Winter Tides (44 page)

Immediately she threw herself over and tried to scramble to her feet, but he held on, stretched on the floor in the doorway, his chin pressed to the ground. Blood trickled out of his hair from where she’d hit him with the teapot, and his wild face was twisted and inhuman, his mouth open and panting. His grip on her ankle tightened as he used her weight to lever himself forward. He shook his right hand loose of the bedspread now and held the knife in the air as if he would plunge it into her leg. She shook her head at him and held her hands up. She saw then that the front door was locked, the chain fastened, and she felt absolutely trapped. The blinds were drawn on the windows, too. Edmund had seen to all of it as soon as she was safely in the apartment.

He stood up carefully, still holding onto her ankle, bending over and pointing the knife at her chest. “Up,” he said.

She stood up, and he took her wrist in his free hand.

He composed himself, contorting his face as if stretching all the muscles, relieving the strain. “Do I bore you?” he asked.

She shook her head, still watching the knife.

“Good, because I have
much
more to say to you. Much more. It’s time we got started.” He pulled her toward the bedroom. “Come on,” he said. “We have a long journey ahead of us.” He closed the bedroom door and then pulled the dresser in front of it, kicking the shards of teapot aside. Watching her out of the corner of his eye, he stepped beside the bed, then bent over and righted the camera, angling the wide lens toward her. “Takes a licking and keeps on ticking,” he said, sighting through the eyepiece. He was six feet away from her.

She ran again, straight at the open closet door, ducking inside and pulling the door shut behind her, instinctively finding the knob on the connecting door and twisting it, picturing the bolts that Dave had so helpfully installed top and bottom….

The door opened, stopping against the hanging clothes just as the door behind her wrenched open, too, the knob torn from her hand. She ducked forward, feeling his hand on her wrist again, twisting it away so hard that her elbow flew back and cracked on the door frame as she slipped through it, pulling the door shut behind her and throwing herself through the next, slamming it shut even as she heard him scrambling into the closet. There was no way to stop him, to lock the door. She looked around wildly, grabbing the edge of the lawyer’s desk and pulling it toward the door, which flew open then, hitting her in the back. She grabbed the rolling desk chair with both hands, picking it up and whirling it around as he came through the door, and the chair hit him square in the chest, two of its legs banging the closet door, Edmund stumbling backward, going down, sweeping the chair away. Anne threw the bolt on the door and ran out into the hallway without looking back, bolting for the stairs. For a moment she ran in near silence down the carpeted corridor, hearing him stumbling along behind her. He was close…. She darted a glance over her shoulder and gasped involuntarily when she saw how close, reaching toward her, his face intent, spittle flecking his chin.

There was noise ahead, the sound of a horn honking—muted, then strangely loud, and a light swept across the bottom of the stairs as she threw herself forward in an out-of-control rush, falling onto the stairs and rolling, the breath knocked out of her. There was a shout, and feet slamming past, and she realized that the street door was open, that someone had come in. She sat up, her heart slamming in her chest, and saw Edmund running back up the corridor. Dave bent over her, asking her how she was. She shook her head. “I’m all right,” she said.

Dave leaped up the stairs, but at that same moment there was the sound of a door banging shut. The building shook with the force of it, and then there was silence. Anne crawled to her feet, stepped through the door into the open air, and leaned against the wall in the foyer. Momentarily she heard feet on the stairs again, and Dave reappeared, coming down two stairs at a time.

She was crying in the instant that he hugged her, and he continued to hold her until she stopped and wiped her eyes. Together they walked back up to her apartment and called the police.

I
T WAS COOL AND DARK BENEATH THE STAGE IN THE
closed-up theatre, and the flashlight beam was blocked in nearly every direction by interlacing wooden posts and beams and by dusty old cardboard cartons of junk. The area under the stage had apparently always been a convenient dumping place, and Edmund pushed his way through the accumulated trash of thirty years—long-abandoned paint cans and broken-down Christmas ornaments and rolled paper signs and pieces of costumes and broken props. The place was an absolute firetrap. Edmund had even found a quart of acetone lying on its side, its paper label chewed off by mice. A couple of weeks ago it would have been pleasant to call the Are marshal anonymously and report the whole mess, if only to give Collier a little something to do with his time, but when he thought about it now, that couple of weeks seemed to Edmund like a year ago, a different life. Everything had changed. He had bigger fish to fry.

He laughed out loud at his own joke and shined the flashlight at the far back wall, pulling himself along through the heavy layer of dust and grime between the low crossbraces, hauling with him a canvas book bag half full of the stuff he had taken out of his room at the Mt. Pleasant. He brought the old can of acetone along, too, favoring it over the gasoline he had thought he was going to use. Just like with Mifflin’s lamp oil and Jenny’s doll and trading cards, the more he let serendipity play along, the more interesting and profound the results.

A broken-down box of junk blocked his way again, and he took a moment to slide it aside, averting his face from the dust. He played the flashlight over the next section of wall and saw what he was looking for—a duplex electrical outlet, uselessly far back beneath the stage. He crawled to it, then settled himself comfortably, propped up the flashlight, and emptied the bag carefully, removing the light bulb with the hole chipped through the top. At the Mt. Pleasant he had crisscrossed the glass globe with masking tape before popping the hole through it with a spring-loaded center punch. The tape still clung to the bulb, and he debated for a moment whether to try to remove it. The torn pieces of tape looked inartistic to him somehow….

He decided to let it go. If he broke the bulb now, he would have to crawl out from beneath the stage and find another one, and he just wasn’t up to going through the rigamarole. He had broken three bulbs already, trying to get the whole thing right. He plugged the light socket cord into the wall and touched the two metal prongs of his tester wires to the metal contact. The test bulb lit, so the old wall socket was hot. Voila! The rest was easy. He had pictured the process in his mind a dozen times. He unfolded the plastic drop cloth and tacked it to the beams overhead, letting the bulk of the cellophane-thin plastic hang loosely around the edges. He bunched the front side of it and tacked it up temporarily in order to give himself air. Then, sitting beneath the tented plastic, he set a pie pan on the floor and carefully poured the acetone into it. He plugged the timer and the light bulb socket together, then set the timer for 2100 hours before plugging the timer into the wall. He wouldn’t need the extension cord, so he pitched it away into the darkness and threw the empty acetone can and the tester wire after it. Gingerly, he screwed the bulb into the socket and tacked the cord to an overhead beam so that the bulb dangled an inch over the pool of acetone. And then for a time he sat in perfect silence, waiting for the timer dial to move perceptibly.

And that was it. He crawled out from under the tent, leaving his bag and his tools behind, and untacked the bunched plastic, arranging it around the acetone and the bulb. The acetone fumes were already heavy in the air, and he crawled away from the area hastily, suppressing the need to cough, and crept out from beneath the stage into the
night-dark theatre. It was still an hour before dawn, and he was dead tired, having been up for what must have been two days. Haunting the theatre at night like the famous Phantom of the Opera had been perfectly safe. The police simply hadn’t thought to
look
for him there. And why would they?

He went down the stairs into the basement, through the basement corridors and into the costume room, where he let himself out the basement door, locking it behind him and making his way through the dark alley between the theatre and the warehouse, carrying what was now the only remaining key to the basement door. He had dropped the other two keys down a gopher hole in the vacant lot an hour ago.

Collier had blocked the hole under the jasmine bush with a sheet of plywood, and Edmund slid the plywood out of its niche quietly now and crawled in under the porch, pulling the plywood back into place behind him. The lattice had already been replaced along the front of the porch, and he could smell both the freshly cut redwood and the charred post where the dolls had been consumed by the magical flames. He lay down on his sleeping bag, staring above him at the porch floor, communing silently with the darkness and cheered by the idea of Collier and Jenny sleeping obliviously just a few feet away. It would be a long day, lying there under the house, but he would sleep through most of it, and tonight would be more than mildly entertaining.

D
AVE HAD DISCOVERED YEARS AGO THAT TECH WEEK IN
the world of the theatre was always completely crazy, no matter how much you thought you were prepared. There was always one last prop or set piece that had to be built
although the show went up in two days. The director, even Collier—perhaps
especially
Collier—wasn’t happy unless he was changing his mind one more time. On every night of the week, getting out of the theatre early inevitably turned into getting out at midnight, and midnight turned into one and two and three o’clock in the morning, until it began to look utterly hopeless that the show would open at all on Friday night. But it was always like that, and yet the show always opened. That’s how this week was shaping up. Although it was only Sunday night, and the play didn’t open until Friday, the impossible problems and complications were stacking up. Collier used Dave as a gopher, and Dave found himself running back and forth between the warehouse and the theatre, chasing tools and supplies.

It was only about eight o’clock now, and already he was tired, having been at the Earl’s since dawn. Anne was due at any moment—in fact, she was past due—having run back up to Laguna Beach earlier in the evening, something about the gallery. He had figured on her returning sometime in the last half hour, and as he crossed the theatre parking lot toward the back of the warehouse, he thought about who he would call if she didn’t show up soon. Jane Potter? Jane at least would know the time that Anne had left Laguna for her drive back down the Highway. With the fog and the late hour, she might not have started out at all.

It was socked in worse than it had been for weeks, and although he could hear the creaking of the oil well out in the lot, no more than thirty feet away, he couldn’t see it. The windows of Collier’s bungalow glowed through the fog, and he could make out the ghostly outline of the front porch railing and misty light from the porch lamp, but the house itself was merely an angular shadow. Fog like this would kill the size of the house on opening night. He rounded the corner, heading up the dirt path, the dark clapboard wall of the Earl’s towering above him.

There had been no word of Edmund. Nobody had caught him at the border. If he showed himself now, they would nail him for Mayhew’s murder and for trafficking in pornography. Probably they’d find evidence that he had murdered the women he’d filmed. They’d already found Mifflin
the notary, who had fled to Mexico, and so now they knew enough about Edmund’s real estate frauds to convict him on that, too, although in the light of all the rest, the fraud was hardly worth bothering about. And Mifflin, it turned out, had dual citizenship. He had made it clear that he wasn’t coming back to the States to testify against anyone, and there was no way he could be extradited for his part in Edmund’s schemes.

So far the Earl didn’t know about any of it. In the last few days he had been nearly crippled with angina, and he was under observation in the same hospital where Casey was recovering. Jolene was running the Earl’s pretty much single-handedly. Dave thought suddenly about how much of the world had changed in the last couple of weeks, how the Earl’s safe little corner of things had been shaken apart, how he and Anne had been thrown together, how so many lives had been altered or destroyed. Like Humpty Dumpty, none of it could be put back together again. Edmund was a small-time megalomaniac, but he was every bit as possessed as a Hitler or a Stalin, and, in his small way, every bit as successful….

But the show was going up in under a week, and to hell with how the world had changed. Car wrecks, murders, arson, bad hearts—nothing got in the way of opening night except the end of the world or a power failure.

Dave reached the end of the path and stepped over the curb and up onto the asphalt. There was a car in the lot, and even through the fog he could see that it was Anne’s Saturn. He picked up his pace, anxious to talk to her, to have some company … to have some help. Collier needed two sheets of luan painted black—“right now,” he had said, forgetting apparently that the paint took a couple of hours to dry. And there was a mushy spot in the stage, and Jim Parsons, who was playing Lear, refused to act on a stage that he might fall through, so Dave had to shore it up tonight, just as soon as he’d put a coat of paint on the luan.

Dave opened the warehouse door and stepped inside. The night lights were on, but none of the other lights, and there was no sign of anyone in the dim interior. “Hello!” he shouted.

There was no answer. The warehouse was silent. He listened to the scrabbling of mice behind the newspaper bin, and to the slow creaking of the oil well from the lot beyond the open window. Then he heard something else—the sound of voices, low and urgent, almost like a radio playing.