Winter Tides (27 page)

What had Anne said yesterday when he had talked about things working out differently? … Things are never different. They’re just what they are. He had let a lot of waves go by over the past fifteen years, but the waves hadn’t missed his presence for a moment.
Bygones
, he thought. It was time to do it again—past time.

Alone now, he paddled even farther outside, just at the far edge of the break, so that the long swells rolled under him and he could sit in peace, listening to the sound of the gulls and letting the offshore breeze blow against his face. He watched the backs of the waves as they pushed in toward shore, spindrift flying backward on the wind. The back of a wave never looked the same as the front: it looked smaller, and it never really steepened and threw itself forward, but hid the violence of the wave’s breaking and simply seemed to disappear into the sea again when its energy was spent. The water had settled quickly after the storm surf, and was deep green and clear, with sunlight glinting from the diamond ripples on the surface. He could see a school of dark fish swimming in the swell, reappearing within successive waves, rising above the level of the ocean toward the wave’s crest, then disappearing suddenly before the wave broke, back down into the depths.

It was nearly impossible to keep his mind off the shadows that shifted beneath the surface, the slowly darkening depths when a wave passed beneath him or a scrap of cloud-drift crossed the sun. A tangle of brown kelp drifted past, buoyed up by air bladders, a long tendril dragging across his calf like a languorous human touch, coiling around his ankle. He stared at it, into the tangled brown stalks and leaves, and he imagined that the kelp holdfasts clung like fingers to a scrap of human bone. He forced himself to recall the dream that recurred in late winter, to recollect her face in that instant before she was snatched away, her dark hair swirling, her eyes full of terror.

He still had no idea whether they had ever found her body. Maybe he should have asked Anne last night, just in order to know. He had always imagined that she was still out here, that she had drifted into deep water on winter currents, settling into the quiet darkness of the seabed, and his dreams had always included bones entangled in water weeds, kelp-filtered shafts of watery sunlight illuminating an ivory rib cage that tumbled over the ocean floor in a slow current. Somehow the image didn’t hold any horror for him this morning. The cold salt water had washed it out of his head.

His board rose steeply over a passing swell, and he realized that he had drifted shoreward. He kicked around parallel with the beach now, watching the dark line of a wave roll toward him, pushing up out of the ocean as it felt the bottom, steepening perceptibly twenty yards to the north. He dug his hands into the water, paddling hard toward the wave’s peak, and, in the instant before it reached him, spun around and took one last deep stroke, jumped to his feet, and dropped down the wave’s face, stalling the board halfway down and ducking beneath the lip of the wave as it threw itself forward. He trailed his left hand across the long glass wall as the wave steepened in front of him. He hunkered down, feeling the board and the wave gather momentum, and he shifted his weight backward, the crest of the wave cascading over his head. He passed into its shadow, watching the sheet of falling water, the distant beach. And then he found himself in sunlight again, driving across the sun-glinting face of the wave, angling up toward the crest and flying up through the feathering lip as a long section of the wave closed out in front of him. Suddenly he was flying. His board, airborne, snapped tight at the end of its leash, and he fell backward into the now-still water, the wave having passed on, his board plunging down a few feet away. He let himself sink beneath the surface until, buoyant in his wetsuit, he floated upward again into the sunlight.

“H
ONESTLY,”
A
NNE SAID, “I DDN’T FIND ANY NOTE.”

“It was taped to the outside of your door.”

“Downstairs? On the street?”

“No. Upstairs. I let myself in with the key you gave me and taped the note to the apartment door. It was about five in the morning. I didn’t want to wake you up.” Anne had finished the four baby heads, which were stacked against the wall now, and was half through airbrushing the detail onto the Duke of Albany’s palace, which was moved back under the balcony, out of the way of falling tikis.

“You didn’t want to wake me up, but you wanted to tell me that you’d be late for work?”

He shrugged. “it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. The gentlemanly thing. I mean, I was sticking you with all the work, and it was only your second day on the job. And besides, I said I’d be here.”

She grinned at him and nodded broadly. “Did you ride the big kahunas this morning?”

“Well, I guess I did. A couple of big kahunas anyway. It felt good to get wet again.”

“I bet it did. Some day I want to go with you. I want to get wet, too.”

“That’s always the beginning of the end, when a surfer starts taking his girlfriend to the beach with him.”

“Now I’m your girlfriend?”

“I didn’t mean it
that
way. I was just pointing out that …” He shrugged. “Okay, I
did
mean it that way. What do you think?”

“What do I think? I think I haven’t been a girlfriend in three years. My last boyfriend …”

“I don’t want to hear about him,” Dave said. “I already hate him.”

“So do I, actually. I fell for his accent.”

“Anyway,” Dave said, “I left a note on the window. It was kind of a thank-you note, if you want to know the truth.”

“What for?”

“For last night. There were a few things I needed to hear, and you said them.”

“I wish I would have got the note.”

“It’s probably lying on the carpet.”

“Probably,” she said. “Except I think I would have seen it. I think maybe you’re making all this note talk up. Next thing you’ll tell me that the check’s in the mail.”

“Why would I tell you that?” Dave asked, opening his toolbox and taking out the top tray. “Do I owe you money?” He took out his Makita drill and a box of bits and screwdriver heads, then started to close the lid. He saw a scrap of paper, though, lying in the tray below, underneath a scattering of spade bits and punches and old pencils. Instantly recognizing it, he pinched up the corner of the paper and pulled it out, turning it over in his hand. It was the letter he had written to Anne, the one that he’d taped to her door that morning.

“What’s that?” Anne asked. “Treasure map? Fan mail from some flounder?”

“It’s the note.”

“Which note would that be, now?” She saw his face then. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s the note I taped to your door this morning.” Baffled, he handed it to her, and she read it.

“You’re sweet,” she said. “But I was actually kind of a clod last night. I never can think of the right thing to say until it’s too late.”

“That’s … You’re wrong, of course. But I taped this to your window at five o’clock this morning. What’s it doing here?” The piece of tape was still attached to it, folded neatly back so that it was stuck entirely to the paper. “You see what I’m saying?”

Anne stepped back and looked appraisingly at the castle for a moment, then sorted through bottles of colored paint. “Maybe you
thought
you taped it to the door, but really you taped it to the bottom of your toolbox. I did that once. I thought I put the checkbook in the drawer, but really I put it in the refrigerator. I found it there the next morning.”

“I’ve done that kind of thing too. But when did I have a chance to put the note in here? I just got here. And it’s underneath stuff, too. It’s not just dropped in here.”

She screwed a jar to the bottom of the airbrush and shot a test spray of paint onto a piece of cardboard, then started shading the stones of the castle. The compressor kicked on, and then after a few moments fell silent again. “Have you considered that maybe you’re crazy?” she asked. “That’s always an option, you know.”

He watched her for a moment, and then a thought came to him.
“You
put it there,” he said to her.

“I didn’t either.”

“You got mad because I left you to finish Collier’s baby heads, and you hid this in the toolbox in order to blow my mind. Go ahead, deny it.”

“Okay, I deny it.”

“Do you
really
deny it?”

She nodded at him, quitting the work with the airbrush. “I didn’t put the note in the toolbox, Dave.”

“Okay, you didn’t put it there.
I
didn’t put it there….”

Suddenly the answer was apparent to him. Nothing about it was funny any more. He knew Anne saw it too.

“Edmund?” she asked doubtfully. She grimaced at him and pushed a lock of hair away from her forehead.

He glanced up at the offices, and Edmund’s light was on. “Has he been here all morning?”

“I guess so,” she said, “although he hasn’t come out. He easily could have put it in the box before I came in.”

Keeping his voice down, Dave told her then about Edmund’s being parked on the street last night. “It was creepy,” he said. “What the hell.was he doing there?”

“I think he was sitting around being jealous,” Anne said, and she told him about the gallery in Laguna, and Edmund’s buying all the paintings. “He’s apparently already gotten a little obsessive.”

“A little,” Dave said.

“I can’t believe he would have taken the note off the door this morning, though. Why would he do that? What difference did it make?”

“Like you said, maybe he’s just crazy. That’s always an option. What time did you leave the apartment?”

“Nearly nine.”

“And I left the note there at about five. That gave him four hours. He didn’t knock or anything? You didn’t hear him out there?”

“No, but I didn’t wake up until nearly seven-thirty, and then I took a shower. There’s no doorbell. I had the stereo going.”

“What time do the other tenants show up?”

“Later, usually. The lawyer at the top of the hall gets there early sometimes, though.”

“Was the street door locked when you came down at nine?”

“Yeah. I unlocked it to let myself out. And I didn’t see that the lawyer was in, either. He might have been, but I didn’t notice his lights on or anything. I didn’t hear him.”

“He
must
have been there. I bet that Edmund was hanging around outside, waiting for you to come out. The lawyer showed up, and Edmund talked him into letting him in. He knocked on your door, but you were in the shower. He read the note, it pissed him off, and so he took it with him, came down here, and put it into the toolbox.”

“But why would he have done that? Put it in the box?”

Dave made his voice as light and matter-of-fact as he could, trying to keep things in proportion, at least for now. “He thinks it’s funny.”

“Funny?”

“Edmund’s sense of humor works on levels that are hard for sane people to comprehend.”

He glanced up at Edmund’s office. If Anne weren’t here right now, he would have had a little talk with Edmund. Casey’s advice wasn’t going to cut it. If Anne were involved, though—forced to take a side—then her job would instantly become a chaotic mess, and she’d probably run.
Dave didn’t want her to run. And he surely didn’t want to be the
cause
of her running.

Out of a sudden curiosity, he bent over and lifted the tray out of the center of the toolbox. He nearly dropped it again. Lying beneath it, like a dead gray snake, was the severed tail of some kind of ratlike animal—a possum, given the size of it. He started to lift it out; then he paused, glancing over at Anne. But she was airbrushing the castle again, concentrating on her work. He picked the tail out of the box and dumped it into the trash barrel, pulling wadded paper over the top of it to hide it.

E
DMUND SAT IN HIS OFFICE, DRESSED IN A GRAY SUIT AND
red tie, the suit fresh from the cleaners. Full of the intensity of waiting, he was too edgy for mundane work, and he leafed idly through a copy of
GQ
, glancing now and then through the office window, waiting for an opportunity. Edmund had been waiting half the morning for Collier to shift his fat tail off the porch and
do
something. Collier had been sitting there for two hours while his granddaughter ran around screaming and howling, dressed like a beggar girl. The old man stood up now and walked in through the screen door, letting it slam behind him. Edmund walked to the window to see if it was time. A few moments later, Collier came out again, waved at someone, and then Dave and Anne came into view, carrying the plywood heads for Collier’s asinine play.

This was just about perfect—the whole gang out of the way. He lost sight of them when they rounded the corner of the warehouse, no doubt heading for the theatre to set the stage for the evening’s rehearsal. He heard an office
door shut—his father’s, no doubt—and he opened his own door far enough to see out, watching as the Earl descended the stairs and went out the front door. Edmund went back to the window and waited until the Earl had rounded the corner of the building, too, apparently following the others.

He opened the desk drawer then and pulled out the pink lunch sack that he’d found that morning. Inside lay the fuel-soaked playing cards, the plastic doll and the toy truck, the matchbook, and the debris from the eucalyptus tree. He slid the cards out of their plastic bag and dumped them back into the sack, then tossed the Ziploc bag into the trash, opened the file cabinet, and took out one of the Night Girl’s dolls, another female, the smallest of the four he had taken from the storage room. He went out through the office door and down the wooden stairs, stopping for a second in order to open Dave’s toolbox. He took out the top tray and saw that the note was gone from where he’d put it early this morning. The possum tail was gone, too, along with the message he’d pinned to it. He grinned, put the tray back in, shut the lid, and then listened at the downstairs office door, where Jolene was working away at her keyboard.

He tiptoed outside and walked along the edge of the building before glancing back to make sure he was still in the clear. What he had in mind was probably going to wreck his suit, but the suit was part of his alibi, and he would cheerfully sacrifice it to put another nail in Collier’s coffin. He hurried past the back of the warehouse, carrying the doll and the folded lunch sack crammed into his pants pockets, and angled across the edge of the vacant lot, covering the few steps to the shrubbery near the eucalyptus tree in seconds, where he slid into the shadows, crouching there out of sight while he caught his breath and looked around again.