Sleeping Beauty

chapter 2

The tide was coming in more strongly now, and I was afraid that the oil would come in with it. It might be on the beaches by tomorrow. I decided to go for a farewell walk southward along the shore. That happened to be the direction the woman with the grebe had taken.

The sunset spilled on the water and flared across the sky.

The sky changed through several colors and became a soft crumbled gray. It was like walking under the roof of an enormous cave where hidden fires burned low.

I came to a kind of natural corner where the shoreline curved out and a cliff rose abruptly from the beach. A few late surfers were waiting on the water for a final big one.

I watched them until a big one rose out of the darkening sea and brought most of them in. A cormorant flew across the water like an urgent afterthought.

I walked on for another half-mile or so. The beach was narrow and getting narrower, encroached on by the waves and crowded by the cliff. The cliff was fifty or sixty feet high at this point. Rough paths and precarious wooden stairways climbed here and there to the houses on its top.

I told myself I couldn’t get caught by the tide. But night was falling now, and the sea was rising to meet it.

A couple of hundred yards ahead of me, a scattering of boulders lay at the foot of the cliff and blocked the beach. I decided to walk that far and then turn back. There was something about the place that worried me. The cliff and the boulders at its base looked in the fading light like something seen for the last time.

A white object was lodged high among the boulders. When I got nearer, I could see that it was a woman and hear between the sounds of the surf that she was crying. She turned her face away from me, but not before I’d recognized her.

As I came near, she sat perfectly still, pretending to be an accidental object caught in a crevice.

“Is there something the matter?”

She stopped crying with a gulp, as though she had swallowed her tears, and turned her face away. “No. There’s nothing the matter.”

“Did the bird die?”

“Yes. It died.” Her voice was high and tight. “Now are you satisfied?”

“It takes a lot to satisfy me. Don’t you think you should find a safer place to sit?”

She didn’t respond at first. Then her head turned slowly. Her wet eyes gleamed at me in the deep twilight.

“I like it here. I hope the tide comes and gets me.”

“Because one grebe died? A lot of diving birds are going to die.”

“Don’t keep talking about death. Please.” She struggled out of her crevice and got to her feet. “Who are you anyway? Did somebody send you here to find me?”

“I came of my own accord.”

“You followed me?”

“Not exactly. I was taking a walk.” A wave came in and splashed against the boulders. I could feel the cold spray on my face. “Don’t you think we better get out of here?”

She looked around in a quick, desperate movement, then up at the cliff where a cantilevered house hung over her head like a threat. “I don’t know where to go.”

“I thought you lived in the neighborhood.”

“No.” She was silent for a moment. “Where do you live?”

“Los Angeles. West Los Angeles.”

Her eyes shifted as if she had made a decision. “So do I.”

I didn’t quite believe in the coincidence, but I was willing to go along with it and see where it led. “Do you have transportation?”

“No.”

“I’ll take you home.”

She came along without any argument. She told me that her name was Laurel Russo, Mrs. Thomas Russo. I said my name was Lew Archer. Something about the situation made me hold back the fact that I was a private detective.

Before we reached the end of the cliff where the beach curved, a high wave came up and soaked our feet and brought in the last surfer. He joined the others, who were squatting around a driftwood fire built under the brow of a natural cave. Their oiled faces and bodies gleamed in the firelight. They looked as if they had given up on civilization and were ready for anything or nothing.

There were other people on the beach, talking in low tones or waiting in silence. We stood with them for a little while in the semidarkness. The ocean and its shores were never entirely dark: the water gathered light like the mirror of a telescope.

The woman was standing so close to me I could feel her breath on my neck. Still she seemed a long way off, at a telescopic distance from me and the others. She seemed to feel it, too. She took hold of my hand. Her hand was cold.

The wide-shouldered young man in the black turtleneck whom I had seen in Blanche’s Restaurant had appeared on the wharf again. He jumped down onto the sand and came toward us. His movements were rather clumsy and mechanical, as if somebody had activated them by pressing a button.

He stopped and looked at the woman with a kind of menacing excitement. Still holding on to my hand, she turned and pulled me toward the road. Her grip was tight and spasmodic, like a frightened child’s. The young man stood and watched us go.

Under the streetlights, I got a good look at her. Her face seemed frozen, her eyes in deep dark shock. When we got into my car, I could smell her fear.

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know. Honestly.”

“Then why are you afraid of him?”

“I’m just afraid, period. Can’t we leave it at that?”

“It wasn’t Tom Russo, was it? Your husband?”

“Certainly not.”

She was shivering. I kept an old raincoat in the trunk of my car, and I got it out and put it over her shoulders. She didn’t look at me or thank me.

I drove up the ramp onto the freeway. The traffic going north with us wasn’t heavy. But an unbroken stream of headlights poured toward us from Los Angeles, as if the city was leaking light through a hole in its side.