Extinct (6 page)

She stared at him now.

“Listen,” he said, “you’re as nice looking as you evidently think you are, but your ring did work on me.”

She started to say something back to him, but it was his time to talk now. “I asked you if you wanted to eat lunch partly because … partly because you were worried about Paul last night and all I said when you told me you were was that he’d be okay. I thought maybe you might still want to ask something. And partly because of Paul. I don’t know. I thought … Hell, maybe it was because I thought he might want to ask me something. It’s none of my business though, is it?”

Her stare slowly softened.

“I believe you’re serious,” she said.

“Really? Well I guess I should be thankful that—”

“No, I do.… I’m sorry.”

He stared back at her.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated.

The waitress leaned over the table to set their tea before them. Carolyn nodded her thanks, then looked back at him as the woman walked away from the table.

“We’ll fix your tank where it’ll work,” she said.

She smiled softly now. “I might order a salad after all,” she added, “if you have time to wait. I’m sure they already have your order about ready.”

Her eyes stayed on his. He nodded.

“Fine,” she said.

He looked at her ring.

She opened her fingers and looked at the band. “To make a long story short—I guess I owe you—he left me right after Paul was born. But don’t start crying. He left the papers to the house signed over to me, lying on the kitchen table. I guess he felt like he owed me something after three years of dating and a year of marriage. He definitely didn’t want a child. He made that plain the first few months I was pregnant. I guess he stuck around a month after the birth to make sure I was going to be able to handle Paul by myself—he said I was too stupid. Or maybe it took him that long to figure out where he was going to go where he wouldn’t be bothered by me trying to get some child support.”

She paused a second. “I’m not a man hater. I wasn’t even really irritated with you. It’s only that you look so much like the pictures of his father Paul found in the attic. And then you’re standing at the boat and Paul’s eyes widen. I was afraid he was going to hop out of the Ranger before he realized you weren’t his father—and it made me angry. Not at him. At his father. And Paul wasn’t hungry—he hardly touched the po’boy—and then he wants to eat with you. Is that some kind of transference? He’s already facing Dustin and Skip drowning, and now seeing you brings his father back into his mind—that he was deserted. I…”

She spread her hands. “No excuse. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”

He was silent a moment. “He’s a nice kid.”

“Not always,” she said, and smiled. A soft smile. It hadn’t escaped him how attractive she was when he had seen her at the river, but with Julie and Barry on his mind he hadn’t dwelled on her looks. Now, looking directly into her face, she was as attractive as he first thought, maybe even more so.

She looked at her ring again. “I don’t wear it all that much really.” She grinned. “Even when I’m on a charter. Just when I’m in a bad mood basically and don’t want to be bothered by anybody. I forgot I had it on. Maybe I’ve used it so much when I’m in a bad mood, it casts a spell now.”

She smiled once more, then looked across her shoulder in the direction Paul had gone—giving Alan her profile: her dark hair and high cheekbones, her full red lips, and the olive hue of her skin.
Damn,
he thought at what he was about to say.

“At the risk of getting us back to where we were a few minutes ago,” he started.

She faced back toward him.

He nodded toward her ring. “Now that I know that doesn’t mean anything, I wouldn’t mind maybe taking you out to dinner.”

He quickly held his hands up in front of him. “A simple no will suffice.”

“I’d love to, really,” she said easily. “But I’m going to stay close to Paul for awhile.… Maybe another time.”

“We can take him along.”

“You have to be kidding.”

“About what?” Paul said as he stepped to his mother’s side. He had two packs of gum in his hand. Neither of them were opened, but he was chewing something.

“I said I’d like to take you and your mother out to dinner tonight—if you’d like to go.”

Paul smiled broadly.

Carolyn frowned, but only half-heartedly.

“Mother?” Paul asked.

She closed her eyes and nodded.

Paul smiled again.

“Eight o’clock?” Alan asked.

“Seven,” she said. “Paul has to be in bed by ten.”

Paul frowned.

Alan’s cellular phone rang.

He grinned as he pulled it from inside his coat. “Ho wondering if I’ve found a boat yet.” He unfolded the phone and lifted it to his ear.

“Hello.”

“Alan, I have to have my baby back to bury. Please help me find him.” Then Julie started sobbing uncontrollably.

“Alan.” It was a different voice—Barry’s. “Alan, I apologize. They’ve stopped … they’ve stopped dragging with all but one boat.” His voice was about to break, too. “Julie can’t bear to think that we might not find … I … I apologize, Alan. I’m sorry.” Alan heard the receiver placed back onto its cradle. He hadn’t said a word.

Carolyn’s eyes were on his expression. “It was Julie,” he said. “They’ve stopped.…” He looked at Paul, listening.

Then the waitress set Paul’s chicken sandwich in front of him. “Be careful,” she said, “the french fries are hot.” Alan looked at the plate. The waitress repeated her warning as she set his order on the table. Outside the window the sunlight shone brightly down on the pool, glistening off the water.
Warming its water.
He didn’t like what he was thinking. He came to his feet.

“I’ll call you later,” he said to Carolyn. He patted Paul on the head and said, “You be ready by seven now—I’ll see you then.”

He looked back at Carolyn again.

“I’ll call you,” he repeated, and walked toward the front of the restaurant.

CHAPTER 7

Alan stopped at the riverbank. Only the
Mako
remained on the water, as Barry had said. The two firemen in the craft were slouched, obviously tired, one of them leaning on his hand and looking off through the marsh as he smoked a cigarette. They were only going through the motions of dragging now. What they were really doing was waiting. It had already been a little over twenty-four hours since the boys had disappeared. It couldn’t be much longer until the warm water would do the job everybody knew it would finally do and the bodies would come floating to the top. Unless they were snagged on something.

And if that was the case, it would quickly reach the point that there wouldn’t be any bodies worth recovering—at least that their parents would be able to face.

That was the thought that had passed through his mind as the waitress had warned about the french fries and the sunlight had glistened off the pool outside the restaurant window. He thought of Julie’s sad voice again, how Barry sounded. He kept staring at the water. It was so damn murky. Only two divers from the search-and-rescue units had gone down. They could have easily been within a few feet of the bodies and had no chance at all of glimpsing them.

But the fish would have no such problems in finding them. And the turtles. Especially one turtle …

He had been diving in Norfork Lake in north Arkansas a few miles from the Missouri border. A storm had passed through the area only a couple of days before and the visibility wasn’t much over five feet. Swimming near the bottom, he had almost blundered into an alligator snapping turtle as big as a pickup-truck tire, the creature’s feet lightly touching the bottom, its long neck thrust forward and its jaws gaping, big enough to ingest a softball, its eyes staring up at him.

Small turtles and fish would go after the eyes and ears and lips first, the soft parts of the bodies. Yet as horrible as that thought was, a mortician could mold the lips and ears back and close the eyes. But a snapping turtle like he had seen at Norfork.… And the Pascagoula River and marsh swarmed with the big turtles, with their ridged backs and wide, hooked beaks giving them the appearance of prehistoric monsters. One of them, given only a little time to work on a body, would leave behind a carnage that nobody could fix—that no mother or father could stand to see.

He punched a number into his cellular phone and lifted it to his ear.

When a voice answered he said, “Bert, this is Alan. I’m going to need some help—some volunteers who can dive.”

*   *   *

The Coast Guard forty-one’s bow threw spray out to both sides, the craft both plowing through the swells and riding up and down with their motion at the same time. Petty Officer Matt Rhiner stood at the flying bridge atop the main structure at the center of the boat. He held a radio mike in one hand and the giant tooth in the other. Only twenty minutes earlier he had reported the damage done to the sunken speedboat, and twice had been asked to repeat the dimensions and condition of the tooth. Now he had been contacted again and asked to stand by. As he waited, he watched the swells building in front of the forty-one. Some of the waves were starting to lose their tops to whitecaps. He looked at the clouds rushing toward the craft. The forty-one suddenly yawed to the left and he had to grab for the front of the bridge to keep his balance. He looked at the young woman at the wheel. She only glanced at him from the corner of her eyes. “Sorry,” she mumbled. She held both hands on the wheel now.

“
Stand by
,” came over the VHF radio, “
for Admiral Kendrick.
”

Admiral? Rhiner was taken aback.

“Petty Officer Rhiner.”

“Yes, sir.”

“This is Admiral Kendrick. I understand you have something unusual on board. I wanted to hear it for myself. Close to seven inches in slant-height?”

“Yes, sir; roughly six and three quarters by the ruler.”

“An indentation in the center of the base; the tooth overall nearly heart-shaped, you reported?”

“Yes, sir. I’ve seen a White Shark tooth; a lot like that except for the indentation and its being so much larger, sir.”

“Still smooth to the touch? Dark in color?”

“Off-white, sir, maybe a light beige.”

“Well make certain you hang onto it son; I have an old friend that’s going to be quite interested in it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Out.”

Seaman Rowella Brunt grimaced as another hard swell bore into the forty-one’s bow at a quarter angle, but she held the boat straight.

“Good job, Seaman,” Rhiner said.

“Thank you.”

He nodded his reply. His gaze went to the tooth again. This time he also thought of the dark shadow that had passed over him, and a chill swept across his shoulders.

*   *   *

It took less than an hour for the volunteers to assemble after Alan made his calls. Two friends who had gone to college with him and owned their own businesses in the area, two off-duty deputies from the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department, three off-duty highway patrolmen, Carolyn’s father, and two neighbors living along the river and a man one of them had brought with him had responded. A dozen of them in all—enough to form a tight line sixty to seventy feet wide across the bottom. In repeatedly moving back and forth from one side of the channel to the other, they could cover better than the length of two football fields in ten or so passes—more than enough area in which to find the boys, even if their bodies had drifted a distance before settling to the bottom.

Actually, there was one more man prepared to dive. But Alan knew there was no way he was going to let him go down.

He looked at Dustin’s father. In a pair of swimming trunks and standing with the three similarly clad highway patrol volunteers, his hand rested limply on an air tank propped upright on the ground beside him as he stared at the water. Carolyn stood a few feet behind him, watching him with a deep sadness apparent in her face. Alan walked toward him.

Barry’s face came around to his. “Barry, this isn’t something you need to be doing.”

“Julie’s going crazy.”

“I know. But we have enough help to cover the bottom. We’ll…”—looking at the pain in Barry’s face, Alan had to take a breath—“we’ll find them.”

“I have to help,” Barry said. “I told her I would.”

“Then you mark the side of our passes each time we come back to the bank—make certain we don’t leave a gap.”

“Alan, I want to dive with—”

“Barry, with you in the water, everybody is going to be thinking about you finding them—how you’re going to react. They wouldn’t be concentrating on what they’re doing.”

“Maybe he’s right,” one of the patrolmen said in a soft voice.

Barry looked at the man and then, without another word and leaving his tank propped where it sat, turned and walked into the trees toward Julie. There wasn’t any reason for him to wait by the bank. Barry knew nobody was needed to mark the passes.

Alan slipped his tank up around his shoulder to his back. The others did the same. Carolyn’s father, his wide chest matted with a thick layer of graying hair, finished buckling his tank’s backpack around his waist and lifted a coil of nylon rope from the ground.

Alan spoke in a voice low enough it wouldn’t reach up through the trees. “With them down there twenty-four hours now, I don’t know how they’re going to look. Whoever does find them, knock on your tank with your knife. We’ll come to the sound. If they look too bad, a couple of us need to come back and try to prepare their parents before we bring them up.”

“Not me,” a voice said in an equally low tone. Alan looked to his right at the youngest of the men, a lean, tanned blond in his mid-twenties. Alan didn’t know him personally, but knew his first name was Donald. He was the one who had come with a neighbor of Julie’s and Barry’s. “I couldn’t handle that,” Donald added.

Carolyn’s father said, “I’ll do it if it comes down to it, son.” He handed the young man an end of the rope and the other men moved to form a fine. He walked in front of them, each of them catching onto the rope at four- to five-foot intervals. Alan stepped to the middle of the line, caught the rope as one of the deputies moved down the line to make way for him, and they started forward.