Alice At Heart (2 page)

As a scuba tank hissed its last minutes of oxygen into his lungs, he once again aimed a cutting torch at the shelving that had collapsed around the legs of his nervous diver, an Italian nicknamed Riz. Griffin and the diver were deep inside the cavernous hold of a sunken American cargo ship named the
Excalibur
. During World War II, the
Excalibur
had ferried ammunition to allied warships off the coast of North Africa until a German submarine torpedoed it. Alongside Griffin and the trapped diver were stacked hundreds of gunnery shells, each as thick as a man’s forearm, all nearly a half-century old, threatening to tumble to the bottom of the ship’s hull.

No problemo
, Griffin’s head diver, Enrique, had proclaimed when they first surveyed the ammunition. Old and wet.
Not going to cause us any trouble
. Griffin had agreed until he surveyed the dive on this last day and the storage shelving collapsed on Riz. As the crew worked methodically to free him, Griffin discreetly picked up one of the precariously balanced shells.

The old missile spoke to him, just as he feared it would.

Death.

The sensation—which he often felt in the water, but never revealed to anyone— was like hearing a silent song, or
feeling
a song, the vibrations of sound waves or the tingle of static electricity, only multiplied and softened. In every instance where some object spoke to him, Griffin felt an almost orgasmic shiver, the stroking of an unseen and dangerous hand. Along with that sensation always came knowledge. And this time that knowledge made Griffin’s blood freeze.

This shell, or one of its brethren, would kill them all.

Riz’s dazed eyes begged him to hurry. The rest of Griffin’s six-man team huddled on the surface aboard the deck of the
Sea She
, Griffin’s massive boat, whose high-tech, state-of-the-art computers and dredges and sonar and satellite tracking systems had helped locate some of the world’s most famous undersea treasure wrecks.
Absolutely goddamned worthless for saving a man’s life
, Griffin admitted.

He strained to see through the fierce light spewing from his cutting torch in the dark Mediterranean water. The torch finally burned through a thick steel cable, and he began prying the tangled shelving apart with hands too large and brutal for the bourbon-and-magnolias Southern aristocracy that had birthed him amid the wealth of coastal Georgia thirty-nine years earlier.

Riz kicked and struggled. Griffin’s muscles burned as he strained to separate the shelving, his gaze always going back to the shells, hundreds of them, ready to fall. All it would take was the right one, just one. Finally, he eased Riz free. The diver’s face relaxed into smiling eyes. Griffin squeezed his shoulder, tugged on the guideline attached to a harness, and instantly Riz began to fly upwards through the water, pulled by a powerful electric wench. The shelving shuddered and gave a soft, wrenching groan. A half-century after men had died inside its steel sanctuary, the
Excalibur
would close like a flower over what remained.

Griffin eased out of the tomblike hull,
feeling
the ship’s sinister memories, the hum of its ghosts inside him, the hum of his own ghosts, too. The
Excalibur
was just waiting for him to move. No, it wasn’t the ship waiting. It was the ocean. Always waiting for him to make one
wrong
move.

Test me
, Griffin told the invisible forces. He surged upward, exiting the hull with a speed and grace that always astonished people when they saw him swim, even when he was hampered by scuba gear. He shrugged off his tank, spit out the mouthpiece, then ripped the mask from his eyes. He propelled himself toward the light, dozens of feet above him.

In the depths of the
Excalibur
, one shell tumbled from the shelving. It pirouetted downward through the dark water, almost beautiful in its heavy grace. It struck the hull’s bottom with a muted clang, its voice the last ringing of any bell for the lost ship.

And it exploded.

The world erupted in billowing, churning chaos. Griffin felt a giant hand slap him from below, then sweep around him, squeezing him between invisible forces. The ocean, which had always been a living monster to him, pressed him in its jaws. Pain shot through his body; his eardrums ruptured. His wet suit tore and then his skin as fragments of the
Excalibur
’s hull sliced him. The explosive concussion slammed into his brain. He went limp and floated, filling the water with his blood.

He opened his eyes, dreaming of death.

You have life inside you that you’ve never used. Breathe
. A voice. Feminine, quiet, strong. She hummed a rhythmic song to him, a stunning vibration of emotion that made the deadly shell pale in comparison.

Griffin struggled.
Can’t. No one can. Can’t breathe.

You can. Try
.

He fed on her passion and suddenly his lungs expanded, he expelled the water from his throat, and somehow, life bloomed into blood-red oxygen inside him. The mystery, the knowledge of a miracle, increased with the darkening of his brain, softened only by the stranger’s unbelievable voice.

Who are you?

Just Alice.

She was gone. He made himself remember, as darkness surrounded him fully, that he was breathing because of an extraordinary illusion named Alice, singing to him beneath the bloody water.

I’ve never had a vision
before and never wanted to. But there he was, vivid in my mind’s eye, floating in front of me as if he really existed. He was clothed in a diver’s wet suit, torn and bloody. His dark eyes, half-open and dreaming of death, were set in a handsome, determined face. He gagged and fought. I felt his pain, his fear, his confusion. Yet I knew he could live if he wanted to.
You have breath inside you that you’ve never used
, I sang to him.
Breathe
.

He looked straight at me, and a kind of wonder appeared on his face, infusing him. He understood.
Who are you
?

Just Alice.

And amazingly, he smiled.

I blinked and he was gone. I was alone again in the freezing, black water at the bottom of the LakeRiley dam. Then my hand closed around a little girl’s soft arm. By the time I reached her, she had sunk, unconscious, into a grotesque underwater landscape of junked cars and appliances and huge, tickling catfish. The temperature slowed her heart and respiration, making her as quiet as a hibernating animal, prolonging her life, saving her from any serious, permanent effects.

She did not know she was drowning, I think. I carried her to the shallows. Her parents screamed when they saw us. Two local paramedics and several of our county sheriff’s deputies began yelling.

At me.

“I found her—” I started nervously, but then they were all over me. The men snatched the child away and threw a blanket around her as I huddled in the lake with my arms crossed over my breasts. Then they dragged me out and covered me, too.

“What the hell were you doing out here, Alice?” yelled one of the deputies, a Riley cousin of mine.

How could I possibly explain? I lay there on the ground, hugging the blanket over me, and said nothing. In the water, I came alive. On land, I tried very hard to be invisible.

At the moment, I wished I were dead.

2

Water People say the earth formed as an afterthought inside the glorious depths of great seas, hardening like the dull, dry pit of a luscious fruit.

—Lilith

Two hundred miles southeast of LakeRiley, the Bonavendier sisters of Sainte’s Point Island, Georgia, were already as much legend as fact. They were rarely seen outside the ethereal borders of their moss-draped barrier island or the beautiful little coastal village, Bellemeade, across from it. It was said that all three were older than sixty, yet all resembled beautiful young women. It was said when they were truly young they’d suffered terrible tragedies out in the world and had returned to the island, vowing never to leave again. It was said they’d secluded themselves even more after murdering Undiline McEvers Randolph—their own distant cousin from Scotland—and her blue-blooded Georgia husband, Porter Randolph, of the Randolph Shipping dynasty. But that had been nearly thirty-five years ago, and who knew what was truth and what was gossip anymore?

The accepted facts were these: The Bonavendier sisters owned Sainte’s Point Island and most of Bellemeade, culturing the tiny village like a pearl: the shops exquisite, the bay front inn, WaterLilies, a place of true charm, the marina across from main street a perfect combination of hardworking fishing boats and exotic little yachts. People swore that a kind of enchantment came over them when they visited the town, and they gazed across Bellemeade Bay with wistful envy at the island, which made a faint strip of wooded magic on the horizon of the Atlantic Ocean.
Look toward the other side of the world
, people said,
and you’ll see Bonavendiers
.

Sainte’s PointIsland, enclave of the Bonavendier family since Revolutionary War times, was glamorous, notorious, alluring, and haunted by gossip even stranger than murder. It was said every Bonavendier for two centuries had been born with webbed feet, swam naked, could seduce anyone at will, was beloved by dolphins, and drank like a fish. Vodka, preferably.

Most of the rumors, if people could have believed them, were quite true.

That night Lilith Bonavendier dreamed of lost children, again. A cold dawn breeze slid through the open French doors of her bedroom. She turned restlessly, naked, her hair streaming over her body.
Oh, Griffin, that I could have saved your dear mother, at least.
The silver-haired eldest of the three Bonavendier sisters sighed as the drowning, black-haired boy cried out to her and her sisters to save his parents, too. Other souls came and went in the mists behind her eyes. Lost chances, lost futures, terrible secrets. Lovers, children. Her only son. All the Bonavendiers who would never be born. Bonavendiers who floated between land and water, lost.

Suddenly a little girl appeared in Lilith’s dreams. Like Griffin Randolph, this child was outside the realm of the womb. This mystery girl with auburn hair and haunted green eyes floated in an endless void just beyond Lilith’s reach.

Lilith woke with a jerk and sat fully upright in a massive, canopied bed of teak wood and Asian silk. She rose and hurried toward the morning light at her open doors, throwing a turquoise robe around her slender body and stroking aside hair the color of silver filigree. It hung in wavy tangles to her knees.

The soft blast of a small boat’s horn sent Lilith hurrying down a hallway filled with antiques and antiquities, the shells of giant sea turtles, the skulls of small whales, a Picasso portrait of her grandmother, a Van Gogh of her great-grandfather, a bust of some caesar filched from a Roman wreck. A relative of theirs, some Bonavendier ancestors had claimed.

Lilith descended the mansion’s curving gothic staircase. Frowning and distracted, she swept past her younger sisters’ bedroom suites and then the mansion’s front parlors warm with fine lounges, exquisite works of art, well-played musical instruments, and exotic books. During her journey, several luxurious cats and a fluttering white cockatiel joined her, screeching at the chilly sub-tropical winter. Lilith padded barefoot onto a deep veranda strewn with heavy wicker, plush cushions, and several ancient Grecian urns of suspiciously authentic conformation. Her thin robe moved around her in the breeze, flickering around her high breasts, lapping at her strong thighs. She stood for a second, gathering her senses in the pink light, her webbed toes curling on a floor of smooth ballast stones her ancestors had plucked, along with gold, from a wrecked Portuguese merchant ship in the late 1700s. The lawn and massive oaks dripping moss stood before her. Below them, a pretty cove with docks and several of the island’s private motorboats and yachts.

Be calm. It was only a dream.

Beyond the cove, the Atlantic burst in frothy tides on the beaches at the edge of the continent. The world began and ended at Sainte’s Point. The beauty and majesty of the island curled around her like a soft cloak, but she searched its folds for hidden treasures still to be found. Several small commercial fishing boats bobbed in the water in the sheltered cove.
Just the morning visitors
, she thought with a sigh.

Lilith
followed a path down a terraced slope, composing her regal face by the time she arrived at a low, stone dock. The rough men and women who captained the small fleet waited with respectful postures. The steam of their breaths rose around them. They fought the chilled air in heavy sweaters and lined slickers, while Lilith stood there wearing only sheer silk, unfazed.

“Good morning, ma’am,” each said in a languid drawl.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. The grouper are running out beyond the reef, and you’ll have good luck with them until nearly noon.” She went on, detailing other prime catches and fishing sites for the day and telling them the weather would begin to warm by midweek.

“Thank you, ma’am,” each said.

This ritual was as old as the Bonavendier legacy on Sainte’s Point. For over two hundred years, the mainland villagers had relied on Bonavendier guidance regarding fish and fowl, weather and tides. As a result, the small town of Bellemeade was one of the most prosperous fishing burgs in coastal Georgia, and no citizen had ever been caught unawares by a hurricane.

“Your newspapers, ma’am,” a captain said and stepped off his boat just long enough to present Lilith with a canvas bag stuffed with local, state, national, and even several international editions of newspapers. She knew she should buy a computer and gather her news from the Internet, but that would disrupt the ritual.

“Thank you for the news of the world,” she said, as always.

As the boats motored away, their engines fading into the slow lap of the surf on the cove’s sandy rim, Lilith sat down with the papers at a garden spot on the lawn. She spread them across a low marble table taken from an English ship in 1822. A chorus of soft whistles and clicks signaled the arrival of a dozen dolphins in the cove, their bulbous, blue-gray heads protruding just above the dark water as they spoke to her. She acknowledged their agitated greetings with a low keen of welcome.