SUMMER of FEAR (34 page)

She shook her head. "Not one of my colors."

"Alice's?"

"How would I know? I don't suppose when
you—"

"No."

Chester keyed in on this truncated exchange, his patient eyes searching
first my face, then Amber's.

I returned his stare with what innocence I could fake, while trying in
my mind to recreate that night, and I could see Alice's rigid outstretched arms
inviting me into the freezer, could feel her icy-slick weight on my back as I
bore her up the mountain, but I could not for my life see her fingernails.

I touched it with my pen. "Fake?"

"Yes," said Amber "It was torn off. Maybe in a struggle.
There's probably some real nail on it. Does that help?"

"Definitely. Get Alice's makeup stuff and bring
it in here."

Amber returned a moment later with her sister's overnight case. She dug
through and found two bottles of nail polish in a shiny black plastic kit. One
was red, the other an opalescent white.

"Amber, what does this
suggest...
in the cosmetic scheme of things?"

"Proves it's not her nail."

"Absolutely not?"

"Russ, nails aren't absolute. But you don't do them pink, then
leave town for two weeks with red and white."

"Oh my, I can almost hear this in court,"
noted Chet.

"She might have forgotten it," I said.

"Might have."

"Or carried the pink in a handier place, like
her purse."

"I already looked," said Amber. "She
didn't."

Naturally, I had thought about another possibility. Amber looked at me,
her eyes steady but rife with the same dire inklings that must have been
visible in my own.

"Grace's color?"

"Women don't
have
just one color, Russ. Remember our
bathroom?"

I did, a veritable makeup department, an entire warehouse of paints and
polishes, shadows and liners in every hue and shade; solvents, removers,
applicators, brushes, tissue: swabs, lighted mirrors, hand-held mirrors,
magnifying mirror: wall mirrors. (It was our favorite place in the world to
make standing, carnal, untender, image-drunk love.)

I said that I had not forgotten our bathroom.

"Well," she said, "then you
know."

"Bag the nail," said Chester. "Perhaps, at some point it
will match nine others that we find in Mr. Parish's possession. They are
probably among his 'evidence' right now at County."

I bagged it and continued on through the dusty rubble in front of me. A
few minutes later, we were done. We placed the filter and contents in one large
evidence bag. Chet arranged the bag in his case with the others after labeling
each.

"You didn't get what you wanted, did you?"
asked Amber.

"Maybe. Hairs. I don't know. A lot of it depends on the good graces
of Mr. Singer."

"Mr. Singer cannot analyze what he does not
possess.'

"Did Alice wear a watch, or eyeglasses?" I asked Amber. I had
not forgotten the tiny screw I had removed from the nap of the carpet here just
a few nights ago. It was still inside the cap of my pen, with my own spares.

"I hadn't seen her in twelve years, Russell.
What now?

"Grace's."

Amber studied me. "To find what?"

"If Parish has been there, doing the same thing he did here, we
need something to prove it. If there's a 'police investigation' tape up, it's
too late."

There was no
tape, and Amber had a key supplied to her by the private detective she had
hired to find Grace.

It was the first time I had been inside my daughter's home. I stood in
the short entryway, holding the batch of mail I'd gotten from her slot in the
lobby, wondering again how I had managed to miss her life. The condo was not
only expensive to start with but the furnishings and accents were expensive,
too—all financed by Amber, as she reminded me. The carpet was a thick cream
Berber, the sofas and chairs heavy rattan with white cotton cushions, and two
of the three living room walls were hung with original oils by Laguna artists
whose styles I recognized. The east wall was mirrored to extend the depth of
the room; the west was all glass,
including a sliding door that opened to a long but narrow balcony overlooking
the yacht basin and restaurants. The kitchen was done in Euro style, which
means everything is the same shape and color (black) and you can't tell the
oven from the dishwasher. The bedroom had a big four-poster and was done in
pinks. The whole place was organized, clean, neat.

"I guess she got my housekeeping style instead
of yours,"

I said.

"What she got was a maid I pay for."

"How come you keep reminding me who pays the
bills?"

"I think you should know."

"If I remember correctly, my child-support
checks came

back."

Amber looked away from me, visibly perturbed. She glanced at Chester,
whose presence had started to resemble that of some acute and silent
conscience.

"Say what you need to say," he said. "You don't have much
that will surprise these old and increasingly hairy ears.

"I
provided
everything I could, Russ. I still do. That's
what I mean. And that's why this whole thing she's fantasized hurts me so
deeply. I don't expect a medal, but it would be nice if my only child tried
thanking me instead of recreating her life with me as some kind of hell."

"Amber," I said, "not everything is
about you."

I considered Amber's misty eyes, her quivering chin, was right, I
thought—not everything was about Amber. Nor about myself. This was about Grace,
and how we might keep her from Parish's tightening net.

Chester broke the silence. "Ms. Wilson, begin in the bathroom and
research what you can on your daughter's nail: Russell and I will try to find
some sign of Mr. Parish. Since you are more familiar with her home than we are,
anything you notice that wasn't here before, anything that seems out of place
might be of help to us. Remember, Martin Parish's goal is to demonstrate that
Grace was in your home the night of July the third.
Our
goal is to
demonstrate that he was here."

Chester began in the cupboards of the kitchen, no doubt wondering
whether Parish had had the audacity to plant something incriminating there—the
club, perhaps.

I went into the bedroom. Grace's nightstand held a leather-bound Bible
with her name embossed in gold on the cover. Midway through Leviticus was a
color postcard of the Champs Elysees, with the words, "Our city welcomes
Grace with an open heart." It was signed "Florent." It had not
beer mailed. Hand-delivered to her hotel, I figured, by Florent himself or
perhaps a friend, just in time for Grace to take it back with her to Orange
County.

Under the Bible
was a notebook that was mostly empty
.
Grace had made a few journal
entries—May 2,4,10,21—then stopped. I read them, learned nothing except that
her job was boring and she wanted to travel again.

There were two photograph albums at the bottom of the stand drawer. I
took them out and looked through: London, Paris, Cannes, Rome, Florence, Rio,
Mexico City, Puerta Vallarta, Hong Kong, Tokyo. Most of the shots were faces
that appeared once, then never returned. Only a few were actually of Grace. A girl's
record of travel, I thought—the sights, the strangers, the obvious. Not one
picture was of Amber. Strange.

I closed the drawer and pressed the message button on the answering
machine that sat atop the stand. I wrote down in my notebook the names, messages,
and numbers. Three calls from Brent Sides. Two from work. Eight from people I
didn't know. Three from me, four hang-ups. One from Reuben Saltz, asking after
Amber.

I lifted the cordless phone and pushed
redial
. A recorded voice told me that I had reached the home of Brent
Sides. The last call Grace made from home, I thought. I wondered.

For a long moment, I stood there and studied the stuffed animals that
crowded Grace's bed and bed stand, covered her two chests of drawers, rested on
her windowsills and bookshelves, even the floor. There must have been a
hundred of them. The idea struck me that I was more interested in getting to
know my daughter—at this late date—than I was in finding some trace of Martin
Parish's presence in her house. I tried to concentrate:
What could Parish
have left behind? What did he transfer from this home to Amber's in order to
find it as 'evidence' later?

I dug into Grace's jewelry chest, wondering whether Parish could have
had the cunning to remove the tiny screw and leave it at Amber's. If he had, I
could not match the screw to any piece of jewelry or to any of the several
watches in the chest. Everything seemed... natural.

Chester continued his more objective path: He checked the closets for
incriminating clothing that Parish might have put there; I heard him throwing
open all the kitchen cupboards and drawers, doing likewise in the laundry room.

I opened the window, sat in a chair, and lighted a cigarette The clock
said 11:35. I watched the smoke slide through the window screen, felt the
nicotine surround my brain, and realize how exhausted I was. The sounds of
Amber's bathroom search issued down the hallway from the bath. Chester had
joined her and I could hear their voices, muffled, through the walls. Gad knows
what she was telling him. I heard them leave the place and assumed they were
headed down to the dumpster. What a pleasant business. I looked across the
street to the dark water of the harbor. A rage continued to build inside me,
directed at Martin. Had Martin done what he did so that I didn't have to? Had he been chosen for darkness, just as
Izzy was chosen for disease and Ing for madness? Did it matter?

I was in no mood for understanding or forgiveness. No, I was much more
in the mood to line up all the Parishes and Ings and tumors and evils in the
world and bash out their live with my ax handle. I would bash until I could
bash no more. I would loose an ocean of blood upon which I would tread—my head held
high. My wife would rise and walk to me and we would embrace. We would begin
our family. My daughter would smile, thrive. We would have a son. My
first-person account of the Midnight Eye would be a best-seller, receive
awards, become a major film. My stilt house would become a museum after I died.
Izzy would live to be 103, remember me fondly in blockbuster of her own, marry
a rickety old man who wore bow ties and adored her.

"Are you going to be sick?"

The voice was Amber's.

"Oh." I focused my eyes, which revealed my
ankles and shoes, crossed before me on the carpet. My cigarette had burned out
and dropped its ash. "No. I'm fine. Resting."

She was
standing directly beneath a recessed ceiling bulb, the light from which lent
her a specific radiance. "Look what we found downstairs."

Amber regarded me
with an odd look of pity but also with an exaggerated expression of pain,
behind which I sensed some kind of victory. She stopped in the doorway of the
bedroom. For a moment, tired as I
was—or maybe because of it—all I could do was behold her form before me, the shape
of her space, the hang of her dress, the slight tautness of the material at her
stomach and chest, the straightness of shoulder, the droop of hair.

"Let's have it," I said.

"It's
from the dumpster outside. We found a wastebasket liner like the one in the
bathroom—tied up and stuffed down around other people's things. I pulled out
about five handfuls of pink-stained tissue, and these were there."

Chet came forward and gave me the small white bag.

A
little covey of fingernails scratched down into the corner and when I tilted it
back the other way, they slid to another. Some wobbled on convex backs. They
were uniform, off-whit nearly opaque. Fakes. Remnants of pink polish remained
on a few of their edges, just shadings really, as if the paint had been removed
with solvent. I counted them once, moved them around, counted them again, moved
them some more, and counted them a third time.

"Nine," I said.

"Nine," echoed Chester. "There're a few others things in
there you should see."

They led me to the bathroom. The door to the cabinet under the sink stood
open. Amber knelt down and pointed to a package of new, blank acrylic
fingernails.

A terrible weight settled on me. My heart was wooden, mechanical, huge.
My legs felt shaky and my ears were ringing. "What about polish?" I
asked, hardly recognizing my own voice.

"They're all in that basket on the counter," said Amber.
"Take your pick."

I took up the basket and looked in. I shuffled the bottles around. There
were six shades of pink. I removed the Baggies from my pocket, spilled the
vacuum-cleaner nail onto the cobalt blue tile of Grace's counter, flipped it
upright. A color called Rosebud looked close. I painted my left middle
fingernail with it, blew it dry. If there was a difference between the pink on
the fake and the pink on my finger, I couldn't see it. Neither could Amber, an
expert on such matters, whose face had gone pale, almost cadaverous in the
harsh bathroom light. Chet nodded along gloomily.