Below the Surface (9 page)

As Bree nodded, she noticed Cole had come downstairs, or rather, she felt his presence. As she introduced him to Marla, she couldn't help but wonder if the woman was here because she cared about finding Daria or just about protecting her precious report. Everything she said sounded like a beautifully prepared and written speech.

Bree jerked when the radio static became a voice. “Travers here, Sam Travers, over. Briana, you read?”

She rushed to her desk and bent over it to pick up the mike, then pushed the button to talk back. “Sam, Briana here, over.” Her heartbeat accelerated. Of all the searchers who had gone out today, Sam was the least likely to call unless he really had something.

“One of my guys found your camera. They dived the Boulder Reef, and it was there. It's got your initials on the back.”

“Sam, thanks! But nothing else?”

Static crackled for a moment. Bree's heart fell to her feet. Was he breaking her in easy? Cole came to stand beside her and put his arm around her again. Manny came charging in from the back room. Marla Sherborne hovered.

“Someone got something?” Manny cried.

“Nothing else,” Sam's voice came loud and clear.

Bree didn't know whether she felt relief or grief, but at least she could look at Daria's pictures on that camera now.

Briana's hands shook as she took the camera from Sam's diver, the freckled, redheaded one, at the front door of her shop. “Boss says, let him know if you find anything that helps,” he said, and was gone.

Bree cradled the camera in her arms. It looked so normal, so undamaged, even dry. Both she and her gear had been through the ravages of the storm and sea, so maybe it was a sign Daria would soon be home soon, safe and sound, as Senator Sherborne had said. She'd been gone for almost an hour now, promising to keep in touch.

“Let's download whatever this camera holds and have a look at it,” she told Cole and Manny. She was heading toward the corner of the office where she kept her computer, scanner and printer when her desk phone rang. She ran to get it. Manny's wife, Juanita, was on the line.

“
Hola,
Briana,” she cried, evidently recognizing her voice. “I so sorry 'bout Daria. I been lighting candles at Our Lady of Guadalupe for you get better, her be found.”

“Thanks for your support, Juanita,” Bree said. Looking instantly more worried than he already was, Manny stepped closer.

“At this time, I hate bother you but Manny there?” Juanita said, her voice breaking. “Our Lucinda—tell him I think she run away!”

“Oh, no. Let us know if we can do anything to help. Here's Manny,” she said, and thrust the phone at him.

“My mother worse?” he said into the phone in Spanish, then frowned as he spoke loud and fast.

Bree didn't mean to eavesdrop, but her Spanish was good enough that she could tell what Manny was saying as he raked his hand through his hair. He insisted Lucinda would not dare run away, so had someone taken her? The conversation was all a horrible echo of her own fears for Daria. Juanita was now screaming so loud, Bree could actually hear her through the phone's mouthpiece, telling him something about a note. No, a note from Lucinda, not for ransom, Juanita was shouting as Bree and Cole moved away to give him more privacy.

“Caramba,”
Manny said. “
Sí,
I told her if she's not proud of us to find a new family, but I didn't really mean run away.”

“Manny,” Bree told him, “go on home. Tell her you'll be right home.”

“I coming home right now, pronto,” he told his wife, digging his truck keys out of his jeans pocket.

“And call if you need help,” Bree called after him as he raced for the door.

“May
Nuestro Señor
and the Virgin help us all!” he cried, and slammed the door behind him to leave only the jingling of its bell.

In the sudden silence, Bree and Cole stood staring at each other.

“I was going to say,” she whispered, “when it rains, it pours, but that seems worse than a cliché right now. Every time I think the nightmare can't get worse, it does.”

She realized she still clutched the camera to her. “Let's take a look at these pictures,” she told him, anxious to be doing something. “Especially the few Daria shot before I dived.”

He followed her over to the computer table. She opened the camera's plastic housing and downloaded the pictures to her desktop PC. In a moment, the screen displayed the array of pictures in three rows.

“Great!” Cole said. “They're in good shape.”

All but the first three were underwater close-ups of the turtle grass meadow. But the first three were Daria's shots off the boat before Bree dove.

“I'm going to enlarge those,” she said, clicking the zoom icon as Cole leaned over her shoulder. Despite the intensity of the moment—or maybe because of it—she could smell the tang of his aftershave or cologne. She could hear his deep, even breathing. Everything about him emanated strength, and she needed that—needed him.

Taken over the bow of the boat, Daria's first photo was of the northwest horizon toward the storm.

“The water's still quite calm, and the storm far off,” Cole observed. “The wave height is what the weather guys call a light chop, two-to four-foot waves, like what I started sailing in. Man, that baby came up hard and fast. So if someone boarded your boat after you were underwater, he or she—”

“She? Ben said that, too. I guess it could have been a woman.”

“So whoever didn't know the storm would be that bad, either, that it could cover up a crime if one was committed. But I see no other boat on that horizon.”

She selected the second picture and enlarged it as big as she could. “One very distant boat,” she said, squinting at the screen, “but it seems to be heading southeast—probably toward either Gordon Pass or the Marco River. And what's that in the sky? A pelican?”

Cole leaned even closer, his brow brushing her hair. “That or a plane. Can you move the cursor around and blow up that part more?”

She did but they couldn't tell. A speck, maybe even a flaw on the camera lens, though it didn't appear in the next two photos they examined minutely.

“She was just trying to be sure everything worked before I went down,” Bree said, her voice sounding small and shaky again. “If these are the last pics she ever shot, I'll frame them.”

Blinking back her tears, she skimmed through the shots she'd made below the surface. Good pictures of a bad result. Even before the storm pulled up some of the turtle grass by its roots and roiled the underwater visibility, the sea grass meadow was sparse, with puny growth and skinny, brown-tinged blades when it should be—used to be—flourishing. Yes, Marla Sherborne would have the explosive, negative report she obviously coveted. But, Bree supposed, a lot of others would be upset. Would their report be enough, as Cole had once implied, to rile some important people?

“I'd just like to rip the whole world apart looking for her,” Bree admitted, putting her head in her hands so she didn't have to look at these normal, calm, beautiful pictures anymore.

“Maybe that's it,” he said, kneeling by her chair and wheeling her in a half turn to face him. He pulled her hands from her teary face and held her wrists hard.

“What's it?”

“When you said ‘rip apart' right now, I thought of something we've both been ignoring. When I tried to make it in to shore in the
Streamin',
I had to fight my way through a riptide the storm and currents had somehow concocted.”

“A riptide. I think I swam through one, too. Yes, I remember! It tried to take me south, toward Marco Island. I went with it, then finally found my way out.”

“So if Daria and or
Mermaids II
tried to get into shore—or if the boat was even adrift at that point—they could have been caught in the current and taken a lot farther from the area that the authorities and your friends have been searching.”

“And that means the Ten Thousand Islands, which are like a jigsaw puzzle.”

“Or, if she didn't get taken that far, she'd get caught by those crosscurrents where the Marco River comes out into the gulf.”

“Big Marco Pass.”

“Can we radio your dive teams to move farther south?”

“Not after the day they've already put in. We agreed their search would be over by one o'clock, and it's almost that now, with nothing found but the camera. But you could be right.”

He jumped to his feet, and she leaped out of her chair. “I'll call the coast guard and talk to them about the possibility,” he said.

She seized his arm. “Let's do that only if that site pans out. Otherwise, with them calling off the search at noon today, that would be like us immediately crying wolf. Come upstairs and look at an underwater marine map I was studying last night. Maybe the combination of storm and tides made a vicious current that isn't usually there—the perfect riptide.”

As they thudded up the stairs to her apartment, she tried to shove away the memory of the tragic scene in the film,
The Perfect Storm.
Everything terrible had converged to sink a sturdy ship with a skilled crew, sink it in towering waves and howling wind.

She seized the map and turned it toward them. They didn't even sit but leaned over the table on their elbows. “See,” she said, pointing. “See this trough the Marco River makes at Big Marco Pass? It can be deep and choppy even in normal conditions, but with extra wind and tide…”

“A lot of water traffic goes in and out of Marco Island there. Maybe someone saw something.”

“I'm praying that our boat's motor simply stalled and the storm ripped the anchor with its chain off the boat. She was injured or had no way to get to me if the storm shoved her in—maybe to here,” she cried, pointing to small outer islands just north of Big Marco Pass. “She could be marooned anywhere here, maybe hurt. Or, like you said, a boat could have capsized right here where a riptide or rogue current shoved it into the battering of river, tide, currents and storm. And there are rock and stone jetties in that area. Cole, we've got to go look, just make a quick dive to be sure, then check islands and beaches.”

“Call some divers back, because you're not going down with just me. Call Travers to use his echo sounder.”

“He hates me—blames me for his son's death in Iraq,” she blurted as she ran into her bedroom to grab some clothes, then continued to talk from her bathroom as she pulled on a one-piece bathing suit, then a spandex dive suit. “We dated for years, high school sweethearts, then went to the same college. But I broke up with him and Ted enlisted!” she called to him. She tore back out into the living room. He did a double take when he saw she was dressed to dive.

“Bree, I said, call somebody else for help. The riptide—your coordinates—it's just another possibility.”

“I'm going. I'm sure our other boat has been returned by now. Just a quick look, then a call to the coast guard and/or the police dive team. They'll really check it out—if I see anything there…”

“If you
and
the others you're going to dive with see anything there,” he corrected.

He grabbed her by both arms to halt her path toward the door and gave her a little shake. “For starters, we need somebody to man the boat if we're both going down.”

“You'll go with me? I promise, no surprises like the dive into the Trade Wreck. But we'll have to get close up to see things, because the vis will be low there.”

“I think it's a good place to check, but—I don't care what you say—I'm calling Travers. We need someone to stay on the boat and someone else to go down with us.”

“You're right,” she said, nodding. Anything to get him to go down with her—to let her go. “My dad used to say only fools break the rules, and I got you cut doing that yesterday. All right, we'll call Sam. However much I used to think I couldn't trust him, he's been helping me now, because he said he didn't blame Daria for what happened to his son.”

“Meaning he still blames you.” He looked down intently into her eyes. “I guess it's none of my business, but did you really love Ted Travers? That's a lot to handle. His death, now—”

“Now Daria's?” she challenged, hands on hips.

“I didn't say that. I was going to say her being missing.”

She gripped his wrists hard, feeling sinews, muscles and bones, so solid in her trembling world. “I keep clinging to the fact we are so close—Daria and I. I'm hoping I'd feel—I'd know—if she were really gone. But she can't be gone. I won't
let
her be gone!”

“Then let's get some help and get going.”

“All right—yes,” she said, and gave him a quick hug. She started to pull away, but he anchored her hard to him.

They clung full length, both holding tight, Bree standing on tiptoe with her arms clamped around his neck and his around her waist. She turned her face into the side of his throat and felt his pulse pounding there. Her blood pressure was surely off the charts. The top of her head fit perfectly under his chin. Her breasts pressed flat to his hard chest and her thighs to his. She was toned, but his flesh was harder, his entire body like the wood his big hands fashioned. She felt swept away, outside herself.