The Winter Beach Page 2

  Lyle sat on a log and listened to the silence of the woods on this particular hill. The silences varied, she had learned; almost always the surf made the background noise, but here it was inaudible. This was like a holding-your-breath silence, she decided. No wind moved the trees, nothing stirred in the undergrowth, no birds called or flew. It was impossible to tell if the rain had stopped; often it continued under the trees long after the skies had cleared. She got up presently and climbed for another half-hour to the top of the hill. It had been a steep climb, but a protected one; here on the crest the wind hit her. Sea wind, salt wind, fresh yet filled with strange odors. The rain had stopped. She braced herself against the trunk of a tree twisted out of shape with sparse growth clinging to the tip ends of its branches. She was wearing a dark green poncho, rain pants of the same color over her woolen slacks, high boots, a woolen knit hat pulled low on her forehead and covered with the poncho hood. A pair of binoculars was clipped to her belt under the poncho. She took them out and began to study the surrounding trees, the other hilltops that now were visible, the rocks of a ledge with a drop of undetermined distance, because the gorge, or whatever it was, was bathed in mist. She did not spot the nest.

  She turned the glasses toward the ocean and for a long time looked seaward. A new storm was building. A boat so distant that it remained a smudge, even with the full magnification, was stuck to the horizon. She hoped that if it was a fishing boat, it made port before the storm hit. There had been two storms so far in the sixteen days she had been in Oregon. It still thrilled and frightened her to think of the power, the uncontrollable rage of the sea under storm winds. It would terrify her to be out there during such a storm. As she watched, the sea and sky became one and swallowed the boat. She knew the front would be racing toward shore, and she knew she would be caught if she returned to her house the way she had come. She stepped back under the trees and mentally studied the map of this day's search. She could go back along the western slope of the hill, skirt the gorge (it was a gorge cut by a tiny fierce stream), follow it until it met Little Salmon Creek, which would lead her home. It was rough, but no rougher than any other trail in these jagged hills that went up and down as if they had been designed by a first-grader.

  The wind blew harder, its cutting edge sharp and cold. Her face had been chapped ever since day one here, and she knew today would not improve matters. She started down the rugged hillside heading toward the creek gorge. The elevation of this peak was one thousand feet; her cabin was one hundred feet above sea level. She began to slide on wet mosses, and finally stopped when she reached out to grasp a tree trunk. Going down would be faster than getting up had been, she thought grimly, clutching the tree until she got her breath back. The little creek plunged over a ledge to a pool fifteen or twenty feet below; she had to detour to find a place to get down the same distance. “A person could get killed,” she muttered, inching down on her buttocks, digging in her heels as hard as she could, sliding a foot or so at a time.

  The trees were fir, pine, an occasional alder, an even rarer oak, and at the margins of the woods huckleberries, blueberries, blackberries, Oregon grapes, raspberries, salmon berries, elderberries ... She could no longer remember the long list of wild plants. They grew so luxuriantly that they appeared to be growing on top of and out of each other, ten feet high, twenty feet. She never had seen such a profusion of vines.

  Down, down, slipping, sliding, lowering herself from tree trunk to tree trunk, clinging to moss-covered rocks, feeling for a toehold below, sometimes walking gingerly on the scree at the edge of the creek when the berry bushes were impenetrable. Always downward. At last she reached a flat spot, and stopped to rest. She had come down almost all the way. She no longer had any chance of beating the storm; she would be caught and drenched. Now all she hoped was that she could be off the steep hill before it struck with full force. She looked seaward; there were only trees that were being erased by mist and clouds leaving suggestive shadows. Then she gasped. There was the nest!

  As Mal Levinson had said, it was hard to hide an eagle's nest. It was some distance from her, down a ravine, up the other side, a quarter of a mile or perhaps a little more. The roiling mist was already blurring its outlines. Impossible to judge its size, but big. It had to be old, used year after year, added to each new season. Eight feet across? She knew any figures from this distance were meaningless, but she could not stop the calculations. Half as deep as it was wide, four by eight then. It crowned a dead pine tree. A gust of wind hit her, lifted her hood, and now she realized that for some time she had been hearing the roar of the surf. She got up and started to make the final descent. In a few moments she came to the place where the little creek joined the larger one, and together they crashed over a rocky outcropping. Now she knew exactly where she was. She stayed as close to the bank of the creek as she could, searching for a place where she could cross. Farther down, near her cabin, she knew it was possible, but difficult because in its final run to the sea the creek was cutting a deep channel through the cliffs.

  How lucky, she was thinking, to find the nest this close to her own place. The two creeks came together at the two-hundred-foot altitude, child's play after scrambling up and down one-thousand-foot peaks. Less than a mile from the cabin; it would be nothing to go back and forth, pack in her gear ... She stopped suddenly and now felt a chill that the wind had not been able to induce in her. There was the other house, Werther's house. The nest was almost in his back yard.

  The boy appeared, coming from the garage carrying a grocery bag. He waved and, after a brief hesitation, she waved back, then continued to follow the creek down to the bridge where tons of boulders and rocks of all sizes had been dumped to stabilize the banks for the bridge supports.

  The rain finally started as she approached the bridge, and she made her way down the boulders with the rain blinding and savaging her all the way. The creek was no more than a foot deep here, but very swift, white water all the way to the beach. Normally she would have picked her way across it on the exposed rocks, but this time she plunged in, trusting her boots to be as waterproof as the manufacturer claimed.

  She had forgotten, she kept thinking in disbelief. She had forgotten about Werther and his young driver/cook/bodyguard. At first it had been all she had thought about, but then, with day after day spent in the wet woods, climbing, slipping, sliding, searching, it was as if she had developed amnesia and for a week or longer she had not thought of them at all. It was the same feeling she had had only a few days ago, she realized, when she had come upon a bottle of sleeping pills and had looked at it without recognition. Then, as now, it had taken an effort to remember.

  She made her way up her side of the boulders; five hundred feet away was her cabin dwarfed by rhododendrons. Weakly she dragged herself toward it, turning once to glance briefly at the other house, knowing it was not visible from here, but looking anyway. The boy had walked to the edge of the creek, was watching her; he waved again, and then ran through the rain back toward his own house, disappearing among the trees and bushes that screened it.

  Spying on her? That openly? Maybe he had been afraid she would fall down in the shallow treacherous stream. Maybe he thought she had fallen many times already; she considered how she looked: muddy, bedraggled, dripping, red-faced from windburn and cold. She looked like a nut, she thought, a real nut.

  She found the key under the planter box and let herself in. The cabin was cold and smelled of sea air and salt and decay. Before she undressed, she made up the fire in the wood stove and put water on to boil for coffee. She wished she had not seen the boy, that he had not spoiled this moment of triumph, that the nest was not in Werther's back yard almost, that Lasater had never ... She stopped herself. She wished for golden wings.

  “Don't waste perfectly good wishes on mundane things,” her father had said to her once when she had still been young enough to sit on his lap.

  She was smiling slightly then as she pulled off her boots; her feet were wet
and cold. Ah well, she had expected that, she thought sourly. She made the coffee, then showered, and examined new bruises acquired that day. She had not lost weight, she thought, surveying herself, but she was shifting it around a lot. Her waist was slimming down, while, she felt certain, her legs were growing at an alarming rate. She would have legs like a sumo wrestler after a few more weeks of uphill, downhill work. Or like a mountain goat. She pulled on her warmest robe and rubbed her hair briskly, then started to make her dinner.

  She sniffed leftover soup, shrugged, and put it on to heat, scraped mold off a piece of cheese, toasted stale bread, quartered an apple, and sat down without another thought of food. As she ate, she studied her topographic map, then drew in a circle around the spot where she knew the nest was. As she had suspected, it was less than half a mile from Werther's house, but not visible from it because of the way the land went up and down. There was a steep hill, then a ravine, then a steeper hill, and it was the flanks of the second hill that the eagle had chosen for a building site.

  She started in surprise when there was a knock on the door. No one had knocked on that door since her arrival. She looked down at herself, then shrugged. She was in a heavy flannel robe and fleece-lined moccasins. Her hair was still wet from the shower, and out every which way from her toweling it. Her wet and muddy clothes were steaming on chairs drawn close to the stove. Everywhere there were books, maps, notebooks; her typewriter was on an end table, plugged into an extension cord that snaked across the room. Mail was stacked on another end table; it had been stacked, now it was in an untidy heap, with a letter or two on the floor where they had fallen when the stack had leaned too far.

  “What the hell,” she muttered, stepping over the extension cord to open the door.

  It was the boy from Werther's house. He grinned at her. He was a good-looking kid, she thought absently, trying to block his view of the room. It was no good, though, he was tall enough to see over her head. His grin deepened. He had black hair with a slight wave, deep brown eyes, beautiful young skin. A heart throb, she thought, remembering the phrase from her school years.

  “I caught a lot of crabs today,” he said, and she saw the package he was carrying. “Mr. Werther thought you might like some.” He held out the package.

  She knew he had seen the remains of her dinner, her clothes, everything. No point in pretending now. She held the door open and stepped back. “Would you like to come in? Have a cup of coffee?”

  “Thanks,” he said, shaking his head. “I have to go back and make our dinner now.”

  She took the package. “Thank you very much. I appreciate this.”

  He nodded and left in the rain. He had come through the creek, she realized, the same way she had come. Actually it was quicker than getting a car down the steep driveway, onto the road, up her equally steep driveway. Over a mile by road, less than half a mile by foot. She closed the door and took the package to the sink. The crabs, two of them, had been steamed and were still warm. Her mouth was watering suddenly, although she had eaten what she thought was enough at the time. She melted butter, then slowly ate again, savoring each bite of the succulent crab meat. Werther, or the boy, had cracked the legs just enough; she was able to get out every scrap. When she finished, she sat back sighing with contentment. She was exhausted, her room was a sty, but she had found the nest. It had been a good day.

  And Lasater? She scowled, gathered up her garbage, and cleared it away. Damn Lasater.

  * * * *

  For the next three days she studied the area of the nest minutely. There was no good vantage point actually for her to stake out as her own. The pine spur was at the end of a ravine that was filled with trees and bushes. Nowhere could she see through the dense greenery for a clear view of the nest. She had to climb one hill after another, circling the ravine, keeping the nest in sight, looking for a likely place to put her lean-to, to set up her tripod, to wait. She finally found a site, about four feet higher than the nest, on a hillside about one hundred feet from it, with a deep chasm between her and the nest. She unslung her backpack and took out the tarpaulin and nylon cords, all dark green, and erected the lean-to, fastening it securely to trees at all four corners. It would have to do, she decided, even though it stood out like a beer can in a mountain brook. She had learned, in photographing hawks, that most birds would accept a lean-to, or wooden blind even, if it was in place before they took up residence. During the next week or so the lean-to would weather, moss would cover it, ferns grow along the ropes, a tree or two sprout to hide the flap ... She took a step back to survey her work, and nodded. Fine. It was fine and it would keep her dry, she decided, and then the rain started again.

  Every three or four days a new front blew in from the Pacific bringing twenty-foot waves, thirty-foot waves, or even higher, crashing into the cliffs, tearing out great chunks of beach, battling savagely with the pillars, needles, stacks of rock that stood in the water as if the land were trying to sneak out to sea. In the thick rain forests the jagged hills broke up the wind; the trees broke up the rain, cushioned its impact, so that by the time it reached the mosses, it was almost gentle. The mosses glowed and bulged with the bounty. The greens intensified. It was like being in an underwater garden. Lyle made her way down the hillside with the cold rain in her face, and she hardly felt it. The blind was ready; she was ready; now it would be a waiting game. Every day she would photograph the nest, and compare the pictures each night. If one new feather was added she would know. The eagles could no more conceal their presence than they could conceal their nest.

  When she reached her side of the bridge again, she crossed the road and went out to the edge of the bluff that overlooked the creek and the beach. The roar of surf was deafening; there was no beach to be seen. This storm had blown in at high tide and waves thundered against the cliffs. The bridge was seventy-five feet above the beach, but spray shot up and was blown across it again and again as the waves exploded below. Little Salmon Creek dropped seventy-five feet in its last mile to the beach, with most of the drop made in a waterfall below the bridge; now Little Salmon Creek was being driven backward and was rising. Lyle stood transfixed, watching the spectacular storm, until the light failed, and now the sounds of crashing waves, of driftwood logs twenty feet long being hurled into bridge pilings, of wind howling through the trees all became frightening and she turned and hurried toward her cabin. She caught a motion from the cliff on the other side of the bridge and she could make out the figure of a watcher there. He was as bundled up as she was, and the light was too feeble by then to be able to tell if it was the boy, or Werther.

  The phone was ringing when she got inside and pushed the door closed against the wind that rushed through with her. Papers stirred with the passage, then settled again. She had to extract the telephone from under a pile of her sweaters she had brought out to air because things left in the bedroom tended to smell musty. The wood stove and a small electric heater in her darkroom were the only heat in the cabin.

  “Yes,” she said, certain it was a wrong number.

  “Mrs. Taney, this is Saul Werther. I wonder if I can talk you into having dinner with me this evening. I'd be most happy if you will accept. Carmen will be glad to pick you up in an hour and take you home again later.”

  She felt a rush of fear that drained her. Please, she prayed silently, not again. Don't start again. She closed her eyes hard.

  “Mrs. Taney, forgive me. We haven't really met, I'm your neighbor across the brook,” he said, as if reminding her he was still on the line. “We watched the storm together.”

  “Yes, of course, I'd ... Thank you. I'll be ready in an hour.”

  For several minutes she stood with her hand on the phone.

  It had happened again, the first time in nearly four years. It had been Werther on the phone, but she had heard Mr. Hendrickson's voice. “Mrs. Taney, I'm afraid there's been an accident...” And she had known. It had been as if she had known even before the telephone rang that evening; she h
ad been waiting for confirmation, nothing more. Fear, grief, shock, guilt: she had been waiting for a cause, for a reason for the terrible emotions that had gripped her, that had been amorphously present for an hour and finally settled out only with the phone call. No one had believed her, not Gregory, not the psychiatrist, and she would have been willing to disbelieve, yearned to be able to disbelieve, but could not, because now and then, always with a meaningless call, that moment had swept over her again. She had come to recognize the rush of emotions that left her feeling hollowed out, as the event was repeated during the next year and a half after Mike's death. And then it had stopped, until now. “Mrs. Taney, I'm afraid there's been an accident. Your son...”

  She began to shiver, and was able to move again. She had to get out of her wet clothes, build up the fire, shower ... This was Lasater's doing. He had made the connection in her mind between Werther, drugs, Mike's death. He had reached inside her head with his words and revived the grief and guilt she had thought was banished. Clever Mr. Lasater, she thought grimly. He had known she would react, not precisely how, that was expecting too much even of him. He had known Werther would make the opening move. If Werther was involved with drug smuggling, she wanted him dead, just as dead as her child was, and she would do all she could to make him dead. Even as she thought it, she knew Lasater had counted on this too.

  * * * *

  Hugh Lasater drove through the town of Salmon Key late that afternoon before the storm hit. He and a companion, Milton Follett, had been driving since early morning, up from San Francisco in a comfortable, spacious motor home.

  “It's the hills that slowed us down,” Hugh Lasater said. “The freeway was great, and then we hit the coastal range. Should have been there by now.”

  Milton Follett was slouched down low in his seat; he did not glance at the town as they went through. “Could have called,” he grumbled, as he had done several times in the past hour or so. He was in his mid-thirties, a blond former linebacker whose muscles were turning to flab.