Medusa

CHAPTER 17

PAUL TROUT WAS NEAR THE END OF THE SEMINAR HE WAS leading on global warming when his cell phone began to vibrate. Without missing a beat, he reached into his sports jacket pocket, shut off the phone, and threw the next graph up on the projection screen, only to hear a soft ripple of laughter behind his back. He turned, curious at what could be so humorous about an ocean-salinity pie chart.

No one was looking at the chart. Every eye in the room was staring out the window at an attractive red-haired woman in a two-piece bathing suit who was on the lawn outside the building. She was doing jumping jacks and waving a cell phone in the air at the same time.

Trout’s head dipped down, as if looking over his glasses in deep thought, and he tugged at the large, colorful bow tie at his neck.

A seminar participant snickered.

“Who is that crazy woman?”

A faint smile came to Trout’s lips.

“I’m afraid that crazy woman is my wife. Please excuse me.”

A quiet gasp of disbelief followed Trout’s exit from the room, but he was used to such reactions. He was a good-looking young man with large hazel-colored eyes and light brown hair neatly parted down the middle and combed back at the temples Gatsby style. In a tailored suit that draped his six-foot-eight physique perfectly, he was impeccably dressed as usual. But while he displayed a sly sense of humor, people often found his serious demeanor at odds with that of his more vivacious wife.

Trout stepped out into the hall and glanced at his phone. A text message appeared.

CAN U TALK?

Trout hit the MEMORY button to return the call.

“Quite the show you put on for my seminar on climate change,” Trout said in his dry New England tone. “Are you auditioning for the Rockettes?”

Rich feminine laughter cascaded from the phone.

“I tried to call you but you didn’t answer, Herr Professor,” said Gamay. “Then I waved my hands outside your window until I was blue in the face. I had on my bathing suit from this morning’s dive, so in desperation I slipped my shift off and put on a skin show. Apparently, it worked.”

Paul broke into an easy grin.

“Oh, it worked, all right,” he said. “The body temperature of every male in the room rose twenty degrees. Your little striptease may have set off a new round of global warming.”

“Sorry,” Gamay said lightly, “but Kurt called. He and Joe are still on the Beebe.”

“Kurt? Why didn’t you say so? How’d the bathysphere dive go?”

“I told him we had watched until the transmission got cut short. He said the dive was memorable.”

“Odd choice of words. What did he mean?”

“He said he’d explain later. But it appears our attempt to relive our courting days here at Scripps is over. Kurt needs somebody to go to Florida to look into the Bonefish Key Marine Center.”

“Why the interest in Bonefish?”

“He again said he’d explain later. He’d like us to snoop around the center and let him know if anything there strikes us as funny . . . As in peculiar.”

“It’s going to be awkward trying to get out of my schedule,” Paul said. “I’m committed to two more days of panels and lectures.”

“I’ve finished my research dives,” Gamay said. “While you wrap up your seminar, I’ll head off to Florida. You can follow when you’re done.”

Paul glanced at his watch.

“Let’s discuss it over lunch,” he said. “I’ll meet you in the cafeteria after I cool down my seminar group.”

He had been amused but not surprised at his wife’s effective, if unorthodox, attention-getting technique. It was typical of her resourcefulness and her fearlessness. Her open personality was the opposite of Trout’s New England reserve, but they had been immediately attracted to each other from the time they first met at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. Paul was studying for his Ph.D. in ocean science, while Gamay had changed her field of interest from marine archaeology to marine biology and was working toward her doctorate also.

They had met on a Scripps field trip to La Paz, Mexico, and were married after graduation the following year. NUMA’s former director, James Sandecker, had recognized their unique talents and asked them to join the Special Assignments Team under Austin’s leadership. After their last assignment, they had been invited to come back to Scripps and had jumped at the chance. Between their seminars and dives, they had spent their time revisiting familiar haunts and hooking up with old friends.

Trout ignored the grins that greeted his return to the seminar room and ran through the rest of his presentation. Gamay was waiting for him in the cafeteria when he was done. He was relieved to see that she had put her shift back on.

Gamay was a fitness nut and a fanatic about eating nutritious foods, but she had given up trying to fight the high-starch diet found on campus. She dipped a long French fry into a puddle of ketchup and popped it in her mouth.

“It’s a good thing I’m leaving this place,” she complained. “I must have put on twenty pounds since we got here. I’m blowing up like a tick.”

Paul rolled his eyes. Gamay was up at six every day for her five-mile run that burned off any possible trace of culinary excess. Although she was only two inches short of six feet tall, she carried no more than one hundred thirty pounds on her small-hipped frame, most of it muscle from her active lifestyle.

Paul eyed a tall glass that contained a frothy strawberry concoction.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have the frappe,” he said.

Gamay brushed a strand of dark red hair out of her eyes and flashed a dazzling smile that showed the slight gap between her two front teeth.

“Last one . . . promise.”

Her eyes had a dreamy expression as she took a long sip.

“Easy promise to keep, now that you’re leaving town. What do you know about Bonefish Key?”

Gamay dabbed the pink mustache off her upper lip with a napkin.

“Only what I’ve read in scientific journals or come across on the Internet. It’s on the west coast of Florida. They’ve made some discoveries that have led to patents in the field of biomedicine. There’s a great deal of interest in finding something in the wild that could be used to cure disease.”

“I remember the bioprospectors we met a while back in the Amazon rain forest.”

Gamay nodded.

“Same concept, but there’s a growing consensus that the ocean’s potential for pharmaceuticals and medicines dwarfs that of the rain forest. The organisms that grow in the ocean are far more dynamic, biologically speaking, than anything on land.”

Furrowing his brow, Paul said, “If Kurt is interested in the marine center, why not go through Kane?”

“I asked him the same question. He said not to expect help from Kane. That we’re on our own and that-”

“He’ll explain later,” Paul finished the sentence.

Gamay feigned a look of astonishment.

“You’re positively psychic at times.”

He put his index finger to his temple.

“My mystic powers are telling me that you are about to offer me the rest of your strawberry frappe.”

Gamay pushed the glass across the table.

“How do you think we should approach this thing with Kane out of the picture?”

“You could try using your NUMA bona fides to leverage a tour of the place.”

“I thought of that. The NUMA connection might get me in the front door, but I don’t know if I’d get the kind of access that would do us any good.”

Paul nodded in agreement.

“You’d get the VIP treatment, a quick tour by a PR flack, a ham sandwich, and a fond good-bye. Kurt apparently wants us to take a look behind the scenes.”

“That was my impression. I need an edge, and I think I know where I can find one.”

“While you work on that edge, I’ll see if I can get you on a flight to Florida.”

Paul stopped by his office to make travel arrangements. Gamay went to the boat dock to tell her dive crew that she was leaving Scripps. She hauled her scuba gear to the dormitory room that had been provided for their stay. She called an ocean chemist colleague at the Scripps Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine. In her usual Gamay fashion, she got right to the point.

“I’m trying to wrangle an overnight stay at Bonefish Key. I remember you saying that your center has worked with them on oceanborne treatments for asthma and arthritis.”

“That’s right,” said Stu Simpson, an ocean biologist. “Most of the institutions working on this stuff share information. Bonefish Key is pretty tight, though. Have you contacted the director, Dr. Kane?”

“He’s a hard guy to track down.”

“Out in the field a lot, I’ve heard, and the place is being run by a Dr. Mayhew. I’ve met him at conferences. Not exactly Mr. Personality, but I may be able to help. Kane used to be with the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, in Fort Pierce, Florida, before he got some money and set up the lab at Bonefish Key. I’ve got a friend at Harbor Branch who’s a pal of Mayhew’s. He owes me. I’ll see if I can call in that marker for you.”

While Gamay waited for Simpson to call back, she turned her laptop on and called up all the information she could find on Bonefish Key. She had been reading for only a few minutes when Dr. Mayhew called. Gamay explained her interest in Bonefish Key, said she was at Scripps but would be in Florida visiting friends and wondered if she could visit the lab. He said he appreciated the interest of someone from NUMA in the marine center’s work, but their visitor schedule was full up.

“That’s too bad,” Gamay said. “NUMA had no problem finding accommodations for your director on the B3 project. Why don’t you talk to Dr. Kane? I’m sure he would love to reciprocate NUMA’s hospitality if you asked him.”

“That’s not possible.” Pause. “We have a guest room free, but only for tomorrow night. Too bad you’re on the other side of the country.”

Gamay saw the opening and struck with the speed of a cobra.

“I’ll be there tomorrow,” she said.

“I wouldn’t want you to come all this way for just one night.”

“No problem, I can revise my schedule. So let’s make it two nights, then. How do I get out to the key?”

There was a stunned silence at the other end of the line. “When you get to Fort Myers, call a man named Dooley Greene. He works for the center and has a boat.”

Mayhew almost hung up without giving her Greene’s phone number. Cute, she thought as she jotted down the information. When Paul returned a few minutes later, she already was packing her duffel bag.

“Are you in?” he asked.

“Just barely.”

She told him how she arm-twisted Mayhew.

“Slick,” Paul said. “You’d make a deadly telemarketer. You’re in luck, by the way. The travel bureau at NUMA has booked you on an early-morning flight to Fort Myers. I’ll come out after I wrap up my seminar.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon walking and riding around the campus, visiting spots from their grad-student days. After a late dinner, Gamay finished packing her bag, and they got to bed early. The next morning, Paul drove Gamay to the airport, gave her a good-bye kiss, and said he would see her in a couple of days.

THE PLANE LIFTED OFF the ground and leveled out at thirty-five thousand feet. Gamay settled back in her seat and read about Bonefish Key on her laptop. It was a narrow strip of land near Pine Island on the Gulf of Mexico. Indians inhabited the island before the Spaniards turned it into a combination fort and trading post. Later, it became a fishing center named after the bonefish that abounded in nearby waters.

Around 1900, an enterprising New Yorker built a hotel, but it was wrecked in a hurricane. The island then passed through a series of owners. After another hurricane stymied an attempt to operate an inn, the owner sold Bonefish Key to a nonprofit foundation and it became a center for the study of marine organisms with pharmaceutical potential.

The flight was smooth, and Gamay used some of the time to work on a report about her work at Scripps. When the plane landed at Fort Myers Airport late in the afternoon, the efficient NUMA travel bureau had arranged for a van to deliver her to the Pine Island ferry landing.

A twin-hulled powerboat was tied up at the dock. The grizzled man at the wheel had a nut-brown tan that only partly hid the creases in his genial face.

“I guess you’re going out to Bonefish,” he said. “I’m Dooley Greene. I make runs for the marine center, which kinda makes me the official greeter.”

Gamay tossed her duffel bag in the double-hull and stepped on board with the sureness of someone who spent a lot of time on boats.

“I’m Dr. Morgan-Trout,” she said, shaking his hand with a grip that surprised Dooley with its firmness. “Please call me Gamay.”

“Thanks, Dr. Gamay,” he said, unable to avoid the honorific. Despite her informality, her almost-regal self-confidence could be intimidating. Emboldened by her friendliness, he added, “Pretty name. Unusual too.”

“My father was a wine nut. He named me after his favorite grape.”

“My father’s favorite booze was cheap gin,” Dooley said. “Guess I should be grateful he didn’t name me Juniper.”

Dooley uncleated the line and pushed the boat away from the dock. As they headed out into the bay, he seemed in no hurry.

“How long have you worked for the center?” Gamay asked.

“I was the dockmaster for the Bonefish Key Inn back when every fisherman and boater on the waterway used to hang out at the bar. After the hotel got beat up by Hurricane Charlie, the owner went bankrupt. When the marine center bought the property, they fixed up the inn. Dr. Kane asked me to run the water taxi and carry supplies. I used to be pretty busy running staff people back and forth, but that’s all quieted down some.”

“Aside from staff, do you bring many visitors out here?”

“Nope. The folks at the lab aren’t the friendliest people . . . Scientists.” He shook his head. Then, realizing his faux pas, he added, “Oh, hell, you a scientist?”

“Yes, Dooley, but I’m a friendly scientist,” she said with her engaging smile. “And I know what you mean. I talked to Dr. Mayhew on the phone.”

“Preachin’ to the choir,” Dooley said with a grin like an old picket fence.

He reached into his work-shirt pocket and pulled out a worn business card that he handed to Gamay.

“I don’t live on the island,” he said. “Call me if you want to get off it. Phones don’t work there unless you climb up the water tower.”

“Dr. Mayhew called me from the island.”

“They got a radiotelephone setup for emergencies and for the mucky-mucks to use.”

The boat left the open water and wound its way through a green maze of mangroves. Gamay felt as if she were heading into Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Eventually, they rounded a turn and headed to an island that was mounded higher and appeared more solid than its surroundings. The pointed top of the white water tower Dooley had mentioned rose above the trees like a coolie hat. He tied the boat to the small dock and turned off the motor.

A grassy slope rose up to a patio and the veranda of a white-stucco building. It was practically hidden in the sun-baked palmettos, the light breeze carrying their damp perfume to Gamay’s nostrils. A snowy egret waded along the shore. It was a picturepostcard perfect Florida scene, but the place gave her an uneasy feeling. Maybe it was the remoteness, the burned-up look of the vegetation, or simply the unearthly stillness.

“It’s so quiet,” she said, unintentionally speaking in almost a whisper. “Almost spooky.”

Dooley chuckled.

“The lodge’s built on an Indian mound. The island belonged to the Calusa before the white man killed them off or made them sick with disease. People still pick up on the bad stuff.”

“Are you saying the island is haunted, Dooley?”

“No Indian ghosts, if that’s what you mean. But everything that’s been built here seems to have come to a bad end.”

Gamay picked up her duffel bag and climbed up on the dock.

“Let’s hope that doesn’t include my short visit, Dooley.”

She had tried to leaven the gloomy mood with her joke, but Dooley wasn’t smiling when he followed her up on the dock.

“Welcome to paradise, Dr. Gamay.”