Below The Surface

Realizing she’d left her mermaid diving suit at the hospital, she donned an old pink spandex wet suit and hurried downstairs. Though she didn’t intend to tell Cole, she felt strange, kind of floaty, but she had to do this and now. Surely, this almost out-of-body feeling was not related to Daria’s fate.

Dad had told them once that, even though he was outside in the waiting room when their mother died in the delivery room, he knew the exact moment when she’d gone because he felt kind of like he’d taken off from the ground. It was so bizarre, he’d said, like the feeling when you ride a roller coaster and go over the highest drop. There was no thrill, only an awed sense of doom. But Bree didn’t want to remember all that, didn’t want to think of that.

As she went to check her desk phone for messages, she heard heavy footsteps and turned to see if Manny or Cole were back. Big, burly Sam Travers, who ran the rival business across the bay, stood in the doorway, not in, not out. He seemed to block out the light and air.

With a bulky build and a face and body hardened by years of physical labor, Sam stood slightly over six feet tall. His hair had been gray for years, and he wore it cut tight to his head, which emphasized his prominent ears and narrowed eyes. Crow’s feet perched at the corners, matching his deep frown lines. Sam had never given in to wearing sunglasses or caps.

Bree recalled from years ago when she and Ted used to hang out together all the time, that his father, now a sixty-four-year-old proud Vietnam War vet, looked angry even when he wasn’t. Since she’d broken up with Ted, though, anger was his perpetual mood around her.

Sam had never been able to forget or forgive that she had broken up with his only child after going steady with him for almost five years, two and a half in high school and then the first two of college. That had started what Sam called a fatal chain of events. But once she was away from Turtle Bay, even though she and Ted were at college just across the state, her world had expanded and Ted’s had not.

He’d been jealous of her new friends and her snorkeling and scuba students, even of the time she spent with Daria. He’d wanted to drive home most weekends, when she had things to do in Miami. He hadn’t really liked college, and she’d thrived there. Maybe he’d become so stridently possessive because his mother had deserted him and Sam while Ted was still in elementary school, but it didn’t do any good to try to analyze him. It just wasn’t working for Bree anymore, but when she’d tried to reason with him, tried to back away, he’d stormed out and joined the marines—the foreign legion, Daria had called it—without even telling Sam.

So while Ted had gone through basic battle training at Paris Island, South Carolina, Sam Travers had begun his war with Bree. He’d blamed her entirely when Ted was killed by a roadside bomb thousands of miles away in Iraq last year. And when he’d been buried with military honors, Sam had exploded at her, telling her to stay away from the funeral, and Daria had gone alone. Things certainly had not gotten better when she and Daria had opened a competitive search-and-salvage shop, though much smaller and more specialized, on Sam’s turf.

Now he stood in her doorway, glaring at her. Ordinarily, she’d be only too happy if she never saw Sam Travers again, but she needed his help.

“Yo,” he said in his usual strident voice, which seemed even louder now. “I was looking for Manny the man, ’cause the TV says you’re still in the hospital. Just wanted to tell him I been out looking for Daria.”

Bree stayed behind her desk. “Thanks for anything you can do. I was going to call you, but I’ve been talking to the coast guard and the air patrol about the rescue efforts.”

“They’re good at talk. You want to find something—in this case, someone—you call Sam. You and I had some bad spots, but I got nothing ’gainst her. I’m going out again.”

Bad spots? she thought. During these past three years after Ted enlisted, Sam had ranted at her, especially when he was drinking, and she’d come to fear him. However much she sympathized with his loss and grieved Ted’s death, she’d even considered getting a restraining order. Ben, her prosecutor brother-in-law, had suggested it, but she didn’t want to admit weakness to Sam, who sometimes seemed right on the edge of becoming a stalker. There were times when she and Daria thought he turned up everywhere.

“I can’t thank you enough for helping,” Bree brazened, though her voice shook. “I know if anyone can find Daria and Mermaids II, it’s you.”

“Yeah, well, bodies might not surface for over a week, but wrecks only give up a trail of bubbles for about twenty-four hours. Time’s awastin’. You facing up to the fact I been using my echo sounder?”

“I’m sure she’s all right…not—the skiff’s not sunk. She put in somewhere. She’s safe, I can feel it.”

“Yeah, I was sure Ted would be all right, too, big guy like that, body armor and all. A well-trained, gung ho marine riding shotgun on an armored tank. Maybe I’m doing this for him, huh, since Daria was his friend, even if you never really were.”

He went out and slammed the door.

6

On the way out to the dive site in the boat, Mermaids I, with Manny at the wheel, Cole’s thoughts were flying as fast as the white wake they left behind. He’d been trying to come up with additional arguments for why this dive was a bad idea, but he knew he’d do the same thing in Bree’s place. Unless he tied her up, he figured he couldn’t stop her, so he had to go along to be certain nothing happened to her. He knew she was going, with or without him.

Then, too, she’d convinced him that she could sense that Daria was alive. He knew nothing firsthand about that intense kind of simpatico relationship with another person, but he’d read identical twins could be that way, and he’d never seen twins who were more mirror images of each other. He’d studied a framed photo of them in their apartment, a formal, posed picture where they were evidently bridesmaids at someone’s wedding. They were beautiful women. If he ever saw Briana smile, he could probably tell one from the other, because one of them had a slightly lopsided grin, with a sort of bet-you-can’t-guess-what-I’m-thinking look.

He was coming to know Briana, and he figured he knew Daria a bit, too, so this felt doubly personal to him. Another reason that he was literally along for the ride, even though he should have been installing Brazilian cherry in the salon on a big yacht in Naples today, was that he’d quickly come to admire Bree so much. She had not gotten hysterical and had seemed in control, when most women he knew would be frantic wrecks by now. Jillian’s first response to any trauma had been tears and tantrums, so he was totally impressed with this woman. Impressed and just plain turned-on, even in these terrible circumstances.

Cole tried to listen carefully as Bree told him things he should know about the dive. Though she was speaking over the roar of the motor, she wasn’t talking loudly enough, and sometimes he had to almost read her lips. Like Cole, Manny seemed to be straining forward to hear her. Instead of facing her, Cole moved to sit beside her, edging her over a bit.

“Motor’s too loud to hear you!” he told her, only to see her cringe. “What is it? What’s the matter?”

“I agree about the motor. Your voice—I’m hearing sounds sharper than I did before, that’s all. It’s nothing. Okay, I’ll start over. First off, if you’re used to diving in the Caribbean or even in the Keys, the water’s going to look really different here, not so clear. We’ll both take dive lights. Manny brought two dive lights along, didn’t you, Manny?” she asked, craning around toward the back of the boat so he could hear her.

She almost bumped noses with Manny since he was leaning so close to her. “Always got two of everything on board,” Manny told her, sitting up straighter. “Usually for you and Daria.”

Bree just nodded. When she turned back toward him, Cole saw she had tears in her eyes.

“Go on,” he prompted. He was grateful she seemed to be thinking clearly, despite the fact her emotions were right on the edge.

“We’re only going down to thirty feet,” she explained, “so we won’t have to decompress, but we’ll take a three-minute safety stop at fifteen feet, both entering and ascending. The wreck lies in a small, natural trough.”

“What’s the visibility at that depth?”

“Vis varies a lot out here, from six inches to sixty feet, but since we evidently aren’t getting a storm today, it could have settled down to ten or twelve, especially since the incoming tide will bring in clearer water. I’ve got to find that camera.”

“Let’s just say we’ll check for the anchor today. Set reasonable goals. We can’t search a vast area on this dive.”

As if she didn’t hear that, when he knew she did, she continued. “The camera’s in a plastic housing, which mutes the red color I’ve painted it, especially since all reds disappear about fifteen feet down. At the depth we’re diving, everything will look green, yellow or blue.”

“I remember. Bree, we should keep this dive short.”

“We need to cover a certain area,” she countered.

Cole was not used to being told what to do. Damn, this woman was stubborn, but maybe that came with being strong.

“I never would have done a dive alone that day,” she admitted, suddenly changing the topic. She kept fussing with her mask she held in her lap. “But Manny needed time to patch up the generation gap with his daughter and couldn’t go. It was the fifty-seventh dive we’d made at the Trade Wreck without incident, photographing and recording the growth of the turtle grass there. Daria had a really bad toothache that came on fast, so I said I’d go down alone. It only takes about twenty-five minutes. The storm was a distant line on the horizon, and the marine weather forecast hadn’t mentioned it could come in so fast or hard.”

“I know. So you anchored nearby but not where the anchor could disturb the site,” Cole said, when she frowned out over the water.

“Right. The submerged aquatic vegetation—SAV—is very delicate and not doing well. We always joked that our motto for this Clear the Gulf Commission project would be Save Our SAV.”

Her voice trailed off and her eyes took on a faraway look. Was she seeing a scene with her sister? He bumped her shoulder gently, and she seemed to come back from wherever she’d been. He was going to have to stick close to her down there, though she was obviously the more skilled diver.

She went on. “The report we were preparing to give the commission—and the media—next week would not be good news. The poor and declining quantity and quality of the sea grass indicates that the whole marine ecosystem here is still struggling from the increasing industrial and toxic runoff. Too many people means too much pollution, and that extends to the Trade Wreck sea grass meadow, which we’re using as a sort of touchstone and symbol for the health of this entire area of the gulf. And it’s sick.”

“A dire report could mean cutbacks, penalties and political fallout for lots of important people. When the foundation of the marine food chain is screwed up, it’s trouble for every living organism all the way up to humans, and that equates to millions of dollars in fishing, real estate and the tourist trade. Had you told anybody about your findings already?” he asked.

“We weren’t keeping it a secret,” she admitted. “You’re thinking someone might want to warn us or stop us from releasing that? But everyone with interests in those things you just mentioned would want the environment to stay safe. They’d want to know what our report says so the situation can be fixed by concerned citizens, environmentalists, scientists, politicians—everyone.”

“Back to our dive. We can’t search the entire area for a camera.”

“I’m hoping it snagged on either the Trade Wreck or another artificial reef nearby.”

He nodded. “I heard there’s one about three miles off Keewadin, where you came in.”

“Right, the Stone Reef. That one’s not a wreck but limestone boulders. I don’t know if the camera would just go to the smooth, sandy bottom and stay put, or if the tides and currents would move it south until it snagged in one reef or the other.”

“So what’s the Trade Wreck like?”

“It’s a supply ship sunk in the late 1930s, made of wood and metal. It broke apart but what’s there is pretty well preserved.”

“Do you use GPS coordinates to locate the site? I don’t see that equipment on board.”