he finished writing, he said, “How you doing?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me.”
“It’s too much. Plus, I need you to look up Barclay T. Pettybone. Seventy-eight years old. Did sixty for murder somewhere in the South. Released in the last month or so. Admitted himself to Baptist Hospital in Jacksonville about a week ago. Then checked himself out. Prognosis bad.”
“Where’d you meet him?”
“He’s on the boat.”
“Thought you worked alone.”
He knew better. The comment was rhetorical.
“Clock’s ticking. Wake somebody if you have to. I’ll check in with you in a day or so. I need to get to West Palm by tomorrow at the latest. I think the clock is ticking faster than I can hear.”
“Keep it between the markers.”
“I intend to.”
Back on Gone Fiction, I cranked the engine and we idled out of the marina. Clay sat in his beanbag and stretched out his legs and tipped his straw hat down over his eyes. In the miles ahead, I would learn that he hummed or whistled constantly, had a beautiful singing voice, and must have been a giant of a man at one time.
Summer stood next to me. She was clutching her book and staring down over the console at Clay. Gunner had dug himself a hole in the bag next to the old man. She put her hand on my arm. “Thank you.”
I was lost in the chart in front of me, trying to calculate time on the water and how much I could push it and where we might take on food and fuel. She tugged on my arm. “You been on the water a long time?”
The downtown area of Daytona is one long no-wake zone, which meant we had a while before I could put her up on plane. “All my life.”
“You love it, don’t you?”
I stared into the water. Through it. Back to my beginning. “I do.”
“Why?”
I waved my hand across the sea of rippled glass in front of us. “Thousands of knife-edged keels and spinning razor blades have cut this water right here. Sliced it into ten billion drops that somehow come back together again. No scar. Nothing can separate it. You could drop a bomb right here and within a few minutes, it’d look like nothing ever happened. Water heals itself. Every time. I like that. And if I’m being honest, maybe I need that.”
She slipped her hand farther inside my arm. Now she wasn’t tugging on my sleeve so much as winding her arm inside mine like a vine. She said nothing as the prop cut the water for the umpteen-millionth time. But despite the damage and the terror we inflicted on that spot of liquid earth, when I looked behind us, the water had come back together. It had healed. Farther on, there was no sign we’d ever been there.
She saw me staring behind us. “Can I ask you something?”
She was pressing closer against the walls I’d erected around myself. The walls I lived behind. The ones that protected me from people who tried to find my heart. I turned and pulled my Costas down over my eyes. “Yes.”
She lifted them up again, setting them at an odd angle on top of my head. “Is Murphy Shepherd your real name?”
The no-wake zone ended. To the west, a deserted plantation house sat back off the water. Four chimneys, missing sections of roof, boarded-up windows, spray-painted graffiti, pigeons flying in and out—a shadow of her former beauty. The remains of a dock, outlined only by the barnacled posts that pierced the water, led from the marsh to the boathouse, a single sheet of rusted tin rubbing against its single remaining post. The hull of a fishing boat bobbed in the water feet away. In the water farther south, two dozen half-submerged sailboats lay at twisted angles. Beached. Run aground. Abandoned. No difference between the sea outside and the sea in. Single masts rose like sentinels at forty-five-degree angles, driven like stakes in the oyster shells. A rusted-out shrimper, rotten nets hung like Spanish moss, sat high in the marsh where the last storm surge had buried her and where she will remain. Forever.
We rode silently through the cemetery. So many muted memories, laughter that would never be heard again. What happens to old boats and those who rode them?
I pushed the throttle forward, bringing Gone Fiction up on plane and easing off when she reached four thousand rpm’s—or thirty-two miles per hour. While Clay napped up front, caressed by the wind,