On the Edge

  “And the woman?”

  “You saw the two of them last night. Glaze has her eating out of his hand. She’ll believe whatever he tells her.” Guthrie leaned back m his chair and stretched his legs out in front of him. “It strikes me that the best thing for us to do now is sit tight and wait for Glaze to do all the hard work.”

  Renner scowled at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Glaze has the inside track with the Slater woman. From what you’ve told me that was going to be LePage’s approach last year. Sounds workable. Let Glaze talk the woman into showing him the location of the caves. Hell, let him go down and get the box, for that matter. No sense risking our necks if we can get him to do it for us. We’ll keep an eye on him. Get to him before he leaves the island.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then I think it would be best for all concerned if Glaze and Ms. Slater have an unfortunate accident while doing a little cave diving.” Guthrie smiled. “Hell, everyone knows how dangerous the sport is.”

  Renner hesitated and then slowly nodded his head. “Yes, I think that would be the neatest way to tie this up.” He was profoundly grateful to have Guthrie with him. It was Guthrie who would do the killing. Guthrie was the professional.

  “There’s just one thing,” Guthrie said coolly.

  “What’s that?”

  “We’ll have to watch ourselves around Glaze. He took Vaden last night. From what Kelso told me, he could have killed him easily. Apparently, Glaze deliberately stopped just short of finishing Vaden.”

  “So? Vaden blew it.”

  Guthrie shook his head. “You don’t understand. Vaden is fast. Very, very fast. But last night Glaze was a little faster.”

  * * *

  Amy uncurled from the chair where she had been making notes on the last half of Private Demons and went to peer over Jed’s shoulder. He was completing the bird cage design he’d started a few days earlier. The precision of the drawing and the neat block printing Jed used for making notes made Amy shake her head in wonder.

  “I would never have the patience for such detailed work,” she observed. “It’s perfect. Every little hinge, every connecting point, every bend in the wire. It’s all there on paper.”

  Jed gave her an amused glance. “I wouldn’t have the patience to construct a hundred thousand word story out of thin air, even if I had the imagination to do it. So I guess we’re even.”

  “Are you going to build this cage when we get back to Caliph’s Bay?”

  “Think it would sell?”

  “In a flash! Jed, I think there’s a huge, untapped market for your cages. Putting them on display in one little gallery in Caliph’s Bay isn’t even scratching the surface. You need to get them into other shops, maybe some pet stores. People spend hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars on exotic birds. They wouldn’t flinch at the idea of getting a beautiful cage to go with the bird.”

  “The Caliph’s Bay Gallery handles my total output as it is,” Jed reminded her calmly. “I don’t have time to build enough cages to put into other outlets.”

  Amy braced herself and then took the plunge. “You would have the time if you quit your government job.”

  There was an acute silence. Jed was watching her but his gaze was unreadable. Amy held her breath.

  At last Jed said slowly, “It bothers you that much?”

  “It could get you killed one of these days.”

  “It’s what I do, Amy.”

  “It’s what you did last month and last year and seven years before that, but nothing says you have to keep doing it.

  Jed stood up slowly until he was towering over her. His hands closed around her shoulders. “Tell me something,” he asked softly, “when I’ve cleaned up the mess you’re in here, are you going to call off our affair because of the way I make my living?”

  Amy drew a shocked breath. “Is that what you think? That I’d let you use your…your peculiar talents to help me and then, when I was safe again, tell you good-bye?”

  “You never wanted to know what I did for a living. But now you do know. Sooner or later you’re going to have to deal with it and with me.” His words were low and slightly roughened by an emotion she couldn’t define.

  “Jed, stop it, I’m suggesting you quit your job for your own sake. It’s dangerous. There’s no future in it.”

  He gave her a slight shake. “Would you leave me because of it?”

  “Jed, please, you’ve got it all wrong,” Amy wailed.

  “Would you leave me because of my job?”

  Amy stepped back, out from under his painful grip. Her eyes were burning with a clear, green flame. “No, dammit, I wouldn’t leave you because of your job. I think it’s a terrible job. I think it’s done some terrible things to you and will probably continue to do terrible things to you. But I won’t leave you because of it. We’re friends, remember? Friends don’t desert each other because they disapprove of each other’s jobs. There. Are you satisfied? I think we’d better change the subject. How about a walk down to the cove?”

  “Amy, wait—”

  “I’m going to put on my sandals.” Amy retreated up the stairs. She felt his eyes on her until she disappeared down the corridor toward her bedroom. Friends, she repeated silently. That was a joke. Friendship didn’t begin to cover what she felt for Jed, although it was certainly part of it.

  She found her sandals and stepped into them, thinking once again of how she would never have become friends, let alone lovers, with a man like Jed Glaze eight months before. But then, she was a different woman than she had been eight months before.

  Jed was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs, his expression stark and intent.

  “Amy,” he began as she lightly descended the stairs, “do you mean it?”

  She frowned. “Mean what?”

  “What you said about my job not making any difference. That our friendship is going to hold after we leave Orleana.”

  “I mean it.” She eyed him quizzically. “Why should it make any difference in our friendship?”

  “Because you’re not the kind of woman who gets involved with a man like me,” he told her through clenched teeth.

  “But I am involved with you,” she pointed out sweetly, her sense of humor revived. “Therefore, we have to assume that there is either something screwy with your reasoning or else you don’t know me quite as well as you think you do.”

  He was silent for a few seconds. “We’re learning a lot about each other these days, aren’t we?”

  “A great deal. Are you ready for that walk?” Without waiting for confirmation, she headed toward the door.

  Jed followed, falling into step beside her as they left the veranda and headed toward the path that led down to the cove. “Thanks, Amy,” he finally said quietly.

  “For what? For not threatening to break off the affair because you won’t promise to quit your job?”

  “For accepting me the way I am.” He was close beside her but he didn’t touch her. His attention was on a wheeling sea gull. “Not everyone would or could.”

  “Is that why you’ve gotten so good at playing chameleon?”

  He gave her a strange sidelong glance. “Chameleon?”

  “You seem to be able to slip into certain social roles whenever you want to. You do it the way a chameleon changes colors, instinctively. The way you handled my parents, for example. You let them treat you as though you were an earnestly aspiring, financially secure suitor for my hand. Connie at Caliph’s Bay Gallery and just about everyone else in town thinks you’re a struggling, eccentric artist who has to do some engineering on the side in order to make ends meet. Hank and Rosie think you’re a friend of the family who happens to be sleeping with me and whose intentions, they hope, are honorable. Dr. Stearn thinks you’re a suitably macho, world-weary type who knows how to handle himself in a knife fight.”

  “So?” Jed challenged softly. “You want the real Jed Glaze to stand up and show himself?”

&nb
sp; Amy smiled and shook her head. “There’s no need. I’ve decided that the real Jed Glaze includes all of the above and maybe a few more interesting persona I have yet to discover.”

  Jed reached out and took her hand, lacing her fingers through his. “You want to watch out for that imagination of yours, woman. Sometimes it takes control.”

  “You want to watch out for that streak of cynical realism that runs through you, Jed. Sometimes it takes control.”

  “Maybe your fantasies make a good counterbalance for my realism.”

  “Maybe.” They walked in silence until they reached the sandy cove and then Amy said gently, “There’s just one thing I’d like to make very clear.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” Deliberately she mocked his laconic tone. “I would never call a halt to our relationship because of your job, but that does not mean I approve of it. I still think you should quit.”

  “Let’s talk about something else,” Jed suggested coolly.

  “Such as?”

  “Such as going down into the caves.”

  Amy nodded unhappily. “I was hoping you’d want to put off the dive for a while until your wound healed.”

  “I’ll take my chances. Vaden’s knife didn’t do that much damage. It looked worse than it is. A little blood goes a long way. By tomorrow or the next day I should be ready to go back into the water. I’ll put a plastic bandage around my arm if it makes you feel any better. That should keep most of the water out.”

  “You’re determined to do this dive, aren’t you?”

  “It has to be done, Amy. I’ve already explained that you can’t leave that kind of loose end lying around. It’s already attracting trouble.”

  “Vaden?”

  Jed nodded. “It’s too much of a coincidence that he picked me to roll last night.”

  “Maybe he was working alone. After all, LePage came alone. Maybe Vaden was a friend of LePage’s and therefore knew about the box,” Amy suggested urgently as her agile brain went to work creating a scenario that would provide an excuse to postpone the dive indefinitely. “It makes sense. He just decided to make a try for the box himself. But he blew it because you stopped him. With him in jail we can relax. Even if Kelso releases him, he’ll kick him off the island. Kelso doesn’t let troublemakers hang around long.”

  Jed’s mouth curved briefly. He freed her hand and ran his fingers teasingly through her windblown hair, shaking her gently. “Like I keep saying, lady, you’ve got a truly creative imagination.”

  Amy winced, her expression rueful. “You don’t buy that version?”

  He lifted one broad shoulder dismissingly. “I’m not sure. It has a certain inherent logic except for the fact that it doesn’t tell us how LePage or Vaden or anyone else knew about the box in the first place.”

  “Details,” she scoffed.

  “That’s what I’m good at,” Jed reminded her. “Dull little details.”

  Amy surrendered to the inevitable. “All right. When do we plan the dive?” She was unaware of the slight shiver that went through her as she accepted that the return to the flooded caves was now imminent.

  But Jed felt the tiny tremor. He also saw the bleak determination that replaced the normal warmth in her eyes. He wanted to take her into his arms and tell her they didn’t have to make the dive. He longed to hold her close and assure her that she was safe, that he could protect her without retrieving the box. But he couldn’t make that kind of promise. The evidence of brewing trouble was all around them, and there was no way in hell he could ignore it.

  Jed came to a halt in the sand and caught Amy by the arms. “Honey, if there was any other way to handle this, I’d use it. Believe me?”

  She smiled up at him with a woman’s acceptance and understanding. Her fingers touched the side of his face, as light as a graceful strand of seaweed reaching out to caress him underwater. “I believe you, Jed. We’ll do this your way.”

  Chapter 15

  Christ, I can’t believe you went down into those caves that night with only one dive light. You should have had at least one extra light as a backup. Preferably two. Do you realize what could have happened if the batteries had failed in the single light you had?” Jed paced slowly around the pile of diving equipment he and Amy had laid out on the living room floor. Tanks, regulators, dive lights, line and reel, fins, diving knives, buoyancy compensators and a few other assorted items were all neatly arranged for his inspection. Two days had passed since the Vaden incident.

  With typical Glaze attention to detail, he’d already been over every item on the floor twice. He’d made Amy go over everything with him both times and was now starting in on a third inspection. Jed Glaze, it turned out, was a great believer in knowing a diving buddy’s paraphernalia as well as he knew his own. Especially, it seemed, when it came to the business of cave diving. He gave credence to the old axiom that a diver’s life could depend on his buddy’s equipment.

  Amy was torn between amusement and the distilled remnants of nightmares as she listened to his admonishing question. “Trust me, Jed, I was well aware of what might have happened.”

  “Dive lights fail all the time, just like flashlights.”

  “I know, Jed.”

  “Swimming around inside a cave without a light would be like—” He broke off abruptly.

  Amy finished the sentence in a surprisingly neutral voice. “Like swimming around inside a tomb. The thought crossed my mind more than once that night, Jed.”

  “And you went into that cave on a half filled tank of air. No safety margin at all. If something had gone wrong you wouldn’t have had a minute’s worth of reserve supply.”

  “I know, Jed.”

  He muttered something that sounded both violent and disgusted as he bent down to unsheathe the diving knife. “Why the hell am I lecturing you? It’s not as though you thought you had a lot of choice. But dammit, Amy, you took a hell of a risk that night.”

  “The caves didn’t seem a whole lot worse at the time than looking down the barrel of that gun LePage had. It was only afterward that I realized it was the caves that terrified me. I think that after I decided I had to hide the box, I just sort of turned off something in my nervous system for a while. It let me function without thinking about the fear. But afterward I never had nightmares about the gun, only about the caves.”

  Jed resheathed the knife and crouched down beside her. His gaze was steady and intent. “I can try going in alone. You can wait at the entrance pool. I’ll see if there’s any chance of finding the box based on your description of where you hid it.”

  Amy shook her head, committed now. “No. Absolutely not. You’re not going into those caves alone. If ever there was a situation that demanded the buddy system, this is it. Besides, I can’t tell you for certain how to find the right tunnel. I know I swam past two or three entrances before I finally set the box down inside one. The only thing I remember clearly is a distinct bend in the main passageway.” She suddenly realized what was probably worrying him. “Afraid I’ll panic on you?”

  He half smiled and shook his head. “Are you kidding? After the way you handled yourself that night LePage pulled a gun on you? No. You are one gutsy lady. When the chips are down, you’re not the kind to panic. I’d trust you at my back any day.”

  His rough approval warmed her. “That first day when we went diving in the cove I didn’t handle myself well.”

  “It was your first time back in the water after the experience eight months ago. You were bound to be nervous. You did fine when we explored that bomber.”

  She nodded. “It was easier the second time.”

  “If you get anxious this time, we’ll get out, give you some time to relax and then try again later. There’s no rush. The box can’t be very far inside the caves. You wouldn’t have had the time or the air to have gone far.”

  Amy took a breath, remembering her fear of running out of air that night. She didn’t tell Jed because she knew it would only upset him, bu
t the truth was by the time she returned to the entrance pool that night she had been out of air. She’d barely made it back out of the cave.

  “Speaking of air,” Jed went on as he got to his feet and resumed his prowling inspection, “We’ll stick to the standard safety formula for this kind of diving. We won’t use any more than one third of our supply going in. We’ll assume we’ll need another third on the way out, which leaves an additional third for emergencies. When either one of us uses up the first third of our air supply, we both turn back. Understood?”

  Amy nodded obediently and then unsuccessfully tried to stifle a small grin. “Why do I get the feeling you’re going to be the captain on this dive?”

  “Probably because I’m the one who’s supposed to be good at details,” he retorted. “Now hush up and pay attention.”

  “Yes. sir.”

  He ignored her too-obedient tone. “We’ll have backups for everything—regulators, lights, the works. We’ll strap the knives to our forearms instead of our legs. Less chance of having them snag on something that way. To cut down on snagging problems we’ll reverse the fin straps and tape them. We’ll also tape down anything else that might stick out and get caught. The last thing we need is for one of us to get equipment tangled on a projection of some kind inside the caves.”

  “I understand.” Amy glanced at the array of diving gear. “You know, Jed, the thing I worried about most that night was kicking up silt. The visibility was good, I remember that much. The water was very clear, but…”

  He nodded grimly. “But the visibility could have gone down to zero in a few seconds if you’d accidentally loosened some silt with a fin or brushed the tank against the ceiling. The stuff could have clouded the water and left you as blind as you would have been if you’d lost the light.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Damn, Amy, whenever I think about it—”

  “Don’t think about it. Believe me I try not to.” For a moment she felt as though she were the one who had to push the project forward in the face of an overactive imagination —this time Jed’s. “We’ll be careful. We’ll do everything by the book this time, follow all the rules. We’ll play it nice and conservative and we’ll put you in charge, how’s that?”