Saratoga Woods 02 The Edge of the Water (11 page)

J
enn set aside time the following day for wind sprints, but as things turned out, Annie had other plans for them both. It was time to arrange the whole diving enterprise, she announced. So they set out for Drake’s Landing.

This was at the bottom of Wharf Street in the village of Langley, across from the weather-worn wrecks of Langley’s old piers, dangerous and long unused. There was a sheltered marina in this location, where boats were docked along barnacle-encrusted slips. Drake’s Landing was tucked into the base of a bluff at the far side of the marina’s parking lot. A sign in front of it creaked from a newly painted post in the frigid wind. It read
DRAKES’ LANDING CHANDLERY
and across the new front window of the building a
GRAND OPENING
banner flopped unevenly.

The place was dark inside. Jenn remarked on this and was secretly grateful. She didn’t like the idea of learning to scuba dive in the middle of winter anyway. Beyond that, she
had
to get to her soccer workouts if she was going to have a chance at all during the tryouts for the All Island team. So if the chandlery was closed, it was fine by her, as long as they could get home before dark.

“Damn,” Annie murmured, gazing at the clearly uninhabited building. “He said he’d be here.”

“Who?”

“Chad. Him. The guy. I told him I’d bring you by this afternoon and he said—”

Someone knocked on the driver’s window and Annie and Jenn turned. They drew in breath simultaneously. If this was Chad, Jenn thought, oh hot mama. He looked like a sculpture. He was chiseled from chin to lips to nose to forehead. His eyes were a friendly brown and his skin was lightly flushed from the wind.

“Annie?” he called out through the closed window. When she nodded, he said, “Sorry. I was on the boat. Come on in,” and he hustled up to the chandlery’s door, which he unlocked.

“Wow,” Annie said in a hushed voice as they followed him. “What a looker. Well, I’ve got a partner back home, so he’s all yours, Jenn.”

Jenn snorted. “As if.”

Annie stopped her with a hand on her arm. She frowned. “Hey. You’re a beauty. Don’t forget it,” she said.

Inside the chandlery, Chad was emerging from his parka, knitted cap, and gloves like someone out of a film. He had short brown hair and the well-defined shoulders and chest of a swimmer. He was slim at the hips and he walked
with
his hips. When he smiled, he flashed a mouth full of perfect white teeth. No doubt he knew he was the Complete Package, Jenn thought. What the hell was he doing in Langley?

“So,” he said, placing himself behind the counter and getting a record book of some sort from a shelf. “You ready to go underwater?” he asked Jenn.

“How cold is it, exactly?”

He waved off Jenn’s concern. “Don’t worry about that part. We’re starting out in a pool. We won’t do ‘real’ water till your final lesson in the marina and then the check-out dive in the passage. And for those dives, you’ll be wearing a dry suit, so the cold won’t bother you.” He shot her a grin. “At least not much.” And then to Annie, “You done much cold water diving?”

She shook her head. “None of that in Florida.”

“Well, I’ll be there to rescue you both from hypothermia. Come on back here, let me show you the stuff we’re going to be using. We c’n get Jenn fitted up with what she needs.”

He took them into a supply room where scuba equipment was neatly arranged along one wall. The harbor commission had put some serious money into the place, Jenn thought as she looked around. While Chad and Annie chatted about the need for a dry suit for Annie to use in the open water, Jenn wandered among the wet suits and dry suits, the tanks, the weight belts, and all the other items she was going to have to learn about. Seeing it all, she realized that she lacked enthusiasm for the whole enterprise. She’d never liked enclosed spaces, and there was something about having to breathe from a tank and look through a mask that made her feel scuba wasn’t a route that would earn her a dime, no matter what Annie said. But she’d said she’d go for it, so she’d go for it. She didn’t think she was going to enjoy it much, though.

Chad suggested they take a look at his boat once he’d fitted Jenn with what she was going to need. That way, she’d see how easy it was going to be to get from the boat into the water, which might make the open-water dive look less threatening to her at the moment.

“I’m not threatened,” Jenn said defensively.

“Sure you’re not,” Chad said with good cheer. “Let’s take a look at the boat anyway.”

She scowled as he headed out of the chandlery. He was treating her like a kid. What was
he
, anyway, nineteen years old? Maybe twenty, but no older than that.

Annie raised her eyebrows and jerked her head toward Chad’s departing back. She murmured, “Nice butt, too,” and Jenn had to smile. She followed Annie out of the door.

• • •

CHAD’S BOAT WAS
a thirty-footer, an ancient thing that he and his dad had renovated from bow to stern. Below, every inch had been made useful with a berth, a head, a galley, and a table. Above this a small cabin protected the boat’s occupants from weather while they were on the water. Chad said he’d take them out in advance of the checkout dive if they wanted to do that. They’d see then that it was a sturdy craft, he told them, so they’d have nothing to worry about. It was also big enough to live on, he told them, which was what he was doing in Langley’s harbor. Now . . . did they want to return to the chandlery and fill out the rest of the paperwork? They did.

Afterward, with all of the details taken care of, Chad shook hands with Annie, said it was great to meet her, told her where and when the first lesson would take place, and walked with them to the chandlery door. When Jenn offered her hand as well, he put his arm around her shoulders instead. He said, “Okay, dive buddy. We’ll fast-track you to certification so you’ll be all ready. See you soon.” Then he ruffled her hair, which made her want to punch his lights.

When they left, Jenn said, “I don’t like being treated like a five-year-old.”

“Don’t blame you,” Annie told her. “Give him time.”

“For what?”

Annie shot her a look. “Guess, why don’t you? I’m too old for him, so the door’s wide open. You’ll be in the pool, he’ll be in the pool.” Annie clasped her hands beneath her chin and batted her eyelashes. “‘I was scared at first but I’m not scared now. Oh Chad, Chad, you’re
such
a good teacher.’”

Jenn guffawed. “Right,” she said.

“You think he wouldn’t go for that?” Annie asked. “Stick with me. I’ll teach you about men.”

Jenn said, “Talking about men . . .” and she pointed at the dock. Ivar Thorndyke was coming along it, carrying a bucket that Jenn well recognized from the times she’d loaded it with bait from her dad. Ivar caught sight of them as he strode to his truck. He set the bucket in the bed and came across to them where they stood at the end of the walk that led to the chandlery’s front door.

He said to Annie, “Renting a boat for a look-see around the passage?”

“Jenn’s going to be my underwater assistant,” was what Annie told him. “We’re getting ready for dive lessons.”

Ivar eyed them both. Jenn could tell his suspicions had just had a match lit under them. “What’re you diving for?” he asked sharply.

Annie didn’t answer at first, like someone wanting someone else to have a chance to evaluate his tone of voice. After a moment, she said evenly, “You seem sort of concerned, Mr. Thorndyke. C’n you tell me why?”

Jenn gave her a look. Ivar was a good customer of her dad’s bait business, and she didn’t much like getting into a tangle with him. So she said, “It’s about that oil spill down at Possession Point, Ivar. Annie’s studying it for her dissertation,” because it seemed the best way to end their conversation and, more than anything, to keep it from veering in the direction of Nera.

She heard Annie hiss in a breath. Jenn gave her a glance and saw her face was stony. For his part, Ivar looked, if anything, more suspicious. Jenn was forced to wonder if she’d just blown it.

Ivar said, “How c’n you study an oil spill that happened . . . what? . . . seventeen, eighteen, years ago?”

“She’s studying its effects,” Jenn told Ivar.

“It was bilge oil,” Annie added. “You’re a boater, right? So you know what that means.”

“A ship’s engine oil,” Ivar said. “What about it?”

“What about it?” Annie asked, eying him like someone surprised at another’s lack of outrage. “For starters, when it spills from a ship, it either sinks to the bottom or it clumps into tar balls that wash onto the beach. If it stays on the bottom, it leaches into what’s there: soil, sand, pebbles, whatever.”

“And you think the oil’s still out there?
That
what this’s about?”

His tone told Jenn he was leading Annie to something, and she knew she’d been stupid to mention that oil spill at all. Ivar wasn’t an idiot. He would connect all the dots: Annie Taylor’s presence in town, her dissertation, her interest in Nera at the seal spotters’ meeting.

Annie said pleasantly, “What I think is that the oil caused mutations in animal and plant life. My theory is—”

“You hold on right there.” Clearly, Jenn thought, Ivar wasn’t about to let the word
mutations
flutter past him. “This’s about our seal. Bilge oil and leaching into the seabed and animal mutations and this is about our seal.”

Annie stood her ground. “I think it’s
the
seal, Mr. Thorndyke,” she said. “It’s not
our
seal or
your
seal or anyone’s seal. The animal’s wild. Wild animals can’t be owned.”

“They’re not supposed to be messed with either.”

“I have no intention of ‘messing’ with anything,” Annie snapped.

“Yeah? Well, you watch your step ’cause I’ll be doing the same.”

With that, Ivar Thorndyke strode back to where he’d left his truck. Jenn watched him go and she became aware that next to her Annie was breathing hard. She glanced at Annie to see her face was pink with some kind of emotion she was trying to hold in. She glanced back at Ivar to see him climbing into his truck and slamming the door, hard.

It came to her that something was going on . . . beyond what was going on. It also came to her that she might want to find out what that something was.

T
he road has been long and although time has passed in the form of light and darkness, I have no idea how many days have come and gone. The rain and the snow have fallen on me, and the wind has blown so fiercely that its force has cracked the limbs from trees. I have been afraid only of this wind, so when it has come, I have kept far away from the forests. Instead I have wandered the country lanes that weave and wind throughout the landscape.

There have been few cars, for I am very far now from the road that I first walked upon. I have followed a route that has climbed many hills, sunk into valleys, and taken me deep into forests. I have not felt lost, but I have felt called. I have felt required to keep walking.

Sometimes I have remained hidden for a day, sometimes for two, once for three. But always I have risen at last and begun to move on, dragging along the wheeled suitcase that the mommy and the daddy left behind them.

I must present a curious sight, for I hobble. I’ve lost a shoe somewhere in the mud along the route I’ve taken, and I have not sought another to replace it. I examine my foot when I stop. I have cut myself. I have bled. The bleeding has stopped and started again. And stopped and started. The foot feels afire but I cannot remain in one place and wait for it to heal. Moving is the only answer I have to the question of why I am alone in this place.

B
ecca was surprised when she found out that Ivar Thorndyke and Sharla Mann were housemates only. She’d figured they were live-in lovers, just as every one of her five stepfathers had been before her mom had married each of them. But it turned out that Sharla did the cooking and the cleaning in exchange for an upstairs bedroom and the use of the downstairs mudroom as her beauty salon. That was it. For his part, Ivar looked at Sharla with puppy eyes but didn’t seem willing to do anything to change the way things were.

Becca picked up whispers from both of them, especially on the two occasions when Sharla asked her to stay for dinner at the end of her workday in Ivar’s chicken coop. Ivar’s whispers tended to be along the lines of
when . . . if she ever . . . what if I asked . . . no way after what happened to her
, which was pretty interesting, while Sharla’s were of the
been there, done that, and have the certificate for it
variety, suggesting she’d had a husband in her life once and didn’t wish to repeat the experience.

This made Becca curious about them both, so she did a little digging around in her spare time. What she uncovered from dropping by the office of the
South Whidbey Record
and going through old copies “for a school report” was a connection between Sharla and the man Eddie Beddoe, who’d been shooting his rifle into the water at Sandy Point. They’d been married. When Eddie Beddoe’s boat had gone down in Saratoga Passage, his “wife of ten years, Sharla Mann” hadn’t wished to discuss with the paper Eddie Beddoe’s claim that a dangerous seal had had a hand—or a flipper, Becca told herself sardonically—in the accident. A reporter had tried to get her to make a comment of some sort, but Sharla hadn’t gone for it. “You’ll have to talk to my husband,” was her only comment.

Becca considered all of this, and particularly she considered Eddie Beddoe and the air of danger that seemed to seep from him. She remembered how his whispers had been about “killing her,” and she felt a stab of fear for Sharla. But they hadn’t been married in years from what she could discover from the paper, so perhaps the
her
that Eddie felt like killing every now and then was indeed the seal.

More and more it seemed to Becca that Nera loomed large in everyone’s legend. In Ivar’s case, according to Sharla, the seal had broken his arm years ago. This turned out to be the reason he was determined to keep everyone at a distance from her. So when, less than a week after Becca had begun working for Ivar, he came into the chicken coop in a rush of whispers claiming
going to hurt . . . dangerous game they’re playing . . . nothing to them and why would she be because . . .
Becca concluded in short order that it was the seal Nera he was thinking about.

He said to her, “Got a job for you. It’s a real one, too, not just messing around in here trying to make sense of my mess.”

Job
with its implication of long-term steady work plus an income made Becca’s ears prick up. She set down the rusty pitchfork she was holding and got ready to hear whatever Ivar intended her to do.

It turned out to be scuba diving, and he explained it all quickly. A scientist new to the island was having a kid learn to dive so she’d have a partner in going into the water and getting after Nera. They weren’t saying as much, but Ivar
knew
that was what they were up to. He needed Becca to learn to dive, too. “I need you to be my eyes and ears on this, Becks,” he told her. “I can’t dive no more and I can’t see a thing without my glasses anyways. But you can do both.”

“I don’t know how to dive.” She could tell he was anxious; she picked up
no for an answer
and
when they’re underwater
and
then she can watch
; and she wanted to help him because she liked him. But diving? She couldn’t manage that one. She told him all this, but he brushed it aside.

“There’s a young fella giving lessons to this kid who’s gonna dive with the scientist. He’ll give lessons to you. I’ll be paying for it, so you got no worries on that score. It’s deadly important, Becks. It’s life and
death
important.”

“But how d’you know they’re going after Nera?”

“They more or less said it straight out down at the marina in Langley. And let me tell you, that can’t happen. Becks, the law says people got to stay one hundred yards away from marine mammals and that’s the law for a reason, which is
everyone’s
safety, both the people and the animals. Now this woman intends to get up close to Nera along with this kid and believe me there’ll be hell to pay.”

“Sharla told me Nera broke your arm,” Becca said, more to herself than to Ivar.

Ivar grew red in the face at the mention of Sharla. “And so she did,” he said.

“But why does the scientist want to get close to her?”

“God knows. All I get’s cagey answers when I ask. Like ‘No one means to hurt that seal, Mr. Thorndyke.’ And ‘Seals do not attack human beings.’ Well, it’s
not
a seal, is it? It’s Nera we’re talking about, and she’s been different from the first. She broke my arm like you say, and Eddie says she sank his boat and people say it’s all hogwash, but I’m not taking chances. No how. No way. So will you help me, Becks?” It would be another part of her job, he told her. In fact, he’d already spoken to the diving instructor. The other kid’s lessons had just begun, and Becca could join them easy as anything. Would she do it? She could be saving a life.

“I guess so,” Becca said, and she was surprised at Ivar’s reaction to his.

He hugged her fiercely and kissed the top of her head. “That’s my lady,” he said huskily.

• • •

AT LEAST IT
would be something extra to do. And it would get her out of the tree house. That was the way Becca thought about the diving. It wasn’t as if her days were crammed with activities, after all. Aside from working for Ivar at Heart’s Desire and keeping low on the radar of Langley life in case Jeff Corrie put in another appearance, her days consisted of going to school, doing her homework in the village library, trying to mold her Western Civ project into something Mr. Keith would find acceptable in spite of Tod Schuman’s stubborn refusal to use anything other than the Internet, and returning to her tree house to eat and sleep and begin the exact same list of activities on the following day. The only diversion from this relentless pleasure was getting to witness Derric and Courtney Baker do the boyfriend/girlfriend bit at school.

What made life worse was that something called Carnation Day was coming. This was, she discovered, an annual fund-raiser put on by the seniors to help pay for their all-night party on graduation day. For one dollar, you could purchase a carnation to send to another student, along with a message. The more dollars you spent, the more carnations you sent. It was, Becca thought morosely, a perfect opportunity for Derric and Courtney to wear complete
mantles
of the flowers as declaration of their feelings for each other. As for herself . . . She figured she was going to be one of the girls who tried surreptitiously to send themselves a flower or two so as to avoid the humiliation of having nothing to carry around on the Big Day.

The only bright spot Becca saw in her life was that her hair didn’t look disgusting any longer. On the other hand, the new style and color hadn’t done a thing to alter her world, since the only person who’d even noticed the change was Jenn McDaniels. And her comment had burst Becca’s small balloon of pleasure soon enough. She’d given the hair a look, said, “Nice try, Fattie. Think that’s going to make a difference?” in her typical Jenn McDaniels way.

So Becca was ready for something different to enter her life. At the moment the something different appeared to be scuba. So be it, she thought.