The Shell Collector (2 page)

“I’m goddamn calm!” I shout.

A few heartbeats pass. Henry smiles at me. I pray to god I’m not smiling back.

“Will you listen to me for just a second?” Henry asks. “You know, because I’m your boss?”

I cross my arms. “Fine. So how much did Ness Wilde pay to bring our august presses to a screeching halt? Pray tell. I can’t wait to hear this.”

“First of all, I didn’t speak with him directly. I spoke with his assistant—”

“Figures,” I say.

“—and his assistant said that if you want the full story on Ness’s father and grandfather, that he’d like to fly you up to his estate to answer your questions in person. Three hours. Whatever you want to ask.”

I laugh. “I’ve done two years of research for this story, and he wants to give me three hours? C’mon, Henry, don’t you see what he’s really doing here? When I got on the train this morning, people were still reading
yesterday’s
paper. Not staring at their screens, but reading the goddamn
Times
. Because of
my
story. And now they’re expecting the second piece I promised—”

“I know.” Henry raises his hands. “Trust me, I know. Our editorial inbox is full of positive responses. And we’ve already seen a bump in new subscriptions. Which is why I told Ness’s assistant to kindly go to hell.”

“You did?” Now I’m confused.

“Of course. I slammed the phone down on her. With gusto. And then it rang again. Immediately.”

“Mr. Wilde himself,” I say. “So
now
he has the balls to call you.”

“I wish it’d been Ness. I would’ve told him off in person. It was the FBI.”

Before I can ask if I heard Henry properly, he leans forward and places a finger on a white business card sitting apart from the rest of the clutter on his desk. I can see the three letters in a large blocky font from where I’m standing. Looking closer, I see a round seal stuffed with an eagle, an American flag, a ring of gold stars, and probably a slice of apple pie in there somewhere. I pick up the card. It belongs to a Special Agent Stanley Cooper.

“I tried to save you a trip uptown,” Henry says. “This guy wants to see you. I emailed you his contact info and left you a voice message—”

“I listen to my voice messages like once a month,” I remind Henry. “You should’ve texted me.”

“Whatever. Just go talk to this guy.”

I check the address on the card: 26 Federal Plaza, down in the financial district. “What does the FBI want with me? And what’s this got to do with you yanking my story?”

Henry takes a deep breath and nods at the card. “I’ll let him explain. It’s complicated. But listen, Maya, the important thing to know is that we’re running the rest of your series. We’re just going to run them weekly rather than daily. You’ve got my word on that. You know I want to nail this guy just as much as you do—”

“As much as I do? I spent seven years writing for the science section before you canned it. All those shelling reports I wrote, the sea level stories, the practical disappearance of Louisiana that I covered, the graft with the construction of the Manhattan levees, the day Times Square flooded? How about my editorials about the beaches that are washing away every single day—?”

“Those are my beaches too,” Henry says, and I can see that his cheeks are red. He’s angry. And maybe not entirely at me. “We’re going to run the rest of the exposé. It’s great work, Maya. You know that. If it were up to me, your second piece would be running right now. But it isn’t up to me.”

“Sure it is,” I tell him. “Ever hear of this thing called freedom of the press?” I shake the business card and nearly call him a spineless ass, but the door behind me is open, and I haven’t heard a single tap on a single keyboard since I walked into Henry's office. Even my insubordination has limits.

Henry grabs his coffee and takes a noisy sip. Whatever’s on his face right then is [REDACTED] by the mug. He and I have a long history of throwing barbs at one another, but this is something else. This is serious. By the time he sets the mug back down, the tension is as thick as sidewalk crowds during lunch hour.

“The FBI isn’t after you or me,” Henry calmly explains, like this should’ve been obvious from the beginning. Like I should know that we at the paper are small fries. And the rest dawns on me before Henry can spell it out. I understand why he pulled the story. And why he wants me to go speak to this Agent Cooper.

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation is after Ness Wilde,” I say.

Henry nods. “Bingo. And they want your help in bringing him down.”

I hail a taxi and give the driver the address for the Federal Plaza downtown. Broadway is jammed. It’s high tide, and of course a handful of pumps are on the fritz. A handful always are. Looking west down 39th, I can see a logjam of traffic backed up from the Lincoln Tunnel and a shimmer of standing water between the cars. People are sloshing through the traffic with galoshes on, despite it being summer and no rain in sight.

A friend of mine at the
Times
has lived in this city for over seventy years. He runs the obits, is semi-retired, says his job is to write farewell letters to old friends. He talks about the old days when New Yorkers didn’t need to check the tide tables before their commute to work. He talks about days when you made sure your train was running, checked if you might need an umbrella or a scarf, not whether your levee had breached or if your neighborhood pumps were down. The man is a walking memory of less-flooded times.

But even in my lifetime, there’s been a lot of change. I remember when I was young, thinking the sea was only capable of offering solace. She was only ever a calming force. I didn’t see her angry side until I was in my teens.

Hurricane Julia. There was a mandatory evacuation. My sister and I helped Dad put the storm shutters over the windows while Mom fretted over which irreplaceable things to pack in the car. We left not knowing what we would return to, if anything. The highway was a parking lot, so Dad took us down the coast before cutting in to the interstate. Driving along the beach, with the horizon a dark and foreboding gray, he pulled onto the shoulder so we could all marvel at the sky.

My sister and I begged to run up to the top of the beach access for a better view. A glance at Mother, our arbiter of risk, the slightest of worried nods. “Be quick,” our father had said.

As loud as the wind was, the sea was louder. Like thunder in my bones. I heard the angry waves before we got up the slick wooden stairs. At the top of the walkway, I stood and gripped the rail and leaned into the wind and watched an ocean I thought I knew whip and thrash around like an enraged beast.

Mountains of white foam crashed down in avalanche after avalanche. The waves bashed the rocks and chewed up the sand. Our parents used to say that the shoreline was forever changing, that a storm might move an entire beach or that the rising seas would push inland and cover what used to be shoreline, but I was too young to notice these things, and I’d never seen a storm like this.

Watching the sea that day, I thought of the people on the local news who got interviewed about a neighbor who had done something heinous. “He was always so quiet,” the neighbor would say. “He was the nicest person in the world.”

That’s how I felt then, seeing that something so familiar had become completely unrecognizable. A loved one had snapped, had become angry. The waves that normally drew us to her now caused our family to flee in terror.

I chose to blame the storm and the wind back then, rather than the sea. I made excuses for her.

As the traffic on Broadway inches south to a symphony of squeaky brake pads and prolonged horn blasts, I think back to the next time I saw the ocean angry. It was my freshman year in college. I went out on a boat with some friends and just assumed they knew what they were doing, that they’d checked the weather. We were five miles offshore when we saw the squall: a great cliff of clouds that stretched from the heavens down to the sea—white on top but a dark gray beneath, like a pristine wedding veil someone had dragged through the mud.

There was no going around it, so we tried to race back to the inlet, but the storm was moving too fast. Winds over fifty miles an hour. It hit us all at once like a heavenly fist, a mighty slam of stinging rain and raucous seas. The outboard came out of the water as a steep wave lifted us up, and the engine stalled. We huddled in the floor of the boat, gripping each other and the rails, quiet, shivering, drenched, the boat filling with water, all of us absolutely terrified. The sea rose around us in crashing pyramids. I thought she would swallow us, this thing from which I had only known love. I learned to fear her then, and to simultaneously hate myself for
feeling
that fear. Afterward, I made more excuses: I blamed it on the sky, on the weather, on the poor planning.

Abusive relationships often go like this: falling in love, not seeing the ugly side, coming up with rationalizations when you do. It’s hard to get free, because you just want to recapture some lost feeling. You want to feel safe, respected, honored again. And you’ll play games with your mind to make that happen. It’s the alcohol’s fault; it’s the stress of their job; you may even make the great sin of blaming yourself.

By the time I was born, they’d already built the levees around Manhattan. Much was made of the project back when it was just an idea: how much it would cost, how unnecessary it was, debates about whether the sea would rise or not. Reading a historical account of the levee project today is strange, knowing what we now know. You marvel at the lack of impatience, at the bickering over details and budgets. Coastlines around the world were being redrawn while people argued whether anything was even occurring, much less whether it was our fault.

When the Hudson first breached the new levees, I was working as a young writer at the
Times
. It was a perigean spring tide, when the moon is at its closest to the Earth and it lines up perfectly with the sun. What used to merely flood the edges of Manhattan now marched across Broadway at midtown. The subways flooded. The city was brought to its knees by an extra six inches of water.

The Hudson River and the East River transformed overnight. No longer beautiful backdrops skirting the city, they became a coiled threat. A lingering drunk. Something to be wary of at all times. I can feel them right now, running down either side of Manhattan, their waters higher than these streets, held back only by great walls and elevated parks. Here I am trapped in the middle, creeping along in a trickle of traffic that flows slower than the tides. Those bodies of water could come together at any moment and drown us all. That’s what they’ve become. And we let them.

Like a lot of people, I sold my car soon after the big levee breach and bought an old electric. Didn’t care about the cost. I changed a lot of habits. And like a lot of people, I made excuses for the rising sea levels. I blamed the companies pumping oil and gas from the ground. I blamed the smiling CEOs at the helm, like Ness Wilde. I blamed the politicians who refused to do anything as they kept getting reelected. I blamed anyone other than the glorious sea of my remembered youth.

I blamed anyone other than myself.

The taxi lets me out on Worth Street, which is high and dry. Inside the Federal Plaza, I go through a security routine that has me patting my pockets for my boarding pass. I have to practically disrobe and send my bag, shoes, and coat through one machine while the rest of me stands inside another to get a thorough scanning. On the other side of the security station, I present Agent Cooper’s card to a man behind an information desk. He picks up his phone and speaks to someone while I thread my belt back through my slacks.

“Fourth floor,” he tells me, hanging up the phone. “Elevators are to the left. Someone will meet you up there.”

I make my way toward the elevators, and now that I’m in this building, I wrack my brain for what Ness Wilde might have done to have gotten the FBI’s attention. Tax evasion is the most obvious. Ocean Oil gets press every year for how little they pay in taxes compared to regular folk like me. Then again, people like me don’t have entire divisions of tax experts on the payroll. And would that be the FBI’s jurisdiction? I get all the three-letter agencies confused.

Whatever it is, I imagine I’ve got some rewrites ahead of me. Yesterday’s piece was about Ness’s great-grandfather. I broke the story up to cover each of the four generations of Wildes individually. If Henry plans to run them weekly, that gives me a few weeks before I have to turn in any revisions on Ness. Plenty of time to tack on whatever’s happening here. A picture of Ness Wilde in handcuffs above the center fold flashes before me. I’m smiling as I step off the elevator.

“Maya Walsh?” a young man asks. He’s dressed like a TV version of what an FBI agent looks like: black suit, scuffed black shoes, thin black tie.

“Agent Cooper?” I ask.

“I’ll take you to him. This way.”

I follow the young man through a maze of cubicles toward the far side of the building. We stop outside an office with Cooper’s name on a brass plate. The young man knocks twice, then lets me inside. The office is dimly lit, the blinds drawn down over the windows. Cooper sits behind his desk, looking at an open folder. A single lamp illuminates the space. There’s a scattering of seashells across the desk, lining the windowsill, and more on top of the filing cabinets. Cooper is obviously a serious collector, and I feel immediately more at ease.

“Ms. Walsh,” he says. He closes the folder, stands up, extends his hand.

“Just Maya,” I say. The young deputy backs out and closes the door, leaving us alone.

“Call me Stan.” He smiles and holds my hand a little longer than necessary. Is he hitting on me? I can never tell. Either way, my mind does this weird New York thing where it imagines me dating every single person I meet, regardless of age, gender, or what part of town they live in. I understand that this is a municipal disorder and that I’m not the only sufferer. And while Agent Cooper is handsome and a collector, I don’t see myself dating an FBI agent. I’m good at this: ruling people out with excuses as flimsy as they are fast.