Shark Island Page 16

  “We had something good going, Kat,” Tye said, his eyes narrowing. “At least I thought we did. But you treated me outside the lab the same way you treated me inside it … like I was just another useful tool you could keep in a box and only take out when you needed it.”

  “That’s not fair—”

  Tye replied with a humorless smile. “The truth isn’t fair?” He shrugged. “Look, it’s fine. I’m over it. I had feelings for you, but I’m past it—”

  “You and Rosalie?”

  “In a way, yeah. But you said you didn’t need to know secrets. You asked if mine will hurt you. The answer is ‘not physically.’”

  Not physically? Did he think she was jealous of him and Rosalie?

  “What does that mean?”

  Tye put a hand on her shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Look, we’re in this together. Let’s get the hell out of here and when we’re back at Woods Hole I’ll put all my cards on the table. For now, it’s just gonna have to be enough for you to know I was in love with you, even if you never wanted me to be.”

  Kat hesitated, wanting to know more. But he’d made it clear the conversation was over, and they had more important things to focus on right now than hurt feelings and recriminations.

  She offered him her hand. “Come on, let’s get you up. We’ve got a while before we need to worry about getting off the ground, but you’re not going to get any stronger than you are right now. Best to start climbing, get you up to the platform.”

  Tye groaned as she helped him to stand. He put an arm around her shoulders and together they shuffled toward the watchtower. When Wolchko and Captain N’Dour realized what was going on, they hurried to be of assistance. Past the tower, Rosalie had turned to watch them all. They all stared up at the platform. Nobody mentioned how difficult it was going to be for Tye to get up there without being able to put much weight on his wounded leg. They all knew.

  “What are you going to do?” Kat asked.

  “For starters, I’m gonna try not to bleed to death,” he said.

  And then he started climbing.

  CHAPTER 28

  Lorena had to remind herself how she had ended up on Deeley Island in the middle of a nor’easter. Not just how, but why. Her husband, Luciano, had been unfaithful from the day of their first date until the day, nearly seven years ago, they finalized their divorce. On their wedding day, he’d sent his own sister around to visit several of his more serious girlfriends to tell them he was getting married. Most of them continued to sleep with him, as did many others over the years of their marriage. Luciano had been handsome and charismatic and a liar of Olympic skill levels.

  Seventeen months after their divorce, he’d been struck by an MBTA bus and killed, just after leaving church. Even his friends had said it was karma. She’d grown up in a strict Italian Catholic household, where divorce had been a dirty word, so her mother had been relieved when Luciano died. It meant she could pretend her daughter was a widow instead of a divorcée. Lorena herself had felt no vindication, no justice. Instead, she’d felt more cheated than ever. Once upon a time they’d had the potential for such happiness, and he’d squandered it. Thrown it away.

  In spite of her mother, Lorena had built herself a happy single life, full of music and coffee and friends. Not long before the accident that took her ex-husband’s life, she had been named to a position on the Board of Directors for the Portland Symphony Orchestra. Her therapy patients fulfilled the needs of her mind, but the symphony made her spirit soar. The only thing that gave her more peace was the sight and sound of the ocean, especially at night or in winter, when the coast would be abandoned by everyone but the lonely and the hopelessly romantic.

  Her friends had gently nudged her to try dating, but she had refused to be set up—didn’t want to risk a disaster that might interfere with those friendships. It had been her friend Sarah’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Angie, who’d persuaded her, with the aid of an excellent bottle of Merlot, to try online dating. You don’t have to even reply to them if they don’t appeal to you, Angie had said. Sarah had cheered Lorena on. Reluctantly and a bit drunkenly, Lorena had gone along with the plan. In the morning she had nursed a headache and promptly forgotten all about it, until two weeks later when she’d had dinner with Sarah and Angie again and the girl had logged back into Lorena’s profile to find dozens of messages. After the first obscenity, Angie had taken over, deleting the filthy propositions before Lorena could see them and only showing her the ones that seemed decent and sincere. The whole thing had made her skin crawl. She hadn’t been able to trust the man she’d married, so how could she trust a man she met on the Internet? It felt wrong to her, inappropriate, and she certainly had no intention of telling her mother. At seventy-nine, the old woman hadn’t softened her judgmental nature one iota.

  Then Angie had smiled. Aww, this guy seems sweet. Cute smile for a dad-type.

  Playing along so as not to disappoint the girl, Lorena had read through the gentlemanly message she’d received from the dad-type, who seemed athletic and adventurous and, yes, was handsome. But it was when she’d clicked on his profile that something had woken up in the back of her mind. The photo featured him standing at the edge of a dock, with gray skies and a rough ocean behind. Beneath the photo had been a quote from a song by Van Morrison—one of her favorites.

  “Let your soul and spirit fly / Into the mystic.”

  The moment had felt electric. She’d always believed in kismet, in serendipity, though she had rarely felt it in her own life.

  Lorena and Jim had their first date the following Wednesday night. Without her ever mentioning that electric moment, they had finished the date by walking along the beach after dark. She hadn’t waited for him to kiss her, though she’d promised herself there would be no kiss. No kiss and no anything else. But he had been so kind and so smart, so open, and so obviously devoted to his sons that she had dared to imagine there might be something there.

  Seventeen months later, he’d asked her to marry him. They had their differences, but she believed that was important in a marriage. Her only hesitation had been that she wanted to make sure Dorian and Kyle felt included, that they supported their father’s choice. She wanted them to feel like she was family. Meeting Jim, beginning a life with him, had felt like climbing the steps to a dream she had never imagined might be possible for her again.

  Now they were inside a nightmare.

  She stood at the tree line at the edge of Deeley Island, staring out at Bald Cap. This was the spot where Jim and Dorian had been standing when Kyle had come to get her. Lorena had been hiding out in the tent, fighting the depression and anxiety that had threatened to overwhelm her. Better for her to stay in the tent and have Jim and the boys think she was unwell than to let them see her at her worst, angry and emotional. She knew that was the wrong approach—hell, she was the therapist, wasn’t she? But just because she knew better, that didn’t mean she had to be rational all the time. Nobody was.

  Yes, Jim had been foolish not to cancel their trip when the weather threatened to turn against them. He had gambled on the forecast being accurate, but this was New England—the forecast was never much better than an educated guess. And, after all, he’d made the wrong choice for the right reason; he wanted them to have this adventure together, to bring them closer.

  But he never imagined this, she thought now. How could he?

  Lorena blew out a breath. Sometimes the rain made her feel as if she were suffocating. Her raincoat had a duck bill on the hood. It seemed silly now and it didn’t provide much real protection, but under the trees and with her duck bill she could hold her phone up and use the camera zoom to get a closer look at what transpired over on Bald Cap. She’d watched one figure clamber down from the watchtower there, and now she saw another begin to climb.

  She tried not to look at the sharks. Tried not to think about the kayaks. The storm would pass eventually, and so would this bizarre gathering of sea creatures.

  Quiet
ly, her own whispered voice drowned out by the rain and wind, Lorena prayed to God for the safety of the people stranded on Bald Cap. Her mother had always told her that God heard your prayers even if they were only in your heart, so she wasn’t worried about the noise drowning her out. What worried her was that in her whole life she had never had a prayer answered. Not demonstrably. It comforted her to pray, to talk to God, and she always told her patients that this sort of comfort had real value to their state of mind, even when they wondered if God was actually there to hear them.

  Today, she really hoped he was listening.

  “Lorena,” a voice said, and she nearly jumped out of her skin as she spun to see that Jim had come up behind her.

  “Don’t do that! You’ll scare the life out of me!” She smiled, but her heart, as her mother would have said, was going to beat the band.

  Jim apologized, but he didn’t smile in return. Tree branches moved and the boys appeared. Dorian might be twenty-one, but Lorena couldn’t stop thinking of the two of them as boys because they were Jim’s boys and might one day be hers, if they could make this work.

  “Look,” Jim said, fidgeting on his feet, not wanting to meet her eyes. “Things are going to get worse over there before too long, and—”

  “I know,” she interrupted, unpleasant thoughts tumbling through her head. “The storm surge is going to overtop them by at least a couple of feet. They’ll be safe on the tower, though. They can ride it out.”

  “Probably. But we can’t be sure of that. And there isn’t room up top for all of them, not to mention the one guy is obviously injured.”

  “The guy climbing the tower right now?” It felt to her like she knew where this was going, and she wanted to cut it off before Jim got there. “We’re all going to ride this out, honey. Just like you told me about the storm. We’ll take our gear uphill and wait the storm out, and so will they.”

  Jim exhaled, then turned toward his sons. Dorian glanced away, not helping, but Kyle’s eyes were excited. To him, this was all part of the adventure.

  “Dad thinks the surge might be way more than two feet above the rock over there,” Kyle said. “And the tower’s old, maybe not very sturdy. Those folks are in trouble and we wanna help them.”

  Lorena slipped her phone into her coat pocket and forced herself to breathe, angry with Jim for putting her in this position. What was she supposed to say to them now? She wasn’t his wife or the boys’ mother. If she used her role here to undermine their courage, they would resent her for it.

  “How will you do that?” she asked, glancing at Dorian, hoping to appeal to his logical mind and sense of self-preservation. “There’s nothing we can do for those people except keep trying to call for help.”

  Jim frowned. “We have the kayaks.”

  Lorena wondered how much of her horror showed on her face. “You want to put a kayak in the water now, in this storm, with all of those sharks out there?”

  Kyle brightened. “Sharks aren’t a natural enemy for people. They wouldn’t attack the kayaks or even us if we were in the water—”

  “Unless they confused us for seals,” Dorian said. “And there are a hell of a lot of seals out there.”

  Jim glanced at him. “Dor, I told you, we don’t have to do this. I’m not going unless you’re sure.”

  Dorian shrugged. “I’m fine. As long as we stay out of the water, we’ll be all right. Though I’d like to give the sharks as wide a berth as we can, so we oughta strike out to the south first, come up on Bald Cap from the other side, away from the main bulk of the seal herd.”

  “I’m coming,” Kyle said darkly.

  “Absolutely not. We’re not leaving Lorena here by herself,” Jim said, “and anyway, we need the room. As it is, we’re only going to bring back one person at a time per kayak, and there are six people over there.”

  He caught himself then, seemed to realize that the three Talbot men had been talking as if she’d suddenly vanished. Jim turned toward her, apology written on his face. Lorena stepped toward him and put her right hand on his cheek, the scruff of his beard rough on her palm.

  “Have you thought this through?”

  Jim nodded. “Promise.”

  “Tell me why this is necessary.”

  “For me,” he said instantly. “I think there’s a damn good chance some of those folks are going to die if we don’t get them off Bald Cap. You didn’t see the sharks kill the one guy—”

  “You’re not helping your case, Dad,” Dorian put in.

  Jim shot him a dark look, then faced Lorena again. “The seals are everywhere. The guy was in the water. We’ll do just what Dorian said, give them as much space as we can. I swear to you, we’ll be careful. But honey, listen, if I do nothing … if we could have helped them, and anyone else dies over there, I’ll never forgive myself.”

  Lorena studied his eyes, but she knew this man so well that she’d heard the truth in his voice. Known it before he’d expressed it. The waves were one thing, the churning ocean bad enough, but she knew he had the skill to manage it. Dorian she felt less certain of, but if Jim had that much confidence how could she doubt it? He wouldn’t risk his own son. Not knowingly.

  “You know how dangerous this is,” she said almost as quietly as she’d said her prayer. “But I understand what you feel, and I wouldn’t want you haunted like that. I don’t have the experience you have, so maybe this is even crazier than I think it is. Just in case, you need to make me a promise. If you get out there and you go over, even once, you both paddle back here as fast as you can. If the sharks seem too interested, if one of them so much as comes near you, then you come back here immediately. If you can’t make those promises, and you go anyway, then the Talbot men and I are going to have a conflict.”

  Lorena glanced at the boys. She didn’t want to tell their father what to do, to diminish him in their eyes and make her seem like their enemy somehow, but she couldn’t let them go without speaking up.

  “I promise,” Jim said, no trace of a smile. He meant it. “I swear to God.”

  “Me, too,” Dorian added, though she hadn’t asked him to. He stood up straight, respectful, not treating her like an enemy or an outsider.

  “Go,” she said. “Kyle and I will move our gear up the hill. Don’t forget what you promised, and don’t do anything stupid.”

  She felt sick to her stomach as Jim kissed her. When he stepped back, Dorian gave her a quick, awkward hug, the first one ever. As he and Jim hurried back through the trees, headed for the spot where they’d dragged the kayaks ashore, Kyle slid his arm through hers as if he were her escort.

  “They’ve got this, Lorena. They know what they’re doing.” He still sounded excited, even proud, as if the danger weren’t real.

  She knew it was. Very real indeed. She snaked her hand into her coat pocket and pulled out her phone, tapping her screen to redial 911. If she had to call a thousand times, she would. Jim and Dorian were courageous and confident in their skill, but in this storm, with all of those sharks, she would rather have relied on the watchtower sustaining the weight of those six people than on Jim’s and Dorian’s skill with kayaks.

  “Let’s go,” Kyle said, trying to guide her through the trees, to watch them push off.

  Lorena resisted him. “We can watch from here. They’ll pass right by.”

  The call didn’t go through, so she dialed again. On the third try she had crackling static and a single ring. Separating from Kyle, she walked down onto the shore, ocean spray blasting up from the rocks as the tide swallowed more and more of Deeley Island. A few seals were nearby, but they ignored her.

  “Anything?” Kyle called to her.

  She shook her head and called again.

  By the time she stood watching Jim and Dorian paddle by, navigating the swells so perfectly it was as if the kayaks were a part of them, she had tried 911 fourteen times.

  On the nineteenth try, it rang through. Lorena froze, thinking the call would be cut off, but then it rang a
gain. And clicked over.

  “Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”

  “Oh, thank God!” she said, spinning around to stare at Kyle, who watched her in disbelief. “Call them back. Get your father back!”

  “Ma’am?” the operator said. “I’m sorry, can you repeat that? What is your emergency?”

  “No, no, I was talking to my … Sorry I—”

  “Ma’am, calm down. Where are you?”

  Lorena took a breath. There was plenty of static on the line, but the voice came through crisply. Kyle raced past her, out onto the rocks. A seal barked at him, bellowed at him, but he ignored the beast and began shouting for his father and brother. Out on the water, Jim and Dorian were flashing their paddles up and in, slicing the water, gliding up a swell and down again.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Deeley Island. We’re on Deeley Island on a kayaking trip and there are thousands of seals and all these sharks, oh my God, dozens of sharks, and there are these people on Bald Cap and they’re trapped there and the storm surge is going to—”

  “You’re hsssss kayaking trip right now? You kayaked hsssss Deeley hsssss this storm?”

  The static cut in and out, but Lorena could make out enough. “Not today—”

  “Tell me about the sharks again?” The woman’s voice was dry and flat. Bored. Maybe even a little angry.

  Calm down, Lorena told herself. Breathe.

  “Listen to me!” she snapped. “Don’t do that. Don’t brush me off.”

  “You said hsssss people hsssss Bald Cap?”

  “Yes! They’re climbing the tower because the tide’s coming in and the sharks are—”

  “How did hsssss hsssss they kayak, too?”

  “They had a boat, but it sank! The sharks—”

  “Ma’am, did you hsssss fined up to five thou—hsssss misuse of the emergency call system. We’ve got real emergencies to—”

  “Goddammit, this is a real fucking emergency. Listen, I get it. I know how crazy this must sound, but do I seem like a crank to you? I’m not some kid screwing around. A man is dead and others are in danger! My fiancé and his son are in danger right now. They just took kayaks over from Deeley to try to get the people off Bald Cap and—”