Jonathan Nasaw - Fear itself

Oh, do, thought Dorie.

“Say, you want to come with?” Pender asked her casually, as if the idea had just occurred to him. He’d been thinking about it for a while, though-with Childs still at large, he wasn’t real thrilled about the prospect of leaving Dorie alone.

“You mean, like, come home with you? To Washington?”

“Maryland, actually. Just for a little while-at least until Childs is behind bars.”

“You don’t think-”

Pender quickly backtracked. “No, no. Of course not-there’s no reason to think he’d be coming back for you. He’s not that stupid. I just thought you might enjoy a little vacation. I could show you around, you could do some painting.”

“No can do.” Dorie was tempted-but there was no sense getting all worked up over an impossibility.

“Why not?”

“Aviophobia.”

“What’s that?”

“Fear of flying.”

“Maybe it’s time to deal with it.”

Dorie sat up, annoyed. “What are you, my shrink now?”

“No,” replied Pender. “But I know enough about fear to know that it makes a useful servant and a lousy master.”

“Oh, swell,” muttered Dorie. “First he’s a shrink, now he’s Yoda.”

“Think it over, scout. Do me a favor, just think it over. I’ll be there holding your hand every inch of the way.”

“It’s not just the fear of flying,” Dorie temporized-phobics were good at temporizing. “I have too much work to do here-I have to get another half-dozen paintings done in time for my show.”

“Why, that’s perfect, then. The trees around Tinsman’s Lock are a knockout this time of year. Box elder, white ash, sugar maple, sycamore, hickory, elm-I bet you’d have to buy a whole new box of crayons.”

“Hey, Pender.”

“What?”

“Give it a break, would you?”

“You bet,” said Pender, making a mental note to pick up a ticket for Dorie when he called for reservations. He had a first-class ticket to turn in-it would more than cover two coach fares.

Scarlet fever, thought Ida, the moment she clapped eyes on Arthur Bellcock. You didn’t spend thirty years as a small-town GP’s wife without learning to recognize a scarlet fever victim.

“Mrs. Day?”

“Mr. Bellcock-come in.”

Bellcock had arrived around six, an hour earlier than scheduled. No problem, though: on Monday there was still plenty of meat left on the widow bird she had just taken out of the refrigerator (a widow bird was the local name for a chicken a single woman would roast on Sunday for a whole week’s worth of suppers), so she invited him for supper.

She wasn’t sure what to expect, having never met a ghostwriter before, but for some reason she’d been picturing a little guy with glasses and a tape recorder, and was therefore unprepared to find this tall, rather creepy looking, entirely hairless fellow with the arrogant slouch and the hypnotic eyes standing empty-handed on her doorstep.

But Ida Day was not one to judge a man by his appearance-Walt had been no Ronald Colman, either. And once he turned the charm on, Arthur Bellcock made it easy to forget his looks. He complimented her cooking, he flattered her about her appearance-if she’d been ten years younger or he’d been ten years older, she might even have suspected that he was making a pass at her.

After supper, though, when they retired to the parlor and the talk turned to Eddie, Bellcock was all business, jotting down her answers in a little spiral-bound pocket notebook. But again he surprised her-the questions weren’t at all what she’d been expecting. He seemed to be less interested in facts than in generalities. What was Eddie like as a boy? What were his interests, his likes and dislikes, his favorite and least favorite pastimes? He appeared to be leading up to something, but to save herself, Ida couldn’t figure out what.

“As I told you on the phone yesterday, Mr. Bellcock,” she explained, bending over the brick hearth to light the fire, “I left Cortland when Eddie was only ten, so I never got to know him as well as I’d have liked to.”

“When was the last time you spoke with your brother?” said Bellcock, leaning back, draping his long arms over the back of the sofa, his pose of studied casualness betrayed only by a nervous twitch in his left thigh that set his heel to tapping.

“A few weeks ago-when he called me about you.” Your motor’s running, Ida wanted to tell him-that’s what Walt always said to Stan, whose leg also used to vibrate annoyingly like that when he was anxious or excited.

Almost there, thought Simon. But before he asked the only question that really mattered, he had to find out for sure whether she knew anything about Pender’s recent exploits. If, say, she’d been following the case in the news, a direct question about fear would be bound to arouse her suspicions-he’d have to find a way to fit the question within that context. “I’ve been out of touch for a few weeks. Any idea what Ed’s working on lately?”

“Now that he’s retired, you mean? His golf game, I should imagine-he told me he and his friend Sid were going to be flying out to California. He was all excited about playing Pebble Beach, as I recall.”

“Right, right.” Retired! That’s why Pender never pulled a gun on me, thought Simon-because he didn’t have one. If Pender was retired, though, then what was he doing nosing around Carmel? And what had Dorie told him that sent him to Berkeley? And what, for that matter, did it say about Simon, that he had allowed his life (and Missy’s-don’t forget about Missy) to be destroyed by some retired old poop.

But never mind all that now, Simon told himself, tamping down his growing rage as best he could. Those were all peripheral issues; the time had come to get down to the meat of the matter. He flipped through the pages of his notebook, pretending to have lost his place.

“Let’s see now, where were we? Likes, dislikes, favorite sport, blah blah blah, first girlfriend…Oh, yes, here we are. Next question is: Did Eddie have any phobias when he was a boy?”

“Phobias?”

“Yes-was there anything in particular that he feared?”

“I know what the word means, Mr. Bellcock-I was trying to remember. There was an episode, when Eddie was…let’s see, I was in my senior year at Ithaca when our mom called and told me to come right home…so Eddie would have been around eight or nine. He and his friend were fooling around with firecrackers. They dropped one down our chimney to see what would happen-it blew up in Eddie’s face. It was touch and go for a couple of weeks whether he’d even regain his sight.”

“Firecrackers, then?” asked Simon, cutting to the chase. “He’s afraid of firecrackers?”

“No, no,” said Ida. “Blindness. Terrified of it. As a boy, you could never get him to play pin the tail on the donkey. And as an adult…Let’s see, it was Stanley’s birthday, Eddie had just graduated from FBI Academy, so it must have been 1972, we had a pinata, and Eddie absolutely refused to put on the blindfold, even after Stanley begged him. And Eddie adored Stanley-he’d have done anything for him.”

But although Arthur Bellcock was busily scribbling in his notebook, Simon Childs was no longer paying any attention.

Blindness, is it? he thought. That’s a good one, that’s a juicy one-we can make a game out of that, Eddie-boy; we can definitely make a game out of that one.

And with that out of the way, there was only one more question remaining to be asked: “Just out of curiosity, Mrs. Day, as long as we’re on the subject-is there anything in particular that you’re afraid of?”

“There was,” said Ida, putting the emphasis on the past tense. And then, probably because Mr. Bellcock was such an extraordinary listener, hanging on her every word, his lips parted and his strangely naked eyes aglow with the reflected light from the fire, Ida found herself telling him what it was-or rather, what it had been.