Deadly Waters (2 page)

“S
pray me, Mom.” Ashley stretched out both arms as her mother took aim with the can of bug repellent. “Mosquitoes sure do love you, honey,” Olivia said, covering Ashley's arms with a fine mist. “Turn around so I can get the backs of your legs. Maybe you should have worn jeans, like Bridger, instead of those shorts.”

“Jeans are too hot,” Ashley answered. “Anyway, it's not fair. I get all chewed up, and Jack hardly has any mosquito bites at all.”

Their father, Steven, said, “It's because you're so sweet, Ashley.”

She started to giggle. “That must mean you're sour, Jack.”

“Hey, I can handle personal rejection from mosquitoes,” Jack answered. “No problem! But I'll put a few squirts of that stuff on me, too, just in case.” The bite of insect repellent filled his nose as Jack squirted his skin. “Here you go, Bridger,” he said, ready to toss the canister, except that Bridger held up his hands like a traffic cop.

“Don't need it,” he said, which was probably true. Bridger was so covered up by his long-sleeved plaid shirt, blue jeans, boots, and Western hat that any mosquito would have had a hard time finding a place to land on him.

Olivia raised her eyebrows. “You sure about that, Bridger? Try guessing how many different species of mosquitoes live in the Everglades.”

“Don't know,” Bridger said.

“Twenty!” Ashley guessed.

“Nope. Forty-three. But only the females bite.”

Bridger asked, “So why don't they get rid of the mosquitoes? You know, spray stuff from airplanes and kill them all?”

“Can't do it,” Steven answered, scratching his wrist where an early-breakfasting mosquito had already sampled him. “Much as we don't like mosquitoes, they're part of the ecosystem.”

Bridger frowned. “Eco—what?”

“That means,” Olivia began, “that all the creatures in the Everglades are linked together. Mosquitoes lay eggs that hatch into something called wrigglers, and they get eaten by
Gambusia
. That's the scientific name, but usually they're called mosquitofish. Other fish eat the mosquitofish: snook, snapper, redfish—the ones you'll be fishing for today, Bridger. And then, of course, birds eat the fish, and other animals eat the birds, all the way up to the biggest animals in the park. If you take out the mosquitoes, everything gets affected.”

“I get it,” Bridger said, nodding. “Chain reaction.”

“No spraying for bugs, huh?” Jack considered that. “So then it can't be pesticides that are making the manatees sick.”

“Actually, the park people checked out another possibility, Jack, that herbicides used to kill weeds in the canals might have washed into the Everglades waters. But when they did the necropsies on the dead manatees—”

“What're ‘necropsies,' Mom?” Ashley interrupted.

“A necropsy is an autopsy on an animal. Anyway, the necropsies didn't show any high level of herbicides in the manatees' tissues. So it's something else,” she told them, frowning. “And the biggest part of the puzzle is why only about 20 percent of the manatees are getting sick. The rest seem just fine. That's the reason they brought me here: to find out what's happening with these sick sea cows.”

“Cows?” Bridger asked, his pale brows knitting together.

“Not your kind of cows,” Steven answered, laughing. “Sea cow is just another name for manatee, and not a very accurate name. Manatees are distant relatives of—get this!—of
elephants
.” Olivia put the half-empty can of bug spray into Jack's camera bag as she added, “They call them cows because they graze on plants all day, just like dairy cows.”

“OK, everybody,” Steven called out, “time to get into the car. Frankie will be waiting at the dock.”

As the three kids jammed side by side in the car's backseat, Ashley explained to Bridger, “Frankie was my grandmother's friend even before my mom was born.”

“Hmmm,” Bridger murmured, peering out the car window. Not too far from them, the waters of the bay sparkled in the sunlight. As Steven maneuvered the car along a palm-lined two-lane road, past houses that looked like boxes with legs, Bridger asked, “How come all these houses are built up on stilts like that?”

“Hurricanes?” Jack suggested, and his father agreed, “Uh-huh. When hurricanes cause big waves to surge up over the land, houses built high on pilings don't get damaged as much.”

“Looks like they could just get up and walk away,” Bridger murmured.

“Yeah, they do look like that. That's a good one, Bridger,” Steven told him, grinning as they pulled over in front of a general store near the water.

Ashley shouted, “There's Frankie, waiting for us.”

Scanning the sidewalk in front of the store, Bridger started to say, “I don't see—” But by then Ashley had darted out of the car and into the arms of a short, wiry, white-haired woman.

“You've grown so big!” the woman was telling Ashley, as Olivia, Jack, and Steven caught up with them. “And Jack—look at you! Twelve years old and you're almost as tall as a man.”

“Frankie, it's great to see you again!” all the Landons exclaimed as they hugged her.

Half in disbelief, then in alarm, Bridger exclaimed, “Frankie is a woman?”

Taking his hand, Olivia pulled him forward and said, “Bridger, I'd like you to meet Captain Frankie Gardell, the best fishing guide in all of the Everglades.”

With his eyes narrowed to a squint, Bridger touched the brim of his cowboy hat and mumbled, “Pleased to meet you, ma'am.” At first he looked anything but pleased, but then his face lightened a bit as he said, “Guess you just
own
the boat, right? Who runs it for you?”

“Me!” When Frankie smiled, the skin around her mouth crinkled into dozens of wrinkles that connected to other dozens of wrinkles in her sun-browned cheeks.

She was small, barely over five feet two, and dressed in a red-and-white-striped shirt that hung over cutoff jeans. It seemed odd, even to Jack, for a 70-year-old woman to wear cutoffs, but somehow on Frankie it looked all right.

“To answer your question, Bridger,” Frankie went on, “when my husband, Gene, was alive, we made the fishing trips together. But Gene's been gone for eight years now, rest his soul, and in that time I've run this business by myself.”

Bridger looked even more confused. “Your husband's name was Jean?”

Chuckling, Frankie answered, “Spelled G-E-N-E. Short for Eugene. And I'm Frankie, short for Francesca. And yonder's the
Pescadillo
.”

Thoroughly flustered, Bridger burst out, “What the heck is a pescadillo?”

“It's my boat! The name is kind of a combination of
‘pesce,'
which is Italian for ‘fish,' and ‘peccadillo,' which means—well, I'll tell you later, Bridger. We need to get moving.”

“Good idea,” Olivia said, glancing at her watch. “I have a meeting in 20 minutes. Lots of people coming: park rangers, researchers—everyone with information on the manatees. I feel as if I've got a thousand pieces of a big puzzle, Frankie, and no picture on the box to guide me. So do you mind if Steven and I leave now and don't see you off?”

“Go, go!” Frankie urged them, shooing Steven and Olivia with sun-browned hands. “My new shipmates and I will be just fine. Won't we, Ashley?”

“You bet!”

Steven said, “Then we'll see you tonight. Get busy out there, guys—if you make a good catch, the restaurant will cook it for us.”

From the end of the dock, the four of them waved, watching Steven and Olivia pull away in the car. Once they'd disappeared, Frankie placed her hands on her hips and surveyed the kids. Jack wondered if she could tell that Bridger was unhappy about her being a woman, but if she knew, she didn't let on. Instead, she began to bark out orders like a real ship's captain.

Pointing briskly, she went down the line. “Jack, you load up the rest of the gear that's right by your feet. Bridger, you take that cooler on board and stow it between the captain's chair and the gunwale. Ashley, you're going to get the line off the piling, and when

I tell you, throw it onto the boat deck and then jump in after it. Don't wait too long, or the boat'll get away from you and you'll end up with an Everglades bath.”

“I'll untie the boat for her,” Bridger offered.

“Nonsense. Ashley's as agile as a monkey. You handle the cooler, and Ashley will take care of the rest. But first, Bridger, take off those boots!”

For a moment, Bridger stood stock still, his face reddening slightly to match the red in his plaid cotton shirt. “Why?” he asked.

“No boots on board! They'll gouge the deck. If you don't have any boat shoes with you, like Jack and Ashley are wearing, then you can just stay in your sock feet.”

Bridger got even redder. Finally, touching the brim of his hat, he said, “Yes, ma'am,” so softly that Jack was sure Frankie hadn't heard, except that she sent another smile in Bridger's direction. He sat down to take off his boots.

Jack jumped down into the
Pescadillo
. From there he reached up to the dock to pick up the gear, one box at a time, transferring it into the boat. Bridger, still on the dock, lifted the cooler and set the boots on top of it, intending to hold everything while he lowered himself into the boat.

“Maybe you ought to…” Jack began as Bridger put one foot on the boat's edge, which Frankie had called the gunwale. But Bridger shook his head. He wobbled a little—the cooler was heavy, the boat moved from the dock under the pressure of his foot, and his socks must have felt pretty slippery on the teakwood gunwale.

Jack halfway reached out to help, but Bridger frowned in concentration, as though this were some kind of athletic competition, and by sheer willpower he could figure out how to balance himself and his heavy load on the narrow rim. And he did. After sizing it all up, he took one more step and then jumped, landing flatfooted in the boat, with his balance and the cooler intact. He didn't grin in satisfaction, but just gave a short, sharp nod to no one in particular, stowed the cooler beside the captain's chair, and set his boots alongside a white vinyl bench.

Out of the corner of her eye, Frankie had watched the whole episode. All she said was, “Hop to it, Ashley. All aboard that's goin' aboard.” Ashley undid the line from the cleat on the piling, threw it into the boat, then scrambled quickly after it.

“All right, crew, line up and get your life jackets,” Frankie ordered. “One per customer—pull them out of the box there.”

“What about you, Frankie?” Ashley asked. “You need to wear one too, don't you?”

“Um…ah…” Frankie hedged, and then said, “Yes, you're absolutely right. Watch me and you can see how to buckle these things.” After they'd all slipped their arms through the pillowy orange life jackets and fastened the straps, Frankie said, “Now let's shove off and see what we can find out there in the land of Ten Thousand Islands.” In an instant the diesel engine caught and roared. Jack could feel the vibrations under his feet.

“Sticking close to shore the way we are now, I've got to go slow,” Frankie told them. “The water's no more than four feet deep here, which makes it easy to run over manatees, something we definitely don't want to do.”

Even their slow passage stirred up a nice breeze, enough to whip Frankie's hair into short white spikes that looked like peaks of meringue. Surely, deftly, she handled the steering wheel as though she and the boat were lifelong friends. After a while, Frankie told them, “The trick to maneuvering through these mangrove islands is to know where the channels are. We've passed the town of Chokoloskee now, so I'll let her out a little.” She pushed the throttle forward on the starboard side of the helm.

“We were in Chokoloskee last night—” Jack had started to say, but before he could get it out, the
Pescadillo
leaped forward and his words were sucked back into his throat.

“Wow! This is
great!
” Ashley cried loudly, so she could be heard above the motor and the sudden rush of wind. “Feels like someone just turned on the air conditioning.” She stood at the helm, next to Frankie, who effortlessly steered through the tea-colored water.

Cupping his hands around his mouth, Jack called, “How fast can this boat go?”

“Seventeen knots when we're in the Gulf.” The boat's bow pushed toward turquoise sky as Jack and Bridger settled back onto the white vinyl bench.

Bridger kept reaching up to hold onto his hat, until a gust of wind almost whipped it off his head into the boat's wake. Grudgingly, he pushed his Stetson underneath the bench. Jack noticed a white band of skin that stretched from Bridger's eyebrows into his pale hair, as though his forehead had never seen sunlight.

Jerking his chin toward the front of the boat, Bridger said, “That Frankie's kinda bossy, isn't she?”

“Maybe. But I like her,” Jack answered.

It seemed Bridger was about to say more, but he stopped when Ashley turned, wide-eyed, to yell, “Jack, Bridger—look over the right side of the boat!”

“Starboard,” Frankie corrected. “Seems like we've got ourselves an escort. There's another one portside, too.”

Jack leaned over the side as far as he could reach. Water sprayed his face in a cool mist, and the teakwood gunwale felt wet beneath his fingers. He had to strain forward until he saw them. Next to the boat's bow, leaping into the air like silver streaks of light, were two dolphins. For once, Jack didn't reach for his camera. He didn't want to pull his eyes away for even a second; magically, the dolphins disappeared into the water, only to reappear like the flash of needles through satin. “They love the waves the boat makes,” Frankie called over her shoulder. “They're playing with us.”