Stormy Cove

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Stormy Cove Page 1

by Bernadette Calonego




  ALSO BY BERNADETTE CALONEGO

  Under Dark Waters

  The Zurich Conspiracy

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 Bernadette Calonego

  Translation copyright © 2016 Gerald Chapple

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published in German as Die Bucht des Schweigens by Amazon Publishing in Germany in 2015. Translated from German by Gerald Chapple. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2016.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503935846

  ISBN-10: 1503935841

  Cover design by Scott Barrie

  For Hubert

  CONTENTS

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  NEWFOUNDLAND’S

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  WORKS CONSULTED

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Lori Finning: photographer from Vancouver

  Lisa Finning: Lori’s mother (lawyer)

  Simon Finning: Lori’s father

  Clifford Finning: Lori’s brother

  Andrew Finning: Lori’s son

  Danielle Page: Lori’s friend

  Craig: Lori’s friend from Vancouver

  Volker Pflug: Lori’s ex-husband (German)

  Franz Ehrsam: Volker’s boyhood friend

  Rosemarie Ehrsam: his wife

  Katja Brosamen: his client

  Waltraud: Katja’s mother

  Erhardt: Katja’s father

  Mona Blackwood: businesswoman in Calgary

  Bobbie Wall: B and B owner

  Gordon Wall: her husband

  Noah Whalen: fisherman in Stormy Cove

  Nate Whalen: his brother

  Emma Whalen: Nate’s wife

  Lance Whalen: Noah’s brother

  Coburn Whalen: Noah’s brother

  Ezekiel (“Ezz”): Noah’s cousin

  Greta Whalen: Noah’s sister

  Robine Whalen: Noah’s sister

  Archie Whalen: Noah’s uncle

  Nita Whalen: his wife

  Winnie Whalen: Noah’s mother

  Abram Whalen: Noah’s father

  Jack Day: Noah’s relative

  Ches Mills: Lori’s neighbor

  Patience Mills: his wife

  Molly Mills: their daughter

  Selina Gould: Lori’s landlady

  Cletus Gould: her son

  Una Gould: his wife

  Mavis Blake: shopkeeper

  Aurelia Peyton: school librarian

  Lloyd Weston: archaeologist

  Beth Ontara: archaeologist

  Annie: archaeologist

  Will Spence: newspaper editor

  Reanna Sholler: reporter

  Jacinta Parsons: murder victim

  Scott Parsons: her father

  Glowena Parsons: her sister

  Ginette Hearne: villager

  Elsie Smith: villager

  Gideon Moore: transport company owner

  Rudolf von Kammerstein: German baron

  Ruth von Kammerstein: his wife

  Tom Quinton: dog owner

  Vera Quinton: his wife

  Rusty: the Quintons’ dog

  Hope Hussey: lodge owner

  Carl Pelley: detective

  John Glaskey: fisherman

  Isaac Richards: fisherman

  John, Seb, Wayne: fishermen

  Joseph Johnston: deceased fisherman

  Mitch and Dorice: elderly couple

  Richard Smallwood: Anglican minister

  PROLOGUE

  He hardly speaks at breakfast. His forehead, eyes, eyebrows, and lips look pinched—like his head is in a vise. He’s worried. She knows it.

  That night, she’d been jolted out of her sleep again, her heart feeling tight and swollen, like a boxing glove. Her silk pajamas clung to her skin, and a damp chill to her forehead.

  She sat bolt upright in bed, gasping for air.

  Suddenly his face was right against hers; she’d startled him.

  Not for the first time.

  He brushed her unruly hair out of her face.

  “I heard it again,” she said.

  The howling. That terrible, incomprehensible, bone-shattering whine that seemed to come from nowhere.

  He pressed her to his chest.

  “It’s gone,” he whispered. “Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

  Then he caressed her until she fell asleep in his arms.

  She steals a glance at him.

  Pretending to be sorting pictures on the computer, she watches him out of the corner of her eye as he sits there, bent over the table, his chin resting in a hand as big as a shovel. He reads the newspaper from cover to cover; it’s just the local rag, but he doesn’t skip over a thing, not even the classifieds. He’s never learned to skim. In his world, there’s no place for skimming. Everything must be observed: wind direction, the movement of the tide, wave action, fish movements, what men in the harbor are saying, news and rumors. Especially rumors. If you miss something, or don’t care what’s going on in the village, then you’re soon on the outside looking in. And that can be fatal.

  She’s only known that since she came into his life.

  How did we manage to survive?

  Here he is, far from the grave of his boat, the Mighty Breeze. Far from the North Atlantic and the steep cliffs, the killer storms and currents. Far from the disaster that pulled him down in its wake.

  He’s an outsider in Vancouver. A man who doesn’t want to be anywhere but on his boat or in his squat little house with green trim. He couldn’t even restack the firewood the storm scattered—that’s how fast everything happened. He must replay things in his mind over and over, neat and tidy as he is. In the chaos of emotions and threats, he is a man who clings to order.

  So all he can do now is read the entire paper. He can’t bring himself to skip over even a page. He calls it wasteful, making a face every time he says the word. His shed by the ocean is stacked with pails, old ropes and tools, rusty winches, used nails, lumber from demolished houses, worn-out knives. A man who always expects hard
times needs these things.

  But he didn’t expect the disaster that befell him.

  He suddenly looks up, and she feels caught in the act.

  “Did you read this?” he asked. “The letters to the editor? People with oceanfront houses are complaining that people walking on the beach keep peeking in their windows.”

  She smiles, happy that he’s found something he finds funny. Nobody in his village has any problem with people constantly looking in their windows. They see everything anyway, never miss a thing. Through trusty binoculars, they spy on the houses on the opposite side of the cove. They know when it’s lights-out and when somebody comes home late.

  But she’d shut her eyes to what she really ought to have seen.

  He stretches across the table to study the classifieds. She never tires of looking at him. A back as round as the leatherback turtle’s that washed ashore one day, dead. The morning after they first made love, her fingers felt for his vertebrae and couldn’t find them. As if he’d morphed from a sea creature into a human.

  If someone saw the way she was watching him now, her fascination would be taken for love.

  But it’s more like wonder. Silent amazement that they’re both here. Together. That he followed her, all this way.

  How did we manage to get away?

  Did we get away?

  He’s always been so afraid of the city. The cars. The crowds. The pace. Traffic lights everywhere. Eyes that look right past him. Mouths that don’t say hello. Losing himself in the sea of people on the sidewalks.

  But now, after everything that happened, he feels secure here. Nobody knows him in Vancouver. Nobody knows anything. His name means nothing.

  It’s been ten months now. He never talks about going back. Not even about the Mighty Breeze. Or the kitchen with its loud, ticking clock. Not one word about the cove or the dock with the rotting planks he’d long wanted to replace.

  “Don’t you want to call?” she asks him occasionally.

  He just shakes his head, raises his eyebrows, and looks out the window, checking the sky over the neighboring apartment towers. Then he wants to go for a walk before it rains. His route always leads to the ocean. Not to his ocean but to this other, western ocean, the Pacific. Water that never, to his astonishment, freezes over in winter.

  She hasn’t taken any pictures of him since they came to Vancouver. As if photographing him were cursed. As if her pictures would reveal something she wasn’t prepared for. The way he’s sitting at the table, turning the pages, his brow furrowed, back arched like a bridge over water, lips pressed together—she doesn’t have to capture this moment with her camera. It’s already burned into her mind. Exactly like the secret that she must never reveal.

  Do visions of what happened haunt him as they do her? She’s afraid to ask.

  Out of nowhere, the memories appear before her eyes, and they’re not always the most terrifying ones.

  The wall hanging, for instance, in a stranger’s living room, of a band of caribou at sunset. Blackish-brown shapes backlit with kitschy neon colors. The caribou stiff, as if blinded by the garish orange and yellow and red.

  A wild animal frozen in the headlights’ glare, fearfully undecided between safety and doom.

  CHAPTER 1

  Lori’s hands were still so shaky that she repeatedly had to put down her cup. Her hostess had introduced herself as Bobbie, brought her tea, and now pursed her lips in sympathy.

  “The truck must have given you a pretty good scare,” she said.

  Lori nodded and rubbed her hands as if that could stop them from trembling.

  “It felt like I was in one of those horror movies where giant trucks loom over little cars and chase them until their victims freak out.”

  She regretted the words as soon as she said them. She was dramatizing again. As if what happened were a metaphor for her life: Lori with a monster breathing down her neck. But she’d laid those ghosts to rest long ago. What must the elderly woman in the armchair think of her? Was she annoyed at this stranger from Vancouver bad-mouthing Newfoundland? And Bobbie had been so friendly when Lori arrived. The B and B was decidedly a family affair: Lori’s hosts lived in the house. Bobbie, whose real name was Roberta Wall—Lori saw that on the Canadian government certification hanging on the wall—must like people a lot. She told Lori she’d been taking care of guests for thirty years.

  “Thirty years, and I still think it’s fun.”

  Bobbie had expanded her business two years before. Lori’s room was in her in-laws’ former house on the other side of a shared garden. All the other rooms were spoken for. Bobbie was expecting participants from a conference “that had something to do with excavations,” she said. Lori had taken a quick look at her room. A thin gold polyester bedspread; a little wall mirror framed by imitation seashells. Lori didn’t see a bedside lamp, but she always brought a portable reading light when she traveled.

  “Oh,” she heard Bobbie say, “there’s Gordon.”

  Lori smiled awkwardly, wishing she could just hole up in her room, gold polyester notwithstanding. Why had she chosen a B and B anyway? For this assignment, Mona had given her more than enough to cover a real hotel. But as a freelance photographer, Lori wasn’t used to luxuries.

  A portly man limped into the living room and plopped down on the sofa.

  “Gordon, this is Lori, from Vancouver. We were just talking about how trucks are making our roads so unsafe.”

  Panting with exertion, the old man nodded at Lori.

  “A truck almost ran her off the road,” Bobbie continued. “Poor thing feared for her life. People really shouldn’t speed with all this snow on the ground.”

  Gordon Wall coughed and gasped loudly for air. “I can tell you exactly why trucks go so fast. They’re paid by the mile and not by the hour, so they drive like hell.”

  “I couldn’t pull over anywhere to let him pass,” Lori explained. “There was no place to. I was afraid he couldn’t brake fast enough and would ram me.”

  “They probably warned you about moose crossings but not about trucks,” Gordon surmised.

  The phone rang and Bobbie took a reservation, giving Lori time to examine the living room. A wall hanging with caribou posed against a background of iridescent neon colors. Assorted plastic flower arrangements. A cuckoo clock and a collection of snow globes. At least a dozen framed family photographs. Lori had already heard how none of Bobbie’s six children lived nearby. Lori nearly said something about her own son, Andrew, but bit her tongue. Let sleeping dogs lie.

  Bobbie, on the other hand, had probably shared her private life with hundreds of tourists over the years. Lori couldn’t fathom why. She would never again allow strangers to meddle in her personal affairs, to gain access to her inner life.

  She tried once more to lift her cup without spilling.

  A still small voice inside her said, You always manage to get into other people’s houses. Into their kitchens, living rooms, even bedrooms. And what’s more, into their souls. It’s how you make your living.

  Bobbie hung up and turned to Lori.

  “What brings you to Newfoundland?”

  A friendly question she probably asked every guest. Nevertheless, it made Lori uncomfortable.

  It was the same discomfort she’d felt in Mona Blackwood’s office. She’d been late for her appointment because a surprise Vancouver snowstorm had delayed her flight to Calgary.

  Lori had assumed the assignment was going to be routine. Yet another portrait of a prominent person. Mona Blackwood was well known in Calgary. Owner of an investment firm that made money in the oil sector. Lots of money. She’d grown up poor in Newfoundland, but moved west to Alberta to seek her fortune. Forty-two, five years older than Lori. Blond, with a chiseled, austere face. Slim, athletic. A woman determined to be taken seriously in a man’s world. She wore a black two-piece suit over a white blouse. Lori would have preferred a little color for the photo and considered how to suggest it. She knew the background had to be bu
sinesslike and sober, nothing fussy or extravagant. Before staging anything, though, Lori wanted to get to know Mona a bit so she could really capture her in a portrait.

  But to her amazement, Mona looked at Lori’s photographer’s bag and said, “We won’t be needing that today.”

  Lori was taken aback.

  “Aren’t I here for a photo shoot?”

  “I’ll explain in a minute. Would you like tea, coffee, some juice, maybe?”

  Mona motioned toward some armchairs.

  Lori asked for coffee—she’d gotten up early. She’d barely sat down in the black leather chair when she saw the book of photos on the glass table. Her book. The pictures of the apostate Mormon sect in Splendid Valley.

  Her name would always be associated with it.

  Lorelei Finning. Splendid Valley.

  Mona opened the book. Lori noticed her silver fingernail extensions. Interesting detail. A deviation from the perfect businesswoman image. Maybe she was open to having an unconventional portrait taken after all.

  “I’ve read the introduction,” Mona began, “but can you tell me some more about how you came to take these pictures?”

  Normally, Lori wasn’t fazed by the request. It’s what everybody wanted to know. How a sect completely shut off from the outside world in a settlement hidden behind high fences, a sect accused of polygamy and trafficking in girls—how a secretive community like that had allowed the photographer Lorelei Finning behind the curtain. Why had they permitted Lori to photograph women, children, and especially men married to dozens of eleven- and twelve-year-old girls?

  No one who saw the pictures could accuse Lori of sympathy toward these men. The sect’s bishop had examined the photos and authorized them himself. He wanted to create a monument; he wanted to demonstrate to the outside world that everything was proper and correct.

  But the bishop didn’t understand that images speak their own language, and Lori’s photographs were eloquent. She had captured something he was too blind to see.

  That was the beginning of the end for the Splendid Valley community. The sect’s leaders were hauled into court and sentenced to prison.

  The book could have been Lori’s big break, but soon after, she’d met Volker and followed him to Germany, a newborn in her arms.

 

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