by Lee, Rachel
“So you’re planning to buy paintbrushes?”
She looked at him then, wondering what he meant. Then she remembered their earlier conversation. “I’m thinking about it. If I don’t paint the house now, it’ll have to wait another year, until my next vacation.”
He nodded and opened his mouth to reply, but just as he started speaking, a long, low roll of thunder shook the house.
“Damn it, Jeff!” Callie said out loud. She looked at the digital clock and saw that the power must have fluctuated, because it was blinking steadily. She suddenly realized the room had become almost as gloomy as night.
“Five minutes,” Chase said, looking at his watch.
“If the power doesn’t go out.” Something new to worry about. God, she hated this! Crossing the room, she turned on the lamp beside the radio.
She hated that radio, she realized. It sat there, ugly and gray, in a corner of the living room, a constant reminder that the Carlsons went to sea. Her dad had bought it after their mother’s death. When he died, she’d come close to throwing it in the trash, but then Jeff had started going out, and she couldn’t bear the thought of not being able to get in touch with him.
So it sat there, a lifeline that she hated.
She probably should have sunk the boat, she thought now. When they had sold their father’s vessel after his death, to get money to live on, Jeff had insisted they take some of it and get a smaller boat. “For pleasure,” he’d said. “We can go fishing, or just cruise on nice days…”
She’d allowed herself to be persuaded, thinking that if Jeff could take the boat out for fun, he wouldn’t feel as strong a need to go out as a commercial fisherman. How wrong she’d been. She’d never imagined that he would use that boat to follow the very lifestyle she wanted him to leave behind.
The radio crackled to life, Jeff’s voice giving the call letters. “It’s getting rough out here,” he said. “We’ve got eight-foot waves…”
Chase picked up the microphone. “Are you still tied to the abandoned vessel?”
“We’re almost done here….” His voice faded away in a burst of static.
Callie came to stand beside the table, gripping the edge of it until her knuckles turned white. Chase looked up at her, his eyes opaque.
“… most of the water out of the boat and…”
Another burst of static. Callie closed her eyes, praying.
“… engine started. Over.”
Chase spoke into the microphone. “Give me your position, over.”
Another roll of thunder shook the house, and there was a sudden machine-gun rattle of rain on the tin roof.
No answer. Chase keyed the mike again. “Lily, give me your position. Over.”
Still no answer, just the unending crackle of static from the speaker.
“Oh, God!” Callie could hardly stand it. Straightening, she began to pace the room, praying to God, praying to the sea to help her brother return safely. Seconds turned slowly into minutes as Chase kept trying to raise the Lily.
“The storm’s playing hell with the radio,” he said once.
Callie didn’t even answer. In her mind all she could see was the Lily tied up along some other boat, rolling dangerously on rough seas, unable to keep her bow into the waves because of the floundering vessel she was tied to. She could see Jeff being washed overboard by a large wave. She could see the Lily being hurled by the waves against the other craft and breaking up. Sinking.
All she could see was the sea taking the last of her family from her.
The minutes dragged into a half hour, then into an hour with no further word from Jeff.
The phone rang. Startled, she jumped and stared at it as if it might bite her. It had to be one of her friends, but she didn’t want to talk to anyone right now. Chase keyed the mike again, and tried to get Jeff. Over and over, his voice remaining calm, he called the Lily and no one answered.
The phone kept ringing, and finally Callie reached for it, ready to give short shrift to whoever it was.
“Ms. Carlson?” asked an unfamiliar man’s voice.
“Yes?”
“Ms. Carlson, this is Warrant Officer Hemlich of the United States Coast Guard. I’m calling about Jeff Carlson.”
Her heart slammed, her eyes closed, and her brain fell silent as she waited for the awful news she was sure must be coming.
“Ma’am, Mr. Carlson asked that somebody call you and tell you he’s all right. We’re escorting him to harbor right now.”
CHAPTER 2
Callie collapsed. Her legs gave way as the adrenaline washed from her system in the tidal wave of relief that poured through her. She caught herself on the edge of the couch and managed to sit, the phone still in her hand.
“What happened?” Chase asked. He leaned forward as if ready to jump to her aid. “What’s wrong?”
“Jeff… he’s okay,” she managed to say, her voice shaking. “He’s okay. God, I thought… it was the Coast Guard and I thought…” She couldn’t even finish the sentence.
Another rumble of thunder shook the house until the windows rattled, momentarily drowning the clatter of rain on the metal roof. Salt spray swept up off the inlet was beginning to cloud the windows, blurring the outside world.
Callie leaned forward, covering her face with her hands, letting herself feel the relief, letting the tension of the past hours slowly ebb from every aching muscle in her body. She wanted to cry, but she wasn’t alone, so she drew deep, steadying breaths and said silent prayers of thanksgiving.
After a few minutes, Chase spoke. “You still going to kill him when he gets home?”
It was the right question, because the absurdity of it struck her, bracing her. She dropped her hands from her face and looked at him. “I’m going to sink that damn boat!”
“It’s an option. Sink both of them.”
She started to laugh, and for a moment she wondered if she was going to be able to stop, or if she was going to sail off into the hysterics that had been threatening for hours now. But her laugh trailed off, and with it escaped the last tension in her body. “He’s all right,” she said again, making herself believe it. “They’re escorting him back to harbor.”
“Escorting?”
For the first time, the word struck her as odd. “That’s what they said.” She searched Chase’s face, hoping he would explain it away.
But he didn’t. “Did they say why?”
She shook her head, feeling a new tension grip her. “I should have asked. I assumed… I thought because the seas are so rough…”
He nodded. “Maybe that’s it. Maybe Jeff was having a little more trouble than he let on. Or maybe they needed help towing the other boat.”
She clung to that but didn’t believe it. Her life had been a series of catastrophes, one after another. Why should this time be any different? But she needed to believe that word escorting was innocent.
Her stomach growled, unhappy that she had fed it nothing but grits since the morning. The thought of food provided a welcome distraction. “I’m going to make something to eat. Join me?” She expected him to make an excuse and go back to his solitude, but he surprised her.
“Sounds good,” he said. “Can I help?”
She had fried chicken left from dinner the previous night. The argument with Jeff had started as they were setting the table, and neither of them had eaten more than a few mouthfuls. She brought that out, along with the potato salad they also hadn’t touched, and she and Chase sat at the big oak kitchen table that had belonged to her great grandmother.
“Thanks for helping me this afternoon, Chase.”
He paused, a spoonful of potato salad between the bowl and his plate. “That’s what neighbors are for.” He smiled.
His smile, Callie thought, was an amazing thing. It transformed his face from piratical and dangerous to warm and welcoming. Only the diamond twinkling in his earlobe reminded her that he could look like a buccaneer.
“Well, thank you anyway,”
she said. “I honestly think Jeff would never have answered my radio calls.”
“You may be underestimating your brother. It sounded to me like he cares about you a lot more than you think.”
“I know he cares about me. He just doesn’t want to listen to me.” She sighed and managed a rueful smile. “Maybe I am a nag.”
“Could be. Or it could just be that he’s young and thinks he knows more than he does. That’s common at his age.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Anyway, I think he would have answered your calls when the weather got worse. He understood your feelings enough to have the Coast Guard call you.”
“That’s true.” The word escorting floated back into her thoughts, but she dismissed it, unwilling to believe it meant anything except that the Coast Guard was making sure her brother got safely back to port. “So you’re a seaman, too?” In her book, that was no recommendation.
“Diver.”
The word was clipped in a way that told her there was a lot of emotion behind it. Even as she was wondering whether to question him, he started talking.
“I was doing deep dives for insurance companies interested in salvage.”
“How deep?”
“My personal max is around three hundred feet. Most of the dives were somewhere between a hundred and a hundred seventy feet though. The deeper you go, the shorter the dive and the harder it is to actually work, so I didn’t do too many really deep ones. For those they tend to use ROVs—remotely operated vehicles.”
“I don’t know much about it, but don’t most divers stay above a hundred?”
“Usually. For recreational diving anyway. This was work.”
“Specialized work.”
“Very.”
She hesitated, then asked, “You said you had an accident?”
His face tightened and his shoulders tensed. “Yeah,” he said roughly. “I got into trouble, and they had to bring me up too fast. I got the bends.”
She caught her breath. Even though she didn’t know much about diving, she knew about how deadly decompression sickness could be. Air embolisms in the tissues and brain could cause permanent damage. “Bad?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
That probably explained the limp and the flickers of pain she saw cross his face from time to time. She felt a surge of sympathy for him, but also a burst of anger. “The damn sea,” she said bitterly.
He shook his head. “It’s best not to look at it that way, Callie. You could get hit by a car crossing the street.”
She pushed back from the table, her appetite gone, and carried her dishes to sink. “It’s the sea,” she said. “It’s different. You know it’s different.”
Turning to face him, she leaned back against the counter and folded her arms. “I grew up in a seafaring family, and I hate the water. People come down here to the Keys and look out at the pretty aquamarine waves and think she’s beautiful. They don’t know her. Jeez, listen to me.” She gave a harsh laugh and shook her head. “I sound so superstitious.”
“Most of us who live with the sea are superstitious,” he said with a shrug.
“It’s illogical though, and I know it. The sea is no different than a mountain, or a hurricane, or any other force of nature. It’s just an inhospitable environment for us. But…” She trailed off. “My dad used to talk about her like she was a living, breathing being.”
“It feels that way when your life depends on it.”
“He loved her. More than anything, he loved the sea. Jeff’s the same way.”
He nodded slowly. “That’s hard on you, isn’t it.”
“You know, you’d make a good psychologist.” She gave a little laugh and tried to shrug off her mood. “I’m being unreasonable, and you’re using active listening to get me to talk about it.”
“Do you analyze every conversation?”
“No, I don’t. But I’m sensing you’re on Jeff’s side in this.”
He shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t know that I’d say that. He was a jerk to go out this morning. I thought so when I saw him go. But that’s youth, more than anything.”
“I mean about the sea. You love the sea, don’t you?”
“Yeah. I do.”
“In spite of what happened to you.”
“Like I said, I could’ve been hit by a car crossing the street.”
She had a feeling he didn’t quite believe that, that he was replying with logic when his feelings were really something very different.
He cleaned his plate, then carried it to the sink. “Thanks for the meal. I need to get on back to my place. But… if you need anything, give me a call. I reckon I’m still good for something.”
A couple of minutes later he was walking back around the inlet in the pouring rain. Callie Carlson was quite a nice armful of woman, he thought in the detached way an artist might admire a painting. She had a Meg Ryan sort of cuteness with short blond hair, and a pair of legs that were made for shorts. In another lifetime he might have checked her out seriously, but not since he’d discovered that life was a hell of a lot easier if you just left women out of it.
Even here in the protected cove the waves were battering against the seawalls and the mangroves. The heron had disappeared, and all the other wildlife was hiding somewhere in the safety of the thick tropical woods. He was sodden and dripping long before he reached his house, but he didn’t care. Getting wet had never bothered him.
He was chilled, though, by the time he climbed the steps to the shelter of his porch. Going around the side to where Callie couldn’t see him from her house, he stripped his clothes and left them in a wet heap on the redwood planking.
Inside he poured a finger of whiskey into a glass and knocked it back, hoping it would take the edge off the chill. Then he climbed into the shower and let the hot water beat some of the ache out of his body.
The bends had done some damage to his hip joint and to his back, and there was nothing he could do about that. But compensating for the pain caused him to move and sit awkwardly, and as the day wore on his muscles began to stiffen and shriek. A hot shower always helped that.
He had just finished toweling himself dry and was climbing into a pair of jeans when he heard an engine coming up the rutted, sandy road to his house. He hadn’t had a single visitor in the three weeks he had lived here, and he wasn’t expecting any now.
Tension filled him again, a different kind. The nightmare visions that plagued the darkness began to crawl around the edges of his mind in the storm-dimmed house. Unable to ignore his uneasiness, he got the Beretta out of the drawer and walked to the bedroom to watch out the back window and see who was coming.
A green Ford Explorer came around the bend, emerging from the thick growth almost as if it had sprung out of the plants. He didn’t recognize the vehicle, and his hand tightened on the butt of his gun.
The car’s windows were darkly tinted, and he couldn’t see the driver. Licking his lips, Chase lifted the gun and waited.
What he was waiting for, he didn’t know. He didn’t believe in his nightmare demons, yet he was absolutely convinced he had something to fear. A hundred times a day he told himself it was just paranoia, but he didn’t believe that either.
Instead he kept remembering that even paranoids have real enemies. It was an old joke, but it didn’t strike him as funny at all. Not anymore.
The Explorer pulled to a stop right behind his pickup truck and the engine turned off. Not exactly a surreptitious approach, Chase decided, relaxing a little.
Then the car door opened and a sigh of relief escaped him as he recognized his old friend Tom Akers. Suddenly embarrassed to be holding a pistol, he shoved it back into his dresser drawer, grabbed a T- shirt, and pulled it on.
He stepped onto the front porch just as Tom was climbing the steps. Old salt that he was, Tom was wearing a sou’wester. He looked up, saw Chase, and broke into a huge grin. “How ya doin’, man?”
“Great. How’s it going, Tom?”
/> They met at the top of the steps and shook hands vigorously.
“You’re looking a helluva lot better than the last time I saw you.”
“Nobody looks good in a hospital bed.”
“Ain’t that the truth?” Tom shucked his rain gear and hung it on the back of a porch chair.
“Come on in. I’ve got a bottle of whiskey just waiting for you.”
“I figured you had one with my name on it.”
Chase’s kitchen, living room, and dining area formed a spacious open L. He and Tom sat at the table with the bottle between them and two highball glasses. Chase poured them each a couple of fingers of whiskey.
Tom took a sip, nodded approval, and set his glass down. “So how are you doing, really?” he asked. “Is the pain getting any better?”
Chase shook his head. “That’s pretty much steady. I’m learning to live with it.”
“And the nightmares?”
“The same.”
Tom sighed and took another sip of whiskey. “Shit, I was hoping it would get better.”
“It’s only been a couple of months. Maybe it will.”
“Do you remember anything about what happened down there?”
For some reason, the question set Chase’s teeth on edge. It wasn’t just that he didn’t like to remember it, it was the feeling he got that everybody was waiting for him to remember something new. And at some instinctive level, he had a strong feeling that it wouldn’t be healthy for him to remember any more. “Just… the hallucinations. It’s not very clear. It probably never will be.”
Tom nodded. “Well, it was a hell of a thing, and I’m damned if I can understand how it happened. It’s not like you haven’t been diving at those depths hundreds of times.”
“Things happen.”
“Things like that don’t happen to careful divers like you.” Tom rubbed the back of his neck as if something irritated him. “I had a bad feeling that day. A real bad feeling. It was like they put that decompression chamber on deck because they knew something was going to happen.”
