Find Me (Inland Empire #1)

by Anne Frasier

the bond between father and daughter was unique and special. It pulsed and generated love on a cellular level.

Yes

Everything could be fixed. Everybody could be made to feel better if a person used the right words.

No

He was no longer behind walls, he’d seen a sunrise, and he was currently staring at a beautiful sky. Most of all, he could see so far.

Distance

Here she was, grown and proof that she was his, that she’d always been his, flesh of his flesh, his DNA, his girl, child, woman.

Family

The nearest crest looked like the high point, but it might have been a false peak. Desert topography could be deceptive. Kind of like life. You kept thinking you’d made it, but in reality the place you wanted was always out of reach.

Direction Purpose

She stepped closer. And closer still, while staring into his eyes, knowing that somewhere in there was a very evil man. And somewhere in there was her father.

Finding.... The act of.... Roles Parenting and The Individual

“But a lot of my life is unfinished stories and things I don’t remember and things I have misremembered. I need to see this through so it will be clear in my head. For my own sanity.”

Memory.... Is ALL

“It would be a shame not to see where this goes when the universe has worked so hard to create this intersection,”

Fate. God. Universe.

The killer who looked normal, acted normal, and moved in charmed circles would always fascinate and horrify.

Find me..... Do serial Killers want to be caught? When? Mythology?

His indifference cut to the bone.

Damning. Insensitivity.

First the monsters come, then the indifference.

Recovery from Trauma. FINDING what?

Their marriage had been years of loneliness, a life imitating life, she herself guilty of not sharing her feelings and making more attempts to speak of what had happened. Instead she’d carried it inside her, never allowing it to escape again, lest it be trivialized once more. Even her grown children didn’t know the extent of the attack that night, or how close she’d come to being killed. The horror of such a violation. They just thought it was cool that their mother was the person behind the arrest of the Inland Empire Killer.

Survival. Resulting in.....

Right now it was almost like Benjamin Fisher, a dead killer, was her only companion on this journey.

Linked. Connecting Not connecting

As you take in a surreal and unwelcoming landscape, you have to learn to feel in a different way. You have to change your focus from near to far, like opening a camera’s depth of field. You have to look at the sky and not at the ground. And once your brain finally makes the change, you’ll see it, really see it, and understand that the world is made up of all kinds of beauty, even in places that at first seem harsh. Places where the absence of trees and shade and things that are physically close allows the mind to expand, to see in a new and different way.”

Ways of Seeing. Perspective

Being dead was mysterious. Someone was there and then they weren’t. It seemed like something that shouldn’t happen to anybody, not even bugs. It wasn’t fair. She never hurt bugs and she never hurt trees, because she didn’t want them to go away and never come back.

Truth. Going away and never coming back.

On one of their magical mornings together, her grandmother told her that men were behind all the problems in the world, and that women had to take care of each other.

Might well be true.

“We all have our ways of dealing with evil,”

Do we though? Incomprehension.

“I feel like I know you.” Reni put a hand over her own heart. “Right here. Like you’ve been living here most of my life. Since that night.” “I think I have.”

Existence

“You both suffered at the hand of the same person,” he said. “Just in different ways.”

Fact

we know how much memory changes between field memory and distant memory. Emotional memory and logical memory.

... and yet ultimately memory is all we have left. What remains of conscious memory after death?

set to rest those strange and nagging feelings that could hover in the background and foreground of life. The sense that something didn’t fit. Daniel had experienced enough of them to understand their gossamer quality. Maybe those would stop for her. Maybe the

unease that could descend on a person in the middle of the night would visit less frequently, or not at all.

Unease = grief

Bad things were still happening in the world, and bad things had happened to both of them, but nature brought solace. Not that the bad things could be erased and forgotten. They couldn’t. The murders. The evil. But she and Daniel were only specks in the universe. Stardust. While that might overwhelm some people, it brought her comfort.

Comfort. Of a sort.