Windswept (9 page)

“We have the way points. There’s an obelisk there, too. The one you line up with the tree to run the pass.”

“Are you crazy?”

He was wondering the same thing.

“Do you have a better idea?”

“Yes! We go to the police.” Meredith’s anxious fingers twisted the hem of her white shirt.

Mia shook her head. “We were just there. They won’t help. Look, we can do this, okay?” Her voice had that forced kind of certainty to it. “We can do this, Mer. We have to.”

Okay, maybe it was time to step in.

“Mia, the boat’s not worth risking your life.”

She turned to him, and even in the moonlight, he could see her face go red. “My grandfather sailed this boat for thirty years and never hurt it!”

Hurt it,
she said. Like it was a living, breathing thing and not an inanimate object.

Mia rushed on. “My cousins sailed it all the way from the US to the Caribbean and never damaged it.”

“They did come close, though,” Meredith murmured.

Mia ignored her, gathering steam. “Seth and Julie sailed it all the way here, against the wind!” She jabbed a finger at his chest. “All the way here and nothing ever happened. I am not letting anything happen to this boat!”

He looked to Meredith for support, but she just nodded at Mia and said, “You’re right.”

Great. He had not one but two stubbornly suicidal sailor chicks on his hands.

A dull buzzing noise sounded in the distance, and they all looked up. A low white light crept slowly across the bay. No, two lights, shining from a small motorboat, swinging to inspect one boat after another. Searching.

The boat was a good mile away and moving slowly, but that didn’t stop his heart from thumping against his chest. If that was who he thought it might be, it was only a question of time before they honed in on
Serendipity.

“Um… Anchors aweigh?” He looked at Mia.

She gave him a firm nod. “Anchors aweigh.”

Ryan watched the sisters jump into action. For a couple of stubbornly suicidal sailors, they sure seemed to know what they were doing.

“What can I do?” he asked.

Mia pointed to the corner of the cockpit. “Sit. We got this. You keep an eye on that motorboat.”

He sat and steamed.
Sit?
You didn’t tell an officer of the NYPD to sit!

Of course, she just had. And that was Mia. She’d had him from day one with that combination of tough and capable, humble and sweet. So he sat, damn it. What choice did he have?

Mia and Meredith moved around the deck like a couple of long-legged gazelles, preparing to get underway.

“Backup mooring line off,” Mia said, tossing a coiled line into the cockpit.

“Wheel unlocked,” Meredith replied.

They were going through a checklist, he realized. One they had down pat. What was it Mia had said about her grandfather and thirty years?

“Mainsheet free,” Meredith called softly.

Mia stood by the mast and sniffed the wind like an old sea dog. Then she started hauling on a halyard, hoisting the mainsail up in creaky stages.

He jerked his head toward the motorboat, but the sound hadn’t seemed to carry. Clouds still obscured the moon, so the white sail wasn’t reflecting much light. Good. He glanced back at the sisters scurrying around the little sailboat.

From the looks of it, they’d spent a lot of time on the boat from the time they could walk. Maybe even before. Even Meredith, with her wary, cautious air became a different person as she moved expertly around the boat. She secured a little inflatable kayak on deck, then stood by the wheel with the mainsheet in her hand.

“Ready?” Mia called.

The sisters looked at each other for a long minute.

“Ready,” Meredith whispered.

Mia slipped one end of the mooring line free, hauled it in, and raised a fist in some kind of signal.

“Underway,” Meredith murmured, tightening the mainsheet.

A gentle southeast breeze filled the sail and just like that, they were ghosting away. No engine, no shouting, no fuss.

Ryan nodded. Even the oldest, crankiest Navy man would heartily approve of this crew. The tidy lines, the clean decks, the perfect teamwork. Everything but the apparent lack of hierarchy, because just when he’d decided Mia was the captain, Meredith would spin the wheel and scan the water like she was the one in charge. And somehow it worked. Seamlessly.

“Nav lights?” Meredith asked as Mia headed below to check the chart.

Mia gave her a grim shake of the head. “No nav lights. Course north by northwest.”

“North by northwest,” Meredith echoed, glancing down at the illuminated compass in front of the wheel. She steered with small, easy movements as her eyes flicked from the compass to the horizon and back.

If he’d given the two sisters a couple of beards and striped shirts, they’d be ready to star in an action movie — the kind with swords and buccaneers. He could imagine Mia perfectly, swinging on a line and slashing her way into the fray. Meredith, well, she’d be the quiet, dependable one at the wheel. The subtle differences between the two sisters were becoming clearer to him now. Mia had a lot of tomboy in her quick, assured movements, while Meredith was more cautious, like she’d learned a few life lessons the hard way. He had to wonder just what had done that to her.

In any case, they were kind of endearing, both of them, each in her own way.

“Why no motor?” he whispered to Meredith.

“A spring in the oil pump rusted. The new one I ordered hasn’t arrived yet,” she said, twisting to glance astern.

A woman who knew diesel engines. He nodded like he’d known that all along. Meredith was full of surprises. Just like Mia, who’d gotten the jib unfurled and the sheets trimmed, and then come to him to slide a gentle hand up his arm.

“You okay?”

“Okay,” he murmured, wondering if he’d ever get a chance to make things right between them again.

She looked deep, deeper, nine-fathoms-deep into his eyes, searching for some truth. He hoped to hell it was there.

“How’s the depth here?” Meredith asked, breaking the hush.

Mia shook her head like she’d been far away in her thoughts. “We’re clear for the next couple of miles. Just stay well off the coast.”

“No sign of that boat?”

All three of them twisted to look back. It was still there but hadn’t detected their departure. At least not yet.

Mia took a deep breath and turned to her sister. “What else did you hear about the sabotaged ship?”

“Well, Celeste said—”

“Who’s Celeste?” he asked.

“A friend of mine,” Meredith said. “She’s a local doctor I met at the clinic.”

He cocked his head.

“Meredith’s a doctor,” Mia explained, and he could hear the pride in her voice. “She’s been volunteering at the clinic.”

Meredith waved a hand in a gesture so like Mia’s when she wanted to divert attention from herself. “Except for the couple of years that she studied in Holland, Celeste has always lived here. She knows everyone.”

“So what did she say?”

“She said her cousin who works next door to the police station told her they had suspects in custody.”

“Yeah,” Mia said glumly. “Us.”

Meredith shook her head and went on, “Celeste said her other cousin the hairdresser said—”

“The hairdresser?” Ryan blurted.

“Hey, who’s always the first to catch local gossip?”

He had to give her that one.

“Celeste’s cousin the hairdresser said everyone suspects those developers.”

His ears perked up. “What developers?”

“That big international company that’s been petitioning to build a new hotel.”

“Why would a hotel developer bomb environmental activists?” he asked, watching the low-lying coastline slide past as
Serendipity
picked up speed. Other than a few clusters of houses and the main town of Kralendijk, the island looked relatively undeveloped. An arid, windswept island, scoured by the trade winds. Did they really need more development here?

“The hotel isn’t the issue. It’s the pontoon they want to build.”

“Pontoon?”

“Like a floating luxury hotel, right on the reef,” Mia explained. “Right on some of the best diving in the world, and on a fragile reef.
Neptune’s Revenge
was here to bring attention to that plan.”

“Well, they brought attention to it, all right,” he muttered. “But would the developers really be that stupid to bomb them when they’d be the first suspects?”

“Except we’re the first suspects, remember?” Mia said. “Or rather, you, Officer Hayes of the…bomb squad, was it?”

“Dive squad,” he murmured, forcing himself to meet her eyes. “The underwater explosives stuff was with the Navy.”

If Meredith looked impressed, Mia sure wasn’t.

I’ll tell you everything, Mia,
he wanted to say.
Just ask, and I’ll start from the beginning and tell it to you right to the end.

But she didn’t ask, so he didn’t say. Just held on to her eyes and willed her to believe.

Meredith looked at Mia, then him, then back at Mia, and finally plowed on. “It doesn’t have to be the developer. It could be someone with a stake in the company or a competitor who could step in if that developer couldn’t build. Really, it could be anyone.”

“Not anyone,” Mia growled. “A guy with dark eyes and a blue wetsuit and UltraFlow fins.”

Meredith’s eyebrow shot up, but Ryan just nodded. Leave it to Mia to notice the brand of the guy’s dive gear.

“Not much to go on,” Meredith said.

They all fell into silence, each of them shooting covert glances over their shoulders. Mia made constant adjustments to the lines, harnessing every breath of the light sea breeze.

Ryan closed his eyes and let the wind comb his hair. His salty skin itched, but that wind was fresh and invigorating, and thank goodness for that, because when things eventually slowed down tonight, his body was going to crash and crash hard.

A quiet hour ticked past as they inched closer and closer to escape.

“Clearing the cape,” Meredith murmured.

“Not far now,” Mia whispered, almost to herself. “This is the tricky part.”

As
Serendipity
nosed around the corner of the bay, the lights of town winked out of sight, one by one. Ryan wasn’t the only one who sighed a little in relief. The boat heeled a couple of degrees harder as they angled into the wind, and the gentle rocking motion became a lively romp. He eyed the dark coastline ahead. Where exactly were they headed?

“You can’t see it until you’re on top of it,” Mia murmured, seeing him peer ahead. “It’s just a tiny cut in the coast, but once you’re in, it opens up to a little bay. No obstructions.”

“Once you’re in, that is,” Meredith muttered. “The pass, on the other hand…”

Mia nodded. “The pass is a little narrow.”

“And hard on the wind.” Meredith pointed out.

And we have no working engine to help us power through it,
he read in the nervous glances they exchanged.

Mia didn’t comment. She just went below and eyed the chart. He peeked over her shoulder to see for himself and, Christ, that pass was narrow. When he looked up to match the chart with the view, he heard the murmur of waves breaking over a reef.

“Okay, we’re almost there.”

He watched Mia fiddle with the GPS, calling up the way points they had marked on their previous trip in — points that would guide them to safety like Hansel and Gretel’s trail of crumbs. Or better than a trail of crumbs, he hoped. But damn, the pass looked narrow, a tiny cut between razor-sharp reefs. One degree off and they’d be sunk — literally.

“You don’t have a pair of night vision goggles, do you?” he tried.

Both sisters laughed dryly.

Right. This wasn’t the Navy or the NYPD. It wasn’t a fancy yacht either, just a sturdy little workhorse that had been lovingly kept up over the years. He could see it in the woodwork, in the polish of the brass. Serendipity was what you might call a good old boat, low on electronic gizmos but high in old-fashioned faith in Lady Luck. If he ever met the cousin who’d brought this boat all the way down from New England, he’d shake his hand — or her hand, because it sounded like Mia and Meredith had a whole pack of Amazonian relatives just as capable of handling this boat as they.

Sailing blind through a reef, he didn’t like. But the crew — these sailors, this family — he liked. Figured he’d have liked the grandfather, too.

“I can keep lookout on the bow,” he offered.

She shook her head. “I’m on the bow. You’re watching the GPS.”

He blinked, slowly processing the fact that he had just been given an order. His gut rolled that one back and forth for a second before he nodded. It was her boat, after all.

She pointed at the display and briefed him on the data points they had saved from their last time through.

“Nothing to it,” he nodded.

“Right,” she muttered and disappeared out onto the deck.

Seconds ticked by, then ponderous minutes, as the icon on the GPS inched closer to the dark line of reefs. Closer. Closer…

“See the obelisk?” Mia called from the bow.

He couldn’t see a goddamn thing.

“Got it,” Meredith replied in a tight voice. “There’s the pass. Our angle’s no good, though. We’ll have to try on the next tack.”

Try. The operative word in that sentence. Not good.

He looked at the chart. The pass was narrow enough as it was — eye-of-the-needle narrow — and with the wind on the nose, they were going to have to zigzag in. A tricky proposition even by day. Suicidal by night.

The muted sound of foam grew louder.

“How much closer, Mia?” Meredith called anxiously.

“Just a little more…a little more…”

“Mia, the reef’s right there!”

“Just a little more…ready…ready… Now! Now! Come about!”

Meredith spun the wheel hard, and the boat leaned over the other way. The boom came over with a dull thump just as Mia came running back to help haul in the sheets. The cacophony of sound and motion settled into an edgy kind of quiet a minute later, when Mia scampered back to the bow to keep lookout again.

They repeated the nerve-racking maneuver three times: edging right up to the reef before jerking away, inching closer to the pass every time. He kept a finger on the thin line of the pass on the chart and called out depth and bearings. The swishing sound of waves smashing into the reef became a roar from all sides.