09-Twelve Mile Limit (17 page)

“If you think she’s lying, you need to tell me. What’s she have to lie about?”

He said, “I think it has something to do with the way she got separated from the others. Something she’s ashamed of. Not that she should be. Under those kind of circumstances, your boat sinks, you’re set adrift at night, no one has a right to question or criticize someone else’s behavior.”

“But that’s exactly what you’re doing right now. Did you catch her in some kind of factual error in her story? Or are you just guessing?” I said.

I felt relieved when he said, “Intuition, just like I said.”

“Okay, your concern is noted. But let’s stick to the facts. You’re the one who brought up the importance of credibility.”

“Just because it’s anecdotal doesn’t mean it’s not factual. There are all kinds of ways to collect data. When I was out there alone aboard the No Mas, three extra days searching, I dropped into a very deep meditative state. It was a heavy scene, man. I was right there with them the night the boat went down. Janet, Amelia, Michael, and Grace. I saw what happened. I saw what happened afterward. The whole dark vision. Like an electric current pouring into my brain. My own little movie running, close enough to them to see their faces, hear their voices.”

I almost allowed him to lure me off the subject and back into our old debate on parapsychology, ghosts, the whole mystical question. I’d like to believe such things happen. Who wouldn’t? If certain people really can foresee the future or read the minds of others, it adds substantial weight to the proposition that there is symmetry and spiritual purpose to the human experience. I would like to believe that, but I don’t.

I’ve heard Tomlinson’s so-called proofs often enough, but I have yet to see proof myself of mystical, extrasensory powers. Tomlinson has an eerie ability to read people and quickly perceive what few others can—that, I don’t argue. I suspect he does it by interpreting body language, voice intonations, who knows, though he’s very good at it. But could he really know what happened the night the Seminole Wind sank without being there? That I did not believe and would not accept.

I took the pilot chart off the deck and folded it open beside my plate. “So if you perceived all that through meditation, tell me how it was. What happened to the three of them after they got split up from Amelia? Are they still alive?”

Tomlinson smiled patiently and tugged his scraggly blond hair back with his left hand, letting the question hang there before he answered, “Marion, sarcasm is your least attractive quality. You resort to it so rarely, I sometimes forget.”

I was cleaning my thick glasses, wanting to see and understand all the little symbols on the chart. I pulled the oil lamp closer as I said, “I’m sorry. So I withdraw the offensive tone, but the question’s the same. What do you think happened? Why didn’t we find them?”

“What I think is, one of the reasons is right there in front of you. Actually the main reason. Look at the current arrows. It’s all right there on the chart.”

Pilot charts are superb tools for the blue-water voyager or the gunk-holing cruiser. They give a lot more information than the much more commonly used U.S. government or NOAA nautical charts. Published by the Defense Mapping Agency, their aim is to help the mariner select the fastest and safest routing for any offshore passage at any time of the year. The charts provide information on weather conditions for very specific areas. They note prevailing winds and calms, average wave heights, typical barometric pressure, average currents, air and water temperatures, and recommended routes.

This pilot chart was for the Gulf of Mexico, Campeche, Mexico to Cuba to New Orleans and Florida, the entire, massive basin dotted with symbols and navigational data. The chart consisted of twelve pages, one for each month of the year, and I had it open to the month of November. I found Marco Island, found the little crosshatched egg-shaped icon at 25 degrees 21 minutes 60 seconds north latitude and 82 degrees 31.97 minutes west longitude: the wreck of the Baja California.

As I studied the chart, noting the feathered arrows that marked prevailing winds and the serpentine arrows that indicated ocean currents and tidal currents, Tomlinson said, “When the Seminole Wind sank, all the detritus drifted southwest. The life jackets, the empty tanks, everything we found. So it’s very natural to assume that three swimmers wearing inflated vests would also drift southwest.”

I was nodding, enjoying the food, enjoying the concise data on the chart, the way they accurately distilled the wild ocean into an orderly and predictable rendering of numbers, graphs, directional arrows. I said, “It’s more than an assumption. All of the data-marking buoys the Coast Guard dropped—what? There were half a dozen or so of them? DMBs—they all drifted southwest. Covered five or six miles every twenty-four hours, which …” I paused. “Now that I think about it, and this is the first time I’ve checked a pilot chart, that doesn’t seem right. It says here the prevailing ocean current runs at about two knots. Anything floating, adrift, should have covered at least thirty, maybe forty, miles in twenty-four hours.”

“Exactly. I was struck by that, too. The figures don’t seem to work out. I spent the afternoon holed-up in Mack’s office doing research on the computer, calling sailor buddies of mine, a couple of shrimp-boat captains who do a lot of dragging in that area. You ever seen a data-marking buoy?”

I had, but I let Tomlinson talk.

“They’re sealed canisters, about three feet long, flat on both ends, painted bright orange, and heavier on the bottom to make them float upright. There’s a GPS antenna on top. Self-locating data-marking buoys, that’s the official name. They send a signal directly to a satellite that tracks their movement. So it’s got to be accurate.”

I said, “Very accurate. Which is why I hadn’t stopped to question the math before. So why did the buoys drift so slowly?”

He stood, came around behind me, looking over my shoulder at the chart. Tomlinson has huge, bony hands with nails bitten down to the quick. Now he touched an index finger to the icon that represented the Baja California. “Okay, this is where they dropped the DMBs, right on the wreck site. All along this line. According to the chart, the prevailing winds are out of the northeast—and they were that night, blowing fifteen to twenty. Prevailing current moves east-southeast at about two knots. The wind was blowing slightly against the current, and that would have reduced the speed of drift. The DMBs covered only about six miles a day. So far, it’s just like the Coast Guard and all the rest of us figured.”

I said, “Three people wearing vests would have blown southwest with the wind, but slowed quite a bit by a current trying to push them to the east. Then that explains it. They would have traveled the same direction and at a similar speed as the buoys.”

Tomlinson said, “Not necessarily. Last night, I took this chart with me when I crawled into my bunk. Kept looking at it and looking at it. You know how when you look directly at a star too long, it disappears? I did that with the area around the Baja California. I just let it blur until it vanished, and that’s when the whole current system came into focus. I’m talking about for the entire Gulf of Mexico. Try it. Let your eyes go wide, imagine the current arrows are in red. Let them stand out and see what happens. The big picture is what you need to see.”

I looked at the chart momentarily, tried to let my eyes blur, but then shook my head. “My imagination isn’t that good. Save us both some time and just tell me what it is I’m supposed to see.”

“Okay, first thing you see is a big saltwater lake, more than a thousand miles wide between Florida and Mexico. The Gulf of Mexico.” He moved his finger down to Cuba. “The saltwater lake has only two openings. There’s a 20-mile-wide opening here between the Florida Keys and Cuba. There’s a 125-mile opening here between Cuba and the Yucatan Peninsula. Those are damn small openings for ocean currents to squeeze through. Take a garden hose, squeeze the end with your thumb, and the water speeds up. Like a jet.”

I said wryly, “I’m aware of that. It’s called the Venturi effect. Constrict flowing water or gas, and its velocity increases.”

“That’s precisely what happens in the Gulf. The arrows here tell the whole story. The equatorial current and the Guiana current come flowing into Cuba, get squeezed between Cuba and the Yucatan, then blast into the Gulf, directly toward Louisiana, the Mississippi River Delta country. The current’s so strong that it ricochets off the southern shallows and breaks into two great looping currents. Those currents break into a series of crazy spirals, smaller loops, like gyres.”

He began to tap the chart with his finger. “There’s one here … a gyre here … here. They’re all over the place. One side of the gyre flows more or less south, the other side flows more or less north. They’re like big, slow-motion whirlpools floating around out there at sea. Oval-shaped rivers that, in the fall and winter, flow at one, maybe even two knots, and faster in summer. Ultimately, most of them exit and gain speed at the stricture between Key West and Cuba.”

“The Gulf Stream,” I said. “That’s what you’re describing. The source of the Gulf Stream.”

He said, “It all contributes, yeah, the Gulf Stream. But do you see what I’m getting at?”

Tomlinson is a teacher with extraordinary gifts, and now, for the first time, I could see that what, at first, appeared to be a random but consistent flow of water was, actually, a series of symmetrical loops. According to the pilot chart, in November, historically, a particularly small but strong gyre existed between Sanibel at the northerly extreme and Flamingo to the south. Offshore, water flowed southeast. Inshore, water spiraled northward.

“Datum marker buoys can’t swim,” Tomlinson said softly. “Janet, Michael, and Grace could. I think that accounts for the difference, and why we didn’t find them. Remember the big charter boat that Amelia told us she saw that night or whose lights she saw, anyway. The Ellen Clair? The captain, Ken Peterson, told her later that he’d anchored over the Baja California.

“I called him this afternoon, Doc. I told him what we plan to do. Find the Seminole Wind and figure out why she sank. Dive the Baja and collect anything we can that corroborates Amelia’s story. We talked for maybe half an hour. Nice guy. Feels terrible that his boat was so close and he couldn’t find them. Just like the rest of us.

“So I was asking him how it went once he got to the Dry Tortugas, how the fishing was, and he said something that made all the little lights come on. He said the trip back to Fort Myers Beach was a lot faster than the trip out because he ran closer to shore where there wasn’t as much wind… and there was a hell of a strong northerly current pushing him along.”

I’d stopped eating. Did not feel like eating anymore. “So they swam east toward the flashing light, Janet, Michael, and Grace,” I said, “just like Amelia. They probably got close to the tower. Maybe real close. But then they stopped swimming for some reason.”

Tomlinson walked to the window above the little ship’s stove. Stood there staring at the lights of the marina. People moving around out there on the docks. Silhouettes, shadows, and muted voices. All Sundays dampen noise, particularly a memorial service Sunday. “I’ve thought and thought about it,” he said. “It’s plausible, possible, maybe even probable… and it’s so goddamn sad I can barely stand it.”

He continued, “We assume that Amelia’s story is mostly true. So why didn’t we find them? If the three hooked up, stayed together, they would have been a larger mass, easier to see. If they separated, the chances of spotting at least one of them increase proportionally. The Coast Guard was using forward-looking infrared radar; those things register body heat from a mile away. So it’s damn unlikely we could have missed them unless I’m right. They swam east toward the tower but stopped. They got caught on the edge of the gyre. Just like Peterson told me: where there was a hell of a strong current pushing them north. At one, maybe two knots, they’d have been off Marco by first light, fifteen maybe twenty miles away. Way the hell north of the Baja California.”

I said, “I wouldn’t call a two-knot current that strong. Those were his words?”

“‘A hell of a strong northerly current.’ That’s what he said. I agree with you. The pilot chart for November shows one to two knots for this particular gyre, but maybe it was stronger. Who knows? Things change fast out there, you know that. But that’s what the man said, and he’s been captaining for fifteen years.”

Now I was feeling sick. The Coast Guard, all of us, we’d all searched from a few miles north of the wreck site, then forty miles and more to the south and southwest.

Tomlinson said, “Powerboats are machines, but a fine sailboat has more in common with a divining rod. The No Mas kept trying to take me north. My sailboat, the wheel, she tried and tried to turn, to show me the way. I was a fool. I wouldn’t let her.

“Our last three days out there, alone, that’s when I finally let the No Mas take control. I gave her the wheel, just like you sometimes give a horse free rein, and she took me way north and west, far out to sea. But it was too late. Too late.”

His voice became a whisper as he added, “At night, when I meditated, I could see what happened, how it happened, everything. Their voices, I could hear their words, see their faces, could feel Janet’s fear, her horror. What Janet saw, I saw, and I knew then just what I know now. They were still alive. They may still be alive.”

Stars, planets, streaking satellites fell toward her, propelled by the buoyancy of each cresting wave, then stars were yanked skyward again as the wave collapsed, dropping her body into a black valley …

Floating on her back, eyes focused overhead and clinging to a universe of blazing starlight, Janet Mueller used her left hand to grip a section of anchor line hitched to the bow of the Seminole Wind while the fingers of her right hand touched the thin gold crucifix she was never without. It was a gift from her late husband, Roger, who’d been killed in a car accident years ago, only three months before their first baby was to be born.