F Is for Fugitive

way to sustain anxiety or depression when you're out of breath. Something in the sweat seems to bring cheer in its wake. We ate supper, chatting companionably, and then I went to my room and packed a bag for the trip. I hadn't begun to think about the situation up in Floral Beach, but I took a minute to open a file folder, which I labeled with Bailey Fowler's name. I sorted through the newspapers stacked up in the utility room, clipping the section that detailed his arrest.
    According to the article, he'd been out on parole on an armed-robbery conviction at the time his seventeen-year-old ex-sweetheart was found strangled to death. Residents of the resort town reported that Fowler, then twenty-three, had been involved in drugs off and on for years, and speculated that he'd killed the girl when he learned of her romantic entanglement with a friend of his. With the plea bargain, he'd been sentenced to six years in the state prison. He'd served less than a year at the Men's Colony at San Luis Obispo when he engineered his escape. He left California, assuming the alias of Peter Lambert. After a number of miscellaneous sales jobs, he'd gone to work for a clothing manufacturer with outlets in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and California. In 1979, the company had promoted him to western division manager. He was transferred to Los Angeles, where he'd been residing ever since. The newspaper indicated that his colleagues were stunned to learn he'd ever been in trouble. They described him as hardworking, competent, outgoing, articulate, active in church and community affairs.
    The black-and-white photograph of Bailey Fowler showed a man maybe forty years old, half-turned toward the camera, his face blank with disbelief. His features were strong, a refined version of his father's, with the same pugnacious jaw-line. An inset showed the police photograph taken of him seventeen years before, when he was booked for the murder of Jean Timberlake. Since then, his hairline had receded slightly and there was a suggestion that he may have darkened the color, but then again that might have been a function of age or the quality of the photograph. He'd been a handsome kid, and he wasn't bad looking now.
    Curious, I thought, that a man can reinvent himself. There was something enormously appealing in the idea of setting one persona aside and constructing a second to take its place. I wondered if serving out his sentence in prison would have had as laudatory an effect as being out in the world, getting on with his life. There was no mention of a family, so I had to guess he'd never married. Unless this new attorney of his was a legal wizard, he'd have to serve the remaining years of his original sentence, plus an additional sixteen months to two years on the felony escape charge. He could be forty-seven by the time he was released, years he probably wasn't interested in giving up without a fight.
    The current paper had a follow-up article, which I also clipped. For the most part, it was a repetition of the first, except that a high school yearbook photo of the murdered girl was included along with his. She'd been a senior. Her dark hair was glossy and straight, cut to the shape of her face, parted in the middle and curving in softly at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were pale, lined with black, her mouth wide and sensual. There was the barest suggestion of a smile, and it gave her an air of knowing something the rest of us might not be aware of yet.
    I slipped the clippings in the folder, which I tucked into the outside pocket of my canvas duffel.
    I'd stop by the office and pick up my portable typewriter en route.
    At nine the next morning, I was on the road, heading up the pass that cuts through the San Rafael Mountains. As the two-lane highway crested, I glanced to my right, struck by the sweep of undulating hills that move northward, intersected by bare bluffs. The rugged terrain is tinted to a hazy blue-gray by the nature of the underlying rock. The land here has lifted, and now the ridges of shale and sandstone project in a visible spine called the Transverse Ranges. Geological experts have concluded that California, west of the San Andreas Fault, has moved north up the Pacific coast by about three hundred miles during the last thirty million years. The Pacific Plate is still grinding away at the continent, buckling the coastal regions in earthquake after earthquake. That we continue to go about our daily business without much thought