In Too Deep (15 page)

I
awoke the next morning to the light spilling in through the translucent curtains. It was early, but exhilaration tightened my chest; I couldn’t sleep any longer, no matter how high the thread count of my sheets.

I was about to go down for breakfast when I remembered Gracia’s present, and I laughed out loud when I opened it: a bikini. The fabric was both soft and tightly elastic, a shimmering light blue like the shadows of sunlight on rippling water. Boy-short bottoms—for my active lifestyle, of course—with a wide-strapped, triangle halter top.

I put it on and checked myself out in the bathroom’s full-length mirror. This was only a billion times better than the lesson suit; it might as well have been stitched out of magic. I thought about sending Gracia a picture, but I didn’t need myself to go viral, so I decided on a simple thank-you text instead.

I plastered on sunscreen like a good girl and threw on my shorts and a top and went downstairs.

The restaurant was as ridiculous as the suite. Three levels cascading toward an open wall overlooking the ocean and the jagged black cliffs, impossibly green and lush at the top. The breeze came just enough to carry the scent of seawater without rustling any of the enormous tropical floral arrangements—birds-of-paradise that were larger than my head.

Violet sat alone on the bottom level, reading a book. I went down and put my hand on the chair across the table from her. “Mind if I join you?”

She looked up, nodded, but didn’t say anything and went back to her book. I sat. A waiter appeared tableside before I’d pulled in my chair, and coffee was served. I stirred milk and pink fake sugar into it while I thought of something to say.

Violet seemed to sense the deliberateness with which I swizzled, because she finally broke the silence. “I shouldn’t even be here right now.”

I looked out onto the crescent-shaped beach, the sand white as flour, the gently rolling turquoise waves. “Yeah, this is awful.”

“You seem like a nice person, Annie, so I’m going to give you some advice. The glitz and the glamour feels great, I’m sure. The private plane, the king-size bed. This.” She gestured to the ocean with her paperback. “But remember one thing: the whole business is built on illusion. And if you’re not the one creating the illusion, then you’re always going to be at its whim.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I was supposed to go to Catalina this weekend with my boyfriend—” She stopped and looked up as though seeing me for the first time. “Did you just ask me what was wrong?”

“Yeah, why?”

She nodded, and then her features softened, and she took a sip of fresh-squeezed, five-star orange juice. She smiled at me and said, “Look, I don’t need to babysit you guys. Jessica had me book her spa treatments all day, so you’re on your own. Just don’t die, and everyone will be okay.”

“Thanks.”

“She’s not that bad. A little overwhelming.”

“So I’ve seen.”

“Dinner is at seven tonight. Whatever you and Josh do, wherever you go, just don’t be late.”

“I promise we won’t die.”

“Fair enough. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to take the world’s longest bath while I pretend to keep tabs on you.”

She took her juice with her, leaving me alone with a basket of fresh-baked breakfast rolls to contemplate what lay ahead. According to what Josh and I had been able to come up with, the sculpture garden was in about fifty feet of water off the coast of Ha’upu Bay. We planned on two dives: the first to get a general sense of the area, and the second to explore any areas of interest in greater detail.

I was unexpectedly anxious about diving with Josh for the first time. I knew that whatever he felt about diving would have nothing to do with me as a person, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that his not enjoying his dives would make me look bad. I’d wanted us to be able to share Cozumel as an experience, and that didn’t work out at all. It was stupid, I knew, especially since we weren’t exactly going on a pleasure dive, but even so—

“You ready?” he said, sliding into the seat across from me. I couldn’t tell if he’d showered or not; his hair looked the same either way. “We missed you at dinner last night. Lobster and mahimahi.”

My orange juice arrived; I downed half of it in one luscious gulp. “I suppose I’m glad that you talked me into this.”

“Right. I twisted your arm.” Josh asked the waiter for a peeled mango on a stick and said to me, “They have the freshest fruit here.”

“Imagine that.”

A boat pulled up to the dock outside. In addition to giving the concierge a picture of Wayo from our spring-break trip and asking him to keep an eye out—thankfully, the trip so far had been Wayo-free—Josh had asked him to arrange for a private dive trip. No dive master, just a boat and a captain. There was reluctance when the concierge found out where we wanted to go, but Josh could be very persuasive, as I knew, and before long we had our very own boat and a captain to go along with it.

“That’s us,” he said. “Now we just have to figure out how to get rid of Violet.”

“Already done,” I said. “We have until seven p.m.”

Josh reached across the table and speared my last wedge of cantaloupe. “Look at you, pulling your weight.”

“The only thing is, we can’t die.”

“Or she’ll kill us.”

“Something like that.”

I carried my gear down to the dock after breakfast, but Josh’s new stuff was already on the boat. And wow, had he gone all out. Poseidon regulator, Zeagle BC, three-hundred-dollar fins. Apparently, when you’ve got the means to take a private jet to a dive location, you’re not going to blink about spending a few grand on your equipment.

“Check this out,” he said, gesturing with his half-eaten mango.

At the stern of the boat were two torpedo-shaped diver propulsion vehicles—DPVs—battery-powered underwater scooters with handles on either side of an encased propeller.

“Are those for us?”

“Yep. Bought them last night. Had ’em charged up and everything. I saw this movie with Navy SEALs in it when I was a kid—”

“We’re not exactly planning an underwater assault.”

“Not literally, maybe. Anyway, I’ve always wanted to try one.”

I was torn between a witty—but admittedly snarky—comment about how annoying he was, and a compliment for buying gear that would allow us to search a wider area. “I’m not the only one pulling my weight,” I said, going for non-snarky.

“You know how to use them, right?”

“Please,” I said, pointing to my chest. “That hurts me to the core.”

The boat was no bigger—though considerably nicer—than Wayo’s runabout. The brilliant yellow canopy was new, and the reflection of a fresh coat of paint sparkled in the water. Our captain was a local named Goofy. He was short and sinewy, with a single deep crease across his forehead whenever he raised his eyebrows, which was all the time.

Captain Goofy took my gear, helped me onto the boat, and pushed off. “We’d best get there early.” Just saying the words seemed to make him uncomfortable.

The sun sparkled already, and the air was thick and tropical, so I kicked off my shorts and pulled my T-shirt over my head. I felt Josh’s eyes on me, but I did my best not to look his way, focusing instead on rolling the shirt, then the shorts, and stuffing them in my dry bag. Finally, I tucked the dry bag away and looked back at the resort as it disappeared behind a cliff.

“Nice suit,” Josh said, taking me in. He stood, absorbing the motion of the boat with bent knees, holding on to the canopy bar with one arm. Before I could thank him, he said, “You could use a tan, though.”

“I hate you,” I said.

Josh slurped on the mango, the thick yellow juice dripping from his grin. “No, you don’t.”

Damn if he wasn’t right about that.

“How much do you know of the island’s history?” Captain Goofy said.

I shared a knowing look with Josh. “A little,” I said. “Not too much.”

“Molokai is so much more than a leper colony,” the captain said, shaking his head.

Josh nearly choked on his mango. “I’m sorry?”

“It was, almost a hundred and fifty years ago, but still, when people think of Molokai, they think of Father Damien. Yes, he was made into a saint. It’s a great story. But a saint who cared for lepers doesn’t drive tourism, if you know what I mean.”

We didn’t have to know what he meant to agree with him.

The boat sliced through the water. For all of Josh’s bluster, I could tell that he was getting nervous. Was it about the dive? About the treasure? Theoretically, it was my job as the more experienced diver to get him to calm down, but how was I supposed to do that if I was just as nervous as he was?

“They call me ‘Goofy’ because of how I surf, okay?” the captain said, as if sensing, and misinterpreting, our unease. “It’s no big deal.”

We rounded a promontory into Ha’upu Bay, and my legs went completely boneless. There it was. The exact image on the disk. Jagged rocks piercing the water like a family of sharks, massive cliffs in the background. The surf broke against the rocks in short clouds of white water; one of them looked like a vanilla ice-cream cone smashed down onto a bright blue plate.

Josh pinched me. I wasn’t dreaming, but I was so giddy that I couldn’t do anything but pinch him back.

“The sculpture garden is one of our great mysteries. How did they get the stone for the sculptures? How did they position them fifty feet below the ocean? Fascinating, like the Moai on Easter Island.”

The captain slowed the engine. We approached the cove at about half speed, the shark-fin towers now looming above us like skyscrapers.

“There’s no diving allowed here,” he said. “It’s a cultural preservation site, so please hurry. I don’t want to lose my license.”

“It’s going to be fine,” Josh said. But no matter how much Josh had paid him, the captain didn’t seem any more receptive to the movie-star-kid nonchalance than I was.

We nestled the boat between the rocks jutting out of the surface, about a hundred feet offshore. The captain pointed to a thin strip of water cascading down the face of a cliff that must have been at least three hundred feet tall. “You’ll find the garden about thirty feet to the right of the waterfall. I’m staying here; I don’t want to get any closer to those rocks than I have to.”

“No problem,” I said.

“Are you sure you can navigate your way back?” The captain squinted at me as though he didn’t trust the rating on my certification card. “A surface swim is not advisable, even in these conditions.”

Before I had the chance to scoff at him, a low, whining siren pierced the morning air. We heard the sound before we saw the boat it came from:
STATE POLICE
in bright red letters across the hull.

A distant and crackly—yet decidedly agitated—voice traveled across the water. “To the small vessel. Please cut your engine
immediately.
”

“You guys might want to go book a massage,” the captain said. He flipped a switch, and the engine went silent.

“
W
e’re doing a research report for school,” Josh said. He splashed
innocence
all over his face and held up an underwater camera I’d never seen before—you couldn’t say that he hadn’t outfitted himself. “It’s no big deal.”

The police boat was almost twice as big as ours, with a two-tiered observation deck above the wheelhouse. The hull’s deep blue paint reflected off the lighter blue water, as if it were casting a shadow in plain sunlight. A uniformed policeman—short-sleeved white shirt, knee-length blue shorts, baseball cap, sunglasses, radio, gun—stood at the bow, perching one leg atop a locked trunk like a pirate captain. His partner stood at the helm behind the wheelhouse glass.

To be so close! Just sixty feet below us was the sculpture garden, and with it…who knew?

“This area is off limits. Unless you happen to have permission from the governor himself, you are not allowed here.” He shot our captain a devilish glare that made the captain clear his throat and turn away. “I’m going to give you—”

“The concierge at Hanauma said we could dive here, no problem,” Josh said, lying. When he’d told the concierge what we wanted, it had taken five of the who-knows-how-many crisp hundred-dollar bills Josh carried in his wallet for him just to call Captain Goofy.

“This area is under the jurisdiction of the Hawaii state police. Not local PD. And certainly not the concierge of a resort.”

Something clicked in my head, a little piece of the puzzle falling into place, and I jumped into action as if hit with a cattle prod.

“Hold on, just a second.” I scrambled through my dry bag, finally finding my cell phone. The signal was low, but it was there. Eight a.m. in Hawaii meant eleven in LA, so there was a good chance she was awake, even though it was Saturday. While the policeman continued to berate our poor captain, I wandered away from them and toward the stern of Goofy’s boat.

“Mimi?” I said when she answered. “I need a favor. Fast.”

“Another one? You should see the pictures from yesterday. They’re already all over the Internet.”

“I’m sure that’s killing you.”

“That’s not the point. How’s Josh?” she said. “Did you guys, you know—”

“Mimi—”

“If I’m going to get plastered all over the tabloids so you can get a little Honolulu nookie, the least you can do is tell me what—”

“Can you stop? I don’t have time to argue with you about this right now.”

Mimi’s annoyance was unmistakable. “What?”

I gave the policeman an apologetic smile and held my thumb and index finger about half an inch apart. The look in Josh’s eyes as he argued unsuccessfully with the policeman was one of disbelief, as if he’d never even considered the possibility that his devastating charm would find its kryptonite.

I said to Mimi, “A while ago you said your parents were throwing a party for the governor of Hawaii. Do they actually know him?”

“I thought you didn’t want to use your connections,” she said.

“Can you call me a hypocrite when we get back, please?”

When she finally let me explain what I needed, she agreed to make the call, on one condition. “Yes,” I said. “I’ll spill it. Everything you want to know.”

I asked the cops to give us five minutes, and with nothing to do but wait and hope, Josh and I prepped our gear. This seemed to make the police even angrier. Not only were these punk kids not immediately leaving the scene, but they had the nerve to act like they’d be allowed to dive anyway!

I pretended not to hear their grumbling, and focused only on my equipment. BC onto the tank, regulator properly attached to the valves. I was glad to have my own gear for this: computer, compass, small knife, dive light. I clipped Josh’s camera to a D-ring on my other shoulder strap. I couldn’t help but be impressed by Josh. He was so much more comfortable around the equipment; he bore no relation to the guy who’d nearly killed himself in the pool.

I checked the battery level of the DPVs, trying to make it look like I knew what I was doing, but no matter the impression I’d given Josh, everything I knew about the scooters came from watching the certification videos and tooling around on our rental unit in the shop pool. I could have taken it out into the Pacific, I guess, but I was saving my first experience for clearer waters, where I could see. Warmer waters, where I didn’t have to swim with a bulky wetsuit.

Now that I was here, the question was, would I get to use it?

The policeman hung two large inflated rings from the edge of his boat and lashed the two boats together. Captain Goofy still wasn’t allowed to touch the throttle, so at least this way the police boat could keep us all from drifting against the rocks.

My phone rang, a number I didn’t recognize, from an 808 area code. I handed it to the officer. “I think this is going to be for you.”

He glared at me as he answered. “Yes, sir… Yes, I understand.… Of course… Thank you, sir.” By the time he gave me back my phone, he was a hundred times angrier than when he’d first arrived.

“I don’t know who you are, but you’ve got an hour. If you break the surface one second late, I
will
arrest you for trespassing. Are we clear?”

We were clear.

I set the timer on my dive computer to go off after thirty minutes, established a compass bearing toward a spot thirty feet to the right of the cliffside waterfall, and with no time to waste, Josh and I dropped backward into the water. When we bobbed to the surface, Captain Goofy handed us each a DPV, and we descended.

The visibility was spectacular. With the ocean floor at only sixty feet, and white sand at that, it was as though the area were being lit both from above and below. Down here, we could see that the shark-fin rocks were like icebergs below the surface: gnarled pillars of rock and coral that became gradually wider before finally disappearing into the sandy bottom. Small tropical fish surrounded them like little airplanes buzzing around King Kong.

When we reached the floor, Josh added air to his BC without my having to tell him to; he hovered fairly well, neutrally buoyant, and I gave him the okay sign. He gave it back, but from the look in his eyes, he was better than okay.

I was, too. I belonged here—not in the halls of the school, not with my friends around egging me on, but here. And we were alone. And I was responsible for the look in his eyes. There are always kids who want to be the ones to introduce you to booze, or weed, or more. They seem to get some sort of thrill out of taking you past your boundaries. That was me now.

I gave him one last okay, then checked my compass bearing and motioned for him to come alongside me with his DPV. I engaged the trigger, and a high-pitched whine suddenly interrupted the hushed silence. The DPV pulled me forward with a slight jolt, and in seconds I was parallel to the ocean floor. I heard Josh engage his scooter, and we were off.

If current diving made me feel like I was gliding, then holding on to the scooter was more like spaceflight; I could actually feel the scooter pulling at my arms. I was probably going at about three knots, much faster than I could have kicked. The water tugged slightly at my regulator as it pushed past my face.

Josh screamed.

I turned to him, expecting to see a shark or a bad guy with a speargun, but he just gave me the okay sign. His was a scream of joy. I squealed back at him.

I found out quickly that if I leaned in one direction, I could make gradual banking turns, almost as if I were on a roller coaster, and so I serpentined just above the bottom, careful to keep the propeller wash from stirring up the silt. Two minutes into the dive, a series of massive stone columns appeared in the distance as if from a lifting fog. The sculpture garden.

The pictures Josh had found did no justice to the size of the pillars. Each one was at least fifteen feet tall and as wide around as a large tree. Some lay on their sides, some protruded from the floor at a slight angle, and one was perfectly vertical. No wonder the place was protected by the government. If everyone were allowed to dive here, it would take a bunch of yahoos—like Josh, I had to say, given the hooting and hollering he was doing as he weaved in and out of the garden—hardly a week to destroy it.

It had been nearly three decades since the archaeologists had restored them, so the sea was well on its way to reclaiming the pillars as artificial reefs. Even so, I could still make out—underneath the coral that had begun to encrust one of them—the faint image of the three crowns from Cortés’s family shield.

Partly to keep up our cover story, but mostly because the pillars were amazing, I unclipped the camera and snapped some pictures while I held on to the scooter with one hand. After a couple of shots, though, I didn’t bother looking at the viewfinder. Instead, I kept my eyes out for something—anything—that didn’t seem to belong.

Near the cliff wall, I spied a wooden stake, slightly mangled at the end as though it had been hammered into the sand. When I moved closer to investigate, I noticed a pear-shaped opening in the stone wall, wide at the bottom and then tapering closed as it rose, like a curtain being peeked through. In contrast to the rest of the ocean floor, it looked like the sand around the stake had been disturbed, and recently.

I disengaged the scooter and set it aside. I fell gently until my knees touched the seafloor. The stake felt like wood when I pulled it out—there was hardly any algae growth at all. It couldn’t have been there for more than a few days. My air started to taste of adrenaline.

Josh cut off his scooter, but he didn’t exactly nestle down. By the time he figured out to empty the air from his BC, there was a fine mist of silt floating up to our waists. I removed a slate from one of my BC pockets and wrote:
Did u see anything around sculptures?

He shook his head.

I pointed to the opening and wrote:
U ok to go in here?

His eyes went wide behind the mask.

I confirmed the time on my computer. Forty-six minutes before we were due back. I checked my air gauge and then his. The scooters had made it so we hardly had to do any work, so there was plenty of air left for both of us. The only problem, and it was a big one, was that Josh didn’t have a dive light. I took his scooter from him and placed it on the ground.

I wrote:
Trust me. OK?

The eyes didn’t get any less wide, but he gave me the okay sign anyway. I put away the slate and removed a safety reel with bright yellow twine. There was nothing else I could find to attach the twine, so I clipped it securely to Josh’s scooter handle and wedged the DPV against a small outcropping on the cliff wall.

I don’t know what happened next.

One second I was motioning for him to hold my ankles, and then I was hyperventilating, my vision blurry and my heart racing. No matter how hard I breathed, it wasn’t enough. I needed more air. I was choking.