Chapter 38
Jeddah answers the door holding a knife.
I shrink back, only now noticing the apron Jeddah wears over his dark trousers and homespun shirt.
Koa jerks his chin at the knife. “What’s for dinner?” The knife doesn’t bother him. He could probably flick Jeddah away with his finger.
“Crab stew.” Jeddah appraises me, his hazel eyes weary. There’s something else. Fear? If he were my subject, I would sketch a face full of edges too deep for someone of his age.
“Your dad in?” asks Koa.
Jeddah lets us in without greeting me.
The home is typical of Nowhere cottages with their wood-frame construction and low-pitched roofs.
A large room features a hearth and two chairs on one end and a square table on the other.
Gilly sits before one of two place settings with bowl and silverware, his face set in a cardboard expression.
Thick rugs cover wood floors. A pine cone spruces up the window, and the scent of browned onions hangs in the air.
Some would call it homey, but remembering what I’ve seen of Gilly in recent days, I can hardly relax.
Jeddah returns to the kitchen, and I hear the sound of a lid being lifted. I never pegged Jeddah as having skill with a skillet, but I suppose someone has had to do the cooking all these years.
“Gilly,” Koa says sternly. “Miss Lucy has some questions for you.”
Gilly rouses from whatever spell he’s under and gestures to the empty chairs.
I take the seat opposite him, facing the kitchen, but Koa remains standing next to me wearing his guard face, a calm exterior belying a hyperfocused interior. Scorch marks halo the swept brick fireplace. Might there have been seal bones in there?
“I didn’t do it,” Gilly says roughly.
“A glove with your surname stitched on the inside was found on Chin Chin Beach, right next to the seal head, covered with blood,” I say.
“Can’t explain that. You dismissing me?”
“I haven’t decided.”
Returning from the kitchen, Jeddah folds his lanky form into a chair.
He picks at a hangnail, staring at a vase of fawn lilies in the center of the table.
The creamy scented petals of the humble flower are always reaching for the sky despite its bowed head.
There is a meticulousness in this house that I doubt is the work of Gilly, who can’t even bother to shave.
Maybe Jeddah has been trying to tame the wilderness as well.
“Yesterday at the marina you said, ‘It knows you’re like him,’ ” I say. “What did you mean?”
Gilly begins to twitch, like a fish you think is dead but flops when you poke at it. “You can speak to sea wolves, just like the Can Man. I seen you. You’re both touched by the devil. Somehow that devil’s learned about you.” Gilly’s eyes dig at my neck. “Killed Mr. Sanders for hiding you.”
I’d only begun to come into my sea-wolf sense the day I sketched Shadow and Scull. The day Mr. Sanders was killed. My throat seems to close, as if a crab has pinched my neck in its claw.
“And maybe you’re next,” Gilly pronounces, jabbing a thick finger at my nose.
“Watch yourself.” Koa pulls his jacket back, giving Gilly a peek at his iron.
The room seems to suck in its breath.
Gilly presses himself against the chair slats.
“The seals were beheaded with a knife, not by sea wolves,” I say, steadying my voice.
“I don’t believe that there’s any demon.
But there is a killer among us. Someone who is trying to make it seem that Mr. Sanders’s death was caused by unnatural forces.
Such that behead seals. And your glove was found on Chin Chin Beach. ”
“You’re accusing me of killing Mr. Sanders?”
“I think you’re hiding something, and if you don’t start talking soon, Koa will be escorting you to the ferry.”
Gilly clams up, his expression turning to cardboard once again. Koa curtly motions Gilly out of his seat.
Jeddah scoots his chair back with a loud scraping sound. “He didn’t do it, okay?” he spits, lips white with anger. He gets up from his chair so violently, the bowls jump. Then he turns his back on us and stares out the window.
“Best explain, Jeddah,” Koa growls, probably knowing Jeddah won’t listen to me.
The fisherman’s son claws at the stubble of his hair. His elbows are scaly, and paint still specks his arms. “I did it. I killed the seals.”
“You’re lying,” gasps Gilly.
“I’m not. They’re easy to shoot. Then I just used my fishing knife.”
“What? But why, son? Why?” The words fall hoarsely from his father’s mouth.
Jeddah whips around, eyes bulging. “They’re laughing at you. We feed them, and they still treat us like dirt.”
Who exactly is “they”? A memory swoops in—bricklayers jeering at Jeddah during the Gatheround.
His face twists. “I remember how it was,” he snarls, the three slashes of his scar standing out bright against his flushed cheeks. “When Mama left us, it got so bad. Well, damn them all to hell. Let ’em be scared. Let ’em think a monster’s coming for them.”
Gilly shakes his head, slumping as heavily as if under a mountain of rope netting. “Why do you listen to them? Haven’t I taught you how to weather a storm?”
“I don’t want to weather any more storms.” Jeddah swipes tears from his eyes. “But I didn’t kill Mr. Sanders. Father Pinnyhorne can vouch for me. I was painting that goddamned bell tower. Takes a whole afternoon to do that.”
I nod; I had seen him there myself. Jeddah slumps over the table, shoulders rounded, face trying to hold back tears. For a long moment he just sits like that, trembling. Then a strangled cry tears out of him. He shoves his chair back from the table and storms out the door.
Koa tips his head after Jeddah, meaning, Time to go.
While he heads off, I linger at the doorway, moved by the sight of the fisherman clinging to the table like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a raft.
Will he change his position on the sea wolves?
Or has the belief become too entrenched?
Like the woody old-man’s beard vines that engulf the trees, perhaps it is too hard to uproot one’s thinking without damaging what remains of the tree in the process.
Gilly groans, the sound of an animal with too many wounds to nurse. “I wish I’d never seen that woman throw herself from that canoe. Her grief-stricken face still haunts me all these years. I’m just a simple man trying to raise my son best I know how…”
I hardly hear the rest. Few people give credence to Gilly’s claim that he once saw a woman turn into a sea wolf.
They say she was sick, but her shoe washed up on the beach, Buddy said when I asked how my mother died.
“What color was the canoe?” I ask, feeling the question stick in my throat.
“The color of misery. Green.”