Swimming With the Dead (19 page)

“Do you know how he was getting this money?”  I asked.

“No, I was hopin’ he found hisself a new job,” she said.  “He got hisself in some kinda trouble with the police?  Billy’s not a bad man; he jus’ got dat pain.”

“We’re just checking people who were seen in the area of a break-in Thursday night.  Talking to lots of folks,” Dunn said.

“Gad almighty, tell me Billy not a part of dat.  You see him you tell him to come home to his children.  He don’ needs to bring no presents,” she said.

On the way out, I stopped to admire a photo in a beautiful gilt frame, a gift from her mother, Clara Reardon explained.  It was their wedding portrait, a radiant Clara, face alive with expectation, and Billy handsome and protective, holding her hand.  Though ten years younger, I recognized him at once.  Billy Reardon was the man who had tried to kill me.

Chapter 18

The next morning, I called the Duvalls.  Caroline answered.  She got George on the other phone and I gave them both a rundown of what I’d found so far.  “What’s the bottom line?” Duvall pressed.  “Was Michael murdered?”

“Yes, I’m fairly certain he was,” I admitted. 

“Find out who did it.  I don’t care what it costs,” Duvall whispered, and hung up.

I headed down to the marina and found O’Brien scrambling around on the front of a boat, pulling on ropes, checking sails, looking in compartments.  He looked like a kid with a new toy. 

We would spend the day diving, then sail down to Saint Martin at dusk.  I planned to meet with Vanderpool at the Saint Martin Port Authority.  It was time I found out why Michael had gone down there and what he had discovered.  Besides, I couldn’t accomplish much more on Tortola.  Dunn would continue to look for Reardon, and he had a deputy checking around about the pipe.  I didn’t think he’d find much.  That piece of steel could have come from anywhere.

“Good morning,” O’Brien called when he saw me watching him. “Step aboard.”  He held out his hand, and I leaped from the dock onto the back of the boat.

“Nice,” I said.  The boat was perfect, not a scratch on her, beautifully painted to mimic clouds and sea.

“She’s just out of the factory,” O’Brien said.  “She’s a thirty-eight-foot Beneteau, one of the smaller boats in the fleet.  Two cabins, two heads, sleeps six in a pinch, but two people can handle her.  She’s small enough that the lines are manageable and in easy reach for tacking or adjusting sails.

“A lot of charterers want the big boats, the fifty-footers or the catamarans.  The cats are notorious party boats because there’s so much deck space to socialize.  Seasoned sailors know better than to anchor anywhere near a big cat, unless of course they want to go join the party until dawn.”

Down below, a dockhand was organizing the kitchen.  She was storing groceries in a space about five by seven feet. 

“Everything’s designed for efficiency on these boats,” he said, showing me around the galley.  “It’s kind of a one-man operation unless you are intimate with the cook.”  A smile washed across his face.

In the middle section nestled along one wall was a dining table, teak polished to a fine hue.  Along the other wall were a bench and the chart table with an instrument panel above it, a radio, switches for pumps, water, lights, GPS, autopilot, and a stereo system. 

O’Brien showed me to the cabin in the forward section, where a built-in bed narrowed and came to a point, molded to the shape of the boat.  A door inside opened to a tiny bathroom.

“The head,” O’Brien explained.  “To shower just close the door and turn on the water.  The drain’s in the floor.  Toilets are pumped with seawater, but when we are under way, valves have to be closed; otherwise we end up with a boat filled with water.  Come on,” O’Brien said.  “Let’s go sailing.  Get situated and we’ll head out.”

Dockhands were throwing lines into the boat as Peter maneuvered her out of the slip and into the harbor.  Sailboats were coming in and out, and a cruise ship was docked at the ship terminal.  At least a hundred people were getting off to spend the morning in Roadtown. 

I caught sight of a black disk floating in the water just below the surface.  Suddenly a tiny head poked out of the water, then disappeared.

“A hawksbill turtle,” O’Brien explained.

Once beyond the jetty he turned the boat, and before I could object, he gave me the wheel.

“Just keep her pointed into the wind,” he said.  Right, easy for him to say.

He hauled the mainsail up, took the wheel, and killed the engine as the huge expanse of white canvas filled.  He pulled on another line that he identified as the jib sheet, and the sail in front billowed, filling in the wind.  When he tightened it, the boat picked up speed, tilting on its side. 

“This is great!” I shouted over the wind.

“Yeah, there’s nothing like that moment when the wind fills the sails.  It’s still a thrill for me even after all these years.  It’ll take us a couple of hours to get to Ginger Island.  Want some lessons?”

He was a good teacher.  “Sailing is half know-how, half instinct,” he said.  “After a while it becomes automatic.  You don’t have to think about the position of the wheel; you just feel it.”

He explained point of sail, the interaction of wind and water, and how the boat was able to move through the water even when the wind was coming toward the boat.  It was all complicated physics and I was following about half of it, picking up the terminology as he talked.

“You’ve got to stay aware,” he said.  “Watch the water, the wind, the weather moving in.  Things can change in an instant.  You might spend thirty minutes slipping through the water, sails perfectly trimmed, when you have to come about because the wind suddenly shifts.  It is a maneuver that must happen quickly or the boat will lose speed and become difficult to control.” 

He gave me the wheel and I was amazed at the power.  I could feel the pressure of the wind in the sails and the water on the keel.  The boat felt solid and responsive.  O’Brien kept telling me not to fall off the wind and to keep the sails full.

“You’re luffing,” he’d say.  I assumed that must be a bad thing.

Finally, I began to get a feel for how to keep the wind in the sails.  Both the jib and the mainsail had a nice bow to them, and the boat sliced quickly through the waves.  The only trouble was that we weren’t headed even remotely in the direction of the island O’Brien had identified as our destination.  I was about to point that out to him when he said it was time to come about.  All I had to do was check my compass reading and turn the boat about ninety degrees when he gave the command.

“Ready about?  Helms alee,” O’Brien shouted.

I decided this must mean turn, so I turned.  When I did, sails started flapping like crazy as the boat crossed through the wind.  O’Brien started pulling in on the jib line and cranking the winch like mad.  Everything shifted as the wind came over the other side and we kept moving swiftly through the water.

By eleven o’clock O’Brien was easing the boat up to a dive mooring at Alice’s Wonderland, a dive site off of Ginger Island.  My job was to stand on the bow of the boat with the boat hook, a tube-like telescoping device with a hook on the end.  With this device I was to hook the rope that floated from the mooring, pull it out of the water, and attach it to the cleat on the front of the boat. 

My first attempt was an embarrassing failure, and O’Brien circled around to make another pass.  I concentrated every fiber of my being on that rope and managed to hook it.  That turned out to be the easy part.  But O’Brien was good.  He managed to give the boat just enough power to keep it directly over the mooring ball, so that the rope was not ripped from my hand.

I fumbled to get the rope under the side rail and onto the cleat, while at the same time struggling to untangle the damn hook, which I had somehow managed to catch in the jib sheet.  All this while trying to keep from falling overboard in what seemed like extremely rough water.  I felt like a klutz.

“Kind of tricky,” O’Brien said.  “This site can be bumpy. It’s exposed to the southeast trades, but the reef is one of the most magnificent in the BVI.  It’s worth the discomfort.”

Discomfort
hardly seemed the right word.  I’d had plenty of experience donning dive gear in the back of the speeding Denver Dive and Rescue vehicle.  But this damned boat was rocking and rolling without any rhythm.

I got into my wet suit and then my vest and tank and managed to get to the back of the boat without falling on my ass.  No easy task with fifty pounds of compressed air on my back and another sixteen pounds belted around my waist, weight necessary to get me to the bottom.  Attached to the inflatable vest was the tangle of hoses that dangled around my knees.

I climbed onto the back platform and pulled on my fins and mask as the boat reared up the side of a swell and then plunged down the other side.  I could hardly wait to get off the boat and below the choppy surface.

O’Brien followed me in and we descended the mooring line, clearing our ears as we went to release the pressure.  At the bottom, I found myself in the midst of huge mushroom-shaped star coral that rose ten to fifteen feet, white sandy valleys running between them.  We were dwarfed by the towering structures.  I could see why the site was named Alice’s Wonderland.  I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the caterpillar smoking his pipe and lounging on top of one of these massive coral heads.  Huge purple and green sea fans, pillar coral, and brilliantly colored sponges nestled among the boulder and brain coral.

We checked our gauges—depth eight feet, 3,200 psi in each tank.  Then we took a minute to get neutrally buoyant, which involves adding air to the vest.  Too much air and you end up drifting back to the surface; too little and you sink to the bottom.  Just enough and you hover effortlessly just above the bottom, never brushing up against the delicate sea life. 

We swam along the sandy canyons, then up to explore the coral ridges at about fifty feet, releasing air from our vests as we went. O’Brien pointed out a lone Elkhorn coral jutting out of the sand.  It was at least ten feet tall, but instead of its typical golden, fuzzy appearance, it was gray and smooth. 

We frightened a peacock flounder disguised in the sand, only its eyes protruding.  When he saw us, he darted off, changing hue to match his surroundings, from tan to a brilliantly spotted blue.

Since my dive at the
Chikuzen
, I’d picked up a couple of books about the reef.  I wanted to know what the hell I was swimming with.  A robust community of parrot fish, queen, stoplight and blue, nibbled on the coral, then swam past me.  I’d read that they can change sex from female to male.  Though why they’d want to do so was beyond my understanding, especially since it seemed they couldn’t go back again.  These fish use their powerful beaks to extract algae from the porous skeletons of dead coral.  In the process, they consume huge amounts of the reef’s structure, calcium carbonate, which gets ground up in their system.  It has nowhere to go but out.  Every once in a while I observed the process in action as they deposited plumes of sandy waste.  Just one parrot fish can make hundreds of pounds of sand in its lifetime.  Thanks to the parrot fish, gorgeous expanses of white sandy beaches abound in the Caribbean. 

The place was crowded with life—squid, Christmas tree and feather-duster worms, and giant anemones, their long tentacles tipped with lavender and chartreuse.  I was surrounded by blue chromis, yellow-headed wrasse, and banded butterfly fish.  A pair of French angelfish swam around a big green sponge.  A ray drifted by in the distance and disappeared.

I swam in to get a closer look at a purple sea fan that swayed in the current.  Attached to its brittle surface, O’Brien pointed out, was a tiny snail covered with orange spots outlined in black—a flamingo tongue.  Suddenly, I found myself under attack.  I’d wandered too close to a damselfish’s personal piece of reef.  I suppose he was to be admired.  No bigger than my palm, he will chase away anything that invades his territory, even divers.  A brilliant orange washed from the fish’s snout halfway down his dorsal fin, iridescent blue flecks dotted his head and back, and a dark spot ringed in light blue marked the back of his dorsal fin.

I was so distracted by the beauty that if O’Brien hadn’t grabbed me, I would have run right into a colony of fire coral. It had a distinctive blade-like shape, white tips, and a mustard-colored smooth surface.  While I knew it wouldn’t kill me, it would inflict a nasty sting that would stay inflamed and painful for days.  I was learning to be wary of some of the most innocuous-looking sea creatures.  Forget sharks and sea snakes.  Watch out for anything labeled fire: fire coral, fire sponges, fire worms.

It was all about protection, though.  I mean, how could you blame the sting ray for whipping its barbed tail into your calf if you stepped on it?  Brush up against an anemone, it will sting, maybe leave a welt.  Touch a black, spiny urchin and it will pierce your skin with a venomous spine.  Most of these injuries just hurt like hell for a couple of days.  Clearly the key is to watch where you’re going and to keep your hands to yourself. 

I was beginning to understand what Michael had been talking about when he’d written that the reef was one of the most complex animal and plant communities on earth, rivaled only by that in the tropical rain forest.  I was surprised when O’Brien took my arm and tapped on his gauge.  I’d been so mesmerized by this underwater fantasy that I’d lost track of the time.  I checked my pressure gauge—500 psi.

Reluctantly, we started back up, emerging right where we had started behind the boat.  O’Brien got out first and took my tank.  After we’d stowed our gear, he started the engine and moved up on the mooring ball.  This time my job was to remove the line from around the cleat in the bow, setting the boat free.  I accomplished my responsibilities in fine fashion; that is, without plunging over the side into the rough seas.

I made my way back to the cockpit, holding on to anything in my grasp, mostly flexible wire lines attached to the mast, the boom, along the side of the boat, all of which provided just enough support to keep me upright but not enough to make it look graceful.  I decided that there was probably no way to look graceful on a sailboat in these conditions and gave up.