The Shark Club

by Ann Kidd Taylor

  “Based on the amount of putrefaction, I’m guessing this shark has been dead only around a week,” I said. “Whoever is doing this could still be in the area.”

  Alvarez lifted her eyebrows and made a notation. “You would think after the guy who was storing the fins was arrested they would’ve shut the whole thing down, but apparently there’s no accounting for greed. They’re nearly impossible to catch and they know it. Our patrols haven’t seen anything suspicious, no illegal commercial outfits on the water. I hate to say it, but the odds aren’t good. We just don’t have any real evidence.”

  The decaying smell of the shark clogged my nose. I forced myself to look at it again. I remembered the shark killing rampage that had gone on right after I was bitten. Those gruesome photographs in the Palermo Times.

  We just don’t have any real evidence.

  “For God’s sake, you have a hundred shark fins and this dismembered shark right in front of you,” I said, my voice rising. “If that’s not evidence, what is?”

  She lowered her camera and turned to me. “Yes, the fins are evidence, the shark is evidence. What I meant to say is that they lead nowhere. We have no one to connect them to. Look, to get real evidence we would have to patrol thousands of nautical miles and board hundreds of boats. We don’t have those kinds of resources. It’s almost impossible. And it would help if the guy who was paid to store the fins would talk. If we can’t catch these people in the act, then what we need, Dr. Donnelly, is to find the fins on board a boat, a boat we can trace back to someone.”

  Listening to this I felt frustrated and discouraged, indignant that she sounded so procedural about it. They would never catch these people. The sergeant didn’t seem to believe they even had a chance of catching them. The black market would go on killing the sharks I’d tagged and named and weighed and studied. I’d given my life to sharks and people were killing them faster than they could reproduce. It was pretty clear at this rate most species would be extinct in a matter of decades.

  I pointed at the lemon, my finger shaking a little, my anger starting to spill over. “This shark was fished out of the water, Sergeant Alvarez. Her fin was sliced off, then her tail, and all the while, she was alive. She was thrown overboard where she drowned and bled to death. And who knows how many pups she’s carrying.”

  Alvarez stared at me in that insufferably cool way she had. “I know how sharks are finned.”

  I should have reeled it in right then, but I couldn’t help myself. I shouted, “There are probably hundreds of more sharks in the Gulf getting slaughtered but people don’t give a shit unless it’s a whale. Save the whales. We all love whales; I love whales. But humans are torturing sharks for profit and pleasure. For shark fin soup. But who cares? It’s just a shark.”

  “Maeve,” Nicholas said. He faced me, putting his hands around my elbows, locking his eyes onto mine. “Maeve.”

  He turned to Alvarez. “When you’re finished, we’ll take the shark and dispose of it. Unless you need to keep it as evidence.”

  Ignoring me, she said, “I don’t need the body. The photographs are sufficient. You can take it. Just make sure you dump it well offshore.”

  Nicholas steered me back along the beach. “Do you have anything in your boat we can wrap the shark in?”

  “There’s an old plastic tarp.”

  We sat in the boat, waiting for Alvarez and Dodd to leave. My anger had dissolved now, and I was feeling embarrassed by my outburst.

  “You were quite something back there,” he said, smiling at me. “I think Gina wanted to Taser you.”

  As Alvarez and Dodd departed in separate boats, Nicholas and I spread the blue plastic onto the sand and rolled the lemon onto the center of it. Each taking an end, we half carried, half dragged her to the boat, where we laid her in the hull.

  “You want me to drive?” he asked, and I realized how tired I felt. I took the passenger seat beside the wheel and gave him the keys.

  He drove slowly at first, slowly enough to miss a sea turtle that surfaced in front of the bow. Its shell was heavily barnacled—there was no telling how old it was.

  “If you’d hit that turtle, it would’ve done me in.”

  “What, you’re not done in already?” His hand left the wheel and rested on top of mine. Selfishly, I let it stay there, wanting the weight and heat of his palm, the nearness of him.

  “We have a lot to talk about, but let’s save it for a better time,” I said. The Daniel confession. I breathed in, feeling the twist of dread. I wasn’t ready for that. Would I ever be ready? “I’m glad you’re here,” I told him.

  “Me, too.”

  When we were far enough from shore, Nicholas killed the engine and dropped anchor. I looked over the side of the boat, into the distance. “The shark was probably headed to the estuaries to have her pups when she was caught,” I said.

  “I thought you’d want to be the one to put her back in the Gulf,” he said. “Are you sure you’re okay to do this?”

  I didn’t blame him for asking. I’d had a small meltdown or what I would hereafter try to think of as an outbreak of righteous indignation. Of course he worried that putting this finned, pregnant lemon back into the food chain would upset me.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I lost it a little back there, but I’m okay.”

  As the skiff bobbled on the water, we stood on either side of the shark, preparing to hoist it up.

  “Let’s get this over with,” he said.

  He stood there holding his side of the tarp, but I couldn’t move.

  “Second thoughts?” he asked.

  “Are we sure there’s no reason to keep her?”

  “Keep her? Seriously?” He let go of the plastic. “We don’t need to do a necropsy, Maeve. We know why she died. And Alvarez said she didn’t need the body to make a case.”

  “I know it’s crazy.” Still, I didn’t reach for the tarp. I went on standing there, looking at him, wanting to make sense of my reluctance. I said, “I don’t know—maybe we should do the necropsy anyway. We might learn something. There must be something to be gained by keeping her. Maybe we could . . .”

  “Could what?” he said.

  And there it was suddenly, the idea I was fumbling for. “Maybe we could use her in some way. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a finned shark is worth a thousand pictures.”

  Twenty-four

  Inside the lab at the Conservancy, I extracted the shark pups from the lemon. Slicing open the yolk sac, I found six of them between ten and twelve inches long. As suspected, she’d been full term. One by one, I cut the placental cords, thin as yarn, and handed the pups’ silvery gray bodies to Nicholas, who injected them with concentrated formaldehyde. We tied identifying labels through their gill slits and carefully slid them into individual jars of dilute formalin. We were gowned, masked, gloved, our eyes walled behind safety glasses, and still the toxic fumes stung my corneas and nostrils. Tears began to leak onto my cheeks.

  “Sadness or formaldehyde?” Nicholas said, screwing on the last lid.

  “Both,” I told him.

  As we wrapped the lemon in a blanket, I vowed to call every media outlet I could think of to come see the finned shark for themselves.

  I glanced at the wall clock. Three twenty. “We need to get this shark into a freezer, and we have to rush if we’re going to make it during the lull between lunch and dinner.”

  “Wait—we’re putting it in a food freezer?”

  “At the hotel. The kitchen has two big walk-ins.”

  He shook his head, more in disbelief, it seemed, than opposition, and thankfully did not argue, and it struck me how patient and tolerant he’d been through the whole ordeal. A real ally. It felt familiar seeing his brown-green eyes behind goggles. We’d logged so many timeless hours underwater together, in sync with a world we both reverenced. A professor had told m
e once not to name the sharks I studied, that it would personalize them and muddy my objectivity. I named them anyway, the way Nicholas had named his rays. Both of us were after more than just probing and measuring sea creatures; we sensed our kinship with them.

  For a moment, I hoped he was still going to Mozambique.

  We loaded the shark onto the back of the pickup and drove to the hotel, parking in the back where the food trucks made deliveries. I glanced at my watch, hoping the kitchen would be clear. About now Daniel would be holding a kitchen staff meeting in the dining room to go over the menu.

  We found the delivery door locked, and I was forced to call Robin to come open it.

  “What are you doing in the delivery zone?” he asked.

  “Just hurry, okay?”

  A few interminable minutes later, he found Nicholas and me on the landing by the door with a mysterious six-foot bulk concealed inside a blanket.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “I need to get this into the freezer,” I said.

  “Jesus, you didn’t kill anybody, did you?” he said, and laughed. “What’s my sister gotten into?”

  “It’s a shark,” I said. “I need to store it for a while.”

  “A shark. You have a shark. Are you crazy? I can’t have that in the freezer with the food.”

  “There’re dead fish in there already. What’s the difference?”

  Nicholas suppressed a laugh, and Robin turned to him. “I’m Robin, Maeve’s twin—the older one, the one who’s usually causing the trouble.”

  “Nicholas Ridley.” Nicholas shook his hand. “We’re just looking to store it for a day. Two days max.”

  “It’s been finned,” I added.

  “Well, why do you have it?” Robin asked.

  What reason did I have that would make any sense to him? It barely made sense to me. What was I doing? Buying time until I could scare up a TV crew from Naples or Fort Myers to come tromp through the kitchen and whip up public opinion against shark finning? The shark’s body was proof of a reprehensible act, maybe not enough to convict someone in a court of law, but surely in people’s minds. Even if a person hated sharks, like Robin had as a kid, encountering a finned shark in the flesh was still a visceral, wrench-in-the-gut kind of thing. I couldn’t dispose of the shark without trying to attract public attention to what was happening right under our noses.

  Robin didn’t wait for me to postulate an answer. He said, “Look, Maeve, I don’t know what’s going on, but we aren’t putting a dead shark in the freezer.”

  He’d dug in.

  “I’m sure you can understand,” Nicholas said. “It’s been a long day. We were out on Teawater this morning with the authorities and we’ve spent the last few hours doing a postmortem and removing six of her pups. I don’t think either Maeve or I am up to taking the boat out again today and dropping the shark into the Gulf. What do you say, mate? Give us a break?”

  “Robin, you owe me,” I said. I gave him a pointed look and he knew exactly what I meant.

  He exhaled and unlocked the door. Peering inside, he said, “I don’t know how we’re going to explain this to Daniel.”

  “Let me handle that,” I said.

  Nicholas and I hoisted the shark through the doorway. Holding on to the ends of the blanket, we lugged the shark through the empty kitchen, past Daniel’s office, the sinks, the salamander grill, the sanitized stainless steel tables, all the way to the back where the freezers were located.

  We set her down, and I scoped out both freezers for a place to deposit her. “There’s not a lot of room in either one of them,” I said. “We’ll have to put her on the floor toward the back.”

  “Put what in the back?” Daniel said, strolling up, his fingers in his jeans pockets, followed by several of his staff. “What’s going on?” His eyes darted from me to Robin, then down to the blanket before settling on Nicholas.

  Robin, who’d been holding open the freezer door, let it fall shut and I felt a gust of icy air sweep across the back of my calves. We all seemed to have gone mute.

  Daniel asked again. “Anyone going to tell me what’s going on?” He smiled, but I heard the edge in his voice, thin as a razor.

  I said, “I know this is crazy, but hear me out, okay? I’m putting a shark in your freezer. Just for a day or so.”

  He looked at the ceiling incredulously. “You’re joking.”

  He listened without interrupting while I explained about the finned shark, how bogged down the investigation had been, and my hope to spark publicity for it, perhaps even cause someone to come forward, or at the very least to raise public awareness.

  Even to my own ears I sounded like a person hanging on to the most meager of hopes.

  “You do realize that having a decomposing shark here probably violates about a hundred different health codes. It’s not like the fresh fish that arrive on ice. This thing has been lying in the sun rotting on a beach. If an inspector walked in right now I could be shut down.”

  “But how likely is that?” I said. “Can’t you just go with me on this?”

  How was it that Nicholas had gotten on board so easily even though he doubted I would get the kind of media attention I wanted? He saw how important it was to me and overrode his reservations. Why couldn’t Daniel do that, too? But then, I was probably being selfish. Nicholas didn’t have a kitchen to protect.

  Daniel looked at Robin. “You’re on board with her plan?”

  “I’m decidedly not, but I’m going along with it anyway,” Robin told him.

  Daniel tugged me a few yards over toward the pantry and whispered, “Dead shark aside, I don’t understand how he got involved.”

  I could see why he wanted an explanation, but the undercurrent of suspicion pissed me off. Please, don’t do this now. “Someone from the Sheriff’s Marine Bureau called Nicholas’s lab. He came to help.”

  “Yeah, I bet he did.”

  Nicholas, who’d been quietly standing in the background, cleared his throat, making me wonder if he’d overheard. It was the first time I noticed how dirty he was, how dirty both of us were. Our shorts and shirts were smeared with God knows what sort of muck. Sweat had dried on my skin, turning my whole body to flypaper. I watched as Nicholas wiped his forehead.

  At that moment, Hazel trailed in with several of Daniel’s staff. She was wearing a scuba mask.

  “Maeve!” she cried, running over to me, slowing when she saw the large hump inside the blanket. “What’s that?”

  With her nose inside the mask, her voice came out muffled, like she had a bad cold. As she talked, the mask fogged and her eyes vanished behind the mist.

  Daniel said, “If the staff would head back out into the dining hall—thank you.”

  As they filed out, glancing over their shoulders, Hazel pulled the mask over her head, taking care not to snag her hair.

  “What was the mask for?” I asked.

  “Onions,” she said. The fish smell hit her then and she pinched her nose. “What’s that, a fish?”

  I looked at Daniel before answering. “It’s a shark. It was hurt very badly.”

  “Is it dead?”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “What happened to it?”

  Again, I threw Daniel a glance and he gave me a small nod. “There are some people out there who cut the fins off sharks so they can sell them. That’s what happened to this one.”

  “Oh.” She blinked and crossed her arms. “Can I see it?”

  “Please don’t unwrap it here,” Daniel said.

  “But I’ve never seen one up close before,” she said. “Please, Dad.”

  “This really is . . . unbelievable,” Daniel said. “Okay, just a peek.”

  Hazel and I knelt beside the shark. She took a breath and seemed to be gathering up her courage. I peeled back the blanket.
Hazel’s eyes swept over the shark’s body. She brushed her finger across the skin above its snout.

  “It feels rough,” she said. “And smooth, too.”

  As I tucked the blanket back around the shark, Hazel noticed Nicholas and gave him a bashful wave. “I saw you in the grocery store that time,” she said. “You know all about rays.”

  “And you’re the founder of the Shark Club, as I recall.”

  “Put it in the freezer,” Daniel said. “But really, you need to get it out of here tomorrow.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Robin and Nicholas moved the shark into the freezer and laid it on the floor.

  Hazel rubbed her thumb across her index finger where she’d touched the shark. “What’s going to happen to it?”

  “Tomorrow I’ll take it out on the boat and put it into the Gulf,” I told her.

  “Will there be a funeral?”

  No one said anything. Daniel rubbed his hand across the top of his head, messing his brown hair. I imagined he was remembering the last funeral Hazel had attended. Holly’s. Of course she expected a funeral after the death of this shark, that’s what happened after someone died.

  “We can have one, if you want,” I told her.

  “Can I go, Dad?”

  I looked at him. “I can take her with me, I mean, if it’s okay with you. We don’t have to go out far.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  Hazel’s whole face lit up. “Can you come, too?” she asked Daniel.

  “Sorry, Bug, I have to work.”

  She turned to Nicholas. “What about you?”

  “I’m sure he has to get back,” Daniel interjected. “It’s Sarasota, right?”

  “It’s no problem, I’m happy to see this through,” Nicholas said.

  Daniel walked over to me and put a possessive arm around my shoulder, pulling me to him. I had put off telling Nicholas about me and Daniel; I’d been a coward, and now this would be how he learned we were seeing each other. I watched, ashamed, as the message registered on Nicholas’s face, stiffening against Daniel, at his proprietary gesture.