Deep Waters Page 5

  “Drat,” the woman said under her breath, scribbling something in her notebook. “I was hoping the two cases weren’t related.”

  THE PROBLEM WITH SPENDING ANY AMOUNT OF time on a boat, Chris reflected, was that it eventually got so boring. You could lean on the deck railing staring at an endless blue horizon for only so long before you got sick of it, and switching to the other side and a view of the coastline chugging past only worked once. Then that got boring and you were stuck, with nothing to do but not touch the delicate scientific equipment because the only people allowed to accidentally break pieces off were the professor’s grad students, and try to avoid driving your cousin crazy.

  Carrie had thrown him out of their shared cabin and barricaded the door when Chris asked her for the fourth time why she thought Maddison wasn’t calling him back.

  “Either distract yourself or swim home and hitchhike to Nebraska,” she had ordered him irritably through the thin wood, “but leave me alone to finish this!”

  “Jeez,” Chris had replied, and gone off to stare at the horizon for a while. He’d remembered to pack and take seasickness medication this time, but he still felt a little spacy, and the strange, oppressive tension hanging over the boat wasn’t helping matters. Carrie was irritable, Chris was worried about Maddison, the two grad students were unknown factors, and even Professor Griffin was a little nuttier than usual.

  “Such a lovely, cruel mistress!” he had announced unexpectedly in the middle of Chris’s sea gazing, wandering over to lean lazily on the railing. If the professor was going to keep doing things like this, they were massively lucky the ship had an autopilot and both grad students could steer. Chris and Carrie had enough accumulated experience with boats that they could probably get everyone back to some part of Florida in an emergency and not accidentally end up in Spain, but neither had what you might call practical experience.

  “The sea, I mean,” Professor Griffin continued, and Chris let him go on, even though the sea had never called to him the same way it did to the professor. It was true that he liked it, that Carrie had pestered a healthy fear of it into him, and that occasionally it made him horribly nauseous, but there wasn’t any mystery in the sea on its own. Chris reserved that for the things in the sea. Apparently Professor Griffin didn’t. “So wide, so poetic,” the man went on, spreading his arms out wide. If he tried to reenact the most famous scene from the movie Titanic Chris might have to go back to bothering Carrie. “So indifferent to the things we do . . . oh yes,” Professor Griffin said when Chris looked up at him. “That’s always fascinated me. Do you know the definition of the word amoral?”

  “Wrong?” Chris asked, caught off guard by what felt like a sudden change of subject.

  “Ah, a common mistake. No, that would be immoral. Amoral, with an A—that means something different, something, hmm, deeper. Like the ocean!”

  “Okay . . . ” The professor was getting philosophical again. This was why Chris tried to bring other people with him when he got stuck with the guy in isolated quarters, especially on the water. The ocean made Professor Griffin massively philosophical, and when he got massively philosophical, Professor Griffin got confusing. Chris gave him a worried, sideways glance.

  “Sorry, I was getting carried away,” the professor said, taking his captain’s hat off to gesture with it and then deciding instead to lean against the railing for a bit. “Amoral means not caring about the right or wrong of a thing, transcending the black and white and seeing the can rather than the should. And the ocean . . . ” He trailed off dreamily.

  “So the ocean is amoral?” Chris asked.

  “Aye,” the professor agreed, which meant he was getting both philosophical and dramatic. “Amoral and quixotic. Beautiful, I would say, but also deadly. It’s that dichotomy that has always drawn me.”

  “Oh-kay . . . ” Chris tried. He had a sudden need for a dictionary. Professor Griffin smiled.

  “Chris, I am sorry. You don’t really want to listen to an old man wax poetic about the second true love I ever had, do you?”

  “I guess I don’t feel quite the same way about the ocean that you do,” Chris said. Professor Griffin clapped him on the shoulder.

  “And that’s perfectly fine—I’m just feeling melancholy today. The other love of my life—well, you don’t want to hear about it.”

  “No, go on,” Chris said. The professor had always been single and had never expressed any interest in dating, and as far as Chris knew he’d never been married or anything like that. And anyway, what else was Chris going to go do, get yelled at by Carrie?

  “Ah,” the professor laughed, “there’s not much to tell. We were . . . two schools of fish, destined to go in opposite directions around the equator for all our lives. And she’s gone now, so I’ll never know—it’s just a shame. You make me think of things that were,” he said sadly. “Back when I saw so many ways that things could go right.”

  “I’m . . . sorry?” Chris offered.

  Professor Griffin put a hand on Chris’s shoulder and stared deeply and uncomfortably into his eyes, said earnestly, “You’re a good soul, Chris,” and wandered off in the direction of the cabin and the radio, leaving behind a puzzled Chris.

  “That was very weird,” Chris finally said to himself, and decided to get to know the grad students.

  This was, strangely enough, much easier said than done. Brad was stretched out on the deck napping when Chris tracked him down, while Harvey was fiddling with the camera and grumbling about lighting. They greeted Chris agreeably enough, and Brad welcomed him to pull up a chair—“Or a bit of deck, if you know what I mean.” But when Chris started asking them questions about their research—normally an easy way to get a graduate student talking—they both clammed up. Brad kept trying to redirect the conversation to fishing, and Harvey simply mumbled and continued poking at his camera.

  To be fair, coastal erosion sounded to Chris like the most agonizingly boring subject anyone could ever decide to study. But in his experience, even if a particular grad student was studying the chemistry of sand they would either talk your ear off about everything they were doing with the sand in horrifying detail, or they would declare that they never wanted to see a grain of sand again in their entire lives and then talk your ear off about why, the end result being the exact same horrifying amount of detail on sand chemistry. Did Brad and Harvey really study coastal erosion?

  Chris squashed his question furiously, hopefully before he made an alarmed face, and then threw himself into a conversation about fishing. Brad, at least, really was an expert. He toyed with the idea of throwing incorrect facts about coastal erosion into the conversation to test Brad or Harvey’s knowledge, but then he remembered that he didn’t know enough about coastal erosion to do that. And that what worked in old spy movies did not necessarily work in real life, especially not when it was almost impossible to sneak facts about coastal erosion into a discussion of fishing. Although Brad and Harvey, being grad students studying coastal erosion, could probably have managed it, but then there would be no need for the test at all.

  Carrie had not moved the furniture away from the door by the time Chris fought himself free from a discussion of fly-fishing with Brad and Harvey, so he was forced to stand in the hallway and pound on the door until she cracked it open.

  “What?” Carrie demanded. “I’m not letting you in if you’re just going to pester me.”

  “I don’t pester you,” Chris protested. “I was leaving you alone, but I need to ask you a question.”

  Carrie groaned and dragged the door open. Chris inched inside around the desk she’d used to wedge the door shut and then replaced it as carefully as possible. Carrie stared at him. She had yellow highlighter smudged all over her fingers.

  “Have you had a chance to talk to Harvey and Brad?” Chris asked when the door was shut.

  “Have you seen me out of this room since we got on the boat?” Carrie asked.

  “Lunch,” Chris offered. “And then,
uh . . . no?”

  “So, unless I was talking to them through the door,” Carrie said, “I haven’t had a chance to.” Her eyebrows were raised. This was not going to be fun.

  “Okay, well I have had a chance to talk to them, and I think—”

  “They’re really impostors and they don’t actually know anything about coastal erosion?”

  “Yeah, actually, how did you come up with that?”

  “They didn’t try to talk my ear off about coastal erosion over lunch,” Carrie said grimly. “They’re probably after the map I’m making.”

  “Really?” Chris asked, less surprised at the idea than at the fact that Carrie had jumped to it so quickly.

  “Chris, what else could it be? A secret embezzling ring? Illegal trade in plastic dolphin keychains? A doomed quest to prove that mermaids exist?”

  “You have no faith in my detective abilities,” Chris complained.

  “It’s the law of averages,” Carrie said, flattening a book open and rummaging around behind her for a pen. “We are looking for the San Telmo, and you have a tendency to see suspicious persons around every corner—and I agree,” she added when Chris opened his mouth to protest that he wasn’t seeing things, “Brad and Harvey are a little suspicious. Actually this whole thing is a little suspicious—if you’re right, then they probably picked coastal erosion on purpose because it’s a perfect excuse for bringing us along.”

  “Because then they have to hug the same coastline we need to search the whole time,” Chris groaned. That thought hadn’t even occurred to him. Then again, Carrie thought coastal erosion was sort of interesting and knew a little about the subject. Maybe he could get her to drop false information into a conversation and see if they took the bait?

  “Whatever you’re planning, the answer is no,” Carrie said.

  “Not even if we could prove that Brad and Harvey are fakes in front of Professor Griffin?” Chris asked. Carrie bit her lip. Her fingers went to the neck of her shirt and then dropped; she’d been developing a nervous habit of fiddling with her locket but she’d left the locket at home.

  “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” she said.

  “Yeah, we have no idea what they’re willing to do if cornered,” Chris agreed, but Carrie was still shaking her head.

  “No, Chris—well, yes.” She bit her lip. “I think Professor Griffin might suspect them already,” she admitted finally.

  “What? Why?”

  “He’s been even stranger than normal recently,” Carrie said. She looked miserable. “He’s more manic than usual, he’s almost too interested in what we’ve been doing, and he put this trip together so fast—”

  “He already had this trip planned,” Chris pointed out. “Brad and Harvey told him they needed to get this done before the start of their summer TA positions.” Although if Brad and Harvey weren’t real grad students then that explanation fell apart. And if that explanation fell apart even for Chris and Carrie, how would Brad and Harvey have fooled Professor Griffin?

  “But how could he not realize that Brad and Harvey aren’t who they say they are?” Carrie asked, voicing what Chris was wondering. “Professor Griffin has had coastal-erosion students before!”

  “I don’t know,” Chris admitted. He hadn’t even known that the professor had had coastal-erosion students before.

  “Maybe that’s why he’s letting them get away with it,” Carrie suggested. “He knows that they’re fake but he doesn’t want to tip them off, so he’s biding his time?”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know,” Carrie admitted. “I just know that Professor Griffin is worried about something he’s not telling us about.”

  Which would make him the second—no, the third person worried about something they weren’t telling Chris or Carrie about. Chris still didn’t know why Maddison had given him a warning tied into her hair ribbon, and then there was the undeniable fact that she’d picked up on some sort of worry from her father, whose sudden decision to drag his family halfway across the country was more than a little suspicious.

  “Okay,” Chris said, the letters CQD resting uncomfortably in the forefront of his mind. “So, what do we do? Nothing?”

  “Even with the professor we’re nearly outnumbered,” Carrie pointed out, which, wow, Chris had not even considered that yet but they really were. “And I hate to say it but this might still be our best chance to find the San Telmo. So I’m going to stay right here with the door closed and finish working out this map.”

  “Right,” Chris said. “I’ll go act casual. Don’t answer the door to anyone but me,” he added as a thought struck him. “I’ll—I’ll knock ‘shave and a haircut’ on the door when I come back.” It was better than talking through the door, and this way Carrie didn’t even have to worry about remembering the code phrases.

  “Or I could just throw myself overboard,” he heard Carrie mutter behind the door. “It might be less silly.”

  “You remember how I told you that the San Telmo isn’t actually a cursed ship?” Robin Redd asked Bethy. It was not completely out of the blue. He’d given up on the idea of calling any of the kids from the Annie Six-Fingers shoot after Bethy demanded to know what he was planning on telling them and realized he had no answer, but he’d been noticeably subdued since the FBI agent’s visit, and kept looking over his shoulder. Bethy had been forced to chase everyone onto the boat herself before Redd had snapped out of it and thrown himself into the final preparations with enthusiasm.

  He was now helping Bethy stuff the much-abused card table into Bethy’s equally abused car. Only two of the table’s legs had consented to fold the way they were supposed to, so it was rough going, and Bethy had to quickly brace a table leg before answering.

  “Please tell me you did not agree to do a show about that ship without telling me,” she said. “I had to lie through my teeth to get the network off our backs when you refused the first time!”

  “Hey, whoa, no!” Redd said. He did something to the backseat of Bethy’s car that made the seats collapse in a way she’d never seen before, and stood back in satisfaction as the table fell into the suddenly available space. It squashed the donut Bethy had been hiding from inquisitive camera operators. Bethy poked her head in the door to try and get it out, but one of the table legs was in the way. “I just figured I should let you know,” Redd explained. “It was said to have sunk along the coast of Archer’s Grove. And since we’re sticking to shallow water to look for manatees, I figured I should warn you. Of the possibility.”

  “Of sudden and unexpected treasure ships?” Bethy asked, giving up on the donut and extracting her bag instead. She was not looking forward to spending several days on a boat with Redd and the camera crew. The danger of cameras falling into the water made everyone touchy, the confined spaces meant people started picking fights, and the ship itself was barely seaworthy.

  Technically it was a ship belonging to a cousin of Flo, who insisted it was seaworthy. Redd thought it was perfect because it was called the Meandering Manatee, and Bethy had not been able to reject it because they couldn’t afford anything else. That did not mean that the strings of Christmas lights decorating the cabin or the nauseating purple-and-red paint job filled her with confidence. Redd bringing up the San Telmo yet again filled her with even less confidence.

  “Or of the treasure ship actually being haunted,” Bethy continued. What was bothering Redd?

  “I used to think it was haunted,” Redd admitted guiltily. “Spent forever looking for the ghost stories I just knew had to be out there about the blood-soaked decks and the writhing octopus at the prow of the ship, before I realized they’d be pointless.” He actually wrung his hands. Bethy folded her arms and decided to wait him out.

  “There are no curses associated with the San Telmo,” Redd said finally. “It’s never appeared as a ghost ship, and it’s only interesting and mysterious because it’s still missing. But if you look at the history of the people who go looking for th
e San Telmo, instead of the history of the ship itself, you’ll notice that terrible things did—do happen around that ship. And,” he added hurriedly, “there is a distinct possibility of some sort of tragedy on the high seas in the very near future, especially if there’s anyone out there right now looking for the San Telmo.”

  “Because it isn’t haunted?” Bethy asked. Redd was almost talking in code and he seemed more worried about the fact that the ship was back in the public consciousness than about it turning up as a ghost.

  “Because it doesn’t need to be,” Redd explained, so direct and so honest that he gave Bethy chills. “There are things out there—like greed, and jealousy, and suspicion—that are much worse than ghosts.”

  EITHER MADDISON WAS AVOIDING HER DAD OR HER dad was avoiding Maddison or they were both trying to avoid each other. Maddison was too irritated and worried to tell. But she kept walking into rooms only a step ahead of her dad, and leaving as soon as he walked into rooms, and her mother was starting to get the grim set to her mouth that said she was going to snap at one of them for being an idiot soon.

  Maddison knew that spending the whole day dialing her friends’ phones at regular intervals and simmering with worry when they kept going to voicemail was several levels of rude, especially if you were staying at someone else’s house. She just couldn’t stop herself. She’d barley managed to stop herself from calling both sets of Kingsolver parents multiple times, and had settled instead for calling each house twice, once to find out that Chris and Carrie were both out with Professor Griffin and wouldn’t be back for at least a day, and then once a little later to ask Carrie’s mom and Chris’s mom if they would please tell Chris and Carrie to call her back as soon as possible.