The Cursed

It had been nearly a year since she had broken it off with Lars Nicholson. Luckily, he’d gone on to join a dive expedition in the Mediterranean, so they never ran into each other. She was glad. He’d insisted they could make it work if they got back together, but she’d known that was an impossibility, even though she’d been devastated. He’d cheated. And it wasn’t that she couldn’t forgive. She just couldn’t understand how easy it had been for him, and she would never be able to forget or trust him again. That was no way to build a relationship. If she took him back, she would become someone she didn’t want to be.

 

Still, it had been a dry year, although she’d barely thought about it until...

 

Damn him. There was no way out of it. He was extremely sexually appealing.

 

“Enough. Time to sleep,” she whispered to herself.

 

Though how possible that would be with him just a few doors away, she didn’t know.

 

She gave herself a mental shake and walked to the window. She pulled the drapes slightly open and froze.

 

There was someone out there. Someone standing in the shadow of the streetlight. Staring up.

 

Without intending to, she had looked right at him.

 

And, cloaked by the night, he might have looked right at her.

 

She dropped the curtain and stepped back. Then, carefully, she tugged at the drape again.

 

Too late. Whoever he was, he had gone.

 

Or she had imagined him.

 

She thought about running down the hall and waking Agent Samson.

 

To say what? Besides, what could he do? There was no one out there now.

 

She pulled the drape a little farther open and looked up and down the street. Arm in arm, two frat-boy types were ambling toward another bed-and-breakfast. Another man—probably a bartender, done at last for the night—was moving swiftly and with purpose.

 

Hannah hesitated and then wondered if what she’d seen had meant anything at all. This was Key West. People were out and about all night long. Maybe the man she’d seen had just stopped to light a cigarette or answer his cell, and he’d simply been looking around, the way people do.

 

She lay down, but by the time she finally drifted to sleep it was almost morning.

 

*

 

The colors of the reef and the water were beautiful, Yerby Catalano thought. There was a feeling about diving—being down dozens of feet below the surface—that was like nothing else in the world.

 

She loved to dive. She’d gotten her certificate just last year, and now she went every chance she could get.

 

This wasn’t the happiest dive of her life, though. The other three had begged off, still shaken by the effects of the day before. She didn’t quite get it. It’s not as if any of them had known the dead man. Even Shelly and Stuart, who’d had the worst of it, had only seen him for a few seconds, and even then they had thought they were seeing a ghost.

 

To Yerby, this was the reason to come to the Keys, and it was ridiculous that the others were going to skip it. She wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

 

The dive boat hadn’t been crowded, maybe because she’d chosen the early dive. Most of Key West wasn’t even awake yet. The Minnow made three trips a day, plus there were night dives for people with more advanced credentials. She made a mental note to go pursue her diving further. A night dive would be cool.

 

But this 8:00 a.m. dive was splendid, too. They went first to Joe’s Tug, which had sunk mysteriously in sixty-five feet of water, and she made up a trio with a young couple from Maine, since no one was allowed to dive alone. As the odd person out, she had to admit to being pissed that Mark hadn’t joined her.

 

But that was all right. Don and Lottie were nice, and she took pictures of yellow tangs and a giant grouper, along with a barracuda drifting a few feet below her and even a nurse shark.

 

The second dive was to an artificial reef growing up around a deliberately sunk small World War II gunship.

 

The ship rose from the sand like an eerie steel-gray ghost. Yerby wished Mark was with her. He would have loved it.

 

The divemaster paused, indicating that they weren’t to disappear into the ship. Yerby silently rebelled at that. Why dive to a ship at all if you couldn’t go inside her?

 

The divemaster led them around the port side. A tiny ray shook free of the sand as it rose from the seabed. Yerby snapped it with her camera.

 

She felt a tap on her shoulder. It was one of the other divers. She turned and saw the couple from Maine just ahead. Don was taking pictures of Lottie, who was doing a lot of posing.

 

Yerby didn’t recognize the diver who’d joined her. Even if she had seen him on the boat, she wouldn’t have known him now. He was wearing a full wet suit—a bit much for Florida, she thought. But a lot of people who came down had learned to dive in the Great Lakes or the Pacific, so they were used to diving with a suit.

 

He motioned toward the ship, smiling.

 

She looked around. No one was watching. She’d wanted to look inside the ship, and she wasn’t going to get a better opportunity. She would just take a peek inside. She would be careful not to get lost. She wanted to live.

 

She automatically checked her air gauge. She would be fine; she had another twenty minutes of air. This was the deepest dive of the day, and they were only fifty feet down. She was breathing slowly and easily, just as she had been taught.

 

The mystery diver disappeared inside the wreck. Vaguely wondering where his partner was, she cautiously followed him.

 

Heather Graham's books