Winter Tides (29 page)

“That’s remarkable,” Mrs. Nyles said. “It seems a little unstable, though, doesn’t it? Growing up in a theatre around all these eccentric people?”

“I guess it depends on how you define stable. This place is … It’s got so much history and magic in it. And it’s a part of something really grand and colorful. Jenny’s only about five years old and already she’s a part of something
that’s understood all over the world. She’s quoting Shakespeare, for God’s sake, at
her
age. Maybe that’s not stable like most people would mean stable, but I guess it’s a kind of stable that I admire. And she’s like Collier’s shadow, too. They’re a team. Maybe since I didn’t have a father around when I grew up, I kind of envy that. And I guess I like eccentric people.”

Mrs. Nyles was silent for a moment, watching the work on the stage. “What’s the point of these enormous heads?” she asked finally.

“I’m a little hazy on it,” Anne said. “Collier says they’re a metaphor for the one-time innocence of Lear’s three daughters. He also refers to them as ‘spectacle.’ He told me all about the theatrical value of ‘spectacle.’ “

Mrs. Nyles nodded, as if she understood perfectly well.

Collier walked all the way to the back of the house now and sat down again in order to get another audience-eye view of the stage. “Another foot!” he shouted, and Dave hauled on the line again, the head rising until it hung just below the bottom edge of the teaser curtain. “That’s good!” Collier shouted, and Dave tied the rope to a cleat and then climbed the ladder to put a stop on the rope so that the head would always descend to the same level, dead even with the other two heads.

Right then the Earl came up the stairs from the basement carrying a handful of colored gels for the lights. He shuffled through the plastic slips, finally holding one of them up and peering through it toward one of the house lights.

“Mrs. Nyles!” he said, as if he was amazingly happy to see her.

She nodded pleasantly at him and shook his hand.

“Too much green, maybe,” he said, waving the gel in her direction. “Give me a critical appraisal. Collier tells me you used to direct a play or two.”

“He’s exaggerating,” Mrs. Nyles said.

“We could use some help around here. Our man on the light board is threatening to go to Kansas for his daughter’s wedding. You ever run a light board?”

“Not in years,” Mrs. Nyles said. “Maybe some other time. Really.” She smiled at him in such a way as to put an end to the idea.

“Bring it outside,” Collier said to the Earl, coming up onto the stage. “You can see it more clearly in the sunshine. It’s too damned dark in here. Well, Mrs. Nyles! What a pleasure. I’ve asked her to take a part in
Lear
,” he said to Anne and the Earl, “but she turned me down flat.”

“That’s our loss,” the Earl said. “Won’t reconsider?”

“Not this time,” Mrs. Nyles said.

“Excuse us.” The Earl nodded at Anne and Mrs. Nyles both. “We’ll be back in a second.”

Anne watched as Collier went out through the parking lot door. The Earl followed, but in the doorway he dropped a half-dozen of the gels and then stooped to pick them up. Anne started to speak to Mrs. Nyles again, but she was interrupted by a sudden wild shout from outdoors, followed by the sound of running footsteps and then another shout, more distant.

E
DMUND STRAIGHTENED UP, HIS COUGHING FIT OVER, AND
immediately he spotted Collier running straight toward him across the theatre parking lot, shouting something incoherent.

“Fire!” Edmund yelled at him, and he waved his hands over his head, as if he was purposefully trying to attract Collier’s attention. Collier was old and fat, and he almost looked comical, coming along with his arm-swinging gait. Edmund set out around the side of the porch at a run, shouting nonsensically now, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” and pointing wildly at the house. Clearly Collier was insane with rage. His face was a mask of anger.

“Inside!” Edmund screamed at him. “Jenny!” There was surprisingly little smoke, the freshening wind blowing most of it back in under the bungalow. Collier didn’t know what the hell was going on. He had seen someone reeling out of the bushes, recognized who it was, and had gone crazy….

“Dirty son-of-a-bitch!” Collier shouted at him, throwing a wild, windmilling punch, heaving himself around with the force of it, sprawling past Edmund, who easily ducked away.

“Fire! You crazy asshole!” Edmund screamed at him again. “Fire!” Other people were coming across the lot from the direction of the theatre now.

Collier spun around, understanding about the fire now, and Edmund backed away, holding his hands up defensively. Black smoke, thank God, had finally begun to billow out through the lattice, and the sight of it had stopped Collier dead. “The hose!” Edmund shouted at him, and then he turned around without another word and ran across the lawn and up the stairs. He yanked the screen door open and looked around the living room, which was empty. “Jenny!” Edmund shouted, kicking over a pole lamp for good measure as he headed straight on through toward the bedrooms.

The little girl appeared then, peering cautiously out through a half-open bedroom door. She looked curiously at him, not moving, putting a finger in her mouth. He grabbed her hand, drew her toward him, and picked her up, carrying her back out across the living room floor and out through the door, which he kicked open hard, hearing it bang against the house. Smoke was blowing back across the porch now, into the house, and he ran through the smoke, down the steps and out onto the lawn. Dave and Anne were just then arriving from the theatre. And here came the Earl, too, and an old woman in a dress, both of them following along. He heard a siren then. Someone had been bright enough to call the fire department!

Edmund set Jenny down safely at the edge of the lawn. “She’s all right,” he said to Anne, casting his voice a little deep. He looked briefly into Anne’s face, struck suddenly with her almost supernatural similarity to the doll in his tableau beneath the porch, the way she tilted her head, just as the doll had tilted her own. For a moment he pictured Anne burning under there, looking back at him in wide wonder….

He shook the image out of his head and yanked his ruined coat off, tossing it onto the grass, and then turned around and headed back toward where Collier was directing hose water through the lattice, or at least was trying to. Collier was down on his hands and knees, coughing in the smoke, the water glancing off the wooden slats and spraying him in the face. Edmund grasped the lattice with both hands and tore it entirely away, the old redwood laths splintering apart. “Here,” he said, grabbing the hose away from Collier. He took a deep breath, held it, and then shoved his head in through the opening, closing his eyes against the smoke—which was mostly white now, the fire not burning nearly as savagely as he had thought it was when he was trapped beneath the porch.

Peering carefully into the flickering shadows, Edmund looked for the face in the smoke, trying to sense the presence of the child who had helped him with his task. But clearly she was gone, and most of the fire, it seemed, had gone with her.

He pointed the hose and sprayed the hell out of everything, pressing forward until his shoulders shoved through the gap, waving the hose up and down, inundating the dirt, flooding the bottom of the floorboards. The smoke cleared away, and he searched the burned debris with his eyes, trying to get a glimpse of the burned plastic doll. He felt his shirt rip, and the broken end of a piece of lath gouged him in the neck. With any luck it had cut him, and with even more luck, Collier would have managed to dampen the fire before the toys had been entirely burned so that the fire department would know that the whole thing was the work of a child, that Collier had been ignoring his pyromaniac daughter again. Water dripped onto his head and back. He saw the doll then, facing him now, her features withered, flesh charred. He had the sudden urge to take it, to keep it, to show it to the Night Girl when she came to
him again tonight. He wondered how Anne would react to the sight of it.

But he controlled himself. Social Services would probably want it as evidence. All by itself, the burned doll could ruin Collier.

Edmund pushed back out of the hole, taking the hose with him. The smoke was sketchy and drifting now, clearing away. A fire truck had pulled into the theatre lot, and three helmeted firemen sprinted toward the porch, pushing past the onlookers. “I think I got it,” Edmund said to them, tossing down the hose. One of the firemen kneeled in front of the hole, took a look, and then sprayed the hose under the porch again for a moment before being satisfied. Edmund walked back out into the middle of the lawn, smoothing his hair back, rolling up his sleeves. There were a dozen people standing around now—neighbors, a couple of kids. Two surfers were jogging across the vacant lot, carrying their boards under their arms, anxious to see what was going on.

“Everything’s under control, folks,” Edmund said, speaking to the crowd, and he bent down on one knee next to Jenny and asked, “Are you okay, darlin’?”

She nodded, clearly frightened out of her wits. Edmund looked at Anne and shook his head, trying to get the point across that this was the kind of trouble that none of them needed. He walked over to the Earl and in a low voice he said, “I’m sorry this had to happen, Dad. I saw smoke coming out through the front of the porch there and crawled underneath to have a look. The fire was already going. Lord knows how it started. Same as the car fire, I guess.”

“You cut yourself,” the Earl said tiredly.

Edmund wiped his neck, then looked at the blood smeared on his hand. “It’s nothing.”

Collier was stone-faced, staring dead ahead. Edmund wandered up to him next, searching for something to say that would irritate the old man without making him violent, something that, ideally, would sound innocent and helpful to a bystander. He folded his arms, clucking his tongue sympathetically. “It’s better not to shoot water straight into a fire like that,” he said. “It blows the embers around too
much. What you want is a mist, a smothering mist.” He worked his hands together in the air in order to illustrate. Collier looked at him blankly.

The fireman crawled out from under the porch and said something to the other two. One of them pried the lattice off the other side of the porch, and they sprayed the hose around under there, too, completely uselessly, from Edmund’s point of view. Edmund bent down and looked underneath. The wooden post was charred, and the underside of the floorboards were smoky black, but there clearly wasn’t any other damage. He saw that the fireman had brought out the doll, a couple of pieces of charred playing cards, and the lighter fluid can. One of them sniffed a card, then handed it to the other. Thank God Collier had knocked them apart with the hose before they were completely burned.

“I’m the one who spotted the fire,” Edmund said to one of the firemen, who nodded and then ignored him. Collier headed up the side of the house. Had
he
seen the burned toys? Yes, he had. He was catching on. The old man lifted the barbecue lid, moved the charcoal sack, and then put the lid down again. He looked around, maybe hoping that he’d left the lighter fluid on the porch. Finally he turned and walked out toward the firemen.

“This is Mr. Collier,” Edmund told them. “He’s my tenant. He and his granddaughter.”

“We’ve met,” one of the firemen said.

“Of course,” Edmund said. “You were here the other night, when the truck burned. We were luckier this time. There doesn’t look like much damage under there, although there was a hell of a lot of smoke. I saw it coming out through the lattice there and came down to check the situation out. When I saw what was burning, I summoned Mr. Collier and instructed him to get the garden hose while I went in after the little girl.”

“
Instructed!
” Collier said, nearly spitting the word out. “I don’t need any goddamn instruction from you.”

“Hey, no harm meant,” Edmund told him. “I’m sorry. I guess we’re all a little shook up.” He wiped at the blood on his neck again, then made a point of staring at his bloodstained hand. Then he ran his hand over his forearm. “Singed the hair right off. I guess you don’t feel the heat; you just do what you have to do. It’s later on that the realization catches up to you.”

“That does happen,” the fireman said.

Edmund bent over and picked up his coat from where it still lay on the lawn. “Looks like something the cat dragged in,” he said.

“You spotted the truck fire the other night, too, didn’t you?” one of the firemen asked Edmund.

“Guilty as charged,” he said. “I’m a little tired of it, too.”

“Not half as tired as I am,” Collier said.

“My father owns the warehouse here,” Edmund told them. “I’m the general manager of it.” He nodded at the Earl’s. “That’s my office window on the second floor. I was up there working when I glanced out and saw the smoke.”

“Nobody else down here?” the first fireman asked.

“Not that I could see. I rushed straight down. Jenny—the little girl—had been out here playing a couple of minutes earlier, and I was afraid she was under there, under the porch. But I guess she went inside right before it started up. I had to move fast, I can tell you. No time to change out of my suit.” He shook wet dirt out of the torn coat and folded it over his arm.

“Where were you, sir?” The fireman directed the question to Collier, who looked more lost than angry now.

“In the theatre,” he said. “I sent Jenny inside to watch Gilligan, and I was heading over to check on her when I saw Edmund here crawling out from under the damn porch. I ran over to see what was up, and all of a sudden there’s a fire broken out.”

“Who’s this Gilligan?” the fireman asked. “Some kind of pet?”

“The show,” Collier said. “
Gilligan’s Island.”

The fireman nodded. “The girl was unsupervised, then?”

“For about a minute, like I said. I was right over there at the theatre, just long enough to get my sets people going, and then I intended to come back over. So let’s cut the
crap.” Edmund nearly laughed. The old man was getting good and angry. “Jenny didn’t start this fire any more than she started that fire the other night,” he said. “I’m about sick of this kind of talk. When the hell did she have time to light a fire? She wasn’t alone longer than the blink of an eye. And nobody starts a house on fire and then goes inside to watch the television. Even a four-year-old wouldn’t do a crazy damn thing like that.”