The Shark Club

by Ann Kidd Taylor

  “You don’t think he’ll go to jail?” I asked.

  “There was a case in the Panhandle about a year ago—you remember this, Marco. A guy confessed to cutting off the fins and throwing the sharks overboard. Cops found the fins on his boat, and even then he got off with no jail and a fine of eighteen thousand dollars. All this guy on Bonnethead did was rent the finners some storage space.”

  I tried to ignore the way he’d trivialized the man’s part in it. I looked at Marco. He was so quiet.

  “You don’t have any idea who these finners could be, then?” I asked Troy, and there was that foreboding feeling again.

  “No, and to be honest with you, I don’t want to know. It takes a special kind of mean to cut the fin off a live shark, let alone a hundred of them.”

  Troy and Marco turned their attention to the Red Sox highlights on the TV above the bar, and I told them good night.

  I started toward the booth where Mindy sat with Robin and Daniel, and then did an about-face, wandering out of the bar onto the beach for a gulp of air. I was being silly about Troy. Marco would never hang out with him if there was a reason to be suspicious.

  I took off my sandals and meandered down to the inlet, where the bonfire, deserted now, burned orange and lonely near the water. Standing beside it, I reflexively held out my palms, even though the temperature was at least 80 degrees. The tide rippled peacefully, its cadence sounding as if it were programmed by a machine in a chic waiting room. Behind me Spoonbills was a box of light. Laughter and voices spilled out.

  Alone, staring into the fire, I felt an urge to leap over it the way the Beltane festival dancers had done. I don’t know why I wanted to do something so crazy, so completely unlike me, but the desire was accompanied by the feeling that if I didn’t, something would be lost to me. Something wild and free and mine.

  The flames were at least knee high. I backed up to get a running start, glancing at the small group of people farther up the beach, the earlier bonfire crowd. The bell clanged inside Spoonbills, followed by an explosion of laughter, and I knew some Florida State fan was paying dearly.

  The photograph of Holly in the apple-red scarf flashed into my head, and my mind was suddenly a blaze of thoughts. Daniel. Mozambique. Key lime pie. Hazel. Shark badges. Shark fins. Nicholas. Baby stone crabs.

  I started to run. My feet pounded the sand. At the edge of the fire I jumped. Heat licked at my feet before I landed, skidding, falling backward a little toward the flames before regaining my balance. The thrill of it took my breath.

  I waded into the surf and let the water wash over my feet. I thought of the quiet moment with Nicholas on New Year’s Eve. Was he home from England?

  As I walked back to Spoonbills, I glanced over my shoulder at the tendril of yellow-orange light and a small happiness rose in my chest and levitated there.

  Twenty-two

  After work on Monday, I took Hazel to the library for Shark Club. We were in search of shark books.

  A larger-than-life sea turtle sculpture sat out front, its shell painted a patchwork of hallucinogenic colors. It looked as if it belonged at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Naturally Hazel couldn’t resist climbing onto its back. She straddled the turtle in blue jean shorts, her pale hair lit gold with sunlight. I was feeling what I imagined to be parental pride at being the one to get Hazel a library card.

  At the desk, I asked for an application and a man handed me a clipboard and said, “Fill this out. Your daughter can print her name at the bottom.”

  “May we borrow a pen?” I asked, letting his mistake go uncorrected, and Hazel and I exchanged a conspiratorial look.

  She took a mango from a bowlful marked FREE.

  “You like mangoes?” I asked.

  She sniffed it, rolled it between her hands, cupped it under her chin. “I like them. Just not to eat.”

  I knew where to find the shark books. When I was a child, Perri took Robin and me to the library regularly, giving us each a canvas bag to stuff with books. I’d brought a bag for Hazel, and she dropped in the mango and swung the bag excitedly as if it were an Easter basket and the juvenile book section held a field of dyed eggs.

  I said, “Maybe one day your shark cartoons will be in here. The Adventures of Sir Fin.”

  “And Rosie, too,” she added.

  The science shelves held a shark goldmine. Whole series on great whites, tigers, bulls, whale sharks, makos, grey reef, silvertips. Hazel plucked several books and slid them into the bag.

  “My tooth is from a lemon,” she said, slinging her thumb under her necklace. “Do they have a lemon book?”

  I found it, finally, misplaced in the Snake section.

  After exhausting the children’s books, we headed to the adult stacks, the Oceans collection, where we located the shark books on the bottom shelf. Plopping onto the floor, I ticked my finger over the spines, the smell of dust, and old paper, and my childhood welling up. “I checked out some of these when I was kid,” I said, engulfed with nostalgia, with the memory of exploring something I wanted to give myself over to, that strange allure and rapture.

  “Are there pictures?” she asked.

  “In some of them.”

  “Are they in color?”

  We cracked open every book in search of pictures. If she liked the look of them, we shoved the book into her bag. She was especially thrilled by Sharks of the World, with its full-page color plates. She flipped out when she saw a goblin shark, its great big mouth open like a train tunnel, and when she came upon a shark spotted like a leopard, she looked up me and said, “I didn’t see that coming.”

  “Let’s find a table,” I told her, grabbing Sharks of the South Pacific for myself.

  We spread the books out on a table near the magazines, away from the senior citizen computer class. I opened Sharks of the South Pacific and Hazel studied the illustrations, uttering soft little exclamations. The photographs Nicholas took of me with Sylvia—she would love to see those. I skimmed the pages, lingering over a chapter titled “Shark Ancestors.” I read Hazel a fantastical story about people in the Tuamotu atolls who believed their deceased loved ones took the form of the shark god Taputapua and visited them, swimming up into lagoons where the family members waded.

  Hazel’s eyes widened. “You mean their grandmother or their mom or somebody died and then came back to see them as a shark?”

  I nodded. “And listen to this. In Kontu, shark callers use rattles to lure sharks to their canoes.”

  “Shark callers? We could do that,” Hazel said.

  “Call sharks?”

  “Could we?”

  I paused. “Well, we’d need rattles. We could make our own out of coconuts. We should go to Jolly’s.”

  Jolly’s flashy neon sign, not to mention the ticky-tacky store itself, was an eyesore for residents, but we understood that tourists shelled out exorbitant amounts of money for trinkets and junk, which helped our small island economy, and we tolerated it. The store carried everything. Rafts, shot glasses, alligator heads, wooden wind chimes, live hermit crabs, boogie boards, culturally outdated towels printed with “I’m Sexy and I Know It.” And coconuts. There were coconut halves turned into thumb pianos. Coconut birdhouses. Coconuts outfitted to send through the mail.

  Reading further to myself, I discovered that while the sharks were revered among the people of Kontu, once they’d been lured to the canoe by the callers, the sharks would be pulled on board, bludgeoned, and speared, then eaten. I decided against telling Hazel this part. She was six. She had a Shark Club motto in her head: If I catch one, I will let it go. It would be hard for her to reconcile her love of sharks with killing them, even among a culture that considered them sacred. I could hardly reconcile it myself.

  I looked up from my book to find Hazel staring at me like I was one of the shiny, preposterous hammerheads in her books.

  “
Are you going to be my new mom?” she asked, her fingers gripping the lip of the table.

  “What? Oh . . . Well, you know . . . I don’t . . .”

  I should have corrected the man at the desk earlier who’d mistaken me for Hazel’s mother. I’d reveled a little too much in that.

  Seconds passed. Hazel’s eyes widened as she waited. Given the librarian’s mistake, she’d asked a logical question, and I was, after all, dating her father. Overhead, the fluorescent light sizzled.

  “I don’t know how to answer that,” I said. “You know, I don’t think anyone could take your mom’s place.”

  I thought I’d satisfied her.

  “But you could be my mom,” she said.

  As much as I wanted to say what was sensible and true and right for her ears, I had nothing. Daniel and I hadn’t talked about marriage—it seemed too soon for that. But hadn’t we both assumed that’s where it was going? Picking up where we left off?

  “My dad said he loves you. He told me.”

  I smiled at her. “Well, I know he loves you very much.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “I’ve loved your dad for a long time.”

  She dropped her hands in her lap. “How long?”

  “Try since I was seven.”

  “I’ll be seven next year.”

  “I know, and if we sit here any longer you just might turn seven. Come on. Let’s go to Jolly’s and buy some coconuts. I think I know how we can turn them into rattles.”

  At the car, I turned on the air conditioner, letting the air cool down before helping Hazel with her seat belt. My hair fell into her face and she blew at it, and I noticed a speck of dried toothpaste in the corner of her mouth and the peach fuzz on her cheeks. Did I love Daniel? It was like asking if water was wet. I’d always loved him. Even when I hated him, I loved him. There would be no regrets this time.

  I looked at her in the rearview mirror. If she asked me now to go to Disney World, I would say yes. If she knew about Mozambique and asked me to stay, right now I would. Was this what motherhood was like?

  Twenty-three

  The next morning, July 25, I drove to work unusually early, the sun just beginning to lift its head into the thin, dark sky. At the Conservancy, I made a pot of coffee in the “kitchen cubby,” so called because it was the size of a broom closet, barely accommodating a mini fridge and a Mr. Coffee, then took my mug to my office, where I left off the lights and opened the blinds, flooding the room with light.

  Doves had convened in the flame trees, cooing loudly enough to be heard through the closed windows. Any minute the pileated woodpecker would begin its morning drilling on the side of the building, a jackhammer to the skull that necessitated earplugs, or iPods, or Zen calisthenics.

  I lingered there, sipping my coffee, thinking about Nicholas. Finally, I went to the computer. I typed:

  Nicholas,

  Are you home?

  May Queen

  I reread it. Please. I had no business being May Queen. It was flirtatious and misleading. I deleted it, typed Maeve, and clicked the send button.

  I got busy scanning Nicholas’s photographs of me and Sylvia to include in the PowerPoint presentation on lemons that I’d promised Russell. Each photo was becoming as familiar to me as my own reflection. I held the close-up he’d taken of my eyes behind the mask. They spoke of everything at once: elation, grief at saying good-bye, the belonging I felt in the water. Bimini had been my grandest adventure yet. I didn’t see how I could give up Mozambique. I didn’t want to leave Daniel and Hazel, but I’d be back and our lives would go on together just as they were now.

  I heard Russell’s flip-flops thudding along the hall, and a couple of seconds later, he rounded the doorway, looking perturbed and breathless, and Russell never looked perturbed and breathless. “A dead shark has washed up on Teawater Key,” he said. “It was finned.”

  I stared at him for a moment, caught in that initial stupefying space where I heard words, but they didn’t register. Then came the hard kick of adrenaline.

  “A contact of mine in the Sheriff’s Office called,” he was saying. “They sent someone out there from the Marine Bureau, and Fish and Wildlife is headed there, too.”

  I grabbed my bag and the keys to the Conservancy pickup and the boat we kept docked on a lift at Palermo Marina. Teawater Key was just south of Palermo, one of the more popular uninhabited islands that made up the Ten Thousand Islands, attracting picnickers and shell seekers.

  “I’m on my way!” I said. “What kind of shark was it?”

  “He didn’t specify.” He paused, looking as if he wanted to say more.

  “What?”

  “If a finned shark has washed up, we both know there are fifty more of them that haven’t. Just find out what you can. And be careful. Assholes that commit crimes against marine life will commit them against people, too.”

  I made the twenty-minute drive to the marina in twelve. The parking lot was a logjam of trucks—local, die-hard fishermen backing their boats down to the water. Unable to get through the maze of traffic, I parked on the grass near the road and jogged to the dock. Maneuvering the skiff out of the slip, I eased it toward open water and hit the throttle.

  The last time I’d dealt with a dead shark had been two years before, when a bull had washed up on the public beach with monofilament line wrapped around its head and gills. It had slowly starved from not being able to open its mouth. A washed-up shark is a rarity—usually a dead shark sank—but if the shark died in the shallows or near mangrove isles, if the waves and currents were just right, it might land on shore.

  As Teawater came into view, I made out four or five anchored boats and a cluster of people congregated on a tiny strip of beach. Coasting in, I tossed a rope over and jumped off the bow, my feet splashing into ankle-deep water. Recognizing the Conservancy logo on the boat, the Fish and Wildlife guy came over and helped me to glide it up onto the sand.

  “Jack Dodd,” he said, introducing himself. He was a fit fiftysomething, his short sleeves fitted snugly around his biceps.

  “I’m Dr. Donnelly,” I said.

  I strode toward the knot of people on the beach, which circled what I presumed to be the dead shark. Most were clad in bathing suits, having boated over for amusement and stumbled into a crime drama.

  Two years ago, I’d been given the task of disposing of the dead bull. The protocol was to return a washed-up shark to its environment, moving it far enough offshore that it wouldn’t wash back. I’d towed it behind the skiff into open water, where I’d removed the tether line and watched it sink slowly like a small, shiny submarine. I’d been struck by the size and power of the creature, the magnificence of it, the horror and banality of its death, and I’d said a prayer under my breath.

  Up ahead, a young woman wearing a tan uniform, a pony tail, and a camera strapped over her shoulder was attempting to move the crowd and cordon off the shark with yellow tape.

  Officer Dodd trotted by me. “Okay, folks, let’s get moving,” he told the curiosity seekers.

  As they dispersed, I had a sudden clear view of the maimed shark. It jolted me—the carcass hulked there, its six-foot body wreathed in sand flies, its eye frozen into a hard black marble. I’d never seen a finned shark, not a real one, and the sight of it, the violence and atrocity of what had been done to it, punched the breath out of me. It was a lemon.

  I dropped down beside it. There was a vicious white gash where the dorsal fin used to be and her tail was missing. The wounds had been cleaned by the saltwater and nibbled at by crabs and gulls. I rested my hands on her round belly.

  “She’s pregnant,” I said, looking up at the uniformed woman who’d paused beside me, the caution tape spooling onto the sand. I judged the shark to be at the end of a gestation that had probably lasted a year.

  “Sergeant Alvarez,” she said. “
I’m with the Sheriff’s Marine Bureau.”

  “Dr. Maeve Donnelly,” I responded, hearing the slight tremble in my voice.

  I swallowed, forcing back tears, fighting to remain professional, unruffled, but even then wondering why professional had become synonymous with dispassionate. I didn’t know how to be dispassionate about sharks, about the ocean, about the things people did to them.

  “Maeve?”

  I sucked in my breath. The unmistakable accent. A hand floated to my shoulder, and Nicholas crouched next to me in the sand. The sight of him demolished the last scraps of self-control I had. My eyes welled up.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, getting to my feet, trying my best to stay composed.

  He glanced at the sergeant, who wore an expression of polite confusion. “Gina . . . Sergeant Alvarez called our lab this morning to let us know a finned shark had washed up,” Nicholas explained. “She’s good about alerting us when there’s an incident. She consulted with us a few years ago on that documentary we did—”

  “Crimes Against Marine Life,” Alvarez volunteered.

  “Anyway, I offered to drive down,” Nicholas said. “I thought you might be here.”

  “When did you get back from England?” I asked.

  “Just last night.”

  “God, you must be jet lagged.”

  “I’m awake now.”

  “Excuse me,” the sergeant said, and Nicholas and I stepped aside as she finished roping off the area and began photographing the shark from various angles. She had an aloof way about her. A kind of indifference to what she was photographing that put me off.

  “This has to be connected to the hundred shark fins that were found on Bonnethead Key last month,” I said, shadowing her. My eruption of sadness had worn off, thank God, but had been replaced with a molten lump of anger in my stomach. “You must have some leads.”

  “It could be a local operation,” Alvarez said. “There were similar cases in Pensacola and the Keys where local fishermen were providing fins to traffickers.” She worked as she talked, snapping pictures and making notes. “The fin trade is a highly lucrative practice. Without a doubt those fins on Bonnethead were meant for the black market.”