Chapter 4 #2
“What does it matter?” Daniel muttered. “It’s not as if they’d refuse the son of Dakon Sanders.”
“That’s hardly the point!” Sanders’s face flushed crimson.
“Your mother would hang her head in shame at the soft-bellied oaf you’ve become.
Can’t even mail your goddamned application.
Life is not all yacht parties and berry picking.
” He slapped Daniel’s basket, sending the berries spilling into the rough sand.
“Maybe I made it too easy. You’ve no gumption, no notion of sacrifice. ”
Not long after the row, Daniel enlisted.
“You think you’re so special because he lets you draw pictures.
” Jeddah’s surly voice breaks through my thoughts.
He steps closer, shoulders straining against his shirt.
The once puny boy now stands a head taller than me.
“We’re more alike than you think.” He points a paint-dabbed finger to my kerchief, then taps the three raised scars on his cheek.
“Both marked for life.” A childhood accident with his father’s treble fishing hook had left a permanent white hen scratch.
“Stuck on an island full of nobodies. I saw you pacing the driveway from the roof. You’re restless too. ”
The wind scalds my burning skin. “We are nothing alike, unless you count opposable thumbs—”
The six o’clock bell sets up its six-beat clamor, cutting me off. It won’t ring again until six in the morning, and then again at noon.
Jeddah knots his arms together. “Have it your way, you stuck-up shrew.” He saunters away.
If it is possible to dislike Jeddah more, I do. Why entrust me with his university dream if only to spit an insult at me? I certainly don’t want to follow him back down the zigzag path, which will require passing him at each switchback.
Instead I take a shortcut behind the church.
The Slide, as it is called, is not paved, but tamped by years of tardy parishioners.
Cedars and hemlocks close overhead, ferns and boulders thick at the edges.
Halfway down, I stumble on a deep rut—children racing their go-wagons, even though it’s against the rules.
The Slide empties at Nowhere Road, near the marina.
Beyond that looms the shipyard, where Sanders Ships International builds its “Specialty” yachts—seventy-foot Burmese teak leviathans with price tags in the tens of thousands.
The latest, the Zephyr, stands like a a beached whale, ribs exposed, tarp skin flapping.
The shipyard stands abandoned now, as do the foundry, sawmill, and machine shop, with only the screams of the murrelets diving for their dinners ghosting through them. Kirr, kirr!
Even the dockmaster has retired for the evening.
The only one still working is Jeddah’s hairy father, tying his fishing boat, the Hure, into one of the twenty slips.
Mr. Sanders employs a full-time fisherman to supply Nowhere’s kitchens—even nicknamed him Gilly for his skill with the gillnet, a mark of approval in Nowhere. Too bad his son’s a louse.
I skip over Nowhere Road to the far eastern reach of the Garden of Tranquility, a masterpiece of water, stone, plant, and pavilion. A path shaped like a question mark winds around a bed of unnervingly bright dahlias—Mrs. Sanders’s handiwork—then drives headlong into a hidden cove.
Moss slicks the ramp to Jawbone Beach, named for the whale jaw that washed up years ago. Hidden from the marina by a twenty-foot drop, it’s where the servants hang unsightly bedding. Today the lines hang empty.
The cobbled shore kneads my soles as I walk, already longing to see Shadow and her calf again.
I envy them, these black-and-white giants who come and go as they please.
Seeing them soothes an ache deep inside me.
They have nothing to fear. No one to answer to.
If they want to see a palm tree, they can just go.
At the end of the beach, a centuries-old yew sprawls like a sea monster up the cliff, raspberries tangling at its roots. I stoop for fallen berries, thinking of Daniel, and let their sweet juice melt on my tongue.
Tomorrow I’ll take the first ferry to San Juan Island, then on to the mainland. If my mother lives, she doesn’t want to be found—or doesn’t know where to look. Should she come to Nowhere, Mr. Sanders can tell her where I’ve gone.
The sight of a bright berry stain on the front of my gray dress makes me laugh, even though I know I will have to scrub it out later.
Gray is a color that is neither here nor there, a color that tries to be all things and ends up being nothing.
Gray is Nowhere for most of the year, and once I leave, I will never wear gray again.
A dark blur jumps out from behind the yew with a high-pitched scream, brushing so close to me I can feel its bristly hair. I fall onto my backside, my breath scooping out of me.
What is a wild boar doing here on the beach? Ears point like cathedral arches, though there’s a tear in one of them. Curved tusks gleam, sharp as grappling hooks. Its double-barreled snout is slick with something red. Berries? Or worse.
“Go away!” I kick rocks at it with my heel.
Hooves shuffle. Then it rears, boxing at the air, red eyes rolling. I snatch a rock and fling it. It clatters uselessly into the water, but the boar jerks up its snout. Its short legs quickly carry it away.
I grab another rock and hasten to my feet in case it returns for round two.
After crazed boars were spotted on Mount Consternation this summer, people blamed the Orkus again—said the demon, angered by Mr. Sanders’s new trail into its feeding grounds, had chosen fresh agents of terror.
Mr. Sanders sent the Rifles to cull the beasts, but clearly they missed one.
I lean over my knees, panting. The boar must have been dozing in the dense yew growth when I startled it.
A shape sticking out of the water catches my eye, a piece of misplaced scenery wagging in the tide. I creep closer.
A head.
Gray-blond hair plasters the skull. Blood ribbons from the stump of the severed neck. The waves retreat, unveiling the rest: a pale face, eyes glazed blue and staring as if they have seen beyond.
My knees buckle.
“Mr. Sanders?” I gasp. Did the boar—?
I begin to scream. There is no one to hear me, but I can’t stop until I retch up all the raspberries.
How can he have met with such a fate?
I stumble from the stones, my oxfords slipping on the slick shore. But there is no fleeing what I have seen. It is etched in my memory like a wound that will never close.