Free Winter Tides by James P. Blaylock Page A

then bringing a slice of cake home to her room. She had only eaten half of the cake before her walk on the pier. There was something about eating her birthday cake alone that had ruined her appetite.
    And yet right now she didn’t feel half as dismal as she had the right to feel, and even the loneliness that she had felt a few minutes ago had evaporated almost instantly. She had been in the apartment for only four nights, but somehow this morning, despite waking up stupid, she finally felt moved in. What she had seen last night on the pier, or thought she had seen, had been nothing but a trick of foggy lamplight and runaway imagination, a fragment of a bad dream that had followed her south from home. And of course, speaking of lamplight, there hadn’t been nearly enough of it for her to have seen colors. Red would merely have looked dark gray.
    Actually, the leftover cake sounded good to her right now. There was nothing wrong with cake for breakfast. Marie Antoinette had recommended it. Of course the food police had cut her head off afterward, but that just made her a martyr to the cause of starting the day with dessert. She climbed out of bed and went into the living room, which doubled as a studio. It was a big room—nearly twenty by forty—in a building that was mostly office space. Hers was the only actual apartment in the building. Her front door opened onto a long interior corridor some ten feet wide and with five other doors similar to hers, most of which led into one-room offices. At the top end of the corridor was a bathroom shared by the rest of thetenants—two fairly pitiful law firms (bankruptcy and divorce) and a record company called Doctor Slim. The other two offices were empty, and, because she could afford it, she had briefly considered renting one of them to use as a studio, except that the living room in this apartment was nicer—big windows looking down toward Main Street on the east and south sides both, and she didn’t have to cross the hall to work. Outside, there were stairs from the bottom end of the corridor down to the street, where there was a door that was kept locked after business hours—officially five o’clock. Mr. Hedgepeth had warned her against leaving the street door unlocked. He made random checks, he said, at all hours, and it was written into the rental agreement that failing to lock the street door, as well as keeping pets, was cause for eviction.
    She unlocked the chain lock and the dead bolt and opened the front door now, looking out into the corridor. The old building was silent, musty-smelling, and dim. Today she would switch the low-wattage bulbs in the overhead lamps to something bigger. Mr. Hedgepeth could charge her another couple of bucks a month if he wanted to. It was Saturday, her first weekend day in the building, and so, as far as she knew, none of the offices were open. The place was hers on the weekend. She could bowl in the corridor if she wanted to.
    She closed the door again and moved to the other side of the living room, where she opened two windows to let in the morning air. Then she looked for the paper plate with the other half of her cake on it. The plate was gone, disappeared from the table it had sat on next to the stuffed chair. She glanced around the room, looking for the cake, which, she told herself, she must have moved somewhere else absentmindedly. But she was certain that she simply
hadn’t
put it anyplace else; she remembered distinctly having left it on the table. Was it still on the table when she’d gotten home from the pier late last night? She couldn’t remember. She hadn’t been in any mood to be thinking about cake. But the door had been bolted while she was gone; that much she remembered.

10
    D AVE HEADED DOWNSTAIRS NOW, OUT THE SIDE DOOR AND around the back of the warehouse, where he found Collier on the side porch of the bungalow, drinking his doughnut shop coffee that he had decanted into a ceramic mug. There was the sound of a