Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock (general ebook reader .TXT) 📗

Jane would have been happy even to talk about sex, if Martha would come back.

And then one day, Huckleberry was nosing around looking for a lost ball when he startled and ran back to Jane, howling his head off.

“What’s up, silly boy? Did you stir up the blue heron’s nest again? You know she doesn’t like that.”

Deep in his throat, Huckleberry growled, then pawed the ground but wouldn’t go farther.

“What is it?” Jane said again, stepping gingerly up to the dune, parting the long beach grass with her fingers.

Oh no, she thought, seeing a pair of steel-toed boots lying side by side, noses up, as if they had bloomed out of the sand. She immediately thought of the other boot, the one with a human foot in it, and was slightly relieved that at least there were two of these and they were also attached to two long legs. It was a weird thing to notice, and she wished Martha were with her, especially when she realized that this was a whole person, intact but not looking very well.

He was probably a few years older than Jane, and his breathing was very, very shallow.

“Huckleberry, go get Mama!” Jane yelled, pointing to the house. But the dog just looked at her and cocked his head one way and then the other.

Jane took off as fast as she could, but she knew she was not the girl who had run like lightning when her brother had screamed. Jane did the best she could, her mind working faster than her legs, replaying the images in her head: salt-crusted leather boots, wet faded jeans, messy bowl-cut hair surrounding a pale face. Much too pale, actually. Ashes from a fire. An old tin can. Clamshells scattered nearby.

God, why do you always have to notice mollusks, even in an emergency? Martha was gone, but Jane could still hear her voice.

It took a concerted effort on the part of the few people still left to get the boy into a bed, warm him up, figure out who he was and how he’d gotten here. This last bit was going to be the most difficult, because even he wouldn’t be able to tell them.

His license said that his name was Conrad James, he was from Granville, Colorado, and he was nineteen years old. That was a real cowboy-sounding name, Jane thought, scanning the atlas she’d gotten from the mobile library. Granville was only about thirty miles from Pigeon Creek, where Martha now lived.

Seeing those towns on the map so close together reminded Jane of all the ways she and Martha had forever tried to make their lives intersect. Except that this boy landing where he had really was just a coincidence.

Conrad had planned to visit an uncle in Canada, one he barely knew but who he’d heard of often. His uncle had a PhD in physics, fixed up vintage cars, and lived with a man. Conrad had wanted to ask his advice: Was it really possible to live in this world and love whoever you wanted?

But he hadn’t made it to Canada, because the beach had drawn him in, its beauty and mystery and the cacophony of waves hitting the rocks. And now Conrad had no idea that he even had an uncle. All of it was gone, just like that. He was a completely blank slate.

The last thing he’d done was dig a few razor clams, make a small fire, and cook them in an old tin can filled with salt water. He was from landlocked Colorado, nowhere near the ocean, so he did not know that digging and eating clams was only done in months containing an “R.” As Martha’s mother used to say, You don’t know what you don’t know.

But now he also didn’t know things he had known. How he’d angrily stormed out of a church sacristy after seeing a priest touch an altar boy who was barely ten years old. He would not remember wondering if he should have told someone—the boy’s mother? Most of all, he had no memory that that same priest had made him feel so much shame about a confessed kiss.

Sadly, that kiss, one of the most beautiful things Conrad had experienced in his life up to that point, would also be forgotten.

Jane knew none of these things about him either as she watched him sleeping in her bed, a warm washcloth on his forehead. But when he finally woke up and had no idea who he was or where he’d come from, she knew that her beloved bivalve mollusks were at the scene of the crime.

She found all of her old Farmers’ Almanacs and the scientific journals that the librarian had brought her over the years. She remembered reading about a toxic substance called domoic acid that was thought to infect shellfish. Scientists were studying cases of people who had actually suffered amnesia after eating clams or mussels or even oysters contaminated by algae blooms. It had popped up a few times in these papers; there had even been outbreaks of amnesic shellfish poisoning on Prince Edward Island.

Of course, she couldn’t test for it, but when the paramedics arrived she handed them a bag full of clamshells that had been on the ground near where she’d found him and told them her theory.

“Some people never recover, and others live their lives remembering only things that happened after they ate the shellfish; still others forget everything, even new things, over and over again. It’s a matter of time, how it plays out long-term. Everyone is different. But he does have many of the symptoms.”

She couldn’t believe how intently they listened to her, as if she were a real scientist.

They promised to send out health officials the next day to test live clams so that nobody else got sick. One of the paramedics smiled and said, “You’ve just saved us hours of work trying to nail this down. At least now we have a place to start. Thank