Freelance and Fishmaids is a supernatural novel, serialized in twelve episodes. This is Episode One.
In this first episode, Caroline Phelan—newly fired from her job as a journalist—meets her informant for the first time, the mysterious man known only as the Captain, and he gives her a proposition.
A wind-clean seagull watched Caroline Phelan from the railing of her apartment balcony, all beady-eyed interest and full from the nearby Greek restaurant’s dumpster, as she sat at her desk and scrolled through a list of uninspiring options for a new job, a steaming mug of green tea perched beside her laptop. Outside, the midmorning light over the modest yet bustling harbor town of Port Salish was milky and wan, a fragile thing, easily veiled by slow, sludgy clouds. Even the weekday traffic sounded sleepy.
Searching for journalism jobs near me hadn’t returned much, so Caroline found herself wondering if she had the skills and instincts to learn technical writing quickly enough to apply for the seeming-bazillion technical writing jobs available. Or grant writing. Why do the grant writers always seem in such high demand?
Regardless, none of the writing jobs locally were on Ferris Island. There was a smattering in Sequim, one or two in Port Townsend, and the bulk were in Seattle. A move appeared to be looming in her future, no matter how she sliced it.
The idea of leaving was a heavy one, heavier than she would have ever imagined.
I need this place, she thought, surprising herself with the desperation. There’s so much I still wanted to do.
Caroline sighed, sipped her tea, her gaze flicking to the tab in her browser where her blog all about Ferris Island’s paranormal hotspots and goings-on sat, idle. Waiting. Ever since she had been fired from the Chronicle, she had found it difficult to even look at it.
Instead, she turned to look out at the seagull.
“Hello,” she said, quietly.
The seagull folded its head over its back and closed its eyes as a light drizzle began to fall in the maritime winter gray. Caroline wondered briefly if she had any crusts of bread to give it before her cell buzzed on the desk.
An unlabeled yet familiar local number.
Caroline froze, thought about letting it go to voicemail, though she assumed he wouldn’t leave a message. He never had, before.
Then again, she had always picked up, before.
It buzzed. She waited. And then, before she could stop herself, she picked it up.
“Caroline, here,” she said.
“Miss Phelan. I may have something that will interest you.”
Despite the brush of cold curiosity along the back of her neck at his words, Caroline wasn’t in the mood. She sipped her tea, frowning. “I’m out of business, Captain. You’ll have to find yourself another amateur ghost hunter.”
A pause. “Can I ask why?”
“My editor saw the blog,” she said, rubbing the bridge of her nose where the tiniest seedling of a headache had started to blossom. “I’ve been fired from the Chronicle. No more Ferris Island Oddities. And since writing jobs on this island are thin on the ground, I’ll likely be moving on, too. Off island. Somewhere.”
She hadn’t meant to be so forthcoming, and the Captain was silent, unreadable. In the background, as with all of their calls, Caroline could hear the gentle murmur of the tide, like rising and falling static. Having never seen his face before, Caroline couldn’t help but picture the man as a grizzled pirate, sea-worn and wave-weary, with his broad, buzzy, drawling British accent and cryptic manner of speaking.
Finally, the Captain said, “How do you feel about pie, Miss Phelan?”
Caroline’s brow furrowed. “What?”
“Pie.” The Captain’s soft smile was audible, even over the phone. “Or soup. Lunch, is what I’m saying. Do you eat lunch?”
Caroline blinked. “I…yes, I eat lunch, but…”
“Have you ever been to the Seavend General Store?”
Caroline thought back, shook her head. “I know where it is. I’ve never eaten there.”
“How about noon?”
Caroline’s mind raced. The Captain, the faceless voice on the phone, her mysterious informant for three years…was he finally willing to reveal himself? And why now?
“I can…do noon.”
“Perfect. Until then.”
And then he hung up. Caroline’s hand shook as she set her cell back down on the desk. It was just before eleven; she had about an hour to get cleaned up and ready.
She looked up in time to see the seagull fix her with a beady-eyed stare, cluck a few times in clear avian disapproval, and then lift off into the air, disappearing into the winter mist.
*******
It was just noon when Caroline pulled into the old, potholed gravel parking lot of the Seavend marina, and the rain began to fall in earnest.
As she got out of the car, pulling her coat’s hood up and over her tight black curls, she paused to take in the smell. There was something unique about Seavend’s smell, all north wind and boat-fuel and the breath off the wild mouth of the nearby ocean. The quiet little village clung to the island’s northern edge in a tumble of shingled houses with overgrown gardens, and the marina—tiny, compared to the harbor in Port Salish—held fishing boats, old sailboats, barnacle-crusted yachts housing live-aboards and free-wheeling retirees, and a handful of recreational speed-boats covered for the winter behind a breakwater speckled with seagull droppings.
Ahead of Caroline was the Seavend General Store, a long-standing Ferris Island institution, its cedar siding silver with weather-wear and a dusty HELP WANTED sign tilted carefully in the front window. In her handful of years on the island, Caroline had passed it by a few times on her way to other news-worthy places, but she had never had a reason to go in. It was the sort of shop common in so many Pacific Northwest hamlets, the kind of place where you can buy a toothbrush, a bag of sugar, and a bottle of motor oil, collect your mail and packages, and grab a pastry on your way out the door. Or, you can sit in one of the creaky, cracked-leather booths and eat a cup of tinny chowder, daydreaming out the foggy single-paned windows while a troupe of local old-timers play cards at the table nearby, the way they do every week. It was that kind of place.
Exactly the sort of place a grizzled pirate captain would meet someone for lunch.
Caroline ran for the door, dodging the rain, and pulled it open, the warmth wafting out to meet her. She stepped inside.
Along the right-hand wall was a long bar with rickety stools, a deli case full of baked goods and tubs of ice cream, a soda machine, and the cash register, where a bored-looking teenager in a waiter’s apron was staring down at his phone. To the left, a few rows of short shelves lined with various groceries, toiletries, and other necessaries for smalltown marine living. There was a tiny fridge for fishing bait in the far corner. And straight ahead, taking up the whole seaview-window side of the building, were booths and small cafe tables for sitting and eating. The whole old place echoed disconcertingly from a high, vaulted ceiling, and an upper-level storage walkway was clustered untidily with cardboard boxes.
Caroline scanned the patrons already seated in the booths and tables, applying her mental image of the Captain to the options. A group of old men in one corner, shooting the breeze. A bleary-eyed mother with her two children. A pair of older ladies chatting amiably, a table full of middle school kids who were clearly on winter break, laughing over cups of soda.
No grizzled pirate captains, and it was now nearly ten past noon. Caroline wondered if, perhaps, the Captain had set her up, or stood her up.
But then—
“Miss Phelan?”
Caroline turned to the familiar voice and the man who had just walked in the door, behind her.
Her first surprise was that he was not, at all, as grizzled a pirate captain as she had assumed he would be. He could not have been much older than she was, in his late thirties or early forties, lanky under an old navy blue peacoat, blond-haired and trim gold-bearded under a black felt cap, the kind common among the island’s fishermen. The sea came in with him, a sharp savor under the muted fragrance of the rain.
Her second surprise was that she knew him. Or, at least, she had seen him, before.
“You…” she said. “You’re…”
He tapped the brim of his hat to her before removing it, and extending his hand. “Reyville,” he said. “Captain Reyville. Hello.”
She took his offered hand, thick with callouses, and shook it in undisguised wonder. “I’ve seen you, before. At the harbor in Port Salish.”
He nodded, smiled. “Likely. I’m always around, helping out the Harbormaster. What kind of pie do you like?”
“Apple,” she said, automatically.
“Coffee?”
“No.”
Reyville turned to the bored teenager, held up two fingers.
“Two slices of apple, one coffee, please, on my tab,” he said, then to Caroline, “shall we sit?”
He led her to the empty booth in the corner with a practiced ease—this was clearly a favorite place of his—and they slid in opposite each other after taking the necessary few moments to remove their wet coats.
Caroline stole glances at him as she pulled off her raincoat and fixed her curls into place. As a journalist, she had covered a few stories at the Port Salish harbor over the years, special events and the occasional crime. And she had seen the blond-haired sailor there, always at the elbow of the Harbormaster, always part of the landscape. But she had never spoken to him, until now. Reyville. Captain Reyville.
Captain of what, exactly?
As they settled in, Caroline was first to speak.
“Okay,” she said. “So, Captain. Three years you’ve been calling me, tipping me off, and we never meet. Why the secrecy?”
Reyville shrugged, rolled the sleeves of his worn cabled sweater back from his wrists. “I dunno. It seemed to work out well for us both, didn’t it? At least for a while. You were trying to keep a low profile. I just felt it was easiest, most convenient for you.”
His accent was even thicker in person than on the phone, if that was possible. Caroline was no expert in the finer points of British dialects, but the Captain certainly didn’t have the stereotypical, polished BBC newsreader tone she might have expected. It was more “in the nose”, so to speak.
“So, then,” she said, slowly, “now that I’m unemployed…it’s fair game.”
The teenage waiter wandered over with two slices of pie and Reyville’s coffee, and Reyville chuckled.
“I guess you could put it that way,” he said, opening a packet of sugar and tapping it into the mug of coffee. “Seemed like the right time to meet. I certainly wasn’t expecting you to say that you’re leaving the island.”
“I don’t have much of a choice. I’m a journalist. There’s only one newspaper on this island, and I got fired from it.” Caroline took a bite of her pie, let her statement sit on the table for a minute, before adding, “I would stay in a heartbeat if I thought I could make enough money as a writer, here. I do…love this place.”
And she meant it. She had never known anywhere quite like this island, with its windswept wilderness and its undercurrent of hauntings, ghosts traveling to and fro as thick as fog. The stories this place could tell, the things she had already seen…
I need this place, she thought, for the second time in so many hours, her heart squeezing at the thought of leaving it. I’m not done, here.
A flutter of movement out of the corner of her eye as a seagull landed on the railing of the shore-hugging walkway outside the window, shivering its wings for a moment before settling in. Watching in that way unique to hungry gulls.
“In my line of work,” Reyville said, “I see a lot of strange things. I’ve been around this island for a long time, and I never run out of wonders to find. It was a joy sharing those things with someone else over the last few years. I wonder if….”
He trailed off. Caroline tore her eyes from the gull, took the bait.
“What?” she said.
He didn't look at her, focusing on his slice of pie, carefully cutting a piece. “I don’t see why we couldn’t…keep going. There’s more than ghosts out there, you know. This island is old, and stranger than you can believe. We’ve barely scratched the surface, you and I.”
Here, he raised his gaze to look at her. “What do you think about going freelance?”
“As, what, a paranormal researcher?” Caroline said, laughing. “What would I do for money?”
“Oh hell, I don’t know. You could work anywhere. You could work here!” Reyville shrugged. “Work wherever you like, enough to make your rent and bills. Part time, if you can make it stretch. And then, with the rest of your time, we could…work together. Keep Ferris Island Oddities going. Blogs make some money nowadays, don’t they? Don’t ask me how, but still, I’ve heard it happens. What do you think?”
Caroline pondered this, pondered him.
“What’s in it for you?” she asked, narrowing her eyes. She knew what she wanted, though she scarcely allowed herself to think it. But what did he want?
Reyville smiled. “Fun,” he replied. “Interest. A laugh. Do you know how monotonous a harbor job gets for an open-water sailor like me? Being landlocked gets tiring, Miss Phelan. Dull.”
It felt like an easy answer, something you might tell a child, like he was brushing her off. She knew there was more; there had to be. But she decided to leave it, at least for now.
For three years this man had been giving her tips on paranormal spots on this island, strange stories and even stranger patterns lying beneath the surface. If he had wanted to lead her into danger, he could have done so, over and over again. He hadn’t.
It wasn’t exactly an open-and-shut case for trusting him, but it was compelling.
Could she picture herself working as a part-time waitress, slinging coffee and pie during the day and hunting ghosts at night with Captain Reyville, the bearded sailor? What a life that would be.
What a life that would be…
The seagull was watching her, as though waiting for her answer.
Hello, it seemed to say. Hello. Don’t say goodbye.
Caroline took another bite of pie.
“Look,” she said, finally, weighing her words carefully, “I think it’s only fair that you know that I’m working on a book. About the paranormal. That’s…why I’m doing all of this. The blog, all of it. It’s…really important to me. Important enough to risk my job for it, and that gamble clearly didn’t pay off…”
She paused, felt the heat rise in her cheeks.
Awkward conversations over the phone. Long-distance. The questions. The disappointment. The shame. The shame.
“I can't say where life will lead me after,” she added, shaking it off, “but if you can get me enough material for my book, then it’s a deal. At least, for now.”
A slow smile spread across Reyville’s face. He held out his calloused hand.
“It’s a deal,” he said.
She took it, shook it firmly. Outside the window the seagull took off with a self-satisfied cry, seemingly spooked from the movement of their hands across the table.
Or perhaps—perhaps!—the gull was off to report all that she had seen, off to tell the birds and beasts, the shades and souls island-wide that Caroline Phelan was going to stay, at least for now! At least for now!
O, feathered prophet! O, winged witness! Hovering like the Spirit of God over the waters, calling and squalling through the mist and rain:
Hello! Hello! Hello!
“Okay. Deal,” Caroline said, smiling in spite of herself. “So, when do you want to begin?”
Reyville tipped his coffee cup. “Got plans tonight?”
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Oh, I loved that ending. The allusion to Genesis, (also maybe Tolkien and the eagle in The Return of the King?), and honestly the whole story. I could *see* the General Store, you know? Man, I wish we had one of those here in Indiana.
Anyway. Very much looking forward to the rest of this.
I'M IN! BUCKLE UP FAM WE'RE GOING TO FERRIS ISLAND!