Born Predators - Chapter 4, Part 2
A book about sharks and people by Anthony Palumbi and Stephen Palumbi
Chapter 4, Part 2
“The key to your new home,” said the girl at the central office with a thin-lipped smile, seeming harried though no one else was there. “Go out this door and turn right, the first villa is number one. Counter-clockwise and you’ll find villa number nine.” Kinney followed instructions along the line of modest rental bungalows about a mile from the beaches. She surveyed the parking lot – it was jammed full with heavy TV utility vans sprouting enormous gray antennae folded on their roofs, and several sedans conspicuously marked with four-letter station call signs.
So consumed was Kinney by the list of errands in her head—unpack, shower, dress and organize herself well enough to go meet the Mayor—that she ignored the lean man in a pullover and blue jeans propped up against one shaded wall of her villa.
He saw her first and hesitated, then walked over. Cleared his throat.
“Kay!” So familiar it barely registered at first, slipping like an icy knife through her ribs. So smooth she couldn’t express the appropriate shock. She froze.
Time had been kind to William Orrin. The beanpole frame he wore in high school had filled out, while his face had gotten thinner, cheekbones emerging over the same deep dimples. He now wore his curly black hair close cut with an age-appropriate fade. At the corners of his dark eyes, creases had accreted from smiling, and a groomed veneer of stylish dark stubble clung to his cheeks.
“Gail couldn’t come herself.” He looked at her carefully, neutrally.
She looked back. If there was a natural, instinctive way to handle the crash of a thousand images, emotions and flashbacks, she couldn’t find it. The one conversation in Hampton Bay she been terrified to have – but strangely yearned to have – stood there, redrawn in modern brush strokes of fifteen more years.
High school friend. High school romance. High school crisis. A huge change in her life that crashed across her whole family and even now jarred her to the bone. Kinney looked at Will and saw nothing but that crisis and how she lived through it, absorbed it and moved on. All on her own. All on a path of her own design – all on a solitary path of her own design – all on a path that had not included anyone else, especially Will.
So why, now, did she taste such anger and longing and…she didn’t know. Regret? Guilt? Maybe wishing that it hadn’t all happened? Of course she wished that. Anybody would.
But at the same time, she also knew in her bones that all that trouble had forged her. Made her into the fighter she was now. Made it possible for her to create and follow a path of her own. Never before, never in Hampton Bay, had she felt that power. She became the determination of her own fate once she left Hampton Bay.
A thousand of those thoughts clashed through her brain all because her old boyfriend Will Orrin stood there.
Long seconds slipped by. She looked at him and wondered who he saw. And she chose nothing to say.
Will’s emotions were squashed down into a ball at his center, hiding, wrapped in his thin smile. He dared not move toward her, and could not move away. So, he rambled. “You remember I could write a little?” he finally offered. “Eight years so far, at the Hampton Bay Augur. Three before that as a freelancer,” he rattled aimlessly. “My editor barely keeps the lights on; I’m sure he lives at the office to save rent.”
“So you work for the local newspaper?” Kinney’s brain finally communicated with her mouth, taking refuge in inane conversation. “On the shark beat?” she decided to be jaunty.
“It’s the only beat right now.”
Kinney continued walking toward her villa. She was both appalled and relieved that Will followed.
“How amazing is it that the shark savior of Hampton Bay turns out to be my Kay!” Will tried a smile, falling in next to her but at a distance.
Kinney winced at the nickname. And the ‘my.’ “How amazing that the newspaper savior of Hampton Bay turns out to be my past!”
She regretted it the second it was out. Will stopped, and let Kinney step ahead, “I told Gail this wouldn’t work…” he began.
“No, Will! Look. I’m sorry…I don’t know really why I’m here or what I’m supposed to do…Uh, how’d you know Gail?” She began to face the shock of this. Her analytical brain trying to chart a way through it.
Will shrugged, hoping the conversation had veered. “What sort of local reporter doesn’t know the Mayor’s assistant? Word of advice. Gail’s the real Mayor, for anything that really has to get done.”
Kinney reached the villa door and swiped it open. She wasn’t sure what came next.
Will interrupted. “I’ve got to get Maxi. Maybe use your bathroom?” He strode back to his car, parked right next to the villa, opened the back door and wrestled a six year old out of her car seat.
Kinney looked on from the doorway and felt a second tsunami of inescapable emotion, coming from far away in the past, rolling in from a decade and a half ago. In a totally unexpected way, it flooded her senses with a wash of feeling that kept building and building. She stood clumsily on the porch steps, trying to find a response. Trying to think calmly about the fact that Will Orin had a daughter.
Will approached, oblivious, with the little girl timidly behind him. Her shirt read CREEPERS GON’ CREEP above the image of a scowling cylindrical green creature rendered in pixel art. She wore her hair in a fine frizzy cloud the color of coffee, disrupted only by a sequence of Gatorade-green plastic barrettes.
“Come say hi to Miss Kinney,” Will pulled her in front, only then seeing the tears rimming Kinney’s eyes, only then catching up to the replay going on in Kinney’s head. He stalled, but then his daughter took over “Maxi Orrin, at your service,” she declared walking up and offering a strong handshake.
Kinney couldn’t help but smile as the little girl’s effusive greeting cut through 15 years of illogical regret. Maxi’s large brown eyes demanded her complete attention, and instant affection.
“Pleased to meet you, Maxi. I’m Kinney Austin,” she breathed. “Your dad and I are friends from a long time ago.”
Maxi emitted a charming little snort. “He’s old.”
Kinney looked at him. “He certainly is old, your dad,” Kinney agreed immediately. “It’s kind of gross, huh?”
“So gross!” she shouted gleefully.
Kinney smiled. “Cool kid, Will. Thanks for bringing her.”
***
“Maxi, you need to use the bathroom? It’s right there,” Will sat on the couch inside Kinney’s villa, pointing at the freshly-appointed bathroom down the short hall. Kinney was unpacking in the bedroom, her back to the open door.
“There’s paper on the toilet, daddy.”
“That’s how they set it up in hotels, sweetie, to look nice. You have to go?”
“No!” she cascaded into giggles.
“Okay,” Will replied with audible skepticism. “Just try.”
When Kinney came out of her bedroom, looking at her watch, Will was working the screen of his phone like he was landing a plane with it. Maxi fiddled with a toy phone of her own, a simple affair with a plastic-coated LCD that displayed a heap of yellow three-dimensional puzzle pieces the little girl was arranging into a pyramid.
“You ever hear of Sparkistry before this?.” Will asked.
“Got kind of the short version from our Aquarium board president. Seems like he’s anxious about it.”
“Biggest new direction in advanced AI. They’re swimming in venture capital, and they’re about to go public, which means everyone with even a small share is gonna be a millionaire overnight.”
“Will, why does this matter?”
“The person who founded Sparkistry—one of the people, anyway—is named Jamie Brinson. He’s the victim, and he adopted us.”
“What does that mean?” Kinney was a bit distracted thinking about what she was supposed to say to the Mayor.
“Well, the town. Jamie had a boat and house here. Donated to local causes, the schools, the library, anodyne stuff. But—and this is just in the last six months—he bought up some shorefront property and made big plans to relocate a new company here. Something about offshore wind, evolving vaccines. No one is completely sure.”
“A big name company? Here?”
“It’s not the same little town as before, Kay. The summer beach crowd is way down, motels closing, restaurants empty. Like the glory days when we were in school are over. But then some very rich people from the city starting showing up like maybe Hampton Bay is the next Camelot. Way changing the tone, fewer people but more influential. New money against the old faded power brokers. So, it’s been a little tense sometimes.”
Kinney moved to the little kitchenette table, opened her laptop and started pulling up files about Jamie. Distractedly, she asked, “So what happened to him really?”
“What we know is that a big company investor threw an all-staff party on a rental yacht to celebrate the IPO. Center stage was Brinson and the CEO Puja Ganguly. The yacht was anchored near the mouth of East Harbor, and at some point Brinson went into the water. I don’t know why, and no one I’ve talked to knows either. Ganguly chased after him in a dinghy. Then the shark appears.”
“Sharks don’t eat people, Will.”
“No doubt you know your stuff,” he shrugged, “but the kid’s gone.”
“I’m right here,” Maxi insisted, absorbed in the game, ignoring their talk.
Kinney moved to sit closer to Will and lowered her voice. “Will, there are a ton of possibilities here and ‘shark attack’ is way down the list. Maybe he fell in by accident and drowned. Maybe he OD’d and someone in the company tried to cover it up! What are the chances anyone on that boat was sober?”
“Probably slim to none. But there’s no point in defending the sharks.”
This jabbed at something in her. “They’re not monsters. Most are barely even dangerous.”
“Oh, come on. Barely dangerous? Of course they’re dangerous.”
“They’re not!” High school Kinney swam up to the surface to fight. PhD Kinney took a breath and resumed control. “OK, look, most sharks are no more dangerous than coyotes. Of course, there are a half dozen species of sharks – out of hundreds - that can be deadly. Big sharks need to be respected. But they are not monsters.”
“But you admit those huge cold-blooded assholes do attack people.”
She closed her eyes, “The big ones are not cold blooded. They barely have assholes.”
“Kind of a technical defense isn’t it?”
“Bites happen.”
“‘Bites happen,’ she says!”
Will had lost none of his capacity to needle her. “If you put people and large wild predators in the same environment for long enough,” she lectured at a machine-gun pace, “someone’s going to do something stupid. And it’s not usually the animal.”
He showed the good sense to drop it, and they moved out of the villa, heading down the path towards Kinney’s car. Will pulled his daughter up to sit in the crook of his elbow, her arms wrapped around his neck. A car seat dangled from his free hand. “Oof! You got about six months left of this, baby girl, before you send Daddy to the chiropractor.”
“This is the wrong car!”
“We’re riding with Miss Kinney.”
The girl belted herself into the car seat as he shut the door and circled about the vehicle, deftly thumbing at his phone as he climbed in. Kinney pulled out of the parking lot. Will was listening to a phone message. His brow furrowed and then climbed above his lashes. Dark eyes widened. She was astonished how much of him remained legible after these long years. “Oh shit, Kinney.”
“Daddy! That’s a swear!”
“I’m sorry, baby, I owe you a quarter. Kinney, turn around.”
“What?”
“Turn around. Uhh, left up there. Up there and then left again.”
“Are you going to patronize me every minute? I know where the Municipal Center is.”
“We’re not going to the Mayor. Not yet. Left!”
“Fine! Jesus!” she chopped her left hand angrily down at the turn signal.
“Daddy!”
“Another quarter! Sorry! We’ll be better!”
“Will, you need to tell me what’s going on. Where are we going?”
“Coast Guard just found Brinson’s body. We’re going to the Coroner’s lab.”
