SUMMER of FEAR (35 page)

"Martin planted the one at Amber's," I said but the feebleness
of my conviction clearly wavered in my voice.

"No," said Chester. "If so, he'd have kept these nine,
not thrown them out."

"Then he planted all ten," I protested.

"Not logical, Russell. He needs either the one from the vacuum or
else these, in his possession. If he did place the nail at Amber's, he
certainly would have absconded with these by now. It supports his case against
Grace. The tenth nail establishes the match."

"My daughter was in my house," said Amber.

My
own voice sounded to me as if it were traveling across continents. "There
will be an explanation. This isn't what it looks like."

We spent the next hour searching Grace's apartment for more proof that
she had been in her mother's room on the night of July the third. She had done
an exemplary job of either hiding it, or taking it somewhere else.

"We've got
one more stop to make," I said.

We let Amber do
the knocking on the door of Brent Sides's apartment, identify herself, and ask
to come in. Chet and I stood against the wall so he couldn't see us through the
peephole His lumpy briefcase sat at our feet.

When we followed Amber in, Sides's sleep-heavy eye went wide. All he had
on was a pair of boxer shorts. His hair was a mess. He had a carving knife in
his hand.

"Mr. Monroe." He blushed and set the knife on the counter.
"Sorry. I was just dreaming about the Midnight Eye getting in here."

"Just us, tonight."

"Mr. Sides. This is Mr. Singer, Orange County Sheriff' Department.
We need to talk."

He gaped momentarily at Chester's badge, then at Amber recognizing her
face—as would nearly any man in the country--- without being able to place it.
He blinked.

"Wanna sit?"

"No. I want you to tell me which part was the
lie."

"Which part of what?"

"Of what you told me about you and Grace. You told me a lot, Brent,
but there was one thing you made up. You made it up because she asked you to,
and because you love her."

"No, man. Everything I said was true."

I stared at him, not wanting to hurt him, although certainly I was
willing.

"There's been a murder, Brent. Grace is in terrible trouble. You
don't understand that trouble, but you love my daughter. So do I. You have ten
seconds to tell me what your lie was. If you don't, I'll make you wish you had,
then you will, anyway."

He looked to Amber, the softness of appeal in his
eyes.

"You really should talk with Mr. Monroe," said Chet. "Unless
you would feel more comfortable in an interrogation booth at County."

"Please, Brent,'.' she said.

Sides glanced at me again, then sat in a director's chair in front of
the TV. His back was to us. I could hardly hear his voice when he finally
spoke.

"We weren't together on July the third," he said. "I
worked and came home. I don't know where Grace was. I was afraid to ask."

"Why was that?" I demanded.

"Oh...
you know."

"I don't know. Why were you afraid to ask where she'd been?"

"Because of the way
she...
looked."

Clarity came to me at that moment. Of course. It would account for
everything we hadn't found in the last hour of searching Grace's home. It would
account for her showing up at Brent's house late that night, after her deed was
done.

"You weren't with her that night, but you saw
her. Right?"

He nodded.

"How did she look, Brent?" Amber asked him
gently.

"Uh...
real scary, like. And she smelled."

"Like what?"

"Like she was terrified, like, or had just been close to something
real bad."

Brent turned then to face us, adjusting the director's chair in our
direction in disconsolate little jerks. He looked at each of us in turn, then
down at the carpet. "I tried to help. I'm not complete idiot, though. You
all should know that I'd do anything for her. Almost anything. I don't know
where she was. But know she was scared."

Chester looked up at me with the same ambivalent expression that always
came to him when he'd nailed someone. A moth spiraled out of the patio light
and landed on the screen

Sides excused himself to the bathroom.

I stepped outside and smoked. I was watching the smoke rise and vanish
into the air. I was thinking back to a time some years ago, just after Isabella
and I were married, when we talked about selling the house and moving out of
the county for good. We'd talked about other places: northern California,
Hawaii Mexico, Texas. What had made us decide not to go? We told ourselves,
finally, that family was most important—-Joe and Corrine, my mother and father,
even, in some indefinite way, the promise of proximity to Grace. We told
ourselves that we had everything we wanted right here: a house and a little
land, clear air coming off the ocean, and no need to get out in the hellish rat
race that commenced each morning on the roads that ran just a few miles from
our private, isolated stilt house of an Eden. We had told ourselves that we could take on the world from our perch,
defend our citadel and live our lives with whatever happiness and purpose we
could bring to bear. We braced out selves for success. But what had made us
wonder in the first place? What had made us doubt? We did not confess it then
but I am certain Isabella suspected—deep in her heart, as did I—that this life
of ours was not to continue, that some dark actuality, far off in the future as
it may have been, had already brushed us with the shadow of its terrible
outstretched wings. Perhaps this was the moment when the first cell
metastasized in Isabella's lovely and loving mind. We will never know. But I do
know that all I could think of that night, leaning against the rough wall of
Brent Sides's apartment, was that we'd somehow made the wrong move, that we'd
have been so much better off somewhere else—somewhere without cancer and
Midnight Eyes and Martin Parishes and daughters so battered by bad fortune that
the very cores of their futures were uncertain as the smoke from my cigarette,
which continued to rise into the darkness.

Chet joined me on the patio.

"Texas," I mumbled to myself.

Chester Fairfax Singer, an unhappy spirit whose last effort for the side
of innocence had revealed nothing more, probably, than just another exercise in
the brutal, the stupid, the desperate, the eternal, studied me from behind his
thick glasses.

"They say San Antonio is very nice," he offered. "May I
ask you, where is your daughter at this moment?"

"My house. With Dad. Give me a day with her, Chet."

"Yes. One
day."

Amber and I drove
back to Laguna without saying a word to each other. But I was aware of her,
acutely so: I could locate the precise plane—just beyond my right
shoulder—where the perimeters of our heartaches met. We shared a common border.
It buzzed like a power line.

Amber said the first words of our trip just as I was about to turn off
Laguna Canyon Road onto my street.

"No, Russ. Keep going. Drive fast."

"Why?"

"Because I asked you to."

I eased back into the fast lane of the deserted road and pressed down
the accelerator. The power of the V-8 seemed to start behind, then pick us up
and take us with it. We were guest of velocity. We rode it through the curves,
eucalyptuses rushing past the windshield like fence pickets. We gorged
ourselves on distance. Amber rested her head on my shoulder and wrapped both
her hands around my arm. And what a surge of remembrance shot through me: We
had been here before, hundred times, a thousand years ago. I had forgotten how
much Amber loved this motion, how she melted into it, how it calmed her. We used
to drive too fast together, just for fun. The speed relaxed her, released her.
I could smell the sweet dank odor of her hair and the light perfume of her
breath when she sighed. You may not forgive, but you will understand that my
craving for Amber came rising with all the power of an incoming tide.

The city appeared, was gone. We hit Coast Highway eighty, raced through
four green lights and a final red before settling into the open four-mile
stretch to the next town. The Pacific glittered to our left. The moon presided.
A trailer park vanished behind us, quickly as a road sign. The center divider
on the highway blurred. To our right, the hills moved by with steady precision.

"I have a confession to make," whispered
Amber.

"Make it."

"First, can I tell you how I feel right now? I feel dead. I believe
that Grace was in my house to kill me. I feel like she accomplished what she
wanted. I feel tainted and stupid and black. I feel like I've wasted everything
that's been set on my table. Every single thing that could have turned out
good."

"I'm sorry. I do, too."

"What do you think it was, specifically, that we did wrong?"

."Everything. But I think we did the best we could, with the tools
we had."

"Is there any consolation in there?"

"Not much that I can see."

"Is there consolation in anything else?"

"In tomorrow, maybe. At least we can tell
ourselves that."

"Gad, Russ, tomorrow's here."

"There is that problem."

"Won't this thing go any faster?"

"Oh yes."

The digital speedometer pegged at ninety-nine, but the car sped crazily
on. Horn blasts followed our passage, fading quickly. For a moment it seemed
possible, and somehow imperative, that we overtake the pools of our high beams
shooting steadily before us. Hope impossible is the purest hope.

"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.