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Story Excerpt

Turtles to the Sea
by Sandra McDonald

1. A turtle only travels when it sticks out its neck, 2488

“It’s a little awkward,” Major William Bristol said, after they’d been briefed.

“That your ancestors owned my ancestors?” Captain Johnny Winstead raised an eyebrow and tilted his chair back from the conference table, which had been painted sea green. “I promise not to hold it against you, Bill.”

Bristol smiled thinly.

Standard procedure before any Recovery Corps mission was to review the profiles of each pilot, including performance evaluations, peer reviews, education, and genetic and cultural lineage. Bristol didn’t flaunt his vast inherited wealth, but his New York family’s name adorned many chunks of expensive Savannah real estate. Johnny’s lowcountry ancestors had lived for centuries on the coastal islands of Georgia, most of which were now submerged.

The briefing officer for this particular mission had managed to dig up a daguerreotype of the Thomas D. Bristol plantation on Little Missoe Island in 1860, with a bearded white man standing squarely on his porch. Surrounding him were the enslaved workers, rigid in their caps and scarves, dresses and jackets, as if dressed for Sunday church. A separate accompanying list contained thirty neatly penned names, including an entry for Sarah Winstead.

“There’s an 87 percent chance you are descended directly from her,” the briefing officer said.

“Thirteen percent wrong,” Bristol said.

“Which one is she?” Johnny asked.

“We don’t know.”

Her name remained, but her face and story were lost. Johnny didn’t mind too much. History was always being erased by time. Before the colonists and missionaries, the islands had been occupied by the Guale indigenous people. Generations built on generations built on generations. He felt lucky to live in an age blessed by the gods, doing the important work they dictated. Just last month he’d prevented the ocean crashes of Malaysia 370 and Air France 17. Sarah Winstead should be proud.

During suit-up the next day, he and Bristol climbed into Air Force uniforms appropriate for the era and pocketed vintage money and fake identification cards. Once they were aloft, backstreamed, and cruising at thirty-five thousand feet over nighttime Georgia, the barrier islands bare specks on the horizon, Johnny gave a brief nod to Sarah and other long-dead ancestors who’d spent their lives down there, who even now were buried in cemeteries likely lost to marsh and tide.

“Savannah Control, we’re holding time-steady in the mission frame,” Bristol reported on the upstream channel. “Relative clock is 00:20:15 and the date is February 5, 1958. Target acquisition report to follow.”

“I’ve got them.” Johnny’s scope was bright with five targets. “Two B-47 bombers, call signs Ivory One and Ivory Two, simulating a combat mission. Ivory Two, serial number 51-2349, is carrying a Mark-15 Mod. Zero two-stage thermonuclear bomb. Coming up fast we’ve got three F-86L Sabres on a training interception. Our friend Lieutenant Stewart is in serial number 52-10108, call sign Pug Gold Two.”

Although Johnny had been on many missions to prevent accidents, the pilots about to collide in mid-air here and now were not the primary objectives. Still, his stomach tightened in sympathy as the clock ticked down to 00:33:30 and Lieutenant Stewart bumped his fighter plane into the second bomber.

“Impact,” Bristol reported. “Never even saw him coming.”

Stewart’s fighter plane lost both wings. He ejected into the stratosphere, his deploying parachute a thin white stream illuminated by the waxing moon. Johnny didn’t envy the long icy descent back to Earth or the frostbite that would follow. The plane fell toward Earth and its eventual crash-landing in a field.

Bristol followed Ivory Two as it veered toward the coast and began a rapid descent. The bomber’s right outboard engine was hanging on by a thread, in imminent danger of detaching and sending the off-balance plane into a tailspin. They listened to the pilot try to secure emergency landing clearance at Hunter Air Force base, but its main runway was under repair. Very logically, the pilot decided to drop his hydrogen bomb into the waters off the coast rather than risk accidental detonation if he crashed.

At an altitude of seven thousand feet, the pilot detached the 1.69 megaton bomb over the blackness of Wassaw Sound, right off the coast of Little Missoe Island. It didn’t detonate. At almost twelve feet long, with nearly eight thousand pounds of shell and components, it sank immediately. The wounded bomber headed inland, where it would soon land safely. Johhny didn’t watch it go; he was too busy mapping the location of the Mk-15 for retrieval.

“No wonder the navy couldn’t find it later,” he said, glancing at the data scrawling on his screen. “The seabed here is full of monazite deposits. Gives off enough radiation to confuse anyone.”

The coordinates went to Savannah control upstream. The mission officer said, “We’ll send out the recovery divers. Come on home.”

Bristol veered the timeship back toward Little Missoe Island. Something flashed on the main console, a bright spark of hot-white that blinded Johnny. His seat rumbled beneath him, a bizarre airborne earthquake, and the realization they were crashing came only a few seconds before the crash itself, into the dark and icy Atlantic, into the crushing turbulence of waves and depth of the sea, into blackness and terror as water slammed down on him, as he tried to orient toward the surface, as the ocean did its best to shove itself down his throat and nose and kill him.

But he woke up: the gods had saved him. He blinked his eyes open to a gray sky, a woman’s face, the grit of sand under him, blazing pain in his legs and arms. His head felt full of eggshells. The Atlantic ocean rolled against his boots.

“Stay still,” said the woman, who was young and yellow-haired and pale as an eggshell. “You were shipwrecked.”

Time-wrecked, he wanted to say. But he didn’t. Not for many years while he waited for rescue; not for decades as he struggled with faith and belief and the crushing disappointment of being abandoned; not until well after their daughter was a teenager, and when he finally told them, his family called him crazy.

*   *   *

2. Be Comfortable in your Own Shell, 2023

Marnie’s phone chimed at four in the morning with a summons for a gravid diamondback terrapin killed by the side of US-80 near Neptune Island. She was in desperate need of some good sleep but of course she said yes. Eggs didn’t stay viable for more than a few hours; the babies, they needed her.

She wrapped a scarf around her hair and drove in the pre-dawn June darkness to downtown Savannah. Twenty minutes, not bad. The sidewalks along East Bay Street were empty of dreaded tourists, the orange trolleys and black carriages not yet roused to haul visitors around the squares and to restaurants and bars and shops. Marnie liked historic architecture and charming parks as much as anyone else, but sometimes she thought the entire city would one day collapse under the immense weight of its own success, a sinkhole of margarita buckets and fish tacos and garlic parmesan oysters collapsing into the river and floating out to sea while tourists snapped selfies of themselves drowning.

Her fuel light lit up on the Islands Expressway. Of course it would. She swallowed down cold coffee from yesterday’s thermos to quell the worry of stalling out. Kindly enough, the grizzled police officer who’d reported the find was still by the side of the road with his lights on, red illumination in the early morning mist.

“Good to see you, Jim,” she said, joining him with her emergency kit. “Late night?”

“Early morning for you, Marnie. The eggs are that way, but I didn’t touch them.”

The dead momma was about five pounds, her beautiful carapace severely cracked from impact with a car or truck. While Jim kept his flashlight aimed at the marsh to dissuade any nearby gators, Marnie used her own light to collect seven eggs scattered by the impact. They were beige and leathery, each one about half the size of a ping-pong ball. Three were cracked, but the four others might still have a slight chance.

“You still retiring this year?” she asked.

“Linda says nope, she ain’t having me around the house every day.”

Sounded just like Linda, who had grown up on the island with Marnie. Jim paused, as if about to say something about Mark and then reconsidering. She didn’t ask. And she didn’t ask about his mother, who’d once been her mother-in-law. He didn’t say anything at all to acknowledge the decades they’d been family. Divorce did that. Made people all awkward around each other, even though they’d known each other for decades.

Jim said, “Maybe I’ll come work out there with you. Don’t you need a security guard?”

“You’d make more money at McDonald’s,” Marnie said, and wasn’t that true. Million-dollar marine science center and minimum wage jobs. The truth of her whole damned career.

“I do like me those egg muffins,” Jim said. “But I was thinking about the island.”

Marnie chose not to answer.

Like others on the rescue and research teams, she kept a portable incubator in her car. The four intact eggs went inside it, and she set the temperature to eighty-six degrees before securing the latches. Later in the day, if her boss Robert Rowe agreed they were viable, they’d go to the care of the University of Georgia. Knowing Robert, he’d ask Marnie to drive and then haggle over reimbursing her the gas. If all went well there, in fifty or sixty days the terrapin population of Georgia would increase by four little hatchlings. If they survived someone else would name them, but for now she called them Eenie, Meenie, Miney, and Moe.

“Keep up the good work,” Jim said as they wrapped the dead momma in a towel and loaded it into Marnie’s trunk. “Say hi to your mom for me.”

Marnie didn’t tell him that the last time she’d talked to Emilyn had been more than two years ago. Since then there’d been only birthday cards and Christmas cards, perfunctorily signed and exchanged.

“I’ll tell her,” was all she said.

Jim walked back to his cruiser and paused at the door. For just a moment, in her headlights, he almost looked like Mark. For a moment she remembered something her father had said long ago about trains that branched away on different tracks with just a flip of a switch, a single decision. She wondered what her life would be like now if she had married Jim, not Mark. If she had chosen the responsible brother, not the dreamer.

But the past was gone and Mark was gone and all her retirement savings gone, too, into the paychecks of lawyers. The only train she was riding was the one that led to bankruptcy if she wasn’t careful and to neglect in a nursing home twenty years away, because everyone knew the neglect that came to old black women with no children or husband to fight on their behalf.

The gas station five miles down the road was open, garish neon lights under a faded logo featuring the god Poseidon. By a miracle Marnie’s credit card didn’t decline. With quarters fished from the armrest she bought herself a cup of coffee, and while the gas pumped she watched the eastern sky lighten over the inlets and grasses, creeks and reeds. The blue-gray-green world breathed, the breeze thick with salt and decay, all the morning birds making unusually loud caws full of quarrels and gossip.

Beside her, the Civic began to tremble. Puzzled, Marnie turned to see the fuel hose start to swing. A car alarm went off on the other side of the gas station. Quickly she unhooked the gas and shoved the nozzle back in place. She took several shaky steps away into the open parking lot, where nothing could fall or topple on her, but within seconds the world went still again.

The cashier from the station, a Latina woman with a phone pressed to her ear, came outside looking panicky.

“It’s done,” Marnie said. “But there might be aftershocks. Better stay out here.”

The next tremor came three minutes later, but it was much milder. Marnie risked getting into her car and driving to Tybee. The radio was full of news about the primary quake, which rated a 4.1 on the scale but had not done much damage. On Big Missoe, the science center was all sleek wood and steel posts and tempered glass windows, nothing obviously broken. She was glad. The facility was only two years old, erected on beachfront land donated by the famed Bristol family, and she doubted that earthquake mitigation had been factored into its construction. Quakes were too rare in coastal Georgia for most people to worry about them, even though Savannah had been shaken strongly more than once.

Kelly, a fresh-faced sophomore from the university, had arrived early to let in the construction workers upgrading the sea turtle tank in the undercroft. She opened the gate to the employee parking area for Marnie and said, “Did you feel that quake? It was crazy.”

“I did. I was just picking up eggs from a highway kill.”

“Oh, babies!” Kelly waited for Marnie to remove the incubator and peered through the plastic lid. “Only three?”

Marnie looked through the lid and counted one, two, and three. The fourth cradle was empty. Carefully she checked the corners, in case it had somehow rolled. Empty. She checked the latches; secure.

The fourth egg had entirely disappeared.

As an endangered species, terrapins were protected by state and federal laws. Marnie’s marine turtle permit required, among other things, careful conservation and protection of resources. She couldn’t very well report that the fourth egg had somehow slipped out and was rolling around the floor of her Civic.

“Yes,” she lied. “Three intact.”

And that was the story she stuck to for the rest of the morning, as she input the rescue data into the computer and Robert double-checked her work. Three. Just three. After several phone calls and video consultations the eggs were deemed viable, and sure enough, Robert asked Marnie to drive them and the dead terrapin and the cracked eggs to the university rehab center on Jekyll Island. She didn’t tell him she’d only had about five hours sleep. The sleep woes of post-menopausal women were of no interest to Robert unless he could use them to somehow recruit more donations or grants. Marnie fortified herself with more coffee and delivered Eenie, Meenie, and Miney to Jekyll Island and a fancier incubator.

“Three’s better than none,” said the director who inspected the eggs and signed off on the transfer.

Marnie drove home dreaming of a long, uninterrupted, blissful sleep she surely deserved. The radio station mentioned the earthquake once or twice, but experts agreed no danger was imminent. Unfortunately the outlet mall traffic was horrendous, everyone busy buying single-use plastic goods destined for landfills or oceans, and Marnie’s head was pounding with fatigue by the time she pulled into the driveway. She brought the empty incubator inside, used the bathroom, checked that no one had broken into her nice home that was no longer home to anyone but her, and finished off the cold pizza she’d ordered for dinner a day or two ago.

When she remembered to clean the incubator she saw she’d forgotten to turn off the heat. Inside, inexplicably returned to its cradle, safe and innocently nestled in warmth, was the fourth egg.

*   *   *

3. Sleepy turtles never catch a sunrise, 1958-1985

“You don’t get to keep a man just because he washed up on the beach,” Vita Hoover said.

“I’m not trying to keep him, Mother,” Emilyn replied. “You know his situation.”

Vita harrumphed. It was her favorite sound. Emilyn heard that harrumph at least five times a day, whether it was over Emilyn’s manly looking clothes, the ridiculous amount of time she spent wading through the marsh and tidal pools, or her hobby of bringing home dead sea turtles and dissecting them in the old shed behind the family cottage.

If Emilyn’s father was still alive, god bless his soul, he’d have a thing or two to say about it all, or so Vita said between all those harrumphs.

Emilyn’s alcoholic father had drowned while drinking and boating. No great loss. After barely scraping through high school, Emilyn had been sent by Vita to secretarial school in Savannah to mend her wild wilderness ways. Everyone told Vita that Emilyn would bounce right back and so Emilyn did, barely a month later. During tourist season she cleaned rooms at the Drayfield Inn, which Vita managed for crusty old Libby Bristol. But in every spare hour she roamed her beloved island, and it was on a winter beach that she found handsome Johnny Winstead washed ashore in a ruined uniform.

He spent weeks recovering at the cottage. Because of the nature of his top-secret air force mission, he didn’t want them calling anyone to come get him. Vita was initially wary, but his military ID seemed genuine and he spoke convincingly of being trained at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and serving as a bomber pilot in Europe. Vita had never heard of black pilots, but when she called Tuskegee they confirmed the enterprise. Her own father had served in the army. He would have rolled over in his grave to know the military had been integrated.

At least Johnny paid his way. His wallet was full of paper bills wrinkled from seawater but perfectly useful, and Vita treated herself to a new dress from Woolworth’s in Savannah.

Come spring, Johnny began exploring the island in small doses. He went to the Division, where the few remaining year-round black residents lived. He went to the mainland to check in with his superiors and came back with a letter from his captain that only Vita was allowed to read. Everyone knew the Russians were probably parked in submarines offshore ready to nuke Charleston, so Vita let him stay on and do his spy work undercover while working at the inn in the maintenance department.

But the man had his quirks. From his first morning on the island Johnny had refused to eat seafood, claiming he was allergic. He’d eat pig and cow, but not perfectly good fish, shrimp, or scallops. Vita slipped some clam juice once into his dinner to test the allergy claim and he was perfectly fine, not a hive in sight. Also, although he went to Sunday church with Emilyn, his worldly travels had apparently exposed him to people who believed in many different gods, including gods deep in the ocean who would one day rise again and be sad at how mankind had desecrated their home.

“Gods like Posideon?” Vita heard Emilyn ask him in a teasing way. “Neptune?”

Johnny’s tone was somber. “Older gods. Ancient and angry.”

Those strange beliefs maybe explained why Johnny was always single-handedly cleaning up beach debris, and pestering Vita to impose blackouts on the inn’s windows during summer nights to avoid distracting sea turtles and hatchlings, and asking boat captains to not dump their toxic greywater without treating it first. Vita wished he’d just go on back to the military, but when 1960 brought Libby Bristol a devastating stroke, and Vita became her full-time caretaker, she didn’t have much time to worry about Johnny. When Libby died a few months later, she left Vita her personal share of the old Bristol lands. Ten thousand precious and priceless acres. The developers soon came calling.

Emilyn said, “You can’t ruin it all with hotels and restaurants, Mom.”

Johnny said, “They’d destroy the habitat, Miss Vita.”

Both of them were crazy. All her life Vita had waited for a windfall, catering to the rich folk on the island while scrimping and saving her meager wages. She wasn’t going to let fortune pass her by. But then Emilyn told her she was pregnant with Johnny’s baby and they intended to marry, and a heart attack struck Vita down before the day was over.

Emilyn and Johnny married in the African Baptist Church, presided over by Reverend Stillman III, whose grandfather had founded the congregation. Within months the newlyweds started a museum in the old shed. Johnny cataloged the fauna, drawing them with a steady hand in notebook after notebook. Emilyn handled all the sea life. With baby Marnie in tow, they set about trying to save the island in ways big and small; they cataloged tree blight and loggerhead nests, fought the government’s attempt to dredge an offshore channel, and successfully warded off developers who saw every beach as an opportunity to pour concrete and lay sewer lines and build hotels.

When she was ten years old, as barefoot and curious and persistent as her mother, Marnie found a collection of metal debris that Johnny had been keeping for years in the woods. He told her it was debris from a special plane, and that he locked it in an old hunting shack to keep it from other collectors.

“This is part of the landing gear,” he said, handing her an ordinary-looking rod. “And that there is a handle from a door.”

“Is it worth money?” Marnie asked, because she needed new shoes. And she wanted a record player. Emilyn was always saying they were paradise-rich but cash-poor, which Marnie thought was grossly unfair.

“Money isn’t what we need, baby girl,” Johnny replied.

He was wrong, but she didn’t tell him. The way he looked at the pieces of metal, all wistful and maybe sad, made her think he wouldn’t listen anyway. Marnie handed back the rod and handle and sat back against the shed, whose inside walls were covered with drawings Johnny had made of turtles. Loggerheads and leatherheads and Kemp-Ridleys and hawksbills. Sometimes he drew them with crowns on their heads, or magic wands held aloft in their flippers. She loved turtles, too, but her father was a little too obsessed for his own good.

*   *   *

4. A turtle never abandons its carriage, 2023

Big Missoe Island had only a few attractions, but they were popular; a scenic lighthouse, a Civil War fort with a history of ghost sightings, and the marine science center, which brought in busloads of school children, Girl Scouts, and Boy Scouts. A busy regional airfield serviced private planes and helicopter tours. A pirate festival every summer encouraged even more tourists to spend their money at bars, restaurants, and inns right along the beach. Marnie herself had spent her honeymoon with Mark at a hotel overlooking the Big Missoe pier. Tourists were well and good, providing jobs and revenue, but in their wake they left plastic trash and cigarette butts and garbage, always garbage, so much garbage.

Little Missoe, a long narrow strip several miles offshore, had no restaurants, no inns, and a ban on all private cars. It was only accessible by government ferry or private boat, and notorious because of the decades-long war between Marnie’s mother with her ten thousand acres of private land and the National Park Service, which owned the other twenty thousand acres (and mismanaged it daily, to listen to Emilyn). Only two hundred tourists per day were allowed on the island in high season, and overnight campers had to carry out whatever they carried in.

Marnie took the ferry to Little Missoe on a sunny Saturday with a mob of campers, hikers, and seashell collectors. She tried to blend in, but as the only black woman in the crowd, the captain recognized her anyway. During the ride across Wassow Sound, most of the passengers hung over the rails looking for dolphins. Marnie kept herself and her backpack inside, well aware of the faint hum of Moe’s incubator. Traveling back to Little Missoe always reminded her of journeying to the end of the world, or maybe the beginning of it; sometimes, on those rare nights when she slept soundly, she dreamt of being lost on endless beaches with the gray ocean always trying to pull her to its depths.

Once on the island she ignored the welcome center, which decades ago had been the ramshackle Drayfield Inn and before that had been the site of a Confederate Army fort and before that a Guale Indian shell mound. Most of the day visitors headed for the bike rental shack, but after checking her watch she set off on Founders Trail, which detoured inland past the towers and gables of the four decaying Bristol mansions and their accompanying stables, garages, and servant quarters. Marnie knew every inch and corner of the terraces and staircases, bedrooms and libraries, all their faded grandeur and lingering ghosts. She could see where roofs were caving in, windows falling out of frames, and enormous posts rotting away. Grass was cracking apart bricks and ivy tearing down shingles, the maritime forest reclaiming land that had been stolen from it a hundred years before.

If Marnie listened hard, she could hear her own giggles cascading down the decades. Or the racing footsteps of island children chasing each other through old ballrooms and grand dining rooms where the robber barons of New York had escaped winter’s grasp to take refuge in paradise.

She kept walking and ignored the aches in her heart and knees. Once past the Bristol mansions, the trail split north and east. The eastern path led to the one-room, shuttered African Baptist Church. The congregation had moved decades ago, leaving behind a cemetery overgrown and forgotten. The church marked the beginning of the Division, where most of the cabins were now decayed piles of wood and tumbled brick chimneys. Tourists who ventured that far on foot took pictures of themselves amid the rubble but rarely mentioned the workers who had made their homes there. Ghost stories abounded about the Guale Indian spirits whose tiny glowing lights swirled in the air after dusk, or about the toothless old Preacher Man in the woods. He was two hundred years old, made immortal by a magic green sea turtle, and if you took his picture he would be invisible in the image.

Marnie turned north and startled an armadillo in the bush. It lurched off and ran over a snake that startled a warbler into flight. She checked her watch again. Two miles more along through oak groves and noisy herons, a small marker noted the end of government land and the beginning of private property. Black vultures eyed her warily as she closed in on Emilyn’s cottage, and Thistle started barking well before she reached the front gate.

“Give me a kiss, you big old monster,” she said, leaning over the posts. Most people would say a Newfoundland dog really had no business being on a Georgia barrier island, but Emilyn never did care about anyone else’s opinion.

The two-story cottage was continuing its slow decline; peeling white paint, lopsided porches, windows stuck open or closed, and a front yard filled with overgrown plants and gnarled driftwood. The side yard reeked of death. Marnie knew without looking that it was full of buckets of rotting sea turtles or porpoises, macerating in seawater so that Emilyn could claim the skeletons for her museum. The museum itself, wedged down a stone path behind the house, was Emilyn’s pride and legacy, open to visitors who had to request access via mail because electronic communication did not exist on this corner of Missoe.

“Hello?” said a man as he rounded the house. He was short, compact, maybe in his mid-fifties. The posture of a former Marine officer, but the scruffy beard of a man who’d gone native. “Can I help you?”

“I’m Emilyn’s daughter,” Marnie said.

He squinted at her, but before he could pass judgment Emilyn called from the road, where she was dragging along a tarpaulin that reeked of more death.

“Just in time to help,” Emilyn said, red-faced and soaked with sweat but undaunted. As usual she had a pistol on her hip and a knife strapped to her leg. No one would imagine that she was more than eighty years old, or that she’d happily arm-wrestle you for a beer and win.

Marnie grabbed a corner of the tarp and started dragging. “Where’s your ATV?”

“Broke.”

“You should fix it.”

“How’s Mark?” Emilyn retorted tartly, and Marnie understood the barb. You mind your own business, child, and I’ll mind mine. But there was a deeper insult there, too, because Emilyn didn’t believe in divorce, never had, never would.

The man came to help with the tarp and forestall the impending argument. He said his name was Ralph Hartman, but not what his job was or where he came from. Marnie didn’t much care about the details. For decades the guest cottage had hosted whatever biologists, historians, or other visitors floated ashore. Ralph was familiar enough with Emilyn’s procedures to take over care of the dead sea otter in the tarpaulin, which left Marnie free to wash up inside.

“Help yourself to lemonade,” Emilyn called after her. A peace offering, that. “Get me a beer while you do.”

Inside was dim, dusty, and hot. Shelves bowed under the weight of books, the old cushions smelled of mold, and the walls were covered floor to ceiling with shells, jaws, teeth, and skeletal oddities. The vintage refrigerator held marine specimens as well as some meager groceries. Emilyn didn’t use supermarkets. She ate from the sea and forest and from her garden, from anything she could catch or slaughter or simply found on the beach. If Marnie stayed overnight they might eat shark for dinner, harvest eggs from the chickens for breakfast, and fry up bacon from one of the unlucky pigs in the yard. No, the only thing Emilyn needed to buy from a store was beer, and that was only because she didn’t have time to brew her own.

By the front door were the only family pictures Emilyn had ever seen to frame and put up. The largest was a young black man in profile, bare-chested at the shore and staring out to sea. His face was as long and serious as the one Marnie saw in her mirror every day.

“Hello, Daddy,” she said.

Marnie brought the cold can of beer to Emilyn in the yard, and Ralph announced he was going down the beach for a swim. He took a bike and he took Thistle, leaving Marnie and Emilyn standing over the putrid bucket of what was labeled a squirrel.

“You didn’t write you were coming,” Emilyn said, her blue eyes narrowed.

“Do I have to?”

“Of course not. This is all yours.”

Marnie didn’t fall into the trap of old arguments. Into the field of landmines waiting to detonate on words such as legacy and duty and family. Her watch beeped a warning she was glad to heed.

“I need to show you something,” she said. “Inside.”

The museum had once been a long, narrow shed. Thanks to solar panels and gas generators, it now had ventilation and lighting and humidity control. After decades of work it was now the most extensive and well-cataloged collection of Georgia’s marine and plant life in the entire state, if not the whole of the eastern seaboard. Formaldehyde jars of jellyfish and sea anemones and snakes and fish lined dozens of shelves, accompanied by boxes of alligator bones, squirrel bones, bones from anything on the island that had bones. Overhead, strung by sturdy wire, hung the spines of porpoises and the carapaces of loggerheads and one very large horse skull. Somewhere in other boxes was a perfectly preserved baby sperm whale.

It took effort to clear just a few inches of desk space for Marnie’s incubator. Emilyn looked through the lid at Moe, clearly unimpressed.

“You came out here after two years to show me an egg?” Emilyn asked.

“I came because it’s not an egg.” Marnie wished she’d helped herself to one of Emilyn’s beers, but settled for draining her lemonade. “Not just an egg, I guess you’d say. It comes and goes.”

“Comes and goes,” Emilyn repeated.

“On its own. Like the ones Dad was always looking for.”

“I don’t see anything coming or going anywhere.”

“It’s about every six hours now. The first time, it was twelve. The intervals are getting shorter.”

Emilyn’s mouth twisted in disbelief and Moe, perhaps eager to please, disappeared. Vanished entirely. One moment the incubator held one beige egg, and the next it was empty.

“We called him crazy,” Marnie said softly. “Time traveling eggs.”

From outside, the vultures squawked loud and sharp. The sea breeze rustled through the trees. Ten thousand acres of maritime forest seemed to lean in closer to the museum, to Marnie, to the family secrets that had twisted their lives.

“I have no opinions about crazy.” Emilyn abruptly straightened. “I’m going for a walk.”

She left the shed without saying anything else. Marnie reset her watch and took the incubator to the house, where she watched and waited. Waited some more. Five hours later, Moe reappeared. Outside, a group of vultures screeched and fell silent.

Read the exciting conclusion in this month’s issue on sale now!

Copyright © 2024. Turtles to the Sea by Sandra McDonald

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