Chapter 25
The sun is barely visible behind a layer of clouds when Nash and I head back to the Lady Vee.
Sinking onto the shore, he pulls off his shoes. “So you were speaking to the sea wolves, like your father could. You told that pod we meant them no harm, and they left us alone.”
I hunker down beside him. “I didn’t know they would understand. I never felt them until the day your”—the words catch in my throat—“the day your uncle died.”
He frowns at me, and I snatch my hand away from where I’ve been fiddling with my kerchief.
“Explain,” he says flatly.
“My mark warms when they are near. If I focus, I can sense their emotions. I can’t explain it.”
“Do they sense yours?”
“I don’t know.”
“You were angry the day my uncle was killed. Maybe your anger stirred them up, and my uncle got in the way.”
I stuff my socks into my boots, buying time. “That can’t be it.”
His eyes don’t let go. “Why not?”
An answer would require I tell him about the letter, and thus my fears about Shimmelfen not being the killer. The secret might spread, to Sveyn and Boots and so on.
But maybe not.
In the fertile space between us, a realization blooms. Daniel had always been our bridge, but even without him, invisible strings remain.
A shared history. Memories sealed by profound emotions: grief, even empathy.
When Mr. Sanders lectured Daniel for missing the university deadline, Nash and I stood a few feet apart, our helpless expressions mirror images.
Then, at Daniel’s funeral, we both watched Mr. Sanders quietly stretch his foot over the open grave for a few devastating moments.
Then he gently retracted it, tears streaming down his face.
Perhaps I can trust Nash. Our family lines have crossed and snagged, and I might need his help unraveling this complicated connection.
That, and I don’t want him to think me a murderer or a witch.
Nash’s irises are the brown of overturned foliage.
I pull Poggie #2 down over my ears. “Let us get seaborne, and I will tell you.”
The Lady Vee sputters awake. As we leave the west island behind, I recite Mr. Sanders’s letter from memory.
Nash’s profile shifts from surprise to confusion to concern. “Does Cosmos know?”
“Not yet. For now it is under my maid’s floorboard.”
He whips off his hat, letting the wind ruffle his hair. “So Uncle D. actually did mean to build a window-boat, like the glass lamps.”
The glass-bottom boat fixtures hung about the house switch on in my head, and my heart draws a hawkish loop. “Those were the window-boats?”
He nods. “Danny begged him to build a real one so he could see the giant squid…”
My breath catches, remembering. Daniel became obsessed with finding one of those monsters after reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. I drew a picture of a giant squid for him, which he framed and stuck on his bedroom wall like a real piece of art.
“But Uncle D. said the window-boats were for studying sea wolves one day,” Nash finishes.
The water has become a flat screen, hiding its layers.
Mr. Sanders never built that boat. Perhaps, without my father, there was no point.
We made a great team. But Daniel’s death had reminded him of his purpose, to understand the sea wolves.
A dream made possible again, if I came into my sea-wolf sense.
Nash holds the wheel with his knees and replaces the hat on his head. “Do you believe in those hungry ghosts Wai mentioned?”
“Not without proof. It’s exhausting, figuring out the truth and untruth of things.”
“Yes. That’s why people would rather believe in the Orkus. It’s an easy answer, even though it terrifies them.”
A raft of loons lifts off the water, their piercing wails mournful and haunting.
“Why did your uncle accept my father’s sea-wolf sense? It’s just as implausible as the Orkus.” I ask.
“Proof. He saw your father’s abilities with his own eyes, just as I have seen yours.
” He watches the loons disappear into the clouds.
“Uncle D. always said, ‘The simplest explanation is usually the right one.’ But that doesn’t mean the right explanation is simple.
Sometimes it defies logic. My uncle was a man of religion, after all. ”
Despite my unease over my logic-defying sea-wolf sense, it somehow heartens me to know that my benefactor, a man of science, left room for the possibility of mystery.
Parish Isle draws closer. Moist air kisses my face as I strain to see through the growing fog, looking for sea wolves or anything else. My father has always been a faceless figure in the distance. But today I can’t help feeling that if I look hard enough, I will see him when the fog shifts.
Entering the East Sound again, we begin to porpoise at the higher speeds, and Nash finds a better angle to plane. No sea wolves have appeared, and my mark feels cool.
“Anyway, that’s why I prefer philosophy over religion.” Nash smoothly maneuvers around a snag of bull kelp. “Religion requires you to believe. I’d much rather understand.” He bites his lip. “Though I wouldn’t mind a miracle or two now and then.”
“What miracles are you hoping for?”
He shrugs. “Raising people from the dead would be nice, but that might be too much to ask for. I’ll settle for curing my father of his fascination with the racehorses.”
The apple might not have fallen far from the tree—Nash does like his cards—but maybe it has rolled far enough away for Nash to gain perspective.
He pulls back on the speed, executing a sharp turn toward a recess in the coast where the cliff walls rise a good thirty feet.
A fence of firs extends the cliff by another hundred.
The big house lies yet another two miles up the sound.
“What are you doing?”
He kills the engine and releases the stern anchor with a series of clinks.
The air is cold and wet, the smell of brine and seaweed rising sharp around us.
Hemmed in by jagged rock, the cove feels sealed off from the world, a secret pocket of the sea.
A cloud of jellyfish appears. They’re just moonies, but they put a queasy feeling in my stomach, resembling pulsating organs spilled into the sea.
“We haven’t eaten lunch, and I want to hear about your list. Are there zebras on it?”
Feeling sheepish, I try to affect an air of cool. Daniel’s tutor once asked us to show on the globe the country we’d most like to visit. I will never forget the disdainful way Nash looked at me when I picked Abyssinia, where zebras live.
“Is the sea wet?” I reply.
A sandwich wrapped in waxed paper makes crinkly sounds as he hands it to me with those precise fingers. “What else?”
“Palm trees,” I say cautiously, expecting derision but finding something more like amusement in his face. “Have you seen one?”
“Sure.” Reaching into the picnic basket, he gleefully discovers a waxed package of olives and sets it aside. “You forget. I have fronds in high places.”
I bury a smile in my sandwich. “I guess I want to see how the world fits together.”
And how I fit there too.
His expression sobers and his eyes probe mine. “A philosopher once said, ‘Search the world for knowledge if you must, but for wisdom you’ll have to look inside.’ ”
I force my bite down, the sandwich suddenly hard to chew. Is my yearning for a place to belong so easy to read? “Which Greek said that?”
“No Greek. That was my mother.” He takes his time licking his finger of salt. “Why did you never come out with us before?”
“You never asked me.”
“No, but Danny always did, and you and he—”
I flinch. Did he mean that Daniel and I were a pair?
Of course, as a girl I fancied myself in love with Daniel.
How could you not love someone who could look you dead in the eye and say he’d found a way to barbecue pudding?
But as we got older, Daniel became moody and forgetful, often forgetting to show up when we’d made plans.
When I told him I thought about attending university, he said, “That’s nice, Luce,” without even hearing me.
I think he was just growing up and growing away.
But perhaps I’d been growing away, too.
“It wasn’t Daniel’s boat,” I tell Nash simply. “I never wished to intrude on your time together.”
“It wouldn’t have been an intrusion.”
I reach inside the picnic basket for a jug of water.
Nash reaches in at the same time, and our hands meet. I pull away, but his fingers snag mine, exploring them like the strings of a fine violin he has been wanting to play.
The shock shuts out all other feeling. His tobacco eyes burn brightly. If a sea wolf were charging us right now, I would not notice. His touch is less scandalous than kissing on the tennis court, which I chalked up to impulse, yet this somehow feels more significant.
“Lucy.” He runs a thumb over my fingers, sending sparks to my heart. Have I misread him all these years? Growing up, he was as cool as the moon, a distant figure eclipsed by the sun beside him. But with Daniel’s bright light extinguished, Nash no longer stands in shadows.
You let him take too many liberties, I hear Koa say.
I tug my hand away from Nash’s, and an immediate coolness settles between us. Despite the calm sea, my seat suddenly feels unsteady and my head spins. Clouds have thickened overhead. It is a sky to get lost in and never come back from.
He clears his throat politely. “If there is a murderer on the loose, perhaps I should stay.”
“You have put off your business with your father twice now,” I say more calmly than I feel. “The best thing you can do for me is shine at Saturday’s party.”
For a moment he looks lost. He sighs. “I will return from Seattle as soon as I can. We Poggies have a saying: ‘It’s just a fish.’ ” He uses Daniel’s good-natured voice. He has always been good at mimicry, but he imitates his uncle and Daniel the best.
“ ‘It’s just a fish.’ What does that mean?”
“Among other things, it means don’t take unnecessary risks.”
I hide my grim expression under my hat. My entire investigation is an unnecessary risk, and I don’t think I can stop anytime soon.