Dateline: Atlantis (24 page)

Now, if it were Donny.
She rolls over and lets the jets hit her on the upper shoulders.
Oh, don't start with him. It's impossible.
Their past is so intertwined with mundane trivia that their over-arching hopes and dreams easily are lost. How does one have a blazing romance with a man who once raced you to the end of the alley for first dibs on a box of oatmeal cookies? Donny, she thought, was clinging to her because he was a semi-orphan himself. His own mother had been working most of the time, and Freya was the one who hovered with peanut-butter fudge and hot chocolate. The father issue is huge. Donny absolutely despises the man who contributed sperm and nothing else to his boyhood. He is carrying around a chip on his shoulder the size of the Willis Tower and doesn't realize that he is trying to forget about it by mooning over Amaryllis.
Or does he really know how to love?

Or does she? She sits straight up in the Jacuzzi and holds her head in her hands. She sits staring into the water, wondering why it was so hard to show her face in her hometown on that last trip. She remembers Aunt Freya in the old days, her hand-embroidered nightgowns, and filling in coloring books on the coffee table in the living room. Why didn't she feel confident enough to go back home? Then a black thought descends like a shade on her consciousness. The Hollister kids running down the alley and chanting into her backyard: “Orphan, orphan, orphan. Little Orphan Amy.” They'd scoot when her uncle chased them with a rake. But that didn't stop them at school or on the playground.

Little Orphan Amy held her head high. She never received anything lower than an A- on her report cards, but, in her mind, she never measured up to some enigmatic mark of superior accomplishment. Nothing was ever good enough.

This ancient civilization story better work. Then I'll finally make it. The talk shows. A headline in the Tribune. They'll all remember me.
Her little fantasy of revenge disintegrates as she remembers
Garret's missing photos. She plunges herself deep into the water. Somehow being good enough, even for herself, is far away indeed.

After she lets the jets work on her neck, she sighs and steps out of the hot tub, feeling her tension draining away with the heat—almost as if it has been pulled off of her like a soggy blanket. The cooler air outside hits her like a blast of refrigeration, and she bundles up in a towel. Maybe she doesn't want a big, complicated love affair, anyway. Maybe all she wants is that Pulitzer that Wright keeps dangling in front of her.

She goes back to her room and writes several names on the note pad next to her phone—all people who once worked with her and who now write for the
Miami Herald
. She studies the names and settles on Sybil Caldwell, an odd choice, because Sybil is a critic, covering theater and the performing arts. But she also worked in news, working the city beat with Amaryllis in Chicago. Most importantly, Sybil is trustworthy, right down to keeping sources secret from nosy editors.

Next, Amaryllis packs a box of heavy winter duds, including that awful winter coat she's been schlepping around, and uses the hotel business center to ship the parcel back to Fiona. Dear Fiona. She's been taking in Amaryllis' mail and managing her bills, also. Amaryllis is thrilled that she had the foresight to sign up for automatic bill pay. All Fiona has to do it tap a few buttons on the computer. The rent is being taken care of by Wright, who also has put her pay into the bank via direct deposit. When Amaryllis finally makes it back to Los Angeles, it will be time to take Fiona out for a night on the town. She owes her Big Time.

As Amaryllis is working with the business center employee on getting a morning pickup for the box, a fax comes in addressed to her. Donny is sending her the nitty gritty on the gang of academic thugs and their holy army. The Doctors of Crime and the Phalanx of the Lord. Pages keep spewing out until she has thirteen documents. She pops them in her purse and goes on the final errand of her day. She treats herself to a late afternoon
of shopping, buying clothes that suit the climate and won't stand out while conducting a murder investigation.

She keeps reminding herself this is all business, but those flowered thong sandals sing to her, call her over to the boutique window. There will be time for leisure, too, she reasons, opening the door to the swank shop.

#

This morning, Sybil is her usual scatter-brained self. She tells her secretary to let Amaryllis into the
Herald
office, and then disappears for forty-five minutes. Amaryllis, wearing her new sandals, sucks in the surging energy and cynical jabber of the newsroom. This is like home to her. She breathes easier, settling back in the chair by Sybil's desk. She notices that like so many of the Herald reporters, she is dressed casually in pastel Capri slacks and a matching brightly hued, short-sleeved shirt. Without knowing how, she, a mere visitor, has finessed Miami style without a problem.

After the long wait, during which she reads all thirteen pages of Donny's fax, Sybil rushes in, carrying two cappuccinos, slightly lukewarm in their foam containers. She offers one to Amaryllis, and, after she sets the drinks on the desk, Sybil grabs her friend in an affectionate hug. They'd been close at a rough time in Sybil's life. She had had a miscarriage and a divorce in Chicago, and the two women became confidantes. Never having been pregnant or married, Amaryllis found herself almost as affected by her friend's dramas as Sybil herself. They know each other inside and out. So it is not strange when Sybil steps back and regards her pal with wide eyes. She's feeling vibes.

“You've got a new man in your life,” she announces, loud enough for a few copy editors nearby to hear. They snicker. Sybil's sixth sense kicks in at the weirdest times, and almost everyone in the newsroom knows about it. They scoff and laugh, but
the truth is that Sybil, true to her name, is almost always correct in her predictions.

“You mean the Maya guy?” Amaryllis says, pushing the thought away with her hand. “A mistake.”

“No, no,” she pulls Amaryllis close and puts her lips to her ear. “Another man. He's a good one. Really good.”

Amaryllis stares at her, not wanting to understand. But she does. She got over Gabriel in one day. Romance is the last thing on her mind.
But Donny...

“I wanted to talk about a twenty-five-year-old murder,” Amaryllis says, pulling the faxes from her purse. “Can you help me find out what's going on with these people?”

Sybil shrugs and scans the pages, then comes up with a blank expression. When she goes numb like this, she looks like a ditz from South Beach. She has bleached and colored her hair an un-earthly halo of strawberry blonde. She wears pastels—lavenders and pinks. She has fingernails painted a frosted color that changes in the light like a hologram. She is a five-foot-tall Easter egg.

Amaryllis smothers a laugh at Sybil's look of consternation. A list of university nerds and an armed crew of survivalist Christians, all with no relation to Miami, would send anyone into confusion. But for Sybil, puzzlement is a normal state.

So, attempting with difficulty to remember every detail, Amaryllis tells the story of Garret Lucas, her archeological discoveries with Gabriel, her parents' murder, and the possibility that her parents found a mysterious structure off the coast of Florida.

Listening to the long explanation, Sybil drums her dazzling fingertips on the metal desk. Her eyes widen when she hears of Garret's murder. She takes a slurp of her cappuccino and takes in some more information, with no signs of boredom.

“Nav-tech,” she says when Amaryllis comes up for air.

“What the hell is that?”

“A so-called ‘secret' military installation out near Andros Island in the Bahamas. They think it's secret, anyway. They do underwater testing of mines and torpedoes. They also do
sonograms of the sea bottom. It's close enough to Florida to be
the site you're talking about.”

She pulls out a Florida area map and indicates a section of the ocean beyond U.S. territorial waters, yet marked as U.S. Navy property. It's just north of Bimini and the Berry Islands.

“No one gets into this place. No one gets out, either,” Sibyl says. “They've got a tower in that complex that was not built by modern man, that's for sure. Some say it's just an oddly shaped sea volcano, but others aren't so sure. Hamilton—you remember Buck Hamilton?—has been trying for years to get the Navy to tell us what they are doing there.

“Yeah,” she continues as she surveys the map. “If your parents were stuck in that tower for a while and the current was right, they could eventually wash up in Homestead Beach, no problem.”

In her gut, Amaryllis knows she's gotten the information she's been striving to find for weeks. Here is an anomalous structure that the academic Mafia couldn't get to, and her parents had penetrated the security. No wonder someone wanted them out of the way.

“Is there any way we can talk to Buck about this right now?”

Sybil lifts both her hands in complete bafflement and stands up to survey the newsroom. She beckons Amaryllis with her fingers. They snake their way through a maze of desks, finally coming to stand next to a man typing notes in a frenzy on a computer screen while cradling his phone receiver in the crook between shoulder and neck. He looks up at Sybil and nods, then does a double take when he sees Amaryllis. He makes a circular motion with one hand, indicating that he'll wind up the conversation in a minute. They stand studying the orchestrated madness in the rest of the office before Hamilton hangs up.

“Amy Quigley! How wonderful!” Buck gets up to hug her. Then he lowers his voice. “I hear you're working on the story of a lifetime.”

“Word sure gets around,” Amaryllis says, looking at Sybil, who is all innocence.

“Well, half of L.A. is talking about it.”

“They
are?
” Amaryllis is anguished thinking that her story is about to be gobbled up by someone else.

“Okay, two guys I know at the
Times
told me about it. And believe me, they don't know your sources. Wright is as tight as a drum with that sort of thing,” he says, sitting back down and leaning into his chair. “Sit down and visit. And tell me why you're in Miami.”

“It's complicated. Part of it does have to do with the big-deal, story of a lifetime that you mentioned,” she says, smiling with a sly sense of conspiracy. “But there's also a murder mystery I want to solve.”

“Wow. Nothing like ambition for you. You were always that way.”

Sybil breaks in before Buck can land any more praise—and flirtation—Amaryllis' way.

“She wants to see pictures of the Tower, Buck,” Sybil says.

Buck runs a hand through his perpetually messy brown hair and whistles. “Ambitious is not the word for it. I've been trying to get at that thing for years,” he says. He leans down to his file drawers and starts riffling through folders.

“I just want to see what it looks like,” Amaryllis says. “It might answer a lot of questions we came up with at the coroner's office.”

Hamilton's phone rings again, but he ignores it, letting it go to voice mail as he continues searching for the files. When he pulls up the correct picture, Amaryllis holds her breath.

The tower is black. Not one of the limestone or granite structures she's seen before. But a black slab of some onyx-colored rock. This thing emerges out of the water like the peak of a witch's cap. It's smooth sided, with no signs of steps, and looks slick to the touch. She's about to say that this couldn't possibly be the pyramid she's looking for, when Buck starts to mumble.

“The guy who took this picture had been diving in the area,” he says. “It's all restricted, you know, and I don't know how the hell he got out of there without getting arrested. But he said he went all the way down underwater, and the thing has an opening. It's filled with lots of sand, but he said there are inscriptions on the wall. I couldn't get much more out of him. He's got the negative of this photo.”

Amaryllis stares at the image again and there's a scream in her lower abdomen, the sensation of being trapped within the blackness, the horror of entombment. In the moment it takes to view the photo, she knows something has shifted. This is no longer about Wright and prize-winning stories. It isn't about ego and coming home to Chicago as a hero. This is about her family and correcting a heinous, veiled crime. This is her call to action and nothing in her body can resist any longer.

“No, I can't tell you who the guy was…” Buck is saying, but she is far away from the conversation now. Scheming how to get near to the tower and how to settle the family score. Wondering what her parents found so fascinating about the black edifice.

“Do you have the GPS coordinates of that thing?” she asks. “And was it always poking out of the water, or does it submerge with the time and tides?

He writes the GPS data down, smiling, and says he has no idea how long the top has been poking out of the water. “You're not thinking of going there are you? Because I'm telling you, no one can.”

Amaryllis simply returns his happy grin. “Try me.” Hamilton's phone rings again.