Stormy Cove
Page 1
ALSO BY BERNADETTE CALONEGO
Under Dark Waters
The Zurich Conspiracy
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2015 Bernadette Calonego
Translation copyright © 2016 Gerald Chapple
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously published in German as Die Bucht des Schweigens by Amazon Publishing in Germany in 2015. Translated from German by Gerald Chapple. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2016.
Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503935846
ISBN-10: 1503935841
Cover design by Scott Barrie
For Hubert
CONTENTS
CAST OF CHARACTERS
NEWFOUNDLAND’S
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
WORKS CONSULTED
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Lori Finning: photographer from Vancouver
Lisa Finning: Lori’s mother (lawyer)
Simon Finning: Lori’s father
Clifford Finning: Lori’s brother
Andrew Finning: Lori’s son
Danielle Page: Lori’s friend
Craig: Lori’s friend from Vancouver
Volker Pflug: Lori’s ex-husband (German)
Franz Ehrsam: Volker’s boyhood friend
Rosemarie Ehrsam: his wife
Katja Brosamen: his client
Waltraud: Katja’s mother
Erhardt: Katja’s father
Mona Blackwood: businesswoman in Calgary
Bobbie Wall: B and B owner
Gordon Wall: her husband
Noah Whalen: fisherman in Stormy Cove
Nate Whalen: his brother
Emma Whalen: Nate’s wife
Lance Whalen: Noah’s brother
Coburn Whalen: Noah’s brother
Ezekiel (“Ezz”): Noah’s cousin
Greta Whalen: Noah’s sister
Robine Whalen: Noah’s sister
Archie Whalen: Noah’s uncle
Nita Whalen: his wife
Winnie Whalen: Noah’s mother
Abram Whalen: Noah’s father
Jack Day: Noah’s relative
Ches Mills: Lori’s neighbor
Patience Mills: his wife
Molly Mills: their daughter
Selina Gould: Lori’s landlady
Cletus Gould: her son
Una Gould: his wife
Mavis Blake: shopkeeper
Aurelia Peyton: school librarian
Lloyd Weston: archaeologist
Beth Ontara: archaeologist
Annie: archaeologist
Will Spence: newspaper editor
Reanna Sholler: reporter
Jacinta Parsons: murder victim
Scott Parsons: her father
Glowena Parsons: her sister
Ginette Hearne: villager
Elsie Smith: villager
Gideon Moore: transport company owner
Rudolf von Kammerstein: German baron
Ruth von Kammerstein: his wife
Tom Quinton: dog owner
Vera Quinton: his wife
Rusty: the Quintons’ dog
Hope Hussey: lodge owner
Carl Pelley: detective
John Glaskey: fisherman
Isaac Richards: fisherman
John, Seb, Wayne: fishermen
Joseph Johnston: deceased fisherman
Mitch and Dorice: elderly couple
Richard Smallwood: Anglican minister
PROLOGUE
He hardly speaks at breakfast. His forehead, eyes, eyebrows, and lips look pinched—like his head is in a vise. He’s worried. She knows it.
That night, she’d been jolted out of her sleep again, her heart feeling tight and swollen, like a boxing glove. Her silk pajamas clung to her skin, and a damp chill to her forehead.
She sat bolt upright in bed, gasping for air.
Suddenly his face was right against hers; she’d startled him.
Not for the first time.
He brushed her unruly hair out of her face.
“I heard it again,” she said.
The howling. That terrible, incomprehensible, bone-shattering whine that seemed to come from nowhere.
He pressed her to his chest.
“It’s gone,” he whispered. “Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
Then he caressed her until she fell asleep in his arms.
She steals a glance at him.
Pretending to be sorting pictures on the computer, she watches him out of the corner of her eye as he sits there, bent over the table, his chin resting in a hand as big as a shovel. He reads the newspaper from cover to cover; it’s just the local rag, but he doesn’t skip over a thing, not even the classifieds. He’s never learned to skim. In his world, there’s no place for skimming. Everything must be observed: wind direction, the movement of the tide, wave action, fish movements, what men in the harbor are saying, news and rumors. Especially rumors. If you miss something, or don’t care what’s going on in the village, then you’re soon on the outside looking in. And that can be fatal.
She’s only known that since she came into his life.
How did we manage to survive?
Here he is, far from the grave of his boat, the Mighty Breeze. Far from the North Atlantic and the steep cliffs, the killer storms and currents. Far from the disaster that pulled him down in its wake.
He’s an outsider in Vancouver. A man who doesn’t want to be anywhere but on his boat or in his squat little house with green trim. He couldn’t even restack the firewood the storm scattered—that’s how fast everything happened. He must replay things in his mind over and over, neat and tidy as he is. In the chaos of emotions and threats, he is a man who clings to order.
So all he can do now is read the entire paper. He can’t bring himself to skip over even a page. He calls it wasteful, making a face every time he says the word. His shed by the ocean is stacked with pails, old ropes and tools, rusty winches, used nails, lumber from demolished houses, worn-out knives. A man who always expects hard
times needs these things.
But he didn’t expect the disaster that befell him.
He suddenly looks up, and she feels caught in the act.
“Did you read this?” he asked. “The letters to the editor? People with oceanfront houses are complaining that people walking on the beach keep peeking in their windows.”
She smiles, happy that he’s found something he finds funny. Nobody in his village has any problem with people constantly looking in their windows. They see everything anyway, never miss a thing. Through trusty binoculars, they spy on the houses on the opposite side of the cove. They know when it’s lights-out and when somebody comes home late.
But she’d shut her eyes to what she really ought to have seen.
He stretches across the table to study the classifieds. She never tires of looking at him. A back as round as the leatherback turtle’s that washed ashore one day, dead. The morning after they first made love, her fingers felt for his vertebrae and couldn’t find them. As if he’d morphed from a sea creature into a human.
If someone saw the way she was watching him now, her fascination would be taken for love.
But it’s more like wonder. Silent amazement that they’re both here. Together. That he followed her, all this way.
How did we manage to get away?
Did we get away?
He’s always been so afraid of the city. The cars. The crowds. The pace. Traffic lights everywhere. Eyes that look right past him. Mouths that don’t say hello. Losing himself in the sea of people on the sidewalks.
But now, after everything that happened, he feels secure here. Nobody knows him in Vancouver. Nobody knows anything. His name means nothing.
It’s been ten months now. He never talks about going back. Not even about the Mighty Breeze. Or the kitchen with its loud, ticking clock. Not one word about the cove or the dock with the rotting planks he’d long wanted to replace.
“Don’t you want to call?” she asks him occasionally.
He just shakes his head, raises his eyebrows, and looks out the window, checking the sky over the neighboring apartment towers. Then he wants to go for a walk before it rains. His route always leads to the ocean. Not to his ocean but to this other, western ocean, the Pacific. Water that never, to his astonishment, freezes over in winter.
She hasn’t taken any pictures of him since they came to Vancouver. As if photographing him were cursed. As if her pictures would reveal something she wasn’t prepared for. The way he’s sitting at the table, turning the pages, his brow furrowed, back arched like a bridge over water, lips pressed together—she doesn’t have to capture this moment with her camera. It’s already burned into her mind. Exactly like the secret that she must never reveal.
Do visions of what happened haunt him as they do her? She’s afraid to ask.
Out of nowhere, the memories appear before her eyes, and they’re not always the most terrifying ones.
The wall hanging, for instance, in a stranger’s living room, of a band of caribou at sunset. Blackish-brown shapes backlit with kitschy neon colors. The caribou stiff, as if blinded by the garish orange and yellow and red.
A wild animal frozen in the headlights’ glare, fearfully undecided between safety and doom.
CHAPTER 1
Lori’s hands were still so shaky that she repeatedly had to put down her cup. Her hostess had introduced herself as Bobbie, brought her tea, and now pursed her lips in sympathy.
“The truck must have given you a pretty good scare,” she said.
Lori nodded and rubbed her hands as if that could stop them from trembling.
“It felt like I was in one of those horror movies where giant trucks loom over little cars and chase them until their victims freak out.”
She regretted the words as soon as she said them. She was dramatizing again. As if what happened were a metaphor for her life: Lori with a monster breathing down her neck. But she’d laid those ghosts to rest long ago. What must the elderly woman in the armchair think of her? Was she annoyed at this stranger from Vancouver bad-mouthing Newfoundland? And Bobbie had been so friendly when Lori arrived. The B and B was decidedly a family affair: Lori’s hosts lived in the house. Bobbie, whose real name was Roberta Wall—Lori saw that on the Canadian government certification hanging on the wall—must like people a lot. She told Lori she’d been taking care of guests for thirty years.
“Thirty years, and I still think it’s fun.”
Bobbie had expanded her business two years before. Lori’s room was in her in-laws’ former house on the other side of a shared garden. All the other rooms were spoken for. Bobbie was expecting participants from a conference “that had something to do with excavations,” she said. Lori had taken a quick look at her room. A thin gold polyester bedspread; a little wall mirror framed by imitation seashells. Lori didn’t see a bedside lamp, but she always brought a portable reading light when she traveled.
“Oh,” she heard Bobbie say, “there’s Gordon.”
Lori smiled awkwardly, wishing she could just hole up in her room, gold polyester notwithstanding. Why had she chosen a B and B anyway? For this assignment, Mona had given her more than enough to cover a real hotel. But as a freelance photographer, Lori wasn’t used to luxuries.
A portly man limped into the living room and plopped down on the sofa.
“Gordon, this is Lori, from Vancouver. We were just talking about how trucks are making our roads so unsafe.”
Panting with exertion, the old man nodded at Lori.
“A truck almost ran her off the road,” Bobbie continued. “Poor thing feared for her life. People really shouldn’t speed with all this snow on the ground.”
Gordon Wall coughed and gasped loudly for air. “I can tell you exactly why trucks go so fast. They’re paid by the mile and not by the hour, so they drive like hell.”
“I couldn’t pull over anywhere to let him pass,” Lori explained. “There was no place to. I was afraid he couldn’t brake fast enough and would ram me.”
“They probably warned you about moose crossings but not about trucks,” Gordon surmised.
The phone rang and Bobbie took a reservation, giving Lori time to examine the living room. A wall hanging with caribou posed against a background of iridescent neon colors. Assorted plastic flower arrangements. A cuckoo clock and a collection of snow globes. At least a dozen framed family photographs. Lori had already heard how none of Bobbie’s six children lived nearby. Lori nearly said something about her own son, Andrew, but bit her tongue. Let sleeping dogs lie.
Bobbie, on the other hand, had probably shared her private life with hundreds of tourists over the years. Lori couldn’t fathom why. She would never again allow strangers to meddle in her personal affairs, to gain access to her inner life.
She tried once more to lift her cup without spilling.
A still small voice inside her said, You always manage to get into other people’s houses. Into their kitchens, living rooms, even bedrooms. And what’s more, into their souls. It’s how you make your living.
Bobbie hung up and turned to Lori.
“What brings you to Newfoundland?”
A friendly question she probably asked every guest. Nevertheless, it made Lori uncomfortable.
It was the same discomfort she’d felt in Mona Blackwood’s office. She’d been late for her appointment because a surprise Vancouver snowstorm had delayed her flight to Calgary.
Lori had assumed the assignment was going to be routine. Yet another portrait of a prominent person. Mona Blackwood was well known in Calgary. Owner of an investment firm that made money in the oil sector. Lots of money. She’d grown up poor in Newfoundland, but moved west to Alberta to seek her fortune. Forty-two, five years older than Lori. Blond, with a chiseled, austere face. Slim, athletic. A woman determined to be taken seriously in a man’s world. She wore a black two-piece suit over a white blouse. Lori would have preferred a little color for the photo and considered how to suggest it. She knew the background had to be bu
sinesslike and sober, nothing fussy or extravagant. Before staging anything, though, Lori wanted to get to know Mona a bit so she could really capture her in a portrait.
But to her amazement, Mona looked at Lori’s photographer’s bag and said, “We won’t be needing that today.”
Lori was taken aback.
“Aren’t I here for a photo shoot?”
“I’ll explain in a minute. Would you like tea, coffee, some juice, maybe?”
Mona motioned toward some armchairs.
Lori asked for coffee—she’d gotten up early. She’d barely sat down in the black leather chair when she saw the book of photos on the glass table. Her book. The pictures of the apostate Mormon sect in Splendid Valley.
Her name would always be associated with it.
Lorelei Finning. Splendid Valley.
Mona opened the book. Lori noticed her silver fingernail extensions. Interesting detail. A deviation from the perfect businesswoman image. Maybe she was open to having an unconventional portrait taken after all.
“I’ve read the introduction,” Mona began, “but can you tell me some more about how you came to take these pictures?”
Normally, Lori wasn’t fazed by the request. It’s what everybody wanted to know. How a sect completely shut off from the outside world in a settlement hidden behind high fences, a sect accused of polygamy and trafficking in girls—how a secretive community like that had allowed the photographer Lorelei Finning behind the curtain. Why had they permitted Lori to photograph women, children, and especially men married to dozens of eleven- and twelve-year-old girls?
No one who saw the pictures could accuse Lori of sympathy toward these men. The sect’s bishop had examined the photos and authorized them himself. He wanted to create a monument; he wanted to demonstrate to the outside world that everything was proper and correct.
But the bishop didn’t understand that images speak their own language, and Lori’s photographs were eloquent. She had captured something he was too blind to see.
That was the beginning of the end for the Splendid Valley community. The sect’s leaders were hauled into court and sentenced to prison.
The book could have been Lori’s big break, but soon after, she’d met Volker and followed him to Germany, a newborn in her arms.