What Lurks Beneath (4 page)

A
nother cold, rainy day.

Val lay alone in her bed, looking out the window at the pale light filtering through the cheap vertical blinds. She'd hit snooze three times before shutting off her alarm and going back to sleep for an hour. Will had already left, which meant he had gone to his boxing gym before work.

It was Monday, and it felt like it.

She imagined that she felt the stare of Will's dog, Bud, boring into the back of her head. For more than a year, he'd sat a few feet from the bed each morning, his short, floppy ears perked up, waiting for her to rise and hoping for a morning run. The dun-colored mutt would wag his tail and push his muzzle into her face, his tongue lapping at her cheek. She would scratch behind his ears, and he'd groan in pleasure. For so long she had wanted a dog again, and they'd really developed a bond in the brief time he'd been in her life.

She finally rolled over, hoping in her half-asleep state that he'd somehow be there again. But he was still gone.

Val sat up and lowered her feet to the cold floor. She threw a sweatshirt on over her tank top and found her slippers, then walked bare-legged down the dim hallway to the kitchen, the dog's ghost padding silently after her. She smelled coffee, and saw that Will had made a pot. He'd also left her a note on the beige Formica countertop:

She thought,
He used to write
Love, W.

She hadn't even seen him last night, since he had come home late from the bar and left again so early. She'd pretended to be asleep as he quietly dressed in the predawn darkness, not wanting to have a conversation with him. What was there to say? She knew he was probably hung over again. Only Will Sturman would stay out late drinking and then rise to go to the gym, even though he wasn't training for anything. The man was nothing if not tough and headstrong.

At least he'd been honest with her when she'd asked him yesterday if he was headed to watch playoff football again.
It's a bye week,
he'd said.
Super Bowl's next weekend. I just need to get out of the apartment.

Months ago, it had become a familiar late-night routine. She'd wake to him bumping noisily about in their kitchen as he made himself an after-binge snack. Then his tall silhouette would fill the door frame as he staggered in, slid into the bed next to her. Never even realizing she was awake in the darkness. When she'd called him on his growing problem, they'd argued. Then he started sleeping on the couch.

She told herself it was out of respect for her, so she could sleep. But she knew he was just withdrawing. Again dwelling on the wife he'd lost, on the loss he now shared with Val, and feeling sorry for himself. As he became what she feared he might.

She had grown up loving a man like this. A man who wasn't capable of reciprocating her love. She wasn't going to do it again. Even if he had once saved her life.

She poured herself a mug of coffee, added cream and walked over to the sliding glass door that opened to their balcony. The rain had stopped for the moment, but it was gray outside.
Just need to get out of the apartment,
he'd said
.
What he meant was
I just need to be alone.

Alone. Or with Maria. But not with her.

Over the green, rolling, chaparral-clad hills in the distance, a red light blinked on a water tower. It was a great view, but she'd planned to move out of this small apartment when Will had first moved up here to be with her. To buy a house. The one-bedroom unit on the outskirts of Marina had simply been a home base for her for four years, when she had always been away doing fieldwork. She'd never intended to spend a lot of time in it, especially if living with a man and a sixty-some pound dog.

She should probably have already gone into the office, but she'd worked on Saturday evening so her boss, Rob Carman, wouldn't care if she came in late. What could he say, anyway? They both knew she had paid her dues at PLARG over the years.

There had been a time when all she had wanted to do was work. When she had been so inspired. What had happened to her, anyway?

Will had happened.
They
had happened. And now they weren't happening anymore. She wasn't meant for relationships. She would never be able to carry a child, as she knew painfully well, and it looked like her best prospect for marriage was an alcoholic. Maybe she should just become single again, and remain that way forever.

Looking at the gray outside, she told herself that maybe the sun would come out, but she knew it probably wouldn't. She sighed and turned away from the window to look for her laptop. She would work from home until she felt enough motivation to shower and head into the lab. There wasn't much to do today, anyway. She'd just need to clean out the tanks to prepare them for another round of (doomed) squid. And if she didn't, it probably wouldn't matter anyway. They weren't likely to have more live specimens turn up for a few weeks or longer.

She brought her laptop to the couch and sat cross-legged on it, resting the computer on her knees. She fired it up and opened her Web browser. She accessed her Outlook e-mail account. A hundred and twenty-one unread messages. She sighed. She should at least get through her overflowing inbox today.

She began scrolling down the page to look for anything urgent. Mostly, the e-mails were just FYIs from colleagues, junk mail, and administrative notifications. She paused on an e-mail from [email protected], received late last night: Richard Ford, from the National Exploration Society. NES had featured her work in a past issue of its monthly, photo-laden magazine, and had partially funded one of her earlier projects through a foundation grant. She opened the e-mail:

Pelletier's name sounded familiar—some biologist—but Val knew neither man personally. Her uncle, Mack, might know these men though. He used to be one of the best cave divers this side of the Atlantic. She continued reading the e-mail:

Val double-clicked the attachment icon to open a new window. On her screen popped up a blurry, dark image. She scanned the digital photo. Much of it was dim, almost black. But not all of it. Val stopped breathing.

On the upper right quadrant was the obvious reason why Ford had sent her an e-mail. Nearly obscured by the dim was a blurred, curved object covered in a field of small, white circles.

Suckers.

“V
al, you still there?”

Valerie Martell blinked, and pressed the cell phone against her ear. “Yeah. Sorry, Rich. I was just looking at your photo again. Are you sure you don't have any other shots of the object in the corner? Maybe from another angle?”

On the other end of the call, Richard Ford cleared his throat in obvious irritation. “No, we don't. I already told you that. Look, I'm really in a hurry here. So if you could just focus for a moment, and let me go over some background . . .”

“Sorry. I'm listening.” She shut the cover of her laptop. Val had worked with the short, balding Ford before. As the executive vice president for research at the National Exploration Society, based in DC, he was intense, driven. Always in a tie. And never patient.

She said, “You were giving me background . . . saying you'd gathered mapping data on the holes, collected samples and multimedia. . . .”

“Right. But we've now postponed the operation. Indefinitely. To figure out what happened, and out of respect for the two divers' families.”

“They'd probably want you to continue,” she said.

“Probably. They were a lot like you and me. But you know the drill. Liability issues trump.”

“Oh, I know.”

Val sat at the small desk in her apartment, which faced the window. The afternoon had turned clear, sunny, and through the open blinds she had a distant view past the low hills to the flat, blue expanse of Monterey Bay. As Ford talked, her mind drifted again to the printout of the dark, blurry image he had sent her. The curved object in the corner, studded with white dots, possibly had a reddish tinge, or maybe that was just her imagination. Maybe she
wanted
it to be red. Wanted it to look more like a cephalopod arm, to give her an excuse to pack her bags and head for the Bahamas.

Ford finished his monologue: “. . . and we've been trying to describe a number of the blue holes in the area since.”

“Uh-huh.”

“This was their fifth foray into this particular hole. It's nicknamed ‘The Staircase' by the locals, because the layers of limestone in its shallows look like giant steps leading to the rim of the main shaft. People swim and bathe in the freshwater on the surface, but until we came along, nobody had ever explored its depths.”

“How did you retrieve the camera?”

“Another of our teams went in. Followed their safety lines to where one had somehow broken off in the tunnel they were mapping.”

“But no sign of the men?”

“Just a few pieces of equipment,” he said. “Let's see . . .”

She heard paper rustling before he continued.

“A swim fin . . . the metal spool for one of their safety lines, a couple other little things. Part of a flashlight.” He paused to let it sink in. “But nothing else so far.”

“How far did you get? On the larger project, I mean?”

“We were making relatively good progress before the accident, considering the logistical complications of diving these caverns. Know anything about the Bahamas's blue holes?”

“Not much. I know about the ones in Belize, though. The geology of the Bahamas must be similar to the Yucatán.”

“Relatively speaking,” Ford said. “The Bahama Bank is karst limestone, which over eons has eroded into impressive submarine cave systems. The more famous ones are perfectly rounded sinkholes, but there are also some fault-line holes offshore that look more like huge cracks.”

“So some of these blue holes are landlocked?”

“Most of them, actually. Inland blue holes, like the one Breck and Pelletier were in. But few are really
landlocked
.”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Many of them link to the ocean through a network of caves. Like their marine counterparts, they formed over the last few million years, mainly during the Ice Ages.”

“When sea level was much lower?”

“Exactly. Hundreds of feet lower. The Bahamian Plateau once towered four hundred feet over the sea. Back then, the limestone platform was exposed to the elements.”

“And acid rain did all the work. Right?”

“You got it. Carbonic acid in rainwater pooled on the rock. Wore it down. Then, in periods where the holes were submerged in the ocean, tidal action helped scour out developing caverns. So now it's a pretty unique place, with a shitload of blue holes.”

“You said those two divers were in an inland hole?”

“Yeah. We'd discovered three main arms off this one hole alone. Side tunnels, extending more than three hundred feet beneath the surface, with two of the passages likely extending far offshore.” There was a pause before Ford continued. “They got that shot I sent you on their last dive. I thought it looked like the arm of a squid or something.”

“Well, it does. Some cephalopod, anyway. If this really is some sort of tentacle, it's very likely an undiscovered species.”

“Just like everything else in those caves,” Ford said. “You plan to look into this? Would PLARG send you down there?”

“Probably not. But I might go, on my own dime.”

“Really? But you're not a caver.”

“I have a few ideas.”

“Well, if you do plan something, let me send you our data first, to get you up to speed. I have a lot of older papers on the area's geology. And since our teams had gotten to more than twenty new holes in just the past two months, we've got a boatload of images, maps, notes. You name it. We were hoping to map at least fifteen more holes before the money ran out, but then . . . well, you know the rest.”

Val frowned. “What happened, Rich? I mean, you said those men were experts.”

“The best,” he said, and then paused. “I don't know, Val. Like most of the other inland holes, it appears that somewhere underground that hole reaches well out to sea. Maybe a strong tidal surge sucked them down. Maybe they got lost. We just don't know.”

“Are you still working to find them?”

“Not anymore. But like I said, we already looked. It's too dangerous to keep sending men back in there.”

Val heard muffled shouting as Ford barked at someone in his office.

He said, “Sorry, Val. I gotta go.”

“What did you say was the name of the last hole they were in? The Stairway?”

“The Staircase. I'll send you an e-mail with more details. But I've really gotta run.”

“Thanks, Rich. I appreciate it. One more question.”

“Hurry.”

“Was Mack on this project? Involved in any way?”

“Your uncle? No. He declined. Like always. I don't know why I ask him anymore.”

“Thanks.” It had been a long time since she'd seen Mack herself.

“Well, good luck,” he said. “And Val?”

“Yes?”

“Be careful down there.”