Fluke or I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings - By Christopher Moore Page 0,12
grabbed Kona by the shoulders. "Where's frame twenty-six, goddamn it? What did you do with it?"
"This just like I get it, mon. I didn't do nothing."
"He's a criminal, Clay," Nate said. Then he grabbed the phone and called the lab.
All they could tell him was that the film had been processed normally and picked up from the bin in front. A machine cut the negatives before they went into the sleeves - perhaps it had snipped off the frame. They'd be happy to give Nate a fresh roll of film for his trouble.
Two hours later Nate sat at the desk, holding a pen and looking at a sheet of paper. Just looking at it. The room was dark except for the desk lamp, which reached out just far enough to leave darkness in all the corners where the unknown could hide. There was a nightstand, the desk, the chair, and a single bed with a trunk set at its end, a blanket on top as a cushion. Nathan Quinn was a tall man, and his feet hung off the end of the bed. He found that if he removed the supporting trunk, he dreamed of foundering in blue-water ocean and woke up gasping. The trunk was full of books, journals, and blankets, none of which had ever been removed since he'd shipped them to the island nine years ago. A centipede the size of a Pontiac had once lived in the bottom-right corner of the trunk but had long since moved on once he realized that no one was ever going to bother him, so he could stand up on his hind hundred feet, hiss like a pissed cat, and deliver a deadly bite to a naked foot. There was a small television, a clock radio, a small kitchenette with two burners and a microwave, two full bookshelves under the window that looked out onto the compound, and a yellowed print of two of Gauguin's Tahitian girls between the windows over the bed. At one time, before the plantations had been automated, ten people probably slept in this room. In grad school at UC Santa Cruz, Nathan Quinn had lived in quarters about this same size. Progress.
The paper on Nate's desk was empty, the bottle of Myers's Dark Rum beside it half empty. The door and windows were open, and Nate could hear the warm trades rattling the fronds of two tall coconut palms out front. There was a tap on the door, and Nate looked up to see Amy silhouetted in the doorway. She stepped into the light.
"Nathan, can I come in?" She was wearing a T-shirt dress that hit her about midthigh.
Nate put his hand over the paper, embarrassed that there was nothing written on it. "I was just trying to put a plan together for - " He looked past the paper to the bottle, then back at Amy. "Do you want a drink?" He picked up the bottle, looked around for a glass, then just held the bottle out to her.
Amy shook her head. "Are you all right?"
"I started this work when I was your age. I don't know if I have the energy to start it all over again."
"It's a lot of work. I'm really sorry this happened."
"Why? You didn't do it. I was close, Amy. There's something that I've been missing, but I was close."
"It will still be there. You know, we have the field notes from the last couple of years. I'll help you put as much of it back together as I can."
"I know you will, but Clay's right. Nobody cares. I should have gone into biochemistry or become an ecowarrior or something."
"I care."
Nate looked at her feet to avoid looking her in the eye. "I know you do. But without the recordings... well - then..." He shrugged and took a sip from the rum bottle. "You can't drink, you know," he said, now the professor, now the Ph.D., now the head researcher. "You can't do anything or have anything in your life that gets in the way of researching whales."
"Okay," Amy said. "I just wanted to see if you were okay."
"Yeah, I'm okay."
"We'll get started putting it back together tomorrow. Good night, Nate." She backed out the door.
"Night, Amy." Nate noticed that she wasn't wearing anything under the T-shirt dress and felt sleazy for it. He turned his attention back to his blank piece of paper, and before he could figure out why, he wrote