Girl at Sea (32 page)

“We have to consider that more might be down there,” he went on. “We need to at least look to see if Magwell brought anything back that he didn’t mention. We need to go back to land first, though. I think Martin should get checked out by a doctor. And we need refills for the tanks.”

“We’re on our way to Civitavecchia,” Julia confirmed. “We might as well go there.”

Clio was starting to feel the effects of a sleepless night, on top of her dive. She collapsed in a chair in the living room, but never quite fell asleep. She just let herself be lulled by the movement of the boat as it headed to the shore. She had just nodded off when they stopped, having reached the town.

“Bad news,” her father said, stepping back in after a con-sultation on the dock. “This place is full. There’s no slip available for us. We’re going to have to anchor farther out. A few of us can disembark here. We can get a doctor to give Martin a once-over, and we can pick up the things we need.”

“Come on now, Ben,” Julia said. “We all need to celebrate. We can all ferry in on the raft. Proper dinner. Champagne.”

Clio looked over in surprise. There was an odd look in Julia’s eyes as she suggested this. Julia wanted them all to go ashore . . .
to
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have fun
. There was definitely something strange about this, but Clio was too tired to think it through.

“No,” her dad replied, shaking his head. “We can’t leave the boat unattended. It’s a good idea, but someone is going to have to stay behind. Aidan? Do you mind? You could drop us off and take the boat out.”

“No problem,” he said.

“Okay. Everyone else can get out here. We’ll need Elsa too, to help us find the doctor. I’m going to get the tanks ready. Some guys here will help me move them over to a dive shop.”

Clio followed her dad out onto the deck.

“Can I stay?” she asked groggily. “I’m exhausted.”

“Aidan’s staying,” he said. “You’re coming.”

“I didn’t really sleep last night. And the dive today was so amazing . . . I’m crashing. Please.”

“I’m not an
idiot
, Clio,” he said. “And I haven’t forgotten last night.”

“Does that mean you’re still sending me back?”

“Don’t you want to go back?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Especially since you’re going to need me.”

“Clio—”

“Anything I’ve done that you really disagree with—it was only because you wouldn’t tell me what was happening. I only swam because you stranded me. I went into Julia’s room to find out what was going on.”

He picked up a tank and lifted it off onto the dock. Clio kept at his heels.

“Okay,” she said. “I need to say this. I’m seventeen. I’m a girl.

Which means that yes, Dad, there may be dating involved.
You
do 278

it. And you know Mom does it. I get to do it too. It’s reality. I grew up. But tonight? I’m really, seriously just tired. Please, can you please trust me enough to be alone with a member of the male species for a few hours? And it’s Aidan. You have to trust him too.”

He said nothing, but she could see there was some confusion in his mind now.

“Dad,” she said, “we
dove
together today. We
found
it.”

Usually, repeated attempts to convince her parents of something failed. But this time, the logic was inescapable, the day simply too good. He paused midway to reaching for the next tank.

“Come on,” he said.

She followed him back inside, where Julia was leading Elsa down from the Champagne Suite. She didn’t look at Aidan or Clio. Her bearing wasn’t mean. It was embarrassed and sad. Clio wanted to talk to her so much, to explain herself, to make her feel better.

The keys were passed over to Aidan.

“Aidan and Clio are saying here,” he said.

Elsa looked down at the floor. Clio felt a pang in her chest.

There was so much to be repaired between them.

“Aidan,” Julia said as she prepared to go, “if you’re going to be here, please write up a report of what happened today. We’ll want a record. Have something ready by the time I get back.

And maybe prep some of the video footage.”

“It’s like it would kill her to give me a night off,” Aidan said after the boat had pushed off, “even after we
find
the stone.”

“How come you get to drive the boat?” she asked.

“Because they showed me how to do it,” he said.

“Well, then you can show me,” she said.

279

Up in the wheelhouse, the turn of a single key brought to life all of the little panels. Clio wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention as Aidan explained what they did, and she could tell his mind wasn’t exactly on the task. He was comfortable around machines and didn’t have to think very hard when discussing them. There wasn’t very far to go, but he let her take the steering wheel for a few seconds. It felt like a steering wheel.

They reached a spot not too far out, yet away from any traffic that might be going along the shore. Aidan flipped some switches to release the anchor, then killed the engine, and the lights on the panels went off. The wheelhouse was silent.

“This isn’t right,” he said, looking out of the tinted glass.

“What isn’t right?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “There’s just something really eerie about getting what you’re looking for.”

“Eerie as in bad?” she asked.

“Just, you don’t expect it,” he said.

He drummed his finger on the panel, examined his shoes, then looked at Clio.

“I thought you were tired,” he said.

“I woke up.”

Neither of them moved. They stood in the middle of the wheelhouse, looking at the panel. Something had to happen.

Clio could feel the space between them. It was practically throbbing. One of them would have to
do
something. Even a large pile of dynamite needs a little spark to set it off.

“You hungry?” he asked.

“Starving.”

They left the wheelhouse and went back down and inside, 280

leaving the glass doors open to catch the evening breeze. In the galley, they gathered up whatever leftovers they could find.

Aidan’s plate ended up being entirely filled with meat, while Clio’s held a strange arrangement of small items—tiny marinated mushrooms, squares of cheese, ends of bread loaves, bunches of salad.

“Since you’re here,” he said, “you can help me work. Come on.”

It was almost like a game they had silently agreed to play: a test to see how long they could draw this out. A few minutes later, they had settled themselves in the small room downstairs, each on one side of the table.

“You were down there,” he said, pushing a pad in her direction.

“Give us an account. I’m going to put together some of this data.”

He flipped open his computer and set to work.

“So,” Aidan said, not taking his eyes off the screen. “What happens next with you?”

“Maybe I stay a few days. Maybe go back home. Maybe we all go back to England.”

“You have a lot of maybes in there,” he said.

“I guess life is full of maybes.”

Clio looked at her com. She switched it off very carefully and quietly pushed it across the table.

“What was that for?” Aidan said, his green eyes flashing over the top of the screen.

“Just moving it out of the way.”

He looked over at his own com out of the corner of his eye, then continued typing. He rocked forward on his chair, and his knees bumped against hers under the table, quickly, once. And then again. Clio drilled her eyes into the pad of paper, willed 281

her hand to stay steady. She leaned in slightly and kneed him back.

He never even blinked. She heard him typing away. But his foot reached out and hooked her ankle, drawing her slightly closer.

One of them would have to look up. One of them had to act.

Slowly—very, very slowly—she unwound her foot.

“Do you want to see what I wrote?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”

She turned the pad upside down to face him but didn’t move it any closer. He lowered the screen of his laptop.

“What did you promise your dad?” he asked, smiling slowly.

“That I would lock my bedroom door,” she said. “And that I wouldn’t pull any funny stunts.”

“Define ‘funny stunts’,” he said.

It was unbearable now. She leaned into the table just a bit. He pushed his laptop over. Then he half stood, leaning in. He draped himself over the table, leaning on his elbows. And then he did something that Clio couldn’t quite recover from—he reached out and, just with the tips of his fingers, touched her right under the chin.

“You know,” he said, “it’s really hard to say the words ‘you’re pretty’ without sounding like a mental patient. But you’re pretty.”

He brought his face closer, just touching his lips against hers but not pressing. Just touching. And then . . .

And then something happened that wasn’t quite what Clio was expecting.

The boat lurched to life and started moving backward at a 282

high rate of speed, throwing them both backward. Clio grabbed the edge of the table, but Aidan couldn’t secure a hold on anything fast enough. He was tossed back into his chair and then back against the wall, where his head landed solidly with a thud.

“They must be back,” he said. “I didn’t hear them. Did you?”

“No.”

There were footsteps above. Clearly, everyone had come back.

The boat angled itself, then switched to rapid forward movement.

“We dropped them off,” he said. “How did they get back without the launch?”

The sudden cutoff of the moment, combined with the movement, left Clio thrumming. She felt a little woozy.

“I don’t know,” she mumbled. “My dad—”

“This isn’t right,” Aidan said. “I don’t like this.”

Clio was just recalling that he had said the same thing earlier, up in the wheelhouse, when the door opened. A man in a Nirvana T-shirt stepped inside. A stranger. He was a fairly small guy, with slightly tufty brown hair. He looked lost. He stared at Clio and Aidan. He looked around at the maps and laptops. He spoke to them in Italian. They looked at each other.

“Who the hell are you?” Aidan asked.

The stranger cocked his head, then in reply pulled a gun from his pocket and pointed it right at Clio.

283

Prisoners

Clio was having an epiphany. It was exploding across her mind, as epiphanies do.

Movies won’t help you now
, it said in its all-consuming echo.

See how wrong they are about this? That’s a gun, and it’s pointing at
you, and does this seem at all like something from a movie? No.

Her brain flipped the gun into a few other objects. He was holding a stapler. He was threatening them with a hand blender.

That was a wrench. A garden hose.

“Hey,” Aidan said quickly. “It’s okay. You don’t . . . You don’t need to do that.”

His words only seemed to confuse the man. The intruder noticed the com on the table and grabbed it. Then he glanced around and behind him, peering out into the hall but keeping the gun trained on them at all times. Then he stepped out and shut the door.

Clio couldn’t even move.

284

“What,” Aidan said, “the hell was that?”

She managed to back toward Aidan a little, and they stood together in the corner, looking at the door.

“Okay,” he said. “Apparently the boat is being stolen. What are you supposed to do? What’s the rule?”

“Do you think he’s coming back?” Clio asked, her eyes darting around the room.

“No idea. Probably?”

There were voices in the hall. The door opened again, and the man stepped back in. Another man glanced around the door.

The two men conferred. Then they waved Clio and Aidan out of the room and up the stairs. They sat them down on the living room floor against the sofa.

Both men seemed nervous. One kept grimacing and laughing, walking around the room and picking things up. He was deeply tan, wore an Italy World Cup Champions T-shirt, and played with his lighter a lot. The other, the one who’d found them, was the smaller of the two. He sat at the table and watched them, tapping his fingers relentlessly. He held his gun loosely with his other hand, almost with the casualness that you might hold a cigarette. Neither, it was clear, spoke any English.

Clio got the impression that whoever these men were, they hadn’t been expecting to find anyone on board.

Of the many strange places she had been in her life, Clio had never been in the path of a gun. And the truth was, it was so completely scary that it almost ceased to be scary at all. Her mind seemed to have short-circuited on fear, leaving her unable to do anything but stare at the leather armchair and take in its every detail. It was kind of like they had invited very weird, 285

awkward guests onto the boat. Guests who brought guns instead of snacks.

For at least an hour, Aidan never moved his eyes from the glass doors. Then Clio heard him speaking in a very low voice when neither of the men was looking.

“Look upset,” he whispered.

She mouthed the word, “What?”

“Look like you’re upset.”

Clio tried her best to arrange her face in something that resembled extreme unhappiness. This should have been easier than it was. Her face didn’t really want to move. Aidan slipped his arms around her and pulled her comfortingly close.