The Raft (31 page)

“And that's what I'll write in the paper. My
Maggie. Not about murder and deceit and sex and corruption, but
about you. What you were able to overcome, what you were able to
accomplish with nothing but the help of one seasick reporter and
plenty of hard sailing.”

Maggie parted her lips to speak, but let her
words go unspoken. Instead, she said, “I love you,” and took
Rachael's hand.

“I love you, too,” Rachael replied, squeezing
Maggie's hand.

And they sat there, watching the sun glisten
off the water as cheers rose up from the gathered crowd behind
them.

Epilogue

Maggie's feet were cold.

Senator Hadian's loafers were, by no stretch
of the imagination, winter footwear. But they were still the only
shoes Maggie owned, and they were by now almost worn out in the
sole.

The last six months had seen Maggie spending
far too much time onshore. Her life had become an almost endless
parade of nondescript bureaucrats. Government types. Lackeys.
Everyone and anyone trying to tell Maggie what to do.

Who knew that running the Raft would turn out
to be so... complicated? After all, Maggie had no official power,
no one had ever elected her. She had no title and held no office.
She was simply in possession of the phone that rang any time anyone
on dryland wanted to reach the Raft. And ring the phone did, off
the hook.

Maggie stumbled through the door of the
Salmon Bay Cafe
with a gust of cold winter wind rushing
through the door behind her. Hurriedly, she latched the door and
shook the icy rain from her coat. She whisked it off and onto a
hook beside the door. She quickly scanned the breadth of the dining
room, scanning for her dinner date, and found the restaurant mostly
empty. It was early. Too late for lunch and too early for dinner.
Maggie found a table and sat down. A waitress brought coffee.

Of course, mostly all of the hullabaloo was
Maggie's own fault. She'd created an almost insurmountable mountain
of work for herself. When the early negotiations with the Feds had
broken down, with the government demanding all sorts of concessions
from the Raft that Maggie knew the Rafters would never make, she'd
fired back with her nuclear option: Raft statehood.

Of course, it was a crazy idea, no one on
either side of the table had really taken it seriously. But the
idea that the Raft might become America's first meta-state had
thrown a sizable wrench into the federal machine that had hoped to
reintegrate the Raft into dryfoot society.

After all, wasn't the nation built on the
idea of no taxation without representation? And with no fixed
address the Rafters had no electoral districts or congressmen to
represent them. It was all a bluff, and Maggie never pretended that
it was anything else – the Raft didn't realistically want or expect
to become the country's fifty-third state – but the long parade of
nondescript bureaucrats had the devil's own time trying to explain
exactly why the Raft
couldn't
apply for statehood. Was a
contiguous area of land
required
for statehood? Was land
required at all? If the Raft could apply for statehood, did that
then mean that, say, the Amish could apply for statehood based on
philosophical unity despite their disparate physical reality?

Nobody knew. Or rather, nobody knew why not.
They blustered and laughed and wrote dismissing editorials, but
Maggie's push for Raft statehood plodded on. The Raft had even had
a Constitutional Convention of sorts, if a potluck and putt-putt
golf aboard the
Kalakala
could be a Constitutional
Convention.

And the bluff served its purpose. A
Government official wasting his time thinking up new strategies to
derail statehood was a Government official not thinking up ways to
collect taxes from the Raft. It served a secondary purpose, too:
casting doubt on the validity of Senator Hadian's end-run
Constitutional Amendment to protect marriage.

Only a few weeks after Meerkat's murder, the
Supreme Court had ruled in favor of the Senator's ratification
convention. One had been hurriedly called in his home state of
Washington, safely over in the more conservative eastern part of
the state, and ratification of the 28th Amendment had easily
passed. It just left the Senator needing one more state to reach
the three-fourths required for the Amendment to become law. But if
the United States had fifty-three states, the Senator would find
himself in need of a fortieth state to back his Amendment. A
Herculean political task beyond even the powers of Senator
Hadian.

Maggie sipped at her coffee and smiled. It
was nothing solid, nothing permanent. But the delicious pleasure of
one-upping the Senator was well worth the bureaucratic pain. While
her petition for Raft statehood was before Congress, while those
who trod the corridors of power searched their law books for
exactly the right wording to well and truly crush Maggie's
nonsense, the Senator's attempt to codify in law his own hate and
prejudice would remain frustrated.

Yes, Maggie sipped at her coffee and smiled.
It was a delicious pleasure indeed.

All the back and forth and meeting with
officials had allowed Maggie to keep her diplomatic immunity
intact, as either a Law enforcement officer for the Nation of
Liberia or the potential first Governor of the State of Raft, it
didn't really matter. The IRS was turning a blind eye to Maggie's
comings and goings on dryland.

So when Rachael had called earlier and asked
if Maggie would like to have coffee at the
Salmon Bay Cafe
,
she'd been able to accept. She'd lowered her dinghy off the stern
of the
Soft Cell
and motored into the locks. Since saying
goodbye six months ago at the height of the summer, Maggie and
Rachael had only spoken on the phone. They'd both been so busy. Now
winter was settling down over the Northwest and the winds were
picking up out on the Puget Sound. It was a bumpy life aboard the
Raft in the winter, an ever-moving platform under your feet. Maggie
was more than happy to sneak away for an hour, to the warmth and
stability of an onshore restaurant. Even if there was a mountain of
work back on the
Soft Cell
that needed to get done.

And it would be good to see Rachael again,
Maggie thought.

The front door of the café opened and
Rachael's bundled, thin frame came in out of the rain. She
disentangled her red hair from her scarf and crossed the restaurant
floor, throwing her arms around Maggie as she stepped up to the
table.

“Maggie, you look wonderful,” she said,
taking a chair at the table.

“I suppose congratulations are in order,”
Maggie said, dropping back into her seat.

“Congratulations?” Rachael laughed. “You
mean, the article? I don't think so. You don't get congratulated
because you're
nominated
for a Pulitzer Prize.”

“Still, I'm very proud,” Maggie beamed. The
news had only become public last week. The article that Rachael had
written about the Raft, the coverage of Maggie's investigation of
Meerkat's murder, however incomplete, had become a sensation. It
had run in three parts over three weeks in the
Seattle
Times,
and
Time
magazine had republished it. The article
- and Rachael - were up for a Pulitzer. There was talk of a movie
deal.

“I had a good story to write about someone I
found very compelling,” Rachael said as the waitress arrived with
coffee.

“Well, you certainly brought some much needed
positive attention to the Raft. And me,” Maggie said, taking a
refill of coffee. “That article opened a lot of doors for me back
east with this whole statehood issue. For that, I very much thank
you.”

“You're welcome.” Rachael took a sip of her
coffee and found it scalding. She thought of something and smiled.
“I saw Senator Hadian on the news last night, fuming about you and
your Raft. I don't think he's entirely forgiven you for taking his
loafers.”

“Serves him right,” Maggie laughed. “For
trying to steal my civil rights.”

Rachael laughed too, stirring milk into her
coffee.

“Maggie, there's -”

“I just realized -”

They both attempted to speak at once.

“Sorry, you go first,” Maggie said.

“No, no, it's nothing. Please,” Rachael
conceded.

“Oh, it's silly. I feel silly now,” Maggie
blushed.

“What? What? Oh, now you have to tell
me.”

“Well, it was... well, running the dinghy
over here, I remembered picking you up that morning at Alki. When
you told me your daughter's name was Margaret. I remember I started
crying. It's silly, I know, but I never asked: Why on earth did you
name her that?”

For a long second, Rachael seemed to weigh
her response.

“Well?” Maggie finally asked. “Don't you
remember? It's curious if nothing else, naming your child after
your old lover.”

“Oh no, I remember,” Rachael shot back
quickly, “I was trying to properly sugarcoat my reply...”

“Oh, great,” Maggie rolled her eyes.

“No, no, it's not like that... listen, I'll
tell you if you promise not to get mad.”

“I wouldn't -”

“About this and about the other thing I'm
about to ask you.”

“What? Well, okay...” But Maggie was unsure
she could keep her promise.

Rachael leaned back in her chair and took a
deep breath. “When she was born, when she came out, Margaret, she
tore me up good. She was late, almost a week, and the delivery was
hard. Six hours. And after it was all over, I still had to go back
the next day to the emergency room to stop the bleeding. It's okay,
I was fine, it was just one of those things, but that stubborn
little... well, you know. She just had to do things the hard way.
If she could have come out sideways, I'm sure she'd have tried it.
And to this day, she hasn't mellowed at all. Not a bit.”

Maggie sardonically chuckled. “So you
thought: who does that remind me of?”

“Exactly. I couldn't get the comparison out
of my head. When I suggested it to Peter, he was fine with it. It's
his grandmother's name and I'm not sure he grasps the derivative.
But I'm superstitious about things like that. I think that names
are important, what we call things and people. Maybe it's working
with words all day. So, if Margaret was going have that side of her
personality, then I hoped, if I named her after you, perhaps she
might get the other side of your personality, too. The side that
lets you take that stubborn streak and make something out of it,
lets you be the squeaky wheel that actually gets the grease. Of
course, when I named her I never thought for a second I'd ever see
you again. That I'd have to sit here and explain it to you.
Otherwise, she'd have been 'Sally.'”

Rachael was blushing, trying to find
something else in the restaurant to look at other than Maggie. She
took a sip of her coffee and fiddled with the cup.

“Okay, I'm not angry about that,” Maggie
said. “What was the other thing you're about to say that was going
to upset me?”

Rachael let out a deep sigh. “I don't know if
I want to ask you, now.”

“Oh, come on,” Maggie smirked.

“No, I was entertaining the idea of us
working together again, but after that little confession, I'm
starting to think it might be weird.”

“No, it's -” Maggie heard the second part and
skipped the first. Then her brain played catch up. “What? Work
together? How?”

“Oh...” Rachael was still avoiding Maggie's
gaze.

“What? Now I am getting mad.”

“It's Peter,” Rachael began, turning to look
Maggie in the eye.

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing,” Rachael said quickly. “Nothing is
wrong with Peter, no, he has...”

“Has what?”

“He has a case...”

“A case?”

“A murder. A week ago. It has everyone
perplexed, it has Peter pulling out his hair. Well, after Meerkat,
after the vault. I sort of told Peter everything...”

“What?” Maggie's eyes grew very wide.

“I had to tell someone the truth. After I
wrote the
exposé. Peter can be trusted,
Maggie. He can keep a secret. He's my husband after all. Anyway, I
told him how you pieced the whole thing together. It impressed him.
Professionally.”

“
I don't
understand,” Maggie shook her head.

“
I was thinking
about a follow-up article. For the
Times
. Something to keep the story in
people's mind. You know, with the first article in front of the
Pulitzer judges, it can't hurt to have people talking about the
story. So, if the Seattle Police brought the Barefoot Detective in
on a case...”

“
The Barefoot
Detective?” Maggie gulped at her coffee in
surprise.

“
Yeah, I'm
trying it on for size. What do you think?” Rachael asked, leaning
forward and watching for Maggie's reaction.

“
I think you're
crazy.” Maggie put her coffee cup down.

“
But -” Rachael
tried quickly.

“
But leave me
out of it.” Maggie climbed to her feet. “Dryfoot problems are no
concern of mine,” she said, looking around for her coat. She
remembered it was on a hook by the door and started for
it.

“
Maggie,”
Rachael said, reaching out for Maggie's arm. “It would keep you in
the papers, you could use the press if you ever expect your
statehood petition to go anywhere.”

“
I don't,”
Maggie said, pulling away her arm.

“
Maggie,”
Rachael called out, rising from her chair.
“Please.”