Troubled Waters (6 page)

With her attention focused outside, the warmth Heath’s hand on her back surprised her, and she jumped. She hadn’t even heard him step out.

“Sorry.” Heath pulled his hand back. “Did I startle you?”

“You’re okay,” she reassured him, shaking off her unnecessary fear. “I’m still feeling a little jittery from that dive.”

“That was rather unnerving, wasn’t it?” Heath agreed.

“Dives always are,” she murmured without thinking as Heath stepped past her and took over at the wheel.

“How’s that?” As Heath turned and looked at her, his eyes widened, showing a desire for understanding.

Tracie immediately felt self-conscious about her unintentional revelation. “Oh, just that we never seem to dive for happy reasons. Most of the dives I’ve been on are to look for a body—either somebody washed overboard, or someone riding their snowmobile out onto thin ice.” Her
thoughts returned to the way her father had died, and she choked back an involuntary sob.

Heath kept their boat cruising toward home, but looked at her sympathetically. “Those are never easy.”

“No.” Tracie felt foolish. None of the guys at the Coast Guard got this emotional, certainly not around each other. She hated being different from her peers simply because she was a woman. But at the same time, her frustration only seemed to make the tears rise more readily to her eyes.

Heath slowed the boat’s speed considerably.

“What are you doing?” Tracie asked. “We’re almost back to Bayfield.”

“I know. And you look like you need a moment.” His voice broke off, and he reached for her.

Tracie took a step back, feeling mortified that he’d make any sort of special allowance on her part. “I’m okay,” she insisted, quickly wiping away a tear that had sneaked past her rapidly blinking eyelids.

Withdrawing his hand, Heath nodded but didn’t move the throttle. “Okay.” The boat idled in the water, the lap of waves marking time as evenly as a pendulum.

Tracie almost wished Heath wasn’t being so nice about her tears. Trevor would have made some nasty remark that would have irked her enough to bury her sadness with anger. But Heath’s silent kindness warmed a part of her heart that had been cold for so long she’d lost all feeling there. Now it ached with thawing sadness.

His fingertips brushed her hand.

She looked up into his compassionate eyes and realized she couldn’t hide her emotions from him. “I hate diving,” she confessed in a strained whisper.

Heath took hold of her hand. “I wish I’d known that. I wouldn’t have asked you to go.”

“It’s not your fault.” She took a shaky breath. He might
as well know. If he knew, at least he’d realize she had some reason for being extra sensitive. “It’s my dad’s.” Her swollen throat cut short her words.

The lapping waves rocked them gently, their nudging motion prompting her to slowly open her heart and trust Heath with the terrors of her past.

“Did your father teach you to dive?” Heath asked after an extended silence.

Tracie shook her head and struggled to speak. “No. He was going to. He never got the chance. He died making a dive in Lake Superior.”

Heath closed his eyes and pressed her hand to his lips while the boat bobbed in the open water. “I’m sorry,” he said simply, his lips brushing her hand.

Feeling as though a weight greater than that of the steel cone they’d hefted from the seabed had been lifted from her, Tracie sniffed and said, “So am I.”

She fell silent again, and Heath put the boat into gear, pointing them back toward the mainland. He gradually increased their speed until they reached the cruising speed of eighteen knots. “How did it happen?” he asked after another silence.

“He was in the Coast Guard, stationed in Bayfield.” Tracie found her voice worked much better now that she’d regained most of her composure. Speaking helped to work out the rest. “They had a call, a submarine of all things, in distress. There were four men on board. My father pulled all four of them to safety, but then, somehow, my father drowned. I’d hoped by joining the Coast Guard I could learn more about what happened, but no one seems to know anything.”

“How long ago did it happen?”

“Fourteen years ago this summer.”

“That’s a long time,” Heath acknowledged. “What about the four men he rescued?”

“One’s dead now. I’ve traced two of them to Canada, but the trail ends there, and the other may as well have never existed for all I’ve managed to find out about him. So I guess I’ll never know what happened, or why there was a submarine on this lake in the first place.”

Heath went silent.

Tracie wondered if she’d made him uncomfortable with her emotional confession and the memories of her father.

But then he spoke up. “Submarines aren’t very common up here, are they?”

“Pretty much unheard of. Why?”

Heath stared back out at the lake, steering them past Basswood Island on the final stretch of the journey toward home.

“Why do you ask?” Tracie prodded after some silence.

He glanced back at the chunk of metal they’d retrieved from the bottom of the sea cave. His face looked pained. “Do you know what that thing is you dragged out of the lake?”

“No idea. You?”

“It’s part of a submarine.”

“No,” Tracie protested immediately, his revelation cutting too close. “That doesn’t make any sense. How would it have gotten inside the cave? That’s—that’s absurd. How do you even know what it is?”

Heath kept one hand on the steering wheel while he picked up the large hunk of metal with his other hand. “It’s a conning cap. It goes on the end of the mast, on the sub’s conning tower. When submarines want to surface through ice, they use the point of this—” he rapped on the blunted tip with his fingers “—to poke through the ice.”

Tracie had seen photos of submarines surfaced at the North Pole before; she’d just never thought much about how they got up through the thick ice. “And how did it get inside the cave?”

“I suppose a sub went into the cave, started poking up through the ice, and the conning cap got knocked off—possibly by hitting the roof of the cave. Subs don’t usually surface through ice in an enclosed space, so the cap wouldn’t have been built to withstand anything harder than ice.”

Tracie shook her head, pushing away the idea, which seemed too far-fetched, too fantastical to have taken place so close to home. “You think a submarine went
inside
the Devil’s Island sea cave? That whole cave can’t be more than about three hundred feet long. Look at your Ohio class subs—they’re over five hundred feet long. They wouldn’t even begin to fit, let alone maneuver in there.”

A smirk spread across Heath’s lips. “You just happen to know off the top of your head how long an Ohio class sub is, huh?”

“I did a lot of research on submarines after my dad died in one,” she explained defensively, though she found his expression appealing, and suddenly had to fight back the attraction she felt toward him.

Heath sobered at the mention on her father’s death. “Then you know not all subs are that long. The more common size is in the two-fifty-to four-hundred-foot range.”

“That’s still way too big to get inside the cave, let alone maneuver.”

“What about a midget sub?”

“Like the shark class?”

“Sure. They’re about fifty feet long, have a crew of four.” He stopped suddenly and met her eyes.

Tracie understood why. “Four men. Just like the submarine my dad died in.”

“Do you know what kind it was?”

“No. The only ones who ever saw it were the four guys he rescued, my dad and his partner. They went out during a storm and the waters were too stirred up to see the vessel clearly. When the Coast Guard went back out later, the submarine was gone.”

“Gone where?” Heath nosed the boat toward the Coast Guard dock.

“Apparently the guys came back out and got it unstuck. It wasn’t in very deep water. They’d run aground on the Devil’s Island shoals less than a mile east of Devil’s Island. The sea depth goes from the eighty-to one-hundred-foot range, to suddenly less than thirty feet deep, which is probably why they ran aground in the first place.”

“So it could still be somewhere in these waters,” Heath clarified. “It could come and go from inside the Devil’s Island sea cave.”

Tracie’s looked out at the blue-gray waves all around them, wondering what might be lurking just beneath. Was the submarine her father died in still active in the lake? Her heart beat so loudly she could hardly hear Heath. She’d searched so long and hard for clues to her father’s death, but she’d given up on ever learning what really happened to him. The submarine he’d died in had disappeared as though it had never existed, along with the four men he’d saved. And now, after fourteen years, she’d dragged a clue up from the watery depths.

She looked at Heath. His gaze didn’t leave hers.

“Don’t forget to watch where we’re going,” she reminded him finally.

He glanced up through the windshield, then back at her. “You don’t think—” he began.

Tracie fought back the strange creeping sensation that had been climbing up her spine. “No.” She shook her head, and spoke with as much certainty as she could muster. “No, that was fourteen years ago. I’m sure it was damaged when it ran aground, or surely it’s been wrecked since. And anyway, the odds alone are ridiculous.”

Then she took several deep breaths and tried to convince herself that the submarine her father had died on wasn’t being used to smuggle diamonds in Lake Superior.

H
eath felt nervous as he drove up the road to Tracie’s house with a box of fried chicken and biscuits on the seat beside him. Though he’d called ahead and she was expecting him, and she’d even sounded pleased to hear his supper plans, Heath still wasn’t sure how wise it was to spend so much time alone with her.

The connection between them was strong enough already, especially after the emotional conversation they’d shared on the boat ride home. It wouldn’t be easy for him to get over her when all of this was over and they went their separate ways, and if he felt that way, knowing going into it that it wouldn’t last, he couldn’t imagine how much the truth would hurt her. If it had been up to him, he’d back off.

But it wasn’t up to him. Jonas wanted him on Tracie like a fly on butter, or so he’d insisted when Heath had called him earlier. Though Heath wanted to believe Tracie had nothing to do with the diamond smugglers, he still couldn’t prove it, and anyone who wanted to question his objectivity would have plenty of reason to do so if they knew how much he’d begun to care for her. He hoped to learn enough tonight to prove she hadn’t been involved with Trevor and the diamond smugglers. But he knew there
was still a possibility what he learned could indicate the opposite, especially given the arguable likelihood she still harbored some level of resentment toward the Coast Guard for her father’s death.

Heath parked his truck and grabbed the food and his awkwardly wrapped parcel. If nothing else, he needed to see Tracie tonight so he could give her the gift he’d bought for her.

“Come on in,” she greeted him with a smile, holding Gunnar back by the collar as the large dog attempted to welcome Heath affectionately.

“Where can I put the chicken so he doesn’t get to it?”

“I’ve got the oven set on warm. We can throw it in there. I found some information online that I want to show you.” She released the dog as they headed toward the kitchen.

Heath obediently set the oven-safe box inside the warm oven, then turned to her with the present behind his back. “I brought you something. Or did you want to show me what you found online first?”

“It can wait. You’ve got my curiosity up.” She looked up at him expectantly. Her hair was still wet and slicked back into a loose braid that hung halfway down her back. Her face looked fresh and free of makeup, though her pink lips shimmered with something that made them look irresistible.

“Close your eyes.” Heath said softly, taking just a moment to relish the expectant, innocent expression on her face before he placed his gift in her outstretched hands.

Snapping her eyes open and peeling back his impromptu wrapping job, Tracie gave a happy shout.

“I take it you know what it is?”

The gratitude shining in her eyes told him she both recognized and appreciated the extra-small-sized steel-plated
body armor. “How did you know I’ve wanted one of these since Saturday?”

“I didn’t know,” He confessed, setting the body armor, wrapping paper and all, on the table behind them. His voice grew gruff. “I wanted you to have one. I don’t want to lose you.”

Though he reached for her and longed to pull her into his arms, it still surprised him when she wrapped her arms around him and gave him a grateful hug.

“Gentle now,” he suggested as her sudden squeeze made his bruises ache.

Tracie pulled away immediately. “I’m sorry.” She looked slightly disoriented for a moment.

Not wanting her to become embarrassed by her sudden burst of affection, Heath quickly changed the subject. “What did you find online?” he prompted her.

“I did a little research on shark class subs,” she pulled him toward the living room where her laptop lay open to a page on naval history.

“The shark class midget nuclear subs—” she took a shaky breath and began to read the article “—were built in the 1980s for speed and maneuverability, and could actually be lifted up out of the water and carried by train or truck when needed. They were all named after different kinds of sharks. During the Gulf War, two of them were lost with all hands: the
Bramble
and the
Requiem.
The
Bramble
was later found and raised, and her sailors were given a proper burial, but the
Requiem
was never located.” She met Heath’s eyes. “It disappeared, along with all four men inside.”

Though he didn’t often give in to feelings of fear, Heath felt a distinct creeping sensation as the fine hairs on the back of his neck stood up in response to Tracie’s words.
He watched silently as she opened another window to an article about the
Requiem
and continued reading.

“In 1990, the
Requiem
was engaged in an offensive operation as part of the Gulf War, and disappeared without a trace with all four hands on board. Efforts to locate the wreck have proven unsuccessful, as the area in which she was lost is one of many strong currents, and the sub may have drifted hundreds or even thousands of miles from the point where contact was initially lost.” Tracie stopped reading and turned her head to face Heath.

“‘May have drifted thousands of miles,’” he repeated, then added his own ending: “or been driven.” He reached around her for the touchpad mouse and toggled the screen up and down. “Does it give the names of the men who were on her?”

“No. I couldn’t find that information anywhere online.”

“I may have some contacts in the Navy who can help us out.” He draped a comforting arm around her shoulder. “I think we’re on to something.”

“But what? Is there any way of proving that conning cap came from the
Requiem
?”

“I don’t think so, not without having the rest of the ship to match it to.” Heath had looked the piece over very carefully once they’d returned to shore. “There’s no serial number on the portion we retrieved, and even if there were, it doesn’t prove the sub is actually in Lake Superior. The cap may have been transported here and dropped, which is probably just as likely as the possibility of the entire sub making its way here.”

Tracie massaged her forehead with her fingertips. “There are so many possibilities it makes my head spin.”

“Don’t think about it for a while,” Heath suggested. “We should eat, don’t you think?”

“Excellent idea.” Tracie led him back into the kitchen. Unlike the night before when they’d eaten the pizza right out of the box, tonight she’d set the table, complete with linen napkins and a cheery vase of artificial flowers as centerpiece.

While Tracie grabbed honey, jam and butter, Heath retrieved the food he’d brought from the oven.

Tracie poured large glasses of milk for both of them. “Everything’s ready. Do you want to say the blessing?” She sat and looked at him expectantly over her folded hands.

Heath slowly lowered himself into his chair, frantically trying to think, his usually astute mind blank. The only table blessing he could think of was his goofy uncle’s
good bread, good meat, good God, let’s eat.
He was pretty sure Tracie wouldn’t appreciate that one. He felt equally certain that any attempt he might make at an impromptu prayer would quickly give away how long it had been since he’d talked to God. “I, um—” he started, folding his hands, pulling them apart, folding them again.

“It’s okay.” She placed a calm hand over his nervous fingers. “I can bless it.”

They both bowed their heads, and Tracie said a few simple lines of thanks.

At her amen, he looked up, about to apologize again.

Tracie beat him to it. “Sorry to put you on the spot like that.”

“No, it’s okay,” he assured her. “I just wasn’t really thinking along those lines.” They hadn’t bothered to bless their pizza the night before, but he should have realized that by now Tracie was comfortable enough around him to share the more intimate things in her life—like her relationship with God. Jonas’s plan assumed she’d open up to him once he got close to her. The fact that she’d openly
prayed with him was just another indication of how close the two of them were becoming.

“Mmm, chicken,” Tracie smiled up at him as she selected a piece for herself. “Thanks so much for supper.”

“No problem. We needed some comfort food after the day we’ve had.” He took a piece for himself and watched Tracie drizzle honey on a biscuit. There was so much information he still needed to learn from her, but getting her to talk would be a delicate process. She’d already told him so much. If he made her suspicious he might not learn anything, and that wouldn’t help either one of them. More than anything, he wished she’d reveal something that would prove her innocence, so he could convince Jonas to let him tell her his true identity.

But coming right out and asking her would no doubt backfire completely. Heath thought back to the psychology class he’d taken years before, recalling the innate way people internally kept track of how much they’d shared about themselves. People tended to try to keep their self-revelation interpersonally fair, if only on a subconscious level. Which meant if Heath expected Tracie to share any more of her life, he needed to share a little of his. “Fried chicken reminds me of Sunday dinners at my grandparents’ house,” he offered, taking a bite of biscuit and watching her expectantly.

Tracie smiled at him and silently munched her chicken.

Perhaps he’d need to share a little more than that before she opened up. “We used to go over to my grandparents’ every Sunday after church.” If nothing else, Heath at least hoped to win some points by mentioning church.

“Do you see your family often?” Tracie asked.

Her question required some thought. Heath didn’t mind talking about things from his distant childhood, but he
didn’t want to reveal too much about his recent life, which didn’t match the story she’d been told. He couldn’t afford to blow his cover until he was certain she wasn’t involved with the diamond smugglers. “Since I joined the military I tend to see them once a year,” Heath confessed. He’d joined the Navy SEALs right out of college. Tracie knew that much. From there he’d gone on to the FBI, but his cover said he’d transferred to the Coast Guard. “It’s difficult to make it home.”

“How many years has that been?”

He did the math quickly in his head. “Twelve.”

Concern filled her features. “Don’t you miss them?”

“Sometimes,” Heath warred against his instinctive wish for privacy that made him want to change the subject, to hide his true feelings. He knew he needed to share part of himself with Tracie before he could expect her to tell him more of her story. She’d told him about losing her father, and that was something he doubted many people knew. Which meant he was already beholden to her. He dredged up the pain of the long-buried past and laid it out in front of her.

“I miss not having a relationship with my family,” he confessed, picking at the remainder of his chicken. “My parents were always at work when I was growing up. Work during the day, work-related functions at night, or just too exhausted from it all to spend time with me. My life was spent with a series of babysitters. Sunday dinners were the closest I came to really feeling like I belonged, like I had a family at all.” He looked up and met her eyes. “I guess I can’t say I really miss them. I didn’t ever know them that well. But I miss not ever knowing them.”

The way Tracie’s face shone with compassion made Heath feel awful. True, he’d had a lonely childhood and had always wished his parents would have cared more
about him. But it didn’t seem fair to Tracie that he should use his past to manipulate her.

“Is it too late to go back?”

Heath swallowed a bite of biscuit. “They want me to. My parents want to retire, to pass the family business on to the next generation. But I don’t want to be like them. I spent my whole childhood resenting the family business. How could I go back there?”

“When my dad died—” Tracie began, then blushed and looked down.

“What?” Heath encouraged her gently.

“No, it’s nothing. I don’t want to sound like I’m trying to lecture you. I’m sure I can’t understand what it was like for you, growing up with such distant parents.”

“No, please. Tell me. I want to know what you’re thinking.”

Hope sparkled in her eyes when she looked up at him. “When my dad died, I wanted to understand what had happened. Not just how he died, but why he loved Lake Superior so much, why he loved the Coast Guard. When I walk into work, I wonder how he felt, walking through the same door, with the same mission I have. I know he loved his job. I just—” She pinched her eyes shut.

Heath leaned forward and took her hand. “You what?”

“I want to love it, like he did. But I don’t. I thought it would be an adventure, that it would draw me closer to my dad. But right now it seems like it’s out to kill me, too. Is that how I’m supposed to get close to him?” The tears that had been welling up in her eyes spilled over, and she shoved them away with her open palms. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I keep crying in front of you. I’m not usually a weepy person.”

“Under the circumstances, I think it’s more than understandable.”

Tracie shook her head. She stood and turned away toward the sink.

Heath rose and wrapped his arms around her, discovering she fit perfectly in his arms. As if she was meant to be there. “Hey,” he said after a moment’s silence.

She tilted her head back and looked him in the face.

“I’m not going to let them get you. I saved you on Saturday, I can do it again. You’re safe with me.”

“But what if you’re not there?”

“I will be.” Heath felt his parents’ absence acutely, the dredged-up memories of his lonely childhood fresh and raw in his promise. He knew he could do better. He had to. “I will be there to keep you safe.”

Tracie trembled in his arms as she pulled back. For a moment he thought she was going to step away, and he felt disappointment at the thought. Instead, she turned to hug him back. They stood in a solid embrace for several long moments before Tracie broke away. “I need to feed Gunnar.”

While Tracie took care of her dog, Heath cleaned off the table and rinsed their glasses at the sink. Then he padded into her living room, where the dying embers of a fire burned low in her wood stove. Heath busied himself stoking the fire. By the time Tracie found him he had a cheery blaze going.