Ron Argo

   The night sounds gather. Soon they are a chorus—cicadas and crickets, an owl, a rustle of possum or skunks or both. A distant dog bays in tune with the critters. The sounds turn her thoughts red.
   It’s dark, humid in the big timber. She runs like a deer in the dark, guided by a dim moon. Her steps are sure.
   Here it is. It’s dark as would be the case on sabbath Saturday.
   Inside, she finds the hallway closet and climbs knowingly up the attic ladder, raises the hatch. She pulls the light to a jolt beyond what she expected or was prepared for. To refocus, she goes dark.
   She can stand full but doesn’t. She moves about as a lower form of animal, wisping aimlessly among the clutter from one planked area to another. Keep moving, no hesitating, no thinking. She tries to avoid touching items, the rocking horse, the stained mattress from a single bed, belts hanging on stud nails, boxes of outgrown clothes, no boxes of toys, his suitcases, the red rubber enema bag on top of a unmarked cardboard box.
   Sorryass hoarders both.
   She comes back to the light, a single bulb strung from the rafter apex. The attic door remains open, a gaping hole and a nine-foot drop to the hall floor. Midnight, stuff to do. She removes her clothes, all of them—jeans, T-shirt, underwear, even contacts, places her socks inside the boots, folds the clothes into a tidy pile between joists. She half-stands again. The feel of nakedness is liberating, visceral. Makes her want to shit. She has placed the clothes on top of a knob-and-tube wire, its sleeve worn bare. Vision of the clothes catching fire reaps a sniff. Then a whimper, then a gushing, bellow of a scream. It happens quickly, she’s caught off guard. She unsheathes the machete, rakes it across her right arm. Quick-flowing blood drips onto the albinic paleness of her naked thigh. Fuck you, remember yourself.
   With a piece of the T-shirt she wraps the forearm.
   She squats like an Asian over two ceiling joists under the light. She lets it go, looking side to side like a dog. But her eyes are closed. She moves away. She puts a mirror to her face. To her surprise the colors aren’t smeared from the sweat of the attic, the humidity. The stubborn black lacquer still shines, a blackface but for the yellow wingspread across the nose, the Phoenix. With a 1” brush she now strokes acrylic crimson vertically across boyish breasts, nipple to nipple, then a longer stroke from chin to navel, symbolizing the God thing, all things as God would have them. The cross is either buried into or rising from the navel, the sustenance of first life. They’ll never know which it is, burial or birth. She doesn’t yet know.
   She stands almost erect now and emits the guttural cry, her prelude to atonement.
   Silent now. The sounds of the night drifting into slumber.
   Silence threatens to quell the rage, cloud her courage. On the move, she bumps the wooden pony. The floor creaks from its heftiness. No splinters on the saddleback, smooth to the touch under buttocks and thighs. Temperature-less. Pleasant. The creaking comes and goes at her command. The roof beams above vacillating as if on the bow riding a high sea. A sound crosses her lips, a sigh. Delight. She releases a slow flow, warm and sensual along the saddle and down her leg and on to the floor.
   She falls off the horse and hits it with the ax. Again, then again until it’s splintered beyond help and unrideable.
   In the yard car tires crunch gravel.
   She steals across joists clean as a cat, her ears keen to every slight and lavish sound. The faint radio voice of Bonnie Raitt drifts then dies. She readies herself, straps the belt with sheaf around her boy-like waist and pulls the cord to the light.
   A squeak. The door. It slams followed by footsteps, bumping noises. No voices. She peers into the sudden light thrown in the hallway below and gasps as the man passes under her, stopping to shut the closet door. She thinks he’s going to look up but he doesn’t. He light his cigarette before entering the bathroom. His moves are faster than she figured for drunken man of his age.
   Her heart is alive, pumping, pumping.
Where’s the woman? She waits but patience is not a thing that now has meaning. The woman will follow, she knows, she prays.
And there she is.
   She loosens the soggy strip of T-shirt on her wounded arm so that her blood flows freely, then drops. A hard thump and she steps through the doorway of the bright bathroom like a long-dead ghost.
   Their eyes behold a naked hairless grotesquely painted and bloody creature hissing and wild-eyed.
   Their expressions are marvelous, clueless. The hatchet glints in the mirror. She watches his flustered, fluttering eyes follow the hatchet's cutting edge, missing his head and catching him on the clavicle. The cigarette drops from his mouth.
   She turns to the woman and swings full. Blood slaps the white porcelain like paint from an incensed artist's hand.
   She returns to him with the long knife, now drawn, guiding the blade under his outstretched arms into the sternum. Adrenaline powers it through him and he sits on the toilet. The man seems bemused, his mouth agape. She cries, Don't you die on me!
   On the floor the woman jerks like a dog in sleep. As the long blade falls deep into her neck, the jerking settles into a oddly graceful spasm, like a step to a waltz.
   Twice she slips on the wet floor trying to prop the woman against the tub. Bangs her head hard on the sink but feels no pain, nothing.
   The woman's eyes are gone. She cries, You pathetic bitch!
   The man follows her movements with dull eyes and compliantly does not die until the smoke and the flames consume him.
   She watches from the fold of the tall timber, dripping in blood and sweat. She watches and calculates the impact of her accomplishment. The release is more than cathartic. It is empowering, and she knows it will have to be shared.






San Diego 1996

CHAPTER ONE

The man made his move. Pressing against her, he shouted, "You with this guy?" The voice a bullet in her ear.
She was at the bend in the bar of some crowded club, standing, no stool to sit or lean on. Electronic jazz seriously cranked. Again his hot breath buffeted her ear, "Let me get you an Irish coffee?"
She knew the spawning gaze, the one letting her know she could be the one. She might have been many men's type--dirty blond, mid-twenties, legs, nice face, good muscle tone. The Athletic Woman with a cherubic face. Her looks falsely announced an easy target.
She applied the athletic elbow to force him back. Then, with sudden astonishment, she found herself answering him, "I-I don't know," even when it was none of his fucking business if she was with the guy or not. It occurred to her she’d said the wrong thing. Should’ve said, "Yeah, now beat it asshole."
Then something more nerving struck her, a faux hand slapping her face: neither did she know who she was. Or where she was. Or how she had gotten here.
The man say something but it did not register. She pressed the damp cool napkin under her drink against her forehead. A Long Island Iced Tea, her drink of choice. A sudden vision came of another woman, a friend, comforting. A place like this, frosty Long Island against her lips.
She flinched at a sudden visceral pain. The pain seemed familiar, making it welcome, a buoy to keep her from sinking farther into some place darker. She squeezed the bar's leather edge to brace against the sharpening throb. Sweat broke on her brow. Nausea swept her.
The spasm reached its peak, immediately eased. Who was she? Panicking, she began hyperventilating to calm herself, needing to grasp a familiar image, anything to keep from spinning out of control. Nothing. She felt wobbly, as though drunk. Helpless.
"You're bleeding," the intruder said.
"What?"
She dabbed her chin with the napkin, then her cheek, glaring at it.
"No, your arm. . . . What happened?"
Dried blood on her right forearm, thin lines around two small crescent-shaped indentions, like the gouge of fingernails. Not like, they were fingernail marks. And bruises. She hadn’t felt the wounds.
First though: assaulted. Then confusion because she’d had colitis attacks before and knew that’s what she’d just now experienced. She felt her face go ashen nonetheless as she pressed her legs together, feeling for signs. Bile worked up to her throat. But she detected no foreign fluids. Be rational, she told herself. There’s no way she could’ve been molested, with only a puny scratch and bruise; she would have been beat to hell resisting. She’d been trained to defend against the attacker, become the attacker, go for the soft places, the groin, neck, shit as a final dissuasion if he got that close to penetration. She had not been sexually challenged, not tonight.
The colic spasm faded completely. She wished it hadn’t. Now spiraling anxiety. Who in hell was she? Her eyeballs jumped with nerves or fear; she couldn’t see clearly, people surrounding her, faceless strangers. Her eyes shut as she again held onto the bar rail, desperate for control. Desperate to step on rampant emotions before they leveled her. Just concentrate on breathing, think of the sound of waterfalls, Bones purring, concrete objects. Bones. Yes, her cat, something familiar.
Her eyes opened. She waved at the bartender. "Please call me a taxi. Right now, please."
"Hey, I'd be glad to give you a lift," said the man, still there.
She looked at him now as though he had dug the nails into her arm. Fury rising. Her clawed hand lifted to rake his face, but an inner discipline screamed, Stop!
"Get away from me!" she said in a voice that carried over the now idled quartet.
She fled past a gauntlet of blurred faces with their critical orbs glued on her. On the sidewalk outside, she stopped. Feeling winded as if from a run. She steadied herself against the red brick building, her weight melting into the rock solidness of mortar and brick.
Her breathing slowed. Her eyes seemed to focus now on the surroundings—the street sign, "Market Street" and "Fifth Ave," under a six-frond gaslamp casting yellow light through a fog, cars moving nosily in both directions, their headlights softened in the marine layer fog. The panic draining into a pool of the familiar.
A small black-leather purse hung from a strap that crossed her chest. She wore her purses that way. She had on loose clothes, cotton slacks, neck-high blouse, conservative wear. She’d been somewhere she didn’t want or have to make an impression. She unsnapped the purse. Keys, a pack of Parliament Lights, wadded tissues, loose change, a cigarette lighter. She tried the cigarette lighter. Four clicks and it worked. She noticed the palsy-like jitter in her fingers fumbling out a cigarette. There was no compact, no lipstick, no feminine wear. She found fifty-seven dollars in the billfold, three credit cards, two of them platinum. She found no snapshots, no boasting of a man or child, no pictures at all except on a California driver's license. She didn't at first recognize the woman in it, with the short ash-blond hair and shiny tanned complexion. But she knew the priggish grin. It was her contempt-of-authority pose. The 27-year-old was her, "Janice Leigh Parrish."
The taxi arrived. She stamped out the cigarette under a lowheel loafer and stepped into the back seat, repeated the address on the license, "2304 Albatross, please." It sounded right. She felt comfortable, even better.
"That in Mission Hills?" he asked, flat eyes reading her in the rearview.
"I don't know. Yes--don't you have a map?"
The Middle Eastern driver made a hard left on Fifth and drove north. Settling into the deep seat, she repeated the name on the license, Janice Leigh Parrish. Something was wrong with that but she could not decide what.
The cab sped along an uphill grade, leaving behind a patch of fogged-in skyscrapers, then turned west toward the bay, then north again onto Albatross, a straight wide street running through groves of junipers, sycamores and old live oak. Good neighborhood, good location. The lots here were wide, most with open yards and a few behind iron and shrub walls. The cabby stopped at the address painted on the curb and turned to look at her straight on. His passenger was asleep in the corner, her head slumped against the window. He checked the meter and spoke in a voice louder than necessary, "Wake up, lady. You’re home."
Startled, she jerked upright clutching her throat as if trying to strangle herself. Wordlessly, she stepped out and paid the sixteen-dollar fair with a twenty.
Alone on the sidewalk, her legs and arms weak as though she had caught the flu, or finished a long run, she tried to connect herself with the street, the house before her, force a memory.
She entered the property through a low picket-fence gate into a yard of multiple flowerbeds, along a sidewalk with a melaleuca here, sculpted manzanita the other side. Finches, she remembered, flocked in the low tangled branches of the native manzanita, chirping most of the day. The bungalow was skirted in white cedar shingles with wide leaded, wavy-glass windows under a forward-slanted roof and a useable porch. It was not alien to her. Spider plants hung on the deep porch; she saw herself stretching to water them and digging the ground under the window to plant Veronica in the steps-side flower gardens of concha, sage and redbud. A dim porch light burned. She remembered standing on a footstool to change the incandescent light to a yellow CFL, but couldn't remember when that was.
She stepped onto the porch and peered into the small-hinged window set into the front door. Dark inside; not like her to turn out all the lights. Neither the cat nor her liked darkness.
She rang the doorbell, its chant deep within the house a nursery rhyme put to music, and then the pungent fragrance of the summer gardenia enveloping her, that too with cozy familiarity; she planted the gardenia from a quart container and it had grown into a lush, prodigious bush on one side of the steps but not the other.
From a key chain heavy with keys she inserted the correct one on the first try into a tarnished brass door lock. She recognized other keys--two for the realty office, the back door of the house, file cabinet keys, a client’s lock box. Her car keys. Where was her car?
She entered the front room entrance way and gasped seeing the shadowy image of herself in the large gold-leaf mirror opposite the door. No priggish grin, just a drawn face with the sunken eyes of someone needing sleep or hungover. Was she that? The shoulder hair would have been parted left with a wave on the right side of her head had it not been matted to her forehead. Had she been running?
The phone rang, faint but nonetheless startling her. She held up her watch under the encroaching outside light. Eleven o'clock. She walked, confidently now, through dark rooms to the wall phone in the kitchen. It was too dark in the dining room to see the surrounding walls, though she knew that the EC Bell giclée with its bright rust-dominating hue was eye level from where she stood and that the thermostat was stationed at the lower right side of its frame. Robin had said the painting clashed with the sky blue room. "She doesn’t belong in the dining room anyway,” Robin had said of the cherubic-face nude. “Move her to the living room.” Candid, she.
She picked up the receiver and waited without speaking, hoping it was Robin.
"Janice? Are you there? . . . Hello?"
As the female voice spoke a cat meowed at her feet. She reached down and lifted it under the belly. The orange-blue calico grunted giving over to the life and hung limply, purring.
"This is me."
She recognized the voice, the impatience in it, but could not connect a face to it.
"I know your rules, Janice, but I had to call," the woman said. "I won't be made to feel guilty for infringing on your space. I wanted you to know that Raul and I are leaving tomorrow for San Miguel, just in case you feel you need to reach me. Despite feeling ill I am going down with him. He needs me there. Don't worry about me, Jan."
The face came to her, angular thin, crows surrounding the mouth, ash-blond hair like her own but streaked with gray. She had set restrictions on her mother's calls, but why?
"Mother--?"
"Please, Janice, don't start. You just don't know what it's doing to me inside, honey, the way you're throwing blame around. I know it's a crucial time in your life. But it's killing me."
And then it came to her--her name. It wasn't Janice. She could not just then account for why, but her name was Jay. Her mother did not know. It occurred to her that no one in the old family knew. She had discarded that name and she had discarded them.
"I--Wait."
She tried to remember what terrible thing had happened. Why would she disown her mother? Why would she flee her past, her own mind?
She said, "I understand your concern, Mother." She didn't, though. It was how she had always responded, agreeing so her mother wouldn't attack.
She turned on the light, sat down heavily in a dining room chair with the cordless phone. "Do I have your number?" she asked. The question felt odd.
"Of course you do. People never change their number in Mexico," her mother said. "Honey, what is it, are you all right? Does that therapist have you on another drug?"
"I can't talk right now."
"Oh, Jan. I just wished you'd let me take care of you."
Like you always did? Jay angrily thought. Still treating her like the neglected child she’d been.
"Well, goodbye now," Jay said and cradled the phone, wanting to say something else to the woman, but afraid. She felt guilty. Pitying the woman who so easily could provoke her.
She set a kettle on the stove, stroked a kitchen match and leaned back to light the burner, remembering not to bump her head on the oversized copper vent. She found tea bags in a porcelain container labeled "Sugar.” The cat followed her steps, coming close to her ankle then flopping full weight short of her foot. She surrendered a small sigh remembering that Bones was brain damaged from falling out of a tree and could not walk the backyard fence without taking a tumble. Jay would marvel looking into the serrated pupils of Bones’ eyes as she tried to walk a straight line along the kitchen table. She imagined a cop’s streetside sobriety test and Bones went to jail every time.
She sat at the dining room table with her lemon-spiced tea and phone book and found her name. She saw the name "Joseph Parrish" and her throat shut down.
In the bathroom she opened the medicine cabinet to familiar items, two rows of prescription drug containers, her contact lens case with the contacts she no longer used, and the retainer to prevent erosion from the chronic nighttime gnashing of her teeth. It too wasting space in the cabinet.
Methodically she tapped out a Restoril capsule and then broke a Darvocet tablet in half and tossed the sleep and pain pills to the back of her pinched throat, forcing them down with faucet water.
She studied her face again. What was wrong with it? Her skin was rich, strong-lined, eyes clear, bright, her best asset. It was an innocent, lively, some had said sweet face. Where was the pain behind the false face coming from?
She heard a noise like the pinch of a door opening and wondered vaguely if she’d locked the front door behind her. She must have, she always locked her doors. Just as she always shut off the lights in the other rooms before bed. Even the hallway was now dark.
She dropped her eyes for a moment then looked back into the serious face in the cabinet mirror. Behind her she saw the shower curtain quiver. She gasped and turned just as the cat slip off the rim of the tub onto the Talavera tiled floor, landing with a thud.
Jay laughed awkwardly in relief. “Bones, I swear. You are one daffy pussy cat.”
She looked again and the eye of the mirror threw the fake smile aside to reveal something her drugs could not cover over. A hand ready to strike her down but grabbing her arm instead, welding itself there. Gray white skin glistening with sweat, then a splash of blood. She viewed a contorted face and saw that it was herself.
"Oh, God!" she yelled. She tried not to lose the drugs and whatever she might have last eaten.






Chapter 2

Two Desyrel caps did the job.
Jay did not now hear the chimes or the pounding at the door. The cat heard it and panicked, bolting in and out of doorways and off furniture. In the bedroom the feline leaped to the bed but missed and knocked the lamp off the nightstand. The light bulb, which had been left on, exploded. Jay stirred then and heard what sounded like construction work, hammering, hollering. Angry-sounding voice saying, "If you're in there, please open the door. This is the police. Police, Miss Parrish. Are you there?"
She could tell it was morning, maybe as late as eight because of the brightness of the light filtering through the blinds. Sunny out. She did not see the cat, though she heard its hollow wailing from somewhere in the room. "Bones! Hush, easy." The cat's bellow instantly dwindled to a mew.
Jay rose, her head swimming and full of wet sand. She labored in her night clothes, clumsy and feeling so heavy she might break through the slatted oak flooring. At the front door she tried to bring her eyes into full focus. A vague gold shield, obviously a law officer’s, flashed through the door’s inner window. She opened and let two six-foot men pass into her house.
They wore dull-colored coats and their faces were serious. The clock on the upright read eight-thirty-eight.
Too groggy to bring reason into the disturbance, Jay said, "What's this about?" pretending the obvious, as if fully awake.
The bulkier man spoke. He introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Millard and the other man, younger, as Detective Pedroza. "I'm sorry if we woke you, but we have a few questions concerning your activities last night. It won’t wait." The detective's grave look betrayed his calm tone. Calm now that they were inside and had her attention.
Jay collapsed onto the couch. Both men moved to catch her but both were slow. “Miss Parrish, can you hear me?” the older one, Millard, asked.
Light entered behind her eyelids. They fluttered and opened. She exhaled slowly, feeling light-headed, dizzy, sweaty. “Huh? What?”
Millard knelt next to her, both knees popping with the effort. "You need a drink of water? Are you on some kind of medication?"
Jay blinked several times and squinted at him. “No, nothing now. Thank you, I’m just very tired.”
She opened her eyes fully. He was close to her, kneeling. She studied his face involuntarily, as she would a potential buyer’s. Her eyes clearer. He had a flaw. There was a webbed scar under his left eye as if from a car crash or some terrible fight, stabbed by a broken bottle. The milky tissue of the scar seemed to glow in bold relief against his pure black skin; she might not have noticed the scar at all on white skin, untanned Noregian skin, like hers. But, oddly, the disfigurement seemed to enhance a sincerity she read in his protruding watery eyes, embodying the kind of ingenuousness that could easily win confidence. And probably confessions, she thought, coming to better senses. She would have to be careful. Whatever he was after couldn't be good.
The other detective, Pedroza, stood stonefaced by the fireplace with one hand folded across the other in front of his crotch. He seemed to be regarding the room for insight into the person who lived here. Noticing, Jay looked around the room herself. It was a sparse, clean-smelling room with leather and wicker furniture and thick-slatted wooden blinds, at the moment sealing off the daylight. No carpet or drapes, no fabrics in the room other than couch pillows, a small rug at the entrance. A room that didn't invite allergens. There were no pictures of family members or friends, as in her pocketbook. The sparsity lent the room an impersonal, cool air.
Millard said, "If you would like to change into some clothes, make some coffee or something, go ahead. We can wait."
"I’ll change if you don't mind."
She got into a pair of loose khaki slacks, put on a bra and an orange linen shirt and over that a dark gray Zoo-booster sweater, unconsciously pushing the sleeves above her elbows. She laced her running shoes, then bound her hair tight as a face lift. Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
Millard sat on the arm of the couch, one leg crossing the other at the ankle. He rubbed his face with both hands as though trying to wipe away the dirt of his business, then started. He wanted to know where she was last night roughly between six and eleven o'clock. She told him what she remembered. She told the truth as she remembered it, omitting the veiled hours before leaving the nightclub.
"And what time was that, that you arrived at your father's place?" Pedroza said from the hearth, an elbow propped against the mantle inches from a Mexican plate with a clay geko poised to lunged from its rim. The handmade Dolores Hidalgo plate was a Christmas gift from Jay's mother.
"About seven-thirty or maybe eight. We had planned to meet."
"Why were you meeting?"
“Is that really necessary to know?”
Both detectives stiffened.
"Alright, it was the second time I had been to see him," she said. "The first visit didn't work out. I--There were personal things we needed to talk about. I needed to talk about."
This seemed to interest both men. Millard leaned forward.
"How long were you there?" he said, surprising Jay by not asking the obvious.
She pinched the bridge of her nose which only spread the pain behind her eyes. "It wasn't long. I don't remember exactly."
She saw they weren’t satisfied. "We got into an argument and I left, okay? I wasn't thinking about the time. . . . We weren't getting along. Is that what you want to hear?"
"That's the ‘personal’ stuff? You two not getting along?" said Pedroza, his tone slipping into derision. He still had his arm on the mantel, the elbow inching closer to the plate.
"It was very personal between us and I'd rather not talk about it," Jay said. "Would you please take your arm off the mantle."
Pedroza jerked his elbow as if a wasp had stung him. He looked at the mantle.
Millard said, "I'm sorry, but we have to ask you to talk about it." He sounded regretful. "Tell us about the argument. Did it get physical?"
"What's happened to him?" Jay said, her voice quivering. "Is he--he's dead, isn't he? What kind of detectives are you?"
Millard lowered his face as though to silently confirm it. "Please, just try to answer our questions. Did your father get physical with you, a push, a slap?"
"Why would you say 'weren't'?” Pedroza said. “Why the past tense?"
Jay tried to grin and frown at the same time. How could she even begin to explain? She sighed, looked at the cold bare floor.
"When—when I was a child, my father. . . ." She averted looking at him. "Do you know what I'm saying? . . . I only started remembering what happened to me recently, after I went into therapy. I had gone to confront him. It was the second time and he did the same thing again--he refused to accept responsibility--"
She stopped before working herself up, the way she would in group. She knew they wouldn't understand.
Millard stood. "Miss Parrish, can anyone corroborate you leaving your father's house? Was anyone else there?"
"What? No. I was there to confront him. I wouldn't take anyone along for that."
Suddenly her eyes welled. Her father’s fragile visage came to her, him standing in the doorway, small and hurt; he had read the letter. She stepped into the kitchen for a tissue. The detectives were standing next to each other when she reentered. She noticed the astonishing amount of space they took up.
"I know you won’t believe this, but I don’t remember being at his house.” Jay looked at Millard. His slight smile was lopsided, solicitous. “When I went, yes, and afterwards at this bar. I know it sounds strange but I lost track, I had amnesia. He opened the door, I don’t remember saying anything. That's all. The next I knew I was at a nightclub in the Gaslamp. It was ten o’clock then. I took a cab home, you can check. Yellow Cab."
"What’s the name of this nightclub?"
"It's at Fifth and Market, next to the corner, I think. They played jazz, loud."
"How long were you there? Did you meet anyone?"
"I don't know. This creep, I don’t know who he was. I don't know how I got there." Jay's voice rose as she spoke. She again felt panicky.
"You don't drive?" Pedroza said with some incredulity. His eyes went narrow. “A realtor, aren’t you, and you don’t have a car?”
She nodded. "Yes, I drive. But I'm not sure where I left my car, it would probably be at my father's condo or at the nightclub. I haven’t had time—"
Pedroza stepped closer to her, his brow furrowed. "The type that drives a Corvette isn't the kind likely to forget that baby. Or leave it out overnight."
She had been typed often because of the Vet; it used only to insult and disappoint her, now it annoyed her.
"What type is that?" she said, barely trying to modulate her tone.
Pedroza grinned, glanced at his partner. He dropped the grin: "The kind that drinks too much and drives too fast and lives too hard. Someone like you, Miss Parrish, looking at your sheet."
She felt the heat begin to rise in her cheeks and told herself he only wanted to provoke her.
"Lots of other people envy me having a Vet too, Detective. I drive a Toyota sedan when I show clients around."
Pedroza said, "What do you think caused you to have amnesia, Miss Parrish?"
"I can't answer that. . . . Do you know where I left my car?"
Pedroza groaned, growing restless. Both shuffled their feet.
Jay could see it coming. They were about to tell her she was under arrest. She said again, her voice pinched, "He's dead, isn't he?"
The detectives exchanged glances.
"Your father's body was discovered last night, late," Pedroza said. “Intended to look like suicide, but no way, very clumsy effort. He was killed around the time you say you were there."
Pedroza took a step toward her. "Do you own a handgun?"
"Miss Parrish," said Millard, "we found evidence of blood at the crime scene that wasn't the victim's. I noticed your arm is scratched. Can you tell me how that happened?"







Chapter 3

Myers saved and sent his story to the city desk. He removed his glasses and pressed his eyes with the flats of his palms, faced the fluorscent newsroom sky. He needed new glasses, stronger ones. The throbbing behind his eyes was some kind of new pressure on the brain; or maybe glaucoma. He wasn’t normally a hypochondriac.
The story caused the headache. Whatever it was, bad eyes or hard story, he felt liked getting the hell to a bar. An hour till noon, but he hadn’t notice the time.
He nixed the bar idea before it had a chance to take hold, which it would if he let it go on. He turned a lidded eye on the city editor working his terminal. Now wait. It wouldn’t take long for Cullen to draw the copy up, then give Myers the call. The angle, he wouldn’t like it. At best he would want a rewrite, which Myers wasn't going to give him. Myers was done with it.
A nightmare scene. Unimaginable: car stopping at the apex of the bridge, a woman—hefty in jeans and tank top, big arms—taking a baby from the back seat. Right there on the side of the road 400 feet above water, then pitching the child over the rail and driving on to the toll booth, paying her dollar, making the U-turn back over the bridge after another dollar toll. It was no spontaneous act of rage. Mavis Betts set out to kill her baby and Myers had struggled hard to find the dispassionate language he should have used writing it.
He still couldn't shake the image an eyewitness described to Myers at the police station where the man was still too shaken four hours after the killing to drive himself home, back over the bridge. Myers used the quote in the second graph: "I saw a grin on the little boy's face when she threw him, like from the thrill of being tossed on a bed. . . ." Myers edited out him saying, Dear God in heaven, oh God, if I’d realized—I might have saved that poor child.
Myers had typed the words as if he were that witness, as if he’s stood in the wind on the Blue Bridge and seen it all happen. He pictured the gleeful face of his own three-year-old son, the squeels gushing from Richie when he got tossed in the air.
Myers grew weary waiting for Max Cullen to ring him and rose stiffly, stretched, made three steps to Gina Lubrano's desk. Lubrano was glued to the screen, settled in her usual position—shoes off, feet tucked under as if on a couch, head seesawing between screen and a notepad. Stranger would have though, cub reporter.
Myers silently read the monitor over her shoulder:
. . . The 70-year-old woman was conscious and cooperative when fire fighters, holding her so she would not collapse, sawed off the iron rod a foot below the point it had impaled her under the chin. . . .
"Holy shit," he blurted.
"And she lives!" Lubrano turned, looked up at Myers.
She punched a key and stood. Like Myers, she stretched, but her craning and contorting was a wordless request for Myers to massage those places. Myers complied. At five-five, he could reach her shoulders easily.
The two co-wrote on occasion, when forced for one reason or another, never by choice. Now and then they went for a drink by choice and bickered over the treatment of a piece the other had written. They never argued style. Style was sacrosanct, individual, not to be tampered with or criticized—like a spouse. Lubrano wasn't presently married. Myers was.
"Mm." Moaned and slumped. "You finish your piece?" She offered a tenative smile, comfort for a tough story. She knew about Mavis Betts, the whole newsroom knew. Happened yesterday late. All over TV.
"Depends on Max," Myers said.
He released her shoulders and glanced in the direction of Max Cullen's station. "Ten to one he'll want the mother's angle as the lead."
"What other angle is there?" Lubrano said. "She murdered her baby, her only child. The woman's a fucking monster, Ray. Everybody's interested in monsters."
When Myers’ phone rang, Lubrano returned to work. He glanced at the city editor's desk. Cullen, looking bored and tired, waved him over with a swooping arm.
Myers sat in the oft-used wing chair by Cullen's desk, waited while he finished a phone conversation. Myers saw his piece on the city ed's screen, cursor blinked in the third graph, hardly past the lead. Cullen cradled the phone and stared blank-faced at Myers.
"Mom gets noticed, Max," Myers said. "Keep reading before you jump to conclusions."
“You hear me say anything?”
Cullen had the skin color of clay and was burdened with an unhealthy paunch from a lifetime of internal abuse and lack of exercise. He wore bow ties and needlessly kept sharpened pencils in his shirt pocket. Somewhat eccentric. An editor, maybe with archaic ideals, but he possessed sound wisdom. It was that wisdom—laced with moral value lost on a cagey staff—that had kept him from advancing beyond the city desk for the past fifteen years.
"But now that you mention it, this piece you wrote? A sidebar. Good sidebar. Mother’s the story, though . . . not the child, not your distressed witness." Cullen shook his head, working into disappointment in his ace, Magic Myers, the writer who knows how to grab and hold his reader when a crime’s bad enough to get in the papers. He had a following.
"It’s the wrong take. We need to dig into the heart of the killer—everybody already knows the what and how. Why did she do it? She had a long history of abuse . . . did that alone compel her to kill? Did it drive her, finally, to insanity? What's your gut instinct tell you about her?"
He was going easy on his prize-winning reporter. Myers looked sideways at him. Mum, not a word. He knew the mother was the story. That’s why he led off with the feel of the event, the cold, exacting casualness and simplicity of a mother ending her child’s life. Didn’t that say all you needed to know about the monster who did it? His personal attitude: Fuck the bitch.
Cullen sighed. "Pretty soon I'm going to cut you loose for a few days R and R. Let you do some work on your Baja place."
"Sure you are. . . . What’s up, Max? You didn’t get me over here for this. What is it?"
“You may want to take a pass,” he said almost apologetically.
Myers wasn’t listening; he took a pot shot. "Workplace massacre and suicide. Nah, that’d be nothing for us. Baby smuggling."
“Sometimes this job sucks . . . but I’d be remiss giving the story to anyone else.”
Myers watched him wring his hands, as if washing them in dirty toilet water. Eccentric, thought Myers. Then it struck him; then he heard what Cullen was saying. He reluctantly asked, “Not a missing child. Don’t tell me that.” His face grew long and sorrowful, as did Cullen’s.
“No, Raymond, a child hasn’t died. But it is about murder and there is a young woman involved. A man’s been shot and they’ve arrested the daughter. Haven’t charged her yet. Talk of repressed memory and sexual child abuse. . . . Hate to give it to you, Ray, but you know nobody can punctuate a story like this better than you. And it’s a good one, unfortunately.”
The old desk editor hadn’t said anything in years about it, but he had not forgotten. For his part, Myers had buried his daughter a thousand times in his mind, but not in the flesh. How could you seal the wound of a loved one disappearing? Gone in an instant? Ten years now. Hardest the first year. No better the next. Struggle to find meaning, marriage officially dead. Life descends into a lonely nightmare. Yet, you hold on, keep yourself together, maintain. Use all the sources you have to find her or her remains. Cold, finally evaporation. Only thing left is to move on, count on learned and practiced disciplines, take solace in cold cases with resolutions, seek normalcy. Maybe even find a semblance of peace learning how to be a father again, older, wiser, calmer.
"Confession?" Myers said. Give in so easily. Not about Kathy, but he felt with gut certainty this story would take him somewhere he had no choice but to go, as though he’d been waiting on it for ten years.
"You’ve got one break," Cullen said, "Millard's handling it."