The Green Room

by Deborah Turrell Atkinson

  Consequently, Storm stood for a few seconds and observed Goober watching his own partner catch a gorgeous wave. Experience, strength, courage, and athleticism all play a part in a surfer’s performance, but Lady Luck also has her role. Picking the right wave, and then having it turn out to be even better than anticipated, can catapult a surfer to greatness. Kimo Hitashi had one.

  Kimo’s first cutback brought a round of applause from the audience. Then the young man, his feet solidly in the foot straps, rocketed down a twenty-foot face. At that speed, ripples acted like ramps, and even from where she stood, Storm could see Kimo and his board bounce along the surface of the water, getting at least six feet of air. When he landed in a crouch, he took stock of his position and seized the opportunity to fade up the wave and disappear into the tube.

  Storm and every other spectator froze, riveted on how, when, and if the speck-sized human would emerge. Time slowed. Storm held her breath, unable to tear her eyes from the thundering mass of water.

  And Kimo appeared, a mote of yellow, careening on the oblique across the slope of a mountain that began to fold in on itself. But he was ahead of the closeout. And his teammate, the Australian, was already revving the powerful PWC through the boiling soup left in the wave’s wake. A roar went up from the crowd, a bellow that carried over the helicopters and blaring PA systems to Storm and Goober. Storm, her mouth still agape, turned her gaze to Goober.

  His posture was straighter, and he held a fist in the air. A reflex of triumph, a cheer for his partner, for the ride Goober had himself wanted so badly.

  The breath caught in Storm’s throat at Goober’s uninhibited and selfless reaction. She shouted to him, but her voice was swallowed by the wind and surf. Though she wondered if he hadn’t paused for a split second, he turned and dashed through the trees and hedges that separated the two beach houses.

  Storm sprinted after him. Her feet sank in deep sand for another thirty yards before she got to a ground cover of lantana, ironwood needles, and a harder packed surface. By then, she was between the two dwellings and out of sight of the beach. On her left was a low fence, whose function was to impede drifting sand, and several dense hibiscus and oleander bushes. On her right was the wrap-around lanai to the nearest house, which showed all the signs of an unoccupied vacation home. Draperies covered all the big, sliding glass doors and picture windows. A couple of wood chaises sat forlornly on the lanai, their cushions stowed until the owner’s next visit.

  Storm stopped and looked around. She also used the moment to catch her breath and knock the hard little round seeds from the ironwood trees from beneath her toes. She had a nasty bruise on the bottom of one heel, which made stepping directly on it painful.

  She brushed at a cut on the ball of her foot, where sand adhered to the beads of blood.

  Gusts of wind still loosened strands of her hair, but she was more protected here by the rise of the beach and the house than she had been down by the water. A line of trees and sprawling philodendra blocked her view of the highway, which passed about two hundred secluded yards from her. Goober was nowhere in sight.

  Wait, had a curtain twitched on the second floor? Storm had the uncomfortable feeling that she was being watched. She looked around, pivoting slowly in the sand.

  The windows on the higher story were mostly large casements, completely draped. There were some wood louvered windows on the bottom floor, next to several large sliding glass doors, also curtained. All the doors and windows appeared to be closed, so she doubted that a breeze had stirred anything inside the house.

  It must have been her imagination, or a spark of paranoia, but she still felt as if someone was nearby. She swallowed. Even the little hairs on the back of her neck began to stand on end.

  Though she hadn’t heard anything she could pinpoint, Storm wheeled to see if anyone stood behind her. Before she could complete the turn, she felt a sharp jab under her left shoulder blade.

  A shock followed, so powerful that all her muscles contracted, then went into spasms. Her jaw clamped tightly and her teeth painfully bit into the side of her tongue. The sinews of her neck contracted, and her eyes, beyond the scope of conscious direction, rolled back in her head. On some level, she knew that she was getting an electric shock, and that she’d fallen onto the sand. But any conscious thoughts were overwhelmed with the knowledge that her limbs stiffened and twitched, completely beyond her control. Her heart pounded with terror and confusion.

  Struggling against the effects of the shock, she found she could roll her eyes. Who was doing this to her? She was just beginning to regain control of her neck muscles when another shock convulsed her. A part howl, part squeal escaped her, then a white cloth covered her face.

  Storm’s muscles couldn’t respond to her brain’s signals, though she wanted to hold her breath. Her gasps were a reflex, beyond her conscious control. She knew that cloying chemical odor. Ether, a common solvent and powerful anesthetic.

  Blackness rolled over and around her, enfolding her in a mantle of nauseating oblivion.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Storm fought her way back to consciousness with an uneasy stomach and spinning head. The sickening sweet residue of ether still clung to her, and she swallowed hard to quell a fat knot of nausea.

  She cracked open one eyelid, closed it against the spinning, and opened it again, more slowly. She lay on one side, in the dark, with her hands bound behind her. Pinpricks of light stabbed through what she sensed was a small, closed space. She shivered with cold, and the abrupt movement induced another onslaught of green whirlies.

  Her churning stomach was worsened by the fact that whatever she lay on rocked gently. The sensation of instability was exacerbated by pounding, a sort of sub-sensory vibration that thrummed around her. This pulsation was punctuated with an imbalance of pressure similar to the feeling one gets when a car window is opened at high speed, and it worsened her queasiness.

  Storm could taste salt, and the swaying motion corresponded to the irregular movement of waves, as in a protected area. As if to reinforce this impression, a wavelet splashed her face, which caused her to jerk her head up and away. This brought about a wave of nausea so strong that she retched with dry heaves, then sagged from the head-spinning the sickness had brought on.

  Another surge of water rose around her. This time, Storm sensed its approach from the change in air pressure, and she lifted her head a few inches. Droplets splashed her face, but she held her breath this time, and the coolness washed away some of her disorientation.

  Each boom was accompanied by the buffeting sensation. Storm labored to sense the reason for the pressure change. In seconds, she knew, and the knowledge caused her to catch her breath. The rhythmic pounding was caused by huge waves beating on rocks, and she was within them.

  She was in a cave, and she lay on a sticky, scratchy surface that swayed with a grating, breaking noise. Storm turned her head and eyed its rough, tacky exterior. She’d seen these sticky bumps a thousand times. She was on a surfboard, a beat-up old thing, which rested on a ledge in the cave. The water covering the rocky platform was two or three inches deep, and caused the surfboard to rock erratically, as if one of its skegs had been broken off.

  How long had she been there? She had no recollection of anything that happened after she’d collapsed on the sand next to the beach cottage. Her arms were tied behind her, which caused her shoulder muscles to cramp and burn. Even that wasn’t as bad as the fact that her hands were senseless lumps, either from cold or from lack of blood flow.

  Storm craned her neck to look around. Her captor had removed her jeans and sweatshirt. Her bikini was all she wore, and she was thoroughly chilled. A sense of rage and violation at being undressed nearly choked her. Fear at the possibility of having been otherwise abused passed through her, but she let fury overtake alarm. Anger would be a much more effective tool, and she yearned to find the guy who put her here.

  Another pounding resonated through th
e cave, accompanied by the shift in air pressure. She forced herself to take a shaky breath, then another. Panic, like the pulsation of the huge waves, battered her senses. But she held it off, and made herself analyze her surroundings. She needed to attract someone’s attention. Lava caves riddled parts of the coastline, and they were often excellent fishing sites. If anyone would be out when the surf was big.

  “Help.” She sounded like a sick puppy. “Help,” she called out, louder. This time she managed a cry that sounded like a child’s.

  Water rose around her again. Like a tide, Storm thought. An incoming tide, each wavelet a little higher than the last. The effects of the ether were fading, and this realization gave her enough strength to struggle to her knees. It took several minutes, and she could only do it because her legs, fortunately, were free. Even so, the surfboard rocked and tilted with her efforts.

  Crouched on her knees, she surveyed the cave. Sharp-toothed rocks loomed only an inch or two above her unprotected back. When the next wave surged through the space, Storm had to lean forward to avoid hitting the back of her head. Even so, the craggy lava scraped her shoulder.

  Now that her head had cleared and her eyes had adjusted, she could make out the entire cave: a ceiling a few inches above her bowed head, a sloping wall near her right shoulder, and a diminishing oval air space that ended in the rocky barrier fifteen feet away. The few inches of water on the ledge had deepened to almost a foot.

  The water was rising. Since she had no concept of how long she’d been unconscious, she didn’t know how much higher it would get. She thought it had been low tide when she went after Goober, which meant that the water could rise a couple of feet in the small space. It would fill the cave.

  Panic broke through the pretense of calm she’d wrapped around herself, and she screamed for help again, this time with a full, lusty roar. Though her voice was strong, it was muffled by water and dripping walls. Storm shouted again, shuddered with an effort at self-control, then moaned with despair. Screaming for help was fine, but she didn’t have the luxury of succumbing to panic. She needed to do two things: get her arms loose and get out of the cave.

  A scattering of small holes allowed narrow rays of sunlight to stab through a porous wall opposite the ledge on which she huddled, and the beams briefly bounced off the surface of a rippled and seemingly bottomless black pool. Though volcanoes hadn’t erupted on O'ahu for a couple million years, volcanic rock existed all over the island. The pencil-thin rays had penetrated porous a'a, the type of jagged lava that would slash a body as easily as the teeth of a Moray.

  Storm squinted with the effort to stay calm and scrutinize all the visible aspects of her enclosure. Think. Someone put her in here, so there had to be an entrance. She twisted her neck until it hurt to examine the ceiling, which was getting closer and closer to the top of her head. There was no place to drop a five-eight, hundred-forty-pound woman and a nine-foot surfboard through the ceiling. So the entrance had to be under water, at least once the tide came in.

  Storm’s throat closed with desperation, and tears burned her eyes as she looked at the tiny rays of light that seeped through the rock like the mockery of some ethereal fairy. Is this what happened to Nahoa? Her gaze flitted around the cave again, this time so frightened she didn’t take in any information. Had he been in this very place?

  Storm remembered the police detectives’ comments about the damage to Nahoa’s body. Sharks loved caves, didn’t they? And they sensed blood from miles away. Was there one in the dark water beneath her, circling to defend its territory?

  “Help!” she shrieked again. Her voice worked at full volume, a hoarse and desperate shriek that died in the closed acoustics of the cave. At the same time, she pulled herself back from the abyss of terror and told herself to think about the entrance to the cave. Even if it was under water, tides in Hawai'i weren’t the twenty-foot changes that occur in other parts of the world. She could dive to it—if she could get free.

  Storm shuddered. She’d just have to take her chances with sharks. Weren’t reef sharks the ones who liked caves? They were smaller than tigers, hammerheads, or whites, and not as apt to attack humans. She was counting on it.

  She jerked at her bonds. Her hands were numb clubs on the end of burning arms and she had to get them loose. As she yanked, the surfboard jerked, then teetered. It was rising with the water, of course, and becoming less stable on its rocky shelf. If she fell off with her hands tied, it would be nearly impossible to get back on the board—or the abrasive ledge. She tugged again, this time more gently. Yes, she was attached to the surfboard itself, by its rubbery leash.

  Storm found comfort in this knowledge for the simple reason that a leash was something she knew. At one end, the rubber tubing would be attached to a hole in the tail of the board, usually by a narrow nylon cord. At the other end, which would normally go around her left ankle, should be a Velcro band. Not that she expected to be bound by Velcro; that was hopelessly wishful thinking.

  She had to get the feeling back in her hands. She needed to move her wrists and arms to get the blood flowing, and maybe, just maybe, loosen the tubing. If it was as old and abused as the board she sat on, it may have hardened, even cracked, with age.

  Nahoa would have tried this, too, she thought with a stab of desperation. And pushed the fear away. Anger was okay, but terror would only freeze her and keep her from considering her options.

  A sucking sensation, a whalloping thump, compression of air, and more water rushed into the cave. This time, it nearly washed her from the board. Storm sucked in a jagged breath. On its heels, another wave rolled through the little cavern, and the old surfboard, for the first time, lifted completely from the uneven shelf and teetered beneath her knees.

  Storm twisted her wrists, grimacing against the rough, tight truss. She rotated them one way, then the other, slowly at first, as she tried to ignore the friction of the rubber against her skin. Slowly and carefully, she rotated on the board so that she could rub her wrists against the knobby lava wall. She needed to find a small, sharp outcropping at the right level. Her abraded shoulder hit the wall and she winced. Damn, the entire wall felt like knife blades. Salty, stinging blades.

  Her hands were so numb from cold and diminished blood supply that she could barely manipulate them. But she felt the salt in her fresh wounds, by God. And when her sawing efforts didn’t hurt quite so much, she figured the lava was scraping more rubber than skin. So she used her pain. With each ripping millimeter, the elasticity of the leash diminished. Instead of retaining its tightness, the resilience of the rubber seemed to lessen. Either that or the blood she imagined now circled her wrists acted as a lubricant. Whatever was happening, she had to keep it up.

  Meanwhile the incoming sea water floated her higher in the small chamber. Her chest now lay directly on her thighs, and the awkward pose not only increased the strain on her shoulders, but caused the bones in her knees to grind against the gritty, hard surfboard. Tears of effort filled her eyes.

  A particularly loud crash, with subsequent gush of water, bumped her head against the ceiling. She yelped, then allowed herself a bellow of rage, with a concurrent blast of effort against her restraints.

  Storm sagged forward and moaned. The pain in her lacerated wrists was so bad she felt faint. She couldn’t even feel her hands, let alone the binding rubber. It was all she could do to keep from flopping onto one exhausted hip, but her instinct for survival restrained her. If she tipped over the board now, she’d never have the energy to get back on. It was all she could do to stay balanced.

  “Owwww, help,” she keened, and her voice rose and fell with exhaustion. Head turned to one side, she watched the last pinhole of light sink below the surface of the water. A subtle glow from below the surface was all that lit the cave. And only a few cubic feet of air remained.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Storm panted. The oxygen level was dropping in the cave. She set her teeth against the pain and
rasped her hands against the cave wall. It was harder and harder to tell where the rubber was. This last swipe hurt enough to take her breath away. She leaned forward and gasped as if she’d been running.

  The cave, as it filled, was becoming darker. Storm rested her forehead on the surfboard. Her wrists felt as if they bled; if she used her imagination, she could feel coolness running down the palms of her outwardly turned hands. She rested for a moment and fixated on the sensation across her poor, abused wrists.

  And that whining noise must be from the lack of oxygen. Was she just going to drift off? She was so tired, she could probably go to sleep. Would she wake up when she fell off the board? She hoped not.

  There was that whining again. If only her one shoulder wasn’t so painful. It was because her one hand lay palm up, beside her on the surfboard. Moving that shoulder had hurt like hell.

  Wait, she’d done it. Her hand was free. That last swipe against the vicious, sharp lava had cut the leash, and she’d been so numb she hadn’t noticed for almost a minute.

  The notion of freedom brought improved mental clarity. Not only were her hands prickling with renewed sensation, her shoulders, which had been pulled and strained, felt as if knife blades were imbedded in them. Blades of liberation, though. Storm jerked upright and clobbered the back of her head against the ceiling of the cave.

  The whining was not part of her disorientation. It was an engine, heard as if from underwater. She drew deep breaths and looked around the small space as if she might notice other changes. Maybe Hamlin was outside, looking for her. He had to be frantic by now, didn’t he?

  “Hamlin,” she screamed. “Hamlin!”

  A man’s muffled voice answered, but she couldn’t make out his words. Too much water and rock between them. She couldn’t be sure, but it didn’t sound like Hamlin. Still, Hamlin would have gone for help. It could be City and County lifeguards on a jet ski or boat. They’d be looking for her, wouldn’t they?