Christa Faust - Fringe The Zodiac Paradox

He made himself focus his eyes on her brown suede platform shoes, instead.

He needn’t have bothered. She went right to Bell as if there was no one else in the room, and snaked her arms around him. She said something to him that was too soft to hear, even though the whole room had gone silent as soon as the women had appeared.

Bell smiled in response to whatever she was saying and hooked an arm possessively around her waist.

Meanwhile the pregnant blonde drifted over to Roscoe, who put a hand on her belly and passed her the joint.

“How’s little Bobby?” Roscoe asked her.

“You’re so sure it’s going to be a boy, aren’t you?” she asked, wrapping a dreamy smile around the moist end of the rapidly shrinking joint.

“Sure I’m sure,” Roscoe said, tapping his temple. “Just like I’m sure he’s going to be a rock star. Like his daddy.” He spoke directly into her tummy. “Isn’t that right, Bobby?”

“Nina,” Bell said, waving a hand in Walter’s direction. “I’d like you to meet my colleague Walter Bishop. Walter, this is Nina Sharp.”

Walter wanted to say oh, yes she is, but he bit his tongue.

“Walter,” Nina said with a knowing smile. “I’ve heard a lot about you. These are my housemates Roscoe Joyce and his lady Abby. The guy under the sideburns is Chick Spivy...”

“And you,” Walter jumped in, gesturing at the guy with the black beard. “You’re Iggy, right? Ruben ‘Iggy’ Ignacio. Drummer. But where are Alex and Oregon Dave?”

Roscoe shook his head, unable to suppress a smile.

“We don’t all live in the same house, you know,” he said. “We ain’t the Partridge Family.”

“Well, I suppose that’s to be expected.” Walter nodded, thoughtful. “But I can’t tell you how pleased I am to meet you three.”

“You’re pleased now,” Roscoe said, eyes going strange and unfocused. “But when we meet again, far, far in the future, we won’t remember having met.”

Walter cocked his head and touched his chin, curious.

“What makes you say that?”

“Sometimes I think Roscoe is psychic,” Abby said, offering the joint to Walter. “He knows things.”

“Is that true?” Walter asked.

“Yeah,” Roscoe said with a self-deprecating shrug. “But I can never see the stuff that really matters.”

“I’d love to perform some tests...” Walter began, reaching out.

“Walter,” Bell said softly, shooting him a significant look and blocking him from taking the joint. “We need to have a private word with Nina.”

Walter frowned, embarrassed and ashamed to think he could have gotten so swept up in meeting his favorite band that he’d forgotten all about Linda’s grandma and the Zodiac Killer.

“Will you excuse us, gentleman?” Walter asked, ducking his head sheepishly.

“Hey, no problem, man,” Roscoe said, hands spread magnanimously wide. “It’s a pleasure to meet a true fan.”

“The pleasure is mine,” Walter replied as he let Bell and Nina led him up the stairs.

7

Nina’s room took up the majority of the third floor, one end featuring four large windows that followed the same half-octagon shape as the living room below. To Walter’s surprise, her private space was unexpectedly Spartan compared to the rock-and-roll Moroccan bordello look of the rest of the house. There were no candles or tchotchkes or figurines on her bookshelves, just precisely organized books, mostly non-fiction covering a wide range of intriguing subjects from physics to feminism to psychic phenomena.

The pristine white linens on her sleek, modern bed were neatly made with sharp hospital corners. Only one pillow. She had a small, well-organized desk centered in the windows with a brand new white Olympia typewriter and a matching telephone.

The only artwork on the clean white walls was a single black-and-white Japanese woodblock print of an owl. Walter imagined that her fashionable wardrobe and the various items that women require in their day-to-day beautification rituals—such as cold cream and hair brushes and lipstick and so on—must have been hidden somewhere in this mostly empty room, but he couldn’t imagine where.

Walter himself preferred to be surrounded by soothing, friendly clutter, and rooms that were too empty like this made him uncomfortable, even antsy, like a little kid at the Guggenheim Museum.

The only places to sit were on her bed, on the desk chair, or on the floor. When Nina waved for them to take seats, Walter chose the desk chair, assuming—based on her previous amorous behavior toward Bell—that the two of them would be comfortable sitting together on her bed.

He was not wrong.

“William,” she said, slipping off her big clunky shoes in such a way that they remained precisely together and aligned with the edge of the bed. Her small, perfect toenails were painted a pale, frosty coral. “Naturally I’m glad to see you, but I can tell it’s not just my feminine charms that brought you here. Why don’t you tell me what the hell is going on.”

Walter didn’t even know where to begin, so he let Bell speak for them.

* * *

When Bell was done, there was a long pregnant moment where Nina just silently sized the two of them up, like a casting agent evaluating a questionable Vaudeville act.

“So let me get this straight,” she said. “You believe that this special blend of acid that you created allowed the two of you to link minds and open some kind of gateway, allowing the Zodiac Killer to enter our world?”

“That’s right,” Bell replied.

“And during this trip, back in 1968, you say you also linked minds with him and had a vision of him killing senior citizens on a bus here in San Francisco.”

“I didn’t realize it was San Francisco at the time,” Walter said. “But that tower...” He gestured toward the windows, even though the tower wasn’t visible from that angle. “I saw that tower on the top of the hill.”

“The Coit Tower?” Nina’s rusty red brows knitted. “That’s where you think this shooting is supposed to take place tomorrow?”

Walter shook his head.

“No, no,” he said. “I saw lots of different things, murders, ciphers, and letters. But the shooting, it was in this warehouse of some kind.”

“Okay,” Nina said. “I’m going to need a minute to process all this.” She reached into a bedside drawer and extracted a pack of cigarettes, shaking one out and placing it between her lips. “You do realize how nuts your story sounds, don’t you?”

She doesn’t believe us, Walter realized with a jolt.

“Belly,” Walter said, feeling a sudden panicky anxiety in his gut. “You said this girl would help us, but I fail to see any evidence to back up your hypothesis. I’m beginning to believe that you have allowed your libido to override your good sense.”

“Hey,” Nina said, pausing with a lit match halfway to her cigarette. “I’m right here, okay? Don’t talk about me like I’m not in the room.” She lit the cigarette and blew out the match with a stream of smoke. “And in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not a little girl, I’m a woman.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean...”

“And another thing,” she continued, steamrolling right over Walter’s meek apology. “I’m not some kind of decorative bunny who can’t handle anything more complicated than putting toothpicks in cocktail weenies and mixing martinis. I just received a dual Masters degree in Chemistry and Business Administration from Stanford. So how about getting down off your chauvinistic horse and treating me like a person?”

Chastened, Walter hung his head. He always tended to get flummoxed around women, and when they were angry even more so. He couldn’t have thought of an appropriate reply if she’d put a gun to his head. Anything he said would be the wrong thing, so he just stayed quiet.