Karen Harper - Below The Surface

She’d found him shockingly handsome in a rugged way. His deep voice had seemed to vibrate into the very core of her being. When she was working, Bree usually gave little thought to clothes, hair or makeup, but she’d wished that day she’d done better than an old, tight wet suit and saltwater-soaked hair yanked back in a ponytail. Cole had worn faded jeans and a black, sawdust-speckled T-shirt but still managed to look like an ad for owning a yacht, not working on one. His angular, hard body was sun-bronzed; he made her perpetual tan look pale. When he smiled or laughed, he got a cheek dimple and narrowed his dark eyes under thick but sleek eyebrows. Even as he’d chatted amiably, he’d managed to look her over thoroughly and she could still feel the impact of that down to her toes. If she could recall all that and Cole’s initial impact on her, didn’t that prove her head and body were still working well?

Other details of their brief time together came cascading back. He’d said he worked alone, measuring, ordering, cutting and fitting the imported woods. He loved being hands-on, he’d told her with a devilish grin. He’d told her his wife hadn’t wanted him to work with his hands and had a fit at a party when he called himself a carpenter instead of a yacht interior designer. And he’d said he was getting divorced, didn’t he?

“I already talked to Manny at your shop,” Amelia was saying, “but I had some trouble understanding him. He has a really thick accent. No wonder you took all those Spanish classes. You and your Hispanics.”

“If you’re including Cole, his grandfather was a boatbuilder from Portugal,” Bree told her as even more images and snatches of their conversation came back to her from that hour they’d spent together months ago. Yes, she was remembering him so distinctly that there was no way her brain could have been short-circuited by a lightning strike. But why hadn’t she placed him instantly when she saw him yesterday?

Granted, she was perceiving light and sound more strongly than was normal, but surely she could handle that. She didn’t intend to share those concerns or her erratic memory with anyone right now, because she had to get out of here and help look for Daria. She needed to speak to the coast guard and the civil air patrol in person. She had a friend who flew for the volunteer patrol, and she wanted to call him. She had some ideas about where to look for the Mermaids II. But what terrified her was that some of those sites were underwater.

After being taken—in a wheelchair, no less—for a battery of neurocognitive tests early the next morning, Bree lay back in her hospital bed, her eyes closed, even more exhausted. The specialist was to be in soon with the results.

“Your knight in shining sailboat brought you this,” Amelia told her, “but they didn’t let him get farther than the nurses’ station on this floor—family only now, especially since there are reporters downstairs who would swarm you.” Bree turned her head to see a beautiful, orange-hued orchid plant. Tears filled her eyes at Cole’s kindness. In the midst of dreadful memories of storm and sharks and the fear of loss, the blooms looked like small, hovering butterflies. Hope—they reminded her of hope. And the plant was in a stunning, striped, dark and light box, made of a kind of wood she’d never seen.

“He’s divorced now, you know, and quite a catch, if you ask me,” Amelia said, smoothing the bedsheets as if she’d remake the bed with Bree in it.

“I’m not looking for a man, but for Daria!”

“Of course—I know. It’s just you haven’t had anyone serious since Ted. Since before Ted died, even. Darn, sorry to have brought that up.”

“It’s all right,” Bree told her, though she would have liked to bandage Amelia’s mouth shut before she stuck her foot in it again. “Just don’t ever bring him up around Sam Travers, because he still blames me for his Ted’s enlisting and his death.”

“As if I’d ever be around Sam Travers,” Amelia muttered, perching on the chair next to the bed. “And how ridiculous to hold it over you just because you broke up with his son and he enlisted and died. But then, people do hold grudges for years when someone or something dear is lost. I can sympathize with that.”

Summoning up what little strength she had, Bree worked the controls to elevate the back of the bed, then got the TV remote from the bedside table. Talking about loss or death right now was the last thing she could bear. As ever, despite how kind Amelia was trying to be, she was getting on Bree’s nerves.

Bree switched on the TV, which sat high on a narrow, suspended shelf across from the foot of her bed. It was almost noon, and the local stations always covered search-and-rescue efforts in the gulf. Search and salvage. If only she could go search for her sister and salvage her from any possible harm right now.

The TV came on with a political commercial, the kind everyone was sick of already, and the election was still almost two months away. This one was for Marla Sherborne, the incumbent, conservative U.S. congresswoman who was adamantly antigambling. The ad, like most of hers, warned against the dangers of letting casino boats into the area, because it would open the doors to “unbridled outside control of huge amounts of dirty money.” A wealthy Miami businessman named Dom Verdugo was trying to bring a casino boat into Turtle Bay, but it hadn’t been approved yet and everyone was arguing about it. A gambling boat would bring more business to local restaurants and shops, but hordes of outsiders could run up property prices and ruin the already endangered old Florida ambience, not to mention create more abuse of the gulf itself. The visuals on this ad even tried to tie the casino boat to water pollution that had endangered marine and plant life below the glittering gulf.

Ironically, there was a tenuous—and doubly tension-filled—relationship between Marla and her opposing candidate in the U.S. senate race, Josh Austin. The scuttlebutt was that Josh Austin’s wealthy sugarcane-baron father-in-law, a longtime widower, was having an affair with Marla. If anything came of the relationship, Josh could be trying to unseat his step-mother-in-law.

See, Bree tried to encourage herself, her brain was working great, filled with names and details from days, weeks, months—years ago. So why couldn’t she summon up much of what happened during her own rescue by Cole? Could they be giving her that sedative already? She had to remember everything to help find Daria.

“The commission doesn’t completely trust Marla Sherborne’s claims of being so gung ho about the environment,” Amelia put in, pointing at the TV. “Not since everyone says she’s literally in bed with that sugarcane baron, Cory Grann, and the fertilizer run-off from their fields is such a problem.”

There was a quick knock on the open door followed by a voice Bree recognized instantly, though he still stood out in the hall. “Do I hear my father-in-law’s name being taken in vain?” a jaunty voice asked. “They’re not letting even the press in to see you, but I pulled a few strings.”

“Josh!” Bree cried as he popped his head around the door and came in. She was so glad to see their old friend. A politician one could trust, Josh Austin had the ways and means to solve any problem. She felt better already.

“I hope you didn’t hear what we think of all these ads, because yours will probably be on next,” Amelia told him. Both sisters knew Josh from years back, when he had dated Daria. Even when Daria and Josh had split up—definitely Josh’s decision—all three sisters had wished him well, though they had seldom seen him in person over the years since. But all the locals were proud of Josh Austin.