Below the Surface (18 page)

“Don't start!” he said, shaking a finger in her face.

“Don't either of you start,” Juanita said. “She set you up for that one,
sí?
Let's just get along today, all right? This the United States of America, and thanks to Bree, we accepted here right with the money and power people.”

Manny just glared at Lucinda as he finished his lemonade. “Maybe when word gets out I'm Bree Devon's partner, people 'round here won't like that,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “When I went with Cole to that place I told you 'bout, if looks could kill, I be dead. And that backwoods bar not even up to Turtle Bay.”

“Shh!” Juanita scolded. “It bad luck at a funeral talk about your own death. It mean, if you not die within the next year, the next of kin of this one buried today be dead.”

Manny rolled his eyes. “Sometimes,
mi
Juanita, I see why our Lucinda want to run from our ways. Next you be telling me just 'cause this a sad day, our
quinceañera
for her be cursed. Let's say
adios
to my partner Briana and head home,
sí?
”

When they made their farewells, he was surprised that Bree and Lucinda hugged each other. And annoyed when he heard Bree say quietly to her, “Remember what I said, Cindi.”

The ceremony at the grave site was blessedly brief, because Amelia was still a wreck and that was destroying Bree's hard-won poise, too. They all walked to their cars. Ben put Amelia in theirs—the boys had gone home with a friend—when Bree said, “I'm staying until they close the grave.”

Ben turned to face her. “It will depress you even more. You don't have to do that.”

“I know. But I came into the world with her, and I want to see her settled and at peace, as they say.”

He took her arm and walked her away from his car. In the distance they could see the funeral director talking to the cemetery crew with their waiting backhoe.

“Bree,” Ben said, obviously fighting to keep his patience, “she's at peace. Now you have to work on that, too, not keep causing waves.”

“That's a good one,” she said. “Not causing waves.”

“You know what I mean. I can tell you're not really letting the dead be dead. I'm not the county prosecutor for nothing, and I can read between the lines about what you've been thinking all of a sudden. If you pursue a half-cocked murder scenario, you're only going to get yourself upset or worse, hurt.”

She pulled away from his hand on her arm and turned to face him squarely. She was tempted to tell him she'd been attacked, but she didn't want him insisting she stay home or with Amelia. And what he'd just said almost sounded like a threat. “Hurt, meaning?” she asked.

“To use another cliché, you're going to stir up a hornet's nest if you go around suspecting people of some sort of wrongdoing, accusing them—”

“I
will
accuse them if I find out someone staged that so-called accident. I thought a county prosecutor might call a possible murder a little more than ‘some sort of wrongdoing.'”

“Amelia said you think someone broke in and searched Daria's room. If I get a CSI tech to come out there and take prints, will you lay off?”

“I'd appreciate that. I was going to try to get the police to do that.”

“I said, will you lay off then?”

“No. Someone clever enough to pop the lock on my veranda doors and desperate enough to climb up onto the second story to do that needs to be stopped. But if CSI does turn up a set of prints other than mine or Daria's, will you pursue it?”

“Of course I will. Look, I'll see if I can call in a favor and send someone over tonight. We wanted to have you come back to the house, but Amelia needs to take a tranquilizer and go to bed. She's never gotten over what she considered desertion by her mother, then her father.”

“That's not the way it was.”

“But if she thinks it's true, it's reality to her, and I can't risk her losing you on top of Daria. There's my bottom line.”

So he wasn't actually threatening her. He was just worried about Amelia, and that was completely understandable.

“And another thing,” he said, in what seemed a lame attempt to change the subject so she wouldn't argue about Amelia and their father, “is Cole DeRoca.”

“What about him? He only saved my life and has been more help to me than anyone. Please don't tell Amelia that, but it's true. Jordan and James like him and—”

“I like him, too, but think about it. He's overly possessive and protective of you, and you've only known him a week. I'm advising, in the emotional state you're in, not to get either psychologically or physically involved with him.”

That advice reminded her of what she'd just told Lucinda, but this was different. She was not some adolescent girl in rebellion against her parents.

“Actually,” she told Ben, “I had met Cole once before. I even had lunch with him, but he was going through a divorce and nothing came of it right then.”

“See, then he might be emotionally vulnerable right now. You know—the rebound effect.”

“Thank you, Dr. Phil.”

“I admit it's a blessing that he found you on the beach and saved your life. But he's too convenient. He's always in the right place at the right time. His office and workshop are right next to the Grog Shop at the end of town, right?”

“Yes. And?”

“Are you positive he didn't know Daria, if he'd bumped into you before?”

“What are you implying? He knew of Daria, because he's on the Clear the Gulf Commission. But we were given our assignment to observe and photograph the sea grass meadow without actually appearing before the commission. My report tomorrow will be the first time I've been there live, so to speak. Ben, you're wrong about Cole. If I can't trust him, I can't trust anyone.”

But those last words tasted bitter in her mouth. If she hadn't known her own twin sister, her lifelong best friend, could she really trust a man she'd known only a week?

T
rue to his word, Ben sent a CSI tech to Bree's place that night. Foolishly, she had been expecting someone like she'd seen on the various TV shows featuring forensic scientists, but it was a young, plain, overweight woman. Her ID card hanging on a bright blue cord around her neck read Marilyn Davis but she asked Bree to call her Mari.

“You'll see this makes a bit of a mess,” Mari said as Bree led her toward Daria's bedroom, “but I want to lift a lot of prints, then eliminate yours. If you have something you're sure your sister touched—a glass in the bathroom you haven't cleaned yet, something like that, I'll eliminate hers, too. Oh, this place has really been tossed, hasn't it?”

“I'm afraid so. I had searched it earlier but someone else did, too, and those are the prints we hope to identify.”

“Did you report the B and E—breaking and entering?” she asked as she tugged on latex gloves and got to work, leaving small pools of dark powder here and there.

“No, because several people had keys. Evidently nothing of value has been taken that I could report.”

“Okeydoke,” she said, her voice darkening with disapproval. Bree almost told her that Ben hadn't suggested reporting it either, but it was none of her business.

“You know,” Mari said, perhaps eager to change the subject, “I've never dusted a place where identical twins were involved. A lot of people figure they have identical prints, but that's not so.”

“We've been asked that more than once over the years,” Bree told her as she leaned in the entry to the bathroom and watched her work. “The prints are supposed to have similarities, though.”

“True. Identicals have the same genetic makeup and their DNA is virtually indistinguishable, but fingerprints are not completely a genetic characteristic. They're partly determined by each separate embryo's environment in the uterus. Their ultimate shape can be influenced by position in the womb and a few other things I can't recall from my forensic classes.”

Bree went into the bathroom to get Daria's drinking glass and gingerly took Daria's mascara and powder from her makeup drawer. She could see visible prints on both plastic cases. Many more cosmetics were here than Bree had recalled her using, including seven tubes of lipstick, when she almost never wore that. But she was getting used to being surprised about her sister. There had been a man in her life she had not wanted to tell Bree about. She only hoped that she hadn't done something that kept Daria from confiding in her. Surely, it was something about the man himself that made Daria remain silent, and she needed to find out what that was.

She rifled through the rest of the cosmetics drawer but found nothing. Perhaps she'd find nothing, prove nothing. She was becoming more and more certain that someone had harmed—killed—Daria, and that now, somehow, she'd become a target, too. Her stomach fluttered in fear, but she beat the feeling down as she put the items in a towel and took them to Mari.

She stared at the thin white gloves encasing Mari's busy hands. Maybe the person who'd searched this room had worn gloves, too.

“I appreciate your taking care of this so quickly,” Bree said, leaning in the doorway again. She couldn't stand the silence in the room as Mari moved about like a ghost.

“Orders from the top.”

“My brother-in-law, Ben Westcott?”

“Him and some other big brass.”

“Josh Austin?”

Bending intently over a brass pull of the dresser, she shrugged her shoulders, but admitted, “The whole CSI unit is amazed at how fast the autopsy report was completed and released. At least, most of it.”

“What do you mean, most of it?”

Mari straightened. Her eyes widened, as if she realized she'd overstepped, however much Bree knew about Ben and Josh pulling strings.

“Probable cause of death was the key thing, that's all.”

“But what else wasn't released yet?”

“Forensics differs with different situations. I'm sure you'll see everything in black and white soon.”

She'd obviously clammed up. Was there something else about Daria's death? Surely she had not been beaten or assaulted, because no one could pass that off as an accident. What else could an autopsy reveal? Could she have been hiding some sort of serious, even terminal, illness? Maybe if word of that got out it might look like she'd committed suicide and neither Ben nor Josh would want that. No, impossible. People with fatal diseases didn't make appointments to get their teeth whitened. It all came back to the fact that Daria would never have left Bree alone out in the gulf.
But,
a little voice taunted her,
the woman who died that day was not the woman you thought you knew.

As soon as Mari finished and left with her collection of prints, Bree locked the place up tight and drove to Ben and Amelia's. Good. Lights were still on in their spacious home. She hoped Ben hadn't gone to bed, because she planned to question him about the rest of the autopsy report.

She knocked instead of ringing the bell. The porch light clicked on, then off, and Ben opened the door. She gasped when she saw he held not only the evening paper but a pistol at his side.

“Don't mind this,” he said, putting it down on the table in the hall. “When I answer the door late at night, it's just a precaution. In my position—”

“In your position,” she interrupted, following him into the den, “you tend to play God.”

“What? Did the CSI person come? What are you talking ab—”

“Don't blame her, but she let something slip about the rest of the autopsy report—you know, the rest of the story.”

Leaning over the back of his tall, leather chair, he frowned. Hands on her hips, Bree faced him.

“What about it?” he asked. “You and Amelia didn't need to see all those chemical readouts of blood, bladder and stomach tests, ad infinitum, or diagrams of dissections. She wasn't on drugs, she wasn't drunk, she wasn't ill, so—”

“I want to see it, all of it.”

“A lot of that stuff takes days. I thought it best if the family got her body back and had her laid to rest. The county medical examiner could have held her body for up to ten days when it needed to be embalmed, not just refrigerated, especially in this hot weather. There. You wanted the facts, you've got them. It was hard enough as is and didn't need to be dragged out.”

“I'd like to drag the truth out of you!”

“Now look,” he said, pointing at her and raising his voice before he lowered it again. “My goal in all this—to protect Amelia first, and then you.”

“Amelia, fine, but you have no right to make decisions for me or for Daria. And, of course, none of this has a thing to do with protecting your reputation, especially with the election less than two months away.”

“That didn't even enter my mind.”

“Let's say I partly believe that, but I want to see the autopsy report. Do you have a copy here?”

“No.”

“Then I'm going to the Collier County Medical Examiner's office first thing tomorrow, before I dive the Trade Wreck, and demand to see—”

“All right, damn it,” he said, and finally came around his chair to slump in it. Bree was horrified to see how ashen and haggard he suddenly looked. It was as if he'd been drained of fight and energy. “You asked for this,” he said, “so just sit down and brace yourself. Swear to me you won't spring this on Amelia, because she's really shaken—grieving for all she's lost over the years, as well as for Daria.”

Bree perched on the edge of the smaller leather chair facing his. As she gripped her hands together in her lap, every nerve in her body tensed.

“The autopsy revealed Daria was about seven weeks' pregnant.”

A great silence crashed into the room. Bree could hear her heartbeat, feel her blood rushing through her veins. Yet her mind went blank. At first those words seemed to bounce off her, as if they were in a foreign language. She didn't move, she didn't breathe. Strangely, the first thought she had was that she now knew why Daria had avoided diving these last few weeks—why she'd lied that she had a bad toothache the day of the storm. It wasn't wise for pregnant women to scuba, since too much water pressure could harm a fetus. Daria had known she was pregnant and had wanted to protect her baby!

Bree wanted to scream, but she amazed herself by speaking calmly—it seemed to be another person's voice. “Can a DNA test ID the father?”

“A DNA test of the fetus would indicate paternity—if you had the father's to match with it. But I didn't want her body dissected in that way. And having Daria disinterred now that she's buried would be crazy and cruel.”

She wanted to argue that he was the one pushing for a quick autopsy and burial, but she said only, “It might lead us to her killer.”

“Bree, stop it! It would also make all the papers and stir up scuttlebutt. I—I take it you didn't know.”

“Of course I didn't know! Not about a pregnancy and not about who could be the father. Why would I know something like that? I'm only her roommate, twin sister, lifelong friend, the person closest to her in the entire universe—at least, I used to think so.”

She was tempted to tell him that she'd been attacked at the Gator Watering Hole, but she was coming not to trust Ben. Even if he'd sent the CSI tech, he hadn't urged her to report the B and E, and now the report of the prints would go to him before Bree saw it. He had claimed that protecting his own reputation played no part in all this, but he'd just blurted out he was trying to avoid scuttlebutt. He must have realized that the unborn baby—her niece or nephew, who had died with Daria—was a motive for murder, depending on what the murderer had to protect. Ben was the county prosecutor, for heaven's sake! But he was trying to gloss this over, stonewall things. Just to spare Amelia and her, as he had said?

She glared at him, unable to hide her anger. “Ben, you know very well that whoever's child it was, whoever she was meeting secretly, could have killed her.”

“In the middle of the gulf in a storm?” he challenged. “You said you didn't hear a motor. Maybe he walked on water or swam out three miles.”

“I never thought I'd live to see you obstruct justice,” she accused. She rose and started out of the den. Ben jumped up and grabbed her arm, swinging her back around.

“And you're going off the deep end!” he accused, his grip tightening.

“Last time you said I was making waves and now I've gone off the deep end. You've got lots of deep, rough water on the brain. Now let me go! I'm devastated and horrified and furious, yes, at her—and you—and at myself for not knowing. I'm going home to bed to sob my eyes out—again.”

She shook loose from him. “Is there anything else I should know?” she demanded.

“Just that even the surprising fact of her pregnancy does not warrant your demand that this become a murder case. I'll let you know about the fingerprints, and I'm monitoring things.”

“Oh, I see you are,” she said, and strode for the front door. As he caught up and opened it for her, she added, “Will you tell Amelia?”

“Since you've taken it out of my hands, yes.”

His pistol lay on the hall table. She had the strangest sense she should take it with her, for her own protection. Just like those sharks, something
was
swimming just below the darkening surface of her life, but she couldn't tell what.

When she finally fell into a fitful sleep that night, Bree sank into the sea. Its black depths reached for her, powerful and violent, and pulled her down, down.

At the bottom of the gulf, the stormy currents swept her into a glass coffin, where she held her breath and tried to fight her way out. She had no scuba tanks, no regulator, no air. Where was her mask?

Water filled the glass coffin. Her hair drifted in her face like her dying turtle grass. It stuck to the skin over her eyes, blinding her like the water in a ditch. She struggled to see.

She raised her hands to get out, to fight against being drowned, against being attacked by a man with a raised wrench. But the wrench was shaped like a concrete shell just outside her glass coffin. People waved from outside. Her parents. Ted. Daria, with a baby floating in her arms.

Someone else appeared on the other side of the glass. Sam, smiling through his mask, happy to see her trapped. He shouted at her, but her good hearing had gone and her hair half blinded her.

Daria, where are you? Daria…who scuttled the ship? Who drowned you?

Scuttlebutt.
Ben was outside, too, shouting that he was trying to protect the family from scuttlebutt. He, too, wore a diving mask that hid his face, but she could see he had his gun. He was not pointing it at her, but at something in the depths, the dark depths of the sea….

Where was Cole? Cole could come to save her.

Though she was trying hard to hold her breath—her last breath—she screamed Cole's name. A man in a black mask wanted her to drown, but someone was shaking her and she shoved her hair away and sucked in a huge breath.