Winter Tides

by James P. Blaylock

  “Then we understand each other.”

  Edmund smiled at him, giving the smile a moment to affect him. “I think we do,” he said, and then walked away from him again, half expecting Dave to jump him from behind, to lose his sanity altogether. He half hoped he would. He could have him arrested for assault.

  41

  MAYHEW HAD BEEN HARD TO GET RID OF, ALTHOUGH IN the end he had taken Ray Mifflin’s twenty-five dollars and two packs of cigarettes. He was dressed in the same faded yellow coat that he’d worn when he’d pretended to be Edmund Dalton’s father, and with the same leisure suit, and true to form, he had headed next door to the liquor store to buy a morning bottle before walking away south again down Beach Boulevard.

  Mifflin sat in his swivel chair now and stared out the window at the afternoon traffic, running through what he’d say to Dalton when the time came to bail out. Dalton wouldn’t make it easy on him. But in the end—and Dalton had to know this—if one of them went down, they would both go down. Dalton’s options were as limited as his own. And if push came absolutely to shove, Mifflin could simply turn him in. He could claim to have been hoaxed by the Mayhew fraud and then admit to relaxing the rules a couple of times afterward, not knowing that Dalton was up to any kind of real malarkey. The money that he had taken from Edmund had been cash. He hadn’t signed any receipts. And so far he hadn’t put a dime of it in the bank, so there were no big deposits to look suspicious to anyone snooping around.

  So on the plus side of the ledger, he had made over fifteen thousand dollars in no time at all. No effort, no expenses, no trouble. He was on the edge of making more quick. Dalton had been right. Right Now Notary was pathetic. It was a living, but that’s about all it was. Mifflin was sick of the trash-strewn strip mall, of the crush of petty business every winter, of the smell of stale coffee and the mountains of forms and the whole damned squalid thing that his life had become.

  Thoughts of Mexico turned in his mind, and he doodled with a pencil on a piece of paper, adding up figures. What the hell would it take? The house in Punta Rioja needed work, but cheap labor was easy to find down there. A wife, for God’s sake, was easy to find down there, or at least it was a hell of a lot easier down there than up here. Since he’d put on weight and his hairline had receded, his chances for companionship had fallen to absolute zip. He had even bought an issue of Cherry Blossoms in order to check out the possibility of buying a Filipino bride, but the next morning, when he had come out into the living room and seen the magazine on the table, he’d been so humiliated that he had tossed it into the trash.

  He threw his pencil at the front door and pushed himself back from the desk. What was utterly clear to him was that Mayhew would soon favor him with another visit. And why not? Mifflin was easy money, and Mayhew knew it. May-hew was an old drunk, but he wasn’t a naive old drunk. He had been tolerably sober on the morning that he had impersonated Dalton’s father, and he had taken a damn good look at the deed that he’d signed. Probably he knew that there was real money involved in the transaction. Mayhew was in a position to nickel-and-dime everyone involved until Hell froze over.

  He hadn’t been happy with the twenty-five bucks he’d gotten this morning, either. Dalton, the old man had told him, had given him fifty. And “that other guy” had given him twenty more. What the hell “other guy”? Mayhew wouldn’t say. He had shaken his head shrewdly, as if he wouldn’t be outfoxed, as if he thought Mifflin himself would start knocking people over for twenty-five bucks himself, and wreck Mayhew’s deal. So who the hell was the other guy? Not Jimmy Stewart, unless he was paying Mayhew for information….

  As much as he hated to talk to the man, Mifflin picked up the phone and dialed Dalton’s number. “We’ve got more trouble,” he said when Dalton answered.

  1

  THE FOG DRIFTED IN EARLY THAT EVENING, A MOVING wall that came in off the ocean, drawn toward the warmth of the coast. Anne and Dave watched it cross the Highway from where they stood in front of Jack’s Surf Shop at the bottom of Main Street, and in moments it engulfed them. They walked west along the sidewalk toward the doughnut shop, cutting up the path through the vacant lot.

  “Is it like this every spring?” Anne asked.

  “Not really,” Dave said. “I think it’s foggy more often in the early fall. It used to be worse, back when most of Fountain Valley was agriculture. The fog would get so thick that you had to drive with the door open, watching the white line.”

  “Agriculture?” Anne asked. “How long ago?” They passed the doughnut shop and turned up the path through the foggy vacant lot.

  “When I was a kid,” Dave said. “Once it started to go, though, it went fast, like the oil wells. It only took a couple of years. The real estate was worth too much.”

  Anne stopped on the path and looked up at him. “What did they grow,” she asked softly, “hamsters?” The fog hid them from the Highway and from 6th Street.

  “A lot of hamsters,” Dave said, nodding. “Hamsters and guinea pickles.” He stood looking at her, his heart pounding. “Mostly they grew sugar beets.”

  “Sugar beets?”

  “Looks like a sweet potato,” Dave said. “They make sugar out of it.”

  “Why don’t they call it a sugar potato?” she asked, looking at him doubtfully. “I think you’re making all this up to impress me with your vast storehouse of knowledge.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “Because you’re thinking that you want to kiss me, and you know I have high standards.”

  He hesitated, looking into her eyes.

  “Yes, that was an invitation,” she said. “Don’t be hopeless.”

  He kissed her then, sliding his hands up under her jacket in order to hold her more closely.

  “That was rather nice,” she said after a moment. “I was afraid maybe you were waiting for a printed invitation.”

  “I’m slow that way,” he said.

  “Good,” she told him. “I like slow men. Slow and goofy.”

  “Well,” he said, “you found one. After all these years of searching.”

  “It seems like we’re alone in the world, doesn’t it?” Anne whispered. They listened to the slow creaking of the invisible oil well and to the sound of surf collapsing along the beach behind them. A dog barked somewhere in the distance, but it sounded as if it were a long way off, and after a moment another dog barked once, as if to answer it, and then both of them were silent. Dave kissed her again, uninvited this time, and then they set out again, walking past the chain-link fence toward the back of the Earl’s.

  The breeze died, the fog hung still in the air around them, and Dave was aware suddenly of a change in the atmosphere. The temperature seemed to decline at the moment that the breeze fell, and he could hear his own heart beating with remarkable clarity. Their own footfalls seemed to echo off the high wooden wall of the warehouse, and from somewhere out in the night, from some indefinable direction, there was the sound of someone else walking, matching them step for step, like an echo.

  Anne’s hand tightened over his, and she drew him to a sudden stop. The slow, scraping tread continued, and Dave could smell burning on the night air now, very faint, as if it came to them from miles and miles away.

  “Do you hear it?” Anne said.

  “The footsteps?”

  “Yes.” She looked around nervously. “Listen how they’re not from any single direction. They’re all around us.”

  “Maybe that’s just a trick of the fog.”

  “It’s not the fog,” she said. “It’s something else.”

  “What else?” he asked. “You’re starting to spook the hell out of me.”

  “I don’t know what else…. Look.” She stopped again.

  The lights from Collier’s front porch glowed to their left. The front door of the bungalow was open. Jenny stood on the porch dressed in a nightgown that dragged on the ground. She wore a feathered boa around her neck, and she stood staring out into the fog, toward the
corner of the warehouse, near where the truck fire had broken out.

  “Do you see her?” Anne whispered. She squeezed Dave’s hand again, as if to compel his attention.

  He did see her now—a red figure in the fog, standing still along the wall of the warehouse, her back turned toward them. It seemed to Dave, impossibly, that he could see the clapboards through her. He knew at once who, or what, he was looking at, knew that Anne was right about the odd sound of the footfalls. The figure wavered in the moving fog, now a nearly transparent red shadow, then something more solid, as if focused by the mist. Her hand moved across the gray clapboard, strobing in the light from the porch lamp, and there was a soft knocking and scraping, as if she were running her nails across the chalky old paint. Then she vanished, leaving a ghostly white patch of fog that faded into the gray of the surrounding night.

  “That’s her,” Jenny said behind them, and Dave lurched in surprise at the sound of her voice. She had come down off the porch and stood behind them now.

  “That’s who?” Anne asked her softly.

  Dave could see that there were marks on the wall—charcoal streaks, not in any pattern or picture, but feeble smears, utterly meaningless. A piece of charred wood lay on the ground, reminding Dave of the story that Anne had told him about her visit to Scotland.

  “That’s the one,” Jenny said emphatically. “The one I said.”

  “Your imaginary friend?” Anne asked.

  She shook her head hard.

  “She’s the one who started the fire,” Dave said.

  Jenny nodded, hugging herself now, as if she suddenly realized she was cold.

  “What’s her name?” Anne asked. “Do you know her name?”

  “Elinor,” Jenny said.

  43

  MORE TROUBLE … THAT WAS RAY MIFFLIN’S CONSTANT complaint, and Edmund was tired of it. Edmund hated being tired of anything. Clearly it was time to do a little bit of housecleaning—throw some refuse into the trash bin. He turned left off the Highway, up Main Street into downtown Seal Beach. His rented Ford was charged to Ray Mifflin’s Mastercard. Cheapskate Rent-a-car had an inventory of about eight cars and operated out of a building that was a remodeled gas station in Long Beach, on a bad block of Cherry Avenue. Hosing the kid at the counter had been easy—a false mustache, a bunch of mousse to slick his hair back, a suit and tie. Thank God he didn’t look a hell of a lot like Ray Mifflin, just enough to rent a car with the man’s I.D. He had even gotten the signature right.

  Stealing Mifflin’s Mastercard and driver’s license had been even easier. Mifflin was in the habit of leaving his wallet on the desktop, because it was too incredibly fat to sit on. Slipping the credit card and license out of it had been the work of a moment, and Edmund was betting that Mifflin wouldn’t look for either one of them tonight. After a long day’s work, Mifflin would be heading home to an easy chair and a bottle of vin ordinaire; he wouldn’t be out throwing the plastic around. And unless he was pulled over by a cop, the license wouldn’t be an issue either. If he did discover them missing, he’d think he left them somewhere, and even if he reported the Mastercard missing or stolen now, so what? Tomorrow or the next day Edmund could shove it through the mail slot in the front door of Right Now Notary, and Mifflin would find it. Probably it would confuse the hell out of him.

  It was past ten, and the shops in downtown Seal Beach were closed, although there were still a couple of bars open and a few scattered pedestrians on the sidewalks. The evening was foggy again, and Edmund switched on the wipers, watching the red glow of the traffic light at Central appear out of the mist. He had always hated fog, but it was just what the doctor ordered tonight. Just to be safe, on his way north he had pulled over in a parking lot in Sunset Beach and disconnected his license plate lamp, although he couldn’t fix his mind on any real reason for having done so. Like so many other things, it fell into the category of inspiration.

  Mifflin had been right, in his tiresome way. Mayhew was turning into a loose cannon, and it was time that Edmund defused him. Hiring him in the first place had been a mistake. He was apparently totally venal, no honor at all. Edmund turned left at Ocean Boulevard and slowed down, immediately spotting the old man standing near the foot of the pier. His clothes were disheveled and his hair was a frizzled mass in the wet air. Edmund lowered the passenger window, leaned across the seat, and whistled. Mayhew looked up as if he had been startled out of sleep, and then hurried across the fifteen feet of sidewalk, opened the car door, and climbed in.

  A pair of foot travelers loomed out of the fog, heading across Ocean toward the pier, and Edmund accelerated slowly away from the curb, even before Mayhew’s door was shut, in order to keep the rental car out of focus to them. Just a ghost, he thought, and the idea of it sent a thrill through him. He turned up 10th Street, through the neighborhood east of Main, where the streets were empty, the houses obscured by the fog, the car’s wipers swishing back and forth at five second intervals. A cat darted out into the street from beneath a parked car, and Edmund swerved toward it, veering off at the last moment when he realized he couldn’t hit it without running into an ivy-covered palm tree at the curb. The cat bounded up a driveway and disappeared.

  “What the hell was that all about?” Mayhew asked him. The old man had an incredulous look on his face.

  Edmund didn’t say anything. He had a nearly overwhelming urge to spit on the old man, but he mastered it, and he swallowed heavily, sucking his mouth dry of saliva. He had spit on a woman in a supermarket parking lot yesterday when she had failed to move her shopping cart out of the way of his car. The act had turned her instantly into a screaming psychotic, and he had waited for her to see that he was laughing before driving calmly away. She had thrown a box of something at him, which had fallen pitifully short, and that had made the whole thing even funnier, and it was all he could do not to circle the parking lot and spit on her again, maybe run her down right there on the spot.

  He realized that Mayhew was still staring at him. After a moment the old man looked away, watching the shadowy houses slip past. At the Highway, Edmund turned right, heading back down through Surfside toward Sunset Beach again. He wasn’t sure what their destination was yet. He would play this one entirely by ear, wait for the inspiration that he knew would come. The night would supply something if only he opened his mind to it. The presence of the old man in the car congested him, though, interfered with his natural artistic impulses, him and his goddamn accusatory staring.

  Maybe he would play cat-and-mouse with old Mayhew—force him out of the car at gunpoint. Kick him in the knees and then make him crawl around a deserted parking lot while Edmund buzzed him in the rental car, closer and closer. He pictured the panic in the old man’s eyes, the sound of the car glancing off a hip, bumping over a foot, old Mayhew limping along ahead of the bumper, the air wheezing out of his lungs. He’d know what the hell it was all about then. He wouldn’t have to ask. Edmund would have to kill him finally, of course, but that would rid the world of one more piece of human trash….

  He fought to control his temper. If there was one thing that murdered artistic impulses, it was temper.

  “What’s the deal this time?” Mayhew asked him finally. He sounded tired out, the poor old thing.

  “How are you feeling?” Edmund asked him, filling his voice with concern. “Have you eaten today? Have you had a chance to bathe?”

  “What’s the goddamn deal?”

  “Which goddamn deal was that?”

  The old man was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I shagged a ride up to the Glider Inn with a man I know, but I had to walk from there. The whole thing took me three hours, and then I stood there at the pier for two more. That’s five hours I’ve got in this transaction so far.”

  “I honestly appreciate that.”

  “Well, that’s good. Because you didn’t appreciate it worth a damn last time. I keep wearing out shoe leather while you get fat. That’s got to stop.”

  “I couldn’t a
gree with you more, Mr. Mayhew.” They cruised past Bolsa Chica Beach, along the dark Highway. So far the night was moonless, and the fog obscured any starlight. They might have been traveling in the middle of a desert.

  “As an independent contractor,” Mayhew said, “I’ve got to look out after myself.”

  “That’s an attitude I can sympathize with. You’re a man of business. You’re an independent contractor. God, that sounds just right, doesn’t it? A contractor.” Edmund considered the possibility of pulling over right here and cutting Mayhew’s tongue out as he had promised to do, but there was nowhere to park except on the Highway itself. It was past the beach curfew, and a lone parked car would draw too much attention to itself, rental or no rental. And besides that, he didn’t have any quarters for the meter. He laughed out loud at the very idea of it. How many quarters would it take, at fifteen minutes a pop, to buy enough time to murder a man? One would do it.

  Abruptly he made the decision to head farther south, to draw this out, whatever it was, while he waited for true inspiration. So far he was just jazzing around here. He couldn’t see a clear structure yet, artistically speaking. He had loaded the trunk of the car with his tools, just as would any artist. But until you found your true subject, how did you know if you wanted oils or pastels, marble or wood or plaster of Paris? Something told him that this one would be a bigger undertaking than anything else so far, that he had been warming up to this, learning his craft. It was no time to be hasty.

  “If we’re heading back into Huntington anyway,” Mayhew said, “then I can’t see why the hell I killed the last five hours hauling myself up to Seal.”

  “You can’t see.”

  “That’s right. I could have stayed in town. All this folderol of yours is pure crap, if you ask me.”

  “You’ll be compensated for your time, Mr. Mayhew.”

  “In what way? That’s all I’m trying to find out here.”

  “What did you have in mind?” Edmund looked sharply at him. “If you’re an independent contractor, make me a bid.”