Beach Blondes

by Katherine Applegate; Michael Grant

  The end of the rope was played out now. Seth used a loose bit of rock to anchor it to the cave floor. Then he went through the narrow opening. Summer followed, careful not to scrape the rock.

  They were in a larger cavern, how large it was impossible to say. But the cave roof was too far overhead even to be seen in the flashlight beam. Summer turned the flashlight off again.

  Hope! The emotion surged in her heart. There was light overhead. Filtered, dim as earliest gray dawn, but definite light. She started up. Seth restrained her, shaking his head slowly.

  Summer understood. They could not shoot suddenly upward. The decompression would cause the bends, a very painful form of death. Even now, they had to be careful.

  They rose slowly, slowly, fighting the panicky urge to hurry.

  Suddenly, Summer realized, her head was out of the water. It seemed unbelievable. But when she raised her mask cautiously, it was true. Air. Genuine, breathable air.

  “Thank God,” she gasped. “There’s air.”

  There was air but no sunlight. Where were they?

  Seth surfaced beside her and tore off his own mask. He swiftly shut the valves on their tanks. “We’re in some kind of air pocket,” he said.

  Summer trained the flashlight around. They were in a huge, vaulted cavern, with sheer rock walls on three sides. On the other side the rock rose more gradually, creating a low, jumbled, dry shelf before it continued up and up.

  At the very apex of the cavern was a tiny window of brilliant blue. The sky.

  Seeing it brought tears to Summer’s eyes. The sky.

  Seth was laughing, a relieved, tired, half-hysterical laugh. Summer realized she was laughing, too, even as tears blurred her vision.

  Seth looked at his gauge. “Three minutes,” he said. “I was on fumes.”

  Summer swam to the shelf and pulled herself heavily out of the water. “Air,” she said. “Boy, do I love air.”

  Seth slumped exhausted beside her. “Air is excellent,” he agreed. He sat up and looked around. “Of course, stairs or a ladder would be nice, too. We’re beneath the island now. I guess this is basically an underground lake.”

  “There has to be some way to get up there,” Summer said. But as she surveyed the cave her confidence faded quickly. The patch of sky was high, very high overhead. The cave was like an overturned bowl, sides sloping upward, utterly impossible to climb unless you were a spider.

  “Someone will come,” Seth said, trying to sound confident. “You know, other divers. They’ll see the boat, and then if they go down, they’ll see the rope. They’ll figure out about the cave-in.”

  Summer nodded in agreement. “You’re probably right.”

  They both stared up at the patch of blue.

  “We won’t freeze or anything,” Seth said. “I mean, it’s a little chilly here, but with the wet suit tops…”

  “And we have air,” Summer said. “A few minutes ago I thought I would gladly sell my soul for fresh air. Or stale air. Or for a chance to suck on bus exhaust. I’ve never been so terrified.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Look, I’m sorry about getting you into this.”

  “You? Jeez, I’m the one who panicked and caused an avalanche or whatever it was.”

  “A cave-in,” he said glumly. “Cave. Cave-in.”

  “That makes sense,” she said, echoing his grim tone.

  “It’s my fault, not yours,” he said.

  “Let’s not argue about it,” Summer said. The adrenaline was wearing off now, and lassitude was setting in. She wanted to savor the sense of relief a little longer before having to move on to recognizing that they were still in serious trouble.

  “Why not argue about it?” Seth said. “We have plenty of time.”

  They fell silent and stared up at the patch of blue. Already it seemed the light was fading, the blue growing darker, shading toward violet.

  The dinner shift had been busy. Marquez had more than a hundred dollars in tips weighing down the pocket of her apron. And she still had a twenty sitting out in the dining room as she began her side work, cleaning the salad and soup area in the kitchen. The job involved emptying the sloppy, destroyed containers of salad dressing they’d used all night into new containers and topping them off from the big bins in the walk-in.

  In the old days she’d liked this job. It gave her an opportunity to be in the kitchen and make frequent trips to the walk-in, where J.T. would manage to be at the same time. It was a little game they played, meeting, kissing, then going back out to work to start the cycle over again. It had been strangely exciting.

  Now she minimized her opportunities to run into J.T. He did the same, steering clear of her.

  He had come over at one point to apologize for the scene in the dining room the night before. She’d apologized, too. Yes, they had both agreed, they were acting immature.

  She’d told him that she was glad if Lianne was good for him. He’d asked her if she had found anyone, and she’d lied and said that she was seeing someone. She stopped short of telling him it was Diver. That lie was too easy to check out, and then she would just look pathetic.

  Despite the hundred and two dollars she had after paying out the bartender and the busboys, she felt low when she left the Crab ’n’ Conch. Low and restless. She went home and called Summer. No answer. Too bad. Summer would have picked up her spirits.

  She showered and called Summer again. Still no answer. If the girl was in the bathroom or something, she was certainly taking her time. Marquez glanced at the clock. Almost a quarter after eleven. Summer had to be back from her trip by now.

  Maybe she had disconnected her phone. Maybe she didn’t want to be disturbed. Maybe she and Seth were…

  “That’s right, Marquez,” she muttered, “torture yourself. Everyone is having a great time but you.”

  But no, Summer wouldn’t have Seth still over at the house. Diver would be there by now, and Summer wasn’t the kind of girl who would feel comfortable making out while someone was snoozing on her roof. Marquez considered calling Diana, but her mom was back and might pick up the phone. The last thing Summer needed was Mallory Olan bursting into the stilt house looking for her.

  Marquez decided to go by and check for herself. There was probably nothing to worry about. And maybe she would run into Diver. They had gotten off to a bad start the other day. Marquez had been too aggressive. She’d forgotten that Diver was different from most guys.

  “Different from most humans, for that matter,” Marquez said. Of course, right now J.T. was probably baring his soul and whatever else he could get away with baring to Lianne. Maybe Marquez should give Diver another chance.

  She looked at the white patch on her wall. The white paint covering the letters J.T. “Jerk,” she said to the patch. And yet, she wished she hadn’t painted his name out. It was easier to be mad at a name than a blank patch.

  She drove her parents’ car to the Olan house, parking down the street rather than in the driveway. She walked quietly past the main house, feeling relieved when she reached the stilt house unchallenged.

  The stilt house was dark and silent, the only sounds the slap of water against the pilings and the slow, mournful creak of the pier.

  She considered turning back. Obviously Summer was just asleep, exhausted from the long day. “Well, tough,” Marquez muttered. “She’ll just have to wake her little self up.”

  Marquez knocked on the door.

  She was startled by a voice from above.

  “She’s not here.” Diver, a dark shape, standing on the deck, looking down.

  Even now Marquez remembered his brief kiss, just a brush of his perfect lips against hers. Maybe they just needed to try that a second time. Or…maybe not.

  “She went out?”

  “I don’t think so,” Diver said. His voice sounded troubled.

  “You mean she never came home?” Marquez opened the door, reached in, and flipped on a light. The bed was made, a surprising sight to Marquez, who never act
ually made her own bed.

  “Summer? You home?” She looked into the bathroom, the only separate room.

  Diver dropped down behind her and followed Marquez inside.

  “I don’t think she’s been back,” Marquez said. She felt out of place, as if the familiar surroundings had become different somehow.

  “She hasn’t been back,” Diver said. “I’m sure.”

  “Diver, you’re worrying me,” Marquez said.

  “I’m worried,” he said. “I—I feel she may be in trouble.”

  “It’s almost midnight. She should have gotten back hours ago. She went scuba diving with Seth. You don’t think anything could have happened, do you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I do think something happened.”

  “Oh my God. What should we do?” Marquez wondered. “Should I tell Mrs. Olan? Or call the Coast Guard?”

  “What can Mrs. Olan do?” Diver asked. “Maybe the Coast Guard.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. She’d just get all upset and it’s probably nothing. But we could call the Coast Guard and, you know, find out if…if they’ve picked up any boats out of gas or whatever.”

  Diver nodded solemnly. He seemed to have withdrawn even further inside himself than usual.

  Suddenly the atmosphere in the room seemed frightening to Marquez. As if the temperature had dropped. “I’ll call the Coast Guard,” she said briskly, anxious to be doing something.

  “I guess that’s all we can do,” Diver said.

  But another possibility had occurred to Marquez. A possibility that had to do with burned hands and two people talking at the very same moment. “There’s another person who might be able to help, too,” Marquez said.

  Diana lay in her bed, uncovered, wearing a simple, white gauze shift, watching the numbers on the clock change. Eleven thirty-eight to eleven thirty-nine. She was waiting for midnight. Midnight seemed right. She didn’t know why. It was just that she had to pick some time, some definite time, when she would do it. Midnight was definite.

  She tightened her grip on the small brown bottle. Her palm was dry, not sweating with nerves. She didn’t feel nervous. Hadn’t felt nervous when she took the bottle from her mother’s bathroom. Her mother had not noticed it missing from her medicine cabinet.

  Or perhaps she had noticed it and just didn’t care.

  Mallory had burned the tape, saying it was for Diana’s own good. Maybe she even halfway believed it. But Diana knew that her own good was no longer an issue. There would be no good for Diana. She was no longer part of the world that others inhabited. The world that Summer—and Seth—lived in.

  She had been lying here forever, it seemed, indifferent to the failing light, indifferent to falling night. Thinking of nothing. Feeling nothing but the presence of the hole as she fell and fell and fell into it, deeper and deeper, like Alice in Wonderland. Too far even to hope for a way back out.

  She had fallen all the way down the hole. And she had found no last-minute salvation. At the end of it all, she was alone. Alone with herself.

  “Just me,” Diana whispered. “Just me.”

  Eleven-forty. Twenty minutes to go.

  18

  Late News and News Too Late

  J.T.’s apartment was a tiny, unexceptional place, with two windows over the main drag, upstairs from a kite store. He had a small balcony off to one side, and the people who owned the store had him hang brightly colored kites from it. He had moved in at the beginning of the summer, wanting to have more independence and freedom than he had in his parents’ home. The thought had also been that he and Marquez could enjoy some privacy there.

  A set of exterior wooden steps led up to the apartment. Marquez climbed them quietly, not wanting to wake J.T. prematurely. She was still undecided about whether to wake him up at all. It was a fairly amazing thing she would have to lay on him, if she decided to go ahead. Her natural reluctance to get further into other people’s problems inclined her to walk away. But it was after midnight, and Summer still wasn’t home.

  She knocked on the door and only then considered the possibility that Lianne might be inside with J.T.

  “That would certainly be embarrassing,” she said under her breath. But then, one way or the other, this was not going to be an easy visit to J.T.

  She had to knock three different times, louder each time, before she saw a light go on inside. The ratty little curtain in the door window moved slightly. J.T. appeared, squinting out of one eye, the other scrunched closed. When he saw her, he opened the other eye as well. Then he opened the door.

  “I suppose you’re wondering why I’m here in the middle of the night?” Marquez said brightly. J.T. was wearing pajama bottoms and no shirt.

  “It crossed my mind, yeah,” he said. He scratched his hair, which just made a bigger mess of it. He seemed to be tasting something he didn’t like.

  “It’s about Summer,” she said.

  He thought about this for a moment. “The waitress or the season?”

  “Summer Smith. She’s not at home.”

  He nodded. “Summer’s not at home. Okay. Thanks for coming by and telling me. I’d been tossing and turning in bed, asking myself: do you think Summer is at home or not? You’ve cleared that up for me.”

  “Can I come in?” Marquez asked, letting his sarcasm flow past without a response.

  He shrugged and led the way inside. The apartment was a typical “guy” apartment—a few sticks of furniture, a large quantity of dirty clothing, posters sagging on the walls, a stone-dead potted plant.

  J.T. went to the kitchen, reappearing with a carton of orange juice from which he took several long swallows.

  Marquez took the one chair. J.T. sat on the edge of the bed and scratched himself indiscreetly.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled, when he saw her disapproving look. “So, Summer isn’t home. What’s the rest of the secret message?”

  “She went out early this morning with Seth Warner. They were going to some island to do some diving. They were supposed to be home this evening. They aren’t home yet.”

  This penetrated. J.T. was a diver himself. He nodded seriously. “Could be engine problems with the boat,” he said. “That’s most likely. Or maybe they lost track of time and decided to sleep over on the island. It isn’t necessarily something…bad.”

  “I called the Coast Guard. They said the same things, but they also said they’d put out an alert.” Marquez hesitated. So far she hadn’t told J.T. anything troubling. She hadn’t passed the point of no return.

  “Why did you come here?” J.T. asked. “Getting my expert opinion as a diver? I’m not exactly a professional. You’ve already called the C.G. It’s probably like they said.”

  Oh, well, Marquez realized, there was probably no avoiding it. “But what do you think it is?” Marquez asked, leaning forward in her chair.

  “I have no idea,” J.T. said.

  Marquez took a deep breath. Then another. This was going to be strange. “Um, J.T., I don’t know how much you’ve ever talked to Summer…”

  “Not much. You know, just work gossip.”

  “So I guess she never told you about…about Jonathan.” Okay, now she was past the point of no return.

  J.T. looked impatient. “You know, Marquez, I was thinking sleep might not be a bad thing.”

  “He was her brother. Jonathan. He disappeared when he was two years old. Before Summer was even born. They never found out what happened to him.”

  Suddenly J.T. was sitting very still. His eyes were narrowly focused on Marquez’s face.

  Marquez plunged ahead. “The other day at work, I noticed that you burned yourself, and at the exact same moment, Summer burned herself in the same place. I know this seems crazy, just let me finish. There was another time when Summer was complaining she had a headache and you had a headache, too. And then the other day, when you both said exactly the same thing at exactly the same time—”

  “How old is Summer?” he asked in a quiet voice.

/>   “She’s seventeen, I guess. She said her brother disappeared just a couple of months before she was born.”

  “Which would mean, if he’s alive today, he would be about eighteen, maybe just turned nineteen,” J.T. said.

  “Yeah,” Marquez confirmed.

  “My age.”

  “Your age.”

  “How long have you suspected this?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, a week, I guess,” Marquez said. “It seemed totally insane. But tonight I got to thinking, you know, about the burning and the headache and all. You know, people talk about brothers and sisters having these…these connections, you know?”

  J.T.’s calm facade began to break down. He looked overwhelmed, like he wanted to hide somewhere. He rubbed his face with his palms.

  “I thought, I don’t know, you might have some idea, some feeling about whether she’s in trouble.” Marquez threw up her hands. “Sorry. This is insane. I can’t believe I even said anything. This is nuts.”

  “Do you know what this would mean?” J.T. asked, his face stricken. “Do you know what it would mean for my parents? I mean, are they some kind of kidnappers? Is that what I’m supposed to believe?”

  “I don’t know,” Marquez said. She fidgeted in her seat for a minute, trying to decide what to do.

  J.T. kept rubbing his face. It was becoming a compulsive movement now, one he couldn’t seem to stop.

  Marquez got up and went to sit beside him. She carefully did not touch him and kept her hands folded in her lap. “Look, J.T., I know this is a lot to even think about. I wouldn’t have said anything, except I’m worried about Summer. The girl seems to have a talent for getting herself into one kind of mess or another.”

  “I don’t have any idea where she is,” J.T. said distractedly. “How would I know? This is nuts. You’re right, this is insane. I mean, I’m not having some kind of psychic connection, if that’s what you think.”

  “But could you maybe think about it?” Marquez pleaded.

  J.T. made an effort to focus. “Look, as a diver I can tell you that there are only a couple of good diving places where they could have gone in an open boat from here and gotten back in the same day.”