‘Hannah! What’s wrong?’ Molly peered at me over the side, her hands white knuckled, gripping the rail. ‘Is Gator OK?’
‘Oh, my God.’ I felt dizzy. I tried to take deep breaths, but ended up retching instead. Molly leaned over me solicitously, patting my hand.
In the meantime, Gator had surfaced nearby, his snorkel dangling. He laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘Take it easy, Hannah.’
‘Seasick?’ Molly asked.
When I didn’t answer, Gator said, ‘She’s had a shock. Bodies down there. Two of ’em.’
Two bodies, fully clothed, staring up into nothingness with wide, sightless eyes. One was a woman, I had no doubt of that. As I struggled to make sense of what I was seeing, her dark hair had drifted, swayed in the current like seaweed around her ruined face.
Gator coughed. ‘Never seen anything like that before.’
Molly’s gaze was fixed on the hideous spot in the water. ‘Can you tell who they are?’
Gator rubbed his eyes. ‘Lobsters did quite a job on the soft tissues of their faces.’ He paused, glanced from Molly to me and back again, seeming to flush under his tan. ‘Sorry.’
‘I set the trap back down to keep the bodies from floating away,’ he continued, ‘but before I did, I found this.’ He uncurled his fingers. In his palm lay a broad gold wedding band. ‘It might mean something to you, Hannah.’
With my free hand, I picked the ring out of Gator’s palm and examined it in the sunlight. Engraving inside the band read, FP+SA 9/5/62.
Frank and Sally Parker.
Gator waited until I was safely up the swim ladder before climbing back into the boat himself. Using strong hands on each of my shoulders, he practically forced me down on a bench, then wrapped me in a foul-weather jacket. In spite of the warmth of the sun, I began to shiver. I drew the jacket more tightly around my shoulders. ‘Were they…?’ I stuttered. ‘Could you tell…?’ I swallowed the words.
Without answering, Gator crossed to the console and reached for his microphone. ‘Didn’t crawl under there themselves.’ He pressed the talk button. ‘Dive Guana, Dive Guana. This is Deep Magic. Come in, Troy.’
‘Things like this simply don’t happen here,’ Molly said while we waited for Troy to show up with the rescue boat from Guana Cay, although there was precious little to rescue. For Frank and Sally Parker it was way too late.
‘Only seventy-some murders in all the islands last year,’ Gator told us. He sat bent over, hands dangling between his knees. ‘Fifty of them in Nassau. Drug-related, of course.’
I scratched Nassau off my list of one thousand and one places to see before I died and asked, ‘What do we do now?’
‘Wait for Troy.’
‘And after that?’
‘As I said before. Nothing. Getting involved with the Bahamian police can take years off your life.’
I felt like screaming, but managed a croak. ‘Gator! You can’t not report this! Those people were my friends!’
‘You mistook my meaning, Hannah. I’m just asking you to let Troy and me handle it.’
I folded my arms across my chest, hugging myself for warmth. Tears pooled in my eyes, spilled over and ran hotly down my cheeks. ‘What I want to know is what Frank and Sally are doing here, dead, when the last time they were seen was miles away in Eleuthera.’
‘We only have Jaime’s word for that. And Jaime’s word is worth, what? Next to nothing?’
Molly blinked rapidly, fighting tears, too. ‘Ain’t worth shee-it! He killed them, didn’t he?’
‘Somebody sure did,’ Gator said.
‘Who else could have done it? Frank and Sally go missing, then Jaime shows up sailing their boat.’ I shrugged out of the jacket, picked up my shorts and top. ‘Why else was he having Wanderer repainted? Idiot thought nobody would notice.’ I shivered. ‘How did he think he was going to get away with it, Gator?’
‘It’s early in the lobster season. He probably thought that by the time I got around to checking the traps, the lobsters would have done their work.’
As Deep Magic rocked gently at anchor on the undulating sea, I staggered to the stern where I untied the lobster bag from the cleat and dumped our catch over the side.
No one protested.
Exhausted, I sat down and rested my forehead on the gunwale, as soothing as a cool washcloth. While Molly rubbed my back, I thought about Jaime’s victims, all of Jaime’s victims. Frank and Sally Parker, the mangroves, the reef, the sea turtles and even poor Alice Madonna Robinson. ‘The man is evil, pure evil.’
Molly wrapped an arm around me and squeezed. ‘The question is, what are we going to do about it?’
Later, much later, Molly and I sat on her porch, a dinner of leftover spaghetti glistening under candlelight. The power had gone out again. Adding insult to injury, Paul had left for Baltimore with the generator he’d purchased still packed in its box, so I’d collected my frozen food from the freezer and taken it over to Molly’s where lights were on in her kitchen, her generator humming.
Molly’s contribution to dinner had been a salad, a delicious mix of spinach and romaine, but I only nibbled on mine.
‘You have to eat sometime, Hannah.’
‘But not now.’ I bit my lower lip, lost in thought. ‘I can’t get it out of my mind, Molly. Frank and Sally… God!’
She laid down her fork. ‘It’s the body bags that got me, Hannah. Hefty Cinch Saks! Mah gawd. I kept reading the side of that box – new, unscented odor block technology. I swear I’ll never be able to use a Hefty bag again.’
The three strands of noodle and two slices of tomato that I’d managed to choke down threatened to make a reappearance, but I pressed my fingernails into my palms and took deep breaths until the feeling passed.
‘Gator called,’ Molly told me. ‘Said Troy would take the bodies to Marsh Harbour. Apparently they have some sort of make-do morgue over there. After a doctor declares them dead…’ Her voice trailed off into the darkness beyond the candlelight.
‘As if there’s any doubt.’ I cringed. ‘Then they’ll be taken to Nassau for autopsy, like that poor fellow who died in the wildfire.’
Molly sipped her wine, then set the glass down. ‘I practically live here, but I don’t have much experience with this sort of thing, as you can well imagine. But the Parkers are American citizens. Won’t US authorities be involved?’
‘Only if invited by the Bahamians, Gator told me. Otherwise the Royal Bahamas Police handle all investigations themselves.’
‘And we’re sure they’re not going to mess up the investigation, how?’
I studied my friend in the candlelight, her eyes bright with tears. ‘I’m going to make some phone calls, Molly. First to Paul…’
‘FBI?’ she interrupted.
I nodded. ‘Interpol, too, if necessary.’
‘Good.’ Molly stood, dinner plate in hand. ‘Tell me, Hannah. What did you say to Gator when he dropped us off?’
‘I suggested that if we wanted a proper investigation, we should take Frank and Sally to the waters off Fort Lauderdale and set their bodies afloat off the beach.’ I snorted, then cackled. Even to myself, I sounded hysterical. ‘And you know what?’
‘What?’
‘He half agreed with me.’
‘But the police say they found no trace of foul play aboard Wanderer! They even gave custody of the boat back to Jaime Mueller until he can contact the Parkers… well, I guess now it’d be their heirs. Makes me sick.’ Using her fork, she scraped the scraps from her plate over the porch rail. Snack time for the hermit crabs who lived under the oleander.
‘The Parkers didn’t have any children,’ I said.
‘Oh. In that case, Jaime Mueller’s probably the proud owner of a used boat.’
‘Maybe Jaime didn’t kill them on their boat, Molly. Maybe he murdered them on shore. Their dinghy’s never been found, you know.’