Chapter 35 Jo
Chapter 35
Jo
No one could put away food the way her brother Finn could. Jo watched in disbelief as he polished off his fifth slice of sausage pizza, washed it down with a third bottle of Shipyard ale, and then reached for the plate of chocolate chip cookies that their father had just pulled out of the oven.
“Whoa, boy, slow down,” said Jo. “You give me a stomachache just watching you.”
“Missed lunch,” said Finn. “Making up for it.”
“By cleaning out Dad’s refrigerator?”
Their father laughed. “He’s just helping me defrost it. That pizza was probably ten years old.”
“Still tasted fine,” Finn mumbled around a mouthful of cookie.
To Finn, everything tasted fine. He had the most undiscriminating palate of anyone Jo knew, and over the years she’d watched her brother eat moldy cheese and green luncheon meat without suffering even a twinge of heartburn. Nor did he ever pack on extra pounds. While Jo had to count every calorie she ate, her wiry brother devoured doughnuts and cheeseburgers without gaining an ounce. She eyed the tempting plate of cookies, thought Oh, what the hell, and grabbed one.
“You said you had questions about diving?” Finn asked Jo.
Owen frowned at his daughter. “You thinking of taking up scuba? I thought you hated the water.”
“I do hate the water. This is about the skeleton Finn pulled out of Maiden Pond.”
“You ID her yet?”
“No. But we’re starting to think that skeleton might have something to do with the abduction of Zoe Conover.”
“How do you figure that? I heard the girl was dumped miles away from the pond.”
“And there may be a reason for that.” She looked at Finn. “Tell me about apnea diving.”
Finn laughed. “Now there’s an abrupt change in subject. How does that come in?”
“It’s from Zoe’s Facebook page. She posted on that page a lot, so I had to scroll way back through all the stuff she wrote about her classes and her girlfriends and clothes, blah blah blah. There was also a lot about her being on the swim team. Apparently, she and the other girls on the team were into something called ‘apnea diving.’ I didn’t realize it might be significant until Maggie Bird told me—”
“Hey, is she the spook?” said Finn.
She looked at her father. “You told him?”
“That they’re spooks? It’s not like it’s a big secret, is it?” said Owen. “You told me back in February you thought they were CIA.”
“Even I’m not supposed to know that.”
Owen shrugged. “So they’ll just have to kill us all.”
“It stays within these walls, okay?” said Jo, and she fixed Finn with a warning look.
Her brother raised his hand. “Scout’s honor.”
“Now tell me about apnea diving. According to YouTube, it’s a hot thing these days.”
“Yeah. The ultimate free diving experience.”
“Meaning?”
“No scuba gear, no fins, no weights. Just you and the water.”
“That sounds like plain old swimming to me,” said Owen.
“It’s way more than that. You’re not just swimming—you’re diving really deep, without an air supply.”
“How deep?” said Jo.
“There are records of divers going eighty, a hundred feet. And that’s without wearing weights, so divers have to fight their own natural buoyancy just to get beneath the surface.”
“That’s insane.”
“But it’s true. Those depths are on the record.”
Jo shuddered. “No, thank you.”
“Apnea,” said Owen, getting up to pour coffee. “Now, I was just a high school biology teacher, but I know that’s not usually considered a good thing.”
“In a medical sense, it’s not good, because it means you’re not breathing,” said Finn. “But we’re talking about diving, where you consciously don’t breathe. It’s an ancient skill, and humans have been doing it for thousands of years. Think of those women pearl divers in Japan. They can go sixty feet, even deeper, on one breath of air.”
Sixty feet, thought Jo. That would have been more than deep enough.
Owen filled their coffee cups and sat back down to face his daughter. “You going to tell us what this has to do with your case?”
“I’m trying to explain why someone tried to kill Zoe,” said Jo. “I don’t think it was for the usual reasons. She wasn’t robbed. There’s no evidence she was sexually assaulted. She was just abducted and left for dead miles away from the pond. And she was found wearing her bathing suit.”
“So she’d been swimming,” said Finn.
“That’s my guess. How deep was the water where you found that skeleton?”
“About twenty-one feet.”
“If Zoe was practicing apnea dives, she could have made it to that depth.”
“Oh yeah. Plus, it’s fresh water, which makes it easier to dive, because she’d be less buoyant.”
“You think that’s what happened?” said Owen. “She found a skeleton when she was diving?”
“A skeleton that someone didn’t want anyone to find. Which meant Zoe had to be silenced before she could tell someone what she saw. And he used her backpack and her cell phone to draw our attention away from the pond, so we wouldn’t search it.”
“But you did search it,” said Owen.
“And we found the bones. I think this is all about her ,” said Jo. “The lady in the lake.”
Through the cubicle window, Jo saw Susan Conover slumped in a chair at her daughter’s bedside, her head lolling forward, her eyes closed. She hated to wake the woman, but she had questions that only Susan could answer, so she stepped into the cubicle and softly called her name.
Susan jerked awake and dazedly blinked at her visitor.
“You’re still here,” said Jo.
“Where else would I be?”
“At home, in bed?”
“I couldn’t stand it anymore, being in that house. With those people.”
“Your family, you mean?”
“Not my family. Not really.” Susan gave a sad shake of the head. “That sounds awful, doesn’t it? But even Ethan doesn’t feel like part of that family. He said he feels like just a summer guest in that house. Oh, they’re polite enough, and they try to be sympathetic, but it all comes out as ... forced. I guess I understand it. Zoe’s not really one of them. Not a blood Conover. Just like I’m not.”
Jo pulled over another chair and sat down. “How is she doing?”
“They started tapering the drugs, and she’s breathing on her own. They’ve taken her off the ventilator, so that’s good. But the doctor said we won’t know the extent of any brain damage until she wakes up.”
“She’s young. And strong enough to make it this far.”
“But will she remember what happened? Will she even remember that I’m her mother?” Susan ran her hand through her hair, pushing it off her face, and strands of silver glinted in the harsh cubicle light. Jo had not noticed those gray hairs before; it seemed the past few days had aged this woman, silvering her hair, engraving new lines in her face. “I wish you’d met her, before this happened.” Susan looked at her daughter. “She was so full of life. Ready to do anything, try anything. And give it a thousand percent.”
“Like swimming?”
Susan smiled. “Yes. My little mermaid.”
“I wanted to ask you about that. Zoe and swimming. I went back through her Facebook page and saw that she and her friends shared several articles about something called apnea diving. Do you know anything about that?”
“You mean free diving?” Susan nodded. “She took lessons last year, when we were in Florida.”
“How deep could she dive?”
“I think she made it to thirty feet.”
“This was in salt water?”
“Yes. Why are you asking?”
“The skeleton that the warden service recovered wasn’t far offshore from Moonview, at a depth of twenty-one feet. If Zoe was diving there, she might have seen something at the bottom of the pond. Something that’s been down there for a long time.”
The revelation made Susan sit up straighter. “You think this is all about that skeleton?”
“It’s just a theory. We still don’t know who the woman was. All we know is, she was young, probably in her twenties. We have to wait for the crime lab to finish the facial reconstruction and analyze her dental work. That could help us narrow down the decade of her death, but it still won’t tell us her name. Or who put her down there.”
“‘Put her down there’?” Susan rocked forward. “Are you saying ...”
“It’s a homicide. The state police are now investigating.”
Susan took another moment to absorb this revelation as well. “How long ago? How long has she been down there?”
“It could have been decades. I’ve reviewed all our missing persons files, looking for any case that matches, but so far, we haven’t found one. Which makes me think the victim was from out of town, someone whose absence wouldn’t be noticed by our local community. Someone who could be easily disposed of, and never missed.”
“And then my daughter went swimming,” Susan murmured.
Jo nodded. “If not for Zoe, we never would have searched the pond. And the skeleton would still be down there.”
Susan fell silent, and no wonder; it must have been difficult for her to take in all of this at once, and the woman was exhausted, wrung out by the seesawing between hope and despair during these last few days. Now Jo had jolted her with yet another shock.
“A woman from out of town,” Susan said softly. She looked at Jo. “Hannah Greene was only eight years old when the woman vanished, but she still remembers it. Which means Elizabeth would remember it too. And so would Arthur Fox.”
“Remember what?”
Susan reached into her pocket and pulled out her cell phone. “You need to talk to my mother-in-law.”