Hugh Howey - The Shell Collector

Ness pours himself another glass of wine. I wave him off before he can offer me any. “I need to drive,” I remind him.

“And I need to calm my nerves,” he says.

It’s almost as if he knows what’s coming. But he must be referring to our confrontation from earlier.

“What did Dimitri do for the company?” I ask.

“A lot of things. Dimitri was a bright man. I’m assuming you know that he passed away this year.”

“Yes. Were you close to him?”

“Very close.”

I open my bag and dig out the box. “I’m sorry for your loss, then.”

“The whole world lost something when Dimitri passed. They don’t make them like that anymore.” Ness raises his glass toward the ceiling and takes a large gulp. As I set the small case on the counter, I hear him nearly choke and fight to swallow. He eyes the plastic case like it’s a lump of radioactive material. I almost don’t need to open the thing to know what I needed to know.

“Tell me what you think of this,” I say. I open the box so that only I can see inside, and I pull out one of the lace murexes. I pass it to Ness. He barely looks at the shell as he takes it, is still eyeing the box.

“A murex,” he finally says. “In good condition.”

“In flawless condition,” I say. “Museum quality. One of a kind, wouldn’t you say?”

Ness nods. “Sure.”

“So explain this.”

I place the other two shells on the counter. I can’t believe I’m doing this. And maybe since I just had one battery fail me, I worry about the amount of charge the FBI recorder has. I should have turned on my phone recorder as well. I try not to worry about that and just concentrate on Ness’s reaction as he studies the three shells.

“They’re nice,” he says. But he sounds distant. Far away.

“Any idea where they might have come from?” I ask.

Ness shrugs.

“I think you know,” I tell him.

He reaches for the bottle of wine, but I grab his wrist and stop him. I slide the bottle of wine toward me and out of his reach. Ness looks at me with a film of tears across his eyes. Worry at being busted? Nerves?

“I think…” Ness hesitates. “I don’t know why he would have taken them. It doesn’t make any sense. He could have just asked.”

“So these are yours?” I can’t believe this. Ness looks staggered. Numb. He would probably tell me anything in this moment.

“Yes, they look… familiar. They were probably mine.”

“Where did you find them?” I ask, knowing they didn’t wash up on any beach.

“I… they came into my possession a while back. A few years ago.”

“They’re only a few years old,” I tell him. “They’re fakes. But you must know that. Any collector worth his salt would. These have been extinct for twenty years—”

“Thirty years,” Ness says.

“So explain them to me.”

“I can’t.”

“How much of your collection is fake?” I ask. I feel bolder the more beat down Ness appears. His confidence is gone and mine surges. Like a seesaw. I forget why I was even nervous. Why I hesitated to do this. There’s a Pulitzer in this. Henry will go ballistic. Hell, I could probably get the science section rolling again, I’ll have so much leverage.

“They aren’t fake,” Ness says, but his voice is a whisper. He doesn’t even believe himself.

I laugh.

Ness looks up at me. His eyes widen at some thought. “I can prove it. Hold on.”

He goes to the kitchen and rummages through several of the cabinets, comes back with a heavy mortar and pestle, the kind used to grind up spices. Ness takes one of the lace murexes and places it in the mortar. Before I can stop him, he cracks the shell with the pestle. I feel the destruction in my chest, like those are my bones snapping.

He fishes out a piece of the broken shell. All I can think is that even a fake of such quality could pay my rent for the year. Even with the buyer knowing it was fake!

“Look,” Ness says. “Wait. I’ll get a loupe.” He turns away from the counter, and I hear myself say that I have one. I fumble in my bag. Ness is animated again, excited. “Look at the shell wall,” he says. “You’ll see a pattern where the slug’s foot scraped back and forth.”

I look through the loupe. I know exactly what he’s talking about; I feel like reminding him that I studied to be a marine biologist. Instead, I say, “This could easily be part of the mold.”

I hear another crunch. The mortar is emptied onto the granite again, forming a second pile of debris. And as I pull the loupe away, there’s a third crunch as the last shell is cracked open.

“Look at these,” he says. “They should be different.”

I’m too busy taking in the fragments and the powder everywhere. It’s as thoughtless as the driveway. Senseless waste.

“Look,” he insists.

And so I do. And sure enough, the patterns are different. The shells are distinct. So, not from a single mold.

I pull the loupe away. Despite what I’m seeing, another thought occurs to me. Ness is a collector. And no collector in his right mind, whatever their collection is like, could destroy three lace murexes without batting an eye. Without flinching. Much less seem to recover their spirits while doing so. His confession came by destroying the shells. All I can think of now is getting to the inn and calling Agent Cooper to let him know what happened here.

“You believe me, don’t you?” Ness asks. Almost with desperation.

“Sure,” I say. I check the time on my phone. “I think I should go.”

My car is beeping at me as I coast into the inn. I leave it with the valet, grab my overnight bag out of the trunk, and remind the young man a second time to make sure he plugs the car in. The registration desk is empty. There’s laughter from the bar, but the rest of the facility is winding down for the night. A man emerges from the back. I hand over my business card, ask for any available upgrade, and get a room key to a suite. I figure Henry owes me for yanking my story.

I find the suite and spend a few minutes unpacking. I catch a flash of myself in the mirror and decide that I look like a wreck. The first person I call is Agent Cooper. I try his cell and brace for the grumble of the half-asleep. Instead, he picks up on the first ring. Sounds chipper as he says “Hello.”

“Do you ever sleep?” I ask.

“Who is this?”

“Maya. Maya Walsh. From the Times. ”

“Of course. Sorry. Been one of those days. So how did it go?”

I imagined him waiting around breathlessly for my call. Instead, it sounds like I’m just one of many things on his mind. “It went great,” I tell him. “The shells definitely link back to Ness… Mr. Wilde, I mean. And the case you had the shells in, did it belong to Mr. Arlov by any chance?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Because he recognized it. And when I asked him if he knew Mr. Arlov, he said they were very close. I think those were his exact words. And then get this—he wondered why Dimitri would have taken the shells from him. They were definitely Ness’s.”

“And you recorded all this?”

“It should all be on your device. Hold on a sec.” I unbutton my blouse, work one arm free, move the phone to my other hand, and wiggle out of my top. Unsnapping the back of my bra, I let it fall away and unclip the recorder from the underwire. “Yeah, the little light is still on. So I should’ve gotten it.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah, he tried to convince me the shells were real. Was adamant about it.”

“I bet.”

“He even had me look inside the torus at how all the wear marks were different. But I was thinking maybe the molds are a one-off, you know? A different mold for each shell.”