by Eric Murphy
Harley pulled his gauges forward to show him he was below a thousand psi. He looked at her gauges and wasn’t surprised to see she was still above two thousand. Will knew he was an “air pig.” Harley had told him it was perfectly normal for first time divers to consume more air. Normal or not, at this rate he wouldn’t have enough to get to shore. He would have to surface and that would give their location away to Drury and Bennett. He was determined not to betray her position, even if it cost him his life.
Harley glanced at her compass before waving in the direction of a purple fan coral. When they got to the fan coral he was just above empty so Harley swapped his empty tank for a full one. She tucked the empty tank beneath a ledge so it wouldn’t float up and give them away.
They had been swimming for what seemed like forever when they came upon another reef, which caused the ocean to foam around it. Will saw broad scrape marks where boats had scarred their hulls.
Harley led them around the reef before peeking to see what was going on with Drury and Bennett. They held on to the ledge to make sure they didn’t bob up too high. A wave crested as it washed over the reef. As it flowed past them in a roil of white foam, they saw that Wavelength was now at a safe mooring.
Because of the distance, they didn’t need to dive quite so deep as they made for a beach that could be reached by a set of stairs leading from the cliff top. One last look over their shoulder, a check on their compass bearing, and they sank below the reef’s warm ocean spume.
They kept swimming till Harley ran out and swapped her tank, jamming the empty one inside a phantom fishing cage lying on the bottom. On her signal, they did another surface check. Bennett and Drury were zigzagging the Zodiac toward shore, peering over their respective sides for the escaped divers and for reefs that could damage their hull and propeller.
They slipped back under the surface when Will’s air ran out.
Chapter Five
The Stonecutter
Tender: The small boat used to get from shore to ship and tied up with a line called a painter.
Will fought off a moment of panic as he grabbed Harley’s emergency regulator and, after a few calming breaths from her tank, they swam in tandem. When they both ran out of air, Harley let their gear sink to the bottom. The big, rolling waves hid them from Drury and Bennett’s searching eyes.
Turning shoreward, they both spotted a man sitting effortlessly on the ocean’s surface. The second man from Will’s dream, the one with the sad eyes, waved them closer. Will shook his head to make sure he wasn’t imagining it.
He was a broad-shouldered black man, flashing an encouraging smile and flicking his left hand to bring them to him, to safety. But instead of the long blond curls Will had seen in his dream, the man wore a bleached straw hat with frayed fringes that fluttered like long, blond hair. He held a slice of orange in his right hand.
A wave pushed them within a few feet of the big man who stared at them, then at the Zodiac. Will threw a frightened look over his shoulder. The man’s powerful, long arms pulled Will and Harley behind him into a circular coral formation where the water appeared to boil.
They hid behind his broad back and the wicker basket that held his sliced oranges. Sitting on the edge of the coral made him look like he was sitting on the ocean’s surface.
The Zodiac was within thirty yards of them. Taking the initiative, the man held up a couple of slices of orange and waved them at Bennett and Drury. “You want some orange? It’s some good. Been soaking here since morning. Nice and cold. You won’t get none better.”
Peeking out from behind the wicker basket, Will and Harley saw Drury and Bennett exchange a look before staring out to sea where a fishing boat was winding its way. Drury reversed the Zodiac in a horseshoe turn, then rumbled off toward Wavelength.
“They moving away some, but best you two stay put a bit till it’s safer.”
The Zodiac picked up speed and the fishing boat thrub-thrubbed closer to Will, Harley, and the man on shore. Her captain eased the throttle back and held about twenty yards from them.
“Well shut my mouth wide open, if it ain’t Aubrey Dill, in the flesh,” the white man called out. “What you doing out here sitting on the boilers with an incoming tide, Aubrey? Won’t make getting back to shore none too easy, now, right?”
Their savior just nodded.
“Say, why don’t I let the tender float in and give you a ride back?” After a moment, he added in a voice tinged with sadness, “Come on now, Aubrey. Nothing good’s gonna come from you staying out here. You being my best friend and all, you know I’d never get over it. No sir, no sir.” He sounded as though he was from the American South.
“I got some young friends here might need some assistance, Sherman. If you’re not too particular about your help.”
That seemed to be all Sherman wanted to hear. He pulled in his tender and pushed it toward shore and let out the painter. The tide and waves washed it their way. Aubrey Dill looked back at a pair of shoes on the shore.
“If those are yours, I could go back and get them for you, Mr. Dill,” offered Harley, knowing Will couldn’t swim any farther.
The big man stared toward the shoes in the sand as if making up his mind, then shook, yes. “Might as well get ’em back. Yes, might as well.”
Harley steadied the bobbing tender so Will and Aubrey could climb in. The tender’s bow rose in the air as he settled on the stern-most thwart. Harley dove into the water and did a head-up crawl to shore. Will wondered where she got the strength.
She did a one-armed sidestroke with the shoes held high in the other arm. She handed them to Aubrey and then hopped in beside Will. Aubrey pulled a watch out of the shoes, stared at it as if unsure of what to do with the unexpected time on his hands, then slid it back onto his wrist.
Sherman hand-over-handed them back to his fishing boat. It looked a bit like a Cape Islander, with its high bow and low sides. He had fishing rods in place as though he’d been too pressed for time to put them away. On either side of the boat was an outrigger.
He gave Will and Harley a hand up, but Aubrey ignored his outstretched hand and, in one graceful motion, stood in the bottom of the tender, swung his long left leg over the fishing boat’s gunwale, and flexed his right leg till he was safely aboard, nodding a thanks Sherman’s way.
Aubrey took the painter from Sherman’s hand and together they hoisted and secured the fiberglass tender onto the foredeck, making sure not to block the hatch. This was obviously not the first time these two had been on this boat together.
Sherman clambered up to the flying bridge and moved the throttle forward. The diesel made the big boat quiver. Aubrey opened a cooler with a sun-bleached blue cover and fished out four bottles of water. He handed one to Will, one to Harley, and called up to Sherman before tossing him one, then sat down to twist the top off of his and take a long, slow pull from his own bottle.
Will couldn’t help but stare at Aubrey and wonder about this recent turn of events. Harley unzipped the jacket on his neoprene diving suit, then gestured for him to drink some water. People on the water often forget to drink because they are surrounded by water, but it is essential to hydrate when scuba diving. Will drank half of his bottle as he slumped on the mall bench, careful not to snag his head on the sharp hooks hidden behind the multicolored lures that hung above him.
He turned his face to the afternoon sun as Sherman maneuvered his boat through the reefs with obvious knowledge of the Bermuda coast. There was something comforting about watching a good sailor practice his craft.
Wavelength had disappeared. Will stood and searched around but could only see a few boats too far off in the distance to tell if one of them was their recent prison. Harley stood beside him looking.
“Well they sure moved off in a hurry, now, didn’t they?” she chortled with relief.
They chugged on for what seemed an hour as the sun lowered in the impossibly blue sky. They were in a harbor now, so Sherman slowed so as not to create a wa
ke. Aubrey tossed two bumpers over the starboard side and when Sherman nudged up by the dock he cleated the stern line, Harley the bow.
Sherman hopped on the dock, gave the attendant his credit card, and, without a word, skipped off. Just as the attendant finished refueling the second tank, Sherman came back with four packages in his hands. He stepped on the gunwale, then down to the cockpit and handed out the warm packages to everyone. He put his own down on a big container Will assumed stored caught fish. A steady drip of cold water ran down one of its rusty metal legs and out to the nearest scupper. Probably from the ice Sherman uses to preserve his fish, thought Will as he unwrapped the package.
It was a sandwich with a thick layer of thinly breaded fish covered in tomato wedges, lettuce, and a smear of mayonnaise on one slice of bread, and mustard on the other. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was till he bit into it.
“Can’t believe how fresh this tastes.”
“Should be, I dropped that grouper off not three hours ago,” said Sherman, wiping a fleck of mayonnaise from the corner of his mouth as he smiled.
Aubrey stared at his sandwich as if unsure he wanted to eat it. As sighs of contentment filled the cockpit, he unwrapped and ate his too.
“So,” started Sherman after sipping his water, “how’d you three end up together out there on the boiler?”
“The boiler?” asked Will.
“The circular coral formation that makes the ocean inside it look like she’s boiling. How’d you come to be there with Aubrey?”
Will was surprised that nobody had thought to ask him about it earlier. Perhaps they had bigger issues on their plate than two teenagers in wetsuits washed up on a Bermudian beach.
Harley explained that they had believed they were delivering a sailboat to Bermuda until they’d been held at gunpoint and forced to dive for something, on a wreck.
“This guy Drury pulled a gun?” asked Sherman.
Harley nodded. “He wanted us to find a wooden box that was supposed to be full of double eagle coins from 1860.”
“Well, if those coins are from 1860, it sounds to me like a Civil War blockade runner,” said Sherman. “Don’t recall there being a known wreck off o’ where I picked you up. The Marie Celeste is the best-known blockade runner that sank here in Bermuda.”
Will was too tired to ask what a blockade runner was. Sherman continued, “’Course, fisherman an’ divers keep finding unknown wrecks all the time. You want me to call the police for you? Nobody should be pointing guns and kidnapping people, no sir, no sir.”
Harley said, “Uh, actually, we’re going to be staying at Windy Farm and —”
“That’s Dr. Doan’s place,” said Sherman. He took off his dark sunglasses, which were so broad they looked like a welder’s mask. Will was startled by how white his skin was behind the sunglasses.
“Yes, Marianne — Dr. Doan I mean — is expecting us. Her son Yeats goes to high school with me. Or at least, he did last year, in Halifax. We left our arrival a bit loose to allow for uncertain sailing times, so I think I’d like to talk to Marianne about what to do next.”
Sherman nodded as he balled the sandwich wrapping paper and dropped it into a big plastic barrel garbage can.
“Oh, for sure. But it’s getting late. Why don’t you stay the night with Aubrey at his place and he could run you up to Windy Farm in the morning? Right, Aubrey?”
Will had the strange feeling that Sherman wanted them to do him the favor of staying with Aubrey, instead of the other way around.
Without waiting for an answer, Sherman took his credit card back from the attendant, signed the receipt, and started his engine up.
“Wow,” said Will, staring at the fuel pump. “Does that say five hundred dollars?”
“Yup. That’s the max it shows, so I have to do it twice to fill this baby up. I go through anywhere from a thousand to twelve hundred dollars’ worth o’ fuel every three days I fish. And Bermuda dollar’s on par with the US dollar so you know that’s expensive. Now, you two okay with staying at Aubrey’s place for the night?”
He threw a questioning look at Aubrey.
“Uh, well, I, uh, hadn’t planned on having guests, but, I guess —”
“Perfect,” said Sherman, opening the engine up as he headed through the harbor and back out to sea.
Will and Harley exchanged a quick glance. Anything was better than being captive on Wavelength. But Will sensed that Harley shared his feeling that something fishy was going on here, and not just because they were on a fishing boat.
Chapter Six
The Blockade Runner
Blockade runner: During the American Civil War, President Lincoln enacted a blockade of ports called the Anaconda Plan, to bring the South to heel through starvation and financial ruin. The South responded by calling on enterprising captains to run the blockade for country and profit. Those boats and their crews that ran the blockade were called blockade runners. The best boats were fast, sleek and hard to detect.
Sherman tied his fishing boat up to the dock behind Aubrey’s house. The first thing Will noticed in the evening light was how tidy the property was. It was a modest bungalow, painted pastel yellow with a high-peaked white roof. On the ride over, Will had observed that all the roofs were white. Harley explained that all the roofs had ridges that channeled rainwater down to spouts that allowed each house to store water in large underground cisterns. Keeping the roof clean and white meant that very little dirt built up in the houses’ drinking water. He asked her how she knew so much about Bermuda’s water system.
“Yeats told me about it. He told me all kinds of things about Bermuda. He was born here.” She saw the puzzled look on his face so she continued, “Yeats is Dr. Doan’s son. He was in my class last year. He lived with his uncle, Dr. Doan’s brother. We were, uh, we were, you know, friends, so we talked a lot. Me about Nova Scotia, and him about Bermuda. I told you about him, about the family we were going to stay with, remember?”
Harley had told him before they left Lunenburg that they were going to spend an extra week with the family of a class friend. He was pretty sure she hadn’t mentioned his name and frankly, with the rush to take his diving lessons so he could scuba dive with his license, he was just happy to hear they had a place to hang out for an extra week.
Pastel colors seemed to be the order of the day in Bermuda. All the houses dotting the shoreline were in those muted tones. Even the sun seemed to follow that color coordination by using the clouds on the horizon to give its setting a pink hue.
They had barely walked off the dock when a big black Lab wiggled its way toward them, making throaty sounds of recognition as it rubbed up against Aubrey’s legs as if it hadn’t seen him in ages or, worse, feared never seeing him again.
“Yes, Hamlet,” said Aubrey, rubbing the writhing dog between the shoulders, “I’m back, I’m back. No need to go on that way. I’m back.”
But Hamlet carried on like that for another few moments while Will and Harley smiled as he squirmed up against Aubrey, desperate to confirm Aubrey’s presence.
“Yes, yes, you’re a good-looking beast, Hamlet. And what the world needs is more good-looking beasts. Yes, they do. Of course they do,” said Aubrey, his voice encouraging the black dog to wag its tail harder.
Aubrey’s dark suit was saline streaked from the salt water. Neither Will nor Harley had asked him why he was dressed that way while sitting on the edge of a coral boiler. The fact that Sherman hadn’t commented upon it at all was really puzzling, but suggested it was not a question to ask.
They continued up the stone path to Aubrey’s house. The plan was to get to Windy Farm tomorrow. Will and Harley carried their diving suits. Harley had peeled hers off. She helped Will roll his diving jacket off, cutting it at the elbow so it continued to protect his forearm. With that off he was able to shed the bottoms.
Sherman had produced a couple of old hoodies that he said he always kept onboard in case the temperature dropped. They were faded from sun a
nd salt and had holes here and there, but they were definitely better than wearing neoprene, and tired as he was, Will would have been chilled without it.
Aubrey’s house looked like nobody lived there. All the shutters were closed; the chairs around the garden table had been tipped so as to lean against the table like people did when they went away on a trip. Aubrey fished a house key from inside a flowerpot by the door and unlocked it. He told them to wait a minute and he’d turn the power on. Will wondered why he would have turned the power off if he was only gone a few hours. Perhaps it was a Bermudian thing.
Will flicked on a light switch but nothing happened. Aubrey made his way down the hall, opened a closet, and activated a breaker, which allowed the hall light to come on. Aubrey moved quietly and gracefully for a big man. Without breaking stride, he fingered a key off a hook by the door and crossed the few feet of driveway to the double door gate to the street. He unlocked a padlock and pulled a long chain from between the rungs of the gate. When he carried it back to the house, Will noticed it was a new chain and padlock, neither showing any signs of rust he was certain would accompany living so close to the ocean, as was the case for people in Lunenburg or Halifax.
Will saw that the small truck in the lane had been covered by a tarp. People in Bermuda sure closed up shop when they went out. Coming and going must be time consuming, thought Will. Sherman waved them inside and turned lights on as he progressed deeper into the house.
Aubrey had unplugged the TV and sound system and the empty fridge was unplugged and the door left open. Aubrey plugged the fridge’s electrical cord back into the socket, which brought the light on till he hip-flicked the door closed.
“Were you going somewhere, Mr., uh, Aubrey?” asked Will.
From the corner of his eye he saw Sherman look to the floor as Harley shot him a “don’t-go-there” look.