Oh no, I’ve scared her to death. She’s having a psychological breakdown, he thought. He’d been so stupid to talk her into this.
She was deathly still for several moments, her body heaving along with each breath. Terrified, Edgar placed a clammy hand on her shoulder and bent down to her, to make sure she was OK.
“Dang, Shay,” he said softly. “I’m so sorry I talked you into jumping. I sure didn’t mean to . . .”
“Gotcha!” she said, shooting up, a wild smile on her face. She cackled at her marvelous revenge—scaring him half to death.
“You suck,” he said, laughing, relieved that she wasn’t hurt or sick.
“But, oh!” she exclaimed. “The falling was awful!”
“Yeah?” he chuckled. “Well, you totally get used to it.”
Then they turned, and when she looked out over the beautiful, expansive ocean, he presented it to her with the wide sweep of his hand.
“This,” he said, “is mine.”
She peered at the horizon and turned slightly to the west, facing the big, yellow moon. As she did, the two of them fell silent and stared at it for a long, lingering moment.
“Where is this?” she whispered. “Where have you brought me?”
He turned and watched her beautiful brown hair drift in all directions.
“It’s where the constellations are upside down,” he said, pointing her to Orion. Orion sat directly on his head, like he was doing some sort of celestial handstand. From there, Edgar sat her down on the island’s top and, overlooking the sea, he told her everything.
Thirteen
With the North American moon high in the sky, Edgar texted Shay:
Look outside.
He was standing breathless beside the street lamp on her street corner, waiting for a bedroom light to come on. Then, suddenly, a curtain fluttered in one of the windows upstairs. Shay’s face appeared for a moment, but then it vanished.
“Ugh,” he said, smashing a palm to his face. “I’m such an idiot.”
Turning forlornly, he headed for home but not before shooting one last glance over his shoulder.
There, on the balcony beneath her window, was Shay! He squinted to see her, but yes, she was weaving expertly through the limbs of a sycamore tree that was adjacent to her bedroom sliding effortlessly down to the bottom of the tree trunk like a fireman’s pole.
“Whoa,” he whispered as she approached. “Sneak out much?” She giggled quietly and looked up at him.
“I used to do gymnastics,” she explained, a wild, invigorated smile on her face. Then she followed him into the night, and together they made off for the Indian Hills.
__________
Escorting her into the cabin, Edgar quickly lit the lantern for her and asked her to wait by the hole.
“I just need to get a few things together,” he said, dashing to the worktable, where there, several items had been arranged for the trip: a soft cooler with ice, two flash lights, two beach towels, and two backpacks, complete with sunscreen, drinks, baseball caps, bagged lunches, and even a music player.
All the essentials for a day at the beach.
“You ready?” he said, and when she nodded, he added, “I sure hope it’s not raining when we get there. Hard to check the weather for an island in the middle of a strange sea on the opposite side of the world and you don’t even know where it is . . . you know?”
He handed her a backpack to carry and took her by the arm, readying for liftoff.
“Oh, I hate this part,” she said, scrunching her nose and grinning.
“Yeah, but you get used to it,” he said, and on the count of three, together they went whooshing through the planet Earth.
__________
Two hours later, as Shay was sprawled on the island, sun tanning, Edgar fished hard for Ambercod.
“It’s been so long since I’ve had a beach day!” she cooed, rubbing a glob of suntan lotion on her light brown shoulders.
It was a really beautiful day.
“Me too,” he said, grunting as he hooked a humongous fish.
“What are you even talking about?” she laughed. “You’ve been a walking zombie at school every day! I bet you come here every night!”
“Not every night,” he insisted.
She was a fabulous addition to his island. Her being there made him notice how quiet the island always was, and how often he talked to himself aloud there, or got lost in his dreary thoughts with nobody else around.
But Shay’s presence made the island feel like an actual beach resort or something—like the two were on a vacation in the Caribbean.
“You hungry?” he asked, as the hooked fish came flopping to shore. Edgar bent and unhooked it, then placed it on a stringer along with the other fish. “I’m starving if you ask me.”
She nodded and laughed, then joined him as the two walked down to the shore, their backpacks slung over their shoulders. Edgar spread a towel out across the course surface and they distributed the food for each other, then ate with their sun-soaked feet in the sea.
“This is great, huh?” he chewed happily.
She smiled and nodded, leaning into him for a moment.
“So,” he said.
“So?”
“Well, I guess you’re pretty rich, huh?” At that, she ceased to chew. Her face darkened immediately. She dropped her head and began to stare at the sand beneath her legs, shaking her head.
“So?” she asked defensively.
“It’s just that,” he said, clamoring to fix the wrong he’d just committed, “I just thought, you know, you live on Japonica Street. With all the big houses.” He painfully swallowed a dry mouthful of sandwich and cursed himself. “That’s the richest neighborhood in town, so I guess I was just pointing that out.”
Shay shrugged again and looked into the sea. “We don’t have as much as some do, I guess.”
He scolded himself again and shrugged.
“Look,” he muttered. “I’m just an idiot. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
She nodded and took another small bite of her sandwich.
“I guess while I’m being a jerk,” he continued, “maybe I could ask you another personal question. That is, if you’re game?” He leaned over and bumped her shoulder playfully with his own.
She nodded and flashed a downcast smile. “Fine. What do you want to know?”
“Well,” he said, “the other day, Weedy mentioned something about your dad being a ‘criminal?’”
“Oh, yeah,” she said grimly, “that.”
She tossed a bit of uneaten crust into the swarming pool of Ambercod offshore. “Well, a couple of years back, my dad was charged with embezzlement,” she said softly. “This was back when he was mayor.”
“Whoa! Your dad was mayor? That’s pretty cool.” After a moment, he asked the obvious question. “Well? Did he do it? Embezzle, I mean?”
“I’m not sure,” she answered, quite candidly. “Although he swears he didn’t do it.”
“Well, then he didn’t,” Edgar confirmed.
She picked up a tiny mollusk shell and inspected the inside.
“He’s the county commissioner nowadays,” she explained. “He’s never been convicted of anything.”
“Well, good,” said Edgar. “I’m glad nothing ever came of it.”
“Not yet,” she corrected him.
He joined her in looking thoughtfully out to sea, the air whipping around them crisp, and the sunshine bright, and the western breeze cooling their faces.
“I’m sorry for prying,” he mumbled, terribly sorry that he’d bummed her out.
“Oh, Edgar. I don’t mind.”
Then she brightened and elbowed him. “Now you’ve gotta tell me one of your skeletons.”
“A . . . what?” he asked. “W
hat ‘skeleton’?”
“You know, a ‘skeleton from your closet.’”
“I showed you this island, didn’t I? I showed you a hole that goes all the way through the Earth! If you told anybody my secret, I’d lose it all. That’s not ‘skeleton’ enough for you?”
“Nope,” she said playfully. “You’ve gotta give me something you’re ashamed of. Not proud of.”
“Oh, I see,” he said, taking a large, thoughtful gulp of Coke. Then, pausing for a moment, he took a deep breath and looked at her, then told her about Bon Secour.
“Two years back,” he began, “I was eating lunch at a marina when suddenly I looked up and there was Dad on national TV—or a picture of him anyway. Below the picture they were showing his rig on fire.
“An oil rig has exploded off the coast today,” continued Edgar, mimicking a reporter’s voice. “The base of the oil rig has been completely engulfed in flames, as you can see on your screen. Crude oil is spewing unabated into the Gulf of Mexico now . . .”
“I remember that,” Shay said.
“Well, remember how a bunch of those people were killed?”
She nodded somberly.
“I totally freaked out at first,” said Edgar, “thinking my dad was dead, too. All the guys I worked with who were eating with me tried to calm me down, but for about an hour I didn’t know if he was alive or dead and I just couldn’t get it together. Then, finally, when my mom—who was even more hysterical than I was—got ahold of me, she gave me the news.”
“He was OK, right?” Shay said.
“Yeah, for the moment,” explained Edgar. “He was shell-shocked, for sure, but he was OK. You’ve got to understand, Shay, that day he lost several good friends, close ones. But afterward was the worst. Suddenly he was facing press conferences and court appearances and testifying for days on end, defending himself for the oil spill. Everyone was blaming the whole thing on him.
“So he was at court defending himself, and we went every day to support him. Every night on the news, there he was, my Dad, the most hated man in Bon Secour.”
Edgar’s mind flashed back to that horrible day, when the judge had questioned his father on trial.
“Were you, Mr. DeWitt, responsible for attaching the safety valves to the bottom of the rig?”
“Yes ma’am, I was.”
“Did you, Mr. DeWitt, do so according to the safety regulations required of you by the guidelines of the EPA?”
“Yes ma’am, I did.”
“Were you, Mr. DeWitt, aware that the equipment in question—the C18-35 Containment Valve—particularly the part you were commissioned to inspect—was eight days beyond its annual safety check up on the day it failed?”
“No ma’am, I was not.”
“So you were responsible for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill?”
“If you need to hold someone accountable, ma’am, for this terrible thing that has happened, I suppose it can be me.”
Edgar disgustedly tossed the remainder of his sandwich to the Ambercod. “Dad got choked up twice on the stand,” he muttered, “he tried not to cry constantly, actually. It was so awful to see. You’ve got to know: he never cries. He never has a reason to! He’s the happiest guy I know. We sat in the courtroom and watched them hammer him all day long, every day, for weeks.
“It wasn’t long after they went ahead and fired him too. He had to endure all that BS just to get fired in the end. Well, even still, he made us stay in Bon Secour for weeks afterward. We didn’t just flee to Washington. He dragged us to town meetings every week and kept telling us that any decent person helps others even when their help is not wanted. Which is exactly the way it was in Bon Secour: they hated him and they hated us because we were his people, but still, he stayed and did all he could to help Bon Secour. They didn’t deserve him.”
“Why?” she asked. “Why did they hate him so much? Wasn’t it an accident? They sound like terrible people.”
“Yeah, but you see, what you don’t understand is how badly the town was devastated. Its tourism industry dried up like that.” He snapped his fingers. “All the fishing, all the swimming, all was lost. Nobody came around anymore. I even lost my job on the charter boat that year because nobody was fishing. The ocean was sludge. My uncle—my Dad’s brother—eventually lost his fishing charter. He lost his boat, too. And my dad was the one to blame. All because of a stupid regulation that screwed him because he was as much behind on his work—and really, even less so—than any other city worker going around doing all their tasks. Hell, he was busy working on all the other crap they were piling on him! My dad is the hardest worker I know. He was the hardest worker in Bon Secour. He loved his job. He loved that place.”
“How terrible,” she whispered.
“Yeah, it was. It is.”
“So that’s why you all moved up here?” she asked. “To Mount Lanier? To get away from those angry people back in your hometown?”
“Yeah,” he nodded. “Dad got a job up here with the Department of Transportation. It’s a pretty crappy job, considering he’s a really smart guy, you know. PhD in Engineering. Master’s in Chemistry. He should be building nuclear bombs and stuff, but you know, this had to happen.”
Shay sighed softly and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Me and my family watched that oil spill on TV. We watched it every day for weeks.”
“We did too,” he said grimly, then reclined beside her on the sand.
Shay straightened and flicked her hair.
“So tell me, Edgar. Why does Flounder not know about this island?”
“Well,” he said, shaking his head. “Flounder’s my good friend, but I’m not sure how calm he is under pressure. There’s a lot of people asking about the Ambercod lately, and his parents probably are, too, so I just can’t risk him knowing the truth right now, not when we’re making so much money.”
“Why do you call it Ambercod?” she asked.
“Well,” he said, nodding proudly at the stringer currently splashing by the shore, “because they’re flaky like Amberjack, but buttery like cod. When Flounder asked me what they were called, ‘Ambercod’ was the first thing that came to mind.”
“I see. So do you have any plans for all this money, Edgar? Besides giving it all to Walmart, I suppose?”
“Yeah,” he said, brightening. “I’m using it to get us back home.”
“To . . . where? Alabama?”
“Yeah,” he nodded.
“But . . . why? What about all those angry people down there in Bon Secour? The ones who treated your family so terribly?”
“Yeah, well,” said Edgar, “you can fix things like that. You can make them like they once were, even a town. Even people.”
“No you can’t!” she said. “You can’t fix a whole town, not if they’re dead-set against you!”
He thought for a moment. “Yeah, you can. I can fix everything now. I can fix everything with the Ambercod.”
__________
As the sun dipped in the sky and the two collected their things, Shay calculated aloud what time they should arrive back at her house.
“I need to jump before it gets any later,” she urged him. “I can’t get caught sneaking out.”
He certainly knew how she felt.
“OK,” he said, “let’s go.” He yanked the stringer of fish from the water and joined her at the hole’s edge.
Before they jumped, she turned to him.
“I asked you before. What’s so good about Alabama?” She looked up at him with big, beautiful eyes.
He could stare at them for days.
“Lots of things,” he explained. “You’ve got hunting and fishing, and the boating’s great, and there’s waterskiing too, and the weather’s just perfect down there: five million degrees in the shade.” He smiled slyly. “Also, it rains occasionally there, which is diffe
rent than some places I know . . .”
He looked down into the hole and his smile faded.
“It’s just home,” he said finally, contemplatively. He hoisted his backpack and looked at her. “You know, like, home?”
“Yes, Edgar, I understand,” she said, slipping her feet over the hole’s edge. “But you know what they don’t have in Alabama?” She smiled and leaned out further. “Me!”
And then she leapt over the hole, dropping like a brick into the darkness, and in seconds was gone.
He stared after her in shock, his mouth wide open.
He was thrilled!
He laughed and leapt down, yanking the stringer of fish behind him as he went whooshing after her. In freefall, he pointed his body straight, like a pencil, as he’d learned to do, then careened headfirst at a blazing speed, blitzing after her while dragging behind him all the flopping, wiggling fish.
Ahead in the darkness, he could see her flashlight flickering. Giggling, he straightened his body even more and accumulated speed, and within seconds he was there, joining up with her. Upon his arrival she twirled to greet him, laughing loudly, her beautiful hair lifted high in the wind.
The Secret Island of Edgar Dewitt Page 10