“Of course!” said Mr. Sweetman, nearly jumping from the table. “A tourist!”
A chorus was raised in agreement. It made sense. Nobody had reported her missing because nobody knew her. “Plain as day,” Sweetman continued. “Went for a wade, tripped and fell somehow, bumped her head and . . .” He projected his head toward the company. “Plain as day. Accident!”
A tourist? For some reason Albert’s head wasn’t nodding with the rest. Something was odd, and he tried to remember what it was. There was a guide in his brain, he’d come to realize of late—always just out of sight, just around the next bend—that would call to him at times like this. It called to him now. “This way, Albert. This way!” He steadied his thoughts with a sip of soup and concentrated on following.
It took him to his memory of the beach. Not the Girl. The beach. He had noticed something as he’d stumbled toward the surf. What was it? “Look around, Albert. Look around!” He surveyed the memory.
“No footprints,” he said aloud.
“No footprints where?” said Jeremy Ash.
Albert sat up, sorted out his thoughts, and spoke them. “There were no footprints on the beach,” he said. “Just ours. So the girl hadn’t been wading, at least not on that beach. There were no other beaches around. Just cliffs. But she didn’t jump or fall from a cliff.”
“Clearly not,” Angela agreed. “She’d have been all beat up—and probably not alive.”
“So,” Albert concluded, “she came from the ocean.” Even the voice in his head had been silenced by that deduction. Albert resumed eating his soup—some kind of seafood or chicken or vegetables, probably. There were potatoes in it, he was sure of that. Of course, this being New Zealand, they might not be.
It was good, though he’d have preferred it hotter.
His companions at the table tossed brief, interrogatory glances at one another; then fell to studying the auguries in their bowls for answers to the questions Albert’s declaration called forth. Jeremy Ash, not uncustomarily, was first to speak.
“She’s not a mermaid, A. What do you mean she came from the sea?”
Albert was bent over his bowl. “If she didn’t come from the land, it’s the only place she could have come from.”
“Could’ve come from the sky,” said Jeremy Ash.
Albert hadn’t thought of that. “Or the sky.”
“I was just kiddin’, A. She didn’t fall from the sky.”
That was good. If she’d fallen from the sky, that would make things much more difficult. “No. Not from the sky,” said Albert, a little relieved. “From the ocean.”
“But she didn’t start out in the ocean,” Angela said. “She had to have started somewhere. Where?”
“What’s in the ocean?” Albert asked, as if proposing a riddle to which he already knew the answer. Which he didn’t.
“Islands,” said Wendell.
“Ships,” said Jeremy Ash.
“Islands and ships,” Albert repeated. “Then that’s where she came from. An island or a ship.”
“I wonder if that’s what the police reckon,” said Sweetman.
As if on cue, the front doorbell rang and, seconds later, the maid preceded the visitor into the room. “P’lice to see you, Mr. Sweetman.”
“Senior Sergeant Hawkes,” said a tall, uniformed man as he entered the room, and stationed himself at the head of the table directly behind Sweetman, who had to turn in his chair to see him; an acrobatic feat for someone of his age, and not without discomfort. “I’m sorry to interrupt your meal,” he said, without seeming sorry at all, “and apologize for not coming to see you sooner about this business of the Girl on the Beach. Suicide attempt, of course. Very sad. But now we’ve had a chance to clear a few things up, I’d like my sergeant here . . .” It was then he realized that his sergeant wasn’t here but, judging from the giggles in the hallway, entertaining the maid. “Jeffreys! In here at once!”
At once, Jeffreys was there.
“As I said, Jeffreys here will take your statements so we can enter them into the record. Just a formality.” He turned partway toward the door, putting his cap back on his head. “Once again, apologies for the intrusion. Enjoy the remainder of your visit to God’s country.”
Albert had finished his soup. He was looking at Hawkes. “She didn’t try to kill herself,” he said.
The policeman was arrested, his hand on the doorknob. “I beg your pardon?” He scanned the faces at the table. “Did someone say something?”
Jeremy Ash spoke up. “She didn’t attempt suicide.”
“’Course she did, young man. Plain as day. Now, if you’ll all just give Jeffreys your statements, you can get on about your business. Good evening.”
“She came from the ocean,” Albert said.
Once again, Hawkes was prevented from leaving. Being of British stock, he was not accustomed to anything that might be seen as a challenge to his authority. “Who spoke?” he said, turning and removing his hat.
“I did,” said Albert.
“And you are?”
Jeremy Ash supplied the basic information.
“Professor, is it?” said Hawkes. “Professor of what?”
Again, it was not Albert, but Jeremy Ash who spoke. “Music.”
“He’s a concert pianist,” said Angela, attempting to clarify.
“Very famous,” Sweetman added. “Very famous.”
“Well, Mr. Famous Piano Player,” said Hawkes for whom, apparently, piano players did not figure high in his estimation. “You said?”
“She came from the ocean,” Albert repeated.
“We all did,” said Hawkes, laughing and, with a swivel of the head toward his sergeant, enlisting that subordinate to do the same. “It’s called evolution.”
No one else was laughing. “Go on,” said the senior sergeant. “What do you mean she came from the ocean?”
Albert explained.
“A ship!” said Hawkes, once again with a caustic laugh. “You mean to say she jumped from some passing ocean liner and swam all the way to shore?”
Is that what he meant? “Maybe.”
“Absurd,” Hawkes huffed. “Absurd,” he said, turning once again to his sergeant, in expectation of affirmation, which was immediately forthcoming. “If she’d fallen from a cruise ship, they’d’ve reported her missing.”
Albert took that in. It made sense. “Then it wasn’t a cruise ship.”
“Good! I’m glad we’re agreed. Now, if you’ll all just . . .”
“It was some other kind of ship.”
“Such as?” Hawkes snapped. “A spaceship?”
They’d already ruled out a fall from the sky. “No. Some other kind of ship.”
“Such as?”
Albert shrugged. Jeremy Ash answered. “A sailboat? A yacht? A fishing boat? A ferry? A canoe?”
Albert loved Jeremy Ash. “One of those,” he said.
“Once again, absurd,” said Hawkes. “Had she fallen or jumped from any of those, they’d’ve let us know so we could launch rescue operations. Now, if that’s all . . .”
It wasn’t.
“What if she didn’t fall or jump?” The thought had occurred to Albert’s brain and tongue simultaneously. “What if she was pushed, or thrown in?”
Angela took up the thread. “If someone was trying to kill her, then of course no one would have reported her missing!”
“It fits, Sergeant,” said Sweetman.
“Senior sergeant,” Hawkes corrected. Not only had his epaulets been ruffled, but his hypothesis as well. And now he was questioning it himself. So he said the only thing that came to mind, but without conviction. “Absurd.”
“Why?” said Angela.
“Why what, young lady?”
“Why is it absurd to consider a possibility that fits all the facts?”
Hawkes, who had begun to sweat around the eyes, manufactured a condescending smile as he put his hat on. “Just you leave the policing to the professionals, missy.
You’ll find that every contingency is taken into account. Suicide, no doubt about it. Sergeant? Take their statements.” He bowed curtly and left in haste.
Sergeant Jeffreys took their statements and, as he was leaving, addressed the room—Albert in particular, though he was looking at Angela. “If asked, I’ll deny I ever said this, but your theory makes more sense than anything we’ve come up with at HQ. I’m just a humble sergeant, but I’ll see if I can’t give things a nudge.” He closed his notebook with an efficient snap, winked, and went away.
There was more giggling in the hallway as the maid showed him to the door.
Jeremy Ash was ebullient. “Here we go again,” he said.
“Here we go again,” said Albert. He wanted to cry.
Chapter Four
Albert was wondering if Lion Red, being a New Zealand beer, went counterclockwise down his throat when he swallowed it. He took another sip and closed his eyes. It was hard to tell.
“Sleepy?” said Angela. She was sitting on the porch rail, midway between him and the moon, twiddling a glass that contained equal part red wine and moonbeams.
“No,” said Albert. “I was thinking.”
Angela, misunderstanding completely, replied. “A lot to think about today.”
“Yes,” said Albert. He lit another cigarette.
“I wish you wouldn’t smoke so much.”
“I know.”
“You’re not his wife, you know,” said Jeremy Ash, who had been rolling his wheelchair rhythmically back and forth between the railing and the house.
Angela, reddening suddenly, shot a quick glance at Albert, then at Jeremy, then adjusted her gaze on distant shadows in which nothing in particular could be discerned. “You don’t need to be married to someone to care about them,” she said. “I just don’t want to see him come down with cancer, or a stroke, or heart attack. There’s nothing good about smoking.”
Albert disagreed. Smoking brought things into focus. He knew better than to say so, because Angela would start quoting studies. And there were lots of studies because, as far as he could figure out, people were paid to make them, and when you pay people to do something, that’s what they do, and they keep doing it until you stop paying them, or someone else pays them more to do the opposite thing.
More than anyone else, Jeremy Ash could read Albert’s mind—probably the result of their shared criminal past. “You really think someone tossed that girl from a boat, A?”
That’s not what he’d been thinking about, which was the little round fruit with hair on it that had been part of dessert. A kiwi. Like the little round, hairy bird that—his host had said when showing him a picture of one—was native to the island. Which made sense, since it couldn’t fly. He suspected one was named after the other, but which came first?
Albert dragged on his cigarette to concentrate his thoughts on Jeremy Ash’s question.
“Could have.”
“Why?”
That was the question that, time and again, had utterly baffled Albert. As far as his observations had taken him, everything in nature made sense. Up, down, left, right, north, south, east, west, a.m., p.m., things fell if you dropped them. Dogs chased cats. Cats ate birds. Day followed night in predictable procession, as did the seasons. Even something as seemingly random as music was, in the end, just audible mathematics . . . with a soul.
Everything made sense, until you added people.
Then, in the words of Cindy back in Tryon, North Carolina, “Everything went plum to hell.”
That’s because people were pinballs. Not just one pinball in a machine, but thousands, millions, billions of pinballs, each going its merry way until it collided with another pinball—or two, or three, or eighty-seven—going different directions. Did anybody, Albert wondered, do anything on purpose? Was it even possible to do something without getting blind-sided by someone else’s something else? Or by(?) one of those bouncy pillars that light up when you run into them, and send you hurtling off in an entirely different direction?
What was the question?
“What?”
“Why would someone toss a girl from a boat?”
“Because they didn’t want her on it.”
“Could be a lot of reasons,” Angela said. “A jealous lover . . . Maybe that’s it! Maybe she was caught in a lover’s triangle, and . . .”
“She was on a yacht,” Jeremy Ash speculated with rising ardor, “and she’s the heir to garmongous fortune. . . ”
“Heiress,” Angela corrected. “And her father married a wicked stepmother, then he died, and the only thing between the stepmother and the fortune . . .”
“Kerplunk!” said Jeremy Ash.
“Kerplunk?”
“Kerplunk,” Jeremy re-echoed. “Over she goes.”
“Very Jane Eyre,” Angela rhapsodized.
“Was that her name?” Albert asked.
“Was what her name?”
“Jane Eyre. Was that the Girl on the Beach?”
“Jane Eyre was a writer, Albert,” said Angela. “English. A long time ago.”
In Albert’s estimation, statements like this highlighted the fundamental flaw in reality. How had a female English writer—from the past, apparently—wheedled her way into a conversation about a girl found washed up on the beach in New Zealand?
Junctions like this, where the train of logic—toodling smoothly along—was suddenly and brutally nudged off the track, were where he and reality often parted company.
“I’m going to go to bed,” he said, and did, leaving Angela, Jeremy Ash, and Mr. Sweetman to embroider the night with possible—and impossible—scenarios, to the rhythm of Wendell’s mastication.
“You look at that page,” said Colonel Rivens, when Albert visited again the next morning. Despite his intention—determination—to play the Colonel’s piano, they’d ended up talking about the Girl on the Beach; rather, the Colonel had ended up talking. Albert, as usual, ended up trying to look as though he was listening. Which had led to the Colonel’s dissertating about the strange series of events that had transpired in Albert’s life in recent memory. And how he, Albert, had been instrumental in solving a series of mysteries that had stymied the police.
That’s not the way Albert saw it. He’d just stumbled from one mistake to another until the truth just gave up. He never considered that these accidents had been taken note of outside the circle of those affected by them. “What do you see?”
Albert looked at the sheet of music sitting on the still-unplayed piano—to which the Colonel was directing his attention. “Music.”
“What do you hear?”
“Music.”
“Exactly. I see the same thing. I know it’s music, but it means nothing to me. I hear nothing. It’s a foreign language. Now,” he picked up a cooking magazine from the coffee table, riffled through its pages and, finding one that suited, held it up for Albert’s inspection. “Look at this. What do you see?”
“Words.”
“But what do they say?”
Albert punched his horn-rimmed glasses up his nose and leaned toward the paper. The letters were familiar, but not the words into which they were assembled. The spell, or incantation, or secret glyph, made no sense.
“I don’t know.”
“They’re a recipe, Maestro! In French! And because I can read French, I know not only what the words say—what they mean—but they affect me physically. My mouth waters. My stomach growls.”
Albert wasn’t sure he wanted to sit so close to someone who was losing control of his bodily functions. Nor did he understand what these observations—though interesting—had to do with detecting, which is what they’d been talking about, and, in a roundabout way, said so.
“Simple. When you become captivated by a jinn—an interest that becomes a passion—you see it everywhere, in everything. For instance, you, seeing birds on parallel telephone wires, might see notes in a song. Be inspired by them, even! While my mind can reassemble a list of ingredien
ts into a dish that would have your tummy turning cartwheels—in a good way.
“Same way with detecting. Things that pass the notice of most people—those whose interests lie elsewhere—are, to the one who has trained himself to be sensitive to them, as obvious as, as . . . I don’t know. The nose on your face!
“That’s what you do.”
“I do?” Albert echoed, staring at the recipe. He raised his French-bedewed eyes. “I don’t think so,” he said flatly.
Though he’d been talking at him for several minutes, this was the first time Rivens had locked eyes with his guest, and—his experience with ANZAC troops in the sweltering jungles of Viet Nam notwithstanding—he was not prepared for the impact. He clutched at the arms of his chair to keep from falling in. “I . . . I . . .”
Much to Rivens’ relief, Albert looked away. The Colonel drew a breath and shook his head slightly, whether to dispel or draw into focus what he’d just seen, it was beyond saying.
“May I play your piano?”
“What? Oh, yes! The piano. Yes. Yes, of course. Please.”
Rivens conducted Albert to the pleasant room overlooking the manicured back yard ringed with a dizzying array of flowers in colors for which Albert, had he noticed, could not have conceived names. But his attention was not on the flowers themselves, but on their reflection in the baby grand that squatted in earnest waitfulness on its circular Persian carpet in the middle of the room. He sat down, played a C chord and let it ring.
“Some people have more than one gift,” said Rivens. He stood Samson-like in the double French doors, and closed them behind him, happy to leave his guest to his music and allow himself time to recover from what he had seen—or not seen—in the depths of Albert’s eyes.
“Birds on telephone wires,” Albert whispered to the keys. He’d never noticed that. He proceeded to compose the prelude to a symphony based upon irregularities in the concentric rings of coffee in a cup, So much depended on the size of the cup, and whether or not the coffee contained cream and sugar.
The music came easily. It had been brewing in his mind since he had made the observation on the plane. Over the intervening hours, it had marinated in the ever-flowing river of his sub-conscious and, like musical tofu, embraced the flavors which the unfolding of those hours had revealed. He wasn’t writing it now; he was just transferring to the keys the score that had already taken shape in his mind.
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