Mischa had to pretend everything was normal with James until a ninth night with a swell and negative tide — a rare occurrence, even more so on the dark night of a new moon.
But eventually, the night did come.
They sat at his dining room table, gazing out the floor-to-ceiling glass. So close, but entirely separate. James was talking about some successful trade he’d made and how he was finally planning their surf vacation to his other home on the Big Island.
“I can’t wait to take you, honey,” he said.
“I can’t wait to go.” She feigned a sweet smile even as her mind flashed to the stuffed baby otter in the garage.
“You all right?” he asked. “You seem a little bit... distracted.”
“Oh no. I’m just daydreaming about these well-deserved plans—”
“Excited to finally do this?”
She nodded. “I think it’s more than time.” Him, cutting into the flesh of a dolphin. Sewing up a seal. Sawing. All those terrible instruments surgeons use to save lives, give new hearts, bring life into the world, he was using to maim and kill her innocent compatriots.
“Yeah, I know. I’m so sorry I haven’t planned a vacation for us yet. It’s just been a really busy time. But that is about to change!”
Damn fucking straight it is, seal murderer.
He looked giddy, like a young boy whose home run had just won his Little League baseball game. Mischa’s stomach turned. How could he be so happy about going to Hawaii when his hands had gutted a small family? She had nightmares of the forever-frozen, terrified faces of those marine animals on secret garage shelves.
Did he say he grew up hunting deer in Minnesota?
“You know what?” she said. “I actually have a surprise planned for you.” She took out the wetsuit, the glow sticks, and a bottle of champagne. “It’s perfect conditions right now.”
He smiled. “I’ll go get ready.”
It would take him ten minutes to get into his wetsuit. Mischa knew she had that long. She worked stealthily.
James paddled out ahead.
“I’m following you,” she said. “It’s hard to see in the dark. I’ll just stay as close as I can.”
She realized how little she’d ever known about James. The Airbow only weighed seven pounds. It wasn’t hard to paddle out with it. But she’d always had strong arms. As she watched him sitting atop his board with the little glow stick, waiting for the next set, she almost felt sorry for him. She set the Airbow on the end of her board and peered through the precision viewfinder at James. What an easy, elegant little weapon. No wonder he liked it so much. She saw her seal, keeping its distance. The stillness was interrupted by an oncoming wave. The set was arriving. She gripped the trigger as she watched him paddle. She felt the lift beneath her board.
Now.
The arrow departed with force. James pummeled forward, off the board. The seal moved. A slight splashing in the waves, then silence. What a perfect collaborator. Who else could disappear a body with such grace? She could already see the headlines: “Cold-Blooded Killer,” “St. Francis of the Seals.”
She went home and took a shower. Early-dawn light poured through the open windows, the thin, sheer curtains undulating like waves in the sea breeze. There wasn’t much time. If she didn’t go now she would have to wait another nine days, and by then it would be too late to go anywhere. She pulled her coat from its hanger and hurried to the beach.
When the detectives finally searched the house, he’d been missing for weeks. They broke the lock on the garage and turned on the light. Nothing but some power tools, old papers, and a dirty hotel towel. They would have questioned the girlfriend, but she was nowhere to be found, as if she, too, had slipped into the sea and vanished.
I am home again. I stayed too long, mesmerized by their world, avoiding my purpose until I forgot my identity. In the human terms, a slacker. A slacking selkie. But there are more like James, his kind, and even worse. Now we are just getting started.
First Peak
by Peggy Townsend
Pleasure Point
Boone sat in the lineup, waiting.
The swell was chest high, out of the south.
He drew his hands through the water and felt the power of the storm that had given birth to the waves, the force that brought them to Pleasure Point. It was a heartbeat, an urgency, a gift from Tūtū Pele’s capricious womb.
He wondered if something would happen before the day was over. He was her servant.
Already, the two kooks were paddling out, both of them in wetsuits that were new and smooth and black. Their arms dipped in choppy strokes. Their feet kicked as if they needed to also propel themselves by air.
He watched them come toward him, felt the energy building behind him. He flattened himself on his board, dug three hard strokes into Mother Ocean, and stood in a single motion that was as natural to him as breathing. He was riding on her supple back, sailing on the force of her slick, wet power. He crouched, let his arms go loose, and knew what the two kooks would see: a bearded apparition in faded neoprene, with long hair that trailed his head like seaweed. He gauged speed and distance, turned slightly so he slowed and was aimed directly at the two men.
He could see the spark of fear in their eyes.
But what they could not see, what they would not see, was what had been left behind. What was now lying secret and powerful in the dirt next to a charcoal-gray monstrosity of a house.
That was what they should fear.
Not him on a board.
“What a dick,” Jonah said, coming out of the water, leaving damp footprints on the concrete steps as he climbed to the top of the cliff. “He could have killed me.”
“Asshole,” Nate agreed.
The September day had an unseasonably dark feel to it, as if winter were ready to pounce. At the top of the stairs, the two men turned back toward the pewter ocean, trying to pick out the man among the two dozen surfers at First Peak who had ruined their day.
“I should call the cops,” Jonah said. His chest rose and fell. Not from exertion but from the emotion of being assaulted by a guy who had looked like some watery Jesus coming at him on Judgment Day.
“You belong here as much as he does,” Nate said.
“Fuckin’-A,” Jonah replied.
Jonah had bought the house on the Point a year earlier, a single-story shack with a triangle peek of the ocean. It had been occupied by a long-haired woman and a young child who, he was told, was autistic. According to his realtor, the mother of the long-haired woman had purchased the place in 1998 for $325,000 and left it to her daughter after she died of metastatic breast cancer. Jonah had offered $1.5 million for the house a day after it went on the market and raised the price an additional $100,000 after another buyer had come on the scene.
He was twenty-nine years old and already worth $40 million.
“You’re doing her a favor,” the realtor had said.
The day after the longhaired woman accepted his offer, Jonah had driven by and seen her sitting in the front yard with her head in her hands. She hadn’t looked like anybody was doing her any favors, but that wasn’t his problem.
His contractor tore down the house to a single standing wall, then built it back up into a two-story modern contemporary with dark-gray stucco walls, a second-floor deck that now gave him a full view of the bay, and a red door that his interior designer said was a sign of good luck and prosperity.