The Shell Collector (7 page)

Ness catches the door as it swings shut, and I can feel him standing on the stoop as I crunch around the car to the driver’s side.

“What do you mean,
manipulate
you?” he asks.

I glance at him over the roof of the car, catch the bewildered look on his face from the flickering porch light. Damn, he’s good.

“I think you’re a sociopath,” I say bluntly. “You tell people what they want to hear, make them vulnerable, make yourself appear vulnerable, and then you take your prey to bed and revel in the gushing stories they print that never tell anyone a goddamn thing. You hang us on your wall, collecting bylines like frat boys collect panties.”

I open the door and get into the car.

“You wanted to know my story,” Ness says. “You wanted the truth, and I’m trying to give it to you.”

He looks bewildered through the passenger window. Or upset. I realize now that I won’t be coming back tomorrow. Or ever. Agent Cooper can unravel this on his own. I’m going to run my stories and expose this man for what he is.

I press the start button and place the car in gear, attempt to spin out, but the car doesn’t move. The low battery light is blinking at me. I glance over at the glove box, which is hanging open, the dimmest of glows leaking from inside. Fuck me.

I look to the porch, but Ness has disappeared back into his house. I slap my steering wheel in frustration. I could’ve sworn I’d closed the glove box when I put my registration away.

The light on the porch is still on. I stare at my phone and consider calling the inn or a taxi or a tow, but I don’t know how to get any of those people past Ness’s double guard gates. With no other choice, I get out of the car again and approach the house. My shouted accusations hang in the air, are still ringing in my ears. Ness answers the door holding his glass of wine, has switched back from coffee. The barest of swallows is left in the bottom of his glass.

“I need to borrow some juice,” I tell him. “My battery’s flat.”

Ness studies me for a moment. A painful moment.

“I would like an apology,” he says.

Through clenched teeth, I say, “I’m sorry.” My anger has been cooled by my embarrassment at needing his help to get out of here.

“I have a battery booster in the garage. You can wait here if you like.”

I decide to follow him, and he doesn’t stop me. Ness heads around the low stucco wall studded with conchs and around toward the garage. Lights above the garage doors flick on automatically and the courtyard blooms bright. Bugs begin to gather around the floodlights. There are three bays. Ness punches a six-digit code into the pad on the wall, and the center bay slides open.

The light inside the garage comes on, and Ness squeezes between a covered car and a rack of shelves. I step inside and lift the cover on the bumper of the car, see the candy-apple red beneath. I also note the exhaust pipe. A gas burner.

“I don’t have a thing for reporters,” Ness tells me as he digs noisily through shelves of tools. “Half of what they’ve written about me over the years is complete fiction. Not that I care. You can write whatever you want. Tell people I came on to you.”

“Didn’t you?” I ask.

“Does it matter?” Ness lugs the orange battery pack my way. I drape the car cover back over the gas-guzzler and step out of the garage. “I asked my dad once how he and my mom met, and he made up a story. He’d make up a different story every time, depending on who was asking. My mom would do it too. I figured it out on my own. Thought you’d like to hear about it.”

“So you want credit for figuring that out?” I follow him back toward my car. The lights wink off behind us. “Well done. Great investigative reporting.”

“I confronted him about it,” Ness says. “This was after my mom died. I asked why he never told me the truth. And it was the first time I ever saw him cry. I mean, bawl like a child.”

Some distant and professional part of me cries out that this might be important, worth writing about, but the rest of me is too riled up to care or even make mental notes. I follow Ness around to my car and watch as he pops the hood and attaches the booster to the battery posts. He checks to make sure the pack is switched on. “Should give you an hour or so of juice. We’ll have to leave it plugged in for half an hour.”

“Convenient,” I tell him. “I’m trapped here.”

“Unless you want to stomp down the driveway in a huff, you are.” He smiles, seems to be joking.

I nearly ask Ness if he opened the glove box while I was reading the journal, but I realize how paranoid I’m being, how crazy that will sound. I’m already feeling the slightest twinge of guilt for blowing up on him.

“Why do you think he kept it a secret?” I ask. “Did he say?”

“He did. And I would have shared that with you, but now I’m not so sure.” He studies me in the dim glow from the porch light. “Maybe it was a mistake to ask you out here. I should’ve just let you run the story however you liked. What difference does it make?”

“I’ll skip to your father with the next piece,” I tell him. “You’ve shown me enough to doubt the veracity of some of my research. But not enough to replace it with anything more forgiving.”

Ness seems to relax. His shoulders drop an inch, like he’s been carrying something heavy there and suddenly it’s gone, suddenly he doesn’t have to tense up against the weight of it all.

“I hoped you’d say that,” he says. He smooths his hair back with his hand. Lets out a held breath. “This isn’t how I imagined tonight going.”

“What did you imagine?” I ask, not sure I really want to know.

“I thought we would talk shells. I remember your old column. I was a fan. I thought I’d show you my collection, let you see what my life has been about. Because it hasn’t been about drilling for oil. All that goes on without me.”

“But you profit from it.”

“I do. And so did my grandfather. And he put that money to good use.”

I recall what Ness said about some things skipping a generation. Or was that me who’d said that?

“You do know you have a reputation,” I say. “Journalism isn’t a large field. Reporters hang out in the same circles.”

“And you believe everything you read in the papers?”

I don’t have a quick response to that.

“Why don’t we go inside while this is charging?” he asks.

“Why can’t you just admit what’s going on? Have you spent any time examining this? Your father fell in love with a reporter, and you seem to be fascinated by that. And now you’re older than he was then, and look at this pattern you’ve formed—”

“I don’t just date reporters.”

“Congratulations.”

“I don’t. It’s just … that’s who I meet. Who else do I socialize with? Have I dated more people than you have? Have I dated more
reporters
than you have?”

“Yes,” I say with confidence. I eye the battery booster; I could probably get to the end of that long-ass driveway on five minutes of charge, then call a cab or have the inn send someone. Ness glances at his watch.

“It’s ten,” he says. “Come inside so you don’t freeze. We don’t have to sit in the same room if you don’t want—”

“Tell me about Dimitri Arlov,” I blurt out.

Ness stares at me across the open hood of my car. Bugs swirl about, meandering toward the beacon that is the front porch light.

“Where did you hear that name?” he asks.

“Did he work for you?” I hug myself, shivering. I can’t tell if it’s from the cold or the adrenaline rush of confronting him about this.

“Dimitri is dead,” Ness says. “Come inside.”

I clutch my bag. “If I come inside, it’s just so I can show you something,” I warn him. “And I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

I leave my car charging and follow Ness back up to the porch. Again he gives me the overly polite
Ladies first
while waving me into the house. I feel clammy as I go over and over how best to show him the shells. I finally decide that Agent Cooper’s method was most dramatic. So I pull out a stool at his kitchen counter and sit down, my bag on the granite between us.

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.”