Lydia Millet - Mermaids in Paradise - A Novel

“Maybe I was just the first,” I said. “I was the only one alone, anyway.”

“Phase one?” said Steve.

“Well, you were a sitting duck, going off by yourself like that,” nodded Rick.

“Blaming the victim!” said Janeane.

“So we have to stay in groups from now on,” I said. “I guess that’s the lesson here. No solo travelers.”

“Right,” said Rick. “I wonder what the situation is, litigation-wise. The parent company’s U.S.-based, you know. You should be able to sue these guys.”

“Instead we’re paying them ,” I said. “I paid these people good money to stay here, and they go ahead and kidnap me.”

I found I could make light of the abduction, now that it was over.

We busied ourselves getting the tech set up — or at least Rick and Miyoko did, while Steve and Janeane and I offered moral support. Miyoko had brought her laptop in; she charged me with finding open-source video of the island that we could use. That was more up my alley than the AV end, so I set myself to the task.

It was almost dusk by the time Chip and Ronnie showed up — Chip and Ronnie, but no Thompson. They looked sub-bleached and waterlogged, with salt crusted on their skin and in their hair. When Chip and I were done with our reunion — not tearful, but a tad private, so we withdrew to the bedroom for a few minutes — he told me Thompson had stowed away. After they’d done some homework to identify the armada’s flagship yacht, and Thompson had equipped himself with a duffel bag of night-diving gear brought up from his condo down the beach, Thompson had snuck aboard the flagship while Chip and Ronnie created a diversion.

“What kind of diversion?” I asked.

“You’re going to be pissed at me.”

“What? Why ?”

“So it probably wasn’t the best alternative. But we didn’t have many choices, was how we saw it. How Thompson saw it, anyway. With the time pressure and all.”

“Chip. Oh no. Chip! Did you guys. . blow up something?”

“It was just small, though, Deb. Just minor. Believe me.”

“Chip! You could have blown your arm off! Or someone else’s! You could have gotten arrested by Homeland Security! You still could! Jesus, Chip!”

“We’re not at home, though, is one positive. I don’t think they have DHS agents here.”

“Chip! Explosives? Who knows what file your little prank could end up in? You think I want to be married to some kind of PATRIOT Act jailbird? Seriously!”

“It was a broken-down part of the dock that was already wrecked, a couple of pilings off in the ocean there, not holding up anything at all. Just a small explosion. Deb, it was just a minor dynamiting. Hell, construction crews do way bigger things all the time. It wasn’t even that loud.”

He sounded a little disappointed, frankly.

“You’re missing my point completely.”

I’d been spot-on, I was thinking, to worry about Thompson’s powerful influence on Chip. Show Chip an ex-Navy father figure with a bomb, I’ll show you a bomb-exploding Chip. We were lucky it hadn’t gone terribly wrong, that no one had been injured. There’d be some serious work to do, when we got home, I told myself, on my better half’s daddy issues. Chip needed a personal Freudian.

“But it worked, Deb. It worked like a charm. They got so freaked out, running around and panicking, that they weren’t even watching when Thompson boarded her. Not a single one of them. Then they saw it wasn’t even anything and it all went back to business. No cops even showed up. None at all, Deb, not a single one! Mission completely accomplished.”

“Was this before or after I called you all kidnapped?”

“Deb. How can you even ask that?” Chip looked pained. “It was after you escaped . Of course.”

“Chip. I know you look up to Thompson, although, as far as I can tell, he’s a certified, wing-nut paramilitary freak. But from now on, acts of terrorism and violence are family decisions. OK, Chip?”

“Fair enough, honey,” said Chip. “I promise, though, there were no people anywhere near.”

“A boat could have passed,” I said. “Anything, Chip. Once the bombing starts, all safety bets are off. Look. I don’t want to argue about it now. But promise me.”

“Done,” said Chip, overwhelmingly relieved. “Done and done.”

“Thompson didn’t take more explosives with him, did he? That wasn’t part of his little kit?”

“No, no,” said Chip hastily. “None at all. The next phase is the robbery, that’s all. He’s just going to get the tape. And then he’ll swim back, in the dark, in his diving gear.”

“He must be a very strong swimmer. Those boats are pretty far out.”

“He’s super strong,” said Chip. “He once competed. Distance.”

“How about guns, Chip? Did he take a weapon with him?”

“Of course not. Guns can’t get wet , Deb.”

“He’s doing the robbing before he’s doing the diving, right? I could see that guy sacrificing a gun. If he got a chance to wave it around first. Plus which — you ever hear of dry bags , Chip? Maybe he just took a gun in a dry bag. I mean surely he took his cell with him, right, to communicate with you? That’s got to be in a dry bag. Maybe, while he was packing it, he also stuck in a gun.”

I didn’t put it past Thompson to go rogue. With the so-called minor dynamiting , he already pretty much had.

“But Thompson’s not a criminal . He used to be a Navy SEAL! He fought for our nation, Deb! Or dove, at least. He dove for our great nation.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, unconvinced.

Finally we hashed it out, as much as we could without a therapy session, and emerged into the main room, where the others were running an equipment test. We wouldn’t use it till morning — that was the plan, at least — when we’d likely be broadcasting from the beach.

“Pretty soon now the first boats are due back,” said Chip, checking his phone. “The flagship’s staying out there, from what we overheard, staying out tonight watching the nets, which will have been set by now. But a lot of the smaller boats are coming back in. We’ve got a man on the inside, Deb, did I tell you?”

Turned out they’d bribed the Fox News spearfisher, the one who’d rummaged in my tampon box. He claimed to be acting as a double agent, undercover in the armada. He had no allegiance to the parent company, much as he’d had no allegiance to Nancy or to Chip and me, but for a hundred bucks he’d agreed to tell Chip everything he’d seen, out there on the sparkling waves. And possibly beneath them. He’d promised to make his first report in the evening; Chip had an assignation with him behind the restaurant-bar where the other turncoats would be helping themselves to free libations.

I found myself wishing we were doing some sleuthing, that we had the manpower and the chops to figure out exactly what had led to Nancy’s untimely death. I discovered it was nagging at me, the unresolved question of whether our scientist had died through simple misadventure or someone’s evil intent. It nagged at me. It really did.

But for now, at least, the murder mystery remained unsolved. We had to fortify ourselves, sooner or later, and that was what we did; at a certain point I realized my brush with kidnapping had left me hungry. When dinnertime came we ate Janeane’s vegan fare, we drank, and periodically Chip received cryptic email bulletins from Thompson, whose cell phone was apparently hooking into the yacht’s WiFi. He was hiding in a closet full of mops, pine oil, and bags of scented kitty litter. Whoever the yacht belonged to liked to keep cats aboard, but Thompson hated cats, claiming their shit could make you schizophrenic. (Chip showed me his email: Cats> civilization> toxoplasmosis> people schiz out OR their brains swell/burst .) The smell of the scented kitty litter was making him, as he wrote Chip, “want to upchuck.”