by Mark Ellis
She looked up from her monitor. The contrast between her surface political consciousness and Lara Svenko’s ideological immersion crossed her mind like a rusty gear. She had simply trusted the Republican patriarchs to keep America safe and prosperous. So insulated had been her pursuit of a career in investigation that in many ways she’d lost touch with the world she would be investigating. To a cuckold husband or scorned wife, what did it matter who controlled Congress? Even as she clicked on websites and made case notes, Melissa felt the breadth of her research into Svenko’s death expanding to include an overdue reeducation.
Suddenly Ms. Claymore was in her doorway. Melissa swiveled her chair away from the window deferentially.
“I thought I’d bring this down personally,” said Scrimshaw’s proficient secretary, proffering a tied salmon-colored packet. “Everything you’ll need for your journey.” Melissa nodded her thanks as the secretary looked past her to the data on her screen. “How goes the research?” she asked.
“Well, I agree so far with the locals and feds that no laws appear to have been broken.
The theory about a GOP killer is just too on-the-nose in my opinion, though I certainly can’t rule it out yet.”
Claymore smiled. “I’ll leave you to your work.”
Melissa locked the salmon-hued travel packet in her top drawer and headed for the elevator. After hours spent peering into her monitor, a quick afternoon latte from the kiosk outside was very much necessary. Jeff Griffin arrived at the elevator doors at the same time and joined her for the ten-story drop. He was a good-looking man, though older. But no, he was a competitor now, along with all the men in all the other offices, and never should the twain of heartstrings and take-home pay meet. Thankfully he did not try to exploit their proximity, only nodded professionally, arching those tawny-gold eyebrows before going his own way in the mezzanine. Apparently, a formal introduction was something nobody thought necessary as yet, or necessary at all.
Back in her office, Melissa opened Scrimshaw’s packet. Charon had gone to great lengths to present Melissa as Sue Ross, a Lewis & Clark College journalism intern with the school’s Pioneer Log, and she was one of just three undergraduate interns green-lit by the cruise makers. She and her apprentice cohorts would compete for angles against seasoned political journalists approved for the cruise. Given Melissa’s decade in the political wilderness, she might as well have been fresh out of the upstairs bedroom of a two-parent Port Rachel split-level.
Melissa caught herself reflecting on Mr. Scrimshaw’s wisdom again. The more she read, the more she understood that her status as a political babe-in-the-woods made her the perfect candidate to pull off the intern ruse. In a piece written by famous conservative talk show host Grant Sharpe (even she knew who he was) on the eve of the 2008 Rainier Policy Institute departure, Melissa read that in the halcyon days of conservative cruises, when Nixon himself might come down to the wharf and wave his approval or Dan Quayle might rotor down onto the helicopter pad for an official sendoff, Melissa’s current age would have been considered ten years too old. Not so much anymore. Journalism departments across the country were peppered with women in their thirties who’d helmed student newspapers, penned campus literary magazines, and then taken tangents in life. Though the recession had greatly impacted the number of admissions to prestigious and expensive private and state colleges, institutions like Cape Lookout were enrolling legions of wannabe correspondents drawn to bylines and self-expression like tourists attracted to the Space Needle.
It was Reagan, or more specifically, Melissa’s father’s stories about Reagan, that first inspired her middle-school interest in competitive swimming. Dennis Blythe had told the story about how Reagan, born rather scrawny, came into his own as a lettered swimmer in high school and went on to become a lifeguard. Over seven summers, the Gipper saved no fewer than seventy-seven lives. With the facts of Reagan’s aquatic prowess made legend in her mind, Melissa tried out for and made the team, and all through her years at Port Rachel High School, she competed and won her share of medals.
It was also in her teens that Melissa impulsively jumped ship and got on board with handsome Bill Clinton. Fleetwood Mac’s million-selling album Rumours became her soundtrack, and “Don’t Stop” her favorite song. The hits kept coming as Bubba dispatched old Dole in 1996. Alas, when the time came in 2000 for Melissa to cast the first ballot of her lifetime, she could not keep the faith with Mr. Gore. His histrionic sighs at the presidential debates with George W seemed creepy, and she didn’t like his extended kiss with Tipper at the Democratic convention. The possibility of a four-to-eight-year stint shadowed by the VP’s prepossessing dark suit struck her as a recipe for something shady and unmoored. She cast her very first vote for Bush Junior in the hopes of a return to Reagan’s Soviet-busting and what she understood as a reemphasis on the founding principles of small government, free markets, and individual rights.
The August after the election, Melissa went to Nevada’s Virginia City with her best friend and classmate, Shauna, for a week’s vacation. They gambled unsuccessfully, tanned successfully, and flirted shamelessly in Main Street bars with happy Republican cowboys. Daytime temperatures reached into the high nineties each day, and the skies, though blue, were hazy with the smoke from nearby wildfires. The pool at the dude ranch was peppered with a fine silt of ash, but that didn’t stop Melissa from taking numerous cooling dips. She and Shauna spent the last day walking the immense cemetery outside the city limits.
It was the last hurrah of a more innocent time. She and Shauna were back in class at Cape Lookout by Monday, September 7, 2001.
Fate had ordained that Melissa should have been at a Cape Lookout desk on the morning of September 11, 2001. During her course of study, she was way too busy for participation in extracurricular swimming events, but the community college had a fabulous pool. Around six on the morning of 9/11, approximately fifteen minutes after the first plane hit, Melissa’s hair was still damp-dry and chlorinated from a quick dip. Another early-morning swimmer, a woman Melissa had seen in the hallways, entered the woman’s lounge and asked if she’d heard the news.
That was the point from which everything after moved in a changed, degenerated rhythm. The school dean’s voice came over the intercom, calling an assembly in the performing arts theater. There was a television, and she and a collection of early birds crowded around it. She knew in her heart that no pilot would have made this mistake.
Then the second plane hit.
After the Pentagon, Melissa and Shauna escaped back to the poolside women’s lounge, where Shauna cried for the loss of life. Melissa wept too, but also sinking in was the extent of her estrangement from world events. They both went back out and watched the coverage, shifting their eyes to the skyscrapers around them. The Police Science Department head, wizened old Mr. Hastings, declared that anyone who wanted to could go home. From the garden lanai of the Port Rachel apartment she then called home, Melissa looked out over a sky empty of Jet City vapor trails. When Fox News ran a day’s-end montage complete with heart-rending orchestration, she wept again.
That was the tipping point, the moment her balmy Reagan/Clinton political identifiers slipped right and stayed right. Right enough to get her labeled a postmillennial ultraconservative, according to her research. And though caught up in her own life and the exigencies of love and career, conservative she remained, enough to stand and be counted among Bush’s 2004 supporters. Though she didn’t fully comprehend the connection between Ground Zero and Iraq, the tableau of Muslim extremists incinerating busloads of Israeli children, slitting Theo van Gogh’s throat on an Amsterdam street, and stoning unfaithful wives to death deeply offended and frightened some fundamental part of her Westernized womanhood. You don’t switch generals in the middle of a life-or-death struggle.
Chapter Eight
It was 3:45 p.m., and Charon had all but folded up for the day. Melissa collected the contents of Scrimshaw’s travel packet and brought up her screen sav
er, the original floating, colored windows that had come with her 1995 Works program, which she had retained and transplanted to Word. She liked the way the windows appeared as small Star Trek blips and then grew, wavering, advancing, till she felt one or two might escape the monitor and float into real space. They always veered off and became invisible in the margins at just the last second, and the eye would travel back to those new windows just forming and beginning their journey. The factoids, leads, and clues inherent in investigative work were like those windows, blipping onto radar, growing, and then skirting off into the obscurity of solution, or it’s opposite, enduring mystery. Suddenly, her eyes fatigued from hours in front of her glazed portal, Melissa rose and walked over to the window. Looking down through the depopulated scrapers, she saw the back end of that fire truck still parked, the big hose still connected, but there was no smoke, the fire was out.
There was a knock at the office door, and there, like a ghost of travels past, stood Shauna, bleary-eyed and ready to go home. The blond, divorced administrative secretary had graduated from Cape Lookout with Melissa, secured a clerical position at Charon, and thus far avoided joining the growing ranks of the unemployed. On Melissa’s advice, she had rented an apartment in quiet, dependable Port Rachel.
“What’s your weekend look like?” she asked.
“Not much,” Melissa admitted. She had planned only to begin preparations for her departure, things like getting her bills in order and talking to condo complex management about holding her mail. She handed her friend a sticky note asking her to check on her place three or four times during her absence.
“No problem,” Shauna agreed. “Listen, Randy and I are going to hit an antiques bazaar on Queen Anne Hill Saturday. Want to go?”
Melissa considered Shauna’s invitation for only a second. She would need get some fresh air a time or two over the weekend or face the groggy dispiritedness that comes with too long absorption in too much information about human failings and misfortune.
“Sure,” she agreed, and the rendezvous was set for ten thirty Saturday morning at her condo so they could all drive in together. Melissa promised to have her espresso maker up and running.
Once outside Charon’s florescent labyrinth, she saw that despite the muggy heat, the city had received a misting drizzle, the kind of insufficient wetting that mixed with accumulated oiliness and created a treacherously slick film on the streets. Sure enough, at the crosswalk to the parking garage, some cretin in one of those ridiculous high-suspension pickup trucks braked suddenly for a red light, did a one eighty on the oil-sheened asphalt, and barely avoided crunching the rear fender of a sedan full of nuns. A black traffic chopper from one of the stations appeared around a skyscraper and leveled off Apocalypse Now–style over the waterfront.
By the time she got to her Legacy at the top floor of the parking tower, the rain had moved out over the water and looked like it wasn’t making it down out of the sky. The slopes of the Olympic Range were still as brown as the back of a bark beetle. She rolled down the grimy, low-clearance ramp of the parking structure.
With such thoughts wafting up like the fumes of Seattle’s enervated rush hour, Melissa took her place in downtown’s start-stop exodus to the freeway. The Legacy’s air conditioning couldn’t quite filter the petroleum tickle at her nostrils. Somebody behind her honked, and she realized traffic had moved forward in front of her. Finally, she saw the grimy-green onramp sign ahead: WEST/Port Rachel. GaGa’s “Poker Face” rotated on the radio again, they were playing it to death, and Melissa still loved hearing it every time.
Soon after Bush’s reelection, Melissa graduated with impressive credits from Cape Lookout, went to work for Charon, and allowed herself to refocus on her own life and indeterminate future. All around her Seattle’s progressives bristled at the hated Bush and Company, yet Melissa felt hermetically sealed within the protective capsule of the Patriot Act’s color-coded warning system. For 2008, Melissa had taken a good long look at Hillary, which surprised her parents. It was about Bill, getting Bill back. Bill was a power plant of wonderful childhood associations. It was no matter that Hillary would pull the purse strings, and all the other strings. As for her long suffering of marital infidelity, let anyone without sin cast the first stone. By Melissa’s reckoning, Chelsea had turned out well, and any woman got points for that. Melissa forgave the woman who appeared to be the Democrat’s frontrunner and was brought up short when Obama ousted Mrs. Clinton.
Once in the voting booth, she rejoined Dennis and Janine Blythe in marking her ballot for centrist survivor John McCain and his attractive running mate, Sarah Palin.
Some jerk-off squeezed past her in the breakdown lane at the light that controlled the freeway onramp, stopping her for one more light cycle in the rat race out of the city. But soon she’d be going on a cruise—the thought of that softened her irritation. Once on Interstate 5, it was autopilot all the way to safe harbor in Port Rachel.
Once back at her home office desk, Melissa opened Scrimshaw’s packet, and her eyes traveled over the Rainier Policy Institute ports of call:
Seattle
Ketchikan
Wrangell
Juneau
Hubbard Glacier
Seattle
She ate a microwave Panini taking care not to unduly stress the ragged edges of her split lip, which finally seemed to be throbbing less. She listed in her Miscellaneous file all that needed to be accomplished before her departure, a list which turned out to be not so long. A web search for Queen Anne auction led her to a neighborhood association website. A bunch of families had formed a coalition based on their disposables, and in exchange for the use of a barricaded street, they’d agreed to donate a percentage of the auction proceeds to Loaves & Fishes. Among the handful of items previewed online, Melissa found a gorgeous stained-glass desk lamp. She’d been looking to replace the tired, green-cast banker’s lamp that now illuminated her desk.
Clicking on weather.com, she saw that the brief afternoon shower had been an anomaly. The expected full-on heat wave had arrived, with no precipitation or even high cloud cover in the foreseeable future. The lattes she’d planned to offer Shauna and Randy four days hence probably wouldn’t work. Melissa had a six-pack of Dasani in the fridge, a better bet.
She walked down the hall to her bedroom and clicked on her ceiling fan. After drifting off, she was awakened by the disquieting confusion of a vivid, REM-hungry dream. It was not about Jimmy but about another man she’d dated, Reese, a bottled-water delivery man who’d been ultimately inconsequential in her life but was quite insistent about something in her dreamscape.
Chapter Nine
Rad looked for signs of the changed economic landscape as he drove his snowdrift-white Escalade the mile from his home into downtown Arbor Glen. Another scorcher was in the works. Nancy was two days gone and had called to say that everyone was fine in Palm Springs. Rad had twenty-four hours to himself before the Rainier Policy Institute departure.
There were definitely more For Sale signs than usual along the parkway, a few clearly designated short sales and some marked Sold. Real estate sharks were trolling the shaded avenues of subprime mortgaged, bank-bundled calamity. After the bubble burst, anyone with disposable income could secure miraculous bargains on homes, second homes, country club memberships, or yachts. Even stock investments, provided they were willing to gamble on when or by what means things would come back.
Though blessed with as much seniority as any captain in Trans Oceanic’s fleet, Rad had seen enough to be concerned. The Rainier Policy Institute cruise had happened with religiosity since President Gerald Ford last struck a bystander with a golf ball, but recently, other charter cruises had been canceled, sometimes on a moment’s notice, cancellations that cost the booking entity tens of thousands in nonrefundable deposits and Trans Oceanic hundreds of thousands in lost revenues.
Some popular perennial cruises had fallen to the ax. Just last week it had been announced that the South Sea United
would not make its annual mid-July run to the Mexican Riviera—not enough middle-class family trade to make the cruise pay off. Staycation was the butchered new word as folks looked at their account balances and decided that a day trip to a nearby historical fort or reliable beach made more sense than even the most affordable cruise. Troubling too was the cancellation of Allcoast Insurance Corp’s million-dollar Mediterranean junket on the Northstar’s sister ship Global Reach, not because of financial straits but due to public outcry. Allcoast had received some of George W’s TARP trickle-down in late 2008. Despite the horrendous economic news, the company continued planning for the gala cruise, meant to signal “job well done” to the policy-purveying troops. When word leaked and Fox and CNN ran with the story, it wasn’t long before Allcoast’s COO was out front of the cameras saying the company had taken another look and rethought the expenditure.
Five years out of Nam, Rad had served as cocaptain on the line’s inaugural cruise, a Hawaiian Island run just before Ford handed the reins to Jimmy Carter. If anyone enjoyed job security, it was Rad, so it would seem. But if cruises kept crashing into the rocks of new realities, full employment for the corps of distinguished veteran skippers might be in jeopardy.
The Escalade rolled down deserted Arbor Glen Drive into the heart of the boutique business district. The parking lot at Timberland Business Center was virtually empty. Niles Timberland, an old-money scion who needed neither bailout nor parachute, designed the building and grounds in a style he called postmillennial globalism, a provincial village replica. It was meant to seem modest, not ostentatious, even as evermore bazillions were being husbanded into the commercial real estate market coffers. The architectural understatement turned out to be more ironically apt than anyone could have predicted. Two-thirds of the center was vacant. Rad’s certified financial planner, William Ward, still had a shingle out, though.