The Noticer Returns

  Baker made it to the group in several big, splashing steps and gestured to the sacks of seafood. “Good grief!” he exclaimed. “I don’t know how much we have, but I do need to get to the vehicle. We need to get this on ice or take it somewhere. Good grief,” he said again. “What do we put the stuff in to ice it down? There aren’t enough ice chests in Fairhope to hold all this.”

  Standing beside the sacks, Baker nudged Sealy and said, “Honey? Are you sure I should walk all the way to the bus? My ankle is—”

  “Your ankle was fine when you were running all over the bay, gigging flounder a few minutes ago,” Sealy said.

  “Guys?”

  They turned and saw Christy moving toward them. “What’s wrong?” Baker asked.

  “Jones is gone,” she said looking around. “At least I . . . well, I guess he’s gone. When he got out of the water, he sat down over there.” Christy pointed. “He was right there.”

  They walked to the place Christy had last seen him and looked up and down the beach, but Jones was nowhere in sight. “He’s probably gone to get Christy’s bus,” Baker said.

  Christy pulled keys from her pocket. “No,” she said. “He would have asked for the keys.”

  “Did he walk to town?” Sealy asked. “Maybe he went to get ice?”

  “Well, no matter what,” Baker said. “We have to get ice, and we’d better do it now.” He stopped and looked hard at something down the shoreline from where they stood.

  “Do you see him?” Sealy asked excitedly.

  Baker looked at her. “No, honey,” he said and fixed his gaze down the beach again. “Now that it’s daylight, I think I know where we are.” He pointed. “I am almost certain that’s Jack Bailey’s house. Listen, you two stay here. If you can, get some water on those bags of shrimp and flounder. I’ll run and enlist Jack. Or at least use his phone.”

  Baker began to shuffle through the sand in the direction of the Baileys’ house. He only went a hundred feet or so before he turned around and yelled, “Hey! Don’t worry about Jones. He’ll be back soon!”

  Nineteen

  I awaken early on most days, often well before dawn, but when my cell phone rang that Monday morning, I was still in bed. The phone was on a chair across the room, though, and I wasn’t sure where it was located. In a dazed half-sleep I did not know how long it had been ringing and was not inclined to answer it anyway. I rolled over and waited for the noise to stop. When it did, I glanced at the clock. It was almost eight thirty.

  The phone began ringing again. Why was I still in bed? Deeply fatigued and having just been forced into consciousness, my thoughts were muddled, but travel delays and a canceled flight soon came into focus. Stranded in Atlanta the night before, I had rented a car, driven the six hours to Orange Beach, and gotten to sleep just before five that morning.

  I was alone. Evidently Polly had taken the boys to school and allowed me to sleep. The thought crossed my mind that I still would have been sleeping had I turned off my phone. It was now ringing for the third time. Finally, thankfully, it stopped . . . and almost immediately began ringing again.

  I kicked the covers off a bit more aggressively than usual and lurched across the bedroom for the phone. Not recognizing the number displayed on the screen, I hesitated just long enough for it to stop ringing. Not trusting this mysteriously persistent marathon caller to give up, I waited, and, sure enough, it rang again.

  Okay, okay, you win, I thought and grudgingly answered.

  “Mr. Andrews?” a woman’s voice asked.

  Sorry. You first, I thought. “Who’s calling, please?”

  “This is Jack Bailey’s assistant. Is this Mr. Andrews?”

  Jack Bailey’s assistant? What was this about? “Yes, it is,” I answered.

  She must have immediately handed the phone to Jack because his voice was the next I heard. “Andy?”

  “Yes, Jack . . . how are you?”

  “Oh, I’m fine, but our buddies are in a bit of a jam. I hope you don’t mind, but I got your number from Sandy Stimpson.”

  This was strange. I had only met Jack a couple of times and barely knew him. “No problem,” I said. “What’s going on? Which buddies and what jam?”

  After Jack gave me a brief rundown, I threw on some shorts and a T-shirt, wrote a quick note for Polly, and left the house.

  A little less than an hour later, I was sitting on a driftwood log by myself, waiting for Jack Bailey. I was sure this was the place we were supposed to meet, but where was Jack?

  Three people were bunched together far down the beach from where I continued to wait. They were too far away to recognize, but I was fairly certain it had to be the Larsons and Christy Haynes.

  Hearing a voice behind me, I stood and saw Jack Bailey approaching, talking on his cell phone. Finishing the call about the time he reached me, Jack smiled and extended his hand. “I apologize for keeping you waiting.”

  We shook hands. “No problem.” I saw his gaze move to the three down the beach. “Nothing happening that I can tell,” I said, and he nodded.

  “Our house is right down there,” Jack pointed. “Seven . . . eight lots away . . . if you’d rather, we can head that way. We can watch them from the wharf.”

  “No . . . I’m fine,” I said. “Thanks though. Maybe later?”

  “Sure.”

  “So, Jack, I mean, seriously . . .” I held my hand up to my eyes, shading them as I looked again at the three figures slowly working their way toward us. I shook my head in amused disbelief and looked at the man who had wanted this meeting. “They really think something might be wrong?”

  Jack grinned. “Do you remember the first time he disappeared on you?”

  I spread my arms in an “Are you kidding?” gesture. “He always disappears! To this day I don’t know if he’s in town or not.”

  Jack smiled and nodded. “We’ll calm them down when they get back.” He motioned toward his house and said, “I see Mary Chandler on the end of our wharf. She’s talking to someone on her cell, but it’s not me.” He held his phone out and grinned, making me smile too. “You sure you don’t want to head to the house?”

  “Thanks, but I’m comfortable,” I said, as though I were back at the Grand Hotel in a suite. As if to prove how pleasant it was, I sat back down on the log. After a moment Jack joined me. We both looked at the three. They were steadily getting closer. Without taking my eyes from them, I grinned and asked, “Which one of them thought he might have drowned?”

  “Christy,” he said. “By the time Baker and I got back here, she and Sealy had already called 911 at one of my neighbors’ houses. You know Hoss Mack . . .” I nodded, acknowledging that I did know the popular sheriff. “Well,” Jack continued, “I called Hoss right away. Thankfully I got him before they launched the flotilla.”

  Both of us were laughing at that point. “Good grief,” I said. “You know the old man would have shown up if they had started dragging the bay for his body. He never would’ve been able to resist it.”

  Jack grabbed my arm. “He probably would’ve floated up by one of the boats, and when they bent over to get him, would have rolled over and said hello!” We fell over in the sand then, laughing until we couldn’t. It was an unusual bond between Jack and me—having the old man in common—and I think we both enjoyed that moment in a way no one else could have.

  “You know, Jack,” I said as I attempted to stretch my back, “I have always wondered why, here on the Eastern Shore, you all call them ‘wharves.’ Like, ‘This is my wharf,’ or ‘Look at the wharf’ . . .”

  “What do you call them?” Jack asked.

  “Docks. We say, ‘Meet me on the dock,’ or ‘They did a nice job on that dock.’ Here, you call it a wharf. In Orange Beach, it’s a dock. And we’re only forty-five minutes away from each other. Same state. Same county, even.”

  “I never thought of that,” Jack said and looked at our friends who were getting closer and closer. “Wait until you see them up close. They look li
ke they’ve been through a war.”

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Jack looked at me. “Oh . . . sorry. I forgot you didn’t know.” He turned around and motioned toward the road and the woods beyond. “Sometime in the middle of the night, the old man led them through there. They came from the old cemetery and got through that in the dark.” He paused as if trying to capture a thought that had fluttered by his consciousness for a moment, only to dance away, out of reach. “I’ve been in there in the daylight and thought I’d never get out. They are scratched and cut to pieces.”

  I didn’t understand. “Why would he bring them through there?”

  Jack looked at me with an odd expression. “For the jubilee,” he said.

  I was frowning. None of this made any sense at all. “Jack, have you ever even witnessed a jubilee?” He shook his head no. “No,” I said, “and neither have I or my wife or any of our friends. You haven’t seen one, and you live on the shore where they take place!

  “Now, how in the heck did these guys come through here in the middle of the night and just happen upon one?” I glanced around. “And I guess they managed to get some flounder. You can smell the fish. There’s shrimp over there on the ground, so they must have spilled a few from some bucket they picked up somewhere. I just don’t get it. How is it possible for anybody to happen upon a jubilee? What are the odds?”

  When I paused, Jack had tilted his head to the side and looked at me through narrowed eyes. “They didn’t happen upon it.”

  “What?”

  “He sent them into the water, had them spread out . . .” Jack stopped again.

  “Oh, come on,” I scoffed, a hint of aggravation beginning to appear. “He had them spread out? He had them spread out and what?”

  “This is what they told me,” Jack said coolly. “Apparently the old man spread them out, and five minutes after they were in the water, a jubilee happened around them.”

  Jack smiled and reached into his back pocket, retrieving an oversized brown envelope. His eyes twinkled like Jones’s as he removed what was obviously folded paper. I smiled, seeing an expression on Jack’s face one doesn’t often see on an adult. But I recognized it. His countenance was that of a sixth grader someone had just called a liar. Now that kid had assembled everyone on the playground and was about to prove that what he had said was true.

  He held the paper up for me to see and twisted it between his thumb and first two fingers. The paper—papers—spread in the way playing cards do. Whatever Jack Bailey held in his hand, I now saw there were three. But three what?

  He continued to hold the papers but placed his hand behind his back and seemed to change the subject. “They had onion sacks,” Jack said. Opening his eyes wide, he added, “They had a lot of onion sacks. They didn’t have a bucket, Andy. When the old man spread them out, they had onion sacks with their names on the labels. They each had a gig, a net, and a light. They were in the water before it happened. They were prepared.”

  Jack walked me over to a flattened area of grass. “This is where the pickups came in to haul the sacks out of here. Those shrimp on the ground just fell out of holes in the sacks.” He was watching me carefully and beginning to get that cocky look the sixth grader has after he has proven his point.

  “I just . . . It’s a bit much, isn’t it? Even for you and me, I mean. And we know . . . Well, it’s astounding and typical all at the same time.” I was still trying to process the evidence in front of me.

  “You know Carson Kimbrough, right? Big seafood dealer?” Jack asked.

  I nodded. “Very well. Awesome guy. In fact, Carson and Cynde live around the corner from us.”

  “Well, I called Carson. He sent a refrigerated truck and a guy with scales and a checkbook. They took all fourteen bags.”

  “You sold it all?” I asked in amazement.

  “Yes, I sold it,” Jack said, laughing. “What did you think we were going to do with it? Clean and put it in Ziploc bags in the freezer? It was more than six hundred pounds of shrimp and almost nine hundred pounds of flounder.”

  My jaw had fallen somewhere around my knees. It was still almost beyond comprehension. “Yeah,” Jack said, seeing my reaction. “Yeah, I am telling you, I have never seen that much fish and shrimp in one place in my life! Here . . . look.”

  From behind his back he produced the three papers and handed them to me. “The bags had names on them,” Jack said. “I had Carson’s guy weigh them separately and write the checks according to what names were on which bags. See . . .” He gestured at the checks as I opened the envelope. “They’re only first names, but it’s a local bank, and if need be, Carson can add the last names before they cash them.”

  Again, I was stunned. “How much did you get for all that?”

  “I just told him to do the best he could on the going rate,” Jack said. “The flounder were whole, so he paid $2.50 a pound on them and the shrimp were huge. So $6.25 a pound there. I guess that’s okay . . .”

  “They are going to faint,” I said. “You did a good thing here, Jack. These folks need this.” I went through the checks again before handing over the envelope. I had started to do the math in my head when Jack had told me the weights and per pound price—I just wanted to have some idea—but I realized the total was all separated nicely right in my hands.

  Christy’s check was for $1,824.50. Baker’s check was a big one for $2,512.50, and his wife, Sealy, had earned $1,505. I was sure they would be happy, but I also knew that all three were being squeezed financially and hoped it would be what they needed.

  My thoughts drifted to the old man. Once again I was amazed at what happened once he began to impart his guidance and perspective. “You know, Jack, Jones told me once that wisdom could not be diminished. He said, ‘It can be silenced, it can be ignored, but it cannot be diminished. Wisdom will grow,’ he said, ‘as you seek it and add it into your life, but if you really want to see wisdom flourish . . . if you desire to see wisdom grow and bloom . . . you must plant a seed of it into the life of another.’”

  Jack thought about that before nodding slowly. “Another seed reference,” he remarked. “Once, long ago, I heard him say that he planted seeds often and generously, but those seeds only grew to full maturity in soil that was being tended diligently.” Lifting his head and turning to look directly at me, Jack said, “There are so many things I’d like to know about him. Where does he go? Why doesn’t he stay?” He glanced at me and said wryly, “Where is he right now?”

  “According to him,” I shrugged, “he’s always around.”

  “I believe it,” Jack said.

  “I do too,” I said. “In fact, I count on it.”

  We stood then and greeted Baker, Sealy, and Christy, who had finally arrived at our spot on the shore. They didn’t appear to be incredibly tired, considering what they had experienced. Baker, in particular, looked remarkably buoyant. Jack noticed the same thing, shooting a questioning glance at me that seemed to ask, What’s up with Baker?

  As we talked, I grew ever more curious about Baker. Sealy and Christy, it appeared, were also somewhat baffled by his behavior. Baker did not act tired in the least. Quite the opposite, in fact, was the case. He was a bit over the top, almost euphoric, and I wasn’t sure how to interpret his mood.

  Jack gave them the checks, and it was awesome to be there to watch. Christy wept with joy, and pretty soon we had all joined the celebration with tears of our own. The three of them told us the story of what had happened in the middle of the night, before dawn, prompting each other, laughing and marveling at specific moments they remembered and would remember forever.

  Jack asked if they were convinced about Jones’s safety, and they assured us they were. In turn, we affirmed that they were correct in that assessment. Jones would return, we told them.

  “Yep,” Jack said, “trust me. It might be a decade before you see him again. Then again, the old guy could be taking a nap in your backseat this afternoon when you climb in
to your car. When will he be back? Where will he show up? Who knows? But count on this: you will see him again.”

  I agreed. “He’s around,” I added, “and, yes, he’s fine.” With that, Jack and I looked at each other and gave a little nod. Together we had verbally tied the situation up with a neat bow. I thought Jack had been articulate, and with my little postscript we were able to reach a logical end point for us all. It was the perfect time for everyone to shake hands, wish each other well, and say good-bye. We were about to do just that when Baker felt the need to agree with us.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said with a big smile. “He is fine. Yes! Jones is fine. He is better than fine. He is great. This is unbelievable, and I’m so happy. I have never been so . . . Well, I’m just so happy that he’s fine. And he is fine. Absolutely fine. Great. Yes!”

  Then he laughed.

  It was one of the strangest things I have ever seen in my life. Jack and I exchanged a long look as Baker laughed. Christy’s mouth was open, and her eyebrows were so high they threatened to merge with her hairline. We all looked at Sealy, who had not taken her eyes off her husband. It was as though she wanted to ask if he had taken something, but knowing he had not, she didn’t bother. But it was apparent she was as mystified by her husband’s behavior as the rest of us.

  Baker’s mood seemed transcendent—over the top—even more so than might be expected at such a moment.

  I just didn’t fully know why.

  It had happened, it was over, and if what he had witnessed had lasted any less than the couple of minutes it did, Baker might not have believed it himself. It had never occurred to him to take a picture with the camera in his phone, but he decided that even with proof of what had happened, he was the only person on earth to whom it meant anything anyway.

  When he had returned to the onion sacks, filled with shrimp and flounder earlier that morning, Baker had Jack Bailey in tow, but his wife and Christy were gone. His intentions had been to get the seafood taken care of right away, and Jack had offered to help. Instead, he was forced to look for the missing women.