From her window, she spied on Annie Taylor, who left the trailer periodically either to haul wood inside for the stove that heated the place or to walk on the driftwood-cluttered beach. When she did this latter thing, she carried a pair of binoculars with her. Perched upon the gnarled roots of a piece of driftwood, she used the binoculars to scan the surface of the water. Jenn figured at first she was looking for the resident orcas. Killer whales made use of Possession Sound at all times of the year, and seventy of them lived within fifty miles of Whidbey Island. To Jenn, they were the only sea creatures of interest.
The third time Annie walked the beach, she took a camera and tripod with her. Jenn decided she was probably a wildlife photographer, then, and she asked her father this at breakfast on the day after Annie’s arrival. He was the only person up aside from Jenn. The day was freezing cold outside, and as usual it wasn’t much warmer in the house. Everyone else in the family had apparently decided the best course was to wait out the cold beneath the covers, but it wasn’t raining, and clear weather meant running practice, which was what Jenn intended to do. Still, there was the matter of Annie. . . .
“Hell if I know,” was Bruce’s answer to Jenn’s question about the young woman and photography. “All I do is collect the rent and all I care about her is: is she quiet at night and will she keep from scaring the herring in the bait pool. You’ll have to ask Eddie if you want to know more. Far’s I’m concerned, ignorance is b-l-i-s-s.” He’d been reading a week-old edition of the South Whidbey Record as he spoke. But he looked up then, took in Jenn’s attire, and said, “Just where the hell you going?” when she told him she’d see him later.
“Sprints,” she said. “Tryouts coming up. All Island Girls’ Soccer. You know.”
“For God’s sake be careful if you’re going on the road. There’s ice out there and if you break a leg—”
“I won’t break a leg,” she told him.
Outside, she began to stretch, using the porch steps and the railing. Her breath was like a fog machine in the freezing air.
A bang sounded from the trailer on the far side of the property, and Annie Taylor stalked outside. She had on so many layers of clothing that Jenn was surprised she could move. She headed for the woodpile and grabbed up an armful.
“Stupid, idiot, frigging, asinine, useless, oh yeah right,” came from Annie to Jenn across the yard. “Like this is supposed to . . . Oh great. Thank you very much.”
Jenn watched as Annie piled up wood and staggered with it back to the trailer. She gave a curious look to the woodpile. The Florida woman was sure going through it. Except . . . Jenn realized that there was no scent of woodsmoke in the morning air.
She went over to the trailer’s door. She stuck her head inside and said, “Sure are going through the wood, huh?”
Annie glanced over at her from a squat woodstove in front of which she was kneeling. “Oh, I sure as hell wish,” she said. “None of it’s burning. I’m just trying to find a damn log that will.”
“Weird,” Jenn said. “It should burn fine.”
“Well, should burn and does burn are two different things. If you see smoke coming out of this trailer, believe me, it’s going to be from my ears.”
“Want me to take a look?”
“Be my guest. If you can make this shit burn—pardon my French but I am so frustrated and I spent the whole damn night freezing my tits off—I owe you breakfast.”
Jenn laughed. “Frozen tits, huh?” she said. “Ouch. Lemme look at the stove.”
TWO
Jenn took one look around the inside of the trailer and said, “Gross. Why’d you rent this place?”
“I need the water around here.” Next to the woodstove, Annie grabbed a log from among the two dozen others already scattered on the floor.
“Uh . . . this is an island?” Jenn said. “Last time I looked there was water everywhere.”
“Sure. Right. But I need this water.”
“It’s the same all over.”
“Wrong,” Annie said. She pointed to the woodstove, its door hanging open like a toothless black mouth. “So, d’you know anything about these things?”
“I know you got to clean out the ashes,” Jenn told her after giving it a quick look. “Nothing’s going to burn inside the stove till you do that. What about the dampers? Are they even open? Bet no one checked the flue, and there’s probably bird nests on top of the chimney.”
Annie said, “Oh,” but she made no move to address these problems. Instead she sank onto a filthy chrome-legged kitchen chair and looked dismally around the place.
To Jenn, the interior of the trailer suggested a serious health hazard. Aside from the chromed-legged chair that Annie was using, the furnishings consisted of another similar chair, a ripped-up banquette, a sloping table, and a mildewed couch that stood beneath a window so leaky that something looking suspiciously like moss appeared to be line dancing along its sill. The place was a death trap in various forms. Jenn wondered how long Annie planned to stay.
She scratched her head and said, “D’you want me to get this woodstove working?”
“Oh would you?” Annie said, brightening at once. “I’d get on my knees and kiss your ring. Except . . . I saw you stretching. Were you about to go running or something? I mean, I don’t want you to—”
“No worries. This’ll just take a sec.”
Jenn went outside and grabbed one of the bait buckets she’d been using for her dribbling practice. She took this to the woodstove and began to shovel the ashes into it. She figured that Annie had decided the fireplace tools standing next to the stove were part of the overall décor. The amount of dust on them suggested that no one had touched them in years.
As she shoveled, she said, “No one’s lived here in, like, for my whole life. You sure you want to stay? I mean, you could probably get real sick.”
“It needs to be fixed up, that’s for sure,” Annie agreed. “I was sort of hoping that hot water, ammonia, baking soda, bleach, and white vinegar would take care of the problem.”
“Either that or blow it up,” Jenn said.
“Which,” Annie added, “might not be exactly a bad idea.”
They laughed together. Annie had a nice laugh. She had neat white teeth and a pretty smile. Jenn liked her and wondered how old she was. A lot older than herself, for sure, but Jenn wondered if they still might become friends. Friends were scarce on this part of the island.
She spied some newspapers sitting beneath a few of the logs, and she yanked these out and showed Annie how to build a proper fire: crumpled newspapers first, followed by a good amount of dry kindling, then logs on the top. She glanced at Annie to see if she was following, and Annie shot her a smile, although what Jenn had to admit was that a woman with Florida plates on her car probably hadn’t built fires very often.
She got to her feet and brushed off her hands. When Annie offered her the matches, she said, “Chimney first,” and she went outside, where she hoisted herself to the trailer’s roof and picked her way through the debris she and her brothers had been hurling up there for years. She found the chimney just as she thought she might find it: with a large bird’s nest perched on its top. She cleared this away and shouted down the chimney, “Let ’er rip, Annie.” In a few moments, a satisfying belch of smoke shot into the air.
Back inside the trailer, she found Annie kneeling in front of the woodstove, warming her hands like someone praying to the fire god. Jenn fed more kindling into the blaze and explained how to bank the stove at night. Annie nodded vaguely and leaned back on her heels. She cocked her head at Jenn and said, “I was thinking. . . . You need a job or anything?”
Jenn always needed a job. Along with potential friends, jobs were also scarce in this part of the island. “Doing what? Keeping your fire going?”
“Ha. That, too.” Annie waved vaguely around the trailer’s interio
r. “Let’s face it, Jenn. This place needs a ton of work. I can do some of it but I can’t do it all because I’ve got to get on with some other things. D’you want to help out? Obviously, I’ll pay.”
The pay part sounded good. The having to be near the trailer part didn’t. “I dunno,” Jenn said. “Maybe. I mean, this place is such a dump and spending a bunch of time in here fixing it up . . . ? No offense, but it sort of creeps me out. How much’re you shelling out to stay here, anyway?”
When Annie named the sum, Jenn gawped at her. “You’re so way being cheated,” she declared. “That’s totally unfair. You need to track down Eddie Beddoe and get a better deal.”
Annie’s expression became chagrined as she glanced around the derelict place. “It’s sort of my fault for being in such a rush, I guess.”
“Being in a rush doesn’t mean you deserve to be robbed.”
“Sure. But I agreed on the price. If I tried to change it, he might tell me to go somewhere else.”
“That’s not a bad idea, if you ask me.”
Annie shook her head. “It’s like I said before: I need Possession Point and I need this water.”
“Why?”
“Just . . . well, just because.”
“Is there some big secret? Like we got Bigfoot swimming in Possession Sound and you’re here to take its picture or something?”
Annie said nothing at first, so for a moment Jenn thought she’d actually hit on the truth, as ludicrous as that truth sounded. She added, “Or maybe a prehistoric water thing? Like our own Loch Ness Monster?”
As things turned out, she wasn’t too far off the point, for Annie caved and said, “Hell. I guess you’ll find out eventually. Especially if you work for me.”
“Find out what?”
“Will you work for me?”
“Okay. All right. But you have to pay me.”
“I said I would. Deal?”
“Deal. Okay. Now, why’re you here?”
Annie glanced back at the door, as if worried about listeners. “I’m here because of the seal,” she said.
• • •
A RATHER LONG time later, Jenn would think that she should have called whoa Nellie when Annie Taylor brought up the seal. For there are seals and there are seals, but Jenn knew in an instant that there was only one seal that Annie was talking about. This seal was called Nera. She was coal black from her flippers to her eyeballs. And for some reason that no one would ever speak about no matter how they were questioned on the topic, she’d been showing up for ages in the Whidbey Island waters at the same time every year. She usually hung around a place called Sandy Point as well as the small village of Langley, cavorting in the water near the Langley marina and barking at tourists, townspeople, and fishermen, like a swimmer trying to get their attention. But—and this was the weirdest part of her behavior—she made the swim from Langley to Possession Point on the very same day, at the very same time, of the very same month each year. She remained in Possession Point’s waters for exactly twenty-four hours, swimming restlessly back and forth, moaning and barking like an abandoned dog. After that, she returned to Langley, spent another month or two hanging in the water below Seawall Park before leaving for wherever she went until the next year rolled around and she did the same things all over again. Her comings and goings were magical and completely mysterious to the people on the south end of Whidbey Island. And the way Jenn figured it, the people on the south end of Whidbey Island were not going to be happy if they found out someone was here to mess with their magic and mystery.
So Jenn said, “A seal? What seal? What d’you want with a seal?” as if she didn’t know exactly what seal Annie was talking about.
Annie said, “Come on. Don’t tell me you don’t know about her. Langley’s got . . . Here, wait a sec. . . .” She went to one of her boxes and pulled out a manila folder from which torn-out magazine pages frothed. She opened this and fingered through them. She brought out an article with brightly colored pictures: a festival, children eating ice cream, yokels wearing bizarre seal costumes, balloons, booths, and a banner across the entry to a park screaming WELCOME BACK NERA!!! in huge red letters.
Jenn couldn’t pretend not to know what this was: one of the village of Langley’s festivals. The dumbnut city fathers had a festival for everything, all to lure tourists to the town’s struggling bed-and-breakfasts, cafés, galleries, boutiques, and T-shirt shops. Nera was practically custom built for a town that welcomed whales, celebrated a “soup box” derby, used alpacas as camels in a pageant at Christmastime, and killed a citizen every year for Murder Mystery Weekend.
So Jenn had to say, “Oh. You must mean Nera.”
“Uh, yeah. I must mean Nera. Is there another seal?”
“Well . . . no. I mean, not exactly.”
“What d’you mean ‘not exactly’?” Annie looked thoughtful before her eyes lit up. She cried, “Jesus, Jenn. Is there more than one? God, wouldn’t that be a coup!”
Jenn frowned. Annie obviously had something cooking, not only to do with Nera but also with Possession Point. If it was Nera alone, she’d be parking her body in Langley: Nera’s central hangout. But for her to come to Possession Point, to insist that she had to be here where the waters were somehow “necessary” to her . . . ? It didn’t sound right to Jenn, so she said directly, “What d’you want her for?”
“Nera?”
“Yeah, Nera.”
“Nothing, really.” And when Jenn looked skeptical, Annie went on. “Okay, two things. One is the possibility of a genetic mutation. The other is the even better possibility of new species of seal.”
“And you care about this, why?” Jenn asked.
“I’m a marine biologist,” she said. “Or at least that’s what I’ll be officially if I ever finish my damn dissertation, and I need that seal to do it.”
“To write it for you? I don’t think she’s up to the job.”
“Very funny. I need her to prove my argument. Or to reveal something new to the world. Either way, I’m made.”
Annie explained the rest in what Jenn would come to know as Annie Taylor fashion. She dipped into one subject, slid over another, painted gloss on a third. Jenn wasn’t sure what this said about Annie, except that when she wanted something, she was a really fast talker in order to get it. So what she revealed in a rush was that Nera either had the rarest of rare conditions called melanism—“All-black, just the opposite of an all-white albino,” Annie explained—or she had a genetic mutation or she was a new species of seal. “She looks vaguely like a Ross seal,” Annie said, “but if that’s the case she’s seriously out of territory. So I figure she’s either a new species or a mutant.”
“Or the opposite of an albino,” Jenn said.
“Yeah. But my money’s on mutant. Which, for my purpose, is almost as good as being a new species.”
“Why?”
“Because the frigging oil companies all over the world keep claiming that their spills aren’t hurting the animal life. Nera’s my chance to prove them wrong. I mean, look at the facts: Oil spilled here around twenty years ago and now we’ve got a freak seal at our fingertips, saying ‘Look at me please and run a few tests.’”
Tests? That rang all the alarms. “No one’s letting you get close to Nera,” Jenn said. “Just so you know. And when was there ever an oil spill around here, anyway?”
“I already said. Twenty years ago. Something like that. It saturated Possession Point. You don’t know about it? Well, maybe you wouldn’t. How long have you lived here? How old are you anyway? You look . . . Are you twelve?”
“Hey! I’m fifteen, okay? And if there was an oil spill, I’d know about it.”
“Why? It would’ve been cleaned up. This place’s remote, sure as hell, but no one’s going to let bilge oil sit on the beach for twenty years. And that’s what it was. Bilge oil. The worst there is
. It’d’ve been cleaned up within weeks, maybe two or three months. But in a couple of years there wouldn’t even have been a sign of it. Except in the sea life.”
“Like Nera.”
“Like Nera. Who just happened to show up a year after the spill? Two years after it? What does that tell you? I know what it tells me. So I need to get a close look at her. I need some samples. One way or the other, she’s proof of something. I just need to know what the ‘something’ is.”
“Samples? No way. No one’s letting you near that seal, Annie.”
“Oh?” Annie gave an airy, dismissive wave. “Believe me, we’ll see about that.”
THREE
Asking her dad about an oil spill at Possession Point got Jenn nowhere. Asking her mom offered much the same result. Her dad was deep into his yearly preparations for Seattle BrewFest, so the only answer he gave to her questions was to grunt, “Hon, do I look like I got time for a discussion on ancient history right now?” as he wrestled with a huge glass jug of amber ale in his brewing shed. Her mom was deep into her daily reading of the Bible, so her reply had to do with God’s speaking to mortal man through natural disasters. When Jenn tried to argue that an oil spill at Possession Point was hardly a natural disaster, Kate’s response of “You just look at all the tornadoes hitting the Midwest this year, Jennifer, and ask yourself if God’s displeasure isn’t evident when houses get blown to bits and semis get tossed in the air” told Jenn that any conversation with her mom was going to be less flavored with facts and more flavored with her mom’s interpretation of whatever part of the Old Testament she and her church friends were in the midst of studying. What Jenn knew from all this was that if she wanted to discover the truth about any long-ago oil spills, she was probably going to have to do it on her own.