14
ONE OF THE EARL’S STAKE-BED TRUCKS WAS PARKED AT the dock now, with the wagon and the fence rails loaded. The warehouse door was open wide, and the hay bales had been shoved out into the sunlight where they waited for loading. Dave could see Edmund talking to someone just inside—a woman who was standing in the shadows—and Dave found himself staring at her, trying to make out her features.
He turned away to watch Casey’s truck pull out of the lot and turn up toward the Highway. There was a slight onshore wind now, and the air carried on it the smell of the ocean, and for a regretful moment Dave recalled the cold feel of the water sluicing down the back of his wetsuit in the early morning, the sun just coming up, the dawn quiet except for the sounds of the waves and the gulls.
Dave had been twenty-two when he had let the girl drown, and in the years before that he and Casey had surfed a hundred breaks between the Oregon border and Puerto Escondido. There were dozens of times when the ocean had let them down, and they had found it calm and flat, but had suited up and paddled out anyway, just to get wet, and sat around watching the horizon, talking about whatever was in the air. Their conversation at the doughnut shop this morning made him feel old, and, what was worse, it made him feel like he’d been living in a closet for the last fifteen years.
He heard the woman’s laugh from inside the warehouse, and he turned around to look. She stood inside the doorway—probably the new sets artist, the woman who could give Nancy a run for her money. Casey had understated her looks. For a fleeting moment she seemed oddly familiar to him, but he couldn’t say quite why, and right then she said something to Edmund, and the two of them moved out of the doorway and disappeared into the shadows inside the warehouse. Dave was struck with curiosity and apprehension both, as if somehow he had been set up for a blind date with this woman—which of course was pure, stupid, wishful thinking.
Heading inside, he picked up the broken pieces of the Duke’s palace and considered the possibility of patching it back together and retouching it with paint. But the tiki had smashed too much of it to dust and fragments, and so he took the pieces out to the Dumpster and tossed them in. Then he picked up the tiki, levered it over his shoulder, and hauled it back up to the top of the stairs, where he set it down heavily on the balcony. The tiki’s belt was nowhere to be seen, neither down on the floor nor up on the balcony. Obviously Edmund had gotten rid of it. The side of the tiki’s forehead had been dented by the fall, and after thinking about it for a moment, Dave headed back downstairs to his toolbox and took out his three-pound sledgehammer. Back upstairs he straddled the tiki, judged the angle, and then pounded the tiki on the head with a two-handed blow, denting the opposite side of its cranium to make its head symmetrical again.
“What exactly are you doing?” It was Edmund’s voice, full of fake cheerfulness, and Dave looked up to see him and the woman standing at the bottom of the stairs. Apparently Edmund had been showing her around.
“Tiki repair,” Dave said, but it was the woman whom he was looking at when he said it.
“I’m Anne Morris,” she said, climbing the stairs. Edmund followed along behind her. She stepped up onto the threshold and held out her hand. She looked at Dave for what seemed to him to be a moment too long, as if she were thinking about something, and once again Dave was struck with something about her—her gypsy hair, perhaps, which was dark and full.
Dave shook her hand awkwardly, suddenly feeling like a fool for staring back at her. “Dave Quinn,” he said. “I’m glad to meet you. You weren’t out walking, were you, a couple of nights ago, late? I know I’ve seen you somewhere before.”
“I don’t think I was,” she said. “Out walking where?”
“Up by the park?”
“No,” she said. “I guess not.”
“Nice try, Dave,” Edmund said. “That line’s been in mothballs so long it smells like camphor.” He laughed pleasantly, to show that he was kidding. “Dave is the all-around handyman and gopher here at the Earl of Gloucester,” Edmund said to Anne. “I don’t know what we’d do without him.” And then to Dave he said, “Strap it up there a little tighter this time, okay? We don’t want a replay of this morning’s little problem, do we?”
Throw it out, Dave told himself.
Edmund winked hard, like an old uncle handing out sage advice, and then put his hand against Anne’s back and guided her past Dave and into his office.