Brian Freeman - The Voice Inside

Magnolia put her head back against the glass door, which had a greenish glow from the lights on the stairs. She closed her eyes, and she shivered. “Hurry back.”

Rudy steadied her shoulders to make sure she didn’t fall, and then he jogged back down the steps into the bar. He waved over the bartender, who approached him with a grin on his delicate lips.

“How’d I do?” the man asked. “She what you were looking for? I made sure those martinis packed a punch.”

“Perfect.” Rudy slid another fifty-dollar bill from his jacket, and then he took out a notepad and wrote a phone number on a piece of paper. He handed both of them across the bar. “Do me a favor, okay? Call this number. Tell the woman who answers that Rudy says hi.”

“Sure thing. Is she your ex-girlfriend? You want to rub it in her face?”

“That’s exactly right,” Rudy said. “And be sure to tell her that I’m leaving with a pretty girl.”

Frost’s old neighborhood hadn’t changed.

He parked at the southern end of Forty-Fifth Avenue, where the side-by-side houses looked like rows of multicolored Legos. He was a block from the zoo and two blocks from the ocean. Memories chased him in the darkness as he got out of the Suburban. Most of the memories were about him and Katie, stalking this area like pirates when they were children.

Frost made the mistake of walking up the stairs to his old house. Force of habit. His parents had sold the family house a year earlier, when they moved to Tucson, but their long-time neighbors, the Holtzmans, were still here. The Easton and Holtzman houses had shared a wall for decades. One was brown stucco; one was aquamarine stucco. Both showed their age.

He corrected himself and knocked on the Holtzman door, and his mother, Janice, answered. She smiled at him, but most of her smiles had a sad quality in recent years.

“It’s good to see you, Frost,” she murmured. “It’s been way too long.”

Parents had a way of channeling guilt into the most innocent of greetings. He knew he hadn’t been down to visit them in Arizona, and he vowed inwardly to schedule a trip soon.

His mother was almost as tall as he was. She had a soft beauty in her face, and her mannerisms were slow and precise. She never hurried. Her brown hair took a lot of work to keep perfect. She wore a blouse and skirt, not expensive, but carefully selected. She had a quietness about her that she’d passed on to her middle child. They were both the introverts of the family.

Janice looked over his shoulder, as if, one of these times, he would bring a girlfriend with him, instead of arriving alone. She gave a tiny sigh of disappointment.

“How are you?” Frost asked.

It wasn’t a throw-away question. There were no simple questions between him and his mother. They’d struggled for years about Frost’s choices in life. She’d wanted him to be a lawyer, not a cop. She’d wanted him to be married by now, not single. When it came to her own life, however, she didn’t usually share her feelings.

“This situation is challenging,” Janice acknowledged in her understated way. “That’s why the support group decided to get together again.”

“Sorry.”

“We don’t blame you for what’s happened, Frost. Duane said you were worried about that. Don’t be. Whatever you did, I’m sure you felt you had no choice.”

“Many of the families don’t see it that way,” Frost said.

“Well, they’ll get over it. We’ll talk to them. I hope you’ll join us this weekend.”

He hesitated, thinking about the support group. The gathering of families in one place was potentially a valuable source of information to help him identify the missing link among Cutter’s victims. On the other hand, he was the last person they would want in the room, asking personal questions. He also had no interest in sharing his own grief with people he didn’t know.

“It would mean a lot to us, Frost,” his mother added pointedly when he didn’t reply. “I’d like you to be there.”

Zing. She was like a mafia don, making an offer he couldn’t refuse. He wanted to say no, but instead he said, “I’ll try to make it.”

Janice led them into the living room, where the Holtzmans sat with his father. The house and its dark furniture hadn’t changed since Frost was a boy, and seemingly, neither had the Holtzmans. They always looked and acted the same. They’d never had children, and their mission in life was to be parents to the rest of the world. They were good at it. Mr. Holtzman — Frost could never call them by their first names, even now — jumped to his feet to get him a beer. Mrs. Holtzman said she had some things to do upstairs, which was a discreet way to give the Easton family time to reconnect.

His father, Ned, got to his feet and wrapped Frost in a bear hug. He was warm where Janice was cool. His parents were the textbook case of opposites attracting each other.

“Frost, we have missed you so much!” Ned told him.

“You too, Dad.”

“How’s Shack? Did you bring him along? I love that cat!”

“Sorry, no. He was sleeping in my laundry basket and looking pretty pleased with himself. I didn’t want to disturb him.”

“Well, I want to see him before we go home,” his father said.

“Ned, it’s just a cat,” his mother said wearily from across the room.

“Ignore her,” Ned said, winking.

Mr. Holtzman arrived with two Torpedo ales for Frost and Ned — like father, like son — but then he headed upstairs to be with his wife and left the three of them alone.

As usual, his mother didn’t know what to say, and his father didn’t know when to stop. Janice hid her pain; Ned used light conversation to pretend his pain wasn’t there. Emotionally, Frost was more like his mother, but over the years, he’d always been closer to his father, even if it was only to talk about history and sports. They also shared a love of San Francisco. Ned had been a convention planner at the Moscone Center for most of his career, and even in retirement, he talked up the city as if he’d never left it behind. If it had been up to Ned, they’d still be living in the house next door, but Janice couldn’t stay there with Katie’s ghost in all the rooms.

His father was like a shorter, squatter version of Frost. In his late sixties, he kept a bushy head of brown-and-gray hair and a trimmed beard, and he had the same laser-like blue eyes he’d given to his children.

“How about that Duane, huh?” Ned asked, swigging his beer. “Have you met Tabby? Isn’t she great?”

“She is,” Frost agreed.

“I love her. We both do. Cute, smart, way too classy for that boy.”

“I thought the same thing,” Frost said, smiling.

“As soon as we met her, we thought she’d be perfect for Duane,” his father went on. “Janice was on top of that fix-up from minute one. Every time we saw her, she’d be pushing her to call Duane.”

“Because she’s a chef,” his mother pointed out from across the room. There was an apology in her tone, as if she had to explain why they’d chosen to fix up Duane and not Frost.

“I get it,” Frost said.

“Of course, it took them forever,” Ned said. “And we all know Duane’s reputation for going from girl to girl. Your mother told him right from the get-go that he was not going to see Tabby unless he was looking for something more. I guess he was finally ready.”

“I hope that’s true,” Frost said.

He waited for his mother to grill him about his own relationship status, but her silence was eloquent. She didn’t need to say a word to make him realize that he’d disappointed her again.

His father, on the other hand, had never met a pause he didn’t need to fill, and he recognized some of the tension between Frost and his mother. “I want to stretch my legs,” Ned said. “I’m all cramped up after the flight. Frost, how about taking a walk around the old neighborhood with me? That okay?”