Dark Water (Cooper M. Reid Book 1) (9 page)

Cooper shrugged. “Can’t blame a guy for trying.”

“No, I can’t,” she said. She then leaned over slowly and gave him a peck on the cheek.

“Thanks for coming out with me tonight,” Cooper said. “To dinner
and
to the beach. Sorry you got such a scare.”

“It’s okay. I’m glad I saw it. I sort of understand why you’ve always been so fascinated with this sort of stuff now.”

“So how about tomorrow? You want to lend a hand?”

“If I can. Remember, I’m leaving tomorrow afternoon. Sometime around four.”

“I know. And don’t forget, I still get one more question from dinner.”

“Sure,” she said. “So I’ll call you tomorrow morning.”

“Sounds good,” Cooper said.

He wanted to stay, to create the opportunity to talk more. He especially wanted to explore what she was thinking now that she had seen something undeniably supernatural up close and personal. But he knew Steph; if she wanted to talk about it, she would. He wasn’t about to pressure her after having been away from her for so long. He figured it was best to offer her complete control over the flow and timing of their friendship and anything that might come out of it.

He got out of the car before any gut-wrenching tension could bloom between them. He gave her a wave, which she returned with a smile as she slid across to the driver’s seat. He then got into his own car and waited until she pulled out and turned onto the main strip.

He watched her go and then sat in the parking lot for a while, too amped to go even think about returning to his room to go to sleep.

***

His first instinct was to go back to the spot along the road where he had parked Stephanie’s car an hour and a half ago. He wouldn’t go down to the beach, but just to the edge of the small rock wall they had climbed down. He could sit there for a while and see if the figure would reappear.

But that seemed like a waste of time. It was too dark and he had no equipment. The old Cooper would have a trunk full of technological gadgets to record and analyze the phenomenon. As he finally pulled out of the restaurant parking lot and hit the main strip, he found himself missing that old version of himself.

He’d been more confident about
everything
back then. And although it had been less than a year ago, it was beginning to feel like he had been living an entirely different life back then. He’d been cocky with his work, sure, but that was because he’d been damned good at it. It had taken his disappearance to clue him in to the fact that if he had continued along that road, someone in the government would have
had
to have shut him up before all was said and done.

He also knew that likely meant being killed in some dark alley. He’d seen the seedier bowels of the FBI, CIA, and other government agencies that didn’t even have proper names. He knew that killing some snooping little writer was not a concern at all. No one would blink an eye, even if that corpse had once been a very accomplished agent.

For that very reason, there was no equipment in Cooper’s trunk. All he carried from his old life was a Sig Sauer P226 that he kept beneath the driver’s seat. It had been the gun he’d carried while an agent for the FBI and the shadow organization that he had worked under for several years afterwards. He’d become quite good with it and had gone to great lengths to get one before coming out to North Carolina to start what he thought might be the first step in the next stage of his bizarre life.

With no equipment and no real clues of any kind, he figured that it was time to start doing some digging. His laptop was back at the motel and as much as he hated to confine himself to his motel room with such a huge reserve of energy within him, he thought that it might be the smartest thing to do.

He travelled the main strip along the primary businesses one last time. As midnight neared, most of them were closing up shop. He thought about Stephanie and how he was beginning to feel that if there was anything at all left from their previous relationship, she had buried it deep within her heart. She’d always been distant with a rough exterior and he didn’t see the likelihood of making any real progress anytime soon.

For now, he’d just have to make do with the small victories as they came to him.

Cooper returned to his motel room, a small, bland square of a room where everything within it was square and bland as well: the soap, the sink, the TV, the dresser, the bed. He showered just to get the salt from the ocean out of his hair and plopped himself down behind his laptop. Using the motel’s slow WiFi connection, he did some research into the area just outside of Kill Devil Hills.

He sat in front of the screen for an hour, the glow of the screen the only light in the room. The first thing to come up when doing research into the area was, of course, the Wright Brothers and their first flight. But one he got more keyword-specific with his search, he started to find more of what he was looking for. He jotted a few notes down in a notepad—one of a few remaining habits from his time as a hotshot author—but wasn’t making any connections. He started to form a few good ideas that he thought might lead somewhere, but by the time thing started connecting for him, he was starting to grow tired. Perhaps, he thought, it would be easier to put it all together after a couple of hours of sleep.

As he started to shut the computer down, he was startled by a soft knock at the door. He started at the door for a moment, suddenly sure that someone from the government was on to him already. Maybe they knew he had returned and had somehow tracked him down. He had covered all of his bases—he’d made sure of it and then double and triple checked his methods—but he knew the lengths that some of those he had once worked with might go to in order to get what they wanted. Maybe now was the time that he would be taken out behind some abandoned building and shot in the back of the head.

The knock came again.

As Cooper inched towards the door, he cursed at himself for leaving his gun in the car.

He approached the door and peeked through the peephole. A burden lifted from his heart instantly, allowing it to soar a bit when he saw that Stephanie was standing on the other side. He unlocked the door, unfastened the chain lock at the top, and opened it.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

“I’m sorry. How did you know where I was staying?”

She sighed sleepily. “I booked the room up for you, dumbass. Remember?”

“Yeah. That’s right. Sorry.”

“Can I sleep here?”

“Of course,” Cooper said, standing aside and letting her enter.

She was carrying a small backpack and was dressed in a white tee shirt and a pair of athletic shorts. Her hair was a bit of a mess and she wasn’t wearing makeup. She looked cute. He smiled at her as she made her way to the queen sized.

“Cooper?” she said as she sprawled out on the bed, wasting no time at trying to recapture her sleep.

“Yeah?”

“I’d like for you to sleep beside me. I’m sort of creeped out. But please don’t make me regret getting you a room with just one bed.”

Cooper wasn’t quite sure how to take that comment, so he simply said, “Okay.”

He went into the bathroom to brush his teeth and by the time he came back out, Stephanie was already lying in bed, under the covers and with the lights out. He lay down beside her, making sure not to infringe upon her space.

He lay quietly, enjoying the feel of her weight on the other side of the bed. He listened to her breathing for a while, wondering if he should even
try
to scoot over and put an arm around her.

“Cooper?” she asked.

“Yeah?”

“I need to ask you something, but after you answer, we forget that this night ever happened. Can you agree to that?”

“I guess.”

“Do you think we would have ever worked out?” she asked.

Stephanie rarely asked questions like that. Like Cooper, she wasn’t much for sentiment. Such a question coming from her was a huge deal. He understood this and did his best to remain calm and honest as he answered.

“I think so,” he said. “It was my fault. I was stupid. My priorities were messed up.”

“I agree wholeheartedly,” she said with a sleepy chuckle. “But was it worth it? In the end—after your disappearance and everything—was throwing what we had away worth it?”

It wasn’t an easy answer, so he did the best he could. “I don’t know yet,” he said truthfully. “Until I can figure out where the hell I was for three whole months, that’s not a question I can answer.”

“I missed you,” she said. “When I heard your voice on the phone I had to use every ounce of strength in me not to cry on the spot. It sounds like an obvious thing to say, but I was really glad you hadn’t died. And honestly, I think somewhere in my stupid head, I always assumed you hadn’t. Isn’t that weird?”

He didn’t answer. He let it all sink in, wishing things could be different.

“For what it’s worth,” she added, “I think we would have made it work.”

“Me, too,” he said.

They were quiet for another thirty seconds or so. Cooper slowly started rolling his body over, determined that he would, at the very least, hold her.

“Cooper?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“One more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“If you come over on my side of the bed, I’m going to knee you in the balls.”

He laughed quietly, although he knew she was serious. He’d treated her badly and he deserved her defensive attitude. Hell, even if he had treated her like a queen, his job had always come first and that hadn’t been fair. He knew this without a doubt and had never argued that she was wrong whenever she had mentioned it in the past.

His work had always come first. And now, although what he was doing wasn’t really work, it was still taking top priority over everything else. Including her…again.

And still, she had agreed to help him and had even faced something sinister tonight as a result, but she was still here with him.

He really didn’t deserve her…not in
any
capacity.

He was going to ask her something about possibly trying to make things work again but her light snoring put a stop to it. He looked over at her and smiled.

He listened to her little snores and closed his eyes. Within five minutes, he was snoring right alongside her, the merest trace of a smile still lingering at the corner of his mouth.

12

They had a cheap breakfast of donuts and coffee at a small coffee shop looking out onto the beach. They sat in patio chairs, enjoying the morning breeze and the sight of the sun on the sea. As they ate, they looked over the few notes that Cooper had compiled the night before. Cooper was glad that Stephanie was there to look over the list with him. She had a great way of making him realize when his ideas were fruitless, something he had hated at one point in their past. But now he was able to see the benefit of it; it kept him grounded and centered on the matter at hand. It was all a part of her tough love and honesty.

In a very odd way, it’s what he had missed the most about her.

After looking over his list for twenty seconds, Stephanie pointed to a single word on his list. She left a smear of jelly filling from her donut on it.

“I think that’s your ticket right there,” she said.

The word she had pointed to was
caves.

“It’s really the only thing I can think of,” Cooper said. “I don’t even know how it might relate to the figure on the rocks, but I definitely heard water pouring down into something deep.”

“Do you even know if there are any caves around this area?”

“Not that I could see. But the little bit of digging I did revealed that sometime back in the early 1700s, there was some pirate activity in the area. There was a fight between two pirate crews over some gold or something. Some of them tended to hide in these tight little coves and caverns that led out to sea.”

“For real? Like
Pirates of the Caribbean
-type pirates?”

“That’s the lamest pirate metaphor ever,” Cooper said. “But yes. Real pirates with the hats and the eye patches and the beards. I read a story on one of the historical society sites about how there were these underground chambers scattered all along the coast where it was rumored that the pirates hid their gold.”

Stephanie was grinning at him, but it was not in a totally joking manner. “You’re not just making this up so we can go off looking for buried treasure, are you?”

“No. After seeing that thing up so close and personal last night, treasure is the last thing on my mind. I don’t think there’s going to be any gold or treasure at the end of this story.”

“Have you decided if you’re going to tell the Blackstocks?”

“Not yet. Right now, I don’t see point. It’s useless to tell them that we saw something that was very likely a ghost near a site that their son was pointing to just before he died. It wouldn’t do anything to ease their pain. If anything, it would probably make things worse.”

He took a moment to appreciate what this meant. In the past, he probably would have wasted no time in mentioning such a thing to grieving parents. Back then, he would have done just about anything to push things along to some sort of powerful climax.

Stephanie popped the remainder of her donut into her mouth and looked at his list again. “You know,” she said, “I thought someone that wrote about this stuff at one point in his life would take better notes than this.”

“I’m trying to not be that guy anymore,” Cooper said.

“How’s that going for you?”

“It’s harder than I thought.”

“But you’re sure this is what you’re supposed to be doing now?”

“Pretty sure, yeah.”

At that, Steph stood up and offered her hand. “Then let’s get out of here and go find some treasure.”

“All the treasure was recovered and divvied up between museums,” Cooper said, taking her offered hand and standing up anyway.