Day 304 - Perfectly Executed. - Chapter 3.2 (1191 Words)

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PERFECTLY EXECUTED

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 3.2

The boat was in a boathouse at the bottom of the cliff, a few hundred feet from the driveway and down a stone path, chiseled into the rock face. The steps were broad and deep, there was no chance of slipping or falling, the crosscut steps and the guardrail adding the final safety touches on the descent. The boat was fueled and ready to go, along with some instructions and general guidelines on its safe use.

Edward had spent his youth on and around boats, his grandfather was a boat maker, working in wood in the earlier days and making the transition to fiberglass when Edward was Eddie the teenager working his summers at his granddad’s yard. He knew from good and bad, he knew from expensive and cheap, and this was definitely the former in both cases.

The house was quiet and peaceful, but too much so at times so the sea was the perfect retreat from the tranquility to the busy silence of the ocean. There was always motion, there was always noise, whether you appreciated it or not. The licking of the sea down the skin of the hull, the rushing of a breeze through the antenna and the conn, the faint cry of birds and the rumble of the waves on the sand. There was a constant sense of a crowd, even as you spent the entire time with no other human.

The first two or three days he came to the boat and took it out for a few hours at a time, he made a stab at fishing but his heart was not in it, he really just wanted the company that only a vast body of water could give him. Back in the boathouse in the early afternoon, a late lunch at the house and then watch a movie before making his dinner from the provisions left for him.

The food was high quality, the produce initially fresh and a few days in, still good and better than average. He was no longer sure what day it was, but that had a lot to do with the fact that he lost track often during a normal week. Days blended in and out, weeks wrapped around the bookends of spending nights at work and nights at home.

There were no helpful clocks showing the date, the time on the stove was permanently set to 0:00, flashing from the last power interruption, the clock on the DVD player sharing the same fate.

Five days went past, and he was ready to admit that this was the very thing he had needed, and he began to think about work again, this time in a whole new light. The break had given him distance from the constant companion of his planning, and relief from the demon that sat on his chest every night in his own home.

Now he was ready to go home, but he assumed there was another couple of days to go, but he was beyond the game of playing along. There would be no more waiting, there would be no more accepting the fate handed to him, his plan was back on track and so was his need to continue it immediately.

He found a coloring book and some crayons in the bedroom that had the bunk beds, the set up for a few children, and the accouterments of other guests perhaps. He claimed them for his own and started work again, working beyond the normal time of his evening meal and in the silence of the house; the television would not be turned on again.

The next morning he packed himself up, most of what he needed was in his head, and took provisions and two bottles of the good scotch and left, not looking back.

The driver was a day early, it was suggested he come up to the house on the sixth day and see how the doctor was progressing, see if he was in the frame of mind where he was able to come back to work, or whether he needed to stay longer.

The house was silent, and the key left on the front mat, in plain sight but with no note.

“Doctor Thompson?” the man’s deep baritone echoed in the double tall entryway and sought the far corners of the house with its volume.

Only silence came back, and the man came further in the house, heading for the bathrooms, the bedrooms and finding no sign except a poorly made bed with the curtains wide open to the view. He pulled a satellite phone from his pocket and made his way through the house calling his employer as he did so.

“He’s not here. Looks like he’s not been here for… at least a few hours.” Her kept talking to the owner of the house as he continued through, but stopped in mid sentence as he reached the mezzanine floor, the one that looked out over the view via the giant glass windows that ran floor to ceiling.

“What the fuck?” The man exclaimed as he took in the sight of several square meters of notes, calculations and formulae scribbled all the way across the wide-open glass of the view window, several meters wide. The scribbled notations were higher than expected too, he must have dragged furniture to the panes and stood on it to get new blank areas to do the work he was obsessed with.

The empty box of crayons, the darker of which were worn to small nubs and halves lay on a coffee table, with a magazine underneath to stop the wax from leaving any detritus on the furniture.  The same consideration was not given to the view and the writing did not obscure the vista exactly, but it did command the attention.

“He’s left a … I don’t even know what this is, on the windows, the one facing north over the cliff, looking over the bay, and the jetty down … there somewhere. I’ll send you some pics, you have to see it, it looks insane. “ The driver took out a normal cell phone, but with no reception he was just using it as a camera, he’d have to send them later when he was back in range.

“What? Uh, yeah I’ll check.”  Told there was a chance he had not escaped so much as just taken a day out via the sea, the driver had been instructed to look for the boat keys. It was possible he was just out on the water with every intention of returning.

The keys were not on the key rack where they were normally kept and he was instructed to head to the boathouse and wait.

Edward was speeding down the coast and was already nearing St Mary’s Bay by the time the driver was opening the boathouse and trying to determine how long the craft had been out.

The sea air had been whipping at his skin for a couple of hours and his face had tightened considerably in that time, reddening but feeling alive and vital in the exposure to the elements.