Faye slept lightly, and at first her dreams were full of cornmeal and bullfrogs with fat, juicy legs. Then they shifted to images of her friend alone, floating, helpless, with nothing to breathe but cold seawater. Until she knew what had happened to the captain, this nightmare would be a soft, black spot of rot at her center. She would never really rest while it was there.
Faye lay awake in the gray light of dawn and saw that Joe wasn’t sleeping either.
He met her eyes and said, “Tide’s low and getting lower.”
Within minutes they were in their bathing suits. It would have been unkind and borderline immoral to skip out on helping hurricane victims, just so they could take a swim and explore the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. But who would judge them for enjoying the water for a couple of hours early on a Thursday morning before they came ashore and got to work?
“Let’s go for a snorkel,” she said.
Light was seeping from beneath Amande’s door, making Faye wonder whether her daughter ever slept. When Michael reached Amande’s age, she would know what his habits had been for his entire lifetime. She’d notice when his sleeping patterns changed or his appetite ebbed, and thus she’d have a reasonable shot at knowing when her son was depressed or struggling. Amande had arrived in her life at sixteen, nearly grown. Faye felt like she was parenting in the dark.
She tapped on the door, and Amande opened it.
“Do you mind keeping an ear out for Michael? We’ll be back in a bit. If he’s hungry, give him a little bite, but don’t worry about breakfast. We’ll fix something when we get back. Or maybe we’ll just eat at the marina.”
In a boat, they could have gotten out to the The Cold Spot in the time it took them to walk from the house to the water’s edge, but Faye didn’t want to take a boat. She didn’t want to drop an anchor and risk damaging whatever was down there.
A shipwreck? A Paleolithic occupation site? Faye almost didn’t care, because either of them would be pretty cool. With the water this low, even the motor’s wake could disrupt fragile archaeological remnants. Wading, with occasional stretches of swimming, was a far safer way to get out there than boating.
A plummeting anchor could also destroy evidence from Captain Eubank’s last moments. She ached to know what had happened to him.
It was entirely possible that she and Joe were making their way out to the very spot where he had died. Faye was walking outdoors at dawn in a bathing suit, so she was already a little cold, but this image sent a chill creeping up her spine.
Change was in the nature of water. The water that drowned the captain had moved on, dispersed by currents in all directions. One of those currents had carried his body to the marina. Those currents might also have carried away everything he left behind—strands of hair, DNA-carrying skin particles, maybe even a carabiner from his equipment bag. It wasn’t likely that evidence remained from his death, but the odds weren’t zero. For example, she doubted that a current could carry a weight belt very far.
Joe reached into the storage shed that he’d built on their beach so that their equipment would always be handy. “What do we need? Masks and snorkels, but no fins?”
“Sounds about right. The water’s so shallow that fins would just get in our way, especially if we need to stop swimming and walk. Let’s just wade in.”
The water was only cold on Faye’s legs for a moment. The sun was rising so fast that she could see it move, and the color of the water was changing just as fast. As its rays reached the bright white sand beneath her bare feet, reflected light made the water glow electric green. By the time the water reached her knees, it was the color of the turquoise ring her grandmother had given her when she was thirteen. As it reached her hips, it was a clear, pure, uncomplicated blue, and Faye’s happiness at being there in that moment was just as uncomplicated.
“I know about where The Cold Spot is,” Joe said, “but I’m not a hundred percent sure I could walk straight out to it.”
“Me neither,” she said. “That’s another reason I thought it made sense not to bring the boat. This way, we’ll feel it when the water gets cold.”
“Yeah,” Joe said, and the look on his face said what he was thinking so plainly—You know how bad I hate cold water—that Faye couldn’t help laughing.
“Look at me,” she said. “This water’s up to my shoulders and it hardly covers your navel. I don’t want to hear anything about how cold you are.”
He shifted the conversation back to the question of where in the heck they were going. “I know The Cold Spot isn’t quite straight out from the beach. It’s more to the west, getting toward the end of the island.”
“Good thing the hurricane wasn’t too bad here. If it changed the shape of the coastline too much, we may never figure out where we’re going.”
“Let’s hope it didn’t,” he said, wading farther from shore.
It took ten minutes of walking for the water to reach her chin. Faye put on her mask, put her snorkel in her mouth, lowered her face into the calm water, and stretched out on top of it. Patches of dark seagrass dotted the sand below her. Brown-shelled scallops were tangled in them, each with a rim of bright-blue eyes. The rhythmic opening and closing of their shells seemed to Faye to drive the motion of the water around her.
As she paddled slowly forward, she passed a school of fish, each as small and silvery as a new dime. She could see the bottom falling away a bit, so she raised her face to tread water, reaching her toes for the bottom.
The sand was out of reach, deeper than she’d expected. Even Joe couldn’t quite touch bottom while keeping his face out of the water. She put her snorkel back in her mouth, pointed her head downward and kicked hard for the bottom.
The sea grasses tickled her belly as she skimmed over them. If the Philomela had gone down near here, she sure didn’t see any sign of it. It looked to her like Captain Eubank had risked his life for nothing, but she wasn’t surprised that she saw no sign of the old steamship. If it had sunk here, so close to Joyeuse Island, Cally would surely have known and she would have talked about the wreck in her oral history. Faye knew for a fact that she didn’t.
The sand beneath her continued to slope downward. Taking a moment to surface and grab a chest full of air, she dropped to the bottom again, beckoning to Joe as she swam. Everything looked as it should—seagrasses, shells, sand, fish—and that’s not what she was hoping to see. She wanted to see something human-made and disruptive. Part of her wanted it to be a shipwreck at the end of a long debris field. A bigger part of her wanted to see stone tools, the black burn mark of a hearth, mastodon bones, and anything else that would prove her theory that The Cold Spot marked a Paleolithic occupation site.
She didn’t actually want to find evidence that her friend had drowned here, but she had to admit to herself that seeing it would be a positive thing. It would make his death more real to her, and it might ease his sister’s mind. Hard evidence might prove, once and for all, whether his drowning was really an accident.
She didn’t know what kind of evidence to hope for. Maybe the captain had left behind a flashlight or some other piece of equipment that he’d dropped while struggling not to drown. And, of course, there was the missing weight belt. Surely the loss of a human life would have left a trace, no matter how small.
She surfaced for another breath. Joe surfaced next to her, blowing the water out of his snorkel before diving for the bottom again.
The water around her was chilly, much colder than it had been when she first got into the water. She hadn’t even noticed it cooling off. It appeared that they’d found The Cold Spot, proving that Joe’s navigational skills were as fearsome in the water as they were in the woods. She’d been to this place countless times, but something was different today. How could there be something different about an expanse of wide open water?
Treading water, Faye kept her face above the surface as she turned in a slow circle. It quickly became clear what the difference was. In all directions, small wind-driven waves rippled the water’s surface, as they always did on a day when the waves were calm, but she and Joe hovered in a patch of water that was as smooth as ice. The area of calm water extended for twenty feet or more in all directions.
She’d seen this phenomenon many times in freshwater creeks but never in the Gulf. It marked a place where the flow of a constant, steady upwelling of water was strong enough to blunt the effects of the wind rippling the water’s surface.
She caught Joe’s eye and knew that he saw it, too.
“Do I feel water coming up from the bottom?” he asked.
“You do,” Faye said.
They each dove for the sandy seafloor below.
The seagrass obscured her view of the seabed, but the feel of rising water on her skin took Faye where she wanted to go. As she got closer to its source, the moving water began to tickle her skin like bubbles in champagne. Her face was barely a yard from the bottom when she saw it.
There was a crack in the world. The bare white sand was interrupted by an almost-circular expanse of exposed tan-to-dark-brown rock, about seven feet across, which must have been the reason for the dark round area that Ossie had seen from so high in the air. In its center was a long narrow crack that had to be the thin black slash that Faye had seen in Joe’s sharpest, closest photo. She could see through the crack into a dark void that was like a small cave.
Water flowed out of the crack with enough force to stir the green grasses surrounding the area of exposed rock. The hurricane had scoured away the sand and debris that had once filled it. Many, many years had probably gone by since the water had flowed freely, but it was doing that now.
Faye had been right about the spring, but this didn’t necessarily mean that Captain Eubank had been wrong about a sunken ship. It wasn’t impossible for the two things to exist in the same place.
She looked around for signs of anything man-made. There was no hull, no debris field, not even a torn section of the Philomela’s rusted iron sheathing. If Captain Eubank did drown in that spot, he had seen no shipwreck in his last moments.
She moved as close to the crack as she could, wishing she had her fins to help her make headway against the strong current belching out of it. Did Captain Eubank swim into the opening, trying to access a cave on the other side?
She had friends who couldn’t have resisted the call of this crack in the earth. She worried that one of those friends might someday die from insatiable curiosity. Cave diving was one of the most dangerous sports in existence. Even a few skydivers had survived equipment failure, still alive after a long fall to the ground. A cave diver whose equipment fails dies, every single time.
Desperate for a breath of air, she lingered, exploring the lips of the opening with her fingers. The crack was big enough to admit both her hands to the wrist, just barely, if she’d been foolish enough to cram them in there.
Was it big enough for even one arm? Nope, not that she planned to try it. There was no way Captain Eubank could have thought this crack was big enough to swim through, even if he’d somehow been able to shed his equipment.
Joe dropped down beside her. Her lungs were bursting, so she left him staring into the slender opening and headed up for air. Shortly after she broke the surface, he followed.
“You see that?” he asked as soon as he could get his snorkel out of his mouth.
“The spring vent? I absolutely did. And the opening’s not big enough for Captain Eubank to pass through.”
“D’you think he might have gotten stuck somehow? My heart nearly stopped when you stuck your hands in there.”
“My hands never passed through the opening. Not even the tips of my fingers. I might take some risks sometimes, but I’m not stupid. But here’s an important thing—I didn’t see any signs of a struggle. Did you? It seems to me that if the captain was stuck in an opening like that one, you’d see evidence that he’d tried to get himself free. The area of exposed rock is small enough that his legs would totally have extended into the sand. You’d see marks where he struggled. And his weight belt would be somewhere nearby.”
“You’d see torn-up seagrass, too.”
“Exactly,” Faye said. “I didn’t notice any traces of a struggle at all. Did you? Honestly, everything I saw looked pristine, but let’s go back down and look again, just to make sure.”
She tried not to think about a man flailing around, trying to free a stuck foot or hand from that opening in the rock. Water would have been piled on top of him, waiting to silently end his life, and this image made Faye want to stay on dry land forever. She honestly didn’t think the captain was foolish enough to jam any body parts into the crack, at least not hard enough to get stuck.
And if he wasn’t trapped like that, how could he have drowned? The water was so shallow here that he could literally have bounced off the seabed and breached the surface over and over again, grabbing one breath after another while he worked to shed his gear. Then he could have walked or swam to shore as easily as they’d gotten to this spot.
Heck. He could have dog-paddled.
“This isn’t the place,” Faye said, surprising herself by how certain she was. “This isn’t where the captain drowned. I’m sure of it.”
“Me, too.”