“No one’s trailing after you,” said Roosevelt as he lowered the night glasses and took back his shotgun. “This way, son.”
I followed him aft across the sun deck to an open hatch on the starboard side.
Roosevelt paused and looked back, over the top of my head, to the port railing where Orson still lingered. “Here now. Come along, dog.”
The mutt hung behind, but not because he sensed anything lurking on the dock. As usual, he was curiously and uncharacteristically shy around Roosevelt.
Our host’s hobby was “animal communication”—a quintessential New Age concept that had been fodder for most daytime television talk shows, although Roosevelt was discreet about his talent and employed it only at the request of neighbors and friends. The mere mention of animal communication had been able to start Bobby foaming at the mouth even long before Pia Klick had decided that she was the goddess of surfing in search of her Kahuna. Roosevelt claimed to be able to discern the anxieties and desires of troubled pets that were brought to him. He didn’t charge for this service, but his lack of interest in money didn’t convince Bobby:
Hell, Snow, I never said he was a charlatan trying to make a buck. He’s well-meaning. But he just ran headfirst into a goalpost once too often.
According to Roosevelt, the only animal with which he had never been able to communicate was my dog. He considered Orson a challenge, and he never missed an opportunity to try to chat him up. “Come here now, old pup.”
With apparent reluctance, Orson finally accepted the invitation. His claws clicked on the deck.
Carrying the shotgun, Roosevelt Frost went through the open hatch and down a set of molded fiberglass stairs lit only by a faint pearly glow at the bottom. He ducked his head, hunched his huge shoulders, pulled his arms against his sides to make himself smaller, but nevertheless appeared at risk of becoming wedged in the tight stairway.
Orson hesitated, tucked his tail between his legs, but finally descended behind Roosevelt, and I went last. The steps led to a porch-style afterdeck overhung by the cantilevered sun deck.
Orson was reluctant to go into the stateroom, which looked cozy and welcoming in the low light of a nightstand lamp. After Roosevelt and I stepped inside, however, Orson vigorously shook the condensed fog off his coat, spraying the entire afterdeck, and then followed us. I could almost believe that he’d hung back out of consideration, to avoid splattering us.
When Orson was inside, Roosevelt locked the door. He tested it to be sure it was secure. Then tested it again.
Beyond the aft stateroom, the main cabin included a galley with bleached-mahogany cabinets and matching faux-mahogany floor, a dining area, and a salon in one open and spacious floor plan. Out of respect for me, it was illuminated only by one downlight in a living-room display case full of football trophies and by two fat green candles standing in saucers on the dinette table.
The air was redolent of fresh-brewed coffee, and when Roosevelt offered a cup, I accepted.
“Sorry to hear about your dad,” he said.
“Well, at least it’s over.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Is it really?”
“I mean, for him.”
“But not for you. Not after what you’ve seen.”
I frowned. “How do you know what I’ve seen?”
“The word’s around,” he said cryptically.
“What do you—”
He held up one hubcap-size hand. “We’ll talk about it in a minute. That’s why I asked you to come here. But I’m still trying to think through what I need to tell you. Let me get around to it in my own way, son.”
Coffee served, the big man took off his nylon windbreaker, hung it on the back of one of the oversized chairs, and sat at the table. He indicated that I should sit catercorner to him, and with his foot, he pushed out another chair. “Here you go, dog,” he said, offering the third seat to Orson.
Although this was standard procedure when we visited Roosevelt, Orson pretended incomprehension. He settled onto the floor in front of the refrigerator.
“That is unacceptable,” Roosevelt quietly informed him.
Orson yawned.
With one foot, Roosevelt gently rattled the chair that he had pushed away from the table for the dog. “Be a good puppy.”
Orson yawned more elaborately than before. He was overplaying his disinterest.
“If I have to, pup, I’ll come over there, pick you up, and put you in this chair,” Roosevelt said, “which will be an embarrassment to your master, who would like you to be a courteous guest.”
He was smiling good-naturedly, and no slightest threatening tone darkened his voice. His broad face was that of a black Buddha, and his eyes were full of kindness and amusement.
“Be a good puppy,” Roosevelt repeated.
Orson swept the floor with his tail, caught himself, and stopped wagging. He shyly shifted his stare from Roosevelt to me and cocked his head.
I shrugged.
Once more Roosevelt lightly rattled the offered chair with his foot.
Although Orson got up from the floor, he didn’t immediately approach the table.
From a pocket of the nylon windbreaker that hung on his chair, Roosevelt extracted a dog biscuit shaped like a bone. He held it in the candlelight so that Orson could see it clearly. Between his big thumb and forefinger, the biscuit appeared to be almost as tiny as a trinket from a charm bracelet, but it was in fact a large treat. With ceremonial solemnity, Roosevelt placed it on the table in front of the seat that was reserved for the dog.
With wanting eyes, Orson followed the biscuit hand. He padded toward the table but stopped short of it. He was being more than usually standoffish.
From the windbreaker, Roosevelt extracted a second biscuit. He held it close to the candles, turning it as if it were an exquisite jewel shining in the flame, and then he put it on the table beside the first biscuit.
Although he whined with desire, Orson didn’t come to the chair. He ducked his head shyly and then looked up from under his brow at our host. This was the only man into whose eyes Orson was sometimes reluctant to stare.
Roosevelt took a third biscuit from the windbreaker pocket. Holding it under his broad and oft-broken nose, he inhaled deeply, lavishly, as if savoring the incomparable aroma of the bone-shaped treat.
Raising his head, Orson sniffed, too.
Roosevelt smiled slyly, winked at the dog—and then popped the biscuit into his mouth. He crunched it with enormous delight, rinsed it down with a swig of coffee, and let out a sigh of pleasure.
I was impressed. I had never seen him do this before. “What did that taste like?”
“Not bad. Sort of like shredded wheat. Want one?”
“No, sir. No, thank you,” I said, content to sip my coffee.
Orson’s ears were pricked; Roosevelt now had his undivided attention. If this towering, gentle-voiced, giant black human truly enjoyed the biscuits, there might be fewer for any canine who played too hard to get.
From the windbreaker draped on the back of his chair, Roosevelt withdrew another biscuit. He held this one under his nose, too, and inhaled so expansively that he was putting me in danger of oxygen deprivation. His eyelids drooped sensuously. A shiver of pretended pleasure swept him, almost swelled into a swoon, and he seemed about to fall into a biscuit-devouring frenzy.
Orson’s anxiety was palpable. He sprang off the floor, into the chair across the table from mine, where Roosevelt wanted him, sat on his hindquarters, and craned his neck forward until his snout was only two inches from Roosevelt’s nose. Together, they sniffed the endangered biscuit.
Instead of popping this one into his mouth, Roosevelt carefully placed it on the table beside the two that were already arranged in front of Orson’s seat. “Good old pup.”
I wasn’t sure that I believed in Roosevelt Frost’s supposed ability to communicate with animals, but in my opinion, he was indisputably a first-rate dog psychologist.
Orson sniffed the biscuits on the table.
“Ah, ah, ah,” Roosevelt warned.
The dog looked up at his host.
“You mustn’t eat them until I say you may,” Roosevelt told him.
The dog licked his chops.
“So help me, pup, if you eat them without my permission,” said Roosevelt, “there will never, ever, ever again be biscuits for you.”
Orson issued a thin, pleading whine.
“I mean it, dog,” Roosevelt said quietly but firmly. “I can’t make you talk to me if you don’t want to. But I can insist that you display a minimum of manners aboard my boat. You can’t just come in here and wolf down the canapes as if you were some wild beast.”
Orson gazed into Roosevelt’s eyes as though trying to judge his commitment to this no-wolfing rule.
Roosevelt didn’t blink.
Apparently convinced that this was no empty threat, the dog lowered his attention to the three biscuits. He gazed at them with such desperate longing that I thought I ought to try one of the damn things, after all.
“Good pup,” said Roosevelt.
He picked up a remote-control device from the table and jabbed one of the buttons on it, although the tip of his finger seemed too large to press fewer than three buttons at once. Behind Orson, motorized tambour doors rolled up and out of sight on the top half of a built-in hutch, revealing two stacks of tightly packed electronic gear gleaming with light-emitting diodes.
Orson was interested enough to turn his head for a moment before resuming worship of the forbidden biscuits.
In the hutch, a large video monitor clicked on. The quartered screen showed murky views of the fog-shrouded marina and the bay on all four sides of the
Nostromo.
“What’s this?” I wondered.
“Security.” Roosevelt put down the remote control. “Motion detectors and infrared sensors will pick up anyone approaching the boat and alert us at once. Then a telescopic lens automatically isolates and zooms in on the intruder before he gets here, so we’ll know what we’re dealing with.”
“What
are
we dealing with?”
The man mountain took two slow, dainty sips of his coffee before he said, “You might already know too much about that.”
“What do you mean? Who are you?”
“I’m nobody but who I am,” he said. “Just old Rosie Frost. If you’re thinking that maybe I’m one of the people behind all this, you’re wrong.”
“What people? Behind what?”
Looking at the four security-camera views on the quartered video monitor, he said, “With any luck, they’re not even aware that I know about them.”
“Who? People at Wyvern?”
He turned to me again. “They’re not just at Wyvern anymore. Townspeople are in it now. I don’t know how many. Maybe a couple of hundred, maybe five hundred, but probably not more than that, at least not yet. No doubt it’s gradually spreading to others…and it’s already beyond Moonlight Bay.”
Frustrated, I said, “Are you
trying
to be inscrutable?”
“As much as I can, yes.”
He got up, fetched the coffeepot, and without further comment freshened our cups. Evidently he intended to make me wait for morsels of information in much the way that poor Orson was being made to wait patiently for his snack.
The dog licked the tabletop around the three biscuits, but his tongue never touched the treats.
When Roosevelt returned to his chair, I said, “If you’re not involved with these people, how do you know so much about them?”
“I don’t know all that much.”
“Apparently a lot more than I do.”
“I know only what the animals tell me.”
“What animals?”
“Well, not your dog, for sure.”
Orson looked up from the biscuits.
“He’s a regular sphinx,” Roosevelt said.
Although I hadn’t been aware of doing so, sometime soon after sunset, I had evidently walked through a magic looking-glass.
Deciding to play by the lunatic rules of this new kingdom, I said, “So…aside from my phlegmatic dog, what do these animals tell you?”
“You shouldn’t know all of it. Just enough so you realize it’s best that you forget what you saw in the hospital garage and up at the funeral home.”
I sat up straighter in my chair, as though pulled erect by my tightening scalp. “You
are
one of them.”
“No. Relax, son. You’re safe with me. How long have we been friends? More than two years now since you first came here with your dog. And I think you know you can trust me.”
In fact, I was at least half convinced that I could still trust Roosevelt Frost, even though I was no longer as sure of my character judgment as I had once been.
“But if you don’t forget what you saw,” he continued, “if you try to contact authorities outside town, you’ll endanger lives.”
As my chest tightened around my heart, I said, “You just told me I could trust you, and now you’re threatening me.”
He looked wounded. “I’m your friend, son. I wouldn’t threaten you. I’m only telling you—”
“Yeah. What the animals said.”
“It’s the people from Wyvern who want to keep a lid on this at any cost, not me. Anyway, you aren’t
personally
in any danger even if you try to go to outside authorities, at least not at first. They won’t touch you. Not you. You’re revered.”
This was one of the most baffling things that he had said yet, and I blinked in confusion. “Revered?”
“Yes. They’re in awe of you.”
I realized that Orson was staring at me intently, temporarily having forgotten the three promised biscuits.
Roosevelt’s statement was not merely baffling: It was downright wacky. “Why would anyone be in awe of me?” I demanded.
“Because of who you are.”
My mind looped and spun and tumbled like a capering seagull. “Who am I?”
Roosevelt frowned and pulled thoughtfully at his face with one hand before finally saying, “Damned if I know. I’m only repeating what I’ve been told.”
What the animals told you. The black Dr. Doolittle.
Some of Bobby’s scorn was creeping into me.
“The point is,” he said, “the Wyvern crowd won’t kill you unless you give them no choice, unless it’s absolutely the only way to shut you up.”
“When you talked to Sasha earlier tonight, you told her this was a matter of life and death.”