11
CLEARLY ANNE WASN’T THINKING RIGHT. SHE MUST HAVE put the cake away. This was silly…. She walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, the obvious spot. There was no cake, and nothing on the counter, either. She went into the bedroom and looked around—at the dresser, the dressing table, the bedside stand. She looked into the trash can in the bathroom. Hell. She knew damned well that she’d left the cake in the living room. She’d even felt guilty about it—first about eating it and then about not putting it away.
Who else had a key? Mr. Hedgepeth, certainly. But somehow the idea of fat old Mr. Hedgepeth breaking in last night for the purpose of eating her birthday cake was too preposterous. Had he eaten the paper plate, too? She sat down on the end of the bed, trying to think things through. When she had gone out into the corridor a few minutes ago, the lock on the door had been bolted, and the chain lock in place. So nobody had sneaked in during the night while she was asleep….
She wondered abruptly whether Mr. Hedgepeth changed the door locks between tenants, and her smile disappeared. Suddenly she felt vulnerable living alone in the old building. The little chain lock was nothing. Anybody with a key could kick the door open in a second. Even without a key, it wouldn’t take much. She walked out into the living room and looked again at the table. And now she saw it—the paper plate with the cake on it had fallen to the floor behind the table itself, and from where she had stood a moment ago it had been hidden by the edge of the chair. She stood for a moment staring at it. Somehow it had fallen cake side down, and then had apparently slid several inches across the floor, leaving a trail of frosting.
She went into the kitchen after paper towels, her late-night walk on the pier returning to her memory. In her mind she saw the slash of cranberry red again, slipping into invisibility behind the tower and the fog….
Cut it out. She was getting morbid. Somehow she had knocked the cake off the damned table without knowing it, probably when she had stood up. Being cake, it hadn’t made a big clatter. There was no great mystery. Mr. Hedgepeth wasn’t involved. He hadn’t sneaked in and flung the cake to the floor. She bent over and wiped up the line of chocolate frosting. Then, as an experiment, she laid the fallen plate and cake so that it sat slightly off the edge of the table and bumped the table leg. The cake was immovable. It sat there as heavily as if it were made of iron. She scooted it farther off the edge and bumped it again, and then caught it when the plate fell. Clearly she hadn’t paid any attention when she’d set it down last night. And of course when the cake was fresh, the frosting had been soft enough for the whole thing to have slid when it hit the floor.
There was no reason to believe that something had pushed it another fourteen or fifteen inches across the floor-boards….
She recalled the figure on the pier last night…. “I don’t believe in you,” she said out loud. But then she was immediately certain that what she didn’t believe in was herself.
She threw the paper towels into the trash, then wiped up the floor again with a wet towel before mopping it dry. Case closed. So much for having cake for breakfast. She found some grapes in the refrigerator and then went back out into the living room. Most of her paintings were still wrapped from shipping, and they were stacked against the walls three and four deep. Six of them were going up to a gallery in Carmel—all of them seascapes. The rest of the paintings would clutter the flat up for who knew how long. Probably she should rent one of the empty rooms across the hall simply for storage.
She looked at the painting on the easel near the window. There was nothing romantic about the subject matter except the sky, which she was painting in the style of Turner. Steal from the best, she thought. She didn’t like what she had done with the pier. The pilings looked gangly, somehow, even though the proportions were technically about right—as if the pier were some sort of Ichabod Crane caterpillar walking up out of the sea….
She noticed something now—what appeared to be a smudge of brown paint, perhaps, against the green-gray ocean. She bent over and looked more closely at it, just a fingerpaint smear of dried stuff against the still-wet oil. Immediately it occurred to her what it was, although there was no plausible explanation for how it had gotten there, and immediately she rejected the idea. She sniffed at it, but the linseed smell of the paint masked the smell of anything else. Finally she took a palette knife, carefully scraped the smudge off, and then wiped the knife clean with one of the paper towels. What the smudge had looked like to her was chocolate frosting. Whatever it was, she hadn’t put it there.
Elinor, she thought, unable to help herself. But then she forced the thought out of her mind, in case thinking about it made it true.