Excerpt of Come Shell or High Water by Molly MacRae

Chapter 1

On the tail of a hurricane, half-drowned in the chaos of whirlwind, deluge, thunder, and lightning, I washed up on Ocracoke Island.

Okay, it wasn’t that dramatic. Hurricane Electra had blown through that week in mid-September but, as Atlantic hurricanes go, Electra was medium to mild. And I had arrived on Ocracoke, but I hadn’t washed ashore. I know a ranger in the U.S. Park Service, and she took me over in her boat, that afternoon, when she went to survey damage to the national park campground. I was half-drowned, but half-drowned by my assumptions, not the storm.

“Love the pink life jacket, Maureen,” Patricia had said over the gurgling engine noise of her boat before we set out from Hatteras Landing for the crossing to Ocracoke. Patricia Crowley and I have known each other since college, thirty-plus years. We don’t see each other often, but she always looks unruffled and in control when she’s in uniform. “The pink looks good with your white knuckles. We haven’t left the dock yet, though, so you might want to give your grip a rest.”

My hands, both of them glued to the edge of whatever you call the dashboard thing on a Park Service boat, looked fine to me. “This cabin’s kind of small—”

“It’s a pilot house.”

“—and we’re standing shoulder to shoulder in it,” I pointed out, “so if I get seasick, I’ll step outside.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Okay.”

Patricia also sounds unruffled and in control when she’s in uniform. Despite her calm, my knuckles and I did not relax. That’s why, by the time Patricia eased the boat away from the dock, my knuckles looked like bleached bones. I stopped looking at them and concentrated on not whimpering. Or being sick.

“It’s getting kind of rough,” I said in a conversational whimper.

“This is the smooth part. Wait’ll we hit the waves in the inlet.”

“Maybe we should turn back?”

“Nope.”

“Okay.”

“I’m doing you an unauthorized favor by taking you along,” Patricia said. Shouted, because the engine was making more noise. “Remember that, in case anyone has occasion to ask, because it isn’t regulation, but we’ll get around that by not saying anything or, if pressed, by saying that a lot of what happens before, during, and after a hurricane isn’t regulation.”

“I really appreciate this.”

“Good. You should. And I’ll appreciate it if you return the favor by not falling overboard and by hoping we don’t founder.”

“Founder?”

“Sink.” She patted me on my drawn shoulders, and I thought about screaming “Don’t take your hands off the steering wheel,” but I didn’t want to distract her, in case it wasn’t called a steering wheel. It didn’t strike me as the best time for nautical vocabulary lessons. 

On the other hand, the best time to go shelling on the sandy ribbon of barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina is after a big blow like Electra. And because I’m a former malacologist (a biologist who studies mollusks, although freshwater mussels and not seashells, in my case), I could sort of make a case for being there. But confusion, disruptions, and mopping up follow even a mild hurricane. There was danger in the surging waves, and evacuated tourists hadn’t been given the all-clear yet to return and finish their idyllic beach vacations along the Outer Banks.

Also, there’s that former thing. I was a working malacologist, but those jobs, like some of the rarer freshwater mussels, are hard to find. I’m all about shells, though. I’ve been collecting them, and folklore, fables, and myths about them, for most of my life. I’ve had minor success publishing picture book retellings of the stories I’ve collected. I get occasional storytelling gigs, too. More than occasional, really. It still surprises me that I can call myself a professional storyteller. My late husband called me his fabulous fabulist.

So, yes, I arrived on the tail of the hurricane. I blew in to see what else had washed ashore. And I did cling to my assumptions because that’s how assumptions work. If I go to the trouble of making them, I figure I might as well believe in them. That’s why I thought I could be clever and careful enough to comb the deserted beaches for shells and not get into trouble. And it’s why I believed that my other reason for making the trip to the picturesque town at the southern tip of Ocracoke Island wasn’t totally mad, either.