Winter Tides (43 page)

“No, but then I was moving fast. I didn’t go through the files much, because I didn’t think they’d mean anything to me.”

“Well, these photos would have meant something. You’re lucky you didn’t find them, though. He’s a sick son of a bitch. A couple of the shots were taken in a garage that looked a lot like the garages in Edmund’s condo, so vice used the photos to get the judge to extend the warrant to the condo, where they found all kinds of stuff in a hidey-hole under a bookcase—films, more photos. There was a darkroom, too, where he apparently did his black-and-white work.”

“The same kind of thing that he was into a few years back?”

“Worse.”

“And he did all the developing himself?”

“Not the color work. He paid for that.”

“Where the hell did he go to get that kind of thing developed? You can’t just walk into Sam’s Club or K Mart or something and hand them the film.”

“There’s photo labs that do confidential work. In fact, the lab that did Edmund’s photos does police work, too. Lots of confidential labs do. They’ll do glamour shots of your wife, whatever the hell you want. Some of them draw the line at kiddy porn, but plenty of them don’t. Edmund’s
line of baloney was the same as before, that he was in the theatrical business. He told them that the photos were staged, blood and all. The lab didn’t ask any questions.”

“But it wasn’t staged.”

“Not the recent stuff. We don’t have any real proof yet, but we’re running down a couple of possibilities. I think Edmund’s goose is cooked. Anyway, what happened, to finish what I was saying, was that when Edmund came home, a vice detective was inside the condo, and Edmund walked into it. He ditched the detective in the condos, which are a complete goddamn maze, and now the man is at large, as we say. Anyway, go ahead on down to Laguna. Take Anne out someplace nice for a change, instead of the usual taquería. And keep an eye on her, Dave—phone checks, whatever it takes. Edmund’s out there somewhere right now, driving around. Like I said, though, if I were Edmund, I’d head for the border again.”

“You’re not Edmund,” Dave said. “Edmund’s one of a kind. He’s a very committed man.”

A
NNE FED TWO QUARTERS INTO THE METER AND LEFT HER
car on the street in a luckily empty space right in front of the street door to her apartment on Main Street. The door itself was locked, since it was after hours, and she let herself in with the key and climbed the stairs to the corridor for the second time that afternoon. Right after work she had stopped in to retrieve her phone messages: there had been only one, from Jane Potter, who had sold two more of her paintings. Now there was gallery space for six or eight paintings altogether, depending on the size.

After listening to the phone message, Anne had run errands, which had taken an hour longer than she’d anticipated, and she had stopped back into the apartment now to grab a couple of pieces of clothing and load the car with the paintings. She had called Dave to tell him, because she would be late getting back down to Laguna Beach, but his line had been busy, and when she’d called back later, he’d been gone. Well, Jane Potter would take care of Dave until Anne got back down to Laguna. It would be a good excuse for Jane to stretch cocktail hour a little bit.

The corridor was dim with Mr. Hedgepeth’s low-wattage bulbs—a different place than it had been three hours ago when there was still sunlight through the few windows and when there were open doors and activity. Her apartment door was bolted, just as she had left it, and she had left the living room light on, too, so that she wouldn’t have to walk into a dark room. Leaving the door open, she stepped inside and laid her purse down on the chair. Her eyes were drawn to the patch of floor, newly cleaned with turpentine, where Elinor had pressed the red paint out of the tube, and she listened to the evening traffic and the silence of the closed-up building, half expecting to hear something out of place—the sound of ghostly footfalls, unidentifiable creaking from some far corner of the apartment.

She turned on another light and then headed into the bedroom to get a coat and a sweater out of the closet and another pair of jeans our of her drawer. The paintings were wrapped and waiting, leaning against the wall by the easel. She would toss the clothes into a shopping bag and then move the paintings downstairs. Three quick trips ought to do it. The bedroom was dark, and she reached around the corner and flipped the light switch on before walking in, then went straight for the closet, opened the door, and pulled the ceiling chain. In an instant she had her jacket in her hand, and she backed out of the closet, reaching for the chain again to turn the light off.

Her hand raised, she stopped and stared at a spot a couple of feet from the floor, nearly at the bottom of the blouses and sweaters that hung on the closet rod in front of the connecting door. It took her a moment to focus on it clearly, to separate the closet shadows from the clothing and from
the dark angular outline of the paneled door. Then she made it out: a jagged blackness, as if the panel itself had been kicked out and then shoved back in, the wood splintered around it.

She spun around, clutching her jacket to her chest, and saw, facing her across the room, a video camera on a tripod, a red light glowing on top of it. The sight of it sent a thrill of fear through her, and with both hands she threw her jacket at the camera, knocking it against the wall. The tripod balanced on one leg for a moment, and then crashed to the floor. Anne stepped hastily past the foot of the bed toward the open door, and it was then that Edmund stepped into the doorway and stood with his arms folded and his lips pursed, contemplating her as if sizing her up. She stared back at him, stepping back toward the closet, gauging the distance to the bedroom windows, which were closed, the street fifteen feet below, impossible to reach. Scream? She suppressed it. She waited for him to speak.

“I let myself in,” he said.

“Most people knock first.” She managed to get this out, and the act of speaking calmed her a little. She remembered then that the front door was open. If he had been hiding in the bathroom or kitchen, it still might be. He didn’t have any apparent weapon, and she glanced around her, looking for something she could use against him but seeing nothing except a ceramic teapot….

One of her paintings hung on what had been a bare wall, and the sight of it was instantly disconcerting to her. It was a painting of a northern California roadside store above the ocean. It had been smeared with paint, and the first thought that came into her mind was of Elinor. The smears weren’t random, though. Someone—Edmund—had daubed red and black streaks on it as if trying to shadow or darken the sky and the grass and the silver gray of the redwood siding on the ramshackle store. The painting was wrecked, the childishly applied red paint looking like something out of a comic-book depiction of Hell.

“What exactly is wrong with you?” she asked him, her sudden anger pushing fear aside. He seemed to recoil a little bit, but then he smiled.

“I have something I have to ask you, and I want you to answer me absolutely truthfully. I want you to know that I’m here only to ask you this question.” His voice had the monotonous tone of a sham guru, and she was struck again by his similarity to Elinor. His demeanor and tone were so obviously fake that even
he
had to know how insane he sounded.

“You came here to ask me a question, but you couldn’t just knock on the door and ask me like any sane human being would do? You had to break in and screw up one of my paintings first?”

The muscles in his neck jerked, and his eyes were abruptly mean and bitter. He forced a smile, though, and then his face grew placid and empty again. “Will you answer?”

“I don’t know. Go ahead and ask.” He still hadn’t moved out of the doorway, and she forced herself not to glance at it.

“But will you answer?”

“Just ask me the question, you crazy goddamn creep.” She realized that she was close to the edge, and she fought to control herself.

Perhpas sensing it, he smiled again, wider now, as if he knew that his voice and his insane sense of purpose was pushing her. “What do you know about the fire that burns in the deep woods?” he asked.

She stared at him. Whatever she had expected, this wasn’t it.

“Have you
been
to that fire?” He narrowed his eyes at her, as if he were particularly keen to hear the answer.

“I … God.
That’s
your question?” She had expected something else—a trip to Club Mex, a proposal.

“That’s my question.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“And yet you painted a picture of that fire?”

“Me? I painted a fire in the woods?”

“In the dead woods—the insects, the leaves, the glow of firelight? Anne …” He shook his head, as if he were a little bit surprised at her. “I’ve
seen
the paintings. I’ve seen
the dolls. I’ve seen the work of the Night Girl.”

“The dolls? Those were the work of my
sister
. My sister painted those pictures. My sister made those dolls.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” he said. “How very right of you to call her your sister. I’ve got a name for her. I call her the Night Girl, because we find each other in the darkness. Do you want to know what I call you?”

“No, Edmund, I don’t.” She tensed herself now. Edmund was completely out of his mind. If she was going to run, she would have to choose the moment carefully. Trying to string him along wasn’t going to work. When the time came, she would have to hit him hard….

“The Day Girl. I call you the Day Girl.”

“That’s good,” she said, nodding and smiling. “Do you want to know what I call you, Edmund?”

“No I don’t, Anne. I no longer expect that you’ll be civil with me, that you’ll give me a chance. You’re too far gone in denial, and I can’t help you. I can only help the Night Girl. I only
want
to help the Night Girl now. The Day Girl has ceased to interest me. The Day Girl has become a hindrance. Are you aware, Anne, that a diamond is nothing more than a compressed lump of coal?”

“Since I was about five, I think.”

“People are like that.”

She shifted her weight, and he responded by squaring himself in the doorway, blocking it entirely.

“We’re partly diamond and we’re partly coal. We want to think we’re all diamond, but we’re not, Anne. Our deepest and most secret desires are coal. Our dreams are made of coal dust. A psychologist will tell you that we don’t remember our dreams because we repress them. But I believe we should embrace them. For years now I’ve tried to capture those dreams on film, and believe me, I’ve done pretty well. Look at this …”

He took a photo out from under his coat and held it in the light. Immediately she looked away, remembering what Jim Hoover had told Dave about Edmund’s fascination with pornography.

“Take a look,” he said gently. “It’s not what you think it is. It’s not what you’ve been told it might be. I’m giving you a chance, Anne. Let me help you.”

She continued to stare at the floor. She wouldn’t look at his damned picture.

“Look at it!” he yelled, and he bounded across the floor and grabbed her arm before she could react. She screamed now, and tried to pull away. He pushed her over backward so that she sprawled on the bed, and in the next instant he held a knife in his hand, a thin stiletto with a blade five inches long. He bent over her, his eyes wide and his mouth working as if he’d lost control of his facial muscles. He held the photo up, and she stared at it. It was nearly completely black, only the faintest light.

“Do you see?” he asked.

She nodded her head.

“There!” He pointed at the photo, at a patch of darkness slightly darker than the background, the vague shape of something that appeared to have been moving when it was photographed, like a time exposure of a woman walking.

“You see her. Of course you see her. Do you recognize yourself in her?”

She stared at him. There was nothing she could say.

She’s the Night Girl, Anne. She’s my soul mate in the late hours. She does my bidding as I do hers. So please, Anne. Don’t tell me about your twin sister. I
know
your sister. The one thing that I don’t know, and I’ll tell you this truthfully, is how the Day Girl and the Night Girl can become one, just as they used to be. Because I’m afraid that the Day Girl simply doesn’t interest me very much.”

He backed away from her now, still holding the knife, the blade glinting in the lamplight. She sat up and took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. The knife changed everything. “I don’t think you understand what I’m saying,” she told him. “The paintings and dolls in storage were made by my sister Elinor. She’s my actual sister.”

“You haven’t been listening to me.”

“I’m telling you the truth. I can introduce you to her. She lives in Victoria, but …”

“You haven’t been
listening
to me,” he said again.

“You’re right,” she said. “And anyway, my sister’s dead.”

“Now at least you’re telling the truth. You killed her, Anne, and you can bring her back. You and I together can bring her back.”

“I wouldn’t want to.”

“Because you’re afraid of her.”

Anne nodded.

“Fear is our most limiting factor. Getting rid of our fears is the liberation of our art. And I mean
all
our fears, Anne, including the fear of our own sexuality. Our sexuality, in all its manifestations, might be the most private matter of them all, Anne, but within the confines of that privacy, its energies need know no limitations. It was your dolls that made me realize that you would understand what I mean. I can easily imagine that there were dolls that even
you
hid away and looked at only in secret. Even you believed that sometimes you’d gone too far. I’d like very much to see your secret things, Anne, because I don’t believe that we can go too far. I don’t believe that there’s any such thing….”

She closed her hand over the bedspread, then lunged toward the door, whipping the bedspread around toward him and ducking past it at the same time, trying to throw it over his head. With the edge of her fist she hit him on the cheekbone, and he caught her wrist, sweeping the bedspread aside with the hand that held the knife. The cloth caught on the blade, and Anne kicked him hard in the groin, then slammed her heel down onto the toe of his shoe. He doubled up, but held onto her wrist, twisting her arm up and away, trying to shake the bedspread off the knife. Pain lanced through her wrist and forearm, and she stood on tiptoe trying to relieve the pressure and grasping for the teapot on the dresser. Her hand closed over the handle, and she smashed it down on his head with her free hand, jerking her other hand from his suddenly weakened grasp and turning toward the door, grabbing the knob and dragging it shut after her. There was a grunt, and the door slammed against something, and in that moment he grabbed her ankle and
she flew forward onto the floorboards, slamming down hard enough to take the breath out of her.