The Water Keeper Read online

  Her face flushed. “In every story, they come so close. I finish each book and I’m like, ‘Bishop, you’re killing me. Just kiss the girl. God won’t mind!’

  “And here’s the crazy part: the character writes the novels. That’s right. Bishop writes his own stories. Everything is first person. Like a real autobiography. But it’s not. David Bishop is the author’s name on the cover and he’s the character’s name inside, but nobody knows the identity of the real writer. Even the description on the jacket is fiction. Meaning the mystery guy, or girl, or whatever, has sold tens of millions of books all around the world and nobody but his editor has ever talked to him. The press offered to pay him a lot of money, but he’s not talking. The news networks have offered the writer a lot of money to appear on TV, but he or she won’t.”

  She raised a finger. “Which is why I agree with the prison theory.”

  “Prison theory?”

  “Either the writer is in an actual prison and can’t get out, or he’s in a physical prison—I think the author is a guy—like a disease or something. Or he was in a horrible wreck or fire or something that changed his appearance, and so he’s badly deformed like the hunchback. He knows if he shows his face, it’ll kill the mystery. And kill book sales. Forever.”

  This entire chain of thought was incredible. As was her fascination with it. To think she’d spent so much time thinking about something and someone who only exists in the imagination. “How do you know all this?”

  She continued, “There are internet forums devoted to research and theories and conversations and possible sightings and . . . Listen to this: the writer—which, mind you, no one has ever seen or has any idea if it’s a man, woman, child, Neanderthal, eighty-year-old grandma, six-hundred-pound pervert, or serial killer serving forty life sentences—has his or her own social media pages and sites that readers and fans have created. Dozens of them claiming to be the real author. Some of them have hundreds of thousands of followers. Which means the fictional writer who writes fiction has given rise to even more fiction! It’s bigger than the search for Sasquatch or Elvis.” She trailed off.

  “Anyway, whoever it is can write because the stories are exciting, fast-paced, take-your-breath-away thrillers-slash-love stories, and everybody—me included—is reading just to know when is he ever going to just get it over with and kiss the girl? I mean, enough already!” She slapped her thigh and raised a finger. “A woman’s body will only make babies for so long.” She pointed her fork at me. “There’s a major rumor floating around the web right now that something big is going to happen in his next book.”

  I had her rolling. Might as well keep it up. I was enjoying seeing her so animated. “Like?”

  “Most everyone agrees it’s one of two things: either she leaves God and they marry, only to reveal her secret, which everyone thinks is that given her promiscuous past, she can’t get pregnant, leaving them childless, or . . . he asks her to marry him, but someone out of his past catches up with him and kidnaps him, and while they torture him for information, she’s stranded at the altar thinking he doesn’t love her, so she goes back to the convent and takes a vow of silence. When he escapes, he can’t find her ’cause she’s not talking. Either way it could kill the series—which is both genius and crazy at the same time.”

  “You’ve really thought this through.”

  “These people are like family.”

  “Of course . . .” I was playing with her now. “There is a third possibility.”

  Her expression changed. “What?”

  “He could just kill ’em off.”

  She shook her head. “Never happen.”

  I laughed. “How are you so certain?”

  She was still shaking her head. Unwilling to entertain the possibility. “Marriage for sure, followed by a rollicking honeymoon where they don’t see the light of day for three weeks. Nine months later she gives birth to the next Jason Bourne. Fast-forward and the spinoff series continues indefinitely. Although . . .” She raised her fork. “Their son does his time in the military so he can learn how to kill people with a rubber ducky, and then the church comes to his dad and tells him they need the son, so he—the son, whose name is something cool like Dagger or Spear or Bolt—fast-tracks through the priesthood only to be brought to Rome where he is special assistant to”—she snapped her fingers—“Bam! The pope. But in reality he’s the pope’s bodyguard. And you can run that story forever. Somebody’s always trying to kill the pope, and then there’s all that money . . .”

  I was laughing. “You’re really into this.”

  She nodded but continued, “The publisher is making money hand over fist. It’s a cash cow. These things are in more than eighty countries and just as many languages. You think they’re going to kill off that guy?” She raised a finger. “Listen to this: his—”

  I interrupted her. “You’re still assuming it’s a him?”

  “Yes, but it’s pretty well accepted that no woman could ever write about his longing for her the way he does. Not to mention that the linguistics departments at five different universities have done some sort of analysis on the words of all the books—the way phrases are put together and word choice and combinations of words—and when they run all that through the computer, every time it’s solidly in the eighty-five-plus percent chance it’s a man. So for the sake of argument—”

  I was amazed. “How do you know all this?”

  “The man got me off drugs! Needless to say, I’m a fan.”

  I was laughing. “Evidently.”

  She continued, “His is the first book in publishing history where advertisers are offering him money—like six-figure money—to mention their products in his books. Automobiles, watches, computers, phones, sunglasses, motorcycles . . .” She paused again. “A winery in Napa even paid a junk-load of money to become the only type of wine he serves at communion. And they paid a bonus if he serves it to her—”

  “That’s ridiculous. May even be blasphemy.”

  She nodded. “There are some angry readers who agree with you. Anyway, whoever this writer is, he’s no dummy. It’s not like you’re watching one big commercial. He’s sly the way he does it. Like, he does it, you read past it, and then it hits you. ‘He just mentioned another product.’”

  “I’ll bet Hollywood loves this guy.”

  “That’s just it. He said no to Hollywood, which just makes everyone want it all the more. Two studios have sued the publisher for rights but lost in court. David Bishop is a genius—he has made a buttload of money and he’s gonna make a buttload more in this next book ’cause he’s giving people a little of what they want but not everything.” She shook her head. “Kill the series? Not a chance.”

  “Of course, you’re assuming that, whoever this person is, they’re motivated by money.”

  “That’s another thing. Several of the news networks investigated where the royalty payments go. Wanna guess?”

  “Some fat, bald guy draped in cheesy gold chains and bad sunglasses living on the beach in Monaco, sipping an umbrella drink, collecting the interest, laughing at people like you?”

  She smiled. “Close, but no. They tracked the royalties to an offshore holding account, but”—she held up a finger—“one of the reporters had a cousin or something who worked at Google, and he figured out that the offshore stuff was just a shell, and that most of the transfers, after they went through a few more shells, ended up . . . Are you ready for this? At a nonprofit.”

  She nodded knowingly. “That’s right.” She whispered for emphasis. “He’s giving it all away.” She raised an eyebrow. “Which only helps sell more books.” She finished her food and spoke with her mouth half full. “I’m not sure what motivates him, but this whole idea—the writer who is both writer and character, and the nun with a scar and a secret, and their impossible love, the way their adventures bring them together but not ‘together,’ but oh so close, and how the royalties go to some nonprofit that nobody can find—the whole thing i
s what people like me dream of.”

  “Which is?”

  She shrugged, speaking matter-of-factly. “The fairy tale. There are a lot of women out there who think we’re just forever stuck on the island of misfit toys, and yet here’s a writer who causes us to think that maybe someone might love us despite the scars and the baggage. Someone who knows what I’m thinking enough to finish my sentences. And what’s more, would know how to fix my coffee if we were stranded on an island. Someone who”—she waved her hand through the air in front of her—“protects me from the world that wants to hurt me.”

  I laughed. “Sounds like a soap opera. Or maybe worse, pulp fiction.”

  She paused. Her voice changed. “I think he, whoever he is, is wounded. Something deep. Some days I think he writes to remember. And some days I think he writes to forget. Whatever the case, I read to believe.”

  “In?”

  “A love I can only dream about.”

  “Sounds like you know him.”

  “I do. We all do. That’s the mystery and the majesty. He’s that good.”

  I laughed. “Somebody should find this guy.”

  “In his last book, the two of them are in Budapest. On this secret mission. And they’re in this hotel in”—she made quotation marks in the air with her fingers—“‘separate but joining’ rooms, mind you, and he’s in the shower trying to rinse off the blood from a gunshot wound, and she’s leaning with her ear pressed to the wall listening to him shower, and she feels guilty but she can’t pull herself away. They’re separated by a single wall, eight inches at most, but it might as well be a million miles.”

  My voice turned sarcastic. “Yeah, I can see it in my mind’s eye. Just tantalizing.”

  She waved me off. “Anyway, he’s in there like a chiseled Adonis in a fountain, and he reads the label on the shampoo in the shower ’cause it smells good and drowns out the smell of his own blood. And you know what happened?”

  “No, but I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

  “The body wash in the book was real in real life. The week after the book released, that body wash was number one on Amazon.” She raised both eyebrows. “I bought a case.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  She waved her fork in circles in the air. “I know how it sounds. What blows my mind is the fact that whoever that writer is, he or she has written something that is so good it took my mind off the drugs. Think about it. Better than drugs? And I’m not the only one. Therapists in rehab give these books to their patients. ‘Read this. Let’s talk.’ Right now there are book club support groups across the country filled with junkies and addicts who are getting clean—all ’cause somebody wrote some words. If I could, I’d hug whoever it is. Kiss them on the mouth. I don’t care. Man, woman, child, zombie . . . they did something that nothing else could.”

  “We’re talking about a book, right?”

  “If I hadn’t read them, I wouldn’t believe it either, but those stories, the characters, the way they talk with one another, the way he thinks about her, describes her, the things he notices about her that she doesn’t even know—like a scar on her ankle where she cut herself shaving, or the sweat on the little hairs on her top lip, or how she moves when she’s walking. All of it just shows how much he values her. Defers to her. In the last book, I nearly died. Cliffhanger at the end. She’s leaning against the shower wall, listening to him, then without reason, she leaves a note on the table and disappears. Next morning, she’s gone. He starts looking. Finds the letter: ‘Dear Love, there is something I need to tell you . . .’

  “This thing she can’t tell him is killing her, so she basically leaves a suicide note. He turns himself inside out trying to find her before she goes through with it. Book ends right there. So we’re all thinking this next book will be about how he and his mentor find her. Because everybody knows he’s not about to kill her off.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Which part?”

  “The part where he kills the girl.”

  “Don’t even talk like that.” She pushed her food around her plate with her fork and stared out the window. As she did, I saw where she’d soaked through the bandaging on the top and side of her shoulder. Throughout breakfast, she had yet to wince or even draw attention to what had to be painful, suggesting she had a high pain threshold. More importantly, she wasn’t working me. She wasn’t using the injuries to get something from me. If anything, it was the furthest thing from her mind. She’d rather talk about some silly book than herself, which told me a lot about her heart.

  “Those two gave me hope when I didn’t have any.”

  “Hope in what?”

  She stared at her plate and shook her head.

  I paused. Her eyes found mine, and I spoke softly. “Hope in what?”

  She looked away. “Hope that I’m not condemned to live and die alone and unloved on this island. That no matter what I do, how screwed up I become, maybe someday, somebody will . . .” She faded off.

  “Will what?”

  She looked down and spoke barely loud enough for me to hear. “Ask me to dance.”

  As we walked out I thought to myself that sometimes people need more than water to learn how to swim.

  Chapter 9

  Walking back to the marina, we passed a roadside cellular store. “Will you let me buy you a new phone?”

  “Only if you let me pay you back.”

  “Whatever. It’s just that if she tries to call and—”

  “That’d be great.”

  I bought her the phone. Once connected, she restored from the cloud and checked her voicemail and messages, but none appeared. Then she dialed Angel. No answer.

  We walked back to the marina where my eager friend had just finished scrubbing down my Whaler. He stood with brush in hand, suds up to his elbows. Gone Fiction was spotless. I handed him another hundred-dollar bill. Doing so did not escape Summer’s attention.

  He smiled. “Mister, you let me know if you ever do any hiring!”

  I shook his hand, stepped into the boat, and cranked and warmed the engine. I looked up at her. She stood staring south down the ditch, then waved her hand across me. “If you give me your address, I can send you some money when I—”

  “Forget it.”

  I busied myself with my electronics, but in truth I was stalling. Trying to look busy when in fact I was just giving her space. She turned the phone in her hands, finally asking me the question that had been on the tip of her tongue since I’d knocked on her door that morning. “Where are you headed?”

  The truth hurt too much. I dodged it and patted the steering wheel. “Wherever Gone Fiction takes me.”

  She put two and two together. “Where’s Gone Fiction headed?”

  “Couple hundred miles that way. Where the world falls off into the ocean.”

  “Sounds perfect.” She shoved her hands deeper in her pockets. “Want some company?”

  “Water can be dangerous when you can’t swim.”

  “And life can be sucky when you don’t know how to dance.”

  I liked her. She was tough in a tender sort of way. And I had a feeling she was a good momma who’d been dealt a bad hand. The cold breeze I couldn’t feel blew across her again, causing her to wrap her arms around herself. Her face was pale and she needed about three weeks of sleep. She pointed to Angel somewhere south of us. Tears appeared quickly. “She’s all I have.”

  I spoke the obvious. “You realize that finding her is needle-in-a-haystack kind of stuff.”

  She nodded and thumbed away a tear.

  “Okay, but I have two rules.”

  She waited.

  “Two months clean, give or take, means you’re tougher than most. Means you did the hard part on your own. You just gutted through it. Books or no books, that stuff pulls on you. From the inside out. It’s like it wraps around your DNA. It can last months. So before you step foot on this boat and we go looking for your daughter who doesn’t want to be f
ound, you have to promise me one thing.”

  She waited as tears streaked her face.

  I continued, “Please don’t lie to me. Just tell me where you are. Don’t hide you from me. I can’t help you if I don’t know the truth.”

  She nodded.

  I stepped forward and looked up at her. “Words matter.”

  This time she spoke them. “I promise.”

  “Second . . .” I waved my hand across the bow where Tabby had resumed his vigil over Fingers’ lunch box. “That’s his spot. Move him from there at your own peril.”

  She was about to step aboard when she thought better of it and stepped back. She patted her chest and swallowed. “There’s more I haven’t told you.”

  I knew this, but first walk, then run. Fingers’ face appeared front and center in my mind’s eye. How I loved that man. I spoke both to her and to the orange box. “I was once in a bad way. On the . . . cusp of some bad stuff. Had a friend find me and tell me that none of us are who we want others to think we are. That despite the mask we are all so good at wearing, we somehow manage to wake up every day hoping there’s still a chance. That maybe, somehow, we can balance the debt ledger we carry in our hearts. That maybe God is offering a special that week and one good equals two bad. But then there are the lies that the memories whisper.”

  Her tears were flowing freely now. She asked, “What do they say?”

  “They say we are alone. That bad choices and mistakes have drained the value out of us. And that we are not worth the cost of getting to us.”

  “Are we?”

  “I have yet to find anyone who is not.”

  “Even when we—”

  “Even when.”

  “Where is your friend now?”