The Winter Beach

by Kate Wilhelm

  He got out the book on hawks, which he had started, then put aside. He did not like books on natural history, could not understand people who became rapturous over animals or scenery. From time to time he looked up swiftly from the book as if only by catching it unawares would he be able to detect the fog if it did start to penetrate the house.

  He came to a chapter that dealt with Sir John Hawkwood, a fourteenth-century mercenary, and his interest quickened. Here was a man he could understand thoroughly. With no nonsense about loyalty to a state or church or any abstract principle, he had gone about his business of hiring himself out to the highest bidder, had done the job contracted for, then gone on to the next without looking back. He had used the weaknesses of others against them and in the end had been rich and honored. Taney was sharp, Lasater thought then; she had made her point that Hawkwood and those like him somehow had been bypassed by one aspect of the evolutionary growth of consciousness. They had not achieved the level of conscience that would necessarily act as a rein on their desires. Unlike the hawk, also without mercy, they were creatures whose needs were not immediate and inseparable from survival. Forever barred from the garden where the innocents still dwelled, and stalled on the ladder of evolution, they existed apart; symbol-making, dissembling, unrecognized before they acted and often after they acted, they were capable of incalculable evil.

  Lasater snapped the book shut. She was going too far, talking as if those people had some kind of deficiency like a diabetic. And she contradicted herself, he thought angrily, first talking about all the stuff hawks grabbed for lunch: baby birds, rabbits, chicks, whatever they could lift, and then saying they could do no wrong. If he took something, she would be on his case fast. He despised people who were that unaware of their own double standards.

  “Taney,” he muttered, “deserves whatever she gets.”

  * * * *

  Sunshine on her face awakened Lyle. She stirred, turned her head fretfully, and slowly drifted to full consciousness. Almost resentfully, she pulled the afghan over her face and tried to go back to sleep, but she was fully awake. She did not move again for several minutes. She had not expected to wake up. She remembered snatches of consciousness, pain, fever, thirst, and she remembered that she had gone through the stages she had read about. She had felt self-pity, then anger, fury actually that this was happening to her, alone in the wilderness. That had passed and she had felt only resignation, and finally anticipation. She had read about those stages preceding death, and when she realized she was looking forward to the end, she had thought with a start: it's true then. And now she was awake.

  Her fever was gone, or at least way down, and she felt only a terrible weakness and thirst. Her mouth was parched, her throat felt raw, her lips were cracked. She raised herself to her elbow and looked for something to drink and saw a can of orange juice; she had not been able to open it the last time she had been awake. She reached for it and pulled it close to her but was too tired to find the opener and finish the task. She rested until her thirst drove her to renewed effort and this time she found the bottle opener and punctured the can with it, only to find she could not lift it to her mouth. Straws were scattered over the car; she groped for one and finally got it in the can and sipped the drink. She rested, drank again, then once more. By then she could pull herself up to a sitting position. Even propped up against the door, she found sitting too strenuous, and lay down again. She dozed, not for long; the sun was still on her when she opened her eyes the next time.

  For the next several hours she sipped juice, dozed, sat up for seconds at a time, then minutes. She tried to remember what she had done through her ordeal, tried to remember her dreams. In one of them Lasater's face had grown so large it took up her entire field of vision; it had said, “Are you going to do it?” When the mouth opened, it became a terrible black pit.

  “No.”

  “Honey, why can't you lie just a little?”

  “Why can't you not lie just a little?”

  “You make categorical statements and then feel obligated to live up to them. Now I have to get you out of here so I can bring in someone else.” He shot her and while he was dragging her down the beach for the tide to take, he kept complaining, “You're nothing but a headache, you know? What would it have cost you?”

  “Stop,” she said then. He released her and she stood up laughing.

  He stared at her aghast, then furiously stalked away. She thought of the dream and could make no sense of it. It was either straightforward and meant exactly what it said, or it was so deep it eluded her. What would it have cost? she thought. She was not certain. Maybe she would have done a good thing even, but it was dirty; she felt certain of that, although she would have been unable to defend it if it were ever proven that Saul was a killer, or a smuggler, or whatever else they might claim.

  She remembered a silver rain when all the fir trees had been transformed into Christmas trees heavily decorated with tinsel. She had been delighted with it, and if she had been able to get up and go out into it, she would have done so. That must have been when she was at her most feverish, her most delirious, she decided.

  In a dream she had agonized over having to choose between Saul and Carmen, and they had waited patiently while she vacillated. She smiled; the rest of the dream was gone, forgotten, and probably it was just as well. Resting now she thought of the meaning of that dream: although she was almost ashamed of her admission, she was attracted to both of them. It was because they both accepted her unquestioningly, with approval, and either they were blind to her flaws, or thought them so unimportant that they actually became insignificant. She could not remember being treated exactly like this before. When she had been younger there had been the standard boyfriends, a proposal or two before she and Gregory had decided to make their arrangement permanent. All that, she thought decisively, had been biological, a burning in the groin, an itch between her legs, nothing more. Even at the height of passion, she had always known that Gregory was fantasizing someone else, someone made up of bits and pieces of movie stars and pictures in magazines. She never had talked about this with anyone because she had accepted it the way she accepted hunger and thirst and growing old, everything that was part of being human. But Saul and Carmen had not looked at her as if they were comparing her to an ideal who existed only in their heads. They had looked at her, had seen her as she was, and had accepted her. And she loved them both for it.

  They were not afraid, she thought; everyone else she knew was afraid, at least most of the time. She remembered telling Saul she had been afraid all her life without ever knowing of what or why. Gregory was afraid. Mike's death had terrified him, as it had terrified her. She, blaming herself, had lived in dread of the day he would also blame her, because that would have justified her guilt. He must have felt the same way, she realized, and felt a rush of sympathy for him that she had not known before. He had needed to run all the way across the country, just as she had needed to run to the woods, to the hills.

  She thought of Hugh Lasater, whose fear made him try to manipulate reality by manipulating truth, but the reality was always there, just out of sight, out of hearing, with its infinite terror.

  Thinking about Hugh Lasater, she sat up again, this time without the accompanying dizziness she had felt before. She knew she needed food, her weakness was at least partly attributable to no food for ... How long? It had not occurred to her to wonder until now. She tried the radio, nothing but static up here in the hills. She began to think of bread in milk, chicken broth steaming hot and fragrant. She settled for an overripe banana and ate almost half of it before she was too tired to bother with any more. She dozed, wakened, tried another banana, and later in the afternoon decided she had to try to get to the creek for water. She had stale bread, and wanted only some water to soften it in.

  She was sticky from spilled juice, she felt grimier than she had been since childhood. The creek was no more than fifteen feet from her car but she had to stop to rest twice be
fore she reached it. The dishtowel she had been using to cool herself with was muddy, filthy; she could imagine what her face looked like. The water was shockingly cold; she held the towel in it until some of the dirt was washed away, wrung it out slightly and then washed her face and neck. She was seized with a chill then. Shaking so hard that she spilled almost as much water as she had been able to get in the juice can, she started back to the car, thinking of the heater, of the afghan, of going back to sleep wrapped snugly in her poncho, covered from toe to head, sleeping deeply without dreams ... And she knew she could not do that, not now. It was time to go home.

  The heater took a long time to warm the car. She sat huddled in the afghan until then, leaning against the door, her eyes closed. She was afraid to lie down for fear she would fall asleep. She kept seeing her own bed, her covers, sheets, a hot bath, something hot to drink, coffee. She wanted to be home before dark, and she knew it would take her a long time to get there.

  She ate a few bites of bread softened in water, and marveled at how hungry she was and how little she could eat at any one time. Two bites of this, three of that. She imagined her body as a giant sponge, absorbing water, juice, whatever she could pour into it, sucking it up greedily, dividing it fairly among her parched tissues. Her tongue felt more normal, and her throat hardly hurt now; she imagined her blood as sluggish as molasses from the refrigerator, demanding more and more of the fluids, stirring, starting to flow again, scolding...

  She smiled at her nonsense and turned on the key, and this time she started down the dirt road. Within ten minutes she had to stop. Her arms were quivering with fatigue; her feet were leaden. And when Hugh Lasater turned up with more threats, more demands, she thought, with her head resting on the steering wheel, she would tell him to get out and, if he did not go, she would call the police and complain.

  And she would call Saul and tell him a man was asking strange questions about him. No more than that. If he knew he was guilty of something, it would be enough. And if he was guilty of murder, she asked herself, was she willing to be his accomplice? She couldn't judge him, she knew, and she turned on the key and started her lurching drive down the hill, down into fog.

  She could remember nothing of this road, which was so steep and curvy it seemed now a miracle that she had driven up it. It twisted and turned and plummeted down, faithfully following the white-water creek. As she went down, the fog thickened until by the time she knew she had come far enough to have reached the picnic area, she could see no farther than a few feet in any direction. She knew she had missed the park when her wheels began to throw gravel. She stopped many times, sometimes turning off the motor, sometimes letting it run while she rested.

  Then, with her front wheels almost on the coast highway she rested for the last time. She would not dare stop again on the highway. She closed her eyes visualizing the rest of her route. The steep climb straight up, over the crest, down again, straight all the way to the lagoon, then the sharp upward curve around the far side of the lagoon, down to the bridge and her own drive. She could leave the car in the driveway and walk the rest of the way. Not soon, but eventually. Reluctantly she started the last leg of her journey.

  * * * *

  One more day, Lasater told himself, he'd give her one more day to show, and if she didn't ... He had no other plan and his mind remained stubbornly blank when he tried to formulate one. He was certain she would be back before his self-imposed deadline.

  He should have used a professional, he thought suddenly, as if stricken with terrible hindsight. If this fizzled it would be used against him that he had gone with an amateur when there were people available who could have done the job the first week. He worried about it, playing it this way and that, looking at the possibilities, and then he left it, just as a well-fed cat leaves a mouse corpse behind. He did not believe Werther would have let any professional inside his house. He had not stayed loose and on the prowl all these years, first eluding the Nazis, and then customs, whatever had come along, by being stupid. He had accepted Taney because she was an amateur, and Taney had to deliver. Lasater still held the image of Taney handing over the evidence he needed. It was a strong image, strong enough to keep him immobile in her house while he waited for her to return.

  It was nearly five when he heard the car in the driveway. A minute passed, another, and finally he could wait no longer; he stamped out into the fog to see why she was stalling. He yanked open her car door to find her slumped forward against the steering wheel. He thought she was out, but at the sound of the door opening she stirred and raised her head. She looked like hell. He had not taken it seriously that she might be really sick; he had been convinced that she had run because her nerve had failed. But she was sick all right.

  “Lyle, baby, you look like death warmed over. Come on, let's get you inside.” He helped her out, then steadied her as she walked to the house. “Jesus, you had us all worried. Carmen's been all over the hills looking for you, they called the cops even.” They had entered the house by then and he deposited her on the couch. “What can I get you? Are you okay sitting up like that?”

  “Just get out,” she said. Her voice was hoarse as if she had a sore throat. “I won't do anything for you. I don't care what you threaten. Get out.”

  “Okay, okay. I'll give Werther a call. I told him I would when you showed up. He's been worried.” She started to get up and he pushed her back. She was too weak to resist his shove, which actually had been quite gentle. For the first time he wondered if she was going to get well, if she had pneumonia or something.

  Carmen answered the first ring. “Mrs. Taney's back,” Lasater said. “She's really sick, she might even be dying. I think she should be taken to a hospital, except there's no way you could get there through that fog. Is there a doctor anywhere nearby?” He knew there was no doctor closer than twenty-six miles. Carmen said he would tell Mr. Werther and hung up. “Do that, kiddo,” Lasater murmured. He turned again to Lyle who had her head back, her eyes closed. “Listen, sweetie, they think I'm Richard Vos, a New York editor. I told them I had your contracts for you. They don't need to know more than that. Got it?”

  Her nod was almost imperceptible.

  “Okay. He'll probably send the kid over. When he gets here, I'm leaving. I'll be back at the park by the lagoon. You just get some rest now, take it easy for a couple of days. I'll see you later in the week.”

  Again she moved her head slightly. “I won't help you,” she said.

  “Okay, just don't worry about it for now. Get well first. And, Lyle, don't tell them anything. You're up to your pink little ears in this and it's classified. You blab, and, honey, they can put you away for a long time.”

  She started to take off her coat and when he touched her in order to help, she flinched involuntarily. He shrugged and moved away again. Her eyes were sunken, her face haggard, but her windburn was clearing up. She was pale as a corpse. “Honey, you look a hundred years old,” he said softly. “I wouldn't lie down and stay still very long if I were you. Someone might want to shovel you under.” She opened her eyes and for a moment he was startled. He had not noticed how very green they were before. Or now they looked greener against her pale skin. There was hatred in her gaze; when a woman is on the downhill slide of thirty-five, she doesn't want to be told she looks like hell, he thought maliciously. He regretted his own impulse to make her open her eyes and acknowledge his presence; now she looked more alive. Coolly he said, “I'm leaving your contracts on the table. I think he's coming. Remember, I'm Richard Vos.”

  He had heard steps on the porch, but no automobile noises in the driveway. It was the kid, come over to check first. He nodded, it was as he had expected. He opened the door and admitted Carmen who was carrying a paper sack.

  “Mrs. Taney, how are you?” Carmen hurried to her and took her hand in both of his, studying her face. Lasater noticed that his fingers went to her pulse. Medical school dropout? Paramedic? He made a mental note to check it out.

 
“Don't try to talk,” Carmen said, rising then. “I brought some soup. I'll just heat it up for you. Have you eaten anything at all since you left?”

  “A little,” she whispered in her hoarse voice.

  “Soup is what you need,” Carmen said and went to the kitchen where he shrugged off his coat and tossed it over a chair, and then rummaged for a pan.

  “If you think you can manage,” Lasater said, “I'll be going. I'm susceptible to viruses and bacteria and things like that. Get a sore throat if anyone within a mile coughs, you know. I tried to get a doctor, but there aren't any in Salmon Key. I'll be going back to the Lagoon Park.” He was keeping his distance from Lyle, watching her as if afraid she might sneeze in his direction without warning. He snatched up his coat and tossed it over his shoulders and opened the door. “If you need me, you know. But I can't do anything. I don't know a thing about how to care for sick people.”

  Inside the motor home he snapped to Follett, “Let's go. Back to the park.”

  “What the hell's going on?”

  “Never mind. We're leaving. At the first turn, I'm going to stop and you get out, go back up here and keep an eye on things. Werther's got to come over. The kid will either call him or go collect him when he thinks the coast is clear. She's really sick.”

  He drove slowly, unable to see more than two feet ahead through the fog. Grumbling, Follett left the motor home when he stopped, and Lasater continued down the highway. Visibility was so poor it would take him nearly an hour to get back to the park. If Taney could drive in it in her shape, he thought, so could he. He reached the bottom of the drive and stopped, trying to remember if the road had the white line on the side all the way, or only on curves, trying to remember if the road curved between here and the bridge.