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A river flows from Shrouded Bay easterly and it crawls east-northeast up into the state. The river, known simply as The Fjord although it is not one, thins out and finally breaks up into a series of deltas about thirty-five miles into land.
Just south of the midpoint of Fissure Bay is Landcaster Island. Back during the turn of the century, developers tried to form the island into a ritzy, posh living space. The idea never caught on, largely because no bridge from the mainland was built. It’d be miles long, and not even to this day will someone undertake that.
Eventually fisherman bought up the island. A small nugget of land a few hundred yards off of Landcaster’s northern coast is where the fisherman and their families,
settled there for the better part of a century, have buried their dead. Littlecaster Island is not much more than an overstuffed graveyard, creepy at dusk. The fading sun throws just enough backlight over the old, ornate gravestones to create a tense and foreboding ambiance.
Fissure River flows dead east from the middle of Fissure Bay, cutting Saint Ansgar in half. The river is broad and straight, a deep swath carved from the earth. The northern shoreline is adorned with a three-mile long boardwalk and expensive, trendy shops and restaurants. Northward of that shoreline, the newer section of Saint Ansgar thrives.
The southern shoreline is a work in progress, and remains mostly a broken down series of docks and refineries. The refineries still stand, gutted and burned out from a deadly and massive fire in the 1920s. The remains hold themselves against the horizon like the skeletal remains of great beasts still not swallowed into the ground. Southward of that, the old section of the city is a haven for evildoers and the economically destitute. The Burrows exist there.
The two western peninsulas that define Fissure Bay and the state’s western border are solid mountain ranges. Spotty areas of flat, grassy fields scattered throughout the strips of mountains are protected as state parks and no industry has ever befallen them.
Both peninsulas are thin, only a mile or two wide. The southern peninsula measures almost six miles in length while the northern extends down almost four. Their tips, missing touching each other by a mile-wide mouth that was never bridged, each have a lighthouse that serves the waterborne traffic entering the bay.
The lighthouses are named The Sirens because of their duel foghorns, sounding in a call and answer. Their shrieks, as low-pitched as a tuba with silvery, sharp and tense edges to them, are common background noise here. Landcaster Island is almost perfectly between the two when looking into the bay from sea. Boat navigators line up the Sirens like sights on a handgun and steer directly at the Landcaster lighthouse. The light tower itself heaves out of the island’s central hill almost two hundred feet into the air, providing a three hundred and sixty degree blast of white light.
I have thrown a man off the walkway on top of that beacon.
On the easterly shore of the Funnel leading into Shrouded Bay is Eastman’s Light, a squat box-like structure close to the ground. On the southern-most point of Fissure Bay is Ansgar’s Light, a candy-cane colored tower at the center of the only decent park in south Ansgar. I still wouldn’t go there at night.
The city. Her streets welcome me. The day is bleached out by the overcast and it all looks like an eclipse. I light a smoke and step out into my hometown. Another day.
7
Because of me, Darla Boothe’s phone starts ringing.
Walking along the street, snow has stopped. I pause by the public library because it has WiFi and I get good reception.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Ms. Boothe?”
“Yes, who is this?” Her voice, tarnished with absolute concern and worry. Those few words paint her picture: bags under weary, bloodshot eyes, aged ten years in two months. Lips drawn in a perpetual look of sorrow. A brunette despair.
“My name is Richard Dean Buckner. Mr. Derne hired me to look for Delilah. I was hoping you could help.”
“He said one of you people would be calling me, I guess. I get so lost now after...all this. So, a...what are you called?”
“I’m a private investigator, ma’am.”
“Right. Like Dog the Bounty Hunter.”
“No. I have much better hair.”
She laughs, mostly hollow.
“Have you heard from her, ma’am?”
“No.” The worry creeps out of her voice and slithers across the phone line. She says with a defeat so absolute I am taxed to hear it: “Bring my baby back to me.” Little words. She begins to sob quietly.
A brilliant sun cascades down through skies as azure as the waters in Lake Tahoe. The thick sheets of snow and ice coating everything rob the light of its warmth and life before reflecting them back up into the world. Beauty, but only skin deep. The allure of the glowing day turns to fangs of icy bitterness as soon as I step into its grip. An empty dazzling.
“Ma’am, do you drink coffee?”
“I do.”
“There’s a place called Raoul’s Mexican Cantina that serves breakfast. If you like chorizo this is the place. How about we meet in a half hour?”
