by Mara Webb
“You can’t drown, neither of us can. But it can still get scary down there and nitrogen can still get you!” he smiled. I smiled back but the through of an underwater accident was making me feel funny.
Soon we were jumping into the water with our super-attractive eye masks that caused our cheeks to bulge out strangely underneath. The water of the ocean around us was so warm and clear, it was nothing like the places I had visited as a child where the sea was a questionable brown and had such a sharp chill to it that even dipping a toe in was unpleasant.
Ryan reminded me how to control my position in the water once again, and then we submerged beneath the surface. It was hard to see just how deep the water was which immediately triggered my concerns about tentacles grabbing at me, Ryan used a hand signal to ask if everything was okay, and I responded that it was, even though I was terrified.
At my university we had practiced in the pool, the occasional offer to dive in local quarries was not so tempting, so my experience was restricted to the indoors. Feeling the movement of the water around me now was so relaxing, a small group of brightly colored fish slowly swam past me and I was mesmerized by the sunlight that had penetrated down deep enough to hit their scales.
This was more like it, down here I didn’t need to worry about solving a crime. I could just take a bit of time to enjoy this trip with my boyfriend before reality came crashing back down on us later at the will reading.
I looked around and saw Ryan swimming away from the boat a little more, so I followed him. We wouldn’t be able to swim out too far because of the magic Rick was using as the yacht’s captain, until the killer was identified we would be tethered, but at least it seemed we were on a reasonably long leash.
Ryan turned around and pointed to a huge turtle swimming through the water, swiftly joined by another. As I smiled it seemed that I had broken the seal around my eye mask and a small amount of water had gotten in. I remembered how to clear my mask from my scuba club days, gestured to Ryan that I was going to sort it out and then took my mask off entirely. Dang it.
I shouldn’t have taken it off.
I squeezed my eyes closed as I fumbled with the straps to try and pull the mask back over my head as I replayed moments in my memory of how I should have done it. I still had my mouthpiece in and, once the mask was secured over my face again, I took a deep breath and tilted my head back. I peeled the mask away from the lower half of my face just a little so that when I exhaled through my nose, the water inside the mask would be expelled.
I had hated practicing in scuba club, although now I wished I’d paid more attention. I opened my eyes once I could feel that the water was no longer filling my mask completely, there was still an inch or so of water to clear, but at least I could now see. When I looked forward, I could see that Ryan was swimming towards me frantically, he was pointing to something behind me.
Everything seemed to happen so quickly that I barely had time to process that I wasn’t being attacked by a giant squid. Ryan looked fearful; I could see it in his eyes as he tried to close the substantial distance between us. But of course, we were now growing further apart because I was sinking. In an instant something had approached me from behind and attached weights to the belt of my equipment causing me to plummet.
As I realized this, I tried to take a deep breath and saw a bubble escaping the tubing and rushing towards the surface as I journeyed downward, my air supply had been cut. I didn’t need to look at the dials or gauges, I knew it was bad.
Ryan was above me now trying to swim down, but he was limited by how fast he could move, I seemed to be sinking faster. The water that had lingered inside my eye mask was beginning to obscure my vision as I looked up at my sweet boyfriend who was desperate to get to me.
I didn’t want it to be like this, I wish that whoever had tried to kill me had done it in some other way. Maybe they could have poisoned the eight thousand Cadbury eggs I had eaten the other day, that would have been much better. I moved my legs to try and propel me upwards, kicking furiously as I reached for the weight clip on my belt.
It had been clipped on in such a haste that they hadn’t done it properly, I was easily able to remove one of them. There was a second attached to my other side. I couldn’t hold my breath anymore and, in my panic, I opened my mouth, the mouthpiece floating out into the water in front of me. Ryan was so close but not quite close enough to share his tank.
He couldn’t reach me.
I could feel my consciousness slipping and I raced to unclip the second weight, I felt it fall away and I was once again floating. I stretched upwards to try and grab hold of Ryan’s hand, I watched his hair fan out around him like a halo, the sunlight just about reaching down to where we were. I reached for his hand, my fingers stretching out as I tried to touch him.
Everything went black.
13
“Nora?”
I opened my eyes suddenly, gasping for air and spluttering water out of my mouth. Ryan leaned over me and when he realized that I was awake the relief on his face quickly became a smile. “Why are you so keen to die at sea?” he joked. I lay on the deck of the ship, a few other guests peered over to watch the spectacle, but they were quiet, the only sound was the ocean lapping up against the side of the yacht.
I felt the strange tingling sensation in my face that I had experienced in the past when I had fainted. I must have got overwhelmed with the panic of the situation; I knew I couldn’t drown but that squid vision really messed me up.
I had suspected that we had put on the scuba gear in case a human spotted us, but I must have gotten too caught up in the idea of needing it to survive that when equipment was damaged I thought I was going to die.
“Okay, back off everyone. Go back to whatever you were doing,” Rose commanded. She was knelt on the deck next to me and brushed some of the wet hair away from my forehead with a motherly concern. “Your boyfriend has a point; this whole trip seems to be cursed or something.”
I knew that she was using that phrase just to mean that we seemed to be having bad luck, but I worried that there might be an actual curse. Rose stood up, gave Ryan a reassuring pat on the shoulder and walked away so that he could speak to me in private.
“Did you see who did it?” he asked me.
“No! You were facing me, I thought you might have!”
I sat up and looked at my discarded scuba equipment lying on the edge of the deck. Ryan was still wearing his, I thought about the physical strength it must have taken to hall my unconscious caboose up the ladder. It was a good job he worked out otherwise I would be lying on the seabed being nibbled at by unimaginably hideous creatures.
“What did you find in that office? Maybe someone didn’t want you sharing a discovery with the group when we gather for the will reading,” Ryan said.
“We told Steph that we would be reading that out later, right? She must have spread the word. I know she had some healing magic on her shoulder, but I doubt she would be up to diving and carrying weights.” Before I had chance to finish my train of thought, Kimberly ran through the glass doors of the murder deck and stopped beside Ryan.
“I really need to talk to you, alone,” she said. She was still sweating and clearly anxious, I didn’t know what to expect. Was she about to confess to killing her boss? To stabbing Stephanie? To trying to drown me?
Well she was completely dry so I could rule at least one of those out. Ryan looked at me and I nodded to say it was okay for him to leave. He muttered something about taking a shower and disappeared inside. “This way,” Kimberly whispered, guiding me inside and through a door behind the bar to a staff area.
“What’s going on?” I asked. We walked through the kitchen and through another small door into a break room with two chairs and a table. There were no windows, it had a ‘1970’s cop show interrogation room’ vibe about it.
“I need to tell you something and I don’t know if it is important or not,” she said. I allowed the silence to hang, I had learned tha
t from the curse-breaker witch. Sometimes the best strategy during an investigation is to leave dead air, that way the other party will nervously talk to fill the quiet. “Jonathon isn’t an alcoholic.”
“What?” I almost shouted, my interest in silence had been shattered immediately by my curiosity. “We’ve all seen him drink until he passes out, we’ve only been on this boat like a day and I’ve seen it. He stinks of alcohol; it’s evaporating off of him.”
“Yeah, he drinks it, a lot of it…” she replied. “But he taught Sean and I this anti-alcohol potion. It’s like a hangover cure that works immediately, kills off the alcohol in your body or something. I’m not really sure how it works, but it means that he is never drunk. He hasn’t been drunk once in the months that he has been playing this weird game with everyone.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Sean and I work with, sorry, worked with Nicholas at his home. He kept us around because he trusts us, had us train in a bunch of yacht stuff so that we could come with him on his trips. Anyway, Jonathon started this alcoholism thing with his family, and we don’t know why, but we know he has been sober.
“The night Nicholas died…there was no way that he was blacked out from booze. I don’t want you to think that he has an alibi because you saw him pass out on the sofa after the meal, he definitely could have killed his father.”
I wasn’t sure what to think of it all, but I had definitely written off Jonathon as a suspect because of his drinking. After what he had consumed at lunch, I thought there was no way he could even stand, let alone murder someone.
I hadn’t actually spoken to Jonathon about his whereabouts during the afternoon of Nicholas’s murder, our only interaction had been after I saw him emerge from the office with Leslie. Now that I thought about it, he was suspiciously steady on his feet for someone that had drunk so much only hours before.
“Does anyone else know this?” I asked her.
“No, he swore us to secrecy. He gave us a lot of money, I…I have student debt. I couldn’t say no.”
I felt for her but, as I was still unaware of the significance of this, I had to be suspicious. I thanked her and wandered out through the maze of doors back onto the murder deck. Captain Rick was standing right in the middle of the room as if he was waiting for me to come out. I felt acutely aware that I was now just wearing a two-piece swimsuit and that my wet hair was plastered to my head.
I subconsciously reached up with my hands to try and rearrange some of the tattered strands but found that my hair was dry and styled into delightfully bouncy curls, it must be that shampoo of Ryan’s that I used by mistake earlier. It didn’t magically mean that I was wearing more clothing though, facing Rick who was wearing a white polo and beige board shorts I felt almost naked.
“There you are, lover boy was just up here telling me about some trouble you got into out on the water,” he said.
“Yeah, it was not the best dive I’ve ever been on. Nice fish though. How’s your day going?” I asked, trying to be as casual as you can when you are essentially wearing wet underwear in front of a man you barely know.
“Well,” he said, taking a deep breath and turning on his heels to begin pacing along the wooden floor, “it’s been interesting. As you are my co-captain with regards to this murder investigation, I should probably tell you about an interesting little conversation I just had with the folks over at the Leilana Island coroner’s office.”
“Oh?”
They must have witches and wizards working in their pathology labs too. Back in Sucré, Ryan’s sister Sophia worked at the Pathology lab and that allowed her to determine cause of death if it was caused by magic, as well as more regular methods. Sophia was able to complete medical tests much faster than her human counterparts and I had to assume the same thing was happening out on the island.
“They faxed me over a little note that I would sure like you to take a look at,” he said.
He was pacing like a detective in one of those old movies where the chief of police would launch into a five-minute monologue that culminated in the big reveal of the killer. Everyone would gasp and then the facade would crack with the guilty party confessing to everything.
“Should we go and look at that now then? Ryan is reading the will out to everyone shortly so we should move quickly,” I said.
Rick clicked his fingers in the air, and I waited for whatever magic he was trying to perform to do something. It turned out it was just a bit more drama, the click was to indicate that he was ready to move to the next room. I rolled my eyes discreetly and followed him to the bridge.
It was more doors and narrow hallways to reach the control room, but when we arrived, I could see for miles through the panoramic windows and felt a pang of jealousy that I didn’t have this view during my nine to five.
“As you are no doubt aware, Nicholas was holding a gun in his hand. His right hand. Now this is the kicker, because guess what…?” he said, pausing for me to take a swing.
“He had crippling arthritis in his right hand?” I answered.
“Ye—well yeah. How did you know?”
“Stephanie told me. Is that why you dragged me here?”
I had hoped for some new information, but Captain Rick was getting such a thrill out of his performance that I resisted the urge to wander off just in case there was anything useful to learn from this conversation.
“Urgh. I was hoping I could tell you something new. I have nothing juicy, apart from the stupid autopsy results. You already know them of course,” he said casually.
“Autopsy results? Didn’t they just collect the body a few hours ago?”
“Ah, so you haven’t heard! I guess you wouldn’t have, what with your diving and attempted murder.”
“Can we get to the results, please captain?”
“Oh, okay. Well yes! First of all, you should have seen the letter heading on this fax. There was this dolphin themed border around the page and—”
“Captain.”
“Right, sorry, sorry. Let me think. You already know about his arthritis. There was a bit about cause of death.”
“Shot in the head,” I said quickly, trying to speed things along. It was like the captain was a gravy boat of information, pouring out facts as slowly as he could.
He gave a gruff laugh. “Not likely! The coroner’s report said that the bullet wound in the head was inflicted shortly after death. It didn’t kill him. The coroner also said—”
“Hold on. Did you say there was a fax? Can I just see it?” I interrupted. I didn’t want to spend my entire day receiving the coroner’s report in pieces.
“I’ll get it now, sorry. I thought you would enjoy the theatre of reveal.” He walked over to a table, retrieved the paper and handed it to me.
The fax was a series of notes from a police officer on the island that included information from the coroner. The first thing that stood out was the dolphin-themed border that the captain had already mentioned. It was amusing and seemed an off choice of stationary given the document’s contents.
A note at the very top mentioned there was currently a stationary shortage on the island, hence the dolphin-bordered fax. The rest of the notes surmised the coroner’s findings.
Shot after he was already dead…blah blah, reason for minimal bleeding…okay got it… I was waiting for information about the actual cause of death. There were several areas for cause of death, and in each of them the coroner had simply written ‘unknown.’
There was nothing. As Nicholas was in good health it seemed very unlikely, he would just drop dead. That could only mean one thing.
Someone had used magic to kill him.
“If you ask me it all points to one thing,” the captain said with dramatic flair. “Now I don’t want to do your job for you but think about it. They don’t know how he died, there’s a lot of non-magical folk on that island. The coroner can’t detect a magical cause of death if he doesn’t know about such things. That means…” he walked over
to the front of the deck, looked at the ocean and turned back, throwing his hand up and pointing at the ceiling. “Magic!”
“Yeah I guessed it was magic already.”
“Oh,” he said with a tone of defeat. “Well then I don’t really have anything for you. Other than maybe the cameras caught whoever jumped in to give you a hard time on your dive.” He was trying to bait me into finding him useful.
“Cameras? There’s CCTV on this thing?”
“Yeah, just exterior cameras. Nothing inside, boss’s orders,” he said, saluting Nicholas’s memory.
“You didn’t think to mention the security cameras stuff earlier, the killer might be on camera too! Or the person that stabbed Steph!” I exclaimed.
“Oh yeah, it just slipped my mind. I’ve got a lot to deal with trying to steer a yacht with a net worth of over a billion dollars on board. If this boat goes down, that’s like just tipping Benjamins right into the ocean, just money…gone.”
“I appreciate that, but right now we are a millionaire down already and another was stabbed. Luckily for you I probably have about twenty dollars in my bank account thanks to my cat, but I would still like to know who tried to kill me just now,” I said.
Rick walked over to a desk that was set up with several computer monitors showing live streams of the activity outside the yacht. There were views of each deck and some cameras seemed to cover the perimeter and faced out onto the water with only a small slice of the boat in each shot. I asked Rick to show me how to look at old footage and then dragged a stool over to dive in.
I couldn’t believe my eyes.
14
I decided to go back to the most recent event first, there was clearly someone on board this luxury yacht that wanted me dead and figuring out who that person was seemed like a greater priority than finding Nicholas’s killer for now. Nicholas was already dead. I was not.
