Epitaph Road (15 page)

He was a man, after all.

“They're gonna stake out your dad's slip,” Sunday said, and as if confirming that, Pelleur and Milne resumed marching toward the dock.

“How long does he stay out?” Tia asked me.

“It depends. Sometimes he fishes the strait. When he does that, he might be gone for just the day. Other times he heads for the coast, fishes the ocean, harbors the boat at Neah Bay or La Push. He might stay gone for days.”

“Does he ever head north?” Tia asked. “Vancouver Island?”

“Wherever the fish are,” I said. “He goes north sometimes, and if he's not coming back today, I hope that's where he is. If Elisha returns, I hope he hears about it and doesn't come back.” I tried to remember what he'd told me of his plans the last time I talked to him, but that was weeks ago, and Dad lived pretty much for the day. He got up in the morning, studied the tides and sky, listened to his radio for fellow fishermen's lies, and decided on an itinerary.

I realized I was wearing out. My eyes were heavy. I felt like lying down somewhere. Anywhere. And the girls looked like I felt. “Why don't you two get a little sleep?” I said. “I'll stand guard. If anything happens, I'll wake you up.”

“You're sure?” Tia said.

“An hour,” Sunday said. She was already stretching out on the scarred wood deck. “Wake me in an hour and I'll take over.”

“Then it's my turn,” Tia said.

Five minutes later their eyes were closed and they were breathing the deep breaths of overdue sleep. I walked around the perimeter of the watch room, looking down and out. I stopped to peer through the binoculars at the PAC cops haunting Dad's slip, the state cops minding the marina entrance. They looked as if they were ready for the long haul. I wondered if someone else was out looking for us.

Minutes passed. I circled the room again and again, breathing in the musty mildewy smells of the old lighthouse. Nothing changed, except the sun rose higher in the sky, the breeze increased in strength, stirring up more whitecaps. No boats broke off from the distant parade and approached the marina. The cops had gotten comfortable — sitting, standing, leaning. One of the state cops lit a cigarette and exhaled a cloud of silvery smoke.

The minutes turned into an hour. I was about to wake up Sunday when two of the PAC cops — the two I didn't know — abruptly left Dad's slip and headed toward shore. Once they got there, they talked to the state cops for a minute, then took off in their car. A moment later, the state cops got in their car and left. No lights, no sirens, no hurry.

I touched Sunday's shoulder. She didn't stir. I shook her. Hard. Finally, she woke with a start and sat up, rubbing her eyes. “Four cops took off,” I told her. “Maybe looking for us. Milne and Pelleur are still at the slip.”

Sunday struggled to her feet and went to the window to look for herself. Tia didn't move. She was on her back, her arm shading her eyes from the bright sunlight. Her chest rose and fell like a listless ocean swell. Sunday picked up the binoculars from the window ledge and raised them to her eyes. She aimed them in the direction of the two cops before panning out to the water.

“Get some sleep,” she murmured. “If those two leave, I'll wake you guys up.”

“Then what?” I said. “I don't know what to do if Dad doesn't come back.”

“Does he ever dock the boat anywhere else around here, I wonder?”

“Nowhere I know of. Nowhere near enough for us to get to anyway.”

“We wait, then,” she said. “We wait till we can't wait any longer, then you'll have to make a break for it. You'll have to get out of the quarantined area, because if Elisha's really coming tomorrow, the cops will be watching everything. You can't afford to be caught and turned back.”

“What about you and Tia?”

“We ain't in any danger. We're untouchable. We laugh at the Bear. We'll stay right here as long as we can. If the cops give up, if your dad comes ashore, we'll be there to meet him and warn him away.”

“We'll see,” I said. “Maybe it won't get to that.” Sunday was right about Elisha's Bear. She and Tia could laugh at it; I couldn't. But I couldn't imagine running off by myself and leaving them here to face whatever was about to happen.

I took the binoculars from her. Something out on the water had caught my eye. Something was moving on an angle in our direction.

I focused. It wasn't
Mr. Lucky.
It wasn't even a fishing boat. It was a Coast Patrol cutter, big and white and green. And fast, I knew, although right now it was just cruising.

“What is it?” Sunday asked.

“Coast Patrol.” A hundred yards behind the cutter was another boat — about the same size, plain gray, the number 9 on its bow — and as the white-and-green boat turned to starboard and began cruising west and parallel to the shoreline a half mile out or so, the gray boat followed. “That gray one's trailing it. Maybe PAC has its own boats. Or maybe it's navy.”

“A naval blockade,” Sunday said. “History repeated.”

“How's he going to get back now?”

“Get some sleep,” she repeated, and I lay down near Tia. I tucked a corner of my backpack under my head and rolled on my side, away from the light, which seemed to be everywhere. But I closed my eyes and a moment later, I was gone.

The next thing I knew, Tia was in my face, inches away. “Someone's coming,” she hissed. Disoriented for a moment, I bolted up to a sitting position. Tia was kneeling next to me. Sunday was squatting at the top of the stairwell, staring down into the gloom.

I heard footsteps, clattering on the metal of the stairs. Whoever it was wasn't trying to be sneaky. It sounded like only one person.

We were trapped. We couldn't go down the steps, but there was no other way out of here. Why hadn't I thought of that when we'd settled on this place for a lookout?

Tia and I got to our feet. Sunday continued to squat and squint into the murk. She put her finger to her lips, warning us to keep our mouths shut.

We waited. Tia took my hand. My heart pounded.

“Hello, young lady,” a voice said. A man's voice. A familiar voice. An instant later, a head emerged from the circular hole in the floor.

Sunday stood and stepped back. “Mister —”

“Gunny,” he said. “Just Gunny.” The fisherman. “I figured you'd migrate here when you didn't find him,” he said, all the way up in the room now. “Should've given you the key, saved you some trouble. And my hasp some wear and tear.” He stepped to the windows that faced out on the strait. He was carrying a big canvas bag. He set it heavily on the floor. “Great view, isn't it?”

“How did you know?” Tia said.

“It's a pretty obvious choice if you're looking for an observation point to watch for someone coming in,” he said. Suddenly, I wondered why the police hadn't come here already.

“We saw you talking to the cops,” I said. “What did you tell them?”

“I don't have a soft spot for cops,” he said. “None of 'em, especially the PAC fascists. I told them I hadn't seen any kids.”

“Thank you,” Sunday said. “Did they ask you about Kellen's dad?”

“‘Barely know him,' I told 'em. ‘Seen him around some, though. Think he's out on a long-term trip.'”

“Is that true?” I said. “You think he is?”

“Don't have any idea. That was just my story.”

“They half believed you,” I said. “Four of them left.”

“The one with the dead eyes stayed, didn't she?” he said.

Pelleur. I knew he was talking about Pelleur. I nodded.

“She didn't buy my story. I could see it on her sour face. I just figured, screw her.”

“She can't stay forever,” I said.

“Maybe long enough, though,” Gunny said. “I get the feeling you're trying to reach your dad in a hurry. And now that the cops are involved, I smell trouble.”

I felt the girls' eyes on me. Gunny seemed like a good guy, but how much could we tell him?

He smiled a little. “Anyway, I'm thinking maybe you want to get ahold of your dad sooner rather than later. So I brought this from my boat.” He crouched down, reached in his bag, and pulled out a battered black box loaded with dials and switches. Mounted on one side was a microphone. He flipped a switch and turned a dial and the radio hummed to life. He turned another knob and static and voices wandered in and out. Another switch. The voices died. “Private line,” he said.

“You know how to get my dad on that thing?” I said.

“I've done it before,” he said. “You wanna give it a try?”

Decision time. What would I tell Dad? If I told him the whole thing, or most of it, Gunny would hear it. And then what? But what choice did I have? “Okay.”

“You got something confidential to say to him, I can take a hike,” Gunny said.

“It's no problem,” I said. “You should hear it, too.”

Gunny raised his eyebrows. He raised the microphone to his mouth
. “Mr. Lucky
, come in,” he said. “
Happy Hour
to
Mr. Lucky
, come in. Charlie? Gunny here. Come on in.”

He waited. I waited. The girls waited. The only noise in the room was the hum and static of the radio as it sat on the floor, and Gunny knelt over it. He looked like he was praying.

“
Mr. Lucky
here,” a voice crackled. Dad. “Down stowing some kings in the cooler, Gunny. Hit it big today. You should come on over.”

“Where are you, Charlie?” Gunny said.

“Not far,” Dad said. “Halfway to Sekiu.” I knew where that was.
Not
far. He was right off the peninsula, just a few miles west of us.

“Got someone who wants to say hello,” Gunny said. He handed me the mike.

“Dad?”

“Kellen? What are you doing there, Kellen?”

It spilled out of me. I sat on the floor and told him everything. Gunny didn't take his eyes off me the whole time, but he seemed to take the news calmly. I ended my story with, “You've got to get away, Dad. You'll be safe if you get away.”

“No can do, Kellen. I'm not leaving you there. And I can't run even if I wanted to. I'm low on fuel, and those boats you mentioned — the Coast Patrol cutter and the destroyer — there are more of them everywhere. They're not letting anyone in or out. No outside boats are allowed to come closer than two miles from coastal settlements, and anyone who tries to leave the two-mile zone is getting turned back. I've seen it happening. I just couldn't figure out why. They didn't bother me because I was minding my own business, catching fish, staying around my own little hot spot.” For some reason, Dad — like Gunny — didn't sound surprised by the whole thing.

“If you come back here, they'll get you,” I said. I stood up and looked out. “They're still waiting at the slip.”

Silence from the other end. “I tell you what,” he said finally. “If Gunny will help us out, I think I've got something that might work.”

“Anything,” Gunny says. “Us loners have to stick together.” Which sounded like some kind of oxymoron when I thought about it, but I was glad to have him on our side.

Dad told us his plan, or at least the first part of it. My heart was drumming so loud I thought Tia, who was hovering nearby, was sure to hear it.

An unresolved question had been squirming its way from a back corner of my mind toward the front, but when the three of us finished going over our part of Dad's getaway plot, Sunday beat me to it. “How'd the piano get up here?”

“That is a puzzle, isn't it?” Gunny said. But he didn't seem to be in a hurry to solve it for us. We had some time to kill before we met Dad, and this was as safe a place as any to kill it.

We waited patiently for him to go on. Even Sunday kept her mouth shut.

“My friend Carlos,” Gunny said finally. “We played together in a small orchestra when we were barely out of diapers, relatively speaking. On a cruise ship, the
Starry Night
. Out at sea when Elisha's Bear came rushing out of hell.”

Gunny paused for a long moment. I glimpsed memories dancing behind eyes squinted against the sunlight. “Anyway, Carlos was from Seattle originally. We tried living there for a while but it was too confining for us. We ended up here, a pair of almost-loners, living in an abandoned house, resurrecting an abandoned fishing boat, just the two of us and our instruments.

“We visited this place a lot, admired the view and the acoustics. One day he got the bright idea of disassembling his piano and putting it back together up here. I was foolish enough to agree to help him. So painstakingly, carefully, we pulled it apart, sawed it apart, hauled it up here in pieces small enough to fit through the hatch, and screwed and drilled and dowelled and glued and clamped and wished it back together. I was mostly the mule. He was the detail guy, the piano man, the perfectionist.”

Sunday whistled admiringly.

“Where is he now?” I asked.

Gunny looked at me as if he hadn't understood the question.

“Carlos,” I said. I would have liked to have met the man who had the great idea of bringing a grand piano to the top of a lighthouse, who could take apart such a complicated instrument and put it back together. “Your friend. Where is he?”

“Gone,” Gunny said hoarsely. “Went overboard one night while we were fishing up north. I didn't realize it right away. I searched for him for hours in the dark, but it was futile. The water's deathly cold and quick up there. Unforgiving.”