Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

our research other than us, the Old Broad, and a dozen or so biologists and whale huggers in the entire world? Face it, Nate, no one gives a damn about singing whales. There's no motive. The question is, who cares?"
    Nate slumped in his chair. Clay was right. No one did care. People, the world, cared about the numbers of whales, so the survey guys, the whale counters, they actually collected data that people cared about. Why? Because if you knew how many whales you had, you knew how many you could or could not kill. People loved and understood and thought they could prove points and make money with the numbers. Behavior… well, behavior was squishy stuff used to entertain fourth-graders on Cable in the Classroom.
    "We were really close, Clay," Nate said. "There's something in the song that we're missing. But without the tapes…"
    Clay shrugged. "You heard one song, you heard 'em all." Which was also true. All the males sang the same song each season. The song might change from season to season, or even evolve through the season somewhat, but in any given population of humpbacks, they were all singing the same tune. No one had figured out exactly why.
    "We'll get new samples."
    "I'd already cleaned up the spectrographs, filtered them, analyzed them. It was all on the hard disks. That work was for specific samples."
    "We'll do it again, Nate. We have time. No one is waiting. No one cares."
    "You don't have to keep saying that."
    "Well, it's starting to bother me, too, now," Clay said. "Who in the hell cares whether you figure out what's going on with humpback song?"
    A kicked-off flip-flop flew into the room followed by the singsong Rastafarian-bruddah pomp of Kona returning, "Irie, Clay, me dready. I be bringing films and herb for the evening to welcome to Jah's mercy, mon. Peace."
    Kona stood there, an envelope of negatives and contact sheet in one hand, a film can held high above his head in the other. He was looking up to it as if it held the elixir of life.
    "You have any idea what he said?" Nate asked. He quickly crossed the room and snatched the negatives away from Kona.
    "I think it's from the 'Jabberwocky,' " Clay replied. "You gave him cash to get the film processed? You can't give him cash."
    "And this lonely stash can to fill with the sacred herb," Kona said. "I'll find me papers, and we can take the ship home to Zion, mon."
    "You can't give him money and an empty film can, Nate. He sees it as a religious duty to fill it up."
    Nate had pulled the contact sheet out of the envelope and was examining it with a loupe. He checked it twice, counting each frame, checking the registry numbers along the edge. Frame twenty-six wasn't there. He held the plastic page of negatives up to the light, looked through the images twice and the registry numbers on the edges three times before he threw them down, checked the earlier frames that Amy had shot of the whale tail, then crossed the room and grabbed Kona by the shoulders. "Where's frame twenty-six, goddamn it? What did you do with it?"
    "This just like I get it, mon. I didn't do nothing."
    "He's a criminal, Clay," Nate said. Then he grabbed the phone and called the lab.
    All they could tell him was that the film had been processed normally and picked up from the bin in front. A machine cut the negatives before they went into the sleeves – perhaps it had snipped off the frame. They'd be happy to give Nate a fresh roll of film for his trouble.
    * * *
    Two hours later Nate sat at the desk, holding a pen and looking at a sheet of paper. Just looking at it. The room was dark except for the desk lamp, which reached out just far enough to leave darkness in all the corners where the unknown could hide. There was a nightstand, the desk, the chair, and a single bed with a trunk set at its end, a blanket on top as a cushion. Nathan Quinn was a tall man, and his feet hung off the end of the bed. He found that if he removed the supporting trunk, he dreamed of foundering in blue-water ocean and woke up gasping. The trunk was full of books, journals, and blankets, none of which had ever been removed since he'd shipped them to the island nine years ago. A centipede the size of a Pontiac had once lived in the bottom-right corner of the trunk but had long since moved on once he realized that no one was ever going to bother him, so he could stand up on his hind hundred feet, hiss like a pissed cat, and deliver a deadly bite to a naked foot. There was a small television, a clock