What he didn’t have was any new information: on Piper and Tom, or climate change—or anything else for that matter. Anytime Anders brought up a subject on something other than the activity he was currently partaking in, the conversation shut down quicker than the gnats found his skin to feast on when he stepped outside.
And the podcast was stalling out, Anders could feel it. Flatlining, more like it, as Anders desperately searched for a pair of jumper cables to revive it.
He woke with a start in the dead of night Monday, the answer plain as day, and he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before now. The email! The one he got right after the Cake Walk. Maybe that wasn’t a crazy person. Maybe it was the source he’d been looking for. The person who would go on record and explain everything he wanted to know about Piper and Tom. He tossed the blanket to the side and jumped off the mattress, making a beeline for his laptop in the dark, where he pulled up the email he had received weeks ago. After a few stops and starts, he typed out a reply on the glowing screen and hit send.
From: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Re: Your Cake Walk story
I think I found the story you’re referring to, but I can’t get anyone to talk. Would you be willing to meet?
Anders checked his email more often than usual that week, hoping to get a response before his Saturday morning ferry ride back over to the island.
But a reply never came.
Chapter 15
As soon as Piper stepped onto the front porch of Tom’s mother’s house, relief welled up in her like water filling a pot. Arlene was challenging to visit on her best days—and this day was certainly not that. She’d been in one of her talking moods and regaled Piper on everything from the argument she was currently in with Tom’s grandfather Herbert (who’d been dead for twenty years) to the proper way to set a formal dining room table (“The edge of the butter knives must turn in toward the plates—you young people have no decorum”) to the origins of the metal cell tower being built just outside of town (“It’s the Russians! And everybody’s just letting it happen!”). Piper loved her mother-in-law—she tried to visit at least every other day, and she and Tom took dinner over twice a week—but she was exhausting, at best. Arlene, who’d once been an energetic, with-it woman, had been on a downward slide ever since Tom’s father had died six years earlier. But at least she hadn’t been slurring today, which Piper hoped meant that Dr. Khari and Lady Judy had both taken her last conversations with them to heart.
Piper turned a corner, startled as a body collided with her knees. “Watch it, Bobby,” she said, reaching down to set him upright.
“Sorry, Pipes!” he said, readying to take off again, with barely a glance at her.
“Hey, where are you headed in such a hurry?”
“Home. Ma says I have to finish my chores before I can play with this.” He held out his pudgy hand, which clutched a plastic grocery bag, hard angles straining against its seams.
“What is it?”
“A camera!”
Piper cocked her head. Bobby’s family was one of the poorest, if not the poorest, on the island. He went barefoot not because he hated wearing shoes, but because he likely didn’t own a pair. “Where’d you get it?”
“Anders. I’ve taken more than a hundrit pictures! But they’re stuck on here. He said he’ll help me get ’em off.”
“He did?”
“Yep. See ya!”
Feet rooted to the ground, she gaped after Bobby’s fleeing form. Not many people surprised Piper. But in the weeks since first stepping foot on this island, Anders was proving to be nothing if not unexpected. She thought after that first adventure—the way he looked trudging back up the dock, sunburned, covered in muck, and missing a shoe (one shoe!—she had tried to paint the picture for Tom and Mrs. Olecki that evening but dissolved into giggles every time she attempted it)—that he’d leave this island for good and never look back. But she had to give him credit. He kept coming back for more. And there was something oddly charming, or at least admirable, about someone being so willing to make such a fool of himself at any cost.
And then there was the way he had begun pitching in— hauling old crab pots down to the incinerator for BobDan, mowing Lady Judy’s lawn, and now this gift for Bobby—it was nothing short of . . . kind. But what she couldn’t possibly understand was why he was doing all of this. For a silly old podcast? Yes, climate change was important, but Anders himself had said—and Mrs. Olecki confirmed—that he had a nearly nonexistent audience. What did he think he was going to accomplish that the New York Times itself couldn’t? Nobody on the mainland cared about what
