Danger at the Dive Shop

by M. J. Mandrake

  Mark slowed the motor as they joined a group of boats clustered around the dark reefs. Elaine and Penny helped each other out of their life jackets and windbreakers. The sun was above the horizon now and the air had warmed up by several degrees. Angelina pointed to somewhere on the map and Mark nodded, moving farther away from the busy area.

  Andrew stood up and made his way to the stern. “I thought we were gonna go to the area closest to the lighthouse. Over there.” He pointed back to where the group of boats had settled. “That’s where the treasure is.”

  Kitty quickly translated for Penny and Elaine, who both perked up considerably at that news.

  “Nobody knows where it is, or if there is any. It’s too busy over there. We’re going to get out of the fray. It’ll be better that way, believe me.” Mark smiled at him, but Andrew shook his head.

  “No, everybody says the treasure is over there. Y’all said we’d be coming here so we could look for it, and now you’re gonna to take us somewhere else. What a rip off,” he said, his face twisting in anger.

  Kitty grimaced. Apparently Andrew hadn’t realized that gold wasn’t in his future after all.

  “You can head over there if you want. It won’t take you long. We’re dropping anchor here, and that’s all there is to it.” Mark put his hands on his hips and stood, feet apart, looming over Andrew.

  For a moment, Kitty thought the two men would come to blows, but Andrew shrugged and turned to the rest of the group. “Y’all know I’m right. Whoever wants to look for it had better come with me.”

  Ren and Jenny exchanged glances.

  “We only heard it was in this area,” Ren said. “Nothing specific.”

  “Well, I got dive buddies who’ve been out here a couple dozen times and they said it was there.” Andrew pointed again.

  “If they’ve been out there so many times, that probably means it’s not there, right?” Jenny asked.

  “Not necessarily,” Joan said. “Maybe they just didn’t look in the right place.” Lisa nodded vehemently, her dive goggles slipping from her forehead.

  “Exactly. And Mark here is tryin’ to keep the place to himself!”

  Mark shook his head, as if to say Whatever, buddy. Again, Kitty was impressed with his control and wondered why Angelina hadn’t been treated with the same calm attitude. “Everybody get ready. We’ve got a couple of tours today and I need to have the boat back by ten. You have about an hour to explore. We’ll be taking a headcount at nine, then we’ll have some refreshments, then back to the dive shop.”

  Despite the tension, the group wandered toward the area of the boat where the railing detached and the divers could sit until it was their turn to roll backwards into the water. Kitty hadn’t been keen about falling blindly the first day, but when Mark had explained how easy it was to dislodge the regulator or hoses and end up having to re-board the boat in order to fix her equipment, she’d embraced the idea.

  “Stay with Angelina and Toto,” Kitty said to Chica. Instead of moving toward her, Chica walked to the railing and looked into the water, her whole body signaling that there was something down there.

  “Yes, lots of fish. Come on, you can’t go with me.” Kitty hooked a finger in Chica’s collar and led her toward Angelina. After a few seconds, Chica stopped trying to see into the water and settled under Angelina’s lounge chair. Angelina reached down and rubbed Chica’s ears.

  “She seems real comfortable with her,” Elaine said, goggling at the sight of Chica parting from Kitty so willingly.

  “She probably fed her some sausage,” Kitty said, trying not to feel defensive. The next moment, she felt remorse at implying Chica could be bought with a treat. Sure, she was a dog, but she was also the smartest and most intuitive animal Kitty had ever met.

  As they all lined up to have their gear checked and rechecked, Kitty glanced over at Chica one last time. It was true that Chica stayed close to Kitty. As long as they’d been friends, Chica had preferred Kitty to everyone and anything else. And vice versa. Maybe there was something more to Angelina, something that Chica sensed and Kitty did not.

  A feeling of foreboding settled over Kitty as the group dropped, one by one, into the water. Penny went, signing “woman overboard” before grabbing her regulator and flopping backwards. Elaine was more sedate, but still pointed to Kitty and signed that she would see her down there. Soon it was Kitty’s turn. She sat on the edge of the boat and glanced backwards. The water was only a few feet below, and she could see her fellow scuba divers making their way in several directions away from the boat.

  Turning forward again, Kitty glanced at Chica. She was stretched under Angelina’s chair, but her focus was on the water. Kitty shivered at her expression. Danger, Chica was saying. Danger below.

  Of course the ocean was dangerous. There were sharks and stingrays and all sorts of odd creatures. She couldn’t live her life cocooned by the fire in her bookstore, or pampered on a luxury cruise her whole life. She had to get out and explore the world in all its incredible beauty, dangerous sea creatures and all.

  Shaking off the fear, Kitty closed her eyes, grabbed her regulator in one hand, pressed her dive mask with the other, and dropped into the ocean.

  Chapter Four

  “Believe me, when you die, it's everybody else's problem but yours.”

  ― Cecelia Ahern

  Kitty dropped below the surface. As the noise of the outside world cut out like someone turning off the TV, she felt an instantaneous relaxation in her muscles. It was soothing, peaceful.

  She took a few moments to get her bearings and then looked around. The water in Cozumel is unnaturally clear and that’s one reason it made for such spectacularly diving. Kitty could see Andrew motioning for others to follow him toward the reef near the rocky outcropping. Even from where Kitty floated, she could see dozens of other divers milling about the area. For just a moment, she felt the urge to swim as fast as she could after Andrew and join the race toward the most likely spot for the treasure. But then she glanced around her and saw the miles of reef stretching in three directions. There was no reason to fight so many other people for a spot.

  The two young men from the other boat followed Andrew, and close behind went Jenny and Ren. The three middle aged women slowly made their way in the same direction, stopping every so often to point out small fish or take a closer look into the crevices of the reef.

  A touch on her arm made Kitty jump, but the water slowed her reaction to a slightly faster than normal shrug.

  “Where should we go?” Penny signed.

  Kitty assumed she wasn’t asking where she and Elaine should go, but where the three of them should go. “It looks really busy over there.” It felt odd to sign in the water, like talking with a mouthful of mashed potatoes. Kitty glanced back at the boat. She wanted to explore farther afield, but not in that direction.

  “Let’s go around the boat, and then toward the shore.” Elaine was surprisingly graceful underwater. They both were. Kitty wondered if that was how she looked. She’d always felt more clumsy in a dive suit, and attached to a breathing apparatus, but perhaps the reality was much different.

  Kitty agreed and they all set off around the boat, giving it forty feet of clearance. Of course the motor was off, but you could never be too careful. Kitty didn’t want to remember the part of the instruction where Coleman had detailed the different accidents that had happened when an oblivious boat owner had encroached on a diver’s personal space.

  As they started toward the reef, Kitty could see why Punta Molas was famous, even without the rumor of treasure. The reef teemed with fish and sea creatures, the sunlight filtered through the water onto white sand in a mesmerizing pattern, and the ocean that stretched in front of Kitty seemed to be made up of a thousand shades of blue.

  Penny waved to get her attention and pointed at a small, spiderlike creature. It was only a few inches long and didn’t seem to have a head or discernable eyes. “Yellowline arrow crab,” she finger spelled. />
  “I’ve never heard of it,” Kitty signed back. “Is it dangerous?”

  “No, just ugly. Looks like an overgrown spider, right?”

  Elaine put up a hand, and Kitty and Penny drifted to a halt again. They crowded closer, trying to see what she was showing them. All Kitty could see was a bright yellow blog attached to the top of the reef.

  “Longlure Frogfish.” Elaine pointed to another close by. “They dangle out a little lure and when some curious fish comes by, they snap it up whole.”

  “How do you two know so much about this?”

  “We bought a book.” Kitty thought she could see Elaine roll her eyes a little behind her mask. She was right. For a woman who owned a bookstore, Kitty hadn’t prepared for the trip very well at all. She’d seen so many beautiful creatures but didn’t know anything about them.

  As they swam farther into the reef, the walls grew higher. Kitty glimpsed another diver near the edge of the reef taking photos of an octopus camouflaged against the seafloor. He was using a closed unit, his exhalations going back into the tank to be mixed again with the oxygen. Kitty knew that most photographers used closed systems to keep the bubbles from interfering with their pictures. Motioning to Penny and Elaine, Kitty pointed away from the other diver. No reason to butt into his area with their mountains of bubbles.

  In the other direction, the reef was so large that there were spaces large enough for the three of them to swim through side-by-side and still not touch the walls. Kitty looked up, amazed at how the light had changed when they moved into the crevice.

  “Like the Grand Canyon, but underwater,” Elaine signed.

  “But in miniature,” Penny said.

  “And made out of coral.” It was hard to laugh around a mouthpiece and Kitty worked on keeping a straight face. Maybe joking around underwater wasn’t such a good idea after all.

  “I think we’ll find squirrel fish in here.” Penny pointed toward the dark areas in the coral.

  Kitty wondered if she’d misunderstood the sign but a moment later, Elaine pointed toward a little striped fish with unnaturally large eyes. “Squirrel fish,” Elaine said. “On our list. You can only see them in the night dives, or in the dark areas.”

  Kitty was starting to feel as if she were the only person without a list. She tried to remember some of the pictures on the boat walls. There were anemones, clownfish, stingrays… There was so much to see and so many names to remember. Kitty focused on the coral walls as she kicked herself further along the sandy bed that stretched into the reef. Bright anemone tentacles waved in the air as she passed. Kitty resisted running a finger along them to see the anemone contract under the false hope of food. Always better to look but not touch. Kitty wasn’t one of those people that needed to handle everything, but underwater she had to fight the urge, like a child in a toy store.

  A large gap in the reef looked promising to explore. Golden-colored fan coral waved gently in the ocean currents and a row of neon pink sea sponges lined the bottom edge like safety lights. A large brain coral grew out of the wall, the design looking eerily like the human organ. In a flurry of bubbles and motion, a group of electric-blue fish burst from their hiding spot and Kitty backpedaled away, panicking. They surrounded her for several seconds as they searched for the way out, away from the black-suited intruder.

  Just fish. Kitty closed her eyes, willing her heart rate to return to normal. If she kept scaring herself, she was going to use up all her oxygen and have to return to the boat.

  The sunlight filtered down into the water, flashing like a strobe light on the rocky outcropping. Glancing back, she didn’t see Penny or Elaine. They must have moved on without her. She would just take a peek and then go back out the way she’d come in. A whisper of doubt passed through her. Maybe she didn’t know the way back. Maybe she’d be stuck in the reefs forever, squeezing through cracks in the walls and following sandy paths to dead ends. Or, at least, until she ran out of oxygen.

  Kitty rolled her eyes at her overactive imagination and lack of reasoning skills. If she lost her way, she could simply resurface and look for the boat.

  A movement caught her attention and she focused on a slight bump in the sand. Maybe she’d found the electric ray Ren wanted. Cautiously moving closer, Kitty turned sideways to squeeze around an outcropping of giant anemones. She couldn’t help staring at the tubers as she floated by, noting the tiny fish resting inside, happy as could be with their poisonous home.

  She crept closer, squinting at the ray-shaped outline. She didn’t want to touch it. Two hundred and twenty volts didn’t feel good at any time. Underwater and attached to scuba gear might possibly be the worst.

  Holding her place above the sandy area, Kitty leaned down and waved a hand over the shape. She couldn’t tell if it was a camouflaged fish, or the sea bed. She supposed that was the point of camouflage, but it was usually easier to find an outline or shadow. Pulling out a small waterproof penlight she kept in her scuba belt, she flicked it on and shone it directly at the sandy bump.

  Eyes blinked at her and then the ray drifting gently away. Kitty pressed herself as close as she dared to the wall, hoping it was simply leaving for a less popular spot and wasn’t angry enough to send a few hundred volts of electricity through her body. The ray drifted back out along the path and she let loose a sigh of relief.

  A moment later her relief turned to alarm when something brushed against her back. Kitty imagined another electric ray, perhaps the larger, over-protective mother of the one she’d just scared out of his hiding spot. She was terrified to turn around, but her fear of being zapped by an angry electric ray took a back seat to her fear of the unknown.

  She swiveled, prepared for the worst. In the beam of her penlight, there wasn’t an angry mother ray, or even another creature. It was a mannequin dressed in scuba gear, another example of the pollution Coleman had ranted about the other day. The dummy’s arm had drifted upward with the current and that’s what had touched her back. Here she was smack dab in the middle of the battle between the diving areas and cruise ships for the reefs. So many businesses relied on the scuba trips for survival. Kitty appreciated both sides of the issue, since she was employed by the mammoth ocean liners who disturbed the ocean currents and she also believed in preserving and shielding the reefs from as much corruption as possible. But here it was clear some irresponsible scuba company had gone and dumped one of their props into the ocean.

  She tugged on the dummy’s arm. It was stiff and unwieldy. Maybe she could dislodge the thing from the reef and bring it back to their boat. It was such a shame that some thoughtless dive company had simply left it out there, creating a silly sort of Halloween display for the tourists who paid good money to see the reefs in all their spectacular glory. The dive shops were the ones claiming the moral high ground against the cruise ships and development, but here they were, leaving their promotional materials at the bottom of the ocean.

  Yanking hard, she managed to pull the top half of the dummy from the crack. The dials and the hoses looked newer and higher quality than what was currently attached to her own tanks. The company would be glad to have it back.

  Changing positions, Kitty moved behind the dummy and hooking her hands under its armpits, tried to hoist it the rest of the way out of the coral. Even with the weightlessness of the water, it seemed filled with lead. Maybe it had a dive belt she could unfasten. Kitty ducked under the torso and shined a light around the midsection of the dummy. Tiny crabs scuttled from a tear in the suit, clearly unhappy with being disturbed in their new home. She smiled, thinking of how the sea life took whatever flotsam was thrown its way and made it useful.

  There was a belt but it was clear except for several small tools. Maybe the suit had filled with water, or there were more than few crabs inhabiting the inside. The idea of hauling around a hundred baby crabs gave her a shiver. She loved the coral life, but anything with long legs and pinchers was a few evolutionary steps too close to spiders.

  For a mo
ment, she considered abandoning the dummy and going on with her tour. Everyone else was searching for buried treasure and here she was, digging trash out of the reef. But then, if not her, who? And when? Kitty knew the rubber and plastic could contaminate the coral despite the sea creatures’ attempts to repurpose it.

  Moving back, she searched for a good place to grab the torso. If only it weren’t so stiff and awkward. She remembered the life guard training she’d received from the cruise liner and thought it would work as well for a water rescue as trash removal. Floating above the dummy, she reached down and hooked one arm under its chin and tugged. It resisted for a moment, then the bottom half sprang free and she was on her way to the surface.

  Kitty kicked her flippers and gazed up at the glittering sunlight. Water rescue had definitely been the way to proceed, as the dummy felt nearly weightless as she made her way the last few feet to the fresh air. Her head bobbed above the water and Kitty searched the horizon for the boat. It wasn’t far away. She could see Angelina walking around the deck and Chica sitting at the railing, facing toward Kitty.

  She started to paddle toward them, one hand hooked into the hoses of the dummy’s gear. There was no sign of the other divers. It was just her luck, really, if they found treasure and she found trash. The next moment, she rolled her eyes at herself. Here she was on a diving trip that she’d won playing Bingo, and she was complaining about not being lucky. It was more likely that nobody would find anything as interesting as what she’d pulled from the reef.

  Not bothering to give the little boat a wide berth since she was above water, Kitty was only a few dozen yards away when Angelina noticed her. The young woman’s eyes went wide and seconds later she was on her knees, staring through the railing.