Winter Tides

by James P. Blaylock

  “Still, there’s precautions to take, Edmund. And if I don’t know the whole story, I can’t take the precautions, can I? I’ve got a career, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I swear on my mother’s grave that from now on, you’11 know the whole story. That’s all I’ve got—one hippie, beach bum brother. He gives most of his money away as it is. I’ve got no sisters, no aunts and uncles, no cousins, nobody else.”

  “I hope you can understand that I can’t take a chance.”

  “Well, it seems to me that you already took one. And so far you’ve made out pretty damned well.”

  “What about this employee of yours?”

  “He’s no threat to either of us. What did you say to him?”

  “Nothing. He’s got nothing.”

  “Then that’s what he’s got. You want to know the whole story? I’ll tell you the whole story. He’s a friend of my brother’s. Long-time, nosy, worthless friend. The worst-case scenario is this: let’s say he finds out something—which he won’t, of course—but let’s say he does, and he goes to my brother. He tells him that bad brother Edmund has cashed out some of the old man’s property. What does Casey do about it?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “That’s my brother. Casey’s my brother. What’s he going to do about it? Call a cop? I don’t think so. And besides, I’m his brother, for God’s sake. I pretty much raised him. Maybe, if he really shows some backbone, he’ll ask for his half of the money, which, of course, I can hand over as soon as the bank opens, since I’m holding onto it for him anyway.”

  “What do you mean, ‘holding onto it’?”

  “What I said. What did you think, that I was taking his half, too?” Edmund rolled his eyes and held the telephone out at arm’s length, gaping at it theatrically. “Ray. My man. I’m not that stupid. There’d be hell to pay down the line if I stole from him. His money’s sitting safe in the bank. Another six-month C.D. every time our ship comes in. As an investment counselor, you’ll tell me that the interest is crap on a C.D., but it’s insured, anyway—it’s safe, it’s easy, he can cash it out quick if he wants to. I’ll be happy as hell to show you the paperwork.” This was brilliant. He should have thought of it straight off, but it had taken his brain a few minutes to get up to power. “If you honestly think we ought to move his money into some other kind of account …”

  “So you’re telling me that you’re only taking half this money?”

  “Only the money that’s due me when the old man dies. I thought we went over all this. I’m not greedy, Ray; I’m impatient. Technically that’s a crime, I guess. But like I said, inheritance tax is a crime too. Probate’s a crime. And by the way, your commission’s coming out of my half. I’ll tell you this, though. If property values drop any farther, and selling these lots now turns out to have been a good idea, then brother Casey’s going to ante up half your commission. I’m not passing myself off as a saint here, but I’m not stealing from my brother, either.” He waited for Mifflin’s response.

  “Okay, then. I wish you would have told me this before Jimmy Stewart walked in.”

  Edmund nearly laughed out loud. Mifflin had bought the farm—hook, line, and sinker. Maybe he had overestimated the man. “If I would have told you I had a brother, Ray, you wouldn’t have touched this at any price. You were petrified as it was. Am I right?”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right. I wouldn’t have touched it.”

  “But now you’ve touched it and you’ve made half a year’s income already, with more on the way. Don’t worry, be happy.”

  “I’m happy.”

  “Good. Because I already managed to move that first piece of real estate, that one out in Fountain Valley. You’ve got a check coming as soon as it clears escrow. Best I could do was thirty days.” All this was a lie too, but maybe it would help keep Ray quiet.

  He glanced at the five paintings tilted against the wall and noticed that one had been defaced—the paint scaled off all over the carpet. He bent over and squinted at it, not quite comprehending. There was something hovering at the edge of his mind, though, like a dream that he was nearly at the point of remembering.

  It was the largest and most expensive of the paintings—a storm over a peninsula of land that was covered with windswept trees, the ocean beyond, the sky a not of clouds. A patch of that sky had been rasped clean of paint.

  “What? I’m sorry, Ray. Someone’s at the door. Hold on!” he yelled at no one, half covering the receiver.

  “I said I hope that’s the last of these little surprises,” Ray said.

  Edmund controlled his temper. “That’s all I’ve got to offer in the surprise category. Are we clear, then?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I’ll hang up and get the door. Nice to hear from you, Ray.” He hung up the phone and got down onto his hands and knees to look more closely at the painting. A jagged shard from the broken water glass lay behind the canvas, paint scrapings clinging to the edge. Beside it lay a small tweezers, and the sight of it recalled the memory that had eluded him.

  He had broken the water glass himself, rapping it against the doorjamb. He could remember the feel of her hand on his shoulder, tracing patterns on his back, the closeness of her body as she hovered behind him, her urgent presence, the murky compulsion of the act of defacing the painting.

  And now he recalled all of it clearly, the long night restored from where its memory had lain in shadow. He got up off the floor and sat on the bed again. He realized that his hands were trembling, and he crossed his arms in front of him to keep them still. He felt momentarily feverish and nauseated, claustrophobic, playing the night through in his mind, frame by languid frame, the urgent hours of darkness wearing on, a memory of gray daylight through the window. Another thrill of recollection swept through him, pushing up into his throat, down into his loins. He licked his lips again, and the memory sharpened, a picture coming suddenly into focus: him crouching before the painting, holding the round body of a spider in the palm of his hand like a tiny black moon. He had removed its legs, plucked them off, laughing out loud, enjoying it immensely, rolling the hairlike legs smoothly between his fingers, his senses wildly acute, feeling the tiny joints popping apart, silky, exquisite explosions beneath his fingertips, the black fragments falling lightly atop the moist white sheet….

  He walked to the window now and opened the blinds with a trembling hand, then closed them immediately, the sunlight nearly blinding him. He knelt on the carpet and peered under the bed. A flashlight lay on the floor near the head end. He had a memory of crawling on his belly in the dust, his back scraping the ribs of the bed frame as he searched along the edge of the carpet and on the wooden legs of the bed frame, hunting things for her. And he could recall the pleasure of the two of them mashing the fat little bodies of spiders and silverfish and dead flies, daubing the brown ooze onto the canvas.

  He had summoned her, yes, but it was she who had possessed him last night, and he had been willingly possessed. It was a marriage, deeper, perhaps, than any conventional marriage could ever be. Dark fear on the one hand, desire on the other—the realm of Nightland, of the imagination loosened from its black iron restraints. He fetched the flashlight out from beneath the bed and clicked it off, even though the battery was long dead, and then examined the ruined painting again, peering at it closely. Tiny fragments of spiders’ legs adhered to the canvas like nonsense hieroglyphics in that pale area where the sky had been scraped clean. The act of gluing them in place with saliva mixed with the mashed insects had occupied what seemed to him now to have been an eternity. He had knelt there working at it, carefully plucking up a fragment of insect from the sheet, laying it on the canvas, utterly consumed by an artistic passion that wasn’t his alone, but was mingled with hers. He knew now that his efforts had been stimulated by his memory of the Night Girl’s painting, and he admired the tiny delicate renderings on the scraped-clean patch of canvas. He could recall all of it now with perfect clarity: the absolute cunning
rightness of a tiny smear of insect paste, the perfect angle of intersecting legs …

  In a sudden flash of insight he understood that the spirit door was nothing more nor less than a blank canvas, black instead of white, and that with his own passion he had created something profound. His blood was still warm with that passion, and he longed for the darkness again and for the return of the Night Girl.

  Anne’s painting, the Day Girl’s painting, was a dead loss from the point of view of anyone who didn’t understand what had happened to it, how it had been changed, and he wondered if Anne herself could ever really understand it, unless her own persona had been consumed by that same passion. Anne was fettered by convention, by her waking reins on the energies that obviously lay seething within her. He understood those energies well now, and he would help her find them if only she would let him, and together they would find a way to share it, by day as well as by night.

  24

  WELL, AS OF TODAY, ANNE WAS A WORKING GIRL. SHE stood at the window thinking about this, looking down at Main Street. The morning was foggy again, although there was sunlight behind the fog, and she had the feeling that the weather would clear up and the day would be perfect. Already she wanted to ditch work and simply wander around—down to the pier, maybe down to Central Park, which Mr. Hedgepeth had told her was wooded and worth seeing. Apparently there was a duck pond and hiking trails. A walk on the beach wouldn’t be a bad thing, either. There were sure to be seashells.

  She almost laughed out loud. Here she was working when she didn’t even have to, mixing herself into Edmund and Dave’s troubles as if she needed some of that commodity in her life.

  Dave … He was rather attractive. She rubbed the lace curtains between her fingers, recalling his eyes, his cheek-bones. He had a good face—nice to paint. He was handsome enough, but maybe more pleasant than handsome. He reminded her of someone, too. He looked something like photographs of her father, although that wasn’t entirely it. There was someone else…. Maybe that was what caused the immediate attraction, which wasn’t at all her style. She usually needed six months to warm up to a man. Dave was a few years older than she was, too, but that sort of thing didn’t bother her at all. And she preferred the awkward type. He had clearly been embarrassed just saying hello.

  Edmund, on the other hand, was a little too glib and a little too sure of himself, and she distrusted both of those things. Any man who was too happy with himself was certain to be mistaken, at least about that. At the university she’d had two different flings, but both of the men had wanted more than she had been willing to give them—although who she was holding out for she couldn’t quite say, and she was beginning to feel a little bit too much like an old maid. Spending her birthday alone hadn’t helped.

  She turned away from the window, picking up her airbrush and paints and putting them in a wooden tackle box and setting the box by the door. It was early, but she decided to head on down to the Earl of Gloucester anyway, if only to check in. She went into the kitchen, rinsed her cereal bowl and spoon, put away the Shredded Wheat, and drank the last half inch of cooled-off tea in her mug. She looked into the mirror over the kitchen sink and put on lipstick, a darker red than she usually wore. It looked flashy, but she felt a little flashy this morning. And right then she decided to change her blouse, too, maybe put on something that was a little less baggy, something that showed off her figure….

  Was she really going to make a move on Dave? Good God, she didn’t even know him. And rumor had it that he had a shaky past, that he was a pervert and a murderer, that he dropped things on people’s heads. Of course it was Edmund who was the rumor mill, and the more she saw of Edmund, the more he had begun to remind her of her sister Elinor. The similarity had nothing to do with his appearance; it was simply that he had the eyes and the facial expressions of a potential liar: the sometimes fraudulent smile, the too-serious tone, the self-promotion at the expense of someone else. There was an egocentricity that was like a high wall around him, protecting him from something, keeping something out. Maybe, as with Elinor, hiding something from the world. All his doubts about Dave had begun to sound pretty purely defensive—maybe worse.

  So she would make up her own mind about the mysterious Dave. In her bedroom, she slipped into a mohair sweater, gave her hair one more toss, and was ready to go out. At the front door she looked around the apartment one last time, still thinking about Elinor, thinking about the birthday cake frosting smeared across her painting.

  “Leave my stuff alone,” she said out loud. Then she picked up the tackle box and went out through the open door into the empty corridor, shutting the door and locking the dead bolt behind her.

  25

  THE ROUTE DOWN PECAN TO MAIN, BACK UP ORANGE 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 discov
ered 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.