Peter Heller - Celine

“Why am I not surprised,” Pete said.

“It’s true,” she said. “Imagine! You can view all those fish while you eat their cousins. Seems to me it would be nerve-racking for the permanent residents, don’t you think? Here.” She wormed a hand into the bag between them on the front seat and pulled out a plastic cylinder filled with strips of beef jerky. “Could you hand me one, please? Pete?”

Jerky was her favorite road-trip food. Maybe her favorite staple, period. If she had to live on jerky and marzipan she’d be totally happy.

Pete asked her if she’d like him to figure out the navigation screen on the dash of the truck and Celine waved her hand no. “They make me nervous,” she said.

“Really?”

She bit off a hunk of dried beef. “I think it’s a terrible invention. Nobody knows how to read a map anymore. You chase down a blue line but you have no idea where you are in the world. Like a rat in a maze. How do I ever know where I am in relation to Pikes Peak, or the South Platte? Or God?”

Pa had grown up on an island in Penobscot Bay, Maine, where everyone knew where they were in relation to God pretty much all the time; he saw her point.

“With regards to the wider context,” Pa said, “do you think we should talk about what we’re doing?”

Celine allowed her eyes to leave the road and to appraise her husband for a full beat. To continue the conceit: For twenty years now he had been spreading these maps on her table, always reminding her of the wider territory. When she lost her bearings he helped her find them, and gently suggested that there were probably many ways to move forward. Pete was a very rare bird.

“Okay,” Celine said. She loved this part. Pete would lay out the facts of the case. His mind was particularly well disciplined and she loved how he chose to organize everything, whether they be the chisels and hand planers he used in the shop in the basement at home, or the threads and stray leads of a case.

Pete took out his reporter’s notebook and hooked his grandpa half-glasses over his ears. “Well, we don’t have much. But then…” He frowned.

But then they never did. Have much. Celine was most happy when they had close to nothing. They had solved dozens of cases when a young adult came to them seeking a birth parent and had nothing but the name of an adoption agency, a town where the handoff had occurred, and perhaps one shred of maybe false information—the rumor, say, that the mother had been a lounge singer. Nothing but sealed records and a young life clouded by questions.

Pete cleared his throat. “Gabriela’s father was Paul Jean-Claude Lamont, born 1931 Sausalito—” Pete rarely editorialized during these recitations but now he did: “That might explain some things.”

“What do you mean?”

He took off his glasses and wiped them on the white handkerchief he always kept in one pocket of his vest. “It’s just a hunch. At the time, Sausalito was a hotbed of smugglers and rumrunners. It faced San Francisco across the bay, but it was isolated. The Golden Gate Bridge wasn’t completed until 1937. Trawlers loaded with liquor would come in through the Gate at night and unload their ‘catch’ and fast boats would cross early the same night or the next. It was dangerous work in the dark, in the fog. The crossing could be very rough and the currents are wicked. A lot of men died. Other things came in that way, too. Guns, opium, even fast women.”

“You mean sad, desperate, exploited prostitutes.”

“What I meant to say.”

“And so?”

“I’m not sure. It was a town full of adventurers and adrenaline. Pretty tough. A lot of traffic moving through, too. There was a big ferry that brought cars across to continue north and south on old 101. We’ll have to ask Gabriela if she knows anything about her paternal grandparents. They might have been schoolteachers for all we know.”

“How does it bear, though? On the case?”

“Well, I just think if there was any town in the country that was truly Out of the Box, it was here. Constant movement, danger. A place perched between the wild sea and the civilized world, a portal. Some people lived on houseboats as early as the twenties. Nobody really did anything the way they were supposed to do it. That’s the feeling I get. They had one of the world’s great cities facing them across the bay, with all its riches and allure, a usually easy boat ride, and yet, here, there was this sense that nothing could touch them, they could play by their own rules. If an impressionable kid grew up there, he probably wouldn’t do anything the way anyone else did either. He might march to his own drum. Have you seen Lamont’s photographs?”

“Have you ?”

“Well.” Pete kept farmer’s if not fisherman’s hours. He usually woke in the dark a little before five. At home in Maine he might have milked the family cow or tossed chunks of firewood from the woodshed to a pile outside the kitchen door. Now in Brooklyn, in their high-ceilinged quiet studio with the bellied cable lights of the Brooklyn Bridge stringing their windows and a tugboat with barge gliding silently beneath it—maybe a foghorn blowing from over near the Battery—then, while Celine slept up in the aerie of their loft, in what he considered the very beating heart of the day he would sit at his computer beneath the big window and lit only by the blue screen of the laptop he’d pull up a current case and follow leads through one improbable leap to another, browsing the Web the whole time. He would let his imagination soar. Sometimes, on these flights of speculation, he would come upon something that would crack a case. The other night he had been perusing Paul Lamont’s impressive catalogue—photographs of wild nature, animals unaware that they were subjects, expeditioners under extreme pressure, earthquake survivors, even war pictures. In the photographs, there was a sensitivity and a rare tenderness, a hewing to beauty that was remarkable.

Celine reached out and put a hand on Pete’s leg. His private world—the one before daybreak that she would never witness—was one of the things she loved and treasured about the man. For Celine, love, the love of a partner, was impossible without mystery. “It’s okay,” she said. “I know you cheat on me early in the morning.”

“Think about it,” Pete said. “Lamont is scarily smart. We know because he came out of public high school and attended my alma mater in Cambridge for a year and a half before dropping out. I called your cousin at the Peabody Museum—”

Celine lifted her hand and waved with excitement. “Rodney!” He was her favorite first cousin. Another Out of the Boxer: the curator of manuscripts at Harvard’s Houghton Library and a consultant at the Peabody—one of the great curating jobs in the world—who received his bachelor’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music and never earned a graduate degree. Unheard of in his position. A passionate viola player and amateur composer. And wonderful wit. Celine adored him. He came to Fishers Island for a few weeks every summer when she was growing up, and he acted very well as a surrogate older brother. He was one of those people who just seemed to make magical things happen. Once, just after Celine graduated from Putney, and during her particularly painful summer romance with a known cad, Rodney drove up island on an August night and convinced the miscreant to give Celine a station wagon. Signed title and all. She cried with delight and threw herself on her cousin’s neck and declared the car much much better than the man. Of course Rodney would do anything for her, and to have a leading research librarian at her pleasure proved at times invaluable in her work.

“Rodney,” Pete repeated, with no outward signs of jealousy. “And he got ahold of young Mr. Lamont’s Harvard transcript.”