“The charter was cancelled,” Shane said, and I heard the deadbolt on the front door turn with a heavy, metallic snap. He came through the doorway of the back room slowly, the way a man approaches a skittish animal. He was smiling, but the corners of the smile did not reach his eyes. I rose from behind the tank racks with the drilled valve in one hand and the plastic bag in the other. My heart was going like a hammer. “Shane,” I said, “I was looking for the key to the cooler. Amber wanted to take the old wetsuits of Rick to the dive club.” His gaze dropped to my hands. For one very long second, neither of us moved.
“Put it down, Laura,” he said softly. “Please.” The smile was gone. His shoulders had dropped, and there was something almost like grief in his face. “I did not want this. You have to believe me. I never wanted any of it.” “The hole in the valve,” I said. My voice came out dry and level, a stranger voice. “You drilled it. So that his tank would leak slowly, on a deep dive, a long way from the surface.” Shane sat down heavily on a stack of crates. He put his elbows on his knees. “I only meant to scare him,” he said. “He was going to the Coast Guard on Monday. I only needed the weekend.”
I did not scream. I kept my eyes on his, and I kept my breathing slow. Rick had taught me that, long ago, on a day I was frightened of the water. When you panic, you use your air twice as fast. Breathe, Laura. In and out. “Every other Thursday,” I said. “Mile marker ninety eight. A man in a speedboat.” “Packages,” Shane said, wearily. “Packages from Cuba, that I never asked about. Twelve thousand dollars a delivery. I had a gambling debt, and a boat loan, and then I had a lifestyle.” He laughed, a short ugly sound. “Rick found a bag on the deck and opened it. That was all. That was all it took.”
A rolled note inside a dive fin and a drilled tank valve in a blue cooler led a widow to the truth about her fiance.
Out in the front of the shop, someone began to pound on the door. A loud rapid knocking, and a young voice shouting, “Mom! Mom!” Amber. And beneath hers, deeper, calmer, another voice, saying, “Coast Guard, sir. We are going to ask you to open the door.” Shane lifted his head. For a moment, a look of such weariness passed over his face that I almost felt pity. “You called them,” he said. “No,” I said. “Amber did. When I told her where I was going, she picked up the phone. She is a very careful girl. Her father taught her to check everything twice.”
He looked at the back door, a metal one, propped open to the alley. He looked at the speedboat tied up in the canal beyond it. Then he looked at me, and I could see the whole calculation go through his mind. “Do not,” I said. “Please do not make it worse. There is a boat from the Coast Guard station at the end of the canal, and two sheriff deputies at the front. They are all waiting. It is finished, Shane.” He sat there, a big sun weathered man in a faded charter shirt, for what felt like a very long time. Then he rose, crossed to the front door, and turned the deadbolt himself.
Lieutenant Elena Ortega of the Coast Guard came in first, with two Monroe County deputies. She was crisp and calm. She read Shane his rights in the shop where he had worked with my husband for twenty two years, among the racks of tanks and the shelves of masks. Amber ran in behind her and threw her arms around me and held on so tightly that I could not breathe. “I am fine,” I kept saying into her hair. “I am fine, sweetheart.” But I was not fine, and she knew it, and we stood there holding each other in the middle of the shop, under the humming fluorescent lights, until the officers had taken him away.
The case reached a federal court in Miami in the winter. The drilled valve was examined by an expert from the National Transportation Safety Board, who testified that the hole had been made with a bit just under two millimeters wide, deliberately, and that it would have bled air gradually, giving a diver no warning until he was deep. The ledger and the GPS unit matched the log of a smuggling ring that agents had been tracking for two years. Shane pleaded guilty to murder and conspiracy and was sentenced to life. I gave a statement. It took four minutes.
I sent the ring back by registered mail to the jail. I could not bear to have it in the house. A card went along with it, in my own hand, with six words. Rick trusted you. So did I. Then I went to the dock, at sunset, and sat on the very spot where Shane had proposed, and I wept for a long time, for my husband, and for the stupid, trusting part of me that had wanted so much to be loved again. The pelicans watched me. A boat horn sounded in the distance. At last I wiped my face and went home to make dinner for my daughter.
We kept the shop. Amber insisted. Rick had always wanted to teach young people about the reef, and so, in June, we opened the doors of the Rick Bennett Reef Academy, a nonprofit school for children from Homestead and Florida City who had never been underwater. Amber teaches the marine biology classes. A retired Navy diver named Ocho teaches safety. The shop is full on Saturdays with shrieking, wet haired kids in too big masks, and every tank is checked three times, once by a teacher, once by a student, and once by me.
In September, at fifty nine years of age, I learned to dive. Amber was my instructor. I went down on a calm morning, in clear green water, with a regulator in my mouth and a small yellow tank on my back, and I sank slowly past the coral. A parrotfish drifted by. A turtle looked at me with mild brown eyes. At sixty feet, I stopped and hung in the blue, weightless, and I felt it all around me, quiet as a prayer. Rick, I thought. I am here. And on the reef, far off in the shimmer, a school of silver fish turned together and flashed like a hand waving.