Shadows on the Sand (6 page)

In the years he’d been a property manager, Greg learned that people responded to an eviction notice in one of two ways. They nodded, heads bowed, knowing they hadn’t paid their rent, couldn’t pay their rent, deserved to be cast out for not keeping their part of the bargain set forth in the lease. These people left with slumped shoulders and fear in their eyes. Greg always felt like the lowest of heels with them, like it was somehow his fault they couldn’t pay. He worried about where they would go, how they would live.

Then there were the others. They were confrontational, belligerent. They felt they were being treated unfairly and made things as difficult as they could. Some chose to be destructive in their misguided effort to pay
you back for getting upset that they hadn’t paid their rent for the past three or four or six months.

Chaz obviously embraced the latter school of thought, and the poor apartment had taken the brunt of his rage. Greg saw holes in the wallboard, and he noted the baseball bat lying on the floor under one. There were dark spots ground into the beige rug, and he was willing to bet they were body waste. Through the opening to the kitchen, he could see the hot-water faucet wrenched from its moorings and the resulting fountain, most of which seemed to be falling into the sink. Still an impressive amount of water rolled across the counter and spilled down the front of the cabinets in a miniature Niagara. The oven door hung drunkenly, one side ripped free.

“Did you clog the toilet too, Chaz?” Greg asked. “Socks? Washcloths? Pampers?”

Chaz glared, chair still raised. “Where’d I get Pampers?”

Not a denial. Greg sighed, thankful he had a reliable plumber on speed dial.

Blake pulled out his cell and hit 911. “We need help with an eviction, and we want to press charges against one Chaz Rudolph, present address Sand and Sea, apartment A, Seaside, for willful destruction of private property and making threats of bodily harm against an officer of the court.”

Blake listened a minute, then hung up. “You’ve got less than five minutes before the police get here.” He stood back from the door. “Out.”

Chaz looked shocked. “You can’t have me arrested! I didn’t do nothing!”

Greg looked from one blatant act of destruction to another. “Four minutes.”

Chaz lowered the chair, then raised it again. He brought it down with a great crash against the coffee table. A chair leg splintered. The coffee table collapsed. Chaz, triumphant, looked at Greg and Blake.

“Three minutes,” Blake said.

“And that isn’t my furniture,” Greg said. “You rented it.”

With a snarl fit for a threatened tiger, Chaz lunged for the door and lurched down the hall. “I’ll get you for this!”

“Yeah, yeah.” Greg followed to be certain the idiot drove off the lot, Blake right behind him. “Call me to set a date to clean the place out, Rudolph.”

Chaz climbed into a bright yellow Hummer without responding.

Greg shook his head. The summer must have been quite profitable. Too bad Chaz wasn’t smart enough to turn in the Hummer and get a Kia. Then he might be able to pay his rent.

Chaz hit the gas, and the Hummer roared backward. Blake nodded with satisfaction and turned back to the building. “Time to change the locks.”

Greg checked his watch, thankful there was no car in the slots behind Chaz. “Locksmith’s due any minute. I’ll turn off the water and call the plumber as soon as Rudolph’s gone.”

He watched as Chaz paused to shift gears. The Hummer leaped forward, but it didn’t turn to drive from the lot.

It drove straight at Greg.

I
leaned on the counter at the cash register after Clooney and Mr. Perkins left. The café hadn’t been totally empty since midspring, and the quiet was nice—provided it didn’t presage a bad fall and winter. There was a fine line between a more relaxed pace and a dismal pace.

“Hey, Carrie,” Lindsay called. “I’m taking ten to run up to the apartment. Everything’s good to go for lunch. Ricky’s got the tomato basil and the vegetable beef soups simmering. The quiche is ready for the oven and will go in as soon as the black forest cake and apple caramel pies are done.”

I glanced at the glass case where a fresh fruit flan was already on display, its circles of strawberries, blueberries, kiwis, and bananas shining under their clear glaze.

“Chicken salad’s ready to go, and the pork barbecue is simmering.” She pulled her apron off and laid it on the counter. “I’ll be back before you even know I’m gone.”

I glanced at the clock. Not quite eleven. All of a sudden taking ten sounded wonderful. Only I wanted thirty. I wanted to walk to the boardwalk, sit on a bench, and let the ocean purl and purr while I threw my head back and listened to its murmur. I should be cleaning the bathroom at the back of the café, but the mess there wasn’t going anywhere. The tangy scent of salt water won over the acrid odor of bleach hands-down.

“Go on up, Linds. Only take thirty.”

“Really?”

“Yep. I’m putting the ‘Back at 11:30’ sign on the door.”

“Yes!”

Her feet pounded up the steps to our apartment. She’d collapse on the sofa with our Maine coon cat, Oreo, lying on her like a great black hairy afghan. Lindsay would murmur how wonderful Oreo was, and she’d purr, her golden eyes closing in delight, her white ruff and whiskers the sole breaks in her midnight pelt.

“Why’d she go up there?” Ricky looked at me with sad eyes. “We could have talked, her and me.”

I couldn’t very well tell him that she needed a break from his adoring gaze, and the one place she knew he wouldn’t try to follow was the apartment. He was allergic to cats.

“Andi, feel free to put your feet up or go for a walk,” I said. “Whatever. Just be back by eleven thirty, okay?”

“I’m going to sit down and do a Sudoku.” She grabbed her book and walked to a back booth. She turned to me just before sliding into her seat. “He didn’t do anything wrong.”

Bill. “Then everything will be fine.” I sure hoped that was so, but the bruise coloring her wrist gave me pause.

“Yeah, everything will be fine.” She sounded as if she was trying to convince herself.

I walked to her and wrapped my arms around her in a gentle hug. She didn’t hug me back, but I didn’t let it bother me. I remembered the long-ago days when I was just Andi’s age and the former owner of Carrie’s had hugged me. I hadn’t responded either—I hadn’t known how—but I’d loved those hugs.

If I could be there for Andi as Mary Prudence had been there for me, even if just a little, I’d feel I was doing something to give back all that had been given to me.

“Carrie likes unraveling things. Fixing things. Being the one in charge. Proving she’s able.”

Greg was right. I was the one who always took charge, but then someone had to seize control of the runaway train that had been my early life. I just hoped there was a bit more to me than being a control freak. Like love. Or humor.

I hung the eleven-thirty sign on the door and started for the boardwalk two blocks away. I paused at the first cross street and looked back over my shoulder. Carrie’s Café. The sign had a Caribbean blue background with navy letters outlined in sea green.

Oh, Lord, I still can’t believe it!

I thought of that long-ago morning when we ran away, Lindsay and I. Mom had swayed in the doorway of the bedroom we girls shared. Sunlight shone through the old sheet I’d tacked to our window for a curtain, making her skin look pastier than usual. Her hair was wild, her eyes bleary. She looked ready to collapse. If the alcohol didn’t get her, malnutrition would.

“Carrie!” She tried to look angry, but her facial muscles weren’t cooperating. “Bobby says you came after him with a knife!”

Bobby, Mom’s latest, leaned on the jamb of Mom’s room, fat belly hanging over his boxers, a nasty smile on his fat face. Well, he had to explain the cut on his arm somehow, and he wasn’t about to say he’d asked for it.

I felt then ten-year-old Lindsay slide under the covers until she was invisible. She was shaking, and I hated Bobby for making her afraid.

“He came into our room last night,” I said.

Mom shrugged. “So? He just wanted to say good night.”

I stared at her. “Mom, that’s not what he wanted!”

She laughed. “Don’t be stupid, Carrie. What could he want with you or your sister? He has me.”

I might not be beautiful and Lindsay might be scrawny, but we looked alive, which was more than I could say for her. The dead street lady I’d seen last winter on my way to school looked better than she did. She’d had me
when she was my age and was now thirty-two, but she looked at least fifty. Old. Old, old, old.

“I want you to give me your knife.” She held out her hand, and it trembled. She needed a drink already, and it was—I checked my alarm clock that I’d stolen from the mom-and-pop store down the street—7:10 a.m.

I shook my head. “Just tell Bobby to stay out of our room, and there won’t be any trouble.”

“This is Bobby’s house too,” she said, “and he can go anywhere he wants. Maybe next time he’ll turn the knife on you.”

Bobby stared at me, his porky eyes hungry, his intent clear.

“Just let him try.”

In a huff she spun to leave. The quick movement made her dizzy and she grabbed for the wall to steady herself. Now that she faced him, Bobby turned injured victim, clutching his bandaged arm, his face a study in pain.

“Come on, my beauty.” He held out his good arm. “I’ve got just what you need.”

Disgusted with both of them, I flopped back on my pillow. Lindsay squeaked as I squished her.

I moved aside. “Come on up for air, Linds. We’ve got to talk. It’s time.”

I had watched enough TV to know what happened to girls who ran away to the big city, so we ran away to Seaside. We’d heard stories about the place all our lives. When Mom got soggy drunk and no man was around to occupy her, she’d get melancholy, remembering all the halcyon summer days before her father took off and her mother jumped in front of a bus.

“Back when my daddy was working, before we moved to Atlanta, we lived in Camden, New Jersey, and we’d go to Seaside for two weeks every summer.” She’d smile and look pretty for a moment. “We’d stay at the Brookburn, this boardinghouse that had one-room apartments with little refrigerators and two-burner stoves, and I had a cot tucked in a corner. We’d
sit on towels on the beach and go in the ocean, which was green, not blue like you see in pictures. Daddy would hold my hands, and I’d jump the waves. At night we’d go on the boardwalk and I’d ride the merry-go-round. Once Daddy took me on the Ferris wheel, and you could see out over the ocean all the way to Europe. At least that’s what he told me.”

Then she’d start to cry and drink until she passed out.

Her stories made me want to live in Seaside, and Lindsay shared that dream.

“Someday, Linds,” I’d tell her as we sat in the library, using the free computer and staring at the sites on the Web full of pictures of pretty beaches and glorious sunsets. Whether we looked at the brilliant transparent blue of the Caribbean or the hypothermic opaque green of the North Atlantic, the sea tugged at us like the cycles of the moon pulled at it.

“Someday,” she’d whisper back, her chair pulled close to mine.

Thanks to Bobby, the day came. It was late spring, a good time to run away.

“I’ll get a job easy,” I told Lindsay as we stuffed what few things we had in our backpacks. “It’s a resort. Resorts need summer help. I can be a waitress or a chambermaid or a cashier. It doesn’t matter.”

“But you’re only sixteen,” Lindsay said, scared.

“I’ll say I’m eighteen and just graduated from high school. I’ll say our mom is in the Army on an overseas tour and our dad’s dead.”

Lindsay looked impressed with the lie. “But where will we sleep?”

“We’ll get a room.” I tried to sound confident. I’d already decided we would sleep under the boardwalk if we had to. Anything was better than here with Bobby or the men who would come after him.

I packed my knife with care, wrapping it in my other pair of jeans. The thought of meeting dangerous men eager to prey on naive girls didn’t frighten me. I’d been keeping my mother’s various “friends” at arm’s length for years,
sometimes with words or tears, more often with my large kitchen knife with which I slept. During the day I hid it under a floorboard so no one could steal it from me. I kept Lindsay close every night too, putting her between me and the wall so no letch could get to her except through me and my knife.

Usually waving my weapon around and threatening to cut off parts of a man’s anatomy were enough. Bobby was the first one I ever had to cut, and I’d only succeeded in driving him off because of surprise. When he came back, and I knew he would, he’d be prepared.

I would not give him that chance.

It took us two days to get to Seaside by bus, tickets paid for with money I filched from Bobby’s wallet, which he’d conveniently left on the kitchen table when he went to the hospital to get his arm stitched up. No wallet, no money, boom! You pick your hospital right and you get a free ride.

The first thing we did when we hit Seaside was go to the beach.