The Music of the Deep: A Novel

by Elizabeth Hall

  He moved on top of her, his eyes locked on her. “Will you marry me, Alex?”

  She couldn’t stop thinking about him, wanting him, in every way possible, far too often. The many fascinating subjects covered in Scientific American lost a bit of their appeal. His attention was intoxicating, and it went straight to that part of Alex that had always believed she did not belong, that she was not good enough. Suddenly, here she was, Alex Turner, being courted by this good-looking man.

  For the first time in her life, other women were looking at her in a completely different way. She was no longer unacceptable Alex with the thick glasses and her head in a book. Her status as an outlier was changed. Now she was the woman on Daniel Frazier’s arm.

  By the end of January, less than six weeks later, Alex had given up her own apartment, the one just a few blocks away from her mother, and moved in with Daniel. They set a date to get married—on Valentine’s Day—as if that would totally disprove Alex’s initial refusal of anything to do with romance.

  “It’s all happening so quickly,” her mother had fretted.

  “A whirlwind romance.” Alex smiled. Romance. She had actually used that word.

  “Whirlwind. Gale force. Tornado. Hurricane. It does appear that many things that move that fast are associated with storm systems.”

  Frances sat down on the edge of Alex’s bed, stripped of sheets and blankets, since it would soon be tossed to the street as she abandoned her old, solitary, far-too-peaceful life. “How well do you really know him, Alex? You met him less than two months ago.”

  “You think he’s really Jack the Ripper?”

  Her mother pressed her lips together. She shrugged. “Have you followed him when he goes out at night?”

  Alex let out a humph. “Oh, Mom, relax. I know what I’m doing.” She had always been, after all, the smartest girl in her class, the one who could look at a problem and figure it out almost instantaneously. From the big picture to the smallest details, Alex had always been quick and sharp, and usually correct.

  “Any man can act a part for a few months, Alex. You don’t really know what kind of man you have until you’ve had a chance to observe him in many situations, over a much longer period of time.” Her mother ran her thumb up and down the bare mattress.

  “Is that the recipe for marital success?” Alex regretted the words instantly; they lodged in her mother’s physique in a subtle but unmistakable jerk.

  Frances drew back slightly and squared her shoulders. “Have you stopped to wonder why he needs to move so fast? This is 2005. People who get married these days have been together for years. They already have a child or two.”

  Her mother’s objections were easy to explain away. Alex swiftly and silently assigned the ulterior motives of a woman who had lost her own husband (sour grapes) and did not want to lose the friendship that she and Alex enjoyed (jealousy). Obviously, her mother did not trust men, any men, after the lies and deceit she had endured from Alex’s father. And just like that, Alex cast aside her mother’s fears, like erasing the chalkboard in a school classroom.

  Alex sat down and patted her mother on the knee. “Don’t worry, Mom. I know what I’m doing.” She had still believed that intelligence was enough, that she knew as much about relationships as she did about organizing information. That she was much too smart for anything bad to happen to her.

  She’d been wrong, more wrong than she could ever have imagined. She didn’t really know him at that point in time; she didn’t really know what kind of man she had married. And standing next to her mother’s coffin, just a few months ago, she knew the truth of what her mother had tried to tell her.

  Alex had turned, and there he was, her husband, off in the distance, talking on his cell phone and smiling. Smiling. As if none of the events of the past few weeks touched him in any way; as if the service at the church, and the line of cars going out to the cemetery, as if that box covered with flowers and about to be lowered into the ground, had nothing to do with him.

  He wasn’t standing next to his wife, his hand on the small of her back, offering physical stability and emotional support. He was off in the trees, talking on the phone and smiling.

  In that moment, she knew. It flashed in her mind like a neon sign. Over the past eleven years, she had experienced a myriad of emotion, a roller-coaster ride of highs and lows in that weird arrangement called marriage. But just then, standing next to her mother’s coffin, looking at her husband talking on the phone and smiling, Alex knew that what she really felt, and had never admitted until that very moment, was the one emotion she had always tried to avoid. Hatred. She hated Daniel Frazier. Hated him with a bitter surge of feeling, as if she had just swallowed acid.

  Alex exhaled again, trying to shake her mind away from the memories of all that pain. She forced herself back to the present, standing at the window in Copper Cove, looking out on the cemetery just below the house. A small white light skittered through the stones, bouncing up and down, moving from side to side. Alex gasped. For one brief instant, she almost thought her mother was out there, in the cemetery of this tiny town on a remote island in Washington, a ghostly light dancing over the stones. As if her mother had had no trouble tracking her down.

  Alex watched, waiting, until the light stopped moving. She exhaled, finally, when she saw that the light was a camping headlight, clamped on the forehead of a woman out there in the darkness of the cemetery. She wore a long duster coat, down to her shins. Her white hair glowed in the darkness.

  Alex watched as the woman stopped, moving through the gravestones in fits and starts, sometimes stopping for longer periods of time. The light bounced on the ground in front of her, and Alex could see a dog, sniffing and straining on a leash. She swallowed and let herself relax. Of course it wasn’t the ghost of her mother, and Alex felt silly that she had given the idea any attention at all. As if the ghosts of the past were anything more than her own imagination, as if they could actually follow her all this distance.

  It was at that very moment that the headlamp turned in Alex’s direction, the shaft of light blazing across the ground and through the window and directly into Alex’s eyes. She raised her hand quickly, blinded by the beam of light that tore through the glass and caught her, like a deer in the headlights.

  FOUR

  “It’s open.”

  Alex was standing on the porch of Maggie’s cabin and had just raised her hand to knock when Maggie’s voice reached her. She opened the door and stepped into a small mudroom, cluttered with boots and slip-on shoes. Jackets hung from hooks against the wall; several rag rugs lay scattered about, in varying shades of wet and muddy. She hung up her coat and turned.

  The main part of the cabin was roughly twenty feet square. Alex could see a bedroom in a far back corner. The kitchen was located in the other back corner, just behind the mudroom. In the front room, a potbellied stove was radiating heat, tingeing the air with the smell of wood smoke and coffee. Maggie sat in a corner, directly across from the front door, at a desk piled high with papers. She pushed her glasses up and appraised Alex.

  “Ghosts keep you awake?”

  Alex brought her head up sharply. It was hard to read anything in Maggie’s face. She let out a nervous huff. “Didn’t hear a thing. Slept like the dead.”

  A smile played at the corners of Maggie’s mouth. “There’s a bowl of oatmeal in the kitchen. Coffee’s on the stove. Get yourself some breakfast, and we’ll get started.”

  Alex nodded and headed to the little kitchen area. She took oatmeal from a pan on the stove and dished it into a bowl. Before she could even think to ask, she heard Maggie’s voice. “Milk, syrup, blueberries—all in the fridge. Decorate that mush however you please.”

  Alex brought the bowl into the front room. “Thank you. I was getting a little hungry.”

  Maggie looked at her over the tops of her glasses. “I figured. Nothing’s open this early. We’ll work half a day or so, and then you can go down and buy some groceries. Get set
tled.”

  Alex lowered her body into one of the chairs by the fire. There wasn’t much in the way of furniture in the front room, just three mission style chairs with red leather cushions, arranged around the potbelly stove. Along the walls were numerous bookshelves, every inch stuffed with books and papers.

  Maggie tipped her head toward a worktable, directly across the room from her own desk. “You can work right there. That computer is old and slow, but I think it can handle the essentials.”

  Alex nodded and carried her oatmeal over to the work space. She turned on the computer and sat down in an old, beat-up office chair, eating oatmeal as she waited for the machine to wake up.

  Maggie pushed her own chair back. “So. This stack of boxes.” She indicated a tower of cardboard storage boxes, stacked five or six high, against the wall. “That’s your job for the next few months.” Maggie took her coffee cup and poured from the blue enamel coffeepot on the stove. “And I should warn you right now that what I’m asking you to do is almost certainly impossible.”

  “Oh?”

  Maggie took her coffee and stood by the front window, looking out at the water of the strait. “I got my degree in marine biology back in 1960. You could count on one hand all the women in that field back then.”

  Alex located a coffee cup and poured. She moved over to the window and stood beside Maggie.

  “There are several of us—scientists, that is, not women—who are located up and down the west coast here. A few in British Columbia and a few of us in the States, spread out through these waters, all the way down to Seattle. And several of us have been studying the orcas, and their habitat, for forty or fifty years now. This group of orcas? The Southern Residents?” She nodded toward the waters out the window. “They are the most studied group of orcas in the world. Most of what we know about killer whales comes from the scientists in these waters.”

  Alex examined photos hanging on the walls. There were terrific shots of the orcas, flying through the air, turned sideways, as if they were playing.

  “How much do you know about them?”

  Alex shook her head. “I didn’t actually do any homework—other than the one article I showed you.”

  “There are orcas all over the world, but they are all a bit different in the way they do things. We have two kinds of orcas in these waters. Transients, or Biggs killer whales—they hunt mammals. They are the ones who eat seals and sea lions, an occasional moose or deer that is out swimming from one island to another. Transients move around a lot, in and out of the waters of Puget Sound. Tend not to vocalize as much, since they have to sneak up on their prey. And they usually travel in small numbers. Less than five, most of the time.

  “The other group is the Southern Resident Killer Whales—SRKW. They eat fish, mostly Chinook salmon.” Maggie picked up binoculars and scanned the waters below them. “They travel in groups of ten or so, sometimes more. Stay together in families their entire lives.

  “They are the ones that most people think of when they think of orcas. Shamu, Free Willy, the spectacle at the marine parks. Fish eaters, all of them.” Maggie took the glasses from her eyes and looked at Alex. “Be a little difficult to put on a show in front of the kiddos and feed the orca a baby seal, now wouldn’t it?”

  Alex shuddered.

  “But the two groups don’t mix. Residents have not mated with the transients for more than seven hundred thousand years. Longer than mankind has been around. Everything about the two groups is different, the way they hunt, the way they vocalize—everything. Except, of course, that they are both black and white. Both are orcas—killer whales.

  “The transients are doing fine; their numbers are steady and increasing. But the residents? The fish eaters? They’re not doing so well.”

  Alex said nothing, but she met Maggie’s eyes.

  Maggie tipped her head toward the wall of boxes behind them. “I’ve kept a copy of everything over the years. All the reports, all the sightings. Everything. There is one scientist who has photo identified every whale in the pod. They have distinctive dorsal fins, distinctive patches near the fin. Like a fingerprint. And he’s taken pictures of every one. Given them numbers, according to the family and pod that they’re in, and names. If the babies live long enough, they get names, too. So in these boxes you will find the family trees for each one of those whales that is still living.

  “Another guy has studied the sounds they make, looking for language patterns. He’s made a dictionary of their vocalizations.

  “And then there’s me. I’m a habitat biologist, so I study everything that affects the places where they live. Pollution, ocean acidification, global warming, Navy sonar, all the ship and boat noise out there in the water. The list of things that affect the orcas, and their habitat, is mind-boggling. And the worst?”

  Alex met her eyes again.

  “They’re having a hard time finding enough food. Salmon have been on the decline for . . . oh, I suppose since white men first reached this area.” Maggie turned toward the window again. “Did you know they used to have wild salmon in Europe? And on the East Coast?” She took a deep breath. “The Pacific Northwest is the only place left where you can still find wild salmon now, and it’s getting harder every year. Seems to me that man, as a species, is bent on destruction. Everywhere man shows up—white men, anyway—all the natural systems go to hell.”

  Maggie took a swig from her coffee cup.

  “As far as I know, there is no one place where all the different information is gathered. The salmon people and the whale people and the ones studying pollutants and boat noise. No one central location for accessing all that material. I really wanted to come up with a way to organize all of it—my own work and theirs.”

  Alex nodded.

  Maggie exhaled, a sound that seemed profoundly tired. “I’m on the downhill slide to eighty, and I’m not going to live forever. And if there’s anything else I can do to help protect those blackfish . . . I want to do it.”

  “Sounds like a good plan. It’s a problem I’ve seen so often—people doing all this great research and no really good way to access everything. Is the University of Washington willing to help?”

  Maggie turned and gave Alex a long look. “Probably. I haven’t asked.”

  “Oh?”

  Maggie grimaced. “It’s been my experience that if you want a project done right, you need to do it yourself. Or at least oversee it yourself.”

  Alex waited.

  “So.” Maggie turned toward the stack of boxes and picked one off the top. She set it on the table with the computer and pulled off the lid. “You’re going to find all kinds of stuff in these. Some of it will not look related to the orcas at all. But it is.

  “I’ve got reports on salmon populations, in all the streams up and down the West Coast. I’ve got reports on what’s happened in the waters since they started salmon farming in British Columbia. Since they built those dams on the Snake River, and the Fraser, and the Columbia. There’s a dam on almost every river system out here, sometimes more than one. Those dams have had a huge impact on the salmon populations.”

  Maggie moved back. “I’ve got reports on ship noise. Oil spills. Chemicals and pollution that have been dumped in these waters over the last hundred years. Did you know that the Canadian government is looking at shipping tons of that tar-sands oil out of Vancouver? They’ve got a pipeline from Alberta carrying that sludge, mixed with all kinds of chemicals, and they want to load it on ships and go right through these waters.” Maggie shook her head. “Sometimes, the thought of all the idiocy in the world is more than I can handle.”

  Maggie’s shoulders slumped for a moment, as if someone had let all the air out of her body. She tapped her hand on the box.

  “We have reams of data, from this group of scientists up and down this area who have been studying the whales for forty years.” She turned to Alex again. “What we don’t have? Is a way to save them from our own stupidity.”

  Maggie look
ed out the window again. “I hear it all the time—the orcas are not as smart as people. They can’t speak the way we do; they can’t make tools and technology. As if that makes us smarter. As if that somehow gives us the right to destroy them—to destroy the life they depend on. To destroy the waters they live in.

  “But they are the top of the food chain in the oceans, and they’ve been around six million years. Humankind has been around about two hundred thousand. We think we are so smart. And with all our brains and science and technology and tools, we’ve just about managed to destroy the planet. The orcas were managing just fine, until we showed up.

  “Now the A Pod in Alaska? Hasn’t had a baby since the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. The Southern Residents? J, K, L Pods? We put them on the endangered species list in 2005, with a population of less than eighty. And in the last eleven years, when we’re supposed to be protecting them? Helping the population recover? You want to know how much progress we’ve made?”

  Maggie stopped speaking for a moment, her jaw clenched. “None. We have seventy-six orcas right now. That’s it. The chances of saving this group grow dimmer every day.

  “I’m an old woman. I’ve been watching these orcas since I was a little girl.” She turned back to stare at the waters. “I just hope I die before I have to see a world without them in it.”

  FIVE

  It was just after two when Alex left Maggie’s cabin and walked down the hill to the main street of Copper Cove. The rain was falling softly, but it wasn’t far, and Alex had no intention of driving that car with the New Mexico license plate in this small town. As if the license plate glowed, advertising exactly where she was from. She wanted, instead, to blend into the landscape, into the gray clouds and rain. Unnoticeable. Unremarkable in any way.

  She pulled the hood of her fleece jacket up over her head; raindrops clung to the fleece like tiny glass beads. Despite the rain, it felt good to move a little, after three days in the car, and she walked up one side of Main Street, intending to get a better feel for the town before she went back down the block to the grocery store. On the other side of the street, meandering slowly down the boardwalk, was the same woman she had seen walking in the cemetery earlier that morning. She was in the same dark gray duster, her white hair visible beneath her hat, her glasses misty with water. She was walking another dog, a smaller one this time, and a tiger-striped cat followed just a step behind, stopping whenever the woman did.