The Road to Amazing (8 page)

It was that the whole marriage thing
meant I was getting closer and closer to the point where I had to
either put up or shut up about the kind of life I was going to
live.

"I'm being neurotic again," I said
glumly, "aren't I?"

Min beamed. "In all honesty, these
might be the least neurotic feelings you've ever had."

"Really?"

"Really."

We both fell silent, looking around at
the jagged foundations of the ruins around us. Now they reminded me
of shark fins sticking up from a roiling ocean of sword ferns. The
wind blew, and I smelled something stinky coming from the direction
of the beach — more than just seaweed.

"So," she said, "what do you think
happened to them? The people of Amazing."

"Really?" I said.

"Are you kidding? A mystery involving
a deserted town? This is totally your kind of thing."

Now I
loved
how well Min knew
me.

"You know," I said, "it might surprise
you, but I'm back to seriously considering the possibility of alien
abduction."

"I think I'm going with a
time vortex, like in that old episode of
Star Trek
. Can you not see it? The
vortex opens, and all the people come out to investigate, and then
they all get sucked into another dimension?"

Right then, I got a text from
Kevin:

Where are you? Come back
to the house. There's something you need to see.

* * *

A beached whale. That's what Kevin
thought I needed to see.

It was down on the beach below the
Amazing Inn, not very far from where we'd had the campfire the
night before. We would've seen it then, which meant it must have
washed up during the night.

It wasn't a gigantic whale, like those
pictures you see of sperm whales or humpbacks washed up on long
sandy beaches. This was a killer whale on a small rocky beach.
Killer whales are mostly black with white patches — I'm pretty sure
they're not whales at all, but actually a kind of porpoise — and
they only ever get about twenty feet long. This one was even
smaller than that, maybe ten feet long, which meant it had to be
young.

It was partly still in the
water, with gentle waves washing around it. But it was definitely
dead, a massive bulk with sagging fins and a gigantic pink tongue
hanging halfway out of its mouth, like when Jabba the Hut dies
in
Return of Jedi
.

"Well, that's a bummer," I said as we
all stood around the carcass. I knew whales were really
intelligent, so I felt like I should be more sad. Part of it was
the bloated tongue, which was disgusting, and part of it was also
the teeth, which weren't quite as sharp as a shark's, but gave me a
little bit of the creeps anyway, knowing creatures big enough to
chomp me down whole were swimming around out in Puget
Sound.

"Killer whales aren't really killers,"
Min said, somehow reading the expression on my face. "Sometimes
they kill other whales, but they mostly eat salmon and seals.
They've literally never killed a human being. That's why 'orca' is
a much better name for them."

"I wonder why it beached itself," Ruby
said.

"Whales beach themselves for all kinds
of reasons," Min said. "Parasites, genetic mutations, injuries from
predators. But I don't think this orca did beach itself. I think it
died at sea, probably several days ago, then the tide washed it up.
Look at its eyes. Look at the skin."

Min had a point: its eyes were
definitely clouded over, and its fins were drooping.

"Oh!" Ruby said. "You're
r
ight
."

Meanwhile, Vernie looked at me and
rolled her eyes. (For all her wonderful qualities, I concede that
Min could sometimes be a know-it-all.)

"What about the smell?" Kevin
said.

No one said anything for a second. The
smell had been there all along, but it was only now
registering.

Really
registering.

It's not like it was the
worst thing I'd ever smelled, a collapsed cesspool or something
like that. But it wasn't roses either. Yes, I know a whale is a
mammal not a fish, but it
smelled
like fish.

Dead fish.

A
lot
of dead fish. Or maybe just one
really, really big dead fish.

Something occurred to me: this whale
smelled pretty bad, and it had only been there for a few hours,
maybe even less. I hadn't smelled it from the deck earlier that
morning, and I had a feeling I would've noticed if it had been down
here.

What's it going to be like
in another twenty-four hours?
I
thought.

I felt guilty again, confronted by the
death of this magnificent, probably-sentient creature, and here I
was thinking mostly about the smell. But the fact is, this had the
potential to ruin our wedding.

Sure enough, Kevin said, "We need to
move it. Someone help me." He leaned over, and Nate and Gunnar
immediately bent down to join him.

"You can't
move
it," Min said,
horrified.

"Why not?" Nate said.

"Because it's illegal! This beached
orca is an essential part of the marine ecosystem. As it
decomposes, it will support of a whole array of life."

"It'll still be an essential part of
the marine ecosystem supporting a whole array of life," Kevin said.
"It'll just be doing it a little farther down the
beach."

"No, it won't, mate," Nate said. "It's
too damn heavy."

"How much do you think it weighs?"
Kevin asked.

"Probably a thousand
pounds," Gunnar said, somehow having already looked it up on his
phone. "Huh. Infant mortality is extremely high. Up to fifty
percent of all orcas die in the first seven months of life. Oh, and
this is cool! Orcas can live to over a hundred years old! But they
only live a quarter that long in captivity. Did you guys see that
documentary,
Blackfish
?"

"Let's all try," Kevin said, ignoring
Gunnar, still talking about moving the creature.

So we all tried (even Min, which I
gave her credit for, considering we were probably committing a
major crime). The black skin felt really cool to the touch and had
this rubbery texture. As for the whale itself, it was almost
surreally heavy. It was like trying to push several tons of wet
towels all piled in a heap, somehow both loose and solid at the
same time. Even all of us together couldn't budge it.

Finally, we gave up.

Not far away, seagulls stood on the
rocky beach, eyeing the carcass.

"Maybe the tide'll take it away?"
Kevin said hopefully.

"Maybe," Min said, but I could tell
from the stark expression on both her and Gunnar's faces that there
was virtually no chance of that.

"Well, maybe it's not so bad up on the
porch," I said, trying to stay positive.

But if anything, the smell was even
worse at the top of the stairs. It was like the breeze off the
water lifted it right up to the deck.

I didn't know what to say to Kevin.
I'd said the night before that nothing was going to go wrong with
our wedding, but now something had. As long as that whale was down
on the beach, there was no way we could get married at the Amazing
Inn.

CHAPTER FIVE

"This is a
disaster
," Kevin
said.

We were still on the deck, above the
dead killer whale — er, orca — down on the beach.

"It's not a
disaster
," I said. "We
could get, like, citronella candles."

"Absolutely," Min said,
nodding.

"A perfect solution!" Vernie
said.

But even as we stood there, the breeze
blew, washing another cloud of dead whale stink up around us like
an ocean wave. Vernie coughed, almost choking, even as she tried
valiantly to suppress it. It didn't seem possible that the smell
could have gotten so much worse in the last few minutes, but maybe
it was more obvious now that we weren't focused on moving the
whale.

"How is it not disaster?" Kevin said
to me. "We can't possibly have the wedding here."

"So we'll just have everyone stay
inside," I said, waltzing toward the house.

"Totally," Gunnar said.

"Hells to the yes!" Otto
said.

Everyone followed me into the
house.

You could even smell it inside the
house with the doors closed. I also realized the dead whale must
have been what I smelled all the way over in Amazing.

"It's not that bad, mate," Nate said
to Kevin.

"No," Ruby said. "Really not bad at
all."

Everyone was lying. I knew
it and Kevin knew it. And the other thing that went unsaid was:
This was how bad that dead orca smelled
now
. How much worse would it be
twenty-four hours from now, after sitting in the sun all
day?

I spotted Vernie and something
occurred to me.

I stepped closer.
"
This
is a movie
moment," I said. "Isn't it?"

"What?" she said.

"The orca down on the beach. And the
fact that the smell is so bad that we can't possibly hold the
wedding here."

She thought about it. "I hate to admit
it, but I think you're right."

If this had been a scene in a
screenplay I was writing, I considered how I'd have my characters
solve the problem.

"We need to find another wedding
venue," I said to the group.

"Twenty-four hours before the
ceremony?" Kevin said, agitated. "On an island? With a budget of
zero?"

He was officially freaking
out.

But that was okay. That was the great
thing about being in a couple: if one person freaked out, there was
still one person left to stay in control and try to make things
right.

"It's a big island," I said. "There's
got to be someplace we can have a wedding."

"Yes," Min said. "Let's see what we
can find."

"Absolutely," Otto said again,
nodding.

We all started moving for the door,
but Vernie stayed where she was.

I looked back at her.

"You folks go," she said. "I think
I'll stay here."

"Really?" I said, disappointed, but
she nodded.

"I think I'll stay here too," Gunnar
said matter-of-factly.

I looked at Min.

"I'd say he wants to take pictures of
the orca," she muttered under her breath, "but knowing Gunnar, he's
probably still more interested in the rain gutters."

* * *

Min, Otto, Kevin, Ruby, Nate, and I
drove into town together, all jammed into Kevin's and my rental
car. Kevin drove, and I called the local caterer we'd hired and
explained the situation. I felt weird about mentioning the actual
reason — a stinky beached orca — so I decided to leave that part
out and say we had a plumbing problem.

"That's terrible!" she said. "Sure, I
can think of a few places you might be able to call."

"Even with no money?" I
said.

"Oh, don't worry about that," she
said. "This is Vashon island! There's a little thing here we like
to call the Vashon Groove — everything is always very laid-back.
When you explain the situation, I'm sure someone will be happy to
help you out."

I jotted down the numbers
she gave me, already feeling much better. It
was
the island, after all. Like I
said before, Vashon Island had a reputation for being artsy and
eccentric. If you were a by-the-numbers, type-A personality, you
weren't going to be very happy on an island where the roads often
weren't marked and you were totally dependent on the coming and
going of the ferry.

When I disconnected, I said to Kevin,
"We're going to be fine."

Behind the wheel, he nodded
stiffly.

I called the places she'd
given me — the grange, the art museum, and something called
The
Old Fruit Barreling Plant
— but it turned out that both the grange and art
museum were already booked, and no one ever picked up at the fruit
barreling plant (and there was no voicemail).

"Well?" Kevin said when I hung up the
phone the third time. This might have been a little bitchy on his
part, because he had to know from listening that I hadn't had any
luck.

"It's okay," I said, still determined
not to add fuel to his freak-out fire. "We'll find a place, don't
worry."

* * *

The town of Vashon was
located at a crossroads right in the middle of the island. The town
itself was sort of a crossroads too, split almost fifty-fifty
between practical businesses for the islanders, like the hardware
store, the grocery store, and the post office, and funkier places
for the tourists and the artsy crowd, like the store with an olive
oil tasting bar, and a gallery where the art was made from nothing
but stuff that washed up on the beach (I suspect they cheated). I
also spotted not one but
two
marijuana stores.