In the Deep

by White, Loreth Anne

  “What did you say?”

  “I said there’s no extradition—”

  “You said Cape Verde islands?”

  “I found two plane tickets in his office. Departure date is in just over two weeks. To the Cape Verde islands. I also found a rental agreement for a luxury villa.”

  “Are . . . are you sure?”

  “Yes I’m fucking sure!” I paced faster, rage fueling me. Martin had beaten me down. He’d nearly stolen my identity—my very concept of self. But not quite. I was still here. I’d found this stuff in time. I now stood at a fork in my own road. Two choices faced me: Collapse and concede. Or get him. Get him back. Show him he should not have dared cross me.

  I spun to face Willow. “I could kill him. I so badly want to kill him.”

  She sat there, deathly pale. “I cannot believe this,” she said quietly. “Rabz? He’s running off with her? She’s like a fixture in Jarrawarra—I can’t believe she’d do this.”

  “I should have taken that knife and plunged it in properly.” I raised an imaginary knife into the air and brought it down repeatedly in a stabbing motion. Stabbity, stabbity, stabbity.

  “Ellie—” She surged to her feet and took hold of my arm. “Stop it. Stop now.”

  “Fuck off, Willow. Don’t touch me.”

  Shocked, she stepped back.

  I came to my senses at the sight of her face. I was breathing hard. I unclenched my fist and pushed my hair off my face. “I mean it,” I said more quietly. “I’m going to get him. I’m going to nail him so hard he’ll be sorry I ever tripped into his arms.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Fight back. And you know what else? If he did this to me . . . this level of a long con like this—my bet is he’s done it before. He had to have built up to this kind of brazen act. There have got to be more victims out there. Victims in all sorts of ways. For starters, all those people who put down significant presale deposits for Agnes Marina land that’s never going to be developed, for a project that is doomed by environmental standards. And now their money is gone? I’m going to war, Willow. I’m going to rally a goddamn army and bury that bastard.” I pointed to the photos on the table. “And those—those are going into my portfolio of evidence.”

  “Are you going to the police?”

  “First I’m going to pack my bags and clear out of this house before Martin returns from Sydney. He’s dangerous. There is so much at stake here—he’s taken more than thirty million from me—I fear he’ll try to stop me, or worse. I need to be gone before he gets home. And I’ve got nine days. I’m going to search the rest of the house, and I’m going to copy the computer evidence and scan all the files and save it all to a flash drive. Then I’m flying back to Canada and going straight to my father’s lawyers. I’m going to get the best damn legal advice from a safe place, and go from there. Because my bet is Martin’s victims are scattered all over the world, and Canadian law enforcement can work globally with Australia and other jurisdictions.”

  “I don’t know, Ellie. If he’s run off with presales, that’s a crime here, in New South Wales.” She looked visibly shaken. “You should go to the local cops. And if he’s dangerous—”

  “What are they going to do? Honestly? Whisk me into some kind of witness protection before they’ve taken the time to investigate whether ‘mad drunk Ellie’s’ accusations even have substance? No, this is bigger than the Jarrawarra community police. I need to get out of here, and I have a week within which to do it.”

  “What can I do?”

  “I need you to leave, Willow. I need to be alone. I need to think.”

  “Ellie—”

  “No, please. Go.” I looked at the PI’s photos on the table and my throat constricted. “I need to process this.”

  She glanced around the room, worry darkening her blue eyes, hesitation in her movements. Her gaze settled back on mine. “I can’t quite absorb all this. Why don’t we get out of here, go for a walk?”

  “I need to be alone.”

  She angled her head.

  “I’m not going to take pills, Willow. I promise. I’m going to gather the files, pack my suitcases, and buy an air ticket home, and then maybe I’ll go for a long walk on my own. I’m thankful for the photos.” I pointed at the glossy evidence. “I owe you. And the PI. But I need to process.”

  She left, and I glanced at the photo of me and Dana above where Willow had been sitting. And that sinister feeling wormed deeper and deeper into me.

  THE MURDER TRIAL

  Pretrial forensic evaluation session.

  The shrink asked me if Martin was like my father. I hate that he’s right about this—I am attracted to men like my dad. Big and powerful and commanding, and I want them to love and treasure me and make me feel safe and special. Like a princess. Like some vestigial childhood fairy-tale thing I can’t shake, someplace in my kid psyche where I got stuck. The place that wants storybook happy endings.

  “So if you wished ill on Martin, do you also wish ill upon your father?”

  A discordant jangle begins in my head—two parts of me being forced together in the mirror.

  “My father is not violent toward me.”

  He assesses me. I haven’t answered his question. I’m getting panicky again. He’s closing in on the hidden and secret places in the basement of my soul again. I feel the rustling of discontent, the discordant alarm bells going off in my body. Agitation.

  “I can see this question makes you uncomfortable, Ellie. We can move on if you like. You called your mother weak.”

  “She was. I despised her for that. For leaving me.”

  He watches me for a few moments. “If you despise those parts of your mother, and you believe on some level you are like your mother, does this mean you despise those traits in yourself?”

  “So is this where I’m supposed to say yeah, but by taking drugs, self-medicating, I numb myself to this truth?”

  “What about Doug? Did he give you the attention you needed?”

  “What are you saying?”

  Silence.

  Panic flicks longer tongues through my belly. “Doug and I loved each other. But it fell apart after we lost Chloe. The grief was too big. Everything we had was built around being Chloe’s parents.”

  “So he wasn’t there for you when you needed him most?”

  Anger surges—basal, rudimentary anger. Incompletely articulated. Dark. “He’s a jerk, okay. He started having affairs.”

  He glances up sharply from his notes. “More than one?”

  “I . . . Right after Chloe was born—he lost . . . interest in me.”

  “Sexually?”

  I fiddled with my hands. My face started going hot. “I was carrying a lot of baby fat. I wasn’t sleeping, not looking good. Breastfeeding was rough. Stressful. I was worried I wasn’t doing it all right.” Emotion coalesces in my eyes. “I wished my mother had been there to guide me. I had all the money in the world, but it couldn’t buy the things I needed. I . . . I was lost. Scared.”

  He consults his notes again. “I see you were diagnosed with postpartum depression. You were clinically depressed well before Chloe drowned.”

  “Where did you get that from?”

  “Transcript of the police interview in Hawaii,” he says.

  “You have no right.”

  “The opposing legal team will have the same access to these transcripts, Ellie.”

  THEN

  LOZZA

  Over one year ago, November 16. Jarrawarra Bay, New South Wales.

  Lozza caught a last wave and rode it all the way into the shallows, where Maya, her eight-year-old daughter, was already waiting with her board. The sun was sinking toward the horizon, and the low-angled rays cast a beaten-copper glow over the sea. The early-summer breeze, warm and rounded against her skin, sent a fine spindrift off the backs of the waves. It was her first surf of the season without a wet suit, and it felt like heaven.

  She slid off her board and all
owed it to float for a moment, catching her breath as Maya came paddling over. Lozza’s muscles ached, and her eyes burned from salt and wind and sun. But this was exactly the kind of mental scrub she’d needed after a long week working on a strike force that had resulted in a biker gang drug bust up the coast. Since moving to Jarrawarra, Lozza had discovered that surfing with her girl was a far better tonic than the booze she’d once habitually sunk into after a tough shift on the homicide squad back in Sydney. Her life there had spiraled into a self-destructive cycle after she’d lost her husband. It had ultimately cost Lozza her coveted position as a detective on an elite investigative squad with State Crime Command. But her boss, her team of brothers in blue, had protected her from losing her badge entirely. They’d kept “the incident” out of the press. And the quiet demotion to the policing backwaters of the South Coast had pretty much saved Lozza. It had allowed her to clean up and adopt Maya. It had brought Lozza closer to her own mother, who’d moved into the beach house Lozza rented to help out with Maya when Lozza worked long hours or was called out at weird times.

  Jarrawarra had been the best decision in the entire world. She was finding her essence in this place with its wild ocean and empty beaches in the off-season, and the great fishing. She was sending down firm roots and discovering a way of life she hadn’t even known she’d been looking for.

  “Did you see my last ride, Mom? Did you see I got barreled?” Maya beamed. Her eyes glittered with fierce excitement.

  “I sure did, kiddo.” Lozza grinned at her daughter as she reached into the water to undo the Velcro strap that secured her board leash to her ankle. Looping the leash over her thruster, she tucked it under her arm, and she and Maya waded through the shallows and onto the hard-packed sand. Small birds scattered as they made their way up the beach toward the dunes where they’d left their gear.

  “Are we gonna have that leftover pizza?” Maya asked, breathing hard at her side as she scrambled to keep up on her skinny brown legs.

  Lozza smiled. Her kid’s thoughts were never far from food. Something they had in common.

  “Yep. But I get the anchovies.”

  “Blech!”

  Lozza laughed. That was the moment she saw the woman sitting up in the dunes. Her waist-length hair—ebony brown—fluttered like a pennant in the wind. She hugged her arms tightly around her knees. Pale skin. A beach towel draped around her shoulders.

  She was watching Lozza and her daughter. Or more likely the sunset behind them. Yet Lozza felt that acute sense of being very keenly observed. It made her hesitate slightly.

  Her inclination was to give the woman space. But her and Maya’s gear was next to the path through the dune grasses, right where the woman sat. So Lozza continued up the beach with Maya in tow. As they neared, Lozza noted the woman had no board with her. Not a surfer, then. She was also beautiful. The kind of beautiful Lozza could never even dream to be.

  “How are ya?” Lozza said as she set her thruster on a patch of dune foliage, fins up. It was casual—what any local would say. She grabbed Maya’s towel, tossed it to her kid, and picked up her own. She began rubbing her tangle of hair.

  The woman glanced up and something inside Lozza stilled. The woman’s eyes were big, and an improbable cobalt color. Like the deep-blue pelagic waters fifteen klicks into the Tasman Sea where the big migratory and predatory fish—marlin, tuna, bonito, great whites—moved deep in the clear, sediment-free currents. But it wasn’t the color. It was something else—a look of raw desperation. Need.

  Lozza had spent enough years as an interrogator to have become adept at reading tells, both overt and at the micro level. It was now second nature to her. And something about this woman screamed fear.

  The rescuer in Lozza, the goddamn gladiator in her DNA that had pushed her to become a cop in the first place—the same impulses that had also gotten her into serious trouble—made her say, “Nice evening, huh?” Because now she was curious, and fishing.

  “Uh . . . yeah, it is,” the woman said, her gaze latching on to Maya. “It’s gorgeous.”

  American. Maybe. But there was also something about the way the woman was staring at Maya that made Lozza feel uncomfortable for reasons she couldn’t articulate.

  “Going in for a quick splash, then?” Lozza asked, noting the woman’s bikini straps beneath her tank top. “Water’s pretty warm—it’s our first session this year without a wettie.” She smiled.

  The woman hugged her knees more tightly against her body as her gaze flashed toward the ocean. That’s when Lozza noticed the aging bruises around the side of her neck. And along her collarbone. And on her arm. Wind gusted and ruffled the woman’s fringe. Lozza saw a cut on her temple and another yellow-green bruise around it. Lozza’s breathing slowed. She’d seen bruises like that before.

  A soft inner war rose inside her—a battle between giving this woman privacy to deal with whatever it was that seemed to be conflicting her right now and satisfying her own curiosity, which was sliding into concern territory. She hooked her towel around her neck, the wind now chasing tiny goose bumps over her skin.

  “So, you in Jarrawarra on holiday, then?”

  “No. I . . . I’m new in town. Arrived last month.” She gave a nervous laugh. “Seems like an eternity ago already, though.”

  “Are you from America?” Maya asked as she draped her towel around her skinny shoulders like a Batman cape.

  “Canada. West Coast.”

  “I’ve never been to Canada,” Maya said, giving a gap-toothed grin that made the woman fixate on her in that odd way again.

  “I didn’t know we’d had any Canadians move into town,” Lozza said, delving deeper.

  “Should you—I mean, have known?”

  She gave a shrug. “I’m a cop. One might expect a local copper to know what’s what in a small rural town like this.”

  The woman recoiled. Her neck tightened. “A cop?”

  Lozza’s interest was 100 percent now. Something was going on here—a darker undertow.

  This was the moment Lozza should have perhaps walked. It was also the instant she could not, because she’d already crossed some invisible and indefinable line. So she proffered her hand. “Laurel Bianchi,” she said. “But everyone calls me Lozza.”

  “Or Lozz,” Maya offered.

  “And this is my daughter, Maya.”

  The woman hesitated, then accepted Lozza’s hand. “Ellie.”

  Her hand was cold and fine boned. Smooth skin. No rings. “Well, then, Ellie, welcome to Jarrawarra Bay, New South Wales.”

  Lozza waited for a last name. Ellie said nothing.

  Lozza picked up her thruster, hooked it under her arm, wavered, then said, “Does Ellie have a surname?”

  She paled, looking as though she’d rather bolt.

  “Hey, no worries. See you next time—enjoy your swim. Come on, Maya-Poo. Pizza’s waiting.”

  Maya gathered up her board and sandals and began to scamper up the dune path ahead of Lozza.

  “Is . . . is it safe? I mean, right now?” Ellie called out behind them.

  Lozza stopped, turned. “What?”

  “Is it safe to swim in this part of the bay right now, at this time of evening with maybe sharks coming out and all? I heard they feed at dusk, and that there are rips here sometimes. And . . . I . . . I guess I expected other swimmers to be out. But the beach is deserted.”

  Lozza frowned, momentarily puzzled.

  “I can swim,” Ellie said forcefully. It sounded off-key. “I just haven’t swum in, you know, big waves for . . . for a while.”

  Lozza looked at the ocean. Surf crunched and boomed off the reef, spumes of spray catching gold rays. The tide was pushing into the mouth of the little creek and churning sand into the water, turning it cloudy and brown.

  “Never mind,” Ellie said. “I feel stupid for asking.”

  “Hell no. It’s smart. To learn how to read the sea, to learn where the rips tend to form and what to look for.” She hesitated. “Hey
, Maya! Hold up. Come back here a minute.”

  Maya came running back down the path.

  Lozza set her board back down. “Come on.” She tilted her head toward the sea. “We’ll go in with you. Just a quick one before the sun sets. You obviously came down to the beach in that getup because you wanted to go in.”

  “Mom! What about the pizza?” Maya held her hand out, palm up.

  “Pizza can wait twenty minutes. A quick swim with Ellie, then you can have extra ice cream for dessert—deal?”

  Maya beamed and put her board down. Going back into the water was no real hardship for Maya Bianchi. The ocean, surfing, swimming, ranked right up there behind food and spiders—Maya’s priorities in life.

  Ellie opened her mouth in a perfect O of surprise, then glanced over her shoulder as if expecting something to come barreling over the dunes. She bit her lip, turned back to face Lozza and Maya.

  “Are you guys sure?”

  “Course we’re sure.”

  THEN

  LOZZA

  Lozza and Maya stayed where Ellie could stand waist-deep as they duck-dived into breaking swells, popping up on the other side. Lozz was puzzled by Ellie. She seemed strangely fearful of the sea yet fiercely determined, yanking the triangles of her bikini back into place each time she came up out of a dive. Her bruises looked like she’d been through hell not that long ago. And the way she kept fixating on Maya in the waves was . . . odd.

  After a few dives, a veil seemed to clear from Ellie’s face. Her movements changed, became looser. She smiled at them, and a light began to shine in her eyes—a spark of mad exhilaration almost.

  “It’s so amazing to be with the two of you in the sea like this,” Ellie said. “Mother and daughter. In the waves.”