Flashback (11 page)

She made herself a peanut butter sandwich, poured a glass of sparkling water that tasted flat though she'd just opened it, and sat on the couch next to a sleeping Piedmont to eat. The coffee table was strewn with Great-Great-Aunt Raffia's correspondence to her sister Peggy. Perhaps because of the dreams she'd had the night before or the moments without oxygen when she'd hovered above the western ramparts watching the last letter she'd read come to life, Anna felt a connection to Raffia and Tilly that was more than family ties. The fear that touched her onboard the Curious when her mind took her back to the beckoning finger again rubbed at the edges of her mind.

"I feel funny," she said to the cat. "My mind isn't working right." The admission, spoken aloud even to a sleeping cat, disturbed her. This was not the kind of thing she wanted to become public knowledge.

"It'll pass," she said to the imaginary jury in her head. Leaving the sandwich half-eaten, she grabbed a daypack she'd stuffed with needful things and left the cat to his nap.

Anna'd been raised on cowboy-and-Indian stories. At least conceptually she was no stranger to the phrase "skinned alive." Having been rudely scraped over the coral, she suffered a new and deeper understanding of the old torture. It hurt to walk. The dress chafed. The sun poked red-hot rays into her. Because they were abraded by living coral, the wounds itched. Scratching them was brutal. The only good thing she could say about the contusions, had she been mad enough to want to play the Pollyanna Glad Game, was they took her mind off the aches the tumbling had engendered, the nausea from swallowing salt water and the persistent cough left over from trying to breathe underwater.

She was in no shape to head up a search for Ranger Shaw but, until the coast guard arrived, she was the only game in town. Letting Teddy go alone was a bad idea. Doing nothing when Bob might be alive and in need was unthinkable.

For twenty minutes she and Teddy continued working the grid from the north-south axis to the west of where Cliff and Mack had quit. Anna tried with very little success to stay in the shade of the Boston Whaler's one pitiful awning. She'd been too scraped up to make herself spread on sun block, and the sun burned her raw flesh.

In the midst of a fantasy about parasols, the radio crackled. Cliff had resurfaced. The bow of the boat had been destroyed by a second and more violent explosion. The beckoning finger was gone, as was every other part of the individual whose remains had hidden in the drowned cabin. Danny's guess that stored fuel had exploded due to fire left burning from the first conflagration amidships was ratified by the remnants of auxiliary fuel tanks stowed, presumably, belowdecks in the fore cabin.

"And I got lucky," he finished. "Got something you need to see."

"What?"

"Come on over. It can wait a few minutes."

His reluctance to deliver the news over the airwaves scared Teddy. Blood drained from her face, leaving it the faded gray-gold of winter grass. Anna knew they shared the same thought; you don't tell a woman you've found her husband's corpse over the radio.

Bob Shaw's body wasn't waiting for them. Not quite.

"Found this about sixty feet south and a bit east of the wreck," Cliff said as Teddy tied their boat to the Curious. He held up what first appeared to be a clump of seaweed-Anna's mind trying to make seaworthy sense of what her eyes saw.

"A duty belt," she said after a moment. "Bob's." Teddy made a small sound. a muffled squeak. Given there was nothing she could do for the woman who'd saved her life but find her husband-or his body-Anna chose not to notice.

She took the gun belt from Cliff's hands and lifted it over the gunwale to examine it. Bob's semiautomatic was snapped into the holster. Spare magazines were full, as was the magazine in the SIG Sauer; cuffs and pepper spray were in place. Because the belt Velcroed closed instead of buckling, it was impossible to tell if it had been removed intentionally or torn off with violence. What with one thing and another, Anna had allowed herself to believe Bob's disappearance and the sinking of the green go-fast boat were separate, unrelated incidents. Boats burned for many reasons, most having nothing to do with AWOL park rangers. Factoring Bob back in changed things. Now it was not just the death of a stranger but, perhaps, a man she liked.

"Anything else?"

Cliff shook his head then said: "I don't know. There might be. I figured you'd want to know soon as could be, so I marked the spot, brought the belt up and called."

Technically, he should have left it where it lay, but under the circumstances that seemed a moot point.

"You up for another dive?" Anna asked.

"Sure. It's less than thirty feet for the most part. I shouldn't have any trouble."

"We," Anna said. "I'm going with you."

"Do you think that's a good idea?" Diving experience, age, years of captaining boats, of commanding, made his soft-spoken question something to be seriously considered.

Anna did so. After a moment she said honestly: "Not a great idea, no. Maybe not even a good idea. But I'll be okay, if that's what you mean. All I intend to do is be a floating pair of eyes."

Satisfied, Cliff nodded. "We stay together," he said neutrally, aware Anna was the captain of this particular ship.

"We stay together," she agreed.

For just such emergencies Anna kept an old swimsuit in the storage bin in the compartment under the bridge. It stank of mildew and bagged in the seat but would suffice to keep her legal. Putting on BC vest and tank wasn't as bad as she'd feared. Though she was bruised from being batted about the ocean floor, the heavy nylon mesh of the vest and the metal air tank had protected those portions of her anatomy from the cutting edges of the coral.

Side by side, she and Cliff rolled backward off the gunwale. When she hit the water Anna would have screamed had her mouth not been full of rubber. Seawater bit into each and every cut and scrape, rubbing salt into her wounds. The shock made her feel faint and disoriented. Pain and the wooziness faded as skin and mind adapted to the new realities of life.

Cliff hung in the water nearby, as comfortable and perfectly balanced as Linda had been. At his "follow me" signal Anna kicked into motion. Once the initial sting had passed it felt wonderful to be underwater. The freedom and weightlessness of diving was the closest thing to flying unaided Anna would ever experience. It was good to stretch her bruised muscles; good to have the weight off her scraped buttocks. And it was good to be doing something other than gridding the ocean with a potential widow and finding nothing.

As they swam past the wreck, she was fascinated by the new configuration the second explosion left behind. The stern, still of a piece, had been shifted, and the floating life jacket, instead of straining for the surface, was half buried beneath. The bow section no longer existed: no structure, no cabin, just pieces blown out in a rough cone shape pointing in the direction from which Anna tad been swimming. It was easy to see how Linda, much closer to the bow of the boat, had fared no worse than she had. For all their might, explosives could be aimed and channeled by containers no more substantial than wax. What had aimed this, Anna couldn't begin to guess and doubted it mattered. She had not been the target. Nor had anyone else.

Further on Cliff stopped, hovering several feet above the bottom. They were about twenty-five feet down. The ocean floor was devoid of vegetation, though not of life. Without trying, Anna found two tiny fish.

One no bigger than her thumbnail vanished into a burrow in the sand at her approach. A red flag, like a surveyor's flag on an eighteen-inch wire, had been stuck in the sand. This, then, was where Bob Shaw's gun belt had been found. With a fingertip, Anna drew a spiral out around the flag, pointed to herself then Cliff. He made the okay sign with thumb and forefinger. Staying ten feet apart the two of them began swimming in an ever-widening circle with the red flag at its center.

The small desolate plain of sand and dead coral gave way to an underwater meadow of what looked to be grasses covered with fur. Soon, on the northern edge of their circle, they swam over the remnants of the sunken go-fast boat. Because of the boulders of coral, they were forced to swim nearer the surface.

On the fifth circuit, more coral intruding with its cacophony of color and confusion of life, they found Shaw's deck shoes. Twenty feet apart and tumbled into a forest of hot pink anemone, Anna was surprised they had spotted them. After the location of the second shoe was marked with another of Cliff's flags, Anna stopped. Hanging in the water, clear now that they'd moved away from the area of disturbance, she looked back across the imaginary circle till she found the red flag marking where the gun belt had been found. A compass reading from the line between shoes and flag read NNW Turning, Anna followed a SSE heading, continuing the line.

Approximately three hundred feet farther she came upon what she'd known must be there: the Bay Ranger. A jagged hole in her bow, she lay on her side in a patch of sand beneath twenty feet of clear, still water. Had the wreck of the go-fast boat not stopped them, Danny and Linda would have found her in the next couple of passes. Already, curious fishes had come and swam languidly around the control panel and its sunshade.

The little Sylvan runabout had no cabin, no belowdecks. Anna and Cliff could see at a glance that Bob was not onboard. Had Bob been on one of the other patrol boats-both Boston Whalers-like Molly Brown, he would have been unsinkable. A Whaler would float even when cut in half, and run if you happened to be on the half with the engine. She hoped Bob's love affair with stealth hadn't killed him.

Because she'd be a fool not to, Anna swam around the boat to be sure a corpse was not pinned beneath or thrown nearby. She knew she would find nothing. Bob Shaw had been alive and swimming at one point. Either he'd left the site of the Bay and dropped first shoes and then duty belt in an attempt to reach the boat that had exploded, or he had jumped from the green boat before it sank and was swimming toward the Bay, dropping first belt then shoes.

Anna guessed it was the former for a couple reasons. Though they couldn't be sure without further investigation, it was a good bet that a piece of debris, blasted from the green boat, was the missile that smashed a hole in Bob's hull. The other reason was, knowing Bob Shaw, if he needed to offload weight, his shoes would go before his firearm.

Catching Cliff's eye, Anna pointed up. Together they surfaced. The strain of a long night, a severe pummeling and a near-death experience were catching up to Anna. Removing her snorkel, she whistled high and piercing, two fingers under her tongue the way Carl Johnson taught her in third grade. When Daniel sighted them she waved and was comforted to see him loose the two boats so they could motor over. Anna didn't feel up to swimming back, but, she told herself-as she would tell them-she remained where she was because she wanted them to see Shaw's boat.

Back onboard, scrapes again on fire from various abuses incurred boarding and stripping off gear, Anna shared what she was fairly sure was the good news.

"It looks like when the other boat exploded, a piece of it pierced Bob's hull and the Bay sank. Probably very quickly. It's a damn big hole. Bob was either thrown overboard or jumped. My bet is thrown. His radio is still on his duty belt. If he'd had time, he would have radioed for help before the water ruined it. From where we found the deck shoes and the belt, it looks as though, once in the water, Bob swam toward the other boat.

"There were survivors on it, is what I'm figuring," Anna finished.

"Bob died saving someone, or trying to?" Teddy asked. Her voice was vague, seeking her hero husband through darkness and fog, looking for an image to take to bed for a lifetime of lonely nights.

"I don't think he's dead," Anna said flatly. "He was swimming. We know he had a personal flotation device, and he was hale and hearty enough to think about saving someone's skin other than his own." She looked at East Key, a skinny ribbon of sand barely above waterline, a half-mile from the boats. "I think Bob and whoever he swam to save must be there; the closest landfall."

"Bob," Teddy said. It was half a question and half a call to the man she had come perilously close to giving up as dead.

"I think he could have tried for East Key." Anna tried to lower what could be false hopes, but it was too late. Teddy was firing up the Reef Ranger without waiting for anyone's by your leave. It was a wonder Anna and Cliff threw off the Reef's lines and saved the Curious from being bumped and towed alongside.

Anna stepped up to the bench and slid in beside Teddy. "Let me take over from here." Teddy had the boat up to ramming speed and, if the look on her face was any indication, had no intention of slowing down to beach the thing.

For a second Teddy glared at her, feral as any half-starved cat, but reason returned. She turned the boat over to Anna and moved to the bow to be that much closer to the place her husband might be.

Anna felt a pang of envy at the obvious love between the Shaws. So what if it was based on castles built in the sand of the Caribbean? And she dearly hoped she was right about Bob. After the first glad tidings and the departure of the Reef an unpleasant thought had darkened her mood. If Bob was on East Key and he was alive, why hadn't he been jumping, waving, signaling two NPS boats a mere half mile out to sea?

Cutting throttle, she let a wave catch and carry the Reef onto the sandy shoreline. East Key was concave along its western shore, creating a nice landing place. Teddy leapt ashore yelling, "Bob!" Anna stayed to give the Reef an extra pull above waterline. East Key was so small-measured not in acres and miles but yards and buckets-Teddy would either find her husband or know he wasn't there before Anna'd done.