Книга - Below The Surface

Below The Surface
Karen Harper


Mills & Boon M&B






Karen Harper

Below the Surface










Contents


Acknowledgment

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25




Acknowledgment


Thanks to my great MIRA Books team.

I value your expertise and support:

Miranda Stecyk

Margaret O’Neill Marbury

Dianne Moggy

Donna Hayes

Craig Swinwood

Katherine Orr, Marleah Stout

and their great staff,

including Maureen Stead

and especially all the dynamic MIRA Books

sales staff!

And, as ever, to my greatest supporter, Don.




1


The Gulf of Mexico off South Florida

September 12, 2006

When Briana Devon surfaced, her boat was gone. Something—besides the fact that the gulf had gone rough since she’d begun her dive—was terribly wrong.

She struggled to keep her underwater camera and strobe from being ripped away by the waves. Her tethered plastic slate with its latex rubber pencil she used to make notes underwater smacked her face; she thrust it behind her.

She kept the regulator in her mouth, clenched between her teeth. Still sucking in the air from her tank, she heard the hiss of her more rapid breathing mingled with the howl of the increasing wind. Since she was fairly low on air, her single tank yanked back and forth on her BC, the vest-style buoyancy compensator that supported her in the water.

This was impossible! Had she come up in the wrong place? No, the pelican float she’d deployed bobbed wildly, riding the waves. She was where she meant to be, but where was Daria and their dive boat? And how fast the distant storm had come up.

Holding on to her gear and using her flippers, she spun in a circle. Maybe the Mermaids II was just blurred by the darkening horizon. No, all she saw were clumps of clouds, not even other boats, with that storm coming in much faster than the weather-man had predicted. But Daria would never have left her out here.

Despite being a veteran diver, panic pulsed through Briana for herself and her sister. Bree and Daria Devon were not only twin sisters but had been best friends since they could remember.

Bree put more air in her BC to keep afloat and fought to calm herself. After all, she’d been diving for twenty of her twenty-eight years and swimming these waters even longer. Every week, she and Daria dived the artificial reef made by the wreck of an old trading boat to check on the growth of pollutant-endangered sea grass and marine life. The grass was a bellwether for the health of the gulf waters in general. It had all been routine until now.

Bree had not noticed whether the anchor had been pulled up. She’d only been intent on doing her work well and quickly. Just take the photos, make the notes, get proof. The results were bad news that was going to upset a lot of powerful people. She’d only come up early because visibility was lessening, and that meant the waves were kicking up. But she’d never imagined this churning, gray sea and gathering storm.

The twins had always buddy-dived unless they were just scraping barnacles off hulls at the marina, but there were two reasons Daria hadn’t made the dive with her today. She’d suddenly developed a bad toothache, which would have made the underwater pressure excruciating for her. And someone had to stay with their dive boat: Daria had given Manny, their only employee at their search-and-salvage shop, the afternoon off since he’d been having so much trouble with his daughter. Actually, Daria hadn’t been diving much this past month anyway, since she’d been so busy concentrating on her accounting class.

Bree’s arms ached from trying to hang on to her camera and strobe in the increasing turbulence. She had never feared this vast stretch of water, only respected it, but now terror immobilized her. Alone. Abandoned? She should probably start swimming in, but she was over four miles out and she’d have to ditch her precious gear. She should have taken it as a bad sign when she saw that bull shark cruising past the reef instead of the usual resident grouper. Bulls became disturbed whenever the water was riled, and they were known to attack humans. How many times had she warned someone not to swim alone or far from shore, and to avoid splashing?

Bree had a whistle to summon help, but there was no one in range to hear it. She could set off her strobe to try to attract attention, but holding it above the waves would wear her out. Reluctantly she let her strobe lights and camera drop, hoping they would snag somewhere near the wreck and she—they—could retrieve them later. The camera was worth big bucks; they’d scraped a lot of barnacles off yachts to buy it.

The twins’ co-owned marine search-and-salvage shop had been struggling, but things were on the upswing lately. They did everything from underwater surveys to hull maintenance to retrieval of lost items or sunken vessels. It could be dirty, hard, even dangerous work, but they both loved it. They knew what was below the surface of the gulf off southwest Florida almost as well as they knew each other.

It had been a surprise and a thrill when the prestigious Clear the Gulf Commission had hired them—not their larger rival across the bay—to record the difficult comeback of off-the-coast marine life under siege from toxic runoff. The whole local ecosystem was being poisoned by fertilizers from sugarcane fields, golf course fairways, and polluted water releases from just too many people.

To save her strength, Bree decided to dive again and get as far as she could underwater before she’d have to ditch her tanks and weight belt to swim in. Though she saw no watercraft, perhaps one would be heading for safe harbor and she could hail it. She upended and kicked down until the turbulence seemed to lessen.

The Gulf of Mexico, off Naples, Marco Island and Turtle Bay, was a shallow body of water, at least compared to the Atlantic. The bottom was fairly flat for a long way out: after an initial drop-off, it deepened about two feet per mile and was broken only by small ledges and man-made reefs. But because the depth was fairly shallow, the gulf could get violent fast. It was the underwater storm of sand and silt that had tipped her off to the one above. Though she did a lot of close-up, well-lit macrophotography, even that was looking grainy today.

Most people—especially tourist divers from “the frozen North,” as their dive friends called it—thought the water off Naples was not great dive territory. But the twins had always loved it more than the glamour spots of the Keys or even the Caribbean. Fifteen feet of visibility in this part of the world was a great disappointment to some, but in the summers, the sea often went flat and turbulence was minimal. This part of the gulf was not crowded with divers, so it seemed pristine, with an abundance of wildlife like grouper, tarpon, rays, sea turtles, beautiful shells and, unfortunately at times, sharks. They also loved the gulf because that’s where they’d learned to dive. It seemed so untouched, with the exception of the fact the reefs were man-made. But then, the natural coral reefs on the other coast were as endangered as the sea life would soon be here, if their project didn’t help turn things around.

As she swam toward shore, roiling sand and silt and the thickening clouds made it too dark for her to be certain in what direction she was heading. Mostly, she went with the surge of the waves, which should take her in. Unfortunately, the tide was flowing out and the wind was fighting that, churning the water into a soupy maelstrom. She couldn’t even read the luminous dial of the compass dive watch Daria had given her for their birthday last month. Daria and the boat…She could not imagine what might have happened, why her sister would desert her during a dive.

Surely nothing could have capsized Mermaids II, not a twenty-four-foot skiff with a flat bottom. There was no so-called Bermuda Triangle on this side of Florida. Yacht pirates and drug dealers wouldn’t want a slow diver’s boat. Smugglers had begun to bring in desperate refugees fleeing Cuba, and boats involved in the horrible human trafficking trade imported poverty-stricken Guatemalan women as domestic drudges or even sex slaves on both sides of the state. But those boats sneaked in at night to avoid being spotted or caught. Even if Daria had become ill, she wouldn’t leave her. Nothing made sense.

In the murky water Bree could not read her air-pressure gauge, but she could feel the air through her mouthpiece becoming more difficult to breathe. Realizing her air was quickly running out, she surfaced. The waves were four feet now; she rode them up, down, sliding with their strength. It had started to rain. Which way was the shore?

She accidentally took in a mouthful of water, then spit it out. Swallowing salt water always made her nauseous. She was getting sick to her stomach anyway, furious and fearful. Dad had always said never to let your emotions rule your head, not when diving. In a way, after Mother died, that had become his credo for life. Just keep busy, so busy you don’t have time for feelings, suffocating, desperate, drowning feelings…

Bree dropped her weight belt, ditched her tank with the quick-release straps and began breathing through her snorkel. The tank went under with a loud gurgle. She felt lighter—better, she tried to buck herself up. She could make it in. Keewadin Island, long and narrow, must be ahead somewhere, maybe three miles or so. Thank God, she hadn’t been at some of the more distant dive sites like Black Hole Sink or Naples Ledges, which were around thirty miles out.

She tried to convince herself that this was only the usual, quick afternoon summer storm, which would pepper the gulf, bathe the Everglades, then depart to leave a warm, humid evening. When would this summer weather break? Was she going to break?

Bree tried not to swallow water. Swimming was suddenly exhausting; despite her desperation to get ashore, she had to pace herself more. She slowed her strokes and kicks toward what she was certain must be land.

Stroke, stroke, stroke, breathe. Despite the outgoing tide, she was certain the waves must be pushing her along. But it was so far in. Hard to get good breaths. And then she heard it, the thing she feared most.

Thunder rumbling, coming. And that meant lightning.

Oh, no. Oh, no. Just last week, she had sat on their veranda at Turtle Bay and watched a storm like this. Forks of lightning had stabbed the gulf and then the bay just beyond the docks, coming closer, closer. As usual, the power had gone off for a while, but the twins weren’t air-conditioner addicts like their older sister. Amelia almost never opened her windows, even in good weather. That would make her house dusty. Her poor kids, whom she kept so clean, could use a little dust and dirt.

Bree’s muscles began to burn. She could hear Dad’s voice telling her and Daria, “When in doubt, get out.” Out, she wanted out. She wanted to be on the Mermaids II with Daria. She wanted to be home, safe and dry. She loved the water, loved the gulf, but not out here alone, tiring, so exhausted. Lord, please keep me safe. Daria, too. What happened? Daria, where are you?

A wave took one of her fins, and she had to kick the other off to avoid swimming askew. On, on, pull, pull, breathe, flee the thunder and lightning coming closer. She was starting to feel in the zone, like when she jogged several miles, but she was getting light-headed, dizzy, too.

The first distinct crack of lightning struck so close she flinched and shrieked into the mouthpiece of her snorkel. And then she saw another reason to scream. A big bull shark was swimming with her.



Cole DeRoca was shocked by how fast the storm came up. Usually, you could set your watch by the afternoon storms off the gulf, but this one was early, fierce and dangerous. Though his custom-made sloop was all wood, he wasn’t about to have his single mast be the tallest thing in the area. After all, Streamin’ had copper and brass fittings, and sailors knew lightning could be erratic and deadly.

It would be crazy to try to make it back to the mainland. He’d have to beach the sloop on Keewadin Island and hope he could get her off the sand later. The wind was a good twenty-five knots, whistling shrilly in the rigging. Ordinarily, he’d love racing at this speed, but he needed dry land fast.

To his amazement, the boat nearly heeled over on her side and started south. He felt shoved, grasped in a giant’s grip. A riptide? Yes, a narrow but deadly one along here, caused by the battle of the waves and wind.

He went with the flow for a little ways, like they tell you to do when swimming, then fought it to head back north, tacking back and forth. Finally, the long, beige beach of the barrier island of Keewadin appeared through the slate-gray of slanted rain. Cole retracted the centerboard as the sloop neared the shore. With good speed from the driving waves, he released the main and jib sheets, but they began flogging wildly. His primary thought was to save himself and the boat at the likely sacrifice of his nearly new sails.

As he approached the shore, he tripped the jamb cleats to release the halyards and began tugging at the thrashing sails until they both dropped to the deck, finally free from the force of the wind. He felt a wave thrust the bow of Streamin’ up, then down, as she slammed onto the beach with a thud. Waves pounded the aft of the stranded vessel.

At least it wasn’t a deadly riptide this time, just the sweep of surf. He jumped into foaming, waist-deep water and struggled to turn her prow in and get her higher on the shore. Thunder rumbled and lightning crackled. Get out of the water, he told himself. Get out now.

Cole loved this boat he’d made with his father, the only one he’d helped him build before everything went wrong. Though he was thirty-four now and had been out on his own since he was twenty, sailing still made him feel closer to his dad. Their family tree boasted five generations of boatbuilders, beginning in Portugal, then the Bahamas, onward to Key West, then Sarasota and Naples. Bahamian sloops like this one had once been used throughout the tropics, but now they were like an endangered species. He often dreamed of ditching his luxury yacht interior trade and take a chance on his own boatbuilding. He’d love to build boats like this one again. America had a throwaway culture, but these babies were built to last, even in a storm, though he’d never seen one as quickly fierce as this.

He tried to set the soles of his running shoes firmly in shifting sand. Both hands on the stern, he shoved. Streamin’ slid her sleek length farther up on the beach. Keeping low, holding the metal anchor by its rope so he didn’t have to touch it, he secured the sloop. Then, his shoes filled with water and sand, he slogged behind the line of mangroves and hunched over, crouched on the balls of his feet. He knew not to lie flat, where you’d have more of your body in contact with the ground if it was hit. Thank God, he’d made it safely out of the gulf, because this was one hell of a howler.



Bree wanted to just close her eyes and give up. A countercurrent swept through here, maybe a riptide that would carry her away. Despite her silent fear of her toothy companion, she swam on. She could stop moving to see if the shark would go away and to save her strength, but what if she got pushed farther out? What if lightning…or that shark…

A fierce, elemental terror flooded her; she wanted to scream and scream.

But then—dear Lord in heaven, was she seeing double? No, there were two of them, two big gray bodies with white underbellies, the dorsal fins knife-edged. The newest bull shark was at least seven feet long, his small, flat eyes staring at her each time he came near the surface. She stopped swimming. Should she just hang still in the water and let herself be taken out to sea? Bulls were aggressive and commotion bothered them. Maybe the rough water would keep their attention off her.

Was this a sheer, stark nightmare? If lightning or the sharks hit her, they might never even find her body. Had Daria been caught by these devouring depths, too?

Bree let the current take her for what seemed an eternity, then, when its powerful pull seemed to ease, swam on toward shore again—sharks still alongside. Each time she kicked, each time she pulled her arms through the water or even turned her head to breathe, she feared the jaws of her companions, feared being fried by another lightning strike so close.

A blast of something hit her hard, jerked her through the next wave. The riptide again? Shark? Jaws of a lightning bolt? She spit out the mouthpiece of her snorkel and screamed.

Bloodred colors exploded before her eyes, in her head. Something huge lunged at her. Then came only blackness.




2


Cole was soaked to his skin. The wind lashed him, and rain stung his shoulders and back through his sopped shirt. The narrow key seemed to shudder with each roll of thunder. Yet, through it all, he thought he’d heard a shriek.

He lifted his head. It wasn’t just the shrill of wind through the boat’s rigging. Something almost human…

Squinting into the rain, he peered around the thick patch of mangroves to check on his sloop. Though Streamin’ had listed from the pounding of the surf, she looked all right. But something was sprawled on the beach beside the hull, as if there had been an accident and the prow had hit someone.

Still keeping low, he went to see what had come in. His breath huffed out as if he’d been hit in the gut; his heart pounded even harder. A woman—it looked like a drowned mermaid!

No, no, of course not, he told himself as he bent over the sprawled figure. The short-sleeved, full-length, silvery-green wet suit clung to her curves so tightly it looked painted on. It was designed with a fin-and-scale pattern to look as if she had a tail. Long legs, that was all. Her shoulder-length, auburn hair clung to her head. Her graceful, limp arms were in a ballerina pose, as if she would dance. Was she dead?

Afraid to roll her face up—instinct in case she had spine or head injuries from hitting his boat—he felt for the pulse at the base of her throat. She felt cold and, despite her tan, her cheek and chin looked pale and waxy, almost as if she were a life-size doll. She had a faint pulse, but she was so still he wasn’t certain she was breathing. Carefully, he turned her over, faceup.

She had marks on her face from a diving mask, but he knew this woman! Or else he knew her sister. She was one of the twins who owned the Two Mermaids Marine Search and Salvage Shop in Turtle Bay, not far from his own business. He’d had an impromptu lunch with one of them—Briana—the day she’d been scraping the hull of the Richardson yacht when he was paneling the salon with Santos mahogany. He’d been going through the divorce then and was only dating his sloop, or he would have called her. Thank God, she was alive, but she might not be soon if she didn’t take a breath.

Ignoring the slashing rain and continued threat of lightning, he pulled her carefully up out of the slosh of the surf. Hunched over her, just beyond the breaking waves, he started mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He hadn’t done that on anyone since he’d tried to save his father when he’d found him on the floor, and that was too late. What had happened to this woman? Surely she hadn’t been swimming in the storm.

She seemed slender and small, but he knew she was a vital, strong woman. Come on, baby. Come on back. Breathe for me. Let my lips warm yours, sweetheart. Come on, come on.

It had amused him, then impressed him, that two women would run such a rough-and-tumble business, especially when their competition across the bay was a gruff, tough guy who pretty much had a monopoly on search and salvage in the area. The women mostly did light salvage, none of the heavy stuff with dredging and demolition like Sam Travers, but search and salvage was always a risky business.

Come on, baby, I know you’re spunky. Take my breath. Come on, you beautiful little mermaid!

He started to panic, his sweat mingling with the rain, even in the cool rush of wind. After what seemed an eternity, her mouth moved against his. He stopped and looked down into her face, glazed by rain and gulf water. Her thick eyelashes, plastered to her ashen cheeks, flickered. She frowned and moaned.

“Hey, mermaid!” he said, feeling like a fool, but he couldn’t remember her last name and wasn’t sure which twin this was. Still, he used the name he knew, one he’d remembered for months now because it had seemed to suit her. It had reminded him of the word brio, for her enthusiasm and verve that time they’d talked and eaten together. He’d felt an instant attraction to her, a surge of desire that he’d tried to control by being overly polite and teasing that day. “Briana?” he said, his voice shaking. “Briana!”

She slitted her eyes open. “Daria?” she said, and started to cough up water.

He rolled her over slightly and braced her with one arm around her. One hand held her forehead steady like his mother used to do for him years ago when he threw up. It wasn’t until he saw the burn marks on her limp left wrist, like a big bracelet around her dive watch, that he realized she might have been hit by lightning. He laid her back down on the sand, leaning over her, trying to keep the rain and wind off her with his body.

“Where’s Daria?” he asked. “What happened?”

No answer. He gasped when he saw her eyes were dilated, the huge, black pupils eating up the gray-green of the irises, the color of the sea. He had to get her medical help—now. He couldn’t wait for the storm to end. But there was no way to get an EMS vehicle out here, and a medical chopper couldn’t fly in this mess. He could get on his radio and Mayday the coast guard, but it would take them time to get out here and he could have her into Naples by then—if all went well.

He had to hurry. His mermaid had evidently fainted or gone comatose at his feet.

He put his hand on her chest to be sure she was still breathing. Yes, shallow but steady. Though he hated to take the chance with the sloop, he had to risk sailing in with her right now. At least in an all-wooden boat—if he could get it off the beach—they might be able to escape the lightning. It would be rough going, but he had to try.

Praying she had no broken bones or internal injuries, he lifted her into the sloop and gently lashed her down. He stripped off his polo shirt and, though it was soaked, too, laid it over her upper torso. One of his customers had been hit by lightning on a golf course, and his doctor had told him that fast medical help had saved him from severe complications. He could not bear it if this beautiful, bold woman were permanently hurt. That old adage about being responsible for someone if you saved their life hit him hard, but he hadn’t saved her yet.

Straining every muscle in his body to get some lift for Streamin’, Cole tried to time pushing the sloop off the sand with the roll of the surf, but the power of the waves and wind beat it back. Waves could easily swamp or capsize a boat leaving a beach. His fourteen-foot sloop, which he knew more intimately than he knew any woman right now, fought him hard.

But he saw the wind had clocked around to the north. He could use the power of the sails to propel the sloop off the beach. In a hand-over-hand effort, he pulled the main halyard until the sail had reached the top of the mast. Then with a grunting, grinding heave, Cole pushed the bow of the boat off the beach toward the pounding surf. As the little sloop swung her bow through the wind, the sails filled, and she moved into deeper water. He pulled himself into the cockpit and grabbed the tiller in one hand while securing the mainsheet with the other. As he lowered the centerboard, the sloop began to feel her sea legs. She quickly picked up speed on a beam reach and cut through the water like a race car.

But it was brutal sailing. He had to step over his mermaid when he played the mainsheet and sit outboard to balance the heavy heeling. He feared a broach roll and had to adjust the tiller constantly. Every time the boat heeled, water sloshed over the side to soak Briana. She came to again, shoved her head and shoulder up by one elbow and screamed, “Sharks! Daria, sharks!”

“Lie down!” Cole shouted. “Down or the boom will get you when we tack. You’re with me, you’re all right. Lie down! There are no sharks. I won’t let them get you or Daria!”

That seemed to calm her, and that trust clenched at his heart. He had to get her to safety, see that she was taken care of. She was out of her head, and his friend had said amnesia and brain damage could be some of the aftereffects of a lightning strike. If he could just let go of the tiller and sit still a second in this raging chaos, he could call for help, have someone meet him at the marina with a squad for her. But he couldn’t tell where he was. To the pier yet? He didn’t want to hit the pier.

As for the sharks, she could not possibly have seen them just now, but she was dead on: he glanced ahead and saw several bull sharks racing right with them, just like the ones in the picture in his office. The Winslow Homer painting called The Gulf Stream was the reason he’d named his company Gulf Stream Yacht Interiors, the reason he’d named this sloop Streamin’. But these sharks almost bumping the boat were no work of art—this race was life and death for real.




3


“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is the sloop Streamin’!”

Cole never took his cell phone out sailing with him since he kept a two-way radio on board. More than once, he’d lost his cell in the gulf or gotten it soaked. His handheld radio was waterproof, and he managed it one-handed. Finally, someone answered his call for help.

“Streamin’, Streamin’, this is the U.S. Coast Guard Station, Naples Harbor. I read you, sloop Streamin’. Say your location. Over.”

“U.S. Coast Guard, this is the sloop Streamin’. This is Cole DeRoca sailing solo out of Turtle Bay. I put in on Keewadin during the storm, but I’m heading for Naples—Port Royal, I think.” Adrenaline poured through him; he hoped to hell he was making sense. “I have a half-drowned passenger who washed in or swam in on Keewadin. She may have been hit by lightning, too—in and out of consciousness.”

“Streamin’, do you have a GPS on board?”

“No GPS, it’s still thick as pea soup out here. Wait—I see the seawall at Gordon Pass, the rock wall to the south—”

“Put in just north of the pass. We’ll send an E.R. squad….”

Cole dropped the radio and slammed both hands back on the tiller. He fought the rush of inward tide that was trying to smash them into the stone break wall of the pass he’d navigated so many times. The outward flow of the Gordon River here crashed into the rising tide. With the wind, it almost capsized them.

He leaned out, away from the hull, using his weight against the lunge and roll of the vessel, wishing he’d had time to get in a trapeze harness. “Come on, baby!” he shouted. His mermaid stirred again, cried out something, but the sloop had to come first now. In these crazy crosscurrents, one wrong move and they’d both be fighting for their lives in the surf. It would be doubtful that he would survive, but Briana would never make it. Above all else, he was desperate to save her.

Cole gritted his teeth and strained to counterbalance the weight of wind and sail. For one terrifying moment, he actually had to steer the tiller with his foot as he hung on to the wire rigging and mainsheet with his hands. The rope cut into his flesh and made his hand go numb. He felt the cords stand out on the sides of his neck; every bone and sinew and muscle screamed at him as he strained to keep the sloop from making a death roll.

Yes! The hull cleared the rocks by about ten yards! He swung Streamin’ toward the shore, scrambling back into the boat, and readied himself for the crunch of her prow on sand and shells. He threw himself next to Briana and held her to him as the sloop came to a precarious, jerking halt. Her body hit against his, but he braced them both.

Miraculously, as he clambered out, it seemed the storm had lessened. Maybe he was just getting used to the deluge of stinging rain. No, it seemed to be letting up, the lightning and thunder rolling away inland over the bay and the Glades. It was like being given a prize for surviving his struggle with the sea.

He reached over the woman’s prone form and retrieved his radio. It still worked. He called the coast guard again and told them his position was about six beachfront houses north of Gordon Pass. They assured him they’d called 911 for him and a squad was on the way.

“One more thing,” he told the officer on the line. “Tell them this woman is Briana—don’t know her last name—who owns the Two Mermaids Search and Salvage in Turtle Bay, and she mentioned her sister, Daria. If anyone can locate Daria, please let her know about Briana’s accident. I’m not sure, but she might have been out in the water with her.”

“If that’s the case, that Daria or her craft are missing, let us know immediately. Over and out.”

“Will do,” Cole said, suddenly sounding so weary to himself. “Will—try to,” he muttered to himself as he snapped the radio off and bent over Briana.

He cradled her in his arms across his lap, trying to keep her warm. She opened her eyes once, those hugely dilated gray-green eyes that didn’t seem to see him, and cuddled closer. His insides flip-flopped. It had been a long time since he’d held a woman and longer since she was someone who needed him.

It seemed both an eternity and yet too soon when he heard a siren screaming along Gordon Drive. He did not let go of Briana until the medics appeared between two houses and came down on the sand carrying a stretcher. They bent over her to take her vitals and put a needle for a drip in her arm. Cole moved back, then off the sloop to give them room.

Several people with houses along the stretch of beach came out into the diminishing rain. A short, elderly man swung a too-small windbreaker around Cole’s shoulders. It was only then he realized he was shaking.

“If I go to the hospital with her, could you watch my boat?” Cole asked him. His teeth were chattering from the chill, and nerves.

“Sure, sure. What happened to her? She your wife?”

“A friend.”

“Sure. Beautiful old boat. Don’t worry about a thing. I mean, I’m sure she’ll be fine—the girl and the boat.”



Manuel Salazar, whom everyone called Manny, slammed the door to his old Ford truck, darted through the last raindrops and unlocked the front door to the Two Mermaids Marine Search and Salvage Shop. His fourteen-year-old daughter, Lucinda, trailed him in, yakking all the way. Lately she talked to her parents only in English. Everyone else in the family was proud to speak in Español, but not Lucinda. He’d laid down the law to her that she was having the traditional quinceañera celebration for her fifteenth birthday, a huge party which announced to friends and family that she was entering adulthood. Most chicas couldn’t wait for that celebration, which was better than any American birthday or sweet-sixteen party, but not his daughter. Lucinda had suddenly gone from being his angelic, younger daughter to someone he didn’t even know.

He walked to his desk to see if there were any phone messages. Nada. With this storm, he wondered where the shop’s dive boat, Mermaids II, had ended up. His stomach knotted.

“But it’s so expensive, Papa. Think of all you and Mama could do with the money.” Lucinda tried another tack to win her argument. “I overheard you say to her you couldn’t afford it, that you’d have to find a way, but why should you?” Dark eyes flashing in her pert, round face, she stood with hands on her hips, glaring at him. She looked so much like his sainted mother sometimes, though his mother would never have been caught dead in torn jeans and skinny-strap top that showed too much skin. “My friends—my American friends—” she plunged on, “think it’s really old-fashioned.”

“So, they not your friends then, sí? Caramba, don’t you look down on your Latina friends. I never know a chica crazy enough pass up a quinceañera! Your Latina friends all happy ’bout their parties, dance with boys, make parents, godparents and padrinas happy, sí? And you just ask your Americana friends, what ’bout ethnic diversity and all that?”

“Man, you go from sounding like a shrink to priest to politician, Papa. I’m an American teenager, and they have some say in their lives. Sure, most chicas want a quinceañera party, but not me! You want to spend some money for me you don’t have, how ’bout a new car I could use to get a job in town when I’m sixteen—that’s the age Americans look forward to.”

“No car! Tell your American friends don’t come if they don’t want a good time with Mexican dancing and food and—”

“I can’t even talk to you and Mama anymore!” she exploded, smacking her hands on her thighs. “Carianna didn’t have to have one!”

“Have to have one? Your older sister give anything, if we could have pay for party for her, invite all our friends and family. But now I got this job with Briana and Daria. They even be padrinas, help us pay for things—”

“So it’s a party for them? No, this whole thing’s for you and Mama, even Carianna and Grandmama Rosa, not for me!”

“Me, me, me!” he mocked, throwing up his hands. “Now that what an American teenager all about! When your mama and I was your age—”

“I’m not you and Mama, and I don’t still have one foot in the great country of Mexico where we were all starving! Why can’t you just listen?”

“You shut your mouth, American girl! You gonna have quinceañera, honor your mama and grandmama. You make your family proud or you gonna find a new family. Now sit there till I find that video camera.”

She turned her back and flopped into the padded chair at Bree’s desk. Muttering under his breath, Manny walked out of the small office space into the large, concrete-floored back room where dive and rescue gear was stored. A sign over the doorway read The Water is Our Office, and on the far wall hung a blown-up poster of the twins in their mermaid wet suits with scuba tanks at their feet and the words Love That Bottled Air! Another large picture at the back of the room showed only the twins’ mermaid tails as they dove below the surface and read, Bottoms Up!

Wall Peg-Boards displayed depth charts, diagrams of the various artificial wrecks in this area of the gulf, and handmade drawings of the precious turtle sea grass the twins tended out by the Trade Wreck. On the floor, separated by aisles to walk between, were gears, winches, capstans, marker buoys, metal detectors, lift bags, underwater lights, pelican floats, wreck reels, cutting tools and cameras.

His area was toward the back of the shop, where the heaviest equipment—especially anything to do with motors—was stored. Manny also handled in-water ship repairs and serviced dive equipment. He had a deal with the twins that he didn’t dive with tanks, only shallow stuff with a snorkel. Too far under water and he went nuts—“claustro-hydrophobic,” Daria had labeled it. Still, he loved the look of this place, the very smell of it. His greatest goal in life was to own the business someday and run it his way. He’d take on the rival salvage company across the bay and, once and for all, shut up its big brute of an owner, Sam Travers. You’d think that since Travers also did industrial dredging, demolition and pile driving, he’d leave the lighter stuff to Two Mermaids, but Sam resented the twins, especially Bree.

This big back room always looked like organized confusion, much, Manny thought, like his employers’ busy lives. How he envied them for building this business, though he’d helped too and thought he was worth more than they paid him. But he’d recently found out that he would inherit half of the shop if anything happened to either of them, and since then, he’d made some big, hard decisions.

Caramba, he might even have to force himself to dive to get what he wanted, instead of just operating on the surface. He grunted as his eyes searched for the camera to film the inside of the big, fancy Garcia Party House he had rented for the quinceañera. He wanted to show his madre how good things were going before cancer took her. She’d given up so much for him. He had to make her proud of him before she died, whatever it cost.

He found the camera and took it out of its plastic underwater casing and rejoined Lucinda, who was twirling herself dizzy in Bree’s chair. Finally, his chica had shut her mouth. But in a way, the silence got to him, because he had to be doing something to keep himself from going loco waiting to hear about Bree and Daria.



For once, Amelia Westcott was glad to see her own driveway. She hated driving in the rain, hated these months of weather so hot and humid you had to run from AC to AC. At least her sons would not be home from Cub Scouts yet and she could take a cool shower and calm down before they showed up. Her meeting with Daria had been disastrous; later, the docent’s tea at the art gallery had gone on much longer than she’d expected, partly because the lights had gone out from that boomer of a storm. Ah, sometime this month or next, the weather would clear and she could breathe again.

If she hadn’t married Ben, who was now the prominent and very busy prosecuting attorney of Collier County, she probably would have moved north to the Carolinas. It might have helped her escape painful memories of her youth in this area. She did love Ben and their lifestyle here, and she was very proud of her husband, although sometimes she wished she had a career—a cause—of her own that would really help other people, something that mattered more than her committees, however philanthropic their purposes and however much they helped promote Ben’s career. Then she could look beyond these very luxurious four walls and the messes her boys made. A stay-at-home mom who didn’t want to stay at home, that was her.

The moment Amelia closed the garage door and went into the house, she heard her message-waiting beeper. Maybe the day had been changed for the Clear the Gulf Commission meeting tomorrow. At least her membership on that had made Bree and Daria admit she was good for something, though it was Florida Congressman Josh Austin who had suggested them for oversight of the sea grass and marine life report.

“You have one messages,” the recorded voice told her when she pressed the play button. With all the world’s modern technology, why couldn’t they teach a digital chip good grammar? Heaven knows, her laptop underlined every darn spelling and grammar error she made in the numerous letters to the editor she wrote.

“This important message is for Amelia Devon Westcott,” the recorded woman’s voice said. Amelia’s stomach went into free fall. She never used her maiden name. “One of our E.R. doctors mentioned you’re on our fund-raising guild committee here at the hospital, so that’s how we traced you. Mrs. Westcott, I’m calling because your sister—we believe it is Briana Devon…”

Briana, Amelia thought. Not Daria?

“…has been brought by emergency squad to Naples Hospital from an accident out in the gulf, and we’re hoping you could come into the E.R. to identify her and be with her.”

Bree! Bree? An accident? Identify her? Were they trying to break the news to her that Bree was dead? It couldn’t be—couldn’t be Bree!

The voice went on, “We have been informed that she lives with another sister, but no one at Briana and Daria Devon’s place of employment and residence knows where Daria is, so we have been unable to reach her.”

As if she were speaking to a real woman, Amelia whispered, “I’ve never been able to reach either of them, no matter how hard—how desperately—I tried.”



Cole paced the E.R. waiting room like an expectant father. He knew he looked like hell, still in soaked shorts, sopping shoes that squeaked when he walked and a borrowed windbreaker that was so small he couldn’t even zip it. The distractions of people in trouble here unnerved him, too: a distraught mother with a kid who’d swallowed a quarter; a young man in terrible pain evidently waiting to be admitted to pass a kidney stone; elderly people who looked like death warmed over. The place was packed, but at least they’d taken Briana back through the swinging doors into the depths of curtained alcoves right away. He’d already bugged the triage nurse more than once. Why didn’t they come tell him something?

This sent him back to the terrible night of his dad’s sudden heart attack. He’d known his father was dead, but he’d called an ambulance. Rather than pronounce him dead at home, they’d done CPR and rushed him to the E.R. in Sarasota, only to tell Cole what he already knew. But Briana had to be all right. She was strong to have lasted out in that brutal gulf, evidently swimming with sharks, too. Cole had practically forced his way into the E.R. vehicle, but they’d shut him out here.

Shut out—the story of his life since his divorce last year from Jillian. He hadn’t realized until she cut him off from their friends—or those he thought were their friends, but were really hers—that he’d given up too much of his own world for hers. It hadn’t helped his client list to have his social contacts shrink like that. At least it had given him an excuse to quit playing country club games. But what he’d learned most from the biggest mistake of his life was that, after two years of their marriage, Jillian had not really been an integral part of him. He just didn’t miss her. He felt sad and bad their marriage had failed, but he didn’t feel her loss. Strangely, he’d feel worse if Briana were lost, and he’d only spent one lunch months ago and then this horrible day with her.

He was surprised to see Amelia Westcott, a woman he served with on the Clear the Gulf Commission, rush in the double glass doors and head for the triage nurse at the front desk.

“You called and told me to come right in,” Amelia said. She was out of breath, but her voice carried clearly. “I’m Briana Devon’s sister. But is her other sister, her twin Daria, here yet?”

Cole went over. “Amelia, I didn’t know you were Briana’s sister—I mean I don’t know why I would—but I’m the one who found her half-drowned on the beach at Keewadin Island and brought her in—”

“Half-drowned? I’ll bet she was with Daria. She’s always with Daria on some sea search, some underwater mission. I can’t believe they were out in that storm.”

Though he could tell she was concerned, she spoke with an undercurrent of bitterness. The older he got, the more he saw family problems everywhere, though most simmered just below the surface of people’s daily lives. He used to think his messed-up family was unique, but now he knew it was almost normal.

The triage nurse was on the phone, checking on Briana’s status. Finally, some answers, Cole thought. He stuck tight to Amelia while she folded her arms and seemed to collapse within herself. She was a good-looking woman, a platinum blonde with every hair in place and icy blue eyes, in contrast to Briana’s natural auburn hair and gray-green eyes. Even now, Amelia looked perfectly put together, with makeup worthy of a photo shoot, while the few times he’d seen the twins around they’d seemed windblown and often wet—a sexy combination. Amelia was obviously older than the twins and, he guessed, uptight by nature as well as from the situation. Rather than taking a deep breath, even when he urged her to, Amelia narrowed her eyes and breathed out through flared nostrils as if she were a bull waiting to charge. That reminded him about the bull sharks, but he decided not to spring that on her, at least not yet.

It wasn’t long before a thin, balding doctor came out and went straight for Amelia. The man—his badge said Dr. Micah Hawkins—flipped through papers on his clipboard and asked, “Mrs. Westcott, you are next of kin for Briana Devon?”

Cole felt his knees go weak. Had Briana died? She couldn’t have died!

“Yes, her sister—one of them,” Amelia said as the doctor gestured her to walk with him. Cole kept right up.

“She swallowed a lot of water, but worse, we believe she’s been struck by lightning while in the gulf and that can lead to complications. And you are?” Dr. Hawkins asked, squinting at Cole.

“Cole DeRoca, the friend who found her and brought her in. I gave her mouth-to-mouth and got her breathing again. She’s going to be all right?”

“You are to be commended, Mr. DeRoca—you probably saved her life. If Mrs. Westcott doesn’t mind, you can come along. We’ll need to run a battery of tests, call in a neuropsychologist. She keeps slipping in and out of consciousness and asking for Daria.”

“Oh, she would,” Amelia said. “But, you mean Daria hasn’t been found?”

“That’s her twin sister. Briana was evidently out in a boat with her,” Cole explained to the doctor. “But Briana must have fallen in.”

“Dear God, Daria can’t be missing—out there, too,” Amelia cried, gripping Dr. Hawkins’s wrist. “Doctor, call in whatever specialists you need. I’m not sure about Briana’s insurance, but I’ll take care of all that.”

Cole’s dislike for Amelia softened a bit. But when she said nothing else, as he followed the two of them deeper into the maze of curtained cubicles, he asked, “But if Briana was out in the gulf with Daria, where is Daria now?”



Was she dead? Briana wondered. She slitted her eyes open, just barely, trying to keep the bright lights out of her dark brain. She felt loggy, helpless, at the mercy of the sliding, shifting sea. Up, down, all around…But the sky looked whiter now, too bright, one big cloud floating over her with more than one sun in it. Ceiling lights. They hurt her eyes, and even when people spoke across the room, it seemed they shouted at her.

People’s faces, unfamiliar, swam in and out above her. The sharks were gone. Had they been real? Daria, her mirror image, where was she? She didn’t like to dive alone, she wanted Daria, her other self, there when they stepped together through the looking glass into the wonderland of the deep.

Someone forced her eyelids apart and shone a bright light into the depths of her brain. She jerked away. She tried to lift her hands to shield her face, but one of her arms was heavy with tubes and the other was bandaged and hurt like heck. A man—a doctor—leaned over her. Oh, Amelia was standing beside him. Why was Amelia here? And who was the tall, handsome man with dark eyes and black hair, his face so worried as he looked her over? His clothes showed he was not another doctor. Had he been swimming with her?

“What happened?” she tried to ask, but she didn’t sound like herself and no one answered. What was the matter with these people? And where was Daria?

“She sustained no burns except on her left wrist, where she wore a stainless-steel dive watch,” the doctor was telling Amelia and the man. “Actually, it’s probably a skin lesion—an inflammatory response—which may disappear in a few days. I’ve already ordered a CT scan and an MRI, and we’ll have her in a room as soon as possible, so we can monitor her better. We’ll do some functional scans but call in a specialist for that.”

“Functional—function of the brain?” the man asked, his deep voice a soothing whisper compared to the others.

“Precisely. Aftereffects can vary widely. And although her pupils are dilated, I want to assure you that does not necessarily mean brain injury, Mrs. Westcott.” He leaned closer, very close. “Briana, I’m Dr. Hawkins. Can you hear me?”

She could hear him, all right. She heard every sound in this place, even the dripping of that bag above into her tube. “Yes,” she said with great effort, because she didn’t think she had the strength to nod. Her lips felt stiff and cracked. “Where’s Daria?”

The tall man spoke again. “Brianna, can you tell us where you last saw Daria?”

She fought to form her words. They had to help find Daria.

“When I dove—off our boat—at Trade Wreck—before the storm.”

Amelia gasped, a sound that pierced Bree’s eardrums. “You mean she could be lost at sea?” her sister demanded, but the man put his hand on Amelia’s arm to keep her quiet.

“Was she still on the boat when you saw her last?” he asked.

“Yes. Yes!”

“Then she’ll be all right,” Amelia said. “She probably had to ride out the storm, or put in somewhere else.” She squeezed Bree’s shoulder and moved away with the doctor.

No, Bree wanted to scream. Didn’t they know Daria never would have left her? Not of her own accord.

“We’ll look for her and find her,” the tall man said, and put his big hand lightly on her shoulder where Amelia’s had just been. His hand was warm, solid. Where had she seen him before? “Just try to rest now,” he said.

If Amelia and the doctor thought they were whispering when they moved away, she heard them anyway. The doctor was saying that a lightning strike near her in the water—a side flash—must have given her a concussion. He told Amelia she might have sporadic amnesia or become moody, distracted, irritable or forgetful.

Exhausted as she was, Bree vowed never to forget what had happened to Daria. But what had happened? At least that man said he would help. He said “we” would find Daria. She should know who he was, but she could not recall. She felt both fearful and furious, so the doctor must be right about her moods, but she could not have amnesia, not about Daria.

Though Bree was afraid if she closed her eyes again she’d see the horror of the sea, the sharks, she pressed her eyelids tightly closed. Amazing how these bright lights hurt her eyes and how she could hear even the shuffle of the nurses’ feet on the floors. Other people’s voices and moans, cries of pain. Was she really hearing those or were they deep inside her?

The occasional screech of the curtains’ rings across the metal rods almost deafened her. She could hear the man ask Amelia for her cell phone and then take it outside the curtain to make a call to the coast guard to tell them about Daria and their dive boat.

Exhausted, sick, she felt so strange, but Bree knew then what she had to do, even if that man had promised to look for Daria, even if he was calling for help. When Amelia and the doctor weren’t looking, she had to get out of this bed, get another boat and go find her sister somewhere out on the dark, devouring sea.




4


It seemed to Bree that the nurses tried to keep her awake all night, not that she had time to sleep anyway. She wanted to get out of bed, find her clothes and find Daria. But nurses came in to check her eyes, shining pinpoints of light into them. They took her blood pressure and checked her drips. She heard them come and go, heard one chewing gum. And always, she thought she heard the roar of the wind and waves.

Despite her desire to stay awake and get up, each time they walked away, Bree slept the sleep of the dead. Had they drugged her? Had someone drugged Daria, too? Had she seen drug dealers trying to make a drop and they knew they had to silence her? Had the horrible people who brought in women for the twentieth-century slave trade called human trafficking come upon her and taken her prisoner, too? Daria would never desert her. Bree knew Daria as well as she knew herself, didn’t she?

Fighting a riptide of fear, she swam from nightmare to nightmare, but was suddenly aware that someone sat by her side. A woman. Amelia, when Bree wanted it desperately to be Daria.

“So strong, the water,” she said, once in the midst of a waking dream in which she was trying to tell her handsome rescuer what had happened. She was safe in his arms, huddled against him for protection. She never thought she’d need or want a man that way. Who was he? Shouldn’t she remember?

“Just a minute. I’ll get you some water,” Amelia said, evidently thinking she’d asked for a drink. She held up a glass with a straw to her lips. Bree saw that it was barely dawn and she was in a private room. Light poured through the window as bright as noon sun.

“Any news? Did they find her?” she asked, then drank greedily. She knew one of the tubes in her arm was to hydrate her, but her throat was so dry.

“They’re going to do a wide search at first light, so that’s right now. The coast guard’s starting with the coordinates your boatman gave them and did an initial sweep of the area last night.”

Manny. If only Manny had been with them as usual, this never would have happened…and then Daria’s sudden toothache…Bree ached all over.

“My boatman’s name,” she told Amelia, exhausted from the little effort of drinking, “is Manuel Salazar—Manny. Please call and tell him I’m okay.”

But what was the name of that other boatman, the sailor? She felt she should know him—wanted to know him.

“They’re going to do an air search, too,” Amelia went on, hovering over her. “I’m sure they’ll find Daria with your boat. I’ll bet the motor didn’t work, the anchor line broke and the storm drove her into the Ten Thousand Islands. They’ll find her.”

“Thanks for being here with me.”

“Where else would I be when you or Daria need me? I’m sorry if it took this accident for you to realize that.”

That edge to her voice, so familiar. When it came to Amelia, Bree remembered too much she’d like to forget. Amelia was six when their mother died of eclampsia in childbirth, delivering her twins. Now, as adults, they understood how their older sister could dislike them, even blame them. Their widowed father had thrown himself into rearing his twins, whom everyone oohed and aahed over. Amelia, a timid soul and a real little lady at heart, though she could be snippy, felt left out when Dad took the younger girls fishing and taught them to swim and dive. He’d always tried to include Amelia, but she’d have no part of it and ended up spending a lot of time with her maternal grandmother while the tomboy twins went to sporting events or dived with Dad.

“Amelia, what’s the name of that man who helped me? I know I’ve met him. I’m just a little foggy on some things—a few recent things.”

“You may have a concussion, or maybe that lightning did scramble your internal wires a bit. You’ve just got to relax or they’ll have to give you a sedative, as soon as they rule out a concussion. That will calm your anxiety and make you forget how traumatic it must have been to—”

“I don’t want to forget! Of course, I’m anxious, because we’ve got to find Daria! I’ve got to go help find her!”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Amelia told her, gently patting her arm as if she were a child. “They’re going to run some brain function tests today with a specialist from Fort Myers before you can be released. But the knight in shining sailboat who rescued you is Cole DeRoca, who serves on the Clear the Gulf Commission with me.”

Amelia went on, explaining that the commission was meeting today and that the twins’ accident would be the talk of the group and she wouldn’t be there to answer their questions.

Yes, Bree thought with a little flutter in her belly. Cole DeRoca, the guy who worked with rare woods and specialized in installing custom-made yacht interiors. Bree had been scraping barnacles off a hull in the marina when he’d been working on the same huge yacht, and he’d shared a sandwich and some wine from the galley with her.

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.

“Hey, I have no choice,” he said, his voice still upbeat. “A necessary evil, a sign of the times. I hate the damn things, too.”

“It’s good to see you, but we need your pull to make something happen for Daria,” Bree told him. “We’ve got to find her.”

“That’s why I’m here. I’m doing everything I can. I’ve already made some this-is-top-priority calls to the guard and the air patrol.”

He shook hands with Amelia, then strode toward the bed and bent to kiss Bree’s cheek. Indeed, one of his campaign ads ran in the background, touting his views that, with stringent oversight, a clean gulf could coexist with controlled gambling to pour more jobs and money into the local economy. And that meant more money for environmental protection. The ad ended with a shot of him and his beautiful wife, Nicole, also a lawyer, holding hands and walking toward the camera on the beach. They had no children, or they would certainly have been in the ad. Daria had said she’d heard that Nicole, whom Josh called Nikki, had suffered two miscarriages.

“I had to see you when I heard,” he said, putting his hand on her shoulder. “Nikki sends her love. She’s down giving the reporters lying in wait for you a sound bite or two about me so they’ll leave you alone.”

“I’d talk to them if I thought it would help find Daria. Be sure to thank her for me.”

“She’s being a real trouper right now. Just between us,” he said, whispering now but shaking his head, “she thinks once I’m in congress, the White House is a small step, and that’s her idea of a dream home. But enough about that. I’m sure they’ll find Daria. Oh, here, I brought you the morning paper about your rescue,” he said, producing a folded copy of the Naples Daily News from under his arm and handing it to Amelia. “You and DeRoca both did what you had to do. I admire both of you for your courage.”

Josh Austin was a wonder, and not just because of his vitality and boyish good looks that never seemed to change. He had always amazed Bree and absolutely awed Daria, who had dated him three years in high school, long before his statewide glory days. In high school he’d been in charge of everything and was voted most likely to succeed. He had, too, leaving everyone behind in his stardust as he married a wealthy man’s daughter whom he met at Florida State, became a successful businessman and the youngest state representative in Tallahassee. He was now in a neck-and-neck race to unseat Marla Sherborne for her U.S. senate seat. Everyone in the area liked Josh, including Daria, even though he’d broken up with her before he’d left for college, long before Ted and Bree had split up. But what a fun foursome they had been years ago. Ted was gone now, but not, she prayed, Daria, too.

The three of them watched silently when the coverage of the search for Daria and their dive boat came up as the lead story. An interview with a coast guard spokesman led, then a sound bite from a member of the civil air patrol, who had been flying the coastal islands all morning and found nothing but normal storm debris on various beaches. And then an interview with Cole.

She hadn’t realized he was so tall, but he made the reporter look like a shrimp. He wore swim trunks and a black T-shirt that showed how muscular he was. It was obvious he hadn’t shaved or slept. It made Bree mad that the hospital staff had turned him away from seeing her, for she owed him her life. If he could only locate Daria, she’d owe him for both of them.

Cole’s thick, swept-back hair shone dark in the sun, and his narrowed eyes looked almost black under his arched brows. His chiseled features were half-handsome, half-craggy, almost foreboding when he frowned. Bree shifted her legs under the sheet. As weak as she felt, the mere look and thought of him poured adrenaline through her body.

Cole and the reporter were standing on the dock of the Turtle Bay Marina. “I’ve been out with friends looking for Daria Devon and her scuba-dive boat,” he said into the mike thrust at him. “Especially near Keewadin Island, where Briana Devon was swept in, though she evidently swam a long way to get there.”

“Do you consider yourself a hero for saving Briana Devon?”

“She saved herself by managing to swim in during that sudden storm. I’m no hero, just someone deeply concerned and trying to help.”

Bree’s heart went out to him. He was on edge, frustrated and worried, she could tell.

“Quite a guy.” Josh’s voice interrupted her agonizing. “His ex-wife was on my initial feasibility/ exploratory committee. Bree, how are you doing, really?” he asked, turning to her when the coverage ended. He leaned against the edge of the bed and bent down to take her hand in his. “Your inner strength, I mean, your ability to face all this. I know how close you are to Daria.”

“I’ll be all right,” she vowed, blinking back tears and gripping his hand harder than she meant to. “The doctor will be in with a report soon. They think a lightning strike might have scrambled my thinking some, but that’s not true. I’m fine! I’ll be fine if we find her.”

Now he held her hand in both of his. “Just stay out of it and let the authorities do their thing, both of you,” he said, glancing at Amelia. “I promise you, I’ll pull all the strings I can and I’ll stay in touch.” He bent to kiss her cheek again. As he moved away, Bree saw his wife out in the hall, looking in. Before she could tell Josh, he hurried out. The room suddenly seemed silent and small again. Then Josh popped back in, pulling his wife behind him. Obviously, Nikki Austin had more influence getting where she wanted to go in the hospital than Cole did.

Nicole Grann Austin was even more striking in person than on TV, in the newspapers or on the glossy brochures the postal carriers delivered in droves these days. Her long, honey-hued hair framed her heart-shaped face, her teeth looked like an ad for whitening strips, and, even now, she looked dressed to kill.

“Nikki says the press in the lobby are really getting restless,” Josh said. “Bree and Amelia, I don’t believe you’ve met Nikki,” he added, making introductions all around. Nikki whispered something to him. “Yeah, good,” he told her, then turned to Bree again. “Look, we have a friend who does a lot of PR for us and pilots our plane. He’s a triple-threat man, because the truth is, he’s also a bodyguard. With this tough race and in this day and age, you just never know. Mark Denton is out in the hall waiting for us, and I’d be glad to loan him to you for a while to keep the media at bay, if you’d like. We’re staying in town tonight and don’t need him to fly us back to Tallahassee until tomorrow.”

“That’s really kind of you, but that’s okay,” Bree said. “I certainly don’t need a bodyguard.” She thought of Cole again. If he would just be willing to help her…

“You call us, if you do,” Nikki put in. Bree saw that the woman was studying her avidly. Maybe she was curious about what someone who had been hit by lightning looked like. Yet there was an edginess about her, or was that just energy and excitement in her big, blue eyes? “Here,” Nikki went on, “I’m going to write down both of our cell-phone numbers for you in case. And I’m a lot easier to reach than ‘the man’ here, if you need anything at all.”

Bree took the piece of paper from her, despite the fact Amelia also reached for it. With more good wishes and promises of help, they were gone. Bree caught a glimpse of their companion, Mark Denton, who reminded her of those buff, secret-service types who hovered around the president. That joke Josh had made about the White House—she didn’t put it past him or Nikki either.

“Now you just take his advice and get some rest, because I’m sure he’ll help us,” Amelia said as she opened the folded newspaper he’d brought and a glossy You Can Trust Josh Austin brochure spilled out on the bed. “See?” she said, pointing at it. “For once, truth in advertising.”



Finally, Bree was alone. After a detailed, positive report from the Fort Myers’s neuropsychologist about her tests, which had included simple memory quizzes, an IQ and an organizational-ability puzzle, no medical personnel were in the room. Amelia had gone to meet her boys, six-year-old Jordan and eight-year-old James, when they got home from school and take them to a neighbor’s before she came back.

Amelia had washed her salt-water-stiffened hair for her, chattering about how she used to wash her and Daria’s hair when they were little. The dressing on Bree’s wrist burn had been changed and the nurse had taught her how to tape a plastic sleeve around her arm so that she could take a shower, which she’d done before Amelia left. Actually, Bree had lifted several other plastic sleeves off the nurse’s cart, because she was going to need them.

She had to get out of here. Forget this staying in for further observation. She was the one who needed to do observation of the entire gulf if she had to. She was going to get Manny to take her out to the Trade Wreck so she and one of her scuba-diving friends could start to trace Daria.

Bree hated to be sneaking out, but she was certain, except for her strange perceptions of light and sound, that she was all right. Dr. Hawkins had said if she had any ringing in her ears, it would probably lessen, so she expected her other problems would end soon, too. He had insisted she needed at least another day of observation and then several days of rest, so Amelia was determined to have Bree go home with her.

Since she was not only burned but burned-out, Bree knew full well the doctor and Amelia would try to stop her from diving. She’d probably have to lie to Manny and whomever she called to help her dive about being given a clean bill of health, but she would do whatever it took to find her sister. What could they do? Arrest her? Lock her up? Nothing mattered but finding Daria. No way could she wait for the possibility of being released tomorrow. That might be too late; it might already be too late.

Bree had racked her brain for clues to what might have happened to her twin. The first thing she could think of to do was to learn whether the boat’s anchor chain was still planted near the Trade Wreck. Had it been pulled up or thrown over? Second, she had to find and salvage her camera. While Bree suited up, Daria had shot some sample pics off the side of the ship. What if there was some hint on that camera, maybe of another watercraft lurking nearby? And she had to call her civil air patrol friend, Dave Mangold. She needed a clue, any clue!

Even though Sam Travers hated her, she was going to ask him to use his large search-and-salvage vessel to look for Daria. She’d hire him if she had to. The coast guard and the civil air patrol obviously could use the help. Sam had that expensive echo sounder, too. If it could spot schools of fish and find anomalies, even wrecks on the bottom of the gulf…

She covered her face with her hands and sucked in a sob. It horrified her even to consider that Mermaids II might have actually gone down in the storm. It couldn’t be, but she had to try everything, had to get the answers no one else was giving her. Losing Daria would be almost like losing herself.

She got out of bed slowly. A bit light-headed, not really dizzy. Man, she hated these hospital gowns. At least they’d untethered her from those hanging tubes. She’d forced herself to eat lunch, tomato soup and half a grilled cheese sandwich, to get some strength and convince Amelia and the nurses she was recovering physically from her ordeal.

Bree shuffled over and closed the door to the hall, hoping that might signal she was sleeping. She knew where the street clothes were that Amelia had brought. She’d be crazy to try walking out of here in her mermaid wet suit. In the tiny bathroom, she put slacks, shoes, a blouse and matching jacket on—you might know Amelia wouldn’t bring any of her more casual work clothes—when the phone on her bedside table rang. She’d have to answer it. Besides, it might be the coast guard or air patrol.

She picked up the phone on its fourth ring. “Briana Devon.”

“Briana! Cole DeRoca. I’m down in the lobby with a friend of yours who heard me ask if you could have visitors this afternoon, a guy named Manny. They say you can’t and that they can’t even release how you’re doing because of privacy laws.”

Her heartbeat kicked up. Her prayers—some of them, at least—were being answered.

“Cole,” she said, trying to keep from crying in relief. This was obviously a sign she should forge ahead with her plans. “You’re a godsend, because I’m leaving and I’d appreciate a ride home. Amelia’s not here right now. I’ll be down in a minute, but ask Manny to hang around, would you? And if there are reporters in the lobby—”

“Three of them, two with camermen.”

“In that case, get Manny to meet us at the shop in Turtle Bay and wait for me by the E.R. entrance, okay?”

“Will do, but are you sure you’re strong enough?”

“Strong enough to do whatever it takes to find my sister,” she said, and hung up before he could question her more about her sudden release.

Making for the door, Bree felt like a felon escaping from the penitentiary. At the last minute, she turned back and scribbled her nurse a note, telling her she was fine and had gone for a walk. That was true enough; somehow, she was going for a dive, too.

As she peeked into the hall, then strode out nonchalantly, she carried Cole’s gift of the orange orchid in her arms.




5


“Is Amelia coming to your place to stay with you?” Cole asked as he drove her away from the hospital. They turned onto the busy Tamiami Trail and headed south toward Turtle Bay. She wanted to recline the seat and go to sleep, but she sat erect, cursing the fact Amelia hadn’t brought her sunglasses. The light, the sounds of traffic—too bright, too much.

“She’s with her two little boys right now,” she told him, pulling down the sun visor on her side. “I’m sure she’ll be over soon.” She couldn’t decide whether to just level with Cole or to get home first before she sprang her desperate plan on him and Manny. Cole had helped her before, but would he help her now? Besides, just his presence, his closeness, was making her even more nervous than she already was.

“Have you ever scuba dived?” she asked.

“Strictly for recreation, but I can hold my own. The last time was in Tahiti for a wedding anniversary. I’m single now.”

“Sorry.” She wasn’t sorry, but she had no time for such thoughts.

“Don’t be. Definitely the best for me and her, too, since she left me.”

A woman had left this man? The entire world was crazy.

“Briana, you look shaky. You aren’t going to be sick?”

“Sick at heart. I’d warn you before I’d upchuck in this beautiful car.”

He was driving a big burgundy sedan, probably one he used to impress his clients, because it didn’t seem like him and it certainly didn’t seem like Turtle Bay. This was a man she didn’t really know.

The village of Turtle Bay was a fairly secluded enclave between the Tamiami Trail on the east, the Gulf of Mexico on the west, the city of Naples to its north and Marco Island to its south. Turtle Bay had been built up years ago, with two clam-canning factories that were now defunct, and the usual condos and luxury waterfront homes had not intruded yet. A lot of locals feared the proposed gambling casino boat here could change all that. One of the old canneries was now quaint shops and seafood restaurants; the other had been converted to Sam Travers’s Search and Salvage. Tourists and fishermen came and went daily in Turtle Bay, but returned to their luxe hotels in Naples when the day’s jaunt was over. It was a tidal bay, so the main marina was built up on high posts, as were some of the modest houses, even those built farther back off the waterfront. Everything from dinghies to yachts and all sizes of sailboats bobbed in the bay.

Manny was waiting for them at the Two Mermaids with the door open. Thank heavens, no reporters were in sight. “Let’s go upstairs,” she told the men and, though every muscle of her body ached, she tried to lead them upstairs gracefully.

Her and Daria’s two-bedroom apartment above the shop was a light, airy and pleasant place with white wicker furniture, bright floral pillows and open vistas of the marina, bay and gulf. Without Daria, it seemed oppressive, so she was glad to have their company.

She took the orchid Cole had carried up for her and put it on the glass-topped coffee table, which was cluttered with the books Daria had been studying for her accounting class. They’d finally admitted they’d been too careless with the financial end of their business. Manny had volunteered to handle that, but they’d decided one of them should specialize in it, and Daria had cheerfully volunteered. She’d seemed obsessed with the course work ever since. In college—Dad had insisted they go to his alma mater in Miami—neither of them had taken courses in anything like accounting or business. Bree had studied languages, and Daria was a philosophy major. The truth was, both of them had majored in giving scuba lessons and getting a tan on trendy South Beach.

“Please sit, both of you,” Bree said, and went into the small galley kitchen. When she was certain they couldn’t see her, she grasped the edge of the counter-top and leaned against it, stiff armed, staring at Daria’s latest note—dated last Friday—on the bulletin board over the sink: Don’t worry about me. Going to study w/ friends after class and might be in late.

She could not cry, Bree told herself, could not dissolve in frustration or fear. She must find strength she did not have, courage she did not feel. However hurting and exhausted, she had to get moving.

She gulped a glass of orange juice, then poured Coke into three glasses, dumped a bag of taco chips into a bowl and carried all that in on a tray. She wanted desperately for these men to see her in control. Cole sat on the sofa, and Manny had taken her rocking chair, so she sat in Daria’s. They were talking about how Manny never dived but oversaw the shop, their two boats—the larger of which was now missing—and the heavy equipment. Man, Bree thought as she drank down half of her soda, but she needed this sugar and caffeine to stoke her strength.

“So, what you planning?” Manny asked her. “I know you. Want me to get the coast guard and the air patrol on the phone?”

“I’m going to call them, but I want to talk to both of you first.”

She forced herself to look directly into Cole’s narrowed eyes, because she figured she could get Manny to do what she wanted. Yes, despite the dire situation, the instant arc of energy and tension crackled between them as fiercely as it had the day they’d had that impromptu lunch on the yacht months ago. She had to admit that Cole DeRoca was still the great unknown, deeper than the sea. He had been nothing but kind and caring, but she well knew there could be unknown fathoms beneath. She felt so intensely drawn to the man that she feared her spinning senses could too easily swamp her usually sensible nature. She couldn’t afford a distraction right now when she needed to be self-disciplined. She needed the man to help her and had to shut everything else out.

“To try to find Daria,” she told them, gripping her sweating glass hard in both hands, “I need to figure out if she left the dive site of her own accord or unwillingly.”

“Caramba,” Manny exclaimed, flinging gestures, “for sure, it was unwilling.”

“So you plan to do what?” Cole asked, putting down his glass and leaning forward with his wrists on his knees.

“I need to see if our boat’s anchor is missing from the seabed near the turtle grass meadow. I dived down the anchor line as usual. But when I was ready to go up, I didn’t even look for it and just made the ascent from where I was.”

“Yeah, you done that before,” Manny put in.

“But was the anchor there,” she went on, “and I just didn’t see it in the increasing turbulence and lessening visibility? Is it still there? And if so, was the anchor chain hauled up properly or shoved off in a hurry? We paid good money for that new anchor and chain, because we’ve had them pull loose, and twice our rope was cut on something. If Daria didn’t leave under duress, she would have hauled it in.”

“What you thinking?” Manny demanded. “That more than a storm made her leave you there?”

“Of course it was more than a storm that made her leave me there!” Bree exploded. “That was bad, but it wasn’t a hurricane! Sorry,” she added more quietly, covering her eyes with one hand. “I’m just on edge, and I know you’ve been, too, Manny, trying to handle your mother’s illness, Lucinda’s attitude and everything.”

As she lowered her hand and looked at him, he shook his head. “Lucinda’s craziness nada compared to this,” he said. “Anyhow I can help, I help.”

“Good,” she said. “I’d like you to go down to our slip at the marina and make sure Mermaid I is ready to go and that scuba tanks are filled—for two divers, if Cole will come along. It still stays light pretty late. At least the storms missed us today, so maybe the underwater visibility will be better.”

“You’re going diving now?” Cole demanded. “Look, Briana, I’m sure you know a lot of local divers who could search for—”

“I need to do it! I know the area. Besides, if I could just retrieve my camera, it could have something on it. I had to let it go in the storm.”

“You got photos of something strange?” Manny asked. He clenched both fists. Even with his brown skin, Bree could tell he was flushing. His voice rose as he got up from the couch and took a step toward the door. “You really thinking someone did something dirty?”

“I don’t want to think that, but I know she wouldn’t just leave, storm or not, toothache or not. I know Daria as well as I know myself!”

Manny bent to swig the rest of his soda and went out. She could hear him thudding down the stairs, muttering to himself.

“Briana—”

“You can call me Bree if you want.”

“The thing is,” Cole went on, “even if the doctor cleared you to leave the hospital, that hardly meant you could go diving right away.”

“He didn’t clear me,” she blurted. “I cleared myself and cleared out. I have to do this!”

She jumped up, making Daria’s chair rock back and forth on its own as if a ghost sat there. With a shiver snaking up her spine, she moved to the French doors, which had a view of the bay. The sight of the sunlit marina and the gulf beyond almost blinded her. Pushing the double doors open, she stepped out onto the veranda where they kept a wrought-iron table and two chairs. She grabbed sunglasses Daria had left there and shoved them on to mute the slant of late-afternoon sun. Not only had her heightened perception of light not worn off, but she was certain that, beyond the normal bustle of the marina, she could hear the seductive sounds of the sea.

Bree decided she’d need to start wearing earplugs, not when she dove, but when she was on terra firma. She’d often had to wear them to sleep. Unlike Daria, she couldn’t fall asleep anywhere. On their overnight flight to Greece for their college-graduation gift, Daria had conked out right away and arrived raring to go, while Bree had wasted an entire night’s sleep just being annoyed that Daria was lost in sweet dreams. Daria…lost…in dreams that were really nightmares…

“Bree,” Cole said, following her out and putting his big hands gently on her shoulders from behind, “under ordinary circumstances, I’d tell you you’re nuts. You’ve got a lot of professional people looking for her. Besides, the police have a dive team—though, I suppose, they won’t deploy it until they’re convinced of foul play, even if we ask…” His deep voice trailed off.

She turned to face him and found herself staring at the beating pulse in his strong, bronzed throat. He was half a head taller than she, but his broad shoulders made him seem larger than that. His eyes were a rich mahogany hue, framed by long, thick lashes. She could see her reflection there, could almost drown in their depths.

For one crazed instant, she longed to throw herself into his arms and just hold tight, to beg him to take this burden from her, comfort her, let her hide in his strength. But she did none of those things. Tackle a problem head-on, Dad would have said. It was the way she was and Daria, too. But had Daria, out on that boat in those rough waves, tried to take on something—or someone—she could not handle?

“Cole, I know that area and the currents like the back of my hand. I have to do this or I’ll never forgive myself. I’m certain I would feel something if she weren’t…weren’t alive. But I do sense she’s in danger. Call it women’s intuition or a sister’s sixth sense. I just have to go check the dive site.”

“Then I’ll go with you—on one condition. If you begin to feel ill down there or I see anything I don’t like, that’s it, we’re out. And we’re not going to do any kind of wide sweep for the camera if it’s not near the dive site. Promise me,” he said, gripping her upper arms, “because I mean it. I’ll pull you right out of there—again.”

“Yes, all right, I promise. I owe you doubly. I really think God sent you to find me, and to help find Daria.”

“Then I just pray I’m up to pleasing all three of you,” he said and surprised her with a hard hug before he let her go.



While Manny was preparing the skiff and putting air in their tanks and Cole drove to his workshop where he kept his own diving gear, Bree made four quick calls. She phoned the hospital main desk to officially check herself out. They were very upset and said they’d inform Dr. Hawkins immediately, but she hung up before they could page him. Bree knew Amelia would try to stop her from diving, so she called her at home and got her answering machine. That was what she’d hoped for, since Amelia should be picking up Jordan and James from their private elementary school about now. She left her a message that she was feeling much stronger and had decided to come home.

She then phoned the coast guard emergency contact number and, after no news there, the civil air patrol information line. She was disappointed and dismayed to learn her pilot friend, Dave Mangold, was out of town and had not participated in the air search. There was no sign of Daria or their boat, but both organizations would keep her informed.

Informed. She was terrified to get a call from either of them.

Realizing she’d left her mermaid diving suit at the hospital, she donned an old pink spandex wet suit and hurried downstairs. Though she didn’t intend to tell Cole, she felt strange, kind of floaty, but she had to do this and now. Surely, this almost out-of-body feeling was not related to Daria’s fate.

Dad had told them once that, even though he was outside in the waiting room when their mother died in the delivery room, he knew the exact moment when she’d gone because he felt kind of like he’d taken off from the ground. It was so bizarre, he’d said, like the feeling when you ride a roller coaster and go over the highest drop. There was no thrill, only an awed sense of doom. But Bree didn’t want to remember all that, didn’t want to think of that.

As she went to check her desk phone for messages, she heard heavy footsteps and turned to see if Manny or Cole were back. Big, burly Sam Travers, who ran the rival business across the bay, stood in the doorway, not in, not out. He seemed to block out the light and air.

With a bulky build and a face and body hardened by years of physical labor, Sam stood slightly over six feet tall. His hair had been gray for years, and he wore it cut tight to his head, which emphasized his prominent ears and narrowed eyes. Crow’s feet perched at the corners, matching his deep frown lines. Sam had never given in to wearing sunglasses or caps.

Bree recalled from years ago when she and Ted used to hang out together all the time, that his father, now a sixty-four-year-old proud Vietnam War vet, looked angry even when he wasn’t. Since she’d broken up with Ted, though, anger was his perpetual mood around her.

Sam had never been able to forget or forgive that she had broken up with his only child after going steady with him for almost five years, two and a half in high school and then the first two of college. That had started what Sam called a fatal chain of events. But once she was away from Turtle Bay, even though she and Ted were at college just across the state, her world had expanded and Ted’s had not.

He’d been jealous of her new friends and her snorkeling and scuba students, even of the time she spent with Daria. He’d wanted to drive home most weekends, when she had things to do in Miami. He hadn’t really liked college, and she’d thrived there. Maybe he’d become so stridently possessive because his mother had deserted him and Sam while Ted was still in elementary school, but it didn’t do any good to try to analyze him. It just wasn’t working for Bree anymore, but when she’d tried to reason with him, tried to back away, he’d stormed out and joined the marines—the foreign legion, Daria had called it—without even telling Sam.

So while Ted had gone through basic battle training at Paris Island, South Carolina, Sam Travers had begun his war with Bree. He’d blamed her entirely when Ted was killed by a roadside bomb thousands of miles away in Iraq last year. And when he’d been buried with military honors, Sam had exploded at her, telling her to stay away from the funeral, and Daria had gone alone. Things certainly had not gotten better when she and Daria had opened a competitive search-and-salvage shop, though much smaller and more specialized, on Sam’s turf.

Now he stood in her doorway, glaring at her. Ordinarily, she’d be only too happy if she never saw Sam Travers again, but she needed his help.

“Yo,” he said in his usual strident voice, which seemed even louder now. “I was looking for Manny the man, ’cause the TV says you’re still in the hospital. Just wanted to tell him I been out looking for Daria.”

Bree stayed behind her desk. “Thanks for anything you can do. I was going to call you, but I’ve been talking to the coast guard and the air patrol about the rescue efforts.”

“They’re good at talk. You want to find something—in this case, someone—you call Sam. You and I had some bad spots, but I got nothing ’gainst her. I’m going out again.”

Bad spots? she thought. During these past three years after Ted enlisted, Sam had ranted at her, especially when he was drinking, and she’d come to fear him. However much she sympathized with his loss and grieved Ted’s death, she’d even considered getting a restraining order. Ben, her prosecutor brother-in-law, had suggested it, but she didn’t want to admit weakness to Sam, who sometimes seemed right on the edge of becoming a stalker. There were times when she and Daria thought he turned up everywhere.

“I can’t thank you enough for helping,” Bree brazened, though her voice shook. “I know if anyone can find Daria and Mermaids II, it’s you.”

“Yeah, well, bodies might not surface for over a week, but wrecks only give up a trail of bubbles for about twenty-four hours. Time’s awastin’. You facing up to the fact I been using my echo sounder?”

“I’m sure she’s all right…not—the skiff’s not sunk. She put in somewhere. She’s safe, I can feel it.”

“Yeah, I was sure Ted would be all right, too, big guy like that, body armor and all. A well-trained, gung ho marine riding shotgun on an armored tank. Maybe I’m doing this for him, huh, since Daria was his friend, even if you never really were.”

He went out and slammed the door.




6


On the way out to the dive site in the boat, Mermaids I, with Manny at the wheel, Cole’s thoughts were flying as fast as the white wake they left behind. He’d been trying to come up with additional arguments for why this dive was a bad idea, but he knew he’d do the same thing in Bree’s place. Unless he tied her up, he figured he couldn’t stop her, so he had to go along to be certain nothing happened to her. He knew she was going, with or without him.

Then, too, she’d convinced him that she could sense that Daria was alive. He knew nothing firsthand about that intense kind of simpatico relationship with another person, but he’d read identical twins could be that way, and he’d never seen twins who were more mirror images of each other. He’d studied a framed photo of them in their apartment, a formal, posed picture where they were evidently bridesmaids at someone’s wedding. They were beautiful women. If he ever saw Briana smile, he could probably tell one from the other, because one of them had a slightly lopsided grin, with a sort of bet-you-can’t-guess-what-I’m-thinking look.

He was coming to know Briana, and he figured he knew Daria a bit, too, so this felt doubly personal to him. Another reason that he was literally along for the ride, even though he should have been installing Brazilian cherry in the salon on a big yacht in Naples today, was that he’d quickly come to admire Bree so much. She had not gotten hysterical and had seemed in control, when most women he knew would be frantic wrecks by now. Jillian’s first response to any trauma had been tears and tantrums, so he was totally impressed with this woman. Impressed and just plain turned-on, even in these terrible circumstances.

Cole tried to listen carefully as Bree told him things he should know about the dive. Though she was speaking over the roar of the motor, she wasn’t talking loudly enough, and sometimes he had to almost read her lips. Like Cole, Manny seemed to be straining forward to hear her. Instead of facing her, Cole moved to sit beside her, edging her over a bit.

“Motor’s too loud to hear you!” he told her, only to see her cringe. “What is it? What’s the matter?”

“I agree about the motor. Your voice—I’m hearing sounds sharper than I did before, that’s all. It’s nothing. Okay, I’ll start over. First off, if you’re used to diving in the Caribbean or even in the Keys, the water’s going to look really different here, not so clear. We’ll both take dive lights. Manny brought two dive lights along, didn’t you, Manny?” she asked, craning around toward the back of the boat so he could hear her.

She almost bumped noses with Manny since he was leaning so close to her. “Always got two of everything on board,” Manny told her, sitting up straighter. “Usually for you and Daria.”

Bree just nodded. When she turned back toward him, Cole saw she had tears in her eyes.

“Go on,” he prompted. He was grateful she seemed to be thinking clearly, despite the fact her emotions were right on the edge.

“We’re only going down to thirty feet,” she explained, “so we won’t have to decompress, but we’ll take a three-minute safety stop at fifteen feet, both entering and ascending. The wreck lies in a small, natural trough.”

“What’s the visibility at that depth?”

“Vis varies a lot out here, from six inches to sixty feet, but since we evidently aren’t getting a storm today, it could have settled down to ten or twelve, especially since the incoming tide will bring in clearer water. I’ve got to find that camera.”

“Let’s just say we’ll check for the anchor today. Set reasonable goals. We can’t search a vast area on this dive.”

As if she didn’t hear that, when he knew she did, she continued. “The camera’s in a plastic housing, which mutes the red color I’ve painted it, especially since all reds disappear about fifteen feet down. At the depth we’re diving, everything will look green, yellow or blue.”

“I remember. Bree, we should keep this dive short.”

“We need to cover a certain area,” she countered.

Cole was not used to being told what to do. Damn, this woman was stubborn, but maybe that came with being strong.

“I never would have done a dive alone that day,” she admitted, suddenly changing the topic. She kept fussing with her mask she held in her lap. “But Manny needed time to patch up the generation gap with his daughter and couldn’t go. It was the fifty-seventh dive we’d made at the Trade Wreck without incident, photographing and recording the growth of the turtle grass there. Daria had a really bad toothache that came on fast, so I said I’d go down alone. It only takes about twenty-five minutes. The storm was a distant line on the horizon, and the marine weather forecast hadn’t mentioned it could come in so fast or hard.”

“I know. So you anchored nearby but not where the anchor could disturb the site,” Cole said, when she frowned out over the water.

“Right. The submerged aquatic vegetation—SAV—is very delicate and not doing well. We always joked that our motto for this Clear the Gulf Commission project would be Save Our SAV.”

Her voice trailed off and her eyes took on a faraway look. Was she seeing a scene with her sister? He bumped her shoulder gently, and she seemed to come back from wherever she’d been. He was going to have to stick close to her down there, though she was obviously the more skilled diver.

She went on. “The report we were preparing to give the commission—and the media—next week would not be good news. The poor and declining quantity and quality of the sea grass indicates that the whole marine ecosystem here is still struggling from the increasing industrial and toxic runoff. Too many people means too much pollution, and that extends to the Trade Wreck sea grass meadow, which we’re using as a sort of touchstone and symbol for the health of this entire area of the gulf. And it’s sick.”

“A dire report could mean cutbacks, penalties and political fallout for lots of important people. When the foundation of the marine food chain is screwed up, it’s trouble for every living organism all the way up to humans, and that equates to millions of dollars in fishing, real estate and the tourist trade. Had you told anybody about your findings already?” he asked.

“We weren’t keeping it a secret,” she admitted. “You’re thinking someone might want to warn us or stop us from releasing that? But everyone with interests in those things you just mentioned would want the environment to stay safe. They’d want to know what our report says so the situation can be fixed by concerned citizens, environmentalists, scientists, politicians—everyone.”

“Back to our dive. We can’t search the entire area for a camera.”

“I’m hoping it snagged on either the Trade Wreck or another artificial reef nearby.”

He nodded. “I heard there’s one about three miles off Keewadin, where you came in.”

“Right, the Stone Reef. That one’s not a wreck but limestone boulders. I don’t know if the camera would just go to the smooth, sandy bottom and stay put, or if the tides and currents would move it south until it snagged in one reef or the other.”

“So what’s the Trade Wreck like?”

“It’s a supply ship sunk in the late 1930s, made of wood and metal. It broke apart but what’s there is pretty well preserved.”

“Do you use GPS coordinates to locate the site? I don’t see that equipment on board.”

“Our only GPS is on the bigger boat, but we’ve been out here so much, it’s half instinct and half compass coordinates. You’ll be glad to know it’s ordinarily a safe dive, with no sharks out here. I think the rough water or sudden change in barometric pressure from the storm yesterday stirred them up.”

“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?

The find filled her with frustration and fury. She had to locate that camera now at all costs, even if it meant going a ways into that broken, rusting old wreck.

She led Cole back in that direction, and they swam the entire length of where the camera might have drifted down or been snagged against the ship by the incoming tide. It was just over twenty-four hours ago now. How could so much have happened so fast? Twenty-four hours—like Sam had said, a new wreck only released a trail of bubbles for that long. Daria, even if the boat went down, tell me you didn’t go with it! I made it in. You must have, too!

They saw no sign of the camera, so they started back, this time peering into nooks and crannies where it might have caught. Bree berated herself that she hadn’t somehow kept the camera with her in the storm, however heavy and bulky. Using both their lights, they illumined each dark entry spot until—

Bree jerked back. Oh, it was just one of those cow skulls, bobbing on the other side of a thick glass porthole. When they’d first dived this wreck with their father years ago, the portholes had been covered with algae, but that, too, had been done in by the lack of oxygen in what some called dead water.

She tried to fight off the images that being this close to the wreck often triggered in her. Whenever she could, she ignored the ship’s ruins and just concentrated on the sea grass meadow. She and Ted had dived this wreck just before they’d broken up, the summer before their junior year of college. The two of them had always called this wreck the Titanic, not because of its size, but because they’d seen the movie just before they’d first dived it together.

As bold as Bree was underwater, that movie had shaken her to her core. The scene where Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio had stood together at the top of the ship as it was sinking into the cold Atlantic had not just scared her but haunted her ever since. The first time Sam berated her for being the reason Ted enlisted and died, he’d said she’d scuttled and wrecked his son’s life. And in her nightmares about Ted’s death, he wasn’t killed by an improvised incendiary device in Iraq but was sent down to his death on a sinking ship, while—like the woman in the movie—Bree survived and lived her life. Then guilt hung heavy in her heart, until she could convince herself once again that Ted had made his own choices and that his loss—like her mother’s death—was not her fault.

Now…now, when that nightmare stalked her, in sleep or awake, would she see Daria going down with the ship? While Bree still lived and breathed and walked and swam, would it be Daria she saw, doomed and clinging to Mermaids II while it slipped into the dreadful depths.

Cole tapped on his tank and gestured about the skull. She tried to motion back to him that cows had been the cargo. He nodded, and they went on, swimming about five feet apart, peering as far as they could see into entries of the wreck. It didn’t take long to determine that the camera was not snagged against the upright stern, but she knew it could have settled into numerous nooks in the tipped fore parts of the ship.

And then Bree saw it! A glint of new metal! It was lodged in a small cranny that had once been clearly marked but was now faded: Fire Ax and Hose—Break Glass. No glass now, and someone might have taken the ax head for a souvenir, but the ragged remains of an old fire hose hung there below the rotting ax handle. It looked like the plastic housing had come off the corner of the camera, but she reached for the piece of metal she could see.

And yanked her arm back. From behind the remnants of the hose, a moray eel lunged at her, barely missing her hand. Bree backed away fast; the eel retreated partly into its lair. Her heart was thudding so hard it sounded like a bass drum was in her mask.

Morays loved to hide in rocks, tall grass or small crevasses to wait for their prey. Frightening in appearance, they had small eyes and a protruding snout, but worse was their always-open mouth, with their powerful jaws and long, sharp teeth. Their skin was scaleless and they had thick, mucous-covered, patterned bodies so they could hide from their prey. This one looked about four feet long, dangerous and hidden…like someone who may have hurt Daria.

Cole took her elbow and pulled her farther away. She pointed at the edge of the camera and he nodded. He swam over the moray’s lair and carefully retrieved the half-rotted wooden ax handle. With it, he hooked the edge of the camera and pulled it out. The eel lunged at the metal, then retreated once again to protect his piece of property.

Bree was relieved until she saw that what had lodged there was the strobe lights she had released and not the camera.

She held the strobe up and shook her head. Cole squeezed her shoulder. Is that yours? he gestured, and she nodded. Their eyes met through their masks. Bree fought back tears. She did not dare cry or the mask would be a mess. She motioned to him that if the strobe was snagged on the wreck, the camera could well be, too. He shook his head and pointed to his watch, though she saw they’d only been down twenty minutes and they had much more air. When he pointed toward the surface, she shook her head and gestured with both hands and her fingers spread: just ten more minutes to peek inside the open entryways.

Another of the common safety sayings about diving, one her dad had stressed, popped into her head. Only fools break the rules. She was not a wreck diver and she hadn’t brought either a wreck reel or a penetration line to help find her way out once she was inside the decaying wreck, where pieces could be loose or block an exit. These lights were good for a thirty-foot dive but not for diving blind inside a wreck—another rule about taboos. Still, when she hit the button on the strobe, it flashed its nearly blinding light. That would have to do to guide her just a little way, to find the camera, which she’d let go of in the same spot she’d dropped the strobe. The risk of moray eels be damned.

She gestured for Cole to follow and swam quickly toward the Trade Wreck with her strobe in one hand and her flashlight in the other. She did not look back. Just a short glimpse inside this corridor and then she’d quickly back out when she was sure the camera could not have been swept farther in.

She heard not only her dad’s words this time, but his voice, too, loud over the hiss-hiss of her own breath in her ears. Only fools stretch the rules. She was a fool, then, a frenzied fool. But if Dad were here, he’d understand why she had to find the camera, find any clue to find Daria. He’d agree that the motto for now was Daria’s lost, and must be found at any cost.

Cole was quick. Bree felt him make a grab for her ankle, but she kept kicking. She shot the strobe off repeatedly to see as she swam inside the sunken ship.




7


Bree was desperate to find the camera, and it was too narrow and too late to back out now. In and down she swam, headfirst into the rabbit hole of a dangerous wonderland. Everything seemed alien, even when she lit the dimness only by her single shaft of flashlight beam. Each time the blinding strobe flashed, the rust-encrusted depths of the long-sunken ship made it seem as if its metal skin was bleeding. The dizzying whirl of floating particles caught in the weird currents toyed with her equilibrium.

In this section of the ship, the port-side wall was the floor of the wreck, so the vessel’s ceiling swirled past on her left and its floor on her right, making her feel even more disoriented. She swam over portholes that living souls had once peered out on their fateful voyage. This world—her entire world—had gone topsy-turvy. Had any of the crew’s bones been trapped here like their living cargo’s? Had something or someone sunk Mermaids II?

Bree saw no more cattle skulls, though several strange sea creatures peered at her and a small lobster scuttled away. But there was no camera. When the corridor turned and she peered beyond to some sort of galley, she maneuvered around to go back out and was amazed to see Cole, so close that she jerked back and clunked her tank into a bulkhead.

In the small, enclosed space, Cole seized her wrist and pulled her toward him. Out of here and up to the surface, he motioned, shining his light on his gestures. Shadows from his hands leaped across his face mask; with his beam at that sharp angle on his strong, sculpted features, he seemed to wear a fright mask. It made her think she really didn’t know this man, yet she needed him badly.





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