The Water Keeper Read online

  “It is finished.”

  I pulled him to me and cried like a baby.

  The Coast Guard wrapped the girls in blankets and started IVs in three of them. Having known Fingers, the captain of the ship waded into the water to help me lift his body off the sand. One of their guys offered to let me ride alongside Fingers while they piloted my Whaler back to port, but I declined. Marie’s body was out there somewhere.

  I had failed.

  I followed the current and beached the Whaler. The sea would do one of two things: bury her in the depths or lay her body on the shore. Hours later, as the sun dropped behind the edge of the water, with both salt and blood caked on my skin, I stood at the water’s edge and unfolded the letter. The weight of it drove me to my knees, where the waves washed over my thighs.

  The words blurred:

  My Love,

  I know this letter will hit you hard . . .

  I thumbed away the tears, walking the shore until daybreak. Reading the letter over and over. Each time hurt worse. Each time her voice grew more distant.

  The tide washed her ashore as the sun broke the skyline. I pulled her limp, pale body against my chest and cried again. Angry. Loud. Broken. Her body in my arms. Skin transparent and cold. I could not make sense of my life. Either what it had become or what it would be. I was lost. I kissed her face. Her cold lips.

  But I could not bring her back.

  The rope around her ankle had been cut with a knife, telling me she’d changed her mind somewhere in the darkness below. Though gone, she was still speaking to me. Still clawing her way back. We lay there as the waves washed over us. I pressed my cheek to hers.

  “You remember that night I found you out here? Everybody was looking for you but nobody thought to look that far out. But there you were. Floating six or seven miles out. You were so cold. Shaking. Then we ran out of gas a mile from shore, and I paddled us in. You were worried we wouldn’t make it. But I had found you. I could have paddled the coast of Florida if it meant we could stay in that boat. Then we built a fire and you leaned in to me. I remember feeling the breeze on my face. The fire on my legs and the smell of you washing over me. All I wanted to do was sit and breathe. Stop the sun. Tell it to wait a few more hours. ‘Please, can’t you hold off just a while?’ Then you placed your hand on mine and kissed my cheek. You whispered, ‘Thank you,’ and I felt your breath on my ear.

  “I was nobody. A sixteen-year-old shadow walking the halls. A kid with a stupid little boat, but you made me somebody. That night was our secret, and seldom did a day pass that we didn’t see each other. Somehow you always found a way to get to me. Then my senior year, you were the only one who thought I could break the record. Forty-eight seconds. I crossed the line and the watch showed ‘forty-seven-point-something’ and I collapsed. We did it. I remember the gun going off but I don’t remember running. I just remember flying. Floating. A thousand people screaming and all I heard was your voice. It’s all I’ve ever heard.

  “I don’t know how to climb off this beach. I don’t know how to walk out of here. I don’t know who I am without you. Fingers said to forgive you but I can’t. There’s nothing to forgive. Nothing at all. Not even the . . . I want you to know I’m sorry I didn’t find you earlier. I’m real sorry. I tried so hard. But evil is real and sometimes it’s hard to hear. I wish you could have heard me. So before you go, before . . . I just want you to know that I’ve loved you from the moment I met you, and you never did anything—not one thing, ever—to make me love you less.

  “My heart hurts. A lot. It’s cracking down the middle, and it’s going to hurt even more when I go to stand up and carry you out of here. But no matter where I go, I’m carrying you with me. I’ll keep you inside me. And every time I bathe or swim or take a drink or walk through the waves or pilot a boat or just stand in the rain, I’ll let the water keep you in me. Marie, as long as there’s water, there’s you in me.”

  As the sun rose above me, I called in the Coast Guard. The helicopter landed on the beach, and when the crew offered to take Marie from me, I declined. I carried her into the bird myself, crossed her arms, pressed her head against my chest, and for the first time since I found her, I uncurled her fingers and slid my hand inside hers.

  They could hear me crying over the sound of the helicopter blades.

  Chapter 1

  A week passed. I ate little. Slept less. Most afternoons I found myself staring out across the water. Days ticked by. Both Marie and Fingers’ last will and testament stipulated they be cremated. Which they were.

  While Fingers had asked me to spread his ashes at the end of the world, Marie had chosen a spot a bit closer to home. In her final letter, Marie had asked me to spread her ashes in the shallow water just off the island where we played as kids. For a week, I clutched the urn in my hands and watched the tide roll in and wash out. High tide. Low tide. High. Low. But I could not convince my legs to carry me out into the water. So, despite Marie’s final wish, I returned to my house and placed the urn on the kitchen table alongside Fingers’ ashes, which I had placed in his signature orange lunch box. An odd pair and a strange sight. A purple urn and a bright-orange box. I stared at them. They stared back at me.

  For another week, I orbited them like a moon. Daylight. Darkness. Daytime. Night.

  Fingers had taught me all I knew. Found me when I was lost. Patched me back together when all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not. I had been Ben Gunn; he had been Jim Hawkins. I had been Crusoe; he had been Friday. In my darkest moment, I had awakened on a shoreline, a castaway with sea foam and fiddler crabs tickling my nose. I could not rescue myself and did not speak the island language. Fingers lifted me from the sand, brushed me off, fed me, and taught me how to walk again. He rescued me when I was beyond rescue. His impact was immeasurable. The absence of his voice deafening.

  Life without Marie was like waking up in a world where the sun had been removed from the sky. I kept her letter close. Read and reread it ten thousand times. Set it next to my face when I lay down to sleep so I could smell her hand, but it brought little comfort. I could not turn back time. Nor could I, no matter how hard I tried, wrap my head around the finality. It didn’t seem possible. It wasn’t. How was she gone? The picture of her alone, terror-filled, a rope around her ankle, leaving this world consumed by shame and regret, was tough to stomach. I had exhausted myself in the search. Spent all I had. Come so close, and yet failed so completely. When she needed me, I had not been there.

  Maybe that hurt most of all. I’d spent my life rescuing the wounded, and yet I could not rescue the one I loved the most.

  Fort George Island sits north of Jacksonville, Florida, protected from the Atlantic by Little Talbot Island. Someone with knowledge of the waterways can navigate the Fort George River from the Atlantic Ocean through the sandbars and shallow waters around Little Talbot into the gentler waters surrounding Fort George. And while protected, Fort George Island is anything but hidden. The reason for this is a confluence of geography. The Intracoastal Waterway—which in North Florida is known to the locals as Clapboard Creek—runs north from the St. Johns River and the Mayport basin to Amelia Island and the Nassau Sound. In between the two, the Fort George River connects the Clapboard with the Atlantic.

  That means the Fort George River is easily accessible by either the ICW or the Atlantic, and thereby party central for the boat culture of North Florida—which includes the wealthy who winter or weekend on Amelia, St. Simons, and Sea Island. At high tide, the Fort George River looks like any other. Water everywhere. But inches below the surface lies a different reality. As the tide recedes, the sandbars around Fort George emerge like Atlantis and become a playground the size of twenty or thirty football fields. High-traffic weekends will see a hundred boats anchored or tethered in daisy chains—boats ranging from twelve-foot Gheenoes to sixteen-foot Montauks to twenty-four-foot center consoles to thirty-two-foot triple engines to forty-foot go-fast boats and every variation in between. E
ven some sixty- or seventy-five-foot yachts will moor in the deeper water and then send their tenders into the playground.

  Weekends are a kaleidoscope of color and an explosion of sound. Boat captains attract attention three ways: the color and design of their boat, the bodies filling the bikinis aboard, and the noise emitting from their speakers. Dotting the periphery are glass bottles in coolies, beach chairs resting in the water, kids on floats, dogs chasing bait fish, boys throwing cast nets, kids on jet skis, sandcastles in disrepair, straw hats of every size and shape, old men flying kites, barbeque grills, and generators. From sunup to sundown, the Fort George system of sandbars is a city that emerges and disappears with the tide.

  My island is one of the many smaller ones surrounding Fort George. With the deepwater access of the ICW to the west and the shallower waters of the river to the south and east, I, too, am hemmed in by water. But unlike Fort George Island, my island is smaller and only accessible by boat. And while Fort George is dotted with homes and churches and clubs and tourists and an old plantation, I live alone.

  Which is how I like it.

  I sat at the kitchen table, sipped my coffee, and tried not to stare at the urns. To give my hands something to do, I cleaned Fingers’ Sig. Then I cleaned it again. And again. I liked the worn feel of it in my hand. It reminded me of him and the umpteen times I’d seen him holster or unholster it. I tried to remember the sounds of his and Marie’s voices or see their faces, but both were muffled and muddled; I couldn’t make them out. With each day, the regrets mounted, and I kept hearing myself speak the many words I’d left unsaid.

  Fingers’ leaving was sudden, and while I always knew it might happen that way given his and my chosen line of work, I wasn’t ready for it. He was here, big as life itself, filling my heart and mind—and then he was gone. I thought through the details of that last day a thousand times over. “We’ll cover more ground if you take the coastline and I take the horizon,” he’d said. I knew we never should have split up. I knew if and when he found Victor’s yacht, he wouldn’t wait. Older and maybe a step slower, he’d charge in. Bull in a china shop. Sig blazing. He was stubborn that way. He knew the moment he grabbed the swim ladder that entering the Gone to Market was a one-way trip.

  It’s why those he rescued trusted him. And why so many more loved him.

  Stories were Fingers’ mechanism for dealing with the memories. They rolled off his tongue one after another—the scent of one pointing to the next. Of course, getting him to sit still long enough was the key, but pour him a glass of earth and the gates would open. When they did, I’d sit, listen, laugh, and cry. We all did.

  I stood at the orange box and mourned the silence. I knew I needed to get going, but I was stalling. The loss of one was crushing. The loss of both was . . . No matter how hard I tried or how long I sat there staring down the table, I could not make sense of the fact that everything I knew about them and had experienced with them was now held in two containers sitting three feet in front of me. I would walk out of the kitchen only to walk back in and be amazed that they had not moved. Purple and orange still staring back at me.

  It was a dream I did not like and from which I could not wake up.

  Sunday afternoon meant much of the crowd had thinned on the sandbars, yet one boat emerged from the ICW pushing a wake against the outgoing tide. A twenty-eight-foot, dual-engine tender for a larger yacht moored in the channel. Two guys and ten girls. Piercingly loud music. They ran the nose up on the beach, and the girls and one guy exited while the captain secured a Bahamian moor so the wind wouldn’t spin him and beach him in the shallows, forcing him to wait about eight hours to nudge his boat loose. Evidently he knew what he was doing.

  His guests roamed the sandbar and set up a volleyball net. The two guys were not remarkable. Tattooed. Muscled. Chains and earrings. Like every other wannabe. But the girls were. As were the sizes of their bikinis. With the beer and umbrella drinks flowing and sundown approaching, the sandbar soon became a topless dance competition.

  I’d seen it all before.

  With the noise of their party over my shoulder, I waded through the waist-deep water several hundred yards away, pulled the crab trap, lifted out the angry blue crab, placed it on a medium-size circle hook, and cast a Carolina rig out into the deeper channel. Twenty minutes later, my drag started singing. A keeper redfish, or red drum as they are technically known, bronzed from the tannins in the St. Johns and St. Mary’s Rivers. Hooked well.

  Redfish is good eating. Dinner served.

  Fingers’ watertight, bright-orange, beat-up Pelican case had probably circled the globe a half dozen times. One more trip wouldn’t hurt. I figured he’d like that. Besides, if the boat took on water, the case could serve as a flotation device and save my life—something Fingers was good at. The trip south would take me several hundred miles through temperamental and sometimes unforgiving waters, so I was planning like the airlines do—“In the event of a loss of cabin pressure.” Unlikely but possible. I secured Fingers’ box on the bow because I knew he’d like the wind in his face.

  I had intended to spend the afternoon readying the Whaler for my trip down the coast, but more often than not I found myself staring at that box. Thinking about the number of times I’d seen Fingers do what Fingers did—make everything better. Years ago, I’d named the Whaler Gone Fiction for reasons that mattered only to me. Fingers told me it was a stupid name. I told him to get his own boat because I wasn’t changing the name. He knew why, so he didn’t fight me on it.

  I changed the oil. Swapped out the prop for something with a little more pitch, which would bring down the rpm’s at higher speeds over long distances. Conserving fuel while bringing my top speed to fifty-five-plus if I trimmed it out.

  I cleared the bills off my desk and then did the one thing I’d been dreading. I composed the email I did not want to write. Then another. How do you tell a person that someone they love has died? I’m not sure I can answer that. When finished, I sat staring at my screen. For an hour. A phone call would have been better—they deserved that—but I didn’t have the bandwidth. I would not be able to control my emotions. So I clicked Send, turned off my computer and my phone, and was in the process of turning out all the lights when I heard a knock. It echoed off the massive doors, crossed the lawn through the rain, and bounced into the second-story open window of my loft inside the barn. Given that I am surrounded by water, visitors are rare. I waited, and there it was again, this time accompanied by a muted female voice.

  A girl’s voice.

  I pulled on a shirt, climbed down, crossed the yard in the rain, and crept barefooted through the darkness, staring at her back. Even from behind, she was beautiful.

  “Hello,” I said.

  She jumped a foot in the air, fell into a squatting position, and screamed. Following that with relieved yet uncertain laughter as I stepped around her and into the light.

  She stood and pointed at me, but her aim was slightly off and most of her words ran together. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people. Now I really have to pee. You open?”

  I unlocked the latch and swung open the massive oaken doors. Our movement turned on the motion lights, which gave me a better look at her. She was a beautiful young woman. Fashion magazine face. Runway legs. Pilates figure. Bare feet, muddy at the edges. She was holding a rain jacket above her head to ward off the drizzle. She laughed uncomfortably. “You scared the sh—” Suddenly aware of her surroundings, she covered her mouth and said, “I mean . . . I wasn’t expecting you. That’s all. Sorry.”

  I recognized her from the sandbar.

  Chapter 2

  She shook off the rain, tracking mud. She was dressed provocatively. Daisy Dukes. Bikini top. Several piercings—nose, ears, and belly button. Black eyeliner. Maybe the eyelashes were not hers. She smelled of smoke but not cigarettes. Possibly a cigar but I doubted it. Her fingers nervously turned the bikini strap behind her neck. She stepped inside and twirled like a dancer. Something she did
both to take in her surroundings and because it was natural. Like she’d danced as a child. Her jet-black hair was not her real color. A recent change. As was the tattoo at the small of her back. The red edges looked slightly irritated.

  Her rain jacket belonged to a man and was several sizes too large. I pointed. “May I?”

  She folded it over her arms. “I’m good.” I wondered if her present distrust of me was fueled by whoever gave her that rain jacket.

  She was fifteen. Maybe sixteen, but I doubted it. The world before her. Something ugly behind her. Her glassy eyes betrayed a stormy and medicated mixture of excitement and fear. Going up or coming down, there was more in her blood than just blood.

  Silence followed. I folded my hands behind my back. “Can I help you?”

  Her words grew more slurred. “You have a baaaa-throom?”

  I pointed at the door, and she went in. Walking provocatively. After a few minutes, her phone rang and I could hear her in there talking more to someone than with. Her raised voice suggested the conversation did not go well. When she returned, she’d settled the jacket loosely around her shoulders.

  “Thaaaank you.”

  Curious, she studied the small chapel. My voice broke the silence. “How old are you?”

  She laughed but wouldn’t look at me. “Twenty-one.”

  I paused long enough to force her to look at me. “Are you okay?”

  More discomfort. Less eye contact. “Why do you ask?”

  I waved my hand across the water where she’d spent the afternoon. “Sometimes getting off a boat can be more difficult than getting on.”

  “You know about boats?”

  “Some.”

  She studied the intricate woodwork. Hand carved. The tops of the pews had been darkened over the years by hand oil and sweat. Her eyes landed on the ornate altar and steps. “It’s beautiful.”