Below the Surface

by Karen Harper

  “Hola, Briana,” she cried, evidently recognizing her voice. “I so sorry ’bout Daria. I been lighting candles at Our Lady of Guadalupe for you get better, her be found.”

  “Thanks for your support, Juanita,” Bree said. Looking instantly more worried than he already was, Manny stepped closer.

  “At this time, I hate bother you but Manny there?” Juanita said, her voice breaking. “Our Lucinda—tell him I think she run away!”

  “Oh, no. Let us know if we can do anything to help. Here’s Manny,” she said, and thrust the phone at him.

  “My mother worse?” he said into the phone in Spanish, then frowned as he spoke loud and fast.

  Bree didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but her Spanish was good enough that she could tell what Manny was saying as he raked his hand through his hair. He insisted Lucinda would not dare run away, so had someone taken her? The conversation was all a horrible echo of her own fears for Daria. Juanita was now screaming so loud, Bree could actually hear her through the phone’s mouthpiece, telling him something about a note. No, a note from Lucinda, not for ransom, Juanita was shouting as Bree and Cole moved away to give him more privacy.

  “Caramba,” Manny said. “Sí, I told her if she’s not proud of us to find a new family, but I didn’t really mean run away.”

  “Manny,” Bree told him, “go on home. Tell her you’ll be right home.”

  “I coming home right now, pronto,” he told his wife, digging his truck keys out of his jeans pocket.

  “And call if you need help,” Bree called after him as he raced for the door.

  “May Nuestro Señor and the Virgin help us all!” he cried, and slammed the door behind him to leave only the jingling of its bell.

  In the sudden silence, Bree and Cole stood staring at each other.

  “I was going to say,” she whispered, “when it rains, it pours, but that seems worse than a cliché right now. Every time I think the nightmare can’t get worse, it does.”

  She realized she still clutched the camera to her. “Let’s take a look at these pictures,” she told him, anxious to be doing something. “Especially the few Daria shot before I dived.”

  He followed her over to the computer table. She opened the camera’s plastic housing and downloaded the pictures to her desktop PC. In a moment, the screen displayed the array of pictures in three rows.

  “Great!” Cole said. “They’re in good shape.”

  All but the first three were underwater close-ups of the turtle grass meadow. But the first three were Daria’s shots off the boat before Bree dove.

  “I’m going to enlarge those,” she said, clicking the zoom icon as Cole leaned over her shoulder. Despite the intensity of the moment—or maybe because of it—she could smell the tang of his aftershave or cologne. She could hear his deep, even breathing. Everything about him emanated strength, and she needed that—needed him.

  Taken over the bow of the boat, Daria’s first photo was of the northwest horizon toward the storm.

  “The water’s still quite calm, and the storm far off,” Cole observed. “The wave height is what the weather guys call a light chop, two-to four-foot waves, like what I started sailing in. Man, that baby came up hard and fast. So if someone boarded your boat after you were underwater, he or she—”

  “She? Ben said that, too. I guess it could have been a woman.”

  “So whoever didn’t know the storm would be that bad, either, that it could cover up a crime if one was committed. But I see no other boat on that horizon.”

  She selected the second picture and enlarged it as big as she could. “One very distant boat,” she said, squinting at the screen, “but it seems to be heading southeast—probably toward either Gordon Pass or the Marco River. And what’s that in the sky? A pelican?”

  Cole leaned even closer, his brow brushing her hair. “That or a plane. Can you move the cursor around and blow up that part more?”

  She did but they couldn’t tell. A speck, maybe even a flaw on the camera lens, though it didn’t appear in the next two photos they examined minutely.

  “She was just trying to be sure everything worked before I went down,” Bree said, her voice sounding small and shaky again. “If these are the last pics she ever shot, I’ll frame them.”

  Blinking back her tears, she skimmed through the shots she’d made below the surface. Good pictures of a bad result. Even before the storm pulled up some of the turtle grass by its roots and roiled the underwater visibility, the sea grass meadow was sparse, with puny growth and skinny, brown-tinged blades when it should be—used to be—flourishing. Yes, Marla Sherborne would have the explosive, negative report she obviously coveted. But, Bree supposed, a lot of others would be upset. Would their report be enough, as Cole had once implied, to rile some important people?

  “I’d just like to rip the whole world apart looking for her,” Bree admitted, putting her head in her hands so she didn’t have to look at these normal, calm, beautiful pictures anymore.

  “Maybe that’s it,” he said, kneeling by her chair and wheeling her in a half turn to face him. He pulled her hands from her teary face and held her wrists hard.

  “What’s it?”

  “When you said ‘rip apart’ right now, I thought of something we’ve both been ignoring. When I tried to make it in to shore in the Streamin’, I had to fight my way through a riptide the storm and currents had somehow concocted.”

  “A riptide. I think I swam through one, too. Yes, I remember! It tried to take me south, toward Marco Island. I went with it, then finally found my way out.”

  “So if Daria and or Mermaids II tried to get into shore—or if the boat was even adrift at that point—they could have been caught in the current and taken a lot farther from the area that the authorities and your friends have been searching.”

  “And that means the Ten Thousand Islands, which are like a jigsaw puzzle.”

  “Or, if she didn’t get taken that far, she’d get caught by those crosscurrents where the Marco River comes out into the gulf.”

  “Big Marco Pass.”

  “Can we radio your dive teams to move farther south?”

  “Not after the day they’ve already put in. We agreed their search would be over by one o’clock, and it’s almost that now, with nothing found but the camera. But you could be right.”

  He jumped to his feet, and she leaped out of her chair. “I’ll call the coast guard and talk to them about the possibility,” he said.

  She seized his arm. “Let’s do that only if that site pans out. Otherwise, with them calling off the search at noon today, that would be like us immediately crying wolf. Come upstairs and look at an underwater marine map I was studying last night. Maybe the combination of storm and tides made a vicious current that isn’t usually there—the perfect riptide.”

  As they thudded up the stairs to her apartment, she tried to shove away the memory of the tragic scene in the film, The Perfect Storm. Everything terrible had converged to sink a sturdy ship with a skilled crew, sink it in towering waves and howling wind.

  She seized the map and turned it toward them. They didn’t even sit but leaned over the table on their elbows. “See,” she said, pointing. “See this trough the Marco River makes at Big Marco Pass? It can be deep and choppy even in normal conditions, but with extra wind and tide…”

  “A lot of water traffic goes in and out of Marco Island there. Maybe someone saw something.”

  “I’m praying that our boat’s motor simply stalled and the storm ripped the anchor with its chain off the boat. She was injured or had no way to get to me if the storm shoved her in—maybe to here,” she cried, pointing to small outer islands just north of Big Marco Pass. “She could be marooned anywhere here, maybe hurt. Or, like you said, a boat could have capsized right here where a riptide or rogue current shoved it into the battering of river, tide, currents and storm. And there are rock and stone jetties in that area. Cole, we’ve got to go look, just make a quick dive to be sure, then che
ck islands and beaches.”

  “Call some divers back, because you’re not going down with just me. Call Travers to use his echo sounder.”

  “He hates me—blames me for his son’s death in Iraq,” she blurted as she ran into her bedroom to grab some clothes, then continued to talk from her bathroom as she pulled on a one-piece bathing suit, then a spandex dive suit. “We dated for years, high school sweethearts, then went to the same college. But I broke up with him and Ted enlisted!” she called to him. She tore back out into the living room. He did a double take when he saw she was dressed to dive.

  “Bree, I said, call somebody else for help. The riptide—your coordinates—it’s just another possibility.”

  “I’m going. I’m sure our other boat has been returned by now. Just a quick look, then a call to the coast guard and/or the police dive team. They’ll really check it out—if I see anything there…”

  “If you and the others you’re going to dive with see anything there,” he corrected.

  He grabbed her by both arms to halt her path toward the door and gave her a little shake. “For starters, we need somebody to man the boat if we’re both going down.”

  “You’ll go with me? I promise, no surprises like the dive into the Trade Wreck. But we’ll have to get close up to see things, because the vis will be low there.”

  “I think it’s a good place to check, but—I don’t care what you say—I’m calling Travers. We need someone to stay on the boat and someone else to go down with us.”

  “You’re right,” she said, nodding. Anything to get him to go down with her—to let her go. “My dad used to say only fools break the rules, and I got you cut doing that yesterday. All right, we’ll call Sam. However much I used to think I couldn’t trust him, he’s been helping me now, because he said he didn’t blame Daria for what happened to his son.”

  “Meaning he still blames you.” He looked down intently into her eyes. “I guess it’s none of my business, but did you really love Ted Travers? That’s a lot to handle. His death, now—”

  “Now Daria’s?” she challenged, hands on hips.

  “I didn’t say that. I was going to say her being missing.”

  She gripped his wrists hard, feeling sinews, muscles and bones, so solid in her trembling world. “I keep clinging to the fact we are so close—Daria and I. I’m hoping I’d feel—I’d know—if she were really gone. But she can’t be gone. I won’t let her be gone!”

  “Then let’s get some help and get going.”

  “All right—yes,” she said, and gave him a quick hug. She started to pull away, but he anchored her hard to him.

  They clung full length, both holding tight, Bree standing on tiptoe with her arms clamped around his neck and his around her waist. She turned her face into the side of his throat and felt his pulse pounding there. Her blood pressure was surely off the charts. The top of her head fit perfectly under his chin. Her breasts pressed flat to his hard chest and her thighs to his. She was toned, but his flesh was harder, his entire body like the wood his big hands fashioned. She felt swept away, outside herself.

  She had not answered his question about loving Ted. She guessed she had once, an adolescent love, fierce then faded. Although she’d been with Cole only three days now, they’d been in such a seething cauldron it seemed she’d needed and wanted him forever. But it was the impact of her own desire that stunned her. This man, she told herself, as they finally, shakily stepped apart, made that jolt of lightning that had hit her seem like nothing.

  9

  As they left Turtle Bay in the smaller of Sam’s two slow barges, Cole almost wished he hadn’t pushed Bree to call Travers for help. It wasn’t so much Travers’s bleary-eyed employee who captained the sluggish vessel nor the two divers who worked for Sam that worried him, but the spearguns they were cleaning.

  Cole had never hunted with spearguns, and these babies looked fierce. “State-of-the-art,” one guy boasted, and explained to him how they worked.

  The weapons had small carbon-dioxide bottles slung beneath their shafts, so a squeeze of the trigger released a burst of gas and fired the spear with a velocity that could not be matched by older guns. The spearheads were bulky and contained .357 magnum cartridges that would explode on impact, driving the shafts deeper and springing out the prongs they proudly demonstrated to Cole while Bree was talking to the captain in the engine house. They showed him how the shaft clipped to their weight belts.

  “You aren’t going to dive with those today,” Cole said, more a statement than a question.

  Ric, who looked like a young Arnold Schwarzenegger, muscles and all, just nodded. Lance, the thin, red-haired guy, said, “Usually do, in case we see something we don’t like—or something we do, for dinner.”

  “With four of us diving in murky water, it doesn’t sound safe,” Cole countered.

  “Nothing too safe about looking for debris in soupy water in a boat channel anyhow,” Ric said. “But I guess we can leave the guns on board for once. If we have to pass up a big grouper though, it’d be real nice if you’d spring for a fish dinner.”

  Cole could not believe they’d consider fishing on a dive as critical as this one, but it must be just more business to them. “You guys and Sam have been very helpful. Yeah, I’ll do just that,” he promised.

  He was glad Bree hadn’t overheard the conversation. She was standing at the stern now, staring into the water, so she didn’t hear the divers or his agreeing to their bribe. But then, maybe she did hear, because he was amazed at how acute her listening powers seemed to be. It had worried him when she’d said she’d heard and seen more things than she should after Daria went missing. At first he thought she meant she was seeing ghosts, or some sort of visions of her sister, but that wasn’t it—he hoped.

  He walked aft and leaned on the taffrail beside her. Partly blocking their view, heavy wire cables and a big hook hung from the winch spool; he wondered how much dead weight this barge could lift out of the water, but he didn’t feel like asking Sam’s divers. For some reason, Sam had not been able to come along, but said he’d be out in a smaller boat soon to see how they were doing. Cole’s protective instincts about Bree made him want to tell Sam he ought to let bygones be just that, where Bree was concerned.

  Sam had told his captain to anchor on the north side of the channel and float several dive flags. Hopefully, those would slow boats and Jet Skis coming in and out of the Marco River even more than the No Wake and Slow—Manatee Zone signs already did.

  “I’m glad we’re in this scow, even if it is a bit slow,” Cole told Bree, intentionally trying to lift her spirits. Her fierce determination had ebbed to a quiet moodiness. “In the crosscurrents there, it will give us a stable diving platform.”

  “Despite its flat bottom,” she said with a sigh, “a boat the length of Mermaids II would have been anything but stable there in that bad storm.”

  “Do you sense something?” he asked. “I mean, that we’re getting closer to answers—to the boat or Daria?”

  “Not exactly that,” she said, frowning out at the churning wake of the barge. “It’s just that she has to be alive. I know she is. I want answers and yet I fear them. This possible scenario seems so possible. I’ve seen wrecks in the gulf, both ships and airplanes, but it just can’t be my boat and my sister! But then,” she said, her voice softer, “I’ll bet poor Manny and Juanita are saying it can’t be their girl who ran away.”

  “You don’t mean that you think Daria could have run away, staged something…”

  “No, no!” she said, covering her ears like a child. “She has no reason to. She’s not the type to do that. I know my sister like—like the back of my own hand. Except,” she added, staring dazedly at the back of her hand in the bright sun, “one of the mirror-image things about us was that I’m right-handed and she’s a leftie. Lefties always feel a little different from others. It was the earliest thing that made us feel we weren’t one and the same.”

  He took her han
d in his. “Bree, why don’t you stay on board with the captain and let me go down alone with Sam’s divers?”

  “Because having a fourth diver could make a difference in low vis. If you reported nothing was there, I’d have to prove it to myself. And if something is there, I’d have to be on-site, look for clues of how the boat broke up.”

  She tugged her hand back and hit both fists on the rail, then, obviously fighting tears, whispered, “Cole, I don’t know what I would have done without you, even after you got me breathing again and to the hospital. You’ve been my life preserver in more ways than one, but I know you have a life to go back to.”

  “I do need to drive to Miami soon to look over a yacht for a big client I might take on. Actually, it’s Dom Verdugo’s casino cruise boat. I was going to turn him down flat, but I think he bears watching and that would be a good way to keep an eye on him. To tell you the truth, my mother was a gambling addict and ruined her life—and almost Dad’s and mine—that way. I’m not sure, but her accidental death may have actually been suicide. Beyond needing this big commission, I’d like to see Verdugo’s plans and boat stopped somehow.”

  “I’m sorry about your mother. I can imagine how terrible that must have been—losing a mother tragically,” she whispered, squeezing his hand.

  She sniffed hard and abruptly turned away to check her gear, which she had laid out behind her on a metal bench. He raked his fingers through his hair. He was a selfish jerk to bring his own family problems up right now, but that had just spilled out. He’d kept what Dad had called their “dirty linen” secret for years, penned up inside, without even telling his wife much about it, yet here he was sharing it with Bree.

  As Cole started to recheck his gear, too, the boat began to rock and roll, as he always called such movement in crosscurrents. On the barge the motion was subtle, not like in a sailboat where the helmsman could feel every shift and shake intimately.

  He admitted to himself that he was yearning to be that way with Bree, to be able to read her, to sense her movements and moods like a sleek ship under his command, although he knew he’d never control her any more than he could the sea. Still, like the best sailing on the Streamin’, it could be a beautiful union. But the shaky ship that was Briana Devon right now was in rough waters, and he prayed she wouldn’t break apart. Cole shook his head to clear it, but Ric’s voice cut short his agonizing.