Below the Surface (3 page)

“You have one messages,” the recorded voice told her when she pressed the play button. With all the world's modern technology, why couldn't they teach a digital chip good grammar? Heaven knows, her laptop underlined every darn spelling and grammar error she made in the numerous letters to the editor she wrote.

“This important message is for Amelia Devon Westcott,” the recorded woman's voice said. Amelia's stomach went into free fall. She never used her maiden name. “One of our E.R. doctors mentioned you're on our fund-raising guild committee here at the hospital, so that's how we traced you. Mrs. Westcott, I'm calling because your sister—we believe it is Briana Devon…”

Briana,
Amelia thought.
Not Daria?

“…has been brought by emergency squad to Naples Hospital from an accident out in the gulf, and we're hoping you could come into the E.R. to identify her and be with her.”

Bree! Bree? An accident? Identify her? Were they trying to break the news to her that Bree was dead? It couldn't be—couldn't be Bree!

The voice went on, “We have been informed that she lives with another sister, but no one at Briana and Daria Devon's place of employment and residence knows where Daria is, so we have been unable to reach her.”

As if she were speaking to a real woman, Amelia whispered, “I've never been able to reach either of them, no matter how hard—how
desperately
—I tried.”

Cole paced the E.R. waiting room like an expectant father. He knew he looked like hell, still in soaked shorts, sopping shoes that squeaked when he walked and a borrowed windbreaker that was so small he couldn't even zip it. The distractions of people in trouble here unnerved him, too: a distraught mother with a kid who'd swallowed a quarter; a young man in terrible pain evidently waiting to be admitted to pass a kidney stone; elderly people who looked like death warmed over. The place was packed, but at least they'd taken Briana back through the swinging doors into the depths of curtained alcoves right away. He'd already bugged the triage nurse more than once. Why didn't they come tell him something?

This sent him back to the terrible night of his dad's sudden heart attack. He'd known his father was dead, but he'd called an ambulance. Rather than pronounce him dead at home, they'd done CPR and rushed him to the E.R. in Sarasota, only to tell Cole what he already knew. But Briana had to be all right. She was strong to have lasted out in that brutal gulf, evidently swimming with sharks, too. Cole had practically forced his way into the E.R. vehicle, but they'd shut him out here.

Shut out—the story of his life since his divorce last year from Jillian. He hadn't realized until she cut him off from their friends—or those he thought were their friends, but were really hers—that he'd given up too much of his own world for hers. It hadn't helped his client list to have his social contacts shrink like that. At least it had given him an excuse to quit playing country club games. But what he'd learned most from the biggest mistake of his life was that, after two years of their marriage, Jillian had not really been an integral part of him. He just didn't miss her. He felt sad and bad their marriage had failed, but he didn't feel her loss. Strangely, he'd feel worse if Briana were lost, and he'd only spent one lunch months ago and then this horrible day with her.

He was surprised to see Amelia Westcott, a woman he served with on the Clear the Gulf Commission, rush in the double glass doors and head for the triage nurse at the front desk.

“You called and told me to come right in,” Amelia said. She was out of breath, but her voice carried clearly. “I'm Briana Devon's sister. But is her other sister, her twin Daria, here yet?”

Cole went over. “Amelia, I didn't know you were Briana's sister—I mean I don't know why I would—but I'm the one who found her half-drowned on the beach at Keewadin Island and brought her in—”

“Half-drowned? I'll bet she was with Daria. She's always with Daria on some sea search, some underwater mission. I can't believe they were out in that storm.”

Though he could tell she was concerned, she spoke with an undercurrent of bitterness. The older he got, the more he saw family problems everywhere, though most simmered just below the surface of people's daily lives. He used to think his messed-up family was unique, but now he knew it was almost normal.

The triage nurse was on the phone, checking on Briana's status. Finally, some answers, Cole thought. He stuck tight to Amelia while she folded her arms and seemed to collapse within herself. She was a good-looking woman, a platinum blonde with every hair in place and icy blue eyes, in contrast to Briana's natural auburn hair and gray-green eyes. Even now, Amelia looked perfectly put together, with makeup worthy of a photo shoot, while the few times he'd seen the twins around they'd seemed windblown and often wet—a sexy combination. Amelia was obviously older than the twins and, he guessed, uptight by nature as well as from the situation. Rather than taking a deep breath, even when he urged her to, Amelia narrowed her eyes and breathed out through flared nostrils as if she were a bull waiting to charge. That reminded him about the bull sharks, but he decided not to spring that on her, at least not yet.

It wasn't long before a thin, balding doctor came out and went straight for Amelia. The man—his badge said Dr. Micah Hawkins—flipped through papers on his clipboard and asked, “Mrs. Westcott, you are next of kin for Briana Devon?”

Cole felt his knees go weak. Had Briana died? She couldn't have died!

“Yes, her sister—one of them,” Amelia said as the doctor gestured her to walk with him. Cole kept right up.

“She swallowed a lot of water, but worse, we believe she's been struck by lightning while in the gulf and that can lead to complications. And you are?” Dr. Hawkins asked, squinting at Cole.

“Cole DeRoca, the friend who found her and brought her in. I gave her mouth-to-mouth and got her breathing again. She's going to be all right?”

“You are to be commended, Mr. DeRoca—you probably saved her life. If Mrs. Westcott doesn't mind, you can come along. We'll need to run a battery of tests, call in a neuropsychologist. She keeps slipping in and out of consciousness and asking for Daria.”

“Oh, she would,” Amelia said. “But, you mean Daria hasn't been found?”

“That's her twin sister. Briana was evidently out in a boat with her,” Cole explained to the doctor. “But Briana must have fallen in.”

“Dear God, Daria can't be missing—out there, too,” Amelia cried, gripping Dr. Hawkins's wrist. “Doctor, call in whatever specialists you need. I'm not sure about Briana's insurance, but I'll take care of all that.”

Cole's dislike for Amelia softened a bit. But when she said nothing else, as he followed the two of them deeper into the maze of curtained cubicles, he asked, “But if Briana was out in the gulf with Daria, where is Daria now?”

Was she dead? Briana wondered. She slitted her eyes open, just barely, trying to keep the bright lights out of her dark brain. She felt loggy, helpless, at the mercy of the sliding, shifting sea. Up, down, all around…But the sky looked whiter now, too bright, one big cloud floating over her with more than one sun in it.
Ceiling lights.
They hurt her eyes, and even when people spoke across the room, it seemed they shouted at her.

People's faces, unfamiliar, swam in and out above her. The sharks were gone. Had they been real? Daria, her mirror image, where was she? She didn't like to dive alone, she wanted Daria, her other self, there when they stepped together through the looking glass into the wonderland of the deep.

Someone forced her eyelids apart and shone a bright light into the depths of her brain. She jerked away. She tried to lift her hands to shield her face, but one of her arms was heavy with tubes and the other was bandaged and hurt like heck. A man—a doctor—leaned over her. Oh, Amelia was standing beside him. Why was Amelia here? And who was the tall, handsome man with dark eyes and black hair, his face so worried as he looked her over? His clothes showed he was not another doctor. Had he been swimming with her?

“What happened?” she tried to ask, but she didn't sound like herself and no one answered. What was the matter with these people? And where was Daria?

“She sustained no burns except on her left wrist, where she wore a stainless-steel dive watch,” the doctor was telling Amelia and the man. “Actually, it's probably a skin lesion—an inflammatory response—which may disappear in a few days. I've already ordered a CT scan and an MRI, and we'll have her in a room as soon as possible, so we can monitor her better. We'll do some functional scans but call in a specialist for that.”

“Functional—function of the brain?” the man asked, his deep voice a soothing whisper compared to the others.

“Precisely. Aftereffects can vary widely. And although her pupils are dilated, I want to assure you that does not necessarily mean brain injury, Mrs. Westcott.” He leaned closer, very close. “Briana, I'm Dr. Hawkins. Can you hear me?”

She could hear him, all right. She heard every sound in this place, even the dripping of that bag above into her tube. “Yes,” she said with great effort, because she didn't think she had the strength to nod. Her lips felt stiff and cracked. “Where's Daria?”

The tall man spoke again. “Brianna, can you tell us where you last saw Daria?”

She fought to form her words. They had to help find Daria.

“When I dove—off our boat—at Trade Wreck—before the storm.”

Amelia gasped, a sound that pierced Bree's eardrums. “You mean she could be lost at sea?” her sister demanded, but the man put his hand on Amelia's arm to keep her quiet.

“Was she still on the boat when you saw her last?” he asked.

“Yes. Yes!”

“Then she'll be all right,” Amelia said. “She probably had to ride out the storm, or put in somewhere else.” She squeezed Bree's shoulder and moved away with the doctor.

No,
Bree wanted to scream. Didn't they know Daria never would have left her? Not of her own accord.

“We'll look for her and find her,” the tall man said, and put his big hand lightly on her shoulder where Amelia's had just been. His hand was warm, solid. Where had she seen him before? “Just try to rest now,” he said.

If Amelia and the doctor thought they were whispering when they moved away, she heard them anyway. The doctor was saying that a lightning strike near her in the water—a side flash—must have given her a concussion. He told Amelia she might have sporadic amnesia or become moody, distracted, irritable or forgetful.

Exhausted as she was, Bree vowed never to forget what had happened to Daria. But what
had
happened? At least that man said he would help. He said “we” would find Daria. She should know who he was, but she could not recall. She felt both fearful and furious, so the doctor must be right about her moods, but she could not have amnesia, not about Daria.

Though Bree was afraid if she closed her eyes again she'd see the horror of the sea, the sharks, she pressed her eyelids tightly closed. Amazing how these bright lights hurt her eyes and how she could hear even the shuffle of the nurses' feet on the floors. Other people's voices and moans, cries of pain. Was she really hearing those or were they deep inside her?

The occasional screech of the curtains' rings across the metal rods almost deafened her. She could hear the man ask Amelia for her cell phone and then take it outside the curtain to make a call to the coast guard to tell them about Daria and their dive boat.

Exhausted, sick, she felt so strange, but Bree knew then what she had to do, even if that man had promised to look for Daria, even if he was calling for help. When Amelia and the doctor weren't looking, she had to get out of this bed, get another boat and go find her sister somewhere out on the dark, devouring sea.

I
t seemed to Bree that the nurses tried to keep her awake all night, not that she had time to sleep anyway. She wanted to get out of bed, find her clothes and find Daria. But nurses came in to check her eyes, shining pinpoints of light into them. They took her blood pressure and checked her drips. She heard them come and go, heard one chewing gum. And always, she thought she heard the roar of the wind and waves.

Despite her desire to stay awake and get up, each time they walked away, Bree slept the sleep of the dead. Had they drugged her? Had someone drugged Daria, too? Had she seen drug dealers trying to make a drop and they knew they had to silence her? Had the horrible people who brought in women for the twentieth-century slave trade called human trafficking come upon her and taken her prisoner, too? Daria would never desert her. Bree knew Daria as well as she knew herself, didn't she?

Fighting a riptide of fear, she swam from nightmare to nightmare, but was suddenly aware that someone sat by her side. A woman. Amelia, when Bree wanted it desperately to be Daria.

“So strong, the water,” she said, once in the midst of a waking dream in which she was trying to tell her handsome rescuer what had happened. She was safe in his arms, huddled against him for protection. She never thought she'd need or want a man that way. Who was he? Shouldn't she remember?

“Just a minute. I'll get you some water,” Amelia said, evidently thinking she'd asked for a drink. She held up a glass with a straw to her lips. Bree saw that it was barely dawn and she was in a private room. Light poured through the window as bright as noon sun.

“Any news? Did they find her?” she asked, then drank greedily. She knew one of the tubes in her arm was to hydrate her, but her throat was so dry.

“They're going to do a wide search at first light, so that's right now. The coast guard's starting with the coordinates your boatman gave them and did an initial sweep of the area last night.”

Manny.
If only Manny had been with them as usual, this never would have happened…and then Daria's sudden toothache…Bree ached all over.

“My boatman's name,” she told Amelia, exhausted from the little effort of drinking, “is Manuel Salazar—Manny. Please call and tell him I'm okay.”

But what was the name of that other boatman, the sailor? She felt she should know him—wanted to know him.

“They're going to do an air search, too,” Amelia went on, hovering over her. “I'm sure they'll find Daria with your boat. I'll bet the motor didn't work, the anchor line broke and the storm drove her into the Ten Thousand Islands. They'll find her.”

“Thanks for being here with me.”

“Where else would I be when you or Daria need me? I'm sorry if it took this accident for you to realize that.”

That edge to her voice, so familiar. When it came to Amelia, Bree remembered too much she'd like to forget. Amelia was six when their mother died of eclampsia in childbirth, delivering her twins. Now, as adults, they understood how their older sister could dislike them, even blame them. Their widowed father had thrown himself into rearing his twins, whom everyone oohed and aahed over. Amelia, a timid soul and a real little lady at heart, though she could be snippy, felt left out when Dad took the younger girls fishing and taught them to swim and dive. He'd always tried to include Amelia, but she'd have no part of it and ended up spending a lot of time with her maternal grandmother while the tomboy twins went to sporting events or dived with Dad.

“Amelia, what's the name of that man who helped me? I know I've met him. I'm just a little foggy on some things—a few recent things.”

“You may have a concussion, or maybe that lightning did scramble your internal wires a bit. You've just got to relax or they'll have to give you a sedative, as soon as they rule out a concussion. That will calm your anxiety and make you forget how traumatic it must have been to—”

“I don't want to forget! Of course, I'm anxious, because we've got to find Daria! I've got to go help find her!”

“You're not going anywhere,” Amelia told her, gently patting her arm as if she were a child. “They're going to run some brain function tests today with a specialist from Fort Myers before you can be released. But the knight in shining sailboat who rescued you is Cole DeRoca, who serves on the Clear the Gulf Commission with me.”

Amelia went on, explaining that the commission was meeting today and that the twins' accident would be the talk of the group and she wouldn't be there to answer their questions.

Yes, Bree thought with a little flutter in her belly. Cole DeRoca, the guy who worked with rare woods and specialized in installing custom-made yacht interiors. Bree had been scraping barnacles off a hull in the marina when he'd been working on the same huge yacht, and he'd shared a sandwich and some wine from the galley with her.

She'd found him shockingly handsome in a rugged way. His deep voice had seemed to vibrate into the very core of her being. When she was working, Bree usually gave little thought to clothes, hair or makeup, but she'd wished that day she'd done better than an old, tight wet suit and saltwater-soaked hair yanked back in a ponytail. Cole had worn faded jeans and a black, sawdust-speckled T-shirt but still managed to look like an ad for owning a yacht, not working on one. His angular, hard body was sun-bronzed; he made her perpetual tan look pale. When he smiled or laughed, he got a cheek dimple and narrowed his dark eyes under thick but sleek eyebrows. Even as he'd chatted amiably, he'd managed to look her over thoroughly and she could still feel the impact of that down to her toes. If she could recall all that and Cole's initial impact on her, didn't that prove her head and body were still working well?

Other details of their brief time together came cascading back. He'd said he worked alone, measuring, ordering, cutting and fitting the imported woods. He loved being hands-on, he'd told her with a devilish grin. He'd told her his wife hadn't wanted him to work with his hands and had a fit at a party when he called himself a carpenter instead of a yacht interior designer. And he'd said he was getting divorced, didn't he?

“I already talked to Manny at your shop,” Amelia was saying, “but I had some trouble understanding him. He has a really thick accent. No wonder you took all those Spanish classes. You and your Hispanics.”

“If you're including Cole, his grandfather was a boatbuilder from Portugal,” Bree told her as even more images and snatches of their conversation came back to her from that hour they'd spent together months ago. Yes, she was remembering him so distinctly that there was no way her brain could have been short-circuited by a lightning strike. But why hadn't she placed him instantly when she saw him yesterday?

Granted, she was perceiving light and sound more strongly than was normal, but surely she could handle that. She didn't intend to share those concerns or her erratic memory with anyone right now, because she had to get out of here and help look for Daria. She needed to speak to the coast guard and the civil air patrol in person. She had a friend who flew for the volunteer patrol, and she wanted to call him. She had some ideas about where to look for the
Mermaids II.
But what terrified her was that some of those sites were underwater.

After being taken—in a wheelchair, no less—for a battery of neurocognitive tests early the next morning, Bree lay back in her hospital bed, her eyes closed, even more exhausted. The specialist was to be in soon with the results.

“Your knight in shining sailboat brought you this,” Amelia told her, “but they didn't let him get farther than the nurses' station on this floor—family only now, especially since there are reporters downstairs who would swarm you.” Bree turned her head to see a beautiful, orange-hued orchid plant. Tears filled her eyes at Cole's kindness. In the midst of dreadful memories of storm and sharks and the fear of loss, the blooms looked like small, hovering butterflies. Hope—they reminded her of hope. And the plant was in a stunning, striped, dark and light box, made of a kind of wood she'd never seen.

“He's divorced now, you know, and quite a catch, if you ask me,” Amelia said, smoothing the bedsheets as if she'd remake the bed with Bree in it.

“I'm not looking for a man, but for Daria!”

“Of course—I know. It's just you haven't had anyone serious since Ted. Since before Ted died, even. Darn, sorry to have brought that up.”

“It's all right,” Bree told her, though she would have liked to bandage Amelia's mouth shut before she stuck her foot in it again. “Just don't ever bring him up around Sam Travers, because he still blames me for his Ted's enlisting and his death.”

“As if I'd ever be around Sam Travers,” Amelia muttered, perching on the chair next to the bed. “And how ridiculous to hold it over you just because you broke up with his son and he enlisted and died. But then, people do hold grudges for years when someone or something dear is lost. I can sympathize with that.”

Summoning up what little strength she had, Bree worked the controls to elevate the back of the bed, then got the TV remote from the bedside table. Talking about loss or death right now was the last thing she could bear. As ever, despite how kind Amelia was trying to be, she was getting on Bree's nerves.

Bree switched on the TV, which sat high on a narrow, suspended shelf across from the foot of her bed. It was almost noon, and the local stations always covered search-and-rescue efforts in the gulf. Search and salvage. If only she could go search for her sister and salvage her from any possible harm right now.

The TV came on with a political commercial, the kind everyone was sick of already, and the election was still almost two months away. This one was for Marla Sherborne, the incumbent, conservative U.S. congresswoman who was adamantly antigambling. The ad, like most of hers, warned against the dangers of letting casino boats into the area, because it would open the doors to “unbridled outside control of huge amounts of dirty money.” A wealthy Miami businessman named Dom Verdugo was trying to bring a casino boat into Turtle Bay, but it hadn't been approved yet and everyone was arguing about it. A gambling boat would bring more business to local restaurants and shops, but hordes of outsiders could run up property prices and ruin the already endangered old Florida ambience, not to mention create more abuse of the gulf itself. The visuals on this ad even tried to tie the casino boat to water pollution that had endangered marine and plant life below the glittering gulf.

Ironically, there was a tenuous—and doubly tension-filled—relationship between Marla and her opposing candidate in the U.S. senate race, Josh Austin. The scuttlebutt was that Josh Austin's wealthy sugarcane-baron father-in-law, a longtime widower, was having an affair with Marla. If anything came of the relationship, Josh could be trying to unseat his step-mother-in-law.

See, Bree tried to encourage herself, her brain was working great, filled with names and details from days, weeks, months—years ago. So why couldn't she summon up much of what happened during her own rescue by Cole? Could they be giving her that sedative already? She had to remember everything to help find Daria.

“The commission doesn't completely trust Marla Sherborne's claims of being so gung ho about the environment,” Amelia put in, pointing at the TV. “Not since everyone says she's literally in bed with that sugarcane baron, Cory Grann, and the fertilizer run-off from their fields is such a problem.”

There was a quick knock on the open door followed by a voice Bree recognized instantly, though he still stood out in the hall. “Do I hear my father-in-law's name being taken in vain?” a jaunty voice asked. “They're not letting even the press in to see you, but I pulled a few strings.”

“Josh!” Bree cried as he popped his head around the door and came in. She was so glad to see their old friend. A politician one could trust, Josh Austin had the ways and means to solve any problem. She felt better already.

“I hope you didn't hear what we think of all these ads, because yours will probably be on next,” Amelia told him. Both sisters knew Josh from years back, when he had dated Daria. Even when Daria and Josh had split up—definitely Josh's decision—all three sisters had wished him well, though they had seldom seen him in person over the years since. But all the locals were proud of Josh Austin.

“Hey, I have no choice,” he said, his voice still upbeat. “A necessary evil, a sign of the times. I hate the damn things, too.”

“It's good to see you, but we need your pull to make something happen for Daria,” Bree told him. “We've got to find her.”

“That's why I'm here. I'm doing everything I can. I've already made some this-is-top-priority calls to the guard and the air patrol.”

He shook hands with Amelia, then strode toward the bed and bent to kiss Bree's cheek. Indeed, one of his campaign ads ran in the background, touting his views that, with stringent oversight, a clean gulf could coexist with controlled gambling to pour more jobs and money into the local economy. And
that
meant more money for environmental protection. The ad ended with a shot of him and his beautiful wife, Nicole, also a lawyer, holding hands and walking toward the camera on the beach. They had no children, or they would certainly have been in the ad. Daria had said she'd heard that Nicole, whom Josh called Nikki, had suffered two miscarriages.