Brian Freeman: The Voice Inside

Frost Easton felt a shiver in the house, which jolted him from a deep sleep. He assumed it was the beginning of an earthquake.

His eyes shot open, blue and wide. In an instant, he was off the sofa, where he typically slept, and on his feet in the chill of his Russian Hill home. His black-and-white cat, Shack, sensed the disturbance, too. Frost saw Shack frozen on the coffee table, with his back arched and his tail puffed like the bloom of a bottlebrush tree. He waited for the ground beneath them to shudder like a fun-house ride.

This was San Francisco. Tremors routinely shook the city with a rumble of subterranean thunder. Most came and went without doing damage, but he’d lived through the deadly Loma Prieta quake when he was only eight years old. You never knew when the next Big One was coming. However, Frost saw none of the telltale signs of a temblor this time. His sister’s blue angel figurine, which was hung from a hook above the bay window, didn’t sway. The empty Sierra Nevada beer bottle he’d left on the coffee table hadn’t walked itself to the edge and tipped over onto the carpet.

This wasn’t an earthquake. This was something else.

He realized that the disturbance was man-made. A bitter breath of cigarette smoke lingered in the house, the way it did when a smoker passed you on the street. Shack, who was normally an oasis of calm, tensed his entire feline body and emitted a throaty growl, as if to say an intruder had been here. When Frost glanced at the glass door leading to the patio, he noticed that it was six inches open, letting in the night air.

He hadn’t left it that way. Someone had been inside the house.

He crossed to the patio door and stepped outside. It was the middle of Saturday night, it was Halloween, and the coastal air was cold and damp. The city fell off sharply below the railing, leading down over flat rooftops toward the blackness of the bay. Frost wore sweats and a T-shirt with a caricature of Mark Twain on the front. His feet were bare; his slicked-back brown hair was messy. He grabbed the patio railing and listened, but he heard no evidence of someone escaping nearby. No car engine on the street. No movement in the dense foliage on the hillside below him.

It felt like a dream, but it wasn’t.

Shack scampered outside to join him. Using his claws, the tiny cat did his best King Kong imitation by wrapping his paws around Frost’s leg and climbing up to his shoulder, as if it were the summit of the Empire State Building.

“I’ve mentioned that those claws of yours hurt, right?” Frost said, grimacing at the pinpricks in his skin. Shack purred and ignored him, as if all were right with the world again. The cat’s tail swished against Frost’s beard, and his paws batted at the bed-head tufts sticking up from Frost’s hair.

The two of them went back inside. Frost closed the door, and Shack made a graceful leap to the sofa. In the darkness, Frost crossed through the living room past the kitchen to the formal dining room, which doubled as his office, and looked out through the tall windows. Below him, Green Street was deserted. No one loitered in the doorways of the apartment building on the other side of the dead end.

He dug inside the pocket of his black sport coat, which was draped over one of the chairs. His badge was untouched. His pistol was still in its holster. Frost retrieved it, and with the gun in his hand, he checked the upstairs rooms one by one. He was alone in the house. And yet something wasn’t right. The smell of smoke told the story. Someone had broken in, but whoever it was had taken nothing and left nothing behind.

Why?

“What about you, Shack?” Frost murmured as he came back downstairs, where the cat waited for him. “Did you see who it was?”

Shack simply turned and made a beeline for his empty food bowl. Frost followed him into the kitchen and filled it. He opened the refrigerator and grabbed a plastic bottle of orange juice. The juice bottle was lonely on the shelf. There wasn’t much else inside. Unless his brother, who was a chef, rescued him with a care package, he typically ate his meals out.

The Russian Hill house was lit only by the glow of the city. In the living room, he pushed aside the fleece blanket and sat down on the tweed sofa near the bay window. He took a swig of orange juice and resealed the bottle. He was wide awake now. He thought about reading — he was halfway through a Stephen Ambrose book about the Lewis and Clark expedition — but he didn’t think he’d be able to concentrate.

Then a shrill alarm filled the room, startling him.

It came from the bar near the kitchen, where his phone was charging. He recognized the wake-up buzzer, which was as harsh and loud as the shout of a drill sergeant. He always set an alarm for six o’clock in the morning, but it wasn’t even close to that time yet.

Before he could get up to turn it off, a second alarm blared from upstairs. The clock in the master bedroom wailed like a fire signal, demanding attention. There was no reason for that alarm to go off. He never slept up there, and he’d never set that alarm as long as he’d been living in the house.

And then another clock. Another alarm, in one of the guest bedrooms upstairs.

And another alarm, in the third bedroom.

Then the radio in the kitchen turned on, broadcasting KSFO talk radio at top volume.

Frost sprang to his feet. “What the hell?”

Finally, one more alarm clanged, like the warning bells of a railroad crossing. This one came from the dining room. Frost didn’t even own a clock that made a noise like that. He stood there, surrounded by a deafening chorus of bells, buzzers, radios, and alarms, and he watched Shack stampede like a madman up and down the stairs in confusion.

Frost went to shut down the alarms one by one, but when he picked up his phone, he noticed the time staring back at him in bright digital numbers.

3:42 a.m.

The sight of those numbers stopped him cold. He was paralyzed by his memories. Another minute passed before he broke out of his trance long enough to switch off the alarm. Then he ran upstairs and yanked out the plugs for the clocks in the bedrooms, and he turned off the radio in the kitchen. Finally, he went to find the strange clock in the dining room.

A double-bell Halloween clock sat on the table.

He hadn’t even noticed it in the darkness. The clock didn’t belong to him. Its face was orange and black, like a grinning jack-o’-lantern, and black bat wings jutted from the sides, waving up and down with the noise of the alarm. The intruder had left the clock for him.

Trick or treat.

The clapper hammered back and forth between two bells, making a noise louder than any of the others. He didn’t know how to stop it. He shook it; he pushed buttons; he twisted knobs. Nothing worked. Finally, with his head pounding, he took the clock to the sink and smashed it with a hammer from the utility drawer. The bells finally went silent, but his ears rang with the echo of the alarms.

3:42 a.m.

This wasn’t an accident or a Halloween prank.

It was a reminder. A taunt.

Someone knew exactly what that time meant to Frost and knew that he would understand its importance. It didn’t matter how much time had gone by. Five years had passed since the last victim was discovered. Four years since Rudy Cutter was found guilty of murder and sent away for life. Even so, Frost never forgot.

3:42 a.m.

That was the time set on the broken watches that had been left on the wrist of every victim. The watches — each one different, each one belonging to the previous victim — were a bloody chain tying together the seven women who had died during Rudy Cutter’s killing spree.