The Road to Amazing (13 page)

I smiled. "How do you think he did
it?"

But Min looked at me with
this droll expression, and we both laughed. This was an ongoing
joke between the two of us, how pointless it was to even
try
to understand the
conundrum that was Gunnar.

"Ruby is no dummy either," I said, "is
she?" I didn't want to talk about what Nate had said at lunch, but
I could at least reference Ruby being smart enough to know what an
idiot he was.

"Did you think she was?" Min
said.

"No, but you know how it is. Everyone
talks about emotional intelligence and 'different learning styles,'
but who really believes in those things? It's not until you see
them in action with people like Gunnar and Ruby."

"Actually, I think almost everyone
else believes in those things. It's just us bookish, verbal types,
people like you and me, who are skeptical. Because if there are
different ways to be smart, it means we're not special."

"Well, hey," I said,
"don't you think we brainy geeks should get
something
? We gave the world
Game of Thrones,
the
Internet, and, you know,
science
. But still people laugh at
us. Everyone says, 'We're all geeks now!' but it's so not true. The
cool kids still run this world, same as always, and you damn well
know it."

Min laughed.

"Are you worried about her spending so
much time with Nate?" I asked.

"Ruby? You mean because they might run
off together?" When I half-shrugged, Min laughed again, and said,
"Oh, God, no! Ruby is the most lesbian lesbian I've ever met.
They're just friends."

I nodded, and we kept
walking down the road to Amazing. At this point, I felt pretty
great. The wedding was back on track, that thing Nate said really
was forgotten, and the air was crisp and clean. Even better, I was
looking forward to seeing the ruins of Amazing again. What
had
happened to those
people all those years ago? I was already spinning this fantasy
about Min and me figuring it out. Yeah, I knew that people had been
investigating this mystery for years, but so what? We'd be like
Veronica Mars! Talk about Revenge of the Nerds: two geeky friends
are staying on the island for a weekend wedding, and they stumble
upon some clue hidden in the ferns, missed by all the investigators
before. Or maybe it was simply a question of being smart enough to
look at the ruins from a slightly different point of view, and our
seeing what should have been obvious to everyone else, but had been
missed because of all their stupid preconceptions.

Yes, this was all a silly fantasy — I
wasn't serious about it, and it wasn't like I was going to mention
it to Min, especially after she'd teased me earlier, saying the
mystery of Amazing was exactly my kind of thing. But somehow it
really did excite me.

We rounded the corner around the hill,
and the little cove came into view.

Min and I weren't alone. A man walked
toward us through the trees, up the trail from the
water.

So much for my Veronica
Mars fantasies,
I thought.

It wasn't only that. I'd been starting
to think of Amazing as a quiet little oasis from the world for Min
and me, a place out of time. But that was silly too. It's not like
other people didn't have a right to be here.

Min and I kept walking forward, until
we all met at the end of the road.

He was older, in his sixties, but
displayed Vashon Island's usual mix of contradictions: he was big
and burly, but somehow soft and sensitive too. His face was craggy
— like he'd spent a lot of his life outside doing something manly,
maybe working on a fishing boat — but he had hoop earrings in both
ears and a hipster-y man bun. He was wearing flannel and denim with
thick boots, all weathered, but a beaded yin/yang symbol hung down
from the zipper of his jacket.

"Howdy!" he said,
friendly-goofy.

"Hello," Min said.

Then none of us said anything. I
wanted to ask what he was doing here, but that felt a little
territorial.

"We're staying at the Amazing Inn," I
explained. "I'm getting married. I'm Russel, and this is
Min."

"Well, congratulations to you both!"
the man said.

"No," I said, "I'm not
getting married to her." But I didn't tell him who I
was
getting married to,
that it was a man named Kevin. Even after all these years, it felt
weird to come out to people I didn't know, especially old people
like this guy.

He nodded like what I'd said made
sense. "I'm Walker," he said, giving one of those names where
you're not sure if it's the first name or the last.

"You live here on the island?" Min
asked.

"Sure do. Right over there." He made a
gesture, but I couldn't see any houses through the
trees.

"Christie — the woman we're renting
from — told us all about this place," I said. I nodded to the
ruins. "The town of Amazing? It's a pretty interesting
story."

Walker took it all in, almost inhaling
it. "Isn't it?"

That's when it occurred to me: maybe
my little Veronica Mars investigation didn't have to end after all.
Amateur detectives interviewed people, didn't they? And who knows?
Maybe the people on the island would know secrets that
off-islanders didn't.

"What do you think happened?" I
asked.

"What?" he said.

"To the people of Amazing."

He laughed. "Well, that's the big
question, isn't it?"

Min and I were quiet, listening. It
felt like she was as interested as I was.

Walker eyed us. The fact that we
seemed so genuinely interested was somehow making him take the
mystery of Amazing more seriously too.

"Mass suicide," he said at last. "At
least that's what I always heard."

Mass suicide?
I thought. This wasn't a very cheery thought,
especially on my wedding weekend. On the other hand, it made more
sense than an alien abduction. And I had said I wanted to know the
truth.

Min nodded. "That's what the articles
all said."

I felt stupid. Min had mentioned that
album of articles back at the house, but I hadn't even bothered to
look at them. Some amateur sleuth I was.

"But Christie said people disappeared
without a trace," I said. "So what about the bodies?"

He nodded toward the rocky promontory
to the left of the cove, the one that looked out over the water.
"They jumped. The water took them away."

Min and I stared at that outcropping
of land, breathless. The sky was even darker now, but I made out a
vague trail up the hill. It was sort of impossible not to visualize
a line of people standing there, winding their way up to the top of
the rock, and then, one by one, jumping out into the water. I
imagined an old man with a cane and fur hat, and a woman with
fly-away hair and an apron still covered with flour from the
kitchen. A strapping young father stopped to clean his spectacles
on his shirt, and another woman held the hands of two small twin
boys (somehow the fact that it was twins made it especially
tragic). Behind them, down the hill, the line of townsfolk twisted
like the tail of a snake.

"But still," I said to
Walker, "the
bodies
. Wouldn't they have washed up somewhere?"

"Maybe so," he said. He
nodded out to the water again. "But that's Puget Sound out there,
one of the narrowest parts. It doesn't look like it, but that water
flows
fast
. If
the tides were right, they coulda been all the way up to the San
Juan Islands within an hour. Maybe some of them
did
wash up, but it was so far away
that no one put two 'n two together. Or maybe they'd been in the
water so long by then that no one recognized 'em."

I wasn't familiar enough with
forensics, or Puget Sound, to know if what he was saying made any
sense, but it didn't seem completely crazy. It was a century ago,
when the whole area was still pretty remote, and communication was
probably seriously lacking.

Still, it was pretty damn depressing.
Part of me wanted to go back to the theory about alien abduction —
the idea that the descendants of Amazing were still alive in a
space ship somewhere, living on, unbeknownst to them, in some
perfect recreation of their town.

"I guess the other question is why," I
said. "Why would a whole town commit suicide? Was it some kind
of—?" I looked at Min. "What was that famous cult back in the
seventies, where everybody killed themselves by drinking poison
Kool-Aid?"

"Jonestown," she said.

I looked at Walker, but he
smiled.

"Well, if we knew that," he said,
"we'd have already solved the mystery, wouldn't we?"

Fair
enough
, I thought.

"I'm curious," I said. "Is anybody
still trying to figure out what really happened? Seriously
investigating it, I mean?"

"Oh, you know how it is,"
Walker said. "Every few years someone comes out here and makes a
big deal about starting up an investigation — some grad student or
something. But it's all for show. After all these years, what is
there left to find? Besides—" At this, he leaned in close. "Do we
really
want
to
solve it? Isn't it better that there's still a little mystery left
in the world?"

Min and I both chuckled.

"Absolutely," I said.

"Well," Walker said, shuffling his
feet a little, "congratulations to you and your—"

"Husband," I finished for him, and I
felt a flash of pride. Just because it was awkward to come out to
people I didn't know, that didn't mean I didn't ever do
it.

His craggy face broke into a grin.
"That so? Well, good for you!"

He gave us a final wave, then turned
and headed off into the trees.

After he was gone, Min looked at
me.

"What?" I said.

"You're totally thinking about the two
of us going all Scooby Doo and being the ones who finally figure
out the mystery of Amazing, aren't you?"

"
No!
" I said, seemingly outraged by
the suggestion. I hesitated. "Actually, I was thinking Veronica
Mars."

She laughed.

"I know we're not going to do it," I
said. "But wouldn't it be great?"

Min turned toward the rocky promontory
— the place where the citizens of Amazing possibly jumped to their
deaths. Then she looked back at me, a twinkle in her
eye.

"Really?" I said. "You really want to
go up there?"

"Don't you?"

I wasn't sure what I wanted. But I
didn't hesitate to follow when Min started down the trail, then up
the promontory. It was steep enough for switchbacks, but there
weren't any. Instead the trail just angled directly upward, over
ferns and between rocks, and I used them as handholds. It wasn't
rock-climbing exactly — or if it was, it was an easy grade — but it
was a pretty steep hike. Because of the incline of the trail, our
feet scraped away the leaves and even the top layer of the soil,
revealing a wet, rich dirt that was a reddish brown color and
smelled like some exotic spice.

If people really had
jumped to their deaths from the top of this hill — a
huge
if — was this the
trail they'd used to get there?

Min and I didn't say another word
until we reached the top. Tufts of grass grew in a small patch,
surrounded by trees and ferns and jagged boulders. From that spot,
we could see that the drop-off was much steeper on the other side
of the promontory — a ragged cliff that plunged sixty or seventy
feet down to the water, which sloshed onto rocks below. There was
no beach here.

Is this where the people
jumped?

I stared out into the waters of Puget
Sound, and it felt a little bit like I was standing in the frame of
a movie. Walker had said that the current moved by fast here, and
it's true that the water wasn't anything like it had been that
morning — still and glistening. Now it roiled and churned. But I
couldn't see a current either. Somehow it seemed like it was moving
in all directions at once.

I felt bad that I wasn't
sad, standing in a place where lots of people could have died — a
little like when I felt guilty about not being more upset about
that dead whale. But I
didn't
feel sad. On the contrary, I was exhilarated. For
one thing, we didn't
know
that people had committed suicide here — it was
probably only a stupid story, not much more likely than an alien
abduction.

The wind blew in my hair,
and a spray of cool mist washed over me, and suddenly it seemed so
stupid, my worrying about getting married (not that I'd been
that
worried to begin
with). Walker was right about Amazing — about the importance of
mystery in the world. Marriage was another mystery, but then so was
all of life. You couldn't predict the future about
anything.