Fear Nothing

silent. Moonlight Bay is no city, but it usually has a distinct night voice nonetheless: a few cars on the move, distant music from a cocktail lounge or a kid practicing guitar on a back porch, a barking dog, the whisking sound of the big brushes on the street-cleaning machine, voices of strollers, laughter from the high-school kids gathered outside the Millennium Arcade down on Embarcadero Way, now and then a melancholy whistle as an Amtrak passenger train or a chain of freight cars approaches the Ocean Avenue crossing… Not at this moment, however, and not on this night. We might as well have been in the deadest neighborhood of a ghost town deep in the Mojave Desert.
        Apparently, the crack of the single gunshot that I had fired in the living room had not been loud enough out here to draw anyone's attention.
        Under the lattice arch, through the sweet fragrance of jasmine, walking the bicycle, its wheel bearings clicking softly, my heart thudding not softly at all, I hurried after Orson to the front gate. He leaped up and pawed open the latch, a trick of his that I'd seen before. Together we followed the walkway to the street, moving quickly but not running.
        We were in luck: no witnesses. No traffic was either approaching or receding along the street. No one was on foot, either.
        If a neighbor saw me running from the house just as it went up in flames, Chief Stevenson might decide to use that as an excuse to come looking for me. To shoot me down when I resisted arrest. Whether I resisted or not.
        I swung onto my bike, balancing it by keeping one foot on the pavement, and looked back at the house. The wind trembled the leaves of the huge magnolia trees, and through the branches, I could see fire lapping at several of the downstairs and upstairs windows.
        Full of grief and excitement, curiosity and dread, sorrow and dark wonder, I raced along the pavement, heading for a street with fewer lamps. Panting loudly, Orson sprinted at my side.
        We had gone nearly a block when I heard the windows begin to explode at the Ferryman house, blown out by the fierce heat.

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    16
        
        Stars between branches, leaf-filtered moonlight, giant oaks, a nurturing darkness, the peace of gravestones - and, for one of us, the eternally intriguing scent of hidden squirrels: We were back in the cemetery adjacent to St. Bernadette's Catholic Church.
        My bike was propped against a granite marker topped by the haloed head of a granite angel. I was sitting - sans halo - with my back against another stone that featured a cross at its summit.
        Blocks away, sirens shrieked into sudden silence as fire-department vehicles arrived at the Ferryman residence.
        I hadn't cycled all the way to Bobby Halloway's house, because I'd been hit by a persistent fit of coughing that hampered my ability to steer. Orson's gait had grown wobbly, too, as he expelled the stubborn scent of the fire with a series of violent sneezes.
        Now, in the company of a crowd too dead to be offended, I hawked up thick soot-flavored phlegm and spat it among the gnarled surface roots of the nearest oak, with the hope that I wasn't killing this mighty tree that had survived two centuries of earthquakes, storms, fires, insects, disease, and - more recently - modern America's passion for erecting a mini-mall with doughnut shop on every street corner. The taste in my mouth could not have been much different if I had been eating charcoal briquettes in a broth of starter fluid.
        Having been in the burning house a shorter time than his more reckless master, Orson recovered faster than I. Before I was half done hawking and spitting, he was padding back and forth among the nearest tombstones, diligently sniffing out arboreal bushytailed rodents.
        Between spells of hacking and expectorating, I talked to Orson if he was in sight, and sometimes he lifted his noble black head and pretended to listen, occasionally wagging his tail to encourage me, though often he was unable to tear his attention away from squirrel spoor.
        “What the hell happened in that house?” I asked. “Who killed her, why were they playing games with me, what was the point of all that business with the dolls, why didn't they just slit my throat and burn me with her?”
        Orson shook his head, and I made a game of interpreting his response. He didn't know. Shook his head in bafflement. Clueless. He