Winter Tides (20 page)

T
HE ROUTE DOWN
P
ECAN TO
M
AIN, BACK UP
O
RANGE
Street to Goldenwest, and then up to Palm and around the corner to his apartment was a little under three miles. Edmund used to run farther, but over the last week or so he
had gotten into the habit of jogging past Anne’s apartment in the morning, which distracted him from merely physical exercise. He wanted to become familiar with her habits, and he had learned that she was often out of her apartment as early as eight. In fact, it was only 8:15 now, and she was already at work, prostituting her art on behalf of the great Leslie Collier and his asinine play.

Edmund looped around onto Main, running easily, not even breaking a sweat in the cool ocean air. The fog still drifted through town, heavy enough to dull people’s perceptions of the day starting up around them. He knew for a fact that the other tenants in Anne’s building wouldn’t be in until at least ten. It would be
easy
to drop in this morning, just for a moment, and have a look around…. The idea filled him with a thrill of fear and excitement. This morning? Right now?

Last night, late, he had dropped by just for a moment. He had gone up the back stairs and left a little something hidden there—an act that was either a step along the way or a purely pointless waste of time. It was his choice. All he had to do was clear away the cobwebs of fear and in-decision. Paying the building a visit this morning was in-evitable, when he opened his eyes and really looked. Otherwise, why was he circling the block?
Something
was going on here, and as long as he kept moving, he was resisting it.

An alley ran behind her apartment building, between Pecan and Orange, and without missing a stride he turned up the alley. When Main Street fell away behind him, he stopped running to catch his breath. There was nothing but silence around him now, silence and the hovering fog. The alley separated the back yards of houses on Pecan from the backyards of houses on Orange, and although there were a couple of garages that fronted the alley, they were closed up tight. The other end of the alley was lost in mist. He walked slowly back toward Main until he drew even with the rear of Anne’s building. Behind it, above the patch of dirt that separated the building from a broken-down shed, were old wooden stairs going up to a disused second-floor balcony filled with junk furniture and broken cardboard
boxes. A door opened onto the balcony, but the door was locked with a hasp and an old rusted lock, and the glass window in the door was barred.

Taking one last quick look around, Edmund strode to the base of the stairs, which was closed off by a low gate built of wood and chicken wire. He braced himself on the post at the base of the stairs and easily vaulted the gate. It would have been equally easy to tear the chicken wire away from the rusted staples that held it in place, but he didn’t want anything about the gate or the fence to change in the slightest. If the landlord was satisfied with his locks and his chicken wire, it was a good idea to keep him that way.

He hurried up the steps and onto the porch, where a section of wall hid him from the alley, and raised the seat cushion from a weather-wrecked easy chair. Bolt cutters lay underneath the cushion, just where he had left them, full of potential. He fitted them over the lock, leaned into the handles, and clipped the bar of the lock as close to the body of the thing as he could. When the lock was closed up, it would still appear to be locked from down below, and it might be weeks or months before someone discovered that it wasn’t locked at all. He took it off the hasp, shoved the lock and the bolt cutters under the seat cushion, and tried the door. When it swung open, he stepped inside, shutting the door behind him.

He found himself in an old service porch with a water heater and a half-dozen wall shelves stacked with paint cans and boxes of nails and screws and odds and ends of handy-man junk. Another door lay beyond, this one unlocked. He opened it a couple of inches and peered through the crack, into the central hallway of the building. There were two doors to his immediate right; one stood half open, revealing a restroom beyond. The other had a sign painted on the window—Bob Slattery, Attorney. On the left stood another door, this one called “Dr. Slim,” a name that meant nothing to him. The door to Anne’s apartment lay halfway down the hail on the right.

He anticipated some sort of inspiration. If he gave it a chance, the old building itself would suggest something to him; some oddly situated window would allow him access to a secret room, or a door would have been left unlocked, or he would find that the rooms were connected by an attic crawl space. There was always
something
significant; you only had to open yourself to its possibilities. He walked down the hallway to the end, trying the doors, and then followed the stairs down to the bottom landing, where he looked out through the glass at the street. The shadow of a pedestrian passed in front of the window, and on impulse he stepped back. Downstairs were three more doors, all of them locked. He could sense that there was nothing for him there. The key to the puzzle lay upstairs somewhere.

He found it at the lawyer’s office, which was locked with an old brass exterior lock with an angled bolt. Evidently the lawyer had nothing of value inside, because a twelve-year-old could get past such a lock. He slipped a polished metal mirror out of his waist pack and threw the bolt, then opened the door and stepped inside. The office was poverty-stricken—worse than Ray Mifflin’s chickenshit office. Clearly the lawyer was some kind of white trash bankruptcy shyster. The blinds were drawn across the windows, and at first in the dim light through the dirty skylights he saw nothing interesting. He roamed around, poking into drawers and files, vaguely looking for photographs, maybe flesh magazines. There were good odds that a lawyer of this caliber kept some fancy reading material around to break up the monotony of his dull day.

But there was nothing that was worth a damn. It looked as if he were wasting his time. Still, the easy lock
had
to mean something. It was clearly an invitation, specifically to him….

He looked at the closet then. He opened the closet door and peeked inside, pulling a light chain that hung beneath a bare ceiling bulb. It was a fairly shallow walk-in closet, nearly empty, just a couple of shelves of cardboard boxes and in-out files. There was a door in the back, though, locked with a padlock, half hidden by a couple of coats that hung from a piece of closet rod.

Bingo! His hunches had paid off. The door
had
to lead into Anne’s apartment. There was light shining on the other side of the door, just a dim light, but it meant a view of some part of Anne’s hidden life!

He crouched on the closet floor and crawled on his hands and knees beneath the coats, where he slid his mirror through the half-inch gap under the door. He held onto the mirror with the tips of his fingers, moving it around, cocking his head to get the right view of it. For a moment he could see nothing but dim smudges, and he put his eye nearly against it in order to see more. The inside of a closet sprang into view. He could see clothing, boxes, an open door. Beyond the door there was something …

The bottom of a bed frame! It was her bedroom light that was on! He oriented himself now, edging the mirror along slowly to increase the size of the view. He could see that the hem of her bedspread edged the corner of the bed frame neatly. So she had made her bed! Typical of Anne the Day Girl. In a dizzying moment the thought came to him that perhaps she had returned home from work, that she was in the apartment right now, bustling around, cleaning things up!

He waited, crouched on his hands and knees, his cheek nearly pressed to the edge of the metal mirror, waiting for her to appear, for her feet to pad into view. Nothing moved, though. There was no sound, no one stirring around. He listened hard for any sound at all from behind the door, but there was perfect silence. Of course she had simply left the light on by mistake.

Disappointed, he crawled back out of the closet and stood up, returning the mirror to his waist pack and then checking his watch. It was after nine now—still too early for the building to be waking up, but getting dangerously close. He would have to hurry. He stepped across to the door, opened it, and peered out into the empty hall. Leaving the door open, he went out through the service porch again, onto the rear balcony. Already the fog was burning off, and there was a breeze in the air, blowing offshore. In another few minutes it would be clear, and he would be running a good chance of being seen, which would compromise his ability to come and go. People pay too much attention to a man lurking around. Next time maybe he would wear a
uniform, a generic gas company-type uniform….

He slipped the bolt cutters out from under the seat cushion and went back in, closing the door after himself again. Inside the closet again he studied the lock, considering what he was about to do. It was a common enough Master lock, clean and new, probably put on the door when Anne took the apartment. If he cut it, he could get into Anne’s apartment this one time, and, unless he made noise, he could linger there nearly as long as he wanted this morning, even if the lawyer showed up for work.

If the lawyer saw that the lock had been cut, though, this avenue would be forever closed to him. The lawyer would shout for the landlord, who would call the police. He stood thinking, weighing his options.

Hurriedly, he left the lawyer’s office again and went back outside. He set the back-door lock carefully into position and ditched the bolt cutters under the seat cushion again before heading down the stairs. Within moments he was jogging up the alley again, his mind working out a plan that had almost infinite potential. In twenty minutes the hardware store downtown would open. He would buy his own lock. Tomorrow morning it would be a simple thing to slip back in and replace the lock that was on there now.

Then
he
would hold the key to the back door of Anne’s closet!

God, how beautiful that image was—how poetic! It was simply a perfect metaphor, and it had been given to him out of nowhere. Once again he had come into this situation empty-handed, mapless, trusting to intuition, to the raw possibilities of art, and he had found the answers to all his questions simply waiting for him.

Now he could come and go as he pleased! His imagination worked on the idea, picturing what he might see, what he might find out about her. And to think that he had almost cut the lock off here and now and wasted a golden opportunity, all because he was acting like a kid who wanted his candy right now. He whooped with sudden laughter. As he had always been taught, if he waited like a good little boy, very soon he would have all the candy he could desire.

F
ROM WHERE HE STOOD IN THE
E
ARL’S OFFICE,
D
AVE
heard footsteps on the stairs. It was Collier coming up, looking happy enough despite the fire.

“What’s the word?” The Earl asked him.

“The word is that the angel of Social Services doesn’t buy this fire explanation either. She hefted one of those pallets. No way she thinks Jenny had anything to do with moving them under the truck.”

“This is the woman I saw the other morning?” Dave asked.

“The very one. Mrs. Lydia Nyles,” Collier told him. “She can look down her glasses at you, I’ll tell you that.
Very
skeptical sort of woman. I told her that skepticism wasn’t healthy, but I don’t think she gave a damn.”

“Be careful what you say to these people,” the Earl said. “Don’t go talking like a crazy man. They take this stuff seriously.”

“You’re damned right they do. If someone calls in a report, she’s got to investigate it. And if she thought I was mistreating Jenny and she
didn’t
take it seriously, I’d have a few things to say to her. Lydia Nyles is okay, though, when you get past the skepticism. Jenny likes her, and that’s what counts. Jenny’s a shrewd judge. I’ve got a good eye myself. Mrs. Nyles is deep, very deep, but her heart’s right.” He winked at Dave and then squinted out the window at the distant ocean. “Yes, indeed. She’s not a bad-looking woman, either, when it comes right down to it. She says she used to act a little bit out at South Coast Rep. Directed a couple of plays out in Westminster for the children’s theatre.”

“She’s sympathetic to this whole thing, then?” the Earl asked.

“Very. I’m thinking about offering her a part in
Lear.”

“Is there a part for a woman of that age?”

“Nothing at all, except for Mrs. deShane’s part. I’d have to invent something,” Collier said.

“She might see it as some sort of conflict of interest …” Dave started to say.

“Did you tell the Earl about the changes in the
Lear
plot?”

“No,” Dave said. “Not yet.”

“
Somebody
better tell me,” the Earl said. “I go away for a couple of days and you two rewrite Shakespeare on me?”

“Just a couple of modifications,” Collier said. “Most of the dialogue and the blocking will still work. I’ve been up half the night working on the revised script, and I’ve got some ideas for sets and props that we’d better get a jump on. I think we’ll change the way the public understands Shakespeare.” He nodded profoundly at the Earl, and then, before he could say anything more, there was a shuffling downstairs, and he glanced out through the open door of the office to see who it was. “Company,” he said.

It was Anne, coming into work early and carrying a wooden tackle box and a long metal ruler. The Earl got up out of his chair and stepped out of the office and onto the balcony, smiling like he’d just won the lottery. “Up here!” he shouted. “Have you met Anne?” he asked Dave.

“Yeah, briefly.”

“Well, you better meet her again. Pay attention this time.” He nodded and elbowed Collier in the ribs. “Take my advice on this one,” he said to Dave, but before the Earl could give him whatever advice he was supposed to take, she reached the top of the balcony and nodded a good morning, smiling at Dave.