Without a Grave

FOURTEEN

DO YOU LIKE FISH? WELL, HE LIKES YOU TOO…Jaws (1975)

After seeing Henry’s photographs, I knew what I had to do.

Conditions had to be perfect: high sun, calm sea, gentle wind, and the tide as near to low as possible. That these conditions coincided with lunch hour at the Tamarind Tree Resort and Marina was a welcome plus. Jaime and Gabriele would be busy at the restaurant, and their workers would have abandoned their backhoes for lunch somewhere in the shade.

Wearing my bathing suit and a long-sleeved T-shirt, I waved to my husband from the living room doorway. He was thoroughly occupied on a marathon Skyping session with Brent.

‘I’m off for a swim. Want to come?’

I waited for Paul to look up from his laptop, holding my breath, hoping he’d be too busy consulting with Brent to say ‘yes.’

Paul put Brent on mute for a moment and said, ‘Where to?’

‘I’m going to collect more sand dollars.’ In way of illustration, I raised my bucket. ‘I’m thinking of turning them into Christmas tree ornaments.’

That part of it, at least, was true. I wasn’t much of a do-it-yourselfer, but even I could thread a red ribbon through one of the five holes on the sand dollar’s shell and tie the two ends of the ribbon into a decorative knot.

Paul waggled his fingers. ‘Have fun!’

I blew him a kiss and headed off.

Frank and Sally had last been seen in Poinciana Cove, so that’s where Pro Bono and I headed. Poinciana Cove was very like the cove Molly and I had explored earlier, but a bit more was going on ashore. The runway was still under construction to the left, marked by the addition of a windsock. To the right, a construction crane was poised over an extension to the Tamarind Tree Marina. I’d heard they planned to add thirty slips.

There were no condos on shore – yet – but three cottages had been built for the Mueller family on Poinciana Point, a bluff overlooking the cove.

I throttled down and pulled as close to shore as I dared, skirting the edge of an extensive reef a mere fifty feet from the beach. To my left, run-off from runway construction was obvious. To my right, where the marina extension would soon be, mangroves were already being ripped from the shore. A backhoe was parked there, and from the look of it, his job was only half done.

Repair had begun on a section of the old Island Fantasy pier. A barge carrying a piledriver was lashed to the middle of the pier at a spot where the row of new pilings ended. Each had been capped with white plastic dunce caps. The clean white of the new planks stood out in sharp contrast to the gray of the seasoned wood.

A sign posted at the end of the pier said, ‘Private Property. Keep Off. Unauthorized Vessels Will Be Towed,’ so I guided Pro Bono to the edge of the reef and dropped the anchor in about ten feet of water.

I eased my feet into my swim fins, put my mask over my face, and slipped overboard.

It was immediately clear that the reef off Poinciana Point was in distress. Beneath me grew a brain coral the size of a Volkswagen. Normally a mustardy brown, large sections of the coral had died, leaving behind a bleached white skeleton. Elkhorn showed evidence of white band disease, working its way up from the base of the coral in ever-widening stripes. Everywhere, algae flourished. The only creatures that seemed happy about it were the parrot fish, scraping the algae off the skeletons with their teeth.

Broken twigs of acropora.

Purple sea fans brown with fungus.

I wanted to weep.

Half buried in the sand, a cable the thickness of my wrist extended from shore and disappeared into the infinite blue of the Sea of Abaco. I decided to follow it ashore. I swam over an oil drum, abandoned and rusted out, empty except for a squirrelfish pecking away, and a bathroom sink, ugly, but not a particular threat to sea life.

A sea turtle swam by, checked me out, then continued on its way, surfacing for a moment to gulp air, then dive again.

The cable dead ended at the pier. Mueller’s crew had done a piss-poor job of clean up. As I snorkeled along the length of the structure, I could distinctly see ruins not all that obvious from above. Ragged netting, rotten and sunken pilings, the upside-down hull of a wooden boat, that might have been casualties of a hurricane. Clearly there was a lot of work still to be done. No wonder Mueller brought visitors into the resort on the marina side of the development.

A small, eco-friendly marina for twenty boats up to 200 feet in length. I smiled grimly. Everything about that phrase was an oxymoron.

I surfaced for a moment, clutching the tatty remains of an old fishing net to keep the tide from carrying me sideways. I heard the growl of an engine starting up – a chainsaw? – then continued working my way along the pier, looking for something, anything even remotely suspicious.

The pipe I had been following appeared not to have been used in some time; parts of it lay in pieces, like elbow macaroni. Sea grass flourished on the sand bottom. Nearer shore, I noticed rectangular patterns in the grass, each roughly the size of a carry-on suitcase. Something had lain there long enough to smother the sea grass, and recently, too.

I surfaced under the dock, breathing fast. Is that what Frank had seen? What he’d died for? I held on to a piling, thinking furiously. The first thing that came to mind was drugs, but I’d never seen a package of drugs that hadn’t come from a pharmacy. Were they small as a brick? Large as a footlocker? And could they be waterproofed?

I had taken a breath to go down for a second look when I felt it. Vibrations. Somebody was heavy-footing it along the pier.

Hugging the piling, I eased around under the pier just as his shadow passed overhead. Through gaps in the planking I could see the zigzag tread of a boat shoe, a bit of bare ankle. I hoped he couldn’t see me.

My visitor began whistling tunelessly. ‘Here you go,’ he said. There was a whoosh followed by a red-tinged splash as a bucketful of mahi-mahi heads, backbones and tails hit the water not eight feet away from where I hung, still clinging to the rotting net.

Gross. I had picked a bad time to explore. I loved eating fish, but getting so up close and personal to their remains made me want to barf. One particularly large fish head stared at me reproachfully, as if chastising me for all the seafood meals I’d enjoyed both now and in the future, as it floated on the surface for a moment, then spiraled slowly to the bottom.

Drawn by some underwater radar, schools of yellow jacks and smallmouth grunts flashed in out of nowhere to chow down. A nurse shark, brownish-grey and about eight feet long, moseyed over from where he’d been dozing in the mangrove, joined by another one, slightly smaller. Then a third joined the banquet. Instinctively, I moved away. Nurse sharks are relatively harmless – they prefer to suck down their prey rather than bite it – but the mouths on these fellows looked as big as aircraft carriers from where I was hanging, and I wasn’t sure how keen their eyesight was.

The whistling stopped.

Something was wrong. The nurse sharks sensed it, too. Ignoring the free lunch, the trio shied away. Had they spotted me?

It’s a common misconception that shark attacks are preceded by ‘dah-da, dah-da, dah-da, dah-da,’ grating strings and blaring horns, accelerating rapidly as the shark gets closer.

Not true. It’s silent, eerily so.

A fish I recognized immediately sleeked into view – a reef shark, his skin flashing silver in the sun. There are several varieties of reef shark – white tip, black tip, gray and silver – but when they’re swimming in your direction at five hundred miles per hour, you don’t stop to check your Fish Watcher’s Field Guide to find out which kind. As I hung there, frozen in fear, he circled the pier, coming so close to me at one point that I could have touched his fin.

I had no intention of sticking around and becoming the main course among the sea of floating hors d’oeuvres, but I didn’t want to call attention to myself.

What had I read in the survivor’s guide?

One. Remain calm. (Easier said than done.)

Two. Don’t splash around like an injured or dying fish. (Noted.)

Three. If a shark approaches, strike it repeatedly with a balled-up fist on its most sensitive parts, the eyes and the gills. Uh, right. The eye in question was passing me again, black as wet coal, round as a silver dollar.

I’d seen sharks in aquariums, but they never looked so big. The shark made another circuit, looming bigger, ever bigger. Blood pounded in my ears. I balled up my fist, holding it close to my chest, getting ready.

The shark shot by, so close I felt the backwash. Its tail touched my leg, scraping along my thigh like sandpaper. His jaw yawned open, his black eye closed, and two yellow jacks that had been wrangling over a mahi-mahi head disappeared in a single snap. Last time they’d scrap over a meal.

While the shark was busy swallowing the jacks, I took the fourth piece of advice from the handbook – I turned and slowly swam away.

I didn’t look back until I reached Pro Bono, hoisted myself up on the rope ladder and threw myself in.

When I dared to look back at the pier, the water was churning as the shark finished off what was left of his feast.

The man still stood at the end of the dock. It was Jaime Mueller.

And I could hear him laughing.