SUMMER of FEAR (36 page)

"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.

⁴⁴
I 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."

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.