Below the Surface

  “I don’t know. I just know that I have to dive Marco Pass again to look at that boat. If it hadn’t been so tricky there, the police or someone could have salvaged it and then they would have seen what happened. Maybe Sam or Ric were banking on the fact they wouldn’t bring the boat up.”

  “But Sam and Ric helped in the search when she first went missing.”

  “Searching where the boat wasn’t until we asked for help at Marco and they had no choice.”

  “Bree, I dived with you twice when I didn’t think it was wise, but—”

  “If we can show an explosion happened on board, we can get the police involved.”

  “But there have been explosions from time to time on board boats for normal reasons, accidents. Someone poured in too much gas trying to start the motor, someone just—”

  “I know! But I still don’t think this was an accident!”

  “Keep your voice down,” he said, looking back toward Verdugo’s yacht. “If we do dive there again, we should take some other divers, but hardly the two we took before.”

  “No other divers, just a lot of light power so we can see down there. We need to do this alone. If I’m wrong, we don’t need someone else talking about it. If I’m right…”

  “When would we dive?”

  “Because of the low vis, we could dive after dark and see just as far. And there would be less boat traffic. We could even dive from the seawall and not from the boat.”

  “Not take Manny?”

  “I’d feel better if he drove us to the seawall. He could keep an eye on things while we dive.”

  “Okay. Let me get a few hours of work done, then I’ll get my gear and meet you at Mermaids about six. I hate to say it, but the possibility of an explosion makes sense. The wind and thunder could have mostly covered up the sound. Give me your plate and goblet and you get going. I’m going to go find Verdugo to thank him. That way I have an excuse for sneaking up on him. I’ve managed to case most of the vessel that way, at least above the main deck.”

  “Be careful. See you at six,” she whispered.

  When Bree got back to her shop, she let herself in. Manny was out on a job, repairing a speedboat engine. She hadn’t even unpacked. She had a lot to do, so she headed toward the stairs.

  The front doorbell rang. She peered out and saw Manny’s daughter and a tall, blond boy. Bree unlocked and opened the door.

  “I know Dad’s not here,” Lucinda blurted. “This is my friend, Luke, and I wanted you to meet him. It’s teacher conference day at school so we got off.”

  “Come on in,” Bree said, though the last thing in the world she wanted right now was small talk with kids, when she had so much to get ready for their night dive. “Luke, it’s nice to meet a friend of Cindi’s,” she added, shaking his hand.

  “A good friend,” she prompted, rolling her eyes behind Luke’s back, as if Bree didn’t get that this was the “friend’s boyfriend” she’d talked about earlier.

  “Sorry about your sister and all,” Luke said. “Losing her like that really bites.”

  “Thank you, Luke. It sure does.”

  He was a head taller than Cindi and quite a contrast to her dark, cute looks. Thin, almost Nordic looking, a bit gawky and very serious. What would their kids look like? Bree wondered, before she caught herself and came back to facts. Manny would have a raving fit if he found these two here and knew Bree had invited them in. But, if she could control Manny, what would she want him to do in this situation? Definitely build bridges for these two, not blow them up.

  Hoping Cindi didn’t hate her for this, Bree said, “I’m sure looking forward to Cindi’s quinceañera party. What a wonderful tradition, like a great foreign import. But it’s also cutting-edge American these days. It’s kind of neat to be setting new styles, don’t you think?” she asked Luke.

  “Oh, yeah, sure. I mean, I didn’t think of it like that.”

  “My sister and I were asked to be some of the patrons for Cindi’s big party, so I have a stake in everyone having a great time. You will be there, won’t you? I know Cindi’s looking forward to dancing with you. Cindi, if you want to ask some of your school friends over to learn some of the special dances, I’m sure your dad and I can clear out some of the back room for a practice area. We’ll call it a combination of High School Musical and Dancing With the Stars.”

  Cindi managed to smile and nod, but she almost turned blue from holding her breath.

  “If I have time—and that’s only if,” Bree added, upping the ante when Luke simply stared at her, “I can give four or five of you a scuba lesson or two after practice.” She was on a roll now, afraid to give the boy too much time to react or reject things.

  “Luke,” she plunged on, “the food will be fantastic with neat, new things to try, and Cindi will look like a fairy princess. It’s better and bigger than any prom, you’ll see.”

  “Well—yeah,” Luke managed, looking as if he’d been hit by a tidal wave. “I’m cool with that.”

  Bree chatted them up some more, got them soft drinks, showed Luke Manny’s desk, talked about him being a partner and his realm of motors and engines, which obviously intrigued the boy. She promised Manny would show him around the back room next time and got them out the front door just before Manny came back. With a sigh of relief for Cindi, if not for herself, Bree took that as a sign the rest of the day would go well.

  But she didn’t push her luck. Before she sat Manny down to tell him about Cindi and Luke’s visit, she got him to promise he’d drive her and Cole to Marco later. She supposed she did make it sound a bit as if Cindi had come to introduce Luke to him. Now it was up to his Lucinda to play her part well at home.

  Bree tried to take a nap but couldn’t. She ended up pacing and looking at the clock. Three hours yet before she would meet Cole here for their dark-water dive.

  She told herself that she had to get back to work on Monday. Clients understood a period of mourning, but her recent publicity had interested new clients. She had to get this place back on its feet. Back on its feet…she was dead on hers, yet she couldn’t rest until she had answers. Manny had gone out on an emergency call, but her entire life seemed like an emergency since Daria had died.

  The words—the reality—still staggered her. Daria…was…dead.

  She leaned her shoulder against the double doors of the veranda and looked out over the harbor. Through the bare-boned forest of the masts and spars of moored sailboats, she could see the roof of Travers and Son Search and Salvage Shop. She’d love to look around in there, now that he and his staff were away. Had they taken that guy at the front desk, or was he still there to oversee things?

  No matter, because she knew the back way to the upstairs, even where a key was hidden, if it was still in the same place after all these years. Since Sam seemed unwilling to change things, she’d bet it was. Sam, she was sure, had sent Ric to pilfer Daria’s room, or else Ric had done it on his own. Turnabout was fair play. Besides, Sam didn’t live there anymore, so she would only be trespassing in his shop—his shrine—not in his home.

  Feeling bold, she locked up and walked the waterfront of Turtle Bay, just as she’d done yesterday with Manny in tow. This time she didn’t even approach the front of the shop. Instead, she walked between the main building and the big boat-storage shed, as she and Ted had done years ago. A tall, wooden pole with a four-foot flat deck for an osprey nest, a nest rejected by the birds for years because it no longer had a clear view of the water, still stood there. Partway up the pole, in a chink, was a key to the third-floor attic entrance. The key had to be reached by climbing the outside stairs, which she did.

  Yes. Sam really should have changed some things, taken down the and Son sign, moved this key. He should have admitted Ted’s own decisions had put him in danger’s way and have gone on with his life without hatred and revenge eating at him.

  But as she leaned over the railing to reach for the key, she felt weak kneed. Could she go on without Daria? Admitti
ng she was dead had been hell. And could she break and enter?

  No, she told herself, she wasn’t breaking in at all. She had a key, and it fitted quietly and perfectly in the keyhole. She had to do this.

  The door creaked. Bree froze, but evidently no one heard her. These rooms were quite a climb from the office downstairs, even if Sam’s employee was manning the desk there. She tiptoed in and closed the door behind her. The window slats were slightly open, casting thin bars of light across the floor. She jammed her finger under her nose to keep from sneezing. If Sam wanted to keep this intact, didn’t he ever clean it?

  This was the room that had once been Ted’s, at least for several years after his mother left. Now it was a small museum, a long closed-up tomb. It reminded her of photos she’d seen of King Tut’s tomb, the Egyptian boy king who had so many jumbled relics buried with him to take into the afterlife. Everything here was coated, not with centuries of desert sand, but with years of harbor dust.

  Her wide eyes took in Ted’s bed, desk and a chair with a pair of jeans thrown on it. An unlaced pair of dirty Keds. His catcher’s mitt, tickets to Disney World, some favorite T-shirts tacked to boards—yes, she remembered that one from the Collier County Fair. Two big posters, one of them autographed, of football players from the Miami Dolphins. And everywhere, photos, photos, photos, ones Sam must have added.

  She looked closer. In the early pictures of Ted, someone had been carefully cut out. His mother, of course. Bree hadn’t known her, but she didn’t think much of a woman who would leave her son, even if she did desert Sam Travers.

  Awed, Bree looked further, past an array of Boy Scout badges, a lineup of bowling and Little League trophies. Then, tacked on a bulletin board, she saw some pictures she recalled. Like Sam’s wife, Bree had been cut out of each one. She felt sick to her stomach.

  Bree pressed her hands over her mouth, scratching her cheek with the key she still held in her hand. Did she now hold the key to who had killed Daria, either to make her suffer Daria’s loss or because he thought he was killing Bree? He’d admitted yesterday they looked so much alike. But then why had Sam offered to buy her out? Why had he offered his barge to help search for Daria? It wasn’t that he wanted to be there to see her pain, because he didn’t arrive at the barge the day they had found Daria until they had discovered her body. Some things seemed to fit, but other facts didn’t.

  Ted’s old stereo set was here, with its big boom box speakers. But it remained a boy’s room. There was nothing of his days as a marine, nothing of his death—until she went into the next room, that had once been Sam’s.

  Bree gasped and jerked so hard she hit her knee on a chair. A life-size mannequin was arrayed in full marine gear, Ted’s dress uniform, beret to boots. Its limbs had been bent into a near salute.

  And on the opposite wall, a flag she recalled Ted had brought home with him just before he’d gone to Iraq. Semper Fi, it read, then in Ted’s handwriting under it, Always Faithful.

  Bree sucked in another big breath as she caught sight of something in the dull, dusty mirror behind her. She swung around. It was a picture of her and Daria. Written across Bree’s face, in Sam’s writing, was Never Faithful.

  She started to cry. She couldn’t help it. Sam hated her that much. Whether he felt she had deserted Ted, as his wife had deserted him, didn’t even matter now. He’d been eaten up by revenge.

  Sam had wanted to make Bree suffer, and he’d succeeded. He must have killed her sister, either by design or mistake. There was no reason to search this room for some other kind of proof. The room itself was proof enough. Somehow, she was certain she’d find that one of Sam’s detonator caps had blown a hole in the very heart of Mermaids II—and her own heart. Did he think the bomb would bring him justice for the bomb that had killed Ted?

  But perhaps she could find what sort of detonator caps they used now, then match whatever they found diving to that. Sam used to keep his explosives separate from everything else that was in his big storage room downstairs. There had always been a room on the second floor she and Ted were not to enter, which Ted jokingly called the “boom room.”

  She tiptoed along the tiny attic hall past the bathroom and opened the door to the stairs. She could hear the muted voice of a man but couldn’t tell what he was saying. So Sam’s front office man was here. No problem, because she wasn’t going onto the first floor and if he kept talking, she could tell exactly how distant he was.

  The stairs to the second floor creaked, so she walked down the edges of the cracked plastic treads. But she was only partway down when a voice came much closer than the other. She froze, pressing herself to the shadows on the wall as someone walked below into the very room she’d been going to enter.

  Ric! It was Ric. Why wasn’t he in Sarasota? Had Sam come back, too?

  He was on his cell phone, talking to someone. Thank God he didn’t glance up the flight of stairs when he walked past.

  “Yeah, I’m on-site, getting more blasting caps and primacord. That bridge is one mean bastard, but these babies will work great if I just get them calibrated right.”

  He must be talking to Sam. They hadn’t taken enough demolition material, and Ric had to come back for more.

  “Yeah, a detonator, too, don’t worry.”

  Should she go back upstairs or might he hear her? He was making some noise in there and, of course, his own voice or Sam’s might cover any sound she made. Slowly, carefully, she started to go back up the stairs.

  “Okay, see you later with everything you need. And remember that little raise you promised this time.”

  Sam could be bribing Ric for his silence on Daria’s killing! Or for doing his dirty work, like trying to scare her away from solving Daria’s death. If she testified to what she’d just overheard, would it be admissible in court? Probably not. But none of that mattered. She and Cole would find evidence underwater now, because they knew what to look for in the broken, blasted body of Mermaids II.

  22

  They dove at dusk. Boat traffic in the Marco Pass was lessening, though vessels went by from time to time with their running lights on, coming in from the gulf. The wind was gentle, the waves a light chop.

  They’d walked half a block from where Manny had parked Bree’s truck in a visitors’ spot at a large, beachside condo community. He seemed more nervous than Bree and Cole as he rolled their tanks and gear along in a two-wheeled shopping cart.

  They would each take two battery-run dive lights down with them, tethered lightly to their wrists to be sure they didn’t get dropped or float away in the murky dark. Bree carried the penetration line, which they would lay down as they went in so they could follow it out. A pen line made for slower swimming, but they could surface where Manny was waiting and not make the mistake of ascending in the channel.

  They had all been quiet, but Bree spoke as they neared the concrete seawall. “I still consider Mermaids II my property, and I intend to try to bring up any evidence of explosives we can find, so I’ve brought two lift bags.”

  “You should have called your brother-in-law to check whether that would be tampering with evidence,” Cole said, “especially if we can get the police to open this as a murder case.”

  “And let him know we’re doing this? I’ve had enough of his lectures and taking over things he had no right to control. He should take care of Amelia, not worry about me.”

  “But I can tell Amelia worries about you. She wants the two of you to be closer.”

  “I know. I think we can be, but right now, I’ve got to do this. I used to think that Daria couldn’t rest in peace until I could prove who hurt her, but I’m the one who can’t rest until this is over.”

  “I checked the fill in these tanks two times,” Manny told them, as he helped them gear up. “You should dive at dawn,” he muttered, half to himself. “Not many boats then neither.”

  “By dawn,” Bree told him as she tightened the straps on her weight belt, “I hope to be knocking on the door of the Napl
es Police Department with proof of a murder.”

  They eased into the night-dark water side by side, tethered to each other’s weight belts by a ten-foot rope. That was the only separation they would allow themselves, they had vowed as they’d kissed for good luck. But now there was no more talking, only the sound of bubbles and the hiss of their breathing. They had not even brought slates to write on. Hand signals and a common purpose—and having been here before—that’s what they were relying on.

  Yet as they descended, Bree found the low vis suffocating, as if the solid walls of a coffin were closing in on them. Still, her eyesight was acute; the dive lights worked well, giving them about a four-feet radius of sight, and they both had compass watches to take them approximately to the spot where the dive boat lay. The day they’d stumbled on Daria and Mermaids II, neither of them had thought to take a compass reading.

  This time they located the main body of the ship before the stern, which had been—Bree was sure now—blasted out. How strange it must have been for Ric to see what their explosives had done that day he’d helped to recover Daria’s body. If she’d not been so distraught, Bree could have noted how they reacted. Cole had only spoken to them before the dive, while they were cleaning and loading their spearguns.

  From the dark depths loomed the majority of the sunken boat, as if it were a ghost ship sailing straight toward them. But that was just a trick of the swift current, lit by their lights. They peered into the wheelhouse where they’d found Daria’s body.

  It struck Bree that the glass was still intact. Wouldn’t a blast have shattered the windows? No, Sam or Ric would know to use whatever strength it took to blow a hole in the hull without creating debris that would float in as evidence. More than one person had told her Sam Travis was skilled at sinking an old boat or a bridge and leaving everything else around it amazingly intact.

  Bree heard a boat’s slow motor whisper past in the channel overhead. Her hearing was still sensitive from the lightning strike.