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I put my breather in my mouth, tested the air, then gave Dad a thumbs up signal. Once he nodded, I pulled my mask on, making sure no stray hairs ruined the seal on my face, clutched the metal detector, and took a giant stride overboard. Warm water embraced me, and as I did a quick scan for sharks, I bobbed to the surface.
I gave Dad the okay signal, and then lowered into the water with my lifeline to the surface trailing behind me.
Turning to face the ocean bottom, I dumped the air out of my buoyancy vest and kicked my fins, making a rapid descent. Morning sunshine streaked through the blue in spears of light that gave me excellent visibility of about fifty yards. The thumping beat of the equipment on Rhino faded above, leaving only the sound of my breathing and the swoosh of the ocean barreling over the reef.
Below me, the ocean floor was an aquatic tapestry of color and movement. About thirty yards ahead, waves crashed over the reef, creating a bubble-filled roll as it hurtled over the jagged rocks.
Below the rocks was an underwater cliff that ran perpendicular to the surface. As I aimed for the wall, the surging waves pawed at my body, pushing me back and forth. If I wasn’t careful, I would be swept up in an invisible liquid hand that could smash me against the jagged coral wall.
Other than the few days I’d spent in hospital, I had lived every day of my life on the ocean. I could read the weather and the ocean currents without the gadgets so many sailors relied upon now. Knowing how a storm would affect the ocean or how to make the most of a full moon were my superpowers. I’d learned everything I knew from Dad; he was the best in the business.
Until his grief and alcohol addiction swallowed nearly every brain cell he had.
When his brief moments of clarity returned, I was reminded of just how brilliant he had once been.
A surge in the water kicked me toward the wall, and using the arm of the metal detector, I kept my body from slamming into a mass of fire coral which would give me a fucking painful sting and a rash that could last for weeks. Pushing off, I maintained a distance of four feet from the wall and continued my descent.
I removed my flashlight from my thigh pocket and aimed the powerful beam toward the coral wall, searching for telltale signs of shipwreck debris. Unperturbed by my presence, electric-blue fish darted across my light beam, reflecting sparks off their tiny scales.
Finding sunken vessels was part information, part luck.
The clue that led me to today’s search had started with luck, which had come from the same bar Dad was at last night. Years ago, Dad had been drinking at Lucky’s Tavern on Amber Island when he’d spotted a battered piece of timber on a shelf amongst dusty shipping paraphernalia. Engraved in the timber were the letters en’s Lur. The rest of the letters may have been severed in the original shipwreck, or they were obliterated by years of ocean currents.
Dad had been searching for clues to the location of the missing Siren’s Lure for years. Believing that the piece of timber had to be part of the missing freighter, he stole it.
It was another seven years before I found the fisherman who’d snared that piece of timber with his fishing line, but his sketchy location was as useless as his attempts to get me into bed with him. The stupid bastard thought my invitation to have a drink with him was also an invitation to have sex.
I was pretty sure he would never make that mistake with a woman again. Nor would he forget my swift kick to his balls that he hadn’t seen coming.
Even with his information, it had taken another seven months before perfect weather conditions gave me an approximate two-day window to finally dive down to the site where I thought that piece of timber was found.
My light beam bounced off something shiny amongst the coral, and checking the rolling bubbles swirling through the water, I waited a few seconds, reading the current, before I kicked forward.
Bloody hell. It’s a broken beer bottle. Scowling, I put the bottle into the net bag on my hip and pushed away from the wall again.
With my increasing depth, sunlight waned, and the water grew cooler . . . another reason for a wetsuit. Shadows danced over the seabed below, and schools of brightly colored fish darted between the corals along the wall. Varieties of coral and plant life were the playground for hundreds of vibrant pink, yellow, and blue fish. Keeping my distance from a coarse Staghorn coral that reached out from the wall, I kicked harder.
I’d been lucky enough to find nineteen ancient wrecks since I’d learned to scuba dive when I was a ten-year-old girl. The oldest wreck had been the S. S. Contessa, a sailing vessel that had sunk during a cyclone in 1826. Despite nine passengers and crew surviving after they made it onto lifeboats and weathered the storm, their Schooner went undiscovered until I found it nearly two hundred years later.
It always amazed me that a wreck could go undetected for so long.
Many were never found.
As I reached the ocean floor, a shadow loomed overhead. A pair of black-tip reef sharks hugged the coral wall above me, seemingly unaffected by the surging current. I’d seen my share of sharks, and only one menacing twelve-foot white pointer had given me a fright. These sharks were only three-foot-long babies in comparison.
I checked my dive watch. I’d been in the water for five minutes and was at a depth of thirty-seven feet. I bucked sideways, fighting against the current, and my hip slammed into a massive brain coral. It was like running into a parked car.
Dammit. Clenching my jaw, I used my gloved hand to brush off the coral without breaking it and lowered to the sand. The current was much stronger on the bottom than I’d anticipated, and it took all my strength to maintain a safe distance from the jagged coral and sharp rocks. I settled my breathing down to a steady rhythm as I searched for clues to an ancient wreck.
Battling the strong current, I turned on the metal detector. As the needle on the display sprang to life, I navigated the underwater maze. I swept my scanner over the sand, trying not to snag on the outcrops of coral that were as sharp as knives.
It was much more exhausting than I’d predicted, and within twenty minutes, my frustration overtook my excitement. I wouldn’t be able to stay down here as long as I planned, and the needle on my metal detector hadn’t even flickered.
At a massive clam, I paused to rest. Bubbles spilled from my breather and danced across my mask on their race to the surface. Around me, the maze of coral towers and crevices were all teeming with marine life. My arms ached from fighting the current while trying to keep a methodical sweep with the metal detector.
Another shadow carved through the muted sunlight, and I smiled as a massive manta ray swam overhead. Being underwater gave me a sense of peace that I rarely enjoyed on the surface. On Rhino, there was always something to do: fix something, make something, help Dad. Down here, it was just me and nature.
A white object was lodged inside a vibrant coral formation a few feet away. I swam toward it, and my light beam pierced the shadows. Wedged in a branch of Pocillopora coral, half-covered by years of growth, was a broken dinner plate.
