The Synopsis Treasury (17 page)

But Edmund is unwilling to wait for his father to die. He has lavish gambling debts and a taste for expensive things. And so, with criminal help, he sets out to hasten the process of dismantling his father’s estate, selling off property, cheating his brother, hiding it from his father.

Late one rainy evening Josh awakens from a peculiar dream to find that he is sitting on his porch swing, although he can’t remember going outdoors. From inside the house his dog is growling, and he realizes that he has been speaking out loud, answering someone in his dream—a young girl, uncannily familiar. It comes to him abruptly that her parting words in the dream were identical to the last words spoken by Elinor Hawthorn, right at the moment that he was forced to release her to drown, and he realizes that in the moment of his awakening, he had been absolutely certain it was Elinor, that this hadn’t been a dream at all, not in any real sense.

Hearing what sounds like footfalls on the sidewalk and the whisper of a ghostly voice, he steps off the porch and into the rain. The lamplit streets are empty of people, and the night is silent except for sound of the wind.

When Anne Hawthorn walks into the Earl of Gloucester, and Josh sees her with no recollection of ever having seen her before, he’s nevertheless shocked—shaken. He realizes that he has somehow associated this woman with the girl in his dream. He tells himself that he must have seen her before, no doubt when she had applied for the job as a sets artist.

The two are attracted to each other almost immediately, neither of them suspecting that they knew each other, briefly and traumatically, fifteen years ago.

The Earl of Gloucester occupies half a city block, a valuable piece of downtown Huntington Beach real estate owned outright by Earl Dalton. The vast old clapboard warehouse is a warren of rooms and catwalks and lofts and dusty skylights, and is filled with vintage automobiles, wooden galleons, stagecoaches, underwater seascapes, and an unimaginable litter of theater props. It’s connected to another old building that houses a community theater company dating back to the 1920’s, still hung with heavy velvet curtains and ancient chandeliers—very atmospheric, but a nightmare to maintain. Like most theater companies, it regularly loses money. The theater director, Charles Collier, is Earl’s longtime friend, and the company uses the theater rent-free. Edmund despises his father’s generosity and his indifference to business, his love of junk theater and his junk friends. The theater and the land it sits on are worth a small fortune.

Josh stumbles across proof that Edmund is defrauding his father and brother, selling his father’s real estate on Catalina Island by filing fraudulent quit claim deeds. When Josh reveals this to Casey, Casey doesn’t care. He’s indifferent to his father’s wealth; greed, he says, is his brother’s disease. Casey understands that his father is living in his own sort of theatrical Wonderland. Given his health, what value is there in wrecking it? How could he possibly be better off knowing that Edmund would betray him?

Josh and Anne sail across the twenty-five mile channel to the island where they discover that Edmund has very powerful associates, including Paul Lavenberg, an accountant, who genially (and convincingly) warns Josh to mind his own business.

Anne, finally, takes Casey’s side. Let it go, she tells Josh, for the old man’s sake. Justice can wait. She reveals that Edmund has made several passes at her over the past couple of weeks. She would certainly like to help give Edmund the trouble he deserves. But she can’t, and neither can Josh without it becoming trouble for all of them. Josh isn’t happy with the idea of letting justice wait. His failing to save Elinor all those years ago has given him a heightened sense of duty—or, perhaps if he were more honest, a fear of personal failure.…

In a passionate late-night conversation on the island, Josh finally discovers that Anne is the girl he saved fifteen years ago, and realizes too that he loves her. Anne, it turns out, has known both of these things for some time. For her part, Anne reveals her fears about her dead sister, and suddenly Josh’s front-porch dream becomes a shade more ominous.

For Josh and Anne, falling in love will turn out to be wonderfully easy, but remaining in love will be slightly more complicated. Anne has dreams of marriage and a family, and when she expresses them, Josh is evasive. Although he cannot—or will not—admit it, the responsibility of that sort of life-long bond frightens him. He failed to save a child fifteen years ago; what if he failed his own children, or failed Anne? From Josh’s point of view, we’re living in a world in which children drown, and sometimes there’s nothing we can do to protect them. It’s safer not to get too close. Anne’s patience with him is partly because of her love for him, and partly because she realizes that his fears are not so very different from her own.

Upon returning to the mainland, Josh confronts Edmund, warning him about Anne and about his illicit business affairs. Edmund laughs at the warning. Shortly thereafter, Josh and Anne return to Anne’s studio and find it a wreck, several of her paintings destroyed with a nearly infantile aggression. Josh suspects Edmund; Anne sees in it evidence of her dead sister.

Edmund’s further attempts to attract Anne are futile, and he hates Josh all the more because of it. Beneath his veneer of superiority and tired indifference, Edmund is increasingly frustrated—with his debts, with his desires, and with his failure to manipulate people, especially Anne. In late night reveries he imagines himself alone with Anne, and finally, out of the empty darkness, Elinor’s identical-twin ghost materializes for him, somehow summoned by his dark passion. As the nights pass she appears more easily and frequently, and comes to possess him with the urgency of her own passions and jealousies, until finally he begins to imagine that with Anne dead, Elinor—quite literally a woman of his dreams—will be restored to actual life.

Lavenberg, Edmund’s criminal accountant, grows increasingly fearful that Josh will cause trouble for Edmund and him both. But as Edmund grows daily more unstable, Lavenberg comes to fear his partner more than he fears Josh, and he’s compelled finally to threaten Edmund by revealing the extent of his own power. Lavenberg, after all, has kept the books and made the transactions which, skillfully manipulated, will make Edmund appear to be starkly guilty. Edmund, he suggests, had better be satisfied with things as they are.

But Edmund is far from satisfied with things as they are, and Lavenberg’s threats have the unfortunate effect of redoubling both his panic and his desires. His father’s health grows worse by the day, it seems, and if the old man were to die, half of the existing estate would fall to Casey. Lavenberg’s betraying him makes this outcome seem almost certain. The pressure from Lavenberg, the tightening noose of Edmund’s debts, and the strangely possessive effects of the phantasmal Elinor all combine to propel Edmund into increasing desperation.

A fire breaks out at the old theater, evidently started by Charles Collier’s granddaughter, who blames it on her imaginary friend … a friend named Elinor.

Someone seems to be visiting—or haunting—Anne’s studio and apartment, despite locked doors and windows. More than once she has seen Edmund lurking in the area, the shadow of a man in the alley below the rear window, heavy footsteps in the outer hallway late at night, and she fears that she is being stalked. Josh encourages her to report her suspicions to the police, but there’s nothing solid to implicate Edmund, whose wealth and position in the community make him immune to idle accusations. This immunity makes him all the more bold.

There are also signs—signs that only Anne can recognize—that the intruder is not Edmund at all, but is Elinor.

And Anne’s paintings have, over the weeks, come to resemble the young Elinor’s. Josh sees in them a growing morbidity and darkness that Anne doesn’t seem to see, and then is anxious to deny. She spends hours on the beach where her sister drowned, painting stormy seascapes under clouded winter skies, as if she is trying to get something just right, to recapture some lost thing from the shadowy green depths of the ocean.

Casey is found dead—drowned in what appears to be a surfing accident on a foggy morning at dawn. He had gone out surfing alone. Josh suspects he didn’t simply drown, and, wishing now that he had exposed Edmund weeks ago, he sets out to find proof that Casey was murdered. Very shortly, someone tries to kill him, too, while he’s working alone in the Earl of Gloucester. He’s certain it’s Edmund, but in the shadowy warehouse, with its myriad corridors and its connections to the old theater and with a thousand places for a person to hide, he can’t be sure.

When Lavenberg learns of Casey’s death, he abandons Edmund entirely. He’s had enough of Edmund’s schemes, money or no money, and he threatens to expose him.

Edmund murders Lavenberg. Murder, he has discovered, is a simple, alternate solution to problems that have gotten hopelessly tangled, like a sudden clean breath of air in a stuffy room.

Old Collier discovers Edmund lighting a fire at the side of the theater, clearly attempting to make it look like the work of a child—Collier’s granddaughter. Edmund provokes Collier into assaulting him. He has set everything up cleverly, and the blame falls to the granddaughter again. Edmund tries to compel his father to throw Collier off the property, which would mean the end of the theater and, ultimately, the collapse of the careful theatrical shelter his father has constructed around himself in the last years of his life. Half-wrecked by Casey’s recent death, Earl nearly capitulates, but when Josh and Anne offer to look after Collier’s granddaughter (whom they understand to be innocent anyway) he finds the strength to refuse Edmund. So Edmund’s last active money-making scheme is smashed, and he is left despised, defeated, and desperately enmeshed in what has become an increasingly psychotic, love/hate relationship with Anne/Elinor.

Anne suspects that she’s being followed by someone when she exits a Laguna Beach gallery late one night. She’s attacked near her disabled car, but manages to fight off her pursuer and finally eludes him after a suspenseful chase through a brush-covered canyon and down onto a deserted ocean cove. In the moonlight she identifies Edmund.

Josh finally discovers hard evidence that Edmund murdered Casey, and Edmund, clearly guilty at last, is forced to flee.

All of Edmund’s schemes are collapsed. What he has left is the ghost of Elinor, his nearly uncontrollable obsession with Anne, and his hatred of Josh and the people who he believes have destroyed him. He dreams of burning the old theater to the ground. Killing the people associated with it would be the only profit left in the act, but that would be profit enough. At night he is drawn back to Anne’s apartment, increasingly desperate and reckless.

In the final scenes of the book, Josh, knowing that Edmund will be compelled to act on his obsessions, devises a scheme to lure Edmund into the Earl of Gloucester. The scheme seems to fail; Edmund doesn’t appear … until later that night, when, as Collier’s show opens in the old theater, Anne stumbles upon Edmund, alone in the deserted props warehouse.

Josh, doubtful about Anne’s absence from the theater, goes looking for her, just as a spectacular fire breaks out, a fire which quickly engulfs the old curtains, burning up into the roof, igniting the props and the wooden stage. Josh finds Anne in the Earl of Gloucester and finally has his chance to confront Edmund, who by now is completely demented and puts up a wild and terrible struggle before falling to his death from a catwalk high above the warehouse floor.

Collier’s granddaughter is missing, and the fire is still burning in the theater. Anne and Josh plunge into the smoke and are quickly separated as they desperately search backstage. Josh finds a little girl in one of the costuming rooms, unconscious on the floor. He picks her up, only then discovering that the girl he holds in his arms is not Collier’s granddaughter at all, but is the twelve year old Elinor. Despite the terrible risk of saving a child whom he knows to be a ghost, he saves her anyway, and when he finally lurches to safety in the firelit parking lot, Elinor vanishes, and only Anne (who has found Collier’s granddaughter and gotten her out safely) sees who it is that Josh has saved.

In the end, it is the very senselessness of having saved the life of a ghost that reveals to Josh the parallel senselessness of his having blamed himself for Elinor’s death all these years. His doubts about himself have vanished along with Elinor’s ghost. And so, with the death of Edmund and the act of saving Elinor, the ghosts of the past, which have haunted the lives of Anne and Josh for fifteen years, are finally exorcised.

***