Winter Tides

by James P. Blaylock

  “I can’t help that,” Dave said.

  14

  ONE OF THE EARL’S STAKE-BED TRUCKS WAS PARKED AT the dock now, with the wagon and the fence rails loaded. The warehouse door was open wide, and the hay bales had been shoved out into the sunlight where they waited for loading. Dave could see Edmund talking to someone just inside—a woman who was standing in the shadows—and Dave found himself staring at her, trying to make out her features.

  He turned away to watch Casey’s truck pull out of the lot and turn up toward the Highway. There was a slight onshore wind now, and the air carried on it the smell of the ocean, and for a regretful moment Dave recalled the cold feel of the water sluicing down the back of his wetsuit in the early morning, the sun just coming up, the dawn quiet except for the sounds of the waves and the gulls.

  Dave had been twenty-two when he had let the girl drown, and in the years before that he and Casey had surfed a hundred breaks between the Oregon border and Puerto Escondido. There were dozens of times when the ocean had let them down, and they had found it calm and flat, but had suited up and paddled out anyway, just to get wet, and sat around watching the horizon, talking about whatever was in the air. Their conversation at the doughnut shop this morning made him feel old, and, what was worse, it made him feel like he’d been living in a closet for the last fifteen years.

  He heard the woman’s laugh from inside the warehouse, and he turned around to look. She stood inside the doorway—probably the new sets artist, the woman who could give Nancy a run for her money. Casey had understated her looks. For a fleeting moment she seemed oddly familiar to him, but he couldn’t say quite why, and right then she said something to Edmund, and the two of them moved out of the doorway and disappeared into the shadows inside the warehouse. Dave was struck with curiosity and apprehension both, as if somehow he had been set up for a blind date with this woman—which of course was pure, stupid, wishful thinking.

  Heading inside, he picked up the broken pieces of the Duke’s palace and considered the possibility of patching it back together and retouching it with paint. But the tiki had smashed too much of it to dust and fragments, and so he took the pieces out to the Dumpster and tossed them in. Then he picked up the tiki, levered it over his shoulder, and hauled it back up to the top of the stairs, where he set it down heavily on the balcony. The tiki’s belt was nowhere to be seen, neither down on the floor nor up on the balcony. Obviously Edmund had gotten rid of it. The side of the tiki’s forehead had been dented by the fall, and after thinking about it for a moment, Dave headed back downstairs to his toolbox and took out his three-pound sledgehammer. Back upstairs he straddled the tiki, judged the angle, and then pounded the tiki on the head with a two-handed blow, denting the opposite side of its cranium to make its head symmetrical again.

  “What exactly are you doing?” It was Edmund’s voice, full of fake cheerfulness, and Dave looked up to see him and the woman standing at the bottom of the stairs. Apparently Edmund had been showing her around.

  “Tiki repair,” Dave said, but it was the woman whom he was looking at when he said it.

  “I’m Anne Morris,” she said, climbing the stairs. Edmund followed along behind her. She stepped up onto the threshold and held out her hand. She looked at Dave for what seemed to him to be a moment too long, as if she were thinking about something, and once again Dave was struck with something about her—her gypsy hair, perhaps, which was dark and full.

  Dave shook her hand awkwardly, suddenly feeling like a fool for staring back at her. “Dave Quinn,” he said. “I’m glad to meet you. You weren’t out walking, were you, a couple of nights ago, late? I know I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

  “I don’t think I was,” she said. “Out walking where?”

  “Up by the park?”

  “No,” she said. “I guess not.”

  “Nice try, Dave,” Edmund said. “That line’s been in mothballs so long it smells like camphor.” He laughed pleasantly, to show that he was kidding. “Dave is the all-around handyman and gopher here at the Earl of Gloucester,” Edmund said to Anne. “I don’t know what we’d do without him.” And then to Dave he said, “Strap it up there a little tighter this time, okay? We don’t want a replay of this morning’s little problem, do we?”

  Throw it out, Dave told himself.

  Edmund winked hard, like an old uncle handing out sage advice, and then put his hand against Anne’s back and guided her past Dave and into his office.

  15

  EDMUND CLOSED THE DOOR AND MOTIONED TO A CHAIR on the opposite side of his desk. Anne sat down, looking around at the scant furniture. Besides the desk and two chairs, there was nothing in the room but a file cabinet. There were no pictures on the wall, not even swap meet—quality prints. There was a plastic plant on top of the file cabinet, the leaves of which appeared to be scrupulously clean. The desktop was empty of real books, although there were half a dozen computer manuals to go along with a new Power Mac, as well as three copies of GQ, fanned out neatly. Beside the computer lay a stack of CD-ROMs in jewel cases, filed in a wooden box with a hinged glass lid.

  “Here’s a couple of forms for you to fill out, Anne.” He smiled at her. “You don’t mind if I call you Anne?”

  “Not at all.”

  “We’re a first-name sort of company.”

  “Good.”

  “I hope Dave didn’t bother you … ?” Edmund nodded at the door.

  “No, he didn’t bother me. He seemed harmless.”

  “I hope so.” He looked at her meaningfully, then started shuffling papers, laying out IRS forms and the other paperwork. Anne wondered what he meant with his “I hope so.” Obviously the two men had a problem with each other.

  “To tell you the truth, Dave is an old friend of my brother’s. He used to have a lot of potential—degree from a good university, a solid job in advertising. Something happened to him, though. He went off the rails somewhere.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “Hell of a shame. He’s my brother’s best friend, like I said. I’ve known him for years.” He shook his head seriously. “When he was what you’d call in between jobs, my father offered him work here, and he’s been around ever since. He’s got a laid-back work ethic, I guess you’d call it. A lot of ex-surfers are like that. He just kind of comes and goes. I don’t know what he’d be up to if it weren’t for my father. If you run a company of this size long enough, you learn a lot about what I call the virtually unemployable, although I don’t mean to say that he’s gotten entirely to that point yet. Anyway, there’s a small percentage of people who simply cannot work. They’re neurotic, they’re drunks, they’re drug addicts, they’re chronically lazy, they have no sense of time. Such people essentially have to be taken care of. That’s all we can do. And it’s our philosophy here at the company that they’re better taken care of by the private sector than by the government. I don’t know if this sort of thing is common up in Canada, but in southern California a number of large and very successful corporations make it a habit, for example, to lire victims of Down syndrome. They make very good employees once they find their niche.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Anne said. “Which category does … is his name Dave?” Dalton nodded. “Which category does Dave fall into? I’m simply curious. Certainly he doesn’t have Down syndrome?”

  “No, no, no. Of course he doesn’t.” He sat back in his chair now and looked at the ceiling as if he were working something out. “You know, it would almost be better if he did. There’d be a certain degree of predictability, at least. You could work with him without …” He bit his lip and squinted. “This is rather a private matter, of course, and I’m already out on a limb here, simply having brought it up with someone who’s not a confidential employee. On the other hand, I think that an attractive woman like you has the right to know about any … peculiarities in the personalities of her fellow workers.”

  “Honestly,” Anne said, “it was just idle curiosity. I shouldn’t have asked
. It’s not my business.”

  “On the contrary, it might well become your business. You wanted a category? How about ‘emotionally damaged’?” He widened his eyes when he said this, in a way that made it look as if it hurt just a little bit.

  “That’s a common enough category.”

  “I suppose it is. I don’t know all the details of the case—nobody does, really, except Dave—but some years back he was involved in the drowning of an adolescent girl.”

  For a moment Anne was speechless. “That’s terrible,” she said finally. “How many years ago?”

  “I don’t know, really. A few.”

  She nodded. A few … “How old was the girl?”

  “Fourteen, something like that. Maybe fifteen. All I can tell you is that the details were a little bit murky. My brother will tell you that Dave was a hero, trying to save this girl’s life, and that’s pretty much been the prevailing story. And maybe it’s true. I don’t know for sure that it’s not. There was some evidence, though, that there was a … relationship. What the hell can I call it?” He waved his hands helplessly. “Let’s just say there might have been something between them.” He gave her an arch look now. “Put it this way: she was far too young for Dave to have had a legitimate interest in her, if in fact he did have an interest in her. I don’t want to be a rumormonger here.”

  “So you’re telling me he knew her?”

  Edmund shrugged and raised his eyebrows. “That’s the way it looked, although that’s not the official story.”

  “So he’s what? A murderer? A child molester?”

  “Oh, God, no. I don’t mean that. There was no real proof. He was never even charged with a crime. Let’s just say that the papers implied that there was more to the drowning than meets the eye. I guess that makes it public knowledge, and there’s no reason for me to be so hesitant here, but I can’t really say any more than that. There’s a certain protocol that I’ve got to follow as an employer….”

  “Of course there is.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to bore you with all of this downbeat talk. I’m a little out of line, and I apologize. And I hate like hell to be running Dave down, because we try to be as supportive as we can be around here. But you’ll be working with him fairly closely, and if it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t have brought the subject up. We had a little bit of difficulty with falling objects today, Dave and I did, and I’m afraid I’m a little sensitive about the safety of our employees, myself included. There’s no way I want to start wearing a football helmet around here. On the other hand, you’re getting tired of hearing me run down a man you don’t even know. I’m getting a little bit tired of it. He’s an old family friend, as I said, and I want to give him the benefit of every doubt. But I’ve got a business to run here, too.”

  “I guess that’s the truth.”

  “Sometimes it’s a hard truth. There are elements of running a business that just aren’t very pleasant.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “You be careful, then. If his behavior is out of line in any way, report it to me. I’ll hold what you tell me in the strictest confidence.”

  “Well, thank you for the advice, Mr. Dalton. I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “Edmund,” he said to her, smiling again. “You call me Edmund, and I’ll call you Anne. Now, you’ve already met my brother Casey. You won’t see him around much. He’s another surfer, only he never got over it. Never really grew up. I guess you don’t have to when you can use your father as a banker. Everybody calls my father the Earl, by the way, like a title. His name actually is Earl, but almost nobody calls him plain Earl. It’s always the Earl. He’ll be back in town this afternoon. You’ll know who he is when you see him. I think I can guarantee that. I guess you could say he’s a character.”

  Dalton shook his head fondly, as if recalling something humorous about his father, and it occurred to Anne that he looked all right when he smiled. She saw then that his nails were manicured, which had always struck her as weird in a man….

  But so what? She liked a manicure now and then herself. There was something luxurious and relaxing about it that was no doubt equally luxurious to a man. And it was possible that the clothes and the grooming were simply part of the uniform of the successful southern California businessman in the late twentieth century. The Earl of Gloucester was eccentric, to say the least, and Edmund’s stark office might easily be something like a calm in a storm instead of a lack of imagination. He was a little heavy-handed with his warnings about Dave, but then if all of this about Dave was true, then probably she should know it. Living alone as she did in an often empty building, she was an easy target.

  On the other hand, quite possibly this was all a simple case of office politics that had gotten out of hand, and she was seeing only the surface of something here, some long-standing feud. She had learned more than once in the past to avoid taking sides.

  She worked at the last of the forms now, filling in all the blanks. She collected the finished forms, tapped them straight against the top of the desk, and handed them to Edmund, who smiled happily at her.

  “I think we’ve made a very good choice in you,” he said, putting his hand briefly on her shoulder.

  “I’ll try to keep you thinking that way.” She smiled back at him.

  ‘I’m absolutely certain you will,” he said.

  16

  IN A LITTLE STREET OFF HILLSIDE AVENUE IN VICTORIA, British Columbia, was a narrow and musty bookshop that Anne found during the last summer she lived at home. She was eighteen, and in September she would move to Seattle to attend the University of Washington. But in that last carefree summer she made an effort to spend time with her mother, who went into town on business on Monday and Wednesday afternoons. Anne had four or five hours to herself in Victoria, which were never quite enough. She sat on the benches along Government Street and sketched boats in the harbor and views of the Parliament Building and the Empress Hotel and the flower-hung streetlamps against a cloud-drift sky. And if she had time, she walked up Hillside to the bookshop, the end store in a row of picturesque old buildings that had been built a century earlier.

  The bookshop was three stories high and no more than twenty feet wide. There were dusty windows facing the streets on the front and side of the shop, but they were shaded by adjacent storefronts and half hidden by books shelved on the deep sills. Even on a sunny summer afternoon, it seemed to be perpetual evening in the store.

  On the top floor, with its exposed roof rafters and water-stained wooden beams, were art books and prints that had been priced so many years ago that she nearly always found something to take home with her. Open wooden stairs with a rickety railing ascended the back wall of the shop, the stair treads worn from use and partly hidden by stacks of unshelved books. The tilted floors were covered with a heavy old flowered linoleum in chalky blues and pinks and yellows that had clearly been meant to modernize the shop fifty years earlier. Now only the dim ghosts of the flowers were visible in the center of the aisles, and patches of linoleum had crumbled away altogether to reveal scattered islands of pine floorboard.

  Late one afternoon in August, Anne browsed alone through the books upstairs, listening idly to the sound of rain on the roof. A summer storm lingered over the harbor, and the rain hammered against the shingles and drove against the windowpanes. Because of the dreary weather, it was more than usually dark in the shop, and except for the rain it was quiet, with no other customers and with the old owner dozing in his chair downstairs.

  Vaguely it dawned on her that she was listening to the rain on the roof almost in the way she would listen to distant music. The drumming had a monotonous quality to it, as if the rain were falling in a repeated pattern of drops. She listened more intently, idly turning the pages of an old book, and it began to sound to her almost as if someone were walking on the shingles overhead, marching in place, the sound of their footfalls having become one with the rain, and, it seemed to her now, with the beating of her own heart.


  At this same moment it seemed to her that she was utterly alone in the shop, that the owner had gone out, perhaps closed the place up, having forgotten that she was up there. The idea sent a thrill of fear through her, and abruptly she knew that she wasn’t alone at all, that someone else was in the room, upstairs, right now. How they had come unseen up the stairs, she couldn’t say, but they had. She stood very still, listening. The room had rapidly grown cool, and the light glowing from the several ceiling lamps had dimmed away to a vague coppery glow. Quietly she shelved the book that she had just taken down and slowly turned toward the stairs, suddenly anxious to leave. And right then, in the narrow space between the eye-level books in front of her and the shelf above them, she saw something move, just a quick glimpse of red cloth—someone in the aisle against the far wall of the room.

  Still she heard nothing except the rain. She stepped toward the top of the stairs, around the edge of the shelves, and peered down the center aisle. It was empty. She knew someone was there. The certainty of it had intensified, and along with it was a growing atmosphere of vague menace. There was the faint stench of burning on the air, too, distant and muted as if carried on the wind, and she felt a crawling sensation, a fingernails-on-a-chalkboard sensation. She looked down the stairs, but they were empty. There was no sound at all from below. The rain drummed on the roof, and the odd footsteplike shuffling continued almost hypnotically, the sound ghostly and insubstantial, as if someone were walking along paved paths at the edge of her imagination, at the edge of her memory.

  “Hello?” she said. Her voice was small, but she couldn’t bring herself to speak louder. There was no answer. She walked slowly along the stair railing toward the inner wall of the shop, edging past the books to see down the third aisle. Nothing. No one was there. The middle aisle was still empty. No one had been there at all. No one could have been there. She turned now, back toward the top of the stairs, glancing at the window….