The Winter Beach Read online

  Under the tree was a circle of litter; the eagle had picked out materials that had been good enough last year, but no longer pleased it. Old moss, old fern fronds, sticks. With an almost reckless abandon it tossed them over the side. When the light began to fade, Lyle picked her way back down the hillside, around the ruins of Saul's house, through the creek and to her own house, where Carmen was waiting for her.

  She had not asked Carmen to stay, but neither had she asked him to leave; it was as if they both accepted that he would remain with her for now. The matter had come up only indirectly when she had said she couldn't pay him, and he had shrugged. For eight days he had been with her in the same relationship apparently that he had had with Saul. He did the shopping, a little cleaning, cooking; he prowled the beaches and brought home clams or scallops or crabs, sometimes a fish. Best of all they talked for hours in the evenings, never about Saul, or Carmen's past, but of history, current affairs, art, music ... Lyle knew that one day he would get restless and drift on, but she refused to think about it and the hollow in her life that would result.

  When she entered the house that day, the odors of cooking food and woodsmoke and the elusive scent of another person greeted her. She felt nearly overcome by contentment, she thought happily.

  “Carmen! He's home. He's beautiful! A wing span over eight feet. All day he's been fixing up the nest, getting ready for his lady love to join him. Tomorrow you have to come up with me and see for yourself.” She was pulling off her outer wear as she talked, unable to restrain the excitement she seemed filled to overflowing with. “I can't wait to see the pictures.”

  She stopped at the look on Carmen's face, a look of such tenderness and love it made her knees weak.

  “I'll come up tomorrow. Maybe I can help you in the dark room after dinner.”

  She nodded. And still they looked at one another and she wondered when she had stopped looking at him as if he were only a boy, when he had stopped looking at her as if she were untouchable.

  Then she said, “I'm filthy. I'd better get washed up and change these muddy clothes.” She fled. She was afraid he was laughing at her confusion.

  They had dinner and worked in the darkroom for two hours. She felt like purring over the proof sheets; at least half a dozen of the pictures would go in, maybe more. Throughout the evening she avoided his gaze, and spoke only of eagles, her day in the blind, the dinner itself. She began to make notes to go with the pictures, and found herself writing a poem instead. When she finished, she felt almost exalted.

  “May I read it?” Carmen asked. She handed it to him silently.

  He read it twice, then said, “I like it very much. It would make a good introduction to the book. I didn't know you wrote poetry.”

  “I don't. I mean I haven't before, not since college days.” She took the sheet of paper back and reread her poem.

  The dead tree flies an eagle on the wind,

  Then steadily reels it in,

  Dip, sway, soar, rise,

  All the time closer.

  To the left, to the right,

  Now too low, now too high,

  But closer.

  From nothing, to a speck

  That could be a cloud,

  To a being coming home,

  It takes shape:

  Sun on snow, the head,

  Great wings without a waver,

  White fan as graceful

  And delicate as a black one

  In a pale practiced hand.

  From the tree's highest crotch,

  From a nest of branches, sticks, twigs, moss,

  Elaborate skyscraper room,

  A silent summons was sent.

  Now the dead tree reels the eagle home.

  Abruptly she stood up. “I guess I'd better get to bed. I want to be up there early. I expect the other one will come in tomorrow or the next day.”

  * * * *

  In a scruffy camper in Lagoon Park Hugh Lasater played the tape over again, listening to their voices intently, following them through dinner, into the darkroom where their voices were almost too low to catch, back to the living room. He wished one of them had read the poem aloud. He heard their good nights, her door closing, Carmen's movements in the living room for another fifteen minutes; then the long silence of the night started. He turned off the tape player. Something, he kept thinking. There was something he should be catching. He rewound it and started over.

  What he did not hear, because the device was activated by sounds and this was done in silence, was the opening of Lyle's door at one-thirty. She stepped into the living room to look at Carmen sleeping on the couch, and when she saw him instead at the window that overlooked the sea, she did not retreat. Instead, after a slight hesitation, he came to her, barefoot, visible in the red glow from the glass door of the wood stove. He reached out his hand and she, after a slight hesitation, took it, and together they went back to her bedroom and softly closed the door.

  Hugh Lasater listened again, and in the middle of the tape, he suddenly slapped the table top hard, waking up Milton Follett on the bunk bed.

  “Son of a bitch!” Lasater said. “The camera bag. Where was it when the house burned down?”

  Follett regarded him with hatred, rolled over, and went back to sleep.

  Lasater had not been asking him; he already knew about the camera bag. Follett was good at certain jobs; he could watch and report movements down to a casual scratching of the head. And Follett had said that Carmen showed up with the bag at Taney's house when she was gone, and he had left with it. He had not been seen with it again. So Werther considerately put it on a stump out of danger before he set the house afire?

  Lasater mused about the boy for a long time that night. He knew photography enough to help Taney in the darkroom. He remembered that sure way he had taken her pulse when she returned from her little jaunt. They had only his word that he had been hired by Werther in Los Angeles; if that was true what had made him jump into that crazy surf in an effort to find the old man. No one risked death for someone he had known only a couple of months, and that surf was a killer. Someone had to make sure that the car door had not jammed shut, Lasater said to himself. That would have screwed it up royally, if there had been no way Werther could have been thrown out. They had waited for the right kind of night with a pea-soup fog for their little charade; maybe the kid even had a rope guide to take him to where he had figured the car would land. No one paid much attention to him; he was always on the beach prowling around.

  Lasater knew his foremost problem now was to convince Mr. Forbisher that his theory was right, that Werther had not been in that car, and that the boy would lead them back to him sooner or later. Turk was convinced that he had seen Werther go over the cliff; Follett believed him, but Follett would have bought anything to get him off this job. He hated the rain and wind and cold weather, and he hated the isolation here. He wanted a woman. When they got back to civilization, Follett would vanish a day or two. There would then be a news item about a woman's body being found ... It was one of those things with Follett, a little weakness of his. Lasater could sympathize with his frustration even while his own frustration mounted to a dangerous level. Even Lasater had to admit that he no longer believed Werther was hiding out in the woods now. Not for eight days. In another day August Ranier would show up, listen to the arguments for continuing the hunt, make his evaluation, report to Forbisher by phone, and then render the decision. Lasater's mouth tightened as he repeated the phrases to himself, all so legal sounding, so proper and genteel.

  He was certain they would not continue to pay the small army Lasater had brought to the coast to watch the old man and the kid. Maybe one operator, or two at the most. They might go for that. He could bring in someone who would get in close to Carmen, and stay close to him. A girl, he thought then, remembering Carmen's body as he had stripped in Taney's house. Even blue with cold and shaking almost uncontrollably, he had been good-looking, so young and unmarked it had been like a stab to
Lasater. Hell, he thought, the kid was human, he must be almost as horny by now as Follett. If he could produce a girl who looked even younger, who looked hurt and vulnerable, who asked for nothing and apparently expected nothing, a runaway with a car of her own, a little money, Carmen would figure he could use her to get him to where he had to go. And where he had to go, Lasater had convinced himself, was home to Saul Werther.

  * * * *

  “Look,” Lyle said softly. “She's pretending she hates it. That's stuff he just brought in yesterday.” The female eagle was discarding seaweed vigorously; the male sat on a nearby tree watching her.

  Carmen laughed. There was mist beyond the blind; it was too fine and too gentle to call rain, it was rather as if a cloud were being lowered very slowly to earth. Carmen had joined Lyle only minutes earlier; there were mist beads on his hair.

  She had been afraid the morning might be awkward, but he had been up when she awakened, and when she had gone into the living room he had kissed her gently on the nose and had continued to make breakfast.

  The female eagle reared up and half-opened her wings threateningly when the male approached the nest. He veered away and returned to his perch. “All in the genes,” Carmen said in a hushed voice. “She's doing what nature programmed her to do.”

  Why this pretense of free will? Lyle wondered. She knew the female might pretend to become too disgusted with the nest, with the male; she might pretend to leave, might even go through some motions of starting a new nest. And in the end they would mate here and the fledglings would hatch out and learn to fly from that dead spur.

  She found herself wondering about her own attempts to escape Lasater's plans, to free herself from the burden of betraying Saul, her own mock flight to freedom. From any distance at all, it now seemed as programmed as the eagles’ behavior, at least her actions and Lasater's. Only Saul and Carmen had been unpredictable. Suddenly she felt that they had been from the start as alien to her as the eagles were, as strange and unknowable. And it had not mattered, she thought, and did not matter now.

  “Why are you smiling like that?” Carmen asked.

  “I was thinking that you and Saul came to Earth from a distant planet, that you're aliens. They won't find his body because he changed himself at the last moment into a great snowy owl and sailed away in the fog. He could come back as a butterfly, or an eagle, or whatever he chooses.”

  “I hope Lasater doesn't start believing that,” Carmen said, laughing. “He might get the Marines out.”

  “Oh, no. He thinks that Saul was a Jewish student in Hitler's Germany and that he discovered something tremendous...”

  She stopped at the change that came over Carmen's features. He leaned toward her and suddenly there was nothing boyish about him, nothing soft or tender.

  “Tell me what he said.”

  “That last morning he stopped me as I was leaving, when I was ill ... She told him all of it. He did not move, but she felt more alone than she had felt in her life, as if a barrier that could never be scaled had come up between them.

  “It's true, isn't it?” she whispered.

  “Essentially. Some details are wrong. David's two younger brothers died young with Tay-Sachs Disease, and it nearly killed his mother. David and his older brother Daniel swore they would find a vaccine for it. But Daniel just couldn't make it in school. He dropped out, David went on. The professor was already into genetic research, and he allowed David to pursue his own studies because he saw that the two would come together at a later date. When the two lines did converge they realized they had something they had not counted on. The professor was terrified that the German government would get it, he was vehemently antifascist, and of course there was the danger that David would be picked up and forced to work in a government lab somewhere. So they kept it very secret, kept the papers on the farm the professor's family had owned for two centuries. David's brother knew what he was doing. When David was called up for registration, fingerprinting, the works, Daniel went. No one noticed. All those Jew boys looked alike after all. So David never was on file actually. David's parents and Daniel were hauled away one day. He found out—they always found out rather quickly—and he returned to the laboratory that night to destroy certain cultures. The Hitler Youth gang caught him there carrying a culture dish across the laboratory. The culture had to be maintained at blood heat or it perished. All he had planned to do was to put it in the refrigerator, because there was a danger of incriminating the professor if he actually destroyed anything in a way that could be proven. When the gang burst in on him, he dropped the dish. They threw him down on the mess and rubbed his face in it. Glass, culture, dirt ... Then they took him outside the building and beat him to a pulp, and they dragged him back to the professor's house, and left him on the steps.” He paused. “The rest of it is pretty much as Lasater suggested, except that the professor wasn't dead. They escaped together with the paperwork.”

  “If his fingerprints aren't on file, why did it matter if Lasater got a set? It would have ended there when they didn't match up.”

  “David's prints aren't in anyone's file,” he said slowly, gazing at the eagles’ nest. “But the professor's are. We simply couldn't be certain they wouldn't be available for comparison.”

  “You're saying that Saul is that professor. What about David?” Her voice sounded harsh and unfamiliar to her; she had to make a great effort to speak at all. She was caught up in a battle against disbelief and despair: Carmen was mad, as mad as Saul had been.

  “You know I'm David,” he said gently, as if only now becoming aware of her distress. “Don't look so scared. You really did know already. Watch the eagles this afternoon. I'm going down to the beach. See you for dinner.” He leaned forward and kissed her lips lightly, and then was gone.

  Dry-eyed, she stared at the eagles’ nest. Crazy. Paranoid delusions. It had to be that. Gradually she found that she was accepting that he was mad and that she didn't care, it didn't matter. He had to be insane, or she had to accept something that had kept him twenty for all those years, that had stopped Saul at sixty-four and held him there. Something that had made them both immortal. And she could not accept immortality.

  The female eagle returned with fresh seaweed to replace that which she had discarded; her token resistance was ended. The male followed with a long scrap of white material he had found somewhere. Together they rearranged the interior of their nest.

  The sun came out and steam rose throughout the forest; the air was heavy with spring fragrances and fertile earth and unnamable sea smells.

  And still Lyle sat staring, not taking pictures, trying to think of nothing at all. She would not think about tomorrow or the next day. She would do her job and if Carmen stayed, she would love him; when he left, she would miss him. Each day was its own beginning and ending. That was enough.

  But she knew it was not enough. Carmen had pointed out the listening device on the underside of the table in her house. Lasater was still out there, listening, spying. Maybe he thought Carmen would lead him to the papers he so desperately wanted. Maybe Carmen could go to them. And, she thought suddenly, she was still here for Lasater to use. He had put her here, he thought of her as his instrument, his property to use when he got ready, to discard afterward, and so far she had not worked for him. The next time he would use her without trying to force cooperation, without her awareness or consent. When he started moving pieces again, he would turn to her and make use of her, she felt certain. Like the winter beach, she felt buffeted by forces she could not comprehend or thwart or dodge, and like the winter beach she felt a presentiment of endings, a loss of laughter in the sand.

  * * * *

  August Ranier had come and gone and Lasater had been stripped of his army with a single word spoken very quietly. “Do I continue?” he had asked.

  “No.”

  Ranier had handed Milton Follett and Lasater their termination checks—they had been hired as consultants—and he had left in his dawn-gray Seville.
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  “Let's get out of here,” Follett said.

  “Aren't you willing to wait to pick up your bug in the house?”

  “Yeah. I'm driving the camper up there. That little baby cost me sixty-three bucks. Let's go.”

  “Milt, hold it a minute. Listen, I know that old man's alive and well somewhere and the kid's going home to him one of these days. I know it just like I know the back of my hand. Now that Forbisher's out of it, we could double the price when we get the stuff. You and I, Milt, just the two of us. A million, two million...”

  “Milt turned on the key and jerked the camper away from its parking spot. He did not even bother to look at Lasater.

  “Milt!” Lasater said softly. “Remember Karen?”

  The camper shuddered to a stop and Milton Follett started up from behind the driver's seat. His hands were clenched.

  “Would you like another Karen?” Lasater asked, whispering the words.

  Follett was pale and his fists opened, the fingers spread wide, then clenched again. “What do you mean?”

  “I'll let you have Taney.”

  Follett sat down on the bunk bed. “Tell me,” he said.

  “What if the cops find her messed up, dead, her money, jewelry, car all gone? What do you suppose they'll think, especially since the old guy disappeared so mysteriously such a short time ago? They'd wonder why a good-looking kid like Carmen was hanging around an old dame like her. But you can have her first, as long as you want, whatever you want.”

  “Why?”

  “I want that kid to run home to papa. He'll run when he finds her. He'll know they'll be after him, he's not a dope. He'll run and we'll be there. Who's the best team in the business, Milt? Not Turk and that bunch of amateurs. You think there's any way in the world the kid can shake us? I think he'll take us home with him.”

  “When?”