Flashback

by Nevada Barr

  "Not much left," Danny said of what they were assuming had once been a boat.

  Though the Reef and the Curious were fifty or sixty feet apart, in the absolute silence he sounded so close Anna's skin twitched like a horse's when a fly alights.

  "Not much," she agreed.

  The lights were picking out only bits and fragments: fiberglass, wood. A ship's line, made to float and bright screaming yellow, caught the light so suddenly it seemed to snake through the oil.

  "Line," Linda said unnecessarily. To Anna's knowledge the first mate neither smoked nor drank strong liquor, but her voiced rasped, bourbon over gravel, like a skid-row actor.

  "I see it."

  "We got a piece of hull," Danny said. "See if you can spot it for 'em, Linda. It wasn't one of ours. Not white. Green. Kind of a glittery metallic bottle green like those newer speedboats got. I don't think it was Bob went down."

  Beside her Anna heard a low mewling cry, barely audible and the first sound Teddy Shaw had made since Danny radioed.

  "Look." Linda pointed with her light south of the circle of oil. "Not the hull but something." The sun had crept closer to the horizon, chasing faint pink-and-gold light ahead to reflect off the water. Against this backdrop, Linda's keen eyes had spotted a shape.

  The Reef was closest. "I'll get it," Anna said.

  Having started the engine, she backed slowly away from the slick, wanting to disturb things as little as possible. She motored up close, and Teddy lifted the thing out of the water with a boat hook and dropped it on deck. "A life jacket," Anna called to the Curious.

  "Not one of ours," Teddy said, and Anna could hear the relief Teddy'd not had the courage to feel till tangible proof it was not her husband's boat was in her hands.

  "Whoever it belonged to wasn't wearing it. Straps are intact, buckles unbroken," Anna said. "Probably shoved under a seat and blown free in the explosion."

  "Bob always wears his. Always," Teddy said. Hope was added to the relief, and Anna was glad for her.

  Bob religiously wore a personal flotation device. It wasn't standard issue but one of those sleek little jobs that rest at the small of the back. It would keep him afloat but had to be deployed. If he were unconscious when he hit the water it would prove nothing but an additional anchor dragging him to the bottom.

  The hum of an approaching boat caught Anna's attention. She threaded back around the cabin to the radio and called the Atlantic Ranger.

  "Mack," she said when he'd answered. "We've got oil and flotsam. Looks like a boat blew up, burned to waterline and sank. It's not the Bay Ranger. No sign of Bob or his boat. You and Cliff keep looking. Linda and I'll dive on this as soon as the light gets a little stronger."

  Silence followed, then a couple clicks of the mike as Mack fingered it. "We'll need to give you a hand with that," he said finally.

  "Linda and I'll take a look. If we need you or Cliff to help with the underwater work, I'll give you a call."

  Another silence, then: "Ten-four." The National Park Service had abandoned the ten codes years before, choosing plain speaking for their radio communications, but some of the numbers, ten-four for "okay" and ten-twenty for "location" had become so ingrained in everyday language that they persisted.

  Anna could understand Mack's reticence to continue the search. In a post so isolated the arrival of groceries and mail was considered a grand occasion it would be hard to be turned away from a bonefide adventure. Quicker than thought, she sent a prayer down to Poseidon that this would prove to be the peak of the day's excitement and that Bob would turn up unharmed and with a good excuse for his nocturnal wandering. She doubted her prayer would be heard. Bob was a stickler for rules. If he were alive, he would have radioed in. The usual reasons for a man staying out all night didn't apply at Fort Jefferson. The only single women near enough for an assignation were the lighthouse keepers on Loggerhead Key and Donna and Patrice not only outweighed and towered over Ranger Shaw but had eyes only for each other.

  For the duration of the dive, Anna abdicated leadership to Linda. For Anna, scuba diving was a sport. On several occasions, the most notable being in the icy waters of Lake Superior, she'd gone on difficult or dangerous dives, but compared to the first mate of the Activa she was a neophyte. Linda had participated in and led dives all over the world. She had rescued other divers, recovered bodies and searched for sunken treasure. Treasure was one of the lures that had brought her, finally, to the Dry Tortugas, a major shipping lane during the days when Spanish galleons were heavy with gold plundered from the Incas and the Aztecs.

  Today would have more to do with bodies than booty, Anna suspected. Or, worse, pieces of bodies. Whole corpses didn't bother her much, but bits here and there were a tad unsettling. And, though she would never admit it even to herself, she wasn't all that gung ho to go flippering around in what might amount to fisherman soup.

  The Reef was rafted off the Curious, and Anna and Teddy joined Linda and Danny on the research boat. Danny had backed it up to be well clear of the oil slick so the divers wouldn't foul their gear or get petroleum on the neoprene of their wet suits when they went over the side. As Anna and Linda donned dive suits and scuba gear, the sun sprang from the sea. In these latitudes there was little twilight; day and night were sudden and complete. While Anna buckled and tugged and checked equipment, Linda went through her safety spiel. Wrecks, especially recent wrecks, were notoriously unstable. It was possible parts of it could still be burning. The women took a moment to rehearse the rudimentary hand signals: help, look and go to the surface. Then they rolled off the gunwale into the water. Because the air temperature had yet to rise with the sun, the water was a few degrees warmer and the initial plunge felt good, like the first immersion in a warm bath. Suddenly weightless and warm, Anna felt her muscles relax and her mind empty of the surface's fussy thoughts.

  The sun low, water made murky by the recent disturbance, the bottom was a mottled dark area seen through a fog of particulate matter. Anna guessed the depth at around thirty or forty feet. The boat they sought had gone down in what was considered deep water in the shallow, reef-filled park. Just to the east of the boundary line the ocean floor dropped thousands of feet down a sheer wall.

  Quicker to get oriented, Linda gestured "follow me." Her fins, long and sleek, were of that strange neon color cities had taken to painting fire trucks in the late seventies, a shade between yellow and lime. Not pretty but surprisingly visible. Anna followed their flicking toward where the boat had exploded, burned and, presumably, sunk.

  Visibility got worse, but not by much. A lot of the particles had settled. The blast must have come early on, between midnight and two or three in the morning. Any earlier and someone at the fort would have heard and reported it. Swimming along in this sea of thoughts and other flotsam it occurred to Anna that someone had heard it. She'd heard it. It had almost awakened her. Tangled in dreams of the Civil War brought on by Great-Great-Aunt Raffia's letter, her unconscious mind had transmuted it into cannon fire. There was no way to prove that had been the case but, looking back, Anna was pretty sure it was. The knowledge was of little practical value. Not having fully awakened, she had no idea what time she'd heard the explosion.

  Doesn't matter, she told herself. Boat fires were stunningly fast. Even if she'd leapt from her bed and sprinted to the Reef Ranger, this boat would have burned to waterline before she could have reached it.

  And Bob?

  That thought Anna pushed away. Too little information yet for self-recrimination.

  The iridescent fins ahead of her stopped. Anna kicked to where Linda hung, suspended fifteen feet above the ocean floor. Beneath them was what remained of the boat whose blood sheened the surface. Guessing from the mess scattered over broken coral reefs, it had been a cigarette-type boat, long and lean and fast; basically huge engines and fuel tank housed in a bullet-shaped fiberglass body. This one was larger than most Anna had seen; maybe thirty feet long when it was in one piece. At present, fragments of i
t were strewn over an area three times that.

  It looked as though the blast had been centered around the engine compartment. The stern had been severed from the rest of the hull and lay at an awkward angle against a coral boulder. The living coral was gouged by the impact and scored by propeller blades. Jagged chunks of ripped and melted fiberglass reached around what had been a bench seat and was now a lump of charred plastic. A bright orange personal flotation device was tethered to it. Buoyant innards trailed out like intestines from a mutilated trunk. One of the straps had caught on the twisted fiberglass, condemning the float to death by drowning.

  Thirty feet away was the foreshortened bow section. Two cabin doors of clamshell design like those in cowboy saloons had been ripped away. One lay on the sand near the wreck, the other was still attached by a length of metal or fiberglass. The rectangle opening into the boat's low-ceilinged cabin was twisted until it resembled a door drawn by a very small child; the lines bent and blurred, none of the corners square. A scrap of cloth--pant leg or sleeve--reached out from the dark interior. Because the water was still, it did not wave or sway but stood out, a flag in a still life.

  Surrounding the two major pieces of the wreck, lying on white sand, scattered across coral, sea fans, sponges and stone, were the shattered remains of the boat's midsection. Much of it was mangled to the point that it was unrecognizable. Here and there were the bizarre anomalies that often accompany tornadoes and explosions. A boat hook, purposely blunt and attached to a long pole, had been thrown clean as a javelin into the sand, its haft sticking up, a piece of paper neatly skewered by the head. The lens of a running light, detached from the hull but otherwise unharmed, lay fifteen feet from the main wreck gleaming ruby-bright, dead center in a circle of green coral.

  The Dry Tortugas's underwater camera rode in a zippered nylon pouch attached to Anna's web gear. She took it out. Even from a distance of twenty feet the photos would not be good. The water was cloudy and the light weak. Later she would take clearer shots, but she wanted to record the lay of the wreck in case anything should shift once they began fiddling with the pieces.

  After the first couple shots Linda tugged her wrist and pointed. Anna's gaze followed the other diver's finger to the forward section of the wreck. The small movements of their fins had moved through the viscous world and finally reached the frozen flag flying from the ruined cabin doorway. The fabric, mottled black and yellow, possibly partially burned, was waving ever so faintly. The motion had disarranged the original drape, exposing what looked very like a forefinger and thumb.

  The two of them began swimming slowly in the direction of the bow. Anna dearly hoped the hand was connected to an arm and the arm to a body with another arm, legs, head and whatnot attached. And she wished she had diving gloves; there was probably going to be slimy bits coming up.

  They stopped again, hovering just above and in front of the door. Linda touched Anna's shoulder, pointed to the wreck and waggled her hand back and forth, reminding Anna that the pieces of the boat were possibly unsteady and could fall, crushing or tapping an unwary diver.

  Linda's short blond hair stood out from her head, moving with strange life lent by the sea. Her mouth was distorted and swollen with the froggy humanness shared by the creature from the black lagoon and scuba divers with their mouthpieces in place. Her light blue eyes, crinkled by lines that usually reassured Anna of a life led in sunlight and laughter, were exaggerated by her mask. A slow leak pooled salt water--an ocean of tears--high on her cheeks.

  For an instant, no less powerful because short-lived, a cold fear swept through Anna; a child awakening in a nightmare made more real by the light of day.

  Anna watched her own hand float up, finger and thumb making the okay sign, letting Linda know she'd gotten the message. The rift between the dimension of Dean Koontz and Jacques Cousteau was healed as quickly as it had formed. The fear was gone.

  Rough night, Anna excused it to her self. Overtired.

  She kicked once and moved to the segmented hull. At a show of her palm, the universal signal for halt, Linda stayed back. Because of Linda's superior skill in the water, Anna had been glad to abdicate leadership during the diving. When it came to risk taking, she couldn't. Storms, currents and reefs were Linda's nemeses. At present, this tippy, murdered vessel with its one flailing human arm, was Anna's responsibility.

  Reaching the top left corner of the cabin, Anna steadied herself on the wreck and looked toward the bow. Keeled over, tilting cabin and deck at a sixty- or seventy-degree angle up from the sandy bottom, the bow was wedged between two upthrusts of coral. From the damage both to the animals and the boat's underside, Anna guessed she had been driven between the coral boulders with a degree of force, enough to shove the bow into the sandy bottom.

  Anna shook the boat experimentally. It didn't budge. She pushed it from several more angles without dislodging anything. Partially reassured it wasn't a death trap just waiting to slam shut on her claustrophobic little self, she swam back to the cabin door, to the fingers protruding from the torn fabric. Linda still hung in the water fifteen feet away. A first mate--and captain when Cliff was sick or on vacation--she was good both at the giving and the taking of orders.

  Anna removed the camera from its pocket and clicked pictures: north, east, south and west of the bow section and one close-up of the finger-fringed fabric floating in front of her nose. Record made, she returned the camera to its niche and kicked a bit closer to examine the beckoning flesh. "Finger-fringed" was unpleasantly apt. What they'd seen was not a thumb and forefinger but a ring finger and the avulsed half of the middle finger. The yellow was not a sleeve but possibly the torso of a tee shirt peeled from the body by the blast and blown out along the arm. There was a wrist, Anna was relieved to note, and part of a forearm leading back to an anchor of some sort. A body, it was to be hoped. Gently, Anna turned the new-made relic. From the look of it, the arm had belonged to a man. Much of the flesh was burned or excised by the explosion, but the ribbons remaining were coarse-skinned and the few hairs not scorched off were coarse and black.

  Bracing herself against the cabin, she reached toward the underwater light at her waist. Head bent toward the hook connecting the flashlight to her buoyancy compensator, she sensed rather than saw darkness descending, an eclipse of the pale watery sun. With a grinding noise that was felt as well as heard the tortured fiberglass fell away beneath her hand. The hulk, steady moments before, rolled with the impetuosity of submerged matter. Under the grinding filling her ears and grating on her bones came Linda's close-mouth scream, a weak mermaid's siren.

  Pushing at the environment with hands and flippered feet, Anna scuttled backward in the tradition of octopi but without the grace. The heel of her right foot banged into coral, and the cabin rolled down. Through the silt and particles, through the luminous and shifting green of the sky, a ton of fiberglass, wood and metal moved. White and bottle green, a wall toppling, a twisted and melting cliff-face.

  Again Anna kicked. Her right leg didn't move but jerked, a spasm as before sleep. The hull rolled onto her swim fin, trapping it and her toes in a vicelike grip. Bubbles, sand, a fog of minute coral deaths, destroyed her vision. Light and dark remained. Dark was fast falling, the cabin roof closing on the boulder where Anna wriggled, bait on a hook. Panic tickled inside her brain, urging her to rip off the blinding mask, tear away the regulator with its claustrophobic life support. Training shaped panic to fear. Fear escalated to instinct.

  The flashlight fell into shadow. The dive knife strapped to Anna's calf found her palm. The blade slid into the top of her fin and with a slash her foot was cut free. She kicked back and up. The cabin rolled, keel looming into view sharp as a harrow, a kaleidoscope of ruin. The hard edge of the still-attached cabin door clawed at Anna's thigh, scraped down over her knee. Ignoring the pain, Anna pushed off the underside of the wreck.

  The moment she was free and safe, the movement stopped. Panting, bubbles and noise billowing out of her regulator, m
ask beginning to fog from internal heat, Anna suffered a horror that this was personal: the insensate, ruined hulk had wanted to kill her. Fear, no less intense because unrealistic, pushed up from her stomach in cold nauseating waves.

  Into the glittering cloud of air bubbles came Linda's face, pulled out of human shape by the dive gear. Thoughts of monsters from the black or any other lagoon were gone; for one rare moment Anna was comforted just not to be alone. Her heart slowed, her breathing began to return to normal. The fear was too much, too hard. Then Anna realized she must have coupled the rolling cabin with being trapped in the dark under nearly two hundred feet of ice-cold water nearly ten years before, experienced that fear for this.

  As good an explanation as any, she told herself. Evils sufficient unto the day.

  With the help of Linda's work-lined face, Anna pulled herself rapidly back together. Linda was signing but Anna's brain was not yet quite right-side up. She made the "okay" with both hands, hoping that was all the answer Linda required. Apparently it was, the agitated finger wiggling and twitching ceased. Bubbles returned to their normal noisy bursts. The women looked down on the offending wreck.

  An old hand, Linda hung in the water not moving, weight and buoyancy perfectly balanced. Anna, her weight belt a tad heavy, had to kick gently to maintain. Missing the one fin, she listed slightly.

  Yards of beautifully colored, incredibly varied and terribly fragile living coral had been crushed or scraped away. Anna felt the loss with greater sorrow than the loss of whoever belonged to the hairy, yellow-clad arm. She justified her inhumane leanings with the myth that her job inured her to human suffering.

  The wreck hadn't completely turned turtle. The coral crevice it wedged itself into during the original descent had stopped it. The top half of the cabin door--the left side, had the boat been upright--was above the coral boulder.