The Shore (Leisure Fiction)

The boys had vanished. The smaller girl wore a red overcoat, easy to follow, as she swung her schoolbag and marched along behind her sister. I manage though. He cruised slowly after them. Passing the girls, the dirty black car turned the corner, gaining speed once out of sight. A crumpled fender sang briefly against a tire, and he scanned each desolate side street he passed. Untenanted dwellings had a look he knew too well. So why can't I shake the feeling I'm the one being watched? He circled the block. Ever since I found this town. There seemed to be a strangely methodical quality to the cottages. Clearly they'd been constructed in clusters, laid out as irregularly as the streets themselves, somehow both monotonous and random. He adjusted the rearview mirror.

An antiseptic-looking church on the corner seemed scarcely larger than the neighboring houses. Just ahead, the girls swung into view again. As they started across the intersection, he eased down slightly on the gas pedal.

The gulls wheeled, their silhouettes like sickles, the erratic spatter of their sharpest screams glancing off the surface of the bay. Earlier they had feasted, descending in droves to the banquet. Now, driven from their roosts by vans and cars and flashing lights, they circled, shrilling.

All day, men in uniforms had milled along the old dock, and whenever a gull settled, drawn by morsels still drifting along the surface, the men threw stones or bits of shell. Once, a shot had been fired, and birds had thundered away to hover and swoop in the frozen sky.

Drifting on currents of air now, they pivoted, wailing in the twilight, awaiting their chance to glean whatever scraps the nets and hooks would miss.

The chill quickened his step. He'd left the Volks on a side street and had followed the children on foot to a playground. The older girl had watched the boys toss a football until encroaching dusk had forced them away to nearby homes. These were the only children he'd seen in the entire town, this tiny group. He'd observed carefully, but they'd met no one else, spoken to no one else.

In the fading light, the scratchy planks of the boardwalk seemed a natural barrier between sea and town, sand lapsing into dun wood, then into a granulating wedge of concrete. From the town side, a hotel pressed up against the boards, its tattered banner rustling overhead. He turned away. So close. Pain thundered in his head. Above the beach, gulls slowly spun, suspended in the vaporous twilight.

Tide's in. Choppy shadows flickered in the waves, but the roar he heard was in his head, in his chest. He walked on, trying to think.

At last, vision blurring with exhaustion, face blazing from the cold, he crossed the boards and headed down the ramp. Patches of ice pocked the sidewalk with the same dull hue as the sky.

Down the block, a lamp winked through the drapes of the house the little girls had entered. No lights showed in any of the other houses, and no curtains parted. Yet the sensation of being watched intensified as he headed into the center of town.

Hiking past darkened storefronts, he peered constantly back over his shoulder. A fleeting shape trailed always just beyond his sight--he felt sure of it. Another sepulchral hotel glowered, boarded as tightly as the one on the boardwalk, and starlings cycloned above its roof. A few street lamps glimmered to life.

With a growl, a jeep bounced past him down the street. Traces of metallic green bled through the white paint around the word POLICE, and he glimpsed a pale, sharp face through the windshield. The jeep slowed at the corner, and he studied it with his peripheral vision. Pretty amateurish, he decided. The revolving light on the hood looked like the sort that attached magnetically. He sauntered past, hands crammed deep in his pockets.

Hunching his shoulders, he turned onto a small residential street, then hurried past shriveled hedges. The jeep didn't follow. He smelled smoke from a wood fire, and his breath spiraled in mist as dead leaves rasped and scuttled across the sidewalk. Keeping his face down, he studied the sidewalk. Past winters had wracked the terrain. Cracks in the street had heaved a foot above the roadbed, as though from an earthquake. He's holed up here. A skin of ice on a puddle crunched beneath his shoe, and his cough felt like a hook in his chest. I know it.

I can feel it. He should get the car, he told himself, begin patrolling the roads that led to the highway. Even now, the boy might be sneaking away, and he would have to begin his search again, going from town to town, looking for...

No, he's gone to ground here. Yesterday, he'd gotten lucky...and blown it. So now he knows I'm after him. A trembling rage convulsed him as debris spun about his head. A dried leaf lifted from the ground and rushed against his chest, held there by the wind. He tried to brush it away, but it clung with brittle tenacity, edges curling sharply, scrabbling at his coat.

Where the hell did I leave the damn car? He crumbled the leaf between his fingers and let the pieces drift away.

Dusk charred the facade of The Edgeharbor Arms, and the light in the window smoldered, glinting off a brass plaque by the entrance. As the lead glass doors to the foyer swung shut behind him, winter rattled at the panes, and tasseled drapes swayed in the draft. Just to be out of the wind felt luxurious.

The room seemed steeped in decades of tobacco and musty dirt. A single lamp by the desk--its yellowing shade depicting a turn-of-the-century boardwalk scene--left most of the lobby in deep gloom, and shadows bulged behind the ripely ammoniac old sofas. At first, he savored the thawing warmth, but as blood trickled back to his hands and feet an aching weariness swept through him.

The door behind the registry desk stood slightly ajar, and beyond it an infant squalled while a man and woman squabbled in a language he didn't speak, the cacophony rendered even less intelligible by the din of a television. The wet smell of boiling pasta engulfed him. Suddenly, the voices ceased, and the television roar dropped to a mutter.

So they know I'm back. Only the baby's wails continued. Abruptly, the door slammed, and the chandelier jangled. Reflexively, he glanced up at the trembling crystal daggers. Then he peered around the lobby, inspecting every corner.

From the moment he'd spied the padlocked doors of the elevator, he'd understood them to be permanently sealed and not merely shut for the season. This applied to much else here in Edgeharbor. Already the Arms seemed wretchedly familiar, like the setting for a recurrent dream, though he'd only been in town just over a week. With a sigh, he lumbered up the stairs.

Patches of carpet had worn down to bare boards. At the second-floor landing only an unshaded bulb in a ceiling fixture diluted the gloom. Need to lie down. Pressure swelled in his head, and it hurt to move his legs. Now.

When he'd checked in, the proprietor's wife had been furious about his demanding a room above the second floor, and she'd wailed in broken English about all the climbing she would have to do. But she'd relented when he paid two weeks in advance and threw in an extra twenty. Being the sole guest carried advantages, and he had his reasons for insisting on an upper level. Anything lower would have been useless for observation...and the windows would have been far too accessible from the ground.

Before he started down the freezing hallway, he contemplated the darkness. A draft fluttered at the back of his neck.

As he turned the key, he listened. Cautiously easing the door open, he groped for the light switch. The threadbare carpet exuded a clammy miasma of suntan lotion and sweat, seeming to emanate even from the few cheerless furnishings. He locked the door behind him, slapped out the light. In the dark, he strode across the room and parted the curtains.

Moisture beaded the glass like black perspiration, and a damp lattice of frost feathered the edges of the pane. Scarcely five o'clock, but darkness rose like floodwaters below. He touched the glass, his fingertips slipping through the haze of moisture, leaving marks like snail tracks. Turning away, he unzipped his leather jacket. Dingy gloom seeped through the curtains, and wind shivered the windowpane. He fumbled with a switch at the back of a sconce until it flickered, barely revealing the room.

The single chair had been painted white so thickly that strands of wicker seemed molded into a single lump. He sat heavily and checked his watch. The numerals gleamed faintly. Can't call for hours yet. Silence pooled in the low corners, stagnant and chilly.