True to his word, Ben sent a CSI tech to Bree’s place that night. Foolishly, she had been expecting someone like she’d seen on the various TV shows featuring forensic scientists, but it was a young, plain, overweight woman. Her ID card hanging on a bright blue cord around her neck read Marilyn Davis but she asked Bree to call her Mari.
“You’ll see this makes a bit of a mess,” Mari said as Bree led her toward Daria’s bedroom, “but I want to lift a lot of prints, then eliminate yours. If you have something you’re sure your sister touched—a glass in the bathroom you haven’t cleaned yet, something like that, I’ll eliminate hers, too. Oh, this place has really been tossed, hasn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so. I had searched it earlier but someone else did, too, and those are the prints we hope to identify.”
“Did you report the B and E—breaking and entering?” she asked as she tugged on latex gloves and got to work, leaving small pools of dark powder here and there.
“No, because several people had keys. Evidently nothing of value has been taken that I could report.”
“Okeydoke,” she said, her voice darkening with disapproval. Bree almost told her that Ben hadn’t suggested reporting it either, but it was none of her business.
“You know,” Mari said, perhaps eager to change the subject, “I’ve never dusted a place where identical twins were involved. A lot of people figure they have identical prints, but that’s not so.”
“We’ve been asked that more than once over the years,” Bree told her as she leaned in the entry to the bathroom and watched her work. “The prints are supposed to have similarities, though.”
“True. Identicals have the same genetic makeup and their DNA is virtually indistinguishable, but fingerprints are not completely a genetic characteristic. They’re partly determined by each separate embryo’s environment in the uterus. Their ultimate shape can be influenced by position in the womb and a few other things I can’t recall from my forensic classes.”
Bree went into the bathroom to get Daria’s drinking glass and gingerly took Daria’s mascara and powder from her makeup drawer. She could see visible prints on both plastic cases. Many more cosmetics were here than Bree had recalled her using, including seven tubes of lipstick, when she almost never wore that. But she was getting used to being surprised about her sister. There had been a man in her life she had not wanted to tell Bree about. She only hoped that she hadn’t done something that kept Daria from confiding in her. Surely, it was something about the man himself that made Daria remain silent, and she needed to find out what that was.
She rifled through the rest of the cosmetics drawer but found nothing. Perhaps she’d find nothing, prove nothing. She was becoming more and more certain that someone had harmed—killed—Daria, and that now, somehow, she’d become a target, too. Her stomach fluttered in fear, but she beat the feeling down as she put the items in a towel and took them to Mari.
She stared at the thin white gloves encasing Mari’s busy hands. Maybe the person who’d searched this room had worn gloves, too.
“I appreciate your taking care of this so quickly,” Bree said, leaning in the doorway again. She couldn’t stand the silence in the room as Mari moved about like a ghost.
“Orders from the top.”
“My brother-in-law, Ben Westcott?”
“Him and some other big brass.”
“Josh Austin?”
Bending intently over a brass pull of the dresser, she shrugged her shoulders, but admitted, “The whole CSI unit is amazed at how fast the autopsy report was completed and released. At least, most of it.”
“What do you mean, most of it?”
Mari straightened. Her eyes widened, as if she realized she’d overstepped, however much Bree knew about Ben and Josh pulling strings.
“Probable cause of death was the key thing, that’s all.”
“But what else wasn’t released yet?”
“Forensics differs with different situations. I’m sure you’ll see everything in black and white soon.”
She’d obviously clammed up. Was there something else about Daria’s death? Surely she had not been beaten or assaulted, because no one could pass that off as an accident. What else could an autopsy reveal? Could she have been hiding some sort of serious, even terminal, illness? Maybe if word of that got out it might look like she’d committed suicide and neither Ben nor Josh would want that. No, impossible. People with fatal diseases didn’t make appointments to get their teeth whitened. It all came back to the fact that Daria would never have left Bree alone out in the gulf. But, a little voice taunted her, the woman who died that day was not the woman you thought you knew.
As soon as Mari finished and left with her collection of prints, Bree locked the place up tight and drove to Ben and Amelia’s. Good. Lights were still on in their spacious home. She hoped Ben hadn’t gone to bed, because she planned to question him about the rest of the autopsy report.
She knocked instead of ringing the bell. The porch light clicked on, then off, and Ben opened the door. She gasped when she saw he held not only the evening paper but a pistol at his side.
“Don’t mind this,” he said, putting it down on the table in the hall. “When I answer the door late at night, it’s just a precaution. In my position—”
“In your position,” she interrupted, following him into the den, “you tend to play God.”
“What? Did the CSI person come? What are you talking ab—”
“Don’t blame her, but she let something slip about the rest of the autopsy report—you know, the rest of the story.”
Leaning over the back of his tall, leather chair, he frowned. Hands on her hips, Bree faced him.
“What about it?” he asked. “You and Amelia didn’t need to see all those chemical readouts of blood, bladder and stomach tests, ad infinitum, or diagrams of dissections. She wasn’t on drugs, she wasn’t drunk, she wasn’t ill, so—”
“I want to see it, all of it.”
“A lot of that stuff takes days. I thought it best if the family got her body back and had her laid to rest. The county medical examiner could have held her body for up to ten days when it needed to be embalmed, not just refrigerated, especially in this hot weather. There. You wanted the facts, you’ve got them. It was hard enough as is and didn’t need to be dragged out.”
“I’d like to drag the truth out of you!”
“Now look,” he said, pointing at her and raising his voice before he lowered it again. “My goal in all this—to protect Amelia first, and then you.”
“Amelia, fine, but you have no right to make decisions for me or for Daria. And, of course, none of this has a thing to do with protecting your reputation, especially with the election less than two months away.”
“That didn’t even enter my mind.”
“Let’s say I partly believe that, but I want to see the autopsy report. Do you have a copy here?”
“No.”
“Then I’m going to the Collier County Medical Examiner’s office first thing tomorrow, before I dive the Trade Wreck, and demand to see—”
“All right, damn it,” he said, and finally came around his chair to slump in it. Bree was horrified to see how ashen and haggard he suddenly looked. It was as if he’d been drained of fight and energy. “You asked for this,” he said, “so just sit down and brace yourself. Swear to me you won’t spring this on Amelia, because she’s really shaken—grieving for all she’s lost over the years, as well as for Daria.”
Bree perched on the edge of the smaller leather chair facing his. As she gripped her hands together in her lap, every nerve in her body tensed.
“The autopsy revealed Daria was about seven weeks’ pregnant.”
A great silence crashed into the room. Bree could hear her heartbeat, feel her blood rushing through her veins. Yet her mind went blank. At first those words seemed to bounce off her, as if they were in a foreign language. She didn’t move, she didn’t breathe. Strangely, the first thought she had was that she now knew why Daria had avoided diving these last few weeks—why she’d lied that she had a bad toothache the day of the storm. It wasn’t wise for pregnant women to scuba, since too much water pressure could harm a fetus. Daria had known she was pregnant and had wanted to protect her baby!
Bree wanted to scream, but she amazed herself by speaking calmly—it seemed to be another person’s voice. “Can a DNA test ID the father?”
“A DNA test of the fetus would indicate paternity—if you had the father’s to match with it. But I didn’t want her body dissected in that way. And having Daria disinterred now that she’s buried would be crazy and cruel.”
She wanted to argue that he was the one pushing for a quick autopsy and burial, but she said only, “It might lead us to her killer.”
“Bree, stop it! It would also make all the papers and stir up scuttlebutt. I—I take it you didn’t know.”
“Of course I didn’t know! Not about a pregnancy and not about who could be the father. Why would I know something like that? I’m only her roommate, twin sister, lifelong friend, the person closest to her in the entire universe—at least, I used to think so.”
She was tempted to tell him that she’d been attacked at the Gator Watering Hole, but she was coming not to trust Ben. Even if he’d sent the CSI tech, he hadn’t urged her to report the B and E, and now the report of the prints would go to him before Bree saw it. He had claimed that protecting his own reputation played no part in all this, but he’d just blurted out he was trying to avoid scuttlebutt. He must have realized that the unborn baby—her niece or nephew, who had died with Daria—was a motive for murder, depending on what the murderer had to protect. Ben was the county prosecutor, for heaven’s sake! But he was trying to gloss this over, stonewall things. Just to spare Amelia and her, as he had said?
She glared at him, unable to hide her anger. “Ben, you know very well that whoever’s child it was, whoever she was meeting secretly, could have killed her.”
“In the middle of the gulf in a storm?” he challenged. “You said you didn’t hear a motor. Maybe he walked on water or swam out three miles.”
“I never thought I’d live to see you obstruct justice,” she accused. She rose and started out of the den. Ben jumped up and grabbed her arm, swinging her back around.
“And you’re going off the deep end!” he accused, his grip tightening.
“Last time you said I was making waves and now I’ve gone off the deep end. You’ve got lots of deep, rough water on the brain. Now let me go! I’m devastated and horrified and furious, yes, at her—and you—and at myself for not knowing. I’m going home to bed to sob my eyes out—again.”
She shook loose from him. “Is there anything else I should know?” she demanded.
“Just that even the surprising fact of her pregnancy does not warrant your demand that this become a murder case. I’ll let you know about the fingerprints, and I’m monitoring things.”
“Oh, I see you are,” she said, and strode for the front door. As he caught up and opened it for her, she added, “Will you tell Amelia?”
“Since you’ve taken it out of my hands, yes.”
His pistol lay on the hall table. She had the strangest sense she should take it with her, for her own protection. Just like those sharks, something was swimming just below the darkening surface of her life, but she couldn’t tell what.
When she finally fell into a fitful sleep that night, Bree sank into the sea. Its black depths reached for her, powerful and violent, and pulled her down, down.
At the bottom of the gulf, the stormy currents swept her into a glass coffin, where she held her breath and tried to fight her way out. She had no scuba tanks, no regulator, no air. Where was her mask?
Water filled the glass coffin. Her hair drifted in her face like her dying turtle grass. It stuck to the skin over her eyes, blinding her like the water in a ditch. She struggled to see.
She raised her hands to get out, to fight against being drowned, against being attacked by a man with a raised wrench. But the wrench was shaped like a concrete shell just outside her glass coffin. People waved from outside. Her parents. Ted. Daria, with a baby floating in her arms.
Someone else appeared on the other side of the glass. Sam, smiling through his mask, happy to see her trapped. He shouted at her, but her good hearing had gone and her hair half blinded her.
Daria, where are you? Daria…who scuttled the ship? Who drowned you?
Scuttlebutt. Ben was outside, too, shouting that he was trying to protect the family from scuttlebutt. He, too, wore a diving mask that hid his face, but she could see he had his gun. He was not pointing it at her, but at something in the depths, the dark depths of the sea….
Where was Cole? Cole could come to save her.
Though she was trying hard to hold her breath—her last breath—she screamed Cole’s name. A man in a black mask wanted her to drown, but someone was shaking her and she shoved her hair away and sucked in a huge breath.
“Bree. Bree! Sweetheart, you’re having a nightmare,” the deep voice said. “Wake up, it’s Cole.”
It was real. He was here, smoothing her hair away from her face, which was wet with tears.
Yes, she remembered now. She’d called him after she drove back from Ben’s. Cole had come over and insisted on sleeping on her sofa. Last time she’d had a nightmare, Amelia had run to her, but this was Cole. Thank God, it was Cole.
He held her until she stopped trembling. “Want to talk about it?” he whispered.
“No, it’s too bizarre. I just want it to go away, to forget it, forget everything.”
He wore his shorts but no shirt. His bare chest seemed so broad with its expanse of muscled skin and crisp, curly hair. He felt cool compared to her.
“Running away,” he said, “is not how you’ve been handling any of this. You know that would never work.”
“I know. I know. I’m so glad you’re here.”
“After all this is settled, I’d like us to spend time together of a different kind.”
She hugged him. “Yes.”
“I’m trying really hard not to take advantage of the fact that you need me now. We hardly know each other under normal circumstances.”
She knew he was trying to talk himself out of climbing into bed with her, but she didn’t want to make that easy for him. She held him tight. Sure, she was insane, dancing on the edge of the same sort of desire that must have hit Daria so hard she had to hide things. She clung tighter to him.
“Bree, sweetheart, I can hardly breathe.”
“That’s the way it was in my nightmare. Sorry.”
She loosened her grip on him slightly and sat up straighter, though they still leaned against each other. Since Bree had heard Ben say Daria was pregnant, nothing had sunk in. Even in explaining it all to Cole, it had not seemed real. The sister she would have sworn she knew seemed to slip further away than even death could take her.
Now Bree fought to clear her head. First thing tomorrow, she had to check the Trade Wreck sea grass meadow, photograph its sorry state one last time before she found the strength to give her report without Daria by her side. But Cole would be with her during the dive and there at the Clear the Gulf Commission. Why couldn’t she clear her head and forget the nightmare that clung to her as hard as she had to Cole?
She shifted slightly away from him and swiped at her slick cheeks. He handed her a tissue from the box of them on her bedside table. Nodding her thanks, she blew her nose and wiped her eyes, then took a drink from the glass of water he handed her.
“A part of me,” she admitted, “does want to run away. Take a cruise, drive down to the Keys and sit on the beach, but anywhere I could see the water would haunt me. Maybe I should take Josh and Nikki up on their invitation to have Mark Denton fly me across the state and stare at nothing but boring sugarcane fields, as Nikki put it.”
“Do you mean it?”
“No. I’ve got to see our sea grass project through, even if it will create a lot of fallout. That turtle grass is in worse shape than I am. For Daria and the future of everything around here, I’ve got to see it all through. The meadow is dying from toxic pollution—and that means the entire biological chain and this whole paradise are endangered. Sorry. It seems I’m delivering my report already.” She tried to smile through her tears. “I’m sorry I woke you up.”
“You didn’t. Despite the hum of the AC, every sound outside jolts me awake.”
“You’re too tall for the sofa.”
“I’m fine. You think you can sleep?”
“I’ve got to. I can’t go into that meeting looking like a witch.”
“Not you, not ever, even now. My mermaid is like those beautiful sirens that lured Odysseus’s ship right into them.”
“To crash into the rocks, you mean.”
He kissed the top of her mussed head and slid off the bed, reluctantly, she could tell. Yes, she needed him, and she was pretty sure she loved him, too. But had Daria thought that and made some sort of colossal mistake with a man she desired? A fatal error?