Husky Lou was a gregarious man. Normally, this would annoy me. But there was something—dare I say it—wholesome about him which made him bearable.
“I can’t emphasize enough the importance of sunscreen.” He then launched into a story of nakedness which was surprisingly easy to ignore.
Striding up and down the Boardwalk beside another large man in a matching pink shirt was a much better disguise than the sunglasses alone. The only one who would recognize me as a local should be Drew, so I steered Husky Lou toward the opposite end of the walkway, where the boards underfoot were lost to sand, ending with a curve of stout fencing.
“Anything that protrudes is particularly vulnerable to sunburn.” Lou squirted a blob of sunscreen into my hand. “And I mean anything. Not just your nose. A baseball cap is always a good idea—I never go anywhere without one. And this is where having a belly can really come in handy….”
As the nudist blathered on and I swiped lotion over the back of my neck, I realized we were not alone. Behind the fence, another conversation was taking place. One in which I was extremely interested. “It’s nine to one in our favor—look, I don’t know why they need a unanimous vote, they just do. Now it’s only a matter of figuring out how to make the last one give in.”
Where had I heard that voice before? Difficult to say, with him whispering and Lou droning on over top of it. I prodded Lou and put my finger to my lips, then gestured to the other conversation with a nod. He shrugged and bent his head to listen in, too.
“But don’t worry, even if the holdout is too stubborn to see common sense, it’s just a matter of figuring out who they are. They might think they’re anonymous, but I’m watching that ballot box like a hawk. Soon as I figure out who’s blocking the deal, we can apply some direct pressure.” A pause, then a whisper. “Someone’s here, gotta go.”
I hurried around the fence, thinking to catch this person in the act—but when I rounded the far side, there was nothing there but a tunnel sealed with a security gate—a gate which appeared to be rusted shut.
“Some trick,” Husky Lou said.
“And what would that be?”
“The way sound bounces right here—almost makes it seem as if voices are coming from that old hole. But obviously, the gate hasn’t been disturbed in ages, and what you’re hearing is actually more like an echo.” He sketched the shape of the fence with a meaty hand. “See the way the wind has bent this fence into a parabola? It’s forming something called a whispering gallery with another structure on the other side of the Boardwalk. And whoever was just talking….” He shielded his eyes and gazed down the shore. “I’d say he’s over by the tents.”
I wondered briefly if this Lou person had been planted by the investors to throw us off their trail. But if that were the case, it would have involved hiring the whole tour group to perpetrate the deception, and setting them in motion days before Dixon and I decided to investigate. But just to be sure, I called up the dictionary on my phone and looked up the word parabola. The definition was a symmetrical curve. I supposed the fence did indeed form such a thing. And if I listened very hard, I could hear Drew Draws calling out, “Anyone can take a selfie! Commemorate your trip to Pinyin Bay with a custom cartoon!”
And, with that, I realized his tent formed a very similar curve.
“I know exactly where the sound came from,” I said, and set off with Husky Lou to check out the very spot I’d been taking such care to avoid. We headed toward the other side of the Boardwalk at a jog. When Lou got winded I let him fall behind, hoping to spot someone looking suspicious in the vicinity of Drew’s tent. I was positive I’d heard the voice before, and hopefully once I saw the man, it would all click into place.
I ran right up to the purple tent, where Drew was sketching an elaborate mound of hair on the portrait he was currently completing. “Well,” he said to me loftily, “look who finally decided to show up. Do you know how many customers decided to go to the old-time photo gallery instead?”
I strode past him and circled the tent…and discovered the mime standing behind it with a phone to his ear.
“I have you now,” I said with great satisfaction, and snatched the phone from his hand.
“Yuri?” said a woman’s voice on the other end of the line. “Is that you?”
“Sabinochka?”
“Did you just butt-dial me? And did you get a new number? What a relief, I thought it must’ve been Crouch bugging me again.”
I cut my eyes to the mime, who made a hopeful cookie-eating gesture.
“It was mime. How long have you been talking with him?”
“Talking at him was more like it. I dunno—ten minutes?”
It had taken me fewer than five to get there from the fence. I checked the mime’s phone. The current call had been running eleven minutes, thirty-two seconds and counting. I put the phone back to my ear. “I can persuade him to stop bothering you,” I told Sabina, looking Crouch in the eye as I spoke.
“Aw, how sweet of you to offer! But no, don’t worry about it. I can handle him myself. Plus, now I’m curious to see if he’s gonna keep sending me random stuff.”
Curiosity can be a dangerous thing—and it sounded like the mime was wearing her down. But Sabina’s love life was none of my business. And his charades would prove overwhelmingly annoying soon enough.
I ended the call and shoved the phone into the mime’s hands. “Who else was back here making a phone call?” I demanded.
He curled his hand beneath his chin and pretended to think about it.
Sabina might not want me to work him over on her behalf…but maybe I had another, equally valid reason to do so: to see if his voice was the one I heard in the whispering gallery. “Stop with the pantomime and say something,” I warned him. “Or I will demonstrate a more painful way to make you talk.”
But before I ended up scrubbing greasepaint off my knuckles, Husky Lou staggered around the corner, dropped his hands to his knees, and struggled to catch his breath. “Did you find the shady character?” Lou eventually managed, between breaths.
Maybe so. Because it was entirely possible the mime could have put Sabina on hold during the call and made another. Since he wasn’t speaking, she might not know the difference.
I cut my eyes to Crouch again.
He shrugged helplessly, eased behind Lou to put himself safely out of my reach…then turned tail and ran off.
He was disturbingly quick.
“Say, listen,” Lou said. “Since we’re so close to the pier, let’s see if there’s any room on the Barge of the Bay history tour. I really wanted to go yesterday, but they were all sold out. It’ll be fun! My treat.”
I hardly wanted to be stuck on some boat…but then I saw the mime sneaking up the gangplank and decided that while I couldn’t manhandle him in front of too many witnesses, just the threat of harm would seem more serious if he couldn’t get away.
“Fine. We will ride boat. Lend me your hat. Sunburn.”
Husky Lou was happy to oblige. And though his baseball cap was damp with sweat, it concealed my shaved head. I was thankful for the pink shirt as we got in line for the barge. If I hunched down and positioned myself strategically, I blended in with the other Back to Nature tourists. I only needed to trick the mime for a moment—enough time to trap him between myself and the bulkhead, and force him to finally speak.
I was well-hidden as I boarded the boat—or so I thought. “Yuri?” Dixon called over. I shook my head and hunched even more…but it was no use. “Yuri! Hey, Yuri! Come sit in my section!”
I cast around to see where Crouch was sitting, but could not find him. “Take your seats, everyone,” called the tour guide at the front of the boat. “And stay seated. The water is a little choppy today.”
The deck lurched under my feet as the barge set off. I staggered to the nearest seat, and sat. I scanned the crowd. No mime.
Not on the barge, at least.
Back on the pier, Crouch bowed his farewell to me with a grand flourish.
I muttered a few choice curses in Russian as a hand fell on my shoulder. “That phrase is starting to sound kind of familiar,” Dixon observed brightly, “though I’ve had zero luck finding it in a translator. Cyrillic is really unfathomable. And you look a-dorable in pink. Whoops, did I say that out loud?” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Anyhow, you’ll be pleased to know I’ve turned up an awesome lead: a secret society.”
He shimmied his shoulders in his eagerness to explain. Even I was forced to admit…it was intriguing. “Go on.”
“Apparently, the Boardwalk is controlled by an enclave of anonymous of people called the Boardwalk Board. It’s super-secret—as in, even they don’t know who else is on it. And one of them is refusing to sell.”
That jibed with the phone call I’d overheard. I told Dixon about the whispering gallery—he mouthed the word parabola and squinted at the fence on the distant shore with no little amount of skepticism. “That doesn’t necessarily preclude wolverines,” he said, mostly to himself. “Though it explains why I thought I heard you talking over there when the only one around was Crouch.”
“We had better figure out who the holdout is before the buyer does. It sounded to me as though things are about to turn ugly.”
“The votes are cast at the Wishing Bell.” Dixon pointed to the clapperless bell mounted in the center of the Boardwalk. “And we can totally see it from here.”
“Many people are sliding notes into that bell. How will we ever figure out which ones—? Hold on…is that Vano Shirque?”