Star could slip into a wet suit as easily as putting on a glove. It was a three-second job for her, bad leg and all. Her secret: liquid dish detergent to lubricate her skin. The thin rubber material slid right on.
She made a face, still smarting over Dr. Gallagher’s assumption that she couldn’t possibly be a diver. People were such idiots about handicaps. They stared at you, pitied you, tried to smooth the way for you. For Star Ling, that limp was normalcy. A mild case of cerebral palsy, that was all — a certain amount of weakness on the left side. She couldn’t remember, of course, but her very first step had demonstrated that limp. It was a part of her and always had been.
It wasn’t nothing. She didn’t delude herself about that. She wouldn’t win any footraces or dance with the Bolshoi. But in the water, everything changed. There was no weakness, no asymmetry. She had felt that on her first trip to the county pool, age four. And she still felt it every time she slipped off the dive platform of a boat. The laws of physics that held her back on dry land melted away in a rush of familiarity and comfort that seemed to say, “You’re home.”
Her eyes wandered aft, where Captain Vanover’s lone crew member was hefting heavy scuba tanks as if they weighed nothing. Menasce Gérard was a hulking six-foot-five-inch native dive guide who went by the puzzling nickname “English.” No one seemed less English than English, a young West Indian man whose first language was French. Secretly, Star had assigned him a different moniker — Mr. Personality. The guy was just about the most humorless human being she’d ever encountered.
They’d been on the boat for nearly half an hour, and he had yet to crack a smile. In fact, she wasn’t sure she could confirm that he had teeth, since he rarely opened his mouth at all. He answered most questions with a series of gestures, shrugs, and grunts.
That didn’t stop Adriana from spewing a line of chitchat at him. Maybe that was how things worked at whatever snooty country club her family belonged to. You kept talking without bothering to notice that you weren’t getting any answers.
“But why do they call you English?” Adriana burbled on. “You’re French, right? I mean, people from Saint-Luc are French citizens.”
English barely shrugged as he checked the pressure gauges on the cylinders of compressed air.
“Your name isn’t English,” she continued. “I just don’t understand why anyone would want to call you that.”
“Will you give it a rest?” Star groaned. “I once knew a guy named Four Eyes who didn’t wear glasses. So they call him English. What’s it to you?”
Adriana wasn’t ready to drop the subject yet. “Well, were the English ever on Saint-Luc?”
At that moment, the enormous guide chose to break his silence. “Yes — and no.”
“Yes and no?” Dante queried.
“Saint-Luc, this is always French. But, alors, in the old times—” He shrugged again. “Yes and no.”
“He means everybody was everywhere in the Caribbean, way back,” Vanover supplied. “Pirate crews came from all nationalities. Merchants too. There were raids, shipwrecks. You could never be sure where an Englishman or anybody else might end up.”
“But in those days a shipwreck was pretty much a death sentence,” Adriana pointed out. “None of the sailors even learned how to swim. That was on purpose. They preferred to drown immediately rather than prolong the agony.”
“Thank you, Miss Goodnews,” put in Kaz, stashing his dive knife in a scabbard on his thigh.
The captain was genuinely impressed. Like the others, he had pegged Adriana as a rich kid who happened to dive because she collected hobbies the same way she collected designer clothes. “Not a lot of people know that,” he said to her. “Been reading up on the Caribbean?”
Adriana flushed. “My uncle is a curator at the British Museum in London. I’ve spent a couple of summers working for him. You pick stuff up.”
Her brow clouded. This year the job had fallen through because Uncle Alfie was in Syria on an archaeological dig. Worse, he had been allowed one assistant, and had chosen Adriana’s older brother, Payton. That had left the girl at loose ends, which was a condition never tolerated by the Ballantynes. Adriana’s parents spent their summers traveling to hot and trendy places to rub elbows with supermodels, dukes, rock stars, and dot.com tycoons. In all the years she could remember, there had been no summer vacation that she or Payton had spent with the family.
Adriana had a mental picture of her parents shopping their daughter to every museum and research outfit that was prestigious enough to deserve a Ballantyne. Good thing her scuba certification was still current, because Poseidon was about as prestigious as it got. She’d naturally assumed that her family’s connections had cinched the job for her, but now she wasn’t so sure. None of the others seemed any more qualified than she was, except maybe Star.
As they approached the boundary of the Hidden Shoals, Vanover cut power, and English climbed up to the crow’s nest to scan for coral heads that might present a danger to the boat. Here on the reefs, it was not uncommon for towers of coral, reaching toward the sun’s nourishing light, to grow until they lurked just below the surface. Over the centuries, many a ship had been fatally holed by such a formation.
At last, they anchored, and preparations for the dive began in earnest. Kaz thought the equipment checks would never end. Tanks charged? Weight belts on? Compressed air coming out of the regulators? Buoyancy compensator vests inflating and deflating properly? It was just like certification class, where they treated you like kindergartners. Did divers ever dive? Or did they spend all their time getting ready?
Dante broke rule number one by trying to walk with his flippers on. He fell flat on his face, nearly smashing his Nikonos underwater camera, which was tethered to his wrist. English helped him up, looking at him pityingly.
Finally, they took to the water, gathering on the surface to pair off.
Kaz spit into his mask to prevent it from fogging. He placed it over his eyes and nose and inhaled to create the watertight suction. He bit down on the regulator and deflated the buoyancy compensator around his neck until he slipped beneath the waves, squeezing the nosepiece of his mask and blowing out to equalize the pressure in his ears.
Underwater. This was only his third dive, and each time he was amazed all over again by this silent alien world, so close at hand, and yet so hidden. People talked about “escaping” into a book or movie. But this was real escape. Down here, hockey was a million miles away, an obscure pastime attached to another life.
His two certification dives had been in cold, murky Lake Simcoe, north of Toronto. So the clear sunlit seascape beneath the surface of the Caribbean was dazzling. The visibility seemed almost infinite, but that wasn’t the astonishing part. It was just so busy down here, so alive! Steven Allagash’s wall-size fish tank was a foggy wasteland by comparison. Thousands of fish of every shape, size, and color darted in all directions.
A tiny, brilliantly striped angelfish ventured up to investigate him. Kaz was fascinated. The curious little creature seemed completely unafraid of the much larger animal that had invaded its ocean. It continued to nose around the bubble stream that rose from his breathing apparatus.
All at once, a shadow passed overhead. In a flash of sudden violence, a round, fat grouper swooped down like a dive-bombing eagle and snapped up the hapless prey.
Whoa. Sorry, guy. Got to keep on your fins. It’s a jungle out here.
Almost as an afterthought, he looked around for Dante, his dive partner. To avoid wearing his glasses underwater, the photographer sported a prescription dive mask that distorted his features into a mountainous nose under saucer-wide, staring eyes. It was a shocked, almost crazed appearance. Kaz chuckled — and swallowed water in the process. Concentrate, he reminded himself with a cough.