Shark Island Page 5

  The pieces fell into place. Somebody had been out there intending to do her harm or just scare the shit out of her. The question burning the hottest in her brain was why, but she knew Tye couldn’t answer that, so she moved on to the next question.

  “Did you see his face?”

  He sniffed, wiped blood from his upper lip with the back of his hand, winced at the pain of touching his nose. “He’s wearing a black hoodie, cinched tight. All I can tell you is he’s white, shorter than me, and willing to draw blood.”

  “Next question, then,” Kat said, and he must have heard it coming in her tone of voice, because he stiffened, his injuries forgotten as he glanced up at her. “What the hell are you doing outside my house in the middle of the night, besides getting hit in the face?”

  Tye stared at her. He scratched at the back of his head and exhaled, glancing around like he might find the answer on the front lawn somewhere.

  “Don’t say you came over here to profess your love like Romeo at Juliet’s balcony.”

  “What if I did?”

  Kat cocked an eyebrow at him. Insects buzzed around his head and some were getting into the house, but she preferred that to letting him inside at the moment.

  “You’re not Romeo, and I sure as hell am not Juliet,” she said. “Plus, there’s no way I’m going to believe that you just happened to be here on the one night when some freak decided to roust me from my bed. Too much of a coincidence, Tye. So I ask you again, what are you—”

  “It’s not the first time,” he told her.

  She frowned. “Which part?”

  He threw up his hands. “Not the freak part, obviously. Not as far as I know, anyway. I’m saying it’s not the first time I’ve had trouble sleeping and found myself walking past your place. It happens a couple of times a week.”

  Kat did not need him to spell it out any further. Tye had a history of insomnia and he lived half a mile away. If the crumbling of their relationship had been keeping him up nights, she could not allow that to be her problem.

  But she opened the door a little farther. Maybe just for tonight.

  “You might as well come in while there are still some bugs on the outside of my house instead of in here with me. I won’t be able to fall right back to sleep anyway. I’ve got that herbal tea that helps you to…” The words trailed off and she gave a little shake of her head. “Anyway, I can make us tea.”

  Tye only stared at her. In the moonlight, the blood on his face glistened black and the rest of his skin seemed sallow and waxy. He looked like something dead.

  “You should call the police, file a report,” he said. “If they want to ask me about it, they can talk to me in the morning before we leave.”

  Kat’s chest hurt. She should not have been disappointed, felt angry at him and at herself that she was.

  “See you at seven,” she said.

  Tye turned and walked toward home, gingerly wiping more blood from his face. As she closed the door, she told herself she did not need him to protect her or to love her. The first part was certainly true; she could protect herself. But she wasn’t so sure about the second part. They had made a terrible couple—this was demonstrable fact—but somehow that did not erase her regret.

  Kat locked her door, searched around for her phone, and dialed the local number for the police department, not daring to phone 911 again, especially now that the crisis was over. When the call ended she found herself sitting on the floral sofa in her living room. She wanted that cup of tea but had no interest in going into the kitchen to make it. Not yet. For the moment she could only sit there and watch the windows and listen very carefully and maybe hold her breath a little.

  Wondering who had come to her window tonight and if he would come back.

  Tomorrow morning she would be headed out to sea for two full days and a night. Part of her wished the trip would take even longer, that she could stay out on the water and not deal with this new and unwelcome fear or the other complications in her life. But in her heart she knew that it never mattered how far you ran to get away from your troubles. You carried them with you, always.

  Literally, in this case, because she and Tye would be on the boat together.

  A chill ran through her as she remembered that voice outside her window, calling her name, and the tapping and scratching on the glass. The jangling of her phone and the presence of someone on the other end of the line. She thought of the refrain of a haunting song by one of her favorite bands.

  If I stay here, trouble will find me.

  Tye would not be the only one unable to sleep tonight.

  CHAPTER 9

  Light rain spattered the dock as Naomi hurried toward the R/V Thaumas, the Woods Hole research vessel upon which she’d be spending at least the next forty hours. It was past seven o’clock, which meant that she was late, but thanks to the gray blanket of sky, the morning seemed barely to have arrived. Over her shoulder, she carried a faded canvas backpack containing a change of clothes, a toothbrush, and her camera case. Her tired eyes itched and she rubbed at them, stifling a yawn with the back of one hand. In the other she held the biggest cup of coffee Dunkin’ Donuts would serve. Nothing fancy. No hazelnut or French vanilla. Just big damn coffee, cream only. Sugar was for amateurs.

  When she had driven up to the front entrance of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, she had been expecting protesters. Maybe some TV cameras. Though details had been sketchy, what little information WHOI had disseminated had inspired keen interest all over the Cape—and beyond—for months. Yet, aside from a single minivan and a middle-aged woman with a hand-painted banner, the road leading to the institution had been deserted. Naomi found herself slightly disappointed. It might have been pure fancy, but she imagined that in her mother’s era people who gave a shit about the world had a bit more fortitude.

  Or maybe it’s just that nobody cares that much, she thought. It was a possibility, of course. The world was full of people primed for reflexive outrage, people who moved on to the next tirade as easily as a seventh-grade girl changed outfits. She remembered those girls and the way they had judged her for her own wardrobe choices, for not caring enough to make herself look pretty—or what they thought pretty was supposed to be. At twenty-one, she remembered middle school as if it had been a prison sentence. It had forged her, steeled her for the future, for dealing with the shit the world had thrown at her ever since.

  Naomi hurried through the WHOI complex, showed her ID three times, and finally made her way along the docks where the institution’s various research vessels were moored. The Thaumas was a thirty-five-footer that glistened like new, its blue hull and white wheelhouse vivid with color against the dull gray of the day. A red stripe along the hull added a dash of style, the thought of which made her smile inwardly.

  The one piece of advice the editor at The Globe had given her had been quite simple—do your homework. Naomi would have prepared anyway, but his advice had sounded more like a caution, and so she had doubled down on the research she had done in advance of this experience. In her experience, most people over thirty treated college students like unruly pets, and she was determined not to let Dr. Cheong’s team perceive her as an interloper.

  But that’s exactly what you are, she thought, hurrying toward the boat.

  The truth. Which made it all the more important for her to prove she had a reason to be there.

  WHOI was a research collective, the scientific equivalent of an old-time hippie commune. Scientists survived at the institution based on their ability to raise the money to fund their own work. As long as they brought in the funding, they got to stick around. Naomi was sure it must be more complicated than that, but she admired the autonomy WHOI researchers seemed to have.

  The rain picked up strength as she reached the Thaumas. Raincoated figures moved around on deck, shifting equipment, and she was relieved to see they had not been delayed by her late arrival. The research vessel rocked in the water, slamming against the bumpers on th
e dock. The folded arm of the crane on the rear deck swayed back and forth as the boat bobbed. She faltered a second as her subconscious mind gauged the amount of space onboard the Thaumas now that her arrival made seven. It was going to be close quarters and that unsettled her. She had known the math in advance, of course, but now that she saw the ship up close the idea gave her pause. Even if they slept in shifts, it was going to get intimate down below.

  One of the figures up on deck spotted her and turned, raising a hand.

  “Naomi, come aboard!” he said, grinning under the hood of his raincoat. She had met Amadou N’Dour two days before for a preinterview and a quick photo session. The skipper of the Thaumas was dead serious about his boat and his responsibilities but seemed lighthearted about everything else.

  “Good morning, Captain N’Dour,” she replied as she stepped across the gap between dock and ship, leaving the land behind.

  The skipper frowned. “Don’t know about that,” he replied in his Senegalese accent, a little French and a little West African. “They’re saying this big storm is tracking east, that it’s going to miss us completely, but I don’t trust weathermen. I trust the sky. And the sky’s got me worried.”

  Naomi blinked, a ripple of worry going through her. “If you’re worried, then I’m terrified.”

  Captain N’Dour laughed. “Don’t be crazy. I don’t like sailing in storms, but I’ve done it a thousand times. Plus, we won’t be far from shore. You’re safe with me.”

  Normally she bristled when men said that sort of thing to her, but Naomi smiled. Somehow the captain really did make her feel safe.

  The introductions began then, starting with the first mate, a lean, unshaven man named Peter Bergting. Some kind of Scandinavian name, though Bergting had no trace of an accent. Naomi shook hands with Dr. Cheong and Dr. Ashmore. She had met them once before, but now that she had actually arrived and her presence on board had become reality they were a bit warmer toward her. She did not hold their reservations against them. Having her along during this experiment was a decision made in the upper echelons of WHOI, under advice from their media relations office. Allowing Naomi to join them would give Woods Hole great press, whether or not the experiment worked. Refusing her would accomplish the opposite. Even so, she felt pretty sure Dr. Cheong would not have invited her if she’d felt she had a choice.

  “I’ll try not to get in your way, Dr. Cheong,” Naomi said, focusing on the lead scientist. The rain pelted them both and Naomi saw it beading up, running down the slick surface of the scientist’s coat.

  “Don’t worry,” she replied. “We won’t let you.”

  Dr. Ashmore smiled. “She’s teasing.”

  “Is she?”

  “I am,” Dr. Cheong said. “And call me Kat, okay? By tomorrow night we’ll all be best friends, or we’ll have killed each other. We might as well be on a first-name basis.”

  Kat introduced their assistant, a grad student named Rosalie Suarez, as well as Eddie Wolchko, the acoustics specialist and engineer who had installed the strange apparatus that now adorned the roof of the Thaumas’s wheelhouse. Wolchko wiped his hands on a rag as he stepped out into the light spatter of rain.

  “A pleasure to meet you,” he said, shaking her hand. His gaze flicked down toward her leg.

  “Nice to meet you, too,” Naomi said, cocking her head, trying to draw his eyes back to her face. Once upon a time, she had been more troubled by guys staring at her tits. Now she almost missed it.

  “With your pants on, you can’t even tell,” Wolchko said.

  Overhearing, Rosalie sighed loudly. “Christ, Eddie.”

  Wolchko flushed deeply, scrunching his face in self-recrimination. “Damn it, I’m sorry. I just … sometimes thoughts roll around in my head and I open my mouth and the wrong one comes out.”

  Naomi nodded. “I know the feeling. But I’m sorry to say you won’t be seeing me with my pants off.”

  The others laughed.

  Wolchko hung his head in shame. “There’s a reason I try to avoid leaving my office.”

  Captain N’Dour gave a loud clap of his hands. “There you have it, my friends. The truth is out. Eddie Wolchko has no filter. You’ll get used to it. And you get to watch him squirm every time he realizes there’s something he probably should not have said out loud.”

  Then Bergting was there, telling them all it was time to cast off, and Wolchko shot him a grateful look before hurrying back into the wheelhouse. Naomi found herself feeling bad for him. She followed Wolchko into the wheelhouse. When he glanced at her, she nodded.

  “No worries,” she said. “I don’t trust anyone with too good a filter.”

  * * *

  Shortly after they cast off and the boat began to ply its way along the coast, Naomi went below to stow her gear, then came back up with her camera and an umbrella. The camera had its own rain shield, but the umbrella helped to keep the lens from speckling and gave her more room to maneuver. As she adjusted to the pitch of the boat, getting her sea legs, she began to snap photos.

  She wore a dark-red raincoat and a weathered Red Sox cap that had once belonged to her father, though he’d been dead so long she only remembered his face from pictures. If someone had asked her, she might have been willing to admit this was one of the reasons photography felt so important to her, but she was not in the habit of volunteering the information.

  Naomi had fallen in love with photography as early as the fourth grade. Her teacher had assigned a project detailing their family histories. Most of Naomi’s classmates had left it to their parents, but once her mom had started pulling out books of old photos she had become lost in the mystery of every picture. Who were these people? What were their stories? Where were the photos taken? And then there was her dad, smiling and alive.

  She’d begun taking her own shots with the family camera, snapping pictures of people, of trees and flowers and architecture, of her cat, Phineas, and the neighbors’ dog. Her passion for marine life had come later, and she’d nurtured that passion enthusiastically, right up until the moment it nearly killed her.

  Time vanished when she was behind her camera. When they’d been together, Kayla had been her favorite model. The camera had introduced them, really. It had given Naomi the confidence to approach a girl that beautiful, to ask if she minded being photographed. Kayla had arched a suggestive eyebrow and said, Clothes on or off? That had been the beginning of them. For the first time it occurred to Naomi that the camera had also been the beginning of the end. The camera and her stupidity for thinking that she had been far enough away from the seals that a shark would not confuse her with one of them.

  Is it too late to undo my mistake? Kayla’s words from the day before echoed in Naomi’s mind now, haunting her. Yes, she thought. It’s too damn late, all right?

  But no matter how emphatically she issued that reply inside her head, it didn’t feel convincing.

  Now she stood on the deck and the boat churned onward, but Naomi paid little attention to their progress. She focused on the task at hand. Focused on what the camera saw.

  Dr. Cheong—Call me Kat, she’d said, and Naomi would try—craned her neck to look up at the dish apparatus on top of the boat.

  “How certain are we that we’re broadcasting?” Kat called into the wheelhouse.

  Wolchko poked his head out. “The signal is going out from both arrays.”

  “You’re one hundred percent certain?”

  Wolchko tried to hide his irritation, but Naomi saw it ripple across his features before he managed to control himself. “One hundred percent,” he said. “Topside and belowdecks.”

  “Thank you, Eddie,” Kat said. If she noticed his irritation, it was pretty clear she did not give a shit.

  Naomi snapped a few pictures of her. Kat was attractive in the too-serious way of people lost in their work, but she could not be blamed for her focus. She and her team had a lot riding on this experiment.

  Bergting had gone below, leaving Captain N’Dour t
o pilot the boat. Tye stood at the prow with binoculars, watching the coastline and making notes with some kind of voice recorder. Naomi suspected the wind would turn half of those recordings into unintelligible gibberish, but these guys were the scientists, so maybe they knew what they were doing.

  She moved toward the wheelhouse, peered inside, and snapped a few quick shots of Wolchko at work with Rosalie, whose job seemed to be to sit inside with a laptop and read data, which seemed boring as hell, considering they hadn’t done anything to acquire new data as yet. Rosalie was only two years older than Naomi—the same age as Kayla—but that little span of time had somehow given her the gravitas of adulthood. They should have been natural allies, but Rosalie had barely acknowledged her presence after the initial introduction. Busy with work, Naomi figured.

  Or maybe she was just a bitch.

  Naomi snapped a few more pictures. They were boring shots, just Wolchko and Rosalie studying computer screens, and Captain N’Dour in the background, going about his business as if the rest of them were ghosts whose chain-rattling shenanigans he was trying to ignore. But The Globe would want that sort of thing, photos of the team doing their work, to go along with the images Naomi hoped to get of the seal herds and the occasional shark fin.

  She shuddered, taking a moment to breathe.

  “Naomi,” a voice said, and she flinched, startled. It was Eddie Wolchko, his brows knitting in consternation at her reaction. “Sorry,” he added. “Didn’t mean to spook you.”

  In reply, she took his picture. “Apologies in return, but I can’t let that facial expression go to waste.”

  He grunted. “I’m not much for having my photo taken.”

  “It’s the least you can do after that awkward bit with my leg.”

  “Fair enough. I told you, though, I’m not—”

  “Good with people.” She snapped his picture again. “It’s okay, Dr. Wolchko. People are so bizarre about it all that I’ve gotten into the bad habit of busting balls any time it turns awkward. I can’t help myself, but I’m working on it.”