Free An Ordinary Drowning, Book One of The Mermaid's Pendant by LeAnn Neal Reilly Page B

met the girl who pulled
me out, yes.”
    Chris
beamed. “What’d I tell you?”
    John
smiled at him. “She’s a scrawny young thing.” He almost said, Too young for
me . He didn’t. Instead, he pointed out the obvious. “With legs.”
    Chris
grinned. “Oh, yeah. They can put on legs, walk on shore. I’ll bet you cold cash
you won’t find it easy to go back to Pittsburgh next week.”
    It was
clear that Chris couldn’t be talked from his irrational belief. But how
irrational was it? How had Tamarind pulled him, a 165-pound male, from eight
feet of ocean? She’d grabbed him as he slipped under that last time. Perhaps
that explained it….
    John
shoved the doubt aside and ended their debate with a joke. “Don’t tell my
girlfriend that. She’ll come down here and kick my ass all the way back if I
don’t.”
    Chris
shook his head and stowed the albums away in watertight bags. As he headed
below decks to put them into a locker, he called over his shoulder, “I came to
Culebra to escape my girlfriend. Best thing I ever did.”
    ***
    At
Amberjack, they descended through warm, clear water to a bottom where
tan-colored soft corals sprouted, sheltering tiny black-and-yellow-striped
wrasses. A sharp, brief twinge of fear erupted through John’s mental restraint,
but it was too late. He succumbed to the press of water overhead, gave into
it—and found himself free to mingle with a teeming world of alien life. Even as
John watched, the wrasses set up cleaning stations there to rid barracudas and
orange hogfish of parasites. Not far from the coral lay a long line of rocks
where delicate sponges and red and black deep-water gorgonians blossomed in a
rich brocade, large French angels gliding among them. At the end of the row of
rocks a cabin-sized boulder jutted off the flat sand. A school of amberjack
swirled around John, many of them larger than his torso. Here Chris urged him
to shoot some photos.
    As John
floated over the boulder with his waterproof disposable at his eye, he heard—or
rather felt—humming like the song Tamarind had hummed the day before. The
weight of the water around him disappeared and colors brightened. Yet when he
looked around he saw nobody but Chris, who hovered nearby. Chris turned his
palm up, questioning. He grabbed at his own throat with two hands before
repeating the upturned palm. John shook his head vigorously and brought the
camera again to his eye. No panic assailed him now. He’d shed his fear as
easily as a sea snake shed its skin.
    ***
    In the
warm air afterwards, his body weighed more and the nerves in his skin tingled,
exposed. The fiberglass deck burned his bare soles, but John scarcely noticed.
As he moved around the deck, he swayed to the rhythm of his afternoon dive even
though the boat rocked little. When they returned to Chris’s dock in the
harbor, they tied the boat up and began stowing gear in the lockers. Voices
further down the dock, the thin cries of seabirds, and the sawing of outboard
motors out in the harbor all washed over him after the deep silence of
Amberjack.
    “John.”
Tamarind’s odd voice startled him.
    Looking
up, he saw her standing on the dock in his t-shirt and the same pair of cargo
shorts that she’d worn the day before and still barefoot. Copper-colored hair
corkscrewed around her face, obscuring her eyes in the breeze. A smile radiated
through the mess.
    “Hey,
Tamarind! And here I was afraid I’d never see that t-shirt again.”
    Chris
paused behind him at that moment and said in a low voice, “I’d be afraid I’d
never see what’s in that t-shirt again.” Raising his voice, he said, “Go on. I
can take care of the rest of this. See you tomorrow then.”
    John
nodded, grabbed his backpack and slipped on his sandals before stepping up onto
the dock.
    “Your
father anchor somewhere close by?”
    “Yes.”
She matched his pace as he walked. “What were you doing? Fishing?”
    “Nope.
That guy—Chris,” here he gestured behind him,