The Night Bird

12

Frost stared at the three wooden planks fixed to the side of a sheer cliff face, making a walkway barely eighteen inches wide. There was no railing, just swags of chain nailed to the rock like Christmas tinsel. On the open side of the planks, the cliff descended straight down into a thousand feet of air. Gnarled, wind-swept trees sprouted from its rocky crevices. Misty mountains filled the distance.

As he examined the weathered beams mounted on the rock, a five-year-old with a vanilla ice cream cone ran through the open canyon to her mother. The tourists crowded around the painting in Ghirardelli Square laughed nervously. It was just a three-dimensional sidewalk illusion, but it was so real that Lucy, with her vertigo, would have fainted.

Frost sat down next to the artist on the stone steps of the plaza’s mermaid fountain. Water gurgled and splashed over brass turtles and bare breasts. The morning sun cast shadows across their faces. The iconic chocolate factory sign loomed above them, and he could smell sweetness in the air.

“Impressive, Herb,” Frost said. “Please tell me that’s not a real place.”

“It is, actually. That’s the famous plank walk on Hua Shan mountain in China.”

“Have you done it?”

“I have.”

Frost wasn’t surprised. Herb was the kind of man who’d lived ten lifetimes in almost seventy years. “And why would anyone do something like that?” he asked.

“A Buddhist would probably say to gain enlightenment,” Herb replied, “but honestly, I was stoned out of my mind.”

Frost laughed. The omnipresent aroma of pot from Herb’s paint-stained flannel shirt was enough to intoxicate anyone who spent too much time with him. He had leathery white skin, dark eyes, and black glasses with tiny magnifiers for close-up work. He was skinny and tall, and he limped because of the time he spent painting on his knees. Shack sat in the artist’s lap, and the black-and-white cat batted at the multicolored beads strung into Herb’s long gray hair.

They’d been friends for fifteen years. Even in a melting pot city like San Francisco, Herb was one of a kind. He knew everybody. Hippies. Fishermen. Gays. Radicals. Yuppies. Techies. He’d spent four terms on the city council in the ’80s, but for as long as Frost could remember, he’d simply painted elaborate sidewalk illusions around the city. He’d been featured on The Tonight Show and Good Morning America and had appeared in a dozen San Francisco — based movies.

“I was at your brother’s food truck a couple days ago,” Herb said, tickling Shack’s chin. “Looks like he’s doing well.”

“He is. Duane loves it. It’s a big change from the brick-and-mortar kitchens.”

“And your parents? How are they?”

“Enjoying Arizona. They bought a golf cart, which I find truly horrifying.”

“Well, I have a pretty high threshold for horrifying.” Herb chuckled. “You’re talking to someone who once got a ticket for riding a Segway on 101. Anyway, it must be lonely not having them around.”

“I get why they moved,” Frost said. “Too many memories.”

Frost thought about Francesca Stein and realized that everything in life came down to memories. The good. The bad. The real. The imagined. Put them all together, and that was the person you were. Would you ever want to change that? He wondered if his parents would choose to erase that night six years ago if they could. The night he had to tell them about Katie.

“So what’s up, Frost?” Herb asked. “You don’t usually brave the tourist crowds on Saturday morning. I assume that means you need my help.”

“I do,” Frost said.

He often consulted with Herb, because his friend had a pipeline into prominent people around the city and knew most of the street dwellers, too. Herb heard rumors and sucked up secrets like a private detective. He wrote a daily blog about San Francisco life that was required reading for journalists and politicians.

“Dr. Francesca Stein,” Frost went on. “Do you know her?”

“Oh, yes. The master of memory.”

“That’s her.”

“What do you want to know?” Herb asked. “She’s lovely, but there’s steel behind those eyes.”

“Is she legit? The whole memory game sounds like a con to me. Can you really erase a memory from someone’s head? Or create a memory of something that never happened?”

“You think it’s something out of a Michael Crichton novel?”

“Honestly? Yeah.”

“I don’t think so, Frost. The older I get, the more I realize that memory is like one of my sidewalk illusions. It can look very real and be nothing but a fantasy. I remember things that I know are false, and I forget things that I know really happened. I talked to someone who went to Dr. Stein for her memory treatment. One of our esteemed city politicians, actually. He killed a pedestrian as a teenage driver, and it began giving him nightmares years after it happened. Dr. Stein worked with him. He still remembers that the accident happened, but he doesn’t remember it happening. Is that a good thing? I don’t know, but it’s real. And his nightmares are gone.”

“Nobody could make me forget finding Katie’s body.”

“You would think that’s true,” Herb said, “but don’t be so sure. The fact that it’s possible to alter memories is why so many scientists are adamant about our not doing it. They accuse Dr. Stein of opening Pandora’s box. I tend to agree with them, even if I had a fairly fluid sense of reality back in the nineteen sixties.”

Herb turned his attention to a child standing in front of them on the bottom step of the fountain. The boy was about six years old, with messy blond hair.

“How may I help you, young man?” Herb asked in a booming voice. He was good with kids.

“Is that real?” the boy asked, gesturing at the three-dimensional painting of Hua Shan mountain in the plaza.

“Does it look real?” Herb asked him.

“Yeah.”

“Then I guess it is.”

The boy thought about this. He looked over his shoulder at the painting. “I don’t think it’s real. I think it’s fake.”

“There’s only one way to find out,” Herb said. “You have to walk the plank, young man.”

The boy folded his arms and marched back to the edge of the painting using big steps, but he kept eyeing Herb behind him, as if to figure out whether he was kidding. He put a foot out and drew it back, and then, with a last glance at Herb, he jumped into the center of the painting. When his feet landed on cement, he looked back with a huge grin. Herb winked at him.

“So why are you asking about this, Frost?” Herb went on. “You’re not thinking of going to Dr. Stein, are you? Because of Katie?”

“No.”

“Then why? Did something happen?”

“Two of Dr. Stein’s patients killed themselves in odd circumstances.”

Herb’s face darkened. “The girl on the bridge?”

Frost nodded. He found himself whistling a song under his breath. “She was one.”

“Are you trying to hold Dr. Stein criminally responsible?” Herb asked. “I wish you luck, but that’s a stretch. I can’t see the DA taking that case.”

“I just want to find out what really happened.”

“Well, I have to confess, I’m biased about Dr. Stein, and not in a good way.”

“Oh? Why is that?”

“Do you remember last summer? The SF State student who was murdered in her apartment near Balboa Park? Her name was Merrilyn Somers. She was stabbed seven times.”

Frost’s brow wrinkled. “I remember, but Jess Salceda led that case, not me.”

“How about the name Darren Newman?” Herb asked.

“Newman was a suspect in the murder, but he was never charged. Jess got a DNA match on someone else in the building, and the guy pled out. He claimed to have been so drunk he didn’t remember anything that happened that night.”

Herb nodded. Shack nudged the old man’s hand impatiently, and when Herb didn’t respond by petting him, the cat got up and relocated to Frost’s shoulder. He lifted his face to smell a waft of sea air.

“You know I’m on the board for a women’s antiviolence coalition, right?” Herb asked.

“Sure.”

“Darren Newman has been on our radar for several years,” Herb said. “Women started complaining about him shortly after he and his parents moved to the Bay Area from Colorado. Bullying. Abuse. Assault. I met him once, just to see who this man was. He’s a sociopath. Slick, charming, and absolutely amoral.”

“I recall Newman having some kind of criminal record, but he’d never done time,” Frost said.

“Yes, his parents are venture capital billionaires. They paid off victims. Nobody filed charges. Then about eighteen months ago, Newman dated the niece of one of our board members, and he raped her. The parents tried to buy her off, but she didn’t want money. She wanted him in jail. She was willing to go to trial and take her chances persuading a jury, but the parents pulled a new maneuver. They paid a psychiatrist to offer evidence to the judge.”

Frost could see where this was going. “Dr. Stein,” he said.

“That’s right. Stein talked about traumatic incidents in Newman’s childhood and suggested treatment, rather than incarceration. Newman copped to a misdemeanor. No jail time. Court-ordered therapy with Stein. Nobody was happy.”

“And Merrilyn Somers—?”

“She got stabbed three months later. She lived two doors down from Darren Newman. Look, Frost, I know what the DNA test showed, and I know Jess Salceda did a thorough investigation before going after that other man in the building. But I have to tell you, everyone in our coalition believed that Darren Newman was guilty. He raped and killed that girl, and he managed to pin it on someone else. What’s even worse is that he never would have been on the street at all if it weren’t for Dr. Francesca Stein.”