Girl at Sea

by Maureen Johnson

  “Here you go,” she said. “You can keep this if you’re interested.”

  “Thanks,” Clio said. She leaned against the sink and looked at the article. It was from an archeology magazine, with long, glossy pages. The images struck Clio at once. They were very 1920s, black-and-white photos of a woman with a bob haircut and a strange-looking bathing suit that looked like shorts and a shirt, standing on the edge of a large sailboat and preparing to dive. She had a look of utter confidence on her face. And she was beautiful—big and strong, with visible muscles in her arms. Her hair was so blond that it looked almost white in the photo, but her eyes were dark. Marguerite’s gaze came right off the page.

  There she was again, in a portrait when she was seventeen. Even though this was an extremely old picture, taken in one of those formal settings that always looked so contrived, her face had that same fierceness. The emotion came through even though she sat demurely wearing a little sailor-style dress, her hair arranged in a pile of very thick curls looping over the top of her head, a little bouquet of flowers in her grip.

  “She was a remarkable woman,” Julia said. “A revolutionary. Totally devoted to her work.”

  “She was a diver, right?”

  “Yes, she was. And long before there was safe equipment. She began the search that we’re on now. She was looking for her father’s boat when she had her accident.”

  “Accident?” Clio said, looking up from the pictures.

  “She died during a dive,” Julia said crisply. “She was trying out a new piece of diving gear, but something went wrong. She was dead before they even got her back up onto the boat. But now we’re continuing the work, and we won’t fail in the same way.”

  There was something cold about the way she said this, whether she meant it that way or not. Something shockingly practical, as if you could just step over someone who died and take over what they were doing. As if an equipment failure during a dive was Marguerite’s fault.

  Or maybe it was just the English accent. It was hard to tell. But Clio felt her eyes narrowing a bit in reaction.

  There was a sound on deck. The divers were coming up. Clio hurried out of the galley and joined them. Her dad was out first. Martin sat on the platform, still halfway in the water.

  “How did it go?” Clio asked.

  They didn’t answer. Her dad was leaning over Martin, taking off his mask. Something was wrong.

  “Clio,” Martin said weakly, “that bottle…”

  It took Clio just a second to remember the nitroglycerin on the bedside stand. She started off running for it, swinging down the circular steps by holding the rails. Her sudden appearance, running through the downstairs hall, drew Aidan’s attention. He leaned out of the workroom.

  “What are you—”

  “It’s Martin,” she said.

  She was back up with the bottle in less than a minute, Aidan right behind her. Martin took the bottle, removed a pill, and swallowed.

  “Should I radio for help?” her dad said. “Should we get you to a hospital?”

  “It’s just chest pain,” Martin said. “I just need to…sit down.”

  Clio’s father and Aidan helped him off the platform and undid the top of his wet suit.

  “We should get you in,” Aidan said. “You’re not looking good.”

  “I’m all right,” Martin said, his voice gruff. “This has happened before. I’ll be fine once this pill kicks in. Go have a look at that.”

  He half pointed to the video camera dangling from Clio’s father’s hand. The camera was passed to Aidan.

  “Yes, take a look,” her dad said. “I think we may be on to something.”

  Impulsive Decisions

  In the light of the camera, the water was a messy green, with gold and brown flecks flying in all directions. Little blobby jellythings and fish poked in and out. The wreck itself was covered in pod-shaped sea creatures, hundreds of these little circles, distorting its form and making it look puffy. But it was there. It was encrusted, but it was a ship.

  “There’s a lot of damage to the front,” Aidan said, pointing to where the ship seemed to melt into the sea bottom. “The metal is twisted. They hit something.”

  Aidan sat at his computer, Julia leaning over his shoulder. Clio stood off to the side, her eyes going between the image and Aidan’s face. He had never looked so intent before. His eyes were lost, deep in the footage.

  “Aidan,” Julia said. “Is this our boat?”

  Aidan still didn’t answer. He twisted around toward the table and began shuffling through the pile of papers scattered there, eventually pulling out a technical drawing of a boat, one that looked quite old. He looked at it, then the screen, then massaged his eyebrows with one hand, pinching them together.

  “There’s no ID.” Aidan paused. “Or there’s another ID. A wrong one, I think. There’s something about this boat. I’m going to call it. I’m going to say this is it.”

  This hit Clio harder than she expected. Her knees gave a little and she leaned back. Aidan started to laugh a bit, and Julia cracked the first genuine smile Clio had seen on her.

  “How do you know?” Clio asked.

  “I’ve been staring at pictures of this damn boat for months. And I can read the sonar images. This is what I do.”

  “Let’s go tell them,” Julia said. She kept her voice calm, but just barely.

  Upstairs, things weren’t looking so good. Martin was out of his wet suit but was slumped on the sofa. He was still insisting that he didn’t need a doctor.

  “What have you got?” her dad asked as the three of them approached.

  “A hit,” Julia said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  He had to sit down next to Martin. His face contorted oddly, either on the verge of laughter or tears. Neither came. His face just stayed like that.

  “First thing we need to figure out,” he said. “Martin.”

  “I’m telling you, Ben. This is not new. It’s just pain.”

  “But you’re not diving again,” her dad said. “There’s no way.”

  “It probably wouldn’t be smart,” Martin admitted. “I’m not quite feeling up to that.”

  “You can’t dive alone,” Clio said quickly. “First rule of diving.”

  “I know the rules,” her father said. “I’m not crazy.”

  Clio could see the debate raging in his eyes. Here they were, maybe sitting on top of the Bell Star, and they couldn’t dive. This wasn’t a position she wanted to be in. And yet…yet she knew that she was going to do it anyway.

  “But I can go with you,” she said.

  “No,” he said quickly. “No way.”

  “I’m the only card-carrying diver here besides you guys,” she said.

  “That’s probably expired.”

  “You know what I mean. And I don’t even know if they do expire. And no, I don’t have it on me, before you even say it…but come on. We’re sitting on top of it. And trust me, I’m careful.”

  This drew looks from everyone.

  “I am!” she said. “I can do it, Dad. And you know I can. It’s not even that deep.”

  “It doesn’t need to be deep to be dangerous.”

  “You taught me for a reason,” she said. “I learned. I can do this. I’ll go with you. You won’t let anything happen.”

  Even as the words were coming out of her mouth, even as her gut instinct was seconding them, her ears couldn’t quite believe it. She was agreeing—no, insisting—that she go diving with her dad.

  “I think she’s right, Ben,” Julia said. “She can handle herself. You even told me her accident had nothing to do with anything she did.”

  So her father had told Julia about the accident.

  “You’re sure about this?” he asked.

  “Completely.”

  No one said anything for three or four entire minutes, which is a lot of silence. Aidan sat down at the dining room table and stared into the galley, his lower jaw set off on an angle. H
e was deep in thought about something, and he didn’t seem to like that thought very much.

  Finally, her father took a deep breath, then sat up.

  “Okay,” he said. “We make a plan—a detailed plan—and we stick to it. We do this conservatively. Aidan, I need you to map that boat, give us a way in and out, plus backups.”

  “You’re doing this?” Aidan asked.

  “We’ll see,” he said. “Maybe. Let’s get the plan together. Look at those cargo holds. If this is the Bell Star, anything that Magwell was carrying was probably in that area, in crates. Clio, you go with him, and you watch. Get the picture of that boat into your head.”

  “You’re serious about this?” Aidan asked Clio as they went down the stairs.

  “Totally serious,” Clio said.

  “Think about this,” Aidan said, turning around on the steps and blocking the way. “Don’t pretend to be tougher than you are.”

  “Are you worried about me?”

  “I’m just—”

  “Look,” she said. “My dad spent a ton of money on my training. I had a private instructor. I did hours of class time. I did penetration training with some wacko who used to be in the Greek navy. I know what I’m doing. I just haven’t…done it in a while.”

  Aidan sighed, then turned and kept walking down and to the workroom. At the table, he pushed aside most of the papers, selecting a few and arranging them in the middle.

  “Meet the Bell Star,” he said, pointing to several grainy photographs and a few of the structural drawings. “These drawings are actually of a ship called the Daybreaker, which was a sister ship. Completely identical, except that it was two feet longer. It’s not a huge boat. There were three cabins for first-class passengers. The next level down had twelve second-class cabins and other rooms for the captain and crew. Just below, to the front and the back of the boat, were the cargo spaces. The one in the front was much larger. The back one was next to the engines and the coal hold.”

  He turned back to his computer monitor, where the blurry image of the wreck was on the screen. With one hand, he reached over and grabbed Clio by the shoulder, pulling her down close. She tried not to think about the fact that mere inches separated their faces again.

  “It looks to me like that’s the rip that brought them down,” he said, pointing to a shadow on the screen. It took Clio’s eyes a second to get used to the focus and find what he was talking about. “It’s not huge, but it’s definitely big enough.”

  “What could do something like that?”

  “There’s no way to know exactly, but it looks like they went into something hard. A rock, a fishing boat. No idea.”

  “You said they knew the route.”

  “The captain should have, yeah. But there was a storm that night. Something obviously went wrong.”

  “Do you think they knew they were sinking?” she asked.

  “On a boat this size?” he said. “A hit like that? Probably. The people on the Titanic didn’t know they were going down because the ship was massive. Some of them felt the bump when the ship hit the iceberg, but most of them paid no attention. A few of them even took the ice from the deck and put it in their drinks. But that was the world’s biggest, most unsinkable ship, and the night was clear. The Bell Star was no Titanic. It was a small passenger boat. And it was clearly hit hard enough for a hole to open in the bottom of the boat. Don’t you think you’d feel that?”

  “Yeah,” Clio said. “I’d feel it.”

  “Okay,” he said standing up and turning back to the drawings on the table. “The Bell Star carried both passengers and small amounts of cargo. The manifest said it was transporting tiles and mail. The tiles were worth some money. They may also have weighed the ship down. You probably saw on the image that the bow is farther down into the seafloor.”

  No. Clio hadn’t seen that at all.

  “My guess is that’s where the tiles were,” he said. “The boat could have been a little unbalanced in the way things were stored. Just a guess. Another guess: the tiles would have been packed in advance, long before the passengers or the mail. My hunch is that passenger cargo, like the stone, is in the back of the boat, here.”

  He drew an invisible circle around a section of the diagram with his finger.

  “That’s where I’m going to plot you guys to,” he said. “You’ll have to go down a few levels. And frankly? Yes. That thought scares me. There are going to be all kinds of edges and metal bits that can slice tubes and lots of weird corners and shifted stuff that can trap divers.”

  “You were going to send my dad there,” she said.

  “It’s not the same thing,” he said. “You need to think about this. Look at that picture on the screen. That is a rusted mess, sixty feet down. Is that really what you want your first dive back to be? You told me yourself that sometimes your dad isn’t too careful. And at this point, you and the water don’t have a very good relationship. I don’t want to sound like grandma here, but this isn’t a joke.”

  No. It wasn’t a joke at all. He was right about the issues. Going deep down into a boat like that—down levels of stairs, past torn bits of metal, completely in the dark. Clio felt a bubble of fear catch in her throat. But more overwhelming was…a lightness in her head. She liked this idea. She had loved diving. The only reason she hadn’t gone back was that her arm was hurt and her mom was freaked out. And then her father was gone. But she would have. Wouldn’t she?

  And if they were right and this stone was all it was supposed to be, nothing was going to stop her from doing the dive. A stone that important…

  “Wait a second,” she said. “Why are you looking in the cargo hold?”

  “We’re looking for a large historical item, which would have been boxed up. It’s the definition of cargo.”

  “How big is the Marguerite stone supposed to be?” she asked.

  “The letter says about two feet long.”

  “Right. So you’re Dr. Magwell, and you have a stone that can help you translate a language no one has ever been able to read before. You’re on a boat that’s sailing to France, and you’re going to be on it for days. You’re on a boat now. It’s boring, right?”

  “Not always,” he said.

  “You know what I mean. So, if you were carrying something like that and if you were stuck on a boat, what would you be doing? Would you put it in the cargo hold? Or would you keep it with you and study it?”

  Aidan drummed his fingers on the table and thought about this.

  “Okay,” he said. “Purely speculating, let’s say that the stone is in his cabin. We have no idea which one was his.”

  “He took this boat a lot, right?”

  “Every year.”

  “And was he rich?”

  “He was well off,” Aidan said.

  “That puts us up here,” Clio said, pointing to the cabins with the windows. “First class. That’s going in, but it’s not that bad. And it’s only a few cabins. That’s where we start.”

  She could see Aidan thinking this over. Under the fringe of overgrown hair, his green eyes flicked back and forth from image to image, and he pulled his long, thin lips into a taut line.

  “You may be right,” he conceded. “I’m going to model these and figure out ways in and out. Are you still sure?”

  “Are you really worried?” she asked.

  “I have to be,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because if you die, Julia will probably make me do it, whether I know how to dive or not. So it’s in my best interests to keep you alive. Also, I think you’re nuts.”

  “I am nuts,” she said, feeling her eyes widen. “I’m my father’s daughter.”

  It looked like Aidan was about to do something—she wasn’t sure what. Reach over for her. Jump up and down. But instead he sat at his computer with a very definite effort.

  “Yeah,” Aidan said. “Maybe you want to skip anything that sounds like famous last words right now, okay? Please?”

 
; The Diver

  First, there was a quiz.

  Every single bit of gear, every hand signal, the use of the dive computer, questions about decompression stops, what to do if she had to switch to the secondary breathing regulator if the first one ran out. Clio had been trained well back in the day and managed to get almost every single question right. The one she got wrong wasn’t very serious but still got her a lecture.

  Martin wasn’t a huge guy, so his suit wasn’t such a bad fit. She had forgotten how unpleasant this part was, getting powdered up, dragging the rubber up her legs inch by inch. Her father loaded her down, putting the backpack-like buoyancy compensator over her shoulders, the weight belt around her waist. They did a trial dive to make sure she could handle herself under the surface.

  Getting in wasn’t a problem. It involved taking one very wide step off the back platform, one hand holding her mask and regulator in place. She looked out, not down, just like she was supposed to, and watched the horizon drop away suddenly, only to be replaced by a greenish-tinted, very quiet world. The weight she carried pulled her down a few feet. She cleared her ears, looked around for jellyfish, and took a thirty-minute swim with her dad around the boat, descending about twenty feet.

  The second she went under, it was if the intervening years without her dad just went away and they were exactly where they were before. There was so much freedom under the water. As she came up to surface, she could see Aidan leaning over the edge of the platform. He looked very tall from down here, very grave. He still didn’t like the idea. As for Clio, it felt really good to be worried about.

  They rested a bit before the actual dive, going over the plans that Aidan had worked up.

  “We’re using pony bottles today,” her dad said as they geared up to go. “We’re going to be carrying way more gas than we need. And you’re going to be carrying a second knife.”

  Clio was covered in her weight in equipment. Three bottles on her back, knives on her thigh and arm. A spool of guide rope. Artifact bags, weights, camera, light. There was something hanging off every part of her body that could withstand the weight. It was almost impossible for her to move.