Chapter 3
Dressed in my gray serving dress and neck kerchief, I descend to the business floor on the second level, a leather portfolio with my latest sketches under my arm.
At a round balcony with a dizzying view of the circular reception room and domed ceiling, I catch my breath, which has suddenly become shallow.
Courage, you jellyfish. You’ve gotten close enough to feel a sea wolf’s moist exhalation on your face.
Surely you can handle telling Mr. Sanders your news.
Mahogany panels darkened with age rise up all around, perfectly joined, every seam hidden.
Mr. Sanders built his mansion with the same obsessive attention to detail as his famous oceangoing vessels.
Behind me, nautical lamps spotlight a ferocious mounted display of hooked-beak salmon.
The scent of cedar lingers. Daniel’s coffin smelled like cedar too, but not enough to hide the scent of death.
I follow a scarlet carpet to the offices at the back of the house. Mr. Sanders wanted to work where the view of the East Sound would be most spectacular.
Through the heavy door, I hear raised voices from inside Mr. Sanders’s office. I pause, my portfolio clutched to my chest.
“—proving yourself a man. You’re just proving yourself a fool and a coward, like your goddamned dice-rolling donkey sack of a father. I will never understand what your mother saw in him.”
Now who is Mr. Sanders dressing down? It could as easily be a servant as one of his two most valuable employees, whom he refers to as his Brain Trust. If ever there were a worst time to tell Mr. Sanders of my decision, this would be it.
A male voice answers, and then there is the crash of something heavy, perhaps a chair.
“Escape?” Mr. Sanders spits out the word. “There is no escape. There is only running into yourself, you idiot. So run, run as fast as you can.”
The door is flung open so fast, I feel the air suck me forward, and I am forced to step back.
Nash stands in the door frame, dark blond hair wild around his head. Daniel’s death seems to have put edges on his cheeks, added depth to his tobacco-brown eyes. He is as hard to look away from as an incoming storm.
I feel myself blush and nod deferentially. “Mr. Sanders-Byre.”
He hates when I call him that, but it is only proper, especially now that we are no longer children.
He blinks. Perhaps his rage has momentarily blinded him.
But as his eyes focus, his anger turns to surprise.
“Lucy.” His gaze falls to my mouth. Is he remembering our brush on the tennis court?
Straightening, he rocks back on the heels of his polished wing tip shoes, as if caught between staying and going.
But with a glance back at his uncle, his expression clouds. He blows past me.
“Lucy, is that you? Come in,” barks Mr. Sanders.
Casting off thoughts of Nash, I approach the mahogany desk, where Mr. Sanders has taken up the newspaper, disregarding an overturned guest chair.
Afternoon light floods the room from the Belgian glass windows, where a sweeping view of a Japanese garden meets a restless sea beyond.
The big house grips its fishhook of rock halfway up the sound, built on money whose origins people love to guess at but never truly know.
Breathing out my nerves, I traverse the basket parquet floor that took craftsmen years to lay, and set the portfolio before him.
Then I return the chair to its position in front of the desk.
Mr. Sanders lowers his newspaper. At least he has covered the swimsuit with his terry-cloth robe. His favorite hat, with its pinched top and short brim, crowns his head. He is careless with how he wears it, and it has developed the lopsided appearance of a cooked oyster.
On the back side of his newspaper, an ad in bold type reads: WOMEN, we need you! Doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, veterinarians, apply to St. Christopher’s…
“What do you know. Pershing’s boys went over the top, right into those German trenches,” he mutters.
His argument with Nash has not left any marks.
“Got the Huns right as they were digging into their sauerkraut. Serves them right.” He folds his paper, anger twitching his brow as he gazes at an oil portrait of his late wife and only son on the wall.
“Yes, sir.” The sight of Daniel, his brown curls combed unnaturally straight, squeezes my heart with two fists.
His mirthful eyes are held wide, as if he’s been caught in the middle of a flinch contest. Koa was my protector outside in the world, but it was Daniel whose cheerful presence made life inside the big house bearable.
After Daniel’s death in the Great War last year, Mr. Sanders bore his tremendous guilt by immersing himself in his pet project, Wilds of Orcas Island.
Daniel’s death has reminded me of my purpose here, he told me as I stood in this very spot.
I wanted to understand the sea wolves, and I got a little lost on my way.
It was a rare glimpse of the man beneath his impenetrable surface, and it caught me at a time when the island had become unbearably dark.
Take Daniel’s clothes if you want. Scouting can be dirty work.
“Messy business with Shimmelfen, but examples must be made,” he says gruffly, interrupting my memory. “Gambling broke my poor sister Viridian’s heart, you know?”
I murmur an assent, though it embarrasses me to admit I’ve listened to such gossip. Viridian Sanders-Byre is said to have suffered a stroke after learning her husband had gambled away the fortune she had earned with her glove-making empire.
“Easy money brings nothing but hardship. Perhaps it’s my fault for paying him too much. Still, I was right to dismiss him. Leadership means listening to yourself, not sparing feelings. Now—let’s see what you’ve brought me.”
I brace myself as he shuffles through the drawings, waiting for him to reach the last.
“This blue heron is lovely. It should have its own page. I tell you, Lucy: once we’re finished, this book will be one for the ages, the first comprehensive study of our piece of the world.
” He taps the blank page of an open book—a prototype of the Wilds of Orcas Island.
In it, both typed and handwritten entries have been divided into animals, plants, and fungi.
He has already reached page 250. “Where there is art, there is enlightenment.” His voice has regained its hale swagger. It is a voice that always has a plan.
“Yes, sir.”
“Oho! That’s a healthy island marble caterpillar on its way to becoming a beautiful butterfly.
” Mr. Sanders holds up a sketch of a two-inch specimen with yellow stripes and black dots.
I also used pinks and purples to capture its iridescence.
“Very rare. Biggest threats are the ignoramuses pulling up the field mustards. Don’t know a good thing when they see it. ”
I stare at my polished oxfords. Perhaps he will think I am an ignoramus who doesn’t know a good thing when she sees it, once he hears about my plan to go to the university. But my mind is set.
He flips to the last sketch. The sea wolves.
His gaze screws tighter and his nostrils flare.
Is he displeased with my work? My toes grip the floor.
Setting the sketch down, his eyes dip to my neck kerchief. “This is stunning. Those scars. However did you…?”
I slowly relinquish my breath. “I was lucky to experience a close view. They were… playful.”
“You don’t say,” he murmurs. I brace myself to be chastised for the second time, but his gaze grows distant, softer. “You’re eighteen now, aren’t you?” To my surprise, his eyes mist.
“As of yesterday.”
Surely that alone cannot move him. He dabs his nose with a handkerchief. “Well, it is marvelous. Maybe even better than the murrelet’s nest.”
“Thank you.” I allow myself a moment to soak in the praise.
Until now, finding the marbled murrelet’s nest had been my single greatest accomplishment as research assistant.
During mating season, the elusive diving seabirds change their color from black to brown with white speckles to blend in with the trees—and are impossible to find.
But I did it. It took weeks of patience and a dose of luck observing which direction they flew after feeding.
I nearly broke my neck climbing an old Douglas fir, where I found a single egg resting on a mossy platform.
“You see, Lucy, the sea wolves aren’t agents of some fictitious demon. Why would they be? They’re at the top of the ladder, a divine species with no one to fear and therefore no one to answer to.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Cats, on the other hand—they are truly out to get us.”
I chuckle. Mr. Sanders’s dislike of house cats is well-known. I hurry out my prepared words while he is in an appreciative mood. “So now that I’ve drawn the sea wolves…”
He cocks an ear, suddenly alert.
I will my voice not to shake. “I am grateful for all you’ve given me, but I will be attending the University of Washington. Classes start in two weeks.”
His animated features settle into something cool and unrevealing, all traces of emotion removed. He fingers an ornate guillotine cigar-cutter, a gift from the king of Greece. “They accepted… you?”
Pinpricks of heat bloom across my face. True, I am a girl with no known parentage and only an island schoolhouse education. But with the men off to war, the schoolmistress told me I had a shot, and she was right. “I thought you might be pleased to hear of my desire to pursue higher learning.”
“I thought you enjoyed your work here. We make a great team.”
A team? The word jolts me. “I do enjoy it. But I—”
His gaze grows heavier.
“I want to see a palm tree.”
“A palm what?” He drops the cigar-cutter and grips the sides of his oyster hat as if trying to keep his brain from exploding. “Of all the…” He throws down his hat, and his hair sticks up like ruffled feathers. “You’re certainly not going to find one at the university.”
“No, but it gets me closer. I would like to continue studying the natural world. Just not here.”
I bite my tongue as his face grows redder.
Your recklessness is going to get you killed, Koa said.
If not killed, at least thrown off the island.
I cannot go insulting Mr. Sanders’s kingdom.
My mind flits to my satchel, in which I’ve packed all my necessities: a wool sweater, a change of clothes, tooth powder and toothbrush, a warm hat, gloves, pencils and sketch pad, and my purse of a hundred dollars—all my savings.
At last, Mr. Sanders leans back, stacking my sketches into a neat pile. “I’m sorry, but university is hardly the place for someone like you.”
A streak of anger runs through me. Koa doubted my judgment but never my mind.
“Oho, before you get your socks in a knot, I know you’re more than capable. You were the one who solved my nickel trick. Neither Danny nor Nash could do it. Remember?”
I nod. Of course I remember. He’d held out both fists, asking where the nickel was. The boys guessed wrong every time. When it came to me, I saw the flaw: Whichever fist they chose, Sanders revealed the coin in the other.
You have two nickels, I’d said.
He’d grinned, pressed both into my palm. Success is the sum of details. Don’t overlook them, he’d said.
Shaking free of the memory, I tell Mr. Sanders simply, “I remember.”
“All I meant is…” His gaze drifts up to a glass-bottomed boat lamp, then back to me, grave. “Your father would not want you to go to university just yet. You’re only eighteen. Same age as he was when he began to… understand.”
I gape. “Understand what? And I thought you didn’t know my father.”
“Yes, I knew him.” His anchor-gray eyebrows pinch with some private ache.
“Knew him? When did you know him? Wh-what about my mother? Why did you never say anything?” The questions stutter out. Withholding such news from a child is one thing, but I haven’t been a child for a while. Didn’t he just say we made a great team? My neck begins to steam under my kerchief.
“Wasn’t the right time. I knew him before you came along.”
My breath gusts out. “You’ve kept me in the dark all these years.”
His eyes flash at my bitter tone. “I am on the verge of discovering an important truth about how he died. If you want to know more, you will have to stay put a little while longer.”
So he is dead. The news drops the floor from the room. “When did he die?” If there is a chance I could’ve known him—
He says nothing.
“And my mother? Is she alive?”
“I don’t know who she is, but I expect not. Else she would’ve made contact by now.”
“Have you been keeping me a prisoner?” My stomach loops at my boldness. I grip the top edge of the guest chair, tempted to overturn it again myself.
“Prisoner?” he scoffs. “Indeed.” Leaning on a forearm, he seals his lips over his square teeth and narrows his eyes.
It’s the way he looked when Standard Oil refused to install a diesel station on our island and he vowed to start his own oil company, if only to grind them out of business.
“You are looking for answers, but beware. Too much knowledge can be a very dangerous thing.”