Windfall: The Wine-Dark Sea
Evan Ranvey shut and locked his front door. He toed his shoes off and left them neatly aligned on the runner, hung his jacket on the coatrack, set his briefcase on the side table, and... listened. The house was quiet. He knew Kirsti was home from checking her location on his iPhone. He listened again. No sound of life. Perhaps she had come home, left her phone, and gone out again.
He padded through to the kitchen and spotted his wife on the back deck sitting at a table, her back to him, her Chromebook open. He watched her for a long minute. She didn't move. Didn't tap a key, didn't put a finger to the touchpad. He could make out that she was looking at the front page of the Globe website.
He slid open the door. She still did not move. He pulled up a chair and sat down. She closed the cover of her laptop.
"Honey, what's wrong?"
Her eyes were red and puffy. Currently dry. "Nothing," she said.
"You've been crying," Evan prodded.
Kirsti made a 'nothing to it' motion with one hand. "Allergies."
He grabbed her Chromebook before she could react and opened the cover. She hadn't closed the tab.
"Christ," Evan said slowly. "Pirates in the Adriatic?" He read on for a moment before speaking again, his eyes still on the screen.
"Maybe he propositioned the wrong man's wife."
She stood up and walked into the house.
**********
Evan did not have a mental calendar. He remembered things, solid objects, files of 3-D renderings. He could picture in his head a sketch of a toy he had whipped up two years ago, but he could not now remember when he had found that book. He could of course go back to the first actions he had taken after finding the damn thing. Those actions would be timestamped somewhere. Just not in his memory.
He didn't even own a proper calendar. With horses or mountains or jet aircraft or any of the other beautiful glossy photographs his coworkers hung in their offices. He preferred to print out an unadorned grid from an online site. Days and a month. With big squares for the days to hold his tiny reminders. Pages held by a binder clip. Hung on the fabric near his computer.
He had not penciled into any square the day his marriage to Kirsti had been scraped into a small green plastic bag, tied, and thrown into a dogshit barrel.
So he could understandably not remember the day he went searching for a stamp. Who used stamps anymore? He had purchased a funny birthday card for his mother and wanted to post it before he forgot. It was Scooby-Doo, of course. She loved that clumsy imaginary doofus.
He thought he remembered that Kirsti had a box that had a sheet of stamps slipped in amongst some envelopes. Who used envelopes anymore?
It wasn't on her desk. He couldn't text her for the location -- she was at her spin class. It wasn't in the top drawer. Then he spied it tucked in the bookcase next to the window. He reached for the green box and froze, anger suddenly boiling in his guts.
On the shelf above was a book he had not seen in the house before this. Beyond The Blockchain. By Tomas Joyce. Evan plucked the book out and gripped it, thinking seriously about chucking it out the window and onto the lawn so he could fire up his lawnmower and make confetti.
Again, the calendar failed him. Nantucket had been in July, that much he recalled.
**********
Kirsti had roomed in college with Elizabeth, who grew up on Nantucket. You'd think that was a sweet deal, but it was only in certain ways. Elizabeth's father had been a fireman on the island, and her mother a teacher. They had retired and moved to North Carolina, leaving their modest house open for the use of their three children. It was a three-bedroom classic shingled one-story very near the beach, which meant that the family members were constantly offered huge sums for the property.
"They all want to level the place and build one of those futuristic monstrosities so the beautiful people can jet in and stay on the Island one week a year," Elizabeth had said the last time she visited them. "Hard for the old folks to keep turning down all that cash. You'd better go stay there soon. Mr. Roberson in the blue house as you turn in the lane has the keys."
Thus they had taken the ferry and found the nice man with the key and laid themselves out in the sun and schmeered on the sunscreen. Evan had somehow imagined a long stretch of deserted sand for some ungodly reason. In truth, there was a small resort and several ostentatious mansions within sight, and scattered umbrellas and beach towels. Not thickly occupied, but not deserted.
Evan noted with an ancient kind of visceral pride that he knew superficial that Kirsti was easily the most desirable woman within sight. She had worn an old red bikini she had been complaining was too old for a few seasons now, but she filled that thing out. Her long black hair in a ponytail and lips a coral red, his wife was worth second and third looks. He knelt to kiss her, careful of the lipstick, and rose.
"I'll go get the cooler," he said and walked up to the house. Once he got into the kitchen, the phone he had left there to charge rang. He picked it up. It was a plastics supplier calling from Uruguay about some parts Evan's company had asked for a quote on. Evan spent almost a half hour going over the quote as best he could from memory, then promised the fellow he would call back when he got back to the office where the specifications were, explaining that he was on vacation. The supplier apologized profusely and wished him a good day.
By the time Evan got back to where he had left Kirsti, she was gone. Her towel and bag were still there. He looked at the few swimmers and could not see her among them. Then his gaze ran along the beach toward where the resort and mansions were. There she was, talking to someone.
Evan set down the cooler and began walking toward them. As he drew nearer, he saw that the man his wife was talking to looked somewhat familiar. In addition, he noted that there were six other men, not at all dressed for the beach, standing in a perimeter around them. Then he saw the twisty wires going from collar up to ear. Security.
He pulled the guy's name up from memory finally. It was Tomas Joyce, the techbro who had become popularly famous after his crypto currency was released. That had been barely two years ago, and already the guy was worth some unimaginable number of billions.
It wasn't that Evan remembered best. What he remembered best was the picture of Joyce on the internet tech news sites and glossy and sharp on the cover of a few actual paper magazines. The man had an eminently punchable face. Arrogant, pale, robotic. His image teetered on the edge of the uncanny valley. With a face like that you'd need security. Evan hadn't been in a fight since second grade, but he would be willing to break his hand for the chance to smash it into Joyce's smug fucking smirk.
And here he was in the pasty flesh.
Evan would never have designed a toy that looked like Tomas Joyce unless it was designed to scare the crap out of a child, which Evan did not ever want to do.
Yeah, yeah, Evan had heard the gamut of ribbing his job elicited. Kirsti at least was an accountant. People understood that occupation, and respected it. Even if you thought being a number cruncher sounded boring, it was a service that people needed and would pay good money not to have to do it themselves.
Evan, though. Evan was a toy designer. Funny stuff. He had long given up trying to explain to anyone in the general public that his job involved computer-aided design and manufacture, marketing psychology, industrial espionage and counter-espionage, building and maintaining a network of anonymous peers on the dark web, etcetera etcetera. Nah, he made stuffed animals, he would say. And change the subject.
As he approached, Joyce shot him a toothy arrogant grin and walked away. His security team led and followed him, keeping Evan isolated.
"What the hell did he want?" Evan demanded.
"That was-"
"I know who that was. What did he want?"
Kirsti put her hand on his arm. "Can't I just have a chat with a stranger without you-"
Evan glared at the retreating figures. "People like him don't 'chat'. They always want something."
She dropped her hand.
**********
Kirsti was in an odd mood, he thought, as he set the table for lunch. Nervous, upset, expectant. Maybe it was too much Nantucket sun, he mused. He poured them both some wine and set out the sandwiches and salad they'd bought from a small shop in Sconset. He said, "I like this shop. We'll have to try their-"
"He wanted to pay me," his wife blurted out. They sat in silence for a moment. "He wanted to hire me for a weekend."
Evan's heartbeat pounded in his ears. He compressed his lips and tried to breath. They both knew he did not have to ask what it was he wanted to hire her for. He no doubt already had an accountant.
They sat in silence for a long time, Evan calming himself, Kirsti staring at her plate.
"A million dollars," she whispered.
**********
Evan gripped the book tightly. Could he tear it in half with his bare hands like the old phone book trick? He opened it. The arrogant asshole had signed it. To Kirsti. From Tomas.
There was a lot hidden between the scrawled black words.
He leafed through the pages. Nothing fell out, nothing was highlighted. No notes in the margins. No damning photographs. When he opened the book wide to see if there was anything on the inside end cover, the dust jacket bent out. He saw something written on the inside and took it off the book for a closer look.
It was a list. Ten long alphanumeric lines. Hexadecimal stripes black on the perfect white of the paper.
