A debt was due. He needed to pay her back for what her music had done for him, and here was his chance.
Five minutes later, he parked in one of the few unnumbered spots near the office of the Starfish Motel, a plain, two-story building on the west side of Highway 101 and down the hill from his house. It wasn't much to look at, to put it mildly, especially from the backside, with its flaking gray paint and rusting metal staircase, but he knew that the sweeping ocean view it afforded all of its occupants more than made up for its drab exterior. Plus, the rooms themselves, although plain, were pretty nice for the money.
He motioned for her to park in the empty spot next to him, then gestured for her to wait in the Navigator. The hodgepodge of houses and other small motels that lined the street seemed quiet, many windows dark, parking lots less than half full, which was no surprise for a Sunday in September. A good night to slip in unnoticed.
The clerk, a kid who smelled like cigarettes and was more interested in the episode of Pawn Stars playing on the TV mounted in the corner of the lobby than in Gage, said they had five rooms available that could be booked for the week. Gage chose one on the first floor on the corner, easier to get in and out without having to walk by a lot of people, and was back outside with the keys before the show had gone to commercial.
She powered down her tinted window, once again wearing her sunglasses. He laughed.
"What?" she asked.
"Do you always wear sunglasses at night?"
"Oh." She took them off. "Sorry. It's just, you know, habit."
"So people won't recognize you?"
"I guess."
"Does it really help that much?"
"Probably not. It's not just that, though. It's like … you don't have to make eye contact, right? If people know you're looking at them, they think that's an invitation. It's weird, but it does make a difference."
He didn't know what to say to that, so he handed her the keys and told her where the room was. They carried her bags to her room, fortunate not to encounter anyone coming or going. She didn't have one guitar, but three, and he carried all of them. He was proud to do so.
The room smelled faintly musty, but otherwise was quite nice: a queen bed with an appropriate starfish comforter, paintings of seashells, pastel-blue walls. The kitchenette was more like a kitchen corner, in that the oven, sink, microwave, half-sized refrigerator, and white laminate cabinets were all crammed into a space hardly bigger than a phone booth, but at least all the pieces were there. She could live there unobtrusively for quite a long time, which was the important thing.
After tossing her bags on the bed, she opened the screen door. The waves crashing on the beach, the salty breeze rustling past the curtains—the sounds and smells of the ocean quickly invaded the space.
"It's so dark out there I can't even see it," she said.
"It's not more than fifty feet away."
"Good. I like it."
"So the place will work?"
"It's great."
She turned and smiled. He smiled back.
"You okay for the night," he said, "or do you want me to go to the store?"
"I'm okay tonight," she said.
"I'll bring some food by in the morning."
"All right. And what's your plan? Who are you going to talk to first?"
"I need to think about it. I'll let you know in the morning."
"You'll keep me in the loop, though?"
"Absolutely."
"Wait, you don't have my number. We need to exchange—"
"I don't have a number."
She smiled faintly. "What?"
"I don't have a phone."
"You don't have a phone?"
"Nope."
"Why not?"
He sighed. "Not this again."
"Excuse me?"
"Nothing. I'll update you in person, okay? We'll figure it out as we go along. Let's just start with tomorrow morning."
She still looked a bit confused, but she nodded. He should have left right then. A wish goodnight, a perfunctory nod, that was all the moment dictated. But he wanted to say something more, something about her music. Maybe nothing quite so personal as what her music had really meant to him, but something. She must have taken the uncomfortable silence the wrong way, because she stared at the floor and chewed on her bottom lip, obviously troubled.
"I need to say something," she said.
Already, he knew something was off. She sounded nervous.
"Okay," he said.
"We're not, you know, having sex."
"What?"
"I just feel I need to get that out there right away."
Gage was so taken aback that words failed him. He found her attractive, certainly, but the last thing he'd been thinking about was making some sort of pass at her. She looked up at him. Again, she must have read his silence the wrong way, because she took a stutter step toward him, her expression now troubled. When she spoke, her words spilled out in a jumbled rush.
"I know that was blunt," she said. "I'm sorry. I hope I didn't your feelings. It's not … I mean, you're obviously attractive. I'm sure you have no trouble with women. I'm just saying—you know, if things were different, if I was … I'm just not in a place, you know? I made a pact with myself. I got so messed up with men I decided—three years, that's what I told myself. Three years without … Okay, I'm babbling. I've said too much already. It'd be helpful if you said something now. Really."
"Okay," he said.
"Okay?"
He shrugged.
"That's it," she said. "Okay?"
"I guess."
"Okay to what?"
"Okay to … your request."
"Huh."
"What do you want me to say?"
She didn't answer for a moment. He heard footsteps on the landing above them, laughter. In the room next door, someone turned on a television and he heard a male voice, steady, droning, like a news anchor. Above it all, the ocean waves continued their rhythmic dance on the beach.
"I don't know," she said. "I guess I expected … I don't know."
"You expected me to put up more of a fight?"
"No. I mean … I, um, I'm just confused."
"I'll say."
She looked at him sharply. "Excuse me?"
"You're confused. I appreciate you putting up the red flag, but honestly, Nora, I wasn't even thinking along those lines."
"Oh," she said.
"Obviously you're an attractive woman. I doubt you have any trouble with men, especially if you're so accustomed to them throwing themselves at you an hour after meeting them that you make them sign some sort of terms of service agreement just to have a conversation with you."
Her face reddened. "That's not—that's not what I was saying!"
"Well, good. Because I'm not one of your groupies, Nora."
"I didn't—I didn't say—"
"And I'm not some celebrity sycophant out to get his jollies by trying to bag the great Nora West like some sort of trophy. The last thing on my mind was how I could get you into bed. I mean, we just met, for God's sake."
"I know! You just—I mean, if you lived my life … If you—if you had to deal with—"
"Oh, I'm sure. If I lived your life, and had men throwing themselves at me all the time, and probably women, too, I might just become self-absorbed enough to think that all people are that way. But not everybody's that way, Nora. I'm not that way. Some people actually believe in, you know, romance. Or letting things go as they will, whether something develops or not."
"I believe in romance."
"Good. I do too. But I wasn't thinking about that either. All I was really thinking about was how to help you. Is that okay? Does my motivation have to be more complex than that?"
She was all wound up with another fiery retort, but his question stopped her. She blinked several times, her pupils so dilated he saw only a sliver of her brown irises. The pink in her cheeks had deepened into a shade of crimson, spreading to her ears, her
forehead, and her neck. She took a deep, shuddering breath, then looked at the floor.
"I think you should go now," she said.
He nodded, though she wasn't looking at him. Had he been too harsh? Of course he'd been too harsh. Navigating the troubled waters of interpersonal conflict had never been his forte. When someone poked him with a stick, he hit back with a club. It was his way. Garrison Gage, master conversationalist.
"I'll be by in the morning with groceries," he said.
She didn't say anything, but when he started for the door, she followed him. The atmosphere between them had been poisoned, but he wasn't sure what to do about it. Partly it was her fault, partly his, but there was no point in assigning blame—it was what it was, and here they were. He opened the door. An elderly couple was shuffling past at just that moment, so he waited, smiling politely at them until they'd passed, making sure to use his body to block Nora from view.
When he turned to say goodbye to Nora, hoping to part on at least somewhat more friendly terms, she was still glaring at him with enough intensity to turn sand into glass.
"I'm not self-absorbed," she said.
"Okay," he said.
"Really, I'm not."
"Okay."
"Will you stop saying okay? I don't think you believe me. It's fine, you don't believe me. But I'm not self-absorbed. I'm not. I just wanted to correct you on that."
"I stand corrected," he said.
He hadn't meant to say it with a smug tone, but he could hear himself, and he certainly sounded smug. His rudeness was apparently unstoppable. Once out, there was little hope putting the jerk inside him back in the bottle. He knew this from experience. Unfettered, unchained, unbridled, here was the side of him that he'd worked to soften in recent years—mostly failing, but still he'd tried. Garrison 2.0, Zoe had jokingly called his feeble attempts at a softer approach. In a strange way, it always felt liberating allowing his pure, raw self out into the light, but he still felt bad it was happening with Nora.
She started to say something else, sputtered a little, then shook her head and started to close the door. He felt a sudden pang of remorse—not so much at what he'd said, or how he'd handled things, but simply that their first night was going to end in such a rotten way. He wanted to salvage it somehow.
"Nora?"
She stopped and looked at him through the crack in the door, eyes weary.
"I really like your music," he said.
It felt phony coming out of his mouth, even if it hadn't felt phony saying it. So much for an eloquent explanation of all her work had done for him. He might as well have sent her a greeting card. She tilted her head down, part nod, part act of surrender.
He was about to try again when she closed the door.
Chapter 5
For his first five years in Barnacle Bluffs, Gage had lived alone. The house on the hill, purchased outright for cash by parting with the brownstone in New York and all of its blood-soaked memories, had offered him the kind of solitary refuge he'd so desperately wanted. Alex had already been in town, of course, and that might have factored into his plans on some minor level—the recognition, even then, that a completely hermitlike existence probably wasn't healthy—but it was the house itself that had really committed him to the move. With the hill below, the undeveloped forest of firs and oaks behind, and the wall of arbor vitae that separated the house from its nearest neighbor, it had resembled a private retreat as much as any two-thousand-square-foot A-frame on only half an acre could.
There may be people a stone's throw away from him on three sides, and a sprawling apartment complex a short jaunt through what only seemed like a massive forest behind him, but the feeling of isolation, of being cut off from the world and all of its problems, was real enough—even if it was only an illusion. A view of the ocean, the night whisper of the trees, and years to stew in his guilt unencumbered by the annoyances of other people: it was all he'd needed. The illusion had worked, at least for a time.
Yet there was another way to look at the seclusion of his house, and the way it had been used to separate him from the world. It wasn't until he rounded the corner on his gravel drive, coming back from dropping off Nora at the Starfish Motel that Sunday night, that he finally realized what should have been obvious to him when he bought the place. The wall of firs to the east, black and textureless in the night, was so solid it could have been concrete. The dozens of column-like arbor vitae, in nicely spaced parallel lines, resembled giant metal bars. This house, his private little compound, wasn't a retreat.
It was a prison.
This was the feeling he carried into the house with him, of being an inmate of a jail of his own making. He didn't bother turning on any lights, settling into his armchair, brooding. The digital oven clock, a beacon of green in the dark, read 9:32. He watched it until it turned to 9:33. He felt an impending depression weighing him down, like the way the air thickens with a coming storm, and shrugged it off with a morose resignation. What would come would come. He listened to the sounds of the house, the dissatisfied hum of the refrigerator, the sigh of the wind against the windows, the wincing creaks and groans of support beams high above him, and wondered if the house missed Zoe too. Maybe it only missed the cat. After all, the cat had spent a lot more time in it.
"Carrot," he said to the dark.
Without quite realizing it, he found himself standing in the doorway to her room. He flicked on the light. She'd tidied it up quite a bit, much tidier than she'd kept it when actually living in it: the bed was made, the floor was clean, the tops of the dressers were organized, agates, shell shells, and other knickknacks she'd picked up on her beach walks neatly arranged. She'd left her Radiohead posters, her packed bookshelves, and most of the framed black-and-white photos. They were hers, photography something she'd been dabbling with since he'd known her, taking them with her Nikon DSLR and printing them on a compact photo printer he'd bought her for Christmas a couple years back.
Some of the photos pictured popular places on the Oregon coast—a sunset view of Haystack Rock in Canon Beach, the Devil's Churn outside of Florence on an overcast day—but most actually pictured small, unremarkable things. Or perhaps remarkable, if seen for what they really were: a piece of driftwood that looked like a hunched old man, a lonely seagull pecking at a piece of gum in the casino parking lot, a rusty, abandoned lawn chair half buried in sand. She'd taken a few pictures of people, too. He smiled when he realized that the one of she and Gage standing in the yard behind the Turret House, taken by Alex, was gone.
He also saw that she'd taken her camera and her printer. Why this made him sad, he could not say.
Struck by the sudden urge to call her, he started for the front door. In five minutes, he could be on the phone at the gas station down the hill. Or was it too late? He stopped, his hand on the doorknob, and realized how foolish he was being. No, he would not succumb to his loneliness with such self-pitying melodrama. What was happening to him?
Instead, he bustled from room to room, as much as a man with a bum knee could bustle, turning on all the lights and directing his sudden burst of energy into a flurry of cleaning. It soon became clear that the house didn't need cleaning, as Zoe had apparently done it recently. This deepened his sadness: one, because she'd cleaned the house and he hadn't noticed, and two, because he'd told her many times over the years that she didn't need to clean at all; he'd be happy to pay for a housekeeper again. She'd always taken offense to this suggestion, as if he was throwing shade at her cleaning prowess. He'd often wondered if the real reason was because her grandmother had been the last housekeeper, and the thought of replacing her with a stranger was just too much for Zoe to bear.
Somehow, with great effort, Gage still managed to collect half a bag worth of garbage, mostly piles of mail she'd left for him to go through, but it was enough for him to feel like he'd accomplished something.
He tied off the string and carried the bag outside. It was going on midnight, and the crescent moon was half
obscured in strips of clouds like a belly dancer spinning amidst rippling scarves. The night felt warm, the heat of the day still lingering, but the darkness was deep enough that the firs, the arbor vitae, and the many varied colors of the ivy, juniper, and the rest of the underbrush had all seeped away, leaving a mottled black. All the light emanating from his house, yellow squares on the gravel, made the darkness that much deeper.
His garbage can was in a small, fenced-in enclosure on the south side of his house, the one area that the porch light didn't reach. With the arbor vitae looming behind it, and the firs towering to his left, even all the brightly illuminated windows of his house couldn't alleviate the impenetrable darkness. It was blackness all around, so black he couldn't even see the lid of the can and had to feel for it. The odor of rancid meat—he guessed Zoe had taken it upon herself to clean the fridge, too—left no doubt he was in the right place. He tossed the bag inside, slamming the lid down in the hopes of trapping the smell. No go. He still got a good whiff of rotten foulness, and he cringed away from it, backing out of the clearing with a hand over his nose.
That was when he saw someone standing in the trees.
It was the silhouette of a man, or at least what seemed like a man, standing between the trunks of two firs, just far enough back in the shadows that his form was almost, but only almost, indistinguishable from the rest of the darkness. It was only the man's torso, the hedge of junipers on that corner blocking his lower form from view, and the branches of a young sapling next to him also blocked part of his face, but Gage was still sure it was a man.
"Hello?" Gage said.
The man didn't move, so still that Gage began to doubt whether he was a real person at all. They both remained absolutely still, a standoff of sorts, and Gage was determined to wait him out. He didn't even want to look away. If the man fled, he wanted to see it, as proof he was real. His Beretta … it was back in the house, and he felt defenseless and exposed. He didn't even have his cane, not that a pursuit through the trees was even a possibility. Was the stranger armed? He could have been aiming a handgun at Gage right now, using the waist-high juniper to block the view.
A Lighthouse for the Lonely Heart: An Oregon Coast Mystery (Garrison Gage Series Book 5) Page 4
