Chapter 3 of the novel, The Talking Mime

Chapter 3

Researching

We had been away from most newspapers and television for several weeks. I have a rule about not reading newspapers or watching television when we're doing our summer cruising — a rule which drives Nym crazy, but one she respects, grudgingly.

She was a journalism major in college and is still hooked on the news of the day, frequently interrupting my writing with some tidbit from NPR that falls on my deaf ears.
        The laptop computers stay home, too, no hardship for me, but sometimes for the balance of the family.

I take my fiction writing relatively seriously, much more so than my publisher and my agent who were still waiting for a big book after three modestly successful novels in 10 years about the intrigues of university life. Since taking a position teaching American Literature at the University of San Francisco, I found that I had plenty of plot lines right outside my door on the campus, but precious little time to write with the staggering number of papers to grade. When Jerrod and Jacob were very young, I had tried my hand at some newspaper writing and gave it up when my editors tried to make me parargraph every sentence and rarely let me put together a story of more than 500 words.
      It might have been than experience that made me so dogmatic on our summer sailing trips, or perhaps it was the peace and quiet — and not hearing about the latest stock market problems or the riots in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Nym and I rowed quietly back out to Rocinante where the boys stood on deck, pretending to be bored but twitching with excitement to hear what had happened in the Harbormaster's office. I had made them stay behind, partly to get cleaned up before coming ashore, but also so that if things got complicated and we were gone, someone would be around the boat to keep an eye on things.

I opted for a nap, while Nym filled the boys in on our adventure. Then I heard Nym shout that she was leaving with the dinghy — and the boys — for some exploring in the town. It sounded like a lot of fun, but I was still a little nervous about leaving the boat unattended. 

I checked the bowline one more time, saw that the wind was still light and likely to remain so, and headed into the aft cabin where my bed looked more comfortable than it could possibly be. There's nothing quite like anchoring when you are tied to a buoy  attached by 3/8  inch chain to a one-ton block of cement sunk 10 feet in the sea bottom.

I all but passed out when my head hit the pillow and dreamed of our trip down and had visions of Wilma Krebs on the bow of my boat, checking for fingerprints around the deck and collecting little particles and feathers so she could track down the gull.

Sleeping on the boat is usually very peaceful for me once I settle in to the rhythm of the water. In an anchorage like this, motorboat wakes can stir things up a bit, but that afternoon I slept soundly, with the waves keeping the boat lifting and dropping gently with a regularity that would've put me to sleep if I hadn't already been so drowsy.

Sometimes at anchor I'll have awful dreams about the boat. The most common has the boat in shallow water and the tide going out. That had happened to us once in the Sacramento River Delta, earning us a nice photo in a sailing magazine of the boys and I cleaning the bottom of Rocinante while she sat high and dry on her side.

I had just awakened and fallen back into a sleep that was leading me to a dream about Ingrid Bergman — another favorite dream topic — when I was startled awake.

"Yo! Daddo!"

I heard the shout from the stern of the boat and rolled over wondering why they were back already , only to read the clock — 1400 hours. Good God. I would never get to sleep tonight, I thought.

They had been gone three hours, now it was just 2 p.m. and I realized that the wind had come up and with it some sizable swells that were making Rocinante creak in the wind as she rode on the chain. Jerrod and Jacob and Nym were bouncing pretty wildly right near the ladder and as I came up the companionway, I could see that the dinghy was riding low with groceries and two large sacks of plastic-wrapped newspapers in the back.

"Mom bought every newspaper for the last month, Dad," Jacob shouted, beating his brother to this bit of news by seconds. Nym cut Jacob off with a quick hand motion before I found out what it cost to  buy the last month's worth of the Monterey Peninsula Herald, the Salinas Californian and Santa Cruz Sentinel. Luckily they were all relatively small-town newspapers or the dinghy might've foundered from the weight of the newsprint.

When I saw the papers, I knew what we were in for. The "no newspaper" rule was out the window and there was little use arguing.

We had done something similar when we lived in Sacramento for a year and I was a visiting professor, teaching about the political writings of Norman Mailer to some generally unappreciative feminists at California State University, Sacramento. Nym worked part-time as an investigator for the Sacramento County District Attorney's office, as she does now in San Francisco, but she became obsessed with a rapist who lurked along a jogging trail adjacent to the American River, waiting for solitary women victims. The police kept issuing lots of "be careful out there" stories, but seemed unable — Nym said uninterested — in catching the perpetrator despite the howls of protest from the community that wanted the guy caught and locked up.

Nym studied news reports, looking at where he had struck, at what time of day, what his likely escapes routes had been. She put together a logical case describing a pattern — and where she thought the rapist would likely strike next. She ended up making the news herself when her boss discounted her theory completely and she went out, alone, to stake out a lonely stretch of the trail for several days.
      All without telling me.

Late one afternoon she was sitting under an eucalyptus tree a mile from downtown Sacramento when she heard a scuffle nearby and ran out to find the trail-side rapist pulling a woman jogger off the trail, a cloth stuffed in her mouth so she couldn't scream. Nym ran up and when he turned, she emptied a 24-ounce can of orange Day-Glo paint all over the face, arms and chest of the would-be rapist, most of which he was still wearing five hours later when the police responded to a report of an oddly colored man reeking of paint thinner who was trying to board a Greyhound for Los Angeles.

"Mom's on the case," Jerrod yelled as they dragged the newspapers and groceries below.

"She's a little out of her jurisdiction, too," I said, regretting it instantly when I felt her eyes on the back of my neck. I opted to smile and get the wine chilled for what was probably going to be a long afternoon of looking at mediocre writing on banal topics — and all printed in 9 point newsprint type.

Nym's methodology was like that followed by a lot of detectives in  novels. She would amass her evidence and pin up notes, ideas, and news clips in a melange on a bulletin board so she could visualize and make connections between disparate events and ideas. I had taught her the technique when we were first married. In literature, we call it a tornado outline, in which the main theme usually jumps off the page at you after a little staring. We kept a 2 foot by 3 foot bulletin board stowed on Rocinante for just such a purpose but it had only been used by me up until this point for writing projects — not junior crime stoppers' stuff.

After a snack of peanuts, we settled in around the table, but after about a hour of quality time of the family reading, I realized we were rocking just enough that my eyes had trouble focusing on the newsprint. The curse of being nearly 50 was that I now had to buy reading glasses in packs of three at the drugstore, usually getting several different strengths, for different jobs. Today the newspapers seem to demand pretty powerful lenses which were making me a bit queasy as the rocking continued and I began to worry about a summer windstorm. The bulletin board was littered with some clippings but still looked pretty bare.

"Mom, what are we looking for?" Jerrod asked.  "Somebody who lost a hand and is offering a reward?"

Jacob snorted from the V-Berth where he had retreated with his Gameboy, opting not to get his hands dirty on the newspapers. "Yeah, look in lost and found, under body parts..."

My offering was just as bad. "It might be less obvious than that boys. I think your mother is going to say, 'Look for missing persons first, attacks by crazed flesh-tearing seagulls second.'"

I was about to make a really bad joke about the hand belonging to Tippi Hedren, star of the classic Alfred Hitchcock film, "The Birds," when I noticed Nym had stopped reading and was staring at Jerrod and I over the tops of her reading classes, with only a trace of a smile.

"I hope you guys are more observant than funny," she said, shoving us each another stack of newspapers. "I do want you to look for missing persons, but also anything else weird.

...Grave robberies.

Theft of a corpse from a hospital.

A motorboat accident.

A missing scuba diver..."

Jerrod and I held up our hands in mock surrender and Nym smiled, returning to her stack of newspapers and I felt myself falling asleep as I scanned the Santa Cruz newspaper with its endless stories about planning commissions, rezonings for new sewer connections and some social event calendar items that made me long for being back out on the ocean. It was reminding me of a friend in college who had worked at a film lab, processing people's snapshots and making prints. I offered that it must be something to see all those different people and what kind of pictures they took. My friend said he would swap jobs with me in a minutes — I was working in the library, checking out books and refences for co-eds — because the pictures he developed and printed documented, he said, the most boring people on the face of the earth.

My eyes were wandering for the porthole by 4 p.m., nearly two hours into the research and many papers to go. Jerrod had started reading just the comics pages of each newspaper, clearly not part of the rules, but had great sympathy.

Nym snapped us all out of it with her clear, part-time DA voice.

"Stop!"

"We have to go back through all of these papers again. We can't assume we're looking for an incident dealing with a woman," she said, drawing looks from all three of us.
       She grabbed the stacks and newspapers and started dealing them out to us again, like a dealer at a poker table.
       "I think that might have been a man's hand, not a woman's. I just wish I could remember the ring better. Maybe the coroner will be able to tell us something tomorrow."

NEXT: Chapter 4, Service with a smile