Chapter 8
Screwing a straw hat over his head, Nash marches doggedly alongside me, squelching the gravel with his glossy custom boots.
Since I’m the one who knows where the yarrow grows, I head north up Nowhere Road, clutching my shears. The good weather has fled, as if Mr. Sanders’s death has canceled summer.
“The coroner put the time of death shortly before your discovery, sometime between three and six o’clock.”
I grip the stiff grass handle of my basket hard enough to bend it. How easily I might have stumbled on the scene—maybe even stopped it.
I force myself to stop thinking and pay attention.
Nash clears his throat. “It wasn’t a clean break, but looked coarsely inflicted, as if carried out by some sort of hacking instrument.” Nash’s voice falters. “Like that poor bastard, the Can Man.”
I wince as the gruesome picture is brought to mind once again. Imagining the violence inflicted upon Mr. Sanders cools my blood. “So it was a murder, not an animal.” At least the sea wolves have been absolved. Yet perhaps an animal would be easier—creatures kill from hunger, never malice.
His long legs devour the road, one stride for every one and a half of mine. “Yes.” Nash fills his lungs, forcing his back straighter.
“I am sorry for your loss.”
His eyes dart toward me. “I told Uncle D. I was planning to enlist after the Gatheround. That’s the argument you heard.”
“I see.”
Mr. Sanders’s words from yesterday echo in my head.
You’re just proving yourself a fool and a coward, just like your goddamned donkey sack of a father.
No wonder Mr. Sanders was upset. After losing Daniel to the war, who could blame him?
His sister Viridian’s only child, Nash, was the only family he had left.
More surprising is the revelation that Nash planned to enlist. I never thought of him as the type to serve his country, much less suffer the indignities of getting a mighty fine—what they call a military haircut nowadays.
He’s always been particular about his hair. Perhaps Daniel’s death has changed him.
He glares at the road, then swipes his face with his arm.
“Out with it. What did you two really disagree over?” His usual voice is charming and nonintrusive, but he can easily be heard when he is upset.
“I am told some such about going to university. But my uncle believed in higher learning. Why would he stop you?”
“I’m not sure. Perhaps he deemed my work for him too important to interrupt.”
“Drawing pictures for his nature book,” he says with derision.
I hold my tongue. There it is, then. Wilds of Orcas Island is a dream that died with Mr. Sanders. I was right to take back my picture of Shadow and Scull.
At a dirt turnout towers a copse of eastern red cedar, which local tribes use for everything from canoes to medicine.
I follow the sound of the ocean, touching the fissured bark of the cedars as I go, just like Cookie does.
The white clusters of yarrow are good at hiding among showier plants, but I’d been finding them for her since I was a girl. I just pray no boars lurk here.
Nash steps in front of me, blocking my way.
He stands a head above me, even taller than Koa, though he is not as broad.
Koa could tie him into a knot. “Who are you?” His eyes roam from my forehead to my neck kerchief, staring as if trying to loosen it with his eyes.
The soap he uses mingles with the zest of the conifers all around us. “Why were you so important to him?”
“Sir? I’m just a servant.”
“Servants don’t usually get to sit in on private lessons.” He abruptly ends his study of me and yanks distractedly at a metal fastener on one of his striped suspenders, pulling it even with the other side.
Growing up, Mr. Sanders let me attend Daniel’s lessons if I finished both my kitchen duties and my schoolwork.
It was hard to know who was more delighted: Daniel, for the chance to escape his boredom, or me, for the opportunity to learn more than the basic writing and arithmetic taught by our schoolmistress.
A second desk was pulled up beside his, though when Nash came in the summers, I was banished to a chair at the back of the room.
“He would’ve let the others join too, if they’d shown interest,” I said.
“I doubt that.”
To argue the point seems churlish, especially right now.
I break off a spray of red cedar, releasing a fresh, citrusy scent into the air.
By the time Daniel’s body arrived from halfway around the world, the stench was cloying.
The Skansie brothers topped the coffin with freshly cut red cedar before shoveling in the dirt.
I divide the spray in two and pass Nash a share. “Cookie says chewing red cedar wards off nausea, but don’t swallow it.”
Nash rolls the plant between his fingers. “You’re avoiding my question.”
“Perhaps your uncle appreciated my curiosity in the sciences, given his keen interest in the natural world. I imagine few here would care to discuss marine worms with him.”
His face eases. “Certainly not Danny.”
“No,” I agree, wondering if we are both remembering the summer Daniel ran around offering a dime to anyone who would eat a worm.
Stealing a glance at me, he takes a cautious sniff of the red cedar.
His nose is sturdy and straight like his uncle’s and cousin’s.
Mr. Sanders inhaled the world as if he could conquer it, while I can still hear Daniel snorting through his with easy laughter.
Nash has always used his to scent out mischief. Or pleasure.
He places the spray on his tongue and chews thoughtfully. I chew mine as well, wincing at the sour turpentine flavor.
“Delightful,” he mutters.
I push toward the ocean, snipping a patch of lacy yarrow and stuffing my basket with leaves of sweet-after-death that Cookie uses to ward off the gnats.
Nash gazes upon the sea a hundred feet out, hands stuffed in his pockets.
The ocean shifts with agitation, stirred by the dozen or so boats pacing the sound.
Passengers peer at us through binoculars.
Nowhere has always attracted its share of curiosity seekers, but today’s crowd is in search of the macabre.
Nash sighs. “Here they come, the sharks, the gulls, hoping for scraps. I hope they sink.”
“Of course you don’t mean that, sir.”
“I do, and stop with the ‘sir,’ ” he says irritably. “Anyone who sees profit in another’s death deserves to be tied to a stone and rolled into the sea.” His fingers pluck one of the triangular leaves from my basket. “It seems incomprehensible that anything can be sweet after death.”
“You must not be religious,” I venture, though I should not be so familiar. We are not equals.
“No, I don’t think I am.” His normally nonchalant expression tightens, and he shuts his eyes as if feeling a headache.
My heart pinches a little. The future of Nowhere will rest on Nash’s still unfurling shoulders. Already the heir of his mother’s glove-making empire, Nash will take over Sanders Ships International, one of the country’s foremost builders of luxury yachts.
Nash wanted to prove himself a man by going to war. But now he stands on a battlefront of a different sort, looking more like a shipwrecked sailor than a soldier.
I do not envy him.
From my perch atop the zigzag path to the church, I watch the Forthright chug toward Anacortes, where Shimmelfen was last seen.
Thick clouds appear to be devouring the tips off the mountains of the opposite shore.
Not three days have passed, and the sheriff has officially named the valet the primary suspect in Mr. Sanders’s death.
Talk of a vengeful evil spirit at last quiets, replaced by softer barbs like “I never liked that goose Shimmelfen” and “It’s that high collar he favored—must’ve cut off oxygen to his brain. ”
Yet the reek of unwashed laundry, which includes my serving dress, still scents the halls. The washerwomen have been too afraid to enter the brick laundry across from Jawbone Beach, that crescent-shaped maw glaring up from the shoreline. But dirty linens will not be my problem after tomorrow.
This morning I gave Boots my notice. “Sir, my work here is finished. I will be attending the university.”
“University?” A frown burrowed deep into his muttonchops. “I’m sure we could find a spot for your skilled hands, perhaps back in the kitchen? Believe me, work at an estate like Nowhere is hard to find. Good lodgings, three square meals. Where I come from, workers ate one bowl of porridge a day.”
A shadowed look crossed his face, and I remembered he had once worked on a banana plantation in his native Jamaica. The thought of such privation made me shudder.
“Thank you, sir, but I have made up my mind.”
With a sigh, he counted out the wages I was owed. “The Dreamcatcher is leaving for Anacortes tomorrow after Sunday services. I will arrange for your passage.”
I’d be in Seattle by Monday, giving me a week and a half to find gainful employment and prepare for university life.
The wail of a solitary bagpiper returns my attention to the cemetery, where hundreds of mourners have gathered, watching as the pine box containing Mr. Sanders’s head is lowered.
Gardenia wreaths smother the hilltop with a heavy, almost wet perfume.
Faces sharpen under the thin glare of clouded sunlight—horror, grief, bewilderment, and something else, something perilously close to excitement.
How are you supposed to feel when attending the burial of a head?
No body has been found, despite extensive searching. Dead bodies float in cold, saline water, which means that either the killer removed the body or an animal consumed it.
“It’s too awful. You know they found a Welsh hatchet on Jawbone Beach,” murmurs an elderly matron.
Her neighbor shudders, wrapping her purple mourning shawl tighter. “Horrible. Unimaginable.”
The hatchet was said to have been part of the valet’s exotic knife collection, and the sheriff believes Shimmelfen retrieved it from his room before Koa marched him to the ferry.
Witnesses swore they saw him aboard. Which means—if he is guilty—he must have swum the sound, barefoot, patent leathers left behind, to commit his grisly errand.
I cannot see it. The regal valet I knew was not a man of the wild. Perhaps he had an accomplice.
Father Pinnyhorne strides out from the freshly painted church, gaze fastening to mine even a hundred feet away.
Now that a killer has been identified, am I exonerated in his eyes?
Feeling my cheeks flush, I lower my gaze to the new rosebushes he planted in my trench, with their showy white blooms. Pinnyhorne crosses to the grave, where the men are shoveling quicklime from his green wheelbarrow into the hole.
He raises his arms for quiet. “Two years ago, I came to Nowhere as a new priest, earnest but… nervous.” A smile crosses his face.
“Mr. Sanders’s first words to me were ‘Welcome home.’ Let us find comfort in the knowledge that God will be receiving Mr. Sanders in similar fashion. ‘Welcome home, son. Welcome home.’ ”
As guests drop in handfuls of dirt, I set off down the zigzagging path. The windows of the big house are dark, and even the little blue flags with the gold SSI insignia hang lifeless. Without its captain, will Nowhere founder?
My attention is caught by a horse passing at the bottom of the hill.
Koa, sitting straight in the saddle, lifts the brim of his cowboy hat to me.
My heart feels heavier in my chest. When Mr. Sanders met his fate, Koa was miles away, trying to extricate a rooster from a wagon wheel.
He has been patrolling nonstop to punish himself since. I haven’t seen him all day.
Koa nods, then urges Goliath on. I will tell him my decision tonight, after the send-off dinner for Mr. Sanders. This will be the last meal I prepare at Nowhere. A farewell feast for the dearly departed—and the soon to go.