Deeper (14 page)

Charlie shook his
head.
 
"I don't think so.
 
I think it was some kind of fish
man."
 
It would have been easy to
laugh it off and push thoughts of what he was saying away, but it was Charlie I
was dealing with.
 
Charlie was
superstitious, sure, but he was also not prone to exaggerating.

"Okay, so
where did it come from?"

"Joe,
believe me, you'd have to see those caves to believe them.
 
They go straight down, and a lot farther than
I thought was possible."
 
He shook
his head.
 
"Ward says the reef is
pretty much the end of the continental landmass.
 
It's possible those caves go all the way to
the bottom and end up in the deep ocean.
 
Of course, no one can prove that, because no one can get down low enough
to test it out."

"Yeah?
 
Well that
doesn't explain how no one has ever seen one of these fish men.
 
This isn’t an area that's exactly unmapped,
Charlie."
 
He sighed and got a look
on his face that said he was ready for a long, drawn out argument.
 
I held up my hands in surrender.
 
"I'm not saying you're wrong, or you
didn't see what you think you saw, Charlie.
 
I'm just trying to understand how anything like that could exist."

"That's
what Ward's been trying to figure out, too."

"I
thought he was trying to map the caves."

"He
is.
 
But that's only part of it.
 
Seems he's heard rumors of
some kind of mermaid population or something that lives on the outer edges of
the reef."

I shook my
head.
 
Not out of disbelief, but out of
disgust.
 
Perfectly educated professors
who look for Atlantis off the coast of
New
Hampshire
aren’t overly bright in my book.
 
Suddenly I wasn't so shocked to find out that
the university didn't feel like footing the bill for the expedition taking
place in
their own
backyard.

"Yeah,
and in ancient times, they sang sailors onto rocks and made them sink their ships."

Charlie got
that just-smelled-something-nasty look on his face.
 
"Yeah, I know.
 
‘Charlie falling for
another ghost story.’"

"Look,
Charlie, I'm not saying anything like that.
 
I'm saying be careful about it, okay?
 
You saw something in a dark cave.
 
It could have been a diver.
 
Maybe
it was something else, but it could have been a diver.
 
There's not a lot of light down there, right?"

That's another
thing about Charlie.
 
He normally had to
concede when logic was pushed in his face.
 
He didn't have to like it, but he wasn't a complete idiot.

"Yeah,
okay, but that doesn't explain what happened to Corey."

"We don't
know what happened to Corey.
 
All we know
is he was hurt.
 
Just because it looks
like a jellyfish stung him doesn’t make it the right answer."

"It
wasn't a jellyfish, Joe."

"Did you
actually see the thing that attacked him?
 
Could you get a decent picture with a sketch artist?"

"I don't
know.
 
Maybe."

"Not a
great answer there, Charlie.
 
Not the
sort that convinces most people."

"I'd
think you'd take my word on it, Joe.
 
I've never lied to you about that sort of thing."
 
He was getting upset, and his face was
starting to get a red color that wasn't exactly healthy.

"You
don't have to convince me.
 
You say it
was a fish man, I'll at least accept that it looked like one in the dark cave
where your flashlight was showing you the way.
 
But the professor and all of his students and you need to have more than
just eyewitness accounts if you want to prove something like that to everyone
out there.
 
A picture would be good, or a
video."

Charlie waved
his hand in the air, dismissing everything I said, like he was swatting at an
annoying bug, and then he turned and walked away.
 
I didn't try to follow him.
 
Charlie was a big boy and if he wanted to
believe there were fish men wandering around under the water that was his
decision to make.
 
I had seen a pair of
legs go under the other night and they'd looked about as normal as a wild boar
at a high society gathering, but that didn't mean I was willing to accept that
they belonged to an extra from the
Creature
from the Black Lagoon
.
 
Show me a
shaggy man with fangs under a full moon and I'm not going to decided I saw a
werewolf, either.
 
Does that make me
stubborn?
 
Maybe, but I can live with
that.

We got the news
almost three hours later that Corey was expected to make a full recovery.
 
Ward came and told us all about it
himself.
 
After that, he went off the
docks and headed for the hotel where he was staying.
 
He had plans of sleeping on dry land.

Not long after
the professor left, the students took off as well, including Diana.
 
Charlie went with her and chose to stay in a
hotel room, too.
 
That left me and the
boys for dinner that night because, though they planned to stay on the
Isabella
, the Parsonses were also going
into town to discuss matters with Ward.

I went with
steaks, and as I was getting ready to cook them, Belle showed up at the docks,
dressed in a pair of jeans and one of my flannel shirts.
 
The old flannel looked like a tent on her,
but she'd managed to tuck it in well enough that it accented her figure.
 
How the hell do women do that?
 
I wish I knew the secret.

By the time
she reached the yacht her clothes were soaked from the continuing
downpour.
 
I gave my wife a hug and spun
her around me on the deck of the yacht I'd named in her honor, not giving the
least bit of a damn about the cold and rain that soaked me.
 
I don't think it'd be possible to write down
how much she means to me.
 
I won't even
try.
 
Let's just leave it at I was very
glad to see her, and almost overwhelmed by the way the stress left my body when
she showed up.
 
I hadn't realized how
much the trip was affecting me until I saw her.

I let Tom take
care of the steaks after that, and went out to the parking to get her overnight
bag and her small suitcase.
 
We took a
quick shower
together
 
and
then got into fresh clothes not long after that.

We ate, we
talked,
we
slept.
 
What else happened that night is no one else's business but mine and
Belle's.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

It was a
little over an hour before dawn when I woke up.
 
The air was even colder than before, but the rain had stopped.
 
I'm not normally a light sleeper, but I'd
heard something that was loud enough to wake me up.
 
I heard it again a moment later:
 
a very soft knock at the cabin door.
 
Instead of getting royally pissed off, I
slipped on a pair of sweats and answered the knock before it could wake
Belle.
 
I figured if I had a reason to
get bitchy, I could do it after I'd left the room.

It was
Davey.
 
He looked a little nervous about
waking me, which according to my wife is always wise.
 
I stepped out of the cabin and ushered him
down a dozen feet or so before asking him what was up.

"Sorry to
wake you, Joe, but I keep hearing shit outside, and with all the talk of fish
men, I'm not checking it by myself."

"Where
the hell is Tom?"

"I
dunno."
 
He looked around
nervous.
 
"He isn't in his
room."

I stifled the
desire to curse up a blue streak and nodded my head instead.
 
With everything that had been going on, I
didn’t really want Davey trying to find out anything on his own.
 
He was a good kid, but he was also not
exactly designed for dealing with any serious threats.
 
Like I said before, he looked like a freshman
in high school.

We grabbed up
a couple of makeshift clubs; mine was an old-fashioned harpoon from back in the
whaling days and Davey took a cast-iron skillet from the mess.
 
Either one would do the job of bashing in the
skull of anyone that had no business being on the
Isabella
.

We were
thorough, too.
 
We looked in every single
room on the yacht, except for the Parsonses room, which was locked up.
 
There was no one to be seen, no one hiding in
any corners or lurking in any shadows.

There was also
no sign of Tom.
 
Either he was in my
cabin with Belle, which I knew he wasn't, or he was in with the Jacob and Mary,
also unlikely, or he was gone from the yacht.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

Here's the
thing:
 
Tom was a big boy.
 
I was worried about him, but I also
acknowledged that he could have decided to go for a late-night walk, or even to
find a hooker.
 
Davey was worried and so
was I, but we both agreed that we should wait at least until the next night
before we decided to report him missing.

Yeah, Belle
didn't agree.
 
That pretty much resolved
the matter.

So instead of
heading off immediately for the reef, my wife and I found our way to the Golden
Cove Police Department and filled out a missing persons report.
 
The detective who came to speak to us was one
of the square-shouldered goons from the previous day.
 
Up close he was just as unattractive.
 
Not surprisingly, he said they couldn't act
on it for twenty-four hours because Tom was an adult.
 
Still, I have to admit I felt better for
making the report early.

"We
should tell his parents."
 
Belle
said the words as calmly as if she had just suggested that we perhaps have
spaghetti and meatballs for dinner.

My response
wasn't quite as calm.
 
"Oh,
hell no!"

"What?"
 
She didn't sound defensive.
 
I was hoping for defensive because there
would have been less of an argument then.
 
"They have a right to know that their son is missing."

"And
that's just fine, but he isn't missing yet.
 
He's missing after twenty-four hours and I'm not ratting out a college
kid to his parents until the allotted time has passed."

"Are you
serious?"

"Of
course I'm serious!"
 
I couldn't
believe she would even ask.

"So if
Laurie or Mike didn't come home from a date you wouldn't worry for a full
day?"
 
She shook her head.
 
"No, screw that.
 
If one of our children vanished without
telling anyone where they were going, you wouldn't want to know?"

Leave it to a
mother to know how to make a father feel guilty.
 
We have two wonderful kids and both of them
are in college.
 
Mike I trust to handle
himself.
 
Laurie I trust to try, but
let's be honest here, I'm a guy and I'm a dad.
 
I know how some men think and I have always worried about my baby girl's
safety.
 
She could be surrounded by a
hundred armed eunuchs who were being paid top dollar to protect her, and I
would still worry.
 
It's what dads do, I
guess.
 
Belle knew how I felt; I knew she
thought the double standard was wrong.
 
It was something we always agreed to disagree about.

I didn't think
she was going to accept my usual chauvinistic ways this time around.

Belle, that's
different and you know it."
 
Okay, I
confess.
 
The argument already sounded
weaker than I wanted.

"Why is
it different, Joe?"
 
She crossed her
arms over her chest and shook her head.
 
"Because he's not your son?"

"Yeah.
 
That's a
big part of it, Belle.
 
He's my employee
and he's a kid.
 
He's also a kid who
might be sleeping with one of the girls from the dive for all I know."

"Fine."
 
I
felt the temperature drop in the car as surely as if I'd turned on the air
conditioner.
 
"So if he's not there
when your divers show up, we should call his parents."