Cradle (43 page)

The salesgirl was a brunette, about twenty, very plain, but with an eager face. ‘Did
you have anything in mind?’ she asked. Her hair was long, like Tiffani’s. Winters
relaxed a little.

‘Sort of,’ he said. ‘She has beautiful long hair. Like yours. What could I get her
that would be really special? It’s her birthday.’ Again he felt a strange anxiety
that he did not understand.

‘What colour?’ the girl asked.

The question didn’t make sense. ‘I don’t even know yet what I want,’ he replied with
a puzzled expression, ‘so I certainly don’t know the colour.’

The salesgirl smiled. ‘What colour is your niece’s hair?’ she said very slowly, almost
as if she were speaking to someone mentally retarded.

‘Oh, of course,’ Winters laughed. ‘Reddish-brown, auburn,’ he said. ‘And it’s very
long.’
You said that already
, a voice whispered inside of him.
You are acting like a fool
.

The salesgirl motioned for him to follow her and they walked back to the rear of the
store. She pointed at a small round glass case full of combs of all shapes and sizes.
‘These would make excellent gifts for your niece,’ she said. There was an inflection
in her voice when she said the word ‘niece’ that bothered Winters.
Could she know something? One of her friends? Or maybe she was at the play?
He took a breath and calmed himself. Again Winters was astonished by the volatility
of his emotions.

On one of the small shelves were two beautiful matching brown combs with gold filigree
across the top. One of the combs was large enough to hold all that magnificent hair
in a chignon against her neck. The other smaller comb was a perfect size to adorn
the side or back of her hairstyle. ‘I’ll take those,’ he said to the girl, ‘the ones
with the gold work along the top. And please gift-wrap them for me.’

The efficient salesgirl reached inside the display case and pulled out the combs.
She told Winters to wait a couple of minutes while she wrapped the present. She disappeared
into the back of the store and Winters was left alone.
I’ll leave them on her dressing table at the end of intermission
, he was thinking. He conjured up a picture of Tiffani going into the dressing room,
by herself, and finding the present under her nameplate against the mirror. Winters
smiled as he imagined her reaction. At that moment a woman with her eight- or nine-year-old
daughter brushed by him in the store. ‘Pardon me,’ the woman said, without looking
around, as she and the little girl rushed to finger some Easter baskets hanging on
the wall.

The salesgirl had finished wrapping the present and was standing next to the computer
cash register. When Winters reached the counter, she handed him a small card that
had ‘Happy Birthday’ imprinted on the upper left corner. Winters stared at it for
a few seconds. ‘No,’ he said finally, ‘no card. I’ll buy another at the stationery
store.’

‘Cash or charge?’ the girl asked him.

Winters panicked for a moment.
I don’t know if I have enough cash on me
, he thought.
And how would I ever explain the charge to Betty?
He opened his wallet and counted his money. He smiled at the girl and said ‘Cash,
please’ when he realized that he had almost fifty dollars. The bill was only thirty-two
dollars.

Commander Winters felt a rush of joy as he nearly skipped out of the store. His earlier
nervousness had completely disappeared. He even began to whistle just before he pushed
open the door and left the enclosed air-conditioned environment of the mall.
I hope she likes the combs
, he said to himself. Then he smiled again.
I know she will
.

Nick poured the last of the bottle of Chablis into Carol’s glass. ‘I don’t think I
could ever be a journalist,’ he said. ‘To be successful it sounds to me as if you
have to be a sneak.’

Carol moved a piece of grilled catfish mixed with some cauliflower on to her fork
and put the bite in her mouth. ‘It’s not that much different from any other job. There
are always questions of ethics, as well as places where your personal and professional
lives come into conflict.’ She finished chewing her food and swallowed before she
continued. ‘I had thought that maybe I would tell you and Troy on Friday evening.
But things just didn’t work out, as you know.’

‘If you had,’ Nick pushed his plate away to indicate that he was finished with his
meal, ‘then everything would have been different. I would have been aware of the possible
danger and most likely it would have been you and I in that place together. Who knows
what might have happened then.’

‘I’ve had worse conflicts before.’ Carol took a drink from her glass of wine. She
wanted to finish with this subject. In her way. ‘Right after I graduated from Stanford,
I worked for the
San Francisco Chronicle
. I was dating Lucas Tipton a little at the time that the Warrior drug scandal broke.
I used the social contacts I had made through him to obtain a unique slant on the
story. Lucas never forgave me. So I’m used to problems. They go with the territory.’

A waiter came by and poured them some coffee. ‘But now that I have finished apologizing,
for the third time,’ Carol said pointedly, ‘I hope we can go back to more important
matters. I must tell you, Nick, that I find your Russian plot idea absolutely off
the wall. The weakest element is Troy. There’s simply no way he could be a spy. It’s
preposterous.’

‘More preposterous than a super-alien space vehicle in need of repairs at the bottom
of the Gulf of Mexico?’ Nick countered stubbornly. ‘Besides, I have a definite motive.
Money. Did you see all the equipment he has wrapped up in that computer game?’

‘Angie probably makes enough off her royalties in one week to cover all that computer
stuff,’ Carol replied. She reached across the table and put her hand on Nick’s forearm.
‘Now don’t overreact, but you know there are some relationships where the woman carries
the financial load. I can tell that she loves him. There’s no doubt in my mind that
she would offer to help him.’

‘Then why did he try to borrow money from me and then Captain Homer on Thursday night?’

‘Hell, Nick, I don’t know.’ Carol was becoming slightly frustrated. ‘But it’s irrelevant
anyway. I can’t imagine any set of conditions, unless I was convinced that I was going
to be killed, that would prevent my going back out there with Troy. Whatever the truth
is, it is certainly a sensational story. I’m surprised you are so hesitant. I thought
you were an adventurer.’

Carol stared directly across the table at Nick. He thought he saw a flicker of flirtation
hiding behind her unwavering gaze.
You are one fascinating woman
, he thought.
And you’re taunting me a little now. I caught your double meaning
. He remembered how good he had felt when he held her on the boat in the afternoon.
Underneath that aggressive veneer is another person. Beautiful and intelligent. Hard
as nails one minute and a vulnerable little girl the next
. Nick was certain that any hope he might have of continuing his relationship with
Carol was dependent on his helping Troy. She wasn’t interested in men who were not
willing to take chances.

‘I used to be,’ Nick finally replied. He twirled his empty wine glass in his hand.
‘I don’t know what happened. I guess I got stung a couple of times and that has made
me more cautious. Particularly where people are concerned. But I will admit that if
I stand back from this situation and imagine myself as simply an observer, I find
the whole affair absolutely fascinating.’

Carol finished her wine and put the glass back on the table. Nick was quiet. She drummed
her fingers on the tabletop and smiled. ‘Well,’ she said, fixing him with her eyes
and picking up her coffee cup, ‘have you made a decision?’

He laughed. ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll do it.’ Now it was his turn to reach out and touch her
arm. ‘For lots of reasons.’

‘Good,’ she remarked. ‘Now that something has been decided, why don’t you help me
prepare for my interview with Captain Homer and the crew. How much was the stuff worth
that you pulled up from the
Santa Rosa?
And who was Jake? I must act as if I’m serious about this story.’ Carol put her fountain
pen tape recorder on the table and turned it on.

‘We officially cleared a little over two million dollars. Jake Lewis and I each received
ten percent, Amanda Winchester was reimbursed for the expense advance plus twenty-five
percent of the profit. Homer, Ellen, and Greta kept the rest.’ Nick stopped but Carol
indicated for him to continue. ‘Jake Lewis was the only close friend I have ever had
as an adult. He was an absolute peach of a person, honest, hard-working, intelligent,
and loyal. And completely naive. He fell for Greta like a ton of bricks. She manipulated
him completely and then used his love to her own advantage.’

Nick looked away, out the window of the small seafood restaurant, at some seagulls
who were soaring over the water in the fading twilight. ‘The night we came back with
the big haul, Jake and I agreed that one of the two of us would always be awake. Even
then there was something peculiar in the Homer-Ellen-Greta triangle. At that time
they were not yet all living together, but I still didn’t trust them. While Jake was
supposedly on watch, Greta balled his brains out. ‘To celebrate,’ he said, when he
apologized to me for falling asleep afterward. When I woke up, more than half of the
treasure was gone.’

Anger long buried was seething in Nick. Carol watched him carefully, noting the intensity
of his passion. ‘Jake didn’t give a shit about the money. He even tried to talk Amanda
and me out of going to court. That’s the kind of guy he was. I remember he told me,
“Hey, Nick my friend, we made two hundred thousand apiece out of this. We cannot prove
there was more. Let’s just be thankful and get on with our lives.” Homer had cheated
him and Greta had shit all over him, but Jake still wasn’t pissed. Not much more than
a year later, he married a water ski queen from Winter Haven, bought a house in Orlando,
and went to work as an aerospace engineer.’

The light was vanishing outside. Nick was deep in a memory, recalling the full measure
of his storm of righteous indignation from eight years before. ‘I’ve never understood
them,’ Carol said quietly. She switched off the recorder. Nick turned and looked at
her, a quizzical frown on his face. ‘You know,’ she added, ‘the people like your friend
Jake. Infinite resiliency. No harboured grudges. Whatever happens to them they just
shake off, like water, and go on living. Cheerfully.’ It was her turn to feel a little
emotion. ‘Sometimes I wish I could be more like that. Then I wouldn’t be afraid.’

They stared at each other in the soft light. Nick put his hand over hers.
And there’s that vulnerable little girl again
. He felt a deep emotional longing stirring in his heart.
She’s let me see it twice in a single day
. ‘Carol,’ he said gently, ‘I want to thank you for this afternoon. You know, for
sharing your feelings with me. I feel like I saw an entirely different Carol Dawson.’

‘You did,’ she said, smiling and making it clear that her protective shield was going
up again. ‘And only time will tell if it was a huge mistake.’ She pulled her hand
slowly away from his. ‘For the moment though, we have other business. Back to the
ménage à trois
. What kind of facility is it that they manage and what do they do there?’

‘Excuse me?’ replied Nick, obviously confused.

‘A friend of mine, Dr. Dale Michaels of the Miami Oceanographic Institute, told me
that Captain Homer and Ellen have some kind of high-tech operation here. I don’t remember
exactly how he described it—’

‘You must be mistaken,’ Nick interrupted. ‘I have known them for almost ten years
and they are never anywhere except in that fancy house of his or on board the
Ambrosia
.’

Carol was puzzled. ‘Dale’s information is always correct. He just told me, yesterday
in fact, that Homer Ashford had field tested the institute’s most advanced underwater
sentries throughout the last five years and that his reports—’

‘Hold it. Hold it.’ Nick was leaning forward on the table. ‘I’m not sure I’m following
you. Back up. This could be very very important.’

Carol started again. ‘One of MOI’s newest product areas is underwater sentries, robots,
essentially, that protect aqua-culture farms from sophisticated thieves as well as
large fish or whales. Dale said that Homer contributes money for the research and
then field tests the prototypes—’

‘
Son of a bitch
,’ Nick was standing up. He was bursting with excitement. ‘How could I have been so
stupid? Of course, of course.’

Now Carol was lost. ‘Would you mind telling me what’s going on?’

‘Certainly,’ Nick answered. ‘But right now we’re in a hurry. We have to go by my apartment
to look at an old map and pick up another navigation system for the boat. I’ll explain
everything on the way.’

Nick put his key card in the reader and the garage door opened. He pulled his Pontiac
into his reserved spot and stopped the car. ‘So you see,’ he was saying to Carol,
‘he knew that we wouldn’t find anything. He let us search both his house
and
the lot that he had bought for his new mansion, down at Pelican Point. We found nothing.
At that time it was still hidden somewhere out in the ocean.’

‘Did you look in the water around his new property at that time?’

‘Yes, we did. Jake and I each dived there, on separate days. We found a very interesting
subterranean cave, but no sign of any of the
Santa Rosa
treasure. But we must have given him the idea. I bet he moved the stuff there a year
or two after Jake left. He probably figured it was safe by then. And he had doubtless
worried himself sick that someone would discover the treasure out in the ocean. You
see, it all fits. Including his involvement with underwater sentries.’