by C. W. Trisef
“And why was a missing ship never reported?” Mr. Coy asked. “There isn’t a nation or corporation so rich that it doesn’t report such a blow to its cash flow without taxpayers up in arms or shareholders down in the mouth. What’s more, every single vessel able to float that day was later accounted for, which means that, according to the record books and nautical logs, that ship—”
“—didn’t exist,” Ret finished the deduction.
“Quite right,” Coy agreed. He was walking now along the curved wall located directly across the room from where Ret was standing. A large window, several yards long and without panes, let in the late afternoon sunlight, which cast Mr. Coy’s long shadow on the floor.
“As you know,” Mr. Coy continued, “while the meat of the subsequent and hardly half-baked investigation was the search for the Coast Guard’s most seasoned captain, simmering on the back burner was the government’s ulterior motive of puzzling together the unanswered ingredients of the entire tale, which some officials believed to possibly be a threat to national security. Besides the snarls and knots that crews discovered as they combed through the hurricane’s aftermath, a few promising artifacts were found among the wreckage, including a brawny orphan in a bloated raft.” Ret didn’t understand, so Mr. Coy, looking down as if a bit annoyed, clarified: “You.” Ret felt slightly flattered that Mr. Coy thought he was promising.
“But when the government’s vast treasury of brilliant minds couldn’t make sense of any of it, they made their best decision yet by summoning me to bring a fresh start to their dead ends.” He stopped and raised his hand in the air. “Life lesson number one, Cooper,” he said, holding up one finger. “If you’ve tried everything and still failed at something, it means you haven’t done one thing: you haven’t been coy.” He looked at Ret and said, whispering gutturally, “So you’d better get—Ben Coy.” He stood motionless for several moments, staring at Ret, as if his counsel should have some profound effect upon Ret. His only movement came from one of his thin, black eyebrows that was dancing up and down above his eye. Then, without warning, he pranced around the room like an elegant deer in a happy meadow. Despite the randomness of his skipping, Ret observed how he still avoided the two divots in the center of the floor. Then he halted as suddenly as he had begun.
“So what more can you tell me about me?” Ret asked, silently irritated by Mr. Coy’s flippant behavior.
“What, do I look like some crack-pot, soothsaying fortune-teller to you?” Ret held his tongue. “That’s what horoscopes are for. But I understand why you might relish this chance to catch up on your past, which you must ardently seek out, so I will tell you this: we were all a bit disappointed when your medical tests merely added more question marks to the situation, though your results were freakish enough to deserve exclamation points, if you ask me.”
“I’m the freak,” Ret muttered under his breath. For the first time in his life, Ret felt like he wasn’t the strangest person in the room.
“But, while the detectives called the case closed and the newscasters grew bored from lack of progress,” Mr. Coy carried on, “I, and I alone, prevented the plug from being pulled on the ailing incident. The government allowed me to relocate to this handsome island where I could continue my research with the full strength of all my instruments as well as keep tabs on you from a close distance.”
“So much for privacy,” Ret shrugged.
“Don’t hold your breath,” Mr. Coy advised. “Your medical records ruined that from the get-go.”
“I feel so—so exposed, so invaded,” Ret admitted, “like some type of experiment—some kind of teenage mutant.”
“Well unless you have a black belt around your waist and a hard shell on your back, there’s nothing to worry about,” Mr. Coy reassured. “No one knows anything about my continuing research except for a few top government officials, and I bet even they have forgotten about it, seeing as they still haven’t come looking for one of the other few promising items that washed ashore—” Ret anxiously looked at Mr. Coy. “—What you’re holding in your hands.”
“You mean you stole this from the government?” Ret asked indignantly, holding up the sphere.
“Stole is such a coarse, untactful word,” Mr. Coy cringed, “certainly a discredit to my name. I would prefer to say that it was artfully and slyly…well, procured. Yes, procured—by someone who they would least expect, and by someone who had to have been—had to have been coy.” A pleased smile curled his lips. “Besides,” he added, “the government just keeps these sorts of dead-end trinkets locked up some place, and their ambivalence to its importance is indicative by their failure to come looking for it.”
“So it’s important?” Ret probed.
“More so to you than to me,” Mr. Coy said, “and that’s not only on the one hand.” He glared at Ret wide-eyed. “The same can be said on the other hand!” Mr. Coy burst into laughter. Ret wasn’t sure whether to laugh with him or at him. It took him a moment to calm down.
“I’ve spent too many of my waking hours in the ancient world not to recognize a resurrected relic when I see one. Just look at it: too perfect to be manmade, but too symbolic to have been forged by nature. I’ve devoted the past year to unraveling its secrets—unearthing its meaning—but to no avail.”
“Well, I guess that means you haven’t been coy,” Ret suggested with a clever smile. Mr. Coy stared at him, disgruntled and speechless, like someone who had just had his thunder stolen—or procured, rather.
“As a matter of fact, boy,” Mr. Coy snapped, “I have been so extremely coy that I didn’t even have to travel halfway around the world to investigate my next lead, because you came to me. I never could quite figure out how you fit into this jigsaw puzzle until the other night when I took you and your sister home after that baseball game.”
“You mean the football game?”
“Whatever it was, that’s beside the point,” a flustered Coy remarked. “When you waved goodbye to us from your porch, I saw the scars on the palm of your hand, and immediately my memory was jogged. It is quite uncommon for something so disfiguring to be in a place as unusual as the palm of the hand, and my mind rolled back to the day when I vocalized this same thought to the team of doctors analyzing your medical records. They thought nothing of it, but I should have known! I should have known to trust my own impressions because, ironically, you are just what the doctor ordered!”
“So you’ve figured out what all of this means?” Ret asked, looking at his hands with a hopeful excitement that matched the enthusiasm that was gradually building with Mr. Coy’s every word.
“Of course not!” Mr. Coy retorted, though with the kind of jubilance that would be displayed if he had, in fact, cracked the code. “This is merely the tip of the iceberg, my boy! The tip of the iceberg! You see, as soon as I arrived home that night, I retrieved that sphere doohickey, and, by George!—one of the images was glowing. Was glowing! Just as I saw on your hand. Only then could I fully decipher the first of the markings, and it was as plain as day: a hook inside the left angle of a triangle. Plain as hook! Triangle as day!” Mr. Coy was drunk with ecstasy. He was shouting now, and his face looked flushed. Like a sports coach who had just won the championship trophy, he had been flailing his arms and kicking his legs so violently that his shirt had come untucked, and the top of his hair had come unslicked.
While Mr. Coy was bouncing off the walls, Ret seized the opportunity to take a load off on his host’s fancy leopard couch. He had almost sat down when Mr. Coy flew over the backside of the couch, lounging lengthwise and leaving no room for his guest.
“Don’t sit on my couch,” he ordered, having suddenly regained his composure. “And I’ll be having my whachamacallit back.” He extended his hand and impatiently fluttered his fingers back and forth. Ret reluctantly returned it to Mr. Coy.
“It looks like something you’d find in one of Principal Stone’s treasure chests,” Ret remarked, already missing the trinket that had so quickly co
me to feel a part of him.
“What’d you say about my chest, boy?” Mr. Coy growled.
“Nothing,” Ret reassured. “I just said the sphere looks like something you’d find in Principal Stone’s treasure chests. That’s all.”
“Treasure chests?” Mr. Coy asked incredulously. “Son, have you been playing too many video games lately?”
“No,” Ret dismissed the accusation, a little insulted.
“And this Principal Stone fellow,” he mocked, “is he some villain who haunts you in your dreams?” He let out a hearty chuckle.
“No, he’s the principal at school,” Ret stated, feeling put upon. “What kind of father doesn’t even know who his own daughter’s principal is?”
The room fell silent. Ret held his breath and bit his tongue, shocked at the words that came out of his own mouth. He braced for Mr. Coy’s reaction, but it took him by surprise. Mr. Coy had swallowed his smile and replaced it with a very sober stare. He was not looking at Ret; instead, it was if he was gazing at the scene of a tragic event. His eyes fell, partially hidden behind their heavy lids. His breathing slowed. He bowed his head.
Ret rushed to repair the damage he had done: “I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t mean—”
Ret’s apology was interrupted when Mr. Coy silently raised his hand, signaling Ret to stop.
“Please, Ret, sit down” he said in a serious tone of voice. He slid his legs off the couch to make room. Ret cautiously sat on the edge of the cushion, his hands jittering nervously in his lap.
“Tell me what I ought to know about my daughter’s principal,” he asked politely.
“Well,” Ret thought for a moment, trying to think of something unsuspicious that he knew about Principal Stone. “This is his second year at Tybee High,” said Ret, “and he, uh, doesn’t really have any place to sit in his office…”
“You’ve been in his office?” Mr. Coy wanted to know.
“Well, yes,” Ret admitted. “That’s when I saw the chests.”
“These chests seem to have made quite an impression on you,” Mr. Coy observed. “Did Principal Stone talk to you about them?”
“Actually,” Ret thought, “no, now that you mention it, he didn’t say anything about them. He basically just talked about himself the whole time—how he moved to the area two summers ago and convinced the retiring principal to let the entire school help with the clean up after the hurricane—” Ret continued to summarize his visit with Principal Stone, hoping that it was helping Mr. Coy to somehow feel better.
“And what were you doing in the principal’s office in the first place?”
“Well, that’s actually something I should probably tell you about,” Ret began. “The night when you saw the scar glowing on my hand was the first time one of my scars had ever glowed like that before. We think it was somehow activated—by us being in danger, triggered by my adrenaline, or something like that. That’s the best we could come up with.”
“We?” Mr. Coy asked.
“Me and my sister, Ana.”
“Right.”
“You see, just before you picked us up,” Ret continued, “these two people tried to attack us behind the bleachers, and, well, I sort of got in front of them and buried them in dirt.”
“And you got in trouble for that?”
“Well, yes, because I didn’t even touch the ground. I just put up my hands to stop them, and the dirt sorta flew on top of them. And then Mr. Quirk showed up and said something about my powers returning to me, but Principal Stone carried him off and told me to report to his office the following Monday.”
“And who is this Mr. Quirk fellow?” Coy asked.
“He’s one of our teachers at school,” Ret explained, again a bit shocked by how uninformed he was about his own daughter’s life, though he dare not vocalize it.
“Quirk,” Mr. Coy mumbled to himself. “A peculiar name, indeed. I’m sure we would get along fine, he and I.”
“Probably better than Principal Stone,” Ret remarked. “It’s like Mr. Quirk is his annoying sidekick or something.”
“So you buried these bandits in dirt without ever touching the ground, you say? I see,” said Mr. Coy, obviously very deep in thought. “I wonder why my Paige never mentioned any of this to me.” Ret worried if Mr. Coy now thought he was some kind of troublemaker or poor influence and wouldn’t let him take his daughter to the winter formal dance. After all, that was the whole reason why he came to Coy Manor in the first place.
“Which reminds me, Mr. Coy,” Ret resumed. “The winter formal dance is coming up soon, and I was wondering if…”
“A dance, you say?” Mr. Coy interrupted.
“Yeah,” Ret said, “and I was wondering if…”
“Soon, you said?”
“Yes,” Ret courteously answered, a little bugged that Mr. Coy was elongating a question that Ret was already finding difficult to ask. “And I…”
“Where will it be?” Mr. Coy asked.
“At the school.”
“And when is it, exactly?” He had suddenly turned into a very concerned parent.
“The last Friday before we break for the holidays.” Ret decided to just let Mr. Coy ask the questions.
“And will there be any parents or teachers at the dance, you know, as chaperones?” Mr. Coy wanted to know.
“Well, yes…I’m sure there will be,” Ret said, slightly confused.
“And you said those chests are inside the principal’s office, is that right?”
“Yes, but sir,” Ret hurried to say, “I just want to know if I can take Paige to the dance!”
Again: silence. Ret sighed, relieved that the deed was done. Without a word, Mr. Coy slowly turned to face Ret with a look of utter bewilderment. It was the strangest look that anyone had ever given him, which was fitting since Mr. Coy was, without a doubt, the strangest and most bewildering man Ret had ever met. When several moments had passed, Ret timidly asked, “Well?”
“Now I have a question for you, Mr. Cooper,” Coy announced, jumping off the couch and suddenly snapping out of his doldrums. He yanked Ret to his feet and forced him to the center of the room. With one hand, Mr. Coy grabbed Ret’s chin and pushed his face upward. “Now don’t look down,” he instructed. Then, with his other hand, Mr. Coy picked up each of Ret’s feet and placed them directly over the two dips in the floor that he had purposely been avoiding all afternoon. Ret was about to lash out in protest when it became clear to him that Mr. Coy was scheming again. Ret played along, a momentary smile forming on his face as he resolved not to be tricked this time by Mr. Coy.
“Keep your chin up,” Mr. Coy demanded, releasing Ret and walking backwards. “I’m watching you.” Ret maintained eye contact with Mr. Coy, and although he never glanced down, Ret slowly and imperceptibly shuffled both of his feet inwardly until he could feel they were off the dips in the floor, knowing he would outsmart Mr. Coy and not be humiliated again.
“My question is this,” Mr. Coy resumed. He rushed to the long, full-length window along the wall and pulled a row of vertical blinds behind him as he dashed the several yards to the other end of the window. The swaying blinds continued to permit the afternoon glow into the room. “Tell me, Mr. Cooper,” Coy said, his hand gripping the shutter string. “Have you ever—Ben Coy?” Mr. Coy shut the blinds, greatly dimming the light in the room. At the snap of the shutting blinds, Ret felt two strong clasps pin his feet to the floor. Like lightning, his eyes jolted downward, where he saw how two metal hooks had appeared in the shallow dips in the floor and tightly clamped his feet to the ground. Each time Ret had watched Mr. Coy avoid the spots, he had never seen anything lurking within them. Like the invisible bust of Grandmother Coy, the clasps had appeared out of thin air. Ret wondered if the extinguishing of the room’s light had anything to do with this phenomenon, but he had only ever known things to hide in the dark—not in the light.
“Hold your breath,” warned a grinning Mr. Coy. Ret inhaled as he felt the floor immediately ar
ound his feet give way, pulling him down through the floorboards and plunging him into water. When the pedestal came to rest on a sandy floor, Ret wondered if he had been ejected from Mr. Coy’s cliffside home and onto the bottom of the ocean. When the cloud of displaced sand had settled, Ret’s heart stopped to see more than a dozen tiger sharks circling around him menacingly.
When Ret looked down at his feet to see if there was any way of escaping from the metal clasps still holding him captive, he noticed something shimmering in the water: his scar was glowing brightly on his hand! Hope and excitement washed away his fear and panic. With arms at his side and with palms down, Ret stood calmly, believing something would come to his rescue, though not knowing what his lifeline might be.
Seconds passed. The sharks were closing in on him now, but Ret saw no walls of mud or barrage of rocks come to his aid. When he checked on his bonds, he was puzzled to see strands of sand particles swirling around his feet. He watched, curiously and a bit impatiently, as the sand poured into the locks of the metal clamps, when suddenly the locks released their prisoner.
No sooner had Ret’s attention returned to his predators than, in an instant, a twelve-foot tiger shark charged, hurtling towards Ret with its massive jaws open wide. With little time to think, Ret braced himself and prepared to strike the beast in the head. He threw his fist at the shark but recoiled in pain when it instead collided with an invisible wall, which the tiger shark also bounced off like a basketball but not without leaving jagged teeth marks along its surface. Immediately, the water drained in Ret’s private glass cage. He could hear Mr. Coy cheering and clapping. Catching his breath, Ret followed his ears through a narrow passageway and into an adjacent room where he rejoined Mr. Coy.
“Bravo, bravo!” he congratulated. “Well done, my lad! Very well done. Calm under pressure, brave in the face of death, and—” Mr. Coy paused, inspecting Ret’s neck, “—underwater so long without any gills. Hip, hip, hooray! I was afraid you might drown, had you not unlocked the secret of draining the cage! Very coy indeed, Mr. Cooper. I knew I liked you.”
