The She

  "So what are you going to do?" I repeated, feeling some urgency rise in my throat.

  She looked from her hands to me. "For one thing, I'm going to dive a wreck. And if some she-devil comes along to take me down, I'll just look at her and say, 'Whassup, witchie? I sure hope you brought your salt and pepper because I am fresh out.'"

  She flopped down, and I watched hex; thinking of how a few short words like that can be jammed with so many unspoken truths. She didn't really care if she lived or died, and that truth showed up even more in her casual shrug, in her ability to flop onto her back and take her eyes off that porthole. It wasn't the same as wanting to commit suicide, but it was gruesome enough, especially when her family didn't seem to care if she lived or died, either. I wondered if my dead parents weren't a better deal than what she had.

  I could also see that maybe this dive was keeping her from feeling suicidal. There really was something to KHK projects that I'd experienced myself. I might never have had suicidal thoughts, but I could get depressed as easily as the next person. I'd be going to pick up Miguel—to take him to a ball game or just to the park to kick a soccer ball around—and I'd see him run from the window and throw open the door when he saw me coming up the street. My mood would jump. It gives you a reason to be here, this whole thing about helping somebody else out when their life is too hard. It was more than remarkable, and at the same time a bit humiliating, that Grey might end up helping me more than I could ever help her.

  I spent the next hour going over in my head how to get my grandfather to agree to fund that dive. I knew he liked Mr. Church. I didn't know if he would agree to spend that much money just because Mr. Church clapped his hands and put them on my head, and what I thought was a reliable memory came fluttering back. But I knew I could talk a very good game, and I got my lines together while watching Grey rest.

  It helped me pass the time without looking out that porthole.

  SIXTEEN

  "When we got within fifty yards of the docks, I could see my brother standing on one, watching us, his cell phone in his hand. Grey was standing beside me looking over the starboard bow, and I nudged her and said, "Uh-oh, trouble."

  Mr. Church floated in sideways, and Emmett caught the starboard bow with his foot.

  Before he could start in on me, I blurted out, "Opa told me I could go, and he also told me he wasn't telling you."

  "I don't need Opa to find you if I want to find you. I went to see Mr. Shields, who said you had been to see Church this morning. I came over here, and the Hope Wainwright was gone, and you were nowhere. Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to be out on a boat in November Evan? Do you know how fast a storm can rise up?"

  "Opa said there was a warm-water eddy on the canyon wall and it was perfectly safe," I told him.

  "I don't care. If something happens to you, what becomes of me?" He turned to Church. "I'm paying you back for that fuel. I don't want my brother feeling indebted to you in any way."

  "Emmett, don't be tacky," I mumbled, climbing onto the dock and giving Grey a hand over. He looked at her with winter air blowing out both nostrils like a bull.

  "And how are you feeling? Do your parents know where you are?"

  "Um, believe me when I tell you, they wouldn't care," she mumbled around a laugh, and anyone but Emmett might have thought nothing more than, "This is not the type of girl you bring home to Mother." But I could feel his usual sympathy going out, and he took her mittened hand in his. He turned to Mr. Church.

  "You and I are going to have a little talk, Edwin. Away from Opa. I'm taking you over to the diner for coffee, do you mind?" But instead of waiting for him to answer he turned to Grey. "You're not planning to drive back to Philadelphia at this ungodly hour are you? There's plenty of room at my grandfather's house, bless his sweet, industrious heart."

  His sarcasm was ripping, despite his concern for Grey. I looked at my watch. It was eleven-fifteen, and I wondered if Mr. Church wasn't normally long in bed by this hour, He had another hour's ride back to Sassafras.

  He said, "I think I can fit you into my busy schedule," and rolled his eyes at me, like another kid in trouble.

  The diner was right across the street from the docks, so we walked over after Mr. Shields's teenage son showed up to scrub down the Hope. Nobody said anything, not even Emmett, even after we'd ordered hot chocolate and I cupped the hot mug in my hands, bringing it under my nose so the steam could thaw my face. Grey did the same.

  Mr. Church mumbled, "By the way, Emmett, you're looking quite the man these days. I don't think I would have recognized you, full university beard and all."

  I guess Emmett caught the dig. "Thank you, I am a full-blooded adult, Edwin. No question. First, I'd like to know what you all were doing out on the water"

  It was a hard question to answer not because we were out to hide everything but because none of us had really been sure. Emmett took the silence the wrong way.

  "You were gone nine hours. I don't think there's any question you went to the canyons, but what were you hoping to accomplish?"

  Mr. Church found his voice first. "Your brother asked me. I've done it for other people who've lost relatives at sea. It gives them a chance to hold a sort of at-sea memorial that brings more closure. I think that's all your brother wanted."

  His kind tone didn't work.

  "Edwin, the problem with that is my parents are not in the canyon."

  "Of course not. They're in heaven," Mr. Church replied, and I hopped in my seat feeling the heat roll off Emmett. This is one, of those sticky moments where an atheist can be rendered speechless. There's not a whole lot he could say that wouldn't sound in utter poor taste. He was sharp and found his way.

  "That's funny. Based on island superstitions, I would have sworn you'd have thought they were under the canyon floor stewing in one of the various Protestant hells, or a hole, or in Hades, or purgatory, depending upon which artistic rendering you're paying homage to. See any she-devils out there, folks?"

  "Emmett." I found my voice first. "Whatever your problem is, or whatever you want to say, just say it. Stop attacking people."

  He waved his hand in the air like he was sorry. "I just feel, and my aunt Mel feels, that Evan needs to accept the truth, and the faster he can do that, the faster he can resume the happy life we have tried so hard to build for him. He can get past this—and with the truth. Not with lies, superstitions, make-believe. I have an army of DEA agents who would tell him the same story I'm trying to tell him. So what are you doing, Edwin?"

  Mr. Church blinked at the tabletop. He glanced at his watch, and I thought he looked tired for the first time tonight. "The DEA had to ignore critical information, simply because it didn't fit their plausibility structure. They're not trained to investigate the paranormal, or even the weather, let alone the complex infrastructure of the two of them—"

  "I could tell you there is no supernatural, but let me be more diplomatic and say there is nothing supernatural about what happened to my parents."

  "Yes, I think that would be far less arrogant of you," Mr. Church agreed.

  I put up my hands. "Emmett, listen to me. He did that thing with his hands to me again. He pulled loran IDs out of my head, long numbers that I scribbled down eight years ago in a very stressful moment. Explain that."

  Emmett wouldn't look at me. His head dropped and he stared at the table so I couldn't see his eyes. I felt an entrapment coming on, but I couldn't hear it in his voice. "So that's what you were doing out there. You were following those loran TDs to ... what? To see if you could sense the Goliath below you or something?"

  I could feel it rolling off him, despite that he wouldn't let me see his eyes, this little tone of his that he used to use whenever he kicked my ass at chess. "Are you sure you want to move there, Evan?" I'd be looking all over the board until my eyeballs were bugging out. "Yeah, I'm sure." Boom, a little slide from some innocent-looking bishop on the other end of the board, four moves into the game. "Checkmate. But you
'll get me next time." I hadn't yet.

  "Yeah," I said cautiously.

  "You think you found the Goliath?"

  "Yeah." I watched him looking at his lap, and since he kept so quiet, I felt my confidence building. "Yeah. And I bet if we went over to our old house, we'd find those exact loran TDs scribbled on the wall."

  He shook his head. "I had the housekeeper wipe them clean about a year after you put them there."

  "Why?" I smacked the table in frustration. "Because it didn't fit the government's little theories? Do you remember them? I'll bet you do, Mr. Great Brain. Were they east of two-six-six-eight-zero, north of four-two-two-eight-zero?"

  I really thought I had him. His eyes widened and wandered up to Mr. Church in some sort of amazement. "That's not bad, Edwin. I have to hand it to you. It's nothing that hasn't happened to millions of other people under the power of hypnosis, but—"

  "I wasn't hypnotized, Emmett! I was driving the boat! There wasn't time—"

  "You were hypnotized by the water; Evan. You've got more Barrett in you than all the other Barretts put together; I think sometimes. I can just see you there on the water; seventeen, becoming a man. I'll bet it was like some sort of religious experience."

  Mr. Church couldn't hold back a laugh. I guess he was remembering me trying to baptize myself in fifty-degree water.

  "How'd you know?" I asked. The confirmation made Emmett look sad. He reached across the table, took my face in his hands, and pulled me toward him.

  "I had one myself."

  "You're kidding."

  "No. I think it was more a Starn experience than a Barrett one, but hell, we've all got salt in our blood. I went out with Mom on Opa's forty-three-footer and refused to come back to shore until I had learned every last angle of every last computerized gadget on his dash. She sat up with me—we didn't sleep more than three hours. We came back because if we didn't, we'd have run out of fuel."

  I rolled my head around a little, very impressed. "Wow. All I did was try to stick my face in the icy water."

  He let go of me, but not with his eyes. I thought, Damn it all. He is a great brother. I got full of regret that we hadn't gotten closer when we were younger and under normal brothers' terms. We shouldn't have been living in Philly with him taking on some huge burden to protect me from more pain. We should have been living down here, with both parents, keeping the salt in our blood. We should have gone into business together; We should own a ship together; I couldn't say that now. Too much time had passed. There was too much history. But maybe I could still save some things.

  "I'm going to talk to Opa." I shot a glance at Grey, who was starting to look stupor-tired. It had been a long day. "I think I can talk him into hiring a bubble drum to dive for the wreck. I want you to leave it alone. I want you to let me talk to him and stay out of it."

  Emmett's eyes wandered to Mr. Church and they changed. They came back to me full of dread. "You asked why I erased those loran TDs. It wasn't because they didn't support a theory. It turns out they didn't support anything, didn't mean anything."

  "How can you say that?"

  "Evan, the Goliath never sank. It was found abandoned, by the Coast Guard and DEA nineteen hours after the disappearance. It's not in the canyon. It's in an old dry dock on the mainland still owned by Starn Industries. Would you like to see it?"

  SEVENTEEN

  I was in such a state of shock that I didn't even ask where we were going as we piled into Opa's car which Emmett had borrowed. Emmett headed west over the three drawbridges. Once on the mainland, he immediately turned north toward Leeds Point, on the other side of Great Bay from Sassafras.

  At that point, I finally found my voice. "Why didn't you tell me this before?"

  I was sitting beside Emmett in the front seat, and I glanced over my shoulder. Mr. Church had asked if he could come, and he was sitting with his head back and his eyes shut. I thought he might be asleep. Grey just sat slumped with her head halfway down to her fingers, which she was picking at, and I thought how dejected she must feel. A dive that had given her a temporary lease on life would never happen now. I spun my head back to Emmett to see him rolling his eyes. I think he would have liked to show me all this and talk to me in private, but everyone had piled into the car.

  "Because, Evan," he said, loud enough that I thought only I could hear it. "It just makes it all the more despicable, this ... plotting it out so well that you're deserting your own boat to ... hide on a smaller less recognizable one. I was absolutely going to tell you, but I felt you had enough to digest for one weekend. The Goliath being here, being there, it doesn't make that much of a difference. They still made a break for it. That's the key issue. I just didn't want you to feel overwhelmed."

  I had to laugh, though it felt hot coming up my throat. I didn't say anything else until we turned off Shore Road onto a little dirt road that twisted and twined for a couple of miles at least back toward Great Bay. At the end the headlights flashed on a sign that looked kind of familiar and said, STARN INDUSTRIES: PRIVATE PROPERTY." It was old and rusted.

  "Besides, I didn't even know about this until I was twenty-one. Remember I told you Opa started hiring lawyers to protect us from further DEA questioning?"

  "Yeah."

  "Well, they questioned me the morning after the disappearance. The Goliath wasn't discovered until five o'clock, or I might have heard it from them. By their analysis, the ship had been intentionally deserted, not involved in some sort of accident. I guess Opa felt like we'd heard enough scandal."

  We passed through a hurricane fence where the gate had caved in and came to the opening of a huge warehouse-looking building as high as the treetops. I then remembered Opa used to keep his first shipping vessel in there after he became a manufacturer: I guess it had been replaced with another one.

  I got out of the car with so many questions, but I didn't want to ask any of them. Emmett had become like a vat of information. I hated it so badly that just being around him made me edgy about the next thing he would tell me.

  We walked over to an enormous sliding door with a padlock on it. He had a key on his key ring, and he opened the lock, pushed hard on the huge door and it rumbled backward. I stood outside until he'd hit a switch and flooded the place with light. My final hope was that I'd see some boat other than the Goliath and this would all be a bad dream or stupid mistake on his part.

  My hope welled up, seeing this monster: For one thing, I had never remembered the Goliath being this massive. The hull went up and up higher than a house, and I couldn't see the top, the part I knew, because the fluorescent lights up on the ceiling were huge and blinding. I almost said, "This isn't the Goliath

  But I remembered the only other time I'd seen the Goliath out of the water. I was eight, helping Dad's guys paint red below the waterline, and he hands me a smaller brush dripping gray paint.

  PHILLIP EVAN BARRETT WAS HERE.

  It's faded and surrounded by paint chips and full of salt, but I leaned my head toward it. I couldn't believe this, and my voiced echoed loudly. "Mr. Church, did you know about this?"

  I turned, and he was swallowing, finding a place on the concrete floor to stare at. "I'm afraid I didn't."

  I thought of a great trip to the canyon, one of the most moving experiences of my life, going down the toilet. I was gripping the bottommost point on the bow of the Goliath, trying to find some way not to accept this.

  "How do they know Mom and Dad and the crew didn't fall into the water somehow?"

  Emmett smiled too sympathetically, and I realized how stupid that sounded. Captains and crew don't fall into the water not in a storm that doesn't even have gale warnings. I remembered some fading photo in my head of a wave. And I remembered pen-and-ink drawings of the The She in a book. I didn't know what to believe, but I was done crying over this shit.

  "Well?" I asked loudly, which only made Emmett's soft-spoken reply sound better.

  "Evan, when the Coast Guard finally got our Mayday, they sent a
chopper immediately. They didn't spot the Goliath, probably because the crew had it under blackout conditions. But they spotted a smaller lit vessel, a pleasure yacht called the Sanskrit, half a mile off, heading south. They spoke to the owner and noted that in the log, but it didn't mean much to the Coast Guard, considering they weren't privy to the whole DEA investigation. It was probably three days later that the DEA called for the records on the chopper search and found a record of the Sanskrit heading south."

  I didn't remember ever hearing the name of that boat and said so.

  "I hadn't either. But the DEA had. The owners, a Mr. and Mrs. Diaz, from Miami, were first being investigated by the IRS because they had too many power toys to match their income—including the Sanskrit. When one suspicious power toy is a yacht that travels the Caribbean frequently, the IRS suspects there's been drug-related income and contacts the DEA. There was actually a Mayday sent from the Sanskrit after it hit Hurricane Marco. It foundered before the Coast Guard in South Florida could get to it. The Mayday said there were eight people on board. When the Coast Guard up here had made contact with the Sanskrit, Mt Diaz had said there were two people on board, himself and his wife. The truth was reported in a moment of severe panic. Mom, Dad, and four crew would have made six additional passengers."

  "It was seen passing through this part of the Atlantic, and then it foundered off the coast of Florida," I muttered hazily.

  "Yes. Right where they marked the X on the hurricane map in my notebook."

  I blinked at the shadows. I couldn't work out the confusion in my head. "You're thinking the six passengers were Mom and Dad and the Goliath crew."

  I glanced at Mr. Church, who stared straight up with his eyes narrowed, like he was trying to hear or see something. I was back to thinking he might be half nuts.

  Emmett said, "The DEA won't pay to dive wrecks unless there are millions of dollars of evidence at stake, and in this case, there was only suspicion. The wreck is still down there. There has only been one dive. A bubble drum in search of a sunken government vessel spotted the Sanskrit about five years ago."