Dr. Sam seemed obsessed with funding for his research. Carver wondered if he was going to hear a pitch for a donation. “Why the interest in sharks?” he asked.
The doctor glared at him as if Carver should have worked out the answer to that question long ago. “Not only will a greater understanding of their habits save lives,” he said, “but there’s no way to know in which direction and how far a larger body of knowledge will take us. Sharks are creatures so suited to their environment that they haven’t evolved to speak of for ages. They’re primitive and close to man on the lower end of the evolutionary scale, a living window on the dawn of our existence.” Was this the spiel the doctor laid on tourists? The torpedo shape of the shark glided near again, momentarily changing the arrangement of light and shadow in the room.
“Can you tell me anything about Leonard Everman?” Carver asked.
Dr. Sam cocked his head to the side and looked thoughtful. “I don’t think I know anyone by that name.”
“He was the boy who drowned recently off Key Montaigne. He had traces of cocaine in his blood.”
“Ah, yes. I recall the name now. All I know is what was in the news. The boy was a runaway, correct?”
“He was,” Carver confirmed.
Dr. Sam shook his head. “Sad, what’s happening to kids today, the way drugs get a hold on them. Maybe it has to do with the disintegration of the American family. I admit I’m influenced by a middle-American Baptist morality; we never quite shake that once it’s put in place during childhood. But I’m not talking about morality so much as family and social unity.” He glanced at the sea life in the displays lining three walls. “Social structure, if you could call it that, is at least fairly constant in the realm of nature. In our society it’s lack of predictability that’s causing many of today’s problems and making people want to opt out of reality.”
“You’re probably right,” Carver said.
“None of us is as far from nature as we’d like to think. Some of our needs are primitive and unchanged from millions of years ago, still burning but in different guises.” The shark glided close and seemed to gaze out at him, then wheeled into murky water and misshapen image at the other side of the tank. “Anyway, Mr. Carver, I’d like to help you, but I can’t. As far as I know, Walter Rainer’s just another rich and parasitic Key Montaigne semi-retiree. At least that’s how I think of them, those people who hardly have to work for a living and don’t seem compelled to accomplish or create anything other than wealth.”
There went Dr. Sam sounding bitter again. Hadn’t he known from the beginning that few shark researchers got rich?
A peal of childish laughter found its way through the thick door.
“If you don’t mind, Mr. Carver, I’d like to finish my notes in here before the summer school tour comes down those stairs.”
Carver said sure, he understood, and thanked Dr. Sam for his time.
Unfortunately he seemed to have taken up too much of it. As he limped toward the exit, the door burst open and kids streamed clomping down the steel steps, trailed by their teenage escort and Katia Marsh. Katia glanced at Dr. Sam and made a helpless motion with her head. He nodded to her, then stared strangely -perhaps with genuine hatred-at a slight blond boy about eight years old. He seemed unable to avert his gaze until the boy looked back at him, puzzled and without recognition. Then Dr. Sam smiled thinly, jotted down a few more notes on his clipboard, and seemed to escape into himself and not notice the shrill young voices and unchecked energy around him.
Carver waited until the steps were clear, then he hobbled up them with his cane and shoved open the door. “Children, this is Victor,” he heard Katia loudly proclaim as the door swung closed behind him. He limped toward the sun held at bay by the tinted glass doors leading outside.
The breeze off the sea had picked up. The Fair Wind was bobbing at the research center dock. Beyond it the smooth white hull of the larger and luxurious Miss Behavin’ appeared motionless at its mooring across the sun-shot water. A pelican went into a wobbly, awkward glide to settle on the guardrail of the parking lot and stare with mild interest at Carver.
Limping across the lot, Carver tried to fit his conversation with Dr. Sam together with that of his reclusive wife Millicent. The wife seemed to be hiding something, while Dr. Sam came across as candid and cooperative. It didn’t figure. After all, they lived together, slept together, should know all about each other and share the same secrets.
Unless Millicent Bing was keeping something from her husband as well as from the outside world.
That wouldn’t be all that unusual in a wife. And it was no business of Carver’s.
Unless the something concerned drugs and Walter Rainer.
22
“You figure the good doctor’s being less than candid?” Beth asked, when Carver had returned to the cottage and told her about his talk with Dr. Sam. She was wearing shorts now, and a white T-shirt with just do it lettered on it. Sitting relaxed yet with an odd regality in the porch glider, she was reading by the sunlight filtering in through the trees and the screen. She’d finished Kafka and had tied into something now by Robert Parker. Hmm.
“I’m not sure,” Carver said. “It’s hard for me to know what academic types are thinking. Dr. Sam might be lying like a politician, bending over backward to make me think there’s no connection between him and Rainer.”
“Like the hot-to-trot damsel who doth protest too vigorously?”
“Something on that order. And Katia acts as if everything at the research center’s up-front and honest scientific toil, tainted only by the evils of tourism to help turn a dollar. A dewy-eyed idealist.”
“Still,” Beth mused, laying aside Parker, “she’s interested in sharks.”
“Even obsessed by them,” Carver said.
Beth stretched languidly, long arms, hands, fingers, fingernails, attaining incredible and graceful reach. “If anything is going on at the Rainer place,” she said, “it’s hard to believe somebody at the research center didn’t at least get a whiff of it. Everything can’t be occurring at night, and the view’s too good not to notice what’s happening over there.”
Carver hobbled across the porch with his cane and lowered himself into the nylon-webbed lawn chair. Flicking a tiny spider off his forearm, he remembered the sun-hazed view across the water from the research center, the clean white hull and gleaming brightwork of the Miss Behavin’ lying beyond the gray and functional Fair Wind. Wealth and leisure contrasting with selflessness and labor. Would workaholics like the Bings and Katia Marsh notice anything outside their immediate range of vision and interest? Did they really care about anything other than their work?
“What about this Katia and Dr. Sam?” Beth asked.
Carver knew what she meant. “Neither of them’s the type.”
“Hah!”
Well, maybe she was right; she’d been reading Kafka and Parker.
“Live with a woman who’s the way you describe Millicent Bing,” Beth said, “and a young beauty interested in sharks might seem mighty appealing.”
Carver said, “She wouldn’t have to be interested in sharks.”
Beth glared at him and raised an eyebrow. Jokingly, though. He thought. She crossed her bare and beautiful brown legs and leaned back in the glider, not only unconcerned with romantic rivals, but arrogantly confident. He figured she might gibe him with a mock warning not to stray, but she said, “That the phone ringing?”
He tilted his head to the side and listened, heard faint electronic chirping from inside the cottage. “Phone,” he said, reaching for his cane.
She knew she could make it inside faster than Carver, so she jumped up and breezed into the cottage. The swinging empty glider lapsed into a paroxysm of descending squeaks behind her, as if objecting that she’d risen.