“But we’ve got a time limit and we don’t know when it will expire. We may have to push on until we find Fielding’s mystery cove.”
“We should discuss the search with him, but either way, he expects to be in Roche Harbor before dark.”
“So did Fielding. . . .”
June in western Washington is rife with vagaries of weather. It’s warm one day, cold and wet the next, and a single twenty-four-hour period can turn back and forth between the extremes two, three, or four times before the day finally passes away. By eleven the sun had come out, the fog was long gone, and Quinton was almost half through his watch at the wheel. As I came up the ladder to bring him sunglasses and sit with him, the view from the flying bridge was clear and full of blue above and below with land visible but distant in nearly all directions. It was beautiful, if still a bit cold. Sun sparkled off the wind-ruffled surface of the water that was scattered with sailboats cutting back and forth and faster motorboats skidding along like water striders on a pond.
I handed Quinton the shades and he slipped them on, sighing. “Man, I had forgotten what this was like. It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?”
I agreed. “Did you spend a lot of time on boats when you were a kid?”
“Not a lot but it was quality. My mom’s folks had a Hatteras—it was kind of like this boat but a little smaller overall and higher in front. My parents usually sent my sister and me up to stay with them for a week in the summer and we’d spend most of our time on the boat with Grandpa Quinn, just pottering around the Sakonnet river and in Narragansett Bay. It was great.”
“Hang on,” I said. “Narragansett . . . isn’t that on Long Island?”
He rolled his eyes and laughed a little. “Rhode Island.”
“You’re from Rhode Island?”
“No, my mom is from Rhode Island.”
“And you?”
“Not from Rhode Island. My sister moved in with my grandparents near the end of their lives. I . . . wasn’t able to go. She really took to the place. Met her husband there.”
“You miss it?”
“I miss them and I miss the way life felt easy when we were all together, tooling around in the boat. Rhode Island? Not specifically. What about you?”
“I’ve never been to Rhode Island.”
“I mean . . . do you miss . . . people?”
I peered at him in confusion. “Which people do you have in mind? I miss the Danzigers.”
“I wasn’t thinking of them.”
I cocked my head, curious. “Who, then? You’ll have to be specific, because I’m just not following your train of thought.”
He looked upset and I felt a spike of anxiety reaching between us. “I was wondering . . . about Novak, to be honest.”
“Will? Why? He’s been gone for almost two years now.”
“Is he really? Dead doesn’t always mean gone with you.”
I tossed my head in exasperation. “Oh, for heaven’s sake! When I say ‘gone,’ I mean gone. What was once William Novak is no more. I used to wonder if his personality lingered in . . . what he became, but I don’t see any sign of that. Of course, I don’t exactly spend a lot of time chatting the Beast up, so I’m not entirely sure, but if I had to bet, I’d say gone is gone in this case. You can’t call the way it tosses me around affectionate.”
“Maybe . . . he’s angry with you.”
“No. He isn’t there,” I explained, feeling my own frustration slowly drain away as I talked. “If anything remains, I would call that thing an echo of humanity—by which I mean the urge to be humane, not something endemically human. But I don’t know that it comes from Will. I’m not even sure it’s more than my imagination that the emotion exists in it at all; the Guardian Beast is not human. It’s not even alive, really. It has substance and existence, but not . . . not a life, no soul of its own. And . . . Quinton, there is nothing—not a ghost or a monster or another human being—that can stand between you and me. And not just because of some silly magic thing. I love you so much and so deeply that if I could let it all flow out of me, it would fill up the whole Sound and spill out into the Pacific Ocean and fishermen in Taiwan would be finding big, sparkly pink shards of it in their nets a hundred years from now.” I threw my arms around him. “I yearn only for you.”
Quinton gave a self-conscious shrug and an embarrassed laugh. “I feel the same way about you and I’m sorry I’m . . . being an ass. Also, I suspect you just wanted to use ‘yearn’ in a sentence.”
I gave my best Valley Girl imitation. “Well, like, duh.”
This time he laughed for real and hugged me back. “You are half-crazy.”
“More than half if you mean crazy about you,” I replied, feeling silly even as I said it.
“All right: totally nuts. Like Chock Full o’Nuts nuts.”
“Chock Full o’Nuts? You really are from the East Coast.”
“And you really aren’t. Chock Full o’Nuts contains no nuts—it’s coffee. Which is appropriate, considering how much of it you drink.”
I stuck my tongue out at him. Then I found myself pressing against him and neither of us had moved; the boat had moved under us.
While we’d been talking the boat had been motoring along in increasingly busy water and now bucked a bit as it crossed the swell from a larger boat’s wake.
Quinton frowned and looked down at the instruments. “Damn it,” he muttered. “Pressure’s falling.”
“Oil pressure?” I asked.
“No, barometric pressure. It means there’s a squall coming up, but . . . I don’t see one. . . .”
Rising wind from the east and south puffed against Mambo Moon, pushing it a touch to the side and a touch more, then swung around and blew in our faces or on the stern—as if the rigid hull were a toy sail to be gusted across a pond—until we were out of alignment with our original path. Being a landlubber, I didn’t think much of it. Having more experience with boats, Quinton figured we were a bit off but wasn’t sure by how much or if it mattered with so much room to maneuver in the wide swath of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. He corrected the course and kept the boat moving ahead. After an hour I noticed that the distant shoreline seemed to be moving along more slowly. I pointed it out to Quinton.
“Well . . .” he started, clearly thinking aloud, “I suppose since the tide is still going out we might be encountering more resistance as we get closer to the mouth of Haro Strait, where the channel is much narrower, so the tidal current would be stronger and moving against us. . . . It should ease as we approach slack tide.”
I had to shrug. “It’s Greek to me. The currents of the Grey, I get; actual water . . . not so much. What’s slack tide?”
“It’s the point in the cycle where the currents have slowed as the tide is nearing the turn. In this case, just before the tide starts to come in, instead of going out like it is now. Areas of slow water like coves and harbors behind breakwaters become still and there’s little to no current movement at the surface. It’s very easy to maneuver in slack water because there’s no current to oppose you.”
“How long does it last, this still period?”
“Depends on the area but it’s usually two to three hours.”
“Then . . . we should be in slack water in an hour or two?”
Quinton paused a moment to consider the math. “Yeah. So the tide will be slacking about the time we have to turn for Mosquito Pass—the southern pass to Roche Harbor. We’re still on the ebb tide now.”
I scowled. “But if it’s slowing down, why are we being pushed sideways more now than before?”
Something slapped the boat again, sending a shiver through the whole structure. I stumbled sideways and Quinton lurched the same direction with me, dragging the wheel around a few degrees before he let go of it. Mambo Moon wiggled in the water like a gaffed fish. I heard the doors below slide open and Zantree came zooming up the ladder to the flying bridge.