Hugh Howey - The Shell Collector

Rather than snoop around in Ness’s robe, I decide to borrow clothes from the closet. Wrapping my hair up in a fresh towel, I step back into the wardrobe. I find a shirt and a pair of shorts. Both will be too big, but they’ll keep me decent. I’m pulling on the shorts when a small voice tells me I’m making a mistake, that I need to slow down, that the rain and my wet clothes are a blessing.

No one can blame me for coming up to the main house. I’m a guest. Our plans got rained out, and my clothes were soaked through. Of course I would want to find a change of dry clothes. Who wouldn’t?

I put the shorts and shirt back and pretend I never saw them. If I’m caught rummaging around, I can say I’m looking for something dry to put on. I can’t use that excuse if I’m already wearing something. It’s perfect. Agent Cooper would be proud.

Back in the bedroom, I go through the nightstand first. Two books with dog-eared pages, one on Tahitian wayfinding, the other on rogue waves. Both are from university presses. Expensive and dull. There’s a pen and a notepad, but nothing written on the first page, and the indentations are too faint to make out what was written before. A tangle of wires and two electrical chargers, nothing interesting.

I try the desk on the other side of the bed, passing by a display case full of rare shells. The problem with looking for excellent fakes in this house is that there are museum-quality pieces everywhere. Even if I had my loupe, the last specimens overcame close scrutiny by both me and the FBI. What I need are notes, passwords to his email accounts, letters from accomplices, something like that.

The small desk mostly turns up pictures of Ness’s daughter. They’re everywhere—in frames arranged across the desk and loose in the drawers. They start with her as a toddler and progress to a gap-toothed smile and then to a gangly young woman on the verge of puberty.

The rain outside is a steady roar. The metal roof rattles from the downpour, and overflowing gutters create a veil of water so thick that it’s impossible to see the beach, hard to even see the end of the deck. It’s also impossible to hear anyone in the house.

“Uh, hello?” a voice calls. “Ness?”

My heart drops. I close the desk drawers in a panic and hurry toward the bathroom. I’m halfway there when someone steps through the bedroom door. A woman. I’m so startled, it takes a moment before I recognize her. Victoria Wilde. Though she goes by Carter now, I think.

“Who are you? ” she asks.

I freeze in place. Ness’s ex-wife hasn’t changed at all from the last tabloid pictures I saw of her, years ago. She has on a black dress, heels, a white pearl necklace. She appears to be dressed up for some event, maybe a funeral. I start to answer her, to explain what I’m doing there, when she raises a hand.

“Never mind. I don’t want to know. Where is Ness?”

“I—I don’t know,” I stammer.

“Woke up to an empty bed, huh?” She crosses the room toward the desk I just left. “Let me tell you, that’s the good Ness. Try living with him for eight years. It’s when you’re falling asleep in an empty bed that you’ve got trouble.”

“I’m not sleeping with him,” I say. I feel young all of a sudden. Guilty. Full of excuses. It all comes from having been caught, but the bad thing I was doing wasn’t the bad thing I’m suspected of doing. The desire for truth won’t let me just shut up. “I’m a reporter,” I say.

“Of course you are, darling.” Victoria rummages through the same desk that I was just rummaging through, and while neither of us belongs there, she makes it look okay. I hear another voice somewhere in the house. Victoria is writing a note, presumably for Ness.

“No really,” I say. “I’m with the Times . I’m doing a piece on Mr. Wilde—”

Victoria turns and looks me up and down for the first time. I touch the towel on my head, then close the robe tighter across my chest and see that Ness’s initials are embroidered there. This looks bad.

“Research, I suppose.” She waves a pen up and down at me, then points it at the bed and raises an eyebrow. Part of me wants to blurt out that yeah, we’re having epic sex, and he wants me to move in with him. But it’s a vindictive part of me that I’m immediately ashamed of. I just want to hurt her because her presence is making me feel like a bad person.

“Holly’s riding lessons are rained out.” Victoria jabs the pen at the window. “Obviously,” she adds. “And I can’t watch her. I’m already going to be late for my luncheon. Make sure Ness gets this note. And don’t worry, she can take care of herself until he gets back.”

“His daughter?” I ask.

“ My daughter,” Victoria says. She slams the pen down on top of the note, leans on the desk for a moment, then laughs at something and shakes her head. She turns toward the door. I want to say something, to ask her to stay for a coffee, to talk to her, get to know something about her, when she turns, takes in the room one more time and my presence in it, and says, “Don’t rearrange the furniture.”

“What?” I’m still clutching the robe tightly around me.

She waves her hand at the room, at the whole house. “Just leave it like this. You’ll want to make it your own, but he won’t give a shit about you in a week and he’ll just have his staff put it all back where it was. All the little dents in the carpet will vacuum out in a few days. So save yourself the time.”

“I—”

“And another thing: Don’t let his smile fool you. It’s a shell. Ness is not a happy man. He never will be. You’ll drive yourself crazy thinking you can change that.”

“Look—” I say.

“Oh, you’ll think I’m a bitch for a month or so. You’ll hate me because I got the closest to him. But in another month or two, you’ll remember this conversation, realize I was right, realize I was being nice to you, trying to save you, and you’ll thank me. You might even write me a nice note.” She smiles. “I have quite a few of those.”

And then she turns and walks away before I can tell her that she’s wrong. Before I can thank her right then. Before I can tell her that she’s confirming everything I already think about the man, giving me the power to resist my baser urges while reminding me why I’m here. That if I knew where to send it, I’d write her that note right now. And I am newly resolved to reach out to her for an interview before I publish my final piece. I now have my in: I can tell her she was right, that I want to thank her in person, and that I want to know more about Ness’s unhappiness, where it comes from, and why he keeps it so cleverly hidden.

I’m running all this through my head when someone says, “I’m hungry.”

I refocus and see the gangly girl from Ness’s pictures standing in the doorway. Holly. His daughter.

“You’re the new one, huh?” she asks. And before I can answer: “What can you make me for breakfast?”

“I’m Maya,” I say. I reach out my hand, and Holly studies it a moment before accepting.

“Riding practice got canceled,” she says.

“So I heard.”

“Mom says I’m not old enough to stay at our house by myself, but she leaves me alone here all the time. I think if I get hurt, she wants it to be on his property.”

“Or maybe if you break something, she wants it to be his,” I suggest. I smile and hope she knows it’s a joke.

Holly smiles back. And then I feel a pang of sadness at how this seems normal to her, talking to a strange woman in her father’s bedroom, a woman who is wearing her father’s robe, and asking that woman to fix her something to eat. Thankfully, she turns and leads me toward the kitchen, and I’m able to use the robe’s lapel to dab at my eye.