The Triangle

by Jennifer Victores

  Abruptly, she stood up and went to grab her purse. The two officers stood and trailed after her.

  “Ma’am, what are you doing?”

  “I’m going down to talk to the Coast Guard. There’s nothing more you guys can tell me. I need to be where I can hear what’s happening, where I can help.”

  “There’s nothing you can--”

  She spun around. “Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do! I know Mark and Dave better than anyone. I know how they think and what they’d do. Don’t you tell me I can’t be useful and that there’s nothing I can do. Even if that’s true, I choose to do nothing there instead of here by myself.”

  She was screaming at the men. She knew it wasn’t their fault, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. Both men backed off slowly.

  “Ma’am, you really shouldn’t drive in the state you’re in,” Fordham said softly, clearly trying to be gentle with her.

  He was right.

  She knew he was right.

  At the moment, she couldn’t even remember how to get to the marina, let alone the Coast Guard station.

  “Thank you. I accept your offer to drive me,” she said.

  The police officers appeared taken aback. Ramirez looked as if he was about to protest when she pinned him with her gaze. “Unless you really want me on the road right now,” she said pointedly.

  “We’d be happy to drop you off and let you speak with someone,” Fordham said hastily.

  “Great. Let’s go.”

  A minute later, she was in the back seat of their squad car. With shaking fingers, she pulled up her mom’s name on her phone. She called and pressed the phone to her cheek.

  “Hi, dear. Are you about ready to pick up the girls?” her mother asked.

  “No. I’m sorry, Mom. I--I need you to keep them a little longer.”

  “Is there something wrong? You don’t sound good.”

  “Please don’t tell the girls, but Mark’s boat went missing. The Coast Guard are searching for it now.”

  Her mom gasped on the other end of the line. “Oh, no!”

  “I’m going down to the Coast Guard station to find out more and see if I can be of any assistance to them.”

  “What can we do to help?”

  “Just tell Emma and Jayne Mama and Daddy love them and we’ll see them soon,” she said, struggling to get the words out around the lump in her throat.

  “Okay. If you need anything, you call. And please try to keep in touch to let us know how it’s going, even if it’s just a quick text message.”

  “I will, Mama. I promise,” Sally said before hanging up.

  She couldn’t do anything to stave off the torrent of tears that suddenly flooded her eyes and poured down her cheeks. She tried her best to keep them in, but she couldn’t. She felt sick--hot and cold all over, as if she had the stomach flu with a high fever. Around her, it was as if things were moving in slow motion, like a dream.

  She stared out the window of the police cruiser at the world going by. She could see happy people, busy going about their day, completely oblivious to the fact that the world was coming to an end.

  How did they not know? She wanted to scream at them that the greatest man in the world was missing, that he might even be dead. She wanted to stop them in their tracks and wipe the grins off their faces as she told them the horror of what was happening. How dare they be happy when everything was crashing down around her?

  She let out a broken sob, no longer caring if the men in the front of the car could hear her crying. The whole world should be crying with her. She leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes as tightly as she could. She tried to wish it all away, but she could still feel the car as it twisted and turned through the streets. She could hear the squawk of the police radio. She could feel her heart ripping into tiny shreds. All of it meant this was real. It was all happening, whether she chose to believe it or not.

  Her tears flowed faster, streaming down her face in hot rivulets to drip off her chin and onto her shirt. She no longer cared. This much pain couldn’t be contained. It was as if every horrible thing that had ever happened taken all together couldn’t possibly compare to the pain and despair of this one moment.

  I can’t live without him.

  I won’t live without him.

  The words kept rattling round and round in her head. And over and through it all, she kept hearing high-pitched screaming. It was as if part of her mind was just screaming without end, unable to cope with the horror presented to it.

  “It’s early yet. They may still find him.”

  “What?” she asked, struggling to understand what Fordham was saying.

  “It’s amazing what they can do these days to find ships that have gone missing. If he’s out there, they’ll find him,” he said with more assurance in his tone.

  “Thank you,” she said, tasting the salt of her tears on her lips.

  With everything she had in her, she wanted to believe him. She wanted it so bad that it scared her.

  It hasn’t been that long. There’s still time.

  She felt as if her mind was shattering, splitting in two. There was the part that refused to believe he was gone and the part that had already lost hope and had surrendered to her grief. They were battling against each other, making her head pound uncontrollably.

  Suddenly the car came to a stop.

  “We’re here,” Ramirez said.

  “Here?”

  “The Coast Guard station,” Fordham said. “Do you want me to escort you inside, find someone with whom you can speak?”

  “Yes, please,” she said, feeling her throat go dry and her legs go numb. He was being so nice to her, and she had yelled at him.

  The part of her that had already given up wanted nothing more than to crawl into a dark corner somewhere and be left alone to cry and lick her wounds. The other part of her was determined to bring him back through the sheer force of her love for him.

  Officer Fordham opened the door for her and she stepped out, her legs shaky. She held onto the door for a moment to regain her balance and then let go of it in favor of the arm he extended to her. She grabbed onto it as if it were a life preserver and she was drowning.

  Did Mark drown?

  Is he alive, but clinging to a life preserver in the middle of the ocean?

  Is Dave with him?

  So many questions raced through her mind. They’d said one of the men had been injured. Was it Mark or Dave?

  She wished she knew something, anything. She was still crying so hard that she couldn’t even really see where she was going. She just held on to Officer Fordham’s arm and let him steer her wherever he was leading her.

  “Captain, this is Mrs. White” she heard him say after they came to a stop.

  She looked up and saw a man staring at her. He was a couple of years older than her with a suntanned face and solemn eyes.

  “You can call me John,” he told her.

  “I’m Sally,” she managed to get out.

  “Thank you, officer. I’ll take it from here,” John murmured.

  Fordham gently extricated himself from her grip. She felt unsteady on her feet and John quickly led her to a chair a few steps away.

  “Please. Sit down before you fall down,” he instructed.

  There was something in his tone which conveyed that he was a man who stood for no nonsense, and for some reason, that reassured her. She immediately sat as he asked.

  She attempted to dash away her tears and he handed her a box of tissues. She took it gratefully and wiped her eyes and cheeks before finally blowing her nose. She wadded up the tissues in her fist and held onto them tightly. She blinked through the tears, trying to focus enough to see where there might be a trash can.

  Instead, the first thing she noticed when her vision cleared was a giant status board with the name of her husband’s ship on it. Her stomach lurched suddenly, and she pointed anxiously
at the board.

  “That’s my husband’s ship,” she said, her voice hoarse. “They were just going fishing. Just fishing,” she repeated lamely.

  John nodded grimly. “I want to assure you we are doing everything we can to find it, along with your husband and his captain.”

  “Dave. He’s a priest. They’ve been friends since elementary school. He used to be in the navy.”

  “Hopefully everything he learned will serve him out there today.”

  “I don’t understand. How did this happen?” she asked.

  “We don’t exactly understand either,” John admitted, taking a seat beside her. “They radioed in reporting some anomalous conditions which frankly, no other ships or radar systems have verified.”

  “What anomalous conditions?” she asked.

  “The biggest problem, as I understand it from their somewhat-garbled transmissions, was intense, white-out foggy conditions.”

  “Fog can happen,” she said, struggling to understand what was unusual about this. “And boats have special navigation systems to get them through bad weather, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am, but they’re the only ones who reported seeing it in the whole area. That leads us to believe that either they weren’t where they thought they were or…”

  “Or what?”

  “Or they were in some way impaired, maybe from excessive drinking or perhaps drug use?” he suggested, eyeing her closely.

  She shook her head fiercely. “No. No way. I can tell you right now that isn’t the case, not with either of them. It can’t be that.”

  “That doesn’t really leave us with many other possibilities.”

  “Well, there has to be another answer. Dave is a great captain and they’re both experienced fishermen. They’ve been out there dozens of times. They know the ocean. They know the waters and the course.”

  “Normally I’d be inclined to agree with you,” he said.

  “Normally?” she said, latching onto the word. The muscles in her shoulders tightened. Did he not believe her? Did he think Mark and Dave were out there drunk, or stoned, or worse?

  “Like I said, there have been no other reports of adverse conditions. We know for a fact that several ships passed near their reported locations several times over the past thirty-six hours, and yet none of them made any sighting of your husband’s boat.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “That’s why we’re investigating the theory that they weren’t where they said they were.”

  “They wouldn’t give you a false location on purpose, especially not if they were calling for help,” she said. “If one of them was hurt, they’d want you to be able to find them. It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “It wouldn’t make a lot of sense no, unless they had an even better reason to hide their location.”

  “What are you saying?” she snapped, her nerves frayed and her frustration mounting. “Are you accusing them of what--of being smugglers? No way. Why don’t you stop assuming they did something wrong and start looking for them!”

  “Ma’am, we are looking for them,” he said, taking a deep breath. “It’s also possible that they thought they were exactly where they said they were, but they were confused or misled by instruments which had somehow ceased working.”

  The screaming in her head grew louder. Mark and Dave were out there somewhere in trouble, and this guy just wanted to talk around and around the problem. She pressed her shaking hands to her head.

  “Look, I know this is hard,” John said. “And believe me, we are doing everything we can to find them. It would be best if you just go home and get some rest.”

  “I am not leaving here without my husband!” she shouted at him.

  “Okay, just calm down.” He held up his hands palms out, as if in surrender. “I don’t want to have to call Officer Fordham to come back and pick you up.”

  “Okay,” she said, struggling to get a grip on her emotions, which were flailing wildly inside her.

  I’m like a drowning animal, she thought.

  The image brought to mind so many others. She couldn’t think of Mark or Dave going through that. She forced herself to take several slow, deep breaths.

  “That’s better,” John said, his voice soothing. “Now, did you have any contact with them after they left?”

  She nodded slowly. “We talked on Saturday. We mostly texted. I kept getting a lot of weird static when we tried to actually speak on the phone. It’s never been that bad when they’ve gone out fishing in the past.”

  “Can you remember anything else strange about your exchanges?” he asked.

  She struggled to think through the dense fog that was wrapping around her mind.

  It’s just like the fog that wrapped around the boat.

  “Um, yes. The text messages were taking a really long time to go back and forth.”

  “How long?” John asked sharply, leaning forward.

  She shook her head. “Long, like a minute or more. Here. You can see the timestamps,” she said. She pulled up the conversation and handed her phone to John. He scrolled through it, his brow furrowed in concentration.

  “Odd,” he muttered under his breath.

  “Does it mean anything? Does it help?”

  “I don’t know. It may mean something. But anything else you can remember, please share it.”

  “Anything. Everything. I just want him back.”

  “We want that, as well.”

  A younger man walked into the room, studying a paper in his hand. “Captain, we’ve got three birds up and we’ve put out the word to all vessels in the area to keep a look out for the boat. If it’s still in our ocean, we’ll--” He glanced up from the paper and abruptly stopped talking.

  “This is Mrs. White,” John said pointedly.

  “Sorry, I’ll come back later,” the man said hastily.

  “No, please! Are you talking about my husband?”

  He glanced at John, who nodded.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What did you mean when you said still in our ocean? Where else would they be?”

  The young man became more flustered than he already was and dropped his eyes. “It’s just a saying, ma’am. If the ship is still floating and hasn’t sank… er, I mean, we’ll find it,” he said, struggling to finish his sentence.

  “Thank you. That will be all,” John said, his voice tight.

  The fog seemed to be lifting from her brain. Now, instead, it felt as if everything was in super sharp focus. John was clearly displeased with the younger man, and she felt it wasn’t just because he’d said the word sank in front of her. There was something else.

  “What was that about?” she asked in a no-nonsense tone.

  “Nothing. Guys aren’t used to talking in front of civilians,” he said briefly in response.

  His voice sounded calm, but she noticed he wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  “Look me in the eyes when you tell me that.”

  He jerked as though stung. He glanced up at her and looked slightly unsettled.

  “It wasn’t nothing,” she growled, clenching her fists. “It wasn’t just that he didn’t know what to say.”

  “Ma’am--”

  “Don’t ma’am me. At least have the decency to use my name if you’re going to lie to me.”

  “I am not lying to you.”

  She took a deep breath. “John, please. Just tell me the truth. What are you hiding from me?”

  Her phone chimed. They both looked at it. John still had a hold of it and his eyes widened.

  He handed it to her. “It looks like someone left you a message,” he said, his tone gruff.

  “Who?” she asked, grabbing the phone from him.

  “Your husband.”

  9

  “I missed his call!” Sally gasped. “He’s alive!” She clutched the phone and played the voicemail.

  “Hey, babe, it’s me. I miss you
. I love you. Goodbye.”

  She pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at it as tears filled her eyes.

  “What is it? What did he say?” John asked.

  She put it on speaker as she replayed the message.

  “Hey, babe, it’s me. I miss you. I love you. Goodbye.”

  He looked up at her. “He sounds remarkably… calm.”

  She bit her lip. “I…I don’t know what this means.”

  “He said in the texts he sent you Saturday night that he’d tried calling but ended up leaving you a voicemail that you said never showed up. Could this be it?”

  She sagged in her chair, feeling all of the fight go out of her. “Yes, that makes sense.” Tears welled in her eyes again. “What if that’s the last time I ever hear his voice?” she asked raggedly.

  “You can’t think that way. We’re still out there looking for him. You have to keep hoping and be strong for him.”

  “What’s the longest someone’s ever been missing and then been found alive?” she asked.

  “A long time,” John said soothingly. “They should have plenty of water on board.”

  “I know they have fish,” she said.

  He chuckled. “Yeah, they’ll never want to eat fish again once they get back.”

  “My freezer would be grateful,” she said, forcing a dry chuckle. “Do you really believe there’s actually a chance that they’re okay?”

  “I do.”

  “The officers said something about one of them being injured.”

  “From what we can tell, we think it was the pilot.”

  “Dave,” she said, feeling a surge of relief and then immediately feeling guilty. “Is it bad that I’m glad it’s him and not Mark?”

  “No. Under the circumstances, that’s a perfectly understandable reaction.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “Would you like some coffee?”

  Sally nodded. Her emotions were out of control and skidding all over the place. Maybe some coffee would help calm her nerves and let her think.

  John got up and left the room. She looked around and realized it was his office. It was lined with pictures of different ships, some quite old looking and others much more modern. It seemed like a pretty random hodgepodge and she couldn’t help but wonder if there was any sort of rhyme or reason to which pictures were included on the walls. The picture closest to her was a drawing of an old-looking sailing ship. She could just make out the name USS Wasp underneath the drawing. Then her eyes fell on a photograph of what looked like a tanker. She squinted her eyes and could just make out the words SS Marine Sulphur Queen.