The Shore (Leisure Fiction)

by Robert Dunbar

  Beneath the boardwalk, the wind stirred a low moan, like the closing note of a solemn hymn.

  Above the cottage roofs, a husk of moon glimmered in the afternoon sky. Before each dwelling, naked trees swayed, gnarled by salt wind, shadows stringing the lawns.

  Even with the seat pushed back as far as it would go, his long legs felt cramped in the Volkswagen. As he sipped coffee, he warmed his hands on the Styrofoam cup. The dead streets seemed slightly wider here, the houses larger, but still no noise intruded, and he found it increasingly difficult to imagine these blocks had ever echoed with the normal sounds of human life. Footsteps? Voices? Laughter? Grinning sourly, he decided he knew little enough about normality to be passing judgment. He turned up the heater. Since chasing the boy on the beach the day before, he hadn't been feeling right and had been making an effort to keep warm. Using one of the leather gloves from the seat beside him, he wiped at the mist on the side window.

  Still no children in sight. He could wait.

  Slumped, he stared glumly through the windshield. Weeks ago, raindrops had dried in jagged splatters on the glass, crusting into a translucent pattern that resembled heaps of tiny leaves. He fiddled with the radio again but soon gave up. Piece of junk. He hated everything about this car.

  Checking his watch, he resumed his surveillance of the street. Between each cottage lay a space wide enough for an automobile. Wooden fences broke up the monotony at random intervals but none offered anything like sufficient cover, especially not in winter with the trees whip-bare. On the other hand, there were no street lamps, and in full dark it might be safe enough, unless a porch light suddenly went on. He studied the yards, mapping out paths to rear doors and lower windows, a routine mental exercise. On the nearest lawn, a birdlike effigy tilted on stiff wire legs; beyond it, a plastic windmill spun, audibly hissing. On the other side of the street, some inventive gardener had bedded only plastic blooms, sun bleached now to a waxy gray, and everywhere small pine trees straggled like ragweed. The wildness creeps in. From many evenings of watching, he knew that jackrabbits frequented these streets at dusk, and twice he'd seen forays of raccoons. Once he'd spotted something like a furred reptile, only afterward realizing it must have been a possum.

  As the school bus swayed ponderously around the corner, he slid farther down in his seat and stayed down until the door hissed. Crouching, he could just see the bus in the side mirror. A girl hopped out, maybe twelve years old, dragging a smaller version of herself along, both of them all scarves and curls. Three boys bounced down after them, pummeling each other with their books while the bus groaned off, exhaust bulging from its tailpipe. The boys jostled through the intersection, as the girls headed down the block.

  Yesterday, he'd trailed the boys. Today, he waited until the girls got halfway to the corner, then jammed the ancient Volkswagen into gear. It shuddered forward, muffler sputtering. Lousy wreck. A cloud of smoke swirled up. Noisier than the damn bus. They'd promised to provide him with a "serviceable" vehicle for this assignment. He'd almost laughed when he'd seen the black beetle. How the hell am I supposed to stalk anybody in this? The clumsy paint job, smudged and clotted, made the car resemble a blob of ink. Like a hearse for clowns. The passenger seat bulged where broken springs pressed the splitting vinyl, and something thumped persistently in the floor. Like Edgar Allan Poe's car. Could be. Practically old enough. He snorted. Serviceable. The cell phone they'd given him stayed in the glove compartment. Permanently. It never worked in any of the places they sent him.

  The boys had vanished. The smaller girl wore a red overcoat, easy to follow, as she swung her schoolbag and marched along behind her sister. I manage though. He cruised slowly after them. Passing the girls, the dirty black car turned the corner, gaining speed once out of sight. A crumpled fender sang briefly against a tire, and he scanned each desolate side street he passed. Untenanted dwellings had a look he knew too well. So why can't I shake the feeling I'm the one being watched? He circled the block. Ever since I found this town. There seemed to be a strangely methodical quality to the cottages. Clearly they'd been constructed in clusters, laid out as irregularly as the streets themselves, somehow both monotonous and random. He adjusted the rearview mirror.

  An antiseptic-looking church on the corner seemed scarcely larger than the neighboring houses. Just ahead, the girls swung into view again. As they started across the intersection, he eased down slightly on the gas pedal.

  The gulls wheeled, their silhouettes like sickles, the erratic spatter of their sharpest screams glancing off the surface of the bay. Earlier they had feasted, descending in droves to the banquet. Now, driven from their roosts by vans and cars and flashing lights, they circled, shrilling.

  All day, men in uniforms had milled along the old dock, and whenever a gull settled, drawn by morsels still drifting along the surface, the men threw stones or bits of shell. Once, a shot had been fired, and birds had thundered away to hover and swoop in the frozen sky.

  Drifting on currents of air now, they pivoted, wailing in the twilight, awaiting their chance to glean whatever scraps the nets and hooks would miss.

  The chill quickened his step. He'd left the Volks on a side street and had followed the children on foot to a playground. The older girl had watched the boys toss a football until encroaching dusk had forced them away to nearby homes. These were the only children he'd seen in the entire town, this tiny group. He'd observed carefully, but they'd met no one else, spoken to no one else.

  In the fading light, the scratchy planks of the boardwalk seemed a natural barrier between sea and town, sand lapsing into dun wood, then into a granulating wedge of concrete. From the town side, a hotel pressed up against the boards, its tattered banner rustling overhead. He turned away. So close. Pain thundered in his head. Above the beach, gulls slowly spun, suspended in the vaporous twilight.

  Tide's in. Choppy shadows flickered in the waves, but the roar he heard was in his head, in his chest. He walked on, trying to think.

  At last, vision blurring with exhaustion, face blazing from the cold, he crossed the boards and headed down the ramp. Patches of ice pocked the sidewalk with the same dull hue as the sky.

  Down the block, a lamp winked through the drapes of the house the little girls had entered. No lights showed in any of the other houses, and no curtains parted. Yet the sensation of being watched intensified as he headed into the center of town.

  Hiking past darkened storefronts, he peered constantly back over his shoulder. A fleeting shape trailed always just beyond his sight--he felt sure of it. Another sepulchral hotel glowered, boarded as tightly as the one on the boardwalk, and starlings cycloned above its roof. A few street lamps glimmered to life.

  With a growl, a jeep bounced past him down the street. Traces of metallic green bled through the white paint around the word POLICE, and he glimpsed a pale, sharp face through the windshield. The jeep slowed at the corner, and he studied it with his peripheral vision. Pretty amateurish, he decided. The revolving light on the hood looked like the sort that attached magnetically. He sauntered past, hands crammed deep in his pockets.

  Hunching his shoulders, he turned onto a small residential street, then hurried past shriveled hedges. The jeep didn't follow. He smelled smoke from a wood fire, and his breath spiraled in mist as dead leaves rasped and scuttled across the sidewalk. Keeping his face down, he studied the sidewalk. Past winters had wracked the terrain. Cracks in the street had heaved a foot above the roadbed, as though from an earthquake. He's holed up here. A skin of ice on a puddle crunched beneath his shoe, and his cough felt like a hook in his chest. I know it.

  I can feel it. He should get the car, he told himself, begin patrolling the roads that led to the highway. Even now, the boy might be sneaking away, and he would have to begin his search again, going from town to town, looking for...

  No, he's gone to ground here. Yesterday, he'd gotten lucky...and blown it. So now he knows I'm after him. A trembling rage convulsed him as debris spun about hi
s head. A dried leaf lifted from the ground and rushed against his chest, held there by the wind. He tried to brush it away, but it clung with brittle tenacity, edges curling sharply, scrabbling at his coat.

  Where the hell did I leave the damn car? He crumbled the leaf between his fingers and let the pieces drift away.

  Dusk charred the facade of The Edgeharbor Arms, and the light in the window smoldered, glinting off a brass plaque by the entrance. As the lead glass doors to the foyer swung shut behind him, winter rattled at the panes, and tasseled drapes swayed in the draft. Just to be out of the wind felt luxurious.

  The room seemed steeped in decades of tobacco and musty dirt. A single lamp by the desk--its yellowing shade depicting a turn-of-the-century boardwalk scene--left most of the lobby in deep gloom, and shadows bulged behind the ripely ammoniac old sofas. At first, he savored the thawing warmth, but as blood trickled back to his hands and feet an aching weariness swept through him.

  The door behind the registry desk stood slightly ajar, and beyond it an infant squalled while a man and woman squabbled in a language he didn't speak, the cacophony rendered even less intelligible by the din of a television. The wet smell of boiling pasta engulfed him. Suddenly, the voices ceased, and the television roar dropped to a mutter.

  So they know I'm back. Only the baby's wails continued. Abruptly, the door slammed, and the chandelier jangled. Reflexively, he glanced up at the trembling crystal daggers. Then he peered around the lobby, inspecting every corner.

  From the moment he'd spied the padlocked doors of the elevator, he'd understood them to be permanently sealed and not merely shut for the season. This applied to much else here in Edgeharbor. Already the Arms seemed wretchedly familiar, like the setting for a recurrent dream, though he'd only been in town just over a week. With a sigh, he lumbered up the stairs.

  Patches of carpet had worn down to bare boards. At the second-floor landing only an unshaded bulb in a ceiling fixture diluted the gloom. Need to lie down. Pressure swelled in his head, and it hurt to move his legs. Now.

  When he'd checked in, the proprietor's wife had been furious about his demanding a room above the second floor, and she'd wailed in broken English about all the climbing she would have to do. But she'd relented when he paid two weeks in advance and threw in an extra twenty. Being the sole guest carried advantages, and he had his reasons for insisting on an upper level. Anything lower would have been useless for observation...and the windows would have been far too accessible from the ground.

  Before he started down the freezing hallway, he contemplated the darkness. A draft fluttered at the back of his neck.

  As he turned the key, he listened. Cautiously easing the door open, he groped for the light switch. The threadbare carpet exuded a clammy miasma of suntan lotion and sweat, seeming to emanate even from the few cheerless furnishings. He locked the door behind him, slapped out the light. In the dark, he strode across the room and parted the curtains.

  Moisture beaded the glass like black perspiration, and a damp lattice of frost feathered the edges of the pane. Scarcely five o'clock, but darkness rose like floodwaters below. He touched the glass, his fingertips slipping through the haze of moisture, leaving marks like snail tracks. Turning away, he unzipped his leather jacket. Dingy gloom seeped through the curtains, and wind shivered the windowpane. He fumbled with a switch at the back of a sconce until it flickered, barely revealing the room.

  The single chair had been painted white so thickly that strands of wicker seemed molded into a single lump. He sat heavily and checked his watch. The numerals gleamed faintly. Can't call for hours yet. Silence pooled in the low corners, stagnant and chilly.

  Wearily, he got up again, pacing, his movements about the room growing disjointed, purposeless. Is this all there is now? Twice he opened and closed the same drawer; then he wandered into the bathroom. The clumsily rigged shower resembled a trap in which the claw-footed tub had been snared. So this is my life? He looked behind the shower curtain, then returned to the bedroom and checked the tight closet. It felt as though every cell in his body craved rest. Should do some work. He swayed for a moment before falling back into the chair as though shoved. He picked at knotted laces with dead fingers, then kicked off a shoe and watched it roll toward the bed. Pulling himself up with a grunt, he heaved himself onto the mattress just as the wall sconce buzzed and went out. Swell.

  The bedside lamp had been manufactured to resemble something roughly crafted from a jug. He switched it on, even that slight movement causing the bedsprings to protest like angry crickets. The lamplight made a perfect circle on the ceiling where the dust-thickened remnant of a cobweb trailed. Have to stay awake. Again he scrutinized the room. Both the wooden nightstand and the dresser had been painted white too many summers ago, and even in this light, wide swathes of glossy red still showed through. He examined the only picture, a seascape with gulls that sailed stiffly over greenish waters. It squarely missed obscuring a stain on the wall. The lumpish waves and the wings of the birds achieved crude symmetry, and despite the mediocrity of execution, something threatening seemed to lurk in the swirling tide. Letting my imagination work overtime. With a shiver, he turned away. Don't need to invent monsters.

  He still felt dizzy. Can't come down with something now. He covered his face with his hands and felt heat throb beneath his eyelids. Damn. Only gradually did something like warmth seep back into his arms and legs. Can't get sick. Not now. A cough shuddered though him. But it never gets warm in here. The day he'd arrived with his suitcases, D'Amato, the proprietor, had bled air from the radiator for over an hour, running up and down the stairs and shouting to his wife, who'd clanged on a pipe somewhere below. The siphoned-off end product had been a pint of evil-looking fluid that smelled like liquid dust. Fetid and catlike, the smell lingered still. Never warm. Tonight, his body ached for a hot shower, but he didn't feel up to enduring the pounding whistle of the pipes. Maybe I'll take a bath later. Generally, that involved slightly less racket.

  He closed his eyes. Don't. He leaned his head back against the wall. Don't sleep now. Pulling his legs onto the bed, he stretched. Get the work out.

  After a moment, he felt under the bed. Go on. Straightening with a grunt, he shifted his legs and set the case on the bed before him. Get on with it. Solemnly, he tapped on the lid, then fished a key out of his wallet.

  In a clear plastic bag, the boy's backpack nearly filled the suitcase, but other things had been crammed in around it. Next to his camera case lay a stack of Polaroids, bound with a rubber band, and beneath them bulged two cardboard folders. He pulled out the thicker folder and adjusted the lamp shade so that light spilled onto the bed.

  Opening the folder, he glanced at the first newspaper clipping....torso found...He set it aside, extracted another....evidence of sexual mutilation...He examined each yellowed clipping as though he'd never seen it before....police sources say they have no information regarding...Searching for any detail he might have missed, he scanned the words, feeling the muscles of his face stiffen and grow numb--an old and familiar sensation. He fumbled for his notepad. On the first page, the name "Stella" had been underlined twice.

  If anything happens to me, so long as they find this, somebody else could take up the search. He found the notion oddly comforting. Leaning back against the wall, he paged through lists of names and dates, many crossed out or with check marks beside them. Some pages began with the names of towns in block letters at the top. Rock Harbor, Wildcrest, Leed's Point. Many towns he could barely remember, the names blurring together in his mind.

  It seemed he'd spent his life in this realm, perhaps the strangest and most unnatural-seeming terrain ever to exist. The countless white sand trails of the Pine Barrens had at last given way to "construction." In just a few years, most of the old shanty towns had vanished, a whole way of life disappearing as residents packed up and headed south, some to settle in the Appalachians, others to join the migrant labor force. And the landscape of parking lots and strip
malls verged always closer, merging one into the other, desperately drab, broken only by the dismally uniform "developments," encroaching on both the sad, shabby resort towns and on the affluent private beaches, on the ghettoed horror of Asbury Park to the north and on the ghettoed horror of Atlantic City to the south. A bizarre world. Different time lines seemed to overlap in this landscape, blanketing one another. He'd seen it everywhere--roadside stands sold homegrown produce beneath buzzing neon.

  At last, he turned to a fresh page and, gripping the pen, carefully printed EDGEHARBOR. He stared at it a long time, then began scribbling in an erratic combination of print and script. Strange, even for this part of shore. Old. Turn-of-century buildings, but falling apart. Some sort ruined factory-type (?) structure near water. Cordoned off, near abandoned dock. Cannery? And tenement buildings middle of town, probably for workers. Empty now. He paused and read over his words. Marina other side of peninsula. Deserted pretty much. Looks like tried convert tourism. Too small for resort. No easy access from highway. Some cottages by sea. Small boardwalk but almost no beach. And the woods creep into the streets.

  Snapping the notebook shut, he replaced all the wrinkled clippings, then tossed the folder aside and dug into the suitcase again. Articles in the thinner file had been drawn from much less reputable sources--supermarket tabloids, digest-size publications with titles like Strange Facts and Psychic Phenomenon--but even the underscored passages in these dog-eared pages he studied. Teenager Stirs Up Poltergeist Panic. Maryland's Bog Monster Unmasked. Finally, these too he put aside, suppressing a yawn.

  From the bottom of the suitcase, he scooped up sheets of paper torn from a legal pad and gave a cursory glance to the rough charts. Feeling around in his jacket, he drew out a road map and hunched forward, spreading it across the bed and trying to smooth down the bunching wrinkles. The paper rattled loudly in his trembling hands. The map depicted most of south central New Jersey and part of the shoreline. Circles and X's in red ink pocked the pinelands region, clustering where the woods encroached on the shore. Edgeharbor. He studied the tapering wedge of the peninsula until his vision blurred. Enough. Laboriously, he refolded the map and tossed it on top of the papers. Won't find him on any map. He stacked the folders, carefully replacing everything in the case before shoving it back under the bed.