Blackwater Sound

Thorn told him about the boat he’d seen, the three people aboard.

‘So they didn’t want to get involved,’ Sugar said. ‘Nothing weird about that. A lot of people freeze up in emergencies.’

‘Afterwards, at Flamingo the kid came over to me. He was trying to be cagey, but it was clear he wanted to see if I’d noticed them before the crash. Like he was worried I had something on him. He had a weird knife and real dodgy eyes. Talked like some half-assed gangster.’

‘A weird knife and dodgy eyes,’ Sugar said. ‘Hell, let’s go arrest the son of a bitch, toss him in solitary.’

Thorn told him about going to the library, about the articles on Morgan Braswell, her father, A.J., about driving to Palm Beach, the run-down mansion, the tight security at the plant.

Sugarman had a sip of his beer. He squeezed some lime into the bottle and had another sip.

‘You’ve been so good lately, Thorn. Everything’s coasting along so nice and easy.’

‘You think I’m making this up?’

‘I was wondering how long it would last. This stretch of tranquillity.’

The schoolteachers paid their bill and got up. They walked behind Thorn and Sugarman. The blonde leaned close and hissed and flashed her claws.

‘The world springs from your mind, Thorn, and sinks again into your mind. That’s what the Buddhists say. And if you ask me, there’s something to it. You see what you want to see.’

‘That goddamn airplane didn’t spring from my mind, Sugar.’

They sat in silence for a while, watched the bartender wash the teachers’ glasses. Thorn pushed his drink away. He was wasting good alcohol, pouring it into a bottomless cavity.

A couple of guys with long hair and Hawaiian shirts came into the bar. The schoolteachers were with them. Everyone laughing. On the same boozy wavelength.

‘There’s nothing weird about this, Sugar? You sure?’

‘Nothing you told me sounds weird, no. Some rich assholes from Palm Beach didn’t want to scuff their manicures. That’s all. I think what it is, you’re shell-shocked. An airplane crashes in your lap, it’s only natural you get a little case of post-trauma. And the way you’re dealing with it, being Thorn, you rush out and start sniffing around, thinking you gotta fix things.’

Thorn looked over at the schoolteachers and their new friends. Bilge Burners all around.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I’m full of shit.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Yeah, you did. Not in those words, but it’s the same thing.’

The bartender came over and asked if they wanted another round. Sugar said no. Thorn shook his head.

‘I think the NTSB might want to talk to you. Transportation Safety Board. You’ve heard of them, right? The people that investigate these things.’

‘I’ve heard of them.’

‘They’d probably like to debrief you. You being an eyewitness and all.’

‘What am I going to tell them? I saw the plane crash. It nearly capsized my boat. I don’t know anything else.’

‘You should call. It’s your civic duty.’

‘Sure,’ Thorn said. ‘Soon as I get a phone installed.’

Sugarman finished his beer and slid it to the edge of the bar. He picked up the tab and kept it out of Thorn’s reach.

‘You want me to, I’ll call them for you.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m going to stay the hell out of this.’

Sugar got down from his stool and rested his hand on Thorn’s shoulder.

‘You get some sleep, buddy. You’ll feel better tomorrow.’

‘Yeah,’ Thorn said. ‘Some sleep. That’d be nice.’

Morgan put the leftover Chinese in the refrigerator. Six white boxes. Shrimp fried rice, garlic chicken, the usual. Enough for dinner tomorrow. She wiped off the table, rinsed the plates and silverware, put them in the dishwasher. She corked the Pinot Noir and set it on the shelf. Set up the coffee machine for the morning.

Johnny was upstairs in his bedroom. Her dad was in his study. Leaving her the woman’s work. Just like they’d treated her mother.

Morgan turned off the kitchen light and went upstairs and stopped on the landing outside Johnny’s room. Marlon Brando was lecturing one of his thugs, using his muffled Godfather voice, as though his cheeks were stuffed with dental cotton. She stood for a moment listening to the familiar dialogue. Johnny watched them every night, gangster movies. Said it relaxed him. Cagney, Bogart, Pacino, Mitchum. Gunfire coming from his room, sirens, swelling music, fuck this, fuck that. For years she tried making fun of the movies, tried bullying him. Neither worked, so finally she gave up. She wasn’t his mother. If he wanted to wallow in that trash, fantasize an alternate life, it was his own choice. She was only his sister. That’s all she was, a sister and a daughter. Her brother and her father were mature adults. She had to keep reminding herself.

She went down the narrow hallway and opened the attic door, took a deep breath, and climbed the narrow stairs into the dark, airless heat. It’d been months since she’d been up there. That long since she’d needed to make the journey. But it was coming up on Easter, the anniversary of all the bad shit. And then there was the stuff from work, the pressures, the desperate come-from-behind finish she was trying to pull off.

A wedge of light angled across the dusty floor of the attic. Passing into the shadows, Morgan bumped her shin against a footlocker. She winced, sucked down a breath, and kept on going, slipping past a broken rocking chair, a stack of old records, a baby bassinet. The cane-back chair was still there. Standing upright now.

She held on to the back of the chair and stepped onto it, teetering for a second. When she had her balance, she reached overhead into the darkness and found the rafter, and ran her hand down the smooth wood until she came to the nylon rope that her mother had knotted there.

She touched a fingertip to the bristly end where Johnny’s knife blade had sawed through the strands. She closed her eyes and gripped that stub of rope and held on until the blood ran out of her arm and it began to grow heavy and numb.

Morgan lay in the dark, her head on Andy’s pillow. His room was the same. Untouched in ten years. His clothes ironed, hanging neatly in his closet. His shelves lined with novels and science texts. His trophies from high school, a photograph of Albert Einstein, a bust of Beethoven. His notes organized in colored folders. His careful script. A treasure trove. Notations, pages of math, detailed technical drawings, his storehouse of ideas. Like some young Leonardo da Vinci, his engineering designs and scientific observations, his experiments light-years ahead of his time. Morgan had managed to decode only one of his ideas so far and it alone had managed to steer MicroDyne back to profitability. There were hundreds of pages of other formulas, detailed drawings of machines and microcircuitry he’d conceived. And there were the anatomical doodles of women with boyish hips and small breasts. Dozens of them. All with Morgan’s shape.

Morgan could no longer smell his scent on the pillowcase. She had long ago inhaled all those leftover particles. Absorbed them, taken them into her bloodstream. Now there were only the invisible molecules, charged atoms, the last traces of his fairy dust lingering in the air. She breathed them in, let them out. Breathed them in again.

Then she was drifting into a dream: Andy was writing on a chalkboard, Morgan sitting in the front row of an empty classroom. Andy was walking her through a formula, the numbers hazy in her dream. She squinted at them but couldn’t make them out. She raised her hand, and was waiting for him to turn from the chalkboard and call on her when the phone shook her awake.

She fumbled in the dark and got it on the third ring. Her hello was deep-throated and groggy.

‘Morgan Braswell?’

‘Yes?’

‘My name is Julie Jamison.’

‘All right.’

‘I’m sorry to disturb you so late, Miss Braswell.’

‘Is this a sales call?’