Good Morning, Darkness

Good Morning, Darkness\ \ By Ruth Francisco \ Mysterious Press\ Copyright © 2004 Ruth Francisco\ All right reserved.\ ISBN: 0-89296-807-9 \ \ \ Chapter One\ I found the first arm. The second one washed up on Malibu Beach, seven miles north of here. The rest of the body must've gotten eaten by sharks. \ The newspapers gave credit to a jogger who came by later, and that's okay by me. I'm legal and everything. I was born here. But that doesn't mean I want to talk to cops.\ Two or three times a week, I get up at four-thirty and take my beat-up Toyota truck down Washington Boulevard to the beach. I go to fish. They say the fish are too polluted to eat, but it tastes better than what you can buy at the store, and it's free. In the two hours before work, I catch enough bonito, bass, or barracuda to feed my family and my neighbors for a few days. When I snag a halibut, I give some to Consuello Rosa, my landlady, and she lets the rent slide awhile.\ Usually I fish off the jetty in Marina del Rey, at the end of the channel, because it's quiet and beautiful. That's the real reason I fish. My younger kids prefer to eat hot dogs, and the fourteen-year-old won't eat nothing her mother cooks, period. So I fish for myself.\ The marina fills me with a peace that I used to feel at church before I found out you can't live your life by their rules and survive in this world. I guess you could call the feeling I get joy. Every time I go fish, I'm amazed that a Mexican like me can wake up in a stucco dump in Culver City and after a five-minute drive be walking past the most beautiful million-dollar mansions in the world. They're not hidden behind high walls covered in concertina, like in Mexico. You can see into their living rooms. Not that I'd want that life. I feel lucky. The people who own those mansions have to take care of them. They have to hire maids and gardeners, make mortgage payments, buy insurance, worry about earthquakes and property taxes. I get to enjoy their gardens and their beautiful views and don't have to worry about nothing. Late at night, when I fall to sleep on the sofa so I won't wake the little ones who've crawled in bed with the wife, I close my eyes and I imagine I'm looking out a picture window at the marina, the moonlight reflecting on the sailboats and the rippling water. I fall asleep with a smile on my face.\ On the morning I found the arm, I'd decided to go fishing on Venice Pier for a change. That's about a mile north of the marina. I woke around four on the sofa with a toy truck in the middle of my back. When I got down to the beach, it was still dark. The moon was setting over the ocean, cutting a white path to the horizon. I threaded leftover chorizo on my fishing lines for bait. I like to think that it's like home cooking for the fish who got spawned down in Baja. I don't want them to forget where they come from. I threw in three lines, then unscrewed my thermos and poured myself some coffee. I was leaning on my elbows, not thinking about much, watching the black night fade to gray and the low mist pulling back from the shore like a puddle drying up on hot asphalt.\ Then I saw the arm.\ It lay on the sand about twenty feet from the water, where the beach is hard and smooth. The tide must've brought it in and left it.\ At first I thought it was a piece of rain gutter like I bought from Home Depot the other day for a job. Then I saw it was an arm. I climbed down from the pier to take a closer look, hoping it was from a mannequin but knowing deep inside it wasn't. I didn't have to get close to know it was too bloated to be plastic. It was a left arm. It didn't smell like the seals I've found on the beach or the whale from a few years back. That you could smell for a mile. But then the morning was still cool. I could tell it was a woman's arm, white with fine hair. The fingernails had chipped pearl and clear nail polish, which, 'cause I have a fourteen-year-old daughter, I knew was called a French manicure. There was a pretty ring on her third finger.\ I probably would've taken the ring if her fingers hadn't been so swollen. I looked to make sure no one else was around, then squatted by the arm. There was a small scar on her elbow and bites on the inside of her triceps, where fish had nibbled. I touched the skin; it didn't bounce back. It felt like a mushroom-fragile and a little slippery. I wasn't repulsed, but maybe a little sad, like when you stop to move roadkill to the side of the highway and realize it's an animal you don't see much anymore, like a silver fox or a bobcat.\ As I stood up, the waves pushed a white rose onto the beach. Most of its petals were gone, and it had a long stem, like the expensive kind people buy to throw off their sailboats along with someone's ashes.\ The sun was beginning to come up, and it was going to be one of those hot spring mornings that acts like summer's in a hurry. I knew someone else would come by, so I went back to my fishing poles and kept an eye on the arm. In a half hour a jogger found it, a white man in his forties running on the beach. He was working at it like his lower back hurt, and I bet he was glad when he saw the arm and had an excuse to stop. He touched the arm with the toe of his sneaker like he thought it might still be alive. That made me laugh. He reached into his pocket and whipped out a cell phone.\ From then on, it was his arm.\ A lady with a couple of dogs walked toward him, and he yelled at her to put them on a leash. She looked pissed until she saw what he was fussing about. By the time the cops showed up, there was a ring of people and dogs around the arm. For some reason, the dog people weren't afraid of getting tickets for having their dogs on the beach. Maybe they were too excited to care. They all stood there, dogs barking away, until the police told everyone to go home.\ Plainclothes detectives and the coroner showed up twenty minutes later. They spent an hour poking at it, taking its temperature, snapping photos. I even saw one of the detectives bend down and sniff it. Finally, they put the arm in a blue plastic bag and drove off with it.\ It wasn't until that evening, after I told the kids and the wife about it, and the neighbors on both sides, and my cousin Paco who dropped by just in time for dinner, after the house finally got quiet and I was drinking a glass of tequila behind the garage on the brick patio I'll finish one of these days, that I thought about the woman the arm belonged to, of what she must've looked like.\ That was when I realized I knew who she was.\ Laura Finnegan woke with a start, her heart pounding, her white tank top sweaty and clinging to her breasts, the sheets twisted around her ankles. She let her head fall back on the pillow and exhaled with a bleating sound. She could feel the blood throbbing in her neck, and she imagined her heart and its network of veins and arteries as an octopus caught in a trap, convulsing, thrashing its arms. A dull headache began above her eyebrows. She wiped the sweat from under her arms with the bottom of her shirt.\ What a horrible dream.\ As soon as she was awake enough to command her muscles, she propped herself up on her elbows and turned her head.\ Scott lay sleeping beside her, soundless, oblivious. He never seemed to wake up gradually to morning sounds-birds, traffic, garbage trucks-but slept deeply until the alarm went off, like a child dead to the world. The top sheet, white with blue cornflowers, curtained over his shoulder and tucked under his chin. She found it odd that it had never before occurred to her that sheets with flower prints were meant to give you the impression of sleeping in a field of blossoms. She squinted, blurring her focus, and imagined a boy napping on the hindquarter of his dog in a meadow of wildflowers. He looked so sweet, so harmless.\ She shuddered, remembering him in the dream. Her terror lingered, leaving her drained, her stomach raw and nauseated.\ Slowly, she pulled the sheet off his body, admiring his shoulders, his chest, his muscular thighs and calves.\ He slept on his right side, facing her, his right arm draped over the pillow, his left thigh at a forty-five-degree angle, as if he were climbing. He had a long face with a squared-off chin, tanned skin, and a mop of straight blond hair. She noticed faint wrinkles on his neck and at the corners of his eyes, which were set a little too close. He was a perfect L.A. boy-man.\ As if pricked, she jerked her hand back to touch her neck. Never had she been so frightened by a dream. Never had a dream felt so real. She seldom remembered her dreams, but this one she could still smell-the stench of red tide at dawn, decaying fish, rancid seaweed. Even with her eyes open, faint images, black, white, and red, flashed like danger signs over her irises. She could still see the coldness in his eyes and an odd twist to his mouth, like when he was close to coming.\ Yet here he was nuzzling the pillow, innocent as a toddler.\ Scott was a generous man, an enthusiastic though not a particularly adventurous lover. He claimed to adore her. He was handsome, athletic, attentive, and funny. He acted like she was the first and only girl he'd ever loved. Her girlfriends told her that when he asked-for there was no doubt in anyone's mind that he would ask-she should agree to marry him. When they said this, they invariably looked wistful yet happy for her, as if she'd won the lottery, as if having a guy like Scott being nuts about you happened only to the lucky few.\ But in her dream he'd stood glaring at her with red in his eyes and black in his heart, an image far more vivid than that of the man who lay beside her.\ Was it true that every character in your dreams was an aspect of yourself? She had long accepted the dark side of her personality, but she knew without a doubt there was nothing in her subconscious that could produce images that terrifying.\ Was her subconscious telling her that Scott was dangerous? Warning her? She tried to think of anything about Scott that had ever frightened her. He was a little jealous, she admitted. He acted proud when other men looked at her, but bristled if they looked too long. She avoided talking about her male colleagues, hating the way his face froze and his eyes stabbed hard into hers until she explained that Ralph, Harry, or Tom was gay or sixty.\ But most men were like that, weren't they? A little insecure? Scott couldn't hide his emotions. He complained obsessively about imagined slights, his face turning beet red, his voice rising, usually out of proportion to the transgression. But he'd never directed his anger at her. He'd never raised a hand to her, never yelled at her. Never.\ Nothing she could think of explained the dream. With her arms and legs still fluttering with adrenaline and a fuzzy skunklike taste souring her mouth, it didn't feel like a dream at all.\ It felt like a premonition.\ Scott Goodsell was in love. He was sure of it. He felt like dancing in the middle of the day, in the middle of the bank parking lot, like some crazy homeless person on Venice Beach. He was in love with the most beautiful woman in the world. She was a goddess.\ Scott thought of himself as a sensitive man, a post-women's-liberation man who respected women and treated them as equals yet appreciated their oddities. He'd grown up with three sisters and had listened when they wept about their boyfriends. On occasion, he'd even flipped through women's magazines, astonished by their tales of sexual abuse, even more astonished by all the products women could buy to make themselves more appealing to men, stuff men don't even like-perfume, makeup, shit like that. He couldn't understand guys who shouted obscenities at beautiful women walking by. Did they really think women found that sexy? Or did it give them pleasure to torment women they could never possibly have?\ Scott felt he'd tried to be honest in his relationships-at least during the last few years-and when he broke up with a woman, he did it in person, gently, reassuring her that she was incredibly desirable, but it was all him, a problem with commitment he was working on. He was almost always able to remain on good terms with them, usually to the extent where they'd welcome a call if he got stuck alone on a Saturday night without a date.\ He even had women friends. True, he'd slept with most of them at one time or another, but now they were friends, and he was surprised that sometimes he felt closer to these women than to his male buddies.\ Of course he would never call himself a sensitive man, a description he found emasculating. He liked to think of himself as a man from whom other men could get explanations for the maddening behavior of their wives and girlfriends, as well as a man to whom women could ask probing questions about the male species.\ Yet, even though he'd had his share of women, and despite what he considered to be his special understanding of them, he'd never before been in love.\ Laura had changed all that. Her beauty took his breath away. She was thin and delicate, with long fingers, a long neck, and long thighs. Her dark brown hair fell perfectly straight down to the middle of her back, and when he turned her to him, pushing back her hair to reveal her piercing blue eyes, he lost himself.\ She was a Modigliani come to life. She possessed a sad, mysterious quality, her body relaxed but alert, her head angled slightly to one side as if she were trying to catch the words to a distant song. And if he stood quietly beside her, it seemed that he, too, could hear the music.\ He loved her efficiency and that she never complained. To his relief, she never talked about her job. All the other women he'd dated yapped on about their careers, office politics, job deadlines, chauvinism from superiors, both real and imagined. Not exactly what a guy wants to hear after a long day. Nor did Laura jabber about her periods or her mother or her ex-boyfriends. In fact, she didn't talk much at all.\ Laura talked with her body. To Scott, her movements were enchanting. Even something as simple as picking up a book or walking across the room seemed choreographed-graceful, fluid, pregnant with meaning. Starting with her lips, her smile spread down her shoulders, up her lifted arms, then to the tips of her fingers. It was like watching a flower unfold in time-lapse photography.\ She'd been a dancer all through high school and college. He asked her once why she hadn't become a professional, and she said she didn't like the endless counting of beats to match the music, to hit your mark. She simply wanted to dance.\ She earned her living as an accountant. Go figure. He liked that, the way women contradicted themselves, as if simultaneously speaking two languages that revealed separate planes of consciousness.\ He liked to play a game. He'd watch Laura while she did something simple, like peel an orange, then try to guess what she was thinking. Then he'd ask her. He loved her all the more when he guessed right. And when they made love, he forgot about himself, completely enchanted by the undulations of her body.\ \ Continues...\ \ \ \ Excerpted from Good Morning, Darkness by Ruth Francisco Copyright © 2004 by Ruth Francisco. Excerpted by permission.\ All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.\ Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. \ \

\ Publishers WeeklyFollowing her much-praised first novel, Confessions of a Deathmaiden (2003), Francisco delivers another outstanding stand-alone, a darker tale with some surprising twists. A Mexican fisherman makes a gruesome discovery on the beach not far from L.A.'s Marina del Rey: "I found the first arm. The second one washed up on Malibu Beach, seven miles north of here. The rest of the body must've gotten eaten by sharks." But whose arm? It would seem to belong to the alluring Laura Finnegan, who had a house on the beach and whom the fisherman used to admire through her window. Det. Sgt. Reggie Brooks of the LAPD is in love with Laura, as is real estate agent Scott Goodsell, who has asked her to marry him, but murder doesn't seem a possibility: Laura has quit her job and gone east to see her relatives. Or has she? Alert readers will suspect there's more going on than meets the eye, and further plot complications prove both serpentine and sanguinary. As in her previous novel, Francisco knows how to turn the screws: the adroit plotting and additional fillip at the end are sufficiently compelling to qualify this as one of the year's best mysteries. Agent, Philip Spitzer. (Sept. 22) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.\ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsA disembodied corpse gives new meaning to the phrase "arms race."One arm's turned up in Venice Beach, a second in Malibu. Whose arms are they, and where's the rest of her? LAPD Detective Sergeant Reggie Brooks, sweating to keep the case from going cold, thinks he can answer the first question: They're the once lovely arms of the breathtakingly beautiful Laura Finnegan-"a Modigliani come to life," now vanished. Brooks knew Laura. Moonlighting as a martial-arts instructor, he not only taught her but managed to fall in love with her. Actually, it's been more a matter of obsession for someone who "never wanted a white girl before." But that's what Laura can do to men. There's the Mexican fisherman, for instance, who watched her windows longingly at night. There's her boorish boss and the nerdy accountant, both spellbound by her. And of course there's loathsome Scott Goodsell, a man you don't dump with impunity. He's changed from ardent lover to relentless stalker and, in Brooks's view, leading suspect. If Laura's been murdered, Brooks vows he'll bring her killer to justice. But what if she hasn't been? What if, in fact, the arms belong to someone else?Character bends too readily to the requirements of plot in Francisco's second (Confessions of a Death Maiden, 2003), reducing the good stuff to flashes.\ \ \ Midwest Book ReviewAn exciting Hitchcock-like crime thriller...plenty of surprises to this powerful dark side of love tale.\ \ \ \ \ Chicago TribuneBeautifully sharp, understated writing.\ \ \ \ \ Publishers WeeklyFollowing her much-praised first novel, Confessions of a Deathmaiden (2003), Francisco delivers another outstanding stand-alone, a darker tale with some surprising twists. As in her previous novel, Francisco knows how to turn the screws: the adroit plotting and additional fillip at the end are sufficiently compelling to qualify this as one of the year's best mysteries.\ \ \ \ \ St. Louis Post-DispatchTruly surprising twists...Francisco tells the story tautly.\ \ \ \ \ Wall Street JournalElaborately suspenseful...an absorbing tale of postmodern noir.\ \