The Shell Collector (26 page)

This time, someone answers after the third ring. A man. “Vincent?” I ask.

“Speaking,” he says.

“This is Maya Walsh. We met down by the boathouse the other day. I’m a … friend of Ness’s.” It feels painful to say, for this is both an understatement and a lie. “I need a huge favor. I need to get in touch with Victoria Carter, Ness’s ex. Can you help?”

“Sure. I don’t have her number on me, but I can track it down for you. Is this a good number to call you back?”

“How long will it take?” I ask.

“Ten minutes. I’m down at the boathouse now. Monique might have the number if you want to try her.”

“Yes. Give me her number.”

I wait while he pulls it up. I watch the woods, where I expect the guards to emerge at any moment. Vincent gives me the number, and I hang up and call Monique. She answers on the first ring.

“Monique? This is Maya Walsh, Ness’s friend, the one staying in the guest house. I need to get in touch with Victoria, Holly’s mom. Do you have her number?”

“Yes,” she says, “but I don’t think she’ll pick up. I always have to leave a message. She’s a very busy woman.”

I clench my fist in frustration. “Okay, give it to me anyway. Or can you think of some way I might get in touch with Holly?”

“Why? What’s going on?”

A jeep emerges from the woods, one of the white security vehicles. A man on foot follows soon after.

“Nothing much,” I say, my heart racing. “She left something down at the guest house, and I think she needs it. What’s Holly’s number?”

I put her on speaker. Monique tells me the number, and I key it into my phone.

“Oh, Ms. Walsh? You might want to text her first. You’ll freak her out if you just call.”

“Of course,” I say, but I’m glad of the reminder.

I open up my messenger.

Holly? It’s Maya. Can I give you a quick call?

I hit send and back around the edge of the lighthouse. The guard on foot has jumped in the jeep, which bounces down the muddy road toward me.

I watch my messages. After an eternity, my phone vibrates in my hand.

Sure.

I call. Holly picks up and says, “Headquarters of the No-Rain Society.” Which is better than a greeting or an apology or an explanation for how we left things.

“Reporting bright and sunny conditions here,” I tell her. The jeep is halfway to the lighthouse. There’s no place for me to hide. “Hey,” I say, trying to keep my voice calm. “There’s totally nothing to do here. I was going to get the cable going, but the customer service people won’t talk to me.”

“Yeah, they suck,” Holly says. “Gimme a minute. I’ll call and have it up and running in no time. That book was boring, right?”

“No, that’s okay,” I say, a bit desperately. “I don’t mind calling them. I was just hoping maybe you knew your dad’s security PIN. That’s what they’re asking for. But if not, no big deal. I can get back into that book.”

I duck my head back, thinking one of the guards in the jeep saw me. I hear the engine rev. Only my pulse is racing faster.

“Oh, no worries,” Holly says. “That’s easy. It’s my birthday.”

“Of course,” I say. I hurry around the lighthouse and down the steps toward the door. Holly says something, and then she’s cut off. I look at my phone. No bars. I hurry back up, wave the phone at the fickle gods of cellular communication, and get a single bar. I start to call back, can hear the guards talking on the other side of the lighthouse, one saying to go inside, the other saying he’ll check the back. As soon as I call Holly, they’ll hear me. When—bless her—my phone vibrates with a text.

Dropped you. 09-22-28. l8r

Back down the steps, I figure I’ve got one chance. I punch in the code, expecting more damn red lights.

But there’s a clunk, a green light, and I push my way inside.

Two pair of muddy boots greet me inside the door. Beside them are Ness’s running shoes, as well as two pairs of ladies’ shoes. A rack is nailed to the wall, several jackets hanging from it. An umbrella leans to the side in a beat-up plastic trashcan.

The room is lit by bare bulbs screwed into outlets along the wall, metal cages around them for protection. Voices can be heard below me, leaking up a narrow staircase. I hear the guard outside clomp down the stairs. I hold my breath, waiting for him to come barging through the door. We seem to be standing there, listening for each other. After an eternity, I hear him march up the stairs. Either he doesn’t have the code or doesn’t expect that I would.

Barefoot, I steal across the room and try to pick out the conversations below. I wouldn’t think a lighthouse would have a basement. I wonder why Ness would come here. I reach the rail and peer down the stairs. Someone in a white lab coat walks past. A woman. I sneak around the railing and lower my head to get a better view, watch her stop at a table and talk to someone. The acoustics below—the distant clatters and the way voices are swallowed—make it sound like a much bigger room than this one.

I decide to creep down the stairs. There’s no sense of danger, not from Ness, not from whatever this is. It isn’t until I see the massive room that I feel afraid. It looks like a warehouse. Racks of shelves cover the far walls, and the shelves are stuffed with what look like aquariums. Long tables run the length of a room the size of a large grocery store. There are industrial machines and what looks like laboratory equipment everywhere. Microscopes. Vials. Twisting tubes of glass. Expensive centrifuges. Reminds me of my marine biology labs from undergrad, but on steroids.

The scope of the place is breathtaking. All cut out beneath a lighthouse. This facility must be newer than the run-down structure that stands above it, though. Added here. Is this where he breeds his hydrothermal shells? Was what I told Agent Cooper spot-on? I watch the man and woman as they huddle together, studying an object in the woman’s hands. There’s a plastic sample case on the table near them. It looks identical to the other two I’ve seen. I wonder if this is that cross between an auger and a cerith from Tara Cay, from our underwater expedition.

The stairs go down to another floor, deeper still. No one sees me creeping behind the rail. I sneak down, make the turn, and continue to the next floor without being spotted. Here, another large open area takes up half the space. A hallway leads off in the other direction, lined with doors—offices, or maybe small labs or storage rooms. All the doors are closed save one. There’s a light inside. I listen for voices but don’t hear any.

The rest of the space looks similar to what’s above, but with no workers. And rather than the long work surfaces, here there are lines of aquariums, water gurgling noisily, pumps and circulation fans whirring. Most of the aquariums are lit. Pipes and electrical wires form a maze across the ceiling, dipping down here and there to service the tanks. I creep over and peer inside the one nearest me. What look like white and orange nutmeg seashells litter the bottom of the tank.

I look around to make sure I’m alone, and then spot a familiar sight in the tank behind me: creamy white lace murexes with their jagged, decorative shells. An entire tank of them. But Cooper said there was no such thing. I reach in to grab one of them, the water warm up to my elbow, and bring it out.

The shell isn’t empty. There’s a slug inside. A gastropod. Was Cooper right all along? Is Ness taking some other species of slug and moving it into cast shells, creating the perfect fake? Maybe something in that process coats the shell enough to fool a testing machine. Or he makes the shells out of calcium carbonate from crushed-up species that are more common. Ness’s driveway is a clue to all that he has access to. Probably dredges the shells up from his private beaches and islands. Then the shells are formed here, injected into some mold, and finally non-extinct species are moved in to make them look real.

My story has an ending, I realize. Here it is. Closure. For the piece, and for me and Ness. I came here to explain myself, to apologize, but all that guilt vanishes in an instant. The story that ran in the
Times
this morning wasn’t my doing anyway. I was apologizing for something that wasn’t my fault. But Ness … he lied to me from the beginning, was leading me on a wild chase, flying me to the Southern Hemisphere when the murexes were sitting in a tank a short walk from his house all along.

I hear a door shut down the hall behind me, turn and see a man in a white lab coat, his face illuminated by the tablet in his hand. He looks up before I have a chance to duck and hide. His eyes widen. I bolt for the stairs. I hear him shout for me to stop.

I race up two flights. The man yells for someone to grab me. I have the murex in my hand; I close my fist around it. I see Ness as I pass through the floor above. He looks up from a workbench, from a microscope; his face was hidden before. I freeze for a moment. As I take off again, Ness lurches up and knocks his stool over. He gives chase as well. Several people are shouting at me, shouting at each other to grab me. I don’t pause to sort it out—I just run.

The cold metallic taste of adrenaline fills my mouth, my body dumping that storehouse of energy. I make it to the top of the stairs and yank open the door to the outside. Before I shut it, I get an idea, hurry back inside, grab the umbrella. Ness is up the stairs, yelling for me to wait. I get outside before he reaches me, slam the door shut just in time, and slide the umbrella through the handle so it catches the jamb.

The door pulls inward, but the umbrella holds. I don’t wait to see how long. I run.

Racing around the lighthouse, I see the jeep with the two guards in the distance. They appear to be driving up and down the tree line, still looking for me. My car is out there, beyond the woods. Ness and the others will be out of that buried laboratory in no time.

I just need to get to safety, and then I can call Cooper, call the cops, get someone to pick me up, blow the lid off this place. My mind races. I consider hiding in the tall grasses, but they’d find me eventually. I consider trying all the cars, seeing if the keys are in any of them, and then driving one of them back to the gate and to my car on the other side.

But the jeep blocks my way into the woods. They’d get me there as well.

Only a few heartbeats pass as I consider all these options. The umbrella rattles, holding Ness at bay. I need to get to the house. There are a handful of possibilities there, all of them insane. I could grab the boat and make my way up the coast to the next dock or bay. I could hide and call Henry or Agent Cooper, either of whom will send someone to help me. I just have to get to Ness’s house.

The edge of the tall bluff is just paces away. I run to the edge and gaze down at the beach. The dunes are steep here. But I can slide. I can make it to the beach and follow the coast.

I hear the door fly open behind me. I have to decide before they get up the stairs and see me, so I jump from the edge and into the steep face of sand. I stay on my back, arms wide, legs locked in front of me, and glissade down the sand in an avalanche.

Coming to a stop on a grassy ledge, I scoot to the edge and jump again. This time my feet catch, and I go end over end. I try to protect my head, to arrest my fall, and end up in a spread-eagle sprawl at the next lip of dune, my hair full of sand.

The murex is gone, my hand empty. I don’t have a hope of finding it, don’t even think of looking for it, but then I see it right along the ledge. It feels important somehow. Evidence. To replace the ones I lost. To make it up to Cooper. I grab the shell and lower myself off the next ledge, another avalanche of sand rushing along with me as I slide the last hundred or so feet to the beach.

I catch my breath at the base of the bluff. Looking up behind me, I see Ness peering down. He doesn’t hesitate for long; he jumps and begins sliding down the cliff face. I take off, running north, knowing I’ll never outpace him. He runs for exercise. My only hope is that he’s tired from his jog this morning, that he’ll cramp up, that he’ll let me go. Silly hopes.

I aim for the hard pack by the ocean where the running is easier. Looking over my shoulder, I see Ness is already a third of the way down the bluff. I concentrate on pumping my legs but check his progress now and then. I have a few hundred meters on him by the time he reaches the beach and takes off after me.

Palpable fear chokes me. I don’t know why—maybe it’s the anger I saw on his face when he slammed the newspaper down—maybe it’s the stakes of this dangerous game—maybe it’s the size of the counterfeiting operation they’re running—maybe it’s from watching too many movies, or from running from the guard at the gate, or from breaking into the lighthouse, or from all the secrecy, but I fear that Ness might kill me if he reaches me. I can’t explain the terror, but it’s real. Like the panic in the submersible. The surety that my life is in jeopardy.

I pull out my phone while I run, need someone to know what happened to me. No signal. The battery alert is flashing. I put it away, can’t run while operating it anyway. Ness is gaining, and my lungs are burning. There’s the inexorable tug of him reeling me in; his house is too distant, and I know there’s no hope, nothing I can do, that I should just stop and give up, but I run and run until he is right behind me, until I can hear him panting, can hear his feet slapping the sand, so close that I dare not turn and look, until he is right upon me, until he tackles me.

His arms wrap around me, and he twists so he takes the brunt of the fall. The air goes out of me anyway. I make the decision to fight, to not let him take me without a struggle, but I can barely breathe, can barely move, and Ness has me pinned on my back, straddles me, is breathing hard himself, and I kick and try to throw my knees into his back.

“What’s gotten into you?” Ness pants.

“You’re hurting me!” I scream. I twist my head to see if anyone will come for me, if Vincent or Monique might be able to hear me from the house.

“Stop fighting and I’ll let you go,” he says.

“If you would have let me go from the beginning—” Deep breaths. “—I wouldn’t
have
to fight you.”

I bring my arms close to my face, dragging his hands with me, and sink my teeth into his wrist.