Bree was desperate to find the camera, and it was too narrow and too late to back out now. In and down she swam, headfirst into the rabbit hole of a dangerous wonderland. Everything seemed alien, even when she lit the dimness only by her single shaft of flashlight beam. Each time the blinding strobe flashed, the rust-encrusted depths of the long-sunken ship made it seem as if its metal skin was bleeding. The dizzying whirl of floating particles caught in the weird currents toyed with her equilibrium.
In this section of the ship, the port-side wall was the floor of the wreck, so the vessel’s ceiling swirled past on her left and its floor on her right, making her feel even more disoriented. She swam over portholes that living souls had once peered out on their fateful voyage. This world—her entire world—had gone topsy-turvy. Had any of the crew’s bones been trapped here like their living cargo’s? Had something or someone sunk Mermaids II?
Bree saw no more cattle skulls, though several strange sea creatures peered at her and a small lobster scuttled away. But there was no camera. When the corridor turned and she peered beyond to some sort of galley, she maneuvered around to go back out and was amazed to see Cole, so close that she jerked back and clunked her tank into a bulkhead.
In the small, enclosed space, Cole seized her wrist and pulled her toward him. Out of here and up to the surface, he motioned, shining his light on his gestures. Shadows from his hands leaped across his face mask; with his beam at that sharp angle on his strong, sculpted features, he seemed to wear a fright mask. It made her think she really didn’t know this man, yet she needed him badly.
Bree knew he was right to make her get out; she’d decided to leave anyway, now that she’d checked for the camera here. But, as if in protest, she accidentally hit the strobe button again. It flashed close in his face. His grip on her tightened, powerful, determined, and he took the strobe from her. Using only his flashlight beam, he gestured, Out! You first. She nodded and started out, using her light again. When they emerged into the relatively brighter water outside the Trade Wreck, she saw he had cut his wrist and was bleeding green blood, because at this depth, crimson always looked green.
She tried to motion that she hadn’t known he was cut and hadn’t meant to flash the strobe in his face. He just jerked his thumb up again. She took the strobe from him so he could stem the blood—she could not tell how bad the cut was—and they quickly ascended with no rest stop and no more communication. They both knew what a tiny bit of blood diffused in a vast stretch of the water could mean, and they didn’t want those bull sharks back.
Bree felt light-headed. Those sharks...could they have attacked Daria if she had fallen in or been pushed off Mermaids II? Bull sharks...the bones of bulls, the skulls of steers caught inside the Trade Wreck... Bree’s life, wrecked without Daria... Daria trapped, her life maybe ruined, sunk...gone.
In a whoosh of foam and bubbles, they broke the surface together and swam to the skiff’s ladder. Manny hurried over to meet them. Cole surprised her by giving her a one-handed boost on her bottom. She spit out her regulator and shoved her mask up on her head. “No, you’re hurt. You first!”
“Get up there!” he ordered, his deep voice rough. “From now on, if we dive together looking for clues, I’m the dive boss. I don’t care if you’re the better diver! You’re distraught right now, so I’m giving you a pass, but you’re not going down there again without someone else in charge and you following orders!”
She climbed out with him right behind her. “How did you get cut?”
“Following you into that rusted bucket of bolts!”
“Since the strobe was there, I just had to look a littler farther in.”
Trying to get a word in, Manny bent over them as they collapsed to sit side by side on the deck. “You find the camera?” Manny asked. “What ’bout the new anchor and chain? You find anything suspicious, any clues at all?”
Briefly, Bree updated him as she worked on Cole’s cut with disinfectant from the first-aid kit. “I think you’ll need a few stitches. I hope you’ve had a tetanus shot,” she told him.
“Working with hammers and nails—and a crazed female diver—I’d better.”
“I’m sorry this happened while you were trying to help me again. I can drive you into an urgent-care clinic if you need stitches. I’d rather not face the E.R. at the hospital again right now.”
“Yeah, it needs a couple of stitches, but I’ll take care of it. Your burned wrist and now this,” he muttered. “We’re a pair.”
We’re a pair.
He’d said it quietly, but she heard him clearly. She looked into his dark eyes, so close, with the bright, setting sun on the gently rocking boat. Manny still hovered, asking more questions, but none of that registered as the physical and emotional impact of the man she tended hit her hard. She barely knew Cole DeRoca, her hero and rescuer, yet he cared about her and she for him.
We’re a pair. That was a cliché she and Daria had used more than once, but now the words meant something different. This sweeping sensation hardly resembled the bond of empathy and synergy she and Daria shared. This was raw energy and power—a fierce magnetism—something she had never felt before, even with Ted, with whom she’d once been so infatuated. This was deeper, almost dangerous. But the timing was terrible, when she had to use anything and anyone, including Cole, to find her sister.
“I’ll ask some local divers to help search,” she said, when the silence between them turned awkward. “But if you could continue to help, I’d be so grateful. I have a supply of plastic sleeves to cover a hurt wrist.” She finished daubing the antibacterial cream on the jagged inch-long cut. Maybe it wasn’t as deep as it had looked at first. Thank God, it was on the side of his wrist and not the soft, inner skin, where he would bleed a lot harder.
Bree jumped when Manny started the motor. She’d been so intent on Cole she hadn’t realized Manny had moved away; she’d forgotten he was even here. Looking away again, out over the gulf that held sacred secrets, Bree pressed her lips tight together. Again she longed to throw herself into Cole’s arms, but then she would explode in the hysteria she felt pressing down on her like the weight of water.
“When Daria and I were kids,” she told him, raising her voice to be heard over the motor, “we once cut our wrists and swore a blood oath to be friends forever—very childish and very dramatic. Also stupid and dangerous, though we didn’t know that. We were only about eight. We got in all kinds of trouble for it, and Amelia told her friends we were total flakes who didn’t know you were only supposed to prick fingers.”
Her voice broke, and she cleared her throat. She blinked back tears as she smoothed the edges of the big bandage onto his skin, tanned and flecked with crisp black hair. They were kneeling now, face-to-face, their hips and shoulders steadied against the rail by the ladder to keep from bouncing against each other as Manny headed the ship toward shore.
“Cole, I’ll never be able to pay you back—I can’t thank you enough for everything,” she blurted, then scrambled to her feet and turned away to pick up some of her gear. Her emotions were so jumbled she was afraid she was going to burst into tears. She sat on the front seat, facing away from him, hunched over the strobe she held across her lap.
Cole came to sit beside her as they sped back toward Turtle Bay. “When this is all over and we’ve found Daria,” he said, bending toward her so only she could hear, “we’ll think of some way you can thank me.”
* * *
At dusk that evening, Bree sat at the table in the apartment, poring over a marine map that detailed every reef, contour and cranny offshore in this area of the gulf. As she’d promised Cole, she’d made numerous calls to diving friends for help to search the gulf underwater tomorrow. Everyone—some were even taking personal days off from work to help—was going to assemble at her shop at nine in the morning. She jolted when her doorbell rang. Probably someone else from the media, she thought.
She almost wished she’d taken Josh and Nikki up on their loan of Mark Denton for a while. He was evidently good not only at protection but at handling press releases. Bree had given a brief statement to the man from the Naples Daily News and the Fort Myers ABC-TV reporter when they’d caught up with her earlier at the marina, but she wasn’t going to answer the doorbell if it was more of the same.
Yet, what if there was word from the search teams—good news? Sometimes the media caught wind of things before those who should have been told first. Or what if Cole had returned? He’d said he would go have his wrist cared for, though, and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow morning, unless she wanted him to sleep on her sofa tonight. She had wanted him to, but she’d told him she was all right. Several times today, in her desperation, she had done things she shouldn’t have and she was afraid of what she might do if she could cling to Cole.
Bree peered out the side window that looked down onto the street to see if she could spot a TV van. There stood her brother-in-law, Ben, looking up with his arms crossed over his chest. His premature silver hair and white, long-sleeved shirt folded up at the elbows seemed to glow in the dusk. As usual, his edgy, stiff body language said everything about his steely backbone. Bree waved at him and hurried down to let him in.
She was proud he was such an upright, unbending county prosecutor, but she thought he too often brought an adversarial stance home from the office and courtroom with him. Ben was up for election in November, just like Josh, and had been bemoaning the fact there had been no high-profile cases to keep him in the public eye lately. Unlike other elected officials, he seldom paid for campaign ads—name recognition and frequent sound bites for the media seemed to be all he needed.
No doubt Amelia had sent him, though he’d probably be happy to lecture his maverick sister-in-law on his own.
“You didn’t need to come all this way,” she greeted him as she let him in. “I’m hanging in. You could have called me.”
“Your cell was busy for hours. Besides, I had to see someone nearby—actually, our casino mover and shaker, Dom Verdugo. All we need is the whiff of organized crime around him, and he’ll be on my hit list. I wanted to tell him privately to keep his nose clean. He invited me to go along on the casino boat’s first cruise to show me he’s on the up-and-up. But I wanted to see you, not only for your and Daria’s sake but Amelia’s, too.”
He gave her a quick hug, then released her to close and lock the door behind him. “Bree, I realize you’re upset and anxious, but you really distressed your older sister by just leaving the hospital today.”
“Come on up, then you can call her to say I’m okay,” she suggested, and motioned him toward the stairs. With a barely perceptible grimace toward the shop, he followed her.
Ben had ditched his usual suit coat and his tie was gone for once. His leather briefcase, too. Still, he managed to look like a ritzy real estate ad from Gulfshore Life magazine, whether he was garbed for the courthouse or his own house. He was a driven man, talented and ambitious, a crusader against breakers of the letter of the law. The more high-profile and gruesome the case, the better. It terrified Bree to think that might come in handy if they didn’t find Daria safe and sound.
“This is exactly the kind of thing I’d warned both of you about,” he went on, sitting upright on the edge of the sofa. “Something was bound to go wrong with all the risks you take.”
“You warned us that Daria and our newest boat might go missing in a storm sometime?” she countered sarcastically, propping her hands on her hips and still standing so as not to feel at a disadvantage to him. With Ben, she always felt she was being grilled on the witness stand, and she’d found the best defense was to be a bit offensive.
“Not precisely,” he admitted, frowning, “but I’ve warned both of you about behavior unbecoming of your brains and beauty.”
“Thanks for the backhanded compliment.”
“Hate to put it this way, Bree, but you’re in too deep. You needed a couple more days under doctors’ care, and you shouldn’t be on your own right now. You should never have chosen to get into a business with so much danger involved.”
“There was nothing dangerous about checking the sea grass meadow for the fifty-eighth time!” she exploded. “I appreciate Amelia’s help in the hospital and your continued concern, but—”
“Just listen for a second. You need a level head here, so I called both the coast guard and the air patrol and told them to report to me if they learned anything.”
“Oh, no...oh, no!” she cried, and collapsed onto the sofa with her head in her hands. “And they called you? Did they find her? The boat?”
“No, but the fact they didn’t isn’t good news either. Calm down,” he went on, turning toward her and putting a hand on her slumped shoulder. “Amelia and I just want to help. This pipe dream, this search-and-salvage endeavor of yours, should be left to the likes of Sam Travers. You know he contacted me last year about buying you out, and I counseled you to take the offer.”
She was angry now. Not only had Ben scared her, maybe intentionally, but he was still doling out advice she—they—didn’t need or want. And now he was trying to become the kingpin in the search for Daria, taking over like he did everything and everyone.
She forced herself to inhale deeply, slowly.
“Ben, I know you don’t approve of what Daria and I chose to do, and that’s your business. But this search-and-salvage shop and finding Daria is my business, though I thank you for sideline support.”
He leaned back on the sofa, one bouncing ankle crossed over his other knee as if he hadn’t heard or heeded a thing she’d said. His voice was soothing, as if he spoke to a child, and that grated on her already raw nerves.
“Come on now, Bree. Why don’t you get some things together and come on home with me for a couple of days? It would do you and Amelia both good, and the boys would love to see you, though I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t tell them all those deep-dive stories or promise them scuba lessons again—not until they’re ready.”
“Which won’t be until you and Amelia are ready and that might be never. I know you have friends in high places, so I repeat, any support you can lend to keep the search going is much appreciated, but I will be the contact and the spokesperson. Now, can I get you some coffee? It’s all ready,” she said, standing.
“Have you been drinking it to stay up? You need your sleep? You look like hell.”
Bree spun back to face him. “That’s because I’m in hell on earth until I can find my sister!”
“You can find her?” He sat up straight again. “That’s exactly what Amelia’s worried about.”
“It’s not just me. I’ve got volunteers who are coming to help tomorrow.”
“You’d better not get in the way of the professional searchers. I’ve seen a lot of missing persons cases, and the best advice I can give you is to keep calm and keep out of it. Sure, stay informed, but let the authorities—”
“The authorities need my help. I know that gulf out there, and I know Daria as well as I know myself. I realize you’ve seen a lot of dire situations, and if someone has deliberately harmed her, you’ll be the first person I’ll ask for advice. I know you’re the prosecutor for the entire county. You do realize I’d think of that, at least?”
“Fine, I hear you. If that turns out to be the case, all I can promise is that we’ll find whoever’s to blame and prosecute him or her to the full extent of the law. And Amelia and I will keep in constant touch.”
Bree nodded, but she wanted to scream at him that she didn’t care about the law, or his levelheaded rules, only about finding Daria any way she could.
* * *
It was nearly nine at night by the time Cole had six stitches in his wrist and got home to shower and chow down a hamburger. Despite that, he drove back to the Turtle Bay Marina. He parked along the dock and glanced up at Bree’s lighted apartment. He was totally tempted to see how she was doing, but he hesitated. He’d called her from the urgent-care clinic, and it might be overkill to stop by like this so late. She needed sleep, though he figured she’d be hard-pressed to get any.
He leaned against the wrought-iron lamppost, then squinted up at the second-floor veranda and double doors. Two figures stood within the apartment—Bree and a silver-haired man.
“And why not?” he muttered to himself, and shoved away from the pole. “She has friends and needs them now.” He knew that she’d arranged a search of other possible spots in the gulf by local divers tomorrow, and he and Manny were going to be there at the crack of dawn to help. But it bothered him that another man was with her tonight.
Besides, Cole told himself, he had come to talk to Dom Verdugo, not Bree. Although “the godfather of offshore gambling,” as the local paper had dubbed him, had not dared to bring his one-hundred-eighty-foot floating casino into its berth at the end of the main marina dock yet. He kept his private yacht, the Xanadu, there. Just as Cole had noted before, the sleek ship seemed to sprout its own bodyguards.
“Hey, how ya doing?” the stocky young man who was obviously standing sentinel near the gangway asked as Cole approached. He had a shaved head, which seemed planted directly on his shoulders with no neck. His black T-shirt and dark pants made him almost blend with the night.
“Not doing too bad,” he told the guy. “I’m Cole DeRoca. Mr. Verdugo asked me to panel the main salon of the casino boat, so I thought I’d have a word with him about it. It’s after office hours, but I figured it was worth a try.”
A second man, who looked like a clone of this one, materialized from down the dock. With a nod to his friend but his eyes assessing Cole, the first man said, “I’ll check.”
Cole tried not to judge the situation in a negative way. The anti-casino-boat locals insisted a flock of security people reeked of organized crime, but those who were pro offshore gambling argued that any rich man with an expensive yacht would want some protection these days.
Personally, but privately, Cole was antigambling, because he’d seen how it could ruin a family—his own. He used to hate his mother because she’d gambled so much of their lives and happiness away, but ever since she’d died, several years before his father had, he regretted he’d shown her anger and not understanding and love.
Cole was an only child, and he’d once adored his beautiful, vibrant mother. Still, he’d never been able to forgive her for her lies and deceit over her gambling addiction. Time after time she’d sworn she wouldn’t squander family funds again, get them in debt, or hang out with people who only wanted her money. She’d drunk too much, too, and had been drunk when she’d gone swimming late at night and accidentally drowned—at least, Cole and his father had told themselves it had been an accident. Surely, she would not have taken her own life, no matter how guilty she’d felt—and how upset she was they could not understand the sickness that made her risk all her husband had worked for and continually gamble away her only son’s esteem and maybe his financial future, too.
But it was not the promise of money that brought Cole here today, considering a job from a man whose glittering gambling empire could ruin people’s lives. His offer from the Miami business mogul was to panel the large central gambling salon of the casino yacht with Caribbean rosewood. Though the job was worth big bucks, Cole had planned to turn it down in protest of Verdugo’s hell-bent push to bring gambling into the Turtle Bay area, one of the few regions left with old-Florida ambience.
But because of Cole’s feelings for Bree, he was considering giving this a try, however much it went against his grain to deal with the devil. If there was anyone Cole could think of who might have the means, the might and maybe the motive to keep the Devon sisters’ dire ecological report from being released next week, it was Verdugo. The man had been pouring money into promoting the new jobs and tourist benefits that would come from voting his way. But if the twins and the Clear the Gulf Commission made a big deal about the gulf waters not recovering from pollution, the swing vote might turn against a big gambling cruise boat making numerous trips in and out of Turtle Bay.
As Marla Sherborne, one of the candidates for the U.S. Senate, had put it in a brochure he’d read, “Verdugo’s Fun ’n’ Sun Cruises are unregulated, and such ships dump waste right off Florida’s pristine shores.”
Besides helping Bree by keeping an eye on Verdugo, it perversely pleased Cole to think a gambler would be paying him. He could use the money from this lucrative job. He wanted desperately to set up a sailboat-building business and get out of doing luxury yacht interiors. Florida was the center of the universe for handcrafted wooden boats. Since net fishing was illegal now, the sloops he’d make would be strictly for pleasure. For years, far too much of his own money had gone down the sewer hole of paying off his mother’s massive gambling debts.
“Okay, he’ll see you now,” the first guard called from behind the polished mahogany rail of the main deck. “Mr. Verdugo’s having a drink and says come join him.”
The second, silent man gestured he should board. As Cole walked up the gangway and followed the first guard to the stern stateroom, he heard a woman’s whining voice on board somewhere aft. He’d seen bigger, plusher yachts, but not in Turtle Bay. The Xanadu stuck out like a manicured thumb in a handful of unpolished nails compared to the other vintage craft moored nearby.
As he entered the golden glow of the stateroom, Cole recognized Verdugo from newspaper photos, though they’d managed to obscure his stature, perhaps intentionally. Short and portly, the fiftysomething entrepreneur greeted him with an outstretched hand. “I hear you’re the hero of the hour, DeRoca.”
“For rare woodworking or breaking news?”
He followed his host into a room larger than most landlocked living rooms. A huge horseshoe couch of ivory leather arched around a freeform glass-topped table; what appeared to be two authentic Picassos overlooked a grand piano. The paintings, a scattering of throw pillows and a large aquarium built into one wall were the only real color in the room of ecru and white with metallic touches. A round area rug muted footsteps. Soft music—an opera?—played in some sort of surround sound.
“You bet, the rescue of that woman—what did I hear she was? Oh, yeah, the ecology photographer,” Verdugo said, his voice naturally gruff but bearing no foreign accent as Cole had expected. “Any word of her sister or the missing boat yet?”
“Unfortunately, no,” Cole said, noting that Verdugo had twice said he’d “heard” something, as if he had eyes and ears out getting information for him. Did the man watch TV, or did his lackeys keep him informed? Or did he somehow know things firsthand?
“I woulda volunteered this boat, but I didn’t want to get in the way of the official search. That storm must have capsized the other sister. Man, can you imagine surfacing from a routine dive and you’re all alone? Is Scotch all right? Neat or on the rocks?”
“Rocks would be fine.” Cole was going to ask him where he’d heard the twins were out on a routine dive, since he hadn’t heard or seen that in the media, but Verdugo pointed at a huge metal bowl and spoke again.
“Have some caramel popcorn with it. People think I’m nuts, but they go together great. Love this stuff,” he added, and grinned to show perfect teeth—probably perfectly false—as he tossed some popcorn in the air and adeptly caught it with his mouth.
“So look,” he went on, pouring drinks behind a metal and white leather bar, “I assume you’ve decided to take my offer to panel the casino ship, or you surely would not be here. Right?”
“I’m here to discuss the possibility.”
“Okay, then,” Verdugo said, and pointed again to the bowl of popcorn as he carried the drinks toward the couch. Cole leaned over, took a small handful of the popcorn and ate some. He studied Dom Verdugo as he handed him a drink and sat on the curved couch, facing him across the glass table.
The man wore tailored Bermuda shorts and a muted silk print shirt, tails out. He was barefooted and deeply tanned, perhaps not as much from the sun as from his obvious Latin heritage; his hooked nose looked Italian and his narrowed, deep-set eyes were just plain hawk-like. He led some small talk, mostly about Cole’s work. The guy was as smooth as the Scotch, and Cole had to remind himself that Verdugo bore watching. He wondered if he had been watching—or “hearing about”—the twins and knew about their coming report, but he couldn’t figure out a way to broach that subject without giving his intentions away. He was probably just overly suspicious, since he’d become so attached to Briana so quickly and, damn it, deeply.
After his first sip, he swirled the Scotch in his glass, chewed on his popcorn and tried not to stare at the beautiful wood paneling on the grand piano. From here it looked like Mexican cocobolo wood, and that stuff was difficult to harvest. Verdugo’s wealth—and the additional fortune he could no doubt make from getting a toehold in southwest Florida with lucrative gambling cruises—made Cole realize he’d probably never harm anyone directly. He’d just have one of his hey-boys do it.
“Actually, I’d like a chance to see the cruise-ship salon before I accept your offer,” he told Verdugo, since the other man had started to talk as if Cole’s employment was a done deal.
“Money’s not an issue.”
Cole swallowed hard at that thought. “But my doing an excellent job for you is. I can see from the stunning surroundings here you have excellent taste.”
“Nothing but the best,” he said, and lifted his glass as if in toast to Cole. “And that’s what the Fun ’n’ Sun Casino Cruises will bring to this area—jobs, the best new restaurants and upscale stores, even more luxury yachts that need rare wood paneling, eh? Our critics call my other floating casinos ‘pay for play’ boats and ‘cruises to nowhere,’ but I beg to differ. We give the customer what he or she wants—craps, blackjack, slots, booze, live entertainment, lots of laughs, you name it. It’s not a cruise to nowhere, no way, but a cruise to fun and profit for everyone.”
You name it...a cruise to nowhere. The words caught in Cole’s mind. He agreed to drive to Miami by Monday to see the cruise ship’s salon and decide whether or not to take the job. If Dom Verdugo could give his customers anything they wanted, he could surely give himself the same. How badly did this man want to stop a negative report on the local environment from coming out? Cole wondered. He’d never tell Bree, but since Daria and Mermaids II were still missing from a storm they should have been able to ride out, he expected the worst. At any rate, if he took the job, he planned to keep his eyes and ears open around Verdugo.
As he reached his car, he saw Bree’s lights were still on. Surely her visitor had left by now. Cole leaned his arms on the top of his car and gazed out over the sailboats and motor craft nodding from their perches on the inky bay. A single small vessel was heading out past the lighted buoys with its fore and aft lights glowing until the blackness of the gulf devoured it.
Cole shook his head and shuddered. Had Daria Devon somehow taken a cruise to nowhere?
* * *
It was almost ten-thirty when Amelia heard Ben drive into the garage. She met him in her nightgown the minute he came in through the laundry room.
“She’s not with you,” she greeted him. “I knew she wouldn’t want to come stay with me—even now.”
“I tried, but I guess my powers of persuasion only work in a courtroom. She’s obsessed with finding Daria, and I can’t blame her for that, at least.” He walked into the kitchen. Amelia hurried barefoot behind him. Flopping his briefcase on the counter, he kissed her cheek. “You’ve been crying again.”
“Of course I’ve been crying. Daria’s my sister, too, not just Briana’s. I should go to her, sleep on her sofa, keep an eye on her. I’ve got to know what she’s planning. You never know what she’ll do.”
“She seemed totally distraught one minute, but full steam ahead the next. When I was leaving, she told me the guy who picked her up in his sailboat is going to help her run a search with other divers tomorrow. It sounds to me as if he’s keeping close tabs on her. I thought they didn’t really know each other before the storm, but they sound...close.”
“Actually, they had met once briefly,” she said. “He’s her rescuing angel,” she muttered, “and I hope not her avenging angel.”
“What’s that about revenge?”
“I didn’t say revenge. It’s nothing.”
Ben reached for the door of the fridge but turned back and put his hands gently on her shoulders. “Bree’s really going to need you when they find Daria.”
“Find her body, you mean.”
Her stomach cramped. Tears blurred Ben to make two of him—like the two of them, little Bree and Daria, always the center of attention, of Dad’s world, of everything in the damned universe. Even her boys were ecstatic when her sisters came over—no doubt to see them, not her—as if Santa and the Easter Bunny and every Star Wars character they adored had all rolled into one and come to visit.
“Yeah, I’m afraid I do mean find her body,” he said with a sigh as he pulled her into his arms. “The odds aren’t good they’ll find Daria afloat on a piece of board or shipwrecked on one of the Ten Thousand Islands.”
“I’ve been racking my brain for what could have happened to her,” she said, leaning against him with her head turned on his shoulder. “Even crazy thoughts like maybe someone found her on the boat alone and kidnapped her, but then wouldn’t we have received a call about ransom? Or what if those horrible people who steal those poor women for labor and sex—”
“Human traffickers?” he interrupted. “Hell, I’d love to prosecute one of those modern-day slave traders who import girls from South America and force them into labor or prostitution. That’s been growing in Miami, and now they’re avoiding law enforcement across the state by coming in here at night, since this coast is darker and less populated. No, I don’t think those boats come in during the day.”
“But if they were waiting offshore to land and then the storm was so bad...”
“That’s too much of a long shot, honey,” he said, hugging her tight. “I’ll bet if there’s a culprit, it’s the storm. Still, we’ve got to hold out hope with Bree. She’s tough and she’s determined.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, pulling away to get a tissue to wipe her eyes and blow her nose. “She’s that and more. You admire her—everyone does. Daria was even more willful, just for the heck of it, but Bree always had some burning purpose. They were—are—different, as well as being like the two peas in the proverbial pod.”
When he stood there, staring at her and frowning as if she were a defendant who would blurt out her guilt to him à la Perry Mason, she pushed past him to open the fridge and take out a carton of orange juice for him.
“Not that,” he said.
“You want some fresh squeezed?”
“Just hand me the soda. I need something a little stiffer than a jolt of Vitamin C.”
“You’ve been busy at work,” she said, trying to change the subject so she could get hold of her emotions.
“Actually, it’s been deadly dull. I could use some face time on TV and some coverage in the papers. Hate to think I’m going to have to pay for all that this time around in the election.”
“Your name is well-known. People respect you, and they’ll vote what they trust.”
“What they trust?” he said almost bitterly as he got a bottle of whiskey from the top cupboard above the fridge. “I don’t think most people trust anyone on a ballot anymore, so I hope and pray they don’t put me in the politician category. Let Josh Austin and Marla Sherborne fight that stigma as well as each other. Prosecutors are public servants. Hell, I could make ten times as much in private practice.”
“I know you could, but we do just fine. You love what you’re doing. It’s your calling in life.”
“You and the kids come first,” he corrected her, but she wasn’t certain she believed him. If her own father hadn’t really loved her, how could Ben?
He mixed himself a stiff drink while she stared at herself in the window above the sink with only dark night beyond. It was like looking at her reflection in a black mirror. She did resemble the twins somewhat. If she’d let her hair go natural, she’d look even more like them. But she looked worn down by worry: guilt weighed heavy on her heart and mind and soul. She felt she was in a stupor, like she was slogging through water—damn, why did she have to think of it that way? She should never have gone to see Daria alone, thinking she could divide and conquer the two of them. And then it had suddenly gone so, so bad.