was still plenty of meat left on the widow bird she had just taken out of the refrigerator (a widow bird was the local name for a chicken a single woman would roast on Sunday for a whole week’s worth of suppers), so she invited him for supper.

  She wasn’t sure what to expect, having never met a ghostwriter before, but for some reason she’d been picturing a little guy with glasses and a tape recorder, and was therefore unprepared to find this tall, rather creepy looking, entirely hairless fellow with the arrogant slouch and the hypnotic eyes standing empty-handed on her doorstep.

  But Ida Day was not one to judge a man by his appearance—Walt had been no Ronald Colman, either. And once he turned the charm on, Arthur Bellcock made it easy to forget his looks. He complimented her cooking, he flattered her about her appearance—if she’d been ten years younger or he’d been ten years older, she might even have suspected that he was making a pass at her.

  After supper, though, when they retired to the parlor and the talk turned to Eddie, Bellcock was all business, jotting down her answers in a little spiral-bound pocket notebook. But again he surprised her—the questions weren’t at all what she’d been expecting. He seemed to be less interested in facts than in generalities. What was Eddie like as a boy? What were his interests, his likes and dislikes, his favorite and least favorite pastimes? He appeared to be leading up to something, but to save herself, Ida couldn’t figure out what.

  “As I told you on the phone yesterday, Mr. Bellcock,” she explained, bending over the brick hearth to light the fire, “I left Cortland when Eddie was only ten, so I never got to know him as well as I’d have liked to.”

  “When was the last time you spoke with your brother?” said Bellcock, leaning back, draping his long arms over the back of the sofa, his pose of studied casualness betrayed only by a nervous twitch in his left thigh that set his heel to tapping.

  “A few weeks ago—when he called me about you.” Your motor’s running, Ida wanted to tell him—that’s what Walt always said to Stan, whose leg also used to vibrate annoyingly like that when he was anxious or excited.

  Almost there, thought Simon. But before he asked the only question that really mattered, he had to find out for sure whether she knew anything about Pender’s recent exploits. If, say, she’d been following the case in the news, a direct question about fear would be bound to arouse her suspicions—he’d have to find a way to fit the question within that context. “I’ve been out of touch for a few weeks. Any idea what Ed’s working on lately?”

  “Now that he’s retired, you mean? His golf game, I should imagine—he told me he and his friend Sid were going to be flying out to California. He was all excited about playing Pebble Beach, as I recall.
”

  “Right, right.” Retired! That’s why Pender never pulled a gun on me, thought Simon—because he didn’t have one. If Pender was retired, though, then what was he doing nosing around Carmel? And what had Dorie told him that sent him to Berkeley? And what, for that matter, did it say about Simon, that he had allowed his life (and Missy’s—don’t forget about Missy) to be destroyed by some retired old poop.

  But never mind all that now, Simon told himself, tamping down his growing rage as best he could. Those were all peripheral issues; the time had come to get down to the meat of the matter. He flipped through the pages of his notebook, pretending to have lost his place.

  “Let’s see now, where were we? Likes, dislikes, favorite sport, blah blah blah, first girlfriend…Oh, yes, here we are. Next question is: Did Eddie have any phobias when he was a boy?”

  “Phobias?”

  “Yes—was there anything in particular that he feared?”

  “I know what the word means, Mr. Bellcock—I was trying to remember. There was an episode, when Eddie was…let’s see, I was in my senior year at Ithaca when our mom called and told me to come right home…so Eddie would have been around eight or nine. He and his friend were fooling around with firecrackers. They dropped one down our chimney to see what would happen—it blew up in Eddie’s face. It was touch and go for a couple of weeks whether he’d even regain his sight.”

  “Firecrackers, then?” asked Simon, cutting to the chase. “He’s afraid of firecrackers?”

  “No, no,” said Ida. “Blindness. Terrified of it. As a boy, you could never get him to play pin the tail on the donkey. And as an adult…Let’s see, it was Stanley’s birthday, Eddie had just graduated from FBI Academy, so it must have been 1972, we had a piñata, and Eddie absolutely refused to put on the blindfold, even after Stanley begged him. And Eddie adored Stanley—he’d have done anything for him.”

  But although Arthur Bellcock was busily scribbling in his notebook, Simon Childs was no longer paying any attention.

  Blindness, is it? he thought. That’s a good one, that’s a juicy one—we can make a game out of that, Eddie-boy; we can definitely make a game out of that one.

  And with that out of the way, there was only one more question remaining to be asked: “Just out of curiosity, Mrs. Day, as long as we’re on the subject—is there anything in particular that you’re afraid of?”

  “There was,” said Ida, putting the emphasis on the past tense. And then, probably because Mr. Bellcock was such an extraordinary listener, hanging on her every word, his lips parted and his strangely naked eyes aglow with the reflected light from the fire, Ida found herself telling him what it was—or rather, what it had been.

  Micrurus Fulvius Fulvius

  1

  The wooded hillside below Pender’s house sloped down to a narrow strip of lawn abutting the eastern bank of the C&O; a tall windbreak of mixed white ash, box elder, hawthorne, sycamore, and sugar maple lined the towpath along the western bank. From the porch, Linda saw the broad silver ribbon of the Potomac winding lazily in the distance through the Froot-Loopy autumn countryside.

  She also saw her breath. Enjoy the view while you can, Linda told herself—in a few weeks those trees will all be bare.

  Linda glanced at her watch—6:30—washed down a handful of vitamins with the dregs of her breakfast smoothie, grabbed her cane, and pushed herself up from her chair. Then it was heigh-ho, heigh-ho, down the River Road we go, to the DOJ-AOB in suburban Virginia, where she received a familiar howdy from the gate guard, who examined the backseat, trunk, and undercarriage of the Geo anyway. The daily security code for the underground garage was 1220, which also happened to be her mom’s birthday; Linda told herself that meant it would be a lucky day for her.

  It was a busy one, at any rate. Two more corpses—well, skeletons—had been unearthed in Simon Childs’s basement, so Linda spent the entire morning reviewing the missing persons printouts for the western states that Thom Davies had culled from the NCIC database over the weekend. Some went back as far as 1968. Where there seemed to be at least a possibility of a match, Linda would fax the preliminary forensic data to the appropriate local authorities.

  Around one o’clock, the eleven cartons of records arrived from Bobbeck, Pflueger, and Morrison—Mr. Pflueger had been as good as his word. She enlisted Pool’s help in cataloguing the contents, which took most of the afternoon. What’d you do in the FBI, Mommy? she imagined her kids asking her someday in the distant future. Darlings, I shuffled paper like nobody’s business.

  Then she remembered that she wasn’t going to be having any kids—or, most likely, any distant future. And although the realization wasn’t exactly news, it did rattle her a little, sucker punching her like that. Too bad, so sad, get over it, she ordered herself, and went back to her paper shuffling.

  2

  With amphetamines, there comes a point where a dosage sufficient to keep you awake is also large enough to cause optical field disturbances similar to hallucinations. Flashing lights in the periphery of your vision, trails and prismatic distortions—you don’t see things that aren’t there, but you almost see things that weren’t there a second ago, and aren’t there when you look again.

  Simon reached that point late Tuesday afternoon. He’d fled La Farge profoundly shaken by how deeply the old woman had gotten under his skin, and though he’d driven blindly through the night and into the dawn, he couldn’t seem to drive fast enough or far enough to get her out of his mind—the fond look in her eyes when she told him about her Down child, her Stanley; the sincere anger in her voice when she recounted how the doctors had told her the best thing she could do for all of them, Stanley, her husband, and herself, was put the child away in an institution before they all got too used to each other; the shame when she told him how close she’d come to listening to them.

  “They wouldn’t let me breast-feed him—they told me I’d get too attached. When he was three weeks old, we put him in his little basket and drove him to the state home down by Madison. The papers were signed—all I had to do was turn around and walk away, but do you know what, Mr. Bellcock? It was as if my legs had turned to stone. To this day—to this day, Mr. Bellcock, I still can’t understand how any mother could do it, physically do it, is what I mean, walk away and leave her baby behind.”

  There’s an old woman in Atlantic City I’d like to ask that same question, thought Simon. And suddenly, although he couldn’t have put a name to the disquieting sensation welling up inside him—it was a strange amalgam of self-pity and empathy—he realized he couldn’t stand to hear much more about how it felt to be Ida Day in particular, or a mother in general, or how it felt to be anybody else at all other than Simon Childs. All he’d ever asked her about, he told himself, all he’d ever wanted to know was what she was afraid of, so they could get on with the game.

  The irony of the situation was that when she finally got around to telling him, it only made things worse. Simon had known, of course, that there were other Down children in the world, tens of thousands of them, and if he’d bothered to think about it, he’d have understood that their parents had some of the same problems that he’d had, loco-parenting Missy—and probably with a lot fewer resources. But it wasn’t until Ida turned from the mantelpiece holding a photograph of Stanley in a filigreed silver frame, and told him how every night for the three years between Walt’s death and Stanley’s, she had lain awake in terror at the thought of dying first, of leaving Stanley behind, helpless, alone, afraid, that she really started getting under his skin.

  Because every time she said “Stanley,” he heard Missy, and the nameless, unfamiliar, disquieting sensation worsened; when she told him how sometimes she even thought about using the revolver in her dresser drawer on both of them if her health started to fail, Simon could scarcely bear it. He fled La Farge at midnight, needing a game more desperately than he had when he’d arrived; by the time he finally pulled off the interstate somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania on Tu
esday afternoon, to look for a motel before he drove the Volvo off the road while swerving to avoid something that wasn’t there, the need had turned to a craving.

  Yes, and people in hell crave ice water, as Grandfather Childs was fond of saying. Simon should have remembered that when he saw the sign for Graham Graham’s Reptilarium, Route 15, Allenwood at the bottom of the off-ramp and was immediately reminded of the ophidiophobe who called herself (or himself, though the majority of ophidiophobes were female) Skairdykat, the last fruit of the PWSPD tree. According to Zap Strum’s information, Skairdy lived in Georgetown, which was not far from Pender’s home in Maryland. He should also have remembered what Grandfather sometimes used to add: if those folks in hell ever get their ice water, they usually find the devil has salted it first.

  Graham Graham’s Reptilarium! Simon, whose interest in snakes went back to his boyhood pet Skinny and whose subsequent hobby had involved him with ophidiophobes more than once (it was one of the most common specific phobias), had often seen Graham on television and had wanted to visit the place for years, but it wasn’t until this afternoon that fate had brought him anywhere near Allenwood, Pennsylvania.

  The reptilarium looked fairly crummy from the outside—it shared a strip mall with a hoagie shop—but once inside, Simon was not disappointed. Mambas, cobras, pythons, vipers, a twelve-foot gator, giant tortoises, exotic frogs and lizards—Simon even saw Graham Graham himself, in safari khakis, leading a group of schoolchildren on a tour. In other circumstances, he told himself, he’d have liked to shake the man’s hand, buy him a drink, talk reptiles. But it would have been indiscreet—after all, Simon was planning to rip the place off right after closing.