6

THE MAN WHO ANSWERED THE DOOR WAS NOT ED Ricketts. Not in the least.

“John,” Anders said. “I was under the impression you had already left for Baja.”

“Not yet,” the man replied, shaking her father’s hand and then returning both long arms awkwardly to his sides. “Still trying to talk some sense into Ed, and that could take months.”

The man produced a labored smile, a horse’s set of big, yellow teeth layered across his gums like roof tiles. He was shorter than her father but looked as though he should have been taller on account of his coarse, oversize features. His brow was broad and bunioned, his nose a weighty bulb at the base of a funnel-like bridge, his ears those not of a human being but of some sort of huge nocturnal mammal. She stuck out her hand and tried not to startle when her fingers were engulfed by his.

“John Steinbeck,” he said.

“Margot Fiske.”

“I know. You couldn’t look more like your father if you tried,” he answered morosely, squinting at the scar on her forehead. “Plus, I can see the telltale damage. The sign of the beast.”

She met his gaze evenly. “That’s not the proper usage of the phrase.”

“Margot,” her father cautioned.

Steinbeck turned away without a word. Anders and Margot followed him inside. She scanned the front room anxiously. It was quiet and bright. The contents were much the same as before—the cluttered desk, the overburdened bookcases, the ancient phonograph, the Coast Guard buoy with a fern planted inside of it, the file cabinet in which there sat a half-empty bag of flour, the same wooden beer crate that had served as Ricketts’s bedside chair. The only change was an odd and obvious one: a ring of unlit tallow candles in the middle of the floor.

“Take my eye off him for one second . . .” Steinbeck grumbled, kicking a candle onto its side.

“We can wait.” Anders tapped a foot in impatience.

“Please do.”

Steinbeck trudged out the rear door. Her father deposited his valise and hat onto the desk and surveyed the room, his upper lip wrinkled in distaste.

“Good Lord,” he said. “He’s worse at housekeeping than we are.”

And then a voice from behind.

“The Fiske family. A delightful surprise!”

She paused before turning to face him, taking care to keep her expression neutral. He was wearing an ankle-length oilskin apron, a stained undershirt, and the sort of green visor favored by gamblers. Arthur was at his side again, as was a woman—below average height, above average looks—who seemed familiar, but in a way she couldn’t quite place.

Ricketts walked briskly up to her father and extended a hand.

“It wasn’t meant to be a surprise,” her father said, completing the handshake, taking a small step back, and reexamining the candles’ broken circle. “I sent word we’d be here at ten past, but—”

“You did? To whom did you speak?”

“I think he called himself . . . Bucky.”

“Ah yes! Bucky. Lives across the way in one of those big storage cylinders. Answers my phone sometimes, but he’s usually too drunk to write anything down. If I had known you were coming, I would have made things a bit more presentable. Or at least cleared away some of the evidence.”

Her father lifted an eyebrow.

“In case you’re interested,” Ricketts continued, “tallow beats beeswax. Almost always.”

“For what purpose?” her father asked warily.

“For the purpose of the séance. I think we might have actually broken through for once, although I’m not sure it was worth the trouble. I always get so nervous in the presence of the supernatural.”

At this, he looked directly at her for the first time since entering the room, his examination prolonged yet buoyant, as if the two of them were in on a joke the others were too slow to understand. She looked at his hands. They were nimble and callused and held a bucket each, just as they had that morning in the tide pools, and at the sight there was a surge of interest strong enough to make her stumble. Whose ghost had he summoned last night? And why?

“Can I offer any of you a beer?” Ricketts asked. “Or a steak?”

She tried to answer but couldn’t.

“She’s shy.” The woman smiled.

“I can assure you she’s anything but,” her father replied.

“Wormy, Arthur.” Ricketts handed the buckets to his companions. “If you please.”

“Doc, perhaps she’d like to—”

“Arthur. Downstairs.”

“They’re just Styela. I don’t have to—”

“Arthur!”

Arthur scowled and followed Wormy through a small door at the far end of the room. Ricketts turned back to Margot and her father.

“Oh, Styela.” He grinned. “Don’t know why I even bother anymore, to be honest with you. Can’t get the boys to bring me much else, so why should I be out there getting them myself?”

In reply, Anders studied Ricketts and then helped himself to the seat behind Ricketts’s desk. Ricketts settled himself contentedly on the beer crate. Margot remained standing and watched as her father began eyeing the papers on the desktop. To anyone else, it might have looked like an idle perusal, but she could see its underlying intensity, assimilative and scathing.

“Any new orders since last we spoke?”

“A few,” Ricketts replied, stretching his legs out in front of him. His pants were rolled up to his knees and his shins were hairier than she remembered. The green visor made him look a little seasick. “But most of the universities ordered their supplies for the spring term in the fall. Which means I have more than a couple dogfish out back just begging for someone to buy them and slice them in two.”

When he turned to smile at her, he looked like a clown, but not the funny kind.

“A challenging business model, isn’t it?” Her father found a document that interested him and inspected it carefully, blinking as if his eyelids were camera shutters. “Flush one minute, broke the next. I don’t know how you manage.”

“Not very well, I’m afraid. If it weren’t for my illustrious benefactor, I don’t know where I’d be.”

“Don’t be so modest. I’m sure John knows a bargain when he sees it.”

“John knows a story when he sees it. And I usually deliver on that front, I’m sorry to say.”

“Yes. His latest book was . . . unusual. Those peach farmers really had the worst of it.”

“Funny. Most people sympathize with the pickers.”

Her father raised his hands in the air. “A heartless capitalist! Guilty as charged!”

“Making something from nothing is what our society values, I’ll grant you that. Making nothing from something, though . . .” He gestured around at the lab. “Well, that’s the real trick.”

“Sadly enough, most people in this town seem to agree.”

“Well, I suppose you’re as much of an expert as anyone,” Ricketts said amiably. “All those Methodists living in tents beneath the butterfly trees, singing the praises of the immaterial. It must have been extraordinary back then.”

When her father looked away from the desk and toward Ricketts, it was with an almost audible snap.

“I’ve overcome my youthful follies and I’m thankful for it,” Anders said, his voice controlled and toneless. “Some men aren’t so lucky.”

“Are you talking about the Renoirs? Because your daughter hated them, too.”

She flinched. This time, Ricketts had certainly gone too far. But there was something in his delivery—a self-deprecating, peaceable sort of humor—that seemed to neutralize the comment even as he voiced it. Her father, too, had been disarmed. She could tell by the way he smiled, shook his head, and reached down to straighten a stack of errant papers.

“I enjoy our banter, Edward.” He sighed. “I truly do.”

“The feeling is more than mutual. Entertaining the Fiske family gives me great pleasure indeed.”

“In that case, I’ll be back for her at five. She gets Sundays off. Not on account of religious superstition, but on account of labor laws.”

“Of course, of course.” Ricketts nodded and looked at Margot. “I’m not sure what I’ll be able to pay her, but once she familiarizes herself with the way everything operates she can decide what seems appropriate and then—”

“No payment is required,” Anders huffed. “Consider her services a much belated act of gratitude. For the kindness you showed her after the accident.”

She heard a chuckle from the corner of the room. During Ricketts and her father’s conversation, Steinbeck had somehow rematerialized unnoticed. He was settled deeply now into a low-slung rocking chair in the corner, knees hitched up to chest height, a large notebook open on his lap, looking for all the world as though he had been there for a century or more and had been disappointed by every second of it.

“If I were you,” Steinbeck suggested, “I’d consider the debt already repaid. In full.”

Her father gave Steinbeck a bemused look and then turned back to Ricketts.

“Five, then?”

“Whenever you like,” Ricketts replied.

“Make sure you knock first,” Steinbeck added. “Or else you might interrupt some . . . how did you put it, Anders? Some ‘youthful follies’?”

“John . . .” Ricketts laughed nervously.

“Yes, yes,” Steinbeck continued, undeterred. “I’m quite the comic. Have you heard the one about the sea otters, Anders? When the male otter takes a mate, he sinks his teeth right into the female’s face and holds on until he’s done!”

She raised an inadvertent hand to her wound and then quickly lowered it. Her father’s left eye twitched.

“I don’t concern myself with lesser mammals,” he sniffed.

“If only your daughter shared your aversions.”

“John.” Ricketts’s voice was solemn now, completely absent of its earlier mirth. “I’m sure you don’t know what you’re saying.”

“And I’m sure he didn’t mean to insult my book.”

“Your book was sentimental,” Anders replied. “And unclear.”

“Unclear? How’s this for clarity? Ed fucked your daughter.”

Her father’s face sank and then reacquired a terrifying blankness. He turned to Ricketts.

“Edward?”

“Anders, there was nothing—”

Steinbeck leapt to his feet, the chair rocking violently in response.

“One more lie from you and I swear! I swear I’ll break every jar, Ed. I’ll release every shark. I’ll burn this stinkhole to the ground.”

“You’ll have to excuse him,” Ricketts explained frantically, his underarms dark with sweat. “He’s under quite a lot of stress. He’s been getting death threats from the agricultural associations, the movie studios won’t leave him alone, his wife has started raising rabbits and—”

“Margot?” Her father was standing very close to her now, his smell an ancient indictment.

She shook her head.

“Say it,” Anders insisted, grabbing her shoulders and shaking them. “Say it in words.”

“You have no right,” Ricketts yelped, as if it were his body under assault, not hers. “She’s a human being. Of age.”

“Of age?” He released Margot and strode across the room in Ricketts’s direction, toppling the remaining candles. “What monster considers fifteen years old of age?”

Ricketts blanched. Margot stopped breathing.

“Fifteen?” Ricketts coughed, slinking back in the direction of the beer crate. “I must say, Anders. One could be forgiven . . . on account of her height, you see . . . for thinking she was a good deal . . . ahem . . . older.”

“My God,” her father whispered.

An interval of hellish silence, Steinbeck’s chair squeaking as its empty form continued to rock. In the distance, she thought she could hear the voices of the woman and the boy, Wormy and Arthur, laughing at something in the water.

Her father put on his hat and made for the door.

“Anders, I certainly hope—”

“Oh, let him go, Ed,” Steinbeck said. “He’s no friend of ours. And neither is the girl.”

On the street, Anders plowed ahead and Margot did her best to keep up.

Earlier, as they had made their way downhill, she had been too distracted to take in the detail of her surroundings, but now she seemed capable of nothing but, the entire landscape suddenly revealing itself as the sort of omen only a fool would misinterpret. There had been a half-dozen whistle blasts in the past twelve hours, so the canneries were full even though the high season was still months away. The buildings convulsed, some of them howling with the expulsion of cooking steam, some of them leaking gray smoke from tube-shaped stacks. The street itself, however, was strangely empty, a shallow, uneasy stillness in the air that made it feel like the moment before the revelation of some very bad or very meaningful piece of news. There were conclusions to arrive at, she told herself, new tactics to consider, second chances upon which to insist. She couldn’t, though. For now, all she could do was try to guess at her father’s next steps.

When they reached the Row’s terminus, she expected him to turn left on David Avenue, to begin the uphill climb. Instead, he stopped in front of the last building on the street. Unlike some of the neighboring canneries, which featured architectural nods to the Spanish-built missions that dotted the length of the state, this one was a blank white box, a message in its austerity that, more than anything that had just been said inside the lab, made her dizzy with panic.

“If you’ll just—”

“I trust you can manage dinner on your own,” he said.

“Nothing needs to change. You’ve never cared about—”

“It’s pointless now. Don’t you understand that? What will he tell you—what will you learn—now that you’ve already given him everything he might have wanted?”

“Might have wanted?” she hissed.

She straightened her back and stiffened her limbs, preparing herself for the obvious rebuttal. Instead, he did something much worse: he turned and moved toward what appeared to be the cannery’s only door, the heavy, steel portal opening with the push of a single outstretched finger.