She took white socks and tennis shoes from the suitcase, put them on, then went to the closet and came out wearing the woman’s nylon windbreaker. She retrieved her clothes from the bathroom and stuffed them into the suitcase. After that, she wandered around gathering the rest of the woman’s things.
“You got the keys?” she asked.
Charlie held up the key case. She plucked it from his hand.
They latched the luggage, and Mag went to the door. Charlie lifted both suitcases off their stands. He followed her outside.
In the east, the sky was pale. But the sun wouldn’t be up for a while yet. From the balcony’s height, he had a good view. He saw no one. The street in front of the motel was deserted. There were about ten cars in the parking lot.
Mag hurried ahead of him. He struggled along with the heavy suitcases. By the time he came to the bottom of the stairs, Mag had already found the car to match her key. It was a blue BMW. She opened the trunk while Charlie hurried across the parking lot.
He swung the suitcases into the trunk.
Mag, in the driver’s seat, leaned over and unlocked the passenger door for him. He climbed inside. The car smelled new.
Its engine thundered to life. Mag backed it up, then swung it toward the exit.
“How ’bout a ride?” Mag asked, gunning it onto the street.
“I wanna get back,” Charlie said.
“Yer too late for the fun.”
Maybe not, he thought. “I don’ care,” he told her.
She muttered something that Charlie couldn’t make out. But she took him toward Funland, the car weaving a little as she raced it up the middle of the street and sped through the blinking red traffic light. She stopped it with a hard lurch that flung him at the dashboard.
“You take the stuff,” she told him.
She gave him the keys. He opened the trunk and removed the suitcases. Then he stepped to her window and handed back the keys.
“What’re y’gonna do?” he asked.
Mag grinned at him. “Take her for a spin. Don’t ya fret, fool, I’ll leave the thing a good ways off.”
The car squealed, laying rubber, and shot away, heading north.
Charlie picked up the suitcases.
He lugged them up the stairs to the boardwalk.
He wondered how long they’d been gone. Too long, probably. The fun was sure to be over by now.
Never knew, though.
Sometimes it lasted pretty long.
He quickened his pace.
Twelve
Robin crawled out of her sleeping bag. The morning was gray with fog. Shivering, she sat on the nylon bag. She searched her pack, took out fresh underwear and socks, her blue jeans and sleeveless shirt. She swept her eyes over the tops of the dunes surrounding her encampment. She saw nobody, and the sand was piled high enough to conceal her from anyone who might be nearby.
Quickly she slipped the folded money out of the front of the underpants she was wearing. She tucked the bills into the front pocket of her jeans. Then she took off the T-shirt and panties she’d slept in and put on the clothes from her pack.
She had used her rolled windbreaker for a pillow. She picked it up, uncovering the sheathed knife that lay on her ground cloth. Once she had the windbreaker on, her shivers subsided.
She slipped the knife into a side pocket of her pack.
Then she put on her hiking boots. The chill of them seeped through her socks, but her body heat quickly warmed them.
She stood up and climbed the sand slope. From the top she had a clear view of the rolling grass-tufted dunes and the flat beach stretching out to the ocean. Gulls whirled and swooped through the gray air. A man was running along the shore, his black Lab trotting at his side. Far down the beach, in the area near Funland, a man was hunting for treasure with the help of a metal detector. Even farther away, surfers stood around in their wet suits and others were on the water—some riding in on combers, but most of them either paddling out, belly-down on their boards, or already way out on the rolling slate of the sea, legs dangling, roosting there as if content to sit.
Her attention strayed from the surfers as she noticed someone descending the main stairs from the boardwalk. A woman in a white sweatshirt and red shorts, a satchel swinging at her side. She was a long way off.
Those were the stairs that Robin had gone down last night, and she was amazed that she had walked so far.
The kid by the ticket booth had really spooked her. The kid, and his friends who hadn’t shown up yet. They had to be trollers. Why else would they be meeting there at that hour?
Robin looked the other way.
She had put just about as much distance as possible between herself and the kid. No more than forty or fifty feet ahead, a chain-link fence marked the end of the public beach. Beyond it, set far back from the shore, stood somebody’s house.
The tide was in now, waves washing past the end of the fence. Last night she could’ve stepped around that post without getting her feet wet, and taken refuge beyond the barrier. But she’d been reluctant to trespass.
Her place in the dunes, she thought, had been fine.
The kids hadn’t found her there.
She wondered if they’d tried.
“Now, there’s as fair a maiden as ever claimed a heart.”
Robin whirled around. The man stood on the crest of the dune behind her campsite. A bum. Fat and old and wearing soiled clothes, a knobby staff in one hand. She felt squirmy inside as she wondered how long he’d been watching her. Had he been hiding, spying on her while she dressed?
“Professor E. A. Poppinsack,” he said, doffing his hat. The hat was a faded brown bowler. Red feathers, tucked into the band on each side, stuck up like wings. He was bald, but he had a thick mustache with ends that curled up in points. He wore a dirty buckskin jacket, fringe swinging in the breeze, and plaid pants that looked more suited to a golfer roaming the links than a bum on the beach. “Top of the morning to you, dear. Have a spot of tea?”
Robin shook her head. “Sorry,” she told him. “I don’t have any.”
“Ah, but I have. Join me, won’t you? Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad tales of the deaths of kings.” Without waiting for a reply, the man turned away and descended the slope. He held his staff high. Its tip twirled a bit when he was out of sight.
Odd bird, Robin thought. But she’d liked the merry twinkle in his eyes, and he’d seemed harmless enough. His outfit made him look, somehow, like a medicine man—the kind of fellow who might have wandered into frontier towns, hawking elixir from the back of his wagon.
Curious, she followed him over the dunes. His encampment was directly behind hers, forty or fifty feet further inland, in a depression surrounded by high drifts of sand.
“Welcome to my estate,” said Poppinsack. He gestured to his rolled sleeping bag. Robin sat down on it. The old man crouched over the pot of boiling water on his propane stove, and added more water from a canteen.
“All the comforts of home,” Robin said.
“Indeed, unemcumbered by the nuisances of mortgage, tax, insurance, and utilities. God provides, Poppinsack abides.” He fetched tea bags from the bulging pocket of his buckskin coat, turned off the flame beneath the pot of roiling water, and plopped in the two bags—along with their strings and paper tabs. “Shall we allow that to steep for a bit?” he asked.
He lowered himself onto a nearby slope. “Are you a Puck or a Pip?”
“A Robin.”
“Ah, Cock Robin. Cockless, as the case may be.”
The remark unsettled her. Maybe this man wasn’t just a harmless eccentric.
“Born to be hanged, mayhap, but not hung. Words. Words are Poppinsack’s passion. The music of the mind. Twenty-six letters, infinite realms.”
“I write some poetry myself,” Robin told him, relaxing somewhat. “Songs.”
His eyes lit up. “A bard?” He slapped his knees, and dust popped from the faded plaid of his pants. “We’re kinsmen, th
en. Sing me a song.”
Smiling, Robin shrugged. “I don’t have my banjo.”
“Fetch it, then, and sing for your tea.”
“Why not?” She got up and hurried off. Descending the sand bank to her camp, she was struck by the close proximity of the two sleeping places. She wondered whether Poppinsack had been aware, all night, of her presence. If so, he hadn’t tried anything. She realized that she felt more comforted than troubled by knowing he’d been nearby.
She hadn’t been completely alone, after all.
If the trollers had found her, would Poppinsack have come blustering to her rescue, brandishing his staff?
Banjo case in hand, she returned to his “estate.” She took out the instrument and sat on his bedroll.
“Was it you I heard yesterday?” Poppinsack asked.
“It might’ve been. I was playing on the boardwalk.”
“While I played words on the strand.”
“Played words?” she asked.
“Beowulf, Tennessee Williams, Mickey Spillane. Smiting Grendyl, flying with the bird that never lands, plugging a dame in the guts. ‘It was easy.’ And you, my dear, performed the background score. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance. Now, sing me a song.”
“There’s a new one I’ve been working on. I’ll test it out on you.”
Smiling, Poppinsack closed his eyes, folded his hands on the lap of his buckskin coat, and leaned back against the sand.
Robin’s fingers flew over the banjo strings, lifting out a quick, spangled tune. After running once through the melody, she started to sing:
Darling, I’ve been here and I’ve been there
And I’ve been next to nowhere.
I’ve been upside down, and inside out,
Topsy-turvy and tossed about.
I’ve been flying high, and crashing low.
I laugh and cry wherever I go—
And it’s all from looking for you,
And it’s all from looking for you.
You ain’t got a face and you ain’t got a name,
But I’m gonna find you just the same.
I’ll know you by your swaggering walk
And the way I tremble when you talk.
You’re the guy with the sunlight in your eyes,
With the laugh that makes my goose bumps rise—
And I’ll keep looking for you,
And I’ll keep looking for you.
You’re the moon and stars and the sunlit sea,
And yabba-dabba doo and diddly dee,
I ain’t writ more so I gots to stop.
Boppity hoppity dibbidy dop.
Nodding and grinning, Poppinsack applauded. “Minstrel girl,” he said. “The Robin is a bardling sure. ‘Laugh that makes my goose bumps rise’—oh, dear.”
“You think that line sucks?” she asked.
“Fetching. You’re fetching. And I shall fetch the tea.” He pushed himself off the sand, went to his duffel bag, and searched inside it. After a few moments he came up with a glove and two plastic mugs. Wearing the glove on his hand, he poured steaming tea into one of the mugs and brought it to Robin. He smelled as if he’d doused himself with cologne, but under its sweet aroma lurked a dark musty odor. Purple capillaries webbed his cheeks. His veiny, bulbous nose was so pitted that it reminded Robin of a huge strawberry decomposing. Trapped in the hairs of his mustache were bits of old meals.
Poppinsack, she decided, looked better at a distance.
“Care for cream?” he asked.
“You have cream?”
“Not a drop. Care for a dollop of rum?” he asked, and pulled a plastic flask from a pocket of his coat.
“Thanks, anyway.”
He filled a mug for himself, splashed some rum in, and returned to his seat on the dune’s slope.
Robin inspected her tea. She was glad to find nothing afloat in it. She took a sip. “Good,” she said.
Poppinsack drank from his mug, sighed, and smacked his lips. “Tell me, minstrel girl, what curse has brought you to this blighted beach?”
“I’m just wandering, seeing the world.”
“Fleeing from what, and whom?”
She shook her head. “What makes you think I’m fleeing from something?”
“Your hurt and haunted eyes.”
“You’re nuts.”
“I’ve seen all things in the heaven and in the earth. I’ve seen many things in hell. How, then, am I nuts?”
“Poe, right?”
“Mercifully butchered. And what tale has your heart to tell?”
She saw no reason to keep the truth from Poppinsack. “My father died. My mother had a fiancé more interested in me. I hit the road. End of story.”
“And how have you fared on the road?”
“I’m still kicking,” Robin said. “What’s your story?”
“To outmatch the wit of your brevity, I am a book bum.”
“Are you really a professor?”
“I have ceased to profess. ’Tis far more pleasurable indeed to hoard pearls than to cast them before swine.”
“So you gave up teaching and now you read all the time?”
He nodded and drank his spiked tea.
“How long have you been here in Boleta Bay?”
“Forever and a day.”
“Aren’t you afraid of the trollers?”
He gazed at Robin and lifted his thick gray eyebrows. “Are you not afraid of the trolls?”
“We’re trolls, aren’t we? I mean, I guess the kids might think so.”
“Thar be trolls and thar be trolls,” Poppinsack said, sounding a lot like Robert Newton playing Long John Silver. “Thar be them that’s harmless, and thar be them that ain’t. Poppinsack could tell such tales of madness as would turn a wench’s blood cold and freeze the chambers of her heart.”
Robin wrinkled her face at him. “You trying to scare me, or what?”
“You’re a roving bard and minstrel,” he said, dropping the pirate growl. “You’re a smart dame, and long on moxie. But under it all, you’re a kid and you don’t know the score.”
“Maybe I know more than you think. I’ve been around some.”
“And have you been God’s spy in the court of the damned?”
“Whatever that means,” she muttered.
“Hie thee away from here. Take a powder, hit the road, ride your thumb to Frisco or L.A., hop on a bus to Palookaville.” And in a voice suddenly void of borrowed rhetoric, he said, “Get the hell out of town, Robin. If you stick around, you might just disappear.”
She stared at him.
“Everybody knew Cock Robin. Nobody knows where she’s gone.”
“You really are scaring me.”
“The robin that flies today won’t be a dead duck tomorrow.”
“If it’s so dangerous around here,” she asked, “why do you stay?”
“Why, indeed? Perhaps because the mermaids sing to me.” Poppinsack finished his tea. “Farewell,” he said.
Robin nodded. “My cue to exit?” she asked.
“Your company has been much appreciated. Heed my warning and flee.”
“I think I will,” she told him. “This place gives me the creeps anyway, and you’re about the fourth person to warn me so far.” She drank the last of her tea, set the mug down on the ground, and closed her banjo case. “Thanks for the tea,” she said, standing up.
“And I thank you for the song.”
With a wave, she turned away and climbed the dune out of Poppinsack’s encampment.
In a coffee shop two blocks east of the boardwalk, Robin ate a breakfast of fried eggs, sausage links, hash browns, and toast. While she worked on the meal, her mind kept straying back to the strange old man and his warnings.
Evil trolls. Disappearances. The court of the damned.
Weird stuff. But he might’ve made it up, just wanting to scare her away. Maybe he felt that she had invaded his territory or something. Perhaps he simply enjoyed scaring people.
/> But he’d seemed a little spooked himself.
Maybe he believed what he’d told her, but none of it had any basis in reality. After all, he was a boozer.
Whether or not the stuff was true, Robin’s experiences with trolls last night had been unnerving, and the kids were an actual threat.
Reason enough to blow this town.
When she finished eating, she picked up the tab. Breakfast had cost four-eighty. She pulled the pack of money from her jeans pocket and folded it open.
She spread the bills.
Her mouth fell open. Her stomach sank.
She looked through the stack again and again.
Every bill was a one.
Yesterday, after she left the downtown bank, six of them had been twenties, one a ten.
Between last night at the movie theater and right now in the coffee shop, somebody had taken her money, substituted singles for twenties, and returned it to her.
And there was only one possible time when it could’ve been done.
While she slept.
In spite of the restaurant’s warmth, chills crawled up Robin’s back. She squeezed her legs together.
She saw Poppinsack kneeling beside her in the dark, sliding open the zipper of her sleeping bag, maybe after already searching her boots and pack and guessing that whatever money she might have was kept on her body. She imagined his hands roaming over her while she slept, not just seeking the money but feeling her up, finally slipping a hand inside her panties and taking out the bills and touching her there too.
Cockless Robin.
The dirty bastard.
And he gave me tea and I sang for him, and all the time he had my money and he knew what he’d done to me.
Robin’s face burned. Her heart pounded. She trembled.
He robbed me and groped me while I slept, and then he pretended to be my friend.
So much for his warnings to leave town.
Hoping I’ll be gone before I find out what he did.
She left her tip on the table, shouldered her pack and picked up her banjo case, and went to the front counter. After paying the cashier, she had only seven dollars.