Winter Tides (9 page)

Collier bent over and pinched the bottom growth off the tomato vines. “You know what he was telling me yesterday? They’re going to tear down the bungalow.”

“Not a chance.”

“Big chance, apparently. They’ll sell the back two acres here to the city. Municipal parking. They’d make enough money to subsidize our rent somewhere else. That’s his word—
subsidize
. Translated, it means that Jenny and I are out on the street. Eviction. Hell, I don’t have any income besides what I get from the Earl—nothing except Social Security. What good is a subsidized rent to me? I’ve been living here rent-free for ten years. I’m grateful for it, too, but I’ve got into the habit of it now. I don’t know what we’d do if we had to move out. Another hundred a month would break me. I don’t care too much myself, but Jenny’s got to have a decent place to live. Damned Social Services is already yapping at me about Jenny.”

“That can’t be any kind of big problem. You’ve got plenty of friends on your side. They’re probably just doing some kind of routine checks.”

“I think some bastard’s been calling in stories, making stuff up.”

“Who?”

“Ed, that’s who. He wants us the hell out of here because he’s a greedy punk.”

“You won’t be evicted,” Dave said. “It just won’t happen. You know the Earl. He won’t even talk about it. He’ll just put it off forever. I think he’s philosophically opposed to municipal parking.”

“Yeah, I
do
know the Earl. He nearly dropped dead from that triple bypass last year. If he dies on us, the bastard son ascends to the throne. He doesn’t have any philosophy except for money.”

“He ascends to the throne along with his brother.”

“Well, God bless his brother. He’s always been my favorite. Hell, I’m Casey’s
god
father. It pains me to say that he’s drunk most of his backbone away, if you follow me. Don’t get me wrong. I’d jump in front of a train to save him. But I don’t think he’s got a lot of fight in him. I think his brother could take him in a cold second.”

“He’d surprise you.”

“I truly hope so.”

The screen door banged shut, and Jenny came down the porch steps drinking a Dr. Pepper.

“It’s too early for that,” Collier said to her. “What about milk?”

“It’s sick,” she said, and she put a finger halfway down her throat to indicate that she was gagged by the idea.

“Well, I don’t want you drinking sodas, not this early in the morning. With lunch it’s okay sometimes, but not with breakfast.”

“I’m finished,” she said. “See?” She turned the can over, dribbling the last few drops out onto the lawn. “Can I have a ’nother one?”

“No,” Collier said. “You can’t even have this one.” She giggled at Dave, who gave her a hard look in order to support Collier. Whatever wisdom there was in the no-soda-in-the-morning attitude was completely lost on her.

“Give us Cordelia,” Collier said to her.

Jenny shook her head and looked at the ground.

“Just a little bit of Cordelia.”

She shook her head again.

“What? Nothing?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“Nothing will come of nothing,” Collier said to her, grimacing in a theatrical rage.

“Unhappy that I am,” Jenny said, “I cannot … I can’t …”

“I cannot heave my heart into my mouth,” Collier reminded her.

“My heart in my mouth,” Jenny said, grinning widely now. She skipped away, circling around the yard, spinning to make herself dizzy.

“She’s a natural,” Collier said, watching her happily. Suddenly he laughed out loud, as if he’d just thought of something funny. “So the Fool walks up to Lear, see, and Lear’s been on an all-night bender. He can’t even see straight. And the Fool says …”

The front end of a car appeared in the parking lot just then, pulling up alongside the theatre and stopping, and its appearance utterly interrupted Collier, who watched the car
uneasily. A woman got out, wearing a dress and carrying a notebook.

“Now
what?” Collier said. The woman looked around her as if she were assessing the general condition of things.

“Real estate agent,” Dave said.

“Social Services! Jesus.” Collier took the empty can from Jenny, tilted it up to his mouth, and pretended to drink from it. “Why don’t you run on inside?” he said to his granddaughter. “Put on a clean t-shirt. And put on shoes, too.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“Because this is Aunt Betty, and she likes it when little girls look nice.”

“Who’s Aunt Betty?”

“Aunt Betty Crocker. Now go on in and put on a clean shirt. Whatever one you want.”

Jenny turned and ran up the steps. The screen door slammed again.

The woman crossed the asphalt at the back of the theater, heading toward them. She was a fairly tall woman, with an upright carriage and a way of walking that made it look as if she’d had a few years of ballet. It would have been years ago, though, because she looked about sixty-five, her hair gray.

“Social Services agent,” Collier said. “Her name is Mrs. Nyles. I’ve had the pleasure once before. Somebody called something in again, I guess. Goddamned Edmund …”

“You want me to stick around?”

“No, you go on. I’ll fill you in if it’s anything.” Collier shook his head tiredly.

Dave walked back toward the Earl’s. This was none of his business unless Collier wanted to make it his business. The Earl had already told him that someone had turned Collier in for child neglect, although Dave hadn’t known that Social Services was making an issue of it. This woman was probably a caseworker. The child-neglect allegation was way out of line—probably Collier was right about it being Edmund who had made the call. Jenny led a strange
life for a kid, though, spending nearly as much time in the old theatre as she spent at home, dressing in costumes out of the basement wardrobe, climbing up and down the ladders to the backstage balconies like a monkey. She could disappear for half an afternoon in among the litter of stage props and equipment stored beneath the stage. A week ago she disappeared entirely, and the police were notified. Casey had found her across the Highway, digging for sand crabs beneath the pier, dressed like a street beggar out of the Arabian Nights. That incident alone might have stirred up Social Services. As for Collier, Dave was certain he was doing the best he knew how, and Jenny always seemed to him to be a happy enough child.

He looked back as he rounded the corner of the warehouse. Jenny was back outside, barefoot, but dressed in a frilly sort of Easter dress now, her hair completely wild, as if she had blow-dried it with a fan. Collier stood talking to the social worker while Jenny turned multiple cartwheels across the lawn.

C
LEARLY
A
NNE WASN’T THINKING RIGHT.
S
HE MUST HAVE
put the cake away. This was silly…. She walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, the obvious spot. There was no cake, and nothing on the counter, either. She went into the bedroom and looked around—at the dresser, the dressing table, the bedside stand. She looked into the trash can in the bathroom. Hell. She knew damned well that she’d left the cake in the living room. She’d even felt guilty about it—first about eating it and then about not putting it away.

Who else had a key? Mr. Hedgepeth, certainly. But somehow the idea of fat old Mr. Hedgepeth breaking in last night for the purpose of eating her birthday cake was too preposterous. Had he eaten the paper plate, too? She sat down on the end of the bed, trying to think things through. When she had gone out into the corridor a few minutes ago, the lock on the door had been bolted, and the chain lock in place. So nobody had sneaked in during the night while she was asleep….

She wondered abruptly whether Mr. Hedgepeth changed the door locks between tenants, and her smile disappeared. Suddenly she felt vulnerable living alone in the old building. The little chain lock was nothing. Anybody with a key could kick the door open in a second. Even without a key, it wouldn’t take much. She walked out into the living room and looked again at the table. And now she saw it—the paper plate with the cake on it had fallen to the floor behind the table itself, and from where she had stood a moment ago it had been hidden by the edge of the chair. She stood for a moment staring at it. Somehow it had fallen cake side down, and then had apparently slid several inches across the floor, leaving a trail of frosting.

She went into the kitchen after paper towels, her late-night walk on the pier returning to her memory. In her mind she saw the slash of cranberry red again, slipping into invisibility behind the tower and the fog….

Cut it out
. She was getting morbid. Somehow she had knocked the cake off the damned table without knowing it, probably when she had stood up. Being cake, it hadn’t made a big clatter. There was no great mystery. Mr. Hedgepeth wasn’t involved. He hadn’t sneaked in and flung the cake to the floor. She bent over and wiped up the line of chocolate frosting. Then, as an experiment, she laid the fallen plate and cake so that it sat slightly off the edge of the table and bumped the table leg. The cake was immovable. It sat there as heavily as if it were made of iron. She scooted it farther off the edge and bumped it again, and then caught it when the plate fell. Clearly she hadn’t paid any attention when she’d set it down last night. And of course when the cake was fresh, the frosting had been soft
enough for the whole thing to have slid when it hit the floor.

There was no reason to believe that something had pushed it another fourteen or fifteen inches across the floor-boards….

She recalled the figure on the pier last night…. “I don’t believe in you,” she said out loud. But then she was immediately certain that what she didn’t believe in was herself.

She threw the paper towels into the trash, then wiped up the floor again with a wet towel before mopping it dry. Case closed. So much for having cake for breakfast. She found some grapes in the refrigerator and then went back out into the living room. Most of her paintings were still wrapped from shipping, and they were stacked against the walls three and four deep. Six of them were going up to a gallery in Carmel—all of them seascapes. The rest of the paintings would clutter the flat up for who knew how long. Probably she should rent one of the empty rooms across the hall simply for storage.

She looked at the painting on the easel near the window. There was nothing romantic about the subject matter except the sky, which she was painting in the style of Turner.
Steal from the best
, she thought. She didn’t like what she had done with the pier. The pilings looked gangly, somehow, even though the proportions were technically about right—as if the pier were some sort of Ichabod Crane caterpillar walking up out of the sea….

She noticed something now—what appeared to be a smudge of brown paint, perhaps, against the green-gray ocean. She bent over and looked more closely at it, just a fingerpaint smear of dried stuff against the still-wet oil. Immediately it occurred to her what it was, although there was no plausible explanation for how it had gotten there, and immediately she rejected the idea. She sniffed at it, but the linseed smell of the paint masked the smell of anything else. Finally she took a palette knife, carefully scraped the smudge off, and then wiped the knife clean with one of the paper towels. What the smudge had looked like to her was
chocolate frosting. Whatever it was, she hadn’t put it there.

Elinor
, she thought, unable to help herself. But then she forced the thought out of her mind, in case thinking about it made it true.

W
HEN HE HEARD A CAR DOOR SLAM,
D
AVE SET HIS EMPTY
coffee cup down and stepped to the window in order to look out into the lot. It was Edmund’s Mercedes, and the man himself was taking something out of the trunk. He shut the trunk lid and then activated the alarm system with the remote button on his key chain. Edmund was thirty-four, with a business degree from Whittier College. He was a racquetball hound who had enough leisure to play every day as well as put in an hour at the gym working out. He golfed, too, twice a week, and got his hair trimmed once a week, and still had time for business lunches and meetings, although whom he met with, Dave couldn’t say; probably the meetings had something to do with the bets he made on the golf and the racquetball. They sure as hell didn’t have anything to do with the Earl of Gloucester. He had an easy smile and an easy way of wearing his expensive clothes, and although Dave had a hunch that he spent a lot of evenings alone, he didn’t have to, since women had fallen all over him for as long as Dave had known him, which was over twenty years now. They never lingered, though.

The smile and the clothes and the expensive cars were all parts of an essentially vacant package, at least as far as Dave was concerned. Dave had never heard Edmund say anything at all that wasn’t calculated. He didn’t have conversations like other people did, never mentioned the
weather, the ocean, traffic—no small talk at all. Here he was, working in what had to be one of the strangest and most colorful buildings on the coast, and yet he seemed no more affected by it than if he’d been working at a grommet factory. Probably he simply hated all of it, and would have been just as happy if it had been a grommet factory. It was within his power to understand a grommet factory, but the Earl of Gloucester was beyond him.

Dave realized that he was in a lousy mood—which he might as well blame on Edmund, as long as he was working him over anyway. He wondered if there wasn’t a little bit of jealousy in his dislike for the man, which had intensified over the last year or so. He thought about it for a moment, but he couldn’t find any. Jealous of what? The truth was, Dave had never really been able to see beneath Edmund’s surface.

Earl Dalton, Edmund’s father, was a multimillionaire on paper—dozens of properties in a half-dozen Orange County beach cities. The lot that the Earl of Gloucester sat on was easily worth more than the business itself was worth, and the adjacent lot, the old theatre, and Collier’s bungalow would have been bulldozed ten years ago and sold for apartments if it was up to Edmund. It wasn’t up to Edmund, though, and that was a relentless irritation to him. What he had apparently told Collier about tearing down the bungalow had to be wishful thinking, meant largely to cause the old man grief.