Dave sat on his bed. Derric turned from his desk. Dave was frowning down at his shoes. He finally said, “Girls, son,” to which Derric replied, “I know where this is going.”
“Yeah? Where?”
“Mom’s worried about me and Courtney. But nothing’s going on.”
Dave Mathieson looked doubtful, and who could blame him? Derric knew his dad’s story: He’d been first married at nineteen for the only reason a boy of nineteen marries. “Dumbest thing I ever did,” was how Dave usually put it. And then he always added, “No second dumbest,” in case Derric misunderstood.
Derric continued. The best idea, he figured, was to tell his dad about the Pledge and the prayer group. Dave Mathieson listened, same way he always did, sitting on the edge of Derric’s bed with his gaze unwavering from Derric’s face, but this didn’t mean he was impressed with the information, and he more or less made this clear when Derric was finished talking about it.
He said, “Pledges don’t mean much when things heat up, son. Things might start with pledging six ways to Sunday, but they don’t end up there.”
“This time they do,” Derric assured him. “She really means it.” And to prove his point, he told his dad about exactly what had happened in the prayer group that day.
His dad said, “How’d you feel about that?”
“The prayer group or her saying what she said?”
“Both.”
“Lame. I mean, I’m not the prayer group type anyway. But I guess . . . well, at least she’s trying.”
“Trying to what?”
“You know. Not to. You know. And I don’t think I want to anyway. But I’m not sure why.”
“This have to do with Becca King?”
Derric shook his head. “It was different with her. I mean, it wasn’t so . . . Things weren’t going so fast like they are with Courtney. I don’t know, Dad. Maybe they weren’t going at all.”
Dave nodded. He said, “Hard to know what’s real and what isn’t sometimes.”
“That’s the truth,” Derric admitted. Except, of course, Courtney felt so real, every sensuous inch of her.
Dave had shifted his gaze from Derric to the beanbag chair for some reason. Derric tensed as he watched this, knowing what was inside. But Dave made no mention of the beanbag and when he finally looked up, he said, “I want you to take care, no matter what. I’m not just talking about condoms here. You got that? I’m talking about seeing beyond the moment. That’s the toughest thing to master.” He rose from the bed, slapping his thighs as he did so. Then he picked up the beanbag, and Derric froze.
“God,” Dave Mathieson said, “this thing’s been around forever. Don’t you want a new one? Or maybe a recliner or something else more comfortable?”
Derric’s lip felt a bit stiff as he replied. “Nah, I like old stuff. I like stuff with history.”
“Well,” Dave said, “that certainly applies to this old thing.”
He tossed the beanbag back onto the floor. It landed with the repair of duct tape on top. To Derric that repair looked like an enormous X. And X, of course, always marked the spot.
PART FOUR
Mutiny Bay
NINETEEN
Becca didn’t even allow herself to think about Derric and Courtney Baker. She told herself that there was no point. She could see that they were totally at odds with each other when they darted out of the prayer circle’s classroom, but she had bigger things on her mind than the extremely remote possibility that Derric had suddenly decided to return to being Derric again.
Besides, she had Tod Schuman to worry about. Moreover, she had his whispers to worry about. They’d been telling her that he was intent on offing his part of the responsibility for their Western Civ project onto her. Make her do it . . . got to do it . . . no way in front of the class . . . stupid stuff she thinks is important . . . were illustrating his Big Plan, and she wasn’t about to let that happen. “You better get your head around the fact that no way am I doing this alone,” she told him. His reply of, “Then you better get your head around the fact that you don’t know everything there is to know about how to make a report, man,” didn’t reassure her of anything other than his complete obstinacy.
On top of that, it turned out that Ivar Thorndyke wanted her to start her scuba lessons ASAP. To facilitate this, he had dragged her away from her job in his chicken coop and bundled her into his truck soon after she’d said she’d be his diving spy. He wanted her to meet Chad Pederson, who would be her instructor, he said. Chad wanted to bring her up to speed before she joined the class with his other dive student.
But when they arrived in Langley, the marine chandlery door had a BE BACK LATER sign posted on it. Ivar swore when he saw this and said, “Damn fool said he’d be here to meet us.” He looked around the marina in the biting wind and Becca did the same, trying to catch sight of anyone dumb enough to be out here in the drizzly cold.
Ivar squinted out into the passage and seemed to see something. He went to his truck and got out a pair of binoculars. He said, “What the . . . ?” when he focused the binoculars on a distant boat sailing in the direction of Sandy Point.
He handed the binoculars over to Becca and said, “Tell me what you see in that boat, Becks. My eyes aren’t like they used to be,” and she found the boat in question out on the water. Two people were in it, a man and a woman. They were going fast as far as she could tell. The water was rough, but they didn’t seem to be letting that stop them.
Becca couldn’t tell much about either of the people although she told Ivar that she could see that the woman had red hair and that the boat was from Port Angeles. But that was all Ivar seemed to need because no way in hell are they going to preceded his announcement of, “Come on. Let’s go!” He made it fiercely and he didn’t mean “let’s go home” because he grabbed his keys and a heavy jacket out of the truck and he headed at a trot for the dock.
Becca followed him. They went up on one of the wharfs and then rattled down the metal gangway and along a dock. There Ivar leaped into a fishing boat. He said, “You handle the lines. Do what I tell you,” and before Becca could assess the whys of what they were doing, they were on the boat, Ivar had his keys in the ignition, and they were chugging out of the marina, pulling on life jackets as they went.
She strained to pick up Ivar’s whispers. Because of the noise of the boat’s engine, though, all she could manage was they mean . . . know it, know it . . . she finds out and Nera will be . . . so she knew this had to do with the seal.
She shouted over the noise, “Whose boat is that, Ivar?”
He said, “Pederson’s. He’s got that damn scientist with him. You said red hair, yes? Well, that’s the scientist. Annie Taylor. And if they’re out on the water when he said he’d meet us in the harbor, there’s only one reason. They’re after Nera.”
“How’d they even know where she is?”
“Internet site. Anyone an’ his brother c’n find out where she is if she’s been seen in the last twenty-four hours.”
In open water, Ivar increased the speed of his boat. They barreled out into the passage. It was rough out there, and bitterly cold, and the water was a rolling, roiling seascape. Their speed made the boat crash into the waves, so Becca held on for her life and kept the other boat in sight. But what she thought was, What is it about this seal? The answer to that question had to be important, she figured, for all these people to act so crazy about the animal.
Up ahead of them Chad’s boat was fast. So was Ivar’s, but he didn’t attempt to overtake it. Becca wondered about this till they finally came to their destination after nearly an hour. This was a bay on the west side of Whidbey Island, where the shoreline made an undulating curve and houses hugged the edge of a bluff overlooking a sandy beach below.
Here, Chad Pederson cut his engine, and his boat bobbed in the gentler waves. In its stern the red-ha
ired woman stood with a camera focused on the water. Chad joined her with a pair of binoculars. They might have been tracing a route from the bay to the beach and up the bluff to the houses, except for the fact that swimming rapidly toward them was the smooth, entirely black shape of a seal.
Ivar muttered, “Oh no you damn don’t,” and he gunned the engine of his boat. He brought it up between the seal and Chad’s craft. He seemed determined to put an end to whatever was going on.
“Back your boat off one hundred yards,” he yelled at them. “You know the law.”
Chad Pederson yelled back, “What’re you talking about? I’m not approaching her. She’s approaching me. Or at least she was till you put your boat in the way.”
“You don’t back off, you’re getting reported,” Ivar told him. “You got that? Back off.”
Annie Taylor said, “We’re taking her picture, Ivar. That’s all.”
Where it’ll start came from Ivar. Close enough almost and then seemed to come from Annie or Chad.
Ivar said, “What you’re doing is getting too close. What you’re doing is bothering her. What you’re doing is endangering her and endangering yourselves. You want a picture of her, you take it from the beach or from the ferry like everyone else.”
Damn stupid old man . . . chance of a lifetime . . . no one stands in my way . . . if anyone knows, then everyone will . . . this could mean she’ll . . . when someone’s desperate . . . grateful and then what comes next will be . . . hurt for sure . . .
Becca fumbled for the AUD box earphone. Better the static, she figured, than trying to work out what everyone was thinking about everything that was going on.
In the other boat, Annie Taylor suddenly put her hand on Chad Pederson’s arm. She said, “Chad, look,” and they all followed her gaze. The seal had actually come between the two boats, putting herself so close that any one of them could have touched her.
Annie began firing off pictures. At first no one said a word.
Becca was astonished by the seal’s strange beauty, every part of her black. Her sleek skin, her eyes, her nose, her whiskers . . . The only thing about her that wasn’t black was her teeth, and these became visible when she barked a greeting.
That prompted Ivar, who said, “Back away. Your boat’ll crush her,” to Chad.
At the same moment, Annie said, “Wait a minute! She’s got a transmitter on!”
While Annie angled for a better position to take a picture from Chad’s boat, the seal turned to face her, which allowed Becca and Ivar to see what Annie meant. To Becca it looked like an old garage door opener fastened to the black seal’s skin. She squinted at it and heard Annie saying, “It looks glued to her neck. Glued, Chad, glued!” as if this was the most important detail in the world. She took more pictures, saying, “Mother of God, I do not believe this!” while Ivar kept saying, “Get away. Get away!”
It came to Becca that Ivar was no longer speaking to Chad or Annie. Rather, he was talking to the seal. It seemed, too, that he got through to her in some obscure fashion because Nera finally dove beneath the water, disappearing from view. She resurfaced some two hundred yards away. She was heading at that point back out into the passage.
Annie Taylor looked from the seal to Ivar. She said, “You know something about that transmitter, don’t you? You know why she has it on. And you know why she hasn’t lost it, don’t you?”
Ivar’s reply was “I don’t know nothing.”
But Becca could tell that he was lying.
TWENTY
A few days before her next scuba lesson, Jenn finally had time to work on her dribbling. Annie wasn’t there, Jenn’s mom had taken her brothers into Langley to look for shoes at the thrift store, and Jenn’s dad was inside the bait shack, doing some work that involved a lot of banging and even more swearing. With time on her hands, she set up her soccer obstacles and got to work. She was thirty minutes into it when Annie arrived.
Annie didn’t stop the Honda to have a chat. She just waited for Jenn to kick the obstacles to one side, and she gunned the car’s engine a couple of times. She looked seriously distracted, so when Jenn had made way for her, she decided to follow the car and see what was up.
She found Annie inside the trailer, stoking the fire. Next to the woodstove, she’d placed her laptop on a chair, and her digital camera was attached to it, uploading pictures. When the door closed behind Jenn, Annie looked up. She said, “Jenn. Hi,” in an absentminded way. She went back to the laptop and the camera.
Clearly, something was going on, and it was only a moment before Jenn saw what it was. Somehow and somewhere, Annie had taken pictures of Nera. They were so close that she could have been in the water with the seal.
“Wow. Where’d you find her?” Jenn asked. “How’d you find her?”
“Mutiny Bay,” Annie said, rapidly scrolling through the shots. “Seal spotters Web site. Bless those loondogs.”
“You got totally close to her.”
“She swam right up to Chad’s boat,” Annie said.
“Oh,” Jenn said.
“What?” Annie looked up at her sharply. She read something on Jenn that Jenn didn’t want there because she said, “Hey, girl. I told you. I’ve got a partner at home. The Chad-boy is yours for the taking. I mean, if you want him.”
“Big thanks,” Jenn said. “I’m not desperate for him yet, but I’ll let you know.”
Annie chuckled. She put her hand out and grabbed Jenn by the waist. She pulled her over, said, “Check this out,” and leaned her head companionably against Jenn’s arm. She said, “I’m thinking she’s not a Ross seal out of her territory at all. D’you know what that means?” She looked up at Jenn.
Her face was close, uplifted, and luminous with the light shining on it from above. Jenn found herself thinking it would be nice to kiss her. Then she found herself wondering what the hell she was thinking and she moved away quickly, covering her movement by pulling a second chair over so that she could sit and look at the picture on the screen. She felt Annie’s gaze on her, and heat climbed up her neck. She said in answer to Annie’s question, “Seems to me that a seal’s a seal.”
“Not if it can’t be identified,” Annie said. “Like I said before, she could be a species of seal not yet documented, but I’ve decided that’s not likely. I mean, I can’t exactly see some seal swimming around Puget Sound every year and going unnoticed as a new species, can you? So ’f you ask me, this seal’s a mutant and if that’s the case, we’re onto something big. We’re not the first ones to see her, though. My guess is she’s been some place other than Puget Sound.”
“Well sure. But we already know that. She’s only here once a year.”
“Yeah. But what I mean is . . . Look at this picture. She’s got a transmitter on, and she sure as hell didn’t put it there herself. Plus, it’s an old one. Check it out. Ivar and his little buddy were there giving us grief, so I couldn’t get the best possible shot, but you can more or less see it.”
“How d’you know it’s old?” For her part, Jenn couldn’t tell it was a transmitter at all. She could see something on the back of the seal’s neck, but it could have been anything. Still, she got Annie’s point. No matter what it was, the fact that the seal was wearing it at all suggested that someone had put it there and, perhaps, that same someone was tracking her. But who was that person? she wondered. And why was the seal important to him?
“These kinds of transmitters,” Annie said, pointing to what could be seen of the gizmo on the seal, “they aren’t used any longer. They fell off, so something better had to be created, something that the seal couldn’t shed.” Annie flicked through more of the pictures. It seemed she was looking for the perfect shot. It wasn’t there, though, because she said, “Damn, damn, damn. I need one clear picture of that thing—just one clear picture—and we’re in business.”
“I thought you wanted her DNA.”
“I want that, too, but this is something else. This is something that could be even better.” She clicked off the pictures and turned to Jenn. She said, “I need you big-time, Beauty. We’ve got to get you certified to dive. We need to get our hands on that seal.”
• • •
THE NEXT DIVING lesson rolled round in two days, and Annie made sure that Jenn was ready for it. They drove into the parking lot of South Whidbey Fitness fifteen minutes early, and Annie hopped out with a bright, “Good deal, he’s already here,” in reference to Chad Pederson’s truck. Jenn followed her with less enthusiasm in the early morning darkness. She hadn’t slept well, she still hadn’t got a whole soccer practice in, and this entire Nera business was starting to feel like something that could seriously derail her life. So she trudged after Annie toward the fitness center. The only sign of life in the place was a bicycle chained to a rack by the door, along with a few lights burning inside the building.
In the locker room, Annie stripped as before, sliding her shapely legs into the butt floss bottom of her bikini. Jenn was sour enough in mood to say, “How’d you swim in that thing anyway?” and Annie turned to her, cupping her breasts and jiggling them playfully as she replied. “Honestly? I’d rather go nude in the pool. I like the sensation. But Chad might freak out. What about you?”
Jenn quickly looked away from Annie. “What about me?”
“Nude or dressed? I walk around my place in Florida butt naked most of the time.”
“Bet the neighbors like that.”
“Well, my partner does.”
“Lucky him,” Jenn said.
“Her,” Annie said. And when Jenn glanced her way, Annie added, “Sorry. I probably should’ve said. Does that freak you out?”
Jenn shrugged, although her heart started break-dancing and she could tell her face had gone traffic-light red. “Why should it?” she asked. “This isn’t, like, nineteen-fifty or something.”