Winter Tides

by James P. Blaylock

  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.

  26

  FROM WHERE HE STOOD IN THE EARL’S OFFICE, DAVE 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.

  “I’m early,” she said. “I wanted to get my bearings a li
ttle bit.”

  Dave tried to read something into her smile. Was it directed particularly at him? He wondered abruptly what Edmund had said to poison her against him. She had an easy way of carrying herself, a sureness about her, that made his chances seem slim….

  His chances of what? he wondered. So far he hadn’t even managed a simple good morning—only his trademark idiot grin. “We’re just starting to talk about Collier’s play,” Dave said. “So you’re right on time.”

  “That’s right,” the Earl told her. “Since you’ll be working on his sets, you ought to hear what he’s got in mind. We’ve got King Lear in the works, which is high-toned theatre for a beach city like ours, but then we’re high-toned people, and we’ve got a higher calling. This is Leslie Collier, by the way, and this young man is Dave Quinn, my right-hand man.”

  “Most people just call me Collier,” Collier told her, bowing at the waist.

  “Anne and I have already met,” Dave said unnecessarily to the Earl, and he grinned at her again. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Collier nudge the Earl’s foot with his own, and he realized that he must be blushing, betrayed by the blood in his own veins.

  “Did you get your stuff moved in downstairs?” the Earl asked her.

  “All of it. Thanks again.”

  “Our pleasure,” the Earl said. “Anne needed some storage room for a bunch of paintings,” he said to Dave and Collier, “so I had her move them in downstairs, in one of the empty closets by the shop. George and Luis chucked out a lot of that old cardboard crap that we had stored down there in order to make room for it.”

  “Paintings? Really?” Dave nodded in appreciation, wondering if he ought to ask to see them, or whether that was out of line.

  “It’s just old stuff,” Anne said hastily. “Call it family heirlooms. I don’t want to throw it all out, mostly for sentimental reasons, but it’s not worth renting storage space, either.”

  “We’ve got storage space to burn,” the Earl said. And then to Collier he said, “So tell us about the play. We’ll make this a de facto story conference. Coffee?” He gestured toward the nearly full pot, but nobody wanted any. Collier told the Earl and Anne about the play, about making Lear a drunk, his kingdom a shambles because he couldn’t leave the bottle alone. The Earl watched Collier attentively, nodding here and there, taking him seriously from the start, objecting to nothing until Collier was done.

  “The king’ll have to sober up by the end of the play,” the Earl said finally. “We’ve got to have some sympathy for him sooner or later, and no one’s got any sympathy for a character who stays drunk past a point.”

  “I was thinking he’d have to be raving drunk on the heath,” Collier told him. “Probably he’s having the DT’s out there. God knows what he sees in the storm clouds, but I’ve got a couple of knockout ideas—which, by the way, I’ve got to ask Dave about. And now that we’ve got an artist, I can ask her too. What I want is three enormous copper baby faces, perfectly spherical, one to represent each of the three daughters. Hammered copper, although we can probably get that effect with copper-colored Rustoleum and black paint.”

  “I can cut the faces out of door skins,” Dave said. “How big did you want them?”

  “Call ’em eight feet across,” Collier said.

  Dave nodded. “We can check out the price of copper foil, but the paint would be worlds cheaper.”

  “Easy to make it look hammered,” Anne said.

  “Good,” Collier said. “And don’t we have about a million rubber snakes around here someplace? We need ’em for the DT’s.”

  “Sure we’ve got snakes,” the Earl said. “Every damned variety. But why stop with the snakes? There’s a couple of dozen stuffed alligators in a box somewhere.”

  “I don’t know about the alligators,” Collier said doubtfully.

  “What the hell’s wrong with them?” The Earl poured himself another cup of coffee. “A reptile’s a reptile.”

  “They’re a little too much, maybe. There’s such a thing as subtlety.”

  “Fair enough,” the Earl said. “It’s your play. If you don’t want any alligators, so be it. Although I think the public likes an alligator. And alligators or no alligators, I still say that nobody’s going to give a damn that the poor king’s been mightily abused—not if he’s still drunk, they’re not.”

  “Hold the hell on, damn it. By the end the man’s sober. You’ve got to picture it. Drenched by rain and beat senseless by the elements, he staggers back into town, except it’s too damned late. They’ve got Cordelia, and they’ve already hung her. The old king’s terrible to see, very wrathful, but a king’s wrath doesn’t cut any mustard with the Fates. Let him rage. She’s as dead as an oyster.”

  “I hate the hell out of that,” the Earl said. “I can’t bear that scene and never could. Why don’t we save Cordelia?”

  “Okay,” Collier said, nodding slowly. “Let’s say we save the girl. Have it your way. It’s got to be good, though; it’s got to be an improvement over the original.” He thought for a moment, furrowing up his forehead, and then said, “How about if she’s saved by angels? We fly ’em in like in the old Greek plays, in a basket out of the clouds.”

  “We’ve got no time to set up the flying apparatus. And besides, I think you ought to give the old king a chance to do the right thing, and not leave it up to angels. That’s bad form—deus ex machina. Let your man solve his own problems or else go down trying. What do you say, Dave?”

  “Sure,” Dave said. “I can do without the angels.”

  “Okay, then,” Collier said, “how about a truckload of potted plants out on the stage? Fake plants on collapsible stems. They hang the girl, see, and the plants wither and die, and then the door bangs open and it’s Lear and the fool and whoever else you want, loaded for bear. There’s a hell of a swordfight, death left and right, about a gallon of blood pumped out onto the stage, the fog machine working hard, cannon fire, big old blunderbuss pistols reeling out of the wings and shooting out sparks. And then when the smoke clears, there lies the girl, apparently dead. The old man reads out the usual speeches, but when he kisses Cordelia on the forehead, up she comes, large as life.”

  “Like in Snow White,” Anne said. She looked ready to burst out laughing, and Dave was full of a sudden joy. He took a chance and winked at her.

  “Just like Snow White,” Collier said. “Except of course it’s the old king, and not a prince. And anyway, right then all those dead plants spring up straight, flowers blooming up all over the stage. I want hundreds of them, all opening up, and bam! into the curtain call. It’ll be miraculous.”

  “It’ll fetch the house down,” the Earl said. “Except I don’t know about the pistols. That was pretty early for pistols, wasn’t it? What do you two think? Can we stand anachronism?”

  “I like the pistols,” Dave said. “We’re not crazy for historical accuracy here anyway, are we?”

  “I’m wondering about an elephant,” Collier said. “We could run in a Hannibal subplot.” He looked at the Earl, who shook his head.

  “Stage wouldn’t hold up, unless you’re talking a plywood elephant.”

  “I was just kidding,” Collier said. “To hell with the elephant. What about the title, though? I’d like to meddle with the title so that the public’s not misled.”

  “Why don’t we call it The Travesty of King Lear?” Dave said, the idea coming to him out of nowhere.

  There was a moment of silence, and both Collier and the Earl looked at him hard, as if trying to figure out whether he was serious or making a joke. “That’s good,” Collier said finally. “I really think that’s good. But it has a little too much of the alligator in it, if you follow me.”

  “Alligator?” Dave asked.

  “I mean to say that it lacks a certain subtlety. I don’t mean to say it’s not brilliant. Of course it’s brilliant. I’m just not sure it’s right.” He looked at his watch then. “Good God almighty,” he said, “it’s nearly nine.”


  “Is that all?” the Earl asked. “Sun’s barely up. Don’t be in such a dad-blamed hurry all the time, you’ll work my employees stupid. Dave, why don’t you and Anne run on up to the corner and buy yourselves a cup of coffee and a cinnamon roll? I’m out of here this afternoon, by the way, and I’m giving Jolene the day off. Once the trucks get loaded, you’ll have the place pretty much to yourselves, so you can really spread out. Right now I want you to take an hour to talk strategy. Develop a working rapport. Then you can come back and do some real work.”

  “I could use a cup of coffee,” Anne said. She stepped out onto the balcony ahead of Dave.

  The Earl put his hand on Dave’s shoulder and whispered, “Talk to the girl, for God’s sake. Turn on the old charm.” Dave followed Anne down the stairs and out onto the loading dock, where the Earl, having followed them, pressed a ten-dollar bill into his hand. “On the house,” he said.

  27

  EDMUND CAME OUT THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR OF THE Ace Hardware on Main. Now that the fog had cleared away, the day was irritatingly bright with sunshine. He realized he was completely worn out. Usually a little exercise gave him an extra jolt of energy, but this morning it had simply crushed him. He had put in another full night, and he felt almost fluish with fatigue and headache now, and with the dusky memories of what once, years ago, might have seemed to him to be shameful. Shame, he had long ago discovered, was just another hang-up. But despite his exhaustion, he longed for the return of evening and the dark urges that accompanied it.