09-Twelve Mile Limit (46 page)

“The stuff I love,” he told me, “from the places I’ve been and still miss.”

Tomlinson also continued to demonstrate his kindness and his loyalty to our strange friendship by his concern for my mental health, his careful inquiries, his thoughtful gestures.

One night, sitting with a beer on my deck, looking out over the black rim of mangroves, he said, in reference to nothing that I’d mentioned (perhaps it was in reply to my long, moody silence): “Marion, the world would be a far worse place without you. Please don’t doubt that. Not nearly so generous, and a hell of a lot duller.”

A few days later, we both chuckled over another of his thoughtful gestures. It was a copy of People magazine with a story and photos about a new feud between Gunnar Camphill and his pointed-faced former agent, Lester West—the guy I’d lobbed into the water. Camphill was suing West for spreading “slanderous lies” about the film star being bested in a fight by a hick fishing guide who resembled the star of Gilligan’s Island. In reply, West had provided the magazine with a photo showing Camphill with two black eyes and a bandage over his nose.

“Two adolescents,” Tomlinson said. “Immature spirits always behave this way.”

Now there was this additional good thing: The government was not going to close our marina after all. As a biologist, my immediate concern, though, was that this mandated review of “fradulent” manatee data was, itself, based on greed, not science. There are now, without fail, parties on both sides of environmental issues who seldom hesitate to pervert science to advance their own cause, increase their own power.

But then I was much reassured when I read the name of the scientist whose work was most often cited: Frieda Matthews, one of Florida’s best biologists and field researchers.

So maybe we’d get to keep our home after all.

Mack was right. That was a pretty good reason to celebrate.

Which is why, on this late Friday afternoon, St. Patrick’s Day, I returned from the marina after spending a couple of very rugged hours helping Mack and Felix, Jeth and the other guides lug kegs of beer and platters of food and set up tables, decorations, a limbo pit, and a PA system for the bands—getting ready for the all-night party to come.

I was sweaty, dirty, and more than ready for a hot shower and my first cold beer of the day—which is why, as I hurried down my wobbly boardwalk, I was so pleased to see the girl standing on the upper porch of my house, frosted mug in hand, smiling.

She was another of the new and unexpected good things that had happened recently, and who had helped bring the occasional little smile to my face.

I listened to her call out to me, “So is this the way civilized people are expected to behave? Drink waiting. House cleaned. All your files, nice and neat. Anything else I can do for you, sir?”

I took the beer from her, nodding while wagging my finger, “You are learning, young lady. That is why you’re here—to learn. Don’t forget it.”

She followed me through the door, telling me about her day, all that she had done, all that she had accomplished. The paper she’d written, the math problems she’d solved. Proud of herself, and with good reason.

In the lab, she said, “Oh yeah, and when I was dusting, this thing fell off the wall. Like it was already broke, just hanging there. What is it, like a security camera? I didn’t know what to do with it.”

As I sat at the stainless-steel dissecting table, she placed in front of me the little digital camera that Bernie Yeager had sent. I’d forgotten all about the damn thing. During my many weeks in Colombia, all of my stone crabs and calico crabs had died, and all of my octopi had disappeared. Right along with most of my fish and two of my biggest sharks.

I was too busy trying to restock to mess with a camera, which was why I hadn’t thought to check the memory stick. But now I did. I opened the little viewing screen, pushed the on button, and then touched rewind.

As the little machine whirred, I heard the girl say from the breezeway, “A package arrived for you today. The box was torn a little, so I could see inside. It’s some kind of small glass case, with like a little blackball inside.”

I looked up from the camera, peering over my glasses. Trying very hard to keep my tone breezy, disinterested, I said, “Oh? Probably some kind of specimen. You better let me open that one.” I wondered if it might be from Tyner. Had he somehow gotten my address?

I listened to her reply, “Okay, okay, I was just telling you, that’s all. Oh, and I took your advice. I called the school counselor and told her I definitely planned to apply to college. Trouble is, I’m so far behind it’s going to be tough for me to catch up. It’s a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. So … well, I’ll see how it goes.”

Speaking slightly louder because she was outside, I said, “Just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean you can’t do it. If it’s harder than you thought, then work harder than you’ve been working. It’s that simple.”

“Oh sure, for someone like you. Maybe I just wasn’t raised that way.”

I didn’t care for her tone of voice. I stood, walked out the screen door, then into my little house where Shanay Money, dressed in baggy shorts and T-shirt, was busy cleaning my kitchen.

She glanced up broom in hand, when I entered, and I said to her, “Look, young lady, when you called me bawling, the night they hauled your father off to jail, you told me that you felt like you were trapped in your father’s life. Trapped by that kind of society. That you wanted out. Okay, so I agreed. We’ve got a deal. You’re out. You have our full support, Ransom’s and mine.”

Shanay said, “I know, I know. That sister of yours, man, she’s so great.”

“Yeah, and she thinks you’re a great roommate, enjoys having you around. You don’t have a mother? Ransom might make a pretty fair replacement. But there are a couple of things neither one of us is going to tolerate. Among them is you speaking badly of yourself. You have a fine intellect, every gift it takes to succeed. I’m not going to let you quit something before you’ve tried. So stop whining, stop looking for ways to fail. I won’t allow it. Any questions, Shanay?”

I liked the look that came into her face. It was a combination of gratitude, astonishment, and humor. “Damn it, Doc, when you’re right, you’re right. I was whining. Exactly what I was doing. You know what’s weird? Kind of secretly, I wanted you to tell me just exactly what you did. That I was looking for excuses to quit.”

Pleased, I said, “There you go. You are your own best barometer. Not me. Not anyone else. So when you talked to the counselor, did he happen to ask what you’re interested in majoring in?”

She said, “He did, matter of fact. I told him pre-law. I’ve always found it kind’a interesting. Plus all the experience I’ve had with cops coming to the house, I figure I already know more than most.”

I smiled, hardly trusting myself to speak. After a long pause, I said, “This state can always use another good lady attorney.”

“That’s what I figure,” she said. “Plus they do some good. Help people. Like you did for my old Davey dog. I’d like that.”

Janet’s line came to mind, though I did not speak it: Irony and love are the only things that separate us from the beasts.

I’m glad I didn’t. The irony I then witnessed would have made a mockery of her, of me—of everything, perhaps. Or maybe it was simply a confirmation of something that only Tomlinson would understand.

I returned to the lab, picked up the camera, pressed play, and a bright, digitized video began to run, everything colored as if shot through a green lens. For a while, there was nothing. Then the show began. I watched the little screen amused, then amazed, and then in a sort of chilling wonderment, as the largest of my Atlantic octopi used its tentacles to pry back the lid of its own tank.

Then, as if purposefully trying to be quiet, the octopus crawled slowly across the lab floor, moving like a Slinky, toward the tank in which I’d kept my stone crabs and calico crabs.

I whispered, “You brilliant little sneak!” as, still methodically, the animal climbed up the leg of the table, to the top of the crab tank. There it carefully and expertly augered the little vise open.

The audio was good. The metal vise clattered when it hit the floor.

Then the octopus pushed back the lid of the crab tank and slid inside to feed.

But that was not the most astonishing shot. The last few seconds of the video consisted of a sudden, unexpected close-up of suction cups, very powerful suction cups, clamping on to the lens of the camera.

They were from the tentacles of a second octopus.

The tentacles flexed, suction cups flattening themselves over the glass of the lens—huge, throbbing a furious red—and then the body of the animal slid over the camera, and suddenly I was staring into one bright, yellow eye. The eye had a black, vertical pupil set like stone into lucent gold. The eye telescoped toward me, then away, focusing, goat-like, staring into the lens as if studying the construction of the camera—or as if studying me.

Then the lens shattered.

I sat back, holding the camera away from me, as the screen slowly faded into darkness.

Author’s Postscript

Much of what you’ve just read is not fiction, it is fact. This novel is based on an actual event as well as political realities that exist in North and South America. To the best of my ability, that event and those complicated political circumstances are described here accurately.

The event: On Friday, November 1994, at approximately 7 P.M., four Canadian SCUBA divers were set adrift off Marco Island, Florida, when their swamped boat sank to the bottom. They were fifty-two nautical miles offshore, anchored over the wreck of the Baja California.

On Sunday morning, thirty-eight hours later, a Coast Guard helicopter spotted one of the missing divers standing naked on a light tower, waving his wet suit to get their attention. The search for the remaining three—all of whom were wearing inflated buoyancy compensator devices (BCDs) and wet suits—resumed. For six days, the search continued. In the body of this novel, the results of that search are portrayed accurately in every small detail. The Coast Guard combed more than 23,000 square miles of water on a carefully coordinated grid search, using the latest high-tech radar and heat-sensitive vector systems, but found nothing. No trace of the remaining three divers was ever found. They vanished as if they’d been drawn into a vortex, then swept over the edge of the earth. David Madott, Omar Shearer, and Kent Munro, all twenty-five years of age, and each a resident of Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto, left behind family and friends who still grieve for them.

It was during the search that rumors began to circulate. As Marion Ford observes in this novel, blame and reason are contrivances to which we cling for comfort, a way of imposing order. All theories as to why the boat sank relied on sinister motives. There were no exceptions.

Watermen also tend to be territorial. No outsider, some believe, can know the currents and quirks of their area like they know them—including the Coast Guard. Some critics said the Coast Guard was searching too far to the south; others said the Coast Guard was searching too far west.

As a longtime fishing guide on nearby Sanibel Island, I was as interested, curious, and suspicious as anyone else. Much of what I heard made no sense; some of what I heard seemed impossible. For instance, I am an occasional long-distance open-water swimmer, and the distance covered by the lone swimmer in the time reported seemed unlikely. There were other troubling improbabilities as well.

At the time, I was a columnist for one of the nation’s great magazines, Outside. My editor gave me free rein to do whatever it took to find out the truth about the sinking of the boat. Exactly four weeks after the event, I accompanied several professional divers and a former FBI agent to the wreck of the Baja California. They’d been hired to bring up equipment and personal effects that had been lost when the boat sank. Ironically, the weather was nearly identical to the weather on the day of the accident, with a wind out of the northeast fifteen to twenty knots. Aboard our fifty-three-foot cruiser, the four-to six-foot seas were unpleasant. In a twenty-five-foot boat, conditions would have been miserable.

Like Marion Ford, I dived the wreck. Like Ford, I got into the water near midnight in an attempt to gain some understanding of the terror those divers experienced that night.

Over the next two months, I investigated every minute aspect of the event and interviewed many dozens of people, including the diver who was found atop the light tower. Investigators hired by the families and I were all seeking answers to the same questions: Why weren’t the three divers found? If dead, they would still be afloat somewhere.

My story was published. I remained in contact with the father of one of the missing three divers, Bill Madott. He refused to give up hope. All of the families refused to give up hope. Because I travel a lot, I helped the families circulate posters in Cuba and countries in Central and South America. Perhaps a boat—a boat used in some kind of illegal enterprise—had picked them up and carried them off to a foreign land. Perhaps they were being held hostage, or maybe they were being used as slave labor.

Perhaps.

Years passed. I continued to stay in contact with Bill. Recently, when I called and told him I was considering writing a fictionalized account of the tragedy, he was enthusiastic.

“Anything to get the word out,” he told me.

The story you’ve just read of their disappearance is precise and factual in every small detail, including actual quotes from many of the people associated with what happened. However, I have completely reinvented not only all four divers, but everyone and anyone involved directly or peripherally with the event. Why? The reason that all the characters in this novel must be fictionalized is simple: No one can write from the perspective of the divers but the divers themselves. Because I wanted to explore the possibilities of what might have happened in fiction, they and everyone else had to be newly minted. The only things the divers of fact have in common with the missing divers in this book are similarities assigned intentionally by me: All were strong, productive, intelligent, and decent people. All were capable of behaving and performing as well as others who have actually survived similar tragedies.