The letter to Moira slipped off the dashboard on the first turn and fell onto the steering column. Refusing to be ignored.
Addy and Cyndra weren’t my relatives, but neither were my brothers in the Rangers. Both were a kind of chosen family. The difference was that Addy and Cyndra and I had chosen each other, and the Army had chosen the guys in the 75th Regiment, after we’d survived the levels of hell that made up the selection process.
Blood, though. Dono had been the only blood relation in my life that I had known, beyond scattered and unreliable impressions of my mother.
Moira had become pregnant at barely sixteen. She hadn’t told Dono about her boyfriend, but it was possible that she’d trusted a friend. And anyone who was that close a friend had probably gone to Watson High with her.
This might be my best shot at ever learning who my father was. If I wanted to know. I’d gone a long time and done just fine without that knowledge.
Air blowing from the car’s vent caught the letter and sent it flying. I snatched it out of the air without thinking. Like I’d been terrified to lose it.
Three
I raced the rapidly setting sun toward the west. About as far west as it was possible to go in Seattle, to the big marina at Shilshole Bay. The gale warning on the NOAA broadcast meant enough wind after nightfall to bang boats against docks and maybe shake them free from their moorings. My speedboat was one of the last possessions of my grandfather’s that I still owned, and I didn’t want it sunk by a storm.
The wind wasn’t waiting for darkness, already pushing the rain half sideways and the Barracuda insistently to the left, as the muscle car’s wide tires sluiced through the streams flowing across Leary Way. The copper-colored Barracuda was a recent acquisition. It still felt disconcertingly low to the ground compared to Dono’s old Dodge pickup, which time and wear had finally forced me to set out to pasture, if an exorbitantly priced space in a long-term garage could be called pasture.
I parked in the marina lot and dialed the number written in purple pen on the letter.
“Hello?” A woman’s voice, sounding rushed, like she’d snatched the phone up while dashing between rooms.
I explained who I was and about how the reunion letter had found its way to me. The voice belonged to Jo Mixon. She made appropriate sounds of dismay when I informed her that Moira had died long ago.
“Why I’m calling,” I said, when her torrent of words slowed, “I was wondering if you could put me in touch with anyone who knew Moira then. A school friend, or even a teacher.”
“Oh. Let me think.”
The noise of rain on the car roof and kids arguing in the background on her side provided a strange kind of hold music.
“Here we are,” she said finally. “I had the yearbook out as part of all the work for the reunion. This is who I was trying to remember. Stasia Llewellyn. She and Moira were joined at the hip, you know?”
“A yearbook? Is there a photograph of Moira?”
“With the seniors?” I heard her flipping pages. “No, I don’t see that. She was in school.”
But maybe she had been pregnant with me when class-picture time came around. Not keen to capture the moment.
“I don’t have any contact information for Stasia,” Jo Mixon said. “I’m sorry.”
I told her that was fine and asked her to spell Stasia Llewellyn’s name. As we said goodbye, I was already pulling up a browser to search for Moira’s friend.
Luck was with me: a Stasia Llewellyn-Wiler on Facebook, from Seattle and now living in Philadelphia. Her family pictures focused almost exclusively on a flock of children who ranged from grade school to college. A job profile on two networking sites listed her as a senior comptroller, whatever that was.
I sent Stasia a message, repeating the basic information I’d given to Jo Mixon and asking her to call me whenever it was convenient.
At dusk on a wet Sunday the marina was nearly deserted. The floating docks bobbed well below the parking level. I had to watch my step on the wet ramp. Cabin lights of a few liveaboards gleamed through the masts and radio antennae like lanterns in a forest.
One bright cabin belonged to Hollis Brant on the Francesca, two docks over. I’d just reached the speedboat when he stepped out from the aft door and waved one broad hand in greeting. He may have shouted something as well; it was hard to tell from a hundred yards away over the drumroll of rain pelting on my jacket hood. I waved back, aware that I’d been avoiding Hollis as much as I had Addy and Cyndra lately. He’d broken things off with his latest girlfriend, Gloria, too. Small wonder he might be craving any company, even as lousy as mine was these days.
The narrow spearhead bow of my twenty-foot speedboat rode high at rest. A consequence of the big Mercury outboard weighing down its stern. Dono had installed the engine and its muffled exhaust not long before his death. The boat had no name, only the registration numbers on the sides. It was painted shark-gray and originally intended for very fast and quiet runs across the Sound and up into the San Juan Islands, usually in the dead of night.
In the weeks since Oregon, it had become my refuge. When the apartment grew small and people became loud, I busied myself with scut work aboard or day trips out on the Sound, even sleeping some nights in the shallow triangular sarcophagus of its tiny cabin. The rhythm of the waves eased my restlessness.
I tied two more fenders as an extra defense between the boat and the dock and had begun checking that each snap of the canvas covering the cockpit was secure when Hollis came rumbling down the ramp. His sole acknowledgment of the foul weather was a canary-yellow slicker thrown over his T-shirt and shorts. Water dripped from it onto his short ruddy legs and sandals. Hollis gave the impression of being ninety percent upper body, all chest and shoulders with a hard round belly and ape-like arms. Even his hair under the slicker’s hood was a shade an elder orangutan would admire.
“Hullo,” he said as he hurriedly closed the last steps. “It’s something when the Sound gets angry, isn’t it?”
“Easy to enjoy a storm when you’re in the harbor.”
“Now that’s a bit of truth. But this is the exception that proves the rule. I’m damned glad you’re here.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Best I explain where it’s dry. If your hatches are sufficiently battened, let’s get the hell inside, shall we?”
We walked through the mounting rain to his dock, Hollis taking every third step double-time, as if to urge me to move even faster. Something was chipping away at his normally carefree façade. By the time we boarded the Francesca, he was practically jogging.
Hollis’s home was a fifty-foot Carver, outfitted for comfort and modified to hide many things that were better left unseen by harbormasters and customs officials. Hollis was a smuggler, an expert one. He’d been a frequent accomplice of my grandfather’s as well as his closest friend.
I hung my dripping coat in the enclosed aft section as Hollis opened the door and almost rushed into the main cabin, leaving a trail of rainwater across the faux teak parquet.
“Hollis—” I began, and then I saw what held his concern.
A tall heavyset white man with bristly brown hair lay on the main settee. He was shirtless, his left rib cage covered with a flat rectangle of folded cloth. Blood had seeped through at least two spots at the lower edge of the thick pad. He didn’t stir at our approach.