Chapter 40
The singing echoed beautifully in the hollow of the cave. She held on tight to Joni’s small, cold hand, and in the other she held Helena’s fingers.
They were together. Connected. Safe.
When the song ended, she chanced a look at Joni. Her expression had relaxed a little, her brow softening. The tautness around her mouth had eased.
Joni looked at each of her friends. Her eyes were misted with tears. She didn’t say anything—she didn’t need to.
Liz stood up, saying, “I’m going to check the weather out there.”
They’d been sheltering in the cave for some time, and Maggie, exhausted and damp, was desperate to return to the tents to sleep.
A few moments later, she heard Liz’s voice calling from the cave entrance. “The storm is getting further away!”
“Thank God!” Maggie said. “We can go back.”
“I don’t know what’s worse,” Helena said. “A wet, dank cave, or a wet, dank tent.”
True. Maggie clambered from her perch on the lobster pots, knees stiff from sitting for so long. The heel of her hiking boot caught in the netting and tugged over the pot, tumbling the stack. A mooring buoy rolled loose, clattering across the cave floor.
“You okay?” Helena asked, helping her upright.
“Fine,” she said, dusting off her knees.
She glanced at her hand, which still clasped Karin’s bracelet, and, without pausing to think about it, tucked the bracelet in her pocket.
Joni helped straighten the pots—but as she did so, her torch beam froze. “That’s odd.”
“What?” Liz asked.
Joni crouched lower. “Something came out of the pot.”
“It’s just the buoy—”
“No. There was something inside it.” She shone her torch on the orange mooring buoy. A clean line had opened across its center and, from it, a brown package had fallen. As she reached to pick it up, a spill of white powder poured from a tear.
“Shit!” Joni whispered.
Maggie’s breath caught in her throat. “Is that . . . ?”
No one answered.
The four of them stared at the sugar-white powder glimmering under the torch beam.
Maggie could hear her pulse in her ears.
After a moment, Joni reached forward and dipped her forefinger into the powder. She held it up toward the light.
Then she brought it toward her mouth.
“Don’t!” Maggie yelled, just as Joni dabbed the powder against her gum.
“Jesus! You don’t know what that is!” Liz cried.
There was a pause.
Joni looked up, eyeing the others. “Yes. I do.”
“Cocaine?” Maggie said.
Joni nodded.
“Why is there a bag of cocaine in this cave?” Helena whispered, glancing around, alarmed.
Joni examined the package, then the mooring buoy. “It’s been purposefully hidden inside the buoy.”
“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” Helena said. “Who is going to leave a bag of cocaine out here?”
“It must be a drop,” Joni said. Then she moved to the next pot, examining it. Every lobster pot had an orange mooring buoy attached to it. She reached for the next buoy, running her fingers over the hard plastic surface.
“What are you doing?” Maggie asked.
“There’ll be more.”
Almost as she said it, Joni found the crack in the buoy, twisted, and pulled it apart.
The beam of her torch bounced over the inside, and there was a second bag of cocaine.
She let out a low whistle. “Looks like they’ve been packed in kilos.”
Maggie had no idea how much a kilo of cocaine was worth, but she knew this was serious.
Helena straightened. “Whoever left this here isn’t going to take kindly to us blundering around their stockroom.”
“Agreed,” Liz said. “We need to get out of here.”
But Joni was already removing the buoy marker from the next pot. She held it close to her ear. Shook it once. She must have felt the dull thud of the package inside it as she said, “There’s more here, too.”
“Stop touching things! Please!” Maggie begged.
Joni set it back and surveyed the cave, hands on hips. “There are over a dozen pots with mooring buoys,” she continued. “If they’ve all got cocaine in them, then that’s twelve kilos of coke. Right here.”
“How much is that worth?” Helena asked.
“I’ve no idea what the street value is in Norway—but back home, I’d guess it must be . . .” She paused, doing the math. “Over a million.”
Helena whistled. “More profitable than netting lobsters.”
Joni said, “We saw that fishing boat leaving the bay last night. D’you remember? Maybe they were delivering it.”
At the time, Maggie had thought how picturesque it looked—the red wooden boat motoring out of the empty bay. Now the image was recast with a dangerous edge. “Do you think they saw us?”
Liz shook her head. “No, they were at such a distance. We’d have been hard to notice against the mountainside.”
Joni said, “If the boat left the cocaine here, then it’s a drop. Someone else will be picking it up.”
“Another boat?” Helena asked.
“Could be,” Joni said, “or someone on foot. If there are a dozen kilos here, then it’d be possible to hike it out.”
A cool feeling traveled over Maggie’s skin. They could have passed the person who was coming for this. She thought of Erik, appearing from the shadows in the woods.
Her fingertips brushed the bracelet in her pocket. “Do you think it’s connected to the bracelet?”
Liz shrugged. “All I know is we need to get out of here. Pack the tents. Go.”
“Agreed,” Helena said, lifting the pots back into position.
“What about the spilled stuff?” Maggie asked. “What do we do with that?”
Everyone looked at the ripped bag of cocaine that was dusting the wet cave floor.
Liz said, “We leave the lobster pot as it is on its side. Maybe it’ll look like an animal disturbed it?”
“What animals have you seen around here?” Helena asked.
“I don’t know!” Liz said. “But we can’t move it—the bag is ripped. It’d be obvious someone was trying to cover it up.”
“Our footprints will be all over the beach!” Maggie said. “They’ll see which way we’ve walked!”
“It’s still raining out there. It’ll wash them away,” Liz said. “We need to go. Now.”
Maggie stole a final glance at the lobster pots. Then she followed the torch beam through the cavernous tunnel, her fingertips pushing into her jacket pocket, turning the letters of Karin’s name.