by Paul Moomaw
Some time later the telephone rings and jars me back into the room. I get up and answer it.
“You didn’t call,” Katherine says.
“Something came up.”
“You don’t sound happy. Should I leave you alone?”
My first impulse is to say yes, but I realize I want to talk to her. Need to talk to her, in fact.
“It’s nothing to do with you,” I say, which is a lie. It has everything to do with her. Angwin is her brother, and she is in the middle of it all.
“You still don’t sound happy.”
“I’m not. I’ve got some things to deal with and they have me out of sorts.”
“You need a boat ride,” Katherine says.
“A what?”
“A boat ride. Did you get my message? I bought a little boat. I want you to be the first passenger. It will be the perfect way to spend a Sunday.”
“I don’t know anything about boats,” I say.
“I do. All you have to do is sit and enjoy the ride.”
I let her talk me into picking her up the next day. We hang up and I try to go back to the world of Bach, but now it doesn’t work. Finally I go outside for a walk, long and direction-less, just to keep my mind from buzzing.
Chapter 42
The next morning I watch through the window to catch Katherine pulling up, and I am out on the sidewalk before she can begin trying to find a space to park. I walk to the driver’s side of the car and open the door.
“I’ll drive,” I say. “You need to look at these.” She gives me a quizzical look, but gets out of the car and takes the manila envelope I hand her. It is the one with the photographs of us together. She walks around to the passenger side and gets in, and I pull out.
“Where are we going?”
“Anacortes. To a marina called Cap Sante. Do you know it?”
“No, but I can get us to Anacortes and you can guide me in.”
My eyes are on the traffic, but I can hear Katherine opening the envelope flap and pulling the pictures out. Then I hear her gasp.
“What the hell?” she says. “Where did you get these?”
“From your brother. He showed up at my house yesterday.”
“No wonder you sounded upset on the phone. You mean that asshole has been following us around and we didn’t even know it?”
I shake my head. “Not him. He hired a private investigator. I spotted him twice, at the zoo and at Discovery Park. I started to go after him there, but I reacted too late.”
“I don’t understand,” Katherine says. She sounds afraid. “It feels like stalking.”
“I hoped you would have an idea why he might be having you followed,” I say. “Because the alternative is that I’m the target. You could say that idea makes me uncomfortable.”
“I don’t know. I really don’t. He’s followed me around before, but . . .” She pauses, and then says, “Oh, wait,” and as she says it I remember the same thing I am sure she is also recalling.
“Gasworks Park,” I say. Angwin was there.
“I bet he was following me that day. Or maybe it was just a coincidence. I think sometimes he just wanders around the city looking for ways to make trouble.”
“Either way, he probably recognized me. I thought he was too far off, and I was facing the other way.”
Katherine taps the photos. “So he paid good money to get the goods on us,” she says.
“On me. He tried to intimidate me.”
“Did it work?”
I just keep driving.
“Dumb question,” Katherine says after a moment. “I can’t imagine you being afraid of anything.”
“I’m afraid of heights,” I say, and immediately want to bite my tongue. My inner scold whispers that now she has something she can use against me. I tell it to shut up. She already has something much bigger than that on me. I laugh out loud.
“What’s funny?” Katherine says.
“You’re learning all my secrets. Now you know I’m a killer and a fraidy cat.”
Now Katherine laughs. “Be careful I don’t blackmail you. Maybe I’ll force you to give me head every morning before coffee.”
“Don’t talk dirty or I’ll have to park the car right now,” I say, and we laugh together.
We reach Interstate Five and head north. There is no more talk until we have gotten as far as Everett. Then Katherine asks, “What does he want?”
I let the question hang for a few moments. “He wants me to move you to the top of the list,” I finally say.
Katherine says nothing, but in her silence, I hear a question.
“You aren’t on the list. On your brother’s, but not on mine. Not ever.” I look away from the traffic briefly and at her. She is gazing at me and I cannot guess what is going on behind her eyes. I return my attention to the road.
“What will you do about Eddy?”
“I don’t know. My thinking hasn’t gotten that far yet.”
“Will you have to kill him?”
“I don’t know.”
“I hope you won’t. I don’t understand why I feel that way, but I do.”
“He’s your brother. I suppose when you were little kids you were close.”
“When we get to Anacortes go straight up Commercial Avenue. I’ll tell you where to turn.”
She clearly does not want to talk more about her brother, and I am just as glad; but I cannot help thinking about him. I do not wish to kill him. I do want to intimidate him. I remember Katherine telling me that her brother stole things. A plan begins to germinate in my mind. It involves breaking into his apartment when he is working at American Lake. I need to know what he actually has on me. Knowledge is power. I am experiencing that right now, because he has knowledge that could give him power over me. I need a counterbalance, or I will have to kill him. It is all vague but it is a start. One thing at a time, I think, and then I am able to put Angwin out of my mind for a while.
When we reach Cap Sante I drop Katherine off at a small steel building that serves as an office and then find a place to park the car. There is a cooler in the back seat, which Katherine says is for our picnic lunch. My job is to lug it from the car to the boat. By the time I return Katherine and a man in blue jeans and a gray t-shirt are walking toward a large storage building.
“This part is the poor man’s marina,” she says as I catch up, and points toward the building. “It’s like a big garage for us little people who can’t afford dock space.”
We wait outside while the man goes into the building. After a short while he reappears, driving a small tractor and towing Katherine’s boat.
“It’s kind of small,” I say. The boat is olive drab metal, about twelve feet long. It is what is called a John boat, with a flat bottom and a squared off nose. A small outboard engine is attached to the transom at the rear, and four seats stretch across from side to side, one at each end and two in the middle.
“It will get us where we’re going,” Katherine says. “It stays upright most of the time, and those bench seats all have blocks of foam under them for flotation.”
I place the cooler into the boat, then we follow on foot as the man tows the boat to a large crane at the edge of the water. He positions the boat beneath the crane, runs large hawsers under the hull, and waves to the crane operator. With a loud whine the crane cable begins to wind up, and the hawsers tighten under the boat and lift it off its trailer. Then the operator swings the boat away from land and lowers it gently into the water next to a small pier. The man who brought the boat out races down a ramp to the pier and releases the hawsers, then stands back as the crane cable moves away. He motions to us and we walk down to the boat. He holds the mooring line as we clamber in. The boat rocks under my feet, and I almost fall. The man grins and tosses me the line.
“Have fun, sailor,” he says, and walks back toward the ramp.
Katherine starts the engine and rotates the tiller a half circle.
“No reverse gear,” she says. �
�You just point the propeller and go.”
We back away from the pier into open water, and then Katherine works the tiller and we curve slowly out and toward Guemes Channel, which runs past Anacortes. When we reach the channel she turns us west. There is some wave action, and the flat bottom of the boat slaps noisily against the surface of the water. Out here the boat seems even smaller. I tell myself that Katherine knows what she is doing. I am not sure I believe it, but it is too late to worry about that now.
We reach more open water, and the waves seem to come from all directions. The little boat tosses and lurches, and Katherine increases the engine power. A couple of times the outboard’s propeller comes right out of the water, and shrieks its freedom for a moment before dropping below the surface again. We reach Bellingham Channel and turn north. The boat seems to slow down, and the engine labors.
“These currents are strong,” Katherine says. “The engine has to fight right now, but in another quarter hour the tide will change and then we’ll have the current with us.” She points to the island to our east. “That’s Guemes Island,” she says, then points west. “And that’s Cypress. That’s where we’re going. No ferries there. No electricity. A few people live there, but not many. The middle part of it is a big park.”
Not long after the boat begins to move more easily, and the engine runs more quietly.
“See?” Katherine says. “Tide’s changed.”
We move past the north end of the island and Katherine turns the boat west. We circle the northernmost point, head back down the western shore for another ten minutes, then turn towards a small cove. The land is steep and covered with trees and undergrowth, and drops down to a narrow beach of gray pebbles. Katherine increases the engine speed as we get closer, then shuts it off, and we coast into the beach. The little boat’s flat bottom makes a grinding sound as we slide onto land. I grab the mooring line, jump out, and tug the boat farther up the beach. Katherine slips over the side and takes the cooler out of the boat. She walks a little way up the beach and sets the cooler down. A large driftwood log rests close to where the forest and beach meet. I pull the boat further up onto land and secure the line to the log.
An old house, small and weather-beaten, lies tucked into the trees just beyond the beach.
“Does that belong to someone?” I ask, pointing at the house.
“Me. My folks left it to me when they died. I guess they knew better than to leave it to Eddy. He would have sold it off by now to pay for some harebrained scheme. They got it from the heirs of a woman who used to live here. The story is that she and her husband lived in this house. He was a fisherman and was lost at sea. She stayed in the house for years, not willing to believe he was dead. Finally she gave up. Most people think she climbed up there to Eagle Rock and jumped, but they never found her body.”
Katherine walks a little ways toward the house and gazes at it, hands on her hips.
“Our family never stayed in it. We always used a tent. When I was little Eddy convinced me the place was haunted. Once when Mom and Dad were off for an evening paddle he talked me into going inside. Then he tied me to an old wood stove and ran off. I was scared to death.” She pauses for a moment and shakes her head slowly. “He liked scaring me. I guess he still does.” She shudders slightly and then says, “Let’s take the cooler and climb up to the rock for lunch.” Without waiting for an answer she grabs the cooler and walks toward a path that disappears into the woods. I hurry to catch up. The path begins to climb steeply, then levels off across a broad glade before it bumps up against another hill. From there it climbs steeply. Katherine moves up it easily and I hang back a little for the pleasure of watching her legs and haunches in motion. The climb takes close to forty minutes and even though the day is cool I am sweating by the time we reach a large expanse of flat rock. Katherine points to a tall pine just inland from where we stand.
“See the nest? There’ve been eagles there every year for as long as I can remember.” She raises her arms over her head and stretches. “Feels good to be here again. I haven’t actually come to the island for three or four years.”
“Why?”
“I hadn’t gotten around to getting another boat.”
“What happened to the first one?”
“Sank.” She does not offer an explanation, and I am not sure I want to know, anyway. She walks to the edge of the rock and peers down. “You can see our boat from here. Come look.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” Just watching her dance around next to the edge of the cliff makes my anus tighten.
Katherine spins and looks at me, then laughs. “You really are afraid of heights,” she says. She does a small pirouette and then stands on one foot, her other leg stretched out over empty space, while I cringe inside and try not to show it.
Finally she takes mercy on me and steps away from the edge of the rock. “I wonder what that old woman thought about just before she jumped. I bet she wasn’t afraid. Maybe excited, but not afraid.”
“I can’t generate much excitement about being dead,” I say.
“It’s just a journey.”
“It’s a dead end. You die. You’re gone. That’s that.”
Katherine looks down at me and shakes her head. “Not true.” She sits down suddenly and leans against my shoulder. “Do you have dreams?”
“Sometimes, but I don’t pay much attention.”
“There’s one I’ve had since I was a little girl. I’m lying somewhere, I don’t know where except it’s a pleasant place, and I am waiting for the clock to chime because I know I have to die before the chiming stops or I’ll be too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“For whatever comes next. I think the trick is to die at exactly the right time, and sometimes you just have to guess when that is. It’s kind of like a contest.” She giggles slightly. “Like where you have to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar to win the prize. You can have all kinds of strategies, but finally it comes down to making the right guess. Otherwise you lose.”
“Then I’ve made losers out of a lot of people. I forced them to leave too early.”
Katherine wriggles against me. “Don’t make fun. And anyway, maybe that’s not true. Maybe you’re the messenger sent to let them know it’s time to go.”
She stands up and stretches. “Let’s eat,” she says, and opens the cooler. “Nothing fancy. Sandwiches from the neighborhood Safeway, deviled eggs, and beer.” She holds up a bottle and I realize that I am thirsty. Hungry, too. I take the bottle, twist off the cap, and take a swallow. It is gratifyingly cold. She tosses me a sandwich. “Ham and cheese.”
We sit side by side, only the sound of chewing and swallowing breaking the silence. A small breeze stirs and I see the beginning of a cloud to the northwest over Vancouver Island. I find myself thinking of the house below us, and of Katherine’s brother tying her up and abandoning her inside.
“What did you parents do when your brother left you tied up like that?”
“Nothing. They told him it wasn’t nice, he shouldn’t do things like that.” She sighs noisily. “Eddy did a lot of things that weren’t nice,” she says. “I think he was always jealous of me. He was older, but I was the star. He had trouble in school. I learned to read and write before kindergarten. He wasn’t athletic. I played killer softball.” She stops again and stares into the distance. “He got even, though,” she says after a while. Her voice has gone soft and her gaze has gone inside somewhere.
“When I was six and he was eleven he started doing things to me. Sexual things. He used to like to spread me out and tie me down. Then he would stick things inside me. Just where would depend on whether he had me lying on my stomach or my back. It went on until I was almost twelve.”
“You didn’t tell your parents?”
Katherine shakes her head. “No.” Suddenly she looks up and points toward the northwest. The cloud I saw has become a bank of clouds, and the breeze is becoming a wind.
“We better
head back,” she says.
We move fast going down the trail. The way is steep and I am carrying the cooler, which bangs against my legs; but I move with a feeling of relief that makes me realize how tense I was the whole time I was up on that exposed piece of rock. By the time we reach the beach there are waves on the water and the wind has picked up. I untie the little boat and together we push it across the pebbles to the water. Katherine gets in and sits by the outboard. I shove the boat far enough into the water to clear the engine’s propeller, and Katherine starts it. I swing the cooler over and into the boat and jump in after it.
As we drift off the beach Katherine swings the nose of the boat south.
“We’ll take Rosario Strait down the west side of the island and then hop across to Anacortes,” she says. She increases power and the little boat begins to slap across the waves. The wind is pushing ever harder from our stern, and soon the boat feels like it is flying. We reach the south end of the island and head out into the larger water of Guemes Channel. To our left I see rocks poking up above the surface of the water.
“There’s a reef over there. Not a good place to go swimming.”
I nod and say nothing. I do not wish to go swimming anywhere around here. The water is killing cold.
We move farther into the big water of the channel and suddenly the waves are coming from all directions. The little boat jumps and lurches. One wave throws me hard to the side and it is all I can do to hang on. I manage, and then look back just in time to see that Katherine has not. She is halfway to her feet and then suddenly over the side. I lunge back to try to grab her, but she is gone. I look around wildly and then I see her head just to the stern. I grab the tiller and try to circle the boat around, and almost swamp it in the process. I am suddenly thankful for the flotation foam under all the seats. I manage to aim the boat toward Katherine, but the waves keep pounding every which way and every time she is close enough to grasp we are swept apart again. Finally, without thinking, I grab the mooring line in one hand and jump into the water. I swim to Katherine and she wraps her arms around my neck. Then I pull us back, hand over hand, to the boat. I support her with my shoulder as she clambers in, and then follow. We sit for a few moments, shivering from the cold air and colder water. Then Katherine half crawls toward the middle of the boat. She waves weakly toward the outboard.