09-Twelve Mile Limit (2 page)

I did have problems, too. Nothing major, but problems that were increasingly perplexing and irksome. Over the last two months, someone or something had snuck into my lab and stolen more than three dozen stone crabs and seven calico crabs. Took them from the hundred-gallon aquarium where I’d been stockpiling them, and always one or two crabs at a time.

It was bizarre. At first I thought a raccoon might have found some kind of secret ingress through the wobbly wooden floor of my old house, or maybe through some unseen space between the wall and the tin roof. I searched and hunted, and found nothing bigger than a mouse-sized opening, but the crabs continued to disappear.

Maddening.

Finally, I covered the aquarium with a pane of heavy glass. If some animal were stealing crabs, a cover would certainly solve the problem, right?

Nope, it didn’t. Crabs continued to disappear, one or two at a time, always at night, but in no other predictable or understandable pattern. Finally, I started sealing the lid of my crab tank with a small metal vise.

I’d begun to think some of my marina friends were playing a practical joke on me—“Hey, know how we can really mess with Doc’s mind?”—but then, concurrently, my octopi began to disappear, too. Two species of octopi live in the waters around Sanibel and they are not easy to collect or keep alive, and my friends are knowledgeable enough to know that. They wouldn’t mess with my octopi, not just because they are valuable creatures but also because everyone at the marina knows that octopi—like manatees—are among my very favorite animals.

I find octopi fascinating, compelling even, for a number of reasons.

As members of the phylum Mollusca, an octopus is a mollusk, like a snail or clam, but that’s where all similarities end. Octopi are the intellectual giants of their phylum. They have the most complex brain of all invertebrates, and they are a hell of a lot smarter than most animals that do have spines, and that includes some people I know.

Octopi have precise, uncanny long-term and short-term memories, and they learn to solve problems by trial and error, by experience. Once they solve a problem, they file away the solution and can then solve similar problems quickly.

The immediate and most striking feature of an octopus is its glowing cat’s eyes. They are highly complex eyes that compare to humans’ in visual acuity but focus by moving the lens in and out rather than by changing their shape. They are bright, predatory eyes that imply a rare analytical intensity, just as an octopus’s ability to change skin color suggests, to some, emotional complexity. There are people who say that when an octopus’s special pigment cells, or chromatophores, strobe red, it’s angry. When they strobe white, the octopus is afraid.

I don’t happen to believe octopi are motivated by emotion or react to emotion—people are much too quick to assign human qualities to animals—but, still, they are fascinating creatures.

Because octopi are smart and predatory, I keep them one or two to a tank and make certain the tanks are heavily lidded.

Even so, I’d now lost one small long-armed octopus and two football-sized Atlantic octopi without explanation. Like the crabs, and like Janet Mueller, the octopi simply seemed to vanish.

Now, out of frustration, I was checking the water in each and every one of my aquaria to make certain conditions were as close to ideal as I could make them before I retackled the mystery of my disappearing lab animals. Salinity had checked out at twenty-four parts per thousand, which was exactly the same as the salinity of the bay in which I’d collected the octopi, and, now, the flask in my hand began to turn a pale shade of rose, meaning there was sufficient oxygen as well.

I listened to Ransom and Tomlinson continue to bicker as I crossed the room to the sink. As I did, I noted that I was being tracked by a solitary, golden eye: The largest of the eight remaining octopi in the tanks along the wall was watching me from beneath a rock ledge.

It recognized me, I had no doubt of that. I saw an extended tentacle throb gray, pink, and brown as I passed, reacting, perhaps, to hunger stimuli. I was the man who brought it two fiddler crabs, each and every evening.

That was when, through the south window, I noticed Jeth Nicholes, a fishing guide and Janet’s on-again, off-again lover, running along the mangrove path toward the wooden walkway that leads to my house. Panic has an odor, a tenor, and a visual quality that imprints on spinal neurons micro-moments before recognition touches the brain.

Jeth was in a panic.

I heard Ransom say to Tomlinson, “Okay, Mr. Vegetarian, Mr. Love and Harmony who say that we shouldn’t kill no living creatures. Talk to me about the other night. The two of us out there on the deck of that sleepy white sailboat of yours smokin’ that ganja. You not the man I saw jump up and squash them palmetto bugs? Man, I seen that with my own two eyes.”

I was moving faster now, toward the door to see what was the matter with Jeth, and her words touched my ears as, Mon, I seen daht wi’ me oon two eyes. A pretty accent that conjured up images of coconut palms, coral islands.

Heard her add, “What you tellin’ me is, an animal got to be big before it important enough not to kill. Or it got to be cute, like a stuffed animal. Stomp, stomp, stomp! Man, I seen you kill them palmetto bugs. I seen you slap plenty of mosquitoes out there on that boat of yours, too, not to mention a couple bushels of no-see-ums.”

I heard Tomlinson answer, “Killing insects, sure, I get some whiskey in me, something crawls up my leg, I’m gonna smack it before I take time to think. But you miss the point, lovely lady. I’ve killed plenty of palmetto bugs. But I wouldn’t kill Florida’s last palmetto bug,” as I opened the lab’s door and saw Jeth sprinting down the walkway. I could feel his weight through the vibrating wood as he ran, could see the mottled color of his face—another kind of color change that illustrated emotion.

He was frightened all right.

When he saw me, he yelled, “Doc, we’ve been trying to call! You got your damn phone off the hook again, don’t you?”

Anger is a common derivative of fear.

I sensed Tomlinson move behind me in the doorway as Jeth, standing still now, yelled, “We’ve got to get all the boats we can down there! The whole marina, we’re organizing, we’re going to run down and join the search. But we need to hurry, damn it!”

I had no idea what he was talking about, of course, but, behind me, Tomlinson whispered, “Janet,” his elevated powers of observation making the quick connection to one of the few people who could cause Jeth to react as he was now.

Which is when Jeth told us that, the day before, Janet had gone diving with three people off Marco Island, and she and her party were now eighteen hours overdue. “With that idiot she was dating, that Mike-asshole from Sarasota!” he added miserably. “The one she met at the bachelorette party. And I’m the one who let her go.”

The news spread fast. It had started at the Coast Guard station at Tampa, I would learn later, and beamed its way down the Florida shoreline, island to island, marina to marina, just as fast as VHF radios and cell phones could spread the news.

Janet Mueller, our Janet, was missing. The news hit me hard. Same with the entire marina community. She was one of us; a favorite member of the fun and quirky saltwater family that, on the islands of Sanibel and Captiva, is made up of fishing guides and liveaboards, waiters and waitresses, bartenders, tackle store and marina employees, and anyone else who makes a living on or around the Gulf of Mexico and its mangrove bays.

She was the quiet girl with glasses, the sisterly type, always there when you needed her, but never out front in any showy way. Janet was the one with the mousy hair and heavy hips, but a cute face; the one who liked to laugh and socialize, but who never displayed much self-confidence. If you were a man, take one look at her, and you had an inexplicable urge to protect her, just as women, on first meeting, knew they could trust and confide in her without even having to think about it much.

Janet arrived at the marina a few years back in pretty bad emotional shape. She’d been a schoolteacher in some small Ohio town. She’d had a husband who adored her, and the two of them worked hard at remodeling their house for the baby they were expecting. Janet was solid, happy, with her future securely mapped and under way. Or so she thought.

It happens very fast, sometimes, and almost always to people who don’t deserve it and who never, never expect it. Her solid world began to wobble out of control, and then it disintegrated. One snowy night, Janet lost her husband in a car accident. Then she lost their baby to a miscarriage.

After a year or so of psychological counseling, she sought refuge and change by moving to Florida. She showed up at the marina one day in a little blue houseboat. Knew nothing about the water, nothing about boats, but Janet was smart enough to realize that she needed to reinvent her own life or slip slowly, inexorably off the edge of sanity.

Ours is a small and selective community, and we appreciate raving individualists. We like small, brave people who find small, brave ways to endure and achieve. We welcomed Janet as one of us; took her under the communal wing, and she soon was one of us.

She started dating Jeth, fishing guide and handyman, then moved her houseboat up to Jensen’s Marina on Captiva after a spat. But her relationship with Dinkin’s Bay Marina continued. She’d stop by several times a week. She never missed the marina’s traditional Friday party, and she was one of the few people I trusted to look after my lab and fish tanks when I was away.

Janet had found a way to find her way. Better than most and with a great deal of humor and grace, she’d done credit to the mandate of our species. She had battled back and discovered a way to survive.

Which was why it seemed so mind-boggling that she was now missing, her boat overdue. So damn tragic and unfair. We all expect life to deal us a few bad cards, but no one person is supposed to be dealt all bad cards. Especially not someone as decent and kind-spirited as Janet Mueller, the woman who’d come to Florida to reconstruct her soul and her future.

As Jeth stood there on the dock, with Tomlinson and then Ransom, too, behind me, I told him, “Calm down, Jeth. It’s going to be okay. Let’s meet down at the bait tanks and get things organized. You go tell Mack and the others.”

He was breathing heavily. Not because he’d been running, but because of the panic he was in. Jeth is a big, good-looking guy with the dense muscularity and loyal face of a high school linebacker. The expression on his face was heartbreaking. The love affair between him and Janet had had its share of setbacks. But they loved each other and would almost certainly end up together. No one at the marina doubted that.

For the last couple of weeks, Jeth and Janet had been suffering through an off-again cycle, and now the man appeared to be near tears. “We’ve got to get going, Doc! We’ve got to get out there and find her!” He pounded a big fist hard against his own thigh. “Christ!” he said miserably, “I can’t believe I let her go!”

I walked over to him, put my hand on his shoulder, and told him, “She’ll be okay. We’ll find her. I promise.”

I saw a small surge of relief come into his face. If I were that confident, so certain she would be found, then there was hope.

The first thing I did was send Tomlinson and Ransom over to the docks to meet with the others so they could start formulating a plan. With winds blowing fifteen to twenty knots, and seas four to six feet offshore, our small boats wouldn’t be able to make the thirty-mile trip to Marco Island via water. Too dangerous, too exhausting. We’d have to trailer our skiffs south and hope that a couple of the liveaboards would volunteer to run down in their much bigger vessels and let us use them as mother ships.

That was assuming, of course, that Janet and her party weren’t found before we got started. Which is why the second thing I did was go to the telephone and call my friend Dalton Dorsey who’s a lieutenant commander at Coast Guard Group, St. Petersburg.

Group St. Pete oversees five small-boat Coast Guard stations and is responsible for patrolling several hundred miles of coastline, from Tallahassee to the Everglades and beyond. It’s a massive area, but the Coasties, as they are called, do an extraordinarily good job. What most people don’t know is that the Coast Guard is under the control of the U.S. Department of Transportation, not the Department of Defense, but its men and women are as well trained, as professional, and often as heroic as any military specialty group.

Which is why, when Jeth first told me that Janet was in a boat reported overdue, I wasn’t overly concerned. If Janet was somewhere out there in a broken-down vessel, it wouldn’t take long for the Coasties to find her.

Or so I believed at the time.

I got lucky. Caught Dalton on his cell phone outside the old St. Pete Coast Guard Administration and Operations Building. It’s a whitewashed, two-story fortress, built back in the 1920s, overlooking Bayboro Harbor and Tampa Bay, just a couple of miles from the Sunshine Skyway. He was there on a Saturday, he said, because he’d scheduled a special inspection, but now he was in the parking lot, headed for his pickup truck and the golf course at McDill Airbase.

When I told him why I’d called, he said, “Our group had three boats reported overdue yesterday, and I don’t remember the specifics of all of ’em, so let me go upstairs to my office and I’ll check the incident report.”

We talked about baseball, then a mutual friend of ours, Tony Johnson, who’s a Florida county court judge but still works in naval intelligence as a reserve officer. Then I heard a rustling of paper, and Dalton said, “Okay, here’s a copy. Everything you want to know. Missing small boat. The call came in at nine-ten to our Fort Myers Beach station. A woman named Sherry Meyer, a friend of the guy who owns the boat, Michael Sanford. She’s the one who called. Are you friends with all these people, Doc?”

“No, just Janet Mueller. I’ve never met the others.”

“Well … she’s listed as being aboard. According to Meyer, anyway … only she said the name was spelled M-i-l-l-e-r, which I’ll change right now. Her, Sanford, a woman named Grace Walker, and another one named Amelia Gardner. Four in all.”