Chapter 5
On the twelfth morning, one of the divers found her dress.
Cooper told her at noon. He came up the outside stairs in his wetsuit, peeled down to the waist, and he didn’t sit down, and she knew from his face before he opened his mouth that it was bad.
“It was snagged on the reef,” he said. “Past the point, on the north side. Deep, at the edge of the drop-off. One of the company guys saw something moving.”
“The green one,” Scarlett said. It wasn’t a question.
“Green. Silk. Zipper open down one side.”
She closed her eyes.
She remembered tearing at that zipper in the black water with fingers she couldn’t feel.
She remembered kicking the dress away, watching it float beside her like a flat second woman, and then watching it sink.
She had been proud of that. It was the smart thing to do.
It was the thing that had kept her alive.
“He was on the boat when they brought it up,” Cooper said quietly. “He held it. He didn’t say anything. He just sat down on the deck and held it in his lap the whole way back.”
Scarlett turned away and went into the bedroom and shut the door.
* * *
From the kitchen window she watched the rest of it happen.
At two o’clock a folding table was set up on the dock beside the Halcyon. There were three men in uniforms and the man from the search company with his clipboard. Luke stood by the table in his pale blue suit. He was not on his phone for once. He had one hand on his brother’s shoulder.
Ryan sat at the table with the green dress folded in front of him.
He didn’t sign right away. For a long time he didn’t do anything. Luke bent and said something in his ear. The man from the search company said something. One of the officers slid a paper across the table and held out a pen.
Ryan looked out at the water.
Scarlett stood at the shutters with her fingers through the slats and said, out loud, to nobody, “Don’t.”
She didn’t know which thing she meant. Don’t sign. Don’t give up. Don’t make me watch you give up. Don’t leave me here.
Ryan took the pen and signed.
He put the pen down carefully, as if it might break. Then he put both hands flat on the green silk and bent his head over it, and his brother patted his back, and the man with the clipboard looked away.
Behind them, at the end of the dock, Alexis stood holding her medical bag.
* * *
By sunset the search was over.
The gray boats pulled their anchors and went out through the channel in a line. The reporters’ boats followed them. The seaplane took off with a roar at five o’clock, and Scarlett watched it climb and bank north toward Miami, and she knew who was on it. Ryan. Luke. Alexis.
The Halcyon left last. It backed off the dock slowly and turned in the harbor, white and enormous, and Troy took it out through the channel with its lights coming on one by one. Scarlett watched it until it was a shape and then a glow and then nothing.
The harbor was empty. For the first time in three days, it was just a small, quiet island harbor with a few fishing boats and Cooper’s dive boat bobbing at its mooring.
Cooper came up the stairs at dark with a paper envelope. “The search company paid me. They paid me for a week I didn’t even work.” He dropped the envelope on the counter like it was dirty. “The contract’s over. The boat’s mine again.”
Scarlett was sitting on the balcony with her knees pulled up.
“Okay,” she said.
* * *
Jess called at nine.
“The memorial’s Saturday,” she said. “At the big church downtown. Luke’s office sent out the notice this afternoon.” She was quiet for a second. “There’s something else.”
“Tell me.”
“I went by your house tonight. I wanted to see him. I don’t know why. I think I wanted to see if he looked guilty.” Jess’s voice went tight. “He wasn’t the one who answered the door.”
Scarlett waited.
“She did. Alexis. In a sweater. She said Ryan was resting and wasn’t seeing anyone.
She said she’d be staying in the guest room for a while, to take care of him.
She said, and I’m quoting, someone has to.
” Jess made a sound like she wanted to hit something.
“She was very nice to me. She held my hand. She said she knew how close you and I were. I wanted to break every bone in her face.”
Scarlett sat still on the balcony with the phone against her ear.
In her house. In her guest room. In a sweater.
Taking care of him.
“Cooper’s boat is free,” she said.
“Then come home,” Jess said.
* * *
They left at four the next morning.
Cooper borrowed a bigger boat from a friend on the other side of the island, a sport-fishing boat with a cabin below and two big engines. He didn’t tell his friend why. His friend didn’t ask. That seemed to be how things worked on Gull Cay.
Scarlett said goodbye to Mae at her kitchen door in the dark. Mae held her face in both hands and looked at her for a long time.
“You were never anybody’s dead woman,” Mae said. “You go on home and tell them.”
Destiny was asleep. Scarlett left a note for her under a shell on the step. It said Starfish first. Always. Love, Miss S.
The crossing took all day. It was long, and loud, and rough in the afternoon when the wind came up.
Scarlett stayed below in the cabin for most of it with her cap on, lying on a narrow bunk and feeling every wave.
They stopped once for fuel at a busy marina, and she didn’t come up on deck at all.
She didn’t know how Cooper handled the paperwork and she didn’t ask.
In the late afternoon she went up to sit beside him at the wheel. The water had changed from turquoise to a deep, plain blue. Far ahead, she could just see a faint gray smudge along the horizon that was not a cloud.
“That’s Florida,” Cooper said.
She looked at it for a long time.
“Can I tell you something?” he said, without taking his eyes off the water. “And you don’t have to say anything back.”
“Okay.”
“You can come back.” He said it plainly, the way he said everything.
“To Gull Cay. Any time. For any reason. If this goes bad. If it goes good and you just want to swim somewhere nobody knows you. If Mae’s kids need a teacher.
If you need a place to stand up again.” He shrugged.
“The apartment’s there. The boat’s there. I’m there.”
Scarlett felt it in her chest, warm and sore at the same time.
She didn’t answer, because he had said she didn’t have to, and because she didn’t trust what would come out. But she leaned over and put her head on his shoulder for a minute. He let her. Then she sat up again and they watched Florida get bigger.
* * *
Jess’s apartment was on the fourth floor of an old pink building near the hospital, with a window unit air conditioner that rattled and a couch covered in laundry. Scarlett had been here a hundred times. She had never been so happy to see a pile of laundry in her life.
Jess opened the door, looked at her, and burst into tears. Again.
“That’s two minutes now,” Scarlett said into her shoulder. “You’re over.”
“Shut up. Shut up. Get in here.”
Scarlett took a long shower. She stood under the water with her eyes closed.
It was the first real shower she had taken since the Halcyon, and the hot water on her face made her heart race in a way she didn’t like, and she made herself stay under it anyway.
She washed her short dark hair three times.
She put on a pair of Jess’s leggings and an old college swim team sweatshirt that still said their school name across the front in cracked letters.
Then she sat at Jess’s tiny kitchen table and ate an entire box of mac and cheese.
“Here’s the plan,” Jess said. She had a legal pad.
Of course she had a legal pad. “Tomorrow morning, we go to the brother of a girl I went to nursing school with. He’s a criminal lawyer.
A real one. He doesn’t know the Walshes from a hole in the ground.
You tell him everything. We take the test result from the clinic.
He tells us who to call. We don’t go to Miami PD, we go to whoever handles crimes on boats.
FBI, Coast Guard, I don’t know. He’ll know.
” She tapped the pad. “You walk in with a lawyer and a test and a nurse who saw your bruise. And then you call Ryan.”
It was a good plan. It was the right plan. Scarlett had said almost exactly the same thing to Cooper on the island.
“Okay,” Scarlett said.
She lay on Jess’s couch that night under a thin blanket with the air conditioner rattling and did not sleep at all.
* * *
She lasted until the next evening.
They did not go to the lawyer in the morning, because Jess’s friend’s brother was in court until Monday. They would go Monday. Monday was two days away. The memorial was Saturday. That was tomorrow.
Scarlett spent the day in Jess’s apartment with the blinds down.
She watched the local news with the sound off.
She watched them show her pearl-earring picture, and then the green dress in a clear evidence bag, and then a short clip of Ryan being helped out of a car at their front gate by a woman with dark hair.
She thought about Alexis in her guest room. Alexis in a sweater, answering the door of her house. Alexis making coffee in her kitchen. Alexis putting a hand on her husband’s back and telling him to rest.
She thought about Ryan sitting on the dock holding the dress.
At nine o’clock she stood up.
“I have to go home,” she said.
Jess looked up from the couch. “Monday. We said Monday.”
“She is sleeping in my house, Jess. Tonight. Right now. Tomorrow she’s going to stand next to him at my memorial service and hold his hand in front of everybody we know.” Scarlett’s voice shook. “I can’t wait until Monday. I can’t sit here another night while she tucks him in.”
“And what if he knew?” Jess stood up. “What if he’s in on it? You walk in there alone, at night, with no lawyer and no cops—”
“He’s not in on it.”
“You don’t know that.”