The Write Way

Chapter 3: The Write Way

The ferry over to the island took an hour and forty minutes.

Lucy Write drew the short straw, being directed to park on the lower car deck with the eighteen wheelers, tractor trailers and pickups pulling fishing boats. They roped the bottom deck off for safety reasons, so she was forced to carry her book up to the passenger deck.

She found a window seat halfway down the boat's length, kicked her shoes off and tucked her feet up. She planned on treating the last stretch of the trip as a short hiatus.

Lucy had spent the entire three hour and five minute flight from Los Angeles to Vancouver piecing together everything she had learned so far. Pulling from old newspaper articles, company documents and personal eyewitness accounts. She was as prepared as she was going to be and she could afford to let her mind wander.

Besides a slight mixup with her rental car at the airport, everything had run smoothly. There was even time to spare.

She'd said exactly that in a brief phone call with her client before boarding the ferry.

"I'll let my contact in Victoria know," the client had answered. "I'd like another update by the end of the week."

Outside her window, the ferry was pulling away and headed toward the islands dimly visible in the distance. Seagulls kept pace, dipping and climbing, white foam spiralling away from the great hull as it sliced through the strait's dark, heaving waves.

For Lucy, this was paradise. A good book and an ocean view were number one and number two. She liked to imagine what she would see if the water ran crystal clear, all the way to the bottom. Great torrents of fish gliding in silvery fashion above mountains of rock and coral and seaweed. Floating above such an immense, foreign world always left her heart beating a bit faster.

Her mother had called her a dreamer when she was young. Too full of ideas. Too naive.

Lucy had never seen it that way. She had a unique mind that could dissect a problem or read a room faster than anyone she'd met. At first, she'd felt isolated and alone. She'd been a quiet child with thoughtful eyes. They'd called her sensitive. They hadn't understood.

She'd barely started to settle back into her book when the captain's voice crackled over the intercom notifying the passengers they were nearing their destination.

The ropes had been removed so she sighed and made her way back down to her car and waited with everyone else. The sunlight was bright when her car clunked over the metal bridge and plunged back into the daylight. She put on a pair of prescription sunglasses for the twenty minute ride into downtown and spun the radio dial to check out the local stations.

Victoria wasn't big like where she was from. Lucy had grown up on the outskirts of LA. Outskirts that were probably ten times the size of the city she rolled through now. She was accustomed to constant traffic, five lane highways, and sweltering heat.

This was the opposite.

The sun was out, but it wasn't hot. The temperature gauge on her rearview mirror was showing 8° outside. Despite it being a Sunday afternoon in spring, the roads were almost empty. It wasn't until she turned onto Government Street, and her GPS told her she was nearing the harbour, that she encountered any real traffic.

And the city was beautiful.

Cobblestone streets were lined with old buildings four stories tall with intricate stonework. Renovated shops with large bay windows dominated their first floors, swing signs easing gently in the breeze.

The harbour had great walls of stone and a wide walkway with vendors set up beside the docks. Restaurants and pubs, gift shops and bookstores adorned the adjacent roadways, and a great hotel stood on one end with ivy clinging to its balconies and turrets. On the other side was what Lucy figured to be the parliament building. Copper roofs, Romanesque domes and towers and arches.