09-Twelve Mile Limit (7 page)

There wasn’t much doubt why. Word was out that the lone survivor was with us. Everyone on the islands wanted to hear what happened from Gardner’s own mouth.

We stopped at Jensen’s Marina for Claudia to join us. Seeing her come out the door of Janet’s little blue Holiday Mansion, with its curtained pilothouse windows, gave us all an emotional jolt. It wasn’t just the family resemblance, though that was part of it. It was the fact that Claudia was wearing a pale, peach-colored beach dress and makeup, and she had a bright red hibiscus bloom fixed behind her right ear.

It was exactly the sort of outfit that Janet typically wore to our Friday parties.

I was standing beside Jeth when Claudia made her entrance. I heard him whisper, “Jesus Christ, that’s almost too much to handle.”

I patted him on the back. “Nothing’s too much. That’s one of the things Janet taught us.”

We stopped at McCarthy’s Marina and boarded the Lady Chadwick for drinks, then we mobbed our way to the Green Flash, and then the Mucky Duck for sunset on the beach. Milled around swapping stories with Pat and Memo at the bar, listening to John Paul on the guitar before returning to Dinkin’s Bay.

The entire time, I noticed that Gardner kept her distance from me, still mad, apparently. Ransom, though, she liked. The two women fast became a pair.

Once, passing behind them, I paused to listen as Ransom, speaking in her musical Bahamian accent, told her “Amelia, darlin’. Let me tell you something ’bout these nice titties ah’ mine. They changed my womanly life, they surely did, and don’t let no man tell you he doan care about your boobies. A woman deserve to look how she want to look, my sister! Yes sir! I reckon they cost me four, maybe five, blow jobs apiece, and that cheap, girl! Very cheap! I were kind’a sweet on that lil’ doctor man anyway. I’d a’ made him feel good for free, no problem!”

I liked Gardner’s unembarrassed laughter—then she noticed me. She said to Ransom, “This big goon really is your brother?”

“Oh yes, oh yes, he one of the very few white ones in our family. He can be kind’a mulish sometimes when it come to women, but he good. Doan you doubt that. My brother, he a good man.”

Long after sunset, several dozen of us sat quietly listening to Amelia Gardner. She was sitting cross-legged atop one of the picnic tables, behind Dinkin’s Bay’s Red Pelican Gift Shop, facing the docks. Sitting to her left was Claudia. Ransom to her right.

The windy, high pressure system that had made our search so exhausting was gone now, replaced by a balmy, tropical low. Through the coconut palms, beyond the yellow windows of my house and lab, I could see drifting clouds and oily star paths on black water. Woodring’s Point and the mouth of Dinkin’s Bay were a charcoal hedge of mangroves two miles north.

It was a very warm night for late November. Even so, Gardner had gone to her Jeep for a jacket, as if affected by memories of the cold that night three weeks earlier. It wasn’t easy for her to talk about it. There was no mistaking the emotion in her voice, and I admired the way she fought her way through it.

I was holding a plastic cup of beer poured over ice, plus a wedge of squeezed lime, and I took a sip now, as she said, “I met Michael Sanford and Grace Walker when I was in the Keys, then again at a dive club party on Siesta Key. You guys ever eat at the old mullet restaurant there? That’s where the party was. They were with a woman by the name of Sherry Meyer, who was supposed to dive the Baja California with us. Lucky for her, though, she had a cold and didn’t make the trip. I wish to hell we’d all had colds that day—” She touched her hand to Claudia’s arm as she said that; Claudia patted Gardner’s hand in return. “But I guess destiny has its reasons and there’s no going back now. Janet was a friend of Michael’s, and I didn’t meet her until I got to Marco. He’d rented a three-bedroom condo—him in one room, we four women in the other two—and we went to bed early Thursday night so we could get up early Friday.”

Because I’d seen still shots of them in the newspapers and on television, I had a fixed mental image of both Sanford and Grace Walker, and impressions of both of them that may or may not have been valid. Michael Sanford could have been a fashion model—six foot four or so, probably 220 pounds, with the jaw, the dimpled chin, and dense, curly black hair that photographs well. Walker was his female, African-American counterpart—busty with makeup and lots of jewelry, a businesswoman in her thirties who was making money and fighting for causes in which she believed. They both knew how to look into the lens of a camera and smile.

Gardner told us that the four of them had left Marco River Marina in Sanford’s twenty-five-foot boat at around 8 A.M. and were headed out Big Marco Pass when Sanford noticed that one of his 225-horsepower Johnsons was overheating. They returned to the marina and had a mechanic switch out a thermostat, which solved the problem.

“Michael bought a second thermostat just in case,” she said. “I suppose most of you’ve heard the rumors that Michael—maybe all of us—ran offshore and sank the boat intentionally for the insurance money. Well, check with the marina. Why would he have bought a second thermostat if he’d planned on sinking his own boat? Why would he have bought a second thermostat if we’d planned on rendezvousing with a drug boat, sinking the Seminole Wind, and escaping? That’s another theory you’ve probably heard.”

Around me, I could see the island fishing guides—eight of them, sitting in their own little group—thinking about it, nodding their heads. Yeah, it didn’t make any sense. If you were going to sabotage your own vessel, you might buy new canvas or pay for a new paint job, just to make it convincing. But a backup thermostat? Very unlikely.

Gardner, an attorney, was already doing a good job of making her case.

On their way offshore, the four divers stopped at a wreck called Ben’s Barge, which is about three miles off Marco. Sanford, a fisherman, wanted to catch some bait so the four of them could fish the Baja California after diving it.

Using tiny hooks and bits of shrimp, they filled the stern’s bait well with small bluegill-shaped fish called pinfish.

“While we caught bait, we discussed what we wanted to do,” Gardner told us. “We were listening to the weather channel on the radio, and Michael told us it wouldn’t be real nice out there, but it should be okay. A couple days ago, I had got my hands on the actual forecast from NOAA. It was ‘small craft should exercise caution, wind out of the east southeast, fifteen to twenty knots, seas four to six feet, with bay and inland waters choppy.’”

She saw the guides react, and said, “I know, I know. We shouldn’t have gone. The temptation is to put the blame on Michael. It was his boat, he’d made the dive several times. But that’s bullshit. We were all adults, all certified divers, and we all agreed. We wanted to dive the Baja California, and, because we were still close to Marco Island, I guess we figured we would be protected from an east wind. It seemed fairly calm three miles out. What I didn’t know at the time was that you don’t measure a wave from its trough. You measure it from sea level. So, when we were anchored on Ben’s Barge, I thought the two-foot waves we were seeing were actually four to six feet high. That changed pretty quickly.”

Amelia said the seas were considerably worse once they were fifty-two nautical miles offshore and reached the Global Positioning System numbers (GPS) that marked the wreck, but the waves still didn’t seem overwhelming. She remembered Michael Sanford telling the group that it sometimes took him three or four times to get the boat anchored just right, but on that Friday, he dropped the anchor, fed out line, and nailed it first try.

“We could see the wreck on the screen of his electronic bottom recorder,” she said. “The bottom was flat, then all of a sudden there was this long geometric shape jutting up. It looked like a small, flat mountain. Michael explained to us that the little floating shapes we saw above the wreck were fish. There were fish all over it. Like a cloud. Because of that, we decided to fish first, then dive.”

Once again, the guides began to shake their heads. It was not a wise thing to do. Hooked fish send out stress vibrations. Stress vibrations attract predators. Why attract predators before getting into the water?

Amelia said, “We fished for maybe an hour. You know how barracuda will crash a live bait right by the boat? The girls had fun with that. But it was getting a little rougher out and Grace started to feel sick, so we decided to gear up and get into the water because we thought she’d feel better then.”

Gardner said that she paired up with Janet, and Sanford paired with Walker because she and Sanford were the two most experienced divers. “Plus I really liked Janet,” she said. “We hit it off the first time we met. She is … Janet was the sort of woman you know you can trust after just talking to her for a few minutes. With her, there wasn’t going to be any of that catty crap that so many men and women pull. No bitching, no whining. Right away, just being with her a couple of days, I was thinking that the two of us could start doing some dive trips together. Maybe some of you know, but good dive partners are hard to find. Especially women divers, the independent types willing to do some traveling.”

Before they got in the water, according to Gardner, Sanford told them that one of the rules of diving is that you never go off and leave a boat unattended. But, because the Baja California was so deep—it was in 110 feet of water—the divers would only have about fifteen minutes of bottom time, so maybe it was actually safer for them all to go at once. It might be wiser to have four divers together on that deep wreck than go in two isolated sets.

“It’s not like Michael called for a vote or anything,” Amelia said. “But nobody stood up and said, ‘Hey, absolutely not. Someone has to stay in the boat.’ I’ve seen other divers go off and leave their boats lots of times, and, the sad thing is, it was the first time I’d ever been with a group who did it.

“We were fifty miles offshore, there weren’t any other boats around, and I, or Janet, or Grace, should have put a foot down. It wasn’t just Michael’s fault. We all screwed up. But that mistake we made …” Amelia laced her fingers together and bowed her head slightly. “That mistake, leaving the boat alone, it’s when things really started to go south. We had the dive flag up and it never entered our minds that, in fifteen minutes, so much could go wrong.”

The four entered the water together, but when they got to a depth of about thirty feet, Grace Walker indicated that she was having trouble equalizing the pressure in her ears. “We followed Michael and Grace up to ten feet or so and waited until she decided to try it again. But Grace’s ears were still hurting her, I could tell. Michael indicated that he and Grace were going to return to the boat, and I signaled ‘okay.’ Janet and I watched them go to the surface, then we continued our dive.”

Gardner told us that she and Janet spent approximately thirteen minutes on the wreck, then started back up. When they were fifteen feet from the surface, they made a safety decompression stop of about three minutes. Then they surfaced. Gardner said she was shocked by what she saw.

“Only about three feet of the boat’s bow was sticking out of the water, and it was capsized. I couldn’t believe it. Janet was in shock, too, and we started swimming toward the boat. We couldn’t see Michael or Grace, and Janet started yelling out Michael’s name. Michael finally answered, but we still couldn’t see them because of the waves. The seas were running about four feet now which, as I told you, meant they were eight feet high or so from the trough. When you’re out there swimming … when you’re out there alone in the water, trying to swim, you spend a lot of time in the trough.”

I didn’t realize how quiet it had become until Amelia paused, then stretched her legs cat-like, giving herself some time, perhaps, to regain emotional control. There was a light breeze drifting out of the mangrove bog from the southwest, carrying the tumid odors of sulfur, tannin, iodine, and salt. The breeze touched the halyards of sailboats, caused a random, indifferent tapping, and carried across the water the sump-sound of the pump to my big fish tank.

No one was talking now. There was no fidgeting. All attention was on Amelia Gardner and the words her lips formed, everyone seeing the scene, the slow tragedy of it recreating itself inside the minds of us all.

She said, “Janet swam straight to the boat while I swam toward Michael’s voice. When I got closer, I could see Michael and Grace in the water, drifting away. They both had their BCD vests inflated, with the tanks still attached, but they weren’t wearing them; they were using them as floats. They couldn’t get back to the boat because they weren’t wearing flippers, and the waves were pushing them farther and farther away. It was awful.”

Gardner told us that she and Janet swam to Michael and Grace, grabbed them, and helped the two jettison the tanks from their backpacks and get into their inflated vests. They then swam back to the boat, jettisoned their own weight belts, and hung on to the exposed length of the anchor line that was attached to the bow. There, Amelia said, she checked her watch. It was 3 P.M.

I didn’t want to interrupt, but had to. It was an important point. I asked her, “What color was your weight belt?”

She looked at me oddly. “Orange,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

I said, “Janet’s weight belt was a kind of blue-green. Teal, I guess you’d call it. Were the weight belts found? Did anyone go down and look?”

Now she was nodding, realized the implications. “Weight belts are so heavy, they would have dropped like rocks. If my story’s true, they’d be side by side. That’s what you’re saying. Maybe on top of one another.” She paused, still staring at me. “No. No one has gone down to confirm my story.”

I knew she was thinking about what we’d discussed earlier, but she didn’t say anything about it. Instead, she continued.

“So … after we surfaced, and when things settled down, our first question, of course, was, what happened? Michael said he didn’t know. He said that he and Grace climbed up the dive ladder at the back of the boat and took off their vests and fins. Then he went to the front to take off the rest of his stuff. When he looked back, he said he was shocked to see water coming in over the transom where the engines were attached. The salvage divers told me later that, when they found the boat, it was still in gear. What must have happened was, Michael had Grace run the boat while he set the anchor, and she must have switched off the engines while they were still in forward. As most of you know a lot better than me, a boat won’t start when it’s in gear.