Night Swimming

by Laura Moore

  “No, thanks, I’m trying to cut back.” He sat in the chair facing Sean’s desk, laid his brown leather briefcase across his knees, and pressed the locks with his thumbs. They opened with a snap. He drew out a sheaf of papers, closed the briefcase, and set it against the legs of the chair. “I’m sorry I couldn’t meet with you yesterday afternoon—”

  “No need to apologize, Mike. Mrs. Ritter’s lawyer will be here shortly,” Sean said. “This is a copy of the police report; take a look.” He leaned forward and handed it to him. “I made an asterisk next to a paragraph I thought might interest you.” As the lawyer’s eyes skimmed the report, Sean continued, “No one pressed charges, but when they interviewed the other driver, the woman claimed she’d seen Mrs. Ritter with a cell phone pressed to her ear. Yeah, that’s the relevant paragraph.” He was silent while Coehlo read the passage.

  Mike Coehlo raised his head and looked at Sean. A smile split his freckled face. “Oops. Looks like this slimeball didn’t do his homework. Thanks, Sean,” he said. “I may actually get to play that round of golf after lunch.”

  “My pleasure.”

  The intercom buzzed. Sean checked his watch. “I believe our slimeball has arrived. Should we make him wait?”

  “Definitely.” Mike grinned. “So, what have you been up to lately, Sean?”

  When Evelyn finally ushered Joseph Anders, the lawyer representing Mrs. Ritter, into Sean’s office, no coffee was offered, no pleasantries wasted, either.

  Anders settled himself in the only remaining chair, adjusted his tie, and with his chin thrust out pugnaciously in Sean’s direction, said, “As I informed you on the phone yesterday, Mayor McDermott, my client, Mrs. Susan Ritter, intends to file a suit against the town of Coral Beach for failing to make necessary safety improvements to the Bellemer Bridge and the Bellemer Road that leads to it. The town’s gross neglect caused my client and her young children extensive injuries. We feel five million dollars—”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Anders,” Sean said. “This is a copy of the investigation report by the police.” He picked up the photocopy and then let it drop onto the desk. He gave the lawyer a smile. “Have you read it by any chance?”

  “Naturally,” the lawyer replied.

  Anders was bluffing. Sean could see the tiniest flicker of worry in his eyes. In a poker game, Sean would take him to the cleaners. He exchanged a look with Mike, leaned back in his chair, and let Mike have his turn.

  Coehlo picked up the copy of the police report and offered it to Anders. “Perhaps you should review page three, paragraph four, Mr. Anders. Then we’ll discuss whether your client really wants to file this lawsuit.”

  Sean watched a grimace of embarrassment steal over the lawyer’s face. He doubted Anders was even aware of the odd little noises he was making. Whoever worked as Anders’s paralegal was about to be out of a job. Sean let him sweat a little before nodding to Coehlo.

  “I assume you understand that Mrs. Ritter’s suit will go nowhere, Mr. Anders,” Mike said. “I suggest you get in touch with your client immediately. And when you do, you might mention that based upon this police report, the town has a solid defense of contributory negligence. Holding a cell phone to your ear while negotiating a curve is a pretty dumb idea. Especially when your kids are in the backseat,” he finished flatly.

  Sean took over. “If you don’t have the good sense to dissuade Mrs. Ritter, I will ask Mr. Coehlo to contact the county prosecutor, who may very well choose to bring Mrs. Ritter to trial for reckless endangerment. Have a nice day, Mr. Anders,” Sean said. “Oh, yes, one other thing. You can give your client a bit of practical advice from me. That curve leading to the bridge? It’s a piece of cake with both hands on the wheel. She should try it sometime.”

  “Thanks for coming, Mike,” Sean said, as Mike Coehlo replaced the papers inside his briefcase and stood up. Sean walked him to the door.

  They shook hands. “God, I loved the look on Anders’s face when he realized just how deep that shit hole was. I haven’t had this much fun all week.” He laughed and gave Sean a hearty slap on the shoulder. “Let’s do it again sometime.”

  “No thanks, Mike, I’d rather not. What I would like to do, however, is find out who put Anders on the Ritters’ doorstep. I saw Mrs. Ritter at the hospital after the accident. She didn’t strike me as the type of person who’d get involved in this sort of thing.”

  “Any names pop up?”

  Sean shrugged. “Gehring, Ferrucci . . . hell, maybe I’m becoming paranoid.”

  “Tell you what, I’ll make a few discreet inquiries. I have some friends at the DOT, too.”

  “Don’t let it interfere with your golf game.”

  “God, no.” Mike grinned. “I’ve got my priorities. I’ll give you a buzz if I unearth anything.”

  “I’d appreciate it, Mike. Give my love to Patty and tell Jamie to have fun scuba diving.”

  Sean shut the door after Mike and turned to Evelyn. “Think you can work your magic on the espresso machine again for me? I’ve got a few minutes before I have to go ten rounds with a roomful of journalists.”

  “Be happy to.” Evelyn made to rise from her chair, when the phone rang. Sitting back down, she answered it. “Mayor McDermott’s office, Evelyn Roemer speaking.” She paused, listening. “Just a minute, please,” she replied, and clamped a hand over the mouthpiece. “Sean, it’s the governor for you.”

  Lily, Karen, and John slid into a vacant booth. A waitress wearing a faded shirt with glittery letters spelling Norma Jean’s emblazoned on its front brought them their menus, asked whether they would like coffee right away, and disappeared.

  “Nice place you’re treating us to, Lily.” John leaned back, resting his arms along the back of the vinyl-covered booth. His sunglasses reflected the noonday sun as he surveyed the other patrons eating lunch, the lunch board with the handwritten specials all but obscured by grime. “Yes, indeed. Real swank. Definitely pulling out all the stops for us.”

  Lily smiled tightly. “Pulling out all the stops?” she repeated. “I think clogging all the arteries is a better way to describe a meal at Norma Jean’s. And for you, John, only the finest grease in Coral Beach will do.” She was too tired to put up with John’s sarcasm. She’d spent the night staring at the dead phone, trying to convince herself that this was for the best. Yet as the clock ticked off the minutes creeping by, she kept hearing Karen’s voice saying the word coward over and over again. Perhaps Karen was right. Perhaps she was a coward, but at least she’d be leaving Coral Beach next week with her heart merely bruised and battered—not lost forever.

  When the waitress returned to take their orders, Lily said, without bothering to consult the menu, “I’ll have the Jimmy Buffet. Hold the beer, please.”

  “What’s a Jimmy Buffet?” John asked her.

  “ ‘Cheeseburger and Paradise,’ ” Lily quoted.

  “So what do they call it if you want a cheeseburger with bacon?”

  Lily pretended to think about it. “That would be a bacon cheeseburger.”

  “Jesus.” John tossed aside the menu. “Bacon cheeseburger for me.”

  “I’ll have the salad, please.” Karen said. “Oh, and some Jell-O.”

  Despite the air of neglect that permeated the place, Norma Jean’s was fast and efficient. Their orders arrived before they’d finished talking about the morning’s dive.

  “I got to admit, this is pretty good,” John said around a mouthful of burger.

  Lily nodded. “Yeah, these are the best burgers in Florida. I figured our last lunch should be a memorable one.”

  “Oh, I’ll definitely remember this trip,” John said with a laugh. Demolishing his burger in short order, he left to use the rest room.

  Karen had merely picked over her salad, muttering about wilted iceberg. With a sigh, she pushed it aside, picked up a spoon, and pulled the bowl of green Jell-O closer.

  Lily signaled the waitress to bring them their check, doing her best not to look while Karen poked t
entatively at the green globs.

  “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” Karen said, watching with sick fascination as it jiggled wildly.

  “You certainly wouldn’t catch me eating that stuff,” Lily said.

  “Mind if I join you?” Sean slid into the space vacated by John.

  “Hey, Sean,” Karen said, smiling brightly for the first time today. “Want some Jell-O? I haven’t taken a bite.”

  “I’ll pass. Thanks though, Karen.” Sean paused and gave Lily a long look. “Hello, Lily.”

  She maintained a stony silence.

  “Here’s your check,” the waitress said, and placed the slip in the middle of the Formica-topped booth. “You want something to eat, Mayor McDermott?”

  “No, thanks, Sue.”

  “A cup of joe?” she asked.

  For a second, Sean’s gaze released Lily to look up and shake his head at the waitress. Lily’s hands flew to her wallet. Opening it, she riffled through the bills. Damn, they were all twenties. She’d have to wait for change.

  “Lily, we need to talk.”

  “That won’t be possible, Mr. Mayor. We’re just leaving.”

  “I thought I’d come on the dive this afternoon—”

  “No!”

  The vehemence of Lily’s response made Karen start. “Gosh, I really need to pee before we set out,” she exclaimed, scooting out from the vinyl booth.

  Like Lily, Sean ignored Karen, paid no attention to her hasty departure. “What do you mean no?” he asked softly. “You’re not barring me from this expedition, are you, Lily?”

  “You bet I am,” she hissed angrily to hide her hurt. “This is already our second dive of the day. We have only one last transect to cover and the study will be finished. We’ve been working our butts off on this project. My team is exhausted. I’m exhausted. The last thing we need is you, Mr. Mayor, breathing down our necks—”

  “Listen, I’m sorry about last night! I couldn’t get rid of Stacy—not with the bloody fund-raiser coming up. I’ll make it up to you, I promise—” The word hung in the air between them. Sean stopped, as conscious as she of an earlier promise made, then broken.

  Lily paled. “Your promises are worthless, Sean. Go utter those sweet nothings to Stacy Malloy. I’m not interested in listening to a two-faced liar.” Her eyes raked over him contemptuously. “I only wonder how many other lies you’ve told.”

  She made to scramble out of the booth, but Sean’s hand shot out, grabbing her arm.

  “Wait a goddamned minute!” he demanded, his anger matching hers.

  She wrenched her arm free. “Don’t you dare touch me.” Her tone was glacial. “Stay away from me—I’m sick of being harassed by the likes of you, Mayor McDermott.” Lips pressed together, Lily rushed out of the diner. Karen followed hurriedly, casting worried looks over her shoulder at Sean.

  “Banyon giving you a rough time, McDermott?” John drawled, shaking his head at Lily’s retreating figure. “Take it from me, Banyon’s the bitch of the millennium. You’ll never get her to open wide.”

  Like a shot, Sean was up, his face inches from Granger’s. His voice low and vicious, he said, “For two cents, I’d beat the shit out of you, Granger. Keep your mouth shut until you leave this town, or I’ll shut it for you.”

  “Yeah, fuck you, too, McDermott,” John snarled, shoving past him.

  The waitress scooped up the check and money Lily had thrown on the table. The 80 percent tip put a smile on her face, so when she stopped at the adjacent booth, glass coffee pot in hand, her voice was extra perky and cheerful. “Need another refill?” she asked, holding the pot over the empty, chipped porcelain cup.

  “No, thanks.” The man didn’t bother to look up, busy scribbling in his notebook. Yet when the waitress continued to hover, he cocked his head, glancing up at her sideways, and saw that her eyes were trained on the pad of paper. Casually, he closed the cover and pushed the wire-bound notebook off to the side. “Sorry, honey, I don’t let anyone read my work till it’s published.”

  “Oh! You a writer?” the waitress asked eagerly. “What you working on? A novel?”

  “That’s right. The story’s a real pot-boiler.”

  “Ooh, good. I love those.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Alone on the stern of the Tangiers, Lily stared at the shoreline. The wind whipped about her, drying her tears. But nothing could stop the sorrow that engulfed her.

  She’d been a fool, a jealous fool. Furious with Sean, with herself, she’d hurled those bitter, angry words at him and then had run. Coward that she was, she’d run, hoping with every fleeing step that Sean would run faster, catch her, and never let her go.

  Idiot, she scolded herself. As if Sean would follow after the things you said to him. He had his pride. He wouldn’t chase after her when she’d behaved like a jealous shrew.

  She had to apologize. As soon as they got back from the dive, she’d go to him. It was time she faced her love with courage.

  Squaring her shoulders, she swiped at the lingering wetness on her cheeks. With this last section of the reef complete, she’d be close to one end. Her fervent wish, though, was that she be given the chance to start anew with Sean.

  Lily’s fins hit the water with a slap. Bobbing to the surface, she treaded water, looking up through the tempered glass of her mask at the Tangiers’s stern for John and Karen to make their entries. Two splashes later, their scuba-clad bodies were beside hers. The three of them kicked over to the ladder and Owen passed down the equipment. At Lily’s signal, and John’s and Karen’s answering thumbs up, the team began its descent.

  This was it, the last section of the reef.

  A little over two weeks ago, they’d begun their study at zone one’s northernmost tip. It had taken them more than twenty dives to examine the patch reef section by section. They’d become familiar with it—with the corals, the fish—as familiar as one might be of a garden lovingly tended and watched over.

  Just as there had been a sense of excitement, of thrilling anticipation on Lily’s first exploratory dive, there was a correlative sadness that pervaded this last dive of the study. More and more often, when Lily conducted a reef study and then returned to visit the site a few years later, she would find the once colorful exotic valleys, ridges, and caves that she’d explored earlier had become diminished, lifeless, like underwater ghost towns. Here faster, there more slowly, the decline of coral reefs could be seen the world over.

  Coral was a home and life source, the foundation of a vast, complex ecosystem. When coral sickened and died, its inhabitants too were affected, no longer able to feed, grow, or to use it as shelter.

  Many of the dangers that threatened coral reefs were invisible to the naked eye—which was why so many samples were collected, and then subjected to a barrage of chemical and bacterial analyses. Some diseases, however, were all too easy to spot, and were becoming a sadly common sight. There was bleaching, when the vibrant tissue of the coral turned white and brittle, the discoloration spreading inexorably over the entire organism until it died. Another was black band disease, an algal infestation that grew in an ominous black ring, like a malevolent bull’s-eye, killing the coral polyps as it spread. Macro algae bloom attacked coral with a suffocating blanket of brownish-green fuzz. Unfortunately, these were just a few of the countless diseases that ravaged and destroyed the extraordinary marine life forms.

  Perhaps it was because Lily had seen no evidence of these dangerous diseases, no warning signs on the rest of the patch reef, that she had begun to think that perhaps Coral Beach was just plain lucky.

  Nothing in Abe Lesnesky’s report had led her to suspect trouble. In the mixed-up mess of papers, graphs, and charts, she hadn’t found a single number or reading to question the vitality of the reef.

  That was why, when Lily swam over the flat relief of zone one and came upon a colony of stag coral, her breath rushed out in a stream of dismay. Stag coral, in its natural state, was usually white or tan, wit
h a delicate triangular fringe decorating its hornlike branches. The one in front of her was an especially large specimen.

  Had the stag coral been healthy, it would have been a thing of beauty, a large and wonderful sculpture that had taken millennia to create. Thus to see suddenly the multiple, thick, black bands encircling its branches was devastating. The disease had already spread, taken over. One glance told Lily the coral wasn’t merely unhealthy, it was dying.

  She flutter-kicked slowly, circling it, mourning what she saw. Her eyes traveled downward, to the coral’s base. A hillock of sediment surrounded it. She took a test tube from her case and carefully scooped up a sample. Stoppering it, she replaced the tube and swam over to John and Karen, who were examining several small sponges.

  For the next hour, Lily and John took core samples of the ocean floor. They collected sediment and algae samples that coated dying coral. When they had accomplished that, they began filling their underwater notebooks with observations, noting down the different types of disease.

  With her cameras, Karen photographed sea fans, sponges, brain coral, elkhorn coral, too many of which showed evidence of algal infestation and massive bleaching.

  It took over an hour to inspect the disease-ridden transect, but less than a minute for Lily to realize that this last transect was a hot spot, the term used by marine biologists to describe an area in which one or more types of disease had spread, destroying coral species.

  As she worked, Lily felt a sympathetic condition take over, as though she too were being attacked by some invidious germ. She was sickened by what she saw.

  Why was this happening, and so quickly, too? The question repeated itself with each sample she took, each notation she made. The onslaught of algae and disease must have been extremely aggressive. Otherwise, Abe Lesnesky would have reported it in the updates he gave to the committee.

  When the team surfaced five yards from where the Tangiers was anchored, there was none of the excited, ebullient chatter that usually flowed between them, once their mouths were free of their regulators’ bulky mouthpieces. They gathered around the foot of the aluminum ladder in cheerless silence. Wearily, they handed their equipment up to Owen, tugged off their fins and, one after the other, climbed the short ladder.