Might as well get to the point, he thought. “So, are you going to tell me what the hell you’re really up to?”
She choked a little on a swallow of beer, those miraculous eyes widening with alarm. “What?”
Marcus looked at her steadily across the splintery table, which bore witness to the history of those who’d sat there before them in deep-carved initials and the names of ships and women, indistinguishable from one another with the passage of time.
“I overheard you and Fergus talking on the boat,” he said bluntly. “I didn’t understand most of it—something about dying kelp and some mysterious illness, and people depending on you to find some kind of answers—but it was enough to make it pretty damn clear that you were never diving for buried treasure. So I want to know what you were looking for; the truth, this time, if you please.”
Beka’s face went blank for a moment, then she sighed, took one last gulp of beer, and set her mug resolutely down on the table. “Fine,” she said. “But I have to warn you, there are secrets involved here that aren’t mine to tell. I’ll explain what I can, and I won’t lie, but there are things I’m not free to speak about. If you can accept that, I’ll share what I can.”
Marcus set his jaw, but nodded. It was a place to start, anyway. “So, not buried treasure,” he repeated.
“That wasn’t exactly a lie,” Beka said, a tiny smile playing at the corner of her lips. “If I can find the answers I’m looking for, they will be worth more than gold to the people involved. And the answers are most certainly buried—at least, I haven’t been able to find them.”
The moment of frivolity slid away, leaving her expression solemn and her eyes shadowed. “There is something wrong with the water down there,” she said. “Plants and fish are being affected, and some people have gotten ill too. We don’t know why, or how to fix it, and that’s what I was trying to find out.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Marcus asked. “Are you working for the government? Is that why I haven’t heard anything about this? Are they covering this up?” He thought about the load of fish he’d delivered to market a couple of days ago. “Hey! Am I poisoning people with the few fish I’m bringing in?” He started to rise from the table, suddenly furious, but she waved a placating hand in his direction and he subsided. For now.
“Sort of, no, no, and definitely not,” she said, the laughter in her voice calming him more than her words. “The fish closer to the surface, the ones you’re catching, seem to be fine. It’s the plant and animal life deeper down in the sea trenches that seem to be affected.”
He opened his mouth, and she added, “And don’t ask me how that is affecting people, because that’s one of the things I can’t tell you. They’re . . . a special group.”
So she sort of worked for the government, and there was some kind of secret underwater experiment that had run into trouble? He’d heard rumors about that kind of thing when he was in the Marines, but hell, you heard all kinds of bizarre rumors about new weapons and super-soldiers and government experiments when you were in the military. Mostly they didn’t amount to much. But maybe he’d stumbled onto something real. Or maybe it was all as foolish and delusional as the fairy stories his father used to charm his younger brother with, getting him so wrapped up in the so-called magic of the sea that he forgot to watch out for its grim reality.
“Okay, so let’s say that for the moment, I’m taking your word about all this. Why is it your job to fix it? You’re a hippie chick jewelry-making surfer girl. Why aren’t there a bunch of government geeks looking into it with submersibles and an army of scientists?”
Beka sighed, suddenly looking ten years older. “Believe it or not, it really is my job to fix it. I’ve got some, um, special skills. And the responsibilities to go with them.” She gazed steadily at him. “I’m thinking you know a little something about how that feels.”
That he did. And the project must be so hush-hush that they’d brought in one troubleshooter instead of a larger group that would have been harder to keep on the down low. Hell, she’d fooled him into thinking she was just another flaky California blonde, so there was something to that plan. Although to his credit, he’d had a feeling something wasn’t quite right about her all along. He just hadn’t known what it was.
“So you haven’t made any progress at all?” he said, feeling more than a hint of sympathy. He’d hated failing at a mission. That’s one of the reasons he’d rarely let it happen. The few truly spectacular failures still kept him up at night, replaying endlessly in his head as though he could somehow change the outcome even now.