Kevin cleared his throat in a very pointed way. Both Cindy and Simon blushed.
“Sorry,” Simon said. “But back to what I’m saying, this is obviously being treated like a mystery. A scientific, vaguely science-fictionish mystery. So here’s my prediction about what’s going to happen. We’ll get to Isla Niña and find a few clues. Then as we’re leaving, something exciting will happen.”
“I can’t believe I’m actually going along with your bullshit,” Maria said, “but exciting in what way?”
“Well duh, exciting enough to keep the audience’s attention, but not quite a lot yet. That will be saved for the big finale.”
“You still haven’t explained why we would just happen to run into another giant sea creature,” Kevin said. “Other than accusing the author of being a shitty writer.”
Simon thought about it for a second, then snapped his fingers. “I’ve got it! We’re not in a book at all. This is a TV show! There’s someone or something out there creating sea monsters, and you two are the heroes!”
“Uh, Simon?” Maria said.
“Yes?”
“Do you see the cameras surrounding you? We’ve already established that we’re on a TV show. Just not the kind you’re thinking.”
This seemed to confuse him, and he wandered away, muttering to himself. “Maybe this is the show-runner’s commentary on the nature of reality in the media. If we…” He left the room before Maria could hear anything else, thankfully. His antics were starting to give her a headache.
Feeling comfortable that the show had gotten enough footage of Simon making a fool out of himself that she didn’t feel the need to play for the cameras, Maria went below deck and rested in her and Kevin’s bed for the rest of the journey. By the time Kevin called down to her that they were almost there, the sun had gone low enough that Merchant kept muttering about the quality of the light. She suggested going back to Isla Santa Cruz and then returning when the light would be better, but Maria and Kevin rejected that. It was already unlikely that they would find any clues as to what had happened to Mrs. Schmidt. They didn’t need the wind and water to have even more time to wipe away any evidence.
Maria and Kevin stood on the bridge looking out over the water at the fast-approaching island. Gary stood off to one side, trying to remain unobtrusive while still getting some perfect shot of the two of them. Gutierrez mumbled to himself about the possibility of having to deal with sea lions on the island. Apparently, when working on another boat, he’d once had a bad experience involving a sea lion and a salami, but despite Gary’s urging, Gutierrez refused to divulge more, saying simply “some things must never be spoken of in polite company.”
Maria only had a vague awareness of this conversation, though. She was too awestruck by the sight of Isla Niña. Judging from her reaction, some might guess that she had never seen an island before, as there was nothing outwardly interesting about the island. Maps had shown that it was roughly circular, the shape of a volcano so old that most of it had been worn away by time so that all that remained was a slightly bulging disk of volcanic rock. The vegetation was little more than a few varieties of grass and cacti. Even the island’s name felt inconsequential, as though someone had run out of names and, deciding it was just barely large enough to merit a name at all, had simply called it “Girl Island,” and declared the day’s work done. An inconsequential land mass, not looking to anyone else like it mattered at all.
And to Maria, it was perfect. After her disillusionment in Puerto Ayora, this felt like the real Galápagos.
“It’s beautiful,” Maria whispered. Only Kevin seemed to hear, and he squeezed her hand with a smile. In the late afternoon light, she saw birds circling a far section of the island. It was hard to tell from this distance, but their approximate size and shape suggested boobies. Her breath caught in her throat as she wondered if maybe it was mating season, and she might get to watch to delightfully awkward yet strangely beautiful mating dance male boobies used to entice the females. There were no hotels here, no stands selling souvenirs, and few to no invasive species. Isla Niña was the closest she could get to a time capsule back to the islands as they had been when Darwin first came here.
They had to stop the Cameron some distance out from the island. There were reefs and volcanic rock outcroppings all over, and nothing bigger than a small boat would be able to land at Isla Niña. Merchant wasn’t happy about that because it limited the amount of equipment they could bring onto the island itself. It was eventually decided that Charlene would go with her and Kevin in one Zodiac while Gary accompanied Cindy, Simon, and Ernesto in the other. Monica inflated the Zodiacs while the sound engineer double-checked their mikes.
“You ready for this?” Kevin asked for what felt like the hundredth time on this trip. Maria shrugged and pretended she didn’t know what he was talking about, even if she knew quite well. This would be another “first time since” moment—the first time since the Cortez Incident that she had used one of the inflatable rafts. Under any other circumstances, that wouldn’t have been a big deal. Except the last time Maria had been in one, it had been thrown into the air from underneath by a giant hammerhead.
Jesus Christ, I can’t be scared about everything in the sea, Maria thought to herself. Next you know, I’m going to start being afraid of chandeliers because there were some on the Titanic.
Getting into the Zodiac didn’t require nearly as much mental willpower as when she first got back on the Cameron, though, and the brief trip to the island proved uneventful. It wasn’t until they tied off their rafts on the rocks that they ran into problems. Ernesto instructed everyone to scrub their shoes, then Gary and Charlene went up the sharp black rocks first. This was followed by a lot of very tricky maneuvers to get the camera equipment up, all so that they could get shots of everyone else climbing onto the island. That seemed like it would be the easy part until it came to Maria’s turn and everyone suddenly remembered that she was unpracticed in climbing a rocky cliff, no matter how small it might be, with only one leg. It took her at least three times as long to get up the side as anyone else, partly because she was so out of shape after so much time in the hospital and partially because her prosthetic foot kept getting caught in the rocks. Kevin offered to help her once, but Maria refused in a no-nonsense tone. If she couldn’t relearn to climb a few measly rocks by herself, she wasn’t going to be able to do any of the real strenuous work out in the field. No one else offered after that.
After many frustrating and embarrassing minutes of trying to climb up, Maria finally made it to the top of the ledge. She took a moment to herself, both to regain some of her strength and to bring her mind back to the situation at hand. Maria took in a deep breath, enjoying the uncorrupted sea air. Uncorrupted, that was, except for the distinct scent of bird shit hanging in the wind, but even that felt right. Large amounts of bird shit meant no humans around to clean it up. Sometimes nature’s idea of “pristine” was different than humans.
While they all took a moment to appreciate the peculiar beauty of the mostly barren island around them, Gary listened carefully to something from his earpiece, presumably Merchant giving orders from back on the ship.
“Maria or Kevin, the boss wants one of you to give some kind of inspirational speech about the islands before we leave. It doesn’t have to be now. We’ll just get the sound and dub it over some of the footage in post,” Gary said
Maria waved her hand dismissively. She didn’t want to think about any of that TV crap right now. She wanted to enjoy this. As much as one could enjoy an investigation into a woman’s death, that was.
“So walk us through this,” Maria said to Ernesto. He gave another brief recap of Debbie Schmidt’s last known minutes, although unlike at the hotel, he didn’t include any of her obnoxious behavior. The woman was dead. No sense dragging something like that out on television.
After that brief overview of where he’d sent everyone, he led them down the path, cautioning them to be careful of a guan
o-surrounded nest that some booby had built right in the middle. He again cautioned them all to watch their step, not even disturbing any of the plants if they could help it, then took them off the path and to the ledge where Mrs. Schmidt had vanished. Here they all stopped, looking down at the rocks jutting out of the sea water. The arm had been retrieved and was now the property of the Puerto Ayora police, nor was there any more blood. Either animals had eaten it or the splash of waves against the rocks had washed it all away.
“Some of those rocks are pretty jagged,” Kevin said. “And slick. It would be easy to believe that someone slipped, fell, hit their head, and then drowned.”
“I assure you, there’s no way that happened. Mr. Schmidt’s story might be distorted by the trauma he’s gone through, but at least trust me. This was no simple accident. Out of all the times I’ve taken tourists out among the islands, I’ve never let something like that happen,” Ernesto said.
“Relax,” Maria said. “No one’s blaming you.” She crouched down closer to the ground, something that was decidedly more uncomfortable than it had once been thanks to the cup of her prosthetic digging into what was left of the flesh below her knee. She needed to get used to it, though. One couldn’t be a biologist in the field without getting down on the ground and dirty. “If not for the arm, I could see how this could be interpreted as an accident, though. If the waves hit down there just right, especially if it were at high tide, the spume of water could knock someone off here and into the sea.”
“Except it wasn’t even high tide,” Ernesto said. “It was a little bit lower than now. Look at how the waves are hitting it. We’re feeling only a little mist even at the strongest swell.”
“So are we honestly considering the idea that a sea monster ate Debbie Schmidt?” Kevin asked.
“You’re right,” Maria said with a forced smile. “It’s highly unlikely. Almost as unlikely as a giant hammerhead that can psychically control other sharks.”
“Teddy Bear was not psychic. And that incident is in no way related to this. I’m sure that if we applied logic to this, we could come up with a plausible reason that a woman fell in by herself and somehow lost her arm in the process.”
Maria looked up at him from her crouch. “Is this how we’re going to do the show, then? You’re the one always trying to come up with the logical explanation while I’m trying to prove its more giant sharks?”
Kevin shrugged. “I have no problem being the Scully to your Mulder.”
“Except I want to be Scully,” Maria said. “Ernesto, you said the tide was lower than this when it all happened?”
“Yes.”
“Coming in or going out?”
“Uh, coming in, I think.”
“What are you thinking, Maria?” Kevin asked.
Maria tried to ignore Charlene standing nearby, obviously wanting to get a close up as she spouted some important detail to whatever narrative the editors would create of all this. “Let’s just ignore the arm for a moment. If she had fallen in or been hit by a wave, wouldn’t the tide coming in have kept the body closer to shore?”
“Um, I don’t know. Not necessarily. A number of major currents converge on the Galápagos, after all. The way they move between the islands is a major part of why you don’t see so much intermingling of species,” Kevin said.
“But this close to shore? What I’m saying is there isn’t any reason they shouldn’t have been able to recover a body. Recovery efforts were attempted, right Ernesto?”
“Search boats were called as soon as we could. They didn’t find anything beyond, um, what she left behind.”
“Okay, so let’s ditch the idea that she fell in. It was a bit of a long shot anyway. So what else could it have been, and where’s your evidence of that?”
Maria sighed. “I don’t have any.”
8
Gary and Charlene said they’d been instructed to get “b-roll,” which was apparently camera-person-ese for “pretty shots of the environment to stick between editing transitions.” Maria was fine with that. It gave her and Kevin a moment to actually enjoy the island before they headed back for the night. They would all stay on the Cameron overnight and then come back to Isla Niña at dawn, although Maria wasn’t sure what they were supposed to accomplish with that time. This didn’t seem like the kind of case that could be solved. Not that she was a detective in the traditional sense (although she preferred to think of all science as detective work), but she knew that when most evidence was washed out to sea and the rest was behind a locked door in a police station miles away, there was little chance of finding any definitive answers. Merchant probably wanted Maria to strap on her specially made prosthetic and jump in the water looking for whatever, if anything, had taken Mrs. Schmidt, but Maria didn’t think she was anywhere near ready for that, especially since they still didn’t have the slightest clue what the true culprit might be. This was not going to be the action-packed episode Merchant hoped for. All the producer would be able to do was cobble together everything she had so far and hope it wasn’t so boring that the show was canceled after the premiere.
She and Kevin found a nearby rock on the edge of the trail where Kevin could sit. Maria chose instead to sprawl out on the ground and, grateful for the chance to escape the chafing so much walking was causing on her stump, unstrapped her prosthetic and let the skin breathe. She refused to look at the twisted snarl of flesh, but it was refreshing to feel that warm island breeze and the tickle of grass. She lay out on her stomach, her chin supported on her fists, as she stared down at the dirt and the microcosm of organisms that lived there.
Kevin, with a pair of binoculars in hand, watched the boobies flying nearby. Maria watched the bugs. To anyone else, that’s all they would have been. To her, this tiny sample was just a part of a much bigger chain. Since entomology wasn’t her specialty, she couldn’t identify the bugs for certain, but she did know enough biology to know these were not the same creatures she would find in her parents’ backyard in San Francisco. Some of the ants, maybe, since to the best of her knowledge, ants were not endemic to the islands and all ant species had been introduced by humans that didn’t care about upsetting the isolated island’s delicate ecosystem. The beetle she watched scurry in front of her, though, she suspected was probably one of the original denizens of Isla Niña, here long before humans had even realized this chain of volcanic rocks existed.
Just sitting here, looking at the beetle and wondering, gave her more joy than she’d had in any other moment since the Cortez Incident. Even her time with Kevin, pleasant and comforting, did not fill her heart in the same way as this simple, tiny show.
“I miss that,” Kevin said.
“Miss what?”
“Your smile. I don’t see it as often as I used to.”
“Hmmm,” she said, although it was difficult to keep the expression going now that he had pointed it out. “So, I think that, at least by Merchant’s standards, this trip is going to be a bust.”
“Big deal,” Kevin said. “So instead of the action-packed show she wanted, she’s going to get the educational program we wanted. I call that a win.”
“Even if no one watches?”
“If something happened to the show, you would still have the money they already gave you. It will cover most of the expenses. If there’s any bills left, there’s still the book deal you were considering.”
“No one’s stupid enough to buy a book about me fighting a giant shark,” Maria said.
“You might be surprised.”
“So level with me. You knew Merchant’s attempt at a thrilling first episode was going to be a bust, didn’t you?”
“Maybe. As much as Merchant probably would like to think so, we’re not going to just run into more giant sharks. Which is exactly why I knew this would be a good way to get you back into the field. No real threat, no real stress, a destination you’ve always wanted to go to.”
“Well, thank you. You’re too good to me, you know that, right?”
“I’m exactly as good to you as you deserve. You’ve been there for me when I’ve gone through just as bad.”
Maria shuddered, thinking back to her early days volunteering with him, back before he’d had his beard, back before he’d been so finely muscled, back when walking into the wrong bar at the wrong time had nearly killed him. They usually didn’t talk about that, though, mostly because Kevin didn’t seem to want to remember. The mere fact that he would bring it up now, that he would acknowledge it, meant something.
“You know,” she said, flipping over to her back and looking over at him with a raised eyebrow, “it’s kind of a shame.”
“What is?”
“That we’re here in paradise, far away from everything, and we’ve got cameras watching us.” She gave him a knowing grin.
He smiled back just as mischievously. “They do seem to be a tad busy at the moment. I’m sure if we found someplace just a little out of the way of eyesight we could get a few minutes to ourselves.”
The idea was appealing, but Maria had to laugh as she thought about the possible consequences. “Now Kevin, I’m sure I didn’t hear you just suggest violating the conservation rules of a World Heritage Site just to get a little nookie. Besides, we’d probably get unlucky and end up doing each other in a pile of booby shit.”
“Okay, this was a sexy conversation. Not anymore.”
She laughed again. “Granted, I’m sure some shit is sexier than others. Maybe accidentally kneeling in a marine iguana turd wouldn’t be so bad. At least nowhere near as bad… as…”
Maria trailed off as something occurred to her.
“Maria, what’s…?”
“Shhhh,” she said, sitting up and holding a finger up to silence him. Maria listened to the natural sounds of the island. The honks of the boobies. The chirps of finches and other small birds. The occasional faint skitter of iguana’s claws on the rocks. The waves as the tide started to come back in.
All the noises she expected to hear on Isla Niña. Except one.
Galapagos Below Page 6
