T. Parker: Summer Of Fear

You have heard of them-the Freeway Strangler (ten alleged victims); the Nightstalker (fourteen); Randy Kraft (seventeen). Incidentally, they play bridge against one another now in the maximum-security wing of Vacaville State Correctional Facility. This has been documented in, of all places, Vanity Fair magazine. (Kraft generally wins. He is impatient with the Freeway Strangler and treats him like a crude child. The Nightstalker is vindictive and makes foolish opening moves. Kraft admires his aggressiveness.)

These men we regarded as outsiders. Even Kraft, a mild-mannered computer programmer who grew up in the county, seemed alien. Maybe that was because his victims were all young men, many of whom he had either seduced or raped in one way or another. Kraft's homosexuality seemed to confine him to a subtle, mysterious world. He inhabited a place where few of the county's straight population could imagine themselves. The unspoken rationale went something like this: I'm not gay, so I'm not going to worry. During Kraft's trial I had a number of talks with him, and I was struck by his intelligence, his humility, his apparent forthrightness. I might add that he was found to have in his possession at the time of arrest (l) a dead Marine Corps private in the front seat of his car and (2) an address book with the names and descriptions of several men who had been drugged, buggered, chopped to pieces, and dumped. A great many of the other entries were of men listed by police as "missing." In spite of all that, Kraft never worked his way into the county's subconscious the way that the Midnight Eye did during our Summer of Fear.

The Midnight Eye came from among us. He was created by us, fostered by us. In the end, I think, people believed he was us, and in a smaller degree, of course, that we were him.

Now it is winter, and the county can begin to forget.

One thing I will not forget is this: The truth will not always make you free.

I can't fully explain why I called Amber Mae Wilson that night. Saturday, the third of July. Yes, I had once been her lover, but that was twenty years ago. Yes, I had thought about her-off and on-for all of those twenty years. Yes, I had been married, happily and without a trace of regret, for the last five.

Maybe it was the dream I had had the night before, which four-year-old Amber Mae Wilson stood on my porch buck naked and said to me, "My name is Amber Mae. I'm three years old. I live in the white house. Can I have a cookie?"

That was a story-a true one, I believe-Amber had told me about herself back when we were in love. I say I believe it was true because it seemed to capture some of Amber's several essences: her boldness, her innocence, her willingness change the facts, her nakedness. But as I came to understand in the two brief years we were together, Amber had always been and always remained in the process of inventing herself. She invented herself to make Amber Mae Wilson-I understand now-someone she could stand to be around. For her, the truth was never static or absolute, never irreversible or binding. It was a wardrobe to be changed as she saw fit.

I called her from a bar that night-a moist, sweltering night-and got no answer, just the machine and message. It was twenty minutes past midnight and I believed I had a mission.

So I drove down to her place in the south of town and sat outside in my car, looking at the wrought-iron gate, the palms illuminated by ground lights, the courtyard behind the gate that featured a fountain in the shape of an airborne dolphin with a stream of water coming out of its mouth. The huge home loomed behind, locked in darkness. It was high in the coastal hills and looked down over the Pacific. She had paid $2.8 million for the place and the 3.5 acres it sat on, as reported in a local paper. The neighbors were hundreds of yards away.

This was the third night in a week I'd been there.

Amber had lived in this house for five years-some kind of record for her, I'm sure. I know for a fact that she had changed the landscaping three times. First, brick walkways and copper weathervanes everywhere, lots of wooden flower boxes-Cape Cod run amok. Next, a xeriscape of drought-tolerants, decomposed granite trails, cactus. Finally, this California-Mediterranean theme. I know all this because my work takes me all over the county. Some things, I can't help but notice.

As I said, the night was unforgivingly hot. I rolled down the windows and laid my head back on the rest. I thought of my wife, Isabella, at home. Isabella, the truest love of my life, who not only taught me love but allowed me to learn it. She would be asleep now. She would be wearing the red knit cap to keep her head warm, in spite of the temperature. The wheelchair and quad cane would be close beside the bed. Her medications would be lined up on a low shelf within arm's reach, each dose contained in a white paper cup, ready to be taken by Isabella in the dark, half-asleep, still stunned by the last ingestion.

Isabella was twenty-eight years old. She had a malignant tumor in her brain. She had been living with it for a little over a year and a half on that night of July 3, when for the third night in a week I sat in my car outside Amber Mae Wilson's home in South Laguna, wondering whether I would find the courage go up and ring the bell on the gate.

You may say, right here, that this Russell Monroe has some explaining to do.

You can't possibly imagine how much.

I can only tell you that then, on the humid, heated night of July 3, I was deeply unwilling to explain anything, most all to myself. I refused to. That would have been contrary to my mission, which was this: I was in the process-I hoped- beginning a secret life.

I opened the glove compartment, took out my flask (slim, silver, engraved to me "With all my love, Isabella"), and drank more whiskey. Isabella. I replaced the flask, lighted a cigarette, laid back my head, and looked out to Amber's courtyard. I tried to banish all thoughts from my mind. I replaced them with memories of Amber, of those days from our youth when the world seemed so ripe for our picking, so pleased to have us aboard. Isn't there always a year or two in everyone's twenties that, when remembered, seem as near to perfect as life can get?

That was when I saw Amber's front door open and shut, and someone moving across the courtyard toward the gate.

It was a man. He wiped something off with a handkerchief before letting the gate swing shut behind him. He walked with his head down and his thumbs hooked into the front pocket of his jeans, the handkerchief balled in his right fist. He turned south on the sidewalk without hesitating, took three steps to the curb, then angled off across the street, let himself into a late-model black Firebird, and drove away

He didn't see me, but I saw him. Oh, did I see him.

His name was Martin Parish. He was the Captain of Detectives, Homicide Division, of the Orange County Sheriff's. He had been an acquaintance, then a friend, then a near friend of mine for twenty years.

Marty Parish was a large man with kind blue eyes and an ardent love of bird hunting.

Marty Parish and I had graduated from the Sheriff's Academy together, winter of 1974.

Marty Parish had introduced me to Amber Mae Wilson at our "commencement" bash.

Marty Parish was the only man that Amber had ever married. It lasted one year, about fifteen years ago. Now he had just left her home after midnight and wiped his fingerprints off the handle of her gate.

I watched the Firebird's taillights disappear in the dark and wondered whether Martin Parish had come to draw from the same well that I had. I always thought Martin was stronger than that. A wave of shame broke over me. For Martin? I wondered-or for myself?

I called Amber's number from my car phone and got the machine again. What an inviting, conspiratorial voice she had!