SUMMER of FEAR (10 page)

"I’ll rent it out for a while," I said.

"And I'll get you a front-row seat when we send this guy to the
gas," said Winters. "Until then, you owe us."

He turned and
walked out.

I stood in the
laundry room again, leaning against the washer and looking out the open door to
the eucalyptus tree in the yard.

That was when I first heard the faint, shallow breathing very close to
me.

It took me a second to realize what it was. I didn't move. I figured a
dog sleeping behind the hamper, maybe, or a cat up on the shelf. For some
reason, it scared me. I didn't blink. It was coming from just below me, just in
front of me, still barely audible.

It stopped, then it started again.

Very slowly, I reached out to the dryer and pulled the door toward me.
Gad, please,
I
thought....
The
light inside went on and two eyes came into view. I knelt and held out my
hands, palms up.

"It's over," I said. "I won't hurt you. You can come out
now, Kim."

She climbed out and into my arms. I guessed she was four or five. She
began whimpering and her breathing deepened. I walked us out into the sunshine.
She dug her face into the crook of my neck. "Mommy screamed and I heard a
bang. Mommy screamed and then she
didn't scream."

"Did you see him, Kim?"

I felt her forehead nodding yes against my neck.

"He was big and hairy and had a red bat."

"Like a baseball bat?"

"When he came out of Mommy's and Daddy's. I want Mommy and Daddy
now."

I rocked her and patted her back and let the sun hit her hair. It was
matted with the vomit she'd given up in terror. "Did you see his
face?"

"He was a hairy giant and had a green robe. I want Mommy and Daddy
now."

I carried her back into the house, down the hallway, and into her living
room. Martin and Karen were still there, standing by the stereo.

"Oh My," said Karen. She walked toward us with a: officious
stride that dissolved about halfway across the room when she broke into a run.
She unwrapped Kim from my shoulders, hefted the girl onto her own, and carried
her toward the front door.

Martin and I stood alone. The piercing flatness of his eye unsettled me.

"Was there a tape at Amber's?" I asked.

He nodded. And his expression softened.

"You listen to it?"

"Once. Same garbled shit as this one. Same
voice."

"Were there beach sounds, cars in the
background?"

"Yeah. Same shit. He left it rewound and ready in he tape player. I
found it because the power light was on and that seemed strange."

I considered. "Did the Eye do Amber,
Marty?"

"Someone
wanted us to think so."

"The Eye
doesn't cart his victims off in plastic bags."

"The Eye
doesn't make beds and cover stains, either, I'd imagine."

"Then what
the hell is going on?"

The smile that
Marty offered next was positively bizarre. "It's not that complicated,
Russ."

I let the statement go because I didn't quite understand it yet; I
hadn't looked at me from Martin Parish's point of view. Now I began to, and a
little spasm of fear fluttered in my heart. "Where is it now—the tape from
Amber's?"

"The second night, when I found
you
there, it was gone. Just
like Amber was."

Then it hit me, clearly and suddenly as a fist in the stomach. Marty
was prepared to believe I'd killed Amber. I could see the conviction in his eyes,
unalterable as faith.

"Grace told me she wasn't there
that night," I said.

"Then one of us is a liar."

"Maybe a killer, too,
Marty?"

Marty was actually smiling again when he said, "I confess, Monroe.
I did them all. I can't stop because it feels so good. Excuse me now while I go
find some evidence so I can arrest myself."

When I returned
home, Grace and Isabella were sitting on the porch—Izzy in her wheelchair and
Grace on the step. My heart made a minor leap at the sight of them together,
apparently peace. For a brief moment, visions of the Wynns receded and all that
mattered was on my porch. We were a family.

Hugging Izzy, I noted her smart outfit—a gewgaw-spangled T-shirt with
matching hat and earrings, outrageous surfer pants with an explosive
red-black-orange pattern, and her usual tennis shoes with the glitter ties. She
was freshly made up and smelled wonderfully of perfume.

Grace allowed me to hug her, too.

"You look beautiful today," I said to
Isabella.

"G-G-Grace helped me. She has better taste than y-y-you."

"And probably more patience, too," I said.

"She's got totally great clothes," said
Grace.

Grace regarded me with unspoken pride. How she had
found her way into Izzy's heart in so short a time, I could not immediately
understand, but I sensed that some workable truce had been struck between them.
After that, the exigencies of appearance and fashion had obviously taken over.

Isabella looked up at me with her great dark eyes. "I don't want to
be l-l-late."

"I promise we won't be late," I said. "But I need one
hour to write an article. Can you two behave yourselves for that long?"

"We definitely cannot," said Grace.

Isabella nodded.

One hour later, I was driving Isabella up to the UC Irvine Medical
Center for the reading of her second PET scan. Her doctors were afraid the
tumor was growing. We were terrified the tumor was growing. The scan results
would help us know whether it was, and, if so, how fast and in what direction.
I had written and faxed my first article on the Midnight Eye to Carla Dance at
the
Journal,
and a courtesy copy to Karen Schultz. I used his self-given
name. Death seemed everywhere, common as air.

These drives from our home in the arid tan hills of the canyon into the
smoggy industrial sprawl of the medical center always seemed like a combination
of the Bataan death march and a scene from
Alice in Wonderland.
There
was a surreal overlay to these dismal journeys, along with a shaken faith that
any minute the nightmare would be broken and we would be just another expectant
couple heading up to the hospital for a chatty visit with our obstetrician. In
fact, we had made just such a trip once, two months before Isabella was
diagnosed, after a drug-store pregnancy test went bright pink. But an
ultrasound showed no heartbeat. A day later, she miscarried. It was her second
loss in six months. Eight weeks later, when the tumor was discovered, we
understood that her body had refused to begin another life because it was
already in a secret battle for its own.

Isabella sat beside me, staring out the window, lost
behind her sunglasses. The spire of Angel Stadium protruded from the haze in
the east. The wide parched bed of the Santa Ana River wound beneath us,
testimony to five years of drought, reminder of still another blessing that God
seemed to have plucked from our tables. There was a wreck on 1-5, as there
always seemed to be each afternoon. We came to a stop, funneled over to the
middle lane, and looked at the lights flashing up ahead.

"What if it's big-bigger?"

"It isn't."

"It really isn't, is it?"

"No way. The implants killed it all."

"And half of m-me."

"That's right."

"I deserve some good news for a charge-charge..
change
—don't
I?"

"You deserve the best news in the world."

We crept around the bang-up. Three cars were off on
the shoulder. A woman sat on the asphalt, her back up against the freeway
divider, her face in her hands.

"Why do p-people always slow watch and
down?"

"It lets them be thankful it's not them."

"Is that why my friends call me?"

"That's not fair, Izzy. Your friends call
because they love you. They don't know what else to do."

"My peach-peach...
speech
is getting
worse, isn't it?"

"I think so, baby."

"I can see the word but I c-can't say it."

"You're doing well enough for me."

"It's worse than last week, though. But it m-m-might be the
drugs."

"It might be," I said.

Isabella stared at the wreck as we moved past, edged into the newly
vacant "fast" lane, and sped up.

She was quiet for a while. "I heard a woman's house in the voice
last night. Was I d-dreaming?"

I told her it was Grace.

"Why didn't she j-j-just stay with her
m-m-mother?"

"Out of town, I guess," I said.

"Do you want her to stay?"

I told her about Grace's trouble.

Isabella thought for a moment. "She might have turned out all
right, if she jaw..
.just
had a mother nother. I mean another
mother."

I let that pass. Isabella had always derived comfort from slamming
Amber, and it wasn't my duty to deny her that pleasure. The thought came to me
again how fundamentally different they were, how opposite.

"Have you seen her re-re-recently?"

"No."

"What about the Fourth of July? You h-had that Amber look at dinner
on the d-deck that night."

"No, Izzy. I haven't seen her in months."

"Does Grace want to live with us?"

"No, she just—"

"I don't want her in the house!" Isabella breathed very deeply
and her chin shook. A tear flattened under the frame of her sunglasses and
smeared her cheek. "I'm sorry," she said.

"It's okay."

"I'm r-r-really afraid they're going to find new
growth."

"No. No new growth, Is. Not today."

"We see some new growth," said Paul Nesson,
pointing out the dark tumor on the PET scan. "It hasn't been particularly
fast. It's about what we expected. Part of it might be mass effect.'

Dr. Paul Nesson was Isabella's neurosurgeon, a young soft-spoken man who
managed to be grave, humorless, and warm, all at the same time. Of all the
surgeons we consulted Nesson was the only one who said that Isabella's was not
hopeless situation. He also said there was no cure. He also
was
the only one who advised against
surgery. Instead, he implanted ten radioactive "seeds" into the tumor
on a Monday, and by Friday, Isabella's legs had lost 60 percent of their
function, he had sat with us for many of those long hours on the neuro floor
while the movement in Isabella's legs ebbed away—starting at her toes and
continuing up. Paul Nesson had told us then that the function loss was
"probably not irreversible," but by now a year later, we all saw that
he'd been wrong. I will never forget the sight of Isabella Monroe, age
twenty-seven, lying in that cheerless room, her head wrapped in a lead-lined
cap to keep the radiation from damaging anyone but her, trying to move her
toes, then her ankles, then her knees. "Well," she said, always
thought those wheelchairs with motors were nice. Can you get me one in a hot
pink, Dr. Nesson?"

"We'll get one in any color you want," he
said quietly.

We settled on black, motorless. When it came time to actually get a
wheelchair, the concept of hot pink had lost its charm.

Isabella
looked at him now, then back at the colorize PET scan pictures. The tumor was a
dark mass outlined in red and yellow. It was no longer round: The powerful
radioactive implants had contorted it into a lumpy asymmetrical mess.

"What do we do?" Isabella asked.

"How's your leg function?"

"Pretty bad."

"More weakness?"

"Yes."

"Speech?"

"It's g-g-getting worse. Want to see my tricks
now?"

Nesson did his usual neurological exam: reflex in the leg (almost none),
nystagmus in the eyes (plenty), facial symmetry (good). He asked to see her
walk. Isabella labored out of her chair, took the handle of a quad cane in each
hand, and picked her way across the room with excruciating slowness, patience,
and concentration. Nesson and I followed on each side of her, ready. She made a
turn, came back to her chair, and slumped into it.

"Why don't I feel any better, doctor?"

Nesson said nothing, looked up at the scan pictures again, his hands
deep in the pockets of his white coat, his head cocked a little to the left.
For a moment, he stood there without moving.

"I think it's time to go in and debulk the tumor, clean out the
necrosed tissue," he said.

"Cut my head open?"

"That would be necessary, yes."

"If you d-d-didn't want to operate a year ago,
why now?"