Winter Tides (12 page)

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.

I
N A LITTLE STREET OFF
H
ILLSIDE
A
VENUE IN
V
ICTORIA
, 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….

… And in the dusty glass she saw the reflection of someone standing, a pale face, a girl’s face, staring straight at her through unfocused eyes. Rainwater ran in rivulets down the outside of the panes, and the reflected red coat and pale features of the girl in the window seemed to shift with the moving water, so that the reflection had the illusion of repeated movement, like the same few frames of a film played over and over again. The smell of burning heightened then, and the sound of the rain was indistinguishable from the sound of what was now clearly feet treading on the old linoleum floor. She knew abruptly and without doubt that the girl in the window was Elinor, her hands repeating the same twisting and pulling motions, the unmistakable mime-like movements of someone sewing, pulling a needle and thread through an imaginary piece of cloth.

The reflection vanished on the instant. The smell of burning was intense now—the burnt rat and cloth smell of the rain-dampened incinerator on her uncle’s farm—and the sound of footsteps filled her head. Anne bolted down the stairs, hanging onto the railing. She turned at the
second-floor landing and looked back, and there was a red blur of movement and the sound of a deep human sigh, and just then something pushed her hard on the back. She screamed and fell forward, grabbing for the handrail, spinning around and falling into the books stacked along the wall. Her hand lost its hold on the rail, and she felt herself tumbling downward in an avalanche of books, and abruptly she landed at the base of the stairs, sitting up, the books heaped around her.

The old man who owned the shop was halfway across the room by then, a look of surprised concern on his face, putting his hand out to help her up. She pulled herself to her feet and ran without speaking, down the center aisle of the shop, out the door and into the rain, not realizing until she was two blocks down Hillside that she had left her umbrella behind. She slowed down to catch her breath. The afternoon smelled like rain and ocean wind now—the smell of burning lingering only in her mind—and the rain pattered on the sidewalk and street without any suggestion of the sound of footsteps. Still she didn’t look behind her, fearful of the shapes and colors that she might see in the gray weather, and it wasn’t until she was safely seated on one of the benches in the pub beneath the Empress Hotel that she felt a momentary shame for having made a shambles of the old man’s books and having run out of the shop without a word.

It had been Elinor’s image reflected in the rainwater and window glass. Anne carried the ghost of her sister with her; or perhaps Elinor’s ghost trailed after her, clinging to her as if by some static electricity of the spirit. What part of that ghost was Elinor? She comprised some remnant of distilled emotion, some sensory recollection of the things of the world, of smells and colors and objects….

Anne could still feel the pressure of unseen hands on her back, and yet she remembered tripping on the books, putting her foot on them and slipping. It was more reasonable to think that she had fallen because of her careless hurry to get out of the room.

In Elinor’s lifetime, Anne had never felt that mental
one-ness with her sister that other identical twins sometimes reported—no simultaneous thoughts; no strange parallel tastes. Aside from their artistic talent, the two of them had been as dissimilar as night and day.

E
DMUND HAD FALLEN ASLEEP WITH HIS HEAD ON HIS DESK
. It was past seven in the evening now, foggy and silent outside, and except for Edmund the Earl’s was empty of people. He jerked upright in his chair now and looked around, suddenly wide awake. For a minute he sat blinking at the back wall of the office, disoriented, his heart racing, trying to define what had awakened him. The interior of the warehouse was dim beyond the office windows—just a couple of the night lamps on. His apprehension drained slowly away, but he was unable to shake the sensation that somebody was, or had been, lurking somewhere nearby.

He rotated his neck and flexed his shoulders to loosen up. There was a television going, the noise no doubt coming from Collier’s house, and he heard a shrill shriek of laughter from a child. The old man was half deaf, and he kept his windows open in any kind of weather so that everyone in downtown Huntington Beach got to listen in to his nightly rounds with
I Love Lucy
and other dusty old repeats. Edmund wasn’t in the mood for calling in a complaint to the police, although yesterday he had called Social Services to report that Collier’s granddaughter had a bruise on her cheek, as if she’d been hit. She didn’t, but what the hell did that matter? They’d still be full of suspicion, and probably they’d make Collier
deny
that he beat the little girl, which would wreck the old man’s week.