He looked at Janet — her face was a little blurred now — and then back at the window again. Below the black horizon was tomorrow, but he felt no regret that he wouldn’t be there to see it. He already knew its size and shape. We’ll talk things over, come to a decision, work things out, take a holiday. It was all rather funny, like the doctor’s advice about eating leafy green vegetables.
“Janet,” he said, “Janet, thanks very much for the binoculars. I really appreciated them.”
He was sure she hadn’t caught the error in tense, and yet there was something queer in the way she was looking at him.
“What are you staring at?” he said.
“Nothing. Let me mix you a drink before you leave.”
“No, thanks.”
“Promise me you won’t be long?”
“No promises on my birthday, remember.”
He thought that at the last moment she would follow him out, but she just sat down again in front of the fire. She watched the flames, her chin resting on her hands. Her face was nebulous, he couldn’t read it without his glasses, or the binoculars, or the giant telescope.
He went outside by the back door and passed the garage. The door had a new padlock, and the spark plugs had been taken out of the jeep and the Lincoln. He had seen Mr. Roma taking them out and Mr. Roma had seen him seeing, but they were both too polite to discuss the matter.
It was high tide. Walking along the edge of the cliff he could hear the hiss of spray and see the white uneven curves of the breakers along the shore.
He took out his watch and looked at the time on the luminous dial. It was nearly nine o’clock.
I’ll wait until it’s exactly nine, he thought.
He stood there until the minute hand mounted the dial and started its descent, but still he couldn’t jump.
Holding the watch in his hand he walked on, blinded by the dark and his own tears.
At ten-thirty they began searching for him, Miss Lewis with the flashlight and Mr. Roma and Mrs. Wakefield carrying the two lanterns that had hung unused in the shed for years.
The lights flickered weirdly through the woods and along the barranca and the edge of the cliff. The birds, startled out of their sleep, squawked distress calls from the uncertain shelter of the leaves. The sound of the surf was like a heavy wind blowing through a forest, pausing, returning.
All this fuss, Miss Lewis thought. There’s fussing about something around here all the time. I’d like a long quiet rest in the city.
But she raised her voice with the others, and called, “Mr. Wakefield, Mr. Wakefield...”
Their voices were feeble against the surf, and their lanterns helpless against the night, no better than glow worms.
“He may be walking on the beach,” Miss Lewis said.
“The tide’s still in,” Mrs. Wakefield said. She was shivering, and her arm ached from the weight of the lantern. “There’s no place to walk.”
“I will look anyway,” Mr. Roma said. “If you will go back to the house, I will look personally, when the tide goes out a little.”
“I’m afraid.”
“I know, I know.”
“He’s dead, I feel it.”
“Go back to the house sensibly and have some coffee, something to warm you.”
“Coffee sounds wonderful,” Miss Lewis said in the bright firm voice she used on Billy. “Come along.”
Mr. Roma set out along the cliff toward the stone steps. When he had nearly reached the bottom, just out of reach of the waves, he sat down with the lantern beside him and waited wearily until the tide went out.
Picking up the lantern he stepped down into the damp sand. Water crept into the top of his shoes and as he walked his feet made a squishing noise that increased his uneasiness; it sounded as though someone was walking behind him. He drew his coat closer, against the insinuating wind that seemed to be coming from all directions and slid up his sleeves and down his collar and up the soggy legs of his trousers.
He moved ahead slowly and cautiously. After each tide the beach changed; things were added and things were taken away. You could never walk along it as you walked on a path through the woods with the certainty that it was the same now as it was yesterday. There were always changes. A boulder had been shifted, a stranded stingray flopped in a tangle of kelp. The tide, heavier than normal, had swept away a foot of sand, exposing hundreds of fist-sized stones.
He paused for a minute, trying to decide whether to ease the stingray back into the water, or to kill and bury it so that no one would get cut by its barbed tail. As he leaned over to free it from the kelp he saw Mr. Wakefield crushed between two boulders, limp and boneless as a sponge, oozing water.
The deputy sheriff, Bracken, came in the middle of the night, and again the next day, and the next.
Bracken was a barrel-shaped man who wore a ten-gallon hat and Western boots. He had started out as a man of ideals. But as the gap increased between his ideals and the facts, he found himself owning a ranch almost paid for by contributions from the Mexican aliens who’d been smuggled into Marsalupe. They arrived by plane, they swam in from freighters, they came in false-bottomed trucks and bales of hay, and in other ways so diverse and ingenious they surprised even Bracken. The aliens didn’t want to be picked up by the Immigration officers and sent back to Mexico, and Bracken didn’t want to help pick them up, as long as they behaved themselves and laid off greasing their knives. After he’d had a few drinks, Bracken got very sad thinking of what a hell of a fine fellow he’d been once, before those damn jigaboos came pouring into town.
He knew Mrs. Wakefield by sight. She had never spoken to him or even nodded at him, and Bracken was sensitive to slights. He thought it was a wonderful opportunity to let her know she was no better than he was, no matter where her money came from.
“Funny thing,” he said, “us being neighbors all this time and never getting together for a powwow until this tragic occurrence.”
She sat in silence, rubbing the knuckles on her left hand and wondering why this terrible man kept coming back to ask her the same questions over and over.
“I’ve told you everything I could,” she said finally.
“Sure, sure, you have. We got to have an inquest, though. It’s the law. You don’t want to break the law, do you?”
“Naturally not. But all this endless prying into my husband’s affairs... He’s dead. What difference does it make whether it was accidental or intentional?”
“The law says we got to find out. I got to collect evidence, see what I mean?”
“Surely you’ve collected enough evidence already.” Enough evidence, she thought, and beer and coffee and ham sandwiches and anything else you could cram into your fat mouth.
Billy came to the door to stare at the man with the funny shoes.
Bracken said, “Get rid of the kid, will you? He gives me the heebie jeebies. I can’t think.”
It was that same day that the curiosity-seekers began to arrive from town. They came up the driveway in cars and along the beach on foot, pretending they were collecting shells or gathering mussels or looking at the view. They took away, as souvenirs, Mr. Roma’s No Trespassing signs and boughs of jacaranda and pieces of stone from the beach.
Though Billy was kept in the house, he could see the people from the windows and he sensed the excitement. The terrible and mysterious excitement made his legs tremble and brought quick tears to his eyes. No one could explain it to him, and no one tried. He was isolated in bewilderment. It was the same house he’d always known, only it was changed, like the beach after a tide.