SUMMER of FEAR

by T. Jefferson Parker

  "I confess that I dream of you often," she said. "It's not always your body or shape, but I know it's you. The first time I saw your car parked outside my house, you know what I did? I parked outside yours the next night, down the hill, where you wouldn't see me. I felt like a teenager. Did you?"

  "Yes."

  "Do I surprise you?"

  "You don't sound like the Amber I used to know."

  Her head was still on my shoulder and her hair blew against my face.

  "Twenty years is a long time, Russ. I am changing. The reason I asked Alice to come out was to try to know my family, to offer some love in that direction. I tried to explain that to you.

  I'm not going to stop until whoever killed her is in jail and paying for what they did—even if it's my own daughter."

  "That's a tough way to turn a life around. Maybe you should start with something on a little smaller scale." I hear the sarcasm in my voice and wished it wasn't there.

  "I've been studying my Bible, giving lots of money to charity. I'm trying to feel the pain of others, not to judge them. I'm thirty-nine years old, Russ. That's old enough to know when something's missing."

  "I understand what you mean."

  "I made a list of every regret I could think of, and what I could do about them. Until tonight, I thought there would be a way to find my daughter again. I guess that's one regret that won't ever be fixed, by me at least. I'll try, though, I'll try to reach her."

  "There may be time," I said, and the thought came me that Grace might be spending a lot of that—time—in lockup.

  "I did not have her tortured, Russ. I don't know what could have put that in her mind. But I want you to believe me I'll confess to anything and everything under the sun. I was terrible mother. But I never hurt her on purpose. Never that.

  I shot into the right lane, braked as we approached the first signal in Corona del Mar, fishtailed into a right turn through the green, brought the back end into line, then cranked a hard U-turn to my left. We idled at the signal.

  "Was sitting outside my house a way of righting some regret?" I asked.

  "No. I never regretted us. I regretted losing us. It was the highest cost of my ambition." "I regretted losing us, too." "I know that. But I do believe you did your part to ruin us. I left, Russ, but you told me to. I'd appreciate it if you'd cop to that. You've had the luxury of me taking the rap for a long time now. Remember the talk we had, sitting on the floor by the fake fireplace that night, after I'd gotten my first contract offer? All the travel I was going to be doing? Do you remember what you said when I asked you what you wanted me to do? You said, “I want you to go, Amber.' The go was loud and clear. I did the dirty work for both of us—I went."

  I know. I helped us crash."

  And had regretted it, even as the words were coming out that night. I could remember every second of that conversation, even now, as if it was a scene from a movie I'd watched a hundred times. To all the charges that have been brought against the male—pride, stubborness, unwillingness to communicate, selfishness, cowardice, insularity, macho inanity—I will gladly confess. Did I love her then? Certainly. But love is a poor excuse for anything. My sole defense is that I never desired any woman but Amber—at least not enough to act on it—when we were together, and for a truly frightening amount of time afterward. I was hers. Even when I began to take other lovers, I was hers. Until, that is, I stumbled on Isabella Sandoval sitting under a palapa amidst the sweet Valencias of the SunBlesst Ranch and my heart, so long detained, fled straight away to her.

  "How could you let me go without a fight, Russ?" Amber whispered quietly.

  Only time had given me the answer. If she had asked me this during one of our parting frays, I'd have told her she wasn't worth it. And she would have believed, because at that time I retained the ability to hurt her—she had not grown beyond me, yet. But that would not have been the truth.

  44I thought then," I said, "that it was dangerous to take what wasn't offered. That I couldn't coax a love out of you that wasn't there to begin with."

  "Afraid it would vanish?"

  "Yes, in the end. Afraid of the collateral damage, too."

  "Meaning what?"

  "Meaning the love I felt for you."

  The light finally changed and I gunned the car back toward Laguna. I maintained a more prudent double-digit speed. To the west, the ocean was an endless plain of black.

  "And what do you think now, Russ, about taking what isn't offered?"

  "I haven't changed my position on that. Some things, you fight too hard to get them, get ruined in the war."

  "You never had to fight for Isabella, did you? She offered you everything you wanted. Handed it right over to you, all of it, all of herself."

  "Yes, she did."

  "How did you choose to deal with that? Wasn't she bargaining with a diluted currency?"

  "I loved and honored her in every way I could."

  "Oh, Russell, you were a lucky man to find her."

  "I've always known that."

  "I'm so sorry for what happened to her. Will she ever be okay... ever?"

  "No."

  "Russ, do you believe in miracles?"

  "No."

  "What is it you hold on to late at night, when the devil’s grabbing at your soul?"

  "His throat." "Do you feel anything tender inside at all?"

  "Tenderness would unravel me."

  My agonies were storming their walls. Was I powerless to stop them, or just unwilling? I heard a wild ringing in my ears.

  "Do you want to die?"

  "Sometimes. Then I think. There has to be more to life than a desire to be taken out on a stretcher."

  "Is it really that bad?"

  "I may just be exhibiting some sorry-ass version of brinksmanship. I've never considered myself cut out for this task—kindness just doesn't come easily. I don't know how much longer I can take care of her. I dream of tumors growing in my balls and lungs."

  "What do you want?"

  "A job where I wear a shirt with my name on it. A straightforward life."

  "Really, I mean. Strip away all your self-pitying horseshit, all your writerly loop-the-loops, and what is it you truly want?"

  "For the people I love to stop dying."

  "There, Russell. I can believe you now. Why does it take you so long sometimes to admit the truth?" The air whipped through the windows. "Pull over," she said.

  I braked and signaled and crunched off onto the shoulder. When the car finally stopped, the dust blew forward and swirled in the headlights. We were between the towns, on a bluff that opened to the sea. Down on the beach, wavering white ribbons rushed and retreated. My heart was in my teeth.

  Amber got out, shut her door, and walked over to the bluff edge. I followed. The smell of sage mixed with the salt air, each intensified by the heat. Amber waited until I caught up with her, then took my hand. We walked the perimeter of the bluff, stopping where a deep gash opened into the abyss. The face of the cliff was back-cut, too steep for me to actually see, and as my gaze followed its invisible plane, I continued to see nothing but darkness until the sand below focused in my view, pale acreage studded with sharp rocks exposed wholly now by the low tide. The sand at the waterline shone as if lacquered The ringing in my ears was so loud, my eyes began to blur, had never in my life—except for those three hellish days with Izzy in a Guadalajara hospital, where her tumor was diagnosed—felt so fragile, so ready to disassemble.

  To my heartache was then added shock when Amber turned me toward her on the edge of this bluff high over the sea and offered her lips, wet and parted, to my own.

  There was nothing exploratory in this act, nothing of negotiation or the art of the deal. No, this was a kiss as pure as sacrifice. It was an offer of everything. She blew the breath her lungs deep into my own as, two decades ago, she had : often done, always to the wilding of my blood.

  I have a clear and permanent memory of what happened next. First, a breeze came off the sea,
oddly cool in the static heat, and it struck my face directly. (How it got around Amber face—locked so close to mine—I cannot explain.) And as it pushed cooly against me, I felt what seemed like the total contents of my mind—thoughts, precepts, memory—being lift out and carried away. The Zapruder film is no more graphic than the vision I had, eyes closed, of everything inside me departing to join this fresh and unlikely breeze. But there was no violence to it. Rather, what was inside me simply stepped out and, like a child hand in hand with a grandparent, walk away.

  Second, I remember the pink cotton material of Amber dress bunched up on the small of her back, clutched in one my hands, and the pure soft heat of her legs pressing against my trembling own, the forward bend and toe-strained perch her, the lift of her dark brown hair in that breeze, a black even darker than the ocean beyond us, the brace of my fingers on her belly. And I remember, too, that we hardly moved—no great histrionics here—because every tiny motion, every fractional of contact was an agony of pleasure I could barely stand. The tremors deep within Amber were all the movement we required.

  Last, I remember where we ended up, though not how we got there. The logistics of the transition are not hard to imagine. I was lying in the dirt, amidst the fragrant sage, staring straight up through Amber's hair to the sky. Her back was still to me. My arms were wrapped around her, my left locked in her right armpit, my right still open against her stomach, holding tight. My legs were spread and her rump rested deep between them, where—I noted—we were still very much connected. Her heart beat hard against the bone of my left elbow. We were both breathing fast. My butt hurt. I was, for the moment, blessedly opinionless.

  But as quickly as my thoughts had departed, so they came scampering back, like rabbits to the hole. There they huddled, frightened, buck-toothed, ashamed. They curled together, hid their faces. They confessed. I closed my eyes again and imagined a fig leaf the size of the heavens. But I did not loosen my grip on Amber; if I had traded everything for this, then I was not about to give it up. I was the monkey caught in a trap because he's unwilling to release the bait from his greedy fist. I was even ready for the electric chair, but I would clutch this treasure to my lap, lodged so high and deep inside her that I could feel the bottom of her heart, until the straps claimed me.

  Or not. Because along with the searing reentry of my conscience came the cooling waters of reason—all that keep the soul from self-immolation. For a moment, a terrible storm of contradiction began to form inside me, but it passed. I was no longer fit to battle myself. I had won and I had lost. I released my grip on Amber Mae and worked my nose into the aromatic crook behind her ear. I gently drove myself into her, to lessening effect. Very deeply, I sighed.

  "Don't speak," she said. I did not.

  "That was a gift," she whispered.

  "It certainly was. Thank you."

  "It wasn't from me. I just delivered it."

  "Who do I send the thank-you note to?"

  "Isabella. We talked."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Driving back down Coast Highway toward my home was a journey of silence and bad conscience. Yes, I owned my secret life now, the very one I was hoping to begin on that awful night of July 3. But what a price to pay. I felt as if I had overdrawn my emotional accounts, that there was no way to finance this latest, wildest of expenditures. It was a perfect correlative to my actual financial quandry, the thought of which sent me further into a dismal spiral. What would I do when the bills came due? I became sullen and remorseful. And surprisingly—perhaps not—I found myself longing for the bed I used to share with Isabella, for the proximity of even her absence, for the darkness of the room in which we had loved each other and would, with some helpful nudge from the fates, love each other again.

  Worst of all was my knowledge that Grace had almost certainly been in Amber's room on that night. Martin Parish had not been lying, after all. A thought came to me: What if Martin and Grace had planned this together? What if Martin had cajoled and helped to terrify Grace, perhaps even hired the men to burn her, used all his considerable influence as Grace's former stepfather to widen the already-gaping chasm between mother and daughter? He could certainly have done so. But to what end? Vengeance for Amber throwing him over? Doubtful. The money due him in Amber's will? Possible. A chill fingered through me as another scenario presented itself: What if Martin and Grace were secret lovers, planning to marry each other's fortunes when Amber was gone? Could this explain Grace's many absence, her frequent phone conversations, her evasiveness? Yes, but so, then why had Martin sworn to seeing Grace on the July 3? Was it as simple as self-protection, having been surprised by a unforeseen factor—myself? A simpler explanation might have been this: Grace's arrival at Amber's was every bit as coincident as my own, and Parish, latching onto an opportunity to throw my curiosities a monstrous curve ball, admitted Grace's untimely entrance to me for the sake of pure confusion. But the overriding question was this: If Martin and Grace had been there together planned the murder together, and killed the wrong woman together, why was Parish building a case against his own accomplice and turning it over to the DA? It made little sense. Had I heard Karen correctly?

  I picked up the car phone and dialed Karen's home number, even though it was close to 2:00 A.M. She answered groggily. I hit a low spot in the canyon and the line went fuzzy for moment, then snapped back into clarity. I asked her simply whether Martin's complaint to DA Peter Haight named Russell Monroe as the killer of Alice Fultz, or Russell Monroe and Grace Wilson.

  "You promised," she said.

  "I know, and I'm sorry. My ass is very much on the line here, Karen."

  "You know how easy these cellular things are to tap?"

  "I'm looking at death row. Tell me, Karen—is Haight going to indict me, or Grace and me?"

  A long silence ensued, then another patch of static as we dipped behind a hillside, then the voiceless clarity again.

  "Grace won't be named," she said finally. "Just you. They're banking she'll work with them and testify."

  Whatever will was driving my body at that moment seemed to diminish to almost nothing. I was floating, as if in the horse latitudes, bereft of power.

  Amber took my hand. "Martin plans to have Grace testify against you?"

  I nodded.

  "She was in on it. It's pure Grace. Damn, Russell, if you could only see her as I have."

  "We'll both be seeing her in about five minutes."

  She was asleep in the guest room when we walked in. My father sat beside her, shotgun across his lap, drinking coffee and reading a magazine. In the limited light, Grace looked more like a child than a woman, her wavy dark hair hid her face and, in spite of the heat, she lay bundled to the neck in the blanket. The ceiling fan whirred above. Theodore examined us, and I sensed his understanding of what had just happened, then realized I hadn't bothered to so much as dust off my clothes or run a brush through my hair.

  "Looks like you three have some business here," he said, rising. "I'll get lost for a while."

  With this, I turned on the light. Grace stirred, whimpered, then opened one dark eye on me.

  "What?" she whispered without moving.

  "Get up," I said. "We need to talk."

  I took her robe from the foot of the bed and handed it to her, turned my back for a moment, and closed my eyes. Let me find her innocent, I thought. Let there be an explanation for this. I heard the rustling of terry cloth on skin, then Grace's perturbed sigh. When I turned, she was sitting up, wrapped in the robe, both eyes trained, rather malignantly, upon Amber. The color had fallen from her face and her mouth was slightly open—half astonishment, half anger.

  "I'm in hell," she said.

  "Wonderful to see you, too, Grace."

  Grace's eyes seemed to lose their focus for a moment and I sensed in her the desire to run. For a moment, I thought she would.

  But when she sprang from the bed, it was not to escape but to charge Amber. I intercepted her, caught her strong wrists
in my hands, and threw her back onto the bed. I beat her to the pillow and removed the .32.

  "You hateful thing," said Amber.

  "Russell," Grace said, training her fearful eyes on m "Can you please make her go away?"

  "No. But you can listen."

  I came right out with what we had discovered: the ripped nail at Amber's, the nine matching it in Grace's wastebasket. I saved Brent Sides's recanted testimony, should it be needed later.

  "Explain," I said.

  Grace moved her disdainful eyes from her mother to me "Twin horrors," she said. "It's like being raised by wolves."

  "We were talking about July the third," I said.

  "If you're accusing me of murder because you think nails in my bathroom match one found at her house—you're even dumber than I thought, Russ."

  'Funny," I said. "No one mentioned murder at all. I was just wondering what you were doing at Amber's that night."

  "I was not at Amber's that night. I was with Brent."

  "We just came from his apartment. He said you didn't show up until real late. You were frightened. You smelled bad. He was afraid to ask where you'd been. So, now I'm asking— where were you?"

  Grace colored deeply but not with shame. It was anger that showed through her skin and fueled a tiny fire in each eye. "I hate you both."

  "That's nice," I said. "Where were you? And if you weren't at Amber's, how did your fingernail manage to get there without you? Grace—I'm tired of your crap."

  The anger in Grace's eyes looked, for a moment, almost flamelike. I had never seen this in her, and yet it didn't surprise me. My own temper was a fierce, though temporary, thing. Amber's was, too. And as I looked at my daughter then, I saw that she was, both literally and figuratively, up against a wall.

  Amber, silent throughout until now, turned to look at me. "Welcome to your girl," she said.

  "You're the thing from hell," said Grace.

  "I know, dear," answered Amber. "I know. But I'm trying hard to be something else. What were you doing in my house that night, Grace? You may as well tell us, since we have proof that you were there. Let me guess—you came to apologize for not talking to me for six months, for acting like I was dead."