Chapter 12
It took me two months to find the marbled murrelet’s nest. The seabirds, half the size of seagulls, play on the ocean most of the day.
But unlike gulls, they never nest in the many nooks offered by our scalloped shoreline.
After weeks of watching them pelt the water like bullets, I realized they always flew east at sunset.
Toward the fearsome Mount Consternation.
Oh-Lolly sets off, eager to get underway. With most people busy with breakfast, the main road is empty. I slow at the madrone-lined path leading to Viridian House, where Nash is staying. Its stained-glass windows reveal nothing.
I should say goodbye.
Then again, why would he want to see me? I’m not sure why Mr. Sanders put this heavy wreath around my neck, but until I know, I’ll feel lopsided, not sure how to walk in this new world.
Heading northeast toward Cascade Lake, the pavement crumbles into gravel, and the trees grow thicker, higher. Shrieks fill the air—fledglings being pushed out of the nest. The learning curve is steep. Deadly. If you don’t pump your wings when you are pushed, you won’t get a second chance.
I click my tongue and nudge Oh-Lolly up to a trot, grateful for her warmth and speed.
“Maybe I shall take one of the Specialties and sail away,” I say, mostly to hear a human voice.
Oh-Lolly jerks up her head, tossing back her blond mane.
I pat her withers. “I’ll take you too, if you can get your sea legs.”
Midway down Cascade Lake the one-room station house appears in the distance, its straight lines at odds with the jagged trees. Oh-Lolly lets out a long whinny.
“Yes, and your boyfriend Goliath can come too, as long as he minds his slobbering.”
Upon reaching the station house, I slide off the piebald and let her drink at the trough. The hems of my split skirt are already dark with dirt, and I roll up my waistband. What a pain propriety is. I should’ve worn scouting duds. There is no one out here to be proper for.
Through the square windows, I don’t see anyone inside, but I knock just in case. A chalkboard is mounted to the door for messages. Not getting an answer, I take a piece of chalk and jot:
8 a.m. Mount Consternation.—Lucy
Writing the word “consternation” presses cold steel against my neck. But isn’t that the exact emotion boiling inside me? A murky stew of shock, dismay, dread, confusion constantly being replenished. If I ever want to send the pot to the chickens and start fresh, onto Mount Consternation I must go.
I swing back into the saddle and steer Oh-Lolly toward the raw, new trail cut into its side.
Before Mr. Sanders’s death, I always found Mount Con-sternation peaceful, with its lush array of wildlife, ripe for the sketching.
But now the stream running alongside the deserted path sounds like a snake rearing up to strike.
Shade from the tree cover feels too cold, a shroud for a corpse.
I try not to think about the fetch-boy drawing his greasy spatula across his neck or wild boars running amok.
“It doesn’t seem right to own a mountain,” I say, feigning a nonchalance my bones do not share.
My leg begins to cramp, and I tuck it across the saddle.
“It is different from owning, say, a horse, where things are more give-and-take. Mountains don’t need anything.
And the things they give—a view, shade—already come free.
” I frown, remembering the handfuls of dirt thrown into Mr. Sanders’s grave.
Own a mountain if you will, but dirt will consume you in the end.
A fungus resembling a bread loaf sticks out of a red cedar, this one with a “burnt” edge on the right side.
Bread-loaf fungi make good markers because of their size, even though such tumors mean the tree has started to rot.
The trail continues for another couple hundred feet up to the glaciated summit, where the denser forests will give way to a more emaciated landscape of lodgepole pine. But we need not go all the way up.
Hunched firs and gnarled hemlock choke our path. Oh-Lolly’s tread overturns leaf litter, exposing eerie white threads of fungal mycelium. I stifle a shiver. Mr. Sanders believed trees communicated with one another through this “mushroom network,” passing nutrients needed to survive.
A scream pierces the air, and I nearly slide off the saddle.
Courage. It is just an osprey. A half-fish, half-eagle demon does not really haunt this mountain, and those broken trees are not the result of its crashing tail.
I press on, and at last a Douglas fir like a witch’s broom rises before us.
“Ah, there you are,” I murmur.
Woodpecker holes pepper its thickly furrowed gray trunk, which rises twice the height of the big house. Though I’d figured out that murrelets headed for the forests after feeding, it was sheer luck I’d chosen to look up at this tree when I spotted a bird diving into the branches.
A rope ladder hangs where I left it, enabling a climb of about twenty feet up the bare stretch of trunk. Oh-Lolly had been my first “ladder,” and nearly the death of me when she’d moved.
After dismounting, I circle the tree, considering its high branches. “Well, I am here, Mr. Sanders. If there is anything you wish to tell me, now would be the time.”
I pause, feeling ridiculous. A fly buzzes near my ear. What exactly did I hope to find? A signpost, perhaps? A marching band unfurling a tell-all banner?
My parents materializing from the mist?
My eyes grow wet, visualizing silhouettes in the gloom.
The rungs of the ladder are slightly damp but still sturdy. My neck pops as I glance up. Leave no mossy stone unturned.
My riding habit has become an encumbrance, its heavy fabric sticking to my legs, the jacket biting under my arms. I disrobe to my long chemise and cotton bloomers and set my clothes upon a rock.
With my satchel strapped tight across my body, I toe up.
Step and pull. Step and pull. I have always had strong legs, honed by years of standing in the kitchen and, more recently, exploring the island.
I lose myself in a rhythm, excitement building as I reach the top of the ladder, which is secured to one of the sturdy limbs that form a crown around the tree.
Past the ladder, I continue my climb using the stoutest branches as stairs. A bread-loaf fungus mimics a step, but I know better than to trust it with my weight. I pull myself up, one limb at a time, trying not to look down.
Like its auklet and puffin cousins, the murrelet’s stout body is built for fish diving. But unlike the others, the murrelet is both of the sea and of the forest. Two worlds contained in one tiny creature, designed to be hidden in plain sight.
Will the nest be occupied, as it was when I first came upon it? I remember my excitement at the sight of the speckled treasure atop its cushion of yellow moss.
Up. Up. Up.
I catch my breath, sweat trickling my back. The San Juan Islands archipelago scatter around me like puzzle pieces. Some people think Orcas Island resembles a giant wolf paw, with the East Sound, West Sound, and Far West Bay the spaces between the four toes.
Directly south, Parish Isle forms a pearl at the mouth of the East Sound.
That is where the heart of the Orkus is said to beat.
Goose bumps prick my skin. Even the most skeptical will go around that eternally misty enclave, whose strong currents can dash the boats of even the most able seamen, and where sea wolves often roam in packs of ten or twenty.
Shaking off those thoughts, I continue climbing. At last I reach the wide branch. My limbs burn with exertion.
Then I see it, and all the pain drains away. A single egg lies upon the yellow moss carpeting the flat part of the branch, its shell a pale olive green with purple-brown speckles.
So the murrelet did return to her nest. Is this what Mr. Sanders wanted me to find?
But what does it mean? That a mother returns to her nest, or that home is not forgotten? That life goes on? Perhaps I am imagining shapes in the mist. Hoping for answers where only shadows lie.
After carefully planting my bottom on the branch, with my back against the trunk, I take out my pencil and sketch pad.
A boom sounds from somewhere far off. A hundred feet below, Oh-Lolly lifts her head from a shrub, then continues nibbling. Could be a hunter. Mr. Sanders allowed hunting in designated areas. I make quick work of the sketch.
By the time I descend again to the top of the ladder, the mist has burned away.
A figure in a brown hat stands at the bottom of the tree, holding my skirt in front of him.
“Koa?”
He tilts his head back, eyes closing, as if feeling a headache. “One boar wasn’t enough for you.”
“What do you mean?”
He focuses on the space by my head. “I just shot another one back there. Now that you’re filthy rich, I guess you do what you want.”
“According to you, I did that anyway. Turn around. My showstopper’s making an appearance.”
That gets an eyeball roll. Once, Mr. Sanders invited cabaret performers to the island, including cancan girls, whose ruffled, showstopping pantaloons nearly started a stampede of bucks ready to propose.
Koa sets my clothes back on the rock, then makes a show of turning around, hands up. He’s not wearing his jacket, and the sleeves of his blue chambray shirt are rolled high.
I’ve begun toeing down the ladder when my eye catches on a woodpecker hole. A rolled paper has been stuffed inside.
“What’ll you do?” Koa says. “I mean, if I were you, I’d buy an airplane.”
My heart begins knocking. I missed the paper on my way up; I was so intent on finding the nest.
“Some folks won’t be happy. Once word’s out, the press might hound you a bit.”
After pinching out the roll, I sit with my back against the trunk, crumbling the double-rimmed saucer lichen behind me. The parchment resists being unrolled but at last reveals a letter, written in Mr. Sanders’s emphatic penmanship and dated August 13, 1918.
The day before he died.
My birthday.
Dear Lucy,
I had hoped to share these words in person, and without secrecy. But if you are reading this, it is because some misfortune has befallen me and the pen must be my messenger.
Despite my best efforts to find the truth, alas, it seems I have failed, and it will be up to you to continue these efforts.
I have kept you in the dark about your parents.
I apologize for that, but I felt it was necessary to protect you, just as I did when I raised you in the anonymity of the kitchen.
You will have heard of the man known here as simply “the Can Man.” He was your father.
The Can Man? I grip the paper as an invisible knife strikes me in the gut. My father. Murdered.
His name was Harry Tang. I met him at the university, where I was studying engineering and he biology, specifically sea wolves, which he considered a misunderstood, highly intelligent species.
Having grown up here, surrounded by these mysterious creatures, I found his ideas intriguing.
With his knowledge, and my expertise building ships, we made plans to construct what we called a “window-boat” to allow us to study the great beasts and share our knowledge with others. We made a great team.
Of course, life does not always follow a direct path. After graduating, jobs being scarce, I returned to Orcas Island to work as a foreman, and he joined me as an interpreter.
We discovered a fortune on Parish Isle in the early spring of 1900. We quit our jobs and purchased the land that became Nowhere.
By then, Daniel was one year old, and Harry was about to introduce me to someone he was besotted with—your mother. But then he was cut down. Investigations led nowhere, and I considered taking my family and leaving this dark place.
A month after he died, exactly eighteen years ago, you floated in on Harry’s green canoe. When I saw that you bore the same birthmark on your neck as Harry, I knew who you were. I knew he would want me to persist.
My success I owe to your father. His legacy I leave to you.
Whoever killed your father is still out there, Lucy. You are your father’s daughter, and only you can calm the wolves.
Avenge him. Free this island. Save yourself.
Dakon Sanders
P.S. The fewer who know about this, the better. I did not risk my neck for nothing.