T. Parker - Summer Of Fear

"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.

"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.