Below the Surface

by Karen Harper

  She led Cole back in that direction, and they swam the entire length of where the camera might have drifted down or been snagged against the ship by the incoming tide. It was just over twenty-four hours ago now. How could so much have happened so fast? Twenty-four hours—like Sam had said, a new wreck only released a trail of bubbles for that long. Daria, even if the boat went down, tell me you didn’t go with it! I made it in. You must have, too!

  They saw no sign of the camera, so they started back, this time peering into nooks and crannies where it might have caught. Bree berated herself that she hadn’t somehow kept the camera with her in the storm, however heavy and bulky. Using both their lights, they illumined each dark entry spot until—

  Bree jerked back. Oh, it was just one of those cow skulls, bobbing on the other side of a thick glass porthole. When they’d first dived this wreck with their father years ago, the portholes had been covered with algae, but that, too, had been done in by the lack of oxygen in what some called dead water.

  She tried to fight off the images that being this close to the wreck often triggered in her. Whenever she could, she ignored the ship’s ruins and just concentrated on the sea grass meadow. She and Ted had dived this wreck just before they’d broken up, the summer before their junior year of college. The two of them had always called this wreck the Titanic, not because of its size, but because they’d seen the movie just before they’d first dived it together.

  As bold as Bree was underwater, that movie had shaken her to her core. The scene where Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio had stood together at the top of the ship as it was sinking into the cold Atlantic had not just scared her but haunted her ever since. The first time Sam berated her for being the reason Ted enlisted and died, he’d said she’d scuttled and wrecked his son’s life. And in her nightmares about Ted’s death, he wasn’t killed by an improvised incendiary device in Iraq but was sent down to his death on a sinking ship, while—like the woman in the movie—Bree survived and lived her life. Then guilt hung heavy in her heart, until she could convince herself once again that Ted had made his own choices and that his loss—like her mother’s death—was not her fault.

  Now…now, when that nightmare stalked her, in sleep or awake, would she see Daria going down with the ship? While Bree still lived and breathed and walked and swam, would it be Daria she saw, doomed and clinging to Mermaids II while it slipped into the dreadful depths.

  Cole tapped on his tank and gestured about the skull. She tried to motion back to him that cows had been the cargo. He nodded, and they went on, swimming about five feet apart, peering as far as they could see into entries of the wreck. It didn’t take long to determine that the camera was not snagged against the upright stern, but she knew it could have settled into numerous nooks in the tipped fore parts of the ship.

  And then Bree saw it! A glint of new metal! It was lodged in a small cranny that had once been clearly marked but was now faded: Fire Ax and Hose—Break Glass. No glass now, and someone might have taken the ax head for a souvenir, but the ragged remains of an old fire hose hung there below the rotting ax handle. It looked like the plastic housing had come off the corner of the camera, but she reached for the piece of metal she could see.

  And yanked her arm back. From behind the remnants of the hose, a moray eel lunged at her, barely missing her hand. Bree backed away fast; the eel retreated partly into its lair. Her heart was thudding so hard it sounded like a bass drum was in her mask.

  Morays loved to hide in rocks, tall grass or small crevasses to wait for their prey. Frightening in appearance, they had small eyes and a protruding snout, but worse was their always-open mouth, with their powerful jaws and long, sharp teeth. Their skin was scaleless and they had thick, mucous-covered, patterned bodies so they could hide from their prey. This one looked about four feet long, dangerous and hidden…like someone who may have hurt Daria.

  Cole took her elbow and pulled her farther away. She pointed at the edge of the camera and he nodded. He swam over the moray’s lair and carefully retrieved the half-rotted wooden ax handle. With it, he hooked the edge of the camera and pulled it out. The eel lunged at the metal, then retreated once again to protect his piece of property.

  Bree was relieved until she saw that what had lodged there was the strobe lights she had released and not the camera.

  She held the strobe up and shook her head. Cole squeezed her shoulder. Is that yours? he gestured, and she nodded. Their eyes met through their masks. Bree fought back tears. She did not dare cry or the mask would be a mess. She motioned to him that if the strobe was snagged on the wreck, the camera could well be, too. He shook his head and pointed to his watch, though she saw they’d only been down twenty minutes and they had much more air. When he pointed toward the surface, she shook her head and gestured with both hands and her fingers spread: just ten more minutes to peek inside the open entryways.

  Another of the common safety sayings about diving, one her dad had stressed, popped into her head. Only fools break the rules. She was not a wreck diver and she hadn’t brought either a wreck reel or a penetration line to help find her way out once she was inside the decaying wreck, where pieces could be loose or block an exit. These lights were good for a thirty-foot dive but not for diving blind inside a wreck—another rule about taboos. Still, when she hit the button on the strobe, it flashed its nearly blinding light. That would have to do to guide her just a little way, to find the camera, which she’d let go of in the same spot she’d dropped the strobe. The risk of moray eels be damned.

  She gestured for Cole to follow and swam quickly toward the Trade Wreck with her strobe in one hand and her flashlight in the other. She did not look back. Just a short glimpse inside this corridor and then she’d quickly back out when she was sure the camera could not have been swept farther in.

  She heard not only her dad’s words this time, but his voice, too, loud over the hiss-hiss of her own breath in her ears. Only fools stretch the rules. She was a fool, then, a frenzied fool. But if Dad were here, he’d understand why she had to find the camera, find any clue to find Daria. He’d agree that the motto for now was Daria’s lost, and must be found at any cost.

  Cole was quick. Bree felt him make a grab for her ankle, but she kept kicking. She shot the strobe off repeatedly to see as she swam inside the sunken ship.

  7

  Bree was desperate to find the camera, and it was too narrow and too late to back out now. In and down she swam, headfirst into the rabbit hole of a dangerous wonderland. Everything seemed alien, even when she lit the dimness only by her single shaft of flashlight beam. Each time the blinding strobe flashed, the rust-encrusted depths of the long-sunken ship made it seem as if its metal skin was bleeding. The dizzying whirl of floating particles caught in the weird currents toyed with her equilibrium.

  In this section of the ship, the port-side wall was the floor of the wreck, so the vessel’s ceiling swirled past on her left and its floor on her right, making her feel even more disoriented. She swam over portholes that living souls had once peered out on their fateful voyage. This world—her entire world—had gone topsy-turvy. Had any of the crew’s bones been trapped here like their living cargo’s? Had something or someone sunk Mermaids II?

  Bree saw no more cattle skulls, though several strange sea creatures peered at her and a small lobster scuttled away. But there was no camera. When the corridor turned and she peered beyond to some sort of galley, she maneuvered around to go back out and was amazed to see Cole, so close that she jerked back and clunked her tank into a bulkhead.

  In the small, enclosed space, Cole seized her wrist and pulled her toward him. Out of here and up to the surface, he motioned, shining his light on his gestures. Shadows from his hands leaped across his face mask; with his beam at that sharp angle on his strong, sculpted features, he seemed to wear a fright mask. It made her think she really didn’t know this man, yet she needed him badly.

  Bree knew he was right to make her get out; she’d decided t
o leave anyway, now that she’d checked for the camera here. But, as if in protest, she accidentally hit the strobe button again. It flashed close in his face. His grip on her tightened, powerful, determined, and he took the strobe from her. Using only his flashlight beam, he gestured, Out! You first. She nodded and started out, using her light again. When they emerged into the relatively brighter water outside the Trade Wreck, she saw he had cut his wrist and was bleeding green blood, because at this depth, crimson always looked green.

  She tried to motion that she hadn’t known he was cut and hadn’t meant to flash the strobe in his face. He just jerked his thumb up again. She took the strobe from him so he could stem the blood—she could not tell how bad the cut was—and they quickly ascended with no rest stop and no more communication. They both knew what a tiny bit of blood diffused in a vast stretch of the water could mean, and they didn’t want those bull sharks back.

  Bree felt light-headed. Those sharks…could they have attacked Daria if she had fallen in or been pushed off Mermaids II? Bull sharks…the bones of bulls, the skulls of steers caught inside the Trade Wreck…Bree’s life, wrecked without Daria…Daria trapped, her life maybe ruined, sunk…gone.

  In a whoosh of foam and bubbles, they broke the surface together and swam to the skiff’s ladder. Manny hurried over to meet them. Cole surprised her by giving her a one-handed boost on her bottom. She spit out her regulator and shoved her mask up on her head. “No, you’re hurt. You first!”

  “Get up there!” he ordered, his deep voice rough. “From now on, if we dive together looking for clues, I’m the dive boss. I don’t care if you’re the better diver! You’re distraught right now, so I’m giving you a pass, but you’re not going down there again without someone else in charge and you following orders!”

  She climbed out with him right behind her. “How did you get cut?”

  “Following you into that rusted bucket of bolts!”

  “Since the strobe was there, I just had to look a littler farther in.”

  Trying to get a word in, Manny bent over them as they collapsed to sit side by side on the deck. “You find the camera?” Manny asked. “What ’bout the new anchor and chain? You find anything suspicious, any clues at all?”

  Briefly, Bree updated him as she worked on Cole’s cut with disinfectant from the first-aid kit. “I think you’ll need a few stitches. I hope you’ve had a tetanus shot,” she told him.

  “Working with hammers and nails—and a crazed female diver—I’d better.”

  “I’m sorry this happened while you were trying to help me again. I can drive you into an urgent-care clinic if you need stitches. I’d rather not face the E.R. at the hospital again right now.”

  “Yeah, it needs a couple of stitches, but I’ll take care of it. Your burned wrist and now this,” he muttered. “We’re a pair.”

  We’re a pair.

  He’d said it quietly, but she heard him clearly. She looked into his dark eyes, so close, with the bright, setting sun on the gently rocking boat. Manny still hovered, asking more questions, but none of that registered as the physical and emotional impact of the man she tended hit her hard. She barely knew Cole DeRoca, her hero and rescuer, yet he cared about her and she for him.

  We’re a pair. That was a cliché she and Daria had used more than once, but now the words meant something different. This sweeping sensation hardly resembled the bond of empathy and synergy she and Daria shared. This was raw energy and power—a fierce magnetism—something she had never felt before, even with Ted, with whom she’d once been so infatuated. This was deeper, almost dangerous. But the timing was terrible, when she had to use anything and anyone, including Cole, to find her sister.

  “I’ll ask some local divers to help search,” she said, when the silence between them turned awkward. “But if you could continue to help, I’d be so grateful. I have a supply of plastic sleeves to cover a hurt wrist.” She finished daubing the antibacterial cream on the jagged inch-long cut. Maybe it wasn’t as deep as it had looked at first. Thank God, it was on the side of his wrist and not the soft, inner skin, where he would bleed a lot harder.

  Bree jumped when Manny started the motor. She’d been so intent on Cole she hadn’t realized Manny had moved away; she’d forgotten he was even here. Looking away again, out over the gulf that held sacred secrets, Bree pressed her lips tight together. Again she longed to throw herself into Cole’s arms, but then she would explode in the hysteria she felt pressing down on her like the weight of water.

  “When Daria and I were kids,” she told him, raising her voice to be heard over the motor, “we once cut our wrists and swore a blood oath to be friends forever—very childish and very dramatic. Also stupid and dangerous, though we didn’t know that. We were only about eight. We got in all kinds of trouble for it, and Amelia told her friends we were total flakes who didn’t know you were only supposed to prick fingers.”

  Her voice broke, and she cleared her throat. She blinked back tears as she smoothed the edges of the big bandage onto his skin, tanned and flecked with crisp black hair. They were kneeling now, face-to-face, their hips and shoulders steadied against the rail by the ladder to keep from bouncing against each other as Manny headed the ship toward shore.

  “Cole, I’ll never be able to pay you back—I can’t thank you enough for everything,” she blurted, then scrambled to her feet and turned away to pick up some of her gear. Her emotions were so jumbled she was afraid she was going to burst into tears. She sat on the front seat, facing away from him, hunched over the strobe she held across her lap.

  Cole came to sit beside her as they sped back toward Turtle Bay. “When this is all over and we’ve found Daria,” he said, bending toward her so only she could hear, “we’ll think of some way you can thank me.”

  At dusk that evening, Bree sat at the table in the apartment, poring over a marine map that detailed every reef, contour and cranny offshore in this area of the gulf. As she’d promised Cole, she’d made numerous calls to diving friends for help to search the gulf underwater tomorrow. Everyone—some were even taking personal days off from work to help—was going to assemble at her shop at nine in the morning. She jolted when her doorbell rang. Probably someone else from the media, she thought.

  She almost wished she’d taken Josh and Nikki up on their loan of Mark Denton for a while. He was evidently good not only at protection but at handling press releases. Bree had given a brief statement to the man from the Naples Daily News and the Fort Myers ABC-TV reporter when they’d caught up with her earlier at the marina, but she wasn’t going to answer the doorbell if it was more of the same.

  Yet, what if there was word from the search teams—good news? Sometimes the media caught wind of things before those who should have been told first. Or what if Cole had returned? He’d said he would go have his wrist cared for, though, and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow morning, unless she wanted him to sleep on her sofa tonight. She had wanted him to, but she’d told him she was all right. Several times today, in her desperation, she had done things she shouldn’t have and she was afraid of what she might do if she could cling to Cole.

  Bree peered out the side window that looked down onto the street to see if she could spot a TV van. There stood her brother-in-law, Ben, looking up with his arms crossed over his chest. His premature silver hair and white, long-sleeved shirt folded up at the elbows seemed to glow in the dusk. As usual, his edgy, stiff body language said everything about his steely backbone. Bree waved at him and hurried down to let him in.

  She was proud he was such an upright, unbending county prosecutor, but she thought he too often brought an adversarial stance home from the office and courtroom with him. Ben was up for election in November, just like Josh, and had been bemoaning the fact there had been no high-profile cases to keep him in the public eye lately. Unlike other elected officials, he seldom paid for campaign ads—name recognition and frequent sound bites for the media seemed to be all he needed.

  No doubt Amelia
had sent him, though he’d probably be happy to lecture his maverick sister-in-law on his own.

  “You didn’t need to come all this way,” she greeted him as she let him in. “I’m hanging in. You could have called me.”

  “Your cell was busy for hours. Besides, I had to see someone nearby—actually, our casino mover and shaker, Dom Verdugo. All we need is the whiff of organized crime around him, and he’ll be on my hit list. I wanted to tell him privately to keep his nose clean. He invited me to go along on the casino boat’s first cruise to show me he’s on the up-and-up. But I wanted to see you, not only for your and Daria’s sake but Amelia’s, too.”

  He gave her a quick hug, then released her to close and lock the door behind him. “Bree, I realize you’re upset and anxious, but you really distressed your older sister by just leaving the hospital today.”

  “Come on up, then you can call her to say I’m okay,” she suggested, and motioned him toward the stairs. With a barely perceptible grimace toward the shop, he followed her.

  Ben had ditched his usual suit coat and his tie was gone for once. His leather briefcase, too. Still, he managed to look like a ritzy real estate ad from Gulf-shore Life magazine, whether he was garbed for the courthouse or his own house. He was a driven man, talented and ambitious, a crusader against breakers of the letter of the law. The more high-profile and gruesome the case, the better. It terrified Bree to think that might come in handy if they didn’t find Daria safe and sound.

  “This is exactly the kind of thing I’d warned both of you about,” he went on, sitting upright on the edge of the sofa. “Something was bound to go wrong with all the risks you take.”

  “You warned us that Daria and our newest boat might go missing in a storm sometime?” she countered sarcastically, propping her hands on her hips and still standing so as not to feel at a disadvantage to him. With Ben, she always felt she was being grilled on the witness stand, and she’d found the best defense was to be a bit offensive.