Under Pressure

by Kathy Brandt

  Finally he stopped and lifted his head out of the water.

  “Hannah, this is totally cool!” he said. “Did you see that big fish over there? It’s just hovering. It looks kind of mean.”

  “That’s a barracuda. Follow me and I’ll show you some other stuff.” I said. “Sometimes you have to look real carefully.”

  We headed over to the rocks and swam along the edge. I spotted a golden-tailed moray eel peering out from a colony of fire coral. Simon came sputtering up.

  “He looks mean too!”

  “I guess it’s the teeth, but isn’t he gorgeous? Look right next to him on that piece of brain coral. That’s a flatworm, the green and purple thing that looks like a pretty piece of spotted lettuce.”

  We stuck our heads back under and I pointed. It took him a minute, but finally he saw it. We kept going and I kept pointing to the things that are easily missed—the Christmas tree worm that flicked closed when I touched it gently with the tip of my finger, the flamingo tongue snail that was eating a sea fan, a porcupine fish under a ledge of brilliant red sponges. Simon came up laughing when it puffed to twice its size like a prickly balloon.

  On the way back to the boat, we got lucky. We saw the sharks, two gray, ghostly shapes lying on the bottom in the sand between colonies of elkhorn and star corals. The sharks were still except for the movement of their gills and the occasional flick of a tail.

  Simon spent the ride back looking at his photos. He’d gotten several shots of parrotfish tails as they swam out of the frame and dozens more of dark schools of blurry fish. But a couple were outstanding, a streak of sunlight turning a staghorn golden, a French angel perfectly posed, it’s yellow flecks electric against a blue-black backdrop.

  Calvin was down in the shed when we got back, pulling out old sheets of plywood.

  “Hey dar, Hannah, Simon. How was da snorklin’?” he asked.

  “You wouldn’t believe what we saw!” Simon said. “I can’t believe what’s under the water. We saw sharks! And worms! And all kinds of fish and stuff.”

  “Hannah’s a good guide,” he said. “She be learnin’ a lot ‘bout da ocean since she be comin’ to des beautiful islands.”

  “Yeah, thanks for taking me, Hannah,” he said. He hugged me fiercely for a second, then ran to the Sea Bird to get ready to go to school.

  “Dat be a good boy,” Calvin said. “He sure be likin’ you. Be hard when dat aunt finally be showin’ up and takin’ him away.”

  Calvin was right. It was going to be hard. I was getting used to having the kid around, rattling dishes in the galley, running on the beach with Sadie, sleeping in the aft cabin. He was an amazing kid—a survivor. Even at nine it was obvious he was one of those people who would embrace life—unless someone wore him down, burdened him with obligations or whatever it was that adults thought important. I wondered what his aunt was like and if she’d nurture his spirit or smother it.

  “Some folks still not believin’ a storm be brewin’ out dar,” Calvin said, wiping his face with his sleeve. It was not even nine o’clock and already the thermometer on the shed was pushing ninety. I was guessing the humidity was the same.

  “Do you think it will hit us, Calvin?” I knew he’d been through his share of hurricanes. Most of the islanders had. The last one that came through had been Wrong Way Lenny. No one had expected that one. It had built up in the western Caribbean and moved east, glancing off the BVI, sweeping down on St. Martin, and causing damage all the way along the island chain to Martinique.

  “Sure be lookin’ like it,” he said. “I be goin’ to act like it will. I be needin’ to protect da marina and get da boats tied down real good. What you be wantin’ to do ‘bout da Sea Bird? We be well protected here in da harbor. Mos’ likely da wind will come over da hills dar. We be gettin’ a lot of water comin’ in. I plans to move da boats off da docks and raft ‘em together. Put dos big moorings out dar for just des occasions. God willin’ they be holdin’. Better for da boats to be out in da deep water dan smashin’ round here on da docks and gettin’ blown onto shore.”

  “I’ll leave the Sea Bird in your hands, Calvin. You know what you’re doing.” I hadn’t really thought about losing the boat. Maybe my father had been right—bad investment—easily destroyed by a swipe from Mother Nature.

  Simon and Rebecca were standing by the road waiting for the bus when I pulled out of Pickering's Landing and headed into Road Town. Simon waved and gave me a quick smile.

  In town, people were mimicking Calvin’s preparations, anticipating the worst and hoping for the best. They were not really engaged in a full-out effort yet, but gathering materials—plywood, boards, hammers.

  I stopped for coffee at Wilson’s Bakery and picked up donuts for Stark. Next door, the hardware store was crowded with people buying nails, tarps, and staple guns.

  “How you be doin’ dis fine day,” Marie Wilson asked as she poured me a coffee to go.

  “I’m good, Marie. Are you ready for bad weather?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I be feelin’ it comin’. Da air, it be swellin’ like a woman be ready for childbirth. Pray dat baby not some devil be comin’ ta send us all ta hell.” She was shaking some kind of dried plant around the store when left.

  “Crazy Marie,” I muttered to myself as I headed to the car. Still, a knife of anxiety caught me off guard. I wondered what kind of precautions were being taken at the school. Jeez, I was thinking like my mother, who had always been unreasonable when it came to worrying about her two daughters. Nothing was going to happen at the school today.

  I drove past the hospital and took a quick turn into the lot. I had just enough time to check on Capy before meeting Stark over at the warehouse. When I walked into his room, a nurse was trying to coax gooey oatmeal down his throat.

  “Dat stuff looks like da trail of slime from a sea slug,” he said. “What I be needin’ is a good drink of rum.”

  “It is not yet ten a.m. and we do not provide alcohol for our patients no matter the time,” the nurse said, indignant. No doubt she was a God-fearing woman who forbade anything stronger than cider in her own home. I’d seen her husband staggering home from the Doubloon more than once though.

  “Why if it don’t be my friend Hannah!” he said. “Ain’t you lookin’ pretty. I hope you not be here ta arrest me. Dat warehouse door be open. Figured nobody be missin’ a old T-shirt, a coupla soggy cigars.”

  “I’m not here to arrest you. I’m glad to see that you’re okay. The whole island has been worried about you, Capy.”

  “Well, I be too hardheaded to kill,” he said. His head was wrapped in a bunch of gauze and one of his eyes was swollen shut.

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “Like I said, dat door be open. I jus thought I’d be havin’ a look around. It be real dark in dar. I be rummagin’ threw all dat junk. Come across some strange stuff, I tell you. Der be a pair of red ladies’ unmentionables. Well, guess I be gettin’ old.”

  “Did you see anyone at all? Hear anything?”

  “Naw, but I be seein’ da nicest purple shoes I ever did see. Gonna try dem on when all of a sudden, I be seein’ stars. Next thing I know, I be layin’ here with dat Doc Hall standin’ over me. Don’t like dat man one bit.”

  “What kind of shoes?” I was sure there had been no purple shoes in any of the passengers’ luggage. More than likely, Capy had been having the delusions of the alcohol-saturated. Christ, for years he’d been telling anyone who would listen about the sea monsters that had taken his boat to Davy Jones’s locker. He’d been out on the boat completely trashed when a squall had come up. He’d clung to a piece of debris and drifted for hours out there until one of the fishermen spotted him.

  He gave me a detailed description of the shoes though—purple with purple laces, rubber soles, and a yellow lightening bolt down each side. Either Capy had vivid delusions or he really had seen something.

  “Do you think they were athletic shoes?” I asked.

  “Y
eah, dat be what dey were. Probably wouldn’t a fit anyways. Dey be lookin’ kinda a small.”

  It wasn’t much, but maybe it was something. Capy gave me a little salute on my way out and told me to bring a bottle of island rum the next time I visited.

  ***

  Stark didn’t see me walk up. He was leaning on his car in front of the warehouse, looking smug. “Hey, Stark, how was dinner last night?” I asked, handing him the donuts.

  “Horrible,” he said.

  “You don’t have the look of a man who spent a horrible evening.”

  “It was the after-dinner part that I was thinking about. I tell you though, Billy’s mother is better than any interrogator I ever met. Jeez. By the time Billy and I left her parents, her mother knew what vegetables I ate as a kid.”

  “Really? What kind?”

  “Funny, Sampson.”

  He was relieved when I told him that Capy had been sitting up in bed giving the nurse trouble this morning. “Weird about those shoes. Do you think he actually saw something?” Stark asked. He knew Capy’s reputation for drunken exaggeration.

  “God knows. I think we should check to see if any of the stores carry anything like them.”

  “Yeah, I can see purple running shoes being a big seller down here. We’ll probably find out that half the ladies over sixty consider them a fashion statement. Of course, you know most of the stores won’t have any records.”

  “You know, Capy did say the shoes were small.”

  “Well, small to Capy might mean no bigger than those huge rubber boots he flops around in. Come on, let’s go in and see what Harrigan has found.”

  Several guys were inside dissecting airplane parts, which were scattered all over the floor. Harrigan was standing with his sleeves rolled up, holding a clipboard and talking to one of them.

  “Here’s what we know so far,” he said, getting right down to business. “There are no signs of a bomb. Expanding gases would have deformed every surface that they touched. There would be signs of pitting—a bunch of craterlike holes and black streaks that radiate from the blast site. There are no burn patterns that indicate fire either.”

  “What about the report that smoke was coming from an engine and that there was an explosion?” Stark asked.

  “Some witness reports remind me of the fairy tales my mother told me. Pure fantasy. Too many movies. One of the accounts said a witness reported an engine falling off! Hardly the case, as you can see. We’ll keep looking, but nothing at all indicates engine fire or any explosion. In fact, I don’t think that either engine was running when the plane hit. If they had been, the props would have been twisted. That agree with what you remember, Hannah?”

  Jimmy and I had already told Harrigan what we’d seen that morning, which had included none of the drama that the other witnesses had reported. “Like I said, the thing just fell from the sky. I remember how silent it was until the plane smashed into the sea.”

  “That matches what I’m finding,” he said.

  “So what do you think?” I asked.

  “Could be a fuel problem, though the gauges show both tanks were almost full. They had seawater in them, but that’s not surprising. Salt water would have seeped in after the plane went under.”

  “Would salt water have been enough to bring the plane down if it was mixed in with the fuel before take off?” I asked.

  “Absolutely. The engines would have sputtered a few times and quit. That would mesh with what you saw—that the plane just turned into the sea. The thing is, it would take a whole lot of salt water. I’ve already checked with the airport. No other plane has had problems with contaminated fuel.”

  “It’s really the perfect ploy—contaminating the tanks with salt water. Who’d know once the plane went into the ocean?” I asked.

  “I will know. I sent the fuel controls out for analysis. There’s one mounted on each engine. They meter the fuel into the engine. It’s a closed system. They will have fuel trapped inside, along with any contaminants. We will know precisely what was going into those engines.”

  “Do you have any educated guesses?” I asked.

  “I know better than to guess. I’ve been at this business for almost twenty years. Half the time I’m just about sure it’s one thing and turns out to be something else all together. Last year I investigated the wreck of a little plane that slammed into the side of a hill. Everyone was sure a bomb had exploded. The news media turned it into a big story about gangsters because they heard there was a guy who had been approached to testify against some mob figures. Everyone was screaming sabotage. We took samples from the debris in the engine and sent them to an expert at the Smithsonian. She found feathers—Canada geese.”

  On the way into the office, I told Stark of my conversation with Kiersted about the dolphins last night.

  “Sounds like he’s over the edge,” Stark said.

  “Probably,” I said. “How the heck do people turn into such extremists?” I wondered out loud.

  I didn’t expect an answer, but Stark provided one anyway. “Maybe it comes from too many failures,” he said.

  “Yeah, or from going unheard.”

  Chapter 22

  “Stark, pull over,” I said. Debra Westbrook was sitting alone at a sidewalk café. I insisted he drop me off at the curb and go away. It was an opportunity to talk to Debra without the senator around and I certainly didn’t think Stark’s presence would enhance the conversation. He actually looked hurt when I told him so.

  “Hello, Mrs. Westbrook,” I said as I approached her table.

  “Detective Sampson, good to see you,” she said, smiling. Not a bad start. Unlike her husband, she didn’t seem to think she needed a lawyer to talk with me.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  “Please do. I was about to order lunch. I would love the company. Please call me Deb.”

  “And call me Hannah,” I said, pulling out a chair as the waiter appeared. She ordered a salad with fresh lobster. If it was fresh it would be spiny lobster, the only species found in the Caribbean. I was disturbed to see that turtle was on the menu. When I asked the waiter about it, he said it was excellent. I skipped giving him a lecture about the fact that turtles were endangered. There was nothing he could do about it. I ordered jerk chicken.

  “Did the senator desert you?” I asked after the waiter headed to the kitchen.

  “I’m afraid so. He’s off looking at a big house on the point near Soper's Hole.”

  “Really? Are you thinking of buying a home down here?” I knew the house. It was more like a mansion.

  “Oh, Jack has this idea about retiring in the islands. Until then he wants to have a place to spend a couple of weeks. It’s not that straightforward though. He’s got to apply for some sort of Non-Belonger Land Holding License before he can buy property in the BVI. He’s supposed to gather financial references, character references, and a police certificate. He’s sure that he’ll get permission. He hasn’t bothered with all the references. He says all it ever takes is money to the right person.”

  “I’m surprised you aren’t looking with him,” I said as the waiter appeared with our lunch.

  “Actually, I’m not interested in owning a place here. I don’t like the idea of being so far away from the children. And someday there will be grandkids. Jack knows how I feel. We argued about it this morning. I told him I didn’t want to look at any property and that he was on his own.” She emptied her wineglass and signaled the waiter for another.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to bring you into my personal affairs. I’m just very upset that he is completely ignoring my wishes.”

  I could see that Debra needed to talk. “It’s okay. You’re pretty alone down here right now,” I said. “I’m sorry about the Rileys.”

  “Louise and I were close. Jack has hardly given it a thought—the fact that we’ve lost good friends. He can be a very indifferent and insensitive man. Very self-centered. Now that the kids are all grown, perhap
s I’ll let Jack live down here by himself.”

  “Are you thinking about leaving Jack?” I asked. It was none of my business, but I wanted to know what the relationship between them was.

  “I’m considering it very seriously,” she said. “I’ve suspected for a long time that he’s been seeing other women.”

  I couldn’t believe she was willing to have this conversation with a stranger. “You could be mistaken. Why not ask him?”

  She just laughed, a bitter laugh, filled with something else—hurt maybe.

  “Don’t be silly. Jack would deny it. You see, he can’t afford to have me leave him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m the one with the money. When we married, Jack was a struggling attorney with few clients and no reputation. Our marriage changed all that. Jack likes to think that he’s the one in control, but if I leave him, the money goes with me. My father made sure of that when we married. I guess he saw right through Jack.”

  “Do you think he knows what you’re considering?”

  “Probably. You see, Jack got careless. When I was packing for this trip, I found a hotel receipt in his shirt pocket. Since I had not been with Jack, it was pretty obvious he’d been with someone else.”

  That explained the receipt I’d found in her address book.

  “So you asked him about it?”

  “I did. He came up with some ridiculous story about his charge card being taken. This whole trip has been a disaster because of it. I am so angry. I told Louise about it. She thought I should file for divorce and gave me the name of a divorce attorney.”

  “Surely your husband has money of his own by now.”

  “He would, but he has expensive tastes and no control. And as long as we are together he has an endless supply.”

  So, if Debra were to leave Jack, he’d have big financial problems. I wondered if he’d resort to bringing down that plane if he knew she was contemplating divorce. “What would happen if you were to die?” I asked.

  “I know what you’re thinking. And yes, he’d inherit half of it. The rest goes to the kids. I admit I’ve considered the fact that Jack’s best option is for me to be dead. I’ve thought about it a lot. But I just don’t think he’d kill me for it. And to bring down an entire plane? As little respect as I have for the man, I don’t think he’d stoop that low.”