Dangerous Depths

by Colleen Coble

  Bane sat at the computer and transferred the data so it showed up as an oblique view of colored bathymetry, a 3-D image that allowed him to assess the area, though not with the detail of the equipment he’d been testing. “Looks promising,” he said.

  Reeking of peanuts, Ron leaned over his shoulder and pointed. “That looks like it could be a fallen mast.”

  In the old days, the only way to find a sunken ship was to stumble onto it in a dive, which was about as likely as a New Yorker stumbling across a mermaid. Now sophisticated sonar could pinpoint likely spots in living color. The truth of the matter still required visual confirmation, and Bane’s adrenaline surged at the thought. “It might be just a rock formation, but there’s only one way to find out. We’ll have to go down and take a look.” He glanced at his watch. “We’ve got another couple of hours of day-light. Let’s get suited up.”

  “You were down twice today, bailed from a plane crash, and lost a friend,” Ron observed. “We’ve only got a little daylight left. Are you sure you’re up to it?”

  Bane glanced at his watch. Nearly five. Was it only early this morning he’d arrived on Moloka’i? The day’s events had piled onto each other. “I’m fine.” Ron’s reminder brought the aches and pains in his back and legs into focus. Bane felt like an old man, but he was intrigued by what he saw on the screen. And his mind kept going back to Candace’s fearful confessions about the future. He owed it to Tony to do what he could for his widow.

  “I’ll go with you.” Ron followed him to the deck, and they both pulled on wet suits. Ajax nosed Bane’s gear and barked. “You want to go, boy?” The dog barked again, and Bane opened his bag and grabbed the dog’s snuba gear: a specially made harness with hose and enclosed bubble around his head.

  Ron’s mouth gaped. “You’re kidding me, right? He doesn’t really dive.”

  “He loves it. He can go down around twelve feet or so.” Bane finished fastening Ajax’s vest. “Watch.” The dog took a flying leap off the end of the boat and into the water. He disappeared from view moments later.

  “And I thought I’d seen everything.” Ron shook his head. A boatswain helped them into their air tanks, and they jumped into the water.

  Bane was too tired to enjoy the colorful show this time. He finned his way down, using a portable GPS device to pinpoint the exact location of the image on his equipment. Ajax joined him, paddling his big paws and looking around with a doggy smile. Bane’s fatigue lifted just watching the dog, and he refocused on the job at hand. Bane paused when he realized the site was the same one he and Leia had explored while looking for Tony’s weight belt. Coral often grew on a shipwreck, creating a seemingly natural reef that was hard to detect as artificial. This particular bed spread out over the area, stopping at a blue hole that dropped off into the abyss.

  He left Ajax exploring a school of wrasses. Diving deeper than the dog could go, he snapped pictures of the banks of bright coral and the outline of the seabed. It extended back to the cave he had wanted to explore. Down here, it was difficult to see the full scope of the site. They’d have to do some excavation. Maybe the cave would be the place to start so they didn’t disturb the coral unless they had to. Bane was adamant about preserving and reviving the ocean’s coral reefs, and he wasn’t willing to toss that away for a sunken ship of dubious value.

  He motioned toward the cave, and Ron swam with him to the opening. Bane’s powerful halogen light probed the recesses. Good, the sharks were gone now. They were only reef tips and not really dangerous normally, but invading their lair might rile them enough to attack. He entered the cave. The sides were about forty feet apart, and the ceiling zoomed over them about twenty feet up. Lichen and shrimp clung to the cave’s surfaces. His small shovel clanked against the side of the cave as they entered. Bane checked his dive computer. He still had another forty-five minutes, long enough to dig a little. His beam swept the sides and ceiling of the cave. He fumbled with his shovel and finally got it in hand, then began to dig at a long symmetrical line on the seafloor. Digging underwater was never his favorite pastime.

  Ron joined him. Bane kept checking his computer as the minutes slipped away. They went down through silt until his shovel brought up something he recognized. He touched Ron’s arm, then hefted the palm-sized cannonball in his hand. Bingo. They’d struck pay dirt. Ron’s grin was wide. He took the cannonball and rolled it around in his hands. Jabbing his thumb up, he swam toward the cave opening with the artifact still in his hand. Bane glanced around, reluctant to leave. He had another ten minutes of bottom time. Ron paused at the mouth of the cave and motioned him energetically. Bane shrugged and swam to join him. Further exploration would have to wait for another day.

  He wished Tony were alive. This ship was old—old enough to have seventeenth-century cannonballs. It just might be Tony’s Spanish galleon.

  Amass of red-and-white ginger flanked the front door of the Kahale home. The embrace of its sweet scent eased the tension in Leia’s shoulders. Candace’s grief had sapped her energy like cold water drained her body temperature. A movement to her right caught Leia’s attention, and she turned to see her mother, Ingrid, and her cousin, Malia.

  “You’re just in time to help,” Malia called. She wore her long, dark hair swooped to one side and draped over her left shoulder. A white orchid nestled behind her right ear because she was unmarried, and a mass of orchids, plumeria, and ginger lay around her where she sat on the grass making leis. Malia was tiny and petite, a classic Hawaiian beauty, and Leia towered over her.

  Leia detoured from the path to join them under the shade of a giant monkeypod tree. Eva lay on her back on the grass and watched Hina stalk a gecko. Leia picked up a finished ginger lei and draped it over her neck, inhaling the heady fragrance, before drop-ping to the soft grass next to Malia. “You look almost done. Are these for the hula festival in O’ahu?” Malia’s leis were renowned in the islands and commanded a premium price. Her shell leis rivaled those sold on Ni’ihau and sold for hundreds of dollars.

  Malia nodded, her gaze lingering on Leia’s face. “What’s wrong?”

  “I take it you didn’t hear the news? Tony Romero died on a dive today.”

  “Aloha no!” Malia said. She put down her lei.

  Ingrid patted Leia’s arm. “Eva told me. Are you doing okay? Tony’s been your friend a long time.”

  Leia had been damming up how she felt, but at the touch of her mother’s hand, she wanted to burrow into Ingrid’s lap and inhale her familiar plumeria scent. She knew better than to give in. Her mother didn’t hold with obvious shows of weakness, which would have surprised most of Ingrid’s patients. As chief of staff at the tiny Moloka’i hospital, Ingrid was warm and understanding, but as a mother, she kept herself aloof.

  Leia shrugged, and her mother’s hand fell away. “Candace is a mess, of course. Maybe the autopsy will show what happened. The funny thing is that his weight belt is missing. It should have been on the seafloor, but it’s nowhere to be found.”

  “What does that mean?” Her mother picked up the twelve-inch-long lei needle and began to slide orchid blossoms onto it.

  Leia took a spare needle and began to thread it through a blossom. “I’m not sure. It seems odd, that’s all.”

  Malia’s gaze sharpened. “Odd as in strange or odd as in suspicious? Are you thinking it might not have been an accident?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that. Everyone liked Tony. I can’t imagine someone wanting to hurt—” She stopped, remembering the threats from Hans.

  “What?” Malia demanded.

  “Do you know Aberg Hans?”

  Malia nodded. “Vaguely. He owns the other dive shop.”

  “He came into Tony’s shop just before we went out. He was mad that Tony was taking all the island’s clients. He claimed Tony was using his treasure-hunting spiel to run him out of business.”

  “Was he?” Ingrid asked in a quiet voice.

  Her mother always did that to her. She was the voice of reason wh
en Leia wanted to jump to conclusions. Ingrid’s medical training, unlike her own, made Leia analyze everything. “Maybe. Tony had a way of making people believe in his dream.”

  “Did you see Tûtû?” Malia asked.

  Leia nodded. “She’s doing well.” She kept her eye on her mother’s forehead. When a slight frown creased the fair Scandinavian skin, Leia held her breath.

  “I suppose you pushed more of your herbal preparations on her?”

  “The scars are fading.” Leia squared her shoulders and met her mother’s gaze.

  “You’re wasting your medical training, Leia. Why can’t you see it? Two more years of residency, and you’d have been a full-fledged doctor.”

  “Why can’t you see I’m not cut out for filling out insurance forms and seeing patients in ten-minute segments like cattle?” Leia fired back. “I tried it your way for months, Mama. I felt like I was turning into someone I didn’t know or like. And I couldn’t stand the smells of antiseptic and drugs. That’s not how God wanted us to live.”

  “You didn’t give it a fair try. I know San Francisco wasn’t what you were used to, but I pulled every imaginable string to get you that opportunity, and you threw it away. It was one of the most sought-after residency programs in the country.”

  “I’m not like you,” Leia said. “I have Dad’s Hawaiian blood in me too. I just want to be who I am inside. I want to learn the old ways before it’s all gone.”

  “Making paper cloth. What good is that? You can do better, Leia.”

  Leia’s gaze shot to her cousin, but Malia didn’t seem to take offense at Ingrid’s denigration of Hawaiian arts. Maybe because she was actually making a living at her leis while Leia scraped by on what little she could sell her cloth for and the tiny payments she got from the patients at Kalaupapa. If not for the chance to live in a house her father owned, she’d never make it.

  Her mother’s gaze touched the scar on Leia’s lip, and Leia had to resist an impulse to cover it with her hand. Her mother wanted only what was best for her—she knew that. She’d known it when she was six years old, when Ingrid had taken her to the hospital for yet another operation for her cleft lip. No tears had leaked from Leia’s eyes since that day, and she vowed never to cry again. She was strong enough to be her own person.

  She watched her mother stand and go to the house. Nearly six feet tall and still blonde and graceful, she had always seemed to Leia to be a throwback to some Valkyrie, maybe Brunhild herself. All her life Leia had tried to live up to her mother’s expectations. Leia often thought of the verse in Revelation of being lukewarm. That’s how she felt—lukewarm. Neither Hawaiian nor Swedish but something in the middle. Neither a success nor a failure but always a dis-appointment. Since the medical school fiasco, she had become all the more determined to prove to her mother that she was capable of choosing her own path.

  Malia winced. “You’ve riled her again.”

  “You brought up Tûtû,” Leia pointed out.

  “Sorry. I didn’t think it would reopen the subject of your chosen profession.”

  “Bane showed up today too,” Leia blurted, watching her cousin’s face.

  “His plane fell into the water,” Eva said, sitting up. “We saved him.”

  Malia was beginning to smile. Leia dropped her gaze. “He’s with Pimental Salvage now, the company that Tony had gone into partnership with to find the Spanish galleon he always talked about.”

  “Bane Oana. What a yummy man. Did you talk to him?”

  “I had no choice. We plucked him out of the water, like Eva said.”

  “You two belong together. God has opened the door again. Don’t let him get away this time.”

  “Nothing has changed. He is still too rigid and structured. I hate being put in a box.” Besides, she didn’t want to run the risk of Bane figuring out the real reason she’d broken off the engagement.

  Aschool of wrasses sensed the movements and darted away. The tiny earthquakes, barely large enough to disturb the current, vibrated along the seafloor and moved through the sea cave. Ripples of tiny waves from the swarms—several quakes back-to-back—caused the sleeping shark to awaken and escape the enclosed space with a flick of its tail. The swarms finally subsided and left no evidence of their activity except for a tiny crack that opened on the seabed, right under the garden of lobe coral. The crack was barely a quarter of an inch across, but it stretched along the seafloor more than a hundred feet before it petered out at the edge of the abyss. A moray eel poked its head out from under a rock and grabbed a wrasse that got too close. Life and death resumed its usual placid rate.

  Five

  Leia still wasn’t used to living alone. She’d lived at home until she went to school and then endured six years of sloppy room-mates and late-night parties when she wanted to study. The luxury of having all her clothes lined up neatly in her own closet wasn’t something she took for granted yet. Though it was only a small, one-bedroom cottage, it was all hers, thanks to her father’s generosity. He couldn’t live in it anyway. The only people who lived in Kalaupapa were those with Hansen’s disease and those like her who worked in the little clinic down the street.

  She sat on the lanai with her Bible. Her gaze drifted across the yard to the distant water. She opened her Bible and tried to focus on the passage she was reading, but capturing her wandering thoughts was difficult lately, especially when she tried to read her Bible. Ever since she’d given up the idea of being a doctor and come home, she and God hadn’t been on the best of terms.

  She should work on her tapa for a bit. Maybe that would clear her head. She shut her Bible and moved to the garden. The pun-gent odor of fermenting bark welcomed her. She plunged her hand into the glutinous mess and extracted a clump. She laid the fermented bark on a stone anvil and picked up the kua kuku, a round beater that had been her grandmother’s. Her muscles coiled and released as she swung the tool and beat the tapa. The ball of fermented bark began to flatten and spread. The sound of her kua kuku striking the stone reminded her of buoys offshore the day she’d told Bane she was breaking their engagement. She pounded harder with the kua kuku. She didn’t want to remember the hurt in his eyes when she refused to answer his questions. But how could she tell him the truth? He was an honorable man. He would have said he would marry her anyway.

  The day he began talking about the children they would have, the death knell for their relationship sounded. Her unease blossomed into full-fledged panic before she’d finally gone in for genetic testing. She shut her eyes and threw all her strength behind her arm. Anything to block out the memory of sitting in that doctor’s office and hearing the verdict. A verdict that had doomed the love between her and Bane. If only he hadn’t come back into her life today.

  She opened her eyes again and wiped the tears that had rolled down her cheeks. A movement caught her eye under a large banyan tree in her backyard. She squinted, not sure if it was branches moving in the wind or someone standing in her backyard. The movement came again, and she realized it was a man staring at the house.

  The hair on the back of her neck rose. A rash of burglaries around Moloka’i had been all over the papers, but she had nothing of value. Anyone looking at the peeling paint on the house would know she didn’t have anything worth stealing, and Kalaupapa wasn’t exactly teeming with wealthy residents. Most subsisted near the poverty level. She put down her tool and started toward the man to find out what he wanted. He took off running, evidently realizing he’d been spotted.

  She charged across the backyard. “Hey, you there!” The man vanished into the jungle that touched the back of the property. She jogged to the tree line and stared into the tangle of vegetation. Adrenaline pumped through her veins, and every nerve ending tingled with something that she told herself was caution, not fear. Prudence said not to go into the forest alone, but what if he got away and just came back when she was sleeping? She would much prefer to face an adversary in the daylight when she could see him. She should call the police. She we
nt back to the lanai and picked up the phone. No dial tone. The phone service in town had been spotty lately.

  Leia stepped back outside, and Hina ran past her legs. The cat dashed into the trees. “Hina, come back here!” She ran after the cat, but stopped at the edge of the thick growth. She heard nothing. Maybe the guy was gone. She turned to retrace her steps when she heard Hina yowl. The distress in the cat’s cry made her turn and plunge into the forest. She wasn’t afraid, she told herself. Holding her hands in front of her in the jujitsu pose, she took a step into the trees, then another one. Her breathing was loud in her ears. Everything in her screamed for her to go back, but she would not be ruled by fear. Besides, Hina needed her. The cat cried out again, seemingly in pain.

  Leia started to call out, but she didn’t want to give away her position in case the man was the cause of her cat’s distress. Stopping near a palm tree, she listened, but there was no sound but the soughing of the wind in the treetops. She forced herself on. There was a clearing out this way and a small cabin Koma said was inhabited by Ku. She smiled at the thought of the old man’s insistent claim.

  The trees parted, and she stepped into the clearing. She heard a sound, and something came at her. She dove, her chest slamming into the dirt. Hina landed on her back. Leia lay on the ground with her heart punching against her ribs. “You just cost me a year of my life, you bad kitty.” She rolled over and grabbed the cat. All Hina’s fur stood up, and her eyes were huge. Something had frightened her badly. Leia ran her hands over Hina but didn’t find any sign of injury. She got to her feet, held Hina under one arm, and dusted her clothes before looking around the clearing.

  Her feet carried her closer to the cabin, even though alarm bells were beginning to go off in her head. The cabin had a closed, secretive feel with its tightly shuttered windows and bolted door. The sound of her shallow gasps filled her ears, and she forced herself to take deeper breaths. Thick vines crawled up the sides in a suffocating mass. She knocked on the door, an unpainted surface that looked as though someone had hewn it with an ax. The rough prick of the wood against her knuckles made her feel more in control.