Chapter 26
Three days pass and Nash does not return.
The party is tomorrow, and his presence is crucial for recapturing Mr. Zephyr’s purchase.
I don’t know why you trust him. Koa’s frustrated words storm through my head.
If Nash doesn’t show, we are stuck with me.
Clients might think we’ve tricked them. We’ll be in a worse situation than the one we are now.
Has his father’s business delayed him? Or has he cast off from Nowhere forever?
Returning from the marina, nerves jangling, I duck into the kitchen. Cookie is snapping beans at the long table, and I grip its worn edge to steady myself. “I was thinking we should ship in salmon for the Gatheround. How many pounds would you suggest?”
“We should go without, for respect.” Snap. Snap. The beans break like tiny bones.
“We have been going without. It’s just one night.
Everything must be perfect if we want the business to continue.
Salmon’s a tradition.” My words come out sharper than I mean.
The business did not concern me before, but now that I can see the changes being wrought under my watch, I can’t help feeling invested in its outcome.
Not to mention people will blame me if things go wrong.
“Business, huh.” A scowl grows under her mobcap. “A real island boss now, aren’t you?”
I suck in my breath, feeling stung. “I don’t plunder the sea or dig holes in the earth.” What have I done but hold up a crumbling castle?
“We are the land’s caretakers, not its owners.” She drops her beans and stares defiantly down at her bowl.
“I didn’t ask to be the owner here. What would you have me do?”
“Give it back.”
“The land? People live here now. They have livelihoods. It’s not that simple.”
She smooths a dish towel, her gaze growing distant. “When you were a child, I let you and Daniel take all my lemons for your treasure hunts.”
My chest tugs, remembering how Daniel and I would bury the lemons so that we could “discover” them with our made-up maps.
She shakes her head. “But the treasure’s real now, and it doesn’t all belong to you. How many more boats do you need to make? How much bigger, fancier a house must you live in? Take what you need; let the rest go.”
I stiffen. The scale of the house and the business are hardly my fault. “And who exactly would I give it back to?”
Her lips purse; she doesn’t have an answer for that. “What happens if that will gets overturned? Who gets it?”
“Nash, though I get the feeling he doesn’t want it. But Mr. Sanders had a plan for making sure Nowhere succeeded if he died, and I can’t just walk away.”
Cookie’s nostrils flare, her chest moving.
She is not pleased with me, but how can I make her understand matters I barely understand myself? “I will order three hundred pounds. We’ll also have duck.”
I leave the kitchen feeling more unsettled than when I entered.
In the reception room, Mrs. Bonefat watches woodworkers polish the mahogany paneling from where she stands near the compass rose mosaic. Careful sanding has revealed the wood’s warm, pinkish-brown hue.
“You missed a spot,” Mrs. Bonefat snaps. Not even the swingy tune playing from the lacquered phonograph puts her in a good mood. “We aren’t paying you for a half job.”
The housekeeper did not complain when the new Persian rugs, in pale salmon pink with intricate designs of navy blue, were rolled in, or when the dark gray curtains were replaced with champagne silk.
She voiced no objection to the removal of the heavy gilded frames with their medieval-looking pictures.
Even the chambray dress I am wearing, with its loose sleeves and split skirt—Flossie’s truce between scouting duds and heiress wear—has evoked no comment from her.
It doesn’t mean she approves.
I leave her to her grumbling, but as I climb the stairs, dollar signs fill my head.
Eighteen thousand spent so far, with a premium for a rush order.
And we haven’t touched the business wing or the bedrooms yet.
I have quickly learned that a ten-million-dollar estate does not mean ten million dollars in the bank.
Half of that is “liquid,” as easy to spend as drinking a glass of water, while the other half is less drinkable, like the value of the big house.
If this investment doesn’t pay off, we will all die of thirst.
Eva is on the telephone when I enter the office. Since my visit to the Chinese camp, there have been no more standoffish moments between us, but I tread carefully. I need her on my side. With the receiver still to her ear, she hands me a card, on which is written:
To whom it may concern,
I, along with my daughter and son-in-law,
Temperance and Miles Cooper, and granddaughter
Prosper, are pleased to accept the invitation to
Nowhere, with the hope we may establish a
mutually beneficial relationship between Nowhere
and Tavernish Lime.
Yours truly,
Milton Tavernish
The heavy card stock makes my finger twitch. At least one of the island bosses will be at the Gatheround. No word yet from the cannery man, Mr. Gotze.
My next meeting is with Gilly and Jeddah, a reunion I’ve been dreading. No doubt they are skeptical of my inheritance. After all, what are the odds that the first person to find Mr. Sanders’s body also inherits his fortune?
And later I must face Koa, who requested a meeting to discuss “personal safety.” We have been avoiding each other aside from his curt reports, and I miss our old companionship.
To burn off nervous energy, I reshelve the pile of botany books I’ve been scouring for mentions of China blue. I have found China aster and China rose, but no China blue. I pick up the vase with the withered mystery stalks, banished here by Flossie as unsuitable for a lady’s chambers.
Eva finishes her call, and her pleated dress of gray silk whispers as she sharpens a pencil in her desk-mounted sharpener.
“Have you heard from Nash?”
“Not yet.”
I clumsily set down the vase, disappointment heavy as a sandbag. Perhaps I should not have trusted him.
“He might still be on the evening ferry,” she adds with a put-on optimism.
A knock interrupts, and soon Jeddah Nacht and his father are sitting across the desk from me. Gilly regards me with the watchful gaze of a lizard. His bucket hat is clenched in his scarred fists, and his grizzled hair springs wildly about his head.
“Would you like something to drink? Tea? Lemonade?” I ask.
“We ain’t thirsty, girl,” says Gilly.
Jeddah holds himself tightly, as if his chair is a rowboat in which he is a bound captive.
His narrow face, with no hint of beard, looks in need of a watering—a scab on his dried lips, pale hazel eyes, his close-cropped hair spiky.
There are scrapes on his arms and a bruise on his cheek below his old hen-scratch scar. Has he been in a fight?
“Tell me, sir, how did you meet Mr. Sanders?”
Gilly eyes Mr. Sanders’s oyster hat on the rack behind me. “He found me reversing my guts on some bad whiskey. Folks laughed at me after I seen that woman throw herself from her canoe and turn into a sea wolf.”
I nod, having heard the rumors.
“They said I was off my chump. Even my wife couldn’t bear to look at me. She ran out. Never seen her since.”
Jeddah picks at the white paint he can never seem to get off. A mudworm, he used to call me, someone so disgusting even my parents didn’t want me. But his mother actually left him. Perhaps his hatred of me was more a reflection of him than of me.
We’re more alike than you think, he said. Is he still thinking about going to the university?
“But Mr. Sanders offered me a job,” Gilly continues.
“Said I could kick the spirits if I tried, and he was right. Haven’t touched a drink since that day.
” He gives Jeddah a stern look. “I owe him everything.” His voice grows harsh.
“It were evil that struck Mr. Sanders and the Can Man, same evil that steers the fish from my net.”
“The Orkus, you mean.”
Color creeps up Gilly’s neck, but he nods, gaze dropping to my kerchief. “Something’s been took from that demon, and it wants revenge. It won’t stop until it gets its bloodfill.”
We discovered a fortune on Parish Isle in early spring of 1900. We quit our jobs and purchased the land that became Nowhere, Mr. Sanders wrote.
What had he and my father found?
“How do you know something was taken?” I ask carefully.
Gilly rubs his hands over his knees, the chair squeaking with each rock. “Mr. Sanders told me himself a few months ago. He’d just landed that big fish—the Zephyr boats—and wanted to ‘walk on water’ to celebrate. Just me, him, and the Hure.”
Eva sits as still as the candlestick phone, eyes alert.
“But when Parish Isle came into view, he turned mopey on his drink,” Gilly continues. “He said, ‘If we had never found that treasure, Harry would still be alive.’
“ ‘Who is Harry, sir?’ I asked.
“ ‘The Can Man,’ he said. Then he started laughing—but it weren’t laughter. He was crying.”
I stare at the craggy surface of Gilly’s forehead, a strange brew of emotions stirring. Mr. Sanders was given a good heaping of grief to bear during his life—the loss of his best friend, his wife, and his son. I wish he’d been able to share his grief, at least over my father, with me.
“The Can Man spoke to sea wolves, is what I heard,” Gilly adds, lowering his voice. “So I put two and two together. Mr. Sanders needed that Can Man’s help to get to Parish Isle. Those two took something that belonged to the demon.”
Thoughts dart through my head like fish in a bowl, never quite reaching a destination.
Gilly speaks with conviction, but surely his words are more fancy than fact.
Mr. Sanders’s letter didn’t mention that he’d needed my father’s help to get to Parish Island, only that the two had discovered fortune together.
A memory of Feather clearing the way for Nash and me bubbles up in my head. Had my father’s sea-wolf sense ensured their safe passage to the fog-bound island? The thought of such power staggers me. What kind of gift had he carried, and what kind of burden have I inherited?
And a larger question presses in: What was this treasure they had taken? Do demons covet the same wealth men do?
Jeddah looks toward the door with hope, and I notice a fleck of paint on his neck. Something tugs at my mind, like a fishing pole that has started to bob and needs reeling in. When he’s not enjoying the view up there, he is a hard worker, Father Pinnyhorne had said.
“When did you start painting the church?” I ask him.
“Tuesday, the day before Mr. Sanders died.”
That was my birthday, the same day Mr. Sanders met with Mr. Tavernish and wrote me his letter. “Did you see anyone unusual visit the estate from your perch up there?” I lift my eyebrows meaningfully, and his long limbs start shifting about in his chair.
“Well, I saw Mr. Tavernish. Why?”
“Miss Lucy is compiling a timeline of Mr. Sanders’s last days,” Eva says evenly from her writing desk. “Just in case the sheriff has more questions.”
I send her a grateful glance. Eva said the priest had dropped by unannounced and attempted to smooth the argument between Mr. Sanders and Mr. Tavernish, but had been rebuffed by both men. “Was Mr. Tavernish coming to or leaving the house?”
“He got into his wagon and started up. But then I saw the priest come out of the house with the man’s cane and hat. They spoke in the driveway.”
“How long did they talk?”
Jeddah swipes his face with his sleeve. “A few minutes. Then the priest climbed in, and they were gone for at least half an hour.”
Father Pinnyhorne and Mr. Tavernish went for a ride? “Did the priest mention what they talked about?”
“No. But when Father Pinnyhorne got back to the chapel, he seemed off. Left the lime barrel exposed.”
I frown. Exposed lime can come into contact with water, activating a heat reaction and rendering it useless.
If Mr. Tavernish was sharing his outrage over an allegation of dumping lime for insurance money, then wouldn’t Father Pinnyhorne have remembered to lid his lime barrel? I will need to ask him.
The phone rings. Eva quietly receives it and gestures to me.
“Thank you for your time,” I tell Jeddah and his father, ushering them to the door.
Then I draw closer to Eva’s desk, hoping the caller is Nash. He is a cad for making me wait this long without a single communication about when he will be returning.
“Please hold, Sheriff.”
The sheriff. I quickly take the phone from her. “Sheriff Orr? It is Lucy.”
“Afternoon, Miss Lucy,” says the sheriff in his genial voice.
“I’m afraid I bring bad news. We found Mr. Shimmelfen.
He got himself beat up in Anacortes and has been laid up in the hospital since then.
Barely remembers his name. But given the date he was admitted, I’m afeared he is not our suspect. ”
“I see.” The pronouncement sends a charge through me. I hoped it would be Shimmelfen, for then at least one murder would be accounted for. A clamoring starts up in my ears. Mr. Sanders’s killer still walks free. There will be widespread panic. “Will you be reopening the investigation, then?”
I find Eva’s worried gaze.
“Yes. It will take me a few days to get to Nowhere. Sunday by earliest.”
“We will be ready to receive you.” I hang up, suddenly too shaky to stand.
It doesn’t seem fast enough, and yet the news is guaranteed to doom the Gatheround tomorrow.
Eva helps me to the settee. “Theory A, that Mr. Sanders’s and your father’s murders are unrelated, is not dead in the water yet, but we might need to tell the sheriff about theory B.”
I crumple my sleeve cuffs. The sheriff’s office ignored my father’s death all those years ago. Sheriff Orr wasn’t part of the staff back then, but if the office was complicit somehow, where would his loyalties lie?
“So how shall we inform the staff about Shimmelfen?” Eva asks.
How indeed? Another meeting in the newly brightened great hall? This will not go over well. Morale will vanish, like a handkerchief in the wind. “What do you suggest?”
She creases one of her skirt pleats with a manicured nail. “Mr. Sanders never asked for my opinion on such important matters.”
“Then he was missing out on good advice.”
A glint of pleasure skips across her face. “Let’s keep the sheriff’s visit secret for now. People are looking forward to the party. Why ruin it for them?”
My eyebrows rise. She is not above a little deception.
And neither am I.