Everyday, Average Jones

by Suzanne Brockmann

  "He's not stupid." Melody opened the door.

  "He's incredibly stupid," Britt argued. "He didn't call me before he ran away. I know he didn't vandalize that house."

  Melody stared at her sister. "You do?"

  "Yeah, and I realized as we were driving here that I can prove it, too. The kid's been on-line, using my computer every night this week, right? I was working the night of the break-in, and you were probably already in bed, but Andy was at our house, at my computer. I just realized I got E-mail from him at work that night. Unless he scheduled a flash session, I can give him a solid alibi. And whether or not there was a flash session scheduled should be easy enough to prove. I just have to access my account information. It'll prove he was logged on and actively using the Net that night."

  "You seriously believe Andy's innocent—?"

  Brittany shrugged. "Well, yeah. He said he didn't do it. The kid may be a royal pain the butt, but I've gotten to know him pretty well over the past few weeks, and he's not a liar."

  "But all those fingerprints..."

  "I know. I haven't figured that out yet, but if Andy says he didn't do it, he didn't do it."

  "I think you should tell this to Tom Beatrice right now," Melody said. She had to smile. "Of all people, I wouldn't have thought you'd be Andy's champion."

  "Yeah, well, I was wrong about him. He's an okay kid." Worry flickered across her face. "I hope he's okay."

  "Jones'll find him," Melody told her sister as she hauled herself out of the car. She had total faith in the SEAL. This was what he was good at. Rescuing hostages and disarming gunmen and finding missing little boys would all fall under the category labeled "piece a cake."

  "Don't go any farther than the quarry," Brittany said threateningly, leaning across the seat to look up at her. "If I get back here and find out that you've done something insane, like join a search party, I swear I'll never let you leave the house again."

  "I won't join a search party. I promise." It was then that Melody saw them. "Oh, God!"

  "You all right?"

  "Boats, Britt." There were two trucks parked at haphazard angles, both of which had boat trailers behind them. They were empty, which meant the boats were in use. "They're dragging the quarry."

  Brittany put the car in park and shut off the engine. She opened the door, then stood looking across the roof of the car at the telltale trailers. Her face was pale, but she shook her head in denial. "It doesn't mean that. Not necessarily."

  Melody blinked back tears. "Yes, it does. You know it."

  Brittany slammed the car door, leaving the vehicle right there, blocking in at least four other cars. "No, it doesn't." Her voice rang with determination.

  Mel followed her sister down the trail that led to the flooded quarry.

  A crowd had gathered. She could see Estelle Warner and Peggy Rogers, surrounded by other members of the Ladies' Club decked out in their hiking boots and jeans. Tom Beatrice and nearly all of Appleton's police force were talking to several state troopers as Vince and Kirsty Romanella hovered nearby. Even Alex Parks was there, sitting on a rock, looking as if he'd been crying. And standing off to the sides were all the people who had volunteered to help search the woods for Andy. The turnout was nearly bigger than last weekend's apple picking at Hetterman's. They were talking in hushed voices, sombrely watching the boats.

  "They're not dragging the water." Brittany shielded her eyes with her hand, trying to see past the glare of the early-morning sun. "What are they doing?"

  Jones was out on one of the boats. Although he was too far away to see clearly, Melody recognized him from his easygoing posture. That, the baseball cap he wore on his head and the fact that, even though it was only forty chilly degrees out, he wore his jacket unbuttoned more than tipped her off.

  The man was totally immune to the cold.

  "The water's too deep to drag in many places." Melody turned to see Estelle Warner standing behind them. "They're using some kind of sonar contraption to try to get a reading on anything that might be a body down at the bottom of the pit," the elderly woman said. "This old quarry's three hundred feet deep in some places. Maybe even deeper in others."

  "They can't be sure he's in there." Melody's heart was in her throat. "Aren't they searching anywhere else?"

  "Considering the fact that an eyewitness saw the boy go into the water, and that the searchers found his clothes exactly where that witness said they'd be..."

  "Oh, no..." Brittany reached for Melody's hand.

  Estelle looked even more dour than usual. "I'm afraid so. It seems the Parks boy met Andy Marshall up here late last night. From what he says, Andy was always trying to pick a fight, and this time was no different. Andy dared the Parks boy to swim across the quarry, and when the Parks boy backed down, Andy took of his own clothes and dove into the water. Had to have been close to freezing, but that wild kid just dove right in."

  Both boats were heading to shore. Jones took off his baseball cap and raked his hair back out of his face, refastening his ponytail. As Melody watched, he put his hat back on, making sure it was securely on his head. As he got closer, she could see that his face was decidedly grim.

  "Apparently, the Parks boy didn't see young Andy come back up," Estelle told them. "He says he searched for a while, calling to Andy, but there was no reply. Of course, it was dark and hard to see much of anything. It's likely the boy dove in the wrong spot, hit his head on a rock. Or maybe the cold just got to him."

  Brittany was squeezing Melody's fingers. "Please don't let them have found something," she whispered.

  "That lieutenant of yours," Estelle told Melody. "He took one look at Andy's clothes—left right where the Parks boy had said they were—and he made a few phone calls to Boston. And this other man, the tall black fellow, he was out here within a few hours with this sonar whatever. Brought diving gear with him, too."

  Harvard. Harvard was on that boat with Jones. Melody could see him now, towering over everyone—even Jones. His shaved head gleamed exotically in the sunlight. His expression, like Jones's, was less than pleased.

  Melody saw Jones spot her as he climbed out of the boat. She saw him hesitate, glancing quickly back at Harvard, and she knew. He hadn't told his friend that she was pregnant.

  It would have been funny if the situation weren't so deadly serious.

  Still, he came toward her, and Melody knew when she looked into his eyes that Harvard's reaction to her pregnancy was the least of his worries.

  He didn't say hello, didn't mince his words. "Honey, we think he's down there."

  Brittany sank to the ground. Estelle knelt next to her, holding her tightly-two mortal enemies allied once again, this time through the death of a child.

  "No," Melody whispered. But she could see the truth written clearly in the stormy green of Jones's eyes. He was stony-faced, sternly angry.

  "It's my fault." His voice was raspy and as dry as his eyes. "I thought he was ready to learn some discipline. I'd been taking him out, running him through some PT. I told him that SEALs had to condition themselves against cold water. I told him about Hell Week—about having to sit in that freezing surf and just hang on. He wanted to try it—try swimming in the quarry, so I let him do it. We just jumped in and jumped out. I thought I'd let him get a taste of what cold really was."

  He stopped, taking a deep breath before he continued. "That was my mistake. I didn't let him stay in. I just pulled him back out. I didn't let him cramp up or find out how hard it is to swim when every muscle in your body is cold and stiff. I think I must've given him the false confidence to try it again."

  "That still doesn't make this your fault." Melody wanted to reach for him, to put her arms around him, but he seemed so distant, so unanimated and still, so grim and hard and unreachable.

  Harvard had come to stand beside them, and she could feel his curious eyes on her, but she didn't look away from Jones. She couldn't look away. He truly blamed himself for this tragedy.

  "It is my
fault. I told him about swim buddies—about how SEALs never swim or dive without another team member, but I know he saw me breaking the rules by swimming alone in the quarry."

  "Junior, we should probably make that dive," Harvard said quietly. "If we've got to go down to 175 feet, it's going to take awhile." When Melody finally glanced at him, he nodded. "How are you, Melody? You're looking very...healthy."

  "Will you tell him, please, that this is not his fault?"

  "The lady says it's not your fault, Jones."

  Jones's expression didn't change as he turned away. "Yeah, right. Let's get this over with."

  Melody couldn't stand it a second longer. She reached for him, catching his hand in hers. "Harlan—"

  There was a flash of surprise in his eyes, surprise that she'd actually used his given name, surprise that she'd actually touched him, but that emotion was quickly turned into stone, along with everything else he was feeling. Even his fingers felt cold.

  She knew this stony anger was his defence against having to go down into that water and possibly—probably—bring up the lifeless body of the boy they'd all come to love over the past few weeks. But she knew just as well that everything he felt—all the blame and the fear and the awful, paralyzing grief—was there inside him. His anger didn't cancel his feelings out; it merely covered them.

  She knew him quite well, she realized. Over the past few weeks, despite her attempts to keep her distance, she'd come to know this man's vast repertoire of minutely different smiles—what they meant, how they broadcast exactly how and what he was feeling. She'd come to know his silences, too. And she'd had a firsthand look at his method of dealing with fear.

  He hid it behind icy cold anger.

  "Be careful," she whispered. A local diving club had frequented the quarry several years ago—until someone had gotten killed and it had been deemed too dangerous a place to dive.

  His eyes told her nothing—nothing but the fact that underneath all that chill, he was hurting. He nodded and even tried to force a smile. "Piece a cake."

  "We'll be down for a while," Harvard told her. "Diving at this depth requires regular stops both on the way down and coming back up. It's time-consuming, and for you, waiting up here on the surface, it'll seem as if it takes forever. You might want to go home and wait for a phone call."

  "Jones has forgotten how to use the phone," Melody said, still gazing into his eyes.

  "I'm sorry I didn't call you," he said quietly, "but all I kept getting was bad news." Emotion shifted across his face, and for a heartbeat, Melody thought he was about to give in to all of his pain and crumple to the ground just as Brittany had. But he didn't. "It seemed senseless to make you worry until I knew for sure Andy was dead." He said the word flatly, bluntly, using it to bring back his anger and put his other emotions in check.

  "We still don't know that for sure." Melody squeezed his hand. But her words were pure bravado. She could see Jones's certainty in his eyes.

  "Go home," he told her.

  "No," she said. If he did find Andy down there, he was going to need her to be here—as badly as she was going to need him. "I'll wait for you to come back up. We can go home together."

  She couldn't believe the words that were coming out of her mouth. Go home together...

  His expression didn't change. For a moment, he didn't even move. But then, in one swift movement, he pulled her into his arms and kissed her hard on the mouth. She clung to him, kissing him back just as ferociously, wanting him, needing him—and needing him to know it.

  He pulled away, breathing hard. He didn't say a word about that incredible kiss. He just took off his jacket and handed it to her. "Spread this on the ground so you'll have something dry to sit on." His voice was harsh, and his eyes were still so angry, but he gently touched the side of her face with one finger. "I don't want you catching cold."

  It was almost as if he loved her. It was almost as if they were lovers who had been together for years.

  "Be careful," Melody said again.

  As he gazed at her, his eyes suddenly looked bleak. "It's too late," he told her quietly. "When it came to dealing with Andy, I wasn't careful enough, and now it's too damn late."

  Melody tried not to cry as he turned and walked away.

  Chapter 12

  Cowboy usually loved to dive, but this was sheer hell. He and H. were heading nearly straight down, using a marked rope to gauge their distance, stopping at regular intervals to let their bodies adjust to the increasing pressure of the water.

  The time spent stopping and waiting dragged on interminably.

  It was necessary, though. If they moved too quickly from the surface to a depth below a hundred feet, and then back, they could—and would—get the bends.

  Cowboy had seen a guy who hadn't believed how crippling the bends could actually be. The stupid SOB had gotten brain damage from bubbles of nitrogen expanding in his system. He still couldn't walk to this day.

  Despite the fact that SEALs were known for breaking the rules, this was one rule they never even bent. Even when they were in as big a hurry as he was.

  Contrary to what he'd told Melody, this dive was anything but a piece of cake. At this depth, he and Harvard had to breathe from special tanks of mixed gas to prevent nitrogen narcosis—also known as the rapture of the deep. As if that wasn't dangerous enough, there was a definite time limit to how long they could remain at that depth. And the number and lengths of decompression stops they would have to make on the way back to the surface were intensely complicated.

  With the scuba gear on, he and Harvard couldn't talk. And at this depth beneath the surface, it was very, very cold and very, very dark. He couldn't even see Harvard next to him. He could only sense his presence.

  Out of all the men in Alpha Squad, Cowboy was glad it was the senior chief who'd been just a short drive away, visiting his family in his hometown just outside Boston. Unlike some of the guys, Harvard knew when not to talk.

  As they'd pulled on their cold-water diving suits, Harvard had had only a brief comment to make about Melody's pregnancy. He'd said, "When you told me you had a situation to deal with, you weren't kidding. You don't do anything halfway, do you, Junior?"

  "No," Cowboy had replied.

  "I assume you're going to do right by the girl?"

  "Yeah," Cowboy had answered automatically. For so long now, his single-most goal had been to marry Melody and be a real father to their baby. But that was before he'd failed so utterly with Andy. Who was he trying to fool here anyway? He knew less than nothing about parenting. The fact that he was diving in this quarry in hopes of recovering Andy's drowned body was proof of that.

  Cowboy floated in the darkness, uncertain of what to wish for. He hoped they weren't going to find Andy's body, but at the same time, if the kid had drowned in this quarry, he hoped that they'd find him right away. It would end the waiting and wondering. And it would be far better than never finding him, never quite knowing for sure.

  He shone his flashlight straight down, knowing that the light couldn't possibly cut through the murky depths to that place where the sonar camera had found an object the approximate size and density of a human body.

  back into the deprivation-tank-like darkness. They had to save their flashlight batteries for when they were really needed.

  He closed his eyes. He knew he could do anything if he had to. But watching the beam from his light reflect off Andy Marshall's pale, water-swollen face was going to be one of the hardest things he would ever have to do.

  It was going to be almost as hard as admitting that maybe Melody had been right all along, almost as hard as it would be to walk away from her sweet smile.

  Cowboy was going to do right by her. Only now that he knew better, he was going to do it by leaving her alone.

  "It was only a bundle of trash," Melody heard Jones report to Tom Beatrice as she inched closer to the group of men. "There was an outcropping of rocks. We searched that area as extensively as possible, given
our time limit at that depth." His mouth was still a grim, straight line. "However, that was only one part of the quarry."

  She had nearly fainted with relief when she'd seen Jones's and Harvard's heads break the surface of the water.

  Jones must've known she'd be watching, worried out of her mind, because he'd turned to search for her, picking her out in the crowd on the shore. As he'd treaded the icy quarry water, he'd looked at her, touching the top of his head with the tips of his fingers, giving her the diver's signal for okay. He was okay, thank God. And the blip they'd picked up on the sonar wasn't Andy's body. It was only a bag of trash.

  "How long do you have to wait before you can make another dive?" Tom Beatrice asked.

  "The earliest we could do it would be late tonight," Jones told the police chief.

  "But it would be smarter and safer to wait until morning," Harvard added. He met the other SEAL'S eyes. "You know as well as I do, Jones—a four—or five—hour delay isn't going to matter one bit to that boy if he's down there."

  Jones glanced around the sombre crowd, at the Romanellas, at Estelle Warner and Brittany. His gaze lingered on Melody before he turned back to the police chief. "I'm sorry, Tom," he said. "Senior Chief Becker's right. We'd better wait and continue the search in the morning."

  "That's fine, son," Tom told him. "It's risky enough diving down there in daylight." He looked around at the men who'd brought the boats. "We'll meet back here at 8:00 a.m. Let's get those boats up and out of the water!"

  Brittany touched Melody's arm, pulling her aside. "I'm leaving."

  "I'm waiting for Jones," Mel told her sister.

  "I know," Brittany said. Her eyes were rimmed with red, but she managed a watery smile. "It's nice to know that something good will come of this."

  Melody shook her head. "Britt, don't get the wrong idea here. Just because I care about Jones doesn't mean I intend to marry him. Because I don't. This isn't about that. We're friends."