50

MONDAY morning, 10:00 a.m., Horace Boone leaned back in his chair and sipped from an enormous mug of coffee, watching through the window as the sun made its brilliant ascent above the Outer Banks, whetting the sky into cloudless November cobalt.

It should’ve been a lovely morning, sitting in that warm sunlit nook of the Ocracoke Coffee Company, amid the smell of fresh coffee beans and newspapers and baking pastries and the murmurs of browsing customers in the adjoining Java Books.

But Horace was a wreck.

It had been four days now since he’d watched Andrew Thomas board the Island Hopper with that pretty young woman and taxi out through Silver Lake harbor into the sound.  He’d waited and waited, staring through the windshield as the sky dumped cold unrelenting rain.  An hour had passed and the Island Hopper returned without them. 

By nightfall there was still no sign of them so he made his way back to the Harper Castle B&B, had supper, and went to bed. 

First thing Friday morning, he returned to the Community Store docks.  The Jeep Cherokee that Andrew and the woman had arrived in was gone.  Horace drove to Howard’s Pub, saw that the Audi Andrew had rented wasn’t there either.

Behind the wheel of his own subcompact rental, a tiny white Kia, Horace felt the hot tears begin to roll down his cheeks.  Up until a few days ago he’d sensed that he was fated to tail Andrew Thomas and record his story.  He’d managed to follow him nearly three thousand miles from Haines Junction, Yukon, to Denver International Airport.  There, he’d lost Andrew in security, waited all weekend in despair near a stand of payphones in the food court of Terminal B, berating himself for flushing his savings on this ridiculous endeavor.  Watching the stream of travelers, he resolved to fly back to Anchorage, apologize profusely to Professor Byron, and finish his MFA in the creative writing program.  This last year of his life had been derailed by a twenty-four-year-old megalomaniac who fancied he would write a book about Andrew Thomas and become famous. 

As Horace gathered his backpack and came to his feet he stared down the terminal and watched in astonishment as the man he thought he’d lost glided toward him on the moving walkway.  Andrew Thomas walked right up beside him, grabbed a payphone, and with his back turned to Horace, proceeded to make a phone call. 

Horace felt certain he was hallucinating but he stood there and listened as Andrew called the North Carolina Department of Transportation and inquired about the ferry schedules from the mainland to a place called Ocracoke Island.  Had Horace any lingering doubt about whether fate and fortune were in his pocket, he then observed Andrew hang up, redial, and book a room at the Harper Castle B&B on Ocracoke for the following week.

His rejuvenation was instantaneous.

Once on Ocracoke, Horace spent Wednesday and Thursday following Andrew’s movements throughout the island—the two trips to the stone manor on the sound, Andrew’s visit to Tatum Boat Tours, Bubba’s Bait and Tackle, his peculiar meeting with the pretty blond at Howard’s Pub, and finally, Andrew and the blond’s departure on that boat in the middle of a nor’easter. 

Apparently they had returned late in the night and for some reason left the island.  Had Horace waited by the docks he might be with them now.  Instead he’d come thousands of miles only to lose Andrew permanently on a small island off the coast of North Carolina.  He’d let the story of a lifetime slip away.  Andrew was long gone by now, pursuing Luther Kite, in a story that Horace would never get to tell. 

No question, he’d missed the party.

Horace set the coffee mug down on his little table and lifted the purple notebook containing the first four chapters of his book on Andrew Thomas.  He didn’t have the heart to write about Andrew this morning.  Thumbing through the pages, he relived the thrill of finding him and standing outside the window of Andrew’s cabin in Haines Junction, watching the master write.  For a month at least, Horace had known hope.

Rising from the table, he acknowledged that this would probably be his final morning on Ocracoke.  But he wasn’t going to waste it as he’d done the last three days—driving aimlessly around the island searching for Andrew’s Audi and that blue Jeep Cherokee.  Tonight he would try one last thing and if that proved futile (as he suspected it would) he’d fly back to Alaska, beg his parents for a little money, and never again do anything this reckless and stupid.