The Last Ferry Out

I'm twenty-eight years old, I have a doctorate in anthropology, and last Saturday I spent seven hours hiding behind a lifeboat on a ferry with a ukulele in my lap. My girlfriend, Chloe, is twenty-nine and has been with me for three years, which is apparently enough time for a person to develop the patience of a structural pillar, except I can't use that phrase anymore because someone told me it's a cliché. She has the patience of a timber frame, then, which is fitting, since timber framing is her whole career. That's how we met, at a workshop three years ago when I was twenty-five. She was showing me how to cut a mortise and I was showing her how to talk for forty minutes about ritual objects in maritime cultures. Somehow she stuck around.

The ferry in question runs between the mainland and a rock off the coast of Newfoundland that calls itself an island the way a shed calls itself a house. Gray channel, gray sky, two docks made of wood that looked soft in the middle like old cheese. The ferry itself was the last one out that morning, captained by a man named Jarrod who had run the route for ten years and looked like he'd personally fought every wave in that channel and won on points.

I should back up and explain why we were there at all, because Chloe asked me the same question about six times and each time I gave a slightly different answer and none of them satisfied her.

"Walk me through it again," she said as we pulled out of the parking lot, her duffel bag between her boots like a peace offering nobody had asked for. "Why are we spending two of my vacation days on a ferry."

"Because the Holland-Vargas wedding is happening on that island this weekend," I said. "And I think the groom is a fence for stolen artifacts."

Chloe looked at me the way she looks at a joint that's been cut wrong. "The groom. The one from the wedding registry website. That groom."

"That's the beauty of it. Nobody suspects a groom. He flies under flags no one else can see, Chloe. He has access to estate sales, private collections, appraisers. He moves pieces through social events nobody audits."

"He moves canapés through social events. He's a groom."

I had my binoculars in my lap and my ukulele in its case by my feet, and I want to acknowledge here that I understand how this looked. I understood it then, too. I just didn't care, which is a personality trait rather than a defense.

The ukulele was my idea, and it was, I maintain, a good idea in principle. Two women sitting on a ferry for hours attracts attention. Two women where one is a cheerful tourist noodling on a ukulele attracts no attention at all, because everyone is busy praying the ukulele player doesn't start singing. Disguise through annoyance. Sun Tzu never wrote it down but I believe he thought it.

Chloe identified the flaw before we even boarded. "Toni, the disguise only works if you can actually play the ukulele. You own a ukulele. Owning one and playing one are different countries and you've never been issued a passport."

"I can play four chords."

"Two of which are the same chord."

"That's called texture."

She didn't argue further because arguing with me on an empty stomach is a losing strategy and she knows it. She's a framer, she thinks in beams and loads, and I think in conspiracies and patterns, and somehow our house has stood for three years. Mostly.

The dock on the mainland side was rickety in a way that made me think fondly of my dissertation fieldwork, where I once watched a man walk across a rope bridge carrying a live goat and both survived. We boarded, paid our fare, and found seats on the bench along the starboard rail, which gave us a sightline across the channel to the island. From the water you could see the wedding pavilion already, a pale tent up on a hill like a mushroom that had decided to be ambitious. White chairs in rows. A dance floor that some poor crew had leveled onto ground that had never once been level in its life.

Jarrod, the captain, came back through the cabin to collect tickets or maybe just to stretch his legs, and that's when the ukulele betrayed me. I had it out on my lap, not even playing, just holding it as a prop, and he stopped.

"That thing tuned or just for looks?" he asked.

"Tuned," I said, which was ninety percent true.

"Play something or put it away. I had a guy last summer played the same three chords for six hours and I still hear them when it's quiet."

Chloe made a sound into her collar that she would describe later as a cough. I strummed a defiant C major, mostly to establish dominance, and Jarrod shook his head and went back to the wheelhouse.

"So," Chloe said, settling in. "Assuming, and I'm granting you this entirely for the sake of the vacation I'm already losing, assuming the groom is a fence. What's the plan? What happens if you see something?"

"If I see something, we document it. Timestamps, photographs, chain of observation. Then I contact the provincial police, or maybe the RCMP, and I become the woman who cracked a smuggling ring using a wedding and a ferry."

"And if you see nothing?"

"Then we had a nice day on the water and I buy you dinner at the only restaurant on the island, which I'm told has nine items and all of them are fish."

"That part's not a hard sell," she admitted, and she leaned her head back against the bulkhead and closed her eyes, which was her way of saying she loved me and had made her peace with the situation for at least the next hour.

That hour was when everything went wrong, in the specific way that things go wrong on ferries.

We were maybe four hundred yards from the island dock when the engine changed pitch. Not arriving pitch. Turning-around pitch. I had my binoculars up, scanning the dock crew, the pavilion, a white van that I had already decided was suspicious because white vans are always suspicious, when the whole deck swung and my binocular view swung with it, from the island to open water and back.

Chloe opened one eye. "Are we turning around?"

I lowered the binoculars. The mainland dock was getting bigger. "We are turning around."

"Why are we turning around?"

I got up and went to the wheelhouse window and knocked, which in hindsight was bold, and Jarrod leaned out with the expression of a man who had been waiting for someone to knock.

"Bride's not ready," he said. "They called it in. We loop till she is. Could be twenty minutes, could be two hours."

"Two hours?"

"Once it was four." He said it the way you'd report the weather. Then he added, almost as an afterthought, "Wedding party booked the whole crossing day. Everything waits on them."

I walked back to Chloe and delivered the news, and she looked at me with an expression I want described accurately for posterity, which is the expression of a woman doing arithmetic in her head and arriving at a total she hates. Two vacation days. Round trip that might be six hours of circling. A ukulele. Me.

"Wasted day," she muttered. "Wasted vacation days. Plural. I used two."

"It's not wasted. It's a stakeout. Stakeouts are mostly waiting, that's what makes them stakeouts."

"You planned this knowing the ferry waits on the bride?"

"I planned this knowing the wedding was Saturday. The bride's lateness is a variable I could not have modeled."

"You could have modeled it if you'd ever been near a wedding."

She had a point and I declined to give her the satisfaction. I went back to my seat and put the binoculars up, and I'll say this for the situation: the circling gave me time to watch the island properly. The white van moved. Nobody was supposed to be moving vans on a setup day with the wedding party not even arrived yet, and the van moved from the boathouse to the pavilion and back, twice, and stopped behind the boathouse both times where the dock couldn't see it.

I got Chloe's attention without words, just a jab of my elbow, and pointed, and she took the binoculars and watched the van's third run and her breathing changed, which I felt more than heard because she was pressed against my shoulder.

"Okay," she said slowly, taking the binoculars down. "Okay, that's a little weird."

"That's what I've been saying."

"It's a van behind a boathouse, Toni. It might be ice."

"It might be ice."

They were still circling when the rain started, and that's a separate part of the story.

The rain came sideways, the way rain does when there's no continent between you and it. Chloe and I huddled deeper against the bulkhead and I pulled my jacket over the ukulele, because priorities.

"We should go inside the cabin," Chloe said.

"And miss the van's next run?"

"The van's not going anywhere in the rain."

"That's exactly when you move contraband, Chloe. Nobody watches a dock in the rain."

"Nobody watches a dock in the rain because it's rain."

She had a point and I declined to give her the satisfaction, which was becoming a theme of the day. That was when a man in a gray suit came around the wheelhouse at a speed I would call a jog with dignity. He was maybe thirty-three, damp in the specific way of a man whose umbrella had lost the argument, and he had a clipboard, which should have been my first warning. My second warning was that he was heading straight for us.

"You two," he said. "Are you with the Vargas side or the Holland side?"

"Neither," I said, with the calm of a woman who had absolutely thought this through.

"Then why are you on this crossing? It's booked. Private charter. The whole day is booked."

"Jarrod let us on," I said, which was true, and I said it the way you say a thing when you want it to sound like authorization.

"That is not what I asked." He looked at the ukulele under my jacket, or rather at the neck of it sticking out, because I had failed to hide the neck. "Why are you sitting behind a lifeboat with a musical instrument?"

And here is where four years of grad school finally paid off, because my mouth opened and produced a plan with no input from my brain at all. "We're the musicians," I said. "Hired for the ceremony. We were told to stay out of sight until the bride arrives, so we don't spoil the entrance."

"You're the musicians."

"We're the musicians."

"With one ukulele."

"We're a duo," Chloe said, and I could have kissed her, and I want it noted that I did not, because there was a clipboard present. "She plays, I... do percussion. Mouth