“No!”
The vehemence of Lily’s response made Karen start. “Gosh, I really need to pee before we set out,” she exclaimed, scooting out from the vinyl booth.
Like Lily, Sean ignored Karen, paid no attention to her hasty departure. “What do you mean no?” he asked softly. “You’re not barring me from this expedition, are you, Lily?”
“You bet I am,” she hissed angrily to hide her hurt. “This is already our second dive of the day. We have only one last transect to cover and the study will be finished. We’ve been working our butts off on this project. My team is exhausted.
I’m
exhausted. The last thing we need is you, Mr. Mayor, breathing down our necks—”
“Listen, I’m sorry about last night! I couldn’t get rid of Stacy—not with the bloody fund-raiser coming up. I’ll make it up to you, I promise—” The word hung in the air between them. Sean stopped, as conscious as she of an earlier promise made, then broken.
Lily paled. “Your promises are worthless, Sean. Go utter those sweet nothings to Stacy Malloy. I’m not interested in listening to a two-faced liar.” Her eyes raked over him contemptuously. “I only wonder how many other lies you’ve told.”
She made to scramble out of the booth, but Sean’s hand shot out, grabbing her arm.
“Wait a goddamned minute!” he demanded, his anger matching hers.
She wrenched her arm free. “Don’t you dare touch me.” Her tone was glacial. “Stay away from me—I’m sick of being harassed by the likes of you, Mayor McDermott.” Lips pressed together, Lily rushed out of the diner. Karen followed hurriedly, casting worried looks over her shoulder at Sean.
“Banyon giving you a rough time, McDermott?” John drawled, shaking his head at Lily’s retreating figure. “Take it from me, Banyon’s the bitch of the millennium. You’ll never get her to open wide.”
Like a shot, Sean was up, his face inches from Granger’s. His voice low and vicious, he said, “For two cents, I’d beat the shit out of you, Granger. Keep your mouth shut until you leave this town, or I’ll shut it for you.”
“Yeah, fuck you, too, McDermott,” John snarled, shoving past him.
The waitress scooped up the check and money Lily had thrown on the table. The 80 percent tip put a smile on her face, so when she stopped at the adjacent booth, glass coffee pot in hand, her voice was extra perky and cheerful. “Need another refill?” she asked, holding the pot over the empty, chipped porcelain cup.
“No, thanks.” The man didn’t bother to look up, busy scribbling in his notebook. Yet when the waitress continued to hover, he cocked his head, glancing up at her sideways, and saw that her eyes were trained on the pad of paper. Casually, he closed the cover and pushed the wire-bound notebook off to the side. “Sorry, honey, I don’t let anyone read my work till it’s published.”
“Oh! You a writer?” the waitress asked eagerly. “What you working on? A novel?”
“That’s right. The story’s a real pot-boiler.”
“Ooh, good. I love those.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Alone on the stern of the
Tangiers
, Lily stared at the shoreline. The wind whipped about her, drying her tears. But nothing could stop the sorrow that engulfed her.
She’d been a fool, a jealous fool. Furious with Sean, with herself, she’d hurled those bitter, angry words at him and then had run. Coward that she was, she’d run, hoping with every fleeing step that Sean would run faster, catch her, and never let her go.
Idiot
, she scolded herself.
As if Sean would follow after the things you said to him.
He had his pride. He wouldn’t chase after her when she’d behaved like a jealous shrew.
She had to apologize. As soon as they got back from the dive, she’d go to him. It was time she faced her love with courage.
Squaring her shoulders, she swiped at the lingering wetness on her cheeks. With this last section of the reef complete, she’d be close to one end. Her fervent wish, though, was that she be given the chance to start anew with Sean.
Lily’s fins hit the water with a slap. Bobbing to the surface, she treaded water, looking up through the tempered glass of her mask at the
Tangiers
’s stern for John and Karen to make their entries. Two splashes later, their scuba-clad bodies were beside hers. The three of them kicked over to the ladder and Owen passed down the equipment. At Lily’s signal, and John’s and Karen’s answering thumbs up, the team began its descent.
This was it, the last section of the reef.
A little over two weeks ago, they’d begun their study at zone one’s northernmost tip. It had taken them more than twenty dives to examine the patch reef section by section. They’d become familiar with it—with the corals, the fish—as familiar as one might be of a garden lovingly tended and watched over.
Just as there had been a sense of excitement, of thrilling anticipation on Lily’s first exploratory dive, there was a correlative sadness that pervaded this last dive of the study. More and more often, when Lily conducted a reef study and then returned to visit the site a few years later, she would find the once colorful exotic valleys, ridges, and caves that she’d explored earlier had become diminished, lifeless, like underwater ghost towns. Here faster, there more slowly, the decline of coral reefs could be seen the world over.
Coral was a home and life source, the foundation of a vast, complex ecosystem. When coral sickened and died, its inhabitants too were affected, no longer able to feed, grow, or to use it as shelter.
Many of the dangers that threatened coral reefs were invisible to the naked eye—which was why so many samples were collected, and then subjected to a barrage of chemical and bacterial analyses. Some diseases, however, were all too easy to spot, and were becoming a sadly common sight. There was
bleaching
, when the vibrant tissue of the coral turned white and brittle, the discoloration spreading inexorably over the entire organism until it died. Another was black band disease, an algal infestation that grew in an ominous black ring, like a malevolent bull’s-eye, killing the coral polyps as it spread. Macro algae bloom attacked coral with a suffocating blanket of brownish-green fuzz. Unfortunately, these were just a few of the countless diseases that ravaged and destroyed the extraordinary marine life forms.
Perhaps it was because Lily had seen no evidence of these dangerous diseases, no warning signs on the rest of the patch reef, that she had begun to think that perhaps Coral Beach was just plain lucky.
Nothing in Abe Lesnesky’s report had led her to suspect trouble. In the mixed-up mess of papers, graphs, and charts, she hadn’t found a single number or reading to question the vitality of the reef.
That was why, when Lily swam over the flat relief of zone one and came upon a colony of stag coral, her breath rushed out in a stream of dismay. Stag coral, in its natural state, was usually white or tan, with a delicate triangular fringe decorating its hornlike branches. The one in front of her was an especially large specimen.
Had the stag coral been healthy, it would have been a thing of beauty, a large and wonderful sculpture that had taken millennia to create. Thus to see suddenly the multiple, thick, black bands encircling its branches was devastating. The disease had already spread, taken over. One glance told Lily the coral wasn’t merely unhealthy, it was dying.
She flutter-kicked slowly, circling it, mourning what she saw. Her eyes traveled downward, to the coral’s base. A hillock of sediment surrounded it. She took a test tube from her case and carefully scooped up a sample. Stoppering it, she replaced the tube and swam over to John and Karen, who were examining several small sponges.
For the next hour, Lily and John took core samples of the ocean floor. They collected sediment and algae samples that coated dying coral. When they had accomplished that, they began filling their underwater notebooks with observations, noting down the different types of disease.
With her cameras, Karen photographed sea fans, sponges, brain coral, elkhorn coral, too many of which showed evidence of algal infestation and massive bleaching.
It took over an hour to inspect the disease-ridden transect, but less than a minute for Lily to realize that this last transect was a
hot spot
, the term used by marine biologists to describe an area in which one or more types of disease had spread, destroying coral species.
As she worked, Lily felt a sympathetic condition take over, as though she too were being attacked by some invidious germ. She was sickened by what she saw.
Why was this happening, and so quickly, too? The question repeated itself with each sample she took, each notation she made. The onslaught of algae and disease must have been extremely aggressive. Otherwise, Abe Lesnesky would have reported it in the updates he gave to the committee.
When the team surfaced five yards from where the
Tangiers
was anchored, there was none of the excited, ebullient chatter that usually flowed between them, once their mouths were free of their regulators’ bulky mouthpieces. They gathered around the foot of the aluminum ladder in cheerless silence. Wearily, they handed their equipment up to Owen, tugged off their fins and, one after the other, climbed the short ladder.
Owen Rafern picked up on the mood quickly. “Something the matter, Dr. Banyon?” he asked, helping Lily off with her scuba tank.
She unsnapped her weight belt, lowered it to the deck, and then shrugged out of her buoyancy control vest. “There were some troubling signs in this area. Some of the coral and sponges are diseased,” she said. It was all right to divulge basic information. The fact that this section of the patch reef was threatened would be public knowledge as soon as she made her report next week.
But it was yet another reason to berate herself for her foolish tantrum with Sean at Norma Jean’s. If he had accompanied them on the dive today, he would have observed firsthand the signs of rampant disease.
“Can you tell what’s causing the disease?”
Lily shook her head tiredly. “No, I can’t say for certain yet.” She reached for the zipper of her wet suit and tugged it down, freeing herself from the neoprene’s constricting fit. “Let’s weigh anchor, Owen. I need to get back to shore quickly.”
Owen nodded. “Happy to oblige, Dr. Banyon, especially as the wind’s picking up again. More rain on the way,” he predicted.
Only then did Lily notice the heavy roll of the
Tangiers
beneath her bare feet. She immediately looked over at Karen, knowing her photographer’s intolerance for rough seas.
She was right to be concerned. Karen’s face had taken on a sickly gray-green cast. Still in her wet suit, she sat slumped against the side of the pilothouse with her knees drawn up.
“Hold on a sec, Karen, and I’ll help you out of your wet suit,” Lily offered. “Just let me stow the tanks first. John, give me a hand here. Let’s get going, Owen. Karen’s sure to feel better once we’re moving.”
“I’m fine,” Karen said just before she vomited.
“Really Karen, there’s no need to be embarrassed,” Lily said when at last she and John joined her by the rental cars. “You know Owen washes down the deck every day.”
Lily and John had been making trips back and forth between the
Tangiers
and the marina parking lot, carting the boxes full of samples, the bags with their gear, as well as Karen’s belongings. Karen had sat guard over them, too sick to stand, let alone help. Though her stomach seemed to have quieted, she remained the portrait of despondency, wretched and green.
What else could go wrong this afternoon?
Lily wondered tiredly. The reef was sick, Karen was sick, it was about to start raining, and there remained a ton of work to do before she could go find Sean.
“All right, let’s figure out how to do this,” she said, thinking aloud. “Two things require immediate attention—Karen and the samples. Karen, you need to go back to the apartment and lie down. I’ll drop you off and meet John at the lab.”
“I can’t go back to the condo yet,” she protested weakly. “I’ve got to FedEx my film to Duggal—”
“What, and puke all over the FedEx counter, too?” John interrupted. “They’ll really love that.” He gave an aggrieved sigh. “You take Karen to the condo, Lily.
I’ll
drop the film off at the FedEx. Then we’ll deal with the samples.”
Karen turned huge, glazed eyes on John. “You’d do that for me, John?”
He shook his head. “Christ, it’s not like you need an advanced degree to FedEx a bunch of film. After all, you manage to do it. Write down the address, Masur. I’ll get the friggin’ film rolls shipped.”
“Remember to insure them, too, okay?” Karen said.
Lily passed her the camera bag, which Karen pulled onto her lap. One after the other, she took out her cameras and rewound the film inside them. Opening the backs of the cameras, she removed the rolls of film and inserted them into protective metal canisters. She stood weaving as she placed the silver canisters in John’s open hand. “Thanks a million, John.”
Lily fished a pen out of her bag, and in block letters wrote the photo lab’s New York address as Karen dictated. She handed the slip to John. “John, you’re really saving the day here. Thank you. You can meet me at the lab when you’re done at the FedEx.” She bent over to pick up one of the boxes containing the core samples.
“Why don’t I take the samples in my car?” John suggested. “The FedEx won’t take long. I can start the labeling as soon as I get to the lab.” With a sheepish grin, he added, “I was kind of hoping you could stop at the deli on your way to the lab and pick me up a couple of roast beef sandwiches and a Coke. Seems like we ate those burgers a hell of a long time ago.”
Lily gave John a warm smile. “It’s a deal. I’ll be over as quick as I can.”
John got into the rental car with the samples and the film and a smile on his face. He started the motor and eased out of the parking lot just in case Lily and Karen were watching. His hand reached into his sweatshirt pocket to pull out his cell phone.
Ferrucci answered on the second ring. “Yes?”
“Pete, this is—”
“Yeah, I know. Hold on a sec.” There was a pause, and John knew he was checking that no one overheard the conversation. Ferrucci came on the line again. “What’s up?”
“I’ve got something to show you in the trunk of my car. Something real valuable. I think we should talk about it. I’m heading toward town now.”
“Stop at the Amoco for gas. Then wait for me.”
Lily’s tires squealed as she turned into a parking space in front of town hall. Thankfully rush hour was waning, so the traffic had been lighter. She’d raced here from the laboratory where she and John had labeled and packed all the core, water, and algal samples into special shipping crates, compelled by her pressing need to see Sean, to make things right between them.
The sky had deepened to a dull, dark gray as she ran up the wide marble steps in front of the town hall. Entering the high-ceilinged hall, she came to an abrupt halt. She had no idea where Sean’s office was. Her sneakers squeaked slightly as she walked down the long empty hall, checking nameplates as she passed. Then, at the far end of the hallway, a door opened, and a bright pink head appeared.
Lily smiled in relief.
“Ms. Roemer,” she called, her voice raised slightly to catch the secretary’s attention.
Evelyn Roemer glanced up from the papers she was reading. Her eyes widened as they took in Lily’s grubby field attire, topped by hair dried in short, salty, punklike spikes. “Dr. Banyon! May I help you?”
“Yes, I was looking for Sean.”
Evelyn Roemer looked even more surprised. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’ve just missed him. He left for the airport to catch a flight to Tallahassee. The governor called him this morning. Sean had planned to take the first flight tomorrow, but then he changed his mind.” With a puzzled frown, she added, “I’m surprised he didn’t mention anything about it when he saw you earlier.”
Disappointment rocked Lily. “No, I’m afraid he didn’t get a chance.” She hadn’t given him one.