He’d offered to bring her, he reminded himself. He’d made the effort. It was Caddie who had said no, who had rejected his extended hand just as she’d rejected his dinner the night before. But he’d decided to let that go. There was no point in having an argument. Obviously, she had been trying to upset him (he found it impossible to believe she could simply have forgotten), and if he let her believe that she had, she would just do it again. It was better, he thought, to ignore her, as Carol had forced him to do when Caddie was an infant and she cried for long periods of time, seemingly for no reason. “Just let her work it out,” Carol had said, while Ben, his nerves tight from hearing his daughter wail in the next room, had wanted to run and snatch her up. He’d secretly accused Carol of heartlessness, even when, after an hour or less, a quick check on Caddie proved that she was indeed sleeping peacefully.

  He would leave her alone now, too, he’d decided. Let her work it out on her own. Whatever “it” was. Apart from a wholesale hatred of him, he couldn’t think of anything specific that would make her so determined to upset him. Then again, he’d never been very good at understanding the unspoken needs of other people. He always assumed that they would tell him what they wanted and was repeatedly surprised when, more often than not, they left it to him to guess.

  A sudden tugging on his fin made him turn his head. Angela was looking into his face, her eyes wide with excitement. She motioned to him to follow her, then turned and swam off. When she stopped, pointing into a crack in the rock, Ben followed her finger to see what she’d been so anxious to show him.

  A tiny red face looked back at him. It was attached to a thin body perhaps a foot long. The creature’s tail was curled, and it peered up at Ben with an expression of utter surprise. The gills on either side of its neck fluttered as it breathed.

  Angela held up her hands, asking him what the animal was. Ben held his hand out, the fingers flat together and turned vertically, and made the sinuous motion that represented an eel. Angela responded with a look of disdain that clearly indicated that she knew full well that it was an eel. Ben then held his hands together, the palms a short distance apart. It’s a baby, he telegraphed at her.

  It was, specifically, a juvenile Wolf Eel. And it was a good find. While adult eels were a not-uncommon sight in Monterey, sightings of their young were rare. They most often stayed well hidden, coming out only when they were large enough to protect themselves. This one, apparently, had decided he was tough enough to handle any potential predators.

  Ben tried to think of a good sign for wolf eel, as Angela was waiting for more clarification. Finally, he lifted his head and pretended to bay. A stream of bubbles flew from his regulator, and when they cleared he saw Angela nodding enthusiastically and clapping her hands together, the childish but completely appropriate sign for having discovered something thrilling.

  Ben motioned for Angela to take pictures of the eel. He hovered vertically in the water column as she did, silently appreciating her patience with what was a difficult undertaking. Not only did she have to juggle the mechanical intricacies of the underwater camera, she had to do it while not making any moves that would frighten her skittish subject. Again, Ben found himself thinking about Caddie. Surely by now she would not only have scared off the little wolf eel, but she would probably somehow be blaming him for it.

  Maybe that’s what fathers are for, he thought. Someone had to be the scapegoat. After all, it wasn’t that far back in human history when the king of a land might be killed as an offering to the gods when something went wrong. The prevailing philosophy—that the king was in charge and therefore should be held responsible for the failings of his kingdom—could with little trouble be applied to fatherhood. Particularly, he thought, by an angry child.

  If Caddie wanted to use him as a whipping boy, he saw little he could do to change her mind. Still, he wished things could be different. He’d had an ambivalent relationship with his own father, a kind of mutual disinterest that, while not hostile, was uncomfortable for both of them. They remained strangers to one another until the day of his father’s death, at which point Frank Ransome had become a silent and seldom-seen ghost who haunted the halls of his son’s memory.

  Is that how Caddie would remember him when he was dead? Would she, should she come across a photograph of him, need a minute to remember exactly who he was, as Ben once had when a picture of his father had fallen from a box of old papers he was carrying from his garage to the garbage can? Looking at the unsmiling face staring up at him from the ground, Ben’s first thought had been that it was a photograph of one of the more humorless American presidents, perhaps Hoover or Johnson. Only after recognizing the dog sitting beside the man, a surly shepherd that went by the name of Prince and that had once bitten Ben, requiring seven stitches to his hand, did Ben remember his father. Even then, the memory was more about the dog, which his father had refused to get rid of following the attack and which Ben had feared until its death nine years later. He recalled, too, that a framed photo of Prince had hung beside his own school portrait in the hallway between the bathroom and his bedroom, where he passed it several times a day.

  Although warm enough during the dive, Ben realized that he was now quite cold. He got Angela’s attention and indicated that they should begin their ascent to the surface. She nodded, looked back at the wolf eel, which had retreated into its den, and the two of them resumed their circling of the pinnacle.

  They moved more quickly now, decreasing their depth at a steady but unhurried pace. When they arrived at the layer of algae, they rose to fifteen feet and stopped there, pausing three minutes as an added precaution against complications from decompression. Unable to see, the minutes passed slowly as Ben checked his computer repeatedly, waiting for the counter on his display to reach zero and free him to surface. Finally it did, and he kicked up through the last dozen feet, breaking the surface not far from the Zodiac. Angela followed shortly after.

  “I think your computer cheats,” she said as they made the short swim to the boat. “You always seem to have a shorter safety stop than I do.”

  “But you always have more air left than I do,” Ben joked. “So that makes us even.”

  Still in the water, he removed his BC, inflating it to keep it afloat while he gripped the rope running along the Zodiac’s side and heaved himself into the boat, propelling himself up with his fins. Then he turned and retrieved from Angela the two cameras and her BC. A moment later she slid gracefully over the side.

  “How come I look like a walrus when I do that and you look like a mermaid?” Ben joked as Angela deftly removed her fins and stowed them in her mesh dive bag.

  Angela started to speak, but Ben cut her off. “Don’t answer that,” he said.

  “I can’t believe that juvenile wolf eel,” said Angela, pulling off her hood and shaking her hair. “He was absolutely gorgeous.”

  She continued to talk about the wolf eel as Ben stowed his gear and started up the boat’s motor. Even during the bumpy, loud ride back to Hopkins she rhapsodized about the dive. Listening to her, Ben tried to imagine Caddie being so excited about, well, anything. He wasn’t sure she was capable of an emotion more exuberant than boredom.

  He was tempted to ask Angela about her relationship with her father, then remembered that they’d already had that discussion, at least in an abbreviated fashion. She’d suggested that Caddie was simply going through a phase. He hoped she was right. But even if she is, he thought as they neared the dock, I doubt she’ll be out of it before the summer’s over.

  CHAPTER 20

  When Brian called at two in the afternoon, Caddie was taking her second nap of the day. Actually, this second rest was accidental, occurring when she fell asleep in the middle of the last chapter of the book she was reading. Having gotten that far, she’d found that she didn’t care who had committed the murders that were central to the novel’s story, and despite her best efforts to remain with the characters to the end, she found it impossible to remain awake. She had been asleep for approximately thirty-five minutes when the phone rang, waking her up.

  Her father, she discovered while racing through the house in an attempt to locate the source of the ringing, had only one phone. This was installed in the kitchen, requiring her to run down the stairs, in the process slipping and hitting her knee on the newel post. Cursing and limping, she made it to the phone on the seventh ring, for once happy that her father’s apparent disinterest in entering the twenty-first century meant either that his ancient (to her) phone had no answering mechanism or that he had failed to turn it on.

  “Hello,” she said, rubbing her smarting knee.

  “Caddie?” replied a male voice.

  For a moment she thought it was Sam, and her heart swelled with relief and joy. Finally, a voice from home. She started to express her pleasure at hearing from a friend when the voice continued. “It’s Brian.”

  “Oh,” she said, momentarily disappointed. “Hi.”

  “Is this a bad time?” Brian asked.

  Caddie rallied herself. “No,” she answered, trying to sound more enthusiastic. “I just fell on the stairs and whacked my knee. How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” said Brian. “You’re sure you’re all right? I don’t want to be responsible for crippling you or anything.”

  Caddie laughed. Now over both the pain of her fall and the dashing of her hopes for news from Sam, she was actually pleased to be talking to Brian. “I’ll send you the emergency room bill,” she teased.

  “I just wanted to say I had a good time last night,” Brian continued. “I know you’re supposed to wait two days—or maybe it’s three, whatever—before you call, but I was thinking about you this morning while I was cutting up fish.”

  “You really know how to make a girl feel special,” said Caddie. “I’ve never been compared to fish parts before.”

  Brian groaned. “That’s not what I meant,” he said. “See, this is why men can’t talk to women. You never know when we’re complimenting you. Me, I’d be thrilled if you compared me to chum.”

  Caddie took the phone (it was at least cordless, which she thought was something of a miracle) into the living room and sat on the couch, pulling her legs up and nestling into the pillows. “I’m not sure if you’re up to chum,” she teased. “Maybe bait.”

  “I’m hanging up now,” said Brian, and when there was dead silence, Caddie thought maybe he had.

  “Hello?” she said.

  It was Brian’s turn to laugh. “Ha!” he said. “You missed me.”

  “Listen, chum,” said Caddie.

  “No,” Brian interrupted. “You listen. How about meeting me at the aquarium this afternoon? Say around four? Then we can hang out for a while.”

  “I don’t know,” said Caddie, pretending to be hesitant. “Oprah’s supposed to have a really great show today. I’m not sure if I can tear myself away.”

  “Well, I hope you and Oprah have a good time,” Brian replied. “I’ll just sit here with my fish parts and think about you.”

  “Don’t even go there,” said Caddie. “Where should I meet you?”

  “Come in the front entrance,” Brian told her. “Tell them you’re meeting me, and they’ll tell you where to go.”

  “You carry that much weight around there, huh?” said Caddie.

  “Hey, in the land of the fish, the guy with the chum is king,” Brian said proudly.

  Caddie said good-bye and hung up. She still wasn’t sure exactly what she thought of Brian. He was cute, and funny, and nice. Pretty much everything that would usually send you screaming, she told herself. Especially the nice part. Nice guys generally weren’t that interesting, mostly because there was no challenge there. Perversely, she tended to go for guys who either didn’t show enough interest in her or showed enough but showed just as much in a couple of others girls as well. Nice was hard for her.

  Still, he made her laugh, and that was something. Besides, she reasoned, there was nothing else going on in her life. Brian might not be the most exciting guy, but he was a guy, and in a place like Monterey, that was enough, at least for the moment.

  She looked at her watch. She had about ninety minutes before she was meeting Brian. That gave her enough time for a shower and maybe a quick lunch before she headed out. She went upstairs, spent her time in the bathroom, and came down again forty minutes later ready for something to eat.

  In the kitchen she opened the refrigerator and looked inside, expecting to find it as bare as she had the day before. Instead she found it filled with plastic containers. She opened one, revealing spaghetti. Another held pasta sauce. She realized that she was staring at the remains of the dinner she’d failed to show up for.

  She took the food to the table and got a bowl from the cupboard. After spooning pasta into it, she poured some of the sauce on top. Two minutes later, while she waited impatiently by the sink, the microwave on the counter dinged and she took the bowl out. The spaghetti had relaxed, and the sauce coated it in a thick blanket of tomatoes. Caddie located the salt and pepper shakers and sprinkled a little of each onto her food.

  She ate quickly. When she was done, she washed the bowl and fork in the sink, dried them, and put them away again. The containers she shook so that the contents appeared untouched, then returned them to the refrigerator. If her father opened them, she thought, he wouldn’t be able to tell if she’d eaten anything or not.

  She went upstairs and brushed her teeth, checking them for stray pieces of basil. Her skin looked good, as did her hair. All in all, she was pretty pleased with her appearance. She was wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt. Blue, everyone told her, was her color. She’d read somewhere that wearing blue relaxed people and made them feel they could trust you. That’s probably why Valium is blue, she thought.

  That reminded her. She returned to her bedroom and took the bottle of pills from her backpack. Tipping one into her hand, she popped it into her mouth and swallowed, chasing it with some water from the glass on the bedside table. She didn’t feel anxious, but as Sam always said, you could never feel too relaxed.

  Grabbing her sunglasses, she left the house and headed for the aquarium. She walked slowly, not wanting to arrive all hot and sweaty. Passing Johnny’s, she didn’t even look to see if Nick was working. She thought vaguely about maybe calling Nicole one of these days, just to see what happened if the three of them really did hang out. But if she knew guys, Nick had probably already made up some bullshit story to tell Nicole. Probably he’d told her that Caddie had come on to him and that it wasn’t a good idea to get too friendly. And I’m sure she believed every word, Caddie thought disdainfully.

  When she reached the aquarium, she approached the ticket window. “I’m here to meet one of the volunteers,” she told the woman behind the glass. “His name is Brian—” She stopped, realizing she didn’t know Brian’s last name. “He does the show in the kelp tank,” she said.

  “Brian Foster,” the woman said. “Are you here for volunteer training?”

  From the woman’s tone, Caddie got the impression that saying no would result in her being asked to pay the admission fee, so she nodded. “Yeah, I’m thinking about it.”

  “Go in and head to the left,” the woman instructed her. “All the way back. You’ll see a door that says STAFF ONLY. Go in and ask for Brian. They’ll know where he is.”

  “Thanks,” Caddie said as the woman turned her attention to the next person in line. She pushed open one of the big doors and went inside. Following instructions, she walked toward the kelp tank area and found the door. She half expected an alarm to sound when she pushed on the handle, but the door swung open without incident, admitting her into a room filled with tanks and machinery.

  “Can I help you?” asked a young man wearing an aquarium T-shirt like the one Brian had.

  “I’m looking for Brian Foster,” Caddie said.

  The guy pointed. “Over there,” he said. “He just finished his show.”

  Caddie walked in the indicated direction. Turning a corner, she found Brian standing in his wet suit. Seeing her, he smiled. “You’re just in time to watch me strip,” he said.

  “Do I have to put a dollar in your wet suit?” Caddie asked.

  Brian pulled a cord at the rear of his suit, drawing a zipper down. He tugged the front of the wet suit down, sliding first one arm and then the other out. His chest was bare, and Caddie admired his lean, well-defined physique.

  “You’re checking me out,” Brian said as he bent over and tugged the suit down past his waist.

  “Right,” Caddie said. “I’m overcome with desire. Please, fish boy.”

  Brian pulled one leg out of the wet suit, turning it inside out in the process. He did have on a bathing suit, but Caddie still got a look at his legs. She pretended not to notice.

  Brian hung the suit on a nearby rack, which already held half a dozen other wet suits. An assortment of other gear was piled on the floor nearby. Caddie recognized some of it as stuff her father had, although what it was used for was a mystery.

  “Do you dive?” Brian asked, noticing her looking at the equipment.

  “No,” Caddie said. “I never learned.”

  “I’m surprised your dad never taught you,” Brian remarked, drying himself with a towel. “You know, with him being a marine biologist and all.”

  Caddie shrugged. “I guess he never had time,” she said.

  Brian toweled his hair. “Want to learn?” he asked her. “I could teach you.”

  Caddie looked doubtfully at the dive gear. “I don’t know,” she said. “It looks kind of complicated.”

  “It’s not,” said Brian, pulling on a T-shirt. He knelt beside the equipment. “Not once you know what it is and how to use it.”

  Caddie joined him on the floor as Brian picked up a short cylindrical object from which three hoses hung down, each one attached to another piece of equipment. “This is your regulator,” Brian said. He placed a mouthpiece between his teeth and talked around it. “You breathe through this,” he said, demonstrating before removing the regulator from his mouth.