Surface Tension (21 page)

The visibility wasn’t great, but I could make out some shadowy shapes. Several threads of silver bubbles wound their way to the surface. Scuba divers. I tried to pick them out in the blurry murk. Two of them. I lifted my head and looked around for their boat. There to the east, about a quarter mile off, was a twenty-foot Sea Ray. From the line angling off the bow, it was obvious she was anchored, but it looked like she was slowly dragging. Not surprising in this depth. It shouldn’t be a problem for them, though. They could swim to it.

From the corner of my eye, I could see Abaco’s legs underwater doing that mechanical even-stroked dog paddle of hers. She circled around me.

The divers were swimming across the sand and grass bottom, heading toward a big dark shadow just to the south of us. I wasn’t sure whether it was natural coral or an artificial reef. I untied the line around my waist and began hyperventilating, fooling my brain into thinking that it had plenty of oxygen. Then I took an extra-large breath and dove.

I’ve always preferred free diving to scuba. There is no rasp and burble of air drawn in and out through a regulator. It’s quiet except for the distant buzz of propellers far away, the pop and crackle of tiny oceanic shrimp, and the crinkling noise as I squeeze my nose, popping my ears during the descent. Since I’d started practicing, the length of time I could hold my breath had grown longer and now I could stay down for over two minutes. My deepest free dive was to sixty-five feet. But not today, not without fins. I did get down deep enough, though, to see the scuba divers. The divers were about twenty feet off the bottom, swimming toward what looked like a small wrecked freighter. Judging from the number of holes in the thing, it was no accident that brought it to rest on the seabed. It definitely had been sunk intentionally, probably part of the artificial reef system.

It was also obvious that these divers were weekend warriors, not dive junkies. No expense had been spared in the gear they wore. I knew their type: more money than experience, and they bought everything the dive shop guys suggested. The smaller guy even had a bang stick strapped to his leg for shark protection. It was a pressure-sensitive device that when jammed into the side of an overly friendly shark would fire off a single shot gun shell. It worked, but you were more likely to hurt yourself diving with the equivalent of a gun strapped to your leg.

The bigger one noticed me, and I waved. I always felt superior to scuba divers. I felt free as a dolphin. He touched his partner’s arm and pointed up.

There was something familiar about the smaller guy. I used my last reserves of air to swim a little deeper. Just as I began kicking for the surface, it hit me: his black hair floating upward around the top of his mask, the dark inkblot of a tattoo on his right hand, last night at the Mai Kai. Cesar Esposito.

By the time I hit the surface, the black was beginning to close in around the periphery of my vision. I had come too close to passing out. Abaco had climbed back into the Whaler already, and she was barking like crazy. She hated it when I dived. I rolled onto my back and floated for several seconds, my eyes closed, waiting for my breath and strength to return.

Cesar Esposito! I pictured him leaning over James Long’s shoulder and the feeling that I had seen him somewhere before last night returned. My eyes popped open, I rolled over and I began swimming fast and furiously for the Whaler.

I pulled myself over the gunwale, threw my mask onto the floor of the boat, and scrambled for the varnished bench behind the wheel. The outboard sputtered and died at the first turn of the key. I glanced back at the engine, and in the distance, I saw the divers at their Sea Ray. Esposito was already in the boat, reaching over the transom and grabbing for his buddy’s gear. The other diver climbed onto the swim step. He towered over Cesar. Even at this distance, I could tell he was huge; his chest and arm muscles were so big, his arms couldn’t swing comfortably at his sides. He reminded me of a cormorant, the way they stand on rocks or buoys, their wings spread wide, trying to dry them.

I tried the key again. No go. Nothing but dying whines from my little starter battery.

Both men had dropped their scuba gear. I heard their big twin Johnsons roar to life. Shit.

Yanking the cover off the Merc with one hand, I reached into the stern locker with the other and pulled out my can of quick-start ether. I sprayed the carburetor keeping my head turned upwind.

Cesar was on the bow of the Sea Ray, bent over, pulling in their anchor line.

The Merc coughed to life on the next try. The Whaler was pointing north, away from the inlet, but I jammed it in gear and shoved the throttle to the max.

I looked back over my shoulder. Now both men were on the bow of their boat, their butts up in the air yanking on their anchor line. Whatever their anchor had snagged on, all that beef wasn’t budging it. The bigger guy looked up when he heard my engine rev up. I turned back toward the inlet in a wide arc and waved to them as I passed.

Seeing them together had made me remember the night on the beach with Ely. I was looking at Big Guy and Shorty.

XIII

It was nearly one o’clock in the afternoon when I parked on the south side of Bimini Lane and fed the meter all three of my quarters before crossing over to Harbor House. I didn’t see James’s Jag anywhere on the street, but for all I knew there might be a fancy employees’ garage behind the buildings somewhere. It was my fervent hope that he wouldn’t be there on a Sunday afternoon and I’d get a chance to talk to Sonya alone. Minerva was on the desk again, and she buzzed me into the building with a smile. I didn’t smile back.

“May I speak to Mr. Long, please?”

“I’m sorry, he isn’t in on Sunday. Would you like to make an appointment to see him on Monday?”
 

Excellent, I thought.

“Damn,” I said.

Minerva looked at me with arched eyebrows.

I plastered an on-the-verge-of-tears look on my face. “I guess I’ll have to tell her parents that I just couldn’t do it.”

“Who?”

“The Daggetts. Elysia’s parents asked me to stop by and pick up some of her things.”

“Well, miss, I don’t really have the authority . . .”

“They wanted me to speak to her friend Sonya, too, because . . . well, you know how parents are. They just have to find out everything she did on that last day. It’s all they have left now.”

Minerva scrunched her brows together and pursed her lips. The fine web of wrinkles deepened around her eyes and lips. “Well, I don’t see any harm in that. Specially seeing as the two girls were roommates and all. You should have told me right off. You don’t need Mr. Long’s permission for that.”

She picked up the phone and dialed an in-house extension. “Sonya? There’s a lady here who’d like to talk to you about Elysia. You got a minute? . . . Uh-huh . . . Okay. I’ll send her on back.”

James hadn’t mentioned Sonya was Ely’s roommate.
 

Minerva pointed to the door opposite her desk. “Just go on through to room twelve. I’ll open it for you. It’ll be on your right. She’s expecting you.”

“Thanks.” When I reached the door a buzzer sounded and the lock released.

The bedroom door opened within seconds after I knocked. Neither one of us said a word at first, although we recognized each other. She was the blond girl who had run into James in the hallway yesterday. He’d called her Sunny. There was open distrust in her eyes.

“May I come in?”

I saw the gap in the door start to close, so I pushed my way in and just started talking.

“Thank you so much for seeing me like this. I know it must be very hard on you, losing a friend like that.” I crossed to the far side of the small room, noticing the open suitcase on the unmade bed. I pointed to the other bed. “Was this Elysia’s bed?” She nodded.

I sat down on the smooth navy bedspread. “Had you two been roommates long?”

She closed the hallway door and leaned against it, crossing her arms under her ample breasts. She was wearing a white tank top and green satin jogging shorts. With her long blond hair and shapely legs, she looked like the type of model who is usually photographed draped over an outboard engine or a motorcycle.

“I already talked to the cops, and I’ve got nothing else to say. Who are you?” she asked.

“My name is Seychelle Sullivan. Maybe Elysia mentioned me.”

I saw in her eyes that she did recognize my name, but her defenses weren’t down yet.

“Yeah,” I went on, “we sure had some great times together. Did Ely ever tell you what we did on her seventeenth birthday?”

A hint of a smile sparkled in her eyes, and she nodded. “She told you about the gorilla suit? She once told my friend B.J. that she loved gorillas. Well, I was complaining to him that I didn’t know what to get her for her birthday, and he said, ‘Let’s rent her a gorilla suit!’ And we did. We made her wear it all weekend—even to work. Only she’s such a shrimp, it was the funniest-looking, shortest-legged gorilla you’ve ever seen.” The room grew terribly quiet when I stopped laughing. “I mean
was
. She was such a shrimp. God, that’s hard to get used to.”
 

After another long, uncomfortable silence, Sonya stuck out her chin and said, “She called you her guardian angel. But I don’t believe in angels.”

“Yeah, she called me that because I was just trying to look out for her. I knew she didn’t have parents who were going to care, but I cared. A lot. And Ely knew that.”

She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”

“And I still care about her now. I care about what they’re saying about her, and I know it isn’t true. I don’t believe Ely’s death was an accident or suicide. I don’t believe she was willingly using drugs again, either. Someone killed her.”

She walked over to the closet and began pulling clothes off the hangers, balling them up and throwing them into the suitcase. “I don’t know anything about that.”

I stayed quiet for a while, knowing the silence would work on her.

Finally she flopped down onto the bed and sat hunched over. She stared at the carpet and rubbed her toes across the fibers. Finally she looked up. “What do you want? I don’t know nothing. Leave me alone!”

“Were you working the door when Ely came home Friday night?”

Her blue eyes glanced up at me with a guilty look, the way Abaco used to look when she’d been left in all day and had peed on the floor in the cottage.

“I don’t think I should be talking to you.”

“Why not? I was a friend of Ely’s. I’m just trying to find out what happened to her. Don’t you want to know what happened to her?”

I almost didn’t hear it, she spoke so softly. “No,” she said, and she started to cry. She had looked so tough, so invulnerable at first, that I had nearly forgotten she was just a kid.

I pushed aside her suitcase and sat next to her. “What is it, Sonya?”

“Sunny, call me Sunny. Ely did. I hate Sonya.” She wiped at her eyes trying to regain her composure, but the tears continued to spill down her cheeks. “Shit, I gotta get out of here.”

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

Oh, man, at fifteen, I was still playing on a girls’ softball team and hanging out on the river with my dad. I was tall and lanky then, dressed in cutoffs and T-shirts to hide what curves I had, and boys ignored me. I had no idea what it would be like to be a little girl in a woman’s sex-kitten body like Sunny’s.

“Where are you from?”

“Indiana.”

“Don’t you think your family misses you?”

She didn’t answer right away. Then she said, “I don’t have a family. My parents died when I was little.”

“I’m sorry. I kinda know what that’s like. My mother died when I was eleven.”

She didn’t say anything for a long while. The room was quiet aside from her occasional sniffles. Finally she looked up, her blue eyes now rimmed in red. “Do you still miss her?”

Decades can go by and you can think you are so over it, and then one little question can just rip it all open again and make the wound as fresh and raw as it was that hot day on the beach. “Yes. Every day of my life.” She nodded and didn’t say anything more for a while as we sat there next to each other each essentially alone with our memories.

She inhaled deeply. “I was raised by my sister and her husband.”

“Where’s your sister now? Maybe you could go back to live with her.”

“I don’t know where she is. Probably dead. She got on drugs, and then she tested positive. She just left.”

There was more to the story, and though I felt pretty certain I knew what it would be, I had to let her tell it.

“That was when Ray started going after me. Then he threw me out because I wouldn’t sleep with him anymore. Said I wasn’t good for anything.”

It was a different variation of the story told by most of the girls in this place.

“Is there anything I can do to help you?”

She turned and looked at me, as though calculating what harm or good I could do her. “You helped Ely a lot. She told me.”

I took a deep breath to keep the quiver out of my voice. “She was my friend. I’m really going to miss her.” Sunny stood up and went into the tiny bathroom. I heard the water running. When she returned, the tears had stopped.

“I might know something that could help you a little. But see, I’m getting out of here. And I don’t have all that much time or money.”

I opened my shoulder bag and pulled a twenty out of my wallet. Her offer hadn’t been well disguised, so I figured there wasn’t any need to try to be tactful. I put the twenty on the bed. She snatched it up and stuffed it in a tiny satin handbag hanging on the doorknob.

“Okay. I came here about four months ago. That’s when I first met Ely.” Sunny went back to throwing things into the suitcase. “She didn’t talk much at first; she was always busy with her work and all. But after a couple of months, she started giving me some hints about how to make it and all. She told me the real story about this place, trying to keep me out of trouble, but by that time, it was already kind of late.”

“What do you mean, the real story about this place?”

She went on with the story, ignoring my question. “I thought I knew exactly what I was doing, and I wouldn’t listen to her at first. But it turned out she was right after all. This place isn’t what I thought it was.”