Never Fear

by Scott Frost

  She was whispering the same words over and over, holding something in her arms. I took a step into the living room and could hear her voice again, but there was an urgent quality to it now as she repeated the words over and over again.

  “Be a good girl, be a good girl.”

  “Enough,” I said out loud. Beads of perspiration were gathering on my forehead. The flood of memories began to come faster and I couldn’t stop it. There were voices, a TV, all the sounds that make up a day inside a home, except none of them was distinct.

  In a far corner of the house I heard the closing of a door. I turned and looked down the dark hallway leading to the bedrooms. The master bedroom was at the far end. The first door on my left had been my room. The walls of the hallway had been where pictures hung. I stared at the empty spaces and the images began to come back. The pictures had never been passed down to me, had vanished from family memory. And my father was in all of them—the wedding pictures, holding a sailfish in Mexico, my mother in a hospital bed with my father standing next to her holding his baby.

  I walked to the end and stared into the empty space that had been my parents’ room but there were no memories there. Not a sound, or a voice, or a picture of what their bed had been like. The reason I had come wasn’t here. I stepped back into the hallway and stopped. The door to what had been my room was closed.

  “Where is she?” I heard my father say.

  I stepped up to the door, hesitated for a moment, then pushed it open. As it swung into the room, the past came rushing back. The walls were painted a bright yellow, a bed against the far wall, a dresser and rocking chair next to the window. The closet door was open. My mother was on her knees inside whispering the same words I had heard her saying by the window.

  “Be a good girl, be a good girl.”

  But it was different now. It wasn’t the gentle voice of a mother rocking a baby to sleep. She was pleading.

  She repeated the words a few more times, then stood up. On the floor a five-year-old girl sat on a blanket staring up at her. I looked at the little girl’s face and saw myself, but I had no memory of this. My mother said something I didn’t understand, then she reached out with a trembling hand and closed the closet door.

  I walked over and stared at the floor of the closet. I didn’t remember this. Why would my mother have closed me inside a dark closet?

  “What happened here?” I whispered.

  I tried to work through it the way I would a crime scene, but I couldn’t. The language of physical evidence wasn’t enough. The bare, empty room was silent. I looked back at the closet, then took a breath and stepped inside.

  “I know this,” I said silently, and then I heard the voice in my head that had always been there, but I never understood the words. Don’t go there.

  The closet smelled of freshly dry-cleaned wool and shoe polish. I knew the feel of the soft blanket on the floor. I knew how far I had to stretch to touch each wall, and that the carpet in one corner was loose.

  My mother was standing at the door looking down at me, her eyes betraying a wildness.

  “This is our secret,” she said and began to close the door.

  I was sitting now. My hand followed the line of light across the floor as if I could hold on to it and keep it from vanishing as the door closed. With the click of the latch, the sliver of light on my hand was gone. I was still for a moment, then I heard my own breathing. It started slowly, as if I wasn’t certain there was air in the darkness. Then my breathing began to race until it had the rhythm of a motor cycling again and again, trying to catch a spark.

  The shattering of glass pierced the darkness beyond the door. I held my breath and listened. There was shouting, a single voice. I tried to understand the words but in the distance of memory only the meaning was understandable. Rage.

  He was moving through the house, going room to room. A lamp was smashed in the living room, dishes thrown off the dining room table. I heard my mother’s voice in clipped pieces. “No . . . no . . . it’s my fault . . . I’m the one . . . Don’t . . .”

  The wood of a dining room chair splintered, as if hit with an ax.

  “God, don’t,” my mother said.

  I heard the soft thud of a body being thrown against a wall and then he was moving again up the hallway. The glass in a picture frame shattered and then the door to the bathroom flew open and I heard the shower curtain pulled aside and then yanked from the rod.

  He tried the door to my bedroom but the lock held. The whole house then shuddered as if a temblor had shaken the ground as he threw his body against the door. A piece of the frame snapped, sounding like a gunshot, but the door held. He hit it again and again, the cracks in the door frame opening farther each time. On the fourth charge the door gave way.

  There was silence for a moment, and then I could hear him standing in the doorway, his breathing heavy with exertion. He stepped into the room and I stared at the faint line of light at the bottom of the door as he passed by the closet, walking over to my small bed. He began ripping at the sheets and covers, pulling them off like a dog digging at a burrow in the ground.

  The bed hit the wall with a jolt and then I heard the sound of his voice. A low murmur, almost a growl. At first I couldn’t understand the words, but then they emerged in repetition again and again. “Where are you? Where are you?”

  His footsteps passed by the closet door heading toward the hallway, then stopped. I heard two clipped exhales, then nothing. Then another short violent breath. His shadow moved into the line of light at the bottom of the door. I covered my mouth with my hand, trying not to make a sound or take a breath.

  The handle of the door began to turn. I started to reach for it, but the darkness in the closet that had been so frightening just a moment before closed around me like two large hands and pulled me back through dresses and coats hanging nearly to the floor until the faint light at the bottom of the door vanished and I disappeared in the darkness.

  I heard the creak of the door’s hinges as it opened. I could hear his breathing again, but this time short, shallow breaths, like he was running. He ripped at a hanger, pulling a coat down, but the light didn’t penetrate the darkness surrounding me. He pulled down another coat and then another, getting closer, his breaths faster and faster as the hangers slid across the rod.

  I backed myself into the corner of the closet, pulling my legs up tight against my chest, trying to get smaller and smaller. Another hanger was pulled away and I could see the edge of light getting closer to me.

  Then a dull, heavy sound seemed to shake the air. My father’s hand came through into my corner of darkness and then pulled away.

  His footsteps were mechanical, like a machine that was broken and out of sequence. He crashed heavily into my dresser, smashing the mirror, then he was moving across the room, three quick steps and then one. The fabric of the curtain began tearing away from the window, then his body hit the floor and the room was silent.

  I waited for a moment, listening for the smallest of movements, but there was only silence.

  The darkness gently let go of me and I was standing at the door to the closet. My father lay on the floor by the window, his right hand still gripping the curtain that had partially torn away from the window. My mother stood in the middle of my room. A golf club slipped from her right hand and hit the floor. In her eyes I saw a fierceness I wouldn’t have thought she was capable of. Her eyes found me and the anger vanished.

  "This is our secret,” she said, "... our secret ... ours.”

  There was no fear in her voice, but there was no strength, either. The memory of my mother began to fade, then the past returned to its hiding place. I wiped away the moisture from my cheek and realized my hand was shaking.

  I closed the closet door. Soft moonlight illuminated the empty bedroom. I walked over to the center of the room and looked down at the floor. A small dent the size of a coin’s edge, or perhaps that of a golf club, lay under years of polish. I knelt down and ran
my fingers over it and the shaking in my hands stopped. Was I to have been my father’s first victim? Is that what she saved me from that night—and in doing so, what had it cost her? Was it that night that always separated us? Instead of pulling mother and daughter together, had it placed a barrier between us? A secret that eroded everything it touched?

  I stepped over to the window and looked out at the dark shapes of the eucalyptus blowing in the wind beyond the back fence. Work it, I thought to myself. Go over it like a cop would a crime scene. But it was no good, I wasn’t a cop inside this house. I was a little girl. My breathing began to spin out of control. The walls of the bedroom threatened to close in around me.

  I ran through the house and out the door, not stopping until I was standing in the middle of the street, gasping for breath.

  “You bastard,” I whispered.

  I looked back at the house that for years had been lost in my memory, but now stood like a fresh crime scene waiting to be worked, or maybe an open wound needing to be bandaged. I started to walk back to close the front door but froze as I stepped onto the sidewalk.

  My legs were shaking and I couldn’t move any closer. I slipped back into a memory as if there were no longer any distance between the past and the present. My mother was standing on the front walk, glancing nervously over her shoulder at the open front door. I was standing right where I was now. She was saying something to me and I was shaking my head. She said it again and I tried to move toward her but couldn’t. She heard something inside the house, looked over her shoulder again, then turned to me.

  "Run.”

  I tried to call to her but I couldn’t speak. I tried to take a step, but my legs wouldn’t move.

  “Run,” she pleaded. “Run as fast as you can.”

  I stepped off the sidewalk and could hear the soft fall of feet on the pavement, but they weren’t mine. He was running in his socks, looking back at his pursuer, who was right behind him.

  The memory of my mother slipped away. Did I listen to her? Did I run that day? Was I fast enough? Did I look over my shoulder and see the same man my brother saw the night he died?

  “Run,” I whispered. “Run as fast as you can, John.”

  31

  I slept on the couch in my office but never for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch before the sound of hangers sliding across the rod in a closet yanked me back to consciousness.

  If I had not understood entirely the world Danny had been living in since the murder of his mother, the view I had gained from the inside of a closet made it all too real. It was the feeling everyone in California has for at least a few moments after the ground shakes during an earthquake. Nothing you’ve trusted in your entire life will last. What is up is no longer up; what is down could be anything.

  I had managed to cling to one truth as a mother. Parents love their children, even parents who disappear or fail. Not even the years in Homicide had shaken that belief. Even when investigating the death of a child at the hands of a parent, I knew that what had destroyed that family wasn’t a lack of love. It was drugs, or alcohol, or one terrible moment that couldn’t be taken back.

  But what was I to believe now? As a cop I knew that memory was the most unreliable of all witnesses. It can be twisted and shaped by time and ensuing events until its connection to reality is held by the thinnest of threads.

  As I watched the sun rise over the San Gabriels I knew only one thing for certain. The words Danny wrote on the ceiling of my bedroom were a warning: Nothing lasts.

  When the morning shift started to arrive I walked back out to the Volvo and drove west toward Eagle Rock. The fires that had started the night before in the hills above Glendale had laid down overnight. The only smoke visible was on the horizon, hanging just above the Pacific, where it had been blown overnight.

  Twisting through the streets of Eagle Rock, I stopped the car down the block from the small Spanish bungalow as a school bus approached from the other direction. Standing on the curb, Candice Fleming helped her son climb aboard the bus, then watched it drive away before walking back inside.

  She had known my father. And she had lied to Harrison and me when we questioned her. Either one of those facts on its own could mean nothing, but together couldn’t be ignored any more than the memories I had run from since I was that little girl in the blue dress.

  I drove down the street and stopped in front of her house. I rang the bell and she came to the door a moment later.

  “I told you everything I know,” she said. “Leave me alone.”

  “Please,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, I have nothing else to say.”

  “Six days ago a lawyer named Gavin and an investigator came and talked to you here.”

  I recognized the look on her face as that of someone caught in a lie, but she quickly covered it up.

  “What if they did? I told them the same thing I told you.”

  “They’re both dead,” I said.

  Fleming began to shake her head. “I don’t see how this has anything to do with me. I told you what I know, now leave me alone.”

  “The investigator’s name was John Manning.”

  The name appeared to weigh her down; her shoulders sagged under her terry cloth robe.

  “I don’t have anything to say.”

  “I think you do, and I think you badly want to say it.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “I know what a secret can do to a person.”

  The air seemed to go out of her.

  “Tell me about Thomas Manning and that night eighteen years ago.”

  She took a breath as she began to shake her head. “He’s dead. What’s the point?”

  I took out the xeroxed copy of my father’s New York license and showed it to her. “Take a close look at that face.”

  She looked at the picture, and I saw a flicker of fear in her eyes as she recognized the man she had known years before.

  “He’s alive?”

  I nodded.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” she said softly. “Why can’t you just leave it alone?”

  “Thomas Manning’s son was murdered. What happened that night eighteen years ago has something to do with it. I’m trying to find out what.”

  She closed her eyes and looked down at the floor. “It’s done and buried.”

  I shook my head. “No, it’s not.”

  Fleming unlatched the door, then walked to the kitchen and I followed. She poured herself a cup of coffee and stared out the window without looking in my direction.

  “I want to know what happened the night you walked out of the theater,” I said.

  She gripped her coffee cup tightly and shook her head. “I told you.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “Don’t make me do this. Please.”

  “Do what?”

  She shook her head in silence for several moments, then whispered, “Remember.”

  Fleming leaned into the counter as if it were the only thing keeping her on her feet.

  “I think it’s better we do this here than at the station, don’t you?” I said.

  She took a deep breath. “He said I would never have to talk about this, ever. He promised me.”

  “Who promised you?”

  “The policeman.”

  I stepped over to the counter. “What policeman told you this?”

  “Back then, a detective.”

  “Hazzard?” I asked.

  She nodded. “He said no one would ever know.”

  “And you’ve kept this secret all these years.”

  She turned and looked at me and nodded.

  “But he didn’t tell you that secret would never go away, did he?” I said.

  “Sometimes it feels like yesterday.”

  “What happened that night?” I asked.

  She started to pick up her cup of coffee but stopped when her hand began to shake.

  “I had heard about him from other actors in the class and from
people in the theater.”

  “Manning?”

  Fleming nodded. “There were stories that he had groped some actresses. Some people believed the stories, others didn’t.”

  “You didn’t.”

  She shook her head. “He was such a good teacher . . . it didn’t make sense. You wanted to be around him, you wanted him to like you.”

  “And he liked you.”

  I recognized the look in her eyes as shame.

  “I thought so.”

  “So you left with him that night after class and you didn’t go home alone.”

  She took a breath and looked at me. “I was only nineteen. I thought someone that talented could only be good.”

  “Where did you go?”

  She walked back to the table and sat down, drawing her legs up and clutching them to her chest.

  “We went to his apartment in Hollywood. He poured some wine. I told myself for years that it happened because I had too much wine to drink.”

  “But you didn’t,” I said.

  “No. He was telling me about working in a movie. . . . Then he told me to remove my clothes.”

  She hesitated, remembering that night.

  “‘If you want to be an actress,’ he said, ‘remove your clothes.’”

  She glanced at me as tears began to fall down her cheeks.

  “I guess I went there because I thought . . . I tried to leave, to fight him off, but . . . He raped me.” She lost her breath for a moment. “When he was done with me I rushed out without my shoes. I walked home in bare feet.”

  The image of my brother running in his socks hit me and my breath caught short. I stepped away from the table and looked out the window for a moment until it slowed.

  “Do you know what time you left?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “It seemed like a long time. I know I didn’t get home until almost midnight. Then I didn’t tell anyone—not even my closest girlfriends. A few days later the police came to ask me some questions and I thought everything was going to be all right.”

  “Hazzard?”

  She nodded. “I told him what happened.”

  “And it wasn’t all right?”