“Thank you,” Otto said, his eyes starting to sting.
Richard shook his head. “Don’t thank me yet. We got a long beach to walk before we’re done and the tide’s runnin’ against us.”
“Always is.”
Richard grinned. He shifted his weight and nodded toward the cottage. “Suppose there’s a cuppa tea and a bit of that cobbler left?”
“Only one way to find out.”
Otto led the way through the deepening dusk and felt his father’s arm drape across his shoulders.
“You’ve made me proud, Otto. You’ve made me proud.”
Otto nodded but didn’t trust himself to speak.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Troy Harbor: April 12, 2346
JIMMY STEPPED OFF THE tram and stared down the length of the street. He’d spent most of the ride staring out at the coastline streaming by. The trip from the Inlet had taken almost ten stans but it gave him a chance to get a look at the operation from the ground. He felt a little gritty and more than ready to get off the train.
The afternoon sun cast slanted shadows across the street. Boats lined the pier, the crane booms pulling buckets of fish from the holds and dumping them onto the conveyors. The onshore breeze brought the scents of fresh-caught fish, hydrazine exhaust, and the sea along with the grumble of engines and the occasional shout.
The tram pulled out, the whistle of its passage dopplering down to nothing before it even cleared the far turn toward the next stop.
He hefted his shoulder bag and headed for the Muddy Grounds. The same sandwich board stood on the sidewalk outside. He shouldered the door open and stepped into a whirlwind of activity. The place wasn’t standing-room only, but almost every stool at the counter had a butt on it and all the tables had at least three or four people. The smell of fishermen—part wool, part rubber, part honest sweat—carried over the aromas of fresh bread, fresh coffee and some kind of baked fish.
A waitress scurried by with a tray of food and nodded. “Grab a seat, hon. Somebody will get to you.” She continued on to a table beside the door and began distributing plates around to a group of smiling, windblown workers.
Jimmy smiled to himself and started for the counter, slipping between the tables and chairs, holding his bag in front of him to keep from banging anybody as he passed. He gathered a couple of curious looks and cautious nods as he worked through the crowd. He’d almost reached the counter when he heard his name called over the din.
“Jimmy.”
He glanced at the corner and spotted Nan waving at him. She pointed to an empty chair at the table. He changed course and worked his way over, hooking the strap of his bag over the back of the chair and settling into the seat. He nodded. “Thanks. You’re just the person I was looking for, actually.”
She grinned and sent an elbow toward the redhead on her left. “Told ya.”
The redhead smiled but seemed uneasy; she fiddled with a coffee mug in front of her and looked at Jimmy in short glances.
Jimmy held his hand across the table. “I’m Jimmy. You already knew that. Who are you?”
The redhead looked up at him, eyes a little wider than before. She glanced at Nan before shaking his hand. “Gloria. Gloria Marks.”
The waitress swung by the table with a fresh mug and a carafe of coffee. She plopped the mug down and topped it off. “You need anything in it?”
Jimmy shook his head. “But I’ll take a bowl of chowder.”
She grinned. “Gotta love a man who knows what he wants. Comin’ up, hon.”
Jimmy looked at Nan. “You knew I’d be back?”
Nan nodded. “Rumor is you’re getting hammered by grievances.”
He took a sip of coffee and shrugged. “They’re still coming but I’m more interested in you.”
She raised her eyebrows and picked up her knitting from an open bag beside her chair. She took a moment to get the needles working before glancing at him. “What d’ya wanna know?”
The waitress came back with chowder and a biscuit. “Anything else?”
Jimmy shook his head. “This’ll do for a start.”
The woman nodded, topped off his cup, and left.
Jimmy slathered butter on the biscuit and asked, “How’d it start?” He took a bite and let the warm buttery flavor fill his mouth.
“Son of the shaman?” Nan asked. “Why ask me?”
He swallowed and took up his spoon, grabbing some chowder and blowing on it. “You were here then,” he said. “Thought you might remember.”
Gloria sucked in a breath. “You’re not that old, are you?
Nan chuckled. “Yes, m’dear. I’m that old. Older than that, actually.”
Gloria’s eyes all but bugged out of her head. “You can’t be.”
“Good genes and clean livin’,” Nan said. “I’ve got at least one of those runnin’ in my favor.” She paused her knitting to take a swig of coffee and give Jimmy a side-eyed look. “What do you know already?”
“I know you were here for the pre-lease period, that we established the lease in ’56, and that nobody was designated as shaman until ’70.”
“Anything in that surprise you?” Nan asked.
“Only that the first mention of them shows just over fifty shamans and that we had three hundred by ’76.”
Gloria looked back and forth between them. “And they talk about rabbits,” she said.
Nan’s fingers picked up the knitting again and she nodded. “The moot was busy covering their asses. That lasted until the turn of the century.”
“Why’d they stop?” Jimmy asked.
Nan shrugged. “They still recognize a few here and there.”
“But something happened in 2300,” Jimmy said.
Nan glanced at him without letting up the pace on her knitting. “Nothin’ to do with me.”
“That was when I took over from the Ole Man,” Jimmy said.
“You must remember as well as me, then,” Nan said. “You were born in—what? ’70?”
“No. ’68.” Jimmy took a moment to grab more chowder, enjoying the fish and real tarragon. “By the time I took over, there were a couple of thousand shamans. The population’s doubled since then.”
“What? Of shamans or people?” Gloria asked.
“Both.” Nan and Jimmy said it at the same time.
Nan gave him a grin and he shrugged.
“What do you really want to know?” Nan asked after a moment.
“Two things,” Jimmy said. “Why is this rule in place, and why is the Ole Man so dead set on killing it before he’ll let a woman be recognized as a shaman?”
Nan pursed her lips and looked down at the needles dancing in her fingers. “The rule protected the first people designated as shamans.” She glanced over at Jimmy. “Some people aren’t cut out for the standard working life. We wanted to make sure they had a place.”
“We who?” Jimmy asked.
“Your father.” Nan paused. “Me.”
Jimmy let that statement lay on the table for a few moments as he sipped his coffee. “You know who the first shaman was.”
She nodded but then shrugged. “The first shaman is still alive but has never been recognized.”
Jimmy nodded. “I figured as much.”
Gloria stared at Jimmy and then looked hard at Nan. “How can you be a shaman but not recognized?” she asked.
Nan’s fingers stopped and she looked at Gloria, her eyebrows raised.
“The first shaman was a woman,” Jimmy said.
Gloria’s lips formed an O.
Nan turned back to her knitting. “Nothing much can be done about it.”
“There’s a story here,” Jimmy said.
Nan nodded but didn’t look up. “Not my story to share.”
“Your grandson’s?” Jimmy asked.
Nan smiled and shrugged. “What little he knows. You’ll have to ask him about it.”
Jimmy frowned at the exposed bottom of his bowl, making one last scrape around w
ith his spoon to get the last of the chowder. “Somebody else,” he said.
Nan nodded.
Jimmy lifted his mug and held it in both hands in front of his face. “Why so many?” he asked after a few moments. “Why so late?”
Nan shook her head. “Not my story.”
“But you know,” Jimmy said. It wasn’t a question.
She gave a micro-shrug. “I have my suspicions,” she said.
Jimmy sighed but felt a smile growing. “Obfuscation,” he said.
She glanced at him.
The waitress cruised by with the coffee carafe, filling cups around the table and picking up Jimmy’s empty bowl. “Anything else?”
“Apple pie?” he asked.
“Ice cream?” she asked.
“Just the pie.”
She nodded and sailed away toward the kitchen.
“You just came here for the pie,” Nan said.
Jimmy chuckled. “It’s a long way to come for pie, but I’ll admit I planned on having a slice or two before I left.”
“Oh?” Gloria asked. “You staying long?”
“Tram back in the morning.”
“You’re staying in transient?” she asked.
Jimmy nodded and took a slug of coffee. “Isn’t anywhere else, is there?”
Gloria looked down at her hands and shook her head. “No. I just thought maybe you had friends to stay with or something.”
“He has no friends here,” Nan said.
Gloria shot her a startled look. “That seems kinda mean.”
Jimmy shook his head. “It’s the truth. I’ve only ever been here twice. Hard to have friends when you’re not around.”
Gloria settled back in her chair and pursed her lips. “Still seems mean.”
“No offense,” Nan said, a tiny grin teasing her lips.
“None taken,” Jimmy said.
The waitress came back with the pie and a smile. “There’s more where that came from.”
Jimmy nodded his thanks and picked up a fork. “One will do me. For now.”
The waitress looked at Gloria. “Aren’t you supposed to be picking up the kids?”
Startled, Gloria glanced at a big clock over the door and gave a little “eep”. “I’m so dead,” she said, grabbing a bag from beside her chair and pulling a wrap off the back. “Put it on my tab, Helen?”
“Scoot,” the waitress said with a grin and stepped back out of the way.
Jimmy caught the waitress’s eye. “Put it on my tab.” He nodded at Nan. “Hers, too.”
The waitress nodded and continued on her path.
“You didn’t need to do that,” Nan said.
“No, but I wanted to.” He ate a couple of bites of pie. “Anything you want to say now that the ears are gone?”
She pursed her lips, apparently concentrating on the way her knitting needles plied the yarn. Eventually she paused and shook her head. “Your father is a stubborn man.”
The non sequitur caught Jimmy’s funny bone and he snorted. “I don’t think that’s news to anybody.”
“When I met him, he wasn’t as harsh as he is now,” she said. Her voice took on a dreamy quality and her focus went to someplace in the middle of the table, even as her fingers never lost the rhythm of her knitting.
“You’ve seen him recently?” Jimmy asked.
Her head gave a little shake. “Not in decades, no.” She sighed and looked at Jimmy. “But I’ve seen his fingerprints on all this shaman business. You’re right. It goes back to the beginning and no, I’m not going to tell you. I said it’s not my story to tell.” She gave another little shake of her head and looked back at her knitting, tugging on the yarn from her bag to gain a little slack.
“You’re sure?” Jimmy asked.
She didn’t say anything for a long time, just plied her needles in a clicky-clicky rhythm. The early evening crowd noise all but drowned out the sound as the locals gathered.
The waitress came back and offered a refill as she scooped up the empty pie plate.
Jimmy nodded and pushed his mug to the corner of the table so she could fill it
Nan glanced up and shook her head. “I’m at my limit for the day, dear.”
The woman nodded and left.
Jimmy looked around at the crowded dining room. “Whose story is it?” he asked.
“Your father’s now,” Nan said. “Maybe Monty’s.” Her needles paused for a few heartbeats before resuming their clicking. “I don’t know how much of it he knows.”
“Monty?” Jimmy asked.
“Yeah. It’s not something we’ve had a lot of conversations about.”
Jimmy sipped his coffee and thought about that. “Autism,” he said.
Nan’s needles picked up their pace and a frown creased her brow as she stared at the work in her hands.
“Asperger’s?”
“You’re just guessing now,” Nan said. Her hands stopped and she peered at him from under her frown. “Talk to your father. He’s the one with the answers.”
Jimmy stared back at her, rolling the idea around in his head. “What can I do to help?” he asked.
Her face blanked for a moment, smoothing out the frown before it reappeared as a scowl. “What makes you think you can help anybody?”
Jimmy shrugged and looked into his nearly empty coffee mug. “I don’t know that I can. That’s why I asked.” He sloshed the coffee around in the bottom of the cup for a bit. “Seems to me something went really wrong somewhere along the line. Before my time. I’m betting you know what it was, but you’re not going to tell me because it’s something my father did.” He glanced over at her. “Something he did to you.”
She swallowed hard and picked up her knitting again, looking at the needles as if they required her attention. “Something I did to him, too,” she said. “You’re not wrong.”
“How many women here would be shamans if they were male?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know and it’s a stupid question.” She knit furiously for a few moments, her scowl deepening but her focus elsewhere. “There’s two things. Separate things,” she said, her voice sounding old and whispery. “The title and the gift.”
Jimmy nodded. “I’ve heard that.”
“The gift,” she said. “That’s rare. That’s the thing. It’s not just the callin’. It’s not just the empathy for the people around ya. It’s being in tune with the world.” She didn’t look up. “Lots of people have the title. Lots more have the calling, the empathy.” She shook her head, biting her lip and frowning at the needles flashing in her hands. “Not everybody has both and fewer still have the gift that makes it all make sense.”
Jimmy nodded and drained the now-cold coffee from his cup, snapping it down on the table. “It’s beginning to be a little clearer.”
She glanced at him. “You think so?”
He nodded again and looked around for the waitress. “What’s the word for the son of a half-brother?” he asked.
Her hands froze and she stared at him, her face blank.
Jimmy spotted the waitress and flexed his thumb in her direction. She nodded and held up a “one sec” finger.
He pushed his chair back from the table and turned in his chair to face her. “You were here in the beginning. Young, beautiful. My father was here. Older. Rich. Powerful. Alone and just as stupid then as he is now.”
She blinked. “Stupid?”
Jimmy nodded. “Men don’t start wise and get stupid as they age. They tend to start dumb and either grow out of it or work to maintain it.” He shrugged. “My father might have been smart in business.” He paused when the waitress came over and presented the tab. He keyed in a big tip and thumbed it, handing it back with a smile.
“Thanks. Come again,” she said and went back to her other tables.
Jimmy looked back at Nan. “He might have been really smart in business or at least at fishing. He got Umber going before coming here. Left a couple of ex-wives and my half-sister there w
hen he set up the deal for St. Cloud.” He looked into her eyes for a moment, seeing the truth in them. “But you knew that already.”
She nodded, tentatively, almost like she didn’t want to.
“So, you’re both here. Small populations. Crossing paths.” He paused, unsure about continuing.
She nodded again, deliberately. “Shaman,” she said. “That’s what you’d call your half-brother’s son.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Troy Harbor: April 13, 2346
JIMMY WOKE EARLY AND left the transient workers quarters just after sunrise. The day had dawned cloudy and cold. The wind smelled of rain in the not too distant future. A quick check of the waterfront confirmed that the tide was about halfway out, so he zipped his windbreaker and climbed the headland toward Monty’s cottage.
He crested the ridge and looked down the length of the wide expanse of beach. The chimney on Monty’s cottage tossed a thin plume of smoke into the onshore breeze, tattering and tearing into nothing almost as soon as it cleared the metal chimney. He picked his way down the rocky path toward the cottage and was about to knock when it opened, startling both of them.
“Well, good morning,” Jimmy said.
Monty frowned. “I’m just going out for my walk. What do you want?”
“Thought I might walk along with you, if you don’t mind,” Jimmy said, moving out of the way.
Monty stepped out of the doorway and closed the door behind him with a slam, forcing Jimmy to take another step back. “What if I do mind?”
Jimmy shrugged. “Well, that tells me something but not what I really want to know.”
Monty stared at him for a few heartbeats as if weighing him with his eyes. “You plan on doin’ a lot of talkin’?”
“I’m hoping to do a lot of listening,” Jimmy said.
Monty’s eyebrows rose a bit, but he shrugged and headed down the trail to the beach. “Tide’s goin’ but it’ll turn soon.”
They walked along the hard-pan, Monty keeping to the higher ground where the waves had pushed piles of sticks and weed. He kept glancing at Jimmy. After a few yards, he asked, “What you want to listen to?”
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