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“No, I insist,” he said when she started to protest. “Your first meal out in Tadoussac is on me.”
“All right,” Abby said with a smile. “Thank you. But the next one’s on me.”
“Fair enough.”
IT WAS FULL DARK when the foursome walked out of the restaurant and the period streetlights lining the town’s main street were glowing in the light mist drifting in off the bay.
“I want to thank you again for supper,” Abby said to Marc as they made their way toward the Doucette home.
“My pleasure.” Marc knew he had to explain his earlier intensity, though he wasn’t about to apologize. “And look, I didn’t mean to offend you about the fishing regulations and all. It’s just, well, it’s something I feel pretty strongly about.”
“No kidding,” Abby said. “And I hope you understand that I feel pretty strongly about what I do. And I’m certainly not here to put anyone out of work.”
Marc nodded. They never are, he thought to himself.
CHAPTER THREE
THE FOG from the night before was just burning off when Abby shut the gate behind her the next morning. She looked back over the fence and saw Figgy contentedly chewing on a bone next to the apartment door. Confident the small dog would be fine until lunch, Abby turned, hitched her bag up onto her shoulder and walked down the road in the direction of the marine center.
The facility itself was housed in a large, three-story building on the banks of the Saguenay River. A sloping driveway led down to the structure through a parking lot and past a spacious dry dock.
During the five minutes it took for Abby to walk from her apartment to the center, she didn’t pass a single person on the sidewalk. Off to her left, she could see some activity around a few of the boats tied to the town dock, but that was it. Farther out, past the bay, the mist still hung over the Saint Lawrence.
Glancing at her watch, Abby saw she was twenty minutes early for her introductory appointment with the center’s director, so she forced herself to walk around the building for ten minutes before entering the double glass doors to the main lobby and visitors’ center.
A pretty young woman at the front desk smiled at her. “May I help you?”
Abby walked over to the desk, reading the name tag on the woman’s vest. “Yes, thank you, Marie. I have an eight-thirty appointment with Dr. Bouchard.”
“Of course,” Marie said, picking up the handset on her desk phone. “May I have your name, please?”
“Abby Miller. Dr. Abby Miller.”
While Marie spoke softly into the phone, Abby looked around the lobby. The entire interior—walls, ceiling, carpeting—was blue. To the left of Marie’s desk was a gift shop, its shelves crammed with stuffed plush whales, whale books, CDs of whale songs, posters of sea life, and the usual coffee mugs, glasses, T-shirts, hats, tote bags and key chains all with the whale theme.
“Dr. Miller?” Abby turned at the deep baritone voice to see a smiling, bearded man she judged to be in his late thirties.
“Dr. Bouchard?”
“I’m very pleased to meet you,” Peter Bouchard extended a hand. “Welcome, and please, call me Pete. We’re a pretty informal bunch around here, as you’ll quickly see.”
“Thank you.” Abby shook the director’s hand. “It’s great to finally be here.”
“Everyone is looking forward to meeting you. Most of the researches are out for the week, taking some last days off before the summer season begins. But they’ll start trickling back in by the weekend. If you’d like, I can show you around.”
“I’d love it,” Abby said. “If we have time for it now.”
Pete shook his head. “Now’s the perfect time. Besides, I’m very proud of this place and welcome the opportunity to show it off.”
Abby laughed, already liking the man who would supervise her research for the next twelve months. “Then by all means, lead on.”
“This is our public area.” Pete indicated the lobby and gift shop. “You’ve already met Marie?”
“Not formally,” Abby said, shaking the woman’s hand. “Hello.”
“Marie is our director of volunteers,” Pete told her.
“Do you have many volunteers here?” Abby asked.
“We have a volunteer staff of around thirty,” Marie said. “They do everything from run the gift shop to give museum tours.”
“In addition to Marie’s volunteer army, we have ten full-time researchers working out of here with another half-dozen lab assistants,” Pete told Abby. “Plus a full maintenance crew and a small secretarial staff.”
Pete directed Abby into a darkened room to the left of the entryway.
“This is our museum,” Pete said, as they walked down the hallway. “Keep in mind, we’ve still got two weeks before we officially open to the public, so things look a little rough right now. It’s taken longer than we planned to change our exhibit for the year.”
Both sides of the hall were pocketed with enclosed display cases depicting the life cycle of the Saguenay whales. In the museum itself, the first thing Abby saw was a massive skeleton of a fin whale hung from the ceiling, keeping a silent watch on a large-scale model of the Saguenay River Fjord, Tadoussac Bay and the surrounding area.
Along the walls, display cases hung open with an array of smaller marine models, and literature and photographs lay scattered around the floor.
“See what I mean.” Pete touched the corner of a drop cloth with the toe of his shoe. “But we’ll have it ready to go by the time the tourists get here,” he said confidently. “Now, right through here….” He led Abby through a door on the far side of the room marked Employees Only.
“The labs are all on the second floor,” Pete said as they walked up a flight of stairs that opened into a long hallway, doors on either side.
They stopped at the second door and Pete rapped softly on the jamb.
“Chris, you in here?”
“Yo, boss, right here.” A young man in a garish Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts, his long blond hair tied back in a ponytail, bounced up from behind a stack of boxes, clipboard in hand.
“Chris Gervais, meet Dr. Abby Miller. Abby, this is Chris. You’ll want to be very, very nice to him. He oversees the assignment of all laboratory space here and he is only too aware of the power he holds.”
Chris shook Abby’s hand. “Don’t believe a word he says. I can’t be swayed by sweet talk. Now, cash bribes, that’s another matter entirely.”
Abby laughed. “Happy to meet you, Chris. We’ll have to talk about those bribes.”
“Too late,” Chris said with a grin. “Got your assignment right here. Your area’s acoustic imprints, right?”
“That’s right,” Abby said.
“Okay, so I’ve set you up near the auditory lab. Your application didn’t say anything about needing office space, but we have a couple of available rooms on the third floor. They don’t have the best views in the place, but it would be all yours.”
“Might not be a bad idea to take one,” Pete said. “Just to give yourself a quiet place where you can go and shut the door. Plus, you could have your phone in there.”
Abby nodded. “If there’s space available, sure, that sounds great.”
“Okay, then,” Chris said. “Let’s go back to my office and we’ll get you squared away.”
“Why don’t you go on ahead with Chris,” Pete suggested. “I’ll wait for you in my office.”
Back in Chris’s office, Abby stood while he rummaged in a desk drawer for a moment, finally rising with a cry of triumph. “Aha! Here we go. Put out your hand.”
Abby did as he instructed and he gave her four keys. “This one’s to the front door, to the lab, to the audio lab and this one’s to your office. I have all the duplicates in case you lose or forget one. See me for any lab supplies you need. We should have pretty much everything you could want in stock, but I have my own system for keeping track of it. It’s convoluted, but it works. And since I’m the only one who understands it, it assures a bit of job security.”
Abby laughed and, after getting directions, walked upstairs to the administrative level. Counting down the doorways, she stopped outside Pete’s office. Peeking around the partially open door, she saw the director behind his desk, phone at his ear. He signaled for her to enter.
The director had what must have been the best view in the place. The windows of the corner office looked over the bay on one side and the Saguenay River on the other. As Pete spoke on the phone, Abby watched the ferry coming across the river.
“Okay,” Pete said, hanging up the phone. “What do you think so far?”
“I think it’s wonderful.” Abby meant it.
“Good, very good. I have to tell you, we’re all pretty excited about your research. It shows some real promise for long-term interest. The more we can learn about the effects of man-made noise pollution on beluga, the better we can help formulate policies to protect them.”
“That’s my goal,” Abby agreed.
Pete leaned back, kicked his feet onto his desk and laced his hands behind his head. “I have to say, we were all pretty impressed with your credentials. University of Massachusetts doesn’t exactly give graduate degrees away.”
Abby blushed slightly. “Thank you.”
“So, when did the sea first capture you?”
Abby laughed. “I can’t really say. To be honest, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t involved in something to do with marine sciences. I grew up in the little town of Wellfleet, on Cape Cod. My parents were both teaching scholars with the Cape Cod National Seashore Park. Mom’s an anthropologist studying the indigenous people’s uses of beached pilot whales, and dad’s made the study of the physiology behind pilot whale beachings his life’s work. Some of my earliest memories are of going out on the boat with them on research trips. When I was old enough, they hired me as their assistant and boat worker.”
“I’ve read their papers—groundbreaking stuff,” Pete said. “And you? Do you hope to follow in their footsteps?”
“You mean the groundbreaking part?” Abby smiled. “Well, that’s every scientist’s dream, isn’t it? No, I’m here to add what I can to the general body of knowledge.”
Abby knew her answer sounded rehearsed. Probably because it was. Growing up as the daughter of Drs. Norman and Lowell Miller had been both a blessing and a curse throughout her life. The shadow her parents cast was a huge one and Abby desperately hoped her own research in Tadoussac would finally enable her to step out of it.
In college and later in graduate school, every time she had met a new professor or scholar, the initial introductions were inevitably followed by comments about knowing the Millers and their work. Intellectually, Abby knew these people were not comparing her to her parents. Still, even now, she was plagued with the uneasy notion that she never quite measured up to her parents.
Belatedly, she realized Pete had said something.
“I’m sorry, could you repeat that?” she asked, feeling a bit foolish.
“I said, we welcome that.” Pete leaned across the desk. “The data you collect this year on the effects of noise pollution—especially from watercraft—will be an invaluable tool to help us recommend regulations controlling the whale-watching industry. There’s still so much we don’t know about the extent the boats impact the whales’ social behavior, breeding, calving, feeding and other life processes.”
“And that’s where I come in,” Abby said.
“Right you are.”
“How many permit-holding whale-watching boats are there around here?” Abby asked.
“A little more than fifty.”
“Sounds like I’ll have plenty of opportunity to study the effects of sound on the beluga.”
“Anxious to get started?”
“Very,” Abby assured him.
“Okay, then.” Pete nodded. Abby had the feeling he was holding something back.
“Is there anything else I should know?” she asked.
Pete sighed and picked up a piece of paper off his desk. “In your acceptance letter, it was mentioned that you’d have regular, scheduled use of a boat.”
“That’s right. I need it to set my sensing equipment in the bay and up the Fjord and then make regular checks on them. In fact, I can’t do much else until those are in.”
“I see.” Pete cleared his throat and looked Abby in the eye. “Well, I’m afraid that might be a problem.”
“What kind of problem?”
“Normally, we operate two research vessels—”
“I know, the Mistral and the Caprice. Either one sounds perfect for what I need,” Abby assured him.
“I’m sure they are,” Pete said. “Trouble is, the Mistral went into dry dock two days ago and I just found out she won’t be seaworthy for at least two months, maybe the whole season.”
This was not good news.
“The thing is,” Pete continued, “the schedules were already set and had to be redone for the one vessel with priority time going to our senior researchers.”
Abby was getting a very bad feeling.
“Unfortunately,” Pete said, “we couldn’t fit you in.”
Abby closed her eyes and took a deep breath. No boat meant no soundings. No soundings meant no data collection and no data meant no research analysis. The disappointment was palpable and she felt near tears.
“I do have an alternative,” Pete said hastily.
“Really?” Abby’s spirits lifted slightly.
“There are a limited number of charter boats available in Tadoussac. If you could find one, I’m sure the center could certify it and then you could use part of your grant to pay for it.”
Abby thought that possibility over. “Do you have a charter you could recommend?” she asked.
Pete shook his head. “We’re not allowed to,” he said. “We get funding from the government and all of our business has to be based on bids. I can, however, give you a list of boats and their captains.” He pulled a sheet of paper from a desk drawer and handed it to Abby.
It was a very short list, Abby thought, scanning it.
“Well, I’m glad I accepted the office,” she said, standing. “Now I know how I’ll spend my first day—calling boat captains.”
THREE HOURS LATER, Abby hung up the phone in her new office, folded her arms on her desk and laid her head down on them.
There had been ten boats, and none of the captains were at the contact number listed next to each name. Abby had spent the morning tracking down the captains and had been referred to, among other places, a marina office, a café, a garage and a warehouse. When she’d finally reached them, one by one, they had said they were too busy or already booked for the entire summer, or else quoted a price that far exceeded the limits of her budget. It was not an auspicious beginning to her summer.
