Die Job (17 page)

“Call for help,” I told Rachel, stripping off my cardigan. I was a mediocre swimmer, not in any way qualified to undertake a rescue in conditions like this, but there was no one else. I sprinted the twenty yards to the waterline, pulling my tee shirt over my head as I went. My feet slapped against the hard, wet sand as I neared the water. A wave broke, sending a surge of water over my feet and halfway up my shins. It was colder than usual, pulled up from the depths by
Horatio’s winds. I stood there, torn, not wanting to dive in, but unwilling to just watch as the sea took the surfer. Between swells, I thought I spotted something black. He wasn’t too far out. The beach sloped gradually into the water and normally I’d have been able to walk out to where he floated. Without further thought, I waded into the angry surf.

THE COLD SMACKED ME. MY SKIN SEEMED TO SHRINK around my frame as I struck out toward where I thought I’d seen the surfer. I couldn’t last more than ten or so minutes. Ducking under a wave about to crest, I popped up for another look. There! In the trough between two waves, I spotted the surfer’s head bobbing just at the surface. One of his arms flailed before another wave cut off my view. I spit out a mouthful of salty water and went under again, finding it easier to swim beneath the waves, even though roiling sand and shell bits made a muddy scrim I couldn’t see through. The next time I surfaced, the surfer was barely a body length away, his face twisted in panic, his mouth open as if he were screaming something.

“I’m coming,” I screamed back pointlessly.

The current pulled him away even as I breaststroked toward him, trying to keep him in sight. Stretching out my hand, I
brushed what felt like the slick skin of his wet suit—his ankle, maybe—before the current yanked him away. A wave began to swell behind him, pulling him up above me. It looked like one arm was useless, dangling helplessly as he tried to stay upright by paddling with his left arm. Then the wave swept me up and I gulped in a deep breath before it smashed me down toward the sea floor, rolling me over and over against the sand. I needed air. I tried to orient myself, tried to get my legs beneath me. Just as I got my legs upright underneath me and pushed as hard as I could, something heavy thudded into me. The surfer.

Frantic to grab him, I hooked a hand around what felt like his knee. Knocked off-balance by his weight, I pushed up with the one foot still touching the sand. I didn’t get much leverage and clawed desperately at the water. Air. I needed air. My head broke the surface and I gulped a mouthful of seawater, choked, and gasped for air. Then, I let my hands climb the surfer’s body, desperate to lift his face from the water. Tangling my fingers in his hair, I pulled his head up. His eyes were shut. Blinking salt out of my eyes, I tried to see if he was breathing, but I couldn’t tell.

Another wave broke over us, but to my relief it seemed to be pushing us toward the shore, not pulling us away. The tide must be coming in. My toes scraped sand and I tried to stand, but the surfer’s weight and the sucking of the water as the wave receded kept me down.

“Hold on,” strong voices called from the shore. “We’re coming.”

Water blurred my vision, but I thought I saw three men pounding toward us, carrying the yellow and green surfboard and a flotation ring. One of them flung it toward me and it bounced off my forehead. I hardly registered the pain. Still
holding the surfer by his hair, I grabbed for the ring just as the men splashed up to me in what turned out to be only waist-high water. Two of them grabbed the unconscious surfer while the third helped me stand. My every muscle trembled, and he put his arm around my waist to keep me from falling. I looked up into his face, at blue eyes framed by bushy white brows and seamed skin that spoke of decades in the sun, and thought I’d never seen anything so wonderful.

BACK IN MOM’s KITCHEN AN HOUR LATER AFTER A shower, shampoo, and change of clothes, I spooned up chicken noodle soup and defused Mom’s worries.

“You said you wouldn’t go in the water,” she said, ladling more soup out of the pot into my bowl.

“I’m full,” I protested. I cupped my hands around the bowl, letting the heat seep into me. The room exuded warmth with its brick wall, yellow paint, copper pans hanging from a rack overhead, and a faint scent of vanilla. “And it’s not like I planned to go swimming. What did you want me to do—leave the poor guy to drown?”

“Of course not. Whatever possessed him to trying surfing with a hurricane off the coast? Didn’t he know how dangerous it was?”

I rather thought that was the point. The surfer had turned out to be a man in his mid-twenties who worked for some government organization in Atlanta. He’d regained consciousness and thanked me and the fishermen for rescuing him as the EMTs prepared to load him into the ambulance to have his broken arm set at the hospital. Over his shoulder, I noticed a reporter speaking with a police officer who had responded with the medics.

“You saved my life,” the surfer said, surprising me with a kiss on the cheek. “My parents thank you.”

“The surf was pushing you toward the beach, anyway,” I said, embarrassed by his gratitude. My hair dripped onto the blanket the EMTs had wrapped around him, and I shivered.

“Still. If there’s ever anything I can do for you, let me know.” Brown-flecked hazel eyes looked into mine with grateful sincerity. “And next time you’re in Atlanta, I’m taking you to dinner.” He pressed a business card into my hand, fishing it from the pocket of khaki shorts the fishermen had retrieved, along with his shoes and wallet, from a heap down the beach. His gaze strayed to the heaving water behind me. “What a rush!”

He was certifiably insane. I told him so and he grinned. As the ambulance started down the road, I glanced at his card: “Stuart Varnet,” it read, “Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.” Sounded like a cheery job.

Rachel had driven me to my apartment in my car, where I’d cleaned up and put Band-Aids on a couple of places scraped raw in the surf. The worst spot was high on my cheekbone, and any facial movement—smiling, frowning, laughing—tugged at it and made me wince. Now, while Rachel and Althea dealt with a client up front, I brought Mom up to speed on what Rachel had told me and what I’d learned from Dillon and Coach Peet. I didn’t mention my upcoming date with Dillon; that was a development I wanted to keep private for the moment.

“I can’t believe Braden was participating in a pharmaceutical study,” she said. “Aren’t there a lot of risks involved?”

“Can’t be any worse than surfing in a hurricane,” I said.

She laughed. “That’s a true fact, but I’m sure Braden had
to have his parents’ permission to take part in a drug study; that young daredevil today certainly didn’t tell his folks. It would be just criminal if Braden had a reaction to the drug and it contributed to his death in some way. Could the medicine have made him dizzy so that he fell?”

“I suppose it’s possible,” I said, rinsing out my bowl and putting it in the drainer. “But don’t forget that someone smothered him. If the fall was an accident, why would someone stalk him at the hospital and kill him? I’d been thinking that the murderer finished him off at the hospital because they were afraid he’d wake up and ID them.”

“That makes sense,” Mom said. She gazed at me over the lenses of her rimless glasses. “How much money would a pharmaceutical company have invested in a drug? If it’s a lot—millions—and a test subject had a potentially fatal accident because of it, mightn’t they want to cover it up?”

“With murder?” I laughed. “You’ve been watching too many thrillers, Mom. This isn’t that Rachel Weisz movie where the evil pharmaceutical company tested drugs on innocent Africans. What was it called? Something about a gardener. Corporations don’t run around killing people. Thanks for the soup. It hit the spot.”

“It was just out of a can.” Mom pursed her lips. “I still think you should follow up on the drug test thing. Maybe that boy who was here yesterday, Braden’s friend, could tell you more about it.”

“Mark Crenshaw.” I’d already planned to talk to him. “Maybe I’ll run over to the school and see if I can catch him before football practice. Then I’ll come back here in time to help with the Locks of Love cuts.”

“You should be resting.” Mom put her hands on her hips.

“I got wet,” I said, kissing her cheek. “It’s not like I was in a car wreck or something. I don’t need to rest.”

“Hmmph. You got pretty beat up. Look at the bruises on your arm.”

The sight of the bruises reminded me of what Rachel had said about Mark’s dad maybe abusing him and I told my mom. “Should I tell someone?”

“I don’t know how you can,” she said, tapping a finger on her lower lip. “You heard it from Rachel who heard it from Lindsay who noticed some bruises on Mark. That’s hardly proof of abuse. You don’t want to start rumors based on such flimsy evidence.”

“His mother had a bruise, too,” I said. “I noticed it this morning.”

“Well, if having a couple bruises is proof of parental or spousal abuse, anyone looking at you would toss me in jail quicker than I can say ‘Jack Robinson.’ ”

“Good point,” I said, eyeing my bruised and scraped arms. I hadn’t relished going to the police or anyone with those accusations and I was relieved to hear Mom didn’t think I should.

I gave her a hug. “Thanks for worrying about me.”

“It’s my job.” She sounded severe, but I caught the twinkle in her eye. “But the pay stinks and the hours are lousy.”

Arriving back at the high school, I headed around back to the practice field. Unless things had changed since I went there, the football team practiced last period and then for an additional hour or so after school. I hoped to intercept Mark Crenshaw before practice kicked off. Coach Peet, I knew, was unlikely to let me distract his players once practice got underway. The field, goal posts at either
end, stretched greenly away from the back of the high school. A single section of rickety bleachers—once white, now a silvery gray where the sun and humidity had chewed away the paint—marked the fifty-yard line. A girl sat midway up, holding her long hair back with one hand and pressing the pages of a textbook open with the other.

I expected to see a steady stream of football players trickling from the exterior gym door onto the field; instead, two players in practice jerseys tossed a football back and forth in the middle of the field. Coach Peet was nowhere in sight. I crossed the field, behind the players, my low-heeled pumps sinking into the grass. I noticed “Crenshaw” stenciled on the back of one of the kids’ jerseys. The other player suddenly cut across the field, then zigzagged toward the middle. Mark brought his arm back and launched the ball in a tight spiral. The receiver snagged it with his fingertips and raced for the end zone.

“Mark?”

He turned, startled. “What? Oh, hi, Miss Terhune.” His eyes slid to his teammate down the field. He caught the football as the receiver lobbed it back to him.

“Do you have a moment to talk?” I asked. “About Braden?”

“I’ve got lots of moments,” he said. “No practice today because of the hurricane. Too many people have evacuated. Give me ten, okay, Josh?” he called to his teammate. “Then we’ll run some more patterns.”

Josh gave him a thumbs-up and joined the girl on the bleachers. I felt awkward standing in the middle of the field, but the bleachers were too small to allow for private conversation.

“My car’s just over there,” Mark said with a nod toward a
blue Mustang parked outside the fence. “We could sit there if you want, out of the wind.”

“Sounds good.”

As we headed toward the car, he asked, “What happened to your face?” His hand brushed the air around his own cheek.

“Swimming accident.” I didn’t want to go into it. “How are you holding up? Everyone says you and Braden were best friends.”

“It’s hard,” Mark said. Pulling off his helmet, he tossed his hair out of his eyes with a flip of his head. “I just can’t believe he’s gone. At practice yesterday, Lonnie would run the pattern and turn, waiting for me to throw to him, but it just wasn’t the same. Every time I hit Lonnie with a pass, it reminded me that Braden’s gone. Dead. It was like finding out he’s dead over and over again, you know? Before, I was really pumped about this season, looking forward to the playoffs. Now . . .” He shrugged. “I’m just kinda going through the motions. I’m thinking about quitting.”

He beeped open the car’s locks and we climbed in. The interior was immaculate and smelled vaguely of pine. A sleeve on the visor held a selection of CDs; other than that, the car looked like it had just come off the showroom floor. “She was a present from my folks,” Mark said self-consciously, smoothing a hand along the dashboard. “When I got my appointment to the Naval Academy.”

Whatever happened to giving a kid a suitcase for a graduation present? “What’s Coach Peet think? About you leaving the team?”

“That I should stick with it. My backup’s just a freshman. He’s good, but Coach would rather go with a known quantity.”

I felt for Mark, but I wasn’t qualified to advise him on his football dilemma. “Look, Mark, a couple of people have told me Braden was participating in some sort of drug study. Do you know anything about that?”