The Shell Collector

by Hugh Howey

  “That’s the kind of detail I wish I’d had a week ago,” I say. “I reached out to your publicist several times—”

  “And if she ignored your inquiries, she earned every penny of what I pay her,” Ness says.

  Until I ran the story you didn’t like, I think to myself. But then I have to remind myself that the story I ran isn’t the one he’s worried about. It’s the next one.

  “So your great-grandfather was climbing the ranks pretty fast. He had his own rig, was dating a VP’s daughter. But then he leaves the company.”

  “A few years later, yeah.”

  “Seems abrupt. He was twenty-five at the time?”

  “A few years can be a long time,” Ness says.

  I think of the years Ness has been a recluse and wonder if he’s speaking from experience. I wonder exactly what he’s been doing with his time. Surely not sitting idle. Maybe he spent that time perfecting the shells in my bag.

  “A lot happened during those years,” Ness says. “Look—” he glances at his wristwatch again. I touch the screen of my phone to wake it up, make sure it’s still recording. “My great-grandfather saw the future of drilling at a young age. He was ambitious. Driven. He had good ideas for getting at oil that no one thought we’d ever reach. He could’ve worked his way up the company. He was young and smart and determined, probably would’ve been CEO of Shell before he was forty. Instead, he quit his job, filed a few patents, and started begging for capital to start his own company.”

  “Which didn’t go so well.”

  “No. It didn’t.”

  “And your great-grandmother Shelly, how did she take this?”

  “The two of them were married on an oil platform by a roughneck who’d been an army chaplain. Shelly’s father was CEO by then, and he said never come home again, and Shelly didn’t. Paps managed to borrow enough to buy an old platform that wasn’t producing. He spent five years refitting it and drilling where people thought he was crazy to drill. The story goes that the tugs sent to repossess the rig were throwing lines to haul the thing away when he struck a gusher. Five miles down. Nothing like it had ever been done before. Of course, he would have a dozen platforms running within a year of that day. And he made it a point to buy every one of the tugs sent to repossess his rig.”

  Wilde sips his coffee. The sky throbs with the light from the lighthouse. I don’t know how he lives within range of a metronome like that.

  “Paps gave us the world, you see. From his son to my father to me. He gave us the world, but he broke it before he handed it over. That’s his legacy. He gave me and my dad the world in a million little flooded pieces. If I remember anything else about him that’s not in the history books, I’d rather not say.”

  “To protect him? Like your grandfather?”

  Wilde laughs. “Yes, because whatever I say wouldn’t be kind.”

  “Tell me about your grandfather, then.” I make a show of turning the recording app off, show him my phone, thinking all the while of the FBI wire. “Off the record. I swear.” Off my record. I swear.

  “I’ll take your signature over your swear any day of the week,” Ness says.

  “You have both.”

  Wilde stares into his coffee. I take a sip of mine.

  “What was he like? From your reading, if not your memory.”

  “My grandfather was a complicated man. I like to say that he walked in his father’s shadow, but with a flashlight.”

  “To dispel those shadows?”

  “To erase him in a way, yes. By the time my father inherited Ocean Oil, my granddad was already blaming his father for destroying the world. It wasn’t just Ocean Oil, of course, but you couldn’t tell my granddad that. Sea temps were up five degrees and sea levels eight inches from when my great-grandfather was born.”

  “Everything I’ve read said the company bypassed your grandfather because of his age. Because of lack of interest.”

  “And I showed you the real reason.” Ness indicates the leather journal sitting on the coffee table. “My grandfather wanted to dismantle Ocean Oil—”

  “And that was why your father inherited the company instead?”

  Ness nods.

  I make a mental note of this. This is not the history anyone else knows. The popular accounts are of an unchanging and evil empire, handed from father to son, each of them perfectly like the other. A convenient tale, because it’s easy to understand. We can transfer our ire from one generation to the next, no forgiveness required, no need to get to know a man. Just judge him by his father’s sins.

  Studying Ness, I allow myself to consider for a moment that I’m wrong about him as well, that he has nothing to do with the fake shells. Maybe the person I think I know is just a caricature of the real man. I’ve sensed this before with other celebrities and political figures I’ve gotten close to, that they’re just people saddled with unachievable expectations. We make of them what we need them to be, good or ill.

  “So your father was supposed to keep the company safe,” I say. “But then he was the one who nearly tore it apart.”

  “For different reasons. Selfish reasons. He saw the laws making their way through Congress. He knew the end of big oil was coming, saw the peak of production. Hell, this was before Manhattan flooded for the first time and the levee project got underway. My dad refused to waste the company’s money lobbying against the inevitable—not because he cared about the environment, but because he hated to see lawyers get rich when they couldn’t win. The board of directors disagreed. They worked in the background to have Dad removed as incompetent.”

  “I didn’t know your dad lost control of the company,” I say, making a mental note of this as well. Henry was going to fall out when he got my edits, and I hadn’t even gotten to Ness yet. But Ness was doing the impossible: convincing me to shelve one story while revising another.

  “The board didn’t take the company away from him for long. My dad had been working on his TideGen program for almost a decade by that point, all in secret. It was a personal project. He paid for it out of his own pocket—”

  “I’d heard that part.”

  “Yeah, it became part of his legend, that he privately financed the oil company’s first green initiative. As everyone knows by now, the whole thing was bullshit. When he couldn’t get the program to work, he turned it into a PR move. Used it for deflection. What’s interesting is when he gave the speech that turned the stock around, he technically wasn’t CEO of anything at that point. The board was waiting until close of markets on Friday to announce, just so they could handle the spin. They were scrambling that same week to name a replacement. Meanwhile, my father was about to shock the world and rescue the company.”

  Ness leans forward and places his hands on his knees. He looks at me for a long pause, a half-smile on his lips. The most distracting thing about this man isn’t his handsomeness, but his confidence. It isn’t fair for any human to visibly worry so little.

  “Can I show you the video?” he asks.

  “I’ve seen it,” I tell him.

  “I want to show you something interesting.”

  “Is there any way I can verify this?” I ask. “That your father wasn’t CEO at the time of the speech?”

  “Let me show you the video,” Ness insists. “You like personal details. I want to show you how my parents met.”

  He gets up and disappears down the hall. I take a sip of coffee and count the time between sweeps of light. Twelve seconds, not ten. If I had a chart of the Maine coast, I could find the lighthouse based on its period. I’m thinking of my father and all he taught me when Ness returns with a tablet.

  He sits down on the sofa beside me. I try to slide over, but the armrest has me pinned. His knee presses against mine. Maybe he isn’t aware of this. He calmly starts the video, and I feel a flush of heat from too much wine or the coffee or from him sitting too close. On the tablet, his father is giving a press conference on the deck of an oil platform, and all I can think is that
this man—who I have been chasing down for two years—is now far too close. I’ve been trying to pin him down, and now he has me pinned. I’m overreacting, I tell myself. I feel like standing up and running away from here, but some tiny voice says this is irrational, to calm the fuck down.

  “Listen,” Ness says, turning up the volume. He has fast-forwarded past the start of his father’s speech. I’ve seen this before. I try to concentrate on what’s happening on that screen, not in the room. The speech occurred a few years before I was born, but every journalist has seen it. Nathaniel Wilde is standing on that symbol of ecological disaster, that oil platform, announcing that it was one of fourteen that drew its own power not by burning the oil it pumped but by the swell of the sea. And now was the time to announce Ocean Oil’s plan to wean itself off oil altogether and that the future of tomorrow’s energy needs would be a mix of geothermal and the incessant wave energy of the ocean tides.

  “Here,” Ness says, pointing at the video. The camera has turned to a group of reporters sitting on folding chairs arranged across the deck of the rig. A woman is holding a pen up in the air, rises to ask a question. “Tara Brighton, UK Daily,” she says. “You don’t really expect us to believe that Ocean Oil is going green, do you?”

  The camera cuts back to Ness’s father. But Ness rewinds the video again. When the camera shifts to the reporter, he pauses the screen. I glance over at him, waiting for him to explain what I’m supposed to be seeing, when I notice the sweep of the lighthouse flash in his wet eyes.

  Tara Brighton—the name comes back to me.

  “That’s your mom,” I say.

  Ness nods. The tablet must be getting heavy, for I note his hand is trembling, falling.

  “Is this how they met?” I ask.

  “Right there,” Ness says, his voice quiet. He fiddles with the shell dangling from his necklace. “What’s wild is that they met in front of so many people, but no one has ever commented on it. No one sees her, I guess. It happens so fast, and everyone is concentrating on my dad. But I think this is … important in understanding who he was. What motivated him.”

  I look back to the screen, to the woman holding the pen and asking the handsome man behind the podium a question. And when I glance up, it’s the wall of magazine covers down the hall—that grid of trophies—that catches my eye. And some grave truth seems to scream out, some fucked-up psychological disorder, and I can’t tell if this is the moment when Ness will attack me and add me to that wall, or if my sentiment is supposed to get the better of me and this is where he expects me to pull him against me. All I can think of is the dozen other women who sat on this sofa and watched this video and saw him tear up, just moments from doing something they would regret. And I wonder if he’s used his grandfather’s notebook countless times, if he has a stack of signed NDAs, if that’s why the leather band wore out, if this is all a trick, some play here on this stage with this room of props, some game of sniffing out foes and vanquishing them. I reach for Ness’s trembling wrist as his hand and tablet fall toward my lap—

  “I have to go,” I say, pushing his arm and the tablet away from me. I stand up too fast, and the room adjusts itself around me. Wine and coffee compete for my senses. I reach for my phone, for my bag with its damning evidence. A new story forms in my mind, a story about a serial manipulator and a fucked-up family four generations deep, chasing along in their fathers’ shadows not with flashlights but with burning torches.

  “Right now?” Ness asks. “But I haven’t shown you my collection—”

  “I’ve seen your collection,” I say. I shove my pad and pen inside my bag, then point at the wall of framed magazine covers. “I’d rather not be added to it.”

  I turn and head up the stairs to get out of that place.

  “Wait,” Ness tells me. He follows me toward the door. “Just one more minute, please—”

  “It’s not going to work on me,” I tell him over my shoulder. “Whatever you’re going to say, however you’re going to try and manipulate me, it won’t work.” I reach for the front door, half expecting to find it locked, myself trapped. But the knob turns easily. I open the door to feel that the air outside has chilled in the last half hour. Or maybe it’s me.

  Ness catches the door as it swings shut, and I can feel him standing on the stoop as I crunch around the car to the driver’s side.

  “What do you mean, manipulate you?” he asks.

  I glance at him over the roof of the car, catch the bewildered look on his face from the flickering porch light. Damn, he’s good.

  “I think you’re a sociopath,” I say bluntly. “You tell people what they want to hear, make them vulnerable, make yourself appear vulnerable, and then you take your prey to bed and revel in the gushing stories they print that never tell anyone a goddamn thing. You hang us on your wall, collecting bylines like frat boys collect panties.”

  I open the door and get into the car.

  “You wanted to know my story,” Ness says. “You wanted the truth, and I’m trying to give it to you.”

  He looks bewildered through the passenger window. Or upset. I realize now that I won’t be coming back tomorrow. Or ever. Agent Cooper can unravel this on his own. I’m going to run my stories and expose this man for what he is.

  I press the start button and place the car in gear, attempt to spin out, but the car doesn’t move. The low battery light is blinking at me. I glance over at the glove box, which is hanging open, the dimmest of glows leaking from inside. Fuck me.

  I look to the porch, but Ness has disappeared back into his house. I slap my steering wheel in frustration. I could’ve sworn I’d closed the glove box when I put my registration away.

  9

  The light on the porch is still on. I stare at my phone and consider calling the inn or a taxi or a tow, but I don’t know how to get any of those people past Ness’s double guard gates. With no other choice, I get out of the car again and approach the house. My shouted accusations hang in the air, are still ringing in my ears. Ness answers the door holding his glass of wine, has switched back from coffee. The barest of swallows is left in the bottom of his glass.

  “I need to borrow some juice,” I tell him. “My battery’s flat.”

  Ness studies me for a moment. A painful moment.

  “I would like an apology,” he says.

  Through clenched teeth, I say, “I’m sorry.” My anger has been cooled by my embarrassment at needing his help to get out of here.

  “I have a battery booster in the garage. You can wait here if you like.”

  I decide to follow him, and he doesn’t stop me. Ness heads around the low stucco wall studded with conchs and around toward the garage. Lights above the garage doors flick on automatically and the courtyard blooms bright. Bugs begin to gather around the floodlights. There are three bays. Ness punches a six-digit code into the pad on the wall, and the center bay slides open.

  The light inside the garage comes on, and Ness squeezes between a covered car and a rack of shelves. I step inside and lift the cover on the bumper of the car, see the candy-apple red beneath. I also note the exhaust pipe. A gas burner.

  “I don’t have a thing for reporters,” Ness tells me as he digs noisily through shelves of tools. “Half of what they’ve written about me over the years is complete fiction. Not that I care. You can write whatever you want. Tell people I came on to you.”

  “Didn’t you?” I ask.

  “Does it matter?” Ness lugs the orange battery pack my way. I drape the car cover back over the gas-guzzler and step out of the garage. “I asked my dad once how he and my mom met, and he made up a story. He’d make up a different story every time, depending on who was asking. My mom would do it too. I figured it out on my own. Thought you’d like to hear about it.”

  “So you want credit for figuring that out?” I follow him back toward my car. The lights wink off behind us. “Well done. Great investigative reporting.”

  “I confronted him about it,” Ness says.
“This was after my mom died. I asked why he never told me the truth. And it was the first time I ever saw him cry. I mean, bawl like a child.”

  Some distant and professional part of me cries out that this might be important, worth writing about, but the rest of me is too riled up to care or even make mental notes. I follow Ness around to my car and watch as he pops the hood and attaches the booster to the battery posts. He checks to make sure the pack is switched on. “Should give you an hour or so of juice. We’ll have to leave it plugged in for half an hour.”

  “Convenient,” I tell him. “I’m trapped here.”

  “Unless you want to stomp down the driveway in a huff, you are.” He smiles, seems to be joking.

  I nearly ask Ness if he opened the glove box while I was reading the journal, but I realize how paranoid I’m being, how crazy that will sound. I’m already feeling the slightest twinge of guilt for blowing up on him.

  “Why do you think he kept it a secret?” I ask. “Did he say?”

  “He did. And I would have shared that with you, but now I’m not so sure.” He studies me in the dim glow from the porch light. “Maybe it was a mistake to ask you out here. I should’ve just let you run the story however you liked. What difference does it make?”

  “I’ll skip to your father with the next piece,” I tell him. “You’ve shown me enough to doubt the veracity of some of my research. But not enough to replace it with anything more forgiving.”

  Ness seems to relax. His shoulders drop an inch, like he’s been carrying something heavy there and suddenly it’s gone, suddenly he doesn’t have to tense up against the weight of it all.

  “I hoped you’d say that,” he says. He smooths his hair back with his hand. Lets out a held breath. “This isn’t how I imagined tonight going.”