Mean High Tide (Thorn Series Book 3)

by James W. Hall

  On the screen Doris stood at the rear of the car loading her suitcases into the trunk. And even from that distance, even with the grainy film and the bad lighting, she could see her right eye dark and bulging where Harden had struck her. Not the first blow of their marriage either.

  Doris stood up, turned her back to the screen.

  "Oh, wait, look," Sylvie said. "Here comes somebody. Who is it? Who could it be? Oh yes, look, it's the sad little daughter. Yes, here she comes now."

  Slowly, Doris turned and watched as the camera followed Gwyneth sprinting to the car. She hurtled at her mother, and as she closed in, she balled up her fists, began to flail them at Doris. Windmilling blow after blow. Doris stood still, not defending against the punches.

  From fifteen years away, Doris could still feel the blows, the memory sharp. She moved in front of the screen, the colors playing on her face as if she stood before an enormous bonfire.

  "I had to get us away, Sylvie. We were dying here, shriveling up. You girls had no friends, I had no adult to talk to for months at a time. He made us suspicious of everybody. Always on guard. Believing every stranger might try to murder us. It was a terrible way to live. I was withering up inside. You were too, Sylvie. Both of you girls were."

  "Down in front," Sylvie said. "Down in front."

  Doris hesitated, looking helplessly into the fluttering light. Then she moved aside, sunk onto the bed again.

  On the screen the young Doris in her white dress squatted beside the white Ford and held Gwyneth to her. The girl sobbing. They stayed that way for a moment or two until Harden lurched into the frame and seized Gwyneth and yanked her out of Doris's embrace. He dragged her back to the porch, yelling out over his shoulder as he marched toward the camera.

  "He's giving you a choice, Mommy. That's what he's yelling. Leave or stay with your family. You remember, Mommy?"

  "I remember," she said faintly.

  The camera jiggled and jerked. For a moment or two the image was fogged over, then gradually it sharpened into view.

  Doris stood in the yard midway between the house and the car. The sun was directly overhead, no shadows anywhere. Doris's arms hung heavily at her sides, eyes streaming as she spoke. She remembered. Oh yes, she'd relived it a thousand times. Reconstructed it, imagined a different speech, different words that might have sent her life down some other path.

  "Now Mommy is telling Gwyneth and Sylvie that she's going to come back in a few days and take her daughters away. As soon as all the legal things get done, the divorce things, she says, she'll be back for her daughters, take them to her new life. But that's not how it turned out. That's not what happened. Is it, Mommy?"

  The young Doris finished her speech, took a long sweeping look at the grounds, then stared dully at the porch where the three of them were standing. At last she dropped her head and turned her back on them and walked to the car and got inside. The Ford sat for almost a minute before it pulled away.

  "I went to court, Sylvie, to get custody of you. But I had no money and Harden had a great deal. And he had connections. Powerful people he knew in the government. People in Washington he'd done favors for. They pulled strings for him. Found a judge who declared me unfit. A restraining order, everything. I appealed, I appealed again. I tried everything I could. Years and years I battled him to get you back.

  "But it was no use. He won, Sylvie. He humiliated me. Prevented me from ever seeing you again without his permission. It was his way of getting even, Sylvie. His way of forcing me to come back. He told me that. Told me that to my face outside the courthouse that last afternoon. 'You want your girls, you're going to have to crawl back, ask our forgiveness.' "

  "But you didn't," Sylvie said quietly. "You didn't crawl back. You didn't come back at all."

  "No. No, I didn't. I tried for years, tried every legal thing I could."

  "You never came back," Sylvie said. "You gave up on us."

  The screen was blinding white, a long strip of empty film with flecks and dashes of color. Sylvie staring into it. Silent for a moment, then harshly clearing her throat as if she were swallowing back her fury or her pain.

  "So, that was August seventh," said Sylvie, her voice hollow. "And this next part is a little later. I don't know exactly, sometime in August. A week later, maybe longer. The two little Winchester girls fending for themselves. One of them is a little less happy, the other is a little more sad."

  On the screen the colors were muted now. Shot indoors, bad lighting. The kitchen was in chaos. The round oak table turned over, pots, pans, skillets on the counters and stacked high in the sink, opened jars of jelly, peanut butter. Cans overturned. A large gray cat was hunched over a can of Spam, licking it.

  "That's Mr. Boots," Sylvie said. "Early on."

  "What's happening?" Doris said. "What's this?"

  "This is when Daddy went after you," she said. "He tried to find you right after you left. Hunt you down, bring you back. Make us a family again."

  "He left you alone?"

  "Oh, yes," Sylvie said. "You never knew, did you, Mommy? You left and you didn't come back like you said you would. So you never knew what happened to us."

  "I wrote to you every single day. For years and years."

  Sylvie shook her head emphatically.

  "You'll say anything now, Mommy. You'll lie, make up any kind of story to make it sound okay."

  "You never saw the letters, did you? Oh god, I knew he'd keep them from you."

  "You left us, Mommy. That's the whole story. You never came back. We learned how to do without you. We got very good at being without you."

  Doris came close, peered at Sylvie through the half-light.

  "How long did he leave you alone? How long was it, Sylvie?"

  "A week the first time."

  "And after that?"

  "Oh, I forget," Sylvie said brightly. "The second time, it was a month, maybe two. He left lots of food, enough for a few weeks. That is, if we hadn't wasted so much of it at first."

  "That bastard. That evil son of a bitch."

  "He wanted to find you," said Sylvie. "He wanted to bring you back, make you our mommy again."

  There was a long-distance shot from the yard, looking at the house. Everything looked normal. A slow pan around the property. The day windy, with heavy clouds off behind the pines.

  "Lights, camera, action."

  A bumpy walk across the yard, up the outside stairs, onto the porch, then into the house, the scene going shadowy, barely visible, the living room with all the same furniture it still contained. A walk down the dark hallway, the camera swinging to look into the kitchen. Very neat now. Everything washed, put away, the table upright. On the counter beside the sink sat a casserole dish. Lid off, a hunk of meat filling it.

  "Mr. Boots," Sylvie said, "tasted a lot like chicken."

  Doris felt the tears burn from her eyes.

  "No telephone, a twenty-mile walk to town. We might've managed that distance the first week, but later on we didn't have the energy. And anyway, we couldn't leave the farm because we might miss Mommy coming back for us. So we stayed. We stayed to wait for our mother. We didn't know she'd given up on us. Though maybe Gwyneth knew. Maybe she knew you'd given up."

  The picture went white for a few seconds, then a wooden chair filled the screen. It lay on its side.

  "I don't believe this requires further narration."

  The camera showed a pair of bare feet suspended a yard from the floor, and it traveled slowly up that same Easter dress that Gwyneth had worn in the earlier shot. Gwyneth's head cocked to the side, tongue showing, the noose tied off to a ceiling fan. The camera lingered on her face, lingered a long time until the dots and flashes marking the end of the reel appeared and the tail of the film began to slap against the projector, and the cockeyed screen went white again.

  "I buried her," Sylvie said. "But something kept digging her up. Something big, a bear maybe, a panther, I don't know. It was out there in the dark, and I could hear it
scratching in the dirt. And all I could do was lie there and listen. I had to bury Gwyneth five times before she stayed buried, before whatever it was that dug her up got all it wanted of her. Five times."

  Doris heard an automobile engine roar, then a few seconds later, heard it entering the yard. A door slammed, then another one. She felt the room begin a slow spin, and the bed seemed to be dropping from under her.

  "Sylvie," she said, her voice strangling her. "You're a prisoner here, aren't you? He's kept you here all these years."

  "What was I supposed to do, desert Daddy? Is that what I should've done? Like you did, Mommy? Run off."

  "Yes," she said. "To save yourself."

  "But, Mommy," said Sylvie, "you told us you were coming back. I couldn't leave. I might miss you."

  Doris heard something out in the yard, a harsh scraping sound, and she stood shakily and walked over to the window. The sun was back-lighting the clouds in the west, a ruby glow spreading along the horizon. In the distance she saw Harden working with a shovel. She couldn't tell what he was doing. Lifting the shovel and jabbing it down fiercely, as if he were trying to hack through a root. Doris gripped the metal grillwork on the window frame and shook it, but it was solid iron and mounted firmly.

  CHAPTER 31

  Hog-tied. Ankles and wrists roped together behind his back. Thorn lay on his side, his left shoulder grinding against the soggy earth. Water covering half his face and rising.

  "You awake?"

  Thorn heard the voice but couldn't tell which dimension it came from, which century. Recognized it, but something had scrambled the wiring in his head, connected red wires to blue, green to yellow. Nothing computing, lights flickering, a sound somewhere, like the splashing of fish rising for the fly, rising and breaking the surface, flipping their tails.

  Feeling water move across the side of his face, water near his mouth. And he thought he might be floating, thought he might be drifting out in the ocean. An eerie scrambled ocean, where a voice said, "Thorn, you hear me? You awake? Come on, man. Get up, we gotta move our asses."

  Hog-tied. Curled backward, spine bent against itself, cheek in the water, having to lift his head slightly so he didn't breathe in the ocean water, smelling fish, smelling the rich green funk of the Everglades. A voice speaking, but Thorn unable to unscramble the words this time. A familiar voice, but with no name attached, like an old song, humming it without remembering the words, or a perfume, one of Darcy's perfumes he could never remember the names of, Darcy always asking him which one he liked best, but hell, he liked them all, if they were on her, he liked them. Darcy gave the perfumes more aroma than they gave her.

  Thorn relaxed, rested his head in the mud, his face half underwater, held his breath, then blew bubbles into the water.

  "Thorn! Wake up, goddamn it. Wake up!"

  Yeah, now he knew whose voice that was. His old pal. What's-his-name. The cop. Out here in the twilight, the water up to his nose, over his mouth. Like here they were again at the bottom of the football pile looking at each other through their face masks. Giddy smiles. Happy as hell, until that arm came snaking down. That arm belonging to some asshole who resented anybody's accomplishment. The asshole who wanted to gouge anybody who was good at something.

  "I hear you," Thorn said. "I hear you, Sugar."

  "Jesus, thank god."

  Thorn heard a splash and felt the water swirl around his face. It was almost night and he had his eyes open now and his eyes were seeing. Dusk. Just minutes of daylight left. Thorn scooched around to see his friend, and Sugarman was hog-tied too, a few feet away, halfway between the ponds and the farmhouse.

  Sugar said, "We gotta get loose, man. Gotta do something quick. This guy's not fucking around."

  Thorn rolled onto his back, brought himself atop his arms now. His body aching in places he couldn't identify. Sugarman rolled over onto his back too, water over their chests. But no more altitude in this position, just as close to drowning. At least Thorn's mind was clearing, the damaged nerves, the frail software of consciousness reconnecting.

  "The knife," Thorn said. "It's on my ankle."

  "You got a knife?"

  "Darcy's knife. On my ankle. See if you can do it."

  Sugarman squirmed toward Thorn. Sugar with a deep gash on his forehead, an eye swollen shut.

  "What's going on, man? This a flood or what?"

  "Full moon high tide," Thorn said. "The Okehatchee River running over its banks."

  "That's one son of a bitching high tide. How much higher?"

  Sugarman wriggling closer. Thorn rolled onto his shoulder again, presenting his ankles to Sugar.

  "Could be just starting. Could get a foot higher."

  "Great," Sugar said. "Great news."

  He felt Sugar bump him. Felt his fingers struggling against the rope. Sugar's back to his back, doing it by feel. Hearing him blow into the water. Then rise up and take a long breath.

  "I can't reach it, man." Sugar huffed for breath. "Angle's all wrong. Let me try this. Let me try something else."

  While Sugarman gasped, Thorn stared at the horizon and saw against the last gray light in the western sky the silhouette of Harden Winchester with his shovel. Thirty, forty yards away, Harden with his back to them, breaking open the soft banks of one of his fish ponds. The water poured out.

  And heard Sugar take three deep breaths, then go below again, felt his friend fumbling at his ankle.

  Very clearly now, Thorn saw the shallow water spread across the yard, gleaming in the rising moonlight, the tight skin of water broken here and there by the flutter of fish. Tilapia were escaping into the yard. A splash near Thorn's face, a small fish frightened by the big men lying in its path, swerving off toward the river.

  Harden was pitching shovelfuls of muck over his shoulder, deepening the furrow he'd already made through the wall of the largest fish pond. The water streamed across his shoes. Fish caught in the sudden current, flipped and twisted, riding the water where it was headed. To the Okehatchee, to the Gulf, to the Atlantic and the reefs and the great currents that would spread those fish to every inlet and bay and sound, every feeding ground, every reef and shoal. Pandora hacking open the box.

  Sugarman choked and sputtered behind him.

  "You all right?"

  Sugar coughed and Thorn heard him splash. He twisted hard and rolled to his right, and watched helplessly as Sugar hawked up more water. When he had his breath back, he said, "Almost had it. I felt it. Almost had the knife."

  "Take it easy, Sugar. Easy."

  "Oh, sure. I take it too easy, we're gonna be dead."

  Sugarman sucked air, lying on his back, arching his neck up above the flood tide.

  "What's that son of a bitch doing? What's this about?"

  "He's letting his fish go."

  "Jesus Christ. How'd we get mixed up with these people?"

  "Gotta get that knife, Sugar. Gotta get it quick."

  "I know, I know. It's just that some of us can't stay under as long as others, okay?"

  Thorn rolled back onto his other shoulder and watched as Harden continued to break down the walls of the fish pond.

  "Why the hell'd you have to snap the scabbard shut? If you'd left it open, I could have the thing out by now."

  "Sorry," Thorn said. "I'll do better next time. I promise."

  ***

  Doris and Sylvie stood at the front window of Sylvie's bedroom, looking through the grillwork. Sylvie could see her father in the distance letting the fish go. And two men tied up in the yard, the water rising, still a foot to go before the tide started out again. It would climb to the top step of the front porch, then begin to slide back out to sea.

  Sylvie didn't know how she felt anymore. Feeling very young, very old too. Her mother was there in her bedroom just like fifteen years ago when every night she'd sat on the edge of Sylvie's bed reading stories to her girls. Night after night, stories about giants, goblins, princesses, stories about children disappearing into their parents'
closets, pushing all the coats and furs aside and finding a secret door in there and opening it and coming out in another place, a world much more colorful, full of danger and excitement, full of heroes and warriors, fools and monsters. Sylvie had searched for that secret door in her own house. Tapped the walls, feeling around. But never found it.

  Loving those stories, loving the memory of them, the sound of her mother's voice. But the moment her mother left, the stories stopped. Everything else too. Her heart stopped. Body, biology, everything. All Sylvie could do was go over it again in her mind, go over those few years before her mother left. Go over and over that time again, looking for what went wrong, what Sylvie had done. Remembering the stories, trying to understand them. Trying to decipher that movie too, Casablanca, another fairy tale. Maybe that would explain. As though her mother had been trying to tell her some secret, leave a hidden message behind in those stories, that movie.

  Now her mother stood beside her at the window and the two of them looked out through the darkness at the men. Thorn and the other one, tied up out there, about to drown. Sylvie not as good a storyteller as the ones who'd made up the tales her mother read. The heroes in those stories were smart and colorful and ingenious. They escaped from danger, found ways to kill the monsters. Those heroes saved the children in that scary world on the other side of the closet. Not Sylvie's heroes. Hers were tied up in the yard, about to drown. Hers were stupid and slow and boring.

  But it was Sylvie's own fault. Men only accomplished the things women urged them to. If it weren't for Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart would have stayed in that same bar forever. Cold and dead inside. Sylvie had tried. She had. Over and over, she'd worked to make the men into heroes. Her boyfriends, her father. But she'd failed. Look out in the yard. If only she could've gotten them to love her a little more.

  "That guy there, the one beside your boyfriend, that's Thorn. He came to rescue me from the ring of fire. But he won't do it. No one ever succeeds against Daddy."

  Doris gripped the bars, looking out at the darkness.