The Shark Club

by Ann Kidd Taylor

  A woman and a girl with yellow hair. They stood on top of a five-tiered cake.

  Beneath it she’d written in cramped letters:

  Mom,

  I wish we could bake cakes again. I made one with Daddy and he says I take after you. I take Grandma Van’s ballet class. I can do a leap. I miss you and cry but not like before. Daddy tells me stories and puts us in them. I live at Grandma Van’s and I learned the address. 523 Laurel Ave. Palermo Island, Florida.

  I love you.

  Hazel

  She’d linked double H’s across the bottom of the page. H~H. Hazel and Holly.

  I handed the letter to Perri. As she read, I felt tears fringe my eyes.

  Her face was somber when she handed the note back to me. I rolled the letter tight like a cigarette, popped it back into the bottle, and screwed on the cap.

  Then I threw it as far as I could.

  Twenty-one

  Spoonbills was a breezy, open-air, cabana-style restaurant with year-round Christmas lights strung around the bar and a mounted sailfish on the wall. The owner was a former running back at the University of Florida, who’d been a buddy of Russell’s. And whenever some poor fool inadvertently uttered the words Florida State, Seminoles, or Bobby Bowden, a bell was rung behind the bar. If you were unfortunate enough to say the blasphemous words, you were required to buy a round of drinks for everyone occupying a barstool. Newcomers to Spoonbills were innocently lured into the rookie mistake, but you only made it once.

  From where Daniel and I sat with Robin, I had a clear view of a bonfire that was burning out on the inlet beach. It was a welcome distraction from the discussion going on at the table about the hotel’s upcoming Book Bash, endless talk about the guest count, the band, the hors d’oeuvres, the liquor order, the staff. I turned my attention to the tiny flame on the votive at our table, the liquid wax threatening to swallow it, and then back again to the beach, where a small crowd had gathered around the fire. Orange embers spit into the air.

  Last New Year’s Eve in Bimini, there’d been a bonfire on the beach. There’d been champagne and a countdown and a few midnight kisses despite the policy forbidding workplace romance. Shortly after midnight, I’d left my colleagues around the fire and strolled back inside the community house for a glass of water. Not that I was drunk; I was tipsy, and I hoped the water would ward off the headache I feared would plague me the next day.

  From the kitchen, I noticed light flashing into the hallway from the rec room. White, blue, white. Curious, I roamed down the hall and peered into the room. It was empty except for Dr. Nicholas Ridley sprawled on the sofa, his bare feet propped on a coffee table. I’d met him only once before, the day I’d arrived, and in the week since, I’d heard others speak about his expertise and his passion. It surprised me to see him here alone in the dark watching television, its light flickering across his face.

  I wandered in, edging around the ping-pong table, drawn by the rhythmic drumming coming from the TV, or possibly by Nicholas himself, and noticed for the first time what was on the screen. Half-naked bodies with elaborate designs painted on their white faces and torsos danced hypnotically, many of them carrying torches. Lush green vines were wound around their arms and legs, the leaves curling off their fingertips. They looked wild, primeval, beautiful.

  Turning to leave, I jarred the ping-pong table, sending a ball bouncing across the floor in hollow clacks.

  “It’s the Beltane Fire Festival,” he said.

  “Oh. And what might that be exactly?”

  “The earth fertility rituals of my ancestors.”

  “So, kind of a family reunion.”

  He laughed. “Come watch. It’s a documentary on Celtic customs.”

  “There happens to be a real-life custom called New Year’s Eve happening on the beach,” I said.

  “I was out there earlier, but New Year’s Eve parties have never been my thing.”

  Leaving my glass of water on the ping-pong table, I retrieved the ball, then dropped onto the cushion next to him. “We met in the hall the other day,” I said, as if I were the most forgettable person he’d ever met.

  “I remember. You’re Maeve Donnelly and you have a nasty scar on your leg.”

  “It’s Nicholas, right?”

  “Hello, again,” he said, and I thought, I will not be one of those daffy women who swoon over British accents.

  “So what’s going on with the dancing people? Who’s she?” A tall, gorgeous woman was being escorted down a hill by women clad in flowy white dresses. Her skin was painted a ghostly white, her lips poppy red. On her head, she wore an elaborate wreath of roses and lilies, spritzed with baby’s breath.

  “That’s the May Queen.” He spoke with his arms folded and lifted one finger. “She has to find the Green Man and then summer can start.”

  “Like the Hulk?”

  “What? No,” he said, and grinned. “Green as in vital and new. See, the May Queen is the earth . . . its fertility, and in order for summer to come round she and the Green Man must . . . How shall I put this? Join together.” He clasped his hands into a big fist, which he then released and reached for the champagne bottle on the floor.

  “Here,” he said.

  To hell with the headache. I took the bottle and drank. The champagne was cool and effervesced over my tongue.

  “Maeve!” he said, as if some ingenious realization had just dawned on him. “Your name. You’re the May Queen.”

  “I’m the May Queen?”

  “Maeve is an Irish name. It means May Eve. As in the eve of May when the Beltane fire ritual takes place to mark the arrival of summer.”

  We stared at the TV, where dancers wearing antlers howled and gyrated with the drums. The spectacle was like a gathering in Narnia.

  We passed the champagne back and forth as the May Queen finally found the Green Man. Hooray—life and fertility would prevail.

  I said, “My parents went to Ireland before I was born, but I’m not sure they had any of this in mind when they named me. In fact, from what I knew of my mother, her giving me a name that had anything to do with an earth fertility ritual would have been”—I blew a dismissive puff of air from my lips—“outlandish.”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes people surprise you,” he said.

  A fire began to burn from inside the abundant arrangement of flowers on the May Queen’s head, crowning her face with light. I wasn’t sure what trick they’d used to keep her from catching on fire. My own head grew hot and all the edges in the room had turned soft. I went over to the ping-pong table and gulped down my water, then picked up a paddle.

  “You wanna play?”

  “All right,” he said, lumbering over and flipping on the overhead light.

  Up close in the brightness, I could see the dark stubble that covered his face.

  “What shall we play for?” he asked.

  “Oh, you’re that kind of guy,” I said, bouncing the ball off the table and tapping it with the paddle.

  “If you mean the betting kind, then yes.”

  “You’re not a table tennis champion, are you?” I asked.

  He laughed. “No. You?”

  “No.”

  “So we’re evenly matched. How about this?” he said. “If I win, you be my dive partner and assist me with my research for the duration of the term, and if you win, I’ll assist with yours. Fair?”

  “Deal.”

  I lost the first game 7–11 and immediately called for the best two out of three. Nicholas, amused, agreed to a second game. With the score 8–8, I tried slamming the ball, but it missed the table and soared over Nicholas’s shoulder.

  “My point,” he exclaimed. “Come on, May Queen.”

  We volleyed, him hitting the ball slow and steady and me sending it right back. The quieter I was, the more he talked.

 
“Have you done any remote underwater video surveying?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “It’s noninvasive for the sharks.”

  “I know what it is. I mean, why are you asking?” I said, and put the ball right into the net. “Oh, you’re trying to distract me.”

  “I’m not,” he said, but he couldn’t say it without laughing. “Okay. I won’t talk. Promise.”

  We played in silence for several minutes. He won the final point and the game. He laid down the paddle with fanfare, an uncontrollable smile on his face, but he didn’t say a word.

  “You can talk now,” I told him.

  “Oh thank God. But I’m not going to gloat.”

  “It’s okay. You can gloat. You beat me.”

  “No, no. I wouldn’t think of it, but we should definitely talk about you brushing up on stingrays.”

  I walked over and extended my hand. “Congratulations.”

  He took my hand. “Thank you. The stingrays thank you. I look forward to your assistance.”

  “Well, you’re lucky to have me.”

  Nicholas went on holding my hand. I expected him to continue the back and forth, the flirting. That’s what we’d been doing, wasn’t it? Sharing champagne and flirting on New Year’s Eve. But he turned quiet, studying me, and the handshake turned into something else. He pulled my hand to his chest and held it there.

  Down the hall, the screen door creaked open, then slammed. A stampede of flip-flops and hoots of laughter shattered the moment. Nicholas let go and stepped back.

  “We’ll meet after breakfast?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “Look, I’m happy to have your help, but not at the expense of your work. Honestly, that would take all the fun out it.”

  “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  For the next six months, I saw Nicholas every day. We turned out to be remarkably compatible dive partners, taking equal turns assisting one another’s research. We didn’t speak again about New Year’s Eve. Not the May Queen, or ping-pong, or the protracted, wordless moment with my hand in his. We filed it away, surrendering to the policy on workplace romance. At least until that last night on the beach.

  A breeze swept through Spoonbills, rippling the strands of colored lights, giving me the sense of unloosed fireflies. I glanced out to where the bonfire still blazed on the beach. Robin’s and Daniel’s voices had become indistinguishable murmurs.

  Robin nudged my hand with his beer bottle. “I can’t believe you’re going to Africa,” he said. “Where is Mozambique anyway?”

  “The east coast, near South Africa,” I said.

  Daniel’s face tightened. “All I know is, it’s a long way away.”

  There was an unmistakable edge to his words. What had he said in my office? There are lots of sharks in Florida. I resisted a retort.

  He pushed back from the table. “I’m getting another beer. Anybody want one?”

  “What was that all about?” Robin asked when he’d left.

  “He’s not totally on board with me leaving.”

  “I guess you can’t blame him. You’re finally back together after all this time and suddenly you’re moving to Africa for four months.”

  “I know. The timing sucks. I get it.”

  “You know Daniel,” Robin said. “He’s an all-or-nothing kind of guy.”

  “Yeah, but it would be nice if he didn’t make me feel bad for wanting to pursue my own life.”

  Robin offered me a neutral shrug and shoveled a glob of guacamole out of the bowl with a chip.

  After I’d broken our engagement, it had seemed possible to me that my going off to Fiji right before our wedding had hit a little too close to home for Daniel—maybe there’d been a semblance in it of his father leaving him. During those first terrible months after his dad left, Daniel used to call his mom at the hotel to be sure that she was still at work, that, while he was in school, she hadn’t disappeared on him, too. It used to kill me. When people leave, they don’t always come back, he’d told me once.

  His father had left him. Then I’d left him. As irrational as it sounded I had to figure out how to make him understand that my research trips weren’t the same thing as his father’s abandonment or our broken engagement. I had to figure out how to make him understand Mozambique wasn’t Fiji all over again.

  I reached for my Sierra Nevada, thinking of Hazel. I dreaded telling her I would be leaving. It was as if some unlived part of me had awakened during these past weeks. I was just now realizing that my world felt more complete with Hazel in it. I was going to miss her.

  At the bar, Daniel was talking with a woman. “Who’s that?”

  Robin turned, craning, and his face sort of lit up. “That’s Mindy. She teaches at Van’s studio.”

  “She’s a dance teacher?”

  “Yeah. She used to be Cinderella at Disney World.”

  “You’re joking,” I said, looking back at her. Cinderella had risen onto her toes and was poised there effortlessly like a long and slender calla lily. She was wearing turquoise flats.

  My mind drifted back to Rachel Gregory and the summer fling that had left Robin in such disarray. For months, he’d refused to give up on her, unable to believe all those declarations of love she’d made were anything other than genuine. I’d sat with him late into the nights during that awful time, listening to his desperate attempts to convince himself it wasn’t over. I had to repeatedly talk him out of getting on a plane and flying to Vermont. Instead, he besieged her with unanswered phone calls and e-mails. The last of his denial had been shattered when Rachel’s husband sent him a letter through an attorney ordering him to cease and desist.

  After that, embarrassed and defeated, he turned back to his work at the hotel, started his novel, and seemed to carry on, but a faint aura of darkness lingered about him, as if he’d decided life would inevitably be his enemy; it would fight him tooth and nail, and this knowledge only seemed to make him cockier and more impulsive, determined to get the outcome he wanted.

  I thought of his decision to leave the hotel and strike out on his own. Perri had been a champ about it. I suspected, like me, she might have had her concerns, but she’d given him her blessing and begun advertising for a new manager.

  Turning back to Robin, I saw him watching Mindy. How different she looked from Rachel, all light and lithe, while Rachel was small and brunette. Had Robin and Mindy’s been a seismic meeting, too?

  “She’s lovely,” I told Robin.

  “I asked her here,” he said.

  When Daniel returned to the table, she lingered at the bar.

  “You know about Robin and Cinderella?” I asked Daniel. “They’re a thing.”

  Daniel looked across the table at Robin. “I introduced them. I thought they’d hit it off.”

  “Well, she left her shoes in his bedroom, so yeah, I’d say they hit it off.” I elbowed Robin. “Well, are you dating or what?”

  “Yeah, we’re kind of dating,” he said. “Come meet her.”

  “Robin tells me you’ve been in Bimini,” Mindy said after we’d been introduced. She lifted herself onto her toes again. A dancer’s natural inclination, I guessed.

  “Maeve is the best shark expert in the world,” Daniel said, placing his hand at the small of my back. I felt like he was trying to make up for his earlier comment, and I took a side step closer to him.

  Robin joked, “Yeah, as we all know, Maeve got all the IQ points and I got all the charm.”

  “I understand you teach at Van’s studio,” I said to Mindy. “Hazel must be one of your students then.”

  “Hazel is a little doll. One of my best students. Gets her talent from her grandmother. Van’s a natural. Such a gift to Palermo. To have an instructor like her on the island . . .”

  She talked on and on in short staccato phrases, t
railing her arms gracefully through the air as if to counteract it. I tried to picture her with her blond hair pulled up, wearing a blue dress and a black velvet ribbon around her throat, having her photo made with little Disney princess girls. After the devastation of Rachel, I hoped Mindy was helping Robin piece himself back together.

  Spying Marco in a booth across the restaurant, I asked to be excused for a moment and hurried over, winding through the maze of tables. He was leaning forward, elbows plunged onto the tabletop, fingers clasped, engaged in what appeared to be an intense exchange with his friend Troy. The conversation that Marco and I’d had about the shark finning the day I’d returned from Bimini came back to me. Troy knew the guy who’d been caught with the fins laid out on tarps in his backyard.

  I slowed for a second, an odd little wave of unease passing over me, and then I dismissed it.

  “Oh! Maeve,” Marco said, looking startled. “I didn’t see you.”

  “I don’t want to interrupt.” Then, looking at Troy, I said, “It’s been a while. I’m Maeve.”

  “Of course. Maeve. Long time, no see.” He was fiftyish, in need of a shave, wearing a cap that said GOOD TIMES CHARTER. The skin around his eyes and temples bore the outline of his sunglasses.

  Sliding over, Marco offered me a seat, and I scooted in beside him. “Troy was just reliving his greatest catch,” he said. “A twenty-pound snook. It’s not true, but it’s a good story.”

  “All my stories are true,” Troy said. “You just need another beer.”

  We made silly small talk for a few moments, until I abruptly changed the subject.

  “I understand you know the person who was caught with the shark fins,” I said to Troy.

  His eyes shot toward Marco, then back at me. “Well, not personally, but I know people who do. From what I understand, he claims he was paid to just store the fins, that he didn’t have anything to do with the finning.”

  “He still hasn’t given up the people who hired him?” I asked.

  “No, and I doubt he will. If he talks and makes a deal, I doubt these people would look kindly on him. He probably figures he’s better off with a hefty fine and his skull intact.”