Night Diver: A Novel (3 page)

After a few hard bangs with her fist, the glove box opened. The map to the rented house was primitive, but combined with what she had looked up online this morning, she wouldn’t get lost.

Finally her cheerless guest abandoned his baggage and got into the passenger seat. The truck settled deep into its worn suspension. Surprisingly deep.

He must be all bone and muscle,
she thought.
I think his kind of consultant is called a troubleshooter. Real bullets optional.

“Do you dive?” she asked.

“Why do you ask?”

“Because you’re really solid. Divers don’t have much body fat. They burn it off.”

“Interesting,” he said.

The call of voices and piercing cry of birds filled what otherwise would have been the silence following his neutral comment.

What a fascinating conversationalist,
she thought.
Boy, is this going to be a fun drive. Let’s see, maybe fifteen minutes to the side of town, and another mile to the rental.

She shifted gears, let out the clutch, and drove slowly onto the airport road.

“Is it long to the ship?” Holden asked.

“Depends on Larry’s dive schedule.”

“Why?”

“He’s picking you up at the cottage the company rented for your friend. The rental itself is about a ten-minute walk from the fuel dock, chandlery, and commercial marina Larry uses. This isn’t a big island.”

The fact that Holden followed her elliptical conversation told Kate he was a lot smarter than the average diver.

“Malcolm Farnsworth is a contract employee, as I am,” Holden said. “I don’t know the man personally, much less call him a friend.”

“How unsurprising.”

Something close to a smile disturbed Holden’s features, but all he said was, “I thought Farnsworth was staying aboard the
Golden Bough
.”

She shrugged. “Larry would know. I just got here.”

“That explains it.”

She told herself she wasn’t going to ask, but she did. “Explains what?”

“Pale skin. Hard to maintain in the tropics, unless you only go about at night.”

“Sorry to disappoint. No vampire blood in the Donnelly family.”

He looked sideways at her. “How terribly ordinary.”

“Certainly makes our lives easier. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a diving vampire.”

Something that could have been a smile changed the line of Holden’s lips. “Do you know how long it is to the rental?”

“No. But again, it’s a small island.”

Five minutes and a lot of greenery went by, broken by occasional brilliant views of the ocean.

“Is it always this warm here?” he asked.

“You’d have to ask a tourism minister. I haven’t been here for years.”

“But you’re one of the diving Donnellys, correct?”

“I don’t dive anymore.” Her tone of voice didn’t encourage questions.

Holden thought about pursuing it. Until he had met her in the airport, there had been no mention of anyone called Kate Donnelly being on the payroll or on board the dive ship
Golden Bough.
He would have to ask the Antiquities Office for more information.

“Couldn’t take the calloused hands and bad hearing?” he asked. “Or was it the nerve damage that put you off diving?”

“I was a careful diver. No damage.”

“You must have quit young.”

“Young enough.”

“So you won’t be suffering dysbaric osteonecrosis either,” Holden said. “A wise choice.”

“I understood about half of that,” she said. “Osteo. Bone. You mean arthritis? A lot of divers end up with it. Grandpa has his share. Are you a doctor?” She glanced at him, then back to the road.

“Diving can lead to arthritis,” Holden said. “Sometimes it just leads to a joint replacement due to bone death, hence the name ‘osteonecrosis.’ And no, I’m not a doctor, but I know my way around underwater operations. Otherwise I would be rather useless for this job.”

That this was his first and only civilian job since he’d been injured was a fact that he kept to himself. The people in Antiquities had conferred with the military doctor and deemed him competent to consult on salvage diving, especially as it had been made clear he was to find reasons to shut down the dive. No diving would be expected of him.

Holden wasn’t unhappy with that. He had been diving enough since the mishap to assure himself that the injury was manageable underwater. Hurt like a bitch, but he could dive.

Kate slowed to match speeds with a tourist bus. It was painted bright green and looked like a giant beetle crawling around the road. Sticking out of open windows, a scattering of hands waved in the breeze like flowers reaching toward the Caribbean sun.

As the silence stretched, she decided that being nice hadn’t worked, so she’d move on to direct.

“My brother wasn’t very clear about what your job is, so I don’t know what kind of information you need.”

“Call me a dive consultant.”

“Grandpa and Larry could be called dive consultants,” she said, keeping her voice neutral. “What is your specific purpose?”

“To evaluate the operation. Surely your brother mentioned that they have precious little to show for all their diving. AO—the Antiquities Office—sent me to plug the money holes, as it were. Our weather people are predicting at least one good gale within the week. There is no point to keeping a losing project on standby while the weather sorts itself out.”

“According to the receipts I’ve seen,” she said carefully, “there are no ‘money holes’ except the normal expenses of any dive.”

Holden considered pointing out the obvious—he had been sent out because incompetence or theft or both were suspected—but decided to save that little gem for another time. From the files he had been given, Moon Rose Ltd. was one buggered operation.

Too bad, how sad, and failure is more common than success,
he thought
. The nondiving member of the Donnelly clan could be the most beautiful woman ever born and it wouldn’t change the outcome. Every dive the department underwrites must produce profit or prestige, and profit is preferred.

“If there are no money holes, there is no problem for me to find,” he said.

The rest of the drive was completed in silence but for the wind rushing through open windows and the occasional cry of birds.

The rental was on land the jungle had pretty much reclaimed from whatever agricultural use had been its previous life. As required in a tropical paradise, the beach sand was a blinding white in the sun, the palms were elegantly graceful, and the sea clear and gentle. St. Vincent had quite a few black sand beaches, compliments of its resident volcano, but this rental wasn’t on one of them.

Kate stopped the rattling truck at the end of dirt ruts that served as a driveway. She made it a point not to look at the water. Smelling it, hearing the seabirds—that was enough.

Too much.

She gripped the wheel with clammy hands and concentrated on her breathing. Without driving to distract her, the reality of where she was kept pulling at her like a cold undertow.

Holden gave the scenery a sweeping glance that missed nothing, lingering over the canted floating dock and the aluminum workboat loosely moored to it. There was a faint path from the house—barely a cottage, really—to the dock. Off to the back of the property there was nothing but tangles of vines, shrubs, and trees.

The dwelling itself was rustic to the point of dilapidation. If the exterior wood had ever been painted, it had worn away. The foundation looked like a kind of cement mixed locally by unskilled labor. The roof had been shingled once; now it was a patchwork of corrugated tin pieces nailed on whenever and wherever a leak became a problem.

Without a word Kate got out, took the cartons of bookkeeping from the bed of the truck, and walked up the rocky, overgrown path to the front. The door was unlocked. She stashed the boxes inside the house. A quick look around told her that the furnishings were as shabby as the house. At least the electricity worked, if the loud hum of the refrigerator was any indication.

She shrugged. Knowing her grandfather and the financial problems of his salvage company, she hadn’t been expecting the Ritz. With a little more exploration she found two tiny bedrooms, one bathroom, and a kitchenette. The back door led to the jungle.

When she returned to the truck for her luggage, Holden was still studying the house and its surroundings from behind his mirrored sunglasses.

“It’s not much,” she said, “but it will get the job done. The bedroom at the back has two bunk beds. You and your fellow employee can share.”

“I’ve stayed in worse,” was all he said.

“Such confidence. You haven’t even seen the inside.”

“Irrelevant. I’ll be bunking on the
Golden Bough
.”

Kate hesitated, remembering her brother’s comment about how crowded the ship was. Then she decided that where Holden slept was Larry’s problem. All she cared about was that she was staying on land. Period. With a little effort and a lot of concentration on cleaning up Larry’s laughable bookkeeping, she would hardly know she was within breathing distance of her nightmare.

And if she told herself that often enough, she might really believe it.

Holden met her at the front door, holding her luggage. “Which room?” he asked.

“The one with a single bed, thank you.”

Kate watched his easy stride as he walked down the narrow hall and thought again that it was too bad such a nice package was wrapped around a block of ice. Then her eye caught the piece of paper held to the tiny refrigerator with a garish fish magnet.

Hi, sis,

Welcome back. Diving rotation got changed. Bring him to the ship, okay?

L
                            

She read the note three times before the roaring in her ears eased and she remembered to breathe.

He can’t do this to me!

But he had.

K
ATE’S FIRST IMPULSE
was to grab her luggage and head back to the airport—and to hell with the family business. But she had fled once, years ago. She was still running. No matter how tempting at the moment, in the long run giving in to fear wasn’t going to get her anywhere she wanted to be.

She blew out a hard breath, breathed in deeply, and repeated until her head no longer felt like it would explode.

It’s calm and sunny. Even the trade winds have taken a vacation, just like they always do in August and September. I was operating workboats when I was eight. I can do it now. That’s one of the reasons I came back, right? To get over what happened. To stop waking up screaming in the middle of the night.

She kept breathing, waiting for it to become automatic again.

Holden walked into the kitchenette and saw Kate standing stiff and motionless, her fist clenched around what looked like a piece of paper.

“Is everything all right?” he asked.

“Just peaches and cream,” she said through clenched teeth.
I’m so going to kill my brother.

Holden raised both black eyebrows and said nothing.

“Looks like you won’t have to wait for Larry to pick you up after all,” she said, throwing the note into a small trash can. “I’ll take you to the
Golden Bough
now. Right now.”
Before I go from fury to fear.

“Excellent,” he said.

And he wondered why she looked angry and fierce and afraid, like a cornered animal.

While he went to the truck for his duffels, she grabbed a wind shell and a sun hat from her luggage. He fell in behind her as she marched down to the dock. Although her shoulders were rigid, her ease on the uneven, wobbly dock told him that she was hardly new to the movement of water under her feet. It was the same for her graceful step from dock to the gunwale, and then down to the open cabin of the boat.

Holden glanced at the aluminum workboat. It was between five and six meters long, powered by two muscular outboard engines, and driven from a forward cabin that was little more that two bench seats with backrests and a windscreen. A fuel compartment filled the area under the stern bench. Various permanent clamps and anchors for ties studded the cargo area. Most were in use, holding down everything from compressed air tanks to fuel and food, waiting to be ferried to the
Golden Bough
.

The boat had the patina of metal that had been hard used, beaten and bitten with thousands of tiny scars and scratches. Pieces of tread from old tires had been fixed on the outer side of the gunwales. The resulting rub rail wasn’t fancy but would get the job done. TT
Golden Bough 2
was painted in faded letters across the stern.

One of the main ship’s two tenders,
Holden noted, mentally checking it against the list of equipment that had appeared on the contract.
Wonder where the other one is, plus the pricey speedboat Farnsworth uses.