Black Water

by Ninie Hammon

  Clocked Out. Aboat Time. Mama’s Happy. Best of Boat Worlds. Seas The Day. Shaken Not Stirred. Lazy Days. Gloria Ann. Dream Boat.

  It hadn’t been evident from the top of the hill, but at least half the slips were indeed empty, which meant the boat and its occupants were out there, tied up somewhere on the huge lake.

  Bailey found only six boats with Adirondack chairs on their decks. Three of those were closed up, not like whoever owned them had left for a while, but like whoever owned them was out of town.

  Of the other three, two had children aboard. The sheriff had told her not to say anything when she found boats with chairs, that he would handle that part. Right now, they were on a seek-and-find mission. But when Bailey came to the first of the chaired boats and saw a little girl come gliding down the slide from the sundeck on top to splash into the lake, she stood there frozen, her heart in her throat. The life-jacketed child never even went under water when she hit the lake, just slid out across the water a few feet, then turned around and came paddling back to the boat. Could this be the little girl?

  Memories flooded into Bailey’s mind of the terror the child had felt, the horror of dark and panic and—

  “Can I help you?”

  Bailey turned toward the voice and realized that she had stopped right in front of the gangway to the boat, blocking the path of a woman carrying two bags of groceries.

  “Oh no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to stand in your way.”

  The woman eyed her suspiciously, and Bailey realized she’d watched Bailey gazing in rapt attention at the little girl.

  “We’re thinking about getting a slide for our boat,” she blurted out. “I was watching your little girl. The straight slides shoot you farther out into the water than this one.”

  The woman bought it. Friendliness and openness were hallmarks of the summer lake culture.

  “We thought about a straight slide,” she said as she passed Bailey and stepped onto the deck of the boat. “But we decided we’d rather start out with a curved one. Abby’s only five and I would just as soon she not hit the water so hard.”

  Bailey smiled and moved on, forcing herself not to stand there staring at the little girl, who had clambered back up the ladder to the boat, up the stairs to the top deck, and was preparing to go back down the slide. Her hair wasn’t in braids, but it was shoulder length, maybe long enough for braids hanging down … no, probably not. It wasn’t this little girl.

  Bailey looked up and down the dock at boats and empty boat slips. The sheriff had said that this part wasn’t the needle-in-a-haystack part. If it wasn’t, what was?

  Chapter Nineteen

  Half an hour later, Bailey rendezvoused with the sheriff in front of the general store. He had found four boats with chairs. Two of them had no children aboard, at least right now they didn’t. That didn’t mean there’d be no children tonight, or tomorrow or whenever the houseboat blew up. The other two boats were still closed up and there were more than two dozen empty houseboat slips.

  She had found only a couple of houseboats with chairs that also had children, but she had listed the numbers of eighteen empty boat slips.

  “The only way to find out if there are chairs on those boats is to find the boats…” Brice made a sweeping gesture that encompassed all the lake they could see, “…somewhere out there, tied up in a cove, having a cookout on the shore, maybe dropped anchor off a rocky bluff for fishing.”

  He said the sheriff’s department had a boat, but it was currently in the shop.

  “One of my deputies, Raleigh Hamilton Fletcher the third — you’ll meet him one of these days — didn’t remove the covers on the water intake valves when he launched the boat last week. Started it up — and with no water coolant, he blew the engine. The boat won’t be available until the middle of next month.”

  “And that’s it? No way to check the rest of these boats until way past too late? Are you okay with that?”

  She hadn’t realized until she started speaking that she was angry. The anger was an amorphous thing and she couldn’t quite put her finger on the source. It was part fear, of course. As soon as she saw the water, her mind filled with images from the — what had it been? What should she call it? The vision? Was that what it was? But it was more a … connection. With or without a name, the twinning of her awareness to that of a drowning child had been among the most horrifying experiences of her life. Piled on top of her ever-growing list of those that began one night in the rain on the way to the airport.

  No, not going there. Absolutely not going there!

  Whispering Mountain Lake was so much more vast than she’d ever dreamed and a little girl was going to drown in it unless Bailey found her first.

  But she realized that part of her anger was the fact that her sense of urgency was not matched by the sheriff’s. He was cooperating and she supposed, under the circumstances, she should be grateful for that and let it go. But he wasn’t consumed by it as she was, and his lack of desperation, his unwillingness to match her emotional commitment, flat-out pissed her off.

  “What would you like for me to do, Bailey?” He was trying to be conciliatory. She hated being “managed.”

  “I didn’t know you needed an amateur to tell you how to do your job.” She grew even more angry when the insult did not appear to offend him. “I don’t know what you ought to do. But I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to look for those houseboats. You’re welcome to join me.”

  She’d worn a bathing suit under her clothes, just in case. Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a yellow elastic hair band with a small plastic minion on it, the kind little girls wore, and used it to tie her hair back in a ponytail. Then she turned on her heel and headed to the far end of the dock where a big man with a florid face and a straw hat stood beneath a sign that said “Jet Ski Rental.”

  When the sheriff figured out where she was going and what she obviously had in mind, he caught up to her in two long strides.

  “You know how to drive a jet ski, do you?” he asked.

  “I can ride a motorcycle,” she lied. It had been a moped, but that was close enough. “How hard can it be? And the worst that can happen is I’ll fall off. Can’t skin your knee on water and I’ll wear a life jacket.”

  He took her by the arm.

  “Can we talk about this?”

  “It’s not up for negotiation. I’m going looking for chairs. There’s nothing left to discuss.”

  “Think this through, Bailey. Riding a jet ski on rough water … the pounding…” He gestured toward the small bandage on her temple, visible now with her hair in a ponytail. “It’s not safe.”

  “Safe? You really don’t get what’s going on here, do you, Sheriff McGreggor? Nothing is safe for me in my ‘condition.’ I’ve already made this speech to T.J. and Dobbs, so I’ll give you the CliffsNotes. I could put on a hat that’s too tight and drop dead. No precaution on my part will make any difference, so I have decided not to take precautions. It’ll be what it’ll be. End of discussion.”

  She paused, and looked him as directly in the eye as she could, given that he was more than a foot taller than she was. “I mean it. This is the end, the forever end of this discussion.”

  “Okay, then. We’re going looking for houseboats.” He held up both hands before she could protest. “I can’t let you go flying off on your own. You’d be lost as soon as you got out of sight of the marina. Give me a few minutes, and I’ll be your guide dog.”

  Bailey browsed the general store’s gift shop until the sheriff returned out of uniform, dressed in a sheriff’s department t-shirt, shorts and sandals. Did he carry a change of clothes in his cruiser? Apparently, he did. She tried not to let him see how glad she was that he’d opted to accompany her. She was all hat and no cattle here. In truth, she had no idea how to operate the machines that didn’t look to her at all like riding a moped. Bailey wasn’t a particularly adventurous sort. She didn’t go rock climbing or spelunking as some of her college fri
ends did. She was definitely not a risk-taker.

  At least, the Essential Bailey hadn’t been a risk-taker. The Bailey who now occupied the body with a bullet in the brain didn’t have quite the same attitude. She couldn’t pinpoint what exactly had changed, but something had. Maybe a near-death experience did that to everyone. Or maybe the fact that she lived only seconds away from certain death took the edge off risk. Stepping into the shower was risky for her now. There weren’t levels of risk anymore when tripping on a banana peel could be fatal.

  And there was something very freeing about that. Freeing and frightening in equal parts. But the fear was a manageable thing.

  The man with the florid face and the straw hat gave her simple instructions. He placed a lanyard around her wrist that attached to a switch on the jet ski. It was, appropriately, she thought, called a kill switch. If she fell off, the switch would turn off the ski’s motor.

  “You get thrown, you won’t have to swim fast enough to catch it.” He laughed as if he hadn’t said the same thing already to two dozen people today.

  “Thrown?” Bailey asked.

  “Oh, it don’t buck like a bronco, if that’s what you’re thinking. Be careful going across boat wakes, though. If you don’t hit them right, you’ll fly right up in the air, ski and all.”

  “Goody.”

  She left her clothes, shoes and purse in the locker provided, then boarded the red jet ski. The sheriff took the blue one. He didn’t bother with the lessons — apparently this wasn’t his first rodeo — and they set out across the “Idle Zone.” Boats were required to idle their motors inside the buoys that encircled the marina, so they didn’t throw up huge wakes that would bang the tied-up boats into the dock.

  Once out past the buoys, the sheriff called out to her and she slowly pulled up beside him. He held up his cellphone incased in plastic. “Floats and waterproof. We’ll keep a list of what we turn up.” Then he slipped the phone into the small compartment in front of the bench seat of the watercraft.

  “One more thing…”

  She waited.

  “This ‘Sheriff McGreggor’ label has got to go. The name’s Brice Creighton Drummond McGreggor. In my mother’s world, only really important people had three first names, and she wanted to make sure I didn’t forget my Scottish roots, particularly since they added a “g” to McGreggor at Ellis Island so that set us apart from our cousins in the old country.” He paused. “Brice is Gaelic for ‘spotted,’ by the way.” He held out his arm and nodded toward the freckles. “Busted.”

  Then he turned on the throttle and headed across the lake. Bailey took a deep breath, swallowed hard, cranked the throttle on her jet ski and followed.

  It became quickly clear that the sheriff had been absolutely right. Left to her own devices, she’d have been lost in minutes. The shoreline looked the same everywhere — trees, rocks, hills. How anybody could keep track of where they were using that as a guide seemed a feat of some kind of magic.

  Brice set out due north of the marina and it looked like he was heading into a solid wall of rocks and scrub trees. But as they drew closer, Bailey saw the opening, the cove that cut into the side of the shore and she followed the sheriff into it. As soon as he passed through the mouth of the cove he cut his speed to an idle. Bailey did the same, and saw why when they rounded the first bend. The water in the cove, not buffeted by the wind on the lake or the wakes of hundreds of boats, was as smooth and flat as a still pond. All manner of boats were tied up at various places down the length of it with lines running out and looping around a tree or rock on shore. Children played in the shallow waters. Adults floated in inflatable lounge chairs, complete with drink holders. Ski boats dragged huge inner tubes loaded with small children slowly up and down the cove, the children squealing in delight as if theirs was as exciting a ride as the tubers on the lake where waves sent them sometimes five feet into the air.

  They followed the cove around bend after bend as it narrowed and became too shallow to safely use a jet ski, which was propelled by sucking water up through an opening in the bottom and pumping it forcefully out the back. Mud, sticks and debris would stop one dead. They turned around and headed back toward where the cove opened on the lake. They’d passed two houseboats. Neither had an Adirondack chair on the deck.

  Back out on the open lake, the sheriff — Brice! — took off toward the next cove. Bailey hit the throttle on the jet ski, and it leapt to life under her as her ponytail whipped out behind her. The wind and spray in her face were exhilarating, the sun on her skin warm, and she found a smile sitting in the folds of her face that actually felt like it belonged there. She hated to admit it to herself, felt in some strange sense she was betraying Bethany. And Aaron, too. But the truth was inescapable. In this moment, this frozen piece of time, Jessie Cunningham, aka Bailey Donahue, was glad to be alive.

  As the day wore on, the sun dragged the temperature higher and higher. Bailey squinted up at puffy clouds that seemed to be frying in the pan of the bright blue sky, and soon yearned for sunglasses. The glare on the water had produced a headache that had joined forces with the constant throbbing in her right temple. That pain had diminished in intensity daily since she left the hospital, but the pounding of the jet skis over boat wakes turned up the volume on it, too, and the combined effect gave the impression that a fissure had opened in her forehead and was slowly spreading around the top of her head. At some point, when the ends of the fissure met in the back, the top of her skull would fly off.

  After a couple of hours of searching, during which they turned up half a dozen houseboats, but none with Adirondack chairs, the sheriff angled into a cove that had a small dock at the far end. It was a recreation area with a sandy beach populated by a herd of children and sunbathers, plus tie-offs for boats, a dock with gasoline pumps, and a general store/restaurant combination where she and Brice wolfed down hot dogs and French fries in a booth with plastic seats and a table with a red-and-white-checkered vinyl tablecloth.

  Bailey had purchased a pair of sunglasses and some sunscreen from the store, and sat dabbing it too late on her tender sunburned nose as Brice finished the last of his turquoise coconut Slurpee.

  Her headache had eased off as soon as there was unmoving land under her, settled back into the ache that had become her constant companion, might well be her new best friend for the rest of her life, replacing in her affections the hospital ceiling tile. She popped two extra-strength aspirins and washed them down with Slurpee and settled back against the padded back of the booth. There was a pleasant buzzing in her head that had nothing to do with injury and everything to do with sun, heat and fatigue.

  “Tired?” Brice asked.

  “A little.” She sat up straighter. “But I’m good.”

  “Oscar bothering you?”

  “Oscar?”

  He smiled and indicated the bandage on her temple. “I figure that anything as important in your life as something that could kill you ought to have a name, don’t you think?”

  “Actually, I never gave it much thought.”

  “There’s no sense wasting a good name on it, though, right? My drill instructor in boot camp at Camp Lejeune when I joined the Marines was Sergeant Oscar P. Tillman. He was…” He paused and his smile grew bigger. “I am unable to describe the man accurately without using words not acceptable in polite conversation.”

  “Oscar. Works for me. And no, Oscar hasn’t thrown a real tantrum in quite a while. All that bouncing, that’d give you a headache even if you didn’t have a bullet in your skull.”

  “The sun, though. You’ve got some color in your cheeks. It’s … you look good.”

  He sat smiling at her across the table, his own face sun-bronzed rather than sun-burned. His caramel-colored eyes, almost amber in this light, were kind. She was drawn to that kindness. There was something profoundly safe about Brice McGreggor, something that had nothing to do with the fact that he was a cop. As a man, as a human being, he was safe. And it’d been a long, long
time since Bailey had felt that kind of “safe” with anyone.

  The moment could have been awkward, but wasn’t for reasons Bailey couldn’t explain. The big man leaned across the table toward her and transitioned out of it smoothly.

  “I’m not even going to bother urging you to go back to the marina and wait for me there, but you should, you know. It doesn’t take two—” He spotted her rising response and held up his hands. “Fine, fine. We’ll both go.” Then he did look serious. “But you are beginning to realize, aren’t you, how” — he didn’t say hopeless, but that’s what he wanted to say — “difficult this is? If we could freeze every boat on this lake where it is, stop time so we could go from one to the next, check them off a list, then maybe. But it’s possible that the houseboat we’re looking for was on the other side of the lake all morning and right after we pulled out of Coyote Cove, they pulled in. We’re going from one moving target to another.”

  Resolve stiffened Bailey’s backbone. She felt her jaw clench. No matter how compassionate, how dedicatedly professional Brice was, he did not have the “fire in his belly” for this chase that she did. She couldn’t reasonably blame him for that. It was a huge stretch that he’d even been willing to entertain the possibility that there was a child out there somewhere who’d die if they didn’t find her. But the fact that his passion didn’t match hers, totally irrational though it was, pissed her off — again.

  “I get it.” Her voice was cold. “We were doomed before we even started this search. But I plan to keep on looking anyway.” She got to her feet and headed toward the screen door of the little restaurant, pulling Brice along in her wake.

  The remainder of the afternoon ground down through pleasantly tiring to exhausting, and then grueling. The wind picked up, decorating the surface of the lake with a delicate lace of white-capped chop that made simply traveling across water un-churned by boat wakes a bouncing, bam, bam, bam proposition. The fissure in her skull opened up again and began traveling down both sides of her head toward the back. Every time they crossed the three-foot swells created by the wake of some yacht or racing ski boat, she suspected the top of her head was held in place by her scalp alone. For the first time since they set out that morning, she genuinely considered the possibility that the next wake, the next swell, the next stretch of choppy water would be the last straw, would finally dislodge the piece of metal in her brain.