Girl at Sea (30 page)

Or maybe it was just the English accent. It was hard to tell.

But Clio felt her eyes narrowing a bit in reaction.

There was a sound on deck. The divers were coming up. Clio hurried out of the galley and joined them. Her dad was out first.

Martin sat on the platform, still halfway in the water.

“How did it go?” Clio asked.

They didn’t answer. Her dad was leaning over Martin, taking off his mask. Something was wrong.

“Clio,” Martin said weakly, “that bottle . . .”

It took Clio just a second to remember the nitroglycerin on 258

the bedside stand. She started off running for it, swinging down the circular steps by holding the rails. Her sudden appearance, running through the downstairs hall, drew Aidan’s attention. He leaned out of the workroom.

“What are you—”

“It’s Martin,” she said.

She was back up with the bottle in less than a minute, Aidan right behind her. Martin took the bottle, removed a pill, and swallowed.

“Should I radio for help?” her dad said. “Should we get you to a hospital?”

“It’s just chest pain,” Martin said. “I just need to . . . sit down.”

Clio’s father and Aidan helped him off the platform and undid the top of his wet suit.

“We should get you in,” Aidan said. “You’re not looking good.”

“I’m all right,” Martin said, his voice gruff. “This has happened before. I’ll be fine once this pill kicks in. Go have a look at that.”

He half pointed to the video camera dangling from Clio’s father’s hand. The camera was passed to Aidan.

“Yes, take a look,” her dad said. “I think we may be on to something.”

259

Impulsive Decisions

In the light of the camera, the water was a messy green, with gold and brown flecks flying in all directions. Little blobby jellythings and fish poked in and out. The wreck itself was covered in pod-shaped sea creatures, hundreds of these little circles, distorting its form and making it look puffy. But it was there. It was encrusted, but it was a ship.

“There’s a lot of damage to the front,” Aidan said, pointing to where the ship seemed to melt into the sea bottom. “The metal is twisted. They hit something.”

Aidan sat at his computer, Julia leaning over his shoulder.

Clio stood off to the side, her eyes going between the image and Aidan’s face. He had never looked so intent before. His eyes were lost, deep in the footage.

“Aidan,” Julia said. “Is this our boat?”

Aidan still didn’t answer. He twisted around toward the table and began shuffling through the pile of papers scattered there, 260

eventually pulling out a technical drawing of a boat, one that looked quite old. He looked at it, then the screen, then massaged his eyebrows with one hand, pinching them together.

“There’s no ID.” Aidan paused. “Or there’s another ID. A wrong one, I think. There’s something about this boat. I’m going to call it. I’m going to say this is it.”

This hit Clio harder than she expected. Her knees gave a little and she leaned back. Aidan started to laugh a bit, and Julia cracked the first genuine smile Clio had seen on her.

“How do you know?” Clio asked.

“I’ve been staring at pictures of this damn boat for months.

And I can read the sonar images. This is what I do.”

“Let’s go tell them,” Julia said. She kept her voice calm, but just barely.

Upstairs, things weren’t looking so good. Martin was out of his wet suit but was slumped on the sofa. He was still insisting that he didn’t need a doctor.

“What have you got?” her dad asked as the three of them approached.

“A hit,” Julia said.

“You’re kidding.”

He had to sit down next to Martin. His face contorted oddly, either on the verge of laughter or tears. Neither came. His face just stayed like that.

“First thing we need to figure out,” he said. “Martin.”

“I’m
telling
you, Ben. This is not new. It’s just pain.”

“But you’re not diving again,” her dad said. “There’s no way.”

“It probably wouldn’t be smart,” Martin admitted. “I’m not quite feeling up to that.”

261

“You can’t dive alone,” Clio said quickly. “First rule of diving.”

“I know the rules,” her father said. “I’m not crazy.”

Clio could see the debate raging in his eyes. Here they were, maybe sitting on top of the
Bell Star
, and they couldn’t dive. This wasn’t a position she wanted to be in. And yet . . . yet she knew that she was going to do it anyway.

“But I can go with you,” she said.

“No,” he said quickly. “No way.”

“I’m the only card-carrying diver here besides you guys,” she said.

“That’s probably expired.”

“You know what I mean. And I don’t even know if they
do
expire. And no, I don’t have it
on
me, before you even say it . . .

but come on. We’re sitting on top of it. And trust me, I’m careful.”

This drew looks from everyone.

“I am!” she said. “I can do it, Dad. And you know I can. It’s not even that deep.”

“It doesn’t need to be deep to be dangerous.”

“You taught me for a reason,” she said. “I learned. I can do this. I’ll go with you. You won’t let anything happen.”

Even as the words were coming out of her mouth, even as her gut instinct was seconding them, her ears couldn’t quite believe it. She was agreeing—no,
insisting
—that she go diving with her dad.

“I think she’s right, Ben,” Julia said. “She can handle herself.

You even told me her accident had nothing to do with anything she did.”

So her father had told Julia about the accident.

262

“You’re sure about this?” he asked.

“Completely.”

No one said anything for three or four entire minutes, which is a lot of silence. Aidan sat down at the dining room table and stared into the galley, his lower jaw set off on an angle. He was deep in thought about something, and he didn’t seem to like that thought very much.

Finally, her father took a deep breath, then sat up.

“Okay,” he said. “We make a plan—a detailed plan—and we stick to it. We do this
conservatively
. Aidan, I need you to map that boat, give us a way in and out, plus backups.”

“You’re doing this?” Aidan asked.

“We’ll see,” he said. “Maybe. Let’s get the plan together. Look at those cargo holds. If this is the
Bell Star
, anything that Magwell was carrying was probably in that area, in crates. Clio, you go with him, and you watch. Get the picture of that boat into your head.”

“You’re serious about this?” Aidan asked Clio as they went down the stairs.

“Totally serious,” Clio said.

“Think about this,” Aidan said, turning around on the steps and blocking the way. “Don’t pretend to be tougher than you are.”

“Are you worried about me?”

“I’m just—”

“Look,” she said. “My dad spent a ton of money on my training. I had a private instructor. I did hours of class time. I did penetration training with some wacko who used to be in the Greek navy. I know what I’m doing. I just haven’t . . . done it in a while.”

263

Aidan sighed, then turned and kept walking down and to the workroom. At the table, he pushed aside most of the papers, selecting a few and arranging them in the middle.

“Meet the
Bell Star
,” he said, pointing to several grainy photographs and a few of the structural drawings. “These drawings are actually of a ship called the
Daybreaker
, which was a sister ship. Completely identical, except that it was two feet longer. It’s not a huge boat. There were three cabins for first-class passengers. The next level down had twelve second-class cabins and other rooms for the captain and crew. Just below, to the front and the back of the boat, were the cargo spaces. The one in the front was much larger. The back one was next to the engines and the coal hold.”

He turned back to his computer monitor, where the blurry image of the wreck was on the screen. With one hand, he reached over and grabbed Clio by the shoulder, pulling her down close. She tried not to think about the fact that mere inches separated their faces again.

“It looks to me like that’s the rip that brought them down,”

he said, pointing to a shadow on the screen. It took Clio’s eyes a second to get used to the focus and find what he was talking about. “It’s not huge, but it’s definitely big enough.”

“What could do something like that?”

“There’s no way to know exactly, but it looks like they went into something hard. A rock, a fishing boat. No idea.”

“You said they knew the route.”

“The captain should have, yeah. But there was a storm that night. Something obviously went wrong.”

“Do you think they knew they were sinking?” she asked.

264

“On a boat this size?” he said. “A hit like that? Probably. The people on the
Titanic
didn’t know they were going down because the ship was massive. Some of them felt the bump when the ship hit the iceberg, but most of them paid no attention. A few of them even took the ice from the deck and put it in their drinks. But that was the world’s biggest, most unsinkable ship, and the night was clear. The
Bell Star
was no
Titanic
. It was a small passenger boat. And it was clearly hit hard enough for a hole to open in the bottom of the boat. Don’t you think you’d feel that?”

“Yeah,” Clio said. “I’d feel it.”

“Okay,” he said standing up and turning back to the drawings on the table. “The
Bell Star
carried both passengers and small amounts of cargo. The manifest said it was transporting tiles and mail. The tiles were worth some money. They may also have weighed the ship down. You probably saw on the image that the bow is farther down into the seafloor.”

No. Clio hadn’t seen that at all.

“My guess is that’s where the tiles were,” he said. “The boat could have been a little unbalanced in the way things were stored. Just a guess. Another guess: the tiles would have been packed in advance, long before the passengers or the mail. My hunch is that passenger cargo, like the stone, is in the back of the boat, here.”

He drew an invisible circle around a section of the diagram with his finger.

“That’s where I’m going to plot you guys to,” he said. “You’ll have to go down a few levels. And frankly? Yes. That thought scares me. There are going to be all kinds of edges and metal bits 265

that can slice tubes and lots of weird corners and shifted stuff that can trap divers.”

“You were going to send my dad there,” she said.

“It’s not the same thing,” he said. “You need to think about this. Look at that picture on the screen. That is a rusted mess, sixty feet down. Is that really what you want your first dive back to be? You told me yourself that sometimes your dad isn’t too careful. And at this point, you and the water don’t have a very good relationship. I don’t want to sound like grandma here, but this isn’t a joke.”

No. It wasn’t a joke at all. He was right about the issues.

Going deep down into a boat like that—down levels of stairs, past torn bits of metal, completely in the dark. Clio felt a bubble of fear catch in her throat. But more overwhelming was . . . a lightness in her head. She liked this idea. She had
loved
diving.

The only reason she hadn’t gone back was that her arm was hurt and her mom was freaked out. And then her father was gone.

But she would have. Wouldn’t she?

And if they were right and this stone was all it was supposed to be, nothing was going to stop her from doing the dive. A stone that important . . .

“Wait a second,” she said. “Why are you looking in the cargo hold?”

“We’re looking for a large historical item, which would have been boxed up. It’s the definition of cargo.”

“How big is the Marguerite stone supposed to be?” she asked.

“The letter says about two feet long.”

“Right. So you’re Dr. Magwell, and you have a stone that can help you translate a language no one has ever been able to read 266

before. You’re on a boat that’s sailing to France, and you’re going to be on it for days.
You’re
on a boat now. It’s boring, right?”

“Not always,” he said.

“You know what I mean. So, if you were carrying something like that and if you were stuck on a boat, what would you be doing? Would
you
put it in the cargo hold? Or would you keep it with you and study it?”

Aidan drummed his fingers on the table and thought about this.

“Okay,” he said. “Purely speculating, let’s say that the stone is in his cabin. We have no idea which one was his.”

“He took this boat a lot, right?”

“Every year.”

“And was he rich?”

“He was well off,” Aidan said.

“That puts us up here,” Clio said, pointing to the cabins with the windows. “First class. That’s going in, but it’s not that bad.

And it’s only a few cabins. That’s where we start.”

She could
see
Aidan thinking this over. Under the fringe of overgrown hair, his green eyes flicked back and forth from image to image, and he pulled his long, thin lips into a taut line.