“Works real well for me,” Anderson laughed. “So... the party starts at 1300 hours on Sunday, right?”
“I don’t know about you and your 1300 hours, but I’ll pick you up at 1:00, okay?
“Perfect. And remind me to teach you how to tell time someday!
Arnold went out to his pickup and headed home, leaving Anderson to spend the rest of the day unloading the tools and junk from his truck, installing the new parts on Mister Kubota and changing oil on both. He had fried himself yet another egg for lunch, but by early Friday evening he felt like something more like a real meal and took himself down to the Zoo, which was almost empty. He sat at his usual table, nursed a beer and ordered a very rare steak sandwich and fries with sliced tomatoes instead of soggy vegetables – even the Zoo couldn’t make those things palatable.
07:45 JULY 15
Anderson’s cell-alarm went off at 07:00 hours as usual. He punch the snooze button twice, shut the alarm off and finally got up half an hour later. He looked out the window as he headed for the bathroom and the shower: it was a beautiful-looking day, with no clouds to be seen and a light breeze from the west.
He took a nice long hot shower, as he always did if he had time, and this morning he had time. As he also often did, he thought of his father, who used to yell at him to get the hell out of the shower: All you need is three minutes, and it’s better for you if the last minute is cold water. You’re wasting time and money on all that hot water! But of course, his father had been a navy guy, and the younger Anderson had not. Bow, stern, port and starboard – and the 24-hour clock – along with a wealth of seamanship knowledge – had been passed down and become rooted in his soul , but not the part about short cold showers. Twenty minutes later he slithered out of the shower, towelled off, and dressed.
The coffee pot, of course had been put to work and the coffee was hot. He took a mug and went out to his porch. He didn’t smoke a lot unless Arnold or another smoker was around but this morning he took a cigarette with him and sat back to think about his plans for the day. The waterfront by the docks was already busy with people launching their boats for a day’s fishing or water-skiing. The lake got very busy on the weekends, and it had occurred to him that nobody would really notice if he took his launch for a nice slow cruise far up the east shore, past MacLean Point and south to where Robertson Mines had proposed to expand the small ore refinery the company had originally built several decades before Anderson ever came to the lake.
He had also been thinking about inviting some company along on this little adventure: Marjorie. Now he took his phone from his shirt pocket, found her number, and hit re-dial. After four rings, she picked up: “Hello?”
“Hi Marjorie, it’s Frank Anderson. Good morning!” She seemed a little surprised, but somehow, pleased. Anderson continued, “Say, it’s a perfect morning to be out on the lake and I was thinking about taking a morning cruise up the lake past your place. No big deal, but I thought you might enjoy coming along.”
“Sounds like a great idea to me! Can I bring the coffee this time, and maybe a sandwich?”
“I sure won’t say no to that! Someday it would be nice to go down the river to Maple Falls and have lunch in that nice little restaurant by the town dock, but that would be a longer trip, and I just kinda felt like going east instead of west. Could I pick you up in about forty-five minutes, or would you like more time?”
“Maybe give me an hour to make the coffee and find something fascinating to make sandwiches with.”
“Perfect,” Anderson replied. I’ll give you a couple of honks as I go around the island, like the other night, and pick you up at your little dock. “And hey, the sandwiches don’t have to be fascinating, y’know. I’m pretty easy to feed!
Marjorie laughed brightly: “Okay, looking forward to it!”
Arnold is gonna tease the shit out of me about this, Anderson laughed to himself after he switched off. But I have an excuse. I want to learn more about Wendy and why she had turned up at the meeting on Thursday night.
He poured a second coffee into his travel mug and walked down to his boat, slipped the spring lines, started the main engine and genset and turned on the electronics. He stood on the dock for a few minutes, watching the traffic that was buzzing about the little harbour, and waved at people he thought he recognized, and some he had no clue. When his area seemed clear, he slipped the bow and stern lines, blew a long blast on the horn and moved very slowly off the dock. When the way seemed clear he headed straight out into the lake before speeding up, then pointed the bow in the general direction of MacLean Point and Ship Island, and moved the throttle forward until his GPS showed he was doing about eight knots. Anderson took out his second smoke, lit it and took a mouthful of coffee and settled in to enjoy the half-hour trip to his first destination: the Webster wharf on Ship Island. He loved moments like these: sunshine, a light wind, the diesels humming under his feet, and a place to go. It’s why he lived here.
The thirty minutes went by too quickly, but as he gave two quick shots on the horn and swung around to the south side of the little island, he was indeed pleased to see his passenger perched on a small cooler near the end of the beat-up old dock. He nosed carefully into the wharf, reversed the engine and stopped alongside. Marjorie was ready... she had put on her small backpack, then handed across the cooler and a big thermos jug and then stepped across onto the boat as if she had done it all her life. Anderson put the engine back into gear and backed out into the little bay, then turned the launch around and headed southeast toward the far shore. “Good morning Marjorie,” he said with a grin. “That was simple – looks like you’ve done that before!”
“Hi Frank. Not really, except with the little boat. This is going to be fun. Apart from the other night, I’ve never been on a boat this size, where I can actually lounge around and relax. Where did you say we are headed?
Anderson pointed along the distant shore: “We’ll cruise up that way until we get close to land a couple of miles up from the point, then follow the shoreline for awhile, up near where the big mining operation is. You can’t really see it from here, but I’m sure you can see smoke and steam coming from there on most weekdays.”
“Oh, sure, when we moved here Wendy told me that’s Robertson Mines. I’ve never been up there – its a bit far to paddle and anyway I prefer to go along the shore and poke around in the shallows and the little marshes and inlets from the streams. I’m not a very energetic kayaker, and not curious enough to zip around in the outboard – it’s just our way to get to and from the village.” She rummaged around on the well deck and unearthed the big thermos. “I see you brought a mug, so let me re-fill it and pour myself one. I noticed the other day that you took it black, but I brought sugar in case you like it. I do.”
“That’s great, and no, black is black, for me. On a cold – very cold – day, though, I’ve been known to add brandy and a bit of sugar.” Anderson had the engine cranked up to about ten knots by now, and there were only distant small boats around so he clicked on the autohelm and let it do the driving while they sipped coffee and talked a bit about the events of Thursday morning. She did tell him that not until last night had she had a really sound sleep; the brief flash of that awful face as it turned under her paddle had stuck with her, and she expected the vision wouldn’t completely go away for a long while.
As she was talking, she noticed that Anderson wasn’t anywhere near the wheel. “Ah, Frank, you’re, ah, not steering. And I’ve completely lost track of direction although I guess perhaps that’s our island over there behind us.”
“Yes, you’re right on both counts – that is indeed your island back there, and we’re still headed up the shore like I said. You been in an airliner, I’m sure, so you know they have autopilots? Well, this boat has an autopilot. Several ways to set it up, but the simple way is what I’ve done: you just aim where you want to go and push a button that tells it to keep going there. Electronics, a compass, GPS and little motors do the res
t.”
“That is so cool,” she laughed, walking over and looking curiously at the switches and dials and screens. “That is so cool. Does it serve coffee and make music too?”
“Nope. That stuff takes up too much room. This outfit just steers so I can pour the coffee, and if I want music I just bring Arnold and Marion along. When they aren’t shouting at each other or smooching, they actually play guitars and sing very well!
“Really?” Marjorie asked. “Arnold so does not look like a musician to me, and if Marion is the woman who works in the Main Street Garage where Wendy told me Arnold works, she doesn’t look like one either. They are both so very practical and rough-and-ready looking!
Anderson chuckled: “Yes, indeed, they are, and if you like country and old folk music, they make for good listening.” Anderson also saw his moment: “Say, as you probably know, Wendy was at the same meeting I was at a couple of nights ago. What does she do? Sorry, that’s kind of rude. I should have first asked what Marjorie does. I know nothing about you at all except that you are brave, steady and cheerful.”
“Hah,” she smirked at him. “Brave, steady and cheerful and not even pretty?”
Anderson could feel his face turn red, and his stomach tighten ever so slightly: “In the words of our Prime Minister, ‘this is 2017’ and I never tell any woman I hardly know that she is really pretty, even when she really is. Seems like it risks a hard slap upside the face – or a lawsuit maybe!”
They both laughed, he a bit nervously and she with pleasure. Marjorie began: “Okay, I’ll take that as a compliment. Let me fill you in on the girls from Webster Island.
“First, Wendy. Wendy is a writer, although she doesn’t call herself that anymore. She works for a small firm as a public relations consultant with a bunch of corporate clients. And, in fact, she doesn’t hardly use her creative side as a writer at all anymore; she manages PR stuff for her clients, and uses her team of young beavers to do the creative work. She is making herself filthy rich, but she is also a sweetheart, very generous, and a wonderful sister. Marjorie paused a moment while Anderson altered course to the south very slightly and re-engaged the autohelm.
“Then there is her older sister Marjorie,” she continued. “Marjorie would like to be an artist, but she is disappointed in herself. She does do contract work, fairly often, as a commercial graphic artist, which she hates to admit. Even at that, she works with pens and pencils and paints or acrylics, and is not capable of working in the modern world of digital art, computer graphics and the like. Marjorie is very lucky that her sister loves her, because she does not feel very worthy.
She paused. “Frank, I’m sorry. I sort of blurted all that out and I am sure it’s not very fascinating.”
Anderson had been listening intently, except for keeping one eye on a fast boat that was approaching from behind them on the starboard side. He put up his had to Marjorie in a gesture that clearly said “wait a minute” and took control of the wheel back from the autohelm. “Don’t know what this guy is up to,” he said aloud. He held the launch on its course while the approaching motorboat overtook them, made a lazy half-circle to the left around the launch and shot back down the lake. The five or six passengers waved beer cans at him, and disappeared with the boat into its own spray, headed back the way it came.
“Okay, sorry about that. You never know what folks are up to.” He set the autohelm on the previous course and clicked it on. “Actually, I am fascinated, absolutely, especially about the artist. I intend that we should spend a lot of time talking about the artist sister, but let’s start briefly with the public relations sister. She came across at first like a bright and lively person, but she kinda kept her cards to herself, like she was sitting in at a poker game. She made no comment except that she was new to the area and didn’t want to give any opinions and she sort of kept looking at me sideways.”
“Funny you should say that. First thing Friday morning over breakfast she asked me what I really knew about ‘that Anderson guy’. I allowed as how I really didn’t know much except that you had been very kind to me and were sensible and obviously well-thought-of by the police and the other people involved. What more’s a girl gonna say, I told her, after all I had only been around you for, like, two hours at most and that was mostly in a boat looking for a dead body. She tried to grill me a little more, and I wondered if you had made a pass at her but that didn’t fit with the little I already knew. I am still wondering what was going on in her head.”
The launch was still about a half-mile offshore, but Anderson went to the wheel, shut down the autohelm, throttled back by about two knots, and set the sonar warning system to 25 feet. He knew the lake was – overall – very deep, as much as 250 feet and averaging over 75 feet, but the shorelines were rocky and while the paper chart didn’t show any shallow areas along the east shore, he wasn’t taking any chances. And, as he was not really very familiar with the east shore with its low rocky profile, he felt the twenty-five foot depth setting should give him plenty of warning at this speed.
Marjorie had been watching this process closely, so he took the time to carefully explain it all carefully. By now, he had settled himself in the helmsman’s seat behind the wheel and was keeping his eye on the GPS and sonar screens as well as the water surface as he edged the boat closer to shore, until they were less than a quarter mile off and running parallel to it. “I have a question for you,” Marjorie said.
Here goes, he thought. “How can I help?” he asked.
“What is a knot, other than something you make in a rope? That doesn’t sound like what you are talking about, though.”
He chuckled, relieved: “Aha, a knot. Yes, the word ‘knot’ refers to more than just a thingy in a rope. In this case, it refers to speed: a nautical mile per hour. One knot is the same as just over one mile per hour, and just under two kilometers per hour. Heaven knows why, in this age of metric everything, we continue to have this unit in English-speaking countries, but there you go. Confuses everyone, don’t feel badly!”
“So now I have a few questions for you,” he continued. “They are about the artist sister.”
“Okay, fair enough,” she replied, “but first, I am looking at the instrument on top of your dashboard, and assuming it is a clock. It just clicked over eleven hundred – it now says eleven hundred and one. So, if it is a clock, does it start all over again at 1:00 pm, or does it do something different, like thirteen hundred, and so on?”
“You nailed it,” Anderson chuckled. “Yep, it counts the hours in order all the way to 23:59, then goes back to four zeros and starts all over. That way there no duplicate hours in the day. It’s called twenty-four hour, or often military, time. Actually the railways have always used it as well.”
“So, like, twelve hundred hours is lunchtime in both languages? And since I’m starving, could we stop out here pretty soon and relax over lunch?”
“First, you are correct. 12:00 hours is lunchtime. Today, though, I would like to wait until we have cleared the area near Robertson Mines. This boat, with its size and design and dirty grey colour – to say nothing of a navigation mast full of aerials – looks kind of official, and I don’t want any of Robertson’s paranoid personnel thinking we’re out here spying. If we slow down, they might wonder if there’s more to us than weekenders out for a ride, and on top of that I want to take some photos, at least with my phone.”
Marjorie was silent for a moment, then brightly piped up and said, “I think I can fix that.” She went out onto the well deck and grabbed her backpack, which she took forward into the tiny cabin, closing the door behind her. In less that two minutes she popped back out of the cabin wearing a very attractive two-piece bathing suit over her very elegant frame. “If I go out on deck with this – she showed him a small but powerful looking camera – and lounge around the deck taking shots of seagulls and loons, they’ll likely not give us another thought. And sometimes the birds might be between us and the shore.”
“You’re b
rilliant! That’s a great idea. I’ll speed up a little so it doesn’t take too long to go by their facility. This is perfect...” he paused, and then almost under his breath: “And you may now officially forget what I didn’t say earlier about your being pretty!”
She giggled at him, and asked when she should start. Anderson asked her to steady the wheel, took a pair of binoculars off the map table and scoured the shoreline. “I think now wouldn’t be a bad idea. I can see the outline of some big buildings about a mile further and I thought I saw some orange markers in the water nearer shore, but just ahead. Yeah, Espionage Specialist and Artist Lady, let’s go for it. Let me know if you see anything interesting through your lens, but don’t keep it on the shore too long or too often.”
She went out onto the well deck, and Anderson bumped the throttle up to about eleven knots, creating a substantially bigger bow-wave and wake which – just maybe, he thought – made it look more like they were just a happy couple out for a joyride. For her part, she wondered over the whole boat, taking snaps of occasional birds, the boat itself, Anderson through the wheelhouse window from the bow, and through the wheelhouse door from the stern. She put her cooler on the shore-side gunwale and took out a couple of beers she had brought, placing one on plain sight on the wheelhouse roof and took the other in to Anderson.
And every few snapshots, the camera lens swung to shore for less than five seconds. They travelled about twenty-five minutes like this until they were well past the buildings, then Anderson changed course slowly to the west and out toward a big low-lying island about four miles away. After a few more minutes, he called, “Enough already! Let’s actually open those beers and relax!”
Sunset at [20 47] Page 7