Never Fear

by Scott Frost

  I stepped over to the dining room. A window that had blown in from the heat explained the ash. The screen on the window had melted and hung like strings of pasta. I started to take a step toward the kitchen and stopped.

  On the top of the dining room table was a handprint in the ash, nothing else, just a print. It was bigger than my own by a couple of glove sizes. The fingers were long and thin.

  “Oh, my God,” Lacy said.

  I switched on the flashlight and swept the room. There were footprints on the floor, moving all about the room. In the darkness I hadn’t noticed, but the walls of the living room, the furniture, even the ceiling were covered in graffiti. The metallic residue I smelled was from the spray paint. Our house had survived the fire only to be trashed by vandals.

  “Fucking assholes,” Lacy whispered.

  I turned off the light and was about to sit when I heard a soft bumping sound coming from the dark hallway leading to the bedrooms. I reached down and slipped my Glock from the holster on my waist and moved cautiously across the living room to the edge of the hallway.

  “Go wait in the car and lock the doors,” I said.

  Lacy looked at me, wanting to argue, but didn’t.

  “You hear something that doesn’t sound right, or I don’t come out, you call nine-one-one and wait for a squad.”

  She nodded and rushed outside.

  One hand on the flashlight, the other holding the weapon, I spun around and flipped on the light. The beam cut through the darkness to my bedroom door. The hallway had the look of a New York subway car that had been abandoned and left to taggers.

  The same sound I had heard before, a soft thumping, was coming from behind my closed bedroom door. I shone the light on the floor, where a set of footprints disappeared into my bedroom.

  With the light focused on the handle of the door to watch for movement, I walked to the end, past the bathroom and Lacy’s room. From inside there was another soft thump, and then another as I took hold of the door handle.

  Now, said the voice in my head. Go.

  I pushed the door open as violently as I could. It hit the wall with a loud crack as I raised the flashlight and my weapon. Out of the darkness something flew through the beam of light toward me and I swung the Glock, my finger tightening on the trigger. It swept past me again and I felt a rush of air on the side of my face and then it hit the window with a flutter of wings.

  In the circle of light from the flashlight I saw a small bird sitting on the windowsill, stunned from the impact. I gripped my weapon as hard as I could and swept the room, then relaxed and lowered it to my side. The footprints in the ash led to and from the window where the bird had tried to get out.

  I holstered the Glock, turned out the flashlight, and walked over to the window and raised it. The bird made no attempt to fly out. I reached down and gently cupped it in my hands and lifted it out into the night air. The sparrow’s head swung around as the bird got its bearings. It shook its wings free of dust and flew off into the darkness. In the grass along the back of the house I could just make out the footprints leading from around the corner.

  I closed the window and looked over the room. The walls were the same as the hallway and living room. The paint moved from bed, to headboard, to wall, to ceiling. The room was no more recognizable to me than the pile of ash that used to be my neighbor’s home. I leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. I knew I should begin to go through the house, do an inventory, see if the vandals had stolen anything, but I didn’t. I just stared at the slashes and swirls of orange and red and black paint.

  “You bastards—” I started to say, but stopped myself. There was something else there, obscured or masked by the spray paint. It appeared to stretch across the entire length of the ceiling.

  I walked over to the corner of the room where it seemed to begin and turned on the flashlight. It was like looking at a picture puzzle—find the rabbit in the witch’s face.

  “Letters,” I said softly.

  They looked to be written in pencil or gray marker. The first letter was T, the second H, each one at least two feet across. I followed it the length of the ceiling, the letters revealing themselves slowly until they formed the last word.

  This is what it’s like in my head.

  This was no gang tagging or the idle fun of a bored teenager. But what was it? I stared at it for a moment, and then noticed there was more writing hidden under the paint. It looked to be half the size of the other words. And it was everywhere. It was all over the ceiling, the walls, the paint hiding it like camouflage, letter after letter of it, hundreds of words. I followed a line of writing across the ceiling and then down the wall, where it stopped above the headboard. As I looked closer I realized not all the writing spelled actual words. Most of it was just the swirl of the marker, like a child would do trying to imitate a parent’s handwriting. But there was no innocence to it. Instead there was a frantic quality. Like the automatic writing of someone in the throes of religious ecstasy, speaking in tongues.

  I directed the light onto the center of the ceiling and traced the script back down along the wall. Just above the headboard the gibberish turned to words again. It took me a moment to recognize the shapes of letters among the swirls of paint.

  Help me, help me, help me.

  I stared for a moment until I was certain I had read it correctly.

  “Who are you?” I said into the darkness.

  The swirls of paint seemed to come spiraling out at me. Then I recognized more words in the center of the ceiling.

  “Stop them,” I whispered.

  The words sent a chill through me. This wasn’t just paint and lines of writing. It was the clearest picture of madness I had ever seen. My bedroom had become the interior of a disturbed psyche. I turned the flashlight off and sat down on the bed.

  Was this my father’s world? Were these the two voices in his head shouting instructions as he dragged a young actress across a stage? The first one filled with terror while the second, softer one begged for forgiveness. Was I looking at the horror he’d kept locked away for eighteen years until he could no longer contain the monster that had killed his own son?

  Or was this the work of Danny Fisher’s troubled mind? A call for help in the midst of chaos?

  I looked around for something I may have missed— something definitive that would identify who had done this. The slashes and swirls of paint quickly became like a thousand voices shouting at me, demanding to be heard, and I couldn’t quiet them. I tried closing my eyes, but it didn’t help. I saw the image of my father holding my mother by the throat as her feet struggled to touch the floor.

  “Mom.”

  I turned and Lacy was standing in the door.

  “Are you all right?”

  I nodded and Lacy walked over and sat down next to me.

  “I think your room is untouched,” I said.

  Lacy took a long look around the room.

  “Maybe it’s time for a new house,” she said. “Too much has happened here.”

  I looked over the mess that used to be my bedroom and couldn’t help but think it reminded me of the wreckage that was my family history.

  “I had a half brother that I never knew about,” I said. “He was murdered four days ago.”

  Lacy looked at me in disbelief.

  “I don’t understand. How is that possible?” Lacy asked.

  “My father . . .” I started to say, but I was no closer to understanding it than I was to deciphering the words written on my bedroom ceiling. I gripped my daughter’s hand and shook my head.

  “My father is a mystery,” I said.

  Lacy glanced at the ceiling for a moment. “This has something to do with it, doesn’t it? This isn’t just random. ”

  I nodded. “I think it’s what’s left when all you have is secrets.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Lacy said.

  “I’ll be out in a second.”

  Lacy held my hand for another moment, then w
alked out. I looked around the room, trying to think of one good memory to take away, but I couldn’t.

  I lingered to take one last look around, then followed Lacy out. As I stepped out the front door I heard my daughter’s voice, barely above a whisper.

  “Can you tell me your name?” she said.

  In the darkness I could barely see the figure standing five feet from Lacy on the front walk, his arms held out wide at his sides as if he wanted to take hold of her. I pulled my weapon and raised it.

  “Step away from her,” I said.

  Lacy looked at me and shook her head.

  “Step away,” I repeated.

  The figure took a step closer to her.

  “I said step away from my daughter.”

  He inched still closer, now little more than three feet from her.

  “Don’t.”

  He started to reach out toward Lacy.

  “Mom,” Lacy said, her voice rising.

  “Step away from her,” I said again.

  He shook his head.

  “Do it now!”

  His hand stopped a few inches from Lacy. Danny Fisher was shirtless, the skin of his hands, arms, and chest stained with slashes of bright orange and black paint, giving the rest of his white skin an unnatural, ghostly appearance. His eyes were wide open with a wild look that I had never seen in a human being before. If he had slept at all in days it couldn’t have been for more than a few fleeting hours.

  “He’s not going to hurt me,” Lacy said, turning toward him.

  Danny looked at my daughter as if those were the first words he had ever heard in his life. He then stared at his hands as if he had no idea how they had become covered in paint.

  “Are you going to hurt my daughter, Danny?” I asked.

  He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out.

  “No, he’s not,” Lacy said softly. She looked at him for a moment. “He wants to tell us something, that’s why he’s here, isn’t it? He has a secret.”

  Danny’s eyes filled with tears and he whispered something barely audible, then said it a little louder, and then again louder still.

  “Stop . . . stop it . . . stop it . . . make it stop.”

  I lowered the gun to my side and he continued to repeat the words over and over.

  “I’ll make it stop, Danny,” I said.

  Lacy reached out and took his hand and he fell silent.

  “Promise,” Danny whispered.

  “I promise,” I said.

  He looked at Lacy’s hand holding his. Then he sank to his knees, wrapping his arms around his chest, and began to shiver as he rocked slowly back and forth.

  “I’ll get him a blanket,” Lacy said, rushing into the house.

  I holstered my gun, stepped over and knelt in front of him. His eyes were the color of a light blue gem-stone; his hair was as blond as I remembered his mother’s being in the photographs of her. I could see her features in the lines of his face. Victoria would have only been a few years older than her son when she was killed.

  “I’m going to make it stop, Danny,” I said.

  He didn’t appear to hear my words, then he began to faintly hum a song over and over. I didn’t recognize it at first, but as he repeated it I realized what it was—a children’s song. A game born out of the plague of the Middle Ages.

  “It will be all right,” I said.

  He began shaking his head back and forth, the song getting louder each time. “Ashes ashes, they all fall down.”

  “Who falls down? Who falls?” I said gently.

  He stopped shaking his head. “Everyone.”

  I reached out and placed my hand on his knee. “Why do they fall?”

  Danny’s eyes found mine for just an instant.

  “He’s alive,” he whispered.

  “Who’s alive?” I said.

  His eyes held mine for a moment longer and then were gone, staring at a point in the darkness.

  24

  Danny’s grandmother met us at the hospital where Danny was admitted for observation. He had said nothing as we drove him there. Was he talking about my father or the River Killer when he said, “He’s alive”? I called Harrison and told him what had happened and that I would stay with Lacy for the rest of the night in her dorm.

  On the drive back to UCLA I told Lacy as much as I knew of my half brother’s life. But the details were those a cop would know, not a sister—age, occupation, and time of death on the concrete banks of what Angelenos call a river.

  The only detail I understood as a sister was that we shared a father who had vanished from both of our lives, and that something was left incomplete in each of us. In the last few hours, maybe only in the last moments, of John’s life he may have unraveled that mystery. That he had thought of me when he did would be as close as I would ever get to knowing him.

  I left out the details of the investigation that pointed to the possibility that her grandfather was a killer. That he was a troubled man was as much as I was willing to say about him. I think she may have guessed much of it anyway.

  For Lacy, an only child, to suddenly find herself connected to another person by blood was like turning a page in a book only to discover the next page was blank. The promise of something more had been filled and then lost all at once. And the questions she was left with were no substitute for the possibilities that had been so close.

  Lacy’s roommate stayed with a friend and I spent the night in the small dorm room, lying just a few feet from my daughter. For a brief moment it felt like she was a small child again, and the events of the world outside were unable to touch us. But the feeling didn’t last— couldn’t. Just before drifting off, Lacy said something that had dogged me since I first saw my brother’s face in the refrigerated vault at the coroner’s.

  “I wonder how much he was like you,” she said softly.

  “He looked like your grandfather,” I said, knowing that wasn’t really what she was asking.

  “He was an investigator. You’re a cop. Your lives have been lived as if they were leading directly to this,” Lacy said.

  I stared into the darkness and knew she was right, or partly right. But what my daughter didn’t understand, and what I knew, was that the moment this was really leading to hadn’t yet happened.

  What sleep I had reminded me of the nights spent on boats with the roll of the ocean sweeping me in and out of dreams and leaving me more exhausted than before I had slept. Shortly before six I slipped out of bed and kissed Lacy on the side of the head before leaving.

  It was already warm when I stepped outside. The promised Santa Ana hadn’t begun to blow this close to the coast, but I knew looking back toward the mountains through the crystal clear sky that a morning this perfect, like most things in southern California, was an illusion and wouldn’t last.

  As I walked to the car I scanned my surroundings to make sure no one had followed Lacy and me to campus. A few students walked the paths. A campus security officer patrolled in his three-wheel scooter, but there was nothing to raise any alarms.

  The drive back to Pasadena took about forty-five minutes, the traffic having not risen to the level of gridlock that it would reach in another hour. I picked up a bagel and coffee at Starbucks just off Colorado, then drove past the plaza to headquarters.

  Patrol shifts were changing as I pulled into the lot. The first-year officers and veterans on the force who liked the action of nights were heading home. Those with families and a sense of their own mortality were just beginning their day.

  I climbed the steps to the second-floor squad room, heading for my office, but stopped when I passed the conference room. Harrison was sitting alone inside, staring at the wall where we had assembled Danny’s map of the universe. I stepped inside but he didn’t turn, his eyes focused straight ahead at the map.

  “How long have you been here?”

  Startled, he turned and looked at me. He looked as if he hadn’t slept. “Most of the night.”

  I was su
rprised by the flush I suddenly felt. My heart seemed to slip out of place in my chest for a beat or two. I closed the door behind me and walked over to him as he slowly rose from his chair. Our arms were around each other before I realized it and I closed my eyes and held him.

  “I’m sorry,” Harrison said.

  “It’s just a house,” I said.

  Harrison shook his head. “If they were just walls and floor and roof, it would be easy.”

  His eyes held mine. The blond surfer who had found sanctuary from a terrible crime by dismantling bombs was gone. For the first time he appeared as if he belonged in Homicide. I recognized something in his eyes that I had seen for years in my own in the mirror. If by holding on to the memory of a murdered wife he had kept alive a sense of hope, then trading that in for the fatalism of Homicide was no bargain.

  “I should have gotten into bed with you,” I said.

  He reached out and took hold of my hand. “I should have taken you. . . . Timing, as you learn on the bomb squad, is everything.”

  Harrison turned and looked at Danny’s map.

  “You’ve found something?” I asked.

  “Maybe.”

  He walked over to the wall where the photographs of the map had been reassembled into the mosaic of the entire thing.

  “If, as Danny said to you last night, ‘he’s alive,’ it’s only logical that he would have put that in here,” he said.

  I stared at the map for a moment.

  “‘If ’ is a big word when you apply it to the young man I saw last night.”

  “I remembered there were numbers in various places on the different rings.”

  I stepped up next to him and he pointed them out. There was no order, no apparent mathematical logic as the orbits of Danny’s world spun out from the center in wider and wider loops. Harrison had discovered that numbers were drawn in several of the planetlike objects that were connected to the pinwheel arms of the galaxy that spun out from the center. There was a five, an eight, a six, and a three.

  “They could mean anything; they could be symbols for something that’s only in his head,” I said.

  “They could also be something very specific, something right in front of us,” Harrison said.