by Hugh Howey
“That’s correct. We have a warrant, mind you. And I suppose now is as good time as any to tell you that all of this has to stay off the record. I’m sure you understand what it means to tamper with an ongoing investigation.”
“All too well,” I say. “So what do you want from me? Anyone could tell you that these shells are fakes.”
“We want you to take Ness Wilde up on his offer for an interview.”
“What? Why?”
“Because he wants to talk to you, and he hasn’t been too eager to talk to us. We don’t have enough here to bring him in. The connection is flimsy—”
“But you think these shells trace back to him.”
“We think it’s possible. We don’t think this Arlov character would have access to anything like this. But his boss might have. There’s also the chance that—” Agent Cooper seems to be searching for the right words. I think I know what he’s about to say and help him out.
“You think there’s a chance that there are more fakes like this out there,” I say. “Maybe even in Wilde’s collection.” And my skin tingles with the idea that Ness Wilde, the great shell collector, might be a phony.
“Exactly,” Cooper says.
“So, what, I go up there and interview him? You want me to wear a wire or something?”
“Precisely. And look, we’re not asking you to do anything other than your job. Get what you can from him. Push him. Prod him. Our job is to sit back and listen.”
“So he’s the hornet’s nest and I’m the stick.”
“Something like that. Just hear what he has to say about these articles you’re working on. Take him up on his offer. Get as close as you can or antagonize him as much as you want. It’s up to you.”
“What about these shells?” I ask.
“What about them?”
“Has he seen them? Have you confronted him with these?”
Agent Cooper shakes his head. “We’re trying to be very delicate about the existence of these shells.”
I dig into my purse and find a pack of tissues. Placing the first lace murex back into the plastic case, I pad the shell before adding the second, then wrap that one before adding the third.
“What are you doing?” Cooper asks, half-reaching for the box.
“If you want me to help, here’s what I’m thinking.” Cooper watches with a frown as the case disappears into my purse. “I’ll go talk to Mr. Wilde and get what I need for my story. And then we’ll hear what the great shell collector has to say when I show him these.”
5
This is how I find myself in Maine, driving down a dusty road in my electric car, with an FBI wire tucked in my bra. I agreed to wear the wire even though I explained to Cooper’s buddies that I plan on recording the entire interview with my cell phone. They said it made chain of custody easier on their end, and that often, what needs recording is said when the suspect doesn’t know they’re being recorded.
Whether or not I would take the assignment, of course, was never in question. I’m a reporter. Dropping these shells in my lap was like tossing a steak to a german shepherd. There was no way I wasn’t going. I want to see Ness Wilde’s face when I confront him with the shells.
What I did refuse was his offer to fly me up. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction or have him think I’m a pushover. A few hours in my car and two recharging stations later, I’m beginning to rethink that strategy. Just the guy’s driveway goes on for miles.
Eventually—with the second gate behind me—the road takes a sharp bend to the left, and some innate sense tells me that I had been approaching the sea and am now heading north up along the coast. If so, the ocean is hidden by the ridiculous trees. The palms bend toward one another like fingers about to interlock. Their dangling coconuts hang like a threat. But they form a tunnel that seems to hold the damaged world beyond at bay. They bore toward a place where people can be wealthy enough to ignore what’s happening around them.
That must be convenient for a man who played a large role in ushering our damaged world along. The irony is rich: Ness Wilde has made billions not just by drilling oil, but by collecting the shells made rare—and valuable—by the burning of fossil fuels. A double whammy.
Glancing down at my battery gauge, I imagine for a moment the horror of not having enough juice to get to my hotel tonight. When I look back up, a view of the house breaks through at the end of the road. As I get closer, I see that it looks a lot smaller than I imagined it would. On Google Maps, the house appeared audacious, a sprawl of additions and add-ons connected by breezeways and boardwalks.
But arriving from the front—because of the way the house is chopped up to stagger down the dunes toward the sea—the portion visible from the drive looks reasonable. Even adorable. Like a house rather than an estate. A small front porch with reproduction gaslight fixtures frames a pebble-bed walkway. The roof is pale pink tile. The siding is white clapboard with bright-blue trim. The house appears as though it belongs in the Caribbean, not on an isolated and prohibitively expensive patch of rocky Maine shoreline.
My car’s tires crunch to a stop on the gravel circle. The drive continues and disappears around a high sandstone wall studded with conch shells. A six- or seven-car garage full of boy toys is probably just around the corner. As I get out of the car, trying to reconcile the incongruous modesty of the front of the house with all I know of Ness Wilde, I see that the drive isn’t paved with gravel at all. It’s made of tiny shells. Millions of them. Billions. Most are ground up into tiny bits from years of traffic, but some are recognizable. Some are even miraculously intact. Periwinkles, ceriths, ravenelis, and cockles.
The sight of so many shells spread out for so base a purpose causes my heart to sink. It’s the sort of blow that stuns you so deep, the intelligent side of your brain can’t signal to the emotional side that this effect might be on purpose. Here, the front of the house seems to say, I am a normal person. And then: Here, you are parking on a fortune in shells. And while reconciling these two: Here, I’m opening the door so that you meet me in a weakened state—
“Maya? From the Times?”
I turn from the audacious and miles-long carpet of shells to the foremost collector of them in the world. Ness Wilde stands on his small front porch, the door behind him open, and I realize that I’m half in and half out of my car, my hand resting numbly on the handle. Composing myself, I grab my bag from the passenger seat and shut the door. I force myself not to look down at my feet, but I can hear the tiny shells crunch beneath my shoes, little screams from hapless victims.
“It’s Ms. Walsh,” I correct him, ignoring what’s going on beneath my feet. We shake hands, and Ness smiles as if he knows what I’m thinking, as if these are roles we are playing. It occurs to me that despite his recent seclusion, he’s done hundreds of interviews over the years. Probably more than I have—and it’s kinda what I do for a living. And then I wonder if he has the timing of coming to the door down to a science, watches on a video screen or peeks through the blinds, all to take the strength out of the knees of his guests as they see what they’ve been driving on for miles.
Suddenly, all the trash-talking I did in the newsroom yesterday afternoon comes back to haunt me. I assured Dawn that I wouldn’t get flustered, that I’d eaten men like this for lunch. Hell, I’ve sat in the White House pressroom and tossed firebombs at the President of the United States. I reminded her of that, and Dawn had laughed. She had interviewed Ness Wilde before.
“Welcome to my home,” Ness says. He half-bows and waves me inside. “Ladies first.”
Despite what I feel about Ness, despite the suspicious shells in my purse, despite the fact that I’ve seen his face on a hundred magazine covers, in all the newspapers, and all over the news, his handsomeness in person still comes as a shock. It’s his smile, however insincere it might be. It’s his golden-bleached locks from years spent shelling. It’s his physique from being wealthy enough to exercise just to pass the time.
I h
ad guiltily hoped to find him broken and shattered, that this was why he was holed up. Forty pounds overweight, perhaps. Balding. Staggering drunk. Some obvious reason for his reclusiveness for the better part of the past four years. But he looks the same. Ness Wilde is one of those men who won’t push forty so much as he’ll shove Father Time aside. Only actors get away with remaining heartthrobs so late in life. Actors and master shell collectors.
“I’ve got a bottle of wine breathing and some snacks put together,” he tells me. “Come downstairs. I’ll show you the view.”
It’s like I didn’t publish a story two days ago accusing his great-grandfather of flooding the world. It’s like this is our third date. Considering how many times he’s done this in the past, I imagine it’s comfortable for him. Remembering what I’m there to do, I force myself to be even more comfortable. I strain to be comfortable.
Ness leads me inside and through a labyrinthine and multi-level layout that manages to chop up ten thousand square feet into small and cozy spaces. My heels clop-clop on sandstone tile. They sound ridiculously loud and formal with him walking ahead, barefoot. I wore one of my power suits: pinstripes and a lacy blouse that I thought went great with the FBI wire. Ness, meanwhile, has on white bottoms that look perfect either for sleeping in or practicing karate. For a top, he has on a pale blue button-up left untucked and only halfway fastened up in the front. Before he turned, I spotted a necklace dangling against his chest, a single shell or stone on a string. I wasn’t brave enough to study it closely to ascertain the species—because this is probably just what he wants people to do: study and stare.
Much too quickly, I am led past priceless treasures. It’s like being hauled through a museum after closing. A flawless junonia, probably six inches long. An array of ivory wentletraps, sitting out in the open. There’s an entire wall of scallops and pectin raveneli with water trickling down them; a great fountain separating two adjoining rooms. I assume all are real. Otherwise, why have them on display?
“The competition,” Ness says, waving at a wall of pictures. It’s dozens of magazine covers, mostly gossip rags and weeklies, a lot of shots I recognize from my research and from years of riding the subway to work. Many of the cover shots feature Ness holding up some rare or impossible shell between his fingertips. He means the magazines, I realize, when he says “the competition.” The competition we face at the paper. As if any of us are healthy enough to worry about the others.
Or maybe he means the reporters. I think back to the stacks of articles I’ve read over the years while writing my piece. How many were written by men? These Ness Wilde clones smile at me as I walk past, almost as if they know what I’m thinking. I’m thinking of how many of those reporters probably trailed dutifully down this hall, just like I am. I think of how many stayed the night. I know of a few, have spoken to them, but that story isn’t set to run for another few weeks. This collection of framed trophies will have to feature in that story, I realize, and I make edits in my head. When I’m done with my own story, I have a strong suspicion that Ness will not frame what I write. Hell, there’s a chance he’ll be reading it behind bars.
“My publicist warned me that the newspaper wouldn’t be as nice as the magazines,” Ness says, almost like he can read my mind. We descend one last level to a bar and enclosed patio. Cantilevered out beyond the sloping dunes, three walls of glass reveal a sweep of white sand and azure waters limned by a shoreline of foamy, crashing waves.
It’s a legendary beach, privately owned and inaccessible, as so many of Wilde’s properties are. The priceless shells decorating the house become background noise, a glittery hiss of pinks and purples that merely add to the aura of the vista before me. Here is the coup de grace of the perfectly arranged meeting. Here is the ploy to win a sheller’s soul. I find myself fantasizing about sleeping over. Who wouldn’t? Who could stroll across a carpet of crushed shells, through a hallway of amassed treasures, see that pristine sand picked over by no more than a few human beings in the last twenty years, and not dream, pine, hope for a morning spent here, a sunrise stroll, searching the low tide for the rare treasures dredged up by a recent storm—
Wilde clears his throat. It underscores the duration of my stunned gawking. A glass of red wine is being held out to me. I nod and accept it, then look for a place to set my bag. The shells inside are burning to get out, to expose him. But I have too many questions first.
“Do you always answer the door yourself?” I ask, fishing out my phone and my notepad.
Wilde pours himself a glass of wine and picks up a piece of cheese from a wooden cutting board in the shape of a whelk. “I live here by myself,” he says. He bites into the cheese and takes a sip of wine. “The staff comes through and tidies up while I’m out.”
“You mean out collecting?”
He smiles mischievously. “What else would I be doing?”
I taste the wine. It’s excellent. Reaching for the bottle, I check the label and see that it’s a local vineyard. I don’t recognize the name. The year tells me why. The wine is older than I am.
“It was a beautiful place,” Wilde tells me, watching me study the bottle. He stacks cheese and sliced meat on thin crackers, then tops each stack with half an olive.
“Was?” I ask. “They’re no longer around?”
“Nothing grows on those hills anymore.” He wipes his hands and studies his little creations. There’s a white apron in a wrinkled hump on the granite countertop, as if he hurriedly removed it to answer the door. Everything feels like a prop, and I realize that I’m going into this interview jaded and tense. The jaded comes from years of pent-up animosity toward Ness Wilde. The tension comes from knowing the FBI will hear every word between us. Wilde watches me while I tap on my phone.
“You don’t mind if I record this, do you?” I ask. And I have to suppress a laugh. I have to fight the urge not to look down my blouse to make sure the wire isn’t showing.
Ness waves the knife he’s using to slice the olives. “Of course not. I thought the interview had already begun, asking me about my help.” He slides the plate of appetizers across the counter at me. “Unless you were just making sure we were alone.”
I laugh and wave off the food. “Oh, I’d rather we weren’t. I’d love to ask your staff a few questions.”
And your ex, I add silently to myself. And your daughter. And whoever else in your employ knows about these shells. But those questions can come later. Starting there would spook him. Though he must know from my piece that this isn’t another adoring housewife profile, another glossy bit of PR.
As the app begins to record, I take in my surroundings so I can describe them for the revised piece. Every shell in this room has been photographed from multiple angles. Every shell, especially Mr. Wilde’s. My job is to crawl inside and shine a light on the shrinking torus deep within that pretty exterior. That’s the story I aim to tell.
“Okay, fire away,” Wilde says. He smiles and raises his glass in salute before taking another sip. And then, almost as if reading my mind, he adds: “Do your worst.”
6
“I’d like to start with your great-grandfather, if I may.” I arrange myself on a sofa that probably cost as much as my car. Ness gets comfortable in an old leather reading chair, his bare feet propped up on a matching ottoman. “You must’ve read the piece I wrote on him—”
“I did.”
“I presume you asked me here to set the record straight. So tell me what I got wrong. I’d love to hear your version of events.”
Wilde swirls his wine glass, and I hold my notepad and pen patiently. The pen and pad are more than just props to remind him of our roles; they’re for jotting down setting and non-verbal cues. It’s often not what people say or how they say it, but how they visibly react to questions. The nervous tics and wide eyes that recorders miss.
“I didn’t know my great-grandfather very well,” Wilde says. “I’ve read books about him. I can tell you what his biographers thought.”
“So what makes you think I was unfair with my piece?”
“I don’t think you were unfair. But you were about to be.”
“With my next piece?” I take a sip of my wine, partly because I want to hide my face. The way Wilde is staring at me, it’s as though my thoughts are written across my cheeks.
“I suspect your next piece was going to be about my grandfather, judging by the little cliffhanger at the end—”
“That was a teaser,” I say, setting down the wine. “A cliffhanger would’ve meant leaving the story about your great-grandfather in suspense.”
“I see. Well, if you’re going to write about my grandfather next, I’d rather you didn’t.”
I laugh. I didn’t expect him to come straight out and grovel, but that seems to be his plan. “Is that so?”
“That’s so. You’d only get everything wrong. Like everyone else has.”
“And you’d like to set me straight? Okay. Tell me about your grandfather. What does everyone get wrong?”
He takes another sip of his wine—closes his eyes while he does so. I can’t tell if he’s composing his thoughts or savoring the vintage.
“They get everything wrong.” He opens his eyes, and I find myself gazing down at my notes. The intensity of the man … it’s like looking into the noonday sun.
“So tell me about him,” I say, as I write something just to write something.
“I don’t remember a whole lot. I was eight when he died. The men in my family have always waited too long before having kids—”
“Except you,” I point out.
Ness flinches. It’s the first time I’ve seen him react to something I’ve said. But then he smiles. “I’d much rather you write your next piece about me or my father. Just leave my grandfather out of whatever it is you think you’re doing.”
I’ve hit a nerve. I make a note about Ness’s daughter. This is a button I can press. Dark truths are lured out by anger and sadness. And it’s cheaper and swifter to cause the former.