The Storm King(5)

The Night Ship.

Until the development of the Wharf area in the 1950s, the Night Ship had been the center of Greystone Lake’s tourism industry. In its prime it featured restaurants, shops, and game rooms. It also included a nightclub, the Night Ship, from which the pier eventually took its name. During the sixties the tourist district consolidated around the Wharf, and the Night Ship found itself isolated in the residential part of Greystone Lake. It was bankrupted, condemned, and barricaded soon after. The town had tried to tear it down, but preservationists thwarted those plans.

As a child, Nate had been glad it hadn’t been demolished. It was a ruin, but a spectacular one. While its boardwalks sagged and buckled, its graceful roofs and fairyland spires did not seem of this world. It was a relic of a more optimistic age—and like everything that old, it had a story all its own.

Nate focused on the lines of Morton Strong’s face.

He tried to pull meaning from the pilings that struck up from the silver water, to discern intent in the arcs of steelwork in the background. He searched this moment of the Night Ship’s birth for any hint that the pier would come to shadow his life as it had.

“Look what the lake dredged up.”

Nate turned to see Tom in the shop’s doorway.

“Deputy.”

“Doc.”



Nate’s oldest friend offered his hand, and Nate used it to pull him into a bear hug.

“You look good.” It was strange to see Tom in a uniform, but it suited him.

Tom laughed. “Look at you in here, browsing like a weekender. You want a ride to Bonaparte Street? I’ll run you up.”

“Can we use the lights?” Nate had been about to buy the postcard of the Night Ship. A strange impulse. Instead, he returned it and gave the tower a spin to conceal his interest.

Tom clapped him on the shoulder. “Even let you work the siren. You solo this weekend?”

“Livvy’s got this ear thing again.” Nate followed his friend back onto the street. “Long drive for a sick three-year-old. Plus, there’s the hurricane.”

“Believe me, I know. Been filling sandbags with the Kiwanis club all morning.”

“Really? Sandbags?” The lake was tempestuous, but hardly the Atlantic.

“Gosh, you’ve really gone full-tourist, haven’t you? A four-foot storm surge will swamp the embankment. You should know that!” Tom laughed. “A bunch of places got reamed by the last hurricane, so we’re going all out on prep this time.”

“Got to keep the place pretty.”

“Pretty’s what pays the bills around here. How does it look to you?”

“The Lake? Fantastic,” Nate said, and it was the truth. The town’s storefronts and waterfront were exquisitely maintained, just as they’d been in their youth. The grandeur of the Lake’s vistas were also extraordinary. The peaks of the headlands. The rippling forests of the foothills. The way all of this beauty was doubled by the mirror of the lake.

It was a storybook town, but as in any fairy tale, things were not as perfect as they first appeared.

“Lots of improvements since you were last around. Johnny opened up that place last year.” Tom pointed to a tea shop down the block. Its windows were planked over in preparation for the coming onslaught, and its awning was being rolled up. “Desserts and pastries supplied by the Empire’s kitchen. Oh, and Emma runs it. That’s her right there. Want to say hello?”



Emma Aoki, who’d once been their classmate, was the woman closing the awning. Her head was tilted to the surge of clouds whipping in from the south. She’d always been slight, but now she looked made of paper. Nate was a block away, but in the push of the wind, he saw that her dress hung on her as if from a hanger. She frowned at the weather, and then her eyes crossed the distance between them. Something in her expression changed, but the frown remained. More than a decade gone, but she knew him at a glance.

“She looks busy,” Nate said. He waved to her, and after a moment she raised her hand to match his own. “Maybe later.”

They turned down a side street to where Tom’s cruiser was parked.

“Actually, I’d like to catch up with everybody at some point. Do you keep in touch with them?” Nate asked.

“Mostly. Some more than others.”

“And Emma? You see a lot of her?”

“Sometimes.” He chucked Nate’s bag into the trunk. “Oh, like, date? Nah.”

Nate got into the passenger side and let the battered seat mold to his body. “She’s very thin. Has she been sick?”

“We’re not all your cancer patients, Doc. Not yet, anyway.” The cruiser lurched onto the wide arc of the Strand, the street closest to the shore.

Tom himself seemed in good health. He looked like he kept in shape, but they’d reached the age where some men begin to fall apart. He had a touch more weight in the cheeks. A new groove in his brow. The angle between his chin and throat had begun to loosen to a curve. Nate wouldn’t have called his friend’s hairline receding, though he had more forehead than he used to.



“Emma’s been having kind of a tough time, though,” Tom said. “She’s living in those apartments by the packing houses—they might be new since you left? Anyway, they had a sewage problem a week or so ago, and her place is on the ground floor.”