Chapter 4 #2
It came to rest flat between her shoulder blades.
Five fingers. Palm pressed hard. Scarlett remembered the heat of it through her dress.
She remembered that it did not steady her.
She remembered that for one second it stayed perfectly still, the way a person’s hand stays still when they are choosing.
Then it pushed.
It was not a stumble. It was not a slip. It was not a doctor catching a drunk woman too late. It was a short, hard, deliberate shove, with a shoulder behind it, aimed at the open gate.
Scarlett remembered Alexis’s face as she went over. She remembered it lit from one side by the deck lights. It had been calm. That was the worst part. Alexis Burke had looked completely calm.
* * *
Scarlett was on her knees in the dirt at the edge of the harbor road.
She didn’t remember kneeling. Her palms were scraped. She was breathing in short gasps like she’d been underwater. Out at the end of the dock, her husband sat alone with his feet over the water, and high above him on the Halcyon’s sky deck, where he had said give me ten minutes, a light was on.
She knew now.
She wasn’t guessing. It wasn’t a bruise and a test and a hole.
Alexis Burke had drugged her and walked her to the stern and put her hand on her back and pushed her into the sea.
And then she had gone back upstairs to Ryan and said nothing, and let him talk to her under the stars while his wife drowned behind the boat.
Scarlett got up.
She did not go to the dock. She walked back up the road on shaking legs, and up the stairs, and she sat on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinets until the sky turned gray.
* * *
In the morning Cooper found her there. She told him. He sat down on the floor beside her and didn’t say anything for a long time.
“Then you call the police,” he said finally. “Right now. You tell them what you remember.”
“I tell them the concussion gave me my memory back on the side of a dirt road at two in the morning.” She laughed, and it came out wrong. “And she says I was drunk. And she’s the one standing next to my husband.”
Cooper started to argue.
The downstairs bell rang.
Cooper went down. Scarlett stood up and, without thinking, started down the inside stairs after him to get her cap from the hook by the shop door. She was three steps from the bottom when she heard the voice in the shop.
“Morning. Troy Maddox, I’m captain on the Halcyon. Mr. Walsh wants to know if you can fill another dozen tanks by noon.”
Scarlett froze.
She was standing in plain sight at the bottom of the stairs. Troy was at the counter, ten feet away, in his white captain’s shirt. He was looking at Cooper. Then he glanced past Cooper, at the stairs, at a thin woman with short dark hair in a man’s T-shirt.
His eyes passed over her face without stopping.
Scarlett turned around and walked back up the stairs, slowly, the way a woman walks when she lives there and has forgotten something. She went into the bedroom and shut the door and stood against it with both hands over her mouth until she heard Troy leave.
* * *
Luke came in on the morning seaplane.
Scarlett saw him through the slats. Ryan’s little brother, in a pale blue suit that was wrong for the heat, with his sunglasses pushed up into his neat hair. He came down the dock on his phone. He didn’t look out at the water once.
Cooper spent the afternoon filling tanks and running them out to the Halcyon in his skiff. He came back at five and went straight up the stairs without stopping in the shop.
“Your brother-in-law,” he said. He shut the kitchen door behind him. “I was tied up at the stern of the yacht handing up tanks. He was on the back deck on a speakerphone call. I don’t think he knew anyone was down there. Or he thought I was nobody.”
“Who was he talking to?”
“A woman. He called her Alexis.”
Scarlett sat down.
“He said the report’s done,” Cooper said.
“He said the doctor’s statement to the Bahamian police says she’d been drinking all day, and that she was upset, and that she was fragile.
He said fragile twice. And the woman said something I couldn’t hear, and he said, Good.
That’s where this ends. We need this to end, for Ryan.
The board needs it to end. And then he said the petition would be ready when she got here.
And she said, I’ll be on the evening plane. He shouldn’t be alone.”
Scarlett looked at the shutters.
“Petition for what?” Cooper said.
“To declare me dead,” Scarlett said. Her voice sounded far away. “So they can hold a memorial. So it’s over.”
The room was quiet.
“I can’t surface here,” she said. “Can I. If I walk down that dock right now, with a concussion and a story about a hand on my back, who’s there?
Luke. Luke is there. And tonight she’ll be there.
The family’s doctor. The one who says I’m fragile.
The one they’ll send to examine me. The one who’ll stand next to Ryan and explain to everybody, very kindly, what’s wrong with poor Scarlett.
” She pressed her hands against her knees to stop them shaking.
“I need to be in Miami. I need Jess. I need a hospital where she doesn’t know a single person, and a real lawyer, and a police officer who’s never heard the name Walsh.
I need to walk in with proof before anybody gets to tell my story for me. ”
“And my boat’s on his contract,” Cooper said.
“Your boat’s on his contract.”
“Until they call off the search.”
“Until he gives up,” Scarlett said.
She didn’t know how she felt about that. She didn’t know if she wanted him to give up or if the thought of it would kill her.
* * *
The evening seaplane came in low over the harbor just as the sun touched the water.
Scarlett watched it from the kitchen window. She told herself she wasn’t going to. She did anyway.
The plane landed and taxied to the mooring, and a small boat brought its passengers to the end of the dock. The first one up the ladder was a woman. Dark hair pulled back. White shirt. A leather medical bag in her hand.
Ryan was coming down the dock from the Halcyon.
He looked worse than he had yesterday. He had been diving since dawn. He was walking the way a man walks when he has barely slept since the night on the boat and has run out of whatever kept him upright.
Alexis set her bag down on the boards.
She didn’t say anything. She simply walked the last few steps to meet him and opened her arms.
And Ryan stopped.
For one second he just stood there.
Then he let her hold him. His arms stayed at his sides.
But his head went down, onto her shoulder, and his back began to shake, and Alexis Burke put one hand flat between his shoulder blades, and she held him there on the dock in the last red light while the cameras on the reporters’ boat swung around to find them.
Scarlett stood at the shutters and watched the hand.