Page 8 of A Sea of Unspoken Things

Mentally, I was still waiting, breath held in my chest, for the thread between us to snap. But if anything, it felt stronger than ever. I pinchedmy eyes closed, pushing the sounds from my mind, and when I opened them again, I focused on the papers stacked in front of me and the patchwork of items pinned to the corkboard. There were notes and reminders overlapped with seemingly random contact sheets and pictures torn from magazines.

The workspace wasn’t neat, but Johnny had had his own kind of chaotic organization that made sense to him. The trick would be decoding it. When I told Quinn Fraser I was coming up to Six Rivers to get Johnny’s documentation for the conservation project, he’d offered to come with me. He’d even insisted that it would be easier to make sense of if he were here, and maybe that was true. But it wasn’t the negatives and field notes I was after. The real reason I’d come to Six Rivers was to understand what exactly was going on here before Johnny died. To find some shred of explanation for the weight of dread I’d felt since that day standing outside the coffee shop. That wasn’t something I could do from San Francisco. And I wasn’t fool enough to believe that’s all Quinn wanted.

I’d first met Quinn Fraser at a black-tie fundraiser for the city’s art council at the San Francisco Public Library. In a way, that was where this chain of events began. Quinn had been seated next to me, and we’d spent the night trading polite small talk and bidding in the silent auction, but as we waited for the valet at the curb hours later, he’d slipped me his card. Flowers arrived at my studio the next morning and meeting up for coffee turned into dinner at Bar Nonnina. That’s when I found out about the project he was heading up at CAS.

Since that night, we’d been walking the tightrope of our not-quite-official relationship, which had been made even more awkward after Johnny’s death. He was Johnny’s boss, but Johnny was my brother, and Quinn hadn’t found a way to be there for me that didn’t feel out of place. We weren’t together, but we weren’t not together, either. And I couldn’t help but feel like it was all tangled up—me, Quinn, the project, Johnny.

I’d been compulsively following the train of thought back and forth since the day Johnny died. If I hadn’t gone to the fundraiser, Iwouldn’t have met Quinn. If I had never met Quinn, I’d never have sent him the link to Johnny’s work. If I hadn’t sent the link, Johnny wouldn’t have been hired on, and if he hadn’t been hired on, he wouldn’t have been in the gorge that day.

There were a thousand ways to divide and slice the timeline. Infinite variables and threads to pull. I’d broken the information down in every way I knew how, and each time, it only grew more maddening. If it had been any other day, if the weather hadn’t been clear, if he’d been standing just eight inches to the left. But none of that mattered if it wasn’t an accident. And that’s what I was here to find out.

I took a sip of coffee and got to work, going through the piles on the desk. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, but it seemed as good a place as any to start. I flipped through various pieces of mail, sorting them according to their importance. Once I was finished, I turned my attention to the laptop. It was still right where Johnny left it, and the screen came to life, the cursor blinking in the field for the password. I typed in our birthdate, the same password he’d always used for everything.

His email inbox was still pulled up on the screen, but the page took almost a full minute to reload. In the time since I’d lived in Six Rivers, the town had gotten internet connectivity, but it seemed to be almost unusable. I scrolled past the unopened messages from the last three months, a mix of junk mail, automated emails, and actual correspondence that looked like it was related to the research project. But when the first one I clicked took more than a minute to load, I gave up and minimized the browser, bringing the desktop into view. I’d have to wait until I had a better connection.

One of the generic Apple backgrounds was half covered by dozens of random files and folders visible on the desktop. The level of order matched the mess on the desk.

“Seriously, Johnny?” I muttered.

I had to skim the file names twice before I found the one I was looking for—CAS.

Johnny wasn’t a scientist, but he’d completed a training series tobecome a certified research assistant, and his territory covered Six Rivers National Forest and into the remote stretches that lay north of it. The five research subjects he’d been monitoring over the last two years were documented somewhere in this maze of files and notebooks, and I was hoping that his records might give me some idea of what he was doing in the days that led up to his death.

I clicked the icon and a new window expanded, filled with more folders. Quinn had tried to give me a basic understanding of what he needed to compile, and after a few minutes, I was able to figure out that Johnny had the project sorted in a somewhat intuitive way. Each territory had its own research subject, a northern spotted owl identified by a two-digit number. Each of the five subjects Johnny was assigned to had their own folder, filled with the detailed records he’d been keeping over the last twenty-four months. Most of them still needed to be transcribed; others just needed to be compiled, formatted, and submitted along with the photographic content.

I glanced up to the metal shelf above the corkboard, where a series of filing bins were stacked side by side. I read each of the labels, taking down the one namedCAS NEGS/PRINTS.The bin was organized into a series of sections, one for each of the locations that Johnny covered. Within their designated tabs, the negatives were cut and sorted into clear plastic sleeves with a selection of prints Johnny had developed.

I opened the section labeledSubject 44and pulled one of the prints from the top of the stack. My hand slipped from the edge of the bin as I sat back in the chair, staring into the pair of liquid gold eyes that seemed to be locked on me. The photograph was of an owl huddled on the branch of a redwood tree, its feathers puffed in the falling snow.

One of the reasons Johnny had been chosen for the project was his uncanny ability to get so close to the owls. Like they didn’t realize he wasn’t one of them. This photo was an example of that. The owl’s gaze seemed to pierce right through the lens of the camera, as if it had been looking right at Johnny when he took the photo. There was afocused, soul-stirring look about the bird that Johnny always seemed to be able to capture.

I leaned in, studying the details. The color was so vivid, the flecks of snow so sharp. It wasn’t until I brought the print closer that I could make out the misshapen form tucked beneath the bird. One perfect foot was clasped around the branch, talons shining, but the other was mangled. It was clutched in a tangle of bones under the feathers like it had been crushed and healed in all the wrong places.

The unsettling thought found me again, a nagging sense that I was looking at a picture of my brother. Johnny had always been the troubled one, the one no one understood. But no oneknewJohnny. Not really. No one except me and Micah.

I flipped through the other sections of the bin, some of them labeled in more detail than others. Where a handful of negative sheets were identified with each subject’s number, some of them had the number of the location. Others just had an abbreviation of some kind, like Johnny had never really developed a system to go by. That would be fun to figure out, I thought.

The last section seemed to be a kind of catch-all, with random incomplete film sheets, prints, and a few pages of scribbled notes. When I flipped past the glossy surface of a picture of Micah, I stopped, sliding it out from the others. My heart twisted a little in my chest when my vision focused on his face. He was lit in the warm glow of what looked like a fire, his dark blond hair falling into his eyes. In one of the shots, the image was blurred with the movement during the exposure, making him look like a smear of paint.

The corresponding negatives had the dateJune 2written on a piece of masking tape, and the entire roll was just variations of the same photo. Micah talking. Micah laughing. Micah’s face turned into the darkness. I’d seen countless rolls of film just like it through the years because it was the kind of thing Johnny did when he was testing out some new piece of equipment. Maybe a lens or a new type of film he wasn’t used to. Whatever was in front of him became his subject.

I reached into my sweater pocket for the roll of film I’d found inJohnny’s jacket, turning it over in my hand. My fingers stilled when I saw a black mark I hadn’t noticed sitting in the dark car the night before. It looked like the squiggle of a Sharpie.

I flipped the canister over, realizing it was a set of letters and numbers.TG 11/10.

My brow creased. It looked like a date—November 10. That was just two days before Johnny died. And TG…was that Trentham Gorge?

Slowly, my eyes dropped to Johnny’s camera bag, still tucked into its place beside the desk legs. I let out a long breath, staring at it.

It was one of the things that hadn’t quite added up. If Johnny was out working in the gorge, he would have had his camera. But when he was found, he didn’t have it. He also hadn’t been wearing his safety gear, and that didn’t track, either. We’d been raised in this forest and taught from a young age how to handle guns. Wearing safety gear was something ingrained in the culture of Six Rivers. Hunting season was knit into the fabric of this place, and there wasn’t a single household that didn’t have a gun collection full of firearms. But of all the unruly details, there was still one thing that unsettled me most. It waswherehe’d been found. Trentham Gorge. Of all places.

I reached out a tentative hand, letting my fingertips brush the canvas of the camera bag. Instantly, that strange, out-of-body sensation was back. I could feel the weight of the camera in my hands. The pull of the strap against my neck. I could hear the click of the shutter. The slide of the film being pulled from its canister.

I unzipped the bag and let it fall open. Johnny’s lenses, batteries, and flashes were wedged into padded sections. Everything he needed on a shoot had its designated place, a far cry from the chaos of the desk in front of me.

It was evident that the gear had been meticulously cared for, in almost pristine condition despite its extensive use. And that made sense. The camera had been the eye through which Johnny saw the world. A window, where he could watch from a safe distance.

I zipped the bag closed and tucked it back into its place, thenturned my attention to the desk drawers. The metal tracks of the large one on the left were stiff, forcing me to jostle it. When it finally slid open, a tall stack of notebooks was stowed inside.