Winter Tides
Page 14
BEHIND CLOSED EYES, EDMUND PICTURED THE SPIRTT DOOR in the white wall of the bedroom, a door that had existence only in the lonely, late-night quiet of his brooding half-sleep. Firelight seemed to flicker on the wall, illuminating the door, which drifted silently open, as if a languid breeze had whispered against it. He heard the sound of its whispering echo in the infinite windy darkness beyond. For a long time as he lay there staring at it, that darkness that had been a door was merely a vague black rectangle, depthless, its edges ghostly and almost imperceptible. The wind from beyond the door ruffled the darkness as if it were a curtain, and the darkness gained dimension until it seemed to him that he could see deep within it, as into a vast, empty, night-filled room. Something moved there, a gray wisp rising like smoke entrapped in an invisible bottle, spinning in slow circles.
He felt languid and easy as he lay there, and he imagined that his eyelids were windows, that he was gazing out through panes of glass at the landscape of the darkened room and at the carefully empty, white-painted wall beyond. He breathed evenly, staring at the long blank surface of it, at the curling smoke, and he thought of her again, pictured her, brought her back into his mind. He had discovered that summoning her was a simple act of will, and the very thought of it thrilled him, hinted at a power he had only begun to make use of, spoke to him of potential ecstasies….
The smoky haze beyond the door formed itself into her shape, her image drawn from the deep pool of longing and desire that lay within him. Slowly he opened his eyes, forming her name in his mind. There was a dim light through the bedroom window, barely illuminating the room, just a wash of curtain-filtered lamplight that shone across the several paintings tilted against the wall. His eyes could see the outline of her face and the contour of her unclothed body among the dim shadows of the bedroom furniture. He saw her again in the darkness-obscured landscapes of the paintings, in the drape of the window curtains, in the casual slump of his bathrobe on the chair in the corner of the room.
His eyes fixed on the empty white wall, and what had seemed to be a vertical shadow cast by lamplight through the window now revealed itself to be the spirit door itself. There was a ghostly, smoky movement in the darkness beyond it, a sibilant whispering, and then, framed by the doorway, her shadow stirred against the deeper shadow of the darkness, and she separated from it, moving him across a vast distance, like a figure flitting toward him through the landscape of a dream.
He pushed himself slowly up onto his elbows, hearing the rustling of sheets, the creaking and shifting of the bed. He felt the woman’s presence like a breath of cool air. He whispered her name, and the Night Girl stood before him, black hair, moth-pale flesh, eyes like moonlight. He breathed her scent and closed his eyes, and then, without the bed having shifted again, without his knowing the precise moment that she had come to him, she lay beside him, cool against his heated flesh, the night perfectly silent, the black hollow in the wall wavering like a misty curtain.
22
“I GUESS THEY THINK IT WAS JENNY THAT STARTED THE fıre,” the Earl said to Dave. He spooned sugar into his coffee and then beat at the bottom of the mug with the spoon instead of stirring it. The cup held about a pint, and had a picture of Morro Rock on it. The Earl looked tired to Dave, his face pale, his shoulders slumped. He wore paisley suspenders and a bow tie, and his hair was slicked back with some sort of oily, rose-smelling hair tonic. He was a short man, only about five-five with the build of Tweedledee. “Looks like she squirted those pallets down with charcoal lighter from Collier’s shed and put a match to it.”
“I don’t believe it,” Dave said. “Jenny just wouldn’t do that.”
The Earl shrugged. “Neither do I. Anybody might have started it. Those pallets and trash have been piled up there for three weeks or more. The problem is that Jenny doesn’t deny it.”
“She admitted to starting it?”
“No, she still says her friend started it. They were playing with matches outside. Collier was down at the doughnut shop looking at the wreck.”
“He left her home alone?”
“Looks like. Only for a few minutes, I guess. He heard the crash at the corner and went down there to see if he could help. Apparently he didn’t figure it could hurt much, leaving her alone for a couple of minutes.”
“Neither do I. What about this friend? Has somebody checked Jenny’s story out?”
The Earl sat down in his office chair and swiveled slowly back and forth. “The friend’s imaginary.” His usual cheerfulness was utterly absent this morning, and he ran his hand tiredly through his hair. Dave looked at the picture of the Earl’s wife, framed on the desk. She was blonde, her hair done up like Greta Garbo, and she was looking ethereally off into space. The Earl had married her in ’46, after he and Collier had gotten out of the army. She’d died in childbirth in ’55, and the Earl had never remarried.
“Who says the friend’s imaginary?” Dave asked.
“Collier himself. He got home just as the fire department was pulling in. It was Jenny who told them about the friend, how she started the fire. Jenny couldn’t say how. Apparently the fire had got going pretty good when Edmund saw it. By the time he called the department, it was too late to save Collier’s truck. That’s where the pallets were—shoved under the rear bumper.”
“And they think Jenny pushed these pallets under the truck and lit them on fire? She burned her grandfather’s truck on purpose, in other words?”
“Nobody’s saying that, exactly, but it’s implied.”
“If that’s what they’re implying, then they’re full of baloney.”
“I hear you. You’re aware of this thing with Collier and Social Services?”
“Yeah. How serious are they?”
“Very serious, with this fire. And Collier’s got this bee in his bonnet about it. He thinks there’s someone calling them up, making up stories. And now this kind of thing …” The Earl shook his head sadly. “And you heard about the magazines?”
Dave shook his head.
“Apparently the investigating officer found a couple of skin magazines in the back of the Harvester, half burned up from the fire.”
“What kind of magazines? Playboy or something?”
“Or something is right. Pretty filthy stuff, as I understand it. Cops confiscated them. At least that’s what Edmund telis me. Said he hadn’t ever seen anything like them.”
“These magazines were that bad, and Collier had them lying around in the open, loose in the back of the truck?”
“That’s where they were when the fire department got there. You can see the problem with all this Social Services trouble.”
“Collier says the magazines aren’t his?”
“Of course he says that. Collier dismissed the whole damned thing. Said he didn’t care where they’d come from and didn’t give a damn. He told the cop that he was seventy years old and could care less about dirty magazines. Apparently the cop even got a good laugh out of it when Collier put it to him that way. It was the cop’s idea that maybe the magazines were stashed there by neighborhood kids, you know. That old heap of Collier’s has been sitting there for a couple of months with bad brakes. Probably that’s just what happened. As I see it, though, a man hates to be put in the position of having to deny something like that, doesn’t he? One way or another he loses. Like Edmund said, though, they can’t be used as any sort of evidence of anything, because of how they were found—without a warrant or anything.”
“I suppose they went into the police report, though.”
“I suppose they did, along with Collier saying they weren’t his.”
The Earl poured himself another cup of coffee, and there was the rattling sound of the big door sliding open and the truck backing up to the loading ramp. A radio started up abruptly—a salsa station, too loud at first, but then turned down, and someone shouted a question in Spanish. Dave caught the words barril and caballo, and there was the sound of the Oklahoma props being loaded onto the flatbed.
“Well, like I told you, there were two of them—her and her imaginary friend. I guess the friend did all the lifting.” The Earl laughed humorlessly. “Anyway, she says she doesn’t know about moving the pallets. She got scared and ran inside. Hell,” he said, “it’ll all blow over.”
“I hope it does, for Collier’s sake as well as Jenny’s.”
“We’ve been here since fifty-four, and nothing like that’s ever happened. Never any real trouble. Hardly an argument.” He shook his head. “But I don’t believe that little girl started that fire, no matter how many imaginary friends she’s got.”
“What does Edmund think about it?” Dave asked. “He was there for the whole thing?”
“Edmund was working late, smelled the smoke. Apparently he’d seen Jenny standing out there, near where the fire broke out, maybe five minutes earlier. He tried like hell to save Collier’s truck, but it was too late.”
“Well,” Dave said, “that’s a dirty shame.” He tried to keep the skepticism out of his voice, but there were a couple of things about this that he didn’t believe. Given that it wasn’t Jenny who started the fire—and he’d bet a shiny new dime that it wasn’t—then it was an arsonist. But an arsonist who wanted to do what? Burn Collier’s International Harvester, a truck that was worth about two hundred dollars soaking wet? Collier didn’t have any enemies … except one.
Edmund started the fire himself. Dave knew this with utter certainty. He understood that the idea was crazy, that he wanted to think that Edmund was up to something shabby like this. Casey would warn him about that kind of thinking, and probably Casey would be right. And certainly there was no use telling the Earl that his older son was a creep and a liar. The Earl couldn’t see it. He wouldn’t see it. And even if he could be made to see it, he would deny it just as easily and surely as if he were brushing away a fly. He denied the termites in the windowsills, the leaky skylights, the money draining through the floorboards of the old Ocean Theatre. The Earl didn’t want “pollution.” He didn’t want the outside world. The Earl of Gloucester was his fortress it kept the outside out and the inside in. That’s why this kind of thing hit him so hard. One thing was true, though: he’d bounce back just as hard.
“Collier’s been a little bit worried about a couple of other things lately, too,” Dave said. “He didn’t need this.”
“What else is he worried about? He hasn’t said anything to me about any other worries.”
“He thinks you’re going to sell the bungalow out from under him. Sell the property to the city.”
“That old hogwash. He’s been on that tack for years now. He’s worried he’s going to be out in the street in his old age, living in an alley. Collier’s a worrier. Always has been. That’s why he’s so damned cheerful and full of crap all the time it’s a cover. I told him that bungalow was his as long as he cared to stay there. And now that he’s got Jenny, he’d be smart to stay there until she’s grown. He can’t do any better than he’s doing right here.”
“That’s just what he thinks. He’s worried that if he loses the place, they’ll take Jenny away. Put her in a foster home.”
“To hell with that. If birds crapped rocks, we’d all have to wear helmets.”
“There’s more truth than poetry in that,” Dave said.
23
EDMUND WAS AWAKENED BY THE TELEPHONE RINGING, dimly aware that it had been ringing for a long time. There was sunlight through the windows, the fog already burned off, so it must be late morning. He groped for the phone, but it wasn’t where it was supposed to be, and he pushed himself up onto his elbow, focusing his eyes as pain lanced across his forehead. His mouth was parched, and he could taste something faintly perfumey, as if he’d been chewing rose petals. He was naked and cold, had been sleeping with-out covers. The two blankets and bedspread were folded and piled where he’d left them, but the top sheet was torn and rumpled and moist, as if he had sweated with a fever all night. He licked his lips. The phone continued to ring. He spotted it on the floor, next to where he had moved the bedside table last night so that all of it would be out of his line of vision. He bent over and picked it up.
“Yeah,” he said, the word sticking in his throat. He looked for his water glass, but it was knocked over and lay broken on the floor.
“Dalton?”
“Yeah. Wait a second.” He recognized Ray Mifflin’s voice. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and cleared his throat, suddenly recalling last night—the door in the wall, bits and pieces of what had followed—but all of it only vaguely, like recalling a dream. The pain in his forehead was a dull throbbing now, like a hangover headache. He looked at the east wall, but there was no door now, just the clean expanse of freshly painted white.
And yet he could tell exactly where the door had opened, could very nearly see a line of shadow there like a hairline scar, like the edge of the dark side of the moon against the darker blackness of space.
He realized suddenly that he was holding the phone to his face, that he had forgotten about the call. “Yeah, Ray. Sony.”
“The phone must’ve rung twenty times.”
“I was asleep.”
“Well, I hope you’re awake now it seems that we’ve got a litüe problem.”
“You sound miffed, Mr. Mifflin.” Edmund snickered, but Ray didn’t laugh. “Seriously, what’s the trouble?” He worked his shoulders and neck to loosen up.
“It seems as if there’s a gentleman who’s interested in our transactions.”
“A gentleman? That wouldn’t be my pseudo father, would it?” He had half expected this after Mayhew’s capers last night. Threatening the man was useless. He should never have used Mayhew in the first place.
“If you mean that homeless man you brought in the first time, no, I don’t. This guy’s fairly young. Thirties, maybe. He introduced himself as Jim Jones, which of course isn’t his name.”
“Jones?”
“That’s the name of that minister who killed all those people in Guyana with poison grapeade. A few years back? C’mon. Edmund. You’ve got to remember that one.”
“That’s who he pretended to be? That cultist?” Edmund smashed his eyes shut and rubbed his forehead, trying to grasp this, but it was simply too insane. He looked at the bedsheet again, but he couldn’t remember tearing it up. Things had happened last night that….
“No, damn it. He didn’t pretend to be that Jim Jones.”
Edmund looked at the telephone receiver in disbelief. “Look, Ray. What the hell are you telling me here? I’m way off the beam.”
“I’m telling you it was a phony name, the first one that came into his head.”
“So was he some kind of agent? What? These guys must carry I.D. You didn’t say anything to this clown, did you? Did he have a subpoena?”
“He didn’t work for the county or for any other agency, Edmund. I’m not sure who he was, but I suspect he’s one of your employees, getting cute.”
“Christ. Of course he was. Fairly tall? Brown hair?”
“Yeah. Looked a little like Jimmy Stewart, but with more muscle, and a different voice, of course.”
“Yeah, I know him. Christ.”
“He’s up to some damn thing. I couldn’t read him, but he was obviously snooping around. I got him to back off, but I wanted to let you know. We don’t want trouble.”
“He’s not trouble, Ray. He’s nothing. He’s a nonentity. Don’t let him worry you.”
“He tells me you’ve got a brother.”
“Yes, indeed,” Ray said, without any hesitation. A lie wouldn’t do here. The jig was clearly already up with Mifflin, not that it mattered.
“Well, that’s not nothing, is it? Looks to me like we’ve got trouble one way or another. I don’t need lies, Edmund. I don’t need to wake up one
morning and have some clown from the county handing me my head in a box.”
“Unlax, Ray. To hell with my brother.”
“That’s two people we’ve got to say to hell with—this Jimmy Stewart character and your brother. Yesterday the coast was clear. Today there’s some kind of invasion. Next thing it’ll be your sister and your cousin.”
“There is no sister, Ray, and I’m telling you not to worry about it. My brother’s a beach bum. He renounced money ten years ago.”
“Nobody renounces money. Look, if it’s all the same to you, I’m going to cash out.”
“What are you talking about, ‘cash out’?”
There was a long silence, and then, speaking very evenly, Mifflin said, “it was our agreement that I could take an early retirement—those were your words—if I ever wanted out. You agreed to pay me half the money you owed me for the commission.”
“Hell, of course I remember that. But what I said is that I’d advance you the money if you were short. And I’m happy to do that. What do you need? New car?”
“I need to put this behind me.”
“You mean out altogether? Out out?”
“That’s the ticket.”
“Hold on just a second, Ray, let me explain a couple of things. First, my brother doesn’t give a rat’s ass about any of this. He’s a hippie. Second, he doesn’t have any idea what kind of properties our old man has. My brother doesn’t soil his mind with business. He literally doesn’t know. I’m the one who keeps that end of things straight, and I’ve been keeping it straight for nearly twenty years. If he wanted to see the books, I could show him the books, and I guarantee you he wouldn’t have a clue.”
“This is not making me any more secure. Keeping two sets of books is like writing all your secrets out in a diary and then leaving it on the shelf. You cook your own damn goose.”
“I didn’t say two sets of books, Ray. I said that he doesn’t know from books. And one way or another, what’s he going to do to me if he does find out? Press charges? Why? To gain what? And as far as he’d know, you’d be innocent. I would have swindled you, too. What would “ I do, point the finger at you? Why? What earthly good would it do me? it’s you who’s got me over a barrel, Ray. Not the other way around.”