She rolled her eyes at him. “I think you know I didn’t. Are you going to say ‘I told you so’ now?”
“I’d rather take you for a beer,” he said, enjoying the look of shock on her sun-burnished face. “And have you tell me exactly what’s going on here.”
Beka opened her mouth, then closed it again without saying anything after taking a careful look at his expression. He stood there patiently, arms crossed, in what his men used to call the “Hell can freeze over before I move” pose. There’d never been a marine who didn’t eventually cave when faced with that pose, and Beka was no different.
Finally, she heaved a sigh, glanced at her waterproof diving watch, and shrugged in defeat. “I’m meeting someone later, but I guess I have enough time for a beer.”
Marcus tried not to grind his teeth at the thought of the someone she was meeting; no doubt her mysterious surfer pal again. None of his business, after all. Even though his heart sometimes whispered that it would like it to be. He stowed the diving gear back on the boat and escorted her to his favorite bar, the Cranky Seagull.
Inside, it looked like what it was: a working sailor’s tavern. No frills for tourists, no cute pink umbrellas in the starkly utilitarian glasses. But the beer was cold, the bartender minded his own business, and nobody cared if you smelled like fish at the end of a long day at sea. The dusty floor, the long wooden bar, and the massive beams in the ceiling had all come from the bodies of long-dead ships, sailing now only in the dreams of hard-drinking men. Since he’d come back to Santa Carmelita, the Cranky Seagull was the only place that had felt remotely like home.
“Nice,” Beka said as they grabbed a beer each and a table toward the back, away from the rowdy bunch playing five-card-draw with a tattered deck. Marcus gave her a sharp look, thinking she was insulting his favorite watering hole, but she was gazing around with a slight grin, admiring the aging sepia prints of ancient seafaring men and their long-ago catches.
“It is,” he agreed, impressed by the way she seemed to fit in wherever she went, even here, where she should have stuck out like a sore thumb. Beauty among the beasts. But she just waved at the drunken card players, gave the bartender a thumbs-up as she took her first swallow of the house brew, and settled in across from Marcus as if they’d been coming there together forever. He had to remind himself that he was there to get the truth, not to watch the way the dim lights made her blue eyes glisten like the summer sky outside. The subtle aroma of fresh strawberries teased at his nostrils, even in the midst of the yeasty, beery smell of the bar.
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.”