I wait while he pulls it up. I watch the woods, where I expect the guards to emerge at any moment. Vincent gives me the number, and I hang up and call Monique. She answers on the first ring.
“Monique? This is Maya Walsh, Ness’s friend, the one staying in the guest house. I need to get in touch with Victoria, Holly’s mom. Do you have her number?”
“Yes,” she says, “but I don’t think she’ll pick up. I always have to leave a message. She’s a very busy woman.”
I clench my fist in frustration. “Okay, give it to me anyway. Or can you think of some way I might get in touch with Holly?”
“Why? What’s going on?”
A jeep emerges from the woods, one of the white security vehicles. A man on foot follows soon after.
“Nothing much,” I say, my heart racing. “She left something down at the guest house, and I think she needs it. What’s Holly’s number?”
I put her on speaker. Monique tells me the number, and I key it into my phone.
“Oh, Ms. Walsh? You might want to text her first. You’ll freak her out if you just call.”
“Of course,” I say, but I’m glad of the reminder.
I open up my messenger.
Holly? It’s Maya. Can I give you a quick call?
I hit send and back around the edge of the lighthouse. The guard on foot has jumped in the jeep, which bounces down the muddy road toward me.
I watch my messages. After an eternity, my phone vibrates in my hand.
Sure.
I call. Holly picks up and says, “Headquarters of the No-Rain Society.” Which is better than a greeting or an apology or an explanation for how we left things.
“Reporting bright and sunny conditions here,” I tell her. The jeep is halfway to the lighthouse. There’s no place for me to hide. “Hey,” I say, trying to keep my voice calm. “There’s totally nothing to do here. I was going to get the cable going, but the customer service people won’t talk to me.”
“Yeah, they suck,” Holly says. “Gimme a minute. I’ll call and have it up and running in no time. That book was boring, right?”
“No, that’s okay,” I say, a bit desperately. “I don’t mind calling them. I was just hoping maybe you knew your dad’s security PIN. That’s what they’re asking for. But if not, no big deal. I can get back into that book.”
I duck my head back, thinking one of the guards in the jeep saw me. I hear the engine rev. Only my pulse is racing faster.
“Oh, no worries,” Holly says. “That’s easy. It’s my birthday.”
“Of course,” I say. I hurry around the lighthouse and down the steps toward the door. Holly says something, and then she’s cut off. I look at my phone. No bars. I hurry back up, wave the phone at the fickle gods of cellular communication, and get a single bar. I start to call back, can hear the guards talking on the other side of the lighthouse, one saying to go inside, the other saying he’ll check the back. As soon as I call Holly, they’ll hear me. When—bless her—my phone vibrates with a text.
Dropped you. 09-22-28. l8r
Back down the steps, I figure I’ve got one chance. I punch in the code, expecting more damn red lights.
But there’s a clunk, a green light, and I push my way inside.
39
Two pair of muddy boots greet me inside the door. Beside them are Ness’s running shoes, as well as two pairs of ladies’ shoes. A rack is nailed to the wall, several jackets hanging from it. An umbrella leans to the side in a beat-up plastic trashcan.
The room is lit by bare bulbs screwed into outlets along the wall, metal cages around them for protection. Voices can be heard below me, leaking up a narrow staircase. I hear the guard outside clomp down the stairs. I hold my breath, waiting for him to come barging through the door. We seem to be standing there, listening for each other. After an eternity, I hear him march up the stairs. Either he doesn’t have the code or doesn’t expect that I would.
Barefoot, I steal across the room and try to pick out the conversations below. I wouldn’t think a lighthouse would have a basement. I wonder why Ness would come here. I reach the rail and peer down the stairs. Someone in a white lab coat walks past. A woman. I sneak around the railing and lower my head to get a better view, watch her stop at a table and talk to someone. The acoustics below—the distant clatters and the way voices are swallowed—make it sound like a much bigger room than this one.
I decide to creep down the stairs. There’s no sense of danger, not from Ness, not from whatever this is. It isn’t until I see the massive room that I feel afraid. It looks like a warehouse. Racks of shelves cover the far walls, and the shelves are stuffed with what look like aquariums. Long tables run the length of a room the size of a large grocery store. There are industrial machines and what looks like laboratory equipment everywhere. Microscopes. Vials. Twisting tubes of glass. Expensive centrifuges. Reminds me of my marine biology labs from undergrad, but on steroids.
The scope of the place is breathtaking. All cut out beneath a lighthouse. This facility must be newer than the run-down structure that stands above it, though. Added here. Is this where he breeds his hydrothermal shells? Was what I told Agent Cooper spot-on? I watch the man and woman as they huddle together, studying an object in the woman’s hands. There’s a plastic sample case on the table near them. It looks identical to the other two I’ve seen. I wonder if this is that cross between an auger and a cerith from Tara Cay, from our underwater expedition.
The stairs go down to another floor, deeper still. No one sees me creeping behind the rail. I sneak down, make the turn, and continue to the next floor without being spotted. Here, another large open area takes up half the space. A hallway leads off in the other direction, lined with doors—offices, or maybe small labs or storage rooms. All the doors are closed save one. There’s a light inside. I listen for voices but don’t hear any.
The rest of the space looks similar to what’s above, but with no workers. And rather than the long work surfaces, here there are lines of aquariums, water gurgling noisily, pumps and circulation fans whirring. Most of the aquariums are lit. Pipes and electrical wires form a maze across the ceiling, dipping down here and there to service the tanks. I creep over and peer inside the one nearest me. What look like white and orange nutmeg seashells litter the bottom of the tank.
I look around to make sure I’m alone, and then spot a familiar sight in the tank behind me: creamy white lace murexes with their jagged, decorative shells. An entire tank of them. But Cooper said there was no such thing. I reach in to grab one of them, the water warm up to my elbow, and bring it out.
The shell isn’t empty. There’s a slug inside. A gastropod. Was Cooper right all along? Is Ness taking some other species of slug and moving it into cast shells, creating the perfect fake? Maybe something in that process coats the shell enough to fool a testing machine. Or he makes the shells out of calcium carbonate from crushed-up species that are more common. Ness’s driveway is a clue to all that he has access to. Probably dredges the shells up from his private beaches and islands. Then the shells are formed here, injected into some mold, and finally non-extinct species are moved in to make them look real.
My story has an ending, I realize. Here it is. Closure. For the piece, and for me and Ness. I came here to explain myself, to apologize, but all that guilt vanishes in an instant. The story that ran in the Times this morning wasn’t my doing anyway. I was apologizing for something that wasn’t my fault. But Ness… he lied to me from the beginning, was leading me on a wild chase, flying me to the Southern Hemisphere when the murexes were sitting in a tank a short walk from his house all along.