Shark Island Page 2

  “Anything else I can get you, honey?” the waitress asked. “More iced tea?”

  Wolchko gave her a rare smile. “That would be great. Thanks.”

  She took the empty cup and headed inside while Wolchko took another bite of his lunch. The lobster roll at Barlow’s Clam Shack was just about the best thing grown-up Eddie Wolchko had ever tasted, and he lingered over his lunch. It was one of the reasons Barlow’s was his favorite hideaway, one of the reasons he had never invited any of his co-workers to meet him here. It was his secret place, and if he could have drawn it around him like the shell of a hermit crab he would have done that in a heartbeat.

  He always saved the slivered pickles for the end, almost like dessert.

  The sunshine beat down on him and he relished the feeling. Whenever he came here, he chose one of the tables out on the sandy patio—one without an umbrella. Wolcho had never understood people who chose to eat outside but then hid from the sun. He knew his skin had paid the price—at thirty-eight, he looked older than his years thanks to the tough, weathered appearance that years in the sun had given him—but he lived on Cape Cod and did much of his work out on the water, studying sharks and other marine life, which was worth the trade-off. And he didn’t mind the idea of nurturing the Old Man and the Sea look. It wasn’t like he was out to impress anyone.

  The screen door hinges squealed as the waitress popped back out with his iced tea. When she set it down he made sure to meet her eyes as he thanked her, trying to practice a higher level of courtesy in his life. She smiled, maybe just to be polite, or grateful for the moment of humanity. Either was fine with Wolchko.

  As he continued eating, he studied the other tables on the patio, all but one of which were occupied by people talking and laughing together. Wolchko liked to pretend they couldn’t see him, and it nearly always worked out that the more he pretended to be invisible, the more people treated him that way. He preferred it that way.

  The patio ran beside the restaurant, with Falmouth Harbor in the back and the parking lot out front. Gulls cawed as they wheeled above the water, the breeze carrying the smell of the ocean. White sails dotted the water in a peaceful panorama.

  Wolchko felt at ease, right up until he heard the crunch of gravel and turned to see the gold Ford Focus pulling into the lot and Rosalie Suarez stepped out from behind the wheel. The hair rose on the back of his neck and he wished his ability to turn invisible were more than imaginary. Barlow’s was his favorite hideaway. How the hell she even knew to look for him there Wolchko had no idea, but Rosalie scanned the patio and made a beeline toward him.

  He ate his pickles, all three slivers at once. He would not be denied those pickles.

  “Eddie,” Rosalie began. “I’ve been calling, but your phone goes straight to—”

  “Voice mail, yeah, because my phone is off,” he said sharply, brows knitted, wanting to make his consternation clear. “Lunch is my time. You know I can’t focus on the research if I don’t escape for a bit.”

  “I do, yeah.” She slid into the wrought-iron chair beside his. “But you wouldn’t want me to wait for you on this.”

  Her eyes were bright and skittery with something that was not quite panic, a look that burned right through his irritation.

  “What could…,” Wolchko began, and then he thought of the one thing that would bring her out looking for him. The thing they had been talking about at the beginning of every tourist season since he started his research at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

  He glanced around to make sure no one was paying attention, sipped his iced tea, and scudded his chair a little closer to her.

  “Where?”

  “Truro,” Rosalie said. “A little way up from Ballston Beach.”

  “Tell me the rest.” Because there had to be more for her to be sitting there.

  Rosalie glanced over her shoulder, leaned in conspiratorially. “At least two Great Whites. Maybe three. Feasting on the seal population as usual when this college girl who fancies herself a wildlife photographer gets too close, in the water, and the sharks get her confused with the seals. College girl lost a leg. She’s in surgery now. A surfer named Luke Turner tried to rescue her. Turner’s dead.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Wolchko whispered.

  Rosalie stole a fry off his plate. “That’s not the worst part.”

  Wolchko leaned back in his chair and threw up his hands, forgetting about the people around them. “How can that not be the worst part?”

  Several heads turned. Rosalie had not forgotten about the potential for being overheard. She ate a couple more fries and waited while people returned to their own conversations.

  “The girl who lost her leg is Naomi Cardiff. Her mother is Ellen Cardiff.”

  Wolchko exhaled a string of quiet profanity. The last fatal shark attack in New England had taken place in 1936. Now the media, the Chamber of Commerce, the tourism board, the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife … they’d all be arguing over what to do about the shark problem, which was really the seal problem, on Cape Cod. Greenpeace and SeaLove and others would get into the fight. And at some point, all eyes would look toward the researchers at Woods Hole to come up with a solution.

  After all, a man had died. But it wasn’t the dead man who would be getting most of the attention. It was Naomi Cardiff … the daughter of the state’s lieutenant governor.

  “Shit,” Wolchko said, staring out at the sailboats beyond the harbor.

  I just wanted a little alone time.

  CHAPTER 3

  Kat Cheong did not resort to storming down the corridor toward her office, but then she didn’t have to. She had been a Research Associate at WHOI for two years, and in that time the junior staff had learned her quirks by trial and error, none more so than Tye Ashmore.

  Her heels clicked on the cold floor of the corridor and her spine was straight, her chin raised, as she reached her office door. As she passed through, heading for her desk, she left the door open because she knew Tye would follow in her wake. He was brilliant and ambitious, full of potential, but in that much at least he was predictable.

  “Close it behind you,” she said as she slid her laptop onto the desk.

  The small office consisted mostly of shelves and books and journals, a few small potted plants, and a hell of a mess on her desk. Three unwashed mugs sat beside her electric kettle on a little table by the door. Kat knew she could have made a stink, gotten herself more office space, but given that she spent nearly all of her time in the lab, there seemed no point.

  Tye closed the door. “I know you’re pissed.”

  Kat leaned on her desk. “Ya think?”

  “Look—”

  “Me first. Then you can decide if you still feel like speaking.”

  Tye hesitated, then shoved his hands into his pockets like a recalcitrant teenager called to the principal’s office. The image was all too accurate, as far as Kat was concerned. His brown hair hung a bit too long, almost shaggy, and the tilt of his jaw suggested a defiance that had probably started as far back as high school. The trouble with Tye was that he knew he was good-looking and he counted on it too much instead of relying on his brains to carry him through. But Kat was not going to say that to him. She had said it before and it hadn’t made an iota of difference.

  She straightened her shirt cuffs, needing to do something with her hands.

  “You undermined me in there, Tye. I’ve been on this research since grad school, it’s half the reason Woods Hole hired me in the first place, and now I’m starting to get somewhere and I need my funding to continue, and then you sabotage me—”

  “I did no such thing.”

  Kat set him on fire with her eyes. Or she would have if she’d had the laser vision she had always wished for. “When I got you this job—”

  He bristled, hands coming out of his pockets. Nothing recalcitrant about him now.

  “Say what, now?”

  “I set up your interview,” she continued. “I gave y
ou my highest recommendation, and that means I put my reputation on the line. I got you in the room.”

  Tye nodded slowly. “You got me in the room. And I’m grateful for that, Kat. You know I am. Grateful and happy to be here, working with you. I accept that I might not be here if you hadn’t gotten me into the room, but they didn’t hire me on your say-so. They hired me because I have the credentials. I’ve done the work. So please don’t tell me you got me the job.”

  “You think there weren’t other candidates with your credentials?”

  He threw up his hands. “You know what? No. I don’t think there were. Not with my references and with the work I’d already done. And I’ve proved myself every day since I got here. I have to, don’t I? Otherwise nobody here is ever going to take either of us seriously now that—”

  She laughed a little, lifting a hand to hide her grin.

  Tye stared. “Are you … seriously, are you laughing? First you’re calling me onto the carpet and now something’s funny?”

  Kat exhaled. She’d always had this problem, laughing at the absolute worst moments. She’d worked up a righteous fury in the quarterly funding meeting they’d just left, but now all that steam had burned off. She adopted a serious expression and crossed the tiny office. There were frosted windows on either side of the door, but the door itself was solid wood. Nobody could see inside.

  “It’s ironic, you know,” she said.

  Tye backed up, frowning, still ready for a fight. “What is?”

  “The more time I spend researching ways to alter instinctive behavior, the less capable I am of controlling my own.”

  With a nudge, she backed him up against the door, wrapping his purple necktie in her fist. “You’re adorable when you’re defending your masculine integrity.”

  “Kat, I’m not kidding around,” Tye said.

  “Ssssshhhh. Neither am I.”

  It was far from the first time they had kissed in her office. Some nights, when the research had gone very late and almost everyone else was gone, they had done far more than kiss. She was still pissed at him. What had happened in that meeting might turn out to be a recipe for disaster down the line. But she was also in love with him, and she admired that he was a man who fought for what he believed in. They had that in common.

  “Kat—”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not done fighting. Call this intermission.”

  Tye kissed her back. It was a very good kiss.

  A quick rap at the door startled them both. Before Kat could say anything, the door opened and whacked Tye in the back of the head. He cried out in protest as Kat darted away from him, smoothing her top and wondering how flushed her cheeks might be.

  “Damn it,” Tye said, rubbing his skull.

  The visitor was their boss, Dr. Carin Aluru, the senior scientist at Woods Hole. Tall, imposing, fiftyish, Dr. Aluru was an insightful researcher who exhibited great kindness on a personal level but a colossal intolerance for nonsense in a professional setting. She knew Kat and Tye had this thing, and she definitely did not approve of them indulging themselves in the office. So Kat was expecting a dressing-down or at least a glare of disapproval.

  What she got was something else.

  “Open your laptop,” Dr. Aluru said, her dark skin uncommonly ashen. “I just got a call from Eddie Wolchko. There’s some video you need to see. And cancel any plans you have for the immediate future.”

  “What’s going on?” Tye asked. “What happened?”

  Kat, however, understood immediately. She hadn’t yet seen the video of the morning’s attack, but she did not need to. The call from Eddie Wolchko and the look on Dr. Aluru’s face said it all.

  Kat rushed over and opened her laptop, glanced up at Tye.

  “What happened,” she said, “is that we just got our funding.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Naomi inhaled sharply. She opened her eyes to slits, but the bright lights forced them shut again. Tightly. Music wove through her confusion—Springsteen singing “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City.” The familiar scratchy voice and raspy guitar were a comfort to her. She exhaled in a huff and drifted off again. The funny thing was that Springsteen was still with her, down in the gentle sway of her not-quite-dreams. Her thoughts ebbed and flowed, pulling at her like an undertow, and in that blackness she imagined herself underwater. Struggling against the tide, neck deep in the ocean … and she was not alone. Something was down there with her, knifing through her dreams. A blanket of numbness coated her brain, muffling everything but the oldest instinct—fear. And that fear drove her back up into consciousness.

  Groaning, she struggled for breath. Her hands flailed at the bright lights and she realized that her eyes were already open. Springsteen was gone. Maybe he had never been there to begin with. He was her mother’s obsession. All of her lullabies to baby Naomi had been Bruce Springsteen songs, so Naomi knew every one of them backward and forward. But Bruce wasn’t there to comfort her now. Her mother was not there to sing her fears away.

  Drugs muddled her thoughts, somehow made her body feel both too heavy and light as air, as if she were floating. Her mouth tasted like salt and wet cardboard and the smell in her nostrils was like piss and furniture polish combined, but it was not the stink that made her gut flip and roil with nausea. It was the memory.

  The surfer had to be dead. She knew that. So much blood in the water. Kayla hauling her up onto the boat. Naomi remembered it all, saw a flash in her mind of the ragged flesh and gleaming bone that was all that remained of her left leg.

  She knew she ought to be screaming. Instead, her heart broke and she lifted a trembling hand to her mouth, as if to inspect her lips in search of the expected scream.

  “Naomi? Oh my God … you’re awake.”

  She blinked, surprised to see Kayla rise from a chair near the hospital bed. The television droned on, the day’s ugly news unfolding in silence, closed captions delivering the tragedies in a scroll along the bottom of the screen. Kayla had been waiting for Naomi to wake, but now that she had, it seemed clear she had no idea what to do.

  “Hey,” Kayla said softly, coming to her, taking her trembling hand. “I’m here, babe. I’m—”

  Naomi ripped her hand free, bloody images still playing in her head. She propped herself up. Kayla kept talking to her, trying to get her to lie down, to calm down. Naomi stared at the flatness of the sheet where her leg ought to have been. It was like some kind of magician’s trick. The outline of her body was distinct, everything where it ought to be, except that the outline ended below her left knee, where the sheet lay flat on the narrow hospital mattress. An illusionist had snapped his fingers and made the lower leg vanish.

  In her mind she could still see the shark’s dull black eye.

  “I can’t…,” she said, shaking her head. Staring at the flat sheet, afraid to move.

  Kayla took Naomi’s face in her hands, tilted her head, locked eyes with her. “You’re okay. Breathe, babe. The doc was just here and she says you’re gonna be okay.”

  Naomi stared at her, wondering what Kayla thought okay even meant. She wanted to shout, but this was the woman she loved, the woman who called her darling. Maybe most important, this was the woman who had dragged her out of the water and saved her life. So Naomi didn’t shout. Instead, she just turned her head away.

  She heard Kayla begin to cry and wanted to comfort her, but then, Kayla wasn’t the one missing a leg. In a little over a month, Kayla would be leaving for California, where she would find another girl to take out on the water, another girl to kiss in the sunshine, with the taste of hard lemonade on her lips.

  Naomi hated self-pity in anyone. Herself most of all.

  “I need to call my mother,” she whispered, face still turned away.

  “I talked to her already and she’s on the way,” Kayla replied, twining her fingers with Naomi’s. “My parents are out in the waiting room. They’ll talk to her when she gets here. They’re being really great, actually. They want to
help.”

  Naomi stiffened.

  “Your parents?” Naomi said, turning reluctantly to study Kayla’s face, her rich brown eyes. “Your parents, who wouldn’t be out there and sure as hell wouldn’t let you be in here with me if they knew I was your girlfriend?”

  Kayla winced. “Hey. They love you. They’re afraid for you.”

  “Only because they don’t know who I am. And they don’t know who you are, either.”

  “Babe?”

  Naomi glanced away again. “Could you please get the doctor?”

  There was a moment of hesitation and then she heard Kayla sniffle, felt her weight lift off the edge of the bed.

  “Yeah, of course. I’ll find her.”

  From the corner of her eye, Naomi watched Kayla cross the room, open the door, and go out, closing it with a soft click.

  “I love you,” Naomi said quietly, and to her own ears it sounded very much like good-bye.

  Taking a deep breath, she reached down and drew aside the sheet. Tugged up her blue-patterned hospital johnny. The bandages covering the stump below her knee were a startling white against the faded-to-gray bedsheets.

  The drugs made her numb below the waist and muddled her thoughts, but not enough. Nothing could ease this pain. Her breathing came quicker, a scream building in her throat. Tears burned the corners of her eyes and she laid her head back on the pillow only to find that the scream had gotten lost somehow. She uttered only a hitching, painful breath and tried not to think about the next hour or the next day or the next year, because then she would have to think about all of the things she had lost today, just to take some pretty pictures.

  If she’d had the camera in her hands, she would have smashed it, blaming the camera and the seals and her own ridiculous self because there was no point in blaming the shark. It had done what sharks do. What it would keep doing.

  She froze, thinking of the surfer’s blood foaming on top of the water, mixing with hers. Thinking of the fins slicing the waves. It struck her that the sharks were still out there. Of course they were still out there, down in the cold and the dark. She stared at the place where her leg should have been.