Without a Grave (22 page)

Molly and I knelt on the white vinyl seats, our elbows resting on the gunwale, watching Gator as he slipped over the side. He floated over the trap for a moment, took a deep breath, then dived. We watched him circle the trap, the tickle stick in one hand, the net in the other.

After two circumnavigations, Gator surfaced, spit out his snorkel to say, ‘It'd be easier if you helped, Hannah.'

‘I'd be glad to.' It was a hot day; the water would feel good.

‘Got a bathing suit?' he asked.

I tugged on my tank top. ‘Underneath.' I turned to Molly. ‘Want to come?'

Eyes wide in mock panic, she pressed a hand to her chest and said, ‘
Moi
? No thanks. I think I'll just watch.'

It took only half a minute for me to strip to my bathing suit and join Gator overboard.

What appeared from the deck of
Deep Magic
as an undulating square of metal, I could see clearly now. A forest of long, whip-like feelers and the smaller, spiny limbs that gave the lobster its name, waved at me from the perimeter of the trap. Using his hands, Gator showed me how to plant the net. Meanwhile, he used his tickle stick to entice one of the lobsters out of his hiding place. As I watched, keeping the net firmly pressed against the bottom as instructed, he tapped smartly on the lobster's white-spotted shell, annoying the creature until it scooted backwards into the net I was holding.

Gator collected the net from me, and we bobbed to the surface. ‘Easy to see if the bug's legal size,' he burbled as he popped his snorkel, ‘but we need to make sure it's not female.' He turned the brownish-green lobster over while still in the net, examined the shape of the fins, checked for telltale eggs.

‘Good to go! How many you want?'

Looking up into the boat, shielding my eyes from the sun, I had a silent consultation with Molly.

‘Dinner at my place tonight, then,' Molly said. ‘So four? Five?'

‘You can freeze them,' Gator suggested.

‘Six, then.'

Gator transferred his catch from the net into a lobster bag hanging from a rope tied to one of
Deep Magic's
cleats. ‘Your turn.' He handed me the tickle stick.

I examined it like some skinny alien being, then handed it back. ‘I'd like to see you do it one more time.'

Gator nodded, dragged his mask down over his eyes and nose, and ducked once again under the surface. I took a deep breath and followed.

Once again, I placed the net and held it steady while Gator used the tickle stick to walk a lobster backwards into it. We shot to the surface to check the legal status of our catch and transferred it to the bag. This time, Gator handed me the tickle stick and we headed back down.

Back at the trap, I picked an unlucky lobster and tried to tease it out from under the trap. It was harder than it looked. Instead of coming out, the creature backed away. I used the tickle stick to probe for it, but he'd disappeared under the siding.

Using a scooping motion that was probably not quite kosher, I swept the stick under the trap, trying to coax the lobster from its hiding place, but it must have scuttled out of range.

I shot to the surface, took a deep breath of air, then headed back down to try again. When I withdrew the stick this time, I'd caught something on it, but it wasn't a lobster. It was a bit of white knit fabric.

I extended the tickle stick in Gator's direction, shrugged. He picked the fabric off, and we bobbed to the surface, where Gator slid his mask to the top of his head and examined the object in the sun. ‘Looks like a bit of sock.'

‘You use socks in your traps?'

‘Nope.' He looked puzzled.

‘Do lobsters drag objects into their dens with them?'

‘Never known it to happen, Hannah. Let's have a look.'

We repositioned our masks and sank to the bottom again. Gator pushed the cinder block off the trap, and with me standing on one side and he on the other, we lifted the platform.

There were lobsters under it all right. Dozens of them. Startled by the sudden blast of sunlight, they scampered in every direction.

But what they were feeding on made me gag. I spit out my snorkel, shot to the surface, and held on to the swim ladder at the stern of the boat with both hands while I quietly parted company with my breakfast.

‘Hannah! What's wrong?' Molly peered at me over the side, her hands white knuckled, gripping the rail. ‘Is Gator OK?'

‘Oh, my God.' I felt dizzy. I tried to take deep breaths, but ended up retching instead. Molly leaned over me solicitously, patting my hand.

In the meantime, Gator had surfaced nearby, his snorkel dangling. He laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘Take it easy, Hannah.'

‘Seasick?' Molly asked.

When I didn't answer, Gator said, ‘She's had a shock. Bodies down there. Two of 'em.'

Two bodies, fully clothed, staring up into nothingness with wide, sightless eyes. One was a woman, I had no doubt of that. As I struggled to make sense of what I was seeing, her dark hair had drifted, swayed in the current like seaweed around her ruined face.

Gator coughed. ‘Never seen anything like that before.'

Molly's gaze was fixed on the hideous spot in the water. ‘Can you tell who they are?'

Gator rubbed his eyes. ‘Lobsters did quite a job on the soft tissues of their faces.' He paused, glanced from Molly to me and back again, seeming to flush under his tan. ‘Sorry.'

‘I set the trap back down to keep the bodies from floating away,' he continued, ‘but before I did, I found this.' He uncurled his fingers. In his palm lay a broad gold wedding band. ‘It might mean something to you, Hannah.'

With my free hand, I picked the ring out of Gator's palm and examined it in the sunlight. Engraving inside the band read, FP+SA 9/5/62.

Frank and Sally Parker.

Gator waited until I was safely up the swim ladder before climbing back into the boat himself. Using strong hands on each of my shoulders, he practically forced me down on a bench, then wrapped me in a foul-weather jacket. In spite of the warmth of the sun, I began to shiver. I drew the jacket more tightly around my shoulders. ‘Were they . . . ?' I stuttered. ‘Could you tell . . . ?' I swallowed the words.

Without answering, Gator crossed to the console and reached for his microphone. ‘Didn't crawl under there themselves.' He pressed the talk button. ‘Dive Guana, Dive Guana. This is
Deep Magic
. Come in, Troy.'

‘Things like this simply don't happen here,' Molly said while we waited for Troy to show up with the rescue boat from Guana Cay, although there was precious little to rescue. For Frank and Sally Parker it was way too late.

‘Only seventy-some murders in all the islands last year,' Gator told us. He sat bent over, hands dangling between his knees. ‘Fifty of them in Nassau. Drug-related, of course.'

I scratched Nassau off my list of one thousand and one places to see before I died and asked, ‘What do we do now?'

‘Wait for Troy.'

‘And after that?'

‘As I said before. Nothing. Getting involved with the Bahamian police can take years off your life.'

I felt like screaming, but managed a croak. ‘Gator! You can't
not
report this! Those people were my friends!'

‘You mistook my meaning, Hannah. I'm just asking you to let Troy and me handle it.'

I folded my arms across my chest, hugging myself for warmth. Tears pooled in my eyes, spilled over and ran hotly down my cheeks. ‘What I want to know is what Frank and Sally are doing here, dead, when the last time they were seen was miles away in Eleuthera.'

‘We only have Jaime's word for that. And Jaime's word is worth, what? Next to nothing?'

Molly blinked rapidly, fighting tears, too. ‘Ain't worth shee-it! He killed them, didn't he?'

‘Somebody sure did,' Gator said.

‘Who else could have done it? Frank and Sally go missing, then Jaime shows up sailing their boat.' I shrugged out of the jacket, picked up my shorts and top. ‘Why else was he having
Wanderer
repainted? Idiot thought nobody would notice.' I shivered. ‘How did he think he was going to get away with it, Gator?'

‘It's early in the lobster season. He probably thought that by the time I got around to checking the traps, the lobsters would have done their work.'

As
Deep Magic
rocked gently at anchor on the undulating sea, I staggered to the stern where I untied the lobster bag from the cleat and dumped our catch over the side.

No one protested.

Exhausted, I sat down and rested my forehead on the gunwale, as soothing as a cool washcloth. While Molly rubbed my back, I thought about Jaime's victims,
all
of Jaime's victims. Frank and Sally Parker, the mangroves, the reef, the sea turtles and even poor Alice Madonna Robinson. ‘The man is evil, pure evil.'

Molly wrapped an arm around me and squeezed. ‘The question is, what are we going to do about it?'

Later, much later, Molly and I sat on her porch, a dinner of leftover spaghetti glistening under candlelight. The power had gone out again. Adding insult to injury, Paul had left for Baltimore with the generator he'd purchased still packed in its box, so I'd collected my frozen food from the freezer and taken it over to Molly's where lights were on in her kitchen, her generator humming.

Molly's contribution to dinner had been a salad, a delicious mix of spinach and romaine, but I only nibbled on mine.

‘You have to eat sometime, Hannah.'

‘But not now.' I bit my lower lip, lost in thought. ‘I can't get it out of my mind, Molly. Frank and Sally . . . God!'

She laid down her fork. ‘It's the body bags that got me, Hannah. Hefty Cinch Saks! Mah gawd. I kept reading the side of that box –
new, unscented odor block technology
. I swear I'll never be able to use a Hefty bag again.'

The three strands of noodle and two slices of tomato that I'd managed to choke down threatened to make a reappearance, but I pressed my fingernails into my palms and took deep breaths until the feeling passed.

‘Gator called,' Molly told me. ‘Said Troy would take the bodies to Marsh Harbour. Apparently they have some sort of make-do morgue over there. After a doctor declares them dead . . .' Her voice trailed off into the darkness beyond the candlelight.

‘As if there's any doubt.' I cringed. ‘Then they'll be taken to Nassau for autopsy, like that poor fellow who died in the wildfire.'

Molly sipped her wine, then set the glass down. ‘I practically live here, but I don't have much experience with this sort of thing, as you can well imagine. But the Parkers are American citizens. Won't US authorities be involved?'

‘Only if invited by the Bahamians, Gator told me. Otherwise the Royal Bahamas Police handle all investigations themselves.'

‘And we're sure they're not going to mess up the investigation, how?'

I studied my friend in the candlelight, her eyes bright with tears. ‘I'm going to make some phone calls, Molly. First to Paul . . .'

‘FBI?' she interrupted.

I nodded. ‘Interpol, too, if necessary.'

‘Good.' Molly stood, dinner plate in hand. ‘Tell me, Hannah. What did you say to Gator when he dropped us off?'

‘I suggested that if we wanted a proper investigation, we should take Frank and Sally to the waters off Fort Lauderdale and set their bodies afloat off the beach.' I snorted, then cackled. Even to myself, I sounded hysterical. ‘And you know what?'

‘What?'

‘He half agreed with me.'

‘But the police say they found no trace of foul play aboard
Wanderer
! They even gave custody of the boat back to Jaime Mueller until he can contact the Parkers . . . well, I guess now it'd be their heirs. Makes me sick.' Using her fork, she scraped the scraps from her plate over the porch rail. Snack time for the hermit crabs who lived under the oleander.

‘The Parkers didn't have any children,' I said.

‘Oh. In that case, Jaime Mueller's probably the proud owner of a used boat.'

‘Maybe Jaime didn't kill them on their boat, Molly. Maybe he murdered them on shore. Their dinghy's never been found, you know.'

A theory took shape in my mind. I imagined
Wanderer
bobbing peacefully at anchor in Poinciana Cove. Frank and Sally, after dark, motoring their dinghy ashore. Dragging it up on the sand and hiding it in the mangroves. Creeping up the beach, into the woods, looking around and checking for . . . what? Something that was polluting the reef?

‘What's Jaime's motive, Hannah? Surely not possession of the sailboat. He could buy ten sailboats like
Wanderer
easy, cold cash in a suitcase.'

I discarded my first theory and went with the obvious. ‘I think Frank and Sally anchored in the cove, and Frank went down for a night dive, like he told the captain of
Northern Lights
he was going to. Then he saw something that Jaime or somebody else didn't want him to see.'

‘Like what?'

I picked a crescent of celery out of my salad, popped it into my mouth and chewed it thoughtfully. ‘Something illegal, of course.'

‘Like what?'

‘Smuggling leaps to mind,' I said, thinking about the little cottage in Kelchner's Cove all locked up nice and tight. ‘Maybe he brought in stuff for his resort that he didn't want to pay thirty percent duty on. Computers, for example. Or air conditioners. Booze?'

‘Interesting theory, Hannah, but El Mirador Land Corporation has deep pockets. Hard to imagine any of those fat cats risking life in prison to save a couple of thousand bucks on air conditioners.'