He began to tap the chart with his finger. “There’s one here… a gyre here… here. They’re all over the place. One side of the gyre flows more or less south, the other side flows more or less north. They’re like big, slow-motion whirlpools floating around out there at sea. Oval-shaped rivers that, in the fall and winter, flow at one, maybe even two knots, and faster in summer. Ultimately, most of them exit and gain speed at the stricture between Key West and Cuba.”
“The Gulf Stream,” I said. “That’s what you’re describing. The source of the Gulf Stream.”
He said, “It all contributes, yeah, the Gulf Stream. But do you see what I’m getting at?”
Tomlinson is a teacher with extraordinary gifts, and now, for the first time, I could see that what, at first, appeared to be a random but consistent flow of water was, actually, a series of symmetrical loops. According to the pilot chart, in November, historically, a particularly small but strong gyre existed between Sanibel at the northerly extreme and Flamingo to the south. Offshore, water flowed southeast. Inshore, water spiraled northward.
“Datum marker buoys can’t swim,” Tomlinson said softly. “Janet, Michael, and Grace could. I think that accounts for the difference, and why we didn’t find them. Remember the big charter boat that Amelia told us she saw that night or whose lights she saw, anyway. The Ellen Clair? The captain, Ken Peterson, told her later that he’d anchored over the Baja California.
“I called him this afternoon, Doc. I told him what we plan to do. Find the Seminole Wind and figure out why she sank. Dive the Baja and collect anything we can that corroborates Amelia’s story. We talked for maybe half an hour. Nice guy. Feels terrible that his boat was so close and he couldn’t find them. Just like the rest of us.
“So I was asking him how it went once he got to the Dry Tortugas, how the fishing was, and he said something that made all the little lights come on. He said the trip back to Fort Myers Beach was a lot faster than the trip out because he ran closer to shore where there wasn’t as much wind… and there was a hell of a strong northerly current pushing him along.”
I’d stopped eating. Did not feel like eating anymore. “So they swam east toward the flashing light, Janet, Michael, and Grace,” I said, “just like Amelia. They probably got close to the tower. Maybe real close. But then they stopped swimming for some reason.”
Tomlinson walked to the window above the little ship’s stove. Stood there staring at the lights of the marina. People moving around out there on the docks. Silhouettes, shadows, and muted voices. All Sundays dampen noise, particularly a memorial service Sunday. “I’ve thought and thought about it,” he said. “It’s plausible, possible, maybe even probable… and it’s so goddamn sad I can barely stand it.”
He continued, “We assume that Amelia’s story is mostly true. So why didn’t we find them? If the three hooked up, stayed together, they would have been a larger mass, easier to see. If they separated, the chances of spotting at least one of them increase proportionally. The Coast Guard was using forward-looking infrared radar; those things register body heat from a mile away. So it’s damn unlikely we could have missed them unless I’m right. They swam east toward the tower but stopped. They got caught on the edge of the gyre. Just like Peterson told me: where there was a hell of a strong current pushing them north. At one, maybe two knots, they’d have been off Marco by first light, fifteen maybe twenty miles away. Way the hell north of the Baja California. ”
I said, “I wouldn’t call a two-knot current that strong. Those were his words?”
“‘A hell of a strong northerly current.’ That’s what he said. I agree with you. The pilot chart for November shows one to two knots for this particular gyre, but maybe it was stronger. Who knows? Things change fast out there, you know that. But that’s what the man said, and he’s been captaining for fifteen years.”
Now I was feeling sick. The Coast Guard, all of us, we’d all searched from a few miles north of the wreck site, then forty miles and more to the south and southwest.
Tomlinson said, “Powerboats are machines, but a fine sailboat has more in common with a divining rod. The No Mas kept trying to take me north. My sailboat, the wheel, she tried and tried to turn, to show me the way. I was a fool. I wouldn’t let her.
“Our last three days out there, alone, that’s when I finally let the No Mas take control. I gave her the wheel, just like you sometimes give a horse free rein, and she took me way north and west, far out to sea. But it was too late. Too late.”
His voice became a whisper as he added, “At night, when I meditated, I could see what happened, how it happened, everything. Their voices, I could hear their words, see their faces, could feel Janet’s fear, her horror. What Janet saw, I saw, and I knew then just what I know now. They were still alive. They may still be alive.”
Part Two
13
Stars, planets, streaking satellites fell toward her, propelled by the buoyancy of each cresting wave, then stars were yanked skyward again as the wave collapsed, dropping her body into a black valley.. .
Floating on her back, eyes focused overhead and clinging to a universe of blazing starlight, Janet Mueller used her left hand to grip a section of anchor line hitched to the bow of the Seminole Wind while the fingers of her right hand touched the thin gold crucifix she was never without. It was a gift from her late husband, Roger, who’d been killed in a car accident years ago, only three months before their first baby was to be born.
They were to have a boy. They knew it from the first ultrasound-an infant so obviously a boy that it was the subject of many whispered bedtime jokes. Thomas Roger Mueller.
Janet barely survived the shock of her husband’s death. Their child did not. She went into labor prematurely, and the doctors could not save the boy, though young Thomas fought valiantly to live for three nights and four days, rabbit-sized, tiny fists clenched, lying inside the oxygen spherical in the preemie ward, Toledo General Hospital.
Her husband was killed the day after Thanksgiving. Thomas Roger died one week later, the first day of December. That was seven years and a different lifetime ago, it had come to seem. Almost as if it had happened to another person, a person with her name and face who’d dreamed all those peaceful times with Roger, and then, still sleeping, slipped into a nightmare that was the deepest of horrors.
That was Ohio. This was Florida. Her new life. The elementary school teacher who, to save her own sanity, traded in expectations of a suburban house and conventional family for a quirky little houseboat at a quirky little marina. Her new life in the tropics with parties, devoted friends, great sunsets, and, finally, a second good man-though she and Jeth had had their problems. Everyone did.
Once browsing through the library of her friend, Marion Ford, she’d found a chapter in a book about certain lizards, members of the Iguanid family, that could change colors as required, even grow new tails if they’d been injured-chromatic transformation and cellular regeneration. Janet felt an unexpected kinship with those creatures because she had learned that, if sufficiently traumatized, a woman must employ chameleon capabilities to endure.
Janet Mueller had lost her heart but was slowly growing a new one in this, the life of her own invention. A good life, too. Until this day. Until this dive trip.
She would survive it. She had to. She’d survived worse.
Now, holding on to the rope, frightened to the point of emotional exhaustion, Janet repeated the prayer that had become her bedtime mantra, her savior during those worst of times: I am strong. My faith is stronger. I am strong. My faith is stronger. Over and over in her mind, she spoke the words by rote. There was another mantra that she’d sometimes used during the day when the pain threatened to overwhelm her. It was one of her favorites because it was both reassuring and assertive: This evil stands no chance against my prayers.