The Tides (22 page)

'Somebody called me here a few minutes ago,' the Life Safety surveyor told her. 'A woman. Asked for me by name, I understand. Told me to go look in the basement and then hung up. It was the strangest thing.'

'You know we'll have to run tests on this water to make sure it's not contaminated,' the Environmental Specialist was telling her. 'You know you can't use anything stored down here until we get the results of the tests. You know'

But Rebecca had seen something on the other side of the dim basement, and she stripped off her shoes and socks and waded into the cold water. Voices burbled in

protest behind her, Dan's among them, but she ignored them. Almost as soon as she stepped into it, the water receded, so that she was walking on exposed wet concrete. Cold traveled up through the soles of her feet, making her ankles and shins ache.

Dave half-sat, half-lay against the basement wall. The rough rectangle of his face, between show dark hair and dark beard, was slack. His eyes seemed to be on her, but when she came close, crouched in front of him, spoke his name, she saw that they were utterly vacant. He was breathing. She took his forearm where it lay across his thigh; the flesh below the rolled-up sleeve of the blue-plaid flannel shirt was very slightly warm, and there was a fluttering pulse, but he did not respond to the pressure of her hand. O.D., she thought.

But in the seconds before the others got to her, she saw movement and a flesh of variegated color farther back in the corner behind Dave; she smelled the alluring went of roses; she heard her name, and Rebecca was fleetingly, fiercely tempted to stay down there, to answer, 'Yes!' and not to summon the others at all.

Chapter
13

Faye was bored.

Faye had often been bored, but she never let it last long. More than anything, she loathed being bored. It was her right to be amused. When Faye got bored, she got dangerous.

She knew what to do to keep herself amused. Arrange herself, get herself together, put on her face, get dressed. She didn't have patience for anything drawn-out, but there were a few things she had to do to get ready, and sometimes the preparations themselves turned out to be fun.

To keep herself occupied while she was getting ready, Faye sang a little song, danced a little dance, flitted in and out of people's lives even though she wasn't much interested. It was the flitting that she liked, and the way heads and hearts turned.

Practically anyplace could be her playground, but The Tides was handy, all these pocked and disintegrating personalities under one roof like candies in a box, here and there somebody wide open and ready for her to move in. They couldn't hold her interest for long, but they would do as distractions while she got ready for her big play. Just the thought of it animated her, which she knew added to her charm.

She didn't waste time fretting over the ones she couldn't get into. Petra Carrasco, for instance, who was shut up tight and full to bursting. Alexander Booth; she'd thought he'd be an easy mark, and she'd thought she had him. His loss.

She zipped into Beatrice Quinn and whispered inside her head that she could go home any time she pleased, even if she didn't know where home was anymore, even if there was no home. She made up fantasies for Abby Wilkins that showed her the zany things you could do with a man whose body had no feeling. She grabbed Trudy Belker's hand and helped her paint a lipstick grin like a rictus, like a slashed throat, from one ear to the other.

It passed the time. It built up her strength. But she was restless and bored, and she wouldn't wait much longer.

Ira Goldberg, on his way to a business meeting, stopped by his daughter's house. Danny had said she was behaving strangely, even for her, and Ira thought he ought to assess her condition himself, he was her father and a physician, but he did not want to. He was afraid.

Naomi, well on her urgent way to The Tides without knowing why, was not at home to his knock. Ira had a key; he let himself in. It appeared that she had not been at her home all day; Danny had said as much, nice home though it was. Something about her empty house disturbed her father in a profound, hidden way, as if at the back of his soul.

When he left he locked the door again carefully, went back three times to make sure it was locked, not to be the one responsible for allowing intruders in. The last time, he left the Cadillac running in the street while he hurried back up the steps and down one more time, which was asking for trouble but none in that form came. Slightly

short of breath, not a good sign in a man his age but what could you expect, Ira sat behind the wheel to collect himself, and could not escape the linked series of things he unwillingly knew. He knew where Naomi would be. He knew he had time before his meeting. He knew it was his duty to go to her, and that he would, and that he did not want to. He did not want to encounter whatever was wrong with Naomi. He did not want to go into a nursing home more than his usual two times a year.

'Good morning!' he called to the girl who was much too young and naive and unmanageable to run a facility. He did not know what Danny saw in her, or maybe he did. 'I hope you enjoyed your holidays?'

For a split second, Rebecca actually didn't understand the reference. She'd worked Christmas, for it was one of the loneliest days of a lonely year for many of her residents, and staffing was skeletal. New Year's Eve she and Kurt had been home together, but she'd spent the evening at the kitchen table doing year-end reports for the Health Department, Medicaid, Medicare, and the management company while Kurt watched TV. At midnight he wandered out, kissed the top of her head, and went to bed before she could rouse herself to respond in more than a cursory way. She hadn't meant to be rude.

She'd worked all night, and before dawn
—
no snow, nothing to mask the harsh outlines of the New Year except the blur of her own agitation and fatigue, no sense of anything new but only of processes begun long ago steadily gathering momentum
—
she'd driven out to The Tides. She'd hardly known what she was doing. She'd parked at the far western edge of the field and stepped in as if she were plunging into the sea.

When the other surveyors had declared themselves
finished for the day
—
they'd be back tomorrow; they had much more to do
—
Ernest Lindgren had not been among them. His topcoat had still been in the conference room, draped over the back of a chair with its sleeves brushing the floor, and his briefcase against the wall. The uncollated pages of the policy book he'd removed from their sacks had by this time drifted across the table, some of them onto the seats of chairs or, further, onto the floor. His notes were plainly visible; he'd written
Condition Out of Compliance
, his small neat cursive suggesting no more emphasis than any other comment, less than halfway down the survey report form. Seeing that, before McAleer turned the form over and slid it into her own briefcase, Rebecca had felt her stomach burn.

Lindgren appeared to have left the facility. Sandy paged him half a dozen times, and there was a minimal search. The Life Safety Inspector walked around outside, went a short distance down into the field, shouted, found nothing.

Eyes gleaming with knowledge she was not supposed to have, Sandy said to the nursing surveyor, 'You don't suppose he went off looking for his daughter?

McAleer regarded her impassively. 'That seems unlikely.'

'I don't know,' Sandy said eagerly. 'I don't know, Odette; if it was me I wouldn't be doing a thing else, would you?' The surveyor did not reply. Sandy said, hopefully, 'Poor Ernie,' but this got no response, either.

There'd been calls back to the main office, consultations among the surveyors, and finally they'd all left, Odette McAleer driving alone in one of the state cars. When they'd returned the next morning, another administrative surveyor had been on the team. Sandy, of course, had asked about Ernie, and had been told, somewhat
grudgingly, that a Missing Person Report had been filed.

As the New Year's sun had begun to glisten behind the cityscape to the east, a cold clear yellow, setting The Tides in featureless relief, Rebecca had crunched across frosty weeds and frozen uneven ground until she'd felt the downward tug of the old lake-bed. Shadows still shimmered in the bowl like a nest of venomous scarves, a strange metallic gray, and Rebecca had been intensely reluctant to go into them even as she hadn't been able to stop herself.

The serpentine scarves wound around her legs. The shadows rose and then fell back. The ground gave way, or her feet skidded out from under her, and she cried out as she slid down the slope.

Her right hand, scrabbling for purchase, encountered something rough and wet, and when she snatched her hand away the object came with it. It smelled of wet wool and roses. It was Ernest Lindgren's stocking cap.

Reflexively, she flung the thing away from her. It sailed cumbersomely into the deeper, writhing, dancing shadows farther down the slope, in what she hoped, as she went down after it, was the bottom of the take-bed. It took her a long time to get to it and longer to crawl back out of the depression, slippery as its sides were from frost and frozen mud.

She was dirty and wet and cold, shaken, when she got back to her car, and the cap beside her on the seat was actively repulsive, but she'd done what she'd presumed to be her duty and taken it to the police station to turn it in. They hadn't seemed to know at first what she was talking about, and she'd wondered if a Missing Person Report hadn't been filed after all, but finally the Sergeant on duty had apparently found something in his records, because he'd taken the cap from her.

She'd spent much of the rest of New Year's Day working outside the facility, bagging up trash, sweeping the porch, scrubbing with almost total lack of effect at the water marks on the side of the building, which in some places were waist-high now. Sometime in the cold afternoon, Kurt had showed up, and she'd agreed to go home, where she'd taken a hot bath and gone to bed and slept soundly until the next morning when it was time to go back to work.

'Happy New Year,' she said now to Ira Goldberg in return, but he had seen his daughter coming into the facility just behind him and had turned to intercept her.

Naomi was thinking: Unless you looked closely you would barely recognize them as human. If you got close enough, their humanness assaulted you
—
their odor, their bones, their fear.

Nobody wanted to get that close. Not examiners, or experimenters, or caretakers, or chroniclers, or visitors, or loved ones, or executioners. Not those who remembered or those who had only to look a little ahead.

It seemed to Naomi that they didn't even want to look at each other: Myra's eyes had been flat and glazed; Paul's spasms prevented him from focusing on anything; her father's eyes were, at this very moment and ever since she had first looked for them, hooded in shadow and shame.

She got her father another cup of coffee from the spotted stainless-steel urn and set it in front of him, plastic on plastic making a dull click. He sat in the overlapping discs of light from the overhead fixtures, his pipe sending trails of smoke up over his smoky hair, his wrists thin past the sleeves of his suit coat. She looked away lest she glimpse the labeled white flesh of his forearm.

She'd never known what numbers his were. She

dropped her gaze to her own anonymous arm, traced numbers there. Numbers that had pretended to identify but had in fact leached identity away. 'Papa,' she said.

He drew on his pipe. He was letting his coffee get cold. 'Naomi,' he said, acknowledging her by name, and her heart swelled painfully in gratitude. 'Daughter,' acknowledging her by rank.

It would not be enough. Naomi drained more coffee into her own cup; there was very little left in the urn, and it trickled thick and bitter. Her stomach churned at the sight and odor of it, and she was remembering Myra, murdering Myra, though nothing in this moment was reminiscent of either victim or act. Briefly she closed her eyes. There would be no more coffee for her father now because she'd taken the last of it for herself.

'You don't look good, Naomi.' To her relief he was sipping his coffee now. 'Your mother worries. Your husband worries.'

'I'm all right. I'm just tired.'

'You don't sleep good?' His white eyebrows jumped. ''I give you something.'

'No. Papa, it's all right. There's just so much to be done here.' She spread her hands to indicate the dining room and the whole of The Tides, then, feeling exposed, folded her hands back in against her waist.

'A person must sleep.'

'I have dreams, Papa.'

He lowered his eyebrows, drank his coffee, waited for her to go on, for his own sake hoped she would not.

'I have dreams when I'm awake, too,' she said. 'I hear things. I see things. Smell things.' She raised her hands to her face. Behind her eyes she saw bony faces with the flesh stretched taut or the skin draping like cloth, smelled