Shark Beach

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  CHAPTER 1

  Corinne Scully lay on the beach, gazed out at the vivid blue water of the Gulf of Mexico, and tried to imagine the crashing waves the hurricane might bring. They were calling the storm Juliet, which had launched a thousand bad Shakespeare-related headlines, but there was nothing romantic about the news coverage. The storm had already blasted a path of destruction through the Caribbean, and now it had begun its journey through the Gulf. The only remaining question was where it would make landfall.

  She heard the familiar hiss-pop of a beer bottle being opened and glanced up as her husband, Rick, handed her a Corona and began fishing inside their cooler for the small plastic container in which they’d placed a sliced-up lime.

  “I’m okay, thanks,” Corinne said, shielding her eyes a bit so she could see his face.

  His brow furrowed. “You sure? I thought you wanted another.”

  “Maybe in a little while. I’m feeling a little queasy.”

  “The sun,” Rick replied. “You should hydrate.”

  “With beer?”

  Rick smiled. “You don’t want that?”

  “Water would be better. You’re right about hydration.”

  He retrieved the beer and traded it for a plastic bottle of water. If Rick had taken offense at her rejection of the Corona, he gave no sign, and Corinne took notice. There had been growing tension between them over the past couple of years and she had been dubious about this vacation as a result, particularly since they were sharing the beach house with friends. Jenn and Matti Hautala and their son, Jesse, were more like family. The couples were together so often their kids had grown up squabbling like siblings.

  Before marriage, it had never occurred to Corinne how difficult it would be to find another couple whose company both she and Rick would treasure, but Jenn and Matti were that couple. Which meant the four of them knew one another’s secrets, and that Jenn had begun to sense the turmoil brewing in the Scullys’ marriage before Corinne herself had consciously become aware of it.

  On his beach towel, Matti reached out a hand without even opening his eyes. “My psychic gift tells me there is an unwanted beer floating in the ether. Come to me, lost soul, and we shall be one.”

  Corinne laughed. Rick nodded in satisfaction and slapped the dripping bottle of Corona into Matti’s hand. With a grunt, Matti sat up and stared at the bottle as if it had magically manifested in his grasp, then looked up to the sky and mouthed “thank you” toward the heavens before tipping the bottle to his lips. When he lay back down, the bottle nestled into the sand by his head, Jenn reached over from her towel and laid a dark arm across his pink-tinged back in the quiet, contented way they always seemed to manage so easily.

  We used to be like that, Corinne thought. Or at least she believed they had. But she and Rick both worked so much that they were often apart, and the less time they spent together, the harder it was for her to remember that she loved her husband, and the easier it was to see the traits she found irritating about him. She could tell that Rick felt the same, that their frequent sparring and the many nights they went to bed with a chilly space between them had taken a toll.

  So they had returned to paradise.

  The Scullys had been to Captiva, Florida, many times. It always seemed to clear their heads and give them time to breathe and take stock of their lives. Over the years there had often been talk of the Hautalas joining them, and now it had finally happened.

  Captiva Island was connected by a small bridge to Sanibel, which was itself connected to the mainland by a miles-long causeway, but out here at the end of the tiny island they might as well have been a thousand miles from their working lives, what Corinne thought of as their office selves. Normally, that distance from the so-called real world was enough to let them exhale, and to ease any tension between them. But this trip felt different to Corinne. It seemed as if Rick found it impossible to relax. If anything, thanks to Hurricane Juliet, Rick had been getting more wound up by the hour.

  He opened a new beer for himself and sat on the edge of his beach towel, watching her.

  Corinne squinted at him. “You want to go for a swim? I’m sure Kelsey would love it.”

  Kelsey, their nine-year-old, was still Daddy’s buddy. Emma, who had turned fourteen in April, had grown too serious to let her father toss her around in the waves. The girls had set up their own beach camp a little ways down the sand with the Hautalas’ son, Jesse. The kids wanted their own space, their own vacation, and although it made Corinne sad, she couldn’t blame them.

  Rick did not respond. He sipped his beer.

  “Babe?”

  He took another sip. “You really think it’s safe to stay?”

  She knew he hated when she rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t help it. “We’ve been through this,” she said.

  “I still think—”

  “We know what you think,” Corinne said, her voice low, glancing over at Jenn and Matti, who were studiously ignoring the conversation. “But the odds of Juliet hitting us are slim, and you know it.”

  “Slim, and growing. And if they’re so slim, why evacuate?”

  She took a deep breath. He wasn’t wrong, but she was sick of talking about it and knew the Hautalas were equally tired of the topic. The storm had been headed for East Texas, and then for the Louisiana coast. Its track kept wobbling, and so every national meteorologist had started to cover their ass by posting a variety of possible paths for Hurricane Juliet, including several models that showed it striking Lee County, Florida, passing over the islands. It had gone from a Category 4 down to a 1, then back up to a 2, its strength just as much a variable as its landfall location. The governor of Florida had ordered the islands and the coastal area on this stretch of the Gulf shoreline to begin voluntary evacuation, but Corinne, Jenn, and Matti all agreed it was too soon to panic.

  “We paid a lot of money for this house,” she reminded Rick for at least the tenth time. “Let’s give it another day, see what the forecast says. If they make the evacuation mandatory, we’ll go.”

  Rick took a long draught of beer. At forty-one, his hair remained dark and his handsome features sharp, but he had worry lines around his eyes and dark circles beneath them. He looked tired, and they had already been in paradise for two nights.

  He turned those tired eyes on her. “And if we’re putting the kids in danger?”

  Anger rippled through her. She pressed her lips together, fighting the urge to tell him off. How dare he accuse her of risking her daughters’ safety? But snapping at him would only make things worse, so instead she stood and turned toward the Hautalas.

  “Who wants to go for a swim?”

  * * *

  Floating in the waves helped cool her down in more ways than one. Corinne lay on her back in the water, rising and falling with each swell. She knew the surf on Captiva could be calm, the waves minimal, but with the storm wreaking havoc out in the Gulf, the beach had begun to take a poundin
g. When she set foot in the water, she had felt the undertow and had been tossed by the power of the waves. She had to swim out farther to be able to just float. For now, it seemed safe enough. The authorities hadn’t closed it off to swimming yet, but she had no doubt they would if the surf got any worse.

  The sun baked her face, and she dunked under the water and came up again, shaking out her hair. She had floated out farther than she would have liked, and the current had begun to sweep her northward, so she began to swim back, watching the beach. One of the things that made Captiva so special was the lack of parking. The beach might be public, but unless you were staying at one of the few hotels or had rented a house, it was nearly impossible to find a place to put your car, which kept the beach from being too heavily populated.

  It was a quiet island, only a few miles long, situated between the Gulf of Mexico to the west and Pine Island Sound to the east. For most of that length, Captiva was only wide enough for a house, the road, and another house. In its midsection, Andy Rosse Lane ran from west to east, with restaurants and colorful rental homes on the Gulf end and kayak rentals on the sound. Music filled the air on that street, from acoustic guitars to steel drums, Jimmy Buffet to calypso. Somehow the island had been mostly undiscovered by the college spring-breakers who descended on many Florida beaches and turned them into raging parties.

  But it couldn’t remain undiscovered forever.

  The Scullys and the Hautalas had sprung for one of the most expensive rentals in Sunset Captiva, an aging development whose sprawl of two-story, stilted beach homes ran along Andy Rosse Lane. They had taken one of the few rentals that sat right on the Gulf, shaded by towering palm trees. The house was so close to the water that Corinne had felt comfortable with the idea of the kids walking back and forth on their own. The only downside was the group that had rented the house next door.

  Corinne spotted their neighbors splashing in the water, not far from where she and her group had made their camp on the sand. This squad of college kids had somehow decided to avoid the massive weeklong raves their peers would be throwing in Daytona Beach and Cabo San Lucas this week, and planted themselves in quiet Captiva instead.

  The spring-breakers’ parties had gone late into the night. The first evening, Matti had asked them to keep the music down. Jesse Hautala might be sixteen, and her own Emma fourteen, but Kelsey was only nine, and blaring hip-hop loses its charm when the clock starts ticking toward midnight. To their credit, the spring-breakers had kept things fairly under control and seemed like an amiable enough bunch.

  Maybe I’m just jealous, Corinne thought now, watching the tallest of the boys, a muscular guy she’d heard the others call Rashad. He picked up one of the girls and hoisted her onto his shoulders, and then the six of them were playing chicken, those on top trying to knock the others into the water. They were half-drunk—and if the smell wafting from their house each night was any indication, probably high more often than not—and they hooted and laughed like they were having the time of their lives.

  “He is delicious, isn’t he?” a voice said.

  Corinne whipped around in the water, startled to find that Jenn had swum up to her while she was lost in thought.

  “Jesus! You scared me half to death!”

  Jenn laughed. “You were a little distracted.”

  Corinne splashed her. “Don’t be evil. They just look like they’re having fun.”

  “They do at that.” Jenn bobbed in the water as a wave rolled beneath them. “You can’t deny it, though. The boy is attractive. And I can promise you, Rick and Matti have been watching those girls out of the corners of their eyes like mountain lions stalking prey.”

  “That’s nasty.”

  Jenn swam a few feet nearer to shore. “They’re men. Men are nasty.”

  Facts were facts. Besides, Corinne would have had to be blind not to notice how attractive the younger women were. None of the three was perfect in the stereotypical beach bunny way, but they radiated youth and energy and freedom in a way that was impossible to ignore. One of them was a curvy Latina, and Corinne knew her husband well enough to know that Rick would have stolen second and third glances at her. The idea did not trouble Corinne. The problems growing between herself and her husband had nothing to do with him sneaking looks at women in bikinis, nor would shaming him for it make the relationship any better.

  Not to mention I’d have to stop looking at Rashad, she thought.

  “Woman, you need a night out,” Jenn said. “Tomorrow night we should leave the husbands with the kids and go listen to music and drink far too many brightly colored fruit-and-booze concoctions.”

  Corinne paddled in the water, smiling at Jenn. “That sounds fantastic. You think they’ll go for it?”

  “I’m not asking them, I’m telling them.”

  “What about the storm?”

  Jenn smiled wistfully. “Then we’ll drink Hurricanes and bring our umbrellas.”

  Corinne made a noise in her throat. It really did sound like what she needed. She swam a few feet away from Jenn, floated for a while with her face toward the sun, and then glanced again at the beach, easily spotting the huge yellow umbrella they had rented from GulfDaze, an all-purpose beach-fun place on Andy Rosse Lane. The girls had taken the umbrella for themselves and Corinne squinted, catching a glance of her daughters.

  Fourteen-year-old Emma lay on her belly on a bamboo beach mat, half-asleep, her hair tied into a bun while she tried to get a tan. Corinne and Rick had argued about the girl’s bikini. Rick thought the cut too daring for a girl Emma’s age, but if he had seen some of the suits she had tried on, Corinne thought he might have had a heart attack. Nine-year-old Kelsey sat under the umbrella reading one of her sister’s discarded paperbacks, a spooky story aimed at kids at least a few years older than she was. The girls had reading in common, but otherwise could not have been more different.

  Emma had always been shy and unsure, but with high school looming so near, she had begun to come out of her shell. Corinne was of two minds about this, happy that Emma seemed ready to engage more with the world but concerned that her daughter had begun to use social media, and to become more worried than ever about her appearance. Thin and fit, she worried about the curve of her belly and the space between her thighs. Smart, offbeat Emma loved ghost stories and alien-invasion movies, but those interests had faded of late, and Corinne feared her daughter was erasing her own uniqueness, making herself more generic in order to fit some social media concept of normal. The idea made her sick.

  Corinne did not think her daughters’ anxieties had dug their claws in too deeply yet, but she found herself on alert where Emma was concerned.

  Kelsey, on the other hand, never gave a damn what anyone thought. At least not yet. Adorably wide-eyed at nine, she shared her sister’s intelligence but had sharper edges, louder and sillier and with a cutting wit that had manifested in the second grade. Kelsey seemed unfazed by concerns that haunted her older sister.

  Corinne’s girls made her proud, but worry gnawed at her. She recalled her mother once saying that the fears of a parent never went away, they only evolved, and she had begun to see how true that statement was.

  She heard Jenn call to her and began to turn just as a massive wave crashed over her. It knocked her backward, pushed her down, and she came up sputtering and wiping at her eyes just as a second wave hit. Corinne hurled herself toward shore, letting the wave carry her, almost bodysurfing instead of being pushed under, and this time when she put her feet down they touched bottom. She stood, still shoulder deep, and turned around to face the next wave. It almost disappointed her to find the size of the waves had diminished, but then she felt the undertow dragging at her legs, the sand whipping past her ankles underwater. Shells bumped across her feet. Thirty feet away, the spring-breakers were all recovering from the big waves, their game of chicken momentarily interrupted.

  “You okay?” Jenn called, swimming toward her.

  Corinne gave her a thumbs-up, but her
thoughts were awhirl. Maybe evacuating was premature until they knew the storm was definitely coming this way, but she decided to keep Kelsey from going into the water alone. The riptide was too powerful.

  Jenn called her name. Corinne wiped at her eyes again, blinking salt away. Another wave rolled around her, lifting her briefly off her feet, and Corinne felt herself brush against something big. Something tough and smooth that slid past her, gliding against her thigh.

  When she turned and saw the fin jutting up from the water, she let out a stream of barely conscious profanity as she dove toward shore, swimming hard, legs kicking and arms pulling. Hip deep, she stood and rushed for the seashell-strewn sand, adrenaline shooting through her. Panic blotted out rational thought, shut down all of her senses, focused only on that fin and the inescapable feeling of vulnerability at her back. She could feel the shark closing in, knew her legs and thighs were still in the water. Corinne thought of the girls, of all she had yet to give or teach them, and her heart broke a little.

  She glanced over her shoulder, knowing what had to happen next.

  Only it didn’t. The fin had vanished. Up to her knees in water, she scanned the waves and saw the fin pop up again, farther away, and saw the now-familiar curve of the marine mammal’s back and the blowhole there. Fear kept her flushed, heart thundering, but embarrassment began to creep in even before her other senses kicked in and she heard Kelsey laughing at her from shore.

  Corinne turned to see her nine-year-old standing in the surf with one hand over her mouth and the other propped on her hip.

  “Mom,” she said, giggling. “It’s a dolphin!”

  Beyond Kelsey, Emma sat on her blanket, rolling her eyes. Jesse waved amiably from the water, wearing a huge grin. Farther up the sand, Rick and sunburnt Matti sat facing each other, drinking their beers and deep in conversation. They hadn’t even noticed.

  “Well,” Jenn said, wading up beside her. “That was a close one.”