Free Winter Tides by James P. Blaylock

and turns? She hoped it was far enough.
    The drive south from Victoria had taken her a long damned time—lots of Sleepy 8 motels and farmhouse B and B’s. In Port Angeles she had driven west and then south on 101 instead of east to Highway 5, and so instead of a two- or three-day run down into southern California, she had spent eighteen days on the Highway, stopping at likely-seeming galleries and walking on foggy, driftwood-littered beaches. She had set a hundred-mile-a-day limit—no more than a couple hours or so on the road—and somewhere above Eureka, when she was about halfway done with the journey, she had considered slowing down even more.
    Someone had told her once that if you set out to cross a street, making each step half the distance to the opposite curb, you would never reach your destination, but would be walking across that street eternally. The same thing could be said for traveling: if you worked it right, taking your time, you could drive south on the Highway forever, with your shadow racing along the rocky edge of the road and the gray Pacific shifting and crashing on the rocks far below….
    … Except that her stuff had been due to arrive in Huntington Beach at the Bekins storage warehouse on the first of April, and she was uncomfortable letting it sit there, especially the paintings. And, even more to the point, something had happened when she had crossed the Golden Gate into San Francisco. It had begun to feel to her almost as if the car were rolling downhill toward an inevitable destination, as if she were some sort of sea creature that had come unmoored from its rock and was adrift on an outgoing tide, swept on a current toward some farther shore. And maybe this was it—this apartment she had rented from Mr. Hedgepeth. Maybe this was her destiny.
    Feeling suddenly lonely, she sat up and pulled the curtains open. Judging from the noise and the traffic outside, it was late in the morning. There was still fog in the air, but the spring sun shone faintly through it, and within another hour or two it would burn off. The street outside was lined with old houses, mostly wooden bungalows with big front porches and cracked sidewalks. There were camphor trees along the curb, and the branches arched entirely over the street. It was worth living there for the trees alone, although that hadn’t been what had drawn her to Huntington Beach. There had been plenty of trees in Victoria.
    What
had
drawn her here? she wondered suddenly. She wasn’t sure that she believed in tides and destiny. Why not Laguna Beach? It would have been simple to have Bekins truck her stuff farther down the Highway. She had looked at three nice apartments in Laguna, including one with a studio that had better light than this apartment in Huntington. Rents weren’t all that much higher in Laguna, and six of her paintings were hung in Potter’s Gallery on Oak Street. It didn’t make any sense, her driving twenty miles back up the coast to find a place to live. Of course she had also found a day job at the Earl of Gloucester, the old theater props warehouse here in town, but considering what it paid, she would have made more waitressing in Laguna, which was packed with upscale restaurants. On the other hand, the job at the props warehouse looked like potential fun, and now that her mother was no longer living,she didn’t need the money anyway. That hadn’t sunk in yet; neither of those things, her money or her mother’s death, seemed quite real to her.
    And any college psychology student would have an opinion on what she was doing in Huntington Beach. She looked into the dresser mirror, which stood against the wall at the end of the bed. Her long dark hair was a fright, pushed around by sleep. In the dim light of the bedroom it looked jet black, although in the sunlight there were shades of auburn in it. Yesterday she had turned twenty-eight years old, and she had celebrated alone, eating a burger and fries at the Longboarder and