The night before, I had studied Stacey’s nautical chart. She’d embarrassed me with her comments about the old map I’d been using. Depths on the laminated chart were recorded in fathoms. One fathom equals six feet. Baker Island had once been a hillock on a plain before the last glaciers melted and the ocean flooded the coast. The sea bottom here was something like sixty fathoms deep.
I stood atop the granite block. Dragged down by ballast, McLeary had already disappeared into the blue-green depths. I tossed my Beretta on the grass and kicked off my kayaking shoes.
Klesko had lagged me on the trail. Now he called to me, imploring me not to do what I was about to do.
I dove into the surf, hoping my leap carried me far enough from any submerged boulders.
The sudden cold was immediate and all-encompassing. My skin seemed to tighten all over, and I had to squeeze my throat shut to suppress the reflexive gasp that is part of the shock response. My scrotum cramped around my testicles like a closed fist.
The salt water burned my eyes and blurred my vision. The density of plankton in the Gulf of Maine stops sunlight from penetrating more than a few yards beneath the surface. The water got dark fast.
Strong currents were already carrying me away from the island. The rising tide was sweeping me toward the mainland, but there were also invisible eddies that wanted to tumble me head over foot. In open-water swimming, it’s usually three things that kill you: cold, exhaustion, and underestimating hydraulic forces.
Nor was I a practiced free diver. All I knew to do was hold my breath, while my heart rate quickened and the pressure built in my inner ears. I made a spear of my body, aimed ever downward.
From the start, I had to fight my body’s natural buoyancy. When I scuba dived, the trick was easy enough: you empty the air from your lungs, only slowly refilling them from your tank as you reach your desired depth. But I didn’t have a molecule of oxygen to spare.
I kicked and kicked, already feeling as if this unconsidered plunge would result in my own suicide.
As I descended, I refused to look up or retreat. My stinging eyes perceived the silvery movement of a ball of baitfish. The school parted so that I might pass through.
McLeary was dressed in blue, which might as well have been nautical camouflage, but her backpack was a fluorescent-yellow Sea to Summit dry bag. The weight of the stones inside meant she probably hadn’t drifted as far as I had from the granite block.
Describing my thoughts and actions in these terms doesn’t remotely describe the extent to which my subconscious guided me.
All I knew to do was kick hard and fight the increasing urge to seek air at the surface. I squinted through slitted eyelids, searching, searching. When I saw a yellow shape behind and beneath me, I felt that I might be falling prey to a hallucination.
But what else could I do but power toward it, using my arms to fight the currents pushing me away from the island?
McLeary had come to rest on a granite shelf. Her eyes were open, her lips were parted, her hair was unrestrained. The individual strands moved like the writhing of glass eels.
Medusa.
She’d lost one of her Bean boots. I managed to grab hold of her bony ankle and tried to pull. But she wouldn’t rise with me. I could feel my lungs issuing stern demands on my central nervous system.
Breathe in now, they said.
Instead, I crawled my way down McLeary’s weighted body until I’d reached her torso. She lay flat atop her backpack, which was held in place by the stones inside. Wasting precious oxygen, I tugged at one of the straps caught around her armpits before I realized that I needed to pull her arm free instead.
As soon as I did, her limp body twisted sideways, and the other arm slipped from under the pinioning strap. I thought she might rise, pulling me like a cork to the surface. But her lungs were empty of air, and she drifted like the lifeless thing she seemed to have become.
My left hand gripped her wrist so hard I might have cracked her radial bones. I planted my bare heels on the ledge, feeling the sharp barnacles like broken glass, then pushed off.
I hadn’t looked up since I’d gone in the water. For a split second, I found myself disoriented by the darkness. I had expected that the sunlight would guide me back to the surface. Divers perish every year because, in the weightless dark, they confuse up with down. But I knew enough to trust my body’s buoyancy. The climb couldn’t have taken more than ten seconds, but they were the longest ten seconds of my life.
I was shocked when my head finally popped above the waves. I exhaled and inhaled, swallowing seawater in the process.
I was surrounded by frothing chop that made it impossible to get my bearings. Turning, I spotted human-shaped figures atop a wall of boulders, and I realized, to my horror, that I’d been carried many yards from the island.
I tried a sidestroke, towing McLeary behind me, but it was that nightmare sensation of not seeming to advance.
Then I caught sight of a man swimming toward me. Klesko kept his face down and only breathed every few strokes. I tried to meet him halfway, but my thighs and quads were sapped, and it was all I could do to tread water.
“You OK?” Steve asked, breathing hard.
“Yeah,” I answered.
“Give her to me.”
When I handed McCleary’s limp form to him, I saw the recognition pass over his face. This was no longer a rescue.
“You sure you can make it?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
He was off again, towing his burden back to the island.
I spent half a minute refilling my lungs, doing my best to tread water without drifting farther from land. Then I started back. My own strokes were sloppy. But I made slow and steady progress.
When I reached the boulder wall at last, I found two hands outstretched. They belonged to Sheriff Santum. He was very strong. For an instant, our faces were as close together as lovers. Then he let go of me.
Shivering, I staggered clear of the berm and flopped onto my back on the pebbled ground. I watched my rib cage rise and fall, and for some reason it made me think of my wolf back home. The seawater I’d swallowed found its way back up in a fit of coughing. Someone shouted that I needed a blanket. Finally, I felt recovered enough to sit up.
On the grass beyond the berm, Maine state medical examiner Walt Kitteridge knelt over Maeve McLeary, performing CPR. The chest compressions caused bloody froth bubbles to spill from the corners of her mouth. Kitteridge abandoned his lifesaving efforts quickly. But what would you expect of a physician who lived in a morgue?
Maeve McLeary was dead and headed for an appointment on the autopsy table.