Breaches & Betrayals, page 7
"May I have everyone's attention?"
The president of the organization clambered up on a chair. A dapper old gentleman with white hair parted in a style fifty years out of date and a face red enough to make any other symbolic bloodstain redundant, he tapped on his glass with a knife from the cheese tray.
"Silence, please!"
Heads turned. Conversation stopped raggedly as the more attentive shushed their companions.
"We're here tonight to celebrate our genre."
Marnie tuned him out as he thanked the board, the awards committee, the event planners, and the caterer. Everyone in the room knew he was building up to a toast to the nominees for the most prestigious award in the genre. She imagined the president announcing her name. She would nod graciously as everyone applauded. The whole crowd would have read her book—all her books.
"It's in the bag," they would tell her, coming up to shake her hand and beg her to sign her latest hardcover. "You can't lose. And your sales!" She would hear the envy and admiration in their voices.
"And now I'm proud to introduce the nominees. They're all here tonight. If everyone would be kind enough to step back a pace. There'll be photo ops for all."
She could see Lionel's silver mane a head above the others. He had aged well. He hadn't been so photogenic when he'd posed for the school yearbook. She still had it, stuffed in the back of her closet. A dozen guests produced lightweight digital cameras or cell phones from a bag or pocket. Flashes flared. The photographers and onlookers called out, coaxing smiles from the nominees.
"Say, 'Cheese!'"
"Say, 'Gorgonzola!'"
"Say, 'Six-figure deal!'"
She took a deep breath and a step forward, then another. The crowd fell away to left and right. At last they stood face to face.
"Hello, Lionel," she said. "May I have this dance?"
Her hand came up out of the beaded bag. She leveled a Kel-Tec P32 at him. The dealer had called it a mousegun. It was small, but at point blank range, she couldn't miss. She might write cozies, but she wasn't stupid.
She squeezed the trigger. As he fell, she thought, so her bestseller wouldn't be a novel after all. Nonfiction authors got better advances, anyway. She would write it in prison.
The Emperor's Hoard
The sun fell hot on the field, and the treasure hunter’s wrist was getting tired, passing his metal detector back and forth, back and forth, over the stubbly earth. Another fifteen minutes, then he’d knock off for the day and settle in with a pint at the pub in the nearby village.
The metal detector beeped. Probably a rusty nail or even a big old penny from the days of shillings and pence. The treasure hunter stooped, groaning a little at a twinge in his lower back, and picked up a tiny circle of blackened metal, bumpy with age. He scratched at it and rubbed it between his fingers. He knew enough to guess that it was ancient, like the occasional Roman coin he’d found in his endless quest. He pulled from his pocket a handkerchief and a tiny bottle of fluid, rubbing gently to remove some of the grime and tarnish. The unmistakable profile of a Roman emperor emerged. Dropping to his knees, he began to dig, scrabbling like a dog in his eagerness. A few scattered coins lay near the surface, but the real prize was a pot, so heavy with coin that he couldn’t lift it.
It took the British Museum three months to clean the 52,000 coins from the dubious reign of Carausius, pirate emperor of Britain from 286 to 293, when he was killed by his finance minister.
*
Carausius lounged in his atrium, admiring the carp in his pool and the mosaic of Neptune frolicking with sea nymphs that lay beneath the water. The finance minister droned on. Carausius had never had a head for figures. His difficulty with mathematics had proved a disadvantage in his dealings with the pirates even before his alliance with them had gotten him banished from Rome. Now that he was emperor, he had a minister to do the thinking about all that. So why was the pesky fellow bothering him?
“Imperator,” the minister said, “your treasurers and centurions cannot account for the monies that we sent to Londinium to pay the troops. They all said to ask you.”
“Oh, that money,” Carausius said. “We were on maneuvers, and a scout reported that a band of Saxon rebels were approaching. So I told the men to bury it.”
He stood and drifted over to the window, looking out at the inevitable British rain as he adjusted the folds of his toga.
“Sir, where did they bury it? The soldiers must be paid. We need that money.”
Carausius flapped a hand at him without turning around.
“Oh, one of the fellows will know. Go and ask them. It’s almost meridies, and I want my lunch.”
He never saw the knife or the hand propelling it into his back, where it pierced the heart.
A Breach of Trust
Uncle Tommy came to my room again last night. He never knocks. I hear the squeak as he turns the doorknob, and the door opens very slowly. There’s time for my stomach to start feeling queasy and my hands to grow cold with sweat. I’ve asked Mom over and over if I can have a lock on my door, but she says I’m not old enough. When you turn thirteen, she says. When you’re a teenager, things will be different. You’ll start to change, you’ll have different needs. Almost two years. I don’t think I can wait that long.
When he finished, tears were leaking down my cheeks the way they always do. He usually acts as if he doesn’t notice. But tonight he flicked a finger along my cheek, and one corner of his mouth turned up in a funny little smile.
“How about if we go somewhere on Saturday, Jenny?” he said. “Someplace special, just you and me?”
My stomach clenched, and I felt a pang of dread in that part I didn’t even know I had until Uncle Tommy started coming to my room. He always uses that word “special.” We have a special relationship, Jenny, he says. Let’s keep it our special secret. He always says he loves me when he begins. Right before he’s finished, he whispers, If you tell, I’ll kill you.
“I’ll ask Mom,” I muttered. I was sitting up in bed, the blankets clutched around me.
He stuck out one finger and lifted my chin with it. He’s done that ever since I was little. He doesn’t say, Smile, Jenny, the way he did back then. I know what he wants, and we both know I have to give it to him.
“Don’t worry about asking your mother.” He sounded cheerful, as if this was an ordinary conversation. “She has to go up Cape tomorrow. I already told her I’d look after you.”
“Can I pick where we go?” I only dared to ask because I knew I’d pleased him. I didn’t want to end up on a deserted stretch of beach, all alone with Uncle Tommy on a blanket in the dunes. Somehow the sunshine makes it even worse.
“Sure, sure,” he said.
“Can we do the whale watch?”
“Sure, why not? We’ll go in the morning. Your mother is leaving early. She’ll be gone by the time you get up.”
*
“You’ve got a milk mustache,” he said, and wiped it off. He was smiling. Sometimes I hate his finger as much as that other part of him.
I had slathered on a lot of sunscreen before I came downstairs. I’ve learned not to give him a chance to “do the honors,” as he calls it. I wore my one-piece bathing suit with a plain white tee shirt and denim overalls over it, and over that a hooded pale blue beach wrap that I’d belted in tightly and knotted twice. In the Middle Ages, my favorite period in history, the men wore armor and the women wore chastity belts. I bet they didn’t even know how lucky they were. As we left the house, I pulled up my hood and stuck a giant pair of sunglasses on my face. Uncle Tommy clamped an arm around me and hurried me toward the gate.
“Come on, Greta Garbo,” he said.
He likes to call me that. He thinks that line, “I want to be alone,” is funny.
We don’t live right on Commercial Street, but it’s still an easy walk to the dock where the whale watch starts. There’s never anyplace to park in P-town, especially during the season. In spite of Uncle Tommy, I couldn’t help a shiver of excitement at the thought of seeing the whales. I love the whales. They’ve been coming to Stellwagen Bank to feed forever. It’s been a National Marine Sanctuary since before I was born, though the whales don’t know that. Or maybe they do. Whales are very, very smart, maybe smarter than people. We don’t know what they know, because we can’t understand their language.
When I grow up, I want to be a marine biologist. I want to be the one who deciphers the whale song. Whales can get entangled in synthetic ropes and nets that injure them so badly that even if they’re rescued, they still die. Or stupid kids release balloons that lose their helium over the ocean and end up blocking whales’ throats and choking them to death. In some countries, they still hunt whales. Oil spills can kill them too. I’d like the people who are responsible for all these things to be able to hear the whales say, “Leave us alone!” in their own voice.
“Stop daydreaming, Greta Garbo,” Uncle Tommy said. “Come on, they’re boarding.”
We were swept aboard the boat in a crowd of tourists. Like all the Dolphin Fleet, it was built for whale watching, with two decks, a cabin that hardly anybody uses once the first whale is sighted, and a low gunwale with a tubular metal rail above it all around the boat. It’s nicer to sit on the top deck, but it doesn’t matter where your seat is once you see the whales. There’s a pretty good snack bar and a couple of tiny rest rooms, and that’s about all you need.
We sat on the top deck in the sun. Nobody paid any attention to us. The tourists all around us were fussing with snacks and cameras and binoculars and trying to keep their kids from driving them crazy during the hour it took to get out to Stellwagen Bank.
“Don’t run!” the parents would yell. “You better not fall overboard.” But most of them didn’t get up and stop the kids from running.
“When will we see the whales?” the kids kept asking. “Will we really see them?”
“You have to be patient,” the mom or dad would say. “I promise you’ll see them soon.”
Grownups should never make promises to kids that they’re not sure they can keep. In this case, they were safe enough. P-town has the best whale watching in the world, thanks to Stellwagen Bank. It’s like the whales’ restaurant that’s always open. The Dolphin people say that 97 percent of their passengers see whales, and they’ll give a full refund to anyone who doesn’t.
After a while, the naturalist—there’s one on every whale watch—started to talk about the whales: what kind of whales we could expect to see, which ones are endangered, and what we know about their lives and behavior. The tourists settled down to listen. The naturalist passed around a piece of baleen. Baleen is a kind of built-in strainer. The plates protect the whales’ throats. They never have to swallow anything bigger than tiny, microscopic plankton and krill.
I love all kinds of whales, but the humpbacks are my favorites. We had a good chance of seeing them today. They’re the other reason the P-town whale watch is so popular. Finbacks, which we also get, are awesome. I mean the real awe, not just cool. But all you see of them is the top of their backs in the distance, a gleaming curve gliding up out of the water and back again. And the spout, which is the only reason you spot them at all. You know the rest of the giant is there, hidden beneath the surface, and that’s awesome too. But the humpies come right up to the boat and put on a show.
I always want to start searching the horizon for that first telltale spout too soon.
I reminded myself to wait till we got closer to Stellwagen. Anyhow, it’s usually the naturalist or one of the crew who sights one first. They know exactly where to look. So I closed my eyes, let my skin feel the warmth of the sun, breathed in the salt air with its overtones of coffee and fried clams, and didn’t let myself think about Uncle Tommy sitting next to me.
“Jenny. Do you want something from the snack bar?”
“What?” I opened my eyes. “Yeah, sure. I’ll go.”
Uncle Tommy reached in his pocket for some money.
“Do you want fried clams?”
“No, I’ll have a hot chocolate. I can bring you coffee if you want.”
He handed me a ten-dollar bill.
“Plenty of cream and sugar, okay?”
“Sure.” I knew how he took his damn coffee.
I made my way down the stairs at the stern. By the time I got back, the naturalist was scanning the horizon with powerful binoculars, and most of the passengers had left their seats and gotten out their cameras. I handed Uncle Tommy his coffee and tried to give him back the change. He waved it away.
“What took you so long?”
“There was a line.”
I had finished my hot chocolate and tossed the cup on the way back. I stood and watched as he sipped his coffee. I had put in enough cream that it wouldn’t be too scalding to drink down. As soon as he drained his cup, I turned toward the rail. He followed me.
“Whale at eleven o’clock!”
They probably haven’t said “Thar she blows” in a hundred years. “Thar” doesn’t tell you exactly which direction to look. So instead, you picture a giant clock face in a circle around the boat. Straight ahead—the bow—is twelve o’clock. We were on the port side, to the left in landlubber terms. I could see the spout when it came again. Two of them, barely visible in the hazy air. It was only a couple of finbacks, but the tourists came crowding over, those on the starboard side stumbling and barking their shins on the backpacks and coolers people had stowed between the rows of benches.
I peered down at the crowd that lined the rail on the lower deck, squeezed in between the port side of the cabin and the gunwale. Heads bobbed as they jostled each other, most pretending that they weren’t. Everybody wanted a clear field for their cameras and binoculars. The cabin made it hard to cross the deck amidships. Up here, the deck stretched unobstructed from port to starboard only at the stern. On the lower deck, the biggest open space was the triangle at the bow, in front of the cabin.
I started toward the stairs.
“Where are you going?”
“I want a good view for the humpbacks.”
Uncle Tommy nodded and followed as I threaded through the crowd, down to the lower deck, in one door of the cabin, and out the other.
Humpbacks aren’t the biggest whales, but they’re the most interesting. Each humpback is unique. The marine biologists who study their behavior have names for all of them. If you go on enough whale watches, like me, you can recognize a whale you’ve seen before by the markings on its fluke. That’s the tail, the last thing you see before the whale dives or sounds. Sounding is a deep dive. It’s how a whale leaves when it’s had enough.
Some of the humpbacks are famous, like Salt, who’s been seen every year since 1976. She’s the same age as my mom. Salt’s fluke looks like a pair of very broad white wings with a splotch of black in the middle that Mom calls an inkblot. You can tell one humpback from another by its dorsal fin, too. Salt’s is a little nub with the smattering of white around it that gave her her name. A lot of them have scars that help identify them. For example, the left side of Cane’s fluke is all chewed up, maybe from an argument with a shark. Whales’ wounds are out where everyone can see.
“Humpback whale at two o’clock!”
We had almost reached the bow on the port side of the lower deck. Everybody else rushed to the starboard side. Luckily, the boat is built not to tilt. Everybody oohed and ahhed at the sight of a white flipper waving at us from only a couple of hundred feet away. As the whale rolled and dove, I saw another spout, farther away but moving toward us. A black and white fluke flipped up at us as the second whale submerged. A moment later, we saw them spout again. They hadn’t sounded. They were coming to play.
“It’s Salt!” The naturalist’s voice floated down from the upper deck. “The other one looks like Pepper. We’ll know for sure when they get a little closer.”
I knew it was Pepper. I recognized her asymmetrical inkblot and the dorsal fin that looks like a seal sitting on a rock. I didn’t need to hear the spiel. I already knew how much Salt has been studied and that she’s had babies with a number of different boyfriends. Anyhow, the naturalist was smart enough to stop talking when the two humpies reached the boat.
They went into a series of rolls, taking turns swimming under each other’s bellies and lifting more and more of themselves out of the water. They knew we were watching, all right. Every time they came up, the crowd gave a cry of delight, the way people do at fireworks or for acrobats at the circus.
Uncle Tommy put his hand on my shoulder. I ducked away from it. I looked up at him. He nodded toward the starboard side. I shook my head. Soon, I figured, they’d swim right under the boat and come up on our side. They were really into showing off today.
Sure enough, the whales went under. The newbies groaned with disappointment, but the experienced whale watchers made a beeline for the port side, our side. They pressed close behind us, babbling with pleasure, as the whales slid out from under the keel. Salt came first, then Pepper, so close I could smell their faint aroma, both animal and ocean, like a mermaid’s breath. I could see the blowhole on the top of each head and hear a sort of sigh as they spouted. It’s how they breathe. Each time they did it, a million droplets of water flew upward in a column of spray.
Salt went under. Pepper followed. Everyone watched the dimpled surface of the sea, trying to anticipate where they’d reappear. I couldn’t help grinning when Salt shot up like a ponderous jack-in-the box. She managed to lift almost half of her body length out of the water. Cameras clicked. Pepper popped up next, not quite so high, then Salt again.
“How do they do that?” I heard a woman squeal.
“Wait till you see a full breach,” a man said. “You won’t believe your eyes.”
A breach is when the whale throws itself all the way out of the water. It can fling that thirty- or forty-ton body into the sky with a kind of joyous abandon. Nobody knows why they do it. I think it’s to feel the moment of total freedom. You have to be very lucky to witness a full breach. The whales don’t do it all the time, at least not where humans can see them. If I was a humpback whale, I’d swim way out to sea on a sunny day and breach till I got dizzy. Still, I hoped that Salt and Pepper would feel like it today.
