Saratoga Woods 02 The Edge of the Water (21 page)

T
he first dive in relatively open water was the next day, and Becca got herself to the marina in Langley on her bike. She wasn’t feeling up to the dive. She certainly had no enthusiasm for it. The whole Derric situation sat on her shoulders like a concrete cape. She wondered how much worse her life could get.

When she saw Jenn McDaniels, she had her answer. Jenn’s smirking “Hey, Beck-
kuh
” told her that the other girl was still deeply enjoying the mess that had been her presentation with Tod Schuman.

What
ever
, Becca thought with resignation. Jenn McDaniels wouldn’t be satisfied until Becca King was out of her life. Doubtless, she’d try to drown her right there in Langley Marina if only she could.

Jenn was suited up already. Chad Pederson was checking the tanks. Annie Taylor was up on the wharf using binoculars to search the surface of the water.

“Anything?” Chad called up to her as Becca joined Jenn by the pile of equipment.

“Nope,” was Annie’s reply.

To Becca’s question of what she was looking for, Chad told her that someone had rung the bell. She knew what this meant. There was a signal bell in a small bluff-top park on First Street in the village. It was rung when someone sighted a gray whale out in the passage.

Jenn groused, “That’s all we need. Diving and having a whale show up.”

Becca thought it sounded sort of cool, but wisely she kept this thought to herself.

The air among them was filled with whispers. For once it was easy to attach them to the thinkers. Jenn’s had gone from
FatBroad not so SmartAss now
to
get it over with
to
get back
to
soccer or I’m finished
while Chad’s dealt with the nice shape of Annie’s butt and
like doggies but I guess,
which didn’t exactly make a lot of sense. Meantime, Annie might have been looking for a whale but what she was thinking about was Nera.
The break I need
suggested that she was going to be relentless till she got what she wanted, whatever that was.

Because of the weather and the water temperature, they were using dry suits for the dive. When they were suited up, they moved toward the water in a line of three, with Chad in the middle, saying to them, “We’re only going down ten feet the first time. We’ll stay near the dock. Take it slow and see how it feels.”

The water was clear, like glass, beyond the marina’s protective bulkhead, and near the marina the bottom was sand and mud and stone. Within ten yards of shore, they were able to sink beneath the surface and put on their fins. While they were doing this, the first fish appeared. Seeing them, Becca smiled around her regulator. She enjoyed the sensation of the water around her. Being underwater was the only place where she had something other than the AUD box to prevent her hearing the whispers of others.

Chad led them along the pilings of the pier, where sea stars clung and barnacles formed lumpy masses. He began to go deeper until they were perhaps ten feet from the surface. It was, to Becca, a magical world.

Things changed quickly, though. A whip of water churned past them, like a strong current that none of them had been expecting. Becca turned to register two things at once: a coal black seal and its lightning fast approach. The animal was heading straight for Jenn.

In a flash, Jenn thrashed her way to the surface. Just as quickly, Chad Pederson followed. Becca turned this way and that to see where the seal had gone, but there was nothing till the water pulsed once again and the seal was there. She swam around Becca. Once, twice, a third time. Then she shot into the open water of Saratoga Passage. But before she did this, she looked directly into Becca’s face. What felt like an electrical shock passed through Becca. It seemed to travel from the seal to her.

Becca surfaced. The scene above was modified chaos. Chad was yelling at Jenn, Jenn was yelling at Chad, Annie Taylor was yelling at them both from up on the wharf.

“—crazy? It was just a seal!” from Chad.

“All right! All right! I freaked out! She came out of nowhere,” from Jenn.

“Jenn, was that Nera? Is Nera
here
?” from Annie.

“Hey,
thanks
, Annie,” Jenn scoffed. “I’m just
fine.
Really.”

Their whispers bombarded the air as well as their words.
All she cares about . . . got to get my hands on . . . that’s the way . . . I’m out of here
 . . . five minutes is all . . . never should have started . . .
It was like at a tennis match, Becca thought, with three players firing balls at each other simultaneously.

Chad was arguing, “Look, you can’t
do
that, okay? And no way am I certifying you if you can’t show me you won’t panic at the first sign of life underwater.”

“Like I care?” Jenn cried and headed for shore. “Like you care? Like anyone cares?”

Annie said, “Come on, Jenn. Don’t be like this.”

“This whole thing is stupid. You’re stupid. He’s stupid. The seal is stupid.”

No way no way
constituted her whispers. She added to them, “You want a dive partner, Annie? Take the FatBroad with you.”

“What? Who’re you talking about?” Chad said.

“Me,” Becca said. “She’s talking about me.”

They were silent at that. They made their way to the shore. Jenn took off for the restrooms and the showers. Becca stayed where she was. She was slow about struggling to remove her tank and the rest of her equipment. She wasn’t in a hurry to join Jenn in the restroom, so instead she went to a spigot and washed off her fins, her hood, and her gloves. Because of this, she was near enough to pick up on the conversation Annie Taylor had with Chad Pederson when the marine biologist came down off the wharf.

“I need to get close enough for a better picture,” Annie said. “That transmitter? It’s going to tell me a lot. And I
need
a sample. Skin’s okay but blood’s a lot better.”

Becca realized, hearing this, that she was listening to a discussion that had been ongoing between them.
Transmitter
told her that Annie was talking about the seal.
Skin
and
blood
made her sit up and take notice.

“You’ll get close enough,” Chad was replying. “No worries about that. We’ll use inflatables and the net.”

“I don’t want to hurt her. I’d be strung up by the seal spotters. Not to mention the Langleyites, or whatever they call themselves.”

“She won’t be hurt. Just contained. And how long will it take? Ten minutes? Fifteen?”

“It all depends how hungry she is. And if she likes the bait.”

“Oh, she’ll like it,” he said.

• • •

BECCA WENT STRAIGHT
to Heart’s Desire. It wasn’t a workday for her, but that didn’t matter. She had to put Ivar into the picture of Annie Taylor and Chad Pederson’s plan for the seal.

At first Ivar didn’t believe she’d even seen Nera. His first response was, “She popped up off Glendale yesterday. Figure she’ll be near Clinton now. Hanging by the ferry. That where you saw her?” He was in the kitchen of the farmhouse, where he’d reduced the neat countertops, the stove, and the sink to a form of rubble in pursuit of making a Bundt cake, which was sitting on top of one burner. He was wielding a spray bottle of Simple Green, dousing everything in sight with puddles of the cleaner and smearing a towel through it. Becca winced and took the stuff and the towel from him.

She said, “Langley Marina. It was the first open-water dive. She was there.”

Ivar said, “No way. That’d be some other seal, Becks. If it was Nera, one of the seal spotters down at Sandy Point would’ve put it on the Web.”

“It was a black seal, Ivar,” Becca told him, and when she went on to include the information about Annie Taylor and Chad Pederson and their plans, Ivar’s eyes widened behind his thick glasses. When she was finished talking, he headed out of the kitchen and made for the stairs.

• • •

BECCA FOLLOWED. SHE’D
never been beyond the farmhouse kitchen. Now she found herself in an old-fashioned living room where a double-wide doorway led to an entryway and the unused front door. The stairs were in the entryway.

Becca wasn’t sure about heading up the stairs, but she could hear Ivar thrashing around. He was muttering to himself as well, so she decided to go for it.

There were three bedrooms above, along with a bathroom where a doorway opened onto old tiles and a claw-footed tub. Ivar’s room overlooked Useless Bay, and since there was a fine telescope at the window, Becca thought at first he’d gone to his room to search for the seal. But it turned out his search was at a computer on the opposite side of the room, and when she approached, she saw that he was on the seal spotters’ Web site and his whispers spoke of
can’t really be . . . should have seen . . . has to be mistaken
, which Becca knew for certain she was not.

Ivar read the screen, shoving his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose. He cast a look at her and said, “You sure of this, Becks?”

“Course,” she said. “And Chad must’ve seen her, too, Ivar, ’cause like I said, he and Annie were talking about how to contain her. That has to be Nera, right? I mean, they wouldn’t be talking about another seal, I don’t think.”

“That seal come close to you?”

Becca shook her head. “She spooked Jenn, though.”

“Jenn’s okay?”

“Sure. Yeah.”

“What about you?”

“Me? I’m okay. Well, obviously.”

“I mean did she spook you.”

Spooked
wasn’t exactly the word, but Becca wasn’t sure how to explain to Ivar what had happened when Nera came close to her. So she said, “She looked at me, is all.”

How it started
from Ivar’s whispers told Becca there were things about Nera that Ivar knew that he wasn’t saying. Probably to anyone. He said sharply, “What d’you mean?”

Becca went at it carefully. There was knowledge here, inside Ivar’s head, and she wanted to glean it. She said, “I mean, she looked at me . . . sort of the way a person does. You know how it is? They pass you on a street and they don’t know who you are but they want to acknowledge you? That’s how it was. Does that make sense? Sounds sort of dumb, I guess.”

“No, it don’t, Becks,” Ivar said, but what he thought was
What should I . . . time comes when someone’s responsibility is . . . why now why now is what I would . . .
which was interrupted by his words. “Thing’s moving along.”

“What things?” Becca asked. He’d turned back to the computer and was reading what the seal spotters had posted. She had to repeat her question and to say his name before he replied.

“That scientist, Becks. She’s not going to stop till she gets what she wants. That being the case, we got to stop her ourselves.”

• • •

THE
WHY
OF
it was what Ivar didn’t explain. At least not adequately, Becca thought. She understood why using nets and inflatables and bait to trap the seal was an idea leading right to trouble. What she didn’t understand was the equal weight Ivar seemed to give to the thought of Annie Taylor’s getting a close picture of the transmitter Nera was wearing, along with a sample of her DNA.

His explanation was not to explain. He said, “Some things’re not meant to be understood. That seal’s one of them,” and that was the end of it. He went on to ramble a bit about nature: penguins marching into the heart of Antarctica to lay their eggs and baby elephants dying of sorrow. But all the time he was talking, his head was also whispering
believe . . . believe
 . . . got to make her believe
, which made Becca press him more than she might have done otherwise.

She said, “But it’s not bad to try to figure things out, is it? Like figuring out why Nera comes back here every year. How c’n that be bad?”

“Where it leads is bad,” Ivar insisted. “
How
it leads there is bad.” He rapped his fingers on his desk and seemed to be struggling with a decision of some kind because what went with the fingers rapping on the desk was
it’s time
and
go ahead
, suggesting more was coming.

Becca waited.
What to tell
 . . .
how
 . . .
if she knew everything
 . . .
trust is always the key and this is beyond
gave her a lot of patience in the wait.

Ivar finally said, “Sometimes people think they can tame and understand nature, Becks. I was one of those people once. Just like Annie Taylor now. That was me. A long time ago.”

“A scientist?” she asked.

He laughed. “I talk like a scientist? No, I was someone who wanted to know things that weren’t none of my business. I wanted to know that seal instead of just accepting that seal. Nera’s private but I didn’t know that. I got too close, and she broke my arm trying to get away ’cause I grabbed her.”

“Oh my gosh,” Becca said. “
That’s
how it happened? So if Annie Taylor gets near her—”

“That seal’s going to defend herself and someone’s going to get hurt.”

“Like that guy . . . Like Eddie Beddoe keeps saying.”