Winter Tides

by James P. Blaylock

  He spotted her this morning on the south side of the Highway at Goldenwest Street, and he pulled over to the curb, tapping his horn. He ran the passenger side window down, watching her in the rearview mirror as she ran toward the car. He expected her to solicit him right through the window, but instead she pulled the door open and climbed in, tossing her shoulder bag to the floor.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Sure.” He glanced at her. She was older than he’d thought she was, and she had the pale, thin look of a druggie. Still, she could pass for sixteen in the right light and makeup. He fought down a nervous thrill, his imagination already running….

  “Where you going?” she asked him.

  “South,” he said. “How about you?”

  “South’s fine.”

  They drove along in silence for a few moments.

  “Nice car,” she said.

  “Thanks. It gets me around.”

  “Shit. It gets you around?”

  “You don’t like it, you shouldn’t have accepted the ride.” He smiled at her, as if he were kidding, but that kind of disrespect from a lowlife ticked him off.

  “Whoa,” she said. “Don’t go off on me. I didn’t say I didn’t like it. Do you want a date?”

  “A what?” The question caught him by surprise, and at first he didn’t quite know what she meant. He realized then that she smelled like marijuana smoke and patchouli. The smell irritated the hell out of him, just because of what it meant about her lifestyle. He’d have to make her take a shower if things worked out—which they would.

  “A date. You know. Do you want somebody?”

  He looked at her again, harder now. She was built pretty well, for a skinny girl, and she had a hungry look in her eyes, as if there was nothing about her that money couldn’t buy. With the right coaching, though, she could look hippie-innocent enough. And he could do her hair up in braids, too, like his old friend Pippi. He ran names through his head. Cinderella? Not hardly. Sleeping Beauty? He might be able to do something with that.

  “I might want a date,” he said. “How about we stop by my place?”

  “Fine with me,” she said, settling back in the seat.

  He nodded and turned left at the corner, heading up toward his condo. He had half expected her to suggest a place, which he wouldn’t have agreed to, since he didn’t actually want a date, not in the way she meant it. Anyway, he needed his camera equipment and the rest of his tools. On the other hand, right now he had to behave like a perfect gentleman, because he wanted her to be willing, up to a point. He wondered what he’d give her to make her willing beyond that point. Sometimes the promise of money only took them so far. Pills would take them farther. But there were other times when he had resorted to unfriendlier forms of persuasion, which itself could be very nearly an art form. He didn’t want bruises, although he found a certain look of raw fear to be pleasing, and he was becoming a master at generating that fear simply by particularly graphic threats concerning what might happen without a little bit of cooperation. By then, of course, if their mouths were taped shut, and they’d already been separated from their clothing and their pitiful dignity, they were generally open to suggestion.

  And then there had been times when he had been forced into an act of particularly persuasive violence, which was regrettable only because of the money it had cost him in the end. Buying silence turned out to be more expensive than he would have thought. The film that had resulted from that experience, however, was first rate, and he almost hoped that his highway hippie might need some of the same persuading before they were through. He looked her over again, and she stared back at him.

  “Can you do me a favor?” he asked when he pulled into the long driveway that led to the parking garages.

  “I guess. What kind of favor?”

  “Duck.”

  She hunched down without asking why, and he heard her giggle from where she crouched on the floorboards. “Why don’t you just flip the neighbors off?” she asked. “I can’t believe how some people let other people manipulate them.”

  “Neither can I,” he said, punching the garage door opener and swinging around into the dark garage. “Neither can I.”

  5

  ANNE’S SISTER ELINOR HAD ONCE KILLED SOMETHING IN their uncle’s shop near the Royal Oak Cemetery on Vancouver Island, on the outskirts of Victoria. It was a small animal, probably a rat. She might have gotten it dead out of a trap and pretended to have killed it, but Anne didn’t think so. Her sister had been entirely capable of killing a rat or a mouse, or even a cat. It had been during summer holiday, a rainy July afternoon. Anne could picture it perfectly, every detail of her uncle’s house and yard, the rain, the dark line of trees beyond the wall, her sister’s precise pose where she sat in the shop in a kitchen chair, her back straight, stitching seams into one of the grotesque dolls that she fashioned out of nylon stockings….

  Elinor’s dolls had become increasingly strange in the six months that she had been making them. She spent her time on almost nothing else—stuffing the nylon with cotton and then bunching and stitching the nylon into more and more lifelike representations of human figures. The anatomical proportions were purposefully, often grotesquely, wrong, the eyes offset, the mouths leering or pouting, the bodily parts so shockingly rendered that Elinor hid them from her mother along with the copies of magazines that provided her with models and inspiration. Elinor was a prodigy, and Anne had always been envious of her sister’s talent and offended by it at the same time. Anne’s own talent had been slower to develop, something that no longer bothered her as it had when she was younger. And now that she was older she knew that Elinor’s dolls were evidence of grossly disturbed sensibilities, but at eleven years old her sister both frightened and fascinated her.

  At the back door of her uncle’s farmhouse there was a path that wound around the side of an old garage and into a barnyard walled with stone. The barn itself had been converted to a shop. It was small—a couple of tool-filled stalls, some open space with machinery, a wood loft, a generator. There was always the smell of petrol and wood chips, and on that day, she Recalled, there was also the smell of the damp wool of her sweater, still wet from earlier in the morning when she and Elinor had been out walking in the rain. Their uncle had been a boatbuilder by trade, living in Vancouver, but when Anne and Elinor were girls he had already retired from it and moved to the island, where he had started building cabinetry, more as a pastime than an occupation. The family had always had money, and owned hundreds of acres of timberland up near the top of the island.

  Anne had walked down the path through the backyard early that afternoon, carrying an umbrella, although the rain had mostly stopped. The house lay empty and quiet behind her because her uncle and aunt had gone into town for the day. She had been looking for Elinor after having spent three hours reading in her upstairs bedroom. She and her sister were just ten years old. The day before had been their birthday.

  Anne smelled the stench of burning fur before she saw what it was that had been lit on fire. An open stone ring, like a cistern, lay just ahead of her, an open incinerator where her uncle burned wood chips and scraps, and the smoke drifting up out of it was heavy with the smell of burnt bone and hair. The drizzle had put the fire nearly out, and it was only smoldering now, and Anne didn’t recognize the scraps of ash-smeared red fabric as her birthday coat until she was next to it.

  Most of the coat was burned despite the rain, and her sister told her matter-of-factly, some time later, that she had doused it with petrol before lighting it on fire. The rat, or whatever it was, lay across the charred remains of the coat in the center of the stone ring, burned down to a thing of hair and bone and leathery flesh. Sickened, Anne had turned away, looking for Elinor and seeing her through the open door of the shop, sitting on the wooden chair, putting the final stitches into the face of a doll whose eyes were shut, as if in sleep, but whose mouth was open in a silent scream. As Anne watched her, her sister yanked the thre
ad tight in the seam, her lips set in a slight smile as if she took a subtle pleasure in her work. She didn’t look up, didn’t acknowledge Anne’s presence.

  By the time their uncle and aunt had returned later that afternoon, the coat and the rat were gone. Elinor had taken them into the woods near the lake and hidden them, and then the next day Anne and Elinor had left for home. In order to protect her sister—or herself, she realized much later—Anne had told her uncle and aunt that she had already packed the coat, and that she didn’t want to unpack it to wear it home, despite the bad weather. And then later, when the coat was clearly missing, Elinor told their mother that Anne had taken it off during their morning walk and had left it absentmindedly by the roadside, the two of them going home without it. When they had remembered and run back for it, the coat had been gone. Somebody had walked off with it. Elinor had felt bad for her sister, who had been absolutely crushed by losing the coat, and simply couldn’t have told their uncle and aunt.

  Anne had kept silent about the lie. Countless times since, she had wondered why. Perhaps it was fear that her mother would think that she was lying and that Elinor was telling the truth. Perhaps it was fear of Elinor. It had been one of a hundred exasperating lies that Anne had put up with in order to coexist with her sister. Her mother, as usual, had believed Elinor entirely. There was no reason she shouldn’t have. Elinor’s story made sense. Elinor had been brilliant at making up hateful stories that made good sense. If Anne had told her mother the truth, her mother wouldn’t have believed it. Later that same night, after Elinor had lied to their mother and Elinor and Anne had gone to bed, Elinor had explained to her in detail about killing the rat.

  Some time later, after Elinor was gone, Anne had looked for the things that Elinor had kept hidden. The dolls and the magazines were gone. Their mother, apparently, had found them, although in the years after, even when Anne was an adult, there was no mention of any of it. And it wasn’t until after her mother’s death that Anne found the boxes that contained the dolls, packed away with the half-dozen paintings that Elinor the prodigy had finished in the span of her short life.

  1

  OVER THE YEARS THE DREAM REAPPEARED IN THE LATE winter, as if it were compelled by the irresistible force of the turning seasons. And ever since Dave had moved back to Huntington Beach, he dreamed even more often about the ocean. Sometimes, on particularly quiet nights, when there was heavy surf and an onshore wind, he could hear the distant breaking of the waves from his house near the park, and he had noticed that the closer he came to sleep, the louder and more insistent was the noise of the breaking waves, as if it were the waves themselves that swept away conscious thought, and submerged his mind beneath their silent green swell.

  Unlike most of his dreams, though, there was nothing strange about the logic of this dream, and nearly nothing had changed in it over the past fifteen years. It almost never involved him actually trying to save the girl from drowning. Instead, he was alone in the ocean, swimming over the tops of increasingly bigger waves. He would scan the empty winter beach with a feeling of growing dread, the sky clouded by smoke rising out of the sand as if from a subterranean chimney, the whole world utterly still and silent except for the moving ocean and the moving smoke. A wave would crest in front of him, and in sudden fear he would dive underwater and swim toward the ocean bottom, into the green darkness, listening for the noise of the wave’s breaking and waiting for the inevitable shock when the turbulence hit him. What looked like swirling seaweed, like surge-washed eelgrass and kelp, would suddenly appear before him, and for one fleeting moment he would see the girl’s face in the weeds, ghost pale, her eyes open and staring, and he would feel her brush against him as the ocean dragged her downward to her death.

  Often he would wake up afraid to move, with the sound of the dream ocean sighing in his ears like the beating of a vast heart. He would lie there waiting, certain that something was pending, that something immensely terrible was about to be revealed. And then he would realize that it had already been revealed to him, whatever it was, that it lay waiting in some crevice of his mind, ready to germinate and bloom again like the seed of an alien flower.

  WHEN HE AWOKE ON THE FRONT PORCH, DAVE FOUND that he was gripping the cold metal arms of the front porch chair as if something had tried to yank him out of it. He relaxed his grip, leaning back, shrugging the stiffness out of his shoulders. There was the smell of gardenia blossoms on the night air and the sound of a moth fluttering against the lamp globe on the porch ceiling. The fog was heavy out on the yard and street. He sat forward, realizing that he must have been asleep for some time. He was cold despite his jacket, and the book he had been reading lay open on his lap.

  As ever, in his mind the last fragments of the dream fell away as the tide of sleep receded, but now he found himself still listening to a sound that came to him from out of the foggy night, like brush strokes on a drum skin at first, or like the soft pacing of someone dragging their shoe soles out on the wet sidewalk, and he knew that he had been listening to the pacing even in his dream, mixed up in the sound of the ocean and breaking waves. His heart raced with the realization, and he was instantly filled again with the certainty that something was pending, that something was about to be revealed to him.

  And then, as if she had in that moment appeared from within a veil of fog, a woman stood looking at him on the front walk, her features unfocused in the murk so that she seemed almost faceless, her dark amorphous clothing misty beneath the streetlamp. Her hair was long and black. Momentarily her features nearly coalesced in the heavy mist, and he was struck with the feeling of vague recognition, but then a window seemed to open in the fog, and just as quickly as she had appeared, she disappeared. He heard the footfalls scraping again on the wet sidewalk, but even they sounded dreamlike, as regular as a heartbeat, and abruptly they fell away, and the night was silent around him.

  He got up from the chair and descended the concrete porch steps to the front walk, and it seemed to him that there was cool air rising from the concrete like an upwelling of ocean water drawn to the surface by a passing wave. He smelled smoke on the wet night air, just a trace of it that lingered for a moment on the lanquid breeze and then was gone. The sidewalk and the street were empty. The street-lamps cast misty circles of yellow light on the curb and the grassy parkway. Moisture from the telephone lines dripped slowly onto the driveway, and now that he was out from under the shelter of the porch, he could hear waves breaking along the distant beach.

  To satisfy an uneasy curiosity, he walked toward the corner. The neighboring houses were dark, their porches and driveways empty. He crossed the street at the end of the block and continued on, heading down toward the ocean, which was six blocks away. It seemed to him that she must have disappeared in this direction, although he couldn’t quite say why, since she had merely vanished from where she had stood, and might just as easily have ascended into the clouds.

  The entire episode began to seem unreal to him, and it dawned on him that she might simply have been a waking hallucination, a trailing remnant of his dream. He turned around and headed home, realizing that he was merely chasing phantoms. It was time for bed—past time. His house loomed into view, the living room light shining out onto the porch. Through the screen door he could see his coffee cup on the table next to the couch. A folded-open copy of Fine Woodworking magazine lay on the floor along with the disassembled parts of an old wooden carpenter’s plane that he was restoring. He climbed the steps, picked his book up from the chair, and went inside the house, where he shut the door and bolted it. For a few more moments he peered out through the blinds, listening to the quiet night and watching the foggy, empty street.

  He walked to the library table that sat against the back wall of the room, opened the single drawer, and reached far into the back of it, in among a scattering of old photographs, finding the beaded bracelet that he had kept in the years since Elinor’s drowning. He couldn’t say why he hadn’t given it back to the drowned gi
rl’s mother, to Elinor’s mother, that morning on the beach. He simply hadn’t. The moment had never come. He hadn’t been able to face her. He had slipped away, crossing the Highway to where his car was parked on the dirt shoulder near the boatyard, the bracelet in the pocket of his trunks. He looked at it now, the ivory-white beads with blocky red letters spelling out her name, a heart and a diamond on either side. The rest of the bracelet was elastic string, which had lost its stretch in the intervening years.

  After a moment he slipped it back into the drawer, losing it once again among the photographs.

  7

  RIGHT NOW NOTARY AND TAX PREP OPERATED OUT OF AN aging strip mall on Beach Boulevard near Talbert. There was a Laundromat next door and a liquor store next to that, which was also a carnicería that sold asada and carnitas tacos to go, and which cashed paychecks and did a limited pawn business. The counter in the liquor store was shielded by bulletproof glass, and the doors and windows were covered with a sliding wrought iron gate after two in the morning. The Laundromat was open all night.

  Ray Mifflin sat at the office desk reading a People magazine and drinking coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. He could hear a muffled churning from beyond the wall, a washing machine chugging away in the Laundromat. From time to time he glanced out the window, waiting for his client to show—a Mr. Edmund Dalton of Huntington Beach, son of a very rich man. Dalton was fifteen minutes late. Ray didn’t normally open until ten, although he was usually in the office a couple hours early. This was ridiculous, though. This morning he had pulled in shortly after dawn for an appointment with a man who was too busy to wait for business hours. Ray had just turned sixty, and he was damned if he would put up with being treated like a fool by some rich young punk.