Riptide

thirteen

Jennifer woke shortly after sunrise, the residue of a nightmare already fading from memory. She’d been running through a maze of fogbound alleys, and a man with a knife was after her, and she slipped on the wet street and he was slashing at her, opening a long rip in her left arm, and she saw his face and it was Richard.

She needed to talk to him. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe just to convince herself that he wasn’t capable of the violence in her dream.

If she called, wouldn’t answer. She tossed on yesterday’s clothes and drove to Dogtown, parking outside the Oakwood Chateau. She took the stairs to the third story and rapped on his door.

“Richard, I know you’re in there. It’s Jennifer. Open up.”

She kept on banging until she was convinced he wasn’t home. He could be anywhere. But the manager said he often went to the cemetery in the morning. It wasn’t far.

She parked on a side street and walked through the gateway, past a sign half obscured by dripping foliage. Traffic hummed on the Santa Monica Freeway, immediately to the north. A homeless man wheeled a shopping cart past the mausoleum, his head bent low.

No one else was in sight. She spent a long moment looking in every direction, but saw no sign of Richard.

There wasn’t any reason to linger. Still, she made her way farther into the graveyard.

Woodlawn Cemetery dated to the early 1800s. Buried here was Venice’s founder, Abbot Kinney, a tobacco mogul who patterned the town after its namesake, complete with Italianate palazzos and sixteen miles of canals navigated by gondolas. “Venice-of-America” was meant to be a cultural showcase, but the public wanted carnivals, roller coasters, and sideshow attractions, and Venice became “the Coney Island of the Pacific.” In the Depression most of the canals were filled in and paved over. Only six were spared. Now they had been dredged and reclaimed, and with amazing speed Venice was being transformed into something close to what Kinney intended-a pleasure garden for a moneyed elite.

Jennifer went past rows of Gothic headstones into a section reserved for bronze plaques set in the earth. Two of the plaques marked the places where her mother and father lay.

Marjorie Ellen Silence. Aldrich Graham Silence.

She rarely came here. Now that she stood over the graves, she wasn’t sure what to do. Say a prayer? She didn’t know any. She contented herself with a whispered, “Rest in peace.” Not the most original sentiment, but she meant it. There had not been much peace for her parents. Aldrich was shattered by mental illness. His suicide left Marjorie an emotional wreck, prone to insomnia and crying jags. She could be a harsh disciplinarian. She and Richard quarreled constantly. Jennifer sometimes thought Marjorie saw too much of Aldrich in her son, and the recognition pained her. Or did it scare her?

Richard was too young to escape the House of Silence. Jennifer was not. She partied nightly. Venice in the early ’90s was still “the sewer by the sea,” as locals called it. No McMansions back then, only decaying buildings and dry canals lined with trash. Drugs were everywhere. At fifteen she was doing coke and speed. At sixteen she ran away from home-for good, she thought.

A girlfriend drove her to San Francisco. They were going to live in Haight-Ashbury in a shared apartment. Or so they assumed until they learned what the rent was like. Her friend ran out on her a few days later, taking the car. Jennifer was alone. She could call home, but she was too scared and too stubborn. She ate at a soup kitchen, cadged dollar bills in public parks. She found a place to live-the utility room in a shopping center, where she could sneak in and out without being seen by the custodial staff. Or perhaps they did see her, but let her stay out of pity. After two months of this, she was a ragged, dirty, emaciated mess.

Then she was raped.

She never knew who did it. On a rainy evening he ambushed her beneath an overpass. It was dark, and she was scared and crying as he jerked down her pants and put himself in her. His cock was flaccid, and he barely got off. He blamed her for struggling too much. He had a knife. She remembered the hot wire of pain along her left arm, then the splash of his sneakers as he ran away.

He’d opened her arm almost from elbow to wrist, a long red slit, oozing blood. She pulled up her pants and applied pressure to her arm, trying to stanch the flow. It didn’t work. She hid inside the mall till closing time, then found a pay phone. With her last few coins she called home. Richard answered. She didn’t know what to say, except that she was in bad shape and she didn’t think she’d be coming back. “I love you,” she said. “Tell Mom I’m sorry.” She hung up while he was asking where she was.

Then she found the utility room and crawled inside to die.

She bled out slowly. The wound was long but not deep. There was time to call for an ambulance, but she didn’t want an ambulance. After the E.R. patched her up, they would reunite her with her mother. She couldn’t go back. It was easier to die.

But she didn’t die, and she had Richard to thank for it.

She blinked, coming out of these memories. Slowly she turned away from the graves and headed back to her car. A folded flyer, a menu for a Thai restaurant, was wedged beneath the wiper blades. Something made her open it. Written across it in a brisk angular hand were six words, all in capitals.

I KNOW YOU HAVE MY BOOK.

She felt nothing at first, only numb unreality, as if the flyer were a figment in a dream. The numbness lasted just long enough for her to identify it as a defense mechanism against shock. With that thought, she snapped out of it.

She jerked around, looking everywhere at once, but whoever had left the note was gone. Or out of sight-hiding, watching her.

Her breath was coming hard and fast, and there was a funny weakness in her knees. She fumbled the car key out of her pocket and got the driver’s door open and slipped behind the wheel. She pulled the door shut, locking it.

The note shook in her hand. Over and over she read those same six words. They shouted at her.

But did they shout in Richard’s voice?