a second. Look here. This is a male peacock feather, and the note says that over eons of time, the males’ feathers got larger and larger to attract females, till the point the males can barely lift off the ground. Can’t hardly fly anymore.”
“Are you finished? We have a job to do.”
“Well, it’s very interesting.”
Ed walked from the room. “Get to work, man.”
* * *
• • •
TEN MINUTES LATER, Joe called out again. As Ed walked out of the small bedroom, toward the sitting room, he said, “Let me guess. You found a stuffed mouse with three eyes.”
There was no reply, but when Ed walked into the room, Joe held up a red wool hat.
“Where’d you find that?”
“Right here, hangin’ on this row of hooks with these coats, other hats, and stuff.”
“In the open like that?”
“Right here like I said.”
From his pocket, Ed pulled out the plastic bag containing the red fibers taken from Chase’s denim jacket the night he died and held it against the red hat.
“They look exactly the same. Same color, same size and thickness,” Joe said as both men studied the hat and sample.
“They do. Both of them have fuzzy beige wool mixed in with the red.”
“Man, this could be it.”
“We’ll have to send the hat to the lab, of course. But if these fibers match, we’ll bring her in for questioning. Bag and label the hat.”
After four hours of searching, the men met in the kitchen.
Stretching his back, Ed said, “I reckon if there’s anything else, we would’ve found it by now. We can always come back. Call it a day.”
Maneuvering the ruts back to town, Joe said, “Seems like if she’s guilty of this thing, she woulda hidden the red cap. Not just hung it in the open like that.”
“She probably had no idea fibers would fall off the hat onto his jacket. Or that the lab could identify them. She just wouldn’t know something like that.”
“Well, she might not a’ known that, but I bet she knows a bunch. Those male peacocks struttin’ around, competin’ so much for sex, they can’t hardly fly. I ain’t sure what it all means, but it adds up to something.”
35.
The Compass
1969
One July afternoon in 1969, more than seven months after Jodie’s visit, The Eastern Seacoast Birds by Catherine Danielle Clark—her second book, a volume of stark detail and beauty—appeared in her mailbox. She ran her fingers over the striking jacket—her painting of a herring gull. Smiling, she said, “Hey, Big Red, you made it to the cover.”
Carrying the new book, Kya walked silently to the shady oak clearing near her shack, searching for mushrooms. The moist duff felt cool on her feet as she neared a cluster of intensely yellow toadstools. Midstride, she halted. There, sitting on the old feather stump, was a small milk carton, red and white, just like the one from so long ago. Unexpectedly, she laughed out loud.
Inside the carton, wrapped in tissue paper, was an old army-issue compass in a brass case, tarnished green-gray with age. She breathed in at the sight of it. She had never needed a compass because the directions seemed obvious to her. But on cloudy days, when the sun was elusive, the compass would guide her.
A folded note read: Dearest Kya, This compass was my grandpa’s from the First World War. He gave it to me when I was little, but I’ve never used it, and I thought maybe you would get the best out of it. Love, Tate. P.S. I’m glad you can read this note!
Kya read the words Dearest and Love again. Tate. The golden-haired boy in the boat, guiding her home before a storm, gifting her feathers on a weathered stump, teaching her to read; the tender teenager steering her through her first cycle as a woman and arousing her first sexual desires as a female; the young scientist encouraging her to publish her books.
Despite gifting him the shell book, she had continued to hide in the undergrowth when she saw him in the marsh, rowing away unseen. The dishonest signals of fireflies, all she knew of love.
Even Jodie had said she should give Tate another chance. But every time she thought of him or saw him, her heart jumped from the old love to the pain of abandonment. She wished it would settle on one side or the other.
Several mornings later, she slipped through the estuaries in an early fog, the compass tucked in her knapsack, though she would not likely need it.