The Voice inside My Head (24 page)

S
ince it’s just past dawn, the Shark Center’s still locked, but the first person we see as we approach the office is Zach, sitting on the front step. He jumps up when he spots us and runs at me.

“I’ve been waiting for hours.” He clutches my arm. “Where were you? I thought maybe you’d done something crazy.”

“I thought
you
were getting drunk. What are you doing here?”

He smiles proudly. “Change of plans, my man. If you’re climbing on the sobriety wagon, I’m coming with you. We’re brothers, right?”

“Brothers.” I nod and hold up my fist, which he bangs with such enthusiasm we both wince.

“I hate to throw water on your party,” says Reesie, “but we’ve got business to attend to.”

We head through the broken archway and down the path to the back of the Shark Center, pausing when we discover the equipment room open. There’s no sign of Tracy inside so we continue on toward the bedrooms. Reesie fills Zach in on the new information we’ve pieced together, and Zach
confirms that Tracy and Pat didn’t get along. He also has his own story about the necklace. He recalls the time when Tracy admired it and asked Pat where she could get one like it.

“She was always doing that,” finishes Zach. “She said mean stuff about Tricia behind her back, but she always copied her. It was like she hated Tricia but wanted to
be
Tricia at the same time.”

I lead the way to Tracy’s room, the one she shared with my sister, but there’s no answer when we knock. We debate whether she could still be at the police station. In the middle of our discussion, Reesie turns away from the rooms and spots Tracy out on the dock. She looks tiny, silhouetted against an expanse of blue sky that melts into the postcard-perfect sapphire ocean. We hurry down the path, keeping her in our sight. She’s sitting at the end of the dock, sipping a cup of something and swinging her slender suntanned legs over the edge. Next to her is a pile of dive equipment she must have lugged out there herself, since Dr. Jake is unlikely to have arrived this early and she’s running out of co-workers. I can’t help but be a little amazed. Half a dozen buoyancy control device jackets are neatly stacked next to the tanks, masks, and regulators, all ready for loading. She’s either a lot stronger than she looks or very determined to pick up the slack.

As I step onto the dock, she turns and gives a friendly wave. The wind whips her sun-bleached hair across her face, and I’m startled for a moment because there’s something profoundly different about her, but it takes me a minute to realize what it is. As I gaze into her clear blue eyes, I’m suddenly struck that she’s not just cute anymore. She’s
downright beautiful, glowing against the breaking dawn. She reaches up to push her hair back, and my eyes are drawn to the sparkle at her throat — my sister’s necklace.

She shouts something, but her words, tossed on the wind, are drowned out by the rhythmic pounding of the surf. The dock shudders with each new wave. For a moment I forget what I’m doing here as my mind and body fight to maintain balance and I’m flooded with a feeling of déjà vu.

She flashes her perfect teeth as I approach. I sense the others right behind me. Their expressions must mirror my own because her smile turns to a frown as she looks from one face to another.

“Is something wrong?” she asks, her hand casually reaching up to her throat to finger the shell-inlaid starfish.

I barely resist the urge to yank it off her neck.

Reesie is not so self-restrained. “Where you’d get this?” she demands, swooping down and grabbing up the starfish with a vehemence that surely makes the chain dig into the back of Tracy’s neck.

Tears spring to Tracy’s eyes as she looks to me for support, but I return her gaze coldly.

“I know my sister didn’t give that to you, so you better answer Reesie’s question.”

A particularly large wave crashes against the dock, knocking us all off balance. Reesie loses her grip on the necklace, giving Tracy just enough time to scramble to her feet, though there are still four of us blocking her way off the dock. She rubs the back of her neck and gives me a reproachful look.

“Why would I lie about it?”

“You tell me.”

“Trish didn’t even like you.” Jamie steps toward her, looming over her. “No way she’d be giving you something as precious as that necklace.”

Tracy doesn’t flinch under Jamie’s penetrating glare, but her eyes flit back and forth to the shoreline.

“Fine,” she says finally. “I found it on the dock, the day after she disappeared. It must have come off during her struggle with Pete. I know I shouldn’t have kept it.” She shoots me an apologetic look. “But I didn’t see what difference it would make since she was gone anyway.”

“She’d only been
gone
a few hours. What made you so sure she wasn’t coming back?” I ask.

“I wasn’t sure. If she’d come back, of course I’d have returned it to her.”

“You told me you and Pat were friends.”

She shrugs. “It was obvious by then she was dead. What good would it have done to tell you your sister was a bitch? I imagine you knew that anyway.”

For one second I think I’ve slapped her, as I hear the thwack and see the redness streak across her cheek. Then I realize Reesie has once again moved in for the kill. I take a second to be grateful she’s on my side.

“Don’t you dare be speaking ill of his sister,” Reesie glowers.

Tracy’s eyes glitter, but it’s not with tears this time. She glares at me, all hint of softness gone so completely, I wonder if it was ever there at all.

“Do you want to know what it was like living with your sister? Do you really want to know?”

She doesn’t give me time to answer as she barrels on.

“From the first day she arrived here, everyone loved her.” Her voice is laden with venom. “Pete was
my
boyfriend before she came. We’d been sleeping together for weeks. He broke up with me an hour after he met her, no explanation. He became obsessed with her. And you …” she turns on Jamie. “Do you remember we used to flirt?”

Jamie gapes at her.

“You never spoke to me after she got here. It was like I’d suddenly become invisible. Everyone was the same — Dr. Jake, every diver who ever came out on our boat. She bewitched them, but they were too stupid to see it.”

“What did you do to her?” Jamie croaks, and I turn to see the horror at Tracy’s hatred etched in his face.

“Nothing. That’s the best part. My idiot ex-boyfriend finished them both off.”

We’re all distracted by the drone of a small incoming plane. It glides low over our heads as it dives in to land.

“That will be the police coming for Pete,” Tracy says. “Did you hear? They’re charging him with attempted murder. So I guess you’ll get some justice after all, Luke.”

I don’t know what to do with this information. Should I feel happy Pete is looking at years in a Honduran jail? I want him punished for what he did to my sister, but he wasn’t trying to kill her. Somehow Tracy’s overt malice seems almost worse.

“Imagine Pete spending the rest of his life in a Honduran jail,” Tracy continues as if reading my mind. “I don’t imagine it’ll be a very long life, though, given the violence in the local prisons. Now, if you guys will excuse me, he made me promise I’d come see him off. I’m the only friend he has now. Payback’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

“Someone sure is,” says Reesie.

Tracy giggles good-naturedly and, for a moment, she’s once again the girl I first met, sweet and vulnerable.

A coldness creeps across my flesh.

No one tries to stop her as she pushes past us and saunters off the dock.

“Do you think Pat had any idea what she was really like?”

I ask, looking from one shocked face to another.

Jamie shakes his head sadly. “I hope not.”

“I don’t get it,” says Zach.

“Me, neither,” I agree. “That girl takes female jealousy to a whole new level.”

“No, not that.… ”

“What don’t you get?” I ask gently.

“Well, she hated Tricia, right?”

“Is he only working that out now?” interrupts Reesie. “Can’t you let the boy have one minute to think?” Jamie shushes her.

“Aren’t enough minutes in the day, if that’s what we’re waiting for,” mutters Reesie, but she keeps quiet while we wait for Zach to go on.

Instead he slumps down on the dock and sits cross-legged, playing with the pressure gauge on one of the regulators Tracy has left unattended. It’s weird that she just walked away and left this stuff. I guess there’s not much theft here because she couldn’t have thought we would guard it for her while she said her good-byes to my sister’s attacker.

“Tracy hated Pete, and she’s happy he got caught,” says Zach.

“Thanks for the recap,” says Reesie. “We’ll be keeping you in mind the next time Nanny misses one of her soaps.”

“So why would she help him look for Tricia the night she got lost? And why would she help him cover up what he did?” he persists. “And who left the voodoo dolls? And someone got freshly washed clothes from Tricia’s room and planted them on McCrae’s dock because those clothes hadn’t been worn and they didn’t have blood on them.”

We stare at him in shocked silence. The coldness that washed over me with Tracy’s revelations has seeped into my bones. I don’t think it would take more than a stiff wind or one more piece of intel to shatter me. I sink down to the dock and rest my head in my hands, feeling the warmth of Reesie’s body as she plumps down next to me. When I look up, I see that Jamie is also sitting, but he’s turned away, staring out to sea.

“Well, as I live and breathe,” says Reesie finally, her voice soft with admiration. “You still got some brain cells left after all.”

“But Pete admitted he hurt my sister,” I point out, though I really don’t know what to think anymore.

“Pete admitted he left your sister bleeding on the dock,” says Reesie. “He doesn’t know what happened to her after that.”

My stomach starts to pitch like a turbulent sea. I feel every wave that pounds the dock like it’s breaking inside me, one after another, a steady rhythm so familiar it’s like breathing. I close my eyes, trying to calm my inner tempest, but it only gets worse, and then I see her. Long swirling black hair, her once beautiful face, now bloated and gouged, one eye
missing and the other no longer the brilliant green of a tropical forest but the green-gray of seaweed. I open my eyes and look down at the water just in time to catch sight of it. Its star-speckled wings flutter gracefully as it disappears under the dock, only to reappear seconds later, skimming the surface as it heads back out to sea.

Why does it keep returning to this spot?

I know I’ve found her before my hands touch the water, before it rushes up my nostrils, before the salt stings my eyes. I follow the gathered fish — a long barracuda, its fraggle teeth too big for its sharp pointed jaw, a blotchy-skinned cowfish, a school of disc-shaped blue tang. I can name them all. Pat was right. I always could. We shared a passion, until I realized it was only a matter of time before it would divide us — her need to throw herself at life regardless of the risks, my need to hang back.

My lungs ache as I work my way down to her; my ears feel like they’re imploding. I see her eddying hair first and mistake it for something natural, a few fronds of sea grass swaying with the current, sheltering the tiny minnows that flit in and out. Three more strokes and I’m looking into her face, the gaping eye socket every bit as terrifying as in my visions, her open eye even more so. It tracks my every movement as I pull at her, trying to take her with me to the surface. Her head tilts back dangerously. I wonder if the neck could snap, the skin and bone separate, and then, as if in answer to my ghastly question, a chunk of her flesh comes away in my hand, revealing the bare ashen bone of her shoulder. I open my mouth to scream and water rushes in. I choke. Darkness — not unwelcome — overcomes me.

The sea changes from translucent blue to the blackness of an earthen grave as reality and imaginings weave together. It’s no longer me grabbing her but her grabbing me. I lash out in horror and scream again, only to find something shoved into my gaping mouth. It’s air, not water rushing in. I push it away, strike out, feeling only fear and perhaps resignation. Pat waits for me in the darkness, and I’m ready to join her. But a hand encircles my arm and again the object is shoved into my mouth. As I suck in again, my senses clear. I reach up, close my hand over the mouthpiece of a regulator and look into Zach’s face, inches from my own. We thrash about as he works my arms into a BCD, fastens it around my torso and slips a mask over my head. I don’t make it easy. Finally successful in forcing me into the equipment, he gives me the thumbs-up. I dimly remember reviewing hand signals with Pat when she was studying for her first dive exam. I answer his question with my own thumbs-up, though I can think of few circumstances when this signal would be more wrong.

In our struggle, Pat has disappeared. I panic, thinking I’ve lost her, but again I follow the fish that feast on her remains. A school of torpedo-shaped jacks leads us straight to her. I look back at Zach, see the horror in his face as his eyes widen and bubbles rise too fast from his own respirator. I point to her hair, try to show him the problem, and his dive training takes over as he moves in, methodically running his fingers through her locks searching for the snag. He dives deeper and shifts her body, and suddenly we can both see where her hair has caught on a cable securing a joint in the dock. He pulls at the strand of hair, looking at me helplessly as it refuses to
give way. I dive closer to grab it myself. It slips through my grasp several times as the current pulls me. Finally I manage to twist it around my finger. The next time the current pulls me, I use the power of it to rip her hair loose.

Only when her head floats free of the dock do I realize a second problem. Her body is bloated with gases, so rather than float to the surface, it starts to sink. It doesn’t make sense. Zach’s eyes behind his mask reflect my own surprise, but we have no time to waste as we dive after her. Zach reaches her first and quickly discovers the problem. I follow his pointing finger, diving deeper to get level with her once again, unable to believe what I’m seeing. My sister, on the night she suffered a blow so severe it rendered her unconscious, went into the water with a weighted dive belt fastened securely around her waist.