Blackwater Sound (5 page)

“Don't worry about it, Jeb. Have I let you down yet?”

He looked at her for several moments. When he spoke, his voice was as gloomy as the haze in his eyes.

“It's more than the payroll, Morgan. And I think you know that.”

He walked over to his desk and pushed aside a pile of folders and took a perch. His thick, white, hairless legs dangling. Despite his island-boy clothes, Jeb was as pasty as a hibernating mole.

“On top of everything else the spark plasma furnace went down again.”

She sighed and came into his office and shut the door behind her. Lately, Jeb had developed a nodding habit, as if he were constantly consulting some inner voice. He nodded now as he stared down at the weave of the carpet.

“It was working fine, DC voltage pulses steady. We were getting excellent results. Better than the liquid phase sintering oven, all that microgravity stuff. This is much better. Good deflection temperatures, dimensional tolerance, the tensile elongation modules all running fine. Ran perfectly for the last few weeks, no sign of anything wrong. Then suddenly it shut down. We're trying to track down the problem now. Should have it back on-line by morning.”

“And that's what you wanted to tell me.”

He looked up at her and nodded to himself.

“You know, Morgan, I was never much of an accountant. This CFO thing, it's always been a joke. Me and A. J. were just a couple of tech guys, lab rats. We didn't give a shit about money. Only reason I got stuck taking care of the books was because A. J. was so damn bad at it. But it's never been something I relished.”

She kept her tone relaxed, working up a little smile.

“But you do it so well, Jeb.”

He scratched at his bare knee, avoiding her eyes.

“So today, I was going over the quarterlies, looking for expenses to trim, some way to get beyond this crisis.” He nodded at the far wall. “It's been a while since I took a good look at the books. I've been a little lax, letting you and the real accountants run the show. I've been so involved with setting up the new furnaces.”

“Is there a point here, Jeb? I'm really very tired.”

Jeb closed his eyes and nodded gravely.

“I found an item I couldn't explain, Morgan. A distressingly large item tucked away in the fine print.”

She felt the air harden in her lungs.

“What exactly is a TP3 hybrid fuel cell, Morgan? Could you explain that to me? Could you tell why in the last six months we've devoted almost half a million dollars of research and development money to a battery?”

He lifted his eyes and settled his gaze on hers. The nodding had ceased.

“Are we in the battery business, Morgan? Because if we are, I think somebody should explain why that is.”

“We're not in the battery business, Jeb.”

His eyes drifted up, holding onto a spot a few inches above her head.

“Well, maybe we should be. I tracked down the specs, looked over the tests you've been running on this TP3. I must say, Morgan, it's got a very impressive performance history. Packs one hell of a wallop.”

Morgan strained to keep the smile on her lips.

“I'm going home now, Jeb. If there's anything else, it can wait till tomorrow.”

“So, if we're not going to manufacture these batteries, why're we doing all this fuel cell R and D, at a time when our resources are strained to the limit? You mind telling me?”

“Good night Jeb.”

“Is this another one of Andy's ideas? Something else you found in his notebooks?”

Morgan felt the smile die on her lips. She drew a calming breath.

“No, it's not Andy's idea. It's mine. All mine. Is that so hard to believe? That I would have an idea once in a while.”

“Nothing personal, Morgan, but it's been my observation that your strength lies in marketing products, not creating them.”

She turned to go but Jeb Shine slid off his desk, angled in front of her, and blocked her way.

She kept her tone relaxed.

“Maybe it's time you started thinking about retirement, Jeb. Take up golf, shuffleboard. Maybe a nice long cruise around Polynesia. You've served your time in the salt mines. What you need to do is kick back a little, take a few deep breaths, you know, before it's too late.”

He squinted at her.

“Too late?”

She reached out and touched the point of her fingernail to one of the hula girls on the belly of his shirt.

“Good night, Jeb. We'll talk again soon, I promise.”

 

When she opened the door to his office, her dad was at his desk staring into his computer screen. He wore a green polo shirt and a pair of khakis, leather sandals. Gray was creeping into his sandy hair, but otherwise he was still trim and youthful. His office walls were bare except for a single photograph that hung across from his desk. Andy and A. J. stood by a seven-hundred-pound blue on the docks in Venezuela, her dad with his arm over Andy's shoulder. A golden light suffusing the sky behind them. Eleven years ago, back when beautiful sunsets were still possible.

On her dad's computer screen she saw the wavy blue lines, the circles and swirls of a tidal chart.

A. J. was running the program he'd written that attempted to plot the movements of Big Mother. Using her last known position, two hundred miles southeast of St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, he was computing the effects of tidal shifts on her migratory pattern.

Her last appearance on the global positioning satellite was on April fifteenth of the previous year. So the computer program had to sift through a year's worth of data to make its current calculation. Tidal shifts were only one of dozens of variables influencing her direction. The ever-changing temperature variants, the snaky course changes of the Gulf Stream and the dozen other tidal currents, the effects of storms, lunar cycles, even the presence of a fishing fleet in a particular zone had to be factored in. And, of course, there were forces he had no way of reckoning. It was, as Morgan had known from the start, a hopeless enterprise. A futile task that nevertheless consumed most of his waking hours. And she was fairly certain it consumed most of the others as well.

“Where is she, Dad?”

“Still off the Abacos. South and east. Thirty, forty miles. I'm beginning to think it's her mating grounds.”

He continued to click his mouse, adding data, correcting.

“It's time to move the boat,” he said. “Marsh Harbor, that's our best bet. Only a few days before the pod switches on. We have to be ready.”

“I know, Dad. Only a few more days.”

“This is the year, Morgan. This is the year we nail her.”

“Yeah, Dad. This is the year.”

But she didn't believe it. No matter how sophisticated his program was, it just wasn't possible to calculate exactly where the fish would surface next. Too many variables, too much chance. Marlin were the least understood fish in the ocean. They'd never been raised in captivity, never studied up close. Placed in an aquarium at any age, they died in hours. Even the top scientists with the national marine fisheries who spent their careers investigating marlin had been unable to track their migration patterns or understand something as basic as
their spawning habits. They were loners, these fish. Mysterious and baffling. Otherworldly.

Big Mother might reappear anywhere on the globe. No way to be sure. Math couldn't do it. Black magic wouldn't either. For all they knew, the transmitter might have broken loose this year somewhere in the marlin's travels. Or the fish might have died since last year's ping—caught by a long-liner, or maybe attacked by its only enemy in the ocean, a great white.

In the weeks following Andy's death, Morgan and her dad had created a duplicate pod, programmed identically, so they'd have an idea of the life span of the pod hooked to Big Mother. The duplicate hung on the wall across from A.J.'s desk, its battery still chugging. Morgan's calculations said it had a ten-year life, but there was no way to predict such a thing with total accuracy. So far, so good. Each spring for the last nine years, the duplicate unit came alive right on schedule and beeped steadily for seven days.

“I'm going home, Dad. I'll pick up something for supper.”

“I'll be along in a while.”

“All right.”

“Tell Johnny he needs to get his gear together. Tomorrow we're heading to Abaco. We have to be close by when she surfaces.”

“All right, Dad.”

“And you're coming, right? To Marsh Harbor?”

“I don't know. There's a lot of work around here.”

He let go of the mouse and swiveled his chair around to face her.

“This could be our last shot,” he said. “That battery's about to give out. It's now or never, Morgan.”

“It's a busy time, Dad. A lot of things around here need my attention.”

He reached out and took her hand in his. His palm was roughened from boat work and fishing, the hand of a laborer.

“Family, Morgan. It's more important than business.”

“Is it, Dad?”

His dark eyes took her in and he gave her a quick boyish smile. The smile her mother must have fallen in love with. This man who had once been so easy and fun-loving, brimming with dreams and self-confidence. Nothing like the dark set of his mouth that dominated his appearance these last few years as his attention to the world dwindled to a fine point. Until all his energy, all his time and intelligence was focused on that one thing, a blue marlin swimming somewhere in the oceans of the world. Big Mother.

“Family,” he said, a brief light filling his smile. “It's everything, Morgan. The whole ball of wax.”

She nodded and said okay, yes, she would go along this one last time.

“Good. Maybe you'll be like your mother. She always brought us luck.”

“Yeah,” Morgan said. “A lot of luck.”

“It wouldn't be right if you weren't there.”

“But when the battery dies, it's over. No more trips. No more chasing.”

His smile drifted away, eyes blurring.

“And you'll come back to work. Start minding the store again.”

He blinked and returned from somewhere far off.

“I know this has been hard on you, Morgan. I'm very proud of you, the way you stepped in and took charge. I couldn't have managed without your help.”

“So you'll come back and everything will be like it was.”

“Someday, sure,” he said. “This can't go on forever.”

“No,” she said. “It can't.”

He took her hand and gave it a squeeze, then swung back to his work.

Morgan stood behind him for another moment and watched her father shift through the screens. Entering new data, studying the small mutations that this fresh information made on the global model.

She watched him type, watched him click the mouse. She reached out and laid a hand on his shoulder but he did not register her
presence. He simply continued to type, to move from screen to screen, entering the latest information, then switching back to the global chart to see what effect his new data had on Big Mother's position.

Morgan closed her eyes and tried to focus all her being on the palm of her hand. Tried to feel the energy that resonated from her father. But all she could sense were the tiny adjustments of muscle and sinew as he typed, as he clicked, as he peered at the cold, bright, deathless screen.

The bar at Sundowners was quiet. Willie Nelson crooning softly from the overhead speakers, the bald, heavyset bartender whistling along. Only Thorn and a couple of schoolteachers on spring break from Chicago staring at each other across the bar. A short, blocky blonde and a tall redhead with a piercing laugh. They talked to him for a while. Told him what they did for a living, where they were from. Going home tomorrow, back to the grind. All those papers to grade. After ten minutes of flirting, they bought him a round, then came around the bar, took the stools on either side of him to watch him drink it. The redhead giggled. They were drunker than he was. Having a lot more fun.

They leaned behind his back and whispered to each other. The blonde whooped with laughter. Thorn poured the Bilge Burner down his throat and stared straight ahead at their reflections in the dark
glass that looked out on the canal. The alcohol wasn't working. The smell of scorched flesh still lingered and he could hear whimpers echoing from the shadows of the bar.

The blonde cupped her hand around Thorn's ear and leaned close.

“Can I interest you in an orgasm,” she whispered. “Two-for-one special.”

The redhead scratched a message on his wrist with her fingernail.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Sorry?” the blonde said. “What's that mean? Sorry.”

“It means I'm not that kind of guy. At least not tonight.”

“Every guy is that kind of guy,” said the blonde.

“He's telling us he's gay, Charlotte.”

“He won't be gay after we get through with him,” Charlotte said.

“You're drunk,” said her friend.

“Well, of course I am. This is the Keys, isn't it? That's the law down here. Get drunk, stay drunk. Isn't that the law, Mr. Scruffy Keys Man?”

“Thanks for the drink,” Thorn said, and got up and moved around the semicircular bar.

For the next fifteen minutes the two schoolteachers glared at him and murmured to each other till finally Sugarman showed up.

“Friends of yours?” he said, nodding hello to the schoolteachers.

“They think I'm gay.”

“You don't look gay,” said Sugarman. “You look morose.”

Sugar was his oldest, closest friend. Jamaican father, Norwegian mother. From that odd mix, he'd inherited a quirky nature, a blend of hot-blooded and serene, sexy island rhythms and cool detachment, a jovial nature, a dissecting mind. He was strikingly handsome with short, dark, curly hair and a thin, straight nose and shrewd dark eyes. His mouth was supple and he had half a dozen different grins at his disposal. His skin was silky and its color was two shades lighter than Thorn's tan. Wherever he went, Sugar got second looks. Once down in Key West, while walking along Duval, two breathless adolescents mistook him for some TV star and pestered Sugar for his autograph,
making such a fuss that finally he signed their napkins to make them go away.

A few years back Sugarman resigned his job as a Monroe County sheriff's deputy and opened a private investigation firm down in Tavernier. Since then he'd been scratching by on runaway kid cases and occasional security work. Enough to pay the mortgage and buy groceries, but no frills. Then last summer Jeannie, his wife since high school, decided she'd had enough of flirting with poverty. She filed for divorce. “Irreconcilable economic aspirations,” is how Sugarman put it. Somehow, she won custody of Janey and Jackie, their twin girls. Jeannie carted the two-year-olds and the rest of her possessions up to Miami, where a few months later she moved in with some charlatan who was pocketing large sums by guiding weak-minded souls to their previous lives. Jeannie always had a soft spot for gurus.

“You realize you're a TV star, Thorn?”

“I heard.”

“They been running the same footage over and over. You're in your skiff pulling some old guy out of the water. I've seen it half a dozen times already. An unidentified Good Samaritan. How's it feel to be famous?”

“Shitty,” he said. “Very shitty.”

Sugarman ordered a Corona. The schoolteachers were arguing. The blonde wanted to move on to another bar. Her friend wanted to go to bed.

“Thanks for coming, Sugar.”

“Hey, you call, I come. That's how it works.”

“Something's strange.”

“Strange?”

“About the crash.”

Sugarman took a longer look at him, and shook his head sadly.

“Oh, no. Here we go.”

Sugar's beer arrived and he removed the wedge of lime and took a sip.

Thorn told him about the boat he'd seen, the three people aboard.

“So they didn't want to get involved,” Sugar said. “Nothing weird about that. A lot of people freeze up in emergencies.”

“Afterwards, at Flamingo the kid came over to me. He was trying to be cagey, but it was clear he wanted to see if I'd noticed them before the crash. Like he was worried I had something on him. He had a weird knife and real dodgy eyes. Talked like some half-assed gangster.”

“A weird knife and dodgy eyes,” Sugar said. “Hell, let's go arrest the son of a bitch, toss him in solitary.”

Thorn told him about going to the library, about the articles on Morgan Braswell, her father, A. J., about driving to Palm Beach, the run-down mansion, the tight security at the plant.

Sugarman had a sip of his beer. He squeezed some lime into the bottle and had another sip.

“You've been so good lately, Thorn. Everything's coasting along so nice and easy.”

“You think I'm making this up?”

“I was wondering how long it would last. This stretch of tranquillity.”

The schoolteachers paid their bill and got up. They walked behind Thorn and Sugarman. The blonde leaned close and hissed and flashed her claws.

“The world springs from your mind, Thorn, and sinks again into your mind. That's what the Buddhists say. And if you ask me, there's something to it. You see what you want to see.”

“That goddamn airplane didn't spring from my mind, Sugar.”

They sat in silence for a while, watched the bartender wash the teachers' glasses. Thorn pushed his drink away. He was wasting good alcohol, pouring it into a bottomless cavity.

A couple of guys with long hair and Hawaiian shirts came into the bar. The schoolteachers were with them. Everyone laughing. On the same boozy wavelength.

“There's nothing weird about this, Sugar? You sure?”

“Nothing you told me sounds weird, no. Some rich assholes from Palm Beach didn't want to scuff their manicures. That's all. I think what it is, you're shell-shocked. An airplane crashes in your lap, it's only natural you get a little case of post-trauma. And the way you're dealing with it, being Thorn, you rush out and start sniffing around, thinking you gotta fix things.”

Thorn looked over at the schoolteachers and their new friends. Bilge Burners all around.

“You're right,” he said. “I'm full of shit.”

“I didn't say that.”

“Yeah, you did. Not in those words, but it's the same thing.”

The bartender came over and asked if they wanted another round. Sugar said no. Thorn shook his head.

“I think the NTSB might want to talk to you. Transportation Safety Board. You've heard of them, right? The people that investigate these things.”

“I've heard of them.”

“They'd probably like to debrief you. You being an eyewitness and all.”

“What am I going to tell them? I saw the plane crash. It nearly capsized my boat. I don't know anything else.”

“You should call. It's your civic duty.”

“Sure,” Thorn said. “Soon as I get a phone installed.”

Sugarman finished his beer and slid it to the edge of the bar. He picked up the tab and kept it out of Thorn's reach.

“You want me to, I'll call them for you.”

“No,” he said. “I'm going to stay the hell out of this.”

Sugar got down from his stool and rested his hand on Thorn's shoulder.

“You get some sleep, buddy. You'll feel better tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” Thorn said. “Some sleep. That'd be nice.”

Morgan put the leftover Chinese in the refrigerator. Six white boxes. Shrimp fried rice, garlic chicken, the usual. Enough for dinner tomorrow. She wiped off the table, rinsed the plates and silverware, put them in the dishwasher. She corked the Pinot Noir and set it on the shelf. Set up the coffee machine for the morning.

Johnny was upstairs in his bedroom. Her dad was in his study. Leaving her the woman's work. Just like they'd treated her mother.

Morgan turned off the kitchen light and went upstairs and stopped on the landing outside Johnny's room. Marlon Brando was lecturing one of his thugs, using his muffled Godfather voice, as though his cheeks were stuffed with dental cotton. She stood for a moment listening to the familiar dialogue. Johnny watched them every night, gangster movies. Said it relaxed him. Cagney, Bogart, Pacino, Mitchum. Gunfire coming from his room, sirens, swelling music, fuck this, fuck that. For years she tried making fun of the movies, tried bullying him. Neither worked, so finally she gave up. She wasn't his mother. If he wanted to wallow in that trash, fantasize an alternate life, it was his own choice. She was only his sister. That's all she was, a sister and a daughter. Her brother and her father were mature adults. She had to keep reminding herself.

She went down the narrow hallway and opened the attic door, took a deep breath, and climbed the narrow stairs into the dark, airless heat. It'd been months since she'd been up there. That long since she'd needed to make the journey. But it was coming up on Easter, the anniversary of all the bad shit. And then there was the stuff from work, the pressures, the desperate come-from-behind finish she was trying to pull off.

A wedge of light angled across the dusty floor of the attic. Passing into the shadows, Morgan bumped her shin against a footlocker. She winced, sucked down a breath, and kept on going, slipping past a broken rocking chair, a stack of old records, a baby bassinet. The cane-back chair was still there. Standing upright now.

She held on to the back of the chair and stepped onto it, teetering
for a second. When she had her balance, she reached overhead into the darkness and found the rafter, and ran her hand down the smooth wood until she came to the nylon rope that her mother had knotted there.

She touched a fingertip to the bristly end where Johnny's knife blade had sawed through the strands. She closed her eyes and gripped that stub of rope and held on until the blood ran out of her arm and it began to grow heavy and numb.

 

Morgan lay in the dark, her head on Andy's pillow. His room was the same. Untouched in ten years. His clothes ironed, hanging neatly in his closet. His shelves lined with novels and science texts. His trophies from high school, a photograph of Albert Einstein, a bust of Beethoven. His notes organized in colored folders. His careful script. A treasure trove. Notations, pages of math, detailed technical drawings, his storehouse of ideas. Like some young Leonardo da Vinci, his engineering designs and scientific observations, his experiments light-years ahead of his time. Morgan had managed to decode only one of his ideas so far and it alone had managed to steer MicroDyne back to profitability. There were hundreds of pages of other formulas, detailed drawings of machines and microcircuitry he'd conceived. And there were the anatomical doodles of women with boyish hips and small breasts. Dozens of them. All with Morgan's shape.

Morgan could no longer smell his scent on the pillowcase. She had long ago inhaled all those leftover particles. Absorbed them, taken them into her bloodstream. Now there were only the invisible molecules, charged atoms, the last traces of his fairy dust lingering in the air. She breathed them in, let them out. Breathed them in again.

Then she was drifting into a dream: Andy was writing on a chalkboard, Morgan sitting in the front row of an empty classroom. Andy was walking her through a formula, the numbers hazy in her dream. She squinted at them but couldn't make them out. She raised her
hand, and was waiting for him to turn from the chalkboard and call on her when the phone shook her awake.

She fumbled in the dark and got it on the third ring. Her hello was deep-throated and groggy.

“Morgan Braswell?”

“Yes?”

“My name is Julie Jamison.”

“All right.”

“I'm sorry to disturb you so late, Miss Braswell.”

“Is this a sales call?”

“I'm a writer,” the woman said. “I'm calling to confirm a few facts on a story I'm doing.”

“About me?”

“Your family,” die woman said. “Do you have a minute? Somebody's made some pretty serious accusations. We'd like to hear your side of things before we go ahead with this.”

 

It was nearly two in the morning when Morgan parked the six-year-old Mercedes in their space at Hobe Bay Marina. Johnny shuffled along behind her, head bowed, mumbling. Morgan marched down the dock. It was breezy and the halyards were jingling and dark water sloshed against the pilings.