Michael Prescott: Riptide

Next she tackled the family photos on the stairs. Most of the glass plates had cracked, but the frames were undamaged. She gathered up the pictures, stacking them neatly. It was funny how rarely she noticed these photographs, though she passed them several times each day. There were shots of her mother on Santa Monica Pier and at a picnic in the Angeles National Forest. She had been a small woman, like Jennifer herself, with the same fragile doll-like quality, but without the assertiveness to compensate for it.

And there was her father, a harried, rumpled man in a loose-fitting suit, his gaze far away.

She had just one memory of her father. She couldn’t even be certain it was a real memory, and not some trick of the mind. She saw herself as a very little girl, riding the carousel on Santa Monica Pier in her father’s lap. The horses whirled, and she was laughing, her father’s strong arms around her waist, holding her tight.

She didn’t want to think about her father. Yet she couldn’t help it. He was so much a part of her life, this man she’d barely known.

Aldrich Silence graduated from USC’s School of Medicine near the top of his class. Though he could have had his pick of lucrative positions, he chose to open a small private practice in Venice. Most of his patients were uninsured, impoverished, or actually homeless. He didn’t make a lot of money. He didn’t care.

He met Marjorie Taylor on a blind date arranged by friends. Unlike other women he’d met, Marjorie didn’t try to convince him to better himself by moving to Beverly Hills. She didn’t think he needed to better himself. She liked him the way he was.

They were married in a hippie style ceremony on the beach. Jennifer was born four years later. By then Aldrich’s practice had begun to fail. The problem wasn’t his uninsured patients. It was Aldrich himself.

He’d started to act “funny,” as Jennifer’s mother would always put it, around the time he turned twenty-six. This was fairly late for the onset of schizophrenia, and the symptoms weren’t correctly diagnosed until they were unmistakable.

In the early years of the illness, he had long periods of normality interspersed with brief spells of irrational behavior. At those times he was uncommunicative and morose. His conversation didn’t track. He would make strange associative leaps. He would get angry for no reason. Occasionally he was violent, breaking small items, slamming doors. On the rare occasions when Marjorie spoke of it, years later, she stressed that he never laid a hand on her. But she was afraid he might.

Aldrich became unpredictable. Some days he didn’t show up at the office. When he did see patients, he would forget their names, ask the same questions over and over, misunderstand their responses. Challenged, he would erupt in rage. Once, he began screaming at the white-haired nurse who ran his reception desk. She quit, and he couldn’t find a replacement.

After the illness was finally diagnosed, Aldrich was sent away to a private psychiatric clinic. He came back seeming clearheaded and calm, almost normal. But the improvements didn’t last.

When Jennifer was two years old, Marjorie gave birth to a second child. A son this time.

Perhaps it was the added responsibility that pushed Aldrich over the edge of the precipice he’d been walking. Or perhaps he had been headed over the edge for so long that even the birth of a son couldn’t save him.

A week after Marjorie returned from the hospital, Aldrich went out to the tool shed in the backyard, and there was a single percussive noise, startling the doves that congregated by the birdbath. Marjorie found him with the gun still in his mouth, his hands gripping the barrel, his fingers clamped down in a final nervous spasm. The back of his head had come off with a gout of blood that sprayed the hammers and power drills pegged to the wall.

Jennifer was home at the time, but at age two she had no understanding of what had happened. Her daddy was there in the morning, and he was not there in the afternoon. That was all.

When she was a little older, she grasped that her daddy hadn’t just gone away. He died. He was taken up to heaven. She knew no details. Perhaps some nascent intuitive sense prevented her from asking.

She was nine years old when a gossipy student in her third-grade homeroom told her the story. Your daddy shot himself. I heard my parents talk about it. They said he went crazy and blew his brains out. Bang!

Jennifer ran crying out of the room. The teacher found her in the bathroom, slumped on the floor and sobbing.

Her mother was called to pick her up early. In the living room, Marjorie sat down with her and told her it was true.

Why’d he do it, Mommy?

I don’t know, Jenny. He’d been acting funny for a long time.

Funny how?

Just…different. He was sick. And the medicine they gave him wasn’t working.

He was a doctor. Doctors don’t get sick.

Sometimes they do.

It wasn’t much of an explanation. But to this day, it was all she had.

The buzz of the doorbell brought her back. She put down the stack of photos and opened the door.

Casey Wilkes stood there, a blue-uniformed figure nearly blocking the view of the black-and-white squad car parked at a hydrant. That was one advantage of being a cop; he never got a ticket. And as a sergeant, he typically rode alone.

“You okay?” he asked.

“They’re dead people, Casey. They’re not going to hurt me.”

He stepped inside, instantly dominating her space without even trying. He wore all his gear-Sam Browne belt with its holstered service pistol and baton; portable radio; handcuffs clinking as he walked. She was always amazed at how much stuff a patrol cop had on, the sheer weight of it, like a suit of chain mail.

For all that, he was lithe, not bulky. His training routine, he’d told her, focused on aerobic conditioning; he had the lean, toned physique of a swimmer. No paunch, no baby fat, nothing soft about him except his wispy blondish hair.

He glanced around the living room. “Where’s the cellar?”

“Over there. But-”

“I’ll check it out.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Stop telling me what I don’t have to do.”

He strode to the trapdoor, which she’d left open. He stepped onto the stairs and tried the light switch.

“Bulb’s dead,” she said.

He gave her a look. “Good home maintenance skills, Silence.”

“Unlike one of us, I’m a white-collar professional, Wilkes.”

He pulled out his flashlight, one of the small rubber models that had replaced the bulky steel MagLites of earlier years. As he proceeded down the stairs, she knelt behind him and put her foot on the topmost tread. He looked back. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Downstairs with you.”

“You need a second look at these bad boys?”

“Not really.”

“So stay put. I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

“Did you just say jiffy ?”

“I have a prodigious vocabulary. It’s one of my many appealing qualities that you’ve so far failed to detect.”

“Me and everybody else.”

“You’re just full of snappy comebacks today, aren’t you, Munchkin?” He reached the bottom of the stairs and disappeared.

“Don’t call me Munchkin,” she said after him.

She’d met Casey at one of Draper’s crime scenes while he was commanding the day watch. He was thirty-four, brash, and approximately as good-looking as he believed himself to be. He’d asked her out; she’d demurred. On subsequent occasions when they’d run into each other, this ritual was repeated. Their relationship had developed a peculiar dynamic-he was always on the make, she was always brushing him off. She’d made her lack of interest clear enough, but out of some combination of stubbornness and masochism he refused to be deterred.