Chapter 2: Cameras and Bureaucrats

Eli Marchetti had been in Kelder's Bight for six hours and had already been asked, twice, whether he was "here about the drownings," in a tone that suggested the asker expected him to say no and was disappointed, in a complicated way, when he said yes. He liked the town more than he'd expected to. He'd built it up in his head for six years as a kind of grim, symbolic place — the town that took Sam — and the reality was smaller and stranger than the symbol: a diner with good pie, a hardware store owner who'd talked his ear off about outboard motor prices for ten minutes before Eli managed to escape, a harbor that smelled like diesel and low tide and, underneath that, something colder and cleaner that he associated, for reasons he didn't examine too closely, with the last phone call he'd ever gotten from his brother. He was unloading the second case of camera gear from the van when the boat charter's dock hand — a kid of maybe nineteen, all elbows, introduced himself as Colt — pointed with his chin toward the parking lot and said, "That's her. Voss. The scientist." Eli straightened up and looked. His first thought, unhelpfully, was that she looked like exactly what he'd been dreading: a woman who had clearly organized her rental car's trunk into labeled bins, wearing a field jacket that looked expensive and unworn, walking toward the dock with the particular brisk, closed-off posture of someone rehearsing an argument she hadn't had yet. His second thought, less helpfully, was that she was strikingly good-looking in a way that had nothing to do with trying to be, and that this was going to make the next six weeks more complicated rather than less. "You're the crew," she said, when she reached him. Not a question. "Eli Marchetti." He held out a hand. She looked at it for half a second longer than was strictly polite before shaking it, quick and firm, already letting go. "Nora Voss. I run the instrument program." A beat. "I got the email an hour ago that said you'd cleared final approval. I want to be clear that I found out about the embedded filming condition from a program office email, not from you, which tells me something about how this collaboration's going to go before we've had a single conversation." "I emailed the office a week ago asking for your contact info directly," Eli said. "They told me site coordination went through them. Not my call. For what it's worth, I'd rather have talked to you first too." That got him nothing — no thaw, no visible reaction at all, just a level, measuring look that made him feel, absurdly, like a piece of equipment she was deciding whether to trust with expensive instruments. "Fine," she said. "Then let's coordinate now. What exactly does 'embedded filming' mean in practice? I need to know before tomorrow's survey run whether I'm going to have someone with a camera standing where I need my hands to be." "It means I go where the work is," Eli said. "I'm not here to stage anything. I'm not going to ask anyone to re-do a deployment for a better angle, and I'm not going to put a camera between you and an instrument when it matters. I've done enough of these to know the difference between filming something real and getting in its way." "You've done Drowning Season deployments before?" "No," he admitted. "I've done six years of storm work everywhere else, waiting for someone like you to finally get funded enough to bring me in legally instead of me trying to sneak a boat out here on my own, which — for the record — I did consider, and didn't do, because I'm not an idiot, whatever you've already decided about me." Something in her face shifted, very slightly — not warmth, but the recalibration of someone updating an assumption without admitting she was doing it. "I haven't decided anything about you," she said, which they both understood to be a lie of the mildest, most diplomatic kind. "Sure," Eli said, and let it go, because pushing felt like exactly the wrong opening move, and because six years of doing this work had taught him that the people who mattered most to a shoot were rarely won over by being right in an argument on day one. She looked past him at the gear cases stacked on the dock — four of them, waterproof, stenciled with a production company's logo he doubted she'd bothered to look up. "How much of that is coming on the boat tomorrow?" "Two cases. One camera body, waterproof housing, one audio rig. I'll leave the drone and the second camera on shore until I know what the boat can actually handle." "The boat can handle exactly what Oda tells you it can handle," Nora said. "You'll meet her tomorrow at six. She runs a tight deck and she does not care whose grant is paying for the charter. If she tells you to sit down, you sit down. If she tells you a shot isn't happening, it isn't happening. I need that understood before we're forty minutes out and the water's already doing something I don't like." "Understood," Eli said, and meant it, and was aware, even as he said it, of a small perverse spike of interest at the phrase *doing something I don't like* — at the fact that she'd said it so plainly, like a fact of the terrain rather than a scare tactic. Most people he worked with dramatized the danger to sound impressive. She talked about it like a checklist item. "You should also know," Nora said, "that I read about you before you got here. About your brother." He'd known this conversation was coming, the way you know a wave is coming before it breaks — you can watch it build the whole way in and it still catches you slightly off guard. "Okay," he said, carefully neutral. "I'm not going to pretend I don't understand why you're here," she said. "I lost someone in water like this too, a different water, a different year, but I understand the shape of it. I'm telling you that so you know I'm not going to lecture you about grief. What I am going to do is treat every safety call on that water as absolute, non-negotiable, and if I ever think your reasons for being here are affecting your judgment about what's safe, I will pull your access. That's not a threat. That's the job." It was, Eli thought, one of the more honest things anyone had said to him in six years of people either handling him gently or accusing him of exploiting his own dead brother for content, and he found — unwillingly, a little resentfully — that he respected it. "Fair," he said. "Same goes the other way. If I ever think a shot's not worth the risk, I'll say so before we're on the water, not after. I've had six years of people telling me I take stupid chances. I don't, actually. I take calculated ones that look stupid from the outside. There's a difference, even if nobody believes me when I say it." "We'll see," Nora said, which was not agreement, but wasn't dismissal either. A gull screamed somewhere over the water, and the wind picked up half a notch, cold enough that Eli watched her tuck a loose strand of hair back with the brisk irritation of someone who found her own body's small disobediences mildly offensive. It was, he thought, a strange thing to notice about someone he'd known for eleven minutes. He filed it away and didn't examine it. "Six a.m.," she said. "Bring less gear than you think you need. The boat's small and the tide window's short." "Six a.m.," he agreed. She turned to go, then stopped, half-turned back, and said — not warmly, but like she'd decided it was owed — "The pie at the Tideline's actually good. In case nobody's told you yet." "Somebody told me," Eli said. "I didn't believe them." "Believe them," Nora said, and walked off down the dock without waiting to see if that landed as a joke, which, Eli thought, watching her go, was somehow the most interesting thing she'd said to him all day. He turned back to the gear cases and started hauling the second one toward the truck, already running the day back through his head the way he ran back footage — looking for the frame that told the real story, underneath the one people meant to tell. She'd said *someone I lost too* and moved past it so fast it left a wake, the way a boat does when it's going somewhere it doesn't want anyone watching it arrive. He knew that particular kind of fast. He'd built a career filming people who talked exactly like that, right before the water took them somewhere the charts said it shouldn't. Colt was still on the dock, coiling line with the unhurried competence of somebody who'd grown up around boats and had stopped needing to think about the motions years ago, and Eli found himself lingering there instead of finishing the load-out, watching the harbor go gold and then gray as the sun dropped behind the breakwater. "She's not what I expected," Eli admitted, mostly to himself, though Colt glanced up. "Dr. Voss? Nobody's ready for her first week," Colt said, grinning. "She had the harbor master in tears over improperly logged mooring permits by day two. Not mean tears. Just — she asks so many precise questions people start to feel like they've been doing their whole job wrong their whole life." "That checks out," Eli said. "She's not wrong to ask, though," Colt added, more serious now, tying off a cleat hitch with two efficient loops. "Everybody around here talks about the Season like it's weather. My uncle always said, ain't weather does that. Weather you can see coming a day out, week out if you're paying attention. This is different. This just decides." He shrugged, the particular fatalism of somebody who'd grown up with a thing nobody in his family had ever tried very hard to explain. "She wants to explain it. That's new. Nobody's really tried that hard before, not with real equipment." "You think she can?" Colt considered the question with more weight than Eli expected from a nineteen-year-old dock hand. "I think," he said slowly, "if anybody's going to, it's somebody who looks at a bullet-holed stop sign and doesn't even blink. That woman's not scared of much. I watched her unload four instrument crates by herself this morning before anybody offered to help, just because she didn't want to wait around for somebody to notice she needed it." Eli filed that away, the way he filed most things that told him more about a person than they meant to reveal, and finished loading the truck in the fading light, thinking less about the deployment schedule now and more about the particular, deliberate way Nora Voss had said *believe them* about a slice of pie and walked off before he could tell whether she meant it as an olive branch or simply as information, delivered and done with, the way she seemed to deliver everything. He drove the rental truck the short distance to the small rental house the production company had booked him — a single-story place two streets back from the harbor, chosen mostly for its proximity to the dock and its willingness to let a documentary crew stack gear cases in what had clearly once been meant as a dining room. He unloaded what needed climate control, left the rest secured in the truck bed under a tarp, and sat for a long while on the front steps afterward with a beer he didn't finish, listening to the particular quiet of a town that had already, without needing to be told, started bracing itself. He thought about his brother, the way he always did in towns that smelled like this one — diesel and low tide and, underneath it, something colder. He thought about the six years of grant applications he'd watched other people fund and abandon, six years of half-access, six years of standing on shorelines two coves over from where he actually needed to be, filming water that looked the same but wasn't, because the water that actually mattered was locked behind exactly the kind of institutional gatekeeping that had finally, this year, cracked open — not because anyone had finally believed him, but because a meteorologist with better credentials and a stronger case had fought for three years to get funded, and he'd simply been lucky enough, or persistent enough, to be attached to her grant when it finally came through. He didn't know yet whether Nora Voss was going to be an obstacle or an ally. He suspected, watching the last of the light go out of the sky over Kelder's Bight, that the answer was going to matter to him more than the documentary itself before this was over — a thought that would have alarmed him, six years ago, back when the only thing he let himself want was an answer, and never, not once, another person to share the wanting with. He hoped, going inside finally to sleep off a long day, that it wasn't an omen. He was aware, even as he hoped it, that hoping wasn't a method, and that six weeks from now the water wasn't going to care what either of them hoped.

Before you start reading

You must be 18 or older

Comments (0)