Chapter 2 #2
She sipped. It was the best thing she had ever tasted.
“My name’s Cooper,” he said. “Cooper Price. I run the shop downstairs. I was taking the boat out early to check a mooring, and there you were.” He sat down on the edge of the chair.
“You’ve got a pretty bad cut on your head.
I cleaned it and closed it up with strips.
I’m not a doctor, but I’ve done a lot of first aid.
I think you’ve got a concussion. You threw up twice and you keep asking me the same questions. ”
“I do?”
“You asked me where you were three times.”
She put a hand up to her head. There was a thick pad of gauze taped above her left eye. Her hair was stiff with salt. She was wearing a man’s gray T-shirt that came to her knees.
“I put that on you,” Cooper said quickly. “You were in your underwear and you were freezing. I didn’t look at anything I didn’t have to. I swear.”
“Okay,” she said. Oddly, she believed him.
“There’s something else.” He hesitated. “You’ve got a bad bruise on your back. Between your shoulder blades. Did you hit something going in?”
Scarlett closed her eyes.
She tried to remember.
She remembered the champagne. She remembered the lights going soft. She remembered Ryan turning toward her on the sky deck and saying give me ten minutes. She remembered walking down stairs. She remembered the noise of the engines, and the white wake, and Alexis’s face half lit by the deck lights.
Then there was a hole.
It wasn’t dark in the hole. It was missing, like a page torn out of a book. She reached for it and her head throbbed so hard that she saw sparks.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t remember.”
“That’s okay. That’s the concussion. Don’t push it.” He stood up. “What’s your name? Is there somebody I should call?”
She opened her mouth. Then she closed it.
“Can I sleep first?” she said.
He looked at her for a moment. Then he nodded. “Yeah. Sleep. I’ll be right downstairs.”
* * *
When she woke again it was dark outside the shutters, and the ceiling fan was still ticking, and she heard a television.
The sound was coming from the next room. A news voice. She lay still and listened, and a word came through the wall that turned her whole body to ice.
Walsh.
She got up. Her legs were weak and the room tipped, but she held the wall and made it to the doorway.
The next room was a small kitchen with a table and a couch. Cooper was sitting on the couch with a beer he wasn’t drinking. A little television sat on the counter. He turned when he heard her, and his face changed.
On the screen was a photograph of Scarlett.
It was her official picture from the Walsh Foundation website. Hair down, pearl earrings, smiling a smile she had practiced. Under it, the words ran across the bottom of the screen: MIAMI BILLIONAIRE’S WIFE MISSING AT SEA.
“—was reported missing early this morning,” the reporter was saying, “when crew members aboard the private yacht Halcyon discovered her cabin empty at dawn. The yacht had been traveling overnight between cays in the central Exumas. According to a guest on board, Mrs. Walsh had been drinking heavily at a dinner party before retiring for the evening. The Royal Bahamas Defence Force and the U.S. Coast Guard have launched a search. Officials say it is believed Mrs. Walsh went overboard sometime during the night.”
Drinking heavily.
Scarlett stood in the doorway in Cooper’s T-shirt and held onto the frame.
“—her husband, Miami developer Ryan Walsh, spoke briefly to reporters this evening in Nassau.”
And there he was.
He was standing in front of a white building with a flag on it.
It was night, and bright lights were pointed at him.
He was still wearing the linen shirt from dinner.
It was wrinkled and there was something dark on the collar.
His face was gray. Not pale. Gray, like a man who had been left out in the rain for days.
“Please,” he said. His voice broke on it. “Please. If anyone was on the water last night. If anyone saw anything. Please find her.”
He couldn’t go on. He looked down at the ground. A man in a uniform touched his shoulder.
And beside him, close enough to touch, in a crisp white shirt with her dark hair pulled back, stood Dr. Alexis Burke. As the camera watched, she reached out and laid her hand on Ryan’s arm. Gentle. Steady. The doctor, taking care of her patient.
Ryan did not shake her off.
The picture cut back to the studio. Scarlett’s face came up again, pearls and practiced smile.
Cooper had stood up. He was looking from the television to Scarlett and back again. She watched him put it together. She watched it land.
“That’s you,” he said quietly.
Scarlett didn’t answer.
She was looking at the space on the screen where Ryan had been. The gray face. The broken voice. The hand on his arm.
She didn’t know what she was looking at.
She didn’t know if that man had any idea what had happened on his boat.
She didn’t know if he had been up on the sky deck telling Alexis his secrets while it happened, or if he had known it would happen, or if he had helped.
She didn’t think so. She couldn’t believe it.
But yesterday morning she would have sworn her husband would never spend two months telling another woman things he wouldn’t tell her, and she would have been wrong about that too.
She didn’t even know what had happened to her. Not really. There was a hole in the middle of it, and a bruise on her back, and a doctor’s hand on her husband’s arm.
“Okay,” Cooper said. He set down his beer. He was pale under his tan. “Okay. They’re searching for you. There are people out there right now. I need to call the police. The Defence Force. Somebody.”
He took his phone out of his pocket.
“Don’t,” Scarlett said.
He stopped.
“Please.” She held onto the door frame with both hands. Her head was pounding. Her voice was shaking, but it was clear. “Please don’t call anyone. Not yet.”
“Lady. Mrs. Walsh. Your husband is on TV crying.”
“I know.”
“They think you’re dead.”
“I know.” She swallowed. “Right now, as far as anyone on that boat knows, I’m dead. And I don’t know what happened to me. I don’t know who did what. I need to know that before anyone knows I’m here.” She looked at him. “Please. Just give me until I know.”
Cooper looked at her for a long time. At the bandage on her head. At her hands on the doorframe.
Slowly, he put the phone down on the counter, screen side down.