The Shark Club

by Ann Kidd Taylor

  I nodded.

  “Second, I’ve just had a chance to go over the calls to the hotline, and since the interview aired, we’ve gotten over eighty of them. Most are worthless, but a couple of them might actually be useful to the investigation.”

  I sat straight up. “Really?”

  “I said might be useful, so don’t get your hopes up too high.” He patted a stack of paper on his desk. “These are the transcripts of all the calls.”

  He handed me the top two pages.

  The calls he felt had possibility were highlighted in yellow. The first was from someone reporting an incident of chumming the water with blood, a common practice in attracting sharks. The other was a sighting of several men shark fishing offshore. My heart sank a little—it was not much to go on. I read over them again, noticing for the first time that both calls were likely describing the same boat. According to the first caller, the chumming took place on a white boat around eighteen feet with a dirty white canopy. The shark fishing was on a white boat, sixteen to eighteen feet, with a torn tan canopy.

  “I’ll take this to Sergeant Alvarez,” I said.

  “Take all the calls,” he said, pushing the rest of the paper toward me. “A few of us have read them, but we’re not law enforcement.”

  I stood, but he waved me back into the chair. “There’s something else.”

  I sat down and waited while Russell fidgeted for a moment with the glass motorcycle tire paperweight on his desk, then let out a long, worried breath. He picked up one of the hotline call sheets he’d set aside from the rest.

  He said, “One of the calls was a threat. A man called it in. It was aimed at you.”

  I reached over and took the paper from his hands. Maeve Donnelly, leave this alone or you’ll be one sorry bitch.

  A cold, hollow feeling flooded through me. I looked at Russell with a tinge of panic dimming the edges of things.

  “I want you to show this threat to Alvarez,” he said.

  “You’re not taking it seriously, are you?” I said, hoping he hadn’t noticed how unnerved I was.

  “I am, and you should, too. I want you to back off a little now. Just take your foot off the gas where this is concerned.”

  “But I have a phone interview this afternoon with the Orlando Sentinel. And I’ve been contacted by the Naples Daily News and the local NBC station.”

  “I figured as much. So let Alvarez handle them.”

  The involuntary reflex of fear was wearing off. Now I just felt indignant. “I can’t back off because some nut made a threat that more than likely is completely empty.”

  “Maeve, hear me out. Whoever called this in knows who you are and where you work. It wouldn’t be difficult to find out where you live. I’m not trying to scare you; I’m saying take it seriously.”

  I walked to the door, holding the bundle of transcripts. “I appreciate your concern, I really do. I’ll be careful, but I can’t give up on this. Not now.”

  Inside my office, I dropped the papers on my desk. A mockingbird perched on the windowsill, looking in, quizzically cocking its head at the unfamiliar world beyond the pane.

  That night I flicked off the lights and climbed into bed with the TV remote and leaned back into a mound of pillows. All day my mind had twitched back and forth between Daniel and the words left by the anonymous caller. Wanting a reprieve, I found Alan Alda wooing Ellen Burstyn in Same Time, Next Year.

  Halfway into the movie, there was a knock on the door. I climbed out of bed and found Daniel in the hallway, holding a pie.

  “Key lime?” I asked.

  “Lemon meringue.” The memory of him hurling the lemon against the side of his would-be house smashed inside my ears. Or was it our would-be house?

  He handed me the pie with two hands, bowing a little like it was a peace offering. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, too,” I told him.

  Inside, Daniel slipped off his chef’s jacket. His T-shirt was ringed with sweat around the neck and under his arms.

  “I said some terrible things . . . ,” I started in, but he interrupted me.

  “I said some terrible things. We don’t have to replay it, okay? We’re sorry. Let’s not dwell on it.”

  The hurtful things we’d said, the places inside they’d come from, all of it happening when we were jumping off into a life together—it frightened me. It’s not that I felt things were hemorrhaging. Just steadily leaking. What had happened between me and Daniel needed to be dwelled on.

  He kissed me. It was a kind of tourniquet, and I took it.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” he said. “Do you mind?”

  “Go ahead. I’m just finishing this movie.”

  He undressed in the dark. The light from the TV strobed across his body. He left his shoes and clothes in a pile on the floor, went into the bathroom, and turned on the shower. I heard it spattering against the tiles. I upped the volume on the movie just as Daniel emerged naked from the bathroom.

  “I have some clothes here, right?” he asked without a shred of self-consciousness.

  I drew up my legs and laughed into my knees. “Bottom drawer,” I said.

  He grinned. “You’re laughing. I’m naked, and you’re laughing.”

  “I’m amused at the confidence it takes to walk around like that,” I said, as he retreated to the bathroom and closed the shower door.

  How easy it was to return to a sense of lightness. Maybe we didn’t need to dissect the fight. Maybe our bond transcended the need to peel back the gauze and look at the wound.

  I hopped off the bed and pulled out a clean pair of shorts and a T-shirt for him, then gathered the dirty ones off the floor. They smelled of sweat and smoke and a smorgasbord of Italian and seafood dishes.

  He yelled from the bathroom, “How was your day?”

  “Pretty good. I did another interview. The Orlando paper. And we may have a small lead on the finnings.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. From the hotline.”

  I dumped Daniel’s dirty clothes onto a chair, then stood in the bathroom doorway and weighed whether or not to tell him about the threat. I knew, though, I’d already kept enough from him.

  “There was something else, too,” I said, talking to him through the shower door. I watched foam slide down his back as he pushed the last of the shampoo out of his hair. “It’s not a big deal, but someone called the hotline and made a threat . . . at me.”

  Daniel turned off the water and grabbed a towel, wrapping it around his waist. “What kind of threat?”

  “Some man called and said I should leave the whole shark finning thing alone or I would be sorry. A sorry bitch, actually.”

  “Jesus, Maeve.” Daniel put his arms around me. His skin was damp and hot, and I was relieved for a moment to feel protected.

  I thought of Perri’s painting propped on my dresser. Maeve, the shark. The painting imbued me with a fearlessness I wasn’t sure I could live up to.

  Daniel said, “It’s personal. I don’t like this.”

  I stepped back, still holding onto his arm. “Me either. I’m scared, okay? But what am I supposed to do? Stop doing my job? Stop caring because a coward came after me on a hotline, trying to shut me down? I won’t do it.”

  Daniel pulled me closer. “No,” he said. “I don’t expect you will.”

  Twenty-nine

  On the last Saturday in July, out on the hotel’s boat landing, Marco drilled holes through the white and purplish clamshells and hollowed-out coconut halves that Hazel and I had bought a while back at Jolly’s, his drill puncturing the air with a high pitched ZZEEEEE ZZEEEEE. Hazel watched through her safety goggles, her hands clamped over her ears.

  When I’d called Marco bright and early, asking to borrow the drill, he’d wanted to know what for.

  “Haze
l and I have a project,” I’d told him.

  “What sort of project?”

  “A . . . um . . . rattle,” I told him.

  “A baby rattle?”

  “No, a shark-calling rattle.”

  “What the hell is a shark-calling rattle?”

  “I was telling Hazel about the Kontu people using rattles to call sharks to their boats and she got it in her head to make one. I know, it’s . . . it’s—”

  “Crazy?” Marco offered.

  “I was going to say, it’s not your average craft. Not like making a pot holder.”

  He laughed. “No joke.”

  “Well, she’s not your average six-year-old,” I said.

  “Right. Why don’t I drill the holes for you myself?”

  Which is how we ended up out here with bits and pieces of coconut flying in all directions. When Marco finished boring the holes, Hazel thanked him by elaborately offering a handshake, and I guessed what was coming next. When we’d bought the shells at Jolly’s, the lure of the dollar knickknacks had been too much for her to resist and she’d begged for a hand buzzer to jolt the palms of unsuspecting people. I’d indulged her.

  Marco took her hand and yelped while Hazel giggled, and I said I was sorry. He pretended to lunge at her and she ran off along the dock.

  “That’s like being stuck by a damn catfish,” he said.

  After he packed his drill and left, Hazel and I sat on the landing alternately stringing clamshells and coconut halves onto a piece of thin rope, which we looped into a circle and secured with a knot.

  “It looks like a bracelet for a giant,” Hazel proclaimed, giving it a shake.

  The clamshells jangled and clanked against the coconuts, making an echoing kind of music. Her eyes widened. “Wow,” she said to me. “We should shake hands.”

  I bit. The small, tinny shock shot to my wrist. I wrangled the awful device from her fingers and chased her with it, asking her to please shake my hand.

  As we climbed into the hotel’s small skiff tied up beside the pontoon, I snapped a picture of Hazel holding up the rattle. I pulled on my khaki Conservancy cap, tugging my ponytail through the back, then battled a light wind as I drove us out into the Gulf and dropped anchor about eighty yards past the channel markers, the hotel’s clay-tiled roof still visible. Hazel’s hair blew across her eyes. I watched her dig a headband from her dinosaur field bag, push her hair back, and put on her red sunglasses.

  “Can I shake the rattle now?” she asked.

  “Yep, go for it.”

  She dropped her arm over the side of the boat and joggled the rattle, while I snapped a few more pictures. The coconuts beat against the side of the boat. The clamshells rapped like hail. The startling commotion traveled across the water, causing me to look back at the beach to see if we’d alarmed the sunbathers.

  “You think a shark will come?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  I didn’t really think a shark would come, but I didn’t rule it out either. I mean, stranger things had happened. The library book on the sharks of the South Pacific had pointed out the Kontu people clacked their rattles against the boat and splashed them in the water, mimicking the sounds of a distressed fish. Sharks were biologically built to respond to those vibrations from great distances, so the Kontu were definitely on to something.

  Hazel gave the rattle a few more shakes, then rested a few minutes before bending over the side again. “Maybe if I get closer to the water,” she said, dipping further.

  I gripped the waistband of her shorts while she shook the coconuts and clamshells. A fish jumped nearby, startling her, and she jerked back into the boat.

  “It was a ladyfish,” I said, laughing.

  “What do we do if a shark comes?” she asked.

  “We just look at it. From right where we are.”

  “You try,” she said, handing over the rattle.

  Dipping it intermittently into the water, I worked it like a marionette while Hazel kept watch for a shark. If one actually showed up, it wouldn’t come like a dolphin with the noisy release of air from a blowhole. It would come by stealth. A fin cutting silently across the surface.

  “I’m hungry,” Hazel announced.

  We put the rattle away for peanut butter crackers. Hazel sat at the wheel and nibbled them. I swigged water while the wind, picking up, blew the front of the boat in a semicircle. Cracker crumbs fell onto her shorts, and I watched her with a content, almost lazy feeling drifting through me. She stuffed a whole cracker into her mouth, bulging out her cheeks. Laughing, I pulled an apple juice box from my bag and handed it to her.

  “You want to give the shark calling one more shot?” I asked.

  Hazel grabbed the rattle and draped herself over the side of the boat.

  Gripping the back of her shirt with one hand, I used my other to hold the binoculars to my eyes.

  “Do you see a shark yet?” she asked, shouting over the racket she was making.

  “Not yet.”

  I scanned the horizon for fishing vessels. Maybe a boat was out there now pulling in sharks, slashing off their fins, and tossing their bodies overboard.

  Hazel said, “If a shark comes, it might be thinking . . . so, you called me, what do you want?” She set the rattle on one of the boat seats, took off her sunglasses, and frowned at me. “What do we say to it?”

  “Good question,” I said, at a complete loss how to answer it. I got the sense there was more to her asking than simple curiosity.

  “Remember that story you read about the sharks being, you know, dead people who come back?” Hazel whispered dead as if the word was too sad or too sacred to speak out loud. “What if the shark that comes is my mom?”

  I smiled at her. Was this why she’d wanted to make a shark-calling rattle in the first place? Hazel wanted to talk about her mother, that much seemed obvious.

  I pieced my words together carefully. “You know, Hazel, I don’t think dead family members really come back as sharks. It’s a kind of myth, or a fairy tale. But if we pretend . . . Let’s say it was your mom who came as a shark . . . what would you want to say to her?”

  She looked at the sky like she was deciphering the possibilities. “I’d say, Mom, can you see me? Can you see me and Maeve? And she’d probably say, Well, yeesss, I see you two all the time.”

  So that’s what it was about. Wanting her mother to be okay with the two of us. I said, “How would she feel about seeing us together, I wonder.”

  “When I’m in bed, I tell her things,” Hazel said. “I told her about Shark Club. How you could be my mom. She was okay with it.”

  She picked up the rattle and began shaking it, more rhythmically now, studying the watery distances.

  I listened to the slow drumming sounds pulsing around the boat. All summer I had been summoning ghosts, too—the specter of me and Daniel.

  “Do you think my bottle made it to that place you said it would go?” Hazel asked. “Muzum-something?”

  It took a moment to remember what I’d told her. “Mozambique?”

  “Mozam-bique.” She enunciated the word with French emphasis the way she did with gâteau.

  “It’s possible,” I said, and it suddenly seemed wrong not to tell her. “I’m going there in a few weeks—to Mozambique. I’ll let you know if your bottle turns up.”

  “You’re going?” She sank onto the bench, folded her hands in her lap, and stared at me. She looked dejected. I was glad she’d put the sunglasses back on, relieved I couldn’t see her eyes.

  “Just for a while,” I told her.

  “What’s there, anyway?”

  “Whale sharks and big ol’ stingrays.”

  “I wish I could go, too,” she said.

  “I tell you what. I’ll dive with my camera and send you pictures of everything I see. It will be li
ke Shark Club.”

  “But you’ll be back, and then we can have real Shark Club?”

  “Promise,” I said.

  I let her call sharks for a little longer before cranking the boat and starting back toward the hotel landing. We were barely underway when she began shouting. “Shark, shark! Look!”

  Turning, I glimpsed a fin, just a flash of one, then it was gone. Whether or not it was a shark, I wasn’t sure. It could’ve been a dolphin. I glanced back again, expecting to see one leaping in our wake. Instead, I spotted a boat trailing forty or fifty yards directly behind us. It was white, sixteen to eighteen feet long. The right front corner of its tan canopy was torn and flapping in the wind.

  The boat from the hotline. It was following us.

  Leave this alone or you’ll be one sorry bitch.

  I tightened my grip on the wheel, a quivery feeling at the back of my knees.

  Hazel yelled “Shark!” again, jumping up and down, the rattle still in her hand. She was making a deafening noise with it.

  I pushed on the throttle, picking up speed, hoping to leave the boat behind, but it accelerated, too, gaining a little, staying menacingly in my wake. I was being given a warning.

  I raised the binoculars, catching sight of two men in sunglasses at the bow, but the boat was bouncing too wildly to see much else. I had an irrational urge to swing around and try to get behind them, but Hazel was in the boat and either way it would have been reckless.

  Nearing the shore, I slowed down as we came through the channel markers and the white boat peeled off to the right, speeding back out into the Gulf.

  I let out a breath.

  “Did you see the shark?” squealed Hazel as I eased the skiff alongside the landing. “It came!”

  “It came just for you,” I said.

  Thirty

  Before daybreak the following Monday, I was piloting the Conservancy boat back to the marina after a night of shark surveying, when the boat with the torn, tan canopy showed up again.