Chapter 17
The room feels much too bright.
Flossie is picking pillows up off the floor. Beyond the small table and chairs, the curtains have been pulled, revealing a blue-gray sky. “Eleven o’clock, miss.”
I bolt upright. I haven’t slept past the early bell, well, ever, and today, Monday, is the first business day of my life as Nowhere’s chief. “How did you get in?”
She nervously sets the pillows on a bench at the foot of the bed. “I was worried about you, and I, well, picked the lock. I decided to let you sleep, as you felt clammy when you went to bed. I’m sorry if I did wrong.”
“You… picked the lock?” I rub my eyes, which feel as if they have been open all night.
“Yes, with a hairpin.” She chews on her lip, posture beginning to hunch.
I can hardly fault her for her concern. But if Flossie can pick the lock, so can others. I will need wedges. “I see. Where is Miss Jack?” I arranged to meet with Eva first thing in the morning.
“At her desk, I believe.”
“Could you fetch her? We can talk over breakfast. Ask her to bring Mr. Sanders’s calendar.”
“But—” She glances at my wrinkled nightgown, then at my determined face. “Yes, right away.”
I use my bathroom, then pull the curtains wider on the marina windows.
With the press ships off to deliver their news, only half of our twenty slips are occupied, and the sound is a mostly empty palette of blue.
Farther past the marina, the foundry, sawmill, and machine shop form symmetrical wood blocks around the shipyard, which from here looks devoid of activity.
From the windows that look out onto the opposite shore, the clouds hang so low, they threaten to erase the mountain completely.
In the garden, workers move with no more purpose than ants after their hill has been kicked.
A junior gardener with a thick neck throws down his rake and yells at the yard boy.
The yard boy squares up. Mr. Kagaoka trots over and breaks up the fight.
Unsettled, I seat myself at the breakfast table, where the Seattle Daily News has been placed. The front page features a camel being hoisted onto a boat and reads “Arabians Join Allies in Red Sea.” Another headline warns, “Spanish Flu Crosses Globe on Military Transports.”
War and disease rage elsewhere in the world, making the problems at home feel small. My eye drifts to the bottom of the page, where a column has been circled: “Nowhere Heiress Installs Nash Sanders-Byre as President of Sanders Ships.”
The paper crackles as I read:
ORCAS ISLAND, Wash.—Following the grisly demise of its founder, Dakon Sanders of Orcas Island, Washington, Sanders Ships International, longtime builder of luxury boats and watercraft, has appointed Mr. Sanders’s nephew as the president, effective immediately.
“We are thrilled to have Mr. Nash Sanders-Byre join the team,” said Mr. Sveyn Olsgaard, general manager.
“With his considerable knowledge of SSI, his youthful vigor, and his can-do spirit, there is no one better poised to take the helm. Simply put, no one understands the running of a family business more than family.”
The bequest of Dakon Sanders’s entire estate, known as Nowhere, to a maid only known as Lucy shocked the nation.
I set the paper down, blood whooshing in my veins. News certainly travels fast. Now I suppose we see how many fish we can reel back in. The article even included a picture of Nash in his college jacket, hair slicked back and showing off those steep Sanders cheekbones.
“Good morning, Lucy.” Eva sweeps in, wearing a gray dress with a French lace collar starched to blade-sharp perfection, and her signature hair bow.
Her dark eyes briefly survey the room, then me, my hair in disarray and a too-thick robe hastily tied around me.
Her thin lips tighten. Withholding comment, she joins me at the table, setting down a leather-bound calendar book and her notepad.
Flossie follows behind her, carrying a tray of eggs, toast, and a bowl of fruit, which I am glad to see does not contain raspberries, plus a vase with a white rose as round as a snowball, whose soapy fragrance borders on belligerent.
She sets it on the table, then pours me a cup of coffee, keeping her distance from Eva.
“Would you like a cup?” I ask the secretary.
“No, thank you,” says Eva, barely glancing at Flossie.
Moving quickly, my maid ports the tray out the door.
Eva’s eyes flit to the newspaper. “Mr. Zephyr telephoned this morning about his yacht,” she briskly informs me.
Surely that is good news, but Eva’s mouth looks carved from stone.
“He’d like to meet the new ‘president.’ As would several other customers.”
The new president. Nash. Of course. I should’ve foreseen this.
One favor. That is all. I will need to ask him to continue his charade a bit longer.
But what if it backfires and he expects more in return?
Favors multiply like rabbits. Daniel once paid me a nickel to do his math; Nash demanded a nickel not to tell on him. Clever then, clever now.
The coffee is hot, and I nearly burn my tongue.
Eva squares her notepad before her, eyes fastened to the page. “My status report contains three items today. One. Morale is low. Mrs. Bonefat reports that the washerwomen won’t go near the beach. I’ve instructed them to use the dahlia garden for now.”
“Good idea.”
“Two. Boots wants to ‘cut the fat.’ The idle workers are beginning to squabble. Perhaps you can discuss the matter over your regular Monday dinner with the Brain Trust tonight.”
My jaw clamps. “How much does it cost to keep them on?” I ask, feeling once again out of my depth.
“Staff and families come to a half a million dollars a year.”
Half a million. What was Mr. Sanders thinking, handing this job over to me? I might own this place, but it doesn’t mean I belong here. If I can get Mr. Zephyr’s sale back, I will leave the running of the business to those who know what they’re doing.
“Three. Gilly only caught two salmon this morning.”
“Can we buy salmon from Mr. Gotze’s fishermen?” The German elder with his still-lush silvery hair and knife-like posture controls the fish market here, both the catching and canning on the west side.
I may as well have suggested we buy pine cones for the dark look Eva gives me. “Mr. Sanders would never.”
“Why is that?”
Of course, Mr. Sanders prided himself on needing nothing from anyone, especially the two other island bosses, but this is an unusual year.
“The two were at war ever since June,” she says carefully. “Mr. Sanders accused Mr. Gotze of stripping the sound with his fish traps. Mr. Gotze offered to stop if Mr. Sanders canceled the gentleman’s agreement.”
We all know of the famous truce by which Gotze keeps his fishermen out of our corridor as long as we left his west coast untouched. That has worked out well for Nowhere, since we’ve never needed more salmon than Gilly can catch.
It appears Mr. Gotze was getting greedy.
“Mr. Gotze said he wouldn’t even come to the fishing derby,” the secretary adds. “Then, of course, Mr. Tavernish pulled out as well.”
The snowball rose blurs in my vision. Mr. Sanders always hosted the end-of-summer contest, in which the three bosses compete for whose men can catch the biggest salmon for their employer.
One of Mr. Gotze’s men always wins. It’s hard to compete with a business that employs a whole fleet of fishermen.
He must have been furious to forfeit, but angry enough to plant seal heads on our beaches?
It would be easy enough to chuck one off a boat.
Boats don’t leave tracks. But killing Mr. Sanders seems more of a stretch.
As the island’s only cannery owner, Gotze would have been my father’s employer. What secrets could he tell me?
Eva has set down her notepad and is gazing at me expectantly.
“Er, very good,” I say, as if I would actually know the difference between a good and a bad status report. The woman is no shirker and seems to get more done in a minute than most do in a day. “I was hoping I could see Mr. Sanders’s schedule.”
Her manicured fingers grip the leather book, then she hands it over.
Each page of the calendar features a block for every day of the week, with entries in both Eva’s typewriter-neat print as well as Mr. Sanders’s emphatic scrawl.
“I logged his meetings in black,” she explains evenly. “Special events, like the Salmon Smokeout, the Gatheround, and the fishing derby are in green. The blue is his own hand.”
I focus on the blue. On the day of the Salmon Smokeout, August 1, he’d scheduled a phone call with someone named Mary Paul at ten in the morning. “Who is this person?”
“A young botany student at the university. I don’t know more than that.”
She wouldn’t have known my father, but would she have heard of him? Perhaps Sanders wanted Miss Paul’s input for Wilds of Orcas Island. He never mentioned her to me. Does she hold the key to whatever he was on the verge of discovering about my father?
“How would I reach her?”
“Through the university number. I can arrange a telephone call, if you’d like.”
“Yes, please. And why is there a red X by her name?”
“Nothing to do with her. Mr. Sanders asked me to mark the days a dead seal was found.”
My breath stalls. Was Mr. Sanders tracking a pattern, starting with this first seal head the day of the Salmon Smokeout? Perhaps he believed the seal killer posed a threat to him. Or to me. Is that why he wrote the letter?
I force in a breath, returning my attention to the page.
Another X has been placed on Monday, August 12—one week ago, two days before Mr. Sanders’s murder. The second seal head. Koa had been worrying over it when he saw me from Crow Point.
On my birthday, the 13th, the same day as Mr. Sanders’s letter to me, he met with Mr. Tavernish of Tavernish Lime, a nobleman of lesser peerage in his native England.
Eva notices my finger on the entry. “Mr. Tavernish came to discuss mining rights on the White Fist.”
I nod. The fist-shaped slab of exposed limestone, two miles north, overlooks the sound and is perfectly positioned for easy quarrying.
Bake it, barrel it, then drop it onto boats for export.
But Mr. Sanders disdained lime work, which blasted off land one can never get back. “Were you at this meeting?”
“I was in my office next door.”
“So you heard.”
Pink spots bloom on her cheeks. “I try not to, but yes, sometimes when the discussion grows, er, heated.”
An image of Mr. Sanders swinging the tie of his terry-cloth robe with annoyance fills my head. “What was said?”
Eva folds her hands prim as a schoolgirl at a desk. Perhaps the question makes her feel disloyal. “Mr. Sanders said, ‘I know you dumped your lime off the Owasee for the insurance money, and that’s the least of your crimes.’ ”
My mind spins, remembering the thousand barrels of Tavernish lime supposedly lost to fire and dumped at sea. Was it fraud? “What crimes did Mr. Sanders mean?” Like Mr. Gotze, Mr. Tavernish was old enough to have known my father. Perhaps one of these crimes concerned my father’s death.
“I don’t know. Then Father Pinnyhorne came by even though he wasn’t on the schedule.
We were standing in the hallway when Mr. Tavernish threw open the door.
Father Pinnyhorne tried to smooth things, but Mr. Tavernish took one look at him and snapped, ‘God help us all,’ before storming off and leaving his cane and hat.
Mr. Sanders lost his temper with the priest too, which he never does. ”
“Sounds like quite the dustup.” A vein in my temple has started to throb. “Mr. Tavernish must have been very angry at Mr. Sanders.” Was it possible he had killed Mr. Sanders to silence him?
Eva’s eyes narrow. “What are you getting at? The sheriff has his suspect. Or does this have to do with the seal heads?”
The toast I’ve been chewing suddenly becomes hard to swallow, despite its generous anointing with butter. Eva may be buttoned up, but she doesn’t miss much.
“No. Well, yes.” I shift around on the hard chair, caught by my own net.
Buying some time, I wash the toast down with some juice.
The fact is, as much as I wish to prevent a panic on Nowhere, a panic has set up in me, and I need an ally, my own mushroom network through which to pass and receive crucial information for survival.
Eva may not like me. But it is clear she feels protective of Mr. Sanders and would want his true killer found.
She can help me run the business while I focus on the investigation.
The fewer who know, the better, Mr. Sanders wrote. She is just one mushroom.
“I have reason to believe Mr. Sanders’s death is connected to my father’s. He was the one they call the Can Man.”
Someone gasps.
But it is not Eva. At the foot of the unmade bed, Flossie stands still as a heron. She must have slipped through the hidden closet door. How much did she hear?
Two mushrooms will be harder to keep track of than one. Yet networks don’t always grow where you plan them—they spread underground, linking the unlikely together. Flossie is clearly good at hiding in plain sight. Perhaps she can be my eyes and ears.
“Flossie,” I say steadily, “please lock the doors and join us.”