Sandcastles

by April Hill

  Gwen thought for a moment. “That sounds a lot like ego to me, and hurt.”

  He laughed. “Nope, guess again. I saw a rerun on TV the other night and rather liked it, actually. Not a bad movie. Not the book I wrote, of course, but not a bad movie, all things considered. Julia Roberts was a knockout. Twenty-five years too young and forty pounds too thin for the part, but a knockout nonetheless. I have to admit that moving it from Iraq to Omaha was a bit of inspired plotting, and adding the orangutan was a nice touch.”

  “You’re whining.”

  “Is that supposed to be insight?’ he asked, his voice cruel.

  “I’m sorry, Josh,” Gwen faltered, “I didn’t mean to sound .…”

  “Forget it. We’d better start back. It’s getting cold.”

  It stayed cold both outside and in for the next few days. Josh stayed in his office and left Gwen to her writing, seeming to take little further interest in her progress. When the weekend arrived, he came into the kitchen where she was working and asked if she wanted to go into town. She declined, claiming she had too much work to finish. After he drove away, she sat and watched the rain and drank her second cup of coffee.

  And then she went looking for the book—Josh’s book. The one she knew was in the house somewhere.

  After two hours of combing through every pile of paper on his desk in every bookshelf and behind every book and in the file cabinet she moved on to his bedroom, searching underneath the bed and standing on a chair to search the upper shelves of his closet. By the time she heard the car pulling down the gravel driveway, she was hot, frustrated and annoyed. Maybe he hadn’t been lying to her. Maybe there was no book.

  They had finished dinner and were sitting before the fire when he took a small key from his pocket and handed it to her.

  She smiled. “The key to your heart?” she asked.

  “The key to my safe, actually,” he said mildly. “Next time you go hunting, try there as well. I don’t want you wasting valuable time trying to break onto it or looking for the combination and getting everything out of order out of order, which you did.”

  Gwen sighed and looked down at her hands. “I know it won’t help to apologize. My curiosity got the better of me. I don’t have to read it, Josh. I don’t even have to see it. I just want to know you’re writing it. It’s important to me.”

  “And it’s important to me to know that I can trust you.”

  She shook her head miserably. “You want me to leave?”

  “Please spare me the melodrama. What I want is for you to improve your burglary skills or give it up entirely. There’s no book, Gwen. Period. If there were I’d tell you.”

  “Then you’re not mad? You’re not going to .…”

  “Of course I’m mad. And spank you? You’d better believe it. Drop your pants, Nancy Drew.”

  Chapter Four

  A few days later, the storm that had threatened for days finally struck, lashing the cliff with unseasonable near-hurricane-force winds that moaned around the corners of the house and took down one of the tall cedars that shaded the deck. When the storm had passed, it left a trail of devastation up and down the coast for miles in either direction. The house itself was rock-solid and sustained no real damage, other than the loss of several items of deck furniture, shattered pieces of which they found far down the beach a few days later, half-buried in the sand.

  “I never liked it anyway,” Josh observed, stuffing the last pieces of a cracked plastic chair into the plastic trash bag he’d brought along. “The only good thing you can say about this modern crap is it doesn’t rust and you don’t have to paint it.”

  “That’s two things,” Gwen corrected him. “Number three—no splinters in your rear end.” She pointed to the cliff wall. “There’s one more busted chair over there.”

  When Denning looked where she had pointed, she noticed a shadow cross his face.

  “I’ll get it later. It’s getting cold. Let’s go back.”

  Gwen started to walk toward the broken chair and the base of the cliff. “No problem. I’ll just....”

  “I said leave it!” he shouted. Gwen stopped and turned to look at him curiously.

  “I’m sorry,” he apologized quickly. “I didn’t mean to shout at you. It’s just that... the wind is so strong I thought we should....” Gwen nodded and joined him as they walked back to the stairs. The “wind” was barely more than a breeze.

  The following morning, she was on the deck sitting in a kitchen chair to brush Charlie, when he appeared at the door. “I’m going into town to buy a new table and some deck chairs. I’ll pick up the groceries while I’m there. Do you want to go along?”

  Gwen shook her head. “No. I’ve got a lot to do after cleaning up our filthy friend here. Don’t forget coffee, will you?”

  “Anything else besides what’s on the list?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I’ll think of it after you’ve left, like always.”

  He kissed the top of her head. “Next time you can do the shopping. That’s what I pay you for.”

  “Yeah, sure. If I may be so bold as to mention it, Lord of the Manor, I’m still waiting for my first check.”

  He grinned then turned and headed for the front door. “Not to worry, love. The check is in the mail.”

  When he was gone, Gwen hurried to the front door to be sure the car was out of sight and already up the steep hill to the road. Then she made her way down the long stairway to the beach as quickly as she could and walked briskly up the beach. Unable to remember exactly where they’d seen the broken plastic chair, it took several minutes to locate the spot. Finally she found the place, only to see that the chair was gone, the marks where it had been still clearly defined in the sand. It hadn’t blown away or been washed out by the tide; Josh had obviously returned for it.

  Suddenly Gwen realized just how stupid her thinking was. “Wow!” she marveled, “he came back and picked up some trash from the beach. How suspicious is that?” She started back to the house, but stopped fifty yards down the beach, remembering the look she had noticed on his face. Fear? Or what? She wheeled in the sand and walked back up the beach.

  The cliff at this particular spot descended in a sheer drop from the embankment above—a distance of maybe fifty feet from the southern end of Denning’s property, Gwen guessed. Here the cliff wall was covered in a thick tangle of weeds and vines, obscured at least halfway up by what looked like years of untended brush. Gwen stood in front of the wall of vegetation for several moments, and then for reasons she couldn’t have explained then or later, she began to tear at the vines and undergrowth with both hands.

  The work was hard, the brush coarse and rough on her hands, with occasional thorns and ragged edges that tore at the skin on her palms and arms. When she had finished tearing down everything she could reach, she had found nothing. Nothing but more spiny, tangled undergrowth and many more crawling insects—living and dead—than she’d expected. Finally, with her hands scratched and close to bleeding, she backed away from the cliff, feeling foolish and dirty. She brushed off as much of the grime as she could and bent down to untangle her foot from a snarled vine. Buried in the sand close against the base of the cliff, she noticed one peeling corner of what looked like a sheet of plywood. She stood up and began to pull loose the next layer of the thick brush, and after ten minutes of hard work, she uncovered a standard four by eight foot plywood panel. Continuing to yank handfuls of brush from the cliff, she found a second section of plywood that together with the original piece formed a crude cover for an opening she could just make out between the joined sheets. Looking around for a tool she found a broken clamshell and used it to scrape at the rotting joint in the hope of enlarging the peephole. When the opening was large enough, she shielded her eyes with both hands to block the light and peered through the crack.

  An old staircase twisting upward in short segments with several landings built close against the rocks—a duplicate of the staircase they used every day to get
down to the beach. Gwen dropped to the sand, breathing hard and laughing at the pitiful result of all her detective work. She foresaw the plot of a new story for Josh—a lurid thriller entitled, “The Mystery Of The Missing Beach Chair,” in which a perfectly common abandoned and unsafe staircase is found by an idiot female detective. The outcome of the mystery? The intrepid girl sleuth is left with a pair of hands that looked and felt like raw meat.

  Quickly Gwen got to her feet and hurried down the beach, hoping to get back to the house before Josh arrived home. As she climbed the staircase to the deck, her guilt increased with every step, and she felt like crying. He had trusted her and almost immediately she’d done it again! The sneaky little purveyor of sleaze and slime had re-emerged unbidden from her unconscious, like some deviant multiple personality. She debated the wisdom of confessing the lurid details of her ridiculous “investigation” to Josh. She might get spanked, of course, but it would be a spanking she richly deserved for not trusting him and for snooping. The longer she thought about the new unsanded paddle, though, and the possibility of splinters, she concluded that while confession was probably good for the soul, it was more than likely to be pure hell on a girl’s bare behind.

  The house was cool, and after she’d showered and washed the dried vines and dead bugs from her hair she felt better and began to relax. It wasn’t until she heard Josh open the front door and come in the house calling for her that she remembered that she hadn’t recovered the plywood barrier.

  “What happened to your hands?” he asked, as they sat in front of the fire that night. He took her scratched hands in his and turned them over.

  “I had to get Charlie out of the weeds down there by the rocks” she lied, gracefully. Gwen had always been a fast and adept liar—an ability that had served her well over the years. “He’d gotten himself pretty snarled up, like the idiot he is.”

  Josh reached down and gave the droopy-eyed dog a quick pat on the head. “Did you hear that Charlie? You mother thinks you’re an idiot.” He put his mug of coffee down on the table and looked carefully at Gwen.

  “Am I an idiot too, Gwen?”

  Gwen cleared her throat to buy at least a few seconds of time. “What?”

  “To still trust you, I mean?”

  Gwen sighed. “No Josh you’re not an idiot. You’re a kind, patient, unusually decent human being—with very poor judgment as it turns out. You found the mess on the beach?”

  He shook his head, obviously mystified. “I’m curious, Gwen. What did you expect to find?”

  She shook her head miserably. “I don’t know, Josh. Can’t we just call it curiosity? I didn’t mean to act like....”

  “An idiot?”

  “Yeah. That and a rotten, ungrateful little spy. “Would you like to know what you found?”

  “No. It’s none of my business.”

  “When my wife was still alive, the stairs you found led up to what used to be the garden. She was the gardener, not me. She used the stairs to get down to the beach.”

  Gwen put her head in her hands. “Oh God, Josh! I’m so sorry! I just wasn’t thinking.”

  “You can’t see it from the beach but there’s a small guest house halfway up the staircase. Susannah used the place as a studio. She was an excellent artist. I closed off the studio and the staircase after she died because... well for a lot of reasons, of course. But none of those reasons are secret or in any way mysterious. The main reasons were because I didn’t like going in there any longer and because the stairs aren’t safe and I’m too lazy to fix them. So no big secrets. If you want to call your editor with that information though....”

  Gwen began to cry. “Please, Josh! Stop it! What can I do to - I know I can’t apologize enough. How can I prove -”

  “Go into the den.” he ordered.

  Gwen wiped her eyes and stood up. “Whatever you want, Josh. I know that whatever you do, I....”

  “Just go!”

  She walked into the den, trying not to cry, and Josh followed her. He reached down, opened the desk drawer and pulled out a handful of paper then put it in the printer.

  He pointed to the desk chair.

  “Sit down.”

  Gwen sniffled. “You’re not going to?”

  “Spank you? What the hell good would that do? No, I want something useful to come out of this. So you’re going to write about what happened—all of it. How you felt, what was going through your mind. What you expected to find. What you did find....” He glanced at his watch. “It’s almost eleven now. I want 5000 words by 7:30 tomorrow morning—all of them good and all of them spelled and punctuated correctly. I’ve disabled the spell- and grammar-check, so you’re on your own.”

  “That’s a lot,” she complained, “if you want it that good.”

  “Oh, did I say ‘good’?” he asked, scornfully. “What I meant to say was ‘excellent’. Superb, outstanding, insightful—especially insightful. I want the ‘New Yorker’ and ‘Harper’s’ to get in a goddamned bidding war over it.”

  “And if it’s not superb, outstanding and blah blah blah, then what?” she asked, already knowing the answer.

  “Then,” he said mildly, “you get your ass blistered more thoroughly more painfully and with more exquisite detail than you ever thought possible. Start writing. I’m going to bed.”

  “Why don’t you just do it now and get it over?” she yelled after him. “You know fucking well I can’t do this!”

  She heard the door to his room slam.

  “SHIT!” she cried, putting her forehead down on the desk. “What is fucking wrong with me?”

  Gwen spent the first half-hour thinking, typing cryptic little phrases each time an “insightful” thought appeared. The next hour she found herself incredibly hungry and went looking for something to eat. She made a tuna sandwich, opened a bag of potato chips and ate them in front of television, watching a rerun of the original “National Velvet.” Returning to the computer, she typed another half-hour of cryptic notes and was composing her first brilliant insightful sentence when Charlie began to whine in that tone that usually signified a dire emergency somewhere in his alimentary canal. She opened the back door and waited as he attended to his needs. (Fifteen minutes. Charlie was indecisive.)

  She spent the ensuing hour curled on the couch, watching a TV evangelist, trying to relax and wondering idly if a last-minute probably insincere conversion to fundamental Christianity would increase her chances at forgiveness and then ate once more, finishing off a quart of rum-raisin ice cream. Finally, she sat down at the computer, in the full knowledge that in five and a half hours (allowing fifteen minutes for her heart-rending excuses and his positioning and baring of the necessary portions of her), she could expect a spanking of almost Olympian proportions.

  At four o’clock in the morning, while she was still staring at the computer screen, half asleep, a thought came to her, and the longer she thought about it, the angrier she got. Shoving her chair back, she stormed upstairs to his bedroom threw the door open with a crash and flung herself on the bed to confront him.

  “If there was nothing to hide, why did you go to so much trouble to keep me from finding that place?” she cried, swatting his shoulder with a throw pillow. “You could have told me about those stairs that first day instead of whisking me away like you did! You knew damned well all that cloak and dagger crap would make me more curious! You set me up, Josh, and that just stinks!”

  Denning sat up groggily and looked at his watch.

  “You’ve got three hours. Get off my bed.” With that he turned over and went back to sleep.

  It was almost eight o’clock and Gwen was sitting on the deck, reading the morning paper, when Denning came outside with a cup of coffee in his hand. He set the cup down walked to the edge of the deck and tore several switches from a low-hanging tree branch. He had apparently already been in the den.

  “What a beautiful morning,” he observed, carefully stripping the leaves from each switch and testing it again
st his palm.

  “How trite,” she snapped. “Do you have a ‘beautiful feeling everything’s going your way’, too?”

  “No, but I have a feeling one of us didn’t finish her homework assignment,” he said. “In which case her morning is going to be anything but beautiful.”

  “All right,” she said sullenly, “I didn’t finish it.”

  “Let me guess. One of the dogs ate it?”

  “Guess again. I didn’t finish because I didn’t want to. I gave up deadlines when I quit the journalism game a few weeks ago,” she replied sourly, throwing the paper down on the table.

  Denning tapped the switch against his thigh and pointed to the deck rail. Gwen looked straight ahead for a moment, ignoring him, but then appearing to come to a decision, she stood up quickly, leaned over the deck rail and raised her nightgown to her waist. She leaned her head on her folded arms and waited stoically while he pulled her panties down to her knees. Grimly determined to remain silent throughout the switching, she winced and made no sound at all as the first blow struck, leaving behind a trio of burning lines across her bare buttocks.

  He swatted twice more, harder and very low—first on her right and then her left cheek, and she bit her lip to keep from crying out as the tip of one switch curled painfully between her legs. The next two blows came fast and sharp across the backs of her thighs, and Gwen finally yelped through gritted teeth. Unable to remain still any longer, she bounced from one foot to the other trying to muffle her squeals in the hollow of her shoulder. Holding her down long enough to lower the sagging panties out of the way and down to her ankles, Josh laid two stinging swats across each of her calves and then stopped.

  For a moment she remained in place, waiting for the rest of the whipping, but then out of the corner of her eye she saw him toss the switches over the deck railing into the brush on the hillside.