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typewriter that had been used as a prop in Hollywood films before he had bought it at auction. Inside the warehouse the smell of the wet sawdust from unseasoned fir was heavy in the air, along with the smell of dust and resin and the musty hay bales stacked against the warehouse wall near the loading dock.
    Working alone in the early morning, Dave Quinn shot one-by-four frames together to build palace walls for a production of
King Lear
that would be staged at the Earl’s own Ocean Theatre next door to the warehouse. Next he would glue polystyrene sheets to these frames, and then a sets artist—who hadn’t started to work yet—would etch the polystyrene and airbrush mossy-looking stones onto it. Then they could move the sections of crenelated castle wall into the theatre itself and fasten them together to build the facade of the Duke of Albany’s palace.
    But if the sets artist didn’t appear soon, like today, Dave would have to move most of his set pieces into the shop in back to make room for more immediate work, which was already cluttering up the area in front of the loading dock door. A theatre company out in Westminster was staging
Oklahoma!
, and the Earl’s was delivering set and prop pieces: hay bales and a Doe-C-Doe Wagon, two horses, thirty feet of split rail corral fence, and six barrels big enough for actors to dance on. Dave had built the fence himself. The Earl himself had gotten the barrels from a Kentucky distillery, and they still smelled like whisky andcharcoal. The wagon, a sort of open buckboard, was already gray with weather and age when they’d gotten it out of a Minnesota barn. Dave had replaced half a dozen of its spokes along with the wagon’s seat, sandblasted the new wood, and grayed it with rottenstone and beeswax. The effect was pretty good. You could pick out the new wood if you were looking close and paying attention, but from theater seats the wagon was an authentic period piece.
    He set down the power staple gun now, and the air compressor chugged for a moment and then fell silent. He could hear in the distance the low rumble of waves breaking through the concrete pilings of the Huntington Beach Pier. The swell had risen during the night, a late-season north swell with tides high enough to worry beachfront homeowners. In 1988 the old pier had been destroyed by a spectacular wave that had broken across the end of it, over a quarter mile out to sea, dwarfing the pier’s twenty-foot light stanchions and sweeping away the flimsy bait shops and cafes and rest rooms, snapping concrete pilings and wrenching apart iron railings that had withstood countless ocean storms since the pier had been restored and reinforced in 1931. Now, as the end of the century drew near, the newly rebuilt pier, with its angled pilings heavily moored in the sea bottom, was engineered to withstand an even heavier swell….
    He walked to the stairs and climbed the wooden steps toward the vast loft that made up the second floor of the Earl of Gloucester. Built on a frame of heavy timbers, the loft occupied maybe a quarter of the open ceiling space in the warehouse, and it was built high enough off the concrete floor to store stage sets and props underneath, including the front section of a Spanish galleon. The ship’s bowsprit and carved mermaid were angled back as if the galleon were tossing on a stormy sea, and the sea itself was attached to the underside of the ship—painted plywood waves mounted on tracks so that the waves moved back and forth, one in front of the other. There was nautical debris stacked around the galleon—open treasure chests, masts, oars, crab and lobster traps, and sections of an old barnacle-encrusted wharf. Fishing nets hung with seashellsand glass floats were strung from the floor joists of the loft above.
    The loft itself was mostly offices along a balcony with a wooden railing. The old offices looked like sets themselves, like something off a sound stage—office cubicles from
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