Beach Blondes

by Katherine Applegate; Michael Grant

“You lying bitch!” Ross exploded.

  “Diana,” Adam said much more calmly, cutting his brother off, “you know that’s not true. I was there. I know that didn’t happen. There is no point in trying to pretend that more happened than actually did.”

  “Sure, there’s a point, all right,” Ross sneered. “She’s thinking she can squeeze us for more money if she makes it look worse than it was.”

  “Shut up, Ross.” The senator’s voice was like a knife. He breathed deeply and ran his tongue over his teeth while he favored Diana with a new look—amusement. “Yes, I suppose you are right,” he said, chuckling softly. “It would make a better story that way. I guess for once I should actually be glad that Ross failed to follow through on what he started. He’s had so many failures.”

  “What is it you want, Diana?” Adam asked.

  “They always want the same thing,” the senator said dryly. “You’ll learn that eventually, Adam. When you are rich, all anyone ever wants from you is money. Did you have a dollar amount in mind, Diana?”

  “Did you, Senator?” Diana shot back.

  The man laughed out loud. “Oh, Adam, you really should have found a way to hold on to this one,” he said. “What a perfect political wife she would have made. It’s a useful thing to have a smart, ruthless, and, may I say, beautiful wife at your side.” But Adam looked troubled. He was gazing narrowly at Diana, sensing that something was wrong. He had known her too long and too well. “She doesn’t want money,” he said.

  “Then, what?” Ross demanded.

  “You, Ross,” Diana said through gritted teeth. “I want you. In prison.”

  Ross barked a wild laugh. “You are crazy. You think you’re going to put a Merrick in prison?” Unable to control himself any longer, he jumped around the corner of the desk, lunging toward Diana. “You want to mess with me?” he shouted. “I’ll finish what I started with you last year! I’ll finish it right now.”

  Diana jumped up from her chair, just as Ross thrust out a hand to grab her. Suddenly everything was in motion.

  Adam came around the desk from his side. But the senator, old as he was, was closer, and surprisingly fast. He reached Ross first. He swung his fist and buried it in Ross’s stomach.

  Ross fell to the floor, gasping for breath and clutching his stomach. He looked stunned and horrified. But no more horrified than Adam.

  “Dad, Dad!” Adam took his father by his shoulders, restraining him and comforting him, too.

  “Now do you see?” Diana screamed, shaking with rage and fresh terror. “Do you see what he is? Do you see what your son is, Senator?”

  “Yes, damn it, I know what he is,” the senator bellowed, in a voice that seemed to make the room vibrate. “Do you think I’ve lived this long and still don’t recognize garbage when I see it?” Diana could only stand there, unable to think of anything to say. This was not in the plan. Ross was gagging and gasping on the floor, still doubled over.

  The senator yanked at his cuffs and straightened his jacket. Then, more quietly, “I know what Ross is. Yes. I know.”

  “Dad, come on,” Adam said, now near tears. He guided his father back to his chair. “Come on, Dad, don’t do this to yourself.”

  Ross crawled away, then carefully, still clutching his stomach, slowly rose far enough to slide into a chair.

  For a while no one said anything. Diana sat back down in her seat. She clutched the bag again on her knee.

  “Here it is, young lady,” the senator said. His voice was flat now, empty of any emotion. “If you try to charge my son with any crime or accuse him publicly of any crime, I will use every bit of my power and influence to destroy you. I’ll have every minute of your life investigated. I’ll investigate your family, your friends. Maybe I’ll find something incriminating, maybe not—it doesn’t matter. Because one way or another, I’ll destroy you. I own the prosecutor here, she was elected with my support, and she’ll do what I say. The same with the local police. Chief Dorman is a personal friend of mine. You won’t find anyone who will believe you or support you. And in the end you’ll be made to look like a hysterical, pathetic figure.”

  As this speech went on, Diana noticed Adam’s face growing sadder. He looked steadily down at the floor. She thought he might be close to crying. Ross just sat silently. At last, it seemed, it had penetrated his mind that he was in trouble, and being rescued by a father who was sickened by the necessity of saving him.

  “On the other hand,” the senator said, “we can forget all of this. And you can have a check for enough money to pay your way through any college in the country, and have a nicely furnished apartment off-campus, and a nice little sports car to drive back and forth to classes. Those are your choices—walk away with a fat check, or get a lesson in the influence of a senior senator with a great deal of money.”

  He pushed back from the desk and stood up. “Think about it for twenty-four hours. Let me know what you decide. Adam, see her to the door.”

  Adam walked with her down the long hallway. They walked in silence. Diana just felt numb. It had worked. She had not failed. She had not broken down. She had not succumbed to fear but had let her anger guide her.

  But it was a strange feeling, winning. More melancholy than happy.

  Adam walked with her out onto the front steps and stopped. It was hot and bright and there was a soft breeze blowing from the water.

  “Diana,” Adam said.

  “Yes?”

  He moved with sudden speed, grabbed one arm, and, with his free hand, fumbled for the tape player in her belt. He yanked it out. He looked at it and nodded, as if he’d expected it all along.

  Diana froze.

  “My dad said you’d try something like this,” Adam said. “He told me to be sure to get it away from you.”

  He pushed the Rewind button, then Play. Ross’s voice.

  “…to mess with me? I’ll finish what I started with you last year!”

  Adam clicked it off. Then he held it out to her.

  Diana took the tape player from him. She searched his face for some explanation, but he would not meet her gaze.

  “Adam, tell your father I have made up my mind,” Diana said.

  “I know,” he said.

  16

  Black Holes

  Down, down they went, deeper than they had ever gone before. Sunlight, so brilliant above on the surface, was filtered and pale at this depth, like a light from another world.

  They played a slow-motion game of tag, Summer following Seth through forests of seaweed, around miniature mountain ranges of tumbled rock and fabulous extrusions of coral, pausing to watch an eel warily poking its nose out of its lair, sharing a moment of pretended terror at the appearance of a small, harmless baby lemon shark. Seth had brought his speargun and looked unusually fierce, prowling the ocean floor with it held casually in his left hand. He was determined, he said, to spear their dinner.

  Summer watched a huge crab, or what looked like a crab to her, shoot backward, stirring up a little whirlpool of sand in its wake. She grabbed Seth’s leg and pointed. Better than spearing some poor helpless fish, she decided. Somehow that would have felt wrong.

  Seth nodded. Crabmeat would be fine by him. He went off in pursuit.

  The crab went straight into a fissure in the rocks. The fissure was large, and Seth cautiously stuck his head in, probing the darkness with the tip of his speargun.

  He motioned for Summer to shine the underwater flashlight inside. She floated alongside him and aimed the beam inside. The light played around crusted walls and caught the retreating crab.

  Seth turned to face her and made a wide, encompassing gesture with his arms. She took it that he was telling her the cave was big. Then he shrugged, not dismissively, but more in a “how about it?” way.

  Summer automatically checked her watch. She still had thirty minutes of air. More than enough. But the idea of swimming into the cave scared her. She made a back-and-forth gesture with her head—“not sure.”
>
  He held up a finger—“look.” He unwrapped a length of yellow nylon rope and fastened one end around a large bulb of coral. Then, with hand gestures, Seth explained that they would go in only as far as the rope would go. That way, there would be no danger of becoming lost inside.

  Summer nodded. Yes. She was up for it.

  Seth winked and led the way through the fissure. It was narrow enough that they could go through only one at a time. Summer kept the flashlight trained on Seth, spotlighting his dull-gray tank, a flash of flipper, a tan, muscular leg.

  She realized she was breathing too fast, unnerved by the suddenly confined space. She bumped against the wall and heard a scraping sound.

  Then it leapt at her, a lightning-quick strike that was just a blur in the water. She screamed into her regulator. The eel slapped hard against the side of her face, dislodging her mask. Water rushed in, blinding her.

  She recoiled, paddling back in panic. Her tank slammed hard into the low roof of the cave.

  She had the sense of an arm, feeling for her, missing. Then the eel whipped across her stomach.

  The light fell away, turning down through the water, a strange slow-motion firework. It came to rest in the sand, pointing uselessly at the wall of the cave.

  She tried to calm herself, but now something else had brushed against her leg. Blind and in terror she twisted hard, slamming her tank again against the low roof.

  There was a muffled cracking sound, like splintering wood or distant thunder.

  Something heavy dropped on the back of her legs. She kicked and moved out of its way. She had lost one of her fins. Something else struck her arm. Another sharp, hard object grazed her left thigh.

  She swam forward with all her strength and plowed directly into something soft and yielding. Seth! His arms found her in the darkness and held her close, gripping her like a vise, forcing her to stop moving.

  For a while she just waited, listening to the scraping, sliding sounds behind her, trying to slow the panicked beat of her heart, trying to gain control over the panting that seemed to bring less and less air from the regulator.

  Seth tapped gently on her face mask. He was telling her to clear her mask, to blow out the water so that she would be able to see. She did, and realized it was not completely black in the cave. A few feet below was the flashlight. Seth dived to get it. But there was some other light, too, very faint but definite.

  Seth aimed the flashlight back at the entrance to the cave. It was gone.

  The yellow nylon rope went to, and then through, a jumbled wall of fallen rock.

  They were trapped. Summer felt the panic beginning to rise in her chest again. Seth came over and patted her on the shoulder. He handed her the light, and she directed it as he worked to dislodge the fallen rocks.

  He was able to toss aside a dozen small stones. But one huge slab of rock lay unmovable.

  Seth tried by himself, and with Summer’s desperate help, but the slab would not budge.

  Finally, Seth pointed to her gauge. Ten minutes of air left. He looked at his own watch and held up seven fingers. In about seven minutes he would be out of air. Three minutes later her own air would be gone.

  The thought of those three minutes shook Summer Smith like nothing she had ever felt before.

  Diana arrived back at her house feeling weird and disconnected from everything that had just happened. It was as if she were watching herself park the car, watching herself go inside, watching herself watching herself from a long way off.

  What had it all meant? On one level it was easy to understand—she had succeeded in getting hard proof of what Ross had done a year earlier. For a year she’d felt beaten and defeated. She’d lived without hope, spiraling down and down, into “the hole,” as she’d called it, the deep, black hole of depression.

  And then, almost at the last minute, she’d seen the way out of the hole. She’d seen that the Merricks were afraid, and that had allowed her anger, for so long turned inward, to explode outward, directed at a better target.

  She should feel wonderful. She felt nothing at all.

  Her mother was in the living room and called to her as she passed by.

  “You’re back early,” Mallory said. She sounded tense.

  “It didn’t take long,” Diana said absently.

  “What didn’t take long?” her mother asked, speaking in clipped, angry cadences. “It didn’t take long for you to try to blackmail Senator Merrick?”

  Diana literally staggered. She looked at her mother with pure, undisguised horror. “How—”

  “The senator called me, how do you think? I just hung up the phone with him.” Mallory stood up and marched over to Diana. She grabbed her arm hard and dragged her to the couch. She practically flung her daughter into it.

  “Do you want to tell me what in hell you think you’re up to?” Mallory demanded.

  “Didn’t Merrick already tell you?”

  “I want to hear it from you, Diana. Because I’m hoping that you have some good explanation for the fact that you are trying to blackmail a United States senator, for God’s sake!”

  Her mother was screaming at her. Literally screaming, in a voice Diana hadn’t heard her use since the divorce. A wild, bitter, sarcastic voice.

  “I’m not blackmailing anyone,” Diana said weakly. She felt as if the air were being crushed out of her, as if she couldn’t breathe. All she wanted to do was run away.

  “Don’t lie to me,” Mallory exploded. “I’m not that stupid, Diana. I know when I’m being lied to. Senator Merrick himself called me and told me what you were up to. Are you trying to tell me that he is making this up?”

  Diana wanted to speak, but her throat was one big lump. Tears were filling her eyes, threatening to spill over. She was determined not to cry in front of her mother.

  “Diana,” Mallory said in a slightly less hostile tone, “I know you’re young, but this is still inexcusable. Do you have any idea what that old man can do to me? To us?”

  “He can’t do anything to me,” Diana said, forcing the words out through gritted teeth. She needed to find her own anger again. Needed to hold on to it.

  “Oh, can’t he?” her mother sneered. “You pathetic little creature, don’t you know? Don’t you know anything? Are you that ignorant? Who do you think pays for this house and your clothes and your cute little car? I do. I do.”

  Diana shook her head in puzzlement. What was her mother ranting about?

  “Oh, I see—you don’t get the connection?” Mallory said with savage sarcasm. “Well, here’s the connection. My publisher is owned twenty-five percent by a company called M.H.G. You know what M.H.G. is? The Merrick Holdings Group. You know how much influence a twenty-five percent share buys? Plenty. More than enough to cut my throat professionally.”

  Diana felt sick. She feared she might throw up from the churning in her stomach. Her head was spinning. She’d thought she’d won. She’d thought she had outsmarted the Merricks. Now they were showing her that the battle had only begun. They had reached right into her home, threatening the one thing her mother really cared about—her career.

  Mallory laughed derisively. “You thought you could blackmail someone like Senator Merrick? Do you need money that badly? I’d have given you money. Rather than have you making up ridiculous stories…”

  Diana felt her lip quivering. Tears were spilling now, and she was past worrying about them. “It isn’t a story,” she said. She pulled the tape recorder out of her waistband. She pushed the button, and sat the recorder on the seat beside her.

  The voices were hollow-sounding but clear. The entire conversation had recorded plainly, except for a few scratching noises.

  Mallory turned away, listening, hiding her face.

  Diana sat very still, saying nothing, vaguely interested in the words, feeling as if she were listening to a conversation that had taken place somewhere else, involving people she didn’t know.

  The tape came to an end.

  Ma
llory walked the few steps to her daughter. With one hand she picked up the tape recorder. With the other she absently stroked her daughter’s head.

  Then she went to the coffee table and sat down. Methodically she pulled the tape from the cartridge, piling the loops in a crystal ashtray.

  Diana watched her mother in horror, unable to move. You can’t do this! she wanted to scream, but no words came out.

  Mallory picked up a matching crystal cigarette lighter and touched the flame to the tape. “I’m doing this for your own good,” she said.

  Diana sat passively. Her anger was gone. She felt nothing. Nothing at all.

  The black hole opened beneath her, welcoming her back.

  17

  Running Out of Time

  Ten minutes of air. Ten minutes. Not a long time for Summer to think about all the things she would never know in her life. Her short life, down suddenly to ten minutes.

  Seth patted her shoulder. She held his hand and squeezed it tight.

  Once more Summer swept the beam around them. Walls of stone and crusted shellfish surrounded them, except in one direction where the cave went down deeper still. The huge crab they had chased was nowhere to be seen. The yellow nylon rope disappeared into the crush of fallen rocks, as if it had gone off into another dimension entirely.

  Summer wondered if the flashlight battery would last as long as their air. Probably. Ten minutes—no, nine—was not a long time.

  Then she remembered it. The light. The other light.

  She turned off the flashlight. Seth shook her, telling her to turn it back on, but she squeezed his hand again to signal that she had a reason. Slowly her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Once again, she was able to make out dim shapes.

  Now Seth had noticed it, too. There should be no light at all.

  She snapped the flashlight on again, pointing it at Seth, then directing the beam along the cave floor. Seth nodded. His eyes were worried but determined. He set off at a moderate speed with Summer close behind. They followed the sandy cave floor down several more feet, reaching a point where the cave roof almost closed off further progress.