The Shell Collector

1

The trees are a decadence. They line the gravel driveway on either side, staggered to look like they march on forever. Oaks, cherries, willows, and palms. They don’t belong here, the palms. They were probably grown down in the Carolinas, or even farther south. I have no idea how they survive the Maine winters. Perhaps they don’t. Perhaps these are million-dollar annuals whooshing by.

I consider the expense of transporting mature trees, one by one, and all the labor involved. Flatbeds rumbling up the interstate with “wide load” signs on the back. Or barges tugged up the coast and unloaded with giant cranes. All for trees that will succumb to the next ten-year storm or the next super freeze. Just to decorate the impossibly long driveway of a filthy rich man. Just to stand there as a giant screw-you to reality, a bold claim that seems to say: Your world has gone to ruin, but not mine. I can afford to make any world I choose.

It’s excesses like these that brought me here to destroy a man.

It’s the palm trees; it’s the shells in my purse; it’s all the things that don’t belong here, including me.

The tires of my beat-up electric car crunch down the miles-long gravel road. I flinch with every pebble that kicks up against the underbody. I hate driving out of the city. The offer to be flown out on Wilde’s helicopter seems less insane now, almost worth swallowing my pride for, almost worth the ridiculousness of it all. Other reporters have probably said, “Yes. Hell yes.” And why wouldn’t they? How many came out here hoping to get screwed rather than to do the screwing?

A rock hits beneath my seat, and my knuckles whiten on the steering wheel. Ahead, twin rows of crape myrtles dot the road. They’re losing their flowers. Purple petals ring the trunks, fallen mementos of a past bloom like photos from college years. But unlike people, trees flower again in the spring; they age in great looping circles. We ride a roller coaster once around, shuddering up clacking tracks and then screaming our fool heads off all the way down.

You’re only thirty-two, I remind myself.

I feel every day of it, I think back.

Another guard gate looms into view down the dusty road. It’s the second gate I’ve had to go through, despite there being no way to access the road between the gates. If the first checkpoint was a testament to seclusion and privacy—with its tall, camera-studded walls marching off in either direction—this second blockade feels more like a padlock around a deeply paranoid mind. Why lock away even further what no one is allowed to see?

Ness Wilde used to live in the limelight. He seemed to bask in it for three solid decades, practically since the day he was born. But he hasn’t been seen in public in four years. This from a man who once graced the cover of practically every gossip rag and shelling magazine, who was on every other TV channel, who must’ve been interviewed a thousand times.

And then, one day, he’s gone. He refuses all interviews. Until this week, when the Times ran the first of four pieces I’ve written on him and his family. Now, suddenly, he wants to talk. And even if I don’t care to oblige him, there are powerful people who insist that I do. People like my editor at the paper. Other people with badges and guns. The kinds of people you listen to if you want to stay employed and on the right side of the law.

I slow to a stop at the second gate, and a young guard steps out. He looks the part: broad shoulders, narrow waist, chiseled jaw, military buzz cut. He motions for me to roll down the window. I press the button, and the smell of honeysuckle and coconuts and the nearby sea fills the car.

“I checked in at the other gate,” I tell the guard.

“Identification,” he says.

“Seriously?”

I mutter this under my breath, and if the guard hears, he doesn’t react. Rummaging in my bag on the passenger seat, I find my Times credentials and driver’s license. I hand them to the guard and do little to conceal my annoyance.

“And the registration,” he says, motioning with his hand.

“For the car?” I ask.

He waits. I curse him as I pop the glove box. This can’t be normal. Some kind of punishment. I try not to be paranoid, try not to think that Ness knows who sent me here.

“So how often do marauders get past the first gate and make it this far?” I ask. I hand him my vehicle registration.

The guard ignores me and studies the ID. I watch his lips mouth my name: Maya Walsh. It’s hard to tell if he’s whispering for the benefit of the wire hanging out of his ear or if he’s one of those people who can’t read without sounding out the words. He glances up at me, checks something on a small tablet, and then holsters the tablet beside his gun. The IDs and registration are returned.

“Pull up in front of the main house,” he says, pointing down the drive with the rigidity and precision of a crossing guard. “Do not drive any further.”

The bright blue metal bar in front of my car’s grille swings up. When I glance back to the guard to make sure I can go, I catch him staring down inside the car and at my chest. I cover myself with one hand and hit the gas and speed away. Once I have some distance between myself and the guard, I glance down at my blouse to make sure I’m decent. For a moment there, I’m terrified the wire the FBI made me wear is showing. But it’s tucked safely away.

I take a deep breath, try to relax. While I’d love to curse my boss, or Special Agent Cooper, or Ness Wilde, or his creepy guard, the truth is I’ve got no one to blame for this assignment but myself. I got into this mess all on my own—and it’s up to me to get out of it.

2

“What the hell is this?” I ask, slamming the morning edition onto my boss’s desk.

Henry—the editor in chief of the Times—noisily sips his coffee. His mug has [REDACTED] printed on the side in blocky red letters. He glances at the paper and smooths his mustache.

“Where’s my story?” I ask. “It was running when I left here last night.”

Leaning to one side, Henry peers past me and out his office door. I don’t need to turn and look. I can feel all the heads behind all those newsroom desks watching me. I heard the whispers during my murderous march down the aisle. Henry sets his mug down. He wouldn’t be so calm if he knew how close I was to either quitting my job or jumping over that desk to rip his silly handlebar mustache off.

“I take it you haven’t checked your email,” he says.

“You mean since I left here at two in the morning?” I look at the clock above his desk. It’s a little after eight. “No, some of us do actual work around here.”

“Close the door and sit down,” Henry tells me.

I cross my arms instead. Henry pinches one side of that ridiculous mustache, shrugs, and gives up, realizing he isn’t going to win the Battle of the Door and the Sitting of the Down.

“Ness Wilde wants an interview,” he says.

The temperature in the office soars. I can feel my pulse throbbing in my neck. “Are you serious?” I ask.

“Dead serious.”

He seems relaxed—like what he’s saying is a good thing, like I’m supposed to be pleased.

I rest both palms on Henry’s desk and lean toward him. “So the first piece in my series runs yesterday, and you get a call from Wilde asking you to yank it, and you just fucking yank it? Just like that?”

I have to turn away. As I do, forty-three heads snap back to their computer screens so fast I think I can hear a whooshing sound out in the newsroom.

“He better not have paid you,” I add, turning back to Henry. “Because I’ll quit, and the Post would love to run that story.”

“You’re not going to quit,” Henry says. And I consider that maybe, just possibly, over the last eight years, I’ve threatened to quit a hair too many times.

“When you gave me the arts and culture section, you said I could still do hard-hitting journalism—”

“And you can,” Henry says.

“—that I wouldn’t be running the birdcage and paint-splatter section of the paper—”

“You’re not. Calm down for a second and listen to me.”

“I’m goddamn calm!” I shout.

A few heartbeats pass. Henry smiles at me. I pray to god I’m not smiling back.

“Will you listen to me for just a second?” Henry asks. “You know, because I’m your boss?”

I cross my arms. “Fine. So how much did Ness Wilde pay to bring our august presses to a screeching halt? Pray tell. I can’t wait to hear this.”

“First of all, I didn’t speak with him directly. I spoke with his assistant—”

“Figures,” I say.

“—and his assistant said that if you want the full story on Ness’s father and grandfather, that he’d like to fly you up to his estate to answer your questions in person. Three hours. Whatever you want to ask.”

I laugh. “I’ve done two years of research for this story, and he wants to give me three hours? C’mon, Henry, don’t you see what he’s really doing here? When I got on the train this morning, people were still reading yesterday’s paper. Not staring at their screens, but reading the goddamn Times. Because of my story. And now they’re expecting the second piece I promised—”

“I know.” Henry raises his hands. “Trust me, I know. Our editorial inbox is full of positive responses. And we’ve already seen a bump in new subscriptions. Which is why I told Ness’s assistant to kindly go to hell.”

“You did?” Now I’m confused.

“Of course. I slammed the phone down on her. With gusto. And then it rang again. Immediately.”

“Mr. Wilde himself,” I say. “So now he has the balls to call you.”

“I wish it’d been Ness. I would’ve told him off in person. It was the FBI.”

Before I can ask if I heard Henry properly, he leans forward and places a finger on a white business card sitting apart from the rest of the clutter on his desk. I can see the three letters in a large blocky font from where I’m standing. Looking closer, I see a round seal stuffed with an eagle, an American flag, a ring of gold stars, and probably a slice of apple pie in there somewhere. I pick up the card. It belongs to a Special Agent Stanley Cooper.

“I tried to save you a trip uptown,” Henry says. “This guy wants to see you. I emailed you his contact info and left you a voice message—”

“I listen to my voice messages like once a month,” I remind Henry. “You should’ve texted me.”

“Whatever. Just go talk to this guy.”

I check the address on the card: 26 Federal Plaza, down in the financial district. “What does the FBI want with me? And what’s this got to do with you yanking my story?”

Henry takes a deep breath and nods at the card. “I’ll let him explain. It’s complicated. But listen, Maya, the important thing to know is that we’re running the rest of your series. We’re just going to run them weekly rather than daily. You’ve got my word on that. You know I want to nail this guy just as much as you do—”

“As much as I do? I spent seven years writing for the science section before you canned it. All those shelling reports I wrote, the sea level stories, the practical disappearance of Louisiana that I covered, the graft with the construction of the Manhattan levees, the day Times Square flooded? How about my editorials about the beaches that are washing away every single day—?”

“Those are my beaches too,” Henry says, and I can see that his cheeks are red. He’s angry. And maybe not entirely at me. “We’re going to run the rest of the exposé. It’s great work, Maya. You know that. If it were up to me, your second piece would be running right now. But it isn’t up to me.”

“Sure it is,” I tell him. “Ever hear of this thing called freedom of the press?” I shake the business card and nearly call him a spineless ass, but the door behind me is open, and I haven’t heard a single tap on a single keyboard since I walked into Henry’s office. Even my insubordination has limits.

Henry grabs his coffee and takes a noisy sip. Whatever’s on his face right then is [REDACTED] by the mug. He and I have a long history of throwing barbs at one another, but this is something else. This is serious. By the time he sets the mug back down, the tension is as thick as sidewalk crowds during lunch hour.

“The FBI isn’t after you or me,” Henry calmly explains, like this should’ve been obvious from the beginning. Like I should know that we at the paper are small fries. And the rest dawns on me before Henry can spell it out. I understand why he pulled the story. And why he wants me to go speak to this Agent Cooper.

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation is after Ness Wilde,” I say.

Henry nods. “Bingo. And they want your help in bringing him down.”

3

I hail a taxi and give the driver the address for the Federal Plaza downtown. Broadway is jammed. It’s high tide, and of course a handful of pumps are on the fritz. A handful always are. Looking west down 39th, I can see a logjam of traffic backed up from the Lincoln Tunnel and a shimmer of standing water between the cars. People are sloshing through the traffic with galoshes on, despite it being summer and no rain in sight.

A friend of mine at the Times has lived in this city for over seventy years. He runs the obits, is semi-retired, says his job is to write farewell letters to old friends. He talks about the old days when New Yorkers didn’t need to check the tide tables before their commute to work. He talks about days when you made sure your train was running, checked if you might need an umbrella or a scarf, not whether your levee had breached or if your neighborhood pumps were down. The man is a walking memory of less-flooded times.

But even in my lifetime, there’s been a lot of change. I remember when I was young, thinking the sea was only capable of offering solace. She was only ever a calming force. I didn’t see her angry side until I was in my teens.

Hurricane Julia. There was a mandatory evacuation. My sister and I helped Dad put the storm shutters over the windows while Mom fretted over which irreplaceable things to pack in the car. We left not knowing what we would return to, if anything. The highway was a parking lot, so Dad took us down the coast before cutting in to the interstate. Driving along the beach, with the horizon a dark and foreboding gray, he pulled onto the shoulder so we could all marvel at the sky.

My sister and I begged to run up to the top of the beach access for a better view. A glance at Mother, our arbiter of risk, the slightest of worried nods. “Be quick,” our father had said.

As loud as the wind was, the sea was louder. Like thunder in my bones. I heard the angry waves before we got up the slick wooden stairs. At the top of the walkway, I stood and gripped the rail and leaned into the wind and watched an ocean I thought I knew whip and thrash around like an enraged beast.

Mountains of white foam crashed down in avalanche after avalanche. The waves bashed the rocks and chewed up the sand. Our parents used to say that the shoreline was forever changing, that a storm might move an entire beach or that the rising seas would push inland and cover what used to be shoreline, but I was too young to notice these things, and I’d never seen a storm like this.

Watching the sea that day, I thought of the people on the local news who got interviewed about a neighbor who had done something heinous. “He was always so quiet,” the neighbor would say. “He was the nicest person in the world.”

That’s how I felt then, seeing that something so familiar had become completely unrecognizable. A loved one had snapped, had become angry. The waves that normally drew us to her now caused our family to flee in terror.

I chose to blame the storm and the wind back then, rather than the sea. I made excuses for her.

As the traffic on Broadway inches south to a symphony of squeaky brake pads and prolonged horn blasts, I think back to the next time I saw the ocean angry. It was my freshman year in college. I went out on a boat with some friends and just assumed they knew what they were doing, that they’d checked the weather. We were five miles offshore when we saw the squall: a great cliff of clouds that stretched from the heavens down to the sea—white on top but a dark gray beneath, like a pristine wedding veil someone had dragged through the mud.

There was no going around it, so we tried to race back to the inlet, but the storm was moving too fast. Winds over fifty miles an hour. It hit us all at once like a heavenly fist, a mighty slam of stinging rain and raucous seas. The outboard came out of the water as a steep wave lifted us up, and the engine stalled. We huddled in the floor of the boat, gripping each other and the rails, quiet, shivering, drenched, the boat filling with water, all of us absolutely terrified. The sea rose around us in crashing pyramids. I thought she would swallow us, this thing from which I had only known love. I learned to fear her then, and to simultaneously hate myself for feeling that fear. Afterward, I made more excuses: I blamed it on the sky, on the weather, on the poor planning.

Abusive relationships often go like this: falling in love, not seeing the ugly side, coming up with rationalizations when you do. It’s hard to get free, because you just want to recapture some lost feeling. You want to feel safe, respected, honored again. And you’ll play games with your mind to make that happen. It’s the alcohol’s fault; it’s the stress of their job; you may even make the great sin of blaming yourself.

By the time I was born, they’d already built the levees around Manhattan. Much was made of the project back when it was just an idea: how much it would cost, how unnecessary it was, debates about whether the sea would rise or not. Reading a historical account of the levee project today is strange, knowing what we now know. You marvel at the lack of impatience, at the bickering over details and budgets. Coastlines around the world were being redrawn while people argued whether anything was even occurring, much less whether it was our fault.

When the Hudson first breached the new levees, I was working as a young writer at the Times. It was a perigean spring tide, when the moon is at its closest to the Earth and it lines up perfectly with the sun. What used to merely flood the edges of Manhattan now marched across Broadway at midtown. The subways flooded. The city was brought to its knees by an extra six inches of water.

The Hudson River and the East River transformed overnight. No longer beautiful backdrops skirting the city, they became a coiled threat. A lingering drunk. Something to be wary of at all times. I can feel them right now, running down either side of Manhattan, their waters higher than these streets, held back only by great walls and elevated parks. Here I am trapped in the middle, creeping along in a trickle of traffic that flows slower than the tides. Those bodies of water could come together at any moment and drown us all. That’s what they’ve become. And we let them.

Like a lot of people, I sold my car soon after the big levee breach and bought an old electric. Didn’t care about the cost. I changed a lot of habits. And like a lot of people, I made excuses for the rising sea levels. I blamed the companies pumping oil and gas from the ground. I blamed the smiling CEOs at the helm, like Ness Wilde. I blamed the politicians who refused to do anything as they kept getting reelected. I blamed anyone other than the glorious sea of my remembered youth.

I blamed anyone other than myself.

4

The taxi lets me out on Worth Street, which is high and dry. Inside the Federal Plaza, I go through a security routine that has me patting my pockets for my boarding pass. I have to practically disrobe and send my bag, shoes, and coat through one machine while the rest of me stands inside another to get a thorough scanning. On the other side of the security station, I present Agent Cooper’s card to a man behind an information desk. He picks up his phone and speaks to someone while I thread my belt back through my slacks.

“Fourth floor,” he tells me, hanging up the phone. “Elevators are to the left. Someone will meet you up there.”

I make my way toward the elevators, and now that I’m in this building, I wrack my brain for what Ness Wilde might have done to have gotten the FBI’s attention. Tax evasion is the most obvious. Ocean Oil gets press every year for how little they pay in taxes compared to regular folk like me. Then again, people like me don’t have entire divisions of tax experts on the payroll. And would that be the FBI’s jurisdiction? I get all the three-letter agencies confused.

Whatever it is, I imagine I’ve got some rewrites ahead of me. Yesterday’s piece was about Ness’s great-grandfather. I broke the story up to cover each of the four generations of Wildes individually. If Henry plans to run them weekly, that gives me a few weeks before I have to turn in any revisions on Ness. Plenty of time to tack on whatever’s happening here. A picture of Ness Wilde in handcuffs above the center fold flashes before me. I’m smiling as I step off the elevator.

“Maya Walsh?” a young man asks. He’s dressed like a TV version of what an FBI agent looks like: black suit, scuffed black shoes, thin black tie.

“Agent Cooper?” I ask.

“I’ll take you to him. This way.”

I follow the young man through a maze of cubicles toward the far side of the building. We stop outside an office with Cooper’s name on a brass plate. The young man knocks twice, then lets me inside. The office is dimly lit, the blinds drawn down over the windows. Cooper sits behind his desk, looking at an open folder. A single lamp illuminates the space. There’s a scattering of seashells across the desk, lining the windowsill, and more on top of the filing cabinets. Cooper is obviously a serious collector, and I feel immediately more at ease.

“Ms. Walsh,” he says. He closes the folder, stands up, extends his hand.

“Just Maya,” I say. The young deputy backs out and closes the door, leaving us alone.

“Call me Stan.” He smiles and holds my hand a little longer than necessary. Is he hitting on me? I can never tell. Either way, my mind does this weird New York thing where it imagines me dating every single person I meet, regardless of age, gender, or what part of town they live in. I understand that this is a municipal disorder and that I’m not the only sufferer. And while Agent Cooper is handsome and a collector, I don’t see myself dating an FBI agent. I’m good at this: ruling people out with excuses as flimsy as they are fast.

“Please, make yourself comfortable.” He waves at a chair, and I sit.

“So you’re the reason my story didn’t run in this morning’s edition,” I say.

“That’s right. Your government needs you, Ms. Walsh.”

He smiles to let me know he’s being cheesy on purpose. And yeah, I am not dating a cop. I’m pretty sure the FBI are the cops. The CIA are the spooks, and the NSA monitors my online shopping habits. I feel like this is right. What I don’t understand is the ATF.

“As you may know, Ness Wilde—”

“I have a quick question,” I say.

“Shoot.”

I lean forward. “What exactly do tobacco and firearms have to do with one another?”

Agent Cooper blinks. Twice. “I’m sorry, what?”

“The ATF. Why put those things together?”

“It’s… uh… has to do with federal oversight of… state-level regulat—”

“Okay, so you don’t know either.” I settle back in my seat, reminding myself to Google this later.

Agent Cooper studies me for a prolonged moment, clears his throat, then seems to gather his wits. “Ms. Walsh—”

“Maya.”

“Of course. Maya. Your editor informs us that you’ve been digging into Ness Wilde’s past. You’ve got a series of pieces planned on him and his father, grandfather, et cetera.”

“That’s right. And I suppose I’m here because you’ve been doing some digging as well. Is this where we exchange notes?” I nod to the thick sheaf of papers Cooper was looking through when I entered. “Is that his folder?”

Agent Cooper laughs. He nods toward the row of filing cabinets that covers one wall of his office. “No. His folder is right there. This one is yours.”

I lean forward and grab it, and Cooper flinches, but doesn’t try to stop me. Inside I find a copy of an old résumé from a decade ago, one I think I uploaded to a public headhunting site. It’s woefully out of date except for my degrees and a few internships. Behind this are printouts of various columns I wrote for the Times. They go back quite a ways, and I have a feeling all of this was printed out recently, like Cooper has been cramming rather than studying.

“If this is all you’ve got on me, I need to live it up a bit more.”

Agent Cooper laughs. He opens a drawer in his desk and reaches inside. I half expect a different folder with some of my college exploits. Instead, he brings out a small plastic case, bright orange, about the size of a closed fist. “Three months ago, a man was found dead in his apartment in Portland, Maine—”

Cooper pauses as I gasp out loud and lean forward, eager to hear more. Worse, I think he can see my genuine excitement at the idea that Ness Wilde is guilty of actual direct murder rather than the indirect kind.

“The gentleman died of a heart attack,” Cooper says. “He was seventy-two years old. No foul play suspected.”

The reporter in me sags in her seat. The rest of me is happy for the deceased. I guess.

“Two weeks later, this goes up for auction alongside other items from the gentleman’s estate.”

Cooper slides the plastic case across the desk. It looks like one of those waterproof boxes snorkelers use to keep things dry while they’re out in the surf. There’s a complex latch with a slot for a key. It’s unlocked, but the latch is stiff. A tight seal. When I lift the lid and see what’s inside, the air seems to evacuate the room.

A lace murex, one of my favorite shells, is nestled inside. Medium-sized, just over an inch long. I move the box into the cone of light from the lamp and note the bright pink aperture and tight apex. The inner lip is so shiny, the shell must be wet. But touching it, I find it to be dry. It just hasn’t lost its luster.

“It looks flawless,” I whisper.

“It is,” Cooper says. “I understand you know a thing or two about shells.”

I think of all the articles he has in that folder, many of them from back when the Times had a science section where my shelling column used to run. “I studied to be a marine biologist,” I say. “Being a reporter happened by accident.” Which isn’t quite right, but the truth is too complicated to get into.

“I’d like to hear your expert opinion on this piece.” Cooper places a loupe on the desk, but I reach into my purse and retrieve my own. My palms are already a little clammy. It’s not often that I get to handle shells this rare.

“Can we open those blinds and get some more light in here?” I ask.

He hesitates, then gets up and raises the blinds. The sunlight streaming into the office catches the ensuing shower of dust. “Thanks,” I say. I bring the loupe to my eye and pull the shell close until it comes into focus.

The murex is distinct for the chaos of crenelations that adorn its edge. They jump off like crashing waves, like amoebas, or a pattern or paisley. The crenelations on this particular specimen are incredibly crisp. Untouched. And the sutures between the whorls are deep and pronounced. The lip of the aperture, where the slug would reside, hasn’t been chipped. And there’s no sign of sand-wear, no dulling of the periostracum from having been tumbled up a beach.

“Was it stolen from a museum?” I ask. For a moment, I wonder if maybe Ness Wilde isn’t a suspect in a case at all, but that perhaps this shell was taken from his collection.

“At what price would you value that shell?” Cooper asks me. He waves his hand when he sees I’m about to complain or make excuses. “Ballpark,” he says. “I’ve had others look at it. I just want your opinion.”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” I admit. “It doesn’t look like it rolled up on any beach.” I look at the crenelations again. They rarely survive any kind of rough handling. “I shouldn’t even be touching this without gloves, to be honest.”

“Just throw out a number,” Cooper says.

“Well, the market is a tad down right now, but a shell like this, I would guess the right buyer would pay between two and three million for it.”

Just hearing myself say this, I have to put the shell back into the box. Gingerly. Cooper quietly laughs at something, and I have to assume it’s my estimate, that their experts said something much different. So I start to defend it.

“You have to keep in mind that this species has been extinct for twenty or thirty years,” I say. “And price is all about condition. I have a murex in my collection that I’d be lucky to get a thousand dollars for. It has dozens of chips, plus a hole clear through the—”

“Your number is solid,” Cooper tells me. “Here’s the problem: we dated that shell, and it’s between two and three years old.”

“That’s impossible,” I say.

Agent Cooper reaches into his drawer again and pulls something else out. He extends his fist to me. I hold my palm out to accept, and he deposits a second lace murex in my hand. While I’m gawking at it, he brings out a third.

“What do you think now?” he asks.

A glance tells me that these are in a similar condition to the first. And now I understand why the FBI is involved. I look over the second murex with my loupe. “These are the best fakes I’ve ever seen,” I say. And I’ve seen my share. I don’t keep reproductions in my own collection, but I have friends who are less scrupulous, or who just get taken advantage of. Across Manhattan, there are thousands of tourist traps with windows full of shells and camera lenses and electronics at prices too good to be true. And for a reason.

“You’re in good company then,” Cooper says. “They’re the best fakes my department has ever seen. They’re good enough to fool our testing equipment—”

“Wait,” I say. I take in the collection of shells scattered around the room and see them in a new light. “I thought the Secret Service handled this sort of thing.”

“You’re thinking of currency,” Cooper says.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Like you, we assumed these were fake just from the condition. And the fact that someone was dumb enough to dump all three of them at once. So we took a sample and dated them, which was the nail in the coffin. At that point, we traced the shells back to the deceased.”

“Who was he?” I ask.

“Dimitri Arlov. Former physicist, among other things. A polymath. When he died he was in the employ of Ocean Oil.”

“The guy who owned these shells worked for Ness Wilde?”

“He worked for his company, yes. In exploration, we think.”

“I don’t get it. Ness is easily the foremost shell collector in the world—” But then I stop and think about what I’m doing in that office. I think about the fact that Henry hung up on Ness’s assistant, and that the FBI called Henry right back. For some reason, I had assumed they were listening in on the Times.

I look up from the shell and study Agent Cooper. “You guys have been tapping Ness Wilde’s phones.”

“That’s correct. We have a warrant, mind you. And I suppose now is as good time as any to tell you that all of this has to stay off the record. I’m sure you understand what it means to tamper with an ongoing investigation.”

“All too well,” I say. “So what do you want from me? Anyone could tell you that these shells are fakes.”

“We want you to take Ness Wilde up on his offer for an interview.”

“What? Why?”

“Because he wants to talk to you, and he hasn’t been too eager to talk to us. We don’t have enough here to bring him in. The connection is flimsy—”

“But you think these shells trace back to him.”

“We think it’s possible. We don’t think this Arlov character would have access to anything like this. But his boss might have. There’s also the chance that—” Agent Cooper seems to be searching for the right words. I think I know what he’s about to say and help him out.

“You think there’s a chance that there are more fakes like this out there,” I say. “Maybe even in Wilde’s collection.” And my skin tingles with the idea that Ness Wilde, the great shell collector, might be a phony.

“Exactly,” Cooper says.

“So, what, I go up there and interview him? You want me to wear a wire or something?”

“Precisely. And look, we’re not asking you to do anything other than your job. Get what you can from him. Push him. Prod him. Our job is to sit back and listen.”

“So he’s the hornet’s nest and I’m the stick.”

“Something like that. Just hear what he has to say about these articles you’re working on. Take him up on his offer. Get as close as you can or antagonize him as much as you want. It’s up to you.”

“What about these shells?” I ask.

“What about them?”

“Has he seen them? Have you confronted him with these?”

Agent Cooper shakes his head. “We’re trying to be very delicate about the existence of these shells.”

I dig into my purse and find a pack of tissues. Placing the first lace murex back into the plastic case, I pad the shell before adding the second, then wrap that one before adding the third.

“What are you doing?” Cooper asks, half-reaching for the box.

“If you want me to help, here’s what I’m thinking.” Cooper watches with a frown as the case disappears into my purse. “I’ll go talk to Mr. Wilde and get what I need for my story. And then we’ll hear what the great shell collector has to say when I show him these.”

5

This is how I find myself in Maine, driving down a dusty road in my electric car, with an FBI wire tucked in my bra. I agreed to wear the wire even though I explained to Cooper’s buddies that I plan on recording the entire interview with my cell phone. They said it made chain of custody easier on their end, and that often, what needs recording is said when the suspect doesn’t know they’re being recorded.

Whether or not I would take the assignment, of course, was never in question. I’m a reporter. Dropping these shells in my lap was like tossing a steak to a german shepherd. There was no way I wasn’t going. I want to see Ness Wilde’s face when I confront him with the shells.

What I did refuse was his offer to fly me up. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction or have him think I’m a pushover. A few hours in my car and two recharging stations later, I’m beginning to rethink that strategy. Just the guy’s driveway goes on for miles.

Eventually—with the second gate behind me—the road takes a sharp bend to the left, and some innate sense tells me that I had been approaching the sea and am now heading north up along the coast. If so, the ocean is hidden by the ridiculous trees. The palms bend toward one another like fingers about to interlock. Their dangling coconuts hang like a threat. But they form a tunnel that seems to hold the damaged world beyond at bay. They bore toward a place where people can be wealthy enough to ignore what’s happening around them.

That must be convenient for a man who played a large role in ushering our damaged world along. The irony is rich: Ness Wilde has made billions not just by drilling oil, but by collecting the shells made rare—and valuable—by the burning of fossil fuels. A double whammy.

Glancing down at my battery gauge, I imagine for a moment the horror of not having enough juice to get to my hotel tonight. When I look back up, a view of the house breaks through at the end of the road. As I get closer, I see that it looks a lot smaller than I imagined it would. On Google Maps, the house appeared audacious, a sprawl of additions and add-ons connected by breezeways and boardwalks.

But arriving from the front—because of the way the house is chopped up to stagger down the dunes toward the sea—the portion visible from the drive looks reasonable. Even adorable. Like a house rather than an estate. A small front porch with reproduction gaslight fixtures frames a pebble-bed walkway. The roof is pale pink tile. The siding is white clapboard with bright-blue trim. The house appears as though it belongs in the Caribbean, not on an isolated and prohibitively expensive patch of rocky Maine shoreline.

My car’s tires crunch to a stop on the gravel circle. The drive continues and disappears around a high sandstone wall studded with conch shells. A six- or seven-car garage full of boy toys is probably just around the corner. As I get out of the car, trying to reconcile the incongruous modesty of the front of the house with all I know of Ness Wilde, I see that the drive isn’t paved with gravel at all. It’s made of tiny shells. Millions of them. Billions. Most are ground up into tiny bits from years of traffic, but some are recognizable. Some are even miraculously intact. Periwinkles, ceriths, ravenelis, and cockles.

The sight of so many shells spread out for so base a purpose causes my heart to sink. It’s the sort of blow that stuns you so deep, the intelligent side of your brain can’t signal to the emotional side that this effect might be on purpose. Here, the front of the house seems to say, I am a normal person. And then: Here, you are parking on a fortune in shells. And while reconciling these two: Here, I’m opening the door so that you meet me in a weakened state—

“Maya? From the Times?”

I turn from the audacious and miles-long carpet of shells to the foremost collector of them in the world. Ness Wilde stands on his small front porch, the door behind him open, and I realize that I’m half in and half out of my car, my hand resting numbly on the handle. Composing myself, I grab my bag from the passenger seat and shut the door. I force myself not to look down at my feet, but I can hear the tiny shells crunch beneath my shoes, little screams from hapless victims.

“It’s Ms. Walsh,” I correct him, ignoring what’s going on beneath my feet. We shake hands, and Ness smiles as if he knows what I’m thinking, as if these are roles we are playing. It occurs to me that despite his recent seclusion, he’s done hundreds of interviews over the years. Probably more than I have—and it’s kinda what I do for a living. And then I wonder if he has the timing of coming to the door down to a science, watches on a video screen or peeks through the blinds, all to take the strength out of the knees of his guests as they see what they’ve been driving on for miles.

Suddenly, all the trash-talking I did in the newsroom yesterday afternoon comes back to haunt me. I assured Dawn that I wouldn’t get flustered, that I’d eaten men like this for lunch. Hell, I’ve sat in the White House pressroom and tossed firebombs at the President of the United States. I reminded her of that, and Dawn had laughed. She had interviewed Ness Wilde before.

“Welcome to my home,” Ness says. He half-bows and waves me inside. “Ladies first.”

Despite what I feel about Ness, despite the suspicious shells in my purse, despite the fact that I’ve seen his face on a hundred magazine covers, in all the newspapers, and all over the news, his handsomeness in person still comes as a shock. It’s his smile, however insincere it might be. It’s his golden-bleached locks from years spent shelling. It’s his physique from being wealthy enough to exercise just to pass the time.

I had guiltily hoped to find him broken and shattered, that this was why he was holed up. Forty pounds overweight, perhaps. Balding. Staggering drunk. Some obvious reason for his reclusiveness for the better part of the past four years. But he looks the same. Ness Wilde is one of those men who won’t push forty so much as he’ll shove Father Time aside. Only actors get away with remaining heartthrobs so late in life. Actors and master shell collectors.

“I’ve got a bottle of wine breathing and some snacks put together,” he tells me. “Come downstairs. I’ll show you the view.”

It’s like I didn’t publish a story two days ago accusing his great-grandfather of flooding the world. It’s like this is our third date. Considering how many times he’s done this in the past, I imagine it’s comfortable for him. Remembering what I’m there to do, I force myself to be even more comfortable. I strain to be comfortable.

Ness leads me inside and through a labyrinthine and multi-level layout that manages to chop up ten thousand square feet into small and cozy spaces. My heels clop-clop on sandstone tile. They sound ridiculously loud and formal with him walking ahead, barefoot. I wore one of my power suits: pinstripes and a lacy blouse that I thought went great with the FBI wire. Ness, meanwhile, has on white bottoms that look perfect either for sleeping in or practicing karate. For a top, he has on a pale blue button-up left untucked and only halfway fastened up in the front. Before he turned, I spotted a necklace dangling against his chest, a single shell or stone on a string. I wasn’t brave enough to study it closely to ascertain the species—because this is probably just what he wants people to do: study and stare.

Much too quickly, I am led past priceless treasures. It’s like being hauled through a museum after closing. A flawless junonia, probably six inches long. An array of ivory wentletraps, sitting out in the open. There’s an entire wall of scallops and pectin raveneli with water trickling down them; a great fountain separating two adjoining rooms. I assume all are real. Otherwise, why have them on display?

“The competition,” Ness says, waving at a wall of pictures. It’s dozens of magazine covers, mostly gossip rags and weeklies, a lot of shots I recognize from my research and from years of riding the subway to work. Many of the cover shots feature Ness holding up some rare or impossible shell between his fingertips. He means the magazines, I realize, when he says “the competition.” The competition we face at the paper. As if any of us are healthy enough to worry about the others.

Or maybe he means the reporters. I think back to the stacks of articles I’ve read over the years while writing my piece. How many were written by men? These Ness Wilde clones smile at me as I walk past, almost as if they know what I’m thinking. I’m thinking of how many of those reporters probably trailed dutifully down this hall, just like I am. I think of how many stayed the night. I know of a few, have spoken to them, but that story isn’t set to run for another few weeks. This collection of framed trophies will have to feature in that story, I realize, and I make edits in my head. When I’m done with my own story, I have a strong suspicion that Ness will not frame what I write. Hell, there’s a chance he’ll be reading it behind bars.

“My publicist warned me that the newspaper wouldn’t be as nice as the magazines,” Ness says, almost like he can read my mind. We descend one last level to a bar and enclosed patio. Cantilevered out beyond the sloping dunes, three walls of glass reveal a sweep of white sand and azure waters limned by a shoreline of foamy, crashing waves.

It’s a legendary beach, privately owned and inaccessible, as so many of Wilde’s properties are. The priceless shells decorating the house become background noise, a glittery hiss of pinks and purples that merely add to the aura of the vista before me. Here is the coup de grace of the perfectly arranged meeting. Here is the ploy to win a sheller’s soul. I find myself fantasizing about sleeping over. Who wouldn’t? Who could stroll across a carpet of crushed shells, through a hallway of amassed treasures, see that pristine sand picked over by no more than a few human beings in the last twenty years, and not dream, pine, hope for a morning spent here, a sunrise stroll, searching the low tide for the rare treasures dredged up by a recent storm—

Wilde clears his throat. It underscores the duration of my stunned gawking. A glass of red wine is being held out to me. I nod and accept it, then look for a place to set my bag. The shells inside are burning to get out, to expose him. But I have too many questions first.

“Do you always answer the door yourself?” I ask, fishing out my phone and my notepad.

Wilde pours himself a glass of wine and picks up a piece of cheese from a wooden cutting board in the shape of a whelk. “I live here by myself,” he says. He bites into the cheese and takes a sip of wine. “The staff comes through and tidies up while I’m out.”

“You mean out collecting?”

He smiles mischievously. “What else would I be doing?”

I taste the wine. It’s excellent. Reaching for the bottle, I check the label and see that it’s a local vineyard. I don’t recognize the name. The year tells me why. The wine is older than I am.

“It was a beautiful place,” Wilde tells me, watching me study the bottle. He stacks cheese and sliced meat on thin crackers, then tops each stack with half an olive.

“Was?” I ask. “They’re no longer around?”

“Nothing grows on those hills anymore.” He wipes his hands and studies his little creations. There’s a white apron in a wrinkled hump on the granite countertop, as if he hurriedly removed it to answer the door. Everything feels like a prop, and I realize that I’m going into this interview jaded and tense. The jaded comes from years of pent-up animosity toward Ness Wilde. The tension comes from knowing the FBI will hear every word between us. Wilde watches me while I tap on my phone.

“You don’t mind if I record this, do you?” I ask. And I have to suppress a laugh. I have to fight the urge not to look down my blouse to make sure the wire isn’t showing.

Ness waves the knife he’s using to slice the olives. “Of course not. I thought the interview had already begun, asking me about my help.” He slides the plate of appetizers across the counter at me. “Unless you were just making sure we were alone.”

I laugh and wave off the food. “Oh, I’d rather we weren’t. I’d love to ask your staff a few questions.”

And your ex, I add silently to myself. And your daughter. And whoever else in your employ knows about these shells. But those questions can come later. Starting there would spook him. Though he must know from my piece that this isn’t another adoring housewife profile, another glossy bit of PR.

As the app begins to record, I take in my surroundings so I can describe them for the revised piece. Every shell in this room has been photographed from multiple angles. Every shell, especially Mr. Wilde’s. My job is to crawl inside and shine a light on the shrinking torus deep within that pretty exterior. That’s the story I aim to tell.

“Okay, fire away,” Wilde says. He smiles and raises his glass in salute before taking another sip. And then, almost as if reading my mind, he adds: “Do your worst.”

6

“I’d like to start with your great-grandfather, if I may.” I arrange myself on a sofa that probably cost as much as my car. Ness gets comfortable in an old leather reading chair, his bare feet propped up on a matching ottoman. “You must’ve read the piece I wrote on him—”

“I did.”

“I presume you asked me here to set the record straight. So tell me what I got wrong. I’d love to hear your version of events.”

Wilde swirls his wine glass, and I hold my notepad and pen patiently. The pen and pad are more than just props to remind him of our roles; they’re for jotting down setting and non-verbal cues. It’s often not what people say or how they say it, but how they visibly react to questions. The nervous tics and wide eyes that recorders miss.

“I didn’t know my great-grandfather very well,” Wilde says. “I’ve read books about him. I can tell you what his biographers thought.”

“So what makes you think I was unfair with my piece?”

“I don’t think you were unfair. But you were about to be.”

“With my next piece?” I take a sip of my wine, partly because I want to hide my face. The way Wilde is staring at me, it’s as though my thoughts are written across my cheeks.

“I suspect your next piece was going to be about my grandfather, judging by the little cliffhanger at the end—”

“That was a teaser,” I say, setting down the wine. “A cliffhanger would’ve meant leaving the story about your great-grandfather in suspense.”

“I see. Well, if you’re going to write about my grandfather next, I’d rather you didn’t.”

I laugh. I didn’t expect him to come straight out and grovel, but that seems to be his plan. “Is that so?”

“That’s so. You’d only get everything wrong. Like everyone else has.”

“And you’d like to set me straight? Okay. Tell me about your grandfather. What does everyone get wrong?”

He takes another sip of his wine—closes his eyes while he does so. I can’t tell if he’s composing his thoughts or savoring the vintage.

“They get everything wrong.” He opens his eyes, and I find myself gazing down at my notes. The intensity of the man… it’s like looking into the noonday sun.

“So tell me about him,” I say, as I write something just to write something.

“I don’t remember a whole lot. I was eight when he died. The men in my family have always waited too long before having kids—”

“Except you,” I point out.

Ness flinches. It’s the first time I’ve seen him react to something I’ve said. But then he smiles. “I’d much rather you write your next piece about me or my father. Just leave my grandfather out of whatever it is you think you’re doing.”

I’ve hit a nerve. I make a note about Ness’s daughter. This is a button I can press. Dark truths are lured out by anger and sadness. And it’s cheaper and swifter to cause the former.

“If you don’t know much about your grandfather, why do you object to me writing about him?” I ask.

“I said I don’t remember much about him, not that I don’t know much about him.”

“Fine. Tell me what you know. Make me believe he was a good man and not someone who got rich while this world went to shit.”

Wilde turns away from this accusation, almost like I’ve slapped him. It feels like I’ve slapped him. Like I’ve said in a sentence what my series of pieces is all about. He stares for some time at the horizon, that gray line where the sea kisses the sky.

“After my grandmother died, my grandfather lived alone in a shack on a spit of beach. He wasn’t anything like his father or my father. Or me, for that matter. I know what you’re going to write, because it’s the history everyone has written. With his vast wealth, my grandfather bought up near-coastal land, what he knew would become prime beachfront property once the sea levels crept up, and then he kept that land for himself. He blocked it off from the world—”

“And none of that is true?”

Wilde shakes his head. “It’s… more complicated than that. My grandfather, he… wasn’t a huge fan of people. Well, it’s not that he didn’t like people, I think he just enjoyed the quiet. Which is why I don’t want to see your story, don’t want people talking about him. He wouldn’t approve. And you can do your series without involving him. I’ll tell you whatever you want about me and you can run that instead.”

I make a note here to dig even deeper into Ness’s grandfather. Telling me not to look into something is the wrong play if that’s what he really wants. Unless Ness knows this and is sending me down a blind alley.

“What about your father, then? He didn’t seem to mind the limelight.”

Wilde laughs, and I glance up from my notebook in time to see him with his head tilted back, white teeth flashing, wrinkles around his eyes. It’s a dangerous laugh. I tell myself it’s another prop, not to believe it.

“My father was the exact opposite,” Ness says. “He hated people, but he loved taking their money. And he was good at it. I think it skips a generation, that drive. My old man took after his grandfather. As a kid, he climbed over oil rigs like they were his private jungle gyms. Didn’t spend much time with his own father. The oil company was his life, his true family. And he took the company to another level, daring other industry leaders to catch up, taunting them, showing them where to drill, correcting their mistakes in public—”

“He wasn’t scared of the competition?”

“No. My father knew he was the smartest man in any room.”

“What about women?”

Wilde shrugs, seems confused. “My dad only had eyes for my mother.”

“No, I mean… you said smartest man in any room. What about women?”

“I misspoke,” Wilde says. “Sorry. It sounded sexist, didn’t it?”

I don’t answer, just let the accusation hang. “It sounds like resentment of absent fathers runs in the family. Boys raised by their grandfathers. Is that why you’re protecting your grandfather? You say you don’t remember much, but maybe he was there for you in those first years in a way your father wasn’t. Showered you with gifts, or let you—”

“That’s not it,” Wilde says.

“So what is it, then?”

Wilde takes a deep breath. “My great-grandfather gave us the world,” he says. “This was his gift to us. He made sure I would never have to work a day in my life, made sure my dad and his dad would have everything. He gave us the world.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing. Like it makes you sad.” I switch the pen to my other hand and wipe my palm on my skirt. There’s an intensity in Wilde’s eyes that I can’t put my finger on, a glare at some distant past. That’s what I want: whatever he’s thinking right then. I wonder if I should push him for more; I wonder if I should show him the shells; but I worry even more that I might frighten some wary truth away.

Wilde sets his wine down and stands up. He is frozen in place for a moment, like he’s locked in a fight-or-flight decision. He walks to a side table, opens a drawer, and pulls out a book. It looks like a Bible, and I wait for him to open it and quote scripture. I wonder if Ness has found God these past years, if that’s why he has withdrawn from the world. Perhaps he is seeking forgiveness for what he and his family have done to the earth.

But as he brings me the book, I can see that it’s a leather journal, worn soft. He hands it to me. The leather strap around the journal doesn’t match the cover; the original probably wore through and fell apart. I slip the strap off and open the notebook. Pages of neat writing. It’s almost calligraphic in its beauty, its timelessness. The pages feel on the verge of growing brittle.

“Part of the reason I asked you here was so you could read this,” Ness says. “It was my grandfather’s journal. His private thoughts. I don’t think he ever meant for anyone else to read it.”

My palms are sweating. Source material on the Wilde family is impossibly hard to find. It all comes secondhand or through interviews. As I flip the pages, a poem stands out for its short stanzas and the way it’s centered on the page. I scan the first few lines:

“I need you to sign this before you read any more,” Ness says.

I glance up. Ness has placed a thick stapled document and a pen on the coffee table.

“What is this?” I ask.

“A non-disclosure agreement. If you ever run a word of what’s in that book, my lawyers assure me that I’ll own not only you, but the Times as well.”

“Is that so?”

He nods. “That’s so. Of course, you can choose not to read it if you don’t want to know the truth.”

“If I can’t write about what’s in here, then why show it to me?”

Ness frowns. It’s the most serious I’ve ever seen him, in person or otherwise. “Because if you read what my grandfather wrote,” he says, “you won’t write anything about him. Ever.”

7

I have to admit that I’m intrigued. Intrigued enough to sign the document. This is not quite why I came here, but as a reporter I know not to turn down opportunities that arise unexpectedly. Besides, I like letting him know that my mind is open, that I’m only interested in the truth, before I grill him about the shells. And the journal is simply too good to pass up.

As I leaf through it, I begin to suspect that Ness didn’t ask me here to interview him; he brought me here to commune with a dead man. He leaves me alone with the journal and the amazing view, as if this has been his plan all along. He tidies up in the kitchen, disappears for long stretches, passes through now and then like an intermittent wind. My wine seems to fill itself once or twice. The sky reddens then darkens. Occasional ships float by in the distance like stars on the move, while the actual stars hang like diamonds in the sky. And to the south, the horizon glows every ten seconds or so as a nearby lighthouse throws its beam in great orbits of the sky.

But all of this is backdrop to the notebook; they are the things I see when I glance up to digest what I’ve just read. I scan entries spaced months and even years apart. Angry screeds at the beginning—dating back eighty years—give way to confessions and measured doses of guilt later in life. One note in particular catches my eye. Halfway into the day’s entry, written over sixty years ago:

I have to read it a second time. So Ness’s grandfather rejected the legacy his own father made, but he did it in secret. To what effect?

There is more. Much more. There are more poems of nature worship and agony, and I find myself blinking tears away, however rough the prose. Here is a soul aging in reverse. Anger giving way to charity. Surety moving to curiosity. Judgment sliding into doubt. The last pages read like the youthful rebellion of the naive, the college spirit, the hopefulness that the world might change for the better. Early pages, meanwhile, read like the hardened cynicism of old age, like the generations of Wildes in my series of planned exposés. If this transformation was real, it transpired without anyone knowing.

I sip my wine. There is a small white light on the horizon following another light: the flash of a longline tug heading south. My father taught me to read these nautical constellations on shelling expeditions that lasted into the night. I think of this journal in my lap as a tug of sorts, pulling me through dark waters. The compulsion to run a story based on what I’m reading is neutered by the document I’ve signed. But maybe it would be worth the worst that lawsuits might bring. A story of quiet redemption and private protest.

But what was the point of this protest? What was the outcome? His own son—Ness’s father—picked up the mantle and carried on pumping oil, warming the air and the sea, ruining whatever plans this journal hints at. Even when Ness’s father turned to green energy, it was a temporary stunt, and the pumping continued. He simply saw room for even greater profits by appealing to the masses. In my research, I found several quotes where Ness’s father practically admits this. It’s the crux of the third part of my story.

“Ness?” I call out. I have so many questions.

He appears moments later, and I am shocked back into awareness of where I am. The wine and the passing of these hours have made being here feel less surreal.

“Explain this,” I say, indicating the journal. “What the hell is this?”

“That’s a good man,” Ness says. “Everything you wrote about my great-grandfather is true. Everything you’ll say about my father and me will be true. But not him. You couldn’t possibly write a true word about him.”

“So the land he bought—what was the point?”

“To protect it. Practically every acre is now under federal protection—“

“But for tax reasons, right?”

Ness shrugs. “People don’t see what they want to see. They see what they expect to see.”

“I need to… I need to think about this.” I hold up the journal. “Can I take this with me?”

Ness laughs. “No way. But you can take as long as you like with it. You can come back tomorrow if you want. Anything to convince you to skip over him.”

I check the time. It’s not yet nine o’clock. The inn where I’m staying is only half an hour away, and fifteen minutes of that is just getting off Ness’s property. I have so many questions. Even if the story can’t be written, I need to know what Ness has pieced together about his grandfather. I need to spend some time going through the notebook more carefully. There’s more here than anyone could decipher in a week. And I still haven’t grilled him about himself or his father. I haven’t asked him about the shells.

“Can I… do you mind if I get some air?”

“Of course. It’s a short walk down to the beach.” Ness takes my wine glass, opens one of the sliding glass doors, and shows me which boardwalk to take. It’s a maze of steps that seems to float above the dunes and between the tall reeds and grasses. I leave my shoes on the deck. Ness offers me a flashlight, but the stairs are dimly lit on either side, and I don’t want to shell. Impossibly, I don’t want to shell.

As I head down, the sea calls from the black distance. I cannot see it and it cannot see me, but we seem to be aware of one another. I think of a poem from the notebook, the dying sighs and whispers, the last breaths, and just how long the final days of that great body of water have stretched out. Dying slowly, like my mother. When everyone thought the end would be swift, like it was for my dad.

Thinking of my father, I remember how we used to walk the shoreline near our house after Mom passed away. We carried bags, but not because we thought we’d find more than a stray shell here or there. The shells were rare enough that we only needed our pockets. The bags were for the trash. He and I watched the plastic index creep and climb from summer to summer, the measure of how much had dissolved into the sea. When I was nine, he and my mom took me on an eco-cruise to see the great raft of detritus caught in the swirling gyre of the Pacific. Each cruise scoops up as much as it can and brings home tons of trash to be recycled. Passengers buy tickets to pay for the fuel and the efforts. It’s also a lottery of sorts, with winners catching glimpses of a lone whale, maybe just a spout or the tail fin before a deep dive. From fellow passengers, we heard stories of such sightings. At my age, this was like being near enough to unicorns, just touching the arm of an old couple who’d had such an encounter.

Then I saw the raft of trash for myself. You could walk across it in places, it was so thick and buoyant. The giant scoops from the deck crane barely made a dent. My mother explained where it all came from until I wept. After she passed away, my father and I kept her spirit alive by picking up trash on the beach. We tried to make the world a prettier place. At least until the next tide rolled in.

The sea has this effect on me, this helpless reminiscing. On Ness Wilde’s private beach, I weep. I weep while the ocean whispers a death rattle of sublime beauty, of such grace. Such dying grace. Where I am standing would’ve been hillside generations ago. The old beach is out there somewhere, buried. Gone.

Straining, I can see the white foam of crashing waves lit by the half-moon. The lighthouse sends another ray around, providing me with glimpses of the shimmering sea. But this beach was bought with oil money. With plastic. Some other beach lies out there in the inky depths, drowned and forgotten. Flooded. And suddenly the cool sand is hot beneath the soles of my feet. And I turn my back on the graceful, dying waters and run toward the boardwalk, toward the stairs up and away, before the sea reaches out and takes me as well, before it keeps coming, absorbing all, washing me away.

8

“You weren’t gone long,” Ness says as I slam the door behind me. My shoes are in my hand. I am shaking. I tell him I need to go, maybe come back tomorrow, and Ness asks if I’m okay to drive. I’m not. I tell him I need a minute. I hear myself say that I have too many questions. That it’s too late in the day.

“Have a seat,” Ness tells me. “I’ll put on coffee.”

I sit down and slip my shoes back on, the sand rough between my toes. I find my purse and dig out my key fob. It feels good to hold it, this means of escape. I feel drugged on more than just wine and sad remembrances. It’s the blow of new knowledge. I remember feeling this at times in college, needing days to recover after seeing the world in a different light. If what I’ve glimpsed about his grandfather is true, then Ness was right, and I can’t run my next piece. It doesn’t stop the rest of my story, but it creates quite the hole. One I can’t fill with the truth—for I have signed that right away.

“You understand this doesn’t change what I write about your father. Or you.”

“Of course. Do you take cream or sugar?”

“Black is fine,” I say. Strands of my hair have come loose from my running, from the wind. I tuck these behind my ear and accept a cup of coffee. Ness sits. We are back where we started, except the stars are out and the view of the beach is gone. The lighthouse whirs in the distance.

“Four generations of oil men,” I say. Ness nods. “Help me understand how… how you aren’t all the same.”

He laughs. “Because it’s a better story and much easier to write if we’re the same. But let me start from the beginning.” He glances at the dive watch on his left wrist, possibly wondering how much time he has, what things to leave out.

“Please,” I tell him. I’m sure I won’t hear anything new, but I look forward to what things he chooses to leave out, where he decides to embellish. And I’m in no shape to drive. No shape to confront him with the shells. It might have to wait until tomorrow. I’m going to have to take him up on the offer to come back.

“My great-grandfather William built Ocean Oil from scratch,” Ness says. “He worked on deep sea rigs while he was in his teens. Dropped out of high school after ninth grade, ran away from home, and became a roughneck on a Shell Oil platform. By the time he was twenty, he was a shift foreman. At twenty-two, he had his own rig. This was ten years younger than anyone in company history.”

“Because of your great-grandmother, right?”

“No. Because he produced barrels like no other, and that was all anyone cared about. He met Shelly, my great-grandmother, after his promotion. I know… that name, right? It was the most common name for both boys and girls at the time. A curse. She was eighteen, and accompanied her father on a rig inspection.”

“And her father was CEO of Shell Oil at the time—”

“Shelly’s father wasn’t CEO yet, just VP of Engineering. One of my dad’s biographers got that wrong, and he got the timing wrong as well. Everyone keeps repeating the same wrong source until it’s gospel.”

I make a note of this.

“By the time William—I only ever knew him as Paps—and Shelly started dating, Paps had his own rig. It wasn’t some kind of favor to him. He earned everything he ever got. If anything, the rig got him that first date, not the other way around. The story is that Shelly fell in love with him at first sight. Saw this young man ordering around people twice his age. He was covered in grime, refused to wear a hardhat but cussed out anyone who neglected theirs, used to say God made his head plenty hard enough.”

“That’s the kind of detail I wish I’d had a week ago,” I say. “I reached out to your publicist several times—”

“And if she ignored your inquiries, she earned every penny of what I pay her,” Ness says.

Until I ran the story you didn’t like, I think to myself. But then I have to remind myself that the story I ran isn’t the one he’s worried about. It’s the next one.

“So your great-grandfather was climbing the ranks pretty fast. He had his own rig, was dating a VP’s daughter. But then he leaves the company.”

“A few years later, yeah.”

“Seems abrupt. He was twenty-five at the time?”

“A few years can be a long time,” Ness says.

I think of the years Ness has been a recluse and wonder if he’s speaking from experience. I wonder exactly what he’s been doing with his time. Surely not sitting idle. Maybe he spent that time perfecting the shells in my bag.

“A lot happened during those years,” Ness says. “Look—” he glances at his wristwatch again. I touch the screen of my phone to wake it up, make sure it’s still recording. “My great-grandfather saw the future of drilling at a young age. He was ambitious. Driven. He had good ideas for getting at oil that no one thought we’d ever reach. He could’ve worked his way up the company. He was young and smart and determined, probably would’ve been CEO of Shell before he was forty. Instead, he quit his job, filed a few patents, and started begging for capital to start his own company.”

“Which didn’t go so well.”

“No. It didn’t.”

“And your great-grandmother Shelly, how did she take this?”

“The two of them were married on an oil platform by a roughneck who’d been an army chaplain. Shelly’s father was CEO by then, and he said never come home again, and Shelly didn’t. Paps managed to borrow enough to buy an old platform that wasn’t producing. He spent five years refitting it and drilling where people thought he was crazy to drill. The story goes that the tugs sent to repossess the rig were throwing lines to haul the thing away when he struck a gusher. Five miles down. Nothing like it had ever been done before. Of course, he would have a dozen platforms running within a year of that day. And he made it a point to buy every one of the tugs sent to repossess his rig.”

Wilde sips his coffee. The sky throbs with the light from the lighthouse. I don’t know how he lives within range of a metronome like that.

“Paps gave us the world, you see. From his son to my father to me. He gave us the world, but he broke it before he handed it over. That’s his legacy. He gave me and my dad the world in a million little flooded pieces. If I remember anything else about him that’s not in the history books, I’d rather not say.”

“To protect him? Like your grandfather?”

Wilde laughs. “Yes, because whatever I say wouldn’t be kind.”

“Tell me about your grandfather, then.” I make a show of turning the recording app off, show him my phone, thinking all the while of the FBI wire. “Off the record. I swear.” Off my record. I swear.

“I’ll take your signature over your swear any day of the week,” Ness says.

“You have both.”

Wilde stares into his coffee. I take a sip of mine.

“What was he like? From your reading, if not your memory.”

“My grandfather was a complicated man. I like to say that he walked in his father’s shadow, but with a flashlight.”

“To dispel those shadows?”

“To erase him in a way, yes. By the time my father inherited Ocean Oil, my granddad was already blaming his father for destroying the world. It wasn’t just Ocean Oil, of course, but you couldn’t tell my granddad that. Sea temps were up five degrees and sea levels eight inches from when my great-grandfather was born.”

“Everything I’ve read said the company bypassed your grandfather because of his age. Because of lack of interest.”

“And I showed you the real reason.” Ness indicates the leather journal sitting on the coffee table. “My grandfather wanted to dismantle Ocean Oil—”

“And that was why your father inherited the company instead?”

Ness nods.

I make a mental note of this. This is not the history anyone else knows. The popular accounts are of an unchanging and evil empire, handed from father to son, each of them perfectly like the other. A convenient tale, because it’s easy to understand. We can transfer our ire from one generation to the next, no forgiveness required, no need to get to know a man. Just judge him by his father’s sins.

Studying Ness, I allow myself to consider for a moment that I’m wrong about him as well, that he has nothing to do with the fake shells. Maybe the person I think I know is just a caricature of the real man. I’ve sensed this before with other celebrities and political figures I’ve gotten close to, that they’re just people saddled with unachievable expectations. We make of them what we need them to be, good or ill.

“So your father was supposed to keep the company safe,” I say. “But then he was the one who nearly tore it apart.”

“For different reasons. Selfish reasons. He saw the laws making their way through Congress. He knew the end of big oil was coming, saw the peak of production. Hell, this was before Manhattan flooded for the first time and the levee project got underway. My dad refused to waste the company’s money lobbying against the inevitable—not because he cared about the environment, but because he hated to see lawyers get rich when they couldn’t win. The board of directors disagreed. They worked in the background to have Dad removed as incompetent.”

“I didn’t know your dad lost control of the company,” I say, making a mental note of this as well. Henry was going to fall out when he got my edits, and I hadn’t even gotten to Ness yet. But Ness was doing the impossible: convincing me to shelve one story while revising another.

“The board didn’t take the company away from him for long. My dad had been working on his TideGen program for almost a decade by that point, all in secret. It was a personal project. He paid for it out of his own pocket—”

“I’d heard that part.”

“Yeah, it became part of his legend, that he privately financed the oil company’s first green initiative. As everyone knows by now, the whole thing was bullshit. When he couldn’t get the program to work, he turned it into a PR move. Used it for deflection. What’s interesting is when he gave the speech that turned the stock around, he technically wasn’t CEO of anything at that point. The board was waiting until close of markets on Friday to announce, just so they could handle the spin. They were scrambling that same week to name a replacement. Meanwhile, my father was about to shock the world and rescue the company.”

Ness leans forward and places his hands on his knees. He looks at me for a long pause, a half-smile on his lips. The most distracting thing about this man isn’t his handsomeness, but his confidence. It isn’t fair for any human to visibly worry so little.

“Can I show you the video?” he asks.

“I’ve seen it,” I tell him.

“I want to show you something interesting.”

“Is there any way I can verify this?” I ask. “That your father wasn’t CEO at the time of the speech?”

“Let me show you the video,” Ness insists. “You like personal details. I want to show you how my parents met.”

He gets up and disappears down the hall. I take a sip of coffee and count the time between sweeps of light. Twelve seconds, not ten. If I had a chart of the Maine coast, I could find the lighthouse based on its period. I’m thinking of my father and all he taught me when Ness returns with a tablet.

He sits down on the sofa beside me. I try to slide over, but the armrest has me pinned. His knee presses against mine. Maybe he isn’t aware of this. He calmly starts the video, and I feel a flush of heat from too much wine or the coffee or from him sitting too close. On the tablet, his father is giving a press conference on the deck of an oil platform, and all I can think is that this man—who I have been chasing down for two years—is now far too close. I’ve been trying to pin him down, and now he has me pinned. I’m overreacting, I tell myself. I feel like standing up and running away from here, but some tiny voice says this is irrational, to calm the fuck down.

“Listen,” Ness says, turning up the volume. He has fast-forwarded past the start of his father’s speech. I’ve seen this before. I try to concentrate on what’s happening on that screen, not in the room. The speech occurred a few years before I was born, but every journalist has seen it. Nathaniel Wilde is standing on that symbol of ecological disaster, that oil platform, announcing that it was one of fourteen that drew its own power not by burning the oil it pumped but by the swell of the sea. And now was the time to announce Ocean Oil’s plan to wean itself off oil altogether and that the future of tomorrow’s energy needs would be a mix of geothermal and the incessant wave energy of the ocean tides.

“Here,” Ness says, pointing at the video. The camera has turned to a group of reporters sitting on folding chairs arranged across the deck of the rig. A woman is holding a pen up in the air, rises to ask a question. “Tara Brighton, UK Daily,” she says. “You don’t really expect us to believe that Ocean Oil is going green, do you?”

The camera cuts back to Ness’s father. But Ness rewinds the video again. When the camera shifts to the reporter, he pauses the screen. I glance over at him, waiting for him to explain what I’m supposed to be seeing, when I notice the sweep of the lighthouse flash in his wet eyes.

Tara Brighton—the name comes back to me.

“That’s your mom,” I say.

Ness nods. The tablet must be getting heavy, for I note his hand is trembling, falling.

“Is this how they met?” I ask.

“Right there,” Ness says, his voice quiet. He fiddles with the shell dangling from his necklace. “What’s wild is that they met in front of so many people, but no one has ever commented on it. No one sees her, I guess. It happens so fast, and everyone is concentrating on my dad. But I think this is… important in understanding who he was. What motivated him.”

I look back to the screen, to the woman holding the pen and asking the handsome man behind the podium a question. And when I glance up, it’s the wall of magazine covers down the hall—that grid of trophies—that catches my eye. And some grave truth seems to scream out, some fucked-up psychological disorder, and I can’t tell if this is the moment when Ness will attack me and add me to that wall, or if my sentiment is supposed to get the better of me and this is where he expects me to pull him against me. All I can think of is the dozen other women who sat on this sofa and watched this video and saw him tear up, just moments from doing something they would regret. And I wonder if he’s used his grandfather’s notebook countless times, if he has a stack of signed NDAs, if that’s why the leather band wore out, if this is all a trick, some play here on this stage with this room of props, some game of sniffing out foes and vanquishing them. I reach for Ness’s trembling wrist as his hand and tablet fall toward my lap—

“I have to go,” I say, pushing his arm and the tablet away from me. I stand up too fast, and the room adjusts itself around me. Wine and coffee compete for my senses. I reach for my phone, for my bag with its damning evidence. A new story forms in my mind, a story about a serial manipulator and a fucked-up family four generations deep, chasing along in their fathers’ shadows not with flashlights but with burning torches.

“Right now?” Ness asks. “But I haven’t shown you my collection—”

“I’ve seen your collection,” I say. I shove my pad and pen inside my bag, then point at the wall of framed magazine covers. “I’d rather not be added to it.”

I turn and head up the stairs to get out of that place.

“Wait,” Ness tells me. He follows me toward the door. “Just one more minute, please—”

“It’s not going to work on me,” I tell him over my shoulder. “Whatever you’re going to say, however you’re going to try and manipulate me, it won’t work.” I reach for the front door, half expecting to find it locked, myself trapped. But the knob turns easily. I open the door to feel that the air outside has chilled in the last half hour. Or maybe it’s me.

Ness catches the door as it swings shut, and I can feel him standing on the stoop as I crunch around the car to the driver’s side.

“What do you mean, manipulate you?” he asks.

I glance at him over the roof of the car, catch the bewildered look on his face from the flickering porch light. Damn, he’s good.

“I think you’re a sociopath,” I say bluntly. “You tell people what they want to hear, make them vulnerable, make yourself appear vulnerable, and then you take your prey to bed and revel in the gushing stories they print that never tell anyone a goddamn thing. You hang us on your wall, collecting bylines like frat boys collect panties.”

I open the door and get into the car.

“You wanted to know my story,” Ness says. “You wanted the truth, and I’m trying to give it to you.”

He looks bewildered through the passenger window. Or upset. I realize now that I won’t be coming back tomorrow. Or ever. Agent Cooper can unravel this on his own. I’m going to run my stories and expose this man for what he is.

I press the start button and place the car in gear, attempt to spin out, but the car doesn’t move. The low battery light is blinking at me. I glance over at the glove box, which is hanging open, the dimmest of glows leaking from inside. Fuck me.

I look to the porch, but Ness has disappeared back into his house. I slap my steering wheel in frustration. I could’ve sworn I’d closed the glove box when I put my registration away.

9

The light on the porch is still on. I stare at my phone and consider calling the inn or a taxi or a tow, but I don’t know how to get any of those people past Ness’s double guard gates. With no other choice, I get out of the car again and approach the house. My shouted accusations hang in the air, are still ringing in my ears. Ness answers the door holding his glass of wine, has switched back from coffee. The barest of swallows is left in the bottom of his glass.

“I need to borrow some juice,” I tell him. “My battery’s flat.”

Ness studies me for a moment. A painful moment.

“I would like an apology,” he says.

Through clenched teeth, I say, “I’m sorry.” My anger has been cooled by my embarrassment at needing his help to get out of here.

“I have a battery booster in the garage. You can wait here if you like.”

I decide to follow him, and he doesn’t stop me. Ness heads around the low stucco wall studded with conchs and around toward the garage. Lights above the garage doors flick on automatically and the courtyard blooms bright. Bugs begin to gather around the floodlights. There are three bays. Ness punches a six-digit code into the pad on the wall, and the center bay slides open.

The light inside the garage comes on, and Ness squeezes between a covered car and a rack of shelves. I step inside and lift the cover on the bumper of the car, see the candy-apple red beneath. I also note the exhaust pipe. A gas burner.

“I don’t have a thing for reporters,” Ness tells me as he digs noisily through shelves of tools. “Half of what they’ve written about me over the years is complete fiction. Not that I care. You can write whatever you want. Tell people I came on to you.”

“Didn’t you?” I ask.

“Does it matter?” Ness lugs the orange battery pack my way. I drape the car cover back over the gas-guzzler and step out of the garage. “I asked my dad once how he and my mom met, and he made up a story. He’d make up a different story every time, depending on who was asking. My mom would do it too. I figured it out on my own. Thought you’d like to hear about it.”

“So you want credit for figuring that out?” I follow him back toward my car. The lights wink off behind us. “Well done. Great investigative reporting.”

“I confronted him about it,” Ness says. “This was after my mom died. I asked why he never told me the truth. And it was the first time I ever saw him cry. I mean, bawl like a child.”

Some distant and professional part of me cries out that this might be important, worth writing about, but the rest of me is too riled up to care or even make mental notes. I follow Ness around to my car and watch as he pops the hood and attaches the booster to the battery posts. He checks to make sure the pack is switched on. “Should give you an hour or so of juice. We’ll have to leave it plugged in for half an hour.”

“Convenient,” I tell him. “I’m trapped here.”

“Unless you want to stomp down the driveway in a huff, you are.” He smiles, seems to be joking.

I nearly ask Ness if he opened the glove box while I was reading the journal, but I realize how paranoid I’m being, how crazy that will sound. I’m already feeling the slightest twinge of guilt for blowing up on him.

“Why do you think he kept it a secret?” I ask. “Did he say?”

“He did. And I would have shared that with you, but now I’m not so sure.” He studies me in the dim glow from the porch light. “Maybe it was a mistake to ask you out here. I should’ve just let you run the story however you liked. What difference does it make?”

“I’ll skip to your father with the next piece,” I tell him. “You’ve shown me enough to doubt the veracity of some of my research. But not enough to replace it with anything more forgiving.”

Ness seems to relax. His shoulders drop an inch, like he’s been carrying something heavy there and suddenly it’s gone, suddenly he doesn’t have to tense up against the weight of it all.

“I hoped you’d say that,” he says. He smooths his hair back with his hand. Lets out a held breath. “This isn’t how I imagined tonight going.”

“What did you imagine?” I ask, not sure I really want to know.

“I thought we would talk shells. I remember your old column. I was a fan. I thought I’d show you my collection, let you see what my life has been about. Because it hasn’t been about drilling for oil. All that goes on without me.”

“But you profit from it.”

“I do. And so did my grandfather. And he put that money to good use.”

I recall what Ness said about some things skipping a generation. Or was that me who’d said that?

“You do know you have a reputation,” I say. “Journalism isn’t a large field. Reporters hang out in the same circles.”

“And you believe everything you read in the papers?”

I don’t have a quick response to that.

“Why don’t we go inside while this is charging?” he asks.

“Why can’t you just admit what’s going on? Have you spent any time examining this? Your father fell in love with a reporter, and you seem to be fascinated by that. And now you’re older than he was then, and look at this pattern you’ve formed—”

“I don’t just date reporters.”

“Congratulations.”

“I don’t. It’s just… that’s who I meet. Who else do I socialize with? Have I dated more people than you have? Have I dated more reporters than you have?”

“Yes,” I say with confidence. I eye the battery booster; I could probably get to the end of that long-ass driveway on five minutes of charge, then call a cab or have the inn send someone. Ness glances at his watch.

“It’s ten,” he says. “Come inside so you don’t freeze. We don’t have to sit in the same room if you don’t want—”

“Tell me about Dimitri Arlov,” I blurt out.

Ness stares at me across the open hood of my car. Bugs swirl about, meandering toward the beacon that is the front porch light.

“Where did you hear that name?” he asks.

“Did he work for you?” I hug myself, shivering. I can’t tell if it’s from the cold or the adrenaline rush of confronting him about this.

“Dimitri is dead,” Ness says. “Come inside.”

I clutch my bag. “If I come inside, it’s just so I can show you something,” I warn him. “And I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

10

I leave my car charging and follow Ness back up to the porch. Again he gives me the overly polite Ladies first while waving me into the house. I feel clammy as I go over and over how best to show him the shells. I finally decide that Agent Cooper’s method was most dramatic. So I pull out a stool at his kitchen counter and sit down, my bag on the granite between us.

Ness pours himself another glass of wine. I wave him off before he can offer me any. “I need to drive,” I remind him.

“And I need to calm my nerves,” he says.

It’s almost as if he knows what’s coming. But he must be referring to our confrontation from earlier.

“What did Dimitri do for the company?” I ask.

“A lot of things. Dimitri was a bright man. I’m assuming you know that he passed away this year.”

“Yes. Were you close to him?”

“Very close.”

I open my bag and dig out the box. “I’m sorry for your loss, then.”

“The whole world lost something when Dimitri passed. They don’t make them like that anymore.” Ness raises his glass toward the ceiling and takes a large gulp. As I set the small case on the counter, I hear him nearly choke and fight to swallow. He eyes the plastic case like it’s a lump of radioactive material. I almost don’t need to open the thing to know what I needed to know.

“Tell me what you think of this,” I say. I open the box so that only I can see inside, and I pull out one of the lace murexes. I pass it to Ness. He barely looks at the shell as he takes it, is still eyeing the box.

“A murex,” he finally says. “In good condition.”

“In flawless condition,” I say. “Museum quality. One of a kind, wouldn’t you say?”

Ness nods. “Sure.”

“So explain this.”

I place the other two shells on the counter. I can’t believe I’m doing this. And maybe since I just had one battery fail me, I worry about the amount of charge the FBI recorder has. I should have turned on my phone recorder as well. I try not to worry about that and just concentrate on Ness’s reaction as he studies the three shells.

“They’re nice,” he says. But he sounds distant. Far away.

“Any idea where they might have come from?” I ask.

Ness shrugs.

“I think you know,” I tell him.

He reaches for the bottle of wine, but I grab his wrist and stop him. I slide the bottle of wine toward me and out of his reach. Ness looks at me with a film of tears across his eyes. Worry at being busted? Nerves?

“I think…” Ness hesitates. “I don’t know why he would have taken them. It doesn’t make any sense. He could have just asked.”

“So these are yours?” I can’t believe this. Ness looks staggered. Numb. He would probably tell me anything in this moment.

“Yes, they look… familiar. They were probably mine.”

“Where did you find them?” I ask, knowing they didn’t wash up on any beach.

“I… they came into my possession a while back. A few years ago.”

“They’re only a few years old,” I tell him. “They’re fakes. But you must know that. Any collector worth his salt would. These have been extinct for twenty years—”

“Thirty years,” Ness says.

“So explain them to me.”

“I can’t.”

“How much of your collection is fake?” I ask. I feel bolder the more beat down Ness appears. His confidence is gone and mine surges. Like a seesaw. I forget why I was even nervous. Why I hesitated to do this. There’s a Pulitzer in this. Henry will go ballistic. Hell, I could probably get the science section rolling again, I’ll have so much leverage.

“They aren’t fake,” Ness says, but his voice is a whisper. He doesn’t even believe himself.

I laugh.

Ness looks up at me. His eyes widen at some thought. “I can prove it. Hold on.”

He goes to the kitchen and rummages through several of the cabinets, comes back with a heavy mortar and pestle, the kind used to grind up spices. Ness takes one of the lace murexes and places it in the mortar. Before I can stop him, he cracks the shell with the pestle. I feel the destruction in my chest, like those are my bones snapping.

He fishes out a piece of the broken shell. All I can think is that even a fake of such quality could pay my rent for the year. Even with the buyer knowing it was fake!

“Look,” Ness says. “Wait. I’ll get a loupe.” He turns away from the counter, and I hear myself say that I have one. I fumble in my bag. Ness is animated again, excited. “Look at the shell wall,” he says. “You’ll see a pattern where the slug’s foot scraped back and forth.”

I look through the loupe. I know exactly what he’s talking about; I feel like reminding him that I studied to be a marine biologist. Instead, I say, “This could easily be part of the mold.”

I hear another crunch. The mortar is emptied onto the granite again, forming a second pile of debris. And as I pull the loupe away, there’s a third crunch as the last shell is cracked open.

“Look at these,” he says. “They should be different.”

I’m too busy taking in the fragments and the powder everywhere. It’s as thoughtless as the driveway. Senseless waste.

“Look,” he insists.

And so I do. And sure enough, the patterns are different. The shells are distinct. So, not from a single mold.

I pull the loupe away. Despite what I’m seeing, another thought occurs to me. Ness is a collector. And no collector in his right mind, whatever their collection is like, could destroy three lace murexes without batting an eye. Without flinching. Much less seem to recover their spirits while doing so. His confession came by destroying the shells. All I can think of now is getting to the inn and calling Agent Cooper to let him know what happened here.

“You believe me, don’t you?” Ness asks. Almost with desperation.

“Sure,” I say. I check the time on my phone. “I think I should go.”

11

My car is beeping at me as I coast into the inn. I leave it with the valet, grab my overnight bag out of the trunk, and remind the young man a second time to make sure he plugs the car in. The registration desk is empty. There’s laughter from the bar, but the rest of the facility is winding down for the night. A man emerges from the back. I hand over my business card, ask for any available upgrade, and get a room key to a suite. I figure Henry owes me for yanking my story.

I find the suite and spend a few minutes unpacking. I catch a flash of myself in the mirror and decide that I look like a wreck. The first person I call is Agent Cooper. I try his cell and brace for the grumble of the half-asleep. Instead, he picks up on the first ring. Sounds chipper as he says “Hello.”

“Do you ever sleep?” I ask.

“Who is this?”

“Maya. Maya Walsh. From the Times.”

“Of course. Sorry. Been one of those days. So how did it go?”

I imagined him waiting around breathlessly for my call. Instead, it sounds like I’m just one of many things on his mind. “It went great,” I tell him. “The shells definitely link back to Ness… Mr. Wilde, I mean. And the case you had the shells in, did it belong to Mr. Arlov by any chance?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Because he recognized it. And when I asked him if he knew Mr. Arlov, he said they were very close. I think those were his exact words. And then get this—he wondered why Dimitri would have taken the shells from him. They were definitely Ness’s.”

“And you recorded all this?”

“It should all be on your device. Hold on a sec.” I unbutton my blouse, work one arm free, move the phone to my other hand, and wiggle out of my top. Unsnapping the back of my bra, I let it fall away and unclip the recorder from the underwire. “Yeah, the little light is still on. So I should’ve gotten it.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah, he tried to convince me the shells were real. Was adamant about it.”

“I bet.”

“He even had me look inside the torus at how all the wear marks were different. But I was thinking maybe the molds are a one-off, you know? A different mold for each shell.”

“Wait. He did what?”

“He showed me the foot rubbings for the slugs. Each one was unique. But I figure he just—”

“How did he show you the inside of the torus?”

I took a deep breath. My heart was racing from the long day and the coffee and the confrontation. “He cracked them open,” I said. “Which he never would’ve done if they were real, right? I mean, forget the value of the things. He’s a collector. If those were real—”

“Maya, you still have the shells, right? Tell me you have the shells.”

I rest a hand on the bathroom counter. My hair is mostly loose from my clip, is hanging around my face. “I told you, he… the shells. He had me look inside—”

I hear Cooper take a deep breath and let it out. I imagine him still at his desk, working all night in the pale glow of that solitary lamp, and now he’s probably pushed back from his desk, is running his hand up through his hair.

“So he destroyed our best evidence right in front of you,” Cooper says.

I don’t say anything. I just study myself in the mirror. The room spins around me.

“Look, it’s okay,” he says. “Just come to my office when you get back in town. Bring the wire. That might be enough to get a search warrant. And you may have spooked him into doing something dumb. We’ll keep an eye on him.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“It’s okay. He’s a crafty guy. If he wasn’t, we’d have nailed him by now. Get some sleep. We’ll regroup when you get home.”

“Okay,” I say. I appreciate him trying to make me feel better, but it doesn’t dent how idiotic I feel. “See you soon.”

“G’night, Maya.”

The phone clicks.

I check the time and debate calling my sister, who loves hearing about my fuck-ups and is great at making me feel better about them. I decide it’s too late. I run a bath instead, letting the water run hot enough to throw up steam. I’m about to step in when my phone rings. I answer immediately, expecting Agent Cooper or possibly even Henry.

“Hello, Maya?”

Ness. It’s crazy that I recognize his voice. “How did you get this number?” I ask.

“The internet. You’re listed, you know.”

I wiggle out of my pants and underwear and test the water. Scalding hot. I get in anyway.

“What do you want?” I ask. “It’s late.”

“I was calling to see if you were coming back tomorrow. To look at that journal some more. I need to let the outer gate know.”

“I don’t think so,” I say. “I think I got what I need.”

“Okay.”

There’s a long silence. Like he wants to say something else but doesn’t know how. I don’t allow myself to care or be curious. I just slip down until my shoulders are submerged, only my head and the hand holding the phone out of the water. I can feel the tension melt out of my muscles and joints in the hot water.

“I was thinking,” Ness says.

I wait.

“You used to do those shelling columns. And you’ve obviously got a story you’re working on about me. And you’re curious about those shells you brought over—”

“The ones you destroyed,” I say.

“So I was thinking maybe I could show you where they came from. Give you a shelling angle to your story. I think… I think I might be ready to share some of my secrets. My shelling secrets.”

I start to ask if by “secrets” he means how he forged the shells, but something even worse pops out of my mouth. “Did you kill Dimitri Arlov?” I ask.

“What—? No. Are you serious? Absolutely not. He was… a very good friend. Absolutely not.”

“Did you know that he stole from you?”

“No. I didn’t. And… you wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me,” I say.

“Okay,” Ness says. “But you’ll have to trust me. Come spend a week with me, and I’ll take you shelling. I’ll show you… where they came from. I think I want people to know.”

“You’ll show me where those lace murexes came from?” I ask, making sure I understand.

Ness hesitates. I wonder what he means by letting people know, what he means about sharing his secrets. Does he know the feds are closing in on him? Does he think he can save himself with a confession or by appealing to the press or to the public? Is he that desperate?

“Yes,” he finally says. “I’ll show you where the laces came from. Give me a week of your time, and I’ll give you the story of a lifetime. I promise.”