Deep Waters

by E. A. House

  “I’m Agent Michelle Grey, this is Forrest Holland,” the woman with the slightly more commanding presence said, shaking hands with the detective. Her partner shook hands and then wandered off to stand guard over the fax machine. “He’s expecting DNA- and dental-record confirmation,” she explained. “We’re sorry to keep you through dinner, but we came by earlier today and missed you. We wanted your take on the Kingsolver case.”

  “I just don’t see what I can tell you,” Detective Hermann explained. “It was initially classified as a hit-and-run, until we caught someone trying to kill her niece and nephew. I had to call in a favor just to keep the case open when the guy committed suicide in a holding cell.”

  “And there’s the niece and nephew again,” Agent Grey sighed. “Oh, I hate being right.”

  PUTTING TOGETHER TWO WRITTEN DESCRIPTIONS and three maps from vastly different time periods in just the right order was tricky. Doing so in just the right way so they overlapped and gave you the fabled location of a sunken ship was not an exact science. If Carrie were a professional cartographer it might be, but Carrie was not a professional cartographer and so they were all going to have to be happy with what she could manage. She’d found the part of the island that had mussel beds and compared that to the part of the island someone could reasonably see from the old mission church. Then she had matched that area to the only place on the island that had ever been described as having white cliffs. They weren’t visible as cliffs anymore, which had been a huge part of the problem of getting the location right; at some point in the fifties the area had been developed and then torn down and then planted over with hardy grasses, and what had been a cliff that gave way abruptly to a stretch of marshy land that led out into the ocean was now a seldom-used beach.

  Such was the march of time. But what was important was this: Carrie had narrowed the number of places Father Gonzalez could have been describing in his account to three, all in the same area no more than a couple of miles across. She had, after careful thought, picked a point in the exact center of the area and arbitrarily declared that that was the point they needed to find. Then she’d looked that point up on an actual map, instead of the colored one in Endangered Floridian Mollusks or one of the ones she’d printed off and scribbled all over. It was right in the middle of nowhere, and also near the legendary screaming caves of Archer’s Grove, but hopefully the actual shipwreck would not be smack in the middle of the supposedly haunted and/or cursed caves that lay along a deserted sandy shoreline in a remote part of the island.

  “Okay,” Carrie said to herself, checking that she had the correct sticky note with the correct coordinates written on it in her hand. “Time to go see how serious Professor Griffin is about finding this ship.”

  She didn’t entirely want to. There was something up with Professor Griffin, and Carrie wasn’t sure what it was. All she was sure about was that the professor was preoccupied and worried about something. He could be afraid, he could be convinced the San Telmo was a fake and was just humoring them, he could have finally gone completely around the bend and decided to go looking for white whales, she just didn’t know. And the not knowing was slowly driving her crazy. If nothing else, the professor’s actions had been out of character ever since he had brought up the FBI and asked Carrie and Chris if they knew where Maddison and her family were, and Carrie couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more to that. Why would the professor bother to notice the FBI investigating, even if they had talked to him?

  Carrie found Professor Griffin in the main cabin, singing to himself about anchors away and sketching the sun in colored pencil. He had his feet up on the dashboard and was swiveling back and forth in his chair.

  “Hey,” she said, and he jumped, almost guiltily.

  “Carrie! You’ve been noticeably absent all day, everything all right?”

  “I was just finishing things up,” Carrie said honestly. It was edging toward night outside and the sun was setting gloriously below the horizon, painting the sky purple and red. It was probably why Professor Griffin had his sketchpad out. The sticky note in her pocket was sticking to her palm.

  “The final resting place of the San Telmo,” she said, holding it out.

  “Ah! Really?” Professor Griffin plucked the note out of Carrie’s hand and squinted at it. “Glasses would be a good idea,” he added, fishing them out of his shirt pocket.

  “It’s hardly exact,” Carrie pointed out, watching the professor as he leaned across the console and made a couple of careful adjustments to the direction they were heading. “I picked a point in the middle of the likeliest-looking spot.”

  “Close only ever counts with horseshoes and hand grenades,” Professor Griffin said, tucking the sticky note in his pocket.

  “Um, Professor?”

  “That sounded a good deal better in my head,” Professor Griffin admitted after thinking it through. “I think it means something different than what I was intending—what I meant to say, Carrie, my dear, was that somewhere in the middle is good enough for me.”

  “That makes a little more sense,” Carrie agreed, edging toward the door. “I’m going to go tell Chris we have a new heading, maybe he’ll stop pestering the grad students about coastal erosion.”

  “Ah,” Professor Griffin said, turning back to the sunset. “Let him pester them! I’ve never known a grad student who didn’t secretly want to spend their entire evening talking your ear off about their subject matter.”

  More like, let him pester them, Carrie thought, since he can’t get anything out of them, since I doubt they’re real grad students. The faint unease she had felt all day was suddenly a lump of lead in her stomach as she went directly to the room she and Chris were sharing and started packing all her books and papers into her duffle bag.

  Apparently, knowing in theory how to sail was finally coming in handy, because apparently Professor Griffin did not know that Carrie could figure out which direction a person was steering a boat. At least, she knew quite well that the adjustments the professor had made to their course as soon as she showed him the sticky note had taken them away from the coast and not toward it. She’d been wondering if there was something bothering the professor; she now had a terrible feeling it was a guilty conscience, because he was clearly lying about something. If she’d wanted an answer to whether the professor was hiding something she now had one, it just happened to be exactly the sort of answer she didn’t want.

  Carrie paused in the middle of wrestling a map back into its original folded shape and abruptly decided that she needed evidence stored in more than one place. Most of the books and papers she had with her were more reference material than anything else, so if anyone looked through them they wouldn’t be able to re-create Carrie’s research. But the map she’d done all her work on would point someone in exactly the right direction. Carrie hauled her duffle bag back onto her bunk and yanked it open, digging out the map in question and fumbling her phone out of her jeans pocket as she did. She still didn’t get any service, but her phone could take pictures, so she saved a version of the map on her phone and stuffed the original copy in her pocket. Then it occurred to Carrie that pictures on her phone were only as safe as her phone was, and her phone was a small plastic rectangle surrounded by gallons upon gallons of seawater. True, she had a waterproof case, but she’d never actually tested it beyond using the phone in the rain.

  So, evidence cleared away and map documented in two different formats, Carrie went in search of Chris and a plastic bag to put her phone in.

  Chris had been poking around Moby and was now nosing around a corner of the equipment room. Carrie stopped in the doorway and rapped “shave and a haircut” on the doorframe, causing him to bang his head on a shelf in the process of looking up.

  “Um,” Carrie said, mildly embarrassed she was even considering doing this, “excuse me while I go to the restroom briefly.” Then she left to do a circuit of the ship in search of a plastic bag before Chris could respond. But
Chris was the one who’d come up with both “shave and a haircut” and “Excuse me while I go to the restroom briefly” as a signal, so if he didn’t realize she was trying to warn him, Carrie was going to be very annoyed.

  Aside from the equipment room—which housed cables, a first aid kit, other stuff for tending to Moby and its operators and thus needed to be well lit “so we can see if there’s blood,” as Abigail tended to put it—the Triangle was dimly lit for such a small ship. The professor had always attributed it to an unfortunate accident involving a string of pineapple-shaped Christmas tree lights and a blown fuse, but it could simply be that the ship was older or that the professor used the wrong kind of light bulbs. Either way it was difficult to find a plastic bag in the gathering dusk on a ship that was increasingly full of dark corners, and it took Carrie an embarrassingly long time to remember that she had a plastic bag full of hairbands in the bathroom.

  The hairbands were, of course, sitting obviously on the lip of the tiny bathroom sink, impersonating a bag of spiders. Carrie fished one hairband out and absent-mindedly snapped it around her wrist, dumped the rest of them in her palm, and slid her phone into the empty bag. It was a freezer bag, so the phone fit, but then she had to spend a whole minute squeezing the air out of the bag before she could get it to zip, and then the resulting bundle of plastic and phone didn’t want to fit in her pocket.

  She was stuffing the phone down in her pocket and muttering about useless pockets when she pushed the bathroom door open and ran directly into one of the grad students—it was the nervous-looking one, Harvey—who was hovering right in front of the door.

  “Hi?” Carrie said, hairbands scattering everywhere. She gathered them up and tried to edge around him towards the equipment room and hopefully Chris. But Harvey wouldn’t let her push past him. “Um,” Carrie said, stomach sinking in realization even as the rational part of her mind tried to say there was a perfectly innocent explanation for all this. “I’m sorry if you needed to pee, I was just getting my stuff out of the bathroom so it’s free!”

  Real smooth, Carrie thought, horrified at her own babbling. It had even rhymed. If she’d had any hope of convincing Professor Griffin that she didn’t know what he and his—accomplices? minions? definitely not real grad students—were planning, she’d just lost it. Because at this point she really couldn’t deny it any longer; whatever the fake grad students were up to, Professor Griffin was up to it with them.

  “Excuse me,” Carrie told Harvey, and fled in the only direction she could—out onto the deck of the ship. And, of course, that particular side of the ship was framed on one side by a railing and on the other by a crane arm that was supposed to be for Moby but hadn’t been able to lift the submersible since the camera had been added. And the door to below-decks didn’t exactly lock, although Carrie slammed it closed hard enough to get someone right in the nose before it bounced back open and Harvey followed her through.

  “Okay, look,” Harvey said, cautiously edging toward Carrie, who backed up to keep the same amount of space between them. Brad was swearing viciously and somewhat thickly behind Harvey, clutching his bleeding nose. Carrie refused to feel guilty, and anyway, where had he even come from?

  “I know this looks really bad,” Harvey said. He looked incredibly nervous and deeply uncomfortable and Carrie figured that was only fair. “But I promise, I didn’t mean to scare you, it was just a misunderstanding, don’t do anything rash—”

  Carrie backed into the boat’s railing and couldn’t go any farther unless she wanted to try walking on water.

  “Okay, I’m going to take a step back . . . ” Harvey said, and then yelped when Brad staggered to his feet and shoved Harvey aside.

  “Wha’ the hell do you tink you’re doing?” he demanded. “We were paid to do a dob!”

  “We can’t just—” Harvey protested, grabbing ineffectually at Brad, who was coming at Carrie with murder in his eyes (on second thought, breaking his nose had maybe not been the best move).

  “Get ob me!” Brad roared, and lunged at Carrie, who couldn’t exactly move out of the way, and only missed her by virtue of Harvey making a swipe at his arm. Carrie ducked a tangle of flailing limbs, and then someone screamed in pain (it wasn’t her) and she narrowly avoided getting punched in the stomach. Brad did manage to grab her by the legs and heft her up. Carrie stabbed him as hard as she could in the eye, and there was another scream, and then she went up . . .

  . . . and over the railing.

  She managed to grab a breath before she hit the water with a painful splash, but most of the air was still knocked out of her lungs and cold seawater went up her nose. She broke the surface coughing and gasping, blinking water desperately out of her eyes and treading water for dear life.

  Chris would maintain until the end of time itself that it wasn’t that he didn’t register Carrie using his own distress code to warn him, it was that he was in the middle of a terrible realization of his own. Two terrible realizations of his own, actually.

  First: Moby was missing its camera and the laptop that went with it—he’d thought they’d just been removed and stored in the equipment room, but a careful search had not turned them up. Without the waterproof camera hooked up to the little submersible, it was impossible for Moby to record any footage from the seafloor. And without the laptop that Abigail had painstakingly programmed to hook up to Moby’s camera, it was impossible to see what Moby was doing on the seafloor in real time. True, Moby’s robot arm looked to be in working order so the little guy could still take samples from the ocean floor, but the stated mission of the current expedition, at least according to Harvey, was to take pictures of the coastline above and below the water, and for that Moby was currently useless. It would be a pretty terrible result if two grad students made special arrangements to do research and then weren’t able to do half of the research; at the very least Brad and Harvey should have discovered the missing hardware within the first five minutes of setting sail and turned the whole expedition around to get it. They should have chased Abigail and the van halfway across the island in order to get the equipment they needed.

  Unless, of course, the camera wasn’t attached to Moby because the trip was a decoy. The camera and the laptop were the newest and most expensive pieces of equipment that weren’t attached directly to Moby, so if someone wanted to make sure the delicate and expensive equipment wasn’t in any danger, it made sense to leave them both behind. Chris did not like what that said about how the trip might end.

  Then, Chris rummaged around in the toolbox, trying to figure out why the submersible was missing its camera—and found a small gray box amongst the screws. He only recognized it as a cell phone jammer because he’d seen one before. Aunt Elsie had brought one home from work when the board voted to put cell phone jammers in the archive reading room to cut down on people trying to smuggle cell phones into the room, then discovered how unpopular an idea it was and nixed the project, but not before buying two of the devices. Aunt Elsie had sighed and taken one home, giving one to the English professor at the college.

  But there was really only one explanation for a cell phone jammer hidden in the toolbox of The Vanishing Triangle. Chris turned the box over until he found a likely looking switch and flipped it, and then checked his cell phone and discovered he had three bars.

  He’d been breathing hard and there had been blood pounding in his ears—it was flat-out scary being stuck on a boat with someone who wanted to cut off communication with the outside world—and so it was only when he had rehidden the jammer in the can of screws that he realized something was happening above decks. There was a storm of swearing going on in the background and Chris poked his head out of the equipment room to see what the matter was and who had splintered the bathroom door. Then he remembered what Carrie had said while he was looking for Moby’s camera, and decided to follow the commotion to its source.

  The swearing sounded like Brad and wasn’t hard to follow, but Chris was only two steps up to th
e deck when he heard a yell and a scream and a splash, and that was when he started running.

  Everyone else was standing on the deck when he shot through the door and skidded to a stop next to the lifeboat. Brad was doubled over and bleeding from his nose, Harvey had both hands clapped over his mouth in apparent horror, and the professor, clutching his hat, looked uncertain. And Carrie—Carrie wasn’t on the boat.

  “What happened?” Chris asked. Harvey shook his head.

  “Chris,” the professor said, “I need you to be calm and logical about all this—”

  “What happened and where’s Carrie?” Chris demanded, and Harvey pointed a shaking finger over the side of the boat at a fast-receding figure in the water.

  “She fell in?” Chris yelped, looking from Harvey to the professor as the two most likely to actually answer him. “Well, did anyone throw her a lifejacket?”

  The professor opened his mouth and then closed it again.

  “Then what are you waiting for?” Chris yelled, already grabbing two from the three that were right next to the lifeboat. Then, either because an instinct told him staying on the ship was not the best option or habit had him rushing into situations that could get him killed, he threw himself off the boat after Carrie.

  She was several yards off the back of the boat, frantically trying to stay afloat in the waves and the wake of the ship. Chris used his best sidestroke while hauling the life vests to reach her and it was still a near thing.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, offering her a lifejacket. The day had been hot, but night was coming on fast and the water was cold and Carrie was starting to shiver.

  “I’m fine—look out!” Carrie said, her eyes growing huge.

  “What—hey!”

  The Triangle made a tight turn that swamped them in a wave, then steamed away at full speed.