Exodus 2022 (19 page)

Ella ran hard for the western end of the bridge, hoping against hope to see a car or pedestrian she could call to. There was no one. The bridge and feeder streets were silent. Empty. 

“Help!”

She ran on, fishing in her jacket for her cell phone, not finding it. Not daring to stop and look.

As she neared the end of the structure she leapt the guardrail—where the earthen riverbank rose up to meet the steel mass of the bridge—and plunged downhill, toward the water. It was dark under the bridge, even with the moon.

“Joe!” Ella screamed, tumbling down the bank, plowing through chin-high weeds and trash, tripping on chunks of concrete and old tires.

“Joe! Help! Somebody!” 

The water was just ahead now, and it was surprisingly, frighteningly vast—a dark, terrifying abyss opening before her. It was moving, too, flowing fast, like a river, as if the moon was exerting an especially strong pull.

“Joe!” Ella stumbled and flailed into the frigid channel, finally stopping when the water was over her knees.

“Joe!” she cried, frantically scanning the black liquid chasm, lurching this way and that, willing her eyes to penetrate the gloom.

What she saw filled her with dread: dark water surging against massive concrete bridge supports; a broad, flat river, rushing, hurrying out of Dyes Inlet, toward the larger sound.

What she didn’t see was even more paralyzing: There was no sign of Joe. No sign of whales, no sign of any movement whatsoever—other than the flowing, roiling water itself. 

“Joe!” She wailed, helplessly, choking on his name as the dark tide slapped the concrete monoliths before her, believing in her heart that he’d already been swept away, that his insane leap had stunned him—if it hadn’t killed him outright—and that his inert, lifeless body was drifting now into Sinclair Inlet.

“Joe,” she cried again, in a strangled, miserable voice no one could hear.

“Ella!”

Ella jumped.

“Ella!”

The voice was coming from upstream—a good hundred yards upstream by the sound of it, and it registered in the back of Ella’s brain that this made no sense.

How can he be upstream? How, in this current, can he possibly be farther up the channel? He should be floating past the ferry terminal by now. No swimmer could swim against this.

She let it go.

He’s alive. That’s all that matters.

“Joe!” She plunged further into the channel, feeling the pull of the current. “I’m here! I’m right here!”

And then she saw him, swimming fast, with the flow, swimming diagonally for shore. “Ella!”

He was coming straight for her. He was going to make it. He was going to be fine.

Overwhelming relief was her first emotion as she watched him swimming confidently for shore. She could breathe again. Think again. Suddenly feel the frigid current swirling around her legs.

Anger was her second emotion. Anger bordering on fury. How could he have done such a thing? How could he have risked his life like that? Where was his sense of self-preservation? Where was the love and compassion he supposedly felt for her?

He really is sick
, she thought.
Profoundly unstable. He must be.

“Ella,” he sputtered, staggering out of the water, stumbling and swaying as he found his footing.

She embraced his drenched, ice-cold body. Held him with every ounce of strength she possessed. The questions could wait. All that mattered now was getting him out of the water, up the bank, and into the car.

“Ella,” Joe said. He coughed, loosening his embrace and peering at her in the moonlight. He was shivering violently, quaking and pulsing like a patient in midseizure. But his eyes glimmered with their own inner light. “She’s here.” He shoved his sopping wet hair out of his eyes with one hand. “Lorna Gwin’s mother.”

Kawoof!

Ella, still facing the channel, gave a muffled cry as a whale surfaced directly behind Joe, a great black mountain of a beast.

The leviathan turned slightly, steadying herself in the shallows with a snap of her great tail flukes. The mist from the whale’s exhale showered the couple, and Ella suddenly found herself eyeball-to-eyeball with the creature. Ella moaned something inaudible and Joe felt her body quiver and quake—almost as violently as his own. He slid to one side so that she could make contact.

“This is Mia,” he said, as Ella stepped forward and pressed her palm to the whale’s sleek, black face. Ella’s own face was a mask of utter bewilderment. She looked as if she’d just been struck by lightning. “Mia,” Joe repeated thoughtfully, as if the facts were unfolding in his brain as he spoke. “Though that’s not her real name. She’s the one who’s been calling me. She’s the source of the voice in my mind.” 

Childlike joy animated Joe’s speech, as if this miraculous epiphany had saved his sanity and set him free—which it had. “I know what she wants now. I understand.”

Ella slowly retracted her hand, reluctantly severing contact with Mia. The whale drew breath into her sleek, shiny black body: a hollow, cavernous sucking sound. Then she slipped back into the channel, and was gone.

BY THE TIME BECK’S OPERATIVES
had scrambled to new vantage points, focused their night-vision gear, and located Joe and Ella, the couple was already exiting the water.

Allen Dodd had caught sight of a large, dark shape sliding into the water immediately behind the couple. He thought at first it was a boat, and spun the controls on his goggles, boosting the image and improving the focus. But when he looked again, the mysterious shape was gone. He scanned the dark recesses around the bridge supports. Nothing. He listened for the sound of a motor. No sound.

Dodd ducked down in the brush as Ella and Joe climbed the steep bank, silently, hand in hand, glancing at each other now and again, locking eyes momentarily, as if to agree that what they’d witnessed had not been a dream. Their legs felt weak and wobbly, but their faces glowed with wonder. 

“Who teacheth us more than the beasts of the earth, and maketh us wiser than the fowls of heaven?”

-Job 35:11

THE WHALE SPOKE TO ME
,
Ella thought, her head jammed with too many revelations to process.
Communicated with me. The voice is real; this is the whale we encountered while kayaking; Joe is not losing his mind; Joe was not poisoned; Dr. Heintzel’s theory about poisoning is wrong.

Ella’s hand—the one she’d used to touch the whale—tingled with static electricity, a bang-your-funny-bone numbness. She looked at her hand in the moonlight, turned it, and wondered what sort of signal or impulse had passed between whale and human. She realized she had not the vaguest idea.

They stumbled onto Washington Avenue, just as a yellow cab rolled past, slowing to look at the half-drowned man and the disheveled woman in wet blue jeans, brambles clinging to her fleece jacket.

The cab turned a corner and Joe pulled Ella close and whispered in her ear. “We need to talk,” he said, excited and out of breath. “But we can’t. Not yet. We’re being watched. And I’m sure your car is bugged.”

Ella’s body stiffened and she tried to pull away so that she could look into his eyes. He held her firm. “No time,” he breathed. “Please just play along with what I say, even if it doesn’t make sense. I’ll explain later. It’ll be all right.”

She nodded and squeezed him harder. “She’s real,” she gasped. “The voice is real.” The notion that her car might be bugged seemed trivial compared to this revelation.

“I know,” said Joe. “But we can’t talk about it. Did you hear what I said?”

“Yeah, I understand.” 

They resumed walking hand in hand and Ella peered at him curiously but did not speak. Joe massaged the side of his skull—where Heintzel had stitched his wounds. When they got to the Jetta, Ella drove.

Joe twisted the heater dial to full blast. “I’m so sorry!” he wailed, so abruptly that Ella jumped, jerking the steering wheel a little too far to the right and clipping the curb as she turned. For a split second she wondered what he was so sorry about. Then she realized he was acting.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“No it’s not,” Joe cried, with convincing anguish. “I tried to kill myself, Ella!”

“But you didn’t kill yourself. You’re here.”

Joe sobbed. “It seems so hopeless. Everything that’s happened. With my health, my church. All down the toilet.”

“Baby,” Ella said soothingly, “It’s okay.”

“As soon as I jumped,” said Joe, his words warped and wobbly and miserable-sounding, “I knew it was a mistake. I knew I could never leave you.”

“Thank God you’re all right. Just…thank God.” She found his hand and winked at him.

“I’m so cold,” Joe moaned, redirecting the heater and turning on the defroster. In fact, he had stopped shivering.

He twisted in his seat and methodically scanned the darkened interior of the car. “I just want to go to sleep,” he said, in weak, exhausted voice. “Sleep.” 

In reality, his face was bright and alert. Eyes sparkling. His methodical scanning ended when he reached the overhead reading light and gently probed the area around the fixture with his fingertips. Found a small bump under the fabric. 

Ella glanced up, fascinated, as Joe loosened the molding and pried the fabric back. The microphone was there, attached to the fixture with a tiny strip of tape. The mic glinted like an earring. 

Ella stared at it, feeling violated, wondering who’d planted the device and how long it had been there. She checked the mirror. A car was behind them, maybe a hundred feet back, but it kept going when she turned into Joe’s neighborhood. According to the clock on the dash it was 2:13 a.m.

“I need to sleep,” Joe repeated mournfully, as they pulled into his driveway. “Tomorrow begins the journey to restore my damaged life.”

Ella thought this was over-the-top and made a slashing sign across her neck. Joe’s eyes twinkled and he looked like he might burst out laughing. Clearly, he was enjoying playing for the microphone and did not seem alarmed by what it implied. 

“I’ll stay with you,” Ella said soberly, shutting the Jetta off.

They went inside, took a hot shower together and crawled into bed, wondering how many more microphones lay hidden and listening inside Joe’s house. They whispered, in the dark, under the covers, as they held each other close.

“Who’s watching us?” Ella asked.

“Beck,” said Joe.

The certainty in his voice surprised her. Frightened her. Beck was a far scarier possibility than Walter Spinell, who might have hired a detective to follow them, to build a case for a lawsuit; or Detective Palmer, who might have assigned a deputy to track them, as part of his investigation. Beck was a trained killer. A professional soldier surrounded by other soldiers, killers in their own right. Beck commanded his own private army.

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do you know it’s him?”

“Mia told me.”

Ella didn’t laugh. “The whale told you Beck was following us?”

“Not with words. But she made it clear enough.”

Joe massaged the side of his head, which was throbbing again.

“She—Mia—can see inside things. It’s her sonar, I think. That’s how whales hunt. How they navigate in the dark, you know?”

“I’ve heard about it, yeah.”

“Yeah. And when I jumped into the water tonight Mia looked at me, outside and in. And she saw something that wasn’t supposed to be there.”

“What? Like another bug? Something in your clothes?”

“Worse,” said Joe. “Way worse. Wires. Hardware. Inside my head. Next to my brain. Mia showed me a picture of it—sent me a picture—which I could see in my mind. There’s no mistaking it. Somebody put it there.”

Ella’s body stiffened in the dark. “That can’t be right,” she said, knowing in her bones that it was right.

“Heintzel must’ve done it,” said Joe, “When we were on the
Mercy
. She’s the only one who could’ve done it.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know, but Mia said the wires were…alive. Hot. Sending out signals.” He rubbed his head again. “She disabled them somehow. With her sonar. Cooked them. Didn’t feel too good.”

Ella pressed her body tight against Joe’s and caressed his face. She was trembling.

“We need to get out of here,” she whispered, “get our cell phones. You call the Bremerton Police. I’ll call Palmer.”

“No. Not yet.”

“But Beck could kill us. Anytime he wants.”

Joe could hear the terror in her voice. He said, “If he wanted that, he would’ve already done it. He put the wires in my head to monitor something. Watch for something.”

“You think he knows about Mia?”

“He must.”

“So why not go to the police?”

“We will. But Mia needs me to do something. Later today. If we involve the police now, it won’t happen.”

Ella was quiet for so long Joe thought she’d fallen asleep.

She whispered, “How can Mia communicate like that? So that we understand?”

“She knew someone,” he said, as the answer formed in his mind. “A long time ago. Someone who taught her things. Taught her about people.”

“Who?”

“A man. I don’t know. I can see him in my mind, but I have no idea who he is.”

“How can Mia put images in your mind? And what does she want you to do?”

“Ella—”

“Who named her Mia? And where did she go tonight? Can the other whales communicate like that?”

“Sweetheart—”

“Do you know you could’ve died jumping off that stupid bridge?”

Joe pressed his finger against Ella’s lips, then kissed her gently. “Baby,” he said, “we have to sleep. We’ll talk more in the morning.”

“But—”

He pulled her close and she melted into his arms.

One hour later Joe got up to pee. He stood unsteadily, then slumped back onto the bed, dizzy. Heart racing. Ella breathed peacefully, rhythmically, in the darkness nearby.

He stood again, using the edge of the nightstand for support, and faced the bathroom, ten paces away. The nightlight underneath the bathroom mirror appeared to be moving. Dancing. Zigzagging in the dark like a firefly. Joe felt his stomach flip and roll and tasted acid—bile—in his mouth.