Dateline: Atlantis (15 page)

Wright is watching her with a glimmer of irritation. He keeps peeking at his watch and pulls down his cuff repeatedly, as if hiding the time from view. He's got plenty of work to do arranging to ship Garret's body back home. There are police and the FBI to consult. Amaryllis knows he's living in a world of pain right now, but she can't move and the paralysis worsens. Donny begins to blink, a sign of confusion. She still can't animate her limbs.

She's drifting in a pool of ocean water clutching the crystal to her breast, looking at the sandy bottom for traces of her parents. Agitated waves flow over her as words drift by—“going now,” “we'll be home soon.”
Home. Where is that to someone lost at sea?
She swims on, gazing at sea snails and odd crustaceans. She thinks about what her parents have become to her. Nothing more than disconnected pieces. She sees them in the sand: discarded shells, a scuba mask here and a fin there. All scattered about the sea floor like stars in the reflected sky.

They met in college, when he was a teacher's assistant and she was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois. As un-alike as could be, she was a petite, blonde product of Chicago's South Side and Catholic down to her white cotton socks. He was a brown-haired gangly, tall Swede from Andersonville, who cared not a whit for religion. They bonded instantly, confounding their parents and friends.

After Maggie Quigley graduated, she married Kristoff Lang. Together, they had a plan to find a lost land they believe lived beneath the Caribbean waves.

Full fadom five thy father lies
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes…

Someone shakes her shoulder. Then again, roughly.
Shakespeare.
The Tempest.
What message is there for me?

“I appreciate that it's been hard on you, Amy, but this really is not the time for daydreaming,” Wright's voice is getting that tight, throaty sound he uses on poor copy editors who let a misspelling get into print. Donny reaches to touch her other shoulder.

“Are you feeling well?” Donny asks.

“Conflicted,” she answers. The watery visions vanish as she pulls her hand off the orb that's swathed in silk in her purse. Her vision clears and she looks from face to face, filled with a desire to wrench away from their expectations. She has a mission to fulfill, how can they know that? Someone has to search for the truth. It's all that matters anymore. She stands and puts her coat on again. Then she swings her purse over her shoulder.

“I'm taking that leave of absence we are entitled to,” she announces to Wright, who stares like a large, gaping baby. “The union says so.”

He utters strange sounds that might be “why” or “now?” but Amaryllis can't bother to sort it out.

“I'm going to Florida. I have to find who these people are, and why they are killing and stealing. Garret and I, we hit a nerve—a big one. I'm not letting this story get away. There's a whole lot more going on than what we found in Mexico.”

Wright continues to thrash, still searching for words.

“Get going,” she urges Wright. “I know you can handle this without me. I'll be back in L.A. before too long.” Wright throws an anxious look her way, then, pressed for time, he turns and bolts for the jetway like a kid scrambling back into school before the bell rings.

Donny steps over and holds her close, and she hides her eyes until the plane departs. She knows her boss's pain, but she can't be Wright's surrogate daughter when she doesn't even know what being a daughter means.
He'll have to fly alone for a while.
When she opens her eyes, the noise of travelers yelling into cell
phones, squeaky baggage wheels shrieking down long hallways, the smell of over-sweetened caramel corn and cinnamon buns, and the piercing wail of a tiny baby all hit her senses like a lash.

Okay. Florida it is.
For the first time in years, she has no idea what she's doing. She looks up at Donny, but all she sees in his eyes is a reflection of her own anxiety.

She stands up to wipe the sweat from her dirty bangs and gives the box of coroner's reports a disgusted push. She leans against a file cabinet and smudges dust on her red silk shirt and sinks to the stool, kicking off her low-heeled pumps. She notices that a tiny run is developing in her pantyhose. Her first day in Florida hasn't been much of a treasure hunt.

“Another glamorous trip to warm the winter blues,” she says tossing a wad of wastepaper at Donny.

“All part of the services I provide,” he says, glancing up from the box of legal documents before him.

Thanks to Donny's legal skills and her reporting background, they talked their way without too much trouble through this tiny police station that resides in a town near Biscayne Bay, a tiny resort burg named Homestead Beach. That's where the Langs washed up on the sands twenty-five years ago, so it is the official place of death.

When the skinny old police captain handed them a request for documents at the coroner's office, they thought they were home free. No one told them that in this sleepy little town, no one is going to go through the files for them. There is no micro-fiche, much less a computer. Instead, a middle-aged woman with tiger streaks in her ash-brown hair led them into a room full of files and indicated the drawers for the appropriate year. Then she left.

They've been digging all afternoon long, and Donny keeps swearing about the way the records are kept. Compared to the city, this is like a cartoon town: pokey and inefficient. But, once
in a while, the woman comes in to offer the hard-working pair some glasses of sweetened ice tea.

“Must be hard for you to work in this heat,” Donny says to the secretary as he accepts his beverage. She blushes a pretty shade of lotus blossoms.

“Naw, you get used to it. It would be nice if they put some air conditioning in here, but my fan has to do.” She turns to exit with a smile on her face.

They take pleasant breaks, slurping the syrupy drinks as they sit covered with paper files, but they are always aware that time is wasting away.

Now, the winter sun has set and Amaryllis knows she has only half an hour before the office closes. The rotating fan blows more dust in her face.

“It's just not here,” she says, glaring at the hundreds of reports she's gone through. Many have been misfiled and the death reports belong to other years or months. “It could be on the moon for all we know.”

“No,” Donny says, his designer shirt a sodden mess. He'd had time to call his office and tell them he had an emergency pro bono case taking him away from his regular business in Florida but couldn't find enough time to pick up a t-shirt at the Miami airport novelty shops. “No, it's here. Wrong year, wrong month, but it's here.”

Her stomach does back flips and she runs to gaze over his shoulder. Sure enough, he's found a document on the Lang deaths. Knowing coroner's reports by heart, she skips the boring details and gets straight to the description of the bodies. The examiner's report matches Sean's dinner story down to tiny details: empty air tanks but no malfunctioning gauges, tubes intact, seals tight, death by drowning. The time of death was undetermined. Age of male: thirty-five. Age of female: thirty-two.

Amaryllis stares at the page for several, uncomprehending minutes. This is her
mother
. How could she have died younger than Amaryllis herself? But there it is, Age: thirty-two. Amaryllis
senses a curdling sensation run through her body, as if she were supposed to shrivel up and die on the spot, just to make things right with the cosmos. Donny looks up from the paperwork, aware that something in the air has darkened. He reads the description that held Amaryllis' attention, obviously not finding the salient fact. So, she points to the age with a shaky finger. Suddenly, her lunch threatens to come tumbling onto the desk.

“You've outlived your mother.” Donny has his arm around her shoulders and she grabs for his hand. Donny waits before adding, “It's not right.”

She nods, keeping her head low to avoid meeting his eyes. She always knew her parents died young, but the significance of the number has hit her like a slap. A hundred thoughts race through her mind and she can't control the frenzy. Is she healthy? What had her mother planned for her when she grew up? Did they think about having other kids? Who the hell would cut down a life at the tender age of thirty-two?

She turns to shake off the torpor that has descended. Too many surprises are piling on too soon. She looks up at Donny.

“Your dad. Is he…?”

“Dead?” Donny takes a long breath and sets his mouth the way he used to when the teacher called on him by surprise. Amaryllis can tell this is not a subject he wants to delve into. “Who knows? He was a deadbeat. He took off when I was a baby and never even showed up when my mother filed for divorce. They couldn't find him to serve the papers.”

“We always called Mrs. Gregorios a widow.”

“Well, it might as well have been true.”

She strokes her brow to remove some of the grime and sweat. Then she finds an item in the coroner's report that jolts her out of her somber mood. Both victims had sandstone deeply embedding in their fingernails, “as if they were struggling to free themselves from some obstruction.” Donny points out that the man's small knife, which most divers carry for emergencies, was missing. He also shows her that the victims were still wearing
their weight belts. If they had planned on surfacing, they would have dropped them to the seafloor. Someone or something, it seemed, surprised them beneath the surface.

None of these facts came up at the original investigation of their death. According to Uncle Sean, the deaths were ruled as accidents. Now, it doesn't look so simple.

Ms. Tiger Top returns to tell them she's locking up. They ask for a photocopy of the document, and she zips one off without a moment's hesitation. Then she plops the boxes haphazardly into the file drawers and sends the amateur investigators out the door.

“Glad you found what you were looking for. Most people never do,” she says, with a hint of apology. “Usually, what they want's up in Miami, and that's a zoo. You got lucky.” She lets out a giggle and locks the steel door and tucks the keys away, flashing hot pink fingernails. Before she leaves, she turns and gives Donny a big wink with a mascara-heavy eye.

#

Sheriff Pritchard is about as nice a cop as Amaryllis has ever met, but he isn't about to budge an inch on the Lang case. She and Donny have already taken up an hour of his time, but he regards them as some kind of amusement instead of a serious reporter/lawyer team. He listens to all the details and scratches his day-old beard when they point to the coroner's report and explain that the Langs were trapped underwater.

“Lotsa ways you can get wedged in between something undersea,” the chief says, leaning back in his creaking leather chair.
When did they start making them this young? He looks all of twenty-three.
“Lemme get Detective Frazier,” the boy-chief says. “He was around then.” He yells through the door for his secretary to “put the fossil on the phone.”

Amaryllis looks at Donny and holds back a laugh. For a second, his eyes lose the sullen haze of frustration they've worn since they landed in Miami. He glimmers with amusement for a moment, and then it's back to business.

In what can only have been five minutes, the Fossil himself appears in the chief's doorway. He's about sixty years old and weather-beaten but nowhere near the ancient being they expect. He scrunches his eyes at the reports Pritchard hands him and adjusts his reading glasses. The chief points out the part about the sandstone under the fingernails and the weight belts. The Fossil nods with a serious look, as if he's the first person taking an interest in the case in a quarter of a century.

After reading enough, Detective Frazier straightens and addresses the visitors in a distinct drawl. This is no snowbird, but a true man of old Florida.

“Yeah, sure I remember the Lang case. The tough ones stand out, you know.” He adjusts his double-knit slacks. “Nothin' made sense about that one. They knew too much to be diving without enough air. Absence of witnesses made it damn tough. Sorry, miss. But it was a puzzler and still is.”

“Well, since the sand under the fingernails and the weight belt issues never came up in the investigation, we have new evidence. Surely, you'll reopen the case.” Amaryllis faces them with arms crossed over her chest.

Pritchard lets out a whoop. “On my funeral,” he yelps, pushing the file aside. “This puppy's cold. Cold as a case can get. Only new info here is that it looks like they got trapped. That doesn't make it a homicide.” He shrugs and tosses a pencil at a desk cup. It glances off the side and clatters to the floor. “These things happen.”

Discouraged, she and Donny move toward the door and Detective Frazier follows them out. “Have a good day now,” he says in loud voice. While he shakes hands, he slips Donny a piece of paper. They scurry out to the parking lot and make sure they are
well out of sight of the police building's windows. Donny examines the small card and begins to laugh.