Karen Harper - Below The Surface

“I was wondering if you still remembered the sharks. You must have swum with them. Some followed us into shore in the sloop.”

“I don’t want to think about that,” she said, shaking her head. “At least the only big fish usually around the Trade Wreck is a resident grouper Daria and I named Gertie…”

She sniffed hard. Tears welled up in her eyes again, and she bit her lower lip. He wanted to put his arm around her, but he just held on to the rail tight as Manny turned them in a slow circle and killed the motor.

Bree usually felt at one with the sea and completely relaxed during her dives. But not today. She wore a high-volume mask that had more airspace and side ports so she could see sideways without turning her head. She’d worn this old day-Glo-pink wet suit partly because it had a pocket on both upper thighs for a dive knife. She carried two knives, hoping Cole didn’t find that strange and that Manny would keep quiet about how abnormal it was.

But everything was abnormal. She had the worst feeling something evil was lurking underwater. At least she had Cole along. Though she didn’t like to think of Cole as a bodyguard, she felt much safer near him. It was obvious that Josh and Nikki Austin felt that way with their pilot-PR man-bodyguard, so why shouldn’t she admit the same to herself? In ordinary circumstance, the idea of this compelling, virile man guarding her body would be to die for—damn, why had she thought of it that way?

She’d used a plastic sleeve to cover the bandage over her burn and wore her old dive watch on her right wrist. She’d have to call the hospital to ask where the one Daria gave her went, because it might be the last gift…the last…

She turned back to her preparations. They screwed on their pressure gauges and checked the air fill, then hooked up their regulators and sucked on them. Bree heard the familiar hissing of gas and the click of the valves, but so much louder than usual.

They back-rolled over the boat rail and went under in a rising blur of silver bubbles. When the cloud cleared, Bree looked for Cole and saw he was above her with only his big body visible, as if he had been decapitated. He must have stuck his head out of the water to say something to Manny.

Waiting for him to join her, Bree racked her brain to recall if she had looked up at the surface or even over at the anchor yesterday while she took photos, made measurements and took notes. When had Mermaids II left? If a second hull had loomed above, she would not have seen it in the low vis and increasing turbulence, but she should have heard an unfamiliar motor. Or had she been too rushed, too intent and busy to note sounds? Usually, even the bothersome little wave runners zipping here and there made a distinctive sound, and she was good at differentiating motor reverberations, from buzz to hum to roar, depending on the size of the vessel.

Cole upended and kicked down to join her at fifteen feet for their safety stop. They were diving the anchor line, but didn’t hang on to it, just near it. From watching him come down and reverse his position to stay stationary beside her, she could tell he was a good diver.

They hung suspended, facing each other, kicking slowly in unison, barely moving but nearly touching. There was something intriguing and intimate about being here like this with him, hidden, close, almost motionless, suspended as if they lay side by side. Although the vastness of the sea was her favorite place to be, Cole DeRoca made her feel small. She wanted his protection, but the turbulent sensations he stirred in her made her also feel out of control and she could not afford that, especially not now. Find clues, she told herself. Find clues to find Daria.

Through their masks, they looked below toward the two gray, shadowy, separate sections of the fifty-foot wreck. Yet their gazes returned to hold each other. Bree forced herself out of the deceptively peaceful lull. She nodded and they swam down toward the wreck with her leading.

The supply boat, named the Charlotte G. Loher but referred to by most local divers as the Trade Wreck, had sailed out of Tampa bound for Key West with cattle in the pre-highway days of southwest Florida. Caught in a hurricane, it had broken into two sections. The stern had settled on its hull, but the midship and the prow lay on its port side. With several entrances into the interior of the ship, it had long been an attraction for divers, though it was labeled a hazard dive now for its rusted, jagged edges and unstable structure. The twins had a theory that the increasing pollution in the gulf had accelerated the disintegration of its wood and metal. One of the wreck’s bizarre attractions was that occasionally, even now, the skull of a steer would float loose from the innards of the ship to gape eyeless out a porthole in the hull or emerge from the dark entry to a mazelike corridor. The twins had never taken one for a dive trophy, but they knew more than one bar or family room that boasted a skull from the Trade Wreck. Bree realized, too late, that she had forgotten to mention that to Cole.

As the wreck loomed closer in the shifting soup of the sea, they clicked on their lights. Bree startled. She was used to things looking twenty-five per cent larger underwater, but she hadn’t been prepared for the increased brightness even here. Perhaps her heightened perceptivity of sound and light could be a blessing. The backscatter of tiny, drifting marine organisms stood out brilliantly. Their slow, swirling movement made her dizzy, but she shook that off. Anyway, this close to possible answers, she was not turning back.

A three-foot sea turtle swimming above the debris eyed them, then glided away. When they swam over and hovered above the sparse sea grass meadow, tiny, spidery arrow crabs with fuzzy topknots seemed to stare at them, but they saw no Gertie the grouper and no camera snagged anywhere here or on the sand flats.

Bree noted that the storm had pulled a few strands of grass loose. Of the fifty-two species of marine sea grass worldwide, only about four of those were widespread in Florida. Her precious turtle grass—fancy biological name Thalassia testudinum—was the most hardy, with its deep root system and sturdy runners from which grew blades of graceful, bright green grass. Most of the sea grass meadow stood about fourteen inches tall and shifted its gentle, ribbonlike blades in harmony with the currents. It should love the relatively shallow waters here but, as she’d told Cole, it was struggling to survive here—just as she was, she thought.

But she had no time for her beloved project right now. They swam back toward the wreck, playing their yellow beams ahead of them. Sometimes Cole’s shaft of light seemed to dance with hers. If only her camera had caught here on the exterior of the ship, and if only it had captured some clue to what happened on the surface.

Bree motioned to Cole, and they swam the area around the wreck in broadening circles, searching for the camera and the anchor. Cole was not letting her out of his sight. When she motioned he could go one way and she the other, he shook his head and swam right on her tail.

And then they saw something. Both their beams shone dully off the links of a chain, which they followed to the half-buried anchor itself. Yes, their new anchor and chain! It was at least thirty feet from the position of the anchor and rope from their smaller skiff today. When Cole held his hands up in a questioning gesture as if to ask her if that was her anchor, she nodded, but her heart sank.

Daria never would have thrown the entire chain overboard, not unless something terrible—more than an approaching storm—had made her flee fast. Or had someone else thrown it over? And if that someone had wanted the Mermaids II, would they have also thrown Daria overboard?