Friday, June 10—11:00 p.m.
“Son of a...”
The broken expletive was followed by a bang that seemed to echo through the bowels of the yacht.
Ava Adams’s eyelids fluttered. Fitfully, she turned once, then twice. The yacht shifted and rocked in the waves. It had been a late night yesterday and the day before, not to mention the fact that this trip had been completely unexpected. She was dreaming—there was no reason to get up, not yet...not for hours yet.
Still, she shivered. Her sleep was skating on the edge of consciousness—what was reality and what was not were no longer clear. In her dream, she only knew that she needed to escape. She flung one arm out grazing the wall, causing her to turn to her other side.
She opened her eyes. She wasn’t fully awake. She didn’t even take in her surroundings before immediately closing her eyes again. But she couldn’t shift as deep into sleep as she’d been. In fact, now with her eyes closed, her consciousness was heating up. She could see through the curtain of lashes. The moonlight drifted in a faint stream of light across the sheet that twisted around her waist. Her breathing leveled out and she fell asleep again. This time the sleep was even lighter than it had been before—more troubled. She didn’t know how long she slept. She only knew that it wasn’t long before she was again awakened. This time by sounds that she couldn’t ignore. They were loud against the background of the once calm rocking of the boat. Her senses came awake, first noting the change in smell. She inhaled, long and slow. She’d done that often in the two days that they’d been anchored in this cove. She loved the hint of vanilla that was so pervasive and wove through the salty scent of ocean, of seawater. Oddly, the vanilla scent was gone.
“To hell—” a man’s voice rose in a shout. It was a shout that seemed to be cut off as if forcibly stopped. He might have said something else. Words that jumbled in the scuffle and chaos of noise that preceded a crash, followed by another.
It was only a nightmare. It was a figment of her imagination. A result of the stress of stepping from one world into another; from academia into the world of a self-sufficient adult. Two weeks from today she was moving to Casper, Wyoming. At twenty-five and with a doctorate in psychology under her belt, it was about time. At least that was what she’d told herself. Her father had encouraged her to take all the time she needed. She knew that was a way of keeping her close, of keeping her dependent on him. Even though she had lived her own life, in her own apartment, paying as many of her college bills herself as she could with money she had made by occasionally tutoring other students, still she had relied on him. It gave him a chance to be the father he hadn’t gotten to be when she truly had been a child. She’d allowed him that. For he’d become her parent in her latter childhood. It had been through marriage, but stepparent or not, she couldn’t ask for a better father. Now they were making up for lost time. Thus, this trip. They both needed it—the time to be together. Life had gotten busy.
She hovered in the abyss between sleeping and wakefulness. But soon sleep was completely chased away as the shouts rose in volume. More disturbing was the absolute silence that followed. That brought her to full consciousness. She was still, hardly breathing, straining to hear. Were the voices real or only her imagination, or part of a dream? Seconds ticked by. She lay tense, unmoving. The conversation she’d had with her father earlier ran uninvited through her mind. Some, if not all, of the things he had said had been disturbing. He said he was concerned that his partner had gotten himself into a situation with fraudulent land sales. She’d begged him to give her details but he’d refused to say more. He had many projects and thus many people he’d partnered with and he hadn’t given her a name. Instead, he told her that what he’d said and what was recorded in a Texan town would be enough, if it were ever necessary, for her to take evidence to the authorities.
What was going on? There was the sound of heavy footsteps, scuffling and another shout. Something banged above her, as if something or someone had hit the deck hard.
Besides herself, there were two other people on board. Her father and his business partner, a man she didn’t know well. The arrival of Ben Whyte had been a surprise to both of them. They’d just been settling in for the night when he’d arrived on a small fishing boat. The fisherman had dropped him off and left. Neither of them had expected him. This had been their vacation—she’d sailed here to Paradise Island, Bahamas, from St. Croix with her father after he’d issued the last-minute invitation. It had been peaceful until Ben had arrived. Almost immediately, she hadn’t liked the tension that Ben seemed to generate. But the initial tension between him and her father later dissolved once they began telling boisterous sports stories. She’d retired for the night as they joked about the antics of a coach on the football field. But the joking she’d left less than an hour earlier was a far cry from what she was hearing now.
Things didn’t sound too friendly anymore. A curse, a series of banging and scuffling sounds that echoed through the boat. She sat up, her heart pounding.
Another shout had her tense, clenching the sheet. One foot poised on the edge of the bed as she tried to decide whether this was dream or reality. Something crashed, a hollow bang like someone had hit a wall, or the floor. The sounds escalated in volume, an angry shout followed but the words were incomprehensible.
She grabbed her phone. The thought of calling for help crowded out the other possibilities. She wasn’t sure who she would be calling or why. What would the local police do about a situation that was unknown even to herself? She needed to find out what was going on, if her father needed help, if...
Footsteps thudded over her head. Their heavy tread was oddly ominous when combined with everything that had preceded them. Then something else banged, a dull sound that seemed to echo through the boat. Something had fallen and hit the deck just a little to the right of where she now sat.
“What’s going on?” she muttered. She flicked on the lamp by the side of the bed. Soft light bathed the room, chasing away the shadows but not the odd noises from above deck. She got out of bed. Blindly, she grabbed something to throw on. A silk wrap that she’d purchased only this morning with no intention of wearing here. It was a garment made for when she had a boyfriend. It was an enticing garment. Now, it was only the first cover at hand.
She stood there for seconds. The seconds could have been a minute, maybe less, maybe more. She considered her options. But her options were unclear in a situation that was as dark as the night around her. All she knew was that something was very off. The silence that had descended in the last seconds was almost as ominous as what had preceded it. A shiver ran down her spine as she left the room. She moved through the tight passageway, slipping past the galley, which was lit only by a thin streak of moonlight that streamed through a porthole to her left. Memory guided her to the narrow metal stairs that led above deck. She was afraid to turn on any more lights, for that might alert whoever was on deck. She wouldn’t think of the fact that there might be strangers, a threat of some sort aboard the yacht. Her fingers quivered and the phone shook in her damp palm.
Only a few hours earlier she had been able to see through a porthole the shadow of the shoreline. Now, there was nothing but a dark, endless stretch of water. That was odd. But even more odd was the fact that the boat was rocking as if it were on open water.
